Category: Cultivating Peace

Irregular contributions from friends and personnel of Forging Ploughshares.

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.

A Sermon by Mr. Michael Hardin, PreachingPeace.com

Preached at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Kingsville, MD Christ the King Sunday, November 22, 2015

Scripture: John 18:33 – 37


33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ 34 Jesus answered, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ 35 Pilate replied, ‘I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?’ 36 Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.’ 37 Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’

Sermon
Pilate might seem like the ultimate 21st Century Post-Modernist. “What is truth?” he says. What indeed is truth?

In Pilate’s time, of course, there were plenty of philosophies floating around the ancient world: Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Syrian, Egyptian and more, many more. And here’s Pilate, the Curator of Judea, confused by the whole mess, standing before a Galilean peasant who has the audacity to challenge him, challenge his authority but very covertly. If you have a Bible, you might like to follow along in this text. Now, I told Dan I don’t think I have ever preached on this particular text before, although when I was a pastor I did follow the lectionary cycle so there is a chance that back in the day I did.

But I was really struck this week in my work as I reflected and prepared for today. Here’s what’s really interesting from this particular text for us today. It’s not a question of what constitutes some sort of generic philosophical truth. And that’s how the tendency of preachers is to read this text. What is truth? Who can know the truth? How can you know the truth? How is truth even to be known? Is there such a thing as truth? And this is the dilemma the plagues the academy that I’ve been involved in for 30 years reading thousands of books by philosophers and theologians, and they all scramble really, really hard to try and figure out.. what is the truth? But in our Gospel, it’s already been said that the truth is not a concept. The truth is a person.

This changes everything because it takes the category of truth out of some sort of way to divide good and evil, right and wrong, true and false. It places it right into the category of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who he is and how he lived his existence. And in this text, right here before Pilate is going to come the key element of that which constitutes truth.

Truth is non-violent.

Jesus will say to Pilate in response to his question “Are you a king?” And Jesus says, “If I was a king of this world, my foot soldiers would have fought in the garden.” There’s an irony here, isn’t there? Because we know that Peter himself drew a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane to protect Jesus, slicing off the ear of a young man named Malchus, a servant of the Chief Priest. So, the fact is, Peter in the garden perceiving himself as a foot soldier of the truth, drew a sword and chopped off the ear of a man. And it’s a good thing he didn’t just run him threw. He just managed to miss this poor guy’s head. Peter was looking to behead the man. Think of this in terms of where we’re at politically today. Peter is no different than anyone in ISIS at that point in the garden. He thinks he’s going to protect Jesus by taking his sword and chopping the fellow’s head off. He misses, thankfully. The guy only loses an ear, which, according to the text, Jesus immediately replaces.

But when Jesus stands before Pilate, he’s very, very clear that his foot soldiers, that is, his true followers… do not bear arms. His followers will not take up weapons to protect him. Now there’s a double irony here. Not only does Peter take up the sword, but in this last week since the bombings in Paris, on Facebook, on Twitter, in the news, on blogs, and webcasts, Christian preacher after Christian preacher and lay people have said unequivocally that we have to take up arms against ISIS. And to that I want to say “Blasphemy!” The follower of Jesus does not take up arms, because the way he reigns, is not of this world.

Jesus is a substantively different leader than President Obama or Vladimir Putin or any other leader on the planet. Every single leader on the planet that runs a nation state or any government, with few exceptions, has a standing army and that standing army is there to protect the people. There is no way a civilized leader with a standing army or the power to push a red button and drop nuclear bombs or to command drones that kill innocent civilians can call themselves a follower of Jesus. They are just kings of this world just like Pilate, and they don’t get that truth has nothing to do with retaliation, nothing to do with violence.

When Christians come to the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John, our tendency is to say “Oh. The people rejected Jesus because they wouldn’t accept his divinity, they wouldn’t accept his claim to be God.” That is not the case. What they specifically rejected was his claim to represent a non-violent God, a non-retaliatory God, a God who would have nothing to do with justice as “eye for eye’ and “tooth for tooth.” That god doesn’t exist. That god is an idol. That’s the god that was believed in by Second Temple Judaism. That’s the god that was believed on in Rome in its many forms. The only God to ever claim non-violence is the God and Father of Jesus, so much so, that this God alone of all the gods forgives.

The great critic of the New Testament, Rudolph Bultmann, was even able to say “Only the God of the Gospel forgives.” Forgiveness is not a category that’s used of figures like Zeus or Apollo. Only God forgives. Only the Maker of heaven and earth loves, forgives and chooses to lay down God’s own life and in the resurrection, not to come back as a retaliatory figure. And that’s what absolutely scared the disciples spitless on that Easter Sunday. They were waiting for vengeance. They had fled, they had betrayed, they had denied Jesus; it was their own people that crucified the Messiah. And surely sittin’ in the room that night when Jesus appears to them, all they can think of is the structure of their theology which requires justice, which requires vengeance, which requires god to satisfy god’s own honor. And so Jesus’ first word to them is the last word that will ever be spoken. “Shalom. Peace. Don’t be afraid. My Papa does not respond to violence with violence, and neither do I.”

And that is the truth that Pilate had in front of him, and that is the truth that confused him. How could this person claim to be a king and yet not take up arms? How is that truth? How is it? How is it that Christianity for almost two thousand years… and one could in fact argue this could be traced to the Jerusalem Church, but I won’t do that. I’ll just go seventeen hundred years with Constantine, not worry about the first three hundred. How is it that for seventeen hundred years we have managed to merge and mingle that which the Gospel has kept apart: God and violence? How is it that we as Christian theologians, as Church, as Christianity have married the two things that God has rent asunder: life and retaliation?

The Gospel text for today is so loaded with irony that if we look at our own historical situation right now as Church, all we can do is repent, because it is in the Name of Jesus that George Bush took this country into Iraq. It is in the Name of Jesus that Christian preachers on the radio and TV would have us sacrifice our young men and young women in Syria. It is in the Name of Jesus that the Airforce Academy in Colorado with its chapel shaped as F-16 jets sits and plays its video games and drones and kills innocent civilians right and left. We as Americans, we’re not just killing foreign terrorists, my friends.

Two days ago, we bombed a house that killed a two year old girl. A two year old girl. We did. That was done in our name. We, a Christian nation, killed this little girl. We don’t know the truth. We are so far from the truth in American Christianity, we’re no different than Pilate, or Peter in the garden, or James and John who would call down violence on a Samaritan village. And like them, we, too, are confronted with the Risen Christ who does not come back with revenge. Jesus did not come back with revenge and retaliation on Easter Sunday, and he’s not coming back in the future with revenge and retaliation.

Some years back, where I live in Lancaster, I drove by a church sign out front – you know all those church signs you read when you’re driving past churches – it said “Jesus is coming back and boy is he pissed.” I don’t worship that Jesus. The Jesus I worship is the Son of the Father. The Jesus I worship is homoousius, of the same substance, of the same reality as the Father. The Jesus I worship is non-violent. The Jesus I worship is forgiving. The Jesus I worship is loving, and nurturing, and compassionate, and merciful, and generous. And so is Papa.

The God who now looks down upon you does not look down upon you with hatred. The God who looks down upon you now doesn’t look at your life and demand or require some atonement from you. The God that makes heaven and earth looks down upon you as His precious children. And He looks down upon the ISIS terrorists as His precious children. And looks down upon that two year old that we killed in His Name as His precious child.

We are all on trial today in American Christianity. We are all on trial. It’s not for us to sit and equivocate about the nature of the truth – Well, Jesus got angry in the temple. Well, Jesus said why don’t you buy a sword – and to try and find a way out, a way back to the kingdom of this world. It is our place to listen only to his voice and recognize that he alone, he alone reveals the character of God. And he alone is the one who comes in that revelation and reconciles us by being crucified on a Roman cross.

How many crosses do you suppose there are in this sanctuary, pictures and icons? And from that cross he prays, “Father. Don’t forgive them! Get them back! Send some bombs on them! Kill them!” Does he do that? Does Jesus say that?….. He says “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.” And that is our problem. We don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to the issues of violence and justice, retaliation and revenge.

If we are going to follow Jesus, there is only one way, only one way. And that way is the same way he went. “If you would be my disciple, take up your cross.” To take up your cross doesn’t mean to suffer. It means to learn to live with the same measure of forgiveness that Jesus himself preached and taught his whole ministry. As he died, over and over again from that cross he was saying “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

René Girard, the great thinker that just passed recently, said “There are only two things that can reconcile: violence and love.” Violence does reconcile, my friends. When we take our anger and hostility out together against someone, when we as a group blame someone for our woes, when someone in our family systems we perceive is the trouble, we blame them for all the woes in the family, when we scapegoat others,.. we can be reconciled. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Violence does reconcile.

But that’s not God’s way. Love is God’s way. Love reconciles. Love absorbs the pain. Love absorbs the violence. Love say “You can kill me, but I believe in a God of love. I believe in a God that raises the dead. I believe in a Kingdom to come. Your liturgy is suffused with this language, the language of truth, the language of the reign of God. Listen to what you just said in the prayers. Listen to what you’re going to say next.

God is good. And this is the Gospel of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

(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.)

Eschatology And Ethics Today

Guest Blog by Michael Hardin

I am inviting you to a thought experiment. I am going to ask you to consider the
implications of your particular eschatological position. That there are implications may not seem so clear since eschatology has to do with the future, not the present. However, as we shall see, one cannot separate eschatology from ethics because they inform each other. Now which comes first, eschatology or ethics? I want to begin with a quote from a lesser known Swiss theologian, Leonard Ragaz, who I cited in The Jesus Driven Life:

The notion is quite untenable, that Jesus built a kind of ethic and theology upon his expectation of the imminence of the kingdom of God. This sort of thing may well happen in the study of a theologian or philosopher…the relationship is quite the reverse from what the eschatological systematizers imagine. It is not the eschatological expectation which determines Jesus’ understanding of God and man…but, conversely his understanding of God and man which determines his eschatological expectation. To fail to see this one must have already put on a professor’s spectacles.

Now the way eschatology is popularly done is as an exercise in what “things”(logoi) happen at the end (eschatos) of time and history. As a doctrine that comes at the end of all our other doctrines (for this is how systematic theology usually arrays doctrine), in American Protestant theology we find that the usual connection between eschatology and other doctrines, say creation, redemption, Christology, sin, the church, etc., is tenuous; that there is an eschatological element to each of these examples of doctrine, yet one is hard pressed to find an exposition where eschatological considerations are taken into account when engaging such doctrines. If they are considered at all, they are usually appendages validating the transactional character of the Janus-faced god. So, when considering the doctrine of eschatology, we must recognize that it has hermeneutical implications for other doctrine.

Second, we might ask about some of the hermeneutical implications, the kind of “So What?” questions. Does it really matter if we hold to dispensationalism, ECT, some form of universalism or annihilationism? Does our view of the end matter, and if so, how is that view formed? If, as Karl Barth says, “Christology is eschatology and Christology that is not eschatological is no Christology at all”, we might want to ask the question asked by Adrio Konig: How did Jesus become eclipsed in modern eschatologies? For a little perspective we might note that church history seems to be a bit of a roller coaster when it comes to eschatology. The first six centuries saw a decided anti-eschatological bent, at least in those groups influenced by John’s Apocalypse like the Montanists or second-third century millenarianism. For the most part one could say that eschatology in terms of a ‘timeline’ did not exist in most of the early church. At best one finds the ‘return’ of Jesus muted and some form of amillennialism prevalent. The original creed of Nicaea simply has that “he [Jesus] will come to judge the living and the dead.”

Eschatology comes back around near the end of the first millennium with Joachim of Fiore, and quiets down again through the Renaissance and Thomistic scholasticism but rears its head again at the cataclysmic shifts occurring during the 16th century (the Reformation). It quiets down again for the next several hundred years as we progress into the Enlightenment but comes to the fore in America with the revival movements of the mid nineteenth century. The early twentieth century saw a renewal of interest in eschatology on several fronts. The popular front of dispensationalism was being pieced together by Larkin, Scofield and others. The scholars had turned their interest to Jesus and the work of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer in Germany shifted the discourse from the ‘gentle Jesus who taught love’ (von Harnack, What is Christianity?) to Jesus the apocalyptic prophet who came to herald the coming new age in his own person. Then, with the advent of the first World War (1914-1918), the eschatological explosion sounded in a small parish church in Switzerland as Karl Barth read the epistle to the Romans from his own unique Kierkegaardian eschatological perspective. It was as the Catholic theologian Karl Adam remarked, “an explosion in the theologians sandbox.”

After the second World War (1941-45), Oscar Cullmann introduced the world to a perspective of overlapping ages in his book Christ and Time, and scholars began speaking of salvation history. C.H. Dodd would suggest (in his book on the parables of Jesus) that Jesus preached a realized eschatology, viz., that everything from the future was now here in the present time. Joachim Jeremias would modify this to speak of “eschatology in the process of realization.” thus preserving the temporal element of the future in Jesus’ teaching. These scholarly interactions, which included reflection on rabbinic Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls, made eschatology a subject for exposition: was the son of man an apocalyptic figure or not? Some said yes (e.g., Schweitzer, Weiss, Bultmann [?]), then the tide turned to no (Vermes), then back again to yes for some, then back again to no for many members of the Jesus Seminar (the ‘enter-exit the apocalyptic son of man debate’). Of course, beginning in the late 1960’s, American dispensationalism began its march toward an indoctrination of all fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. While its success has been somewhat muted by Calvinism’s a-millennial thinking, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth would eventuate into a non-stop proliferation of dates of Jesus’ return, and the publication of the best-selling books of all time, the Left Behind series.

All of this to say that the history of Christianity has been a reckoning with the eschatological implications of the Gospel. The problem is that transactional eschatologies like we find rampant in Second Temple Judaism, replete with judgements and determinations as to who goes where and what benefits or punishments are doled out have come into Christianity in a myriad of ways that include over-realized eschatologies (charismatics) to timetables (as in dispensationalism) to utopias (as in most forms of universalism). But rarely do eschatological visions (doctrines) have anything to do with this life.

Jesus’ eschatological vision was quite different. His was an ethical eschatology. He lived in the present the way he would live at the end. His is a life that is self-consistent, he is the “same yesterday, today and forever.” His eschatological vision of the reign of God, how God, whom he called his Abba, reigned in mercy and kindness and peacemaking led directly to his call to the peacemaking (pacifistic) life. It is impossible at this point to unknot Jesus’ eschatology and ethics, they are two sides of a coin. This is an implication that can be demonstrated over and over again in Jesus’ teaching.

Most of us on this page have rejected all forms of the penal substitution theory of Calvinism preferring a universalist approach based upon the later authentic Pauline letters (excluding I and 2 Thess, and the Pastorals). We have been able to show that there is nothing penal about the atonement. We hope to also show there is nothing penal about eschatology preferring to speak of restorative judgment rather than retributive judgment. And our vision of the ‘cosmic Christ’ or our exegesis of Christ as the Second Adam (Romans 5:12-21 where “all” means “all”) encourages us to consider that at the end all things will be put right, or so is our hope. And so we rightfully have rejected any theory that sees humans consciously being tortured for eternity.

However, most do not realize the implications for this life of having a universal eschatological salvific perspective. When the Risen Christ returns he says two
things:

  1. Peace
  2. Do not Fear

Have you ever wondered about this? The Risen Christ is the bringer of a message from beyond death and that message is good. It not only speaks peace but his very non judgmental presence is peace; from the perspective of Jesus, the disciples are still his little lambs. Second he tells them not to fear; for they had an eschatology of judgment and Jesus’ presence and word blows that eschatology away as wind blows fog away.

Peace is the final word. Peace, the making of peace between persons in relationship, the unity of all with all, this is the Gospel eschatological vision and it not only began in Jesus’ life but it continues in our lives. If you are a universalist you are de facto a pacifist. If we are not a pacifist in this life and we claim to be a universalist, our eschatological vision has no power, and we live a lie. Universal salvation (eschatological vision) and the ethical implications of that constitute the Christian Life.

If you claim to be a universalist and do not love your enemies in this life what good does it do you to be a universalist? If we seek retribution, reparation, tit for tat justice, if we engage in or justify the use of violent force in this life for ourselves or others we have no right to claim to be universalists. At best all we have is a “shoot to kill and let God sort it out at the end” eschatology.

So I challenge everyone who claims to be universalist to follow Jesus, to forgive the enemy, even if it means doing so all day long, seventy times seven. I challenge you not to take sides in mimetic conflicts but to find ways to be peacemakers. I urge you to live out your eschatological vision in the same manner as did Jesus of Nazareth. Turn your swords, your guns, your resentments, your griefs into plowshares and help illumine a peaceable kingdom.

(Register now for the class: Rene Girard and Nonviolent Atonement, taught by Michael Hardin, from October 7 to December 6th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

Bedrock

Guest blog by Brian Sartor

Celebrating twenty-five years of a critically acclaimed cult classic, New York Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson’s “Here’s Why ‘The Matrix’ Is More Relevant Than Ever”[1] helped me reframe political polarization and family infighting in the Trump era. My twin brother, Brad, and I were of the same mind earlier in life. We were both in divinity school when The Matrix came out, thinking alike and voting alike. Twenty-five years before that, as monozygotic twins, for two weeks in utero we shared the exact same biological identity, a single fertilized egg, one human cell.

Now we no longer seem to share the same reality. For eight years we have debated each other over politics, philosophy, history, theology, and biblical interpretation. Deep scrutiny of our differences throughout the Trump era has exposed what cannot be denied: the guiding narrative of Christianity for us now appears to have two different meanings.

Wilkinson normalized this experience for me in the last line of her review: “…great art never has one fixed meaning, and because of that, it’s always a little dangerous.”[2] She refers to the alt-right’s use of the red-pill trope to meme their socio-political vision of reality, a national identity based on race. She also refers to other groups finding meaning in the film, including transgender people who take obvious nods from lines in the movie “about Neo’s very existence inside a literal binary system.” Whether the red pill awakens you to deep state control, gender binary, tech-saturated existence, woke corporate capitalism, or the patriarchy, Wilkinson says the identity of the false reality system, the matrix as one sees it, “depends, ironically enough, upon which system you’re most interested in dismantling.”[3]

According to this insight, two meaning systems in the same country, culture, church, or family see each other as a false meaning system to be dismantled. In such a scenario both factions forget that the common ground of a common identity is the only foundation for truth. Wilkinson notes an essential idea articulated by philosopher Jean Baudrillard upon whose thought The Matrix is based: “[I]t does no good to point out ‘the truth’ from within a system that denies or suppresses reality. In those circumstances, your only tool to combat oppression is violence. You can only fight nihilism with nihilism.”[4] Human freedom and difference implicitly subject us to futility and violence. Whenever art, or human meaning, is interpreted in a new way, the natural response to the split, like a newly divided zygote, is that the two cells define themselves in violent opposition to one another.

Wilkinson also notes that Baudrillard did not like The Matrix as it did not accurately represent his philosophical use for the concept of simulation. The writers of The Matrix themselves also parted ways with Baudrillard’s nihilism in their film script by allowing the power of love to have a reality-shaping role. The Matrix is latent with Christian imagery and symbolism and is therefore itself a new interpretation of an old meaning system, a modern narrative for an ancient faith.

Consistent with Baudrillard’s philosophy and Wilkinson’s point that the matrix “you see depends… upon which system you’re most interested in dismantling” is the observation that any new depiction of Christian meaning naturally opposes the older depiction, which counter-opposes the new, and both systems then lapse into twin forms of nihilism locked in opposition. Wilkinson layers in the interesting twist that during the past twenty-five years both writer-directors of the film, born biological brothers, surnamed Wachowski, have each come out as transgender women. One of the Wachowski sisters, Lilly, said, “[W]hile the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work, the bedrock that all ideas rest upon is love.”[5]

This is certainly a Christian insight, but whenever we treat love as a categorical imperative, a universal ethic, or a fixed moral law, its unique power dissipates and leaves us with only a free-floating idea and not bedrock. There is no reason to assume that Lilly Wachowski or her sister, Lana, would disagree with the previous statement, but even alt-right nationalists could claim love as the bedrock of all ideas. Christian love is not an emotion, motive, intention, principle, nature, essence, ethic, law, abstraction, or absolute. Love, the bedrock of reality, much more than the summation of divine or human law, is always modeled and never coded.

Baudrillard is right: each system that denies or suppresses reality is simply its own matrix. Where love is merely the higher law of Christian humanism coded into a matrix, choosing that new “reality” over the old simulation is “to reject one narrative and adopt another.”  As Wilkinson says, “The red-pilled person is just accepting a new matrix.”[6]

Life imitates art, so while reading the last line of Wilkinson’s review, (“…great art never has one fixed meaning, and because of that, it’s always a little dangerous.”)[7] something clicked. I realized that twin brothers who take up Christianity believing its meaning is fixed will proceed to beat each other senseless trying to convince each other about what is true. Such violence can be avoided in one of two ways: 1) by both twins accepting the imposition of an arbitrating authority over the shared original (or other agreed upon) fixed meaning system, or 2) by at least one of the twins exercising the power to resist seeing Christianity as a fixed meaning system. The mode of operating to be resisted here, which is operating according to the letter of the law, includes making clear distinctions, identifying the self and the other according to those distinctions, and then defending the self, attacking the other, or both.

An alternative mode of operating, which is operating according to the spirit of the law, circumvents violence by exercising the power to operate directly according to love, not making distinctions and divisions by which to identify the self and the other. “Walking according to the spirit”[8] is a Christ-like mode of unity, resonance, and communion with God and the world. It is an experiential knowledge that grounds us, defines us, and identifies us, both the person and the newly formed human community. This tacit, embodied, and personal knowledge of God is an experience that cannot be transmitted through a fixed meaning system, nor can it be used to dominate the will of the other without being corrupted. The spirit of the law is therefore elusive to all systems and surprisingly diverse in both insight and application. Words, even creeds, cannot contain it. Ideas rest upon it and take flight. Systems, institutions, and “Christian” empires built by human hands remain external to it, easily ossify, and eventually fade away.

St Paul says that the (fixed) letter of the law kills while the spirit of the law (love) gives life. In Romans 2, in Romans 7, and in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul says:

“…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…”[9]

“…now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.”[10]

“[God] made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life…”[11]

The spirit is wholly other than the letter of the law. One is a shadow or copy,[12] and the other is the real thing. The spirit of the firstborn divine-human person, as anticipated by ancient Israel, has written the law directly on our hearts.[13] There is nothing inherently wrong with the letter of the law written in stone, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with any outward national, ethnic, gendered, social, or cultural identity written in flesh or ink. However, these things are free-floating identity markers and not bedrock. The shared, personal, experiential, and embodied knowledge of God written on our hearts is bedrock. The original model of love, Jesus of Nazareth, the Anointed One, his spirit alive within us, his body, the ecclesia, is bedrock. Twins and diverse cultures therefore need not fight over fixed meaning. Jesus taught his disciples another way based on the bedrock of a personal identity: “Who do you say that I am?” [14]

There is still time and opportunity to approach all personal and political differences in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness—in true unity and freedom—not leaning on our own understanding, distinctions, and naturally opposed external identities. The real world has always implicitly subjected us to violence, but real-world freedom and diversity no longer necessarily lead to violence. When we start with a common identity grounded in the spirit and not in the letter of the law, the thin layers of futility crumble to expose bedrock. On that foundation, the oneness of a single human cell is a oneness that pales in comparison to what twins may experience after seventy-five or a hundred years of living. The entire human race and cosmos united through the Spirit of Christ as one body with many members may take a little longer than that. Either way, eight years of futility are a blip on the screen.

[1] Alissa Wilkinson, “Here’s Why ‘The Matrix’ Is More Relevant Than Ever”, The New York Times, July 31, 2024. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/movies/the-matrix-ai-film.html?unlocked_article_code=1._U0.YHLw.h0jchd2X93p-&smid=url-share

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Romans 8:4.

[9] Romans 2:28-29.

[10] Romans 7:6.

[11] 2 Corinthians 3:6.

[12] Hebrews 8:5; 9:24; 10:1.

[13] Jeremiah 31:31-34; 2 Corinthians 3:4-6.

[14] Matthew 16:15; Mark 8:29.

Men’s Girardian Study Group on Marriage

Rene Girard offers a perspective on marriage that seems to go unnoticed. In the wider culture there are discussions of marriage with a myriad of diagnoses, labels for issues and, most difficult of all, labels for people. Men are acutely, if subconsciously aware that once a behavior is labeled a person is a hair’s breadth away from being labeled. A person with a label in any culture is usually beyond redemption. We will sidestep this entire trend as much as possible and examine root causes and behaviors that are impediments to peace in a marriage with as few labels as possible in the hope of finding healing for men in Christ. Forging Ploughshares’ focus on peace, a healing, communal image of God and salvation, and the work of Rene Girard provide, we believe, a robust foundation for exploring this vital issue together in a confidential forum. We have a few privately written resources drawing on the theological currents in our work that we will share, and we will together decide on resources (books, articles, podcasts) to look at.


In this 4 part series beginning in July (day and time to be determined) Forging Ploughshares will host a men’s reading and discussion group examining peace in marriage and the impediments we bring to peace, we will examine the following areas: the false self, desire, impediments to peace through the brokenness of desire in marriage, and some thoughts on reorienting desire through Jesus. We hope that the men’s group will provide a safe, confidential way to explore together. There is no charge for the group, and all materials will be provided in the class.

Email Paul Axton at paulv.axton@gmail.com to sign up or make inquiries.

Veneration of the Victory-Tree: A Meditation on the “Dream of the Rood”

The cross of Christ intersects our lives and transforms us at the place we most need Jesus. So, in reflecting upon the 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem “Dream of the Rood,” I am not surprised that a medieval and martial people would understand the cross in terms of military conquest; only then, for the self-sacrificial love of Christ and the cross itself to triumph over violence.[1] For in the mystery of the cross, Jesus sacrifices himself for the life of the world. The cross, hitherto, an object of shame and humiliation becomes an object of devotion and faithfulness to the way of Jesus. And the cross symbolizes and represents Christian love: a self-sacrificial love that extends to enemies as well as neighbors. Christians venerate the cross to draw near to the gift of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and especially during Passiontide, we contemplate the salvation wrought by the work of Christ on the cross. Thus, I invite you to reflect on the “Dream of the Rood” this Holy Week, to venerate the “victory-tree,” on which Christ offered his life for ours, and to meditate upon the great salvation we have in Jesus.

The “Dream of the Rood” describes the poet’s dream wherein he encounters the true cross upon which Christ died. In this dream the cross speaks giving a firsthand account of the crucifixion. The poem can be divided into three sections: it begins by describing the poet’s vision of the exalted cross, then the cross speaks recalling Jesus’s crucifixion from its point of view, and finally the poem concludes in a prayer offered by the poet extolling the glory and wonder of the Christ’s death. In this way, the poet invites us to a profound veneration of the holy cross and contemplation of the paschal mystery.

The poet begins by describing his dream as an encounter of the exalted cross. He says, “It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree raised on high, wound round with light, the brightest of beams.” The exalted cross appears as the cross in glory, which is the cross seen from the vantage of God’s victory over sin, death, and evil. When we behold the cross beyond the warped perversion of sin or the tarnish of death, then we like the poet behold the completed work of Christ and God’s presence revealed within all things. Thus, the poet declares, “that was no felon’s gallows.” The exalted cross reflects the glory of God from the place of uttermost despair, the place in which mankind kills the Son of God who became as we are to save us. So, the poet first responds to the sight of the exalted cross by becoming keenly aware of his own sin:

            Wondrous was the victory-tree, and I was stained by sins,

            wounded with guilt; I saw the tree of glory

            honored in garments, shining with joys,

            bedecked with gold; gems had

            covered worthily the Creator’s tree.

            And yet beneath that gold I began to see

            an ancient wretched struggle, when it first began

            to bleed on the right side. I was all beset with sorrows,

            fearful for that fair vision; I saw that eager beacon

            change garments and colors—now it was drenched,

            stained with blood, now bedecked with treasure.

 Indeed, confronted by the cross of glory we should all examine ourselves and confess by my own hand and for me my savior died. Yet, the exalted cross also remains forever the cross of Christ’s cosmic victory over the Enemy, the principalities and powers of darkness, and evil. To encounter the cross means simultaneously to gaze upon the glory of God and the suffering of Christ. The cross joins desolation and the consolation of God. And in the exaltation of cross, we witness the triumph of love over violence.

Then, the poem continues in a new voice, for the cross addresses the poet recalling its participation in Christ’s victory. The cross speaks first of its abuse as the instrument of executing criminals, lamenting, “Strong enemies seized me there, made me their spectacle, made me bear their criminals.” But in Christ’s crucifixion, the cross becomes something more than an instrument of death; for in Christ’s death God redeems all, even the cross. The cross transcends the use put to it by sinful mankind becoming God’s instrument of grace. The cross tells of cooperating with God’s saving purposes:

            …Then I saw the Lord of mankind

            hasten eagerly, when he wanted to ascend upon me.

            I did not dare to break or bow down

            against the Lord’s word, when I saw

            the ends of the earth tremble. Easily I might

            have felled all those enemies, and yet I stood fast.

            Then the young hero made ready—that was God almighty—

            strong and resolute; he ascended on the high gallows,

            brave in the sight of many, when he wanted to ransom mankind.

            I trembled when he embraced me, but I dared not bow to the ground,

            or gall to the earth’s corners—I had to stand fast.

            I was reared as a cross: I raised up the mighty King,

            the Lord of heaven; I dared not lie down.

The cross reveals that God in his wisdom does not save us without us.[2]  God’s plan of salvation includes the cooperation of creation. God saves us by the Blessed Virgin Mary’s cooperation with divine grace bearing God into the world as Jesus. God saves us by the cooperation of human nature and divine nature in the person of Jesus Christ. In the poet’s dream, God saves us by the cross’s cooperation with Christ for the salvation of the world. According to his wisdom, God saves us by drawing us into his own divine life and purpose for all things.

Then, the poem continues while the cross continues to speak describing Christ’s death, burial, and victory, which has caused some to question why the cross should speak so much, if at all. A conscious and intelligent cross might be the fruit of poetic imagination, or as some scholars suggest, the vestiges of a pagan and animistic past.[3] On the contrary, I consider the notion of a conscious relic guiding the Christian soul into deeper meditation of the mysteries of God a profoundly Christian idea. After all, St. Paul says in his Epistle to the Romans, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.”[4] In some way, the cosmos as God’s creature awaits the fulfillment of God’s creative purposes, when mankind will be revealed fully as the “children of God.” The cosmos, then, awaits the full manifestation of God’s work already accomplished on the cross. Creation’s conscious achievement of its end is realized not in some historical or primordial beginning, nor in the accumulation of days and years, nor by marking progress in terms of values or evolutionary biology, but in Jesus’s incarnation come to its fulness on the cross. Creation, after all, exists by God’s pleasure sprung from the fecundity of God’s love and formed according to God’s wisdom. Thus, I am not surprised that modern scientist endeavor to solve the hard problem of consciousness—whence consciousness—to no avail, especially when the presupposition is that matter produces consciousness. Regardless of how complex the chemical, biological, and physical systems of matter present themselves, matter does not produce consciousness much less intelligence. No, it seems more likely, and infinitely more satisfying, that God according to his love and wisdom, identical to the divine mind, creates all that is and grants creation a life of its own imbued with some sort of consciousness proportional to its being and its being loved, which can respond to God its creator and lover. Indeed, all that exists does so because God loves it, and the love of God ultimately revealed by Christ on the cross should not be considered frivolous. Therefore, we do well to learn from the poet that holy relics, the cross, and even the cosmos may serve as guides into the divine mystery of God’s love.

Finally, the poet concludes in prayer that he too might take up the cross and find himself in the glorious presence of God with his saints. After encountering the cross, recollecting his thoughts, the poet said:

            … My spirit longed to start

            on the journey forth; it felt

            so much of longing. It is now my life’s hope

            that I might seek the tree of victory

            alone, more often than all men

            and honor it well. I wish for that

            with all my heart, and my hope of protection is

            fixed on the cross. …

The cross marks the boundaries and defines the lines that chart the Christian life. The poet having received the vision of the true cross can do nothing else but take up his own cross and follow Jesus. Doubtless, suffering will mark the journey, even as Christ suffered, but when we undergo the passion of this life with faith and hope, then love will be our guide. Love will remain as we meet our end, for as the poet says, this life is but “loaned” to us and not our own. We ought then to be both as careful and careless with our lives as Jesus was with his. With great care we tend to our lives that we might grow into likeness of Christ; we offer our lives joined to Christ’s life as a gift to God. But was not our Lord, also, quite careless with his life abandoning it to death for our sake? So too we must not value our lives more than we love God or our neighbor. Only, then, can we know how to love ourselves. Furthermore, when we take up our journey after Christ’s own, we can be sure of its success:

            The Son was successful in that journey,

            mighty and victorious, when he came with a multitude,

            a great host of souls, into God’s kingdom,

            the one Ruler almighty, the angels rejoicing

            and all the saints already in heaven

            dwelling in glory, when almighty God,

            their Ruler, returned to his rightful home.

Not even death impeded Christ’s journey of incarnation, death, descent into the grave, victory, resurrection, and ascension. Death itself became God’s captive, made to serve God’s purposes, and made to usher God’s beloved into glory.

Therefore, as the poet says, when we venerate the holy cross, we venerate the “victory-tree.” Jesus by the grace of God invites us to contemplate the vastness of God’s blessing and love for us. The holiness of the cross is God’s holiness, which is the unwillingness of Christ to succumb to the temptation of establishing his life in this world. His life remained hidden with God. Consequently, he willingly took up the cross that it might raise him up as the King of Glory. The glory of God bore the woundedness of sinful mankind while he himself knew no sin. The wounded cross reveals the cross of glory, and the cross of glory heals our woundedness. Mankind in league with the Evil One contrived the cross as an instrument of terror and the humiliation of God, but God is not mocked. God redeemed the cross itself to preach his victory. And his victory becomes our victory, when we follow Christ, share in his love, and glory in his cross.

This article and others about Christian Spirituality and Acetic Theology by Fr. Jonathan Totty can be found at https://jonathantotty.substack.com/ which is dedicated to Christian pastoral and spiritual writing to foster a love of God and authentic subjectivity.

[1] “The Dream of the Rood” is anonymous and can be read in full online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159129/dream-of-the-rood-translation. The version quoted here is translated by Roy M. Liuzza.

[2] “God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us.” S. Augustine, in The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1847.

[3] Richard North, Heathen God’s in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 247.

[4] Romans 8:19

Evil and How the Cross of Christ Overcomes It: Thoughts about the One Perfect Simple Triune God rescuing the rebellious, foolish, and mostly immature lot of folks known as humankind. Or reflection on the cross. Or Soul Odyssey.

A former professor and dear friend often asked students who were not paying attention in his theology classes, “What are you going to say when some child asks you, ‘what was that snake doing in the garden?’” Not that he took a particularly literal view of Genesis; rather he was determined to demonstrate just how high and how low the stakes are when we do theology. The stakes for theology are never any higher or lower than when someone asks about the so-called problem of evil. The stakes are low when someone inquires theoretically about the problem of evil because an answer will involve philosophy and an entanglement of the doctrines of God, grace, theological anthropology, free-will, etc. so as to ensure that the inquirer will neither grasp nor reproduce the answer adequately apart from much reflection. Also, any good answer to
questions about the problem of evil will terminate in some discussion of evil as a surd, as no-thing, and with no actual cause per se. Consequently, a skillful presentation of the question of evil often ends with some amount of befuddlement. Alternatively, the stakes are high when someone asks, “whence and wither evil?” while experiencing it.

The low stakes conversation about the so-called problem of evil begins with some form of the question: How can God be good and omnipotent and evil exist? Then, someone will trot out some tired examples of natural and moral evil such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, or some other disaster, or the Holocaust, or the suffering of children. Then, the conversation might take one of several possible directions. Some folks will cry, “God is dead!” A few of these might take glee in a reductionistic fantasy wherein “good” and “evil” exist as mere constructs of language. But most people are happily inconsistent in navigating the tension between their beliefs and behavior. Others will attempt a theodicy, and concoct various unconvincing arguments about why the vindictive super powerful sky god can do whatever he wants. While kinder and wiser folks know better than to imagine evil is some thing. These folks will ponder classical ideas about the privation theory of evil, about what it means to be human, about consciousness, about what it means for a thing to be a thing, about what it means for God to be, and what to be even means. After this pondering comes a long, generally true, explanation totally lost on most people who want an answer better suited to common sense living. So, often the stakes remain low in any discussion of evil, and the best possible outcome will be to keep a vast majority of the professional theologians away from the people actually suffering.

Alternatively, evil can hurt us. I witnessed a real life instance of grappling with the problem of evil at the age of eleven. One year some time ago, simultaneously, or due to the convergence of my memories, I recall doctors diagnosing two of my cousins with terminal illnesses. One family received news that their son would be born with a hole in his heart and not likely survive birth. The other family observed their seemingly healthy one-year-old decline in mobility, for he had cancer. My cousin born with a hole in his heart defied the odds and lived for six months before dying. Whereas my cousin diagnosed with cancer lives even now. One family held a burial while the other raised their son. Such is life; inexplicable, mysterious, full of sorrow, full of joy, and from a Christian perspective permeated by God’s grace. But in these situations, we feel haunted as if by a forgotten memory that life is not as it should be. Anyone with a scrap of moral intelligence feels injustice when children suffer and die. We call this injustice evil, and to speak about evil in the context of particular suffering means a high stakes conversation whereby people may encounter grace or despair.

Suffering is not intrinsically salvific. The suffering and death of a child does not contribute anything to the meaning of the universe. God does not necessitate evil as a part of his grand plan for the cosmos. Where evil is concerned, everything does not happen for a reason. I would think all of this goes without saying, but when my cousin died several well-meaning and God-fearing Christians said something like, “I know it is hard to understand, but everything happens according to God’s plan.” When someone says something about evil happening according to God’s plan, I can only surmise that the Church has failed to teach and pass on the Christian faith. For the foundation of Christianity resides in the Church proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus, which is a story about God in Christ overcoming and putting an end to evil. Thus, Christian teaching does not explain evil but offers a solution to the problem of evil.

Evil constitutes a problem for humanity, for communities of people, and especially individual people but not for God. None of the authors of Holy Scripture seek to explain evil nor do they attempt to vindicate God from responsibility for evil. Instead, the Scriptures present the work of Christ as the resolution to evil as a human problem, as the problem of this cosmos, even as a
spiritual problem. St. Paul, for example, proclaims the work of Christ as freeing humanity, and all things really, from this present evil age (Gal. 1:4). Thus, when the stakes are high, Christians ought to have something to offer those who experience the wound of evil. The Church ought to be a community that proclaims the cross of Christ as a healing salve and as liberation from sin and death. The Gospel, whether expressed in its distilled Pauline form wherein Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection frees humanity from bondage to sin (Rom. 6-8) or in its longer narrative forms recounted by the Evangelists, tells a compelling story about God rescuing the cosmos from evil.

The story of our rescue begins with our present situation. Whence and wither evil? Scripture only hints at how our current predicament came to be in the language of myth. Myth, in this case, means a form of language that references and makes sense of some otherwise incomprehensible realm. Just because a story is a myth does not mean it cannot be true. In fact, some of the deepest truths can only be communicated indirectly by mythic narrative. Thus begins the book of Genesis describing human existence in this present age. Genesis 1-11, does not record the history of man’s fall but describes the reality of the fallen world. Accordingly, the fall does not reference some event in time, but the only Christian way of making sense of humanity’s alienation from God, a universe defined by predation, and ultimately sin, death, and evil.1 Perhaps, David Bentley Hart describes this ahistorical fall best as “an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends.”2 Fallenness, then, describes our present situation as one of distorted understanding about ourselves, the world, and God’s purpose in creation.

Yet, because of Jesus Christ, fallenness cannot wholly describe our present situation. Fallenness remains an apt description of the only cosmos we know, but the work of Christ provides a larger narrative context for this fallen world. As Christ reveals the truth about us and the world, we recognize evil as the perversion and privation of the fullness of God revealed in Jesus. He defines what is most true, most real, and essentially durable about God’s creation. Evil does not have the last say about us; God in Jesus ultimately defines us. God reveals authentic creation in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Indeed, the cross especially marks the event in which the distorted values of this present age unmask themselves as the fallen demonic powers and principalities. Simultaneously the cross reveals the glory of God. The distorted values of this present age consist in the illicit desire for control at whatever cost. The cost usually manifests itself in murderous violence. The ethic of this present age can be summed up: return evil unto evil, hate your enemy, and secure your life in this world no matter what it takes. In stark contrast, God reveals his glory in an ethic that can be summed up: love your enemy (Mt. 5:43-4); Lk. 6:27) and do not repay evil for evil (Rom. 12:17-21).3 We might expect the Lord to annihilate this present evil age, the world, and all of us with it, but whatever vengeance he reserves for himself he expresses as the suffering servant casting out evil and healing us by his own woundedness (Isa. 53:5). Thus, we cannot make sense of our fallenness by measuring how far we have fallen, evil has no explanation, so we must make sense of our present state in terms of redemption.

In his death and resurrection, Christ overcomes evil, this evil age, and the evil within us. We do not need a theodicy. We do not need an argument to vindicate God of evildoing. We need salvation. We all must traverse this fallen world engulfed by darkness, and we only do so safely according to the Light that has come into the world, Jesus Christ. Truly each of us has already embarked upon an odyssey toward our true home. But I do not mean Heaven. Rather God beckons us from the cross of Christ to be made fully human, which is to say divinized made in the image and likeness of himself. Thus, Christ both saves us from this present evil age and makes us the place of his salvation in the world, specifically as the community of the church. Salvation from evil occurs within us when our lives become transformed by the ethic of the cross. Our odyssey in this life, then, means understanding ourselves according to our true creation revealed in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Indeed, God saves us, and all things, by forming us into a people and a community who live according to the ethic of the cross. Therefore, when the stakes are high and evil confronts us in the particulars of everyday life, we must respond by embodying Jesus’ ethic of the cross. We must do good rather than evil. We must bless rather than curse. We must respond in love. Evil is not a thing to be destroyed but an affliction to be healed. The answer to the question of evil, then, is not an explanation but the cruciform life of Christ’s followers.

(Sign up for the course, The Theology of Maximus the Confessor with Jordan Wood. https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings. The course will run from 2024/3/25–2024/5/17 and will meet on Saturdays.)

1Jordan Daniel Wood in The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor, pp. 155-169, argues some patristic theologians such as Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximos the Confessor taught a “prehistorical” fall.

2David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami, p. 22. For further reading about the Fall as ahistorical, see Jesse Hake’s article shared by Aiden Kimel, at Eclectic Orthodoxy, and Kimel’s response.

3 Robert Doran develops Bernard Lonergan’s notion that the “Law of the Cross” transforms evil into the “supreme good.” in The Trinity in History: A Theology of the Divine Missions (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2012), 227-258. Doran’s insights have heavily influenced my own thought about how the cross of Christ constitutes authentic human subjectivity and ultimately authentic communities.

The End of Lincoln Christian University: Why it Matters

By C J Dull

On May 31, 2024 Lincoln Christian University will close its doors.  It will truly mark the end of an era for the Independent Christian Churches, however hackneyed and trite that may sound. The formative years of this group are often considered a titanic struggle between two contrasting personalities, Dean Walker on the left and R C Foster on the right. The former perfected the art of turning eccentricity into profundity, while the latter was clear to the point of being accusatory, turning the debate skills he learned at Harvard on the whole religious landscape.  Yet on an institutional level, the two major figures were Leonard Wymore of the North American Christian Convention and Earl Hargrove of Lincoln.  

The discussion below will focus more on the contribution of Lincoln, which is not quite as obvious as the North American. Yet it should be remembered that at the end of May the two most significant institutions of the Independent Christian Churches during its formative period will only be history—or more bluntly, dead. That can hardly fail to be significant or perhaps crucial or essential for the group as a whole. Some may infer that this is a good time to echo the concluding words of the Springfield Presbytery and sink into the larger Christian world, however defined, but it seems rather that stripping the romanticized emphasis on unity is preferable.  

Intriguingly, while Emmanuel and Lincoln proposed different emphases, they derive from a common source, the Kerschner Butler School of Religion. This “common source” did produce different approaches. Emmanuel maintained an interest in contacts with the restructured Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) while Lincoln was quick to dissociate itself from them. Hargrove was motivated to enter the ministry while a member of a Disciples congregation and did his theological work at Phillips Seminary–thus, the irony of his original motivation and its contrasting later policy. One area in which he did maintain his Disciple interests was his view of women in the pulpit. He seemed particularly impressed by their ability to keep congregations loyal and coherent during a difficult period. When Prof. Heine (alumnus and professor of Lincoln) published a seminal article on the subject in 1977, it was not a new emphasis. Female graduates of Lincoln often found active careers in the churches. Eleanor Daniel was probably the most prominent Independent during this period, having served as a seminary professor and/or dean at all three seminaries and having demonstrated that she was “the expert” on Christian Education. Again, the irony of a school—and its female members–working to preserve a constituency that was not particularly sympathetic to such participation.  

The rise of Lincoln to a position resembling hegemony seemed to owe a great deal to timing and environment. Most are not impressed when we speak of those coming from “small farms”.  It often betokens a kind of sparse, parochial, sometimes remote background, mitigated only by hard work. Those in eastern Tennessee may easily conjure up images of tax defiance and moonshine. “Small farms” in central Illinois are a different story. They are generally flat—hence all the jokes about being located in a cornfield—fertile and mechanized. The congregation in Assumption, IL, where Ben Merold became somewhat prominent, also included Leroy Trulock, a very large implement dealer. Agricultural entities may be various sizes, but they generally are quite sophisticated in their approach to the practice. Most state universities in this area have schools of agriculture that are well-funded and often have vast extension services, the local one being the U of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Though an agricultural environment may not usually be associated with cosmopolitan awareness, in most such places the day begins with radio announcers giving the market and other reports often on a global scale. I recall quite distinctly giving a perfunctory greeting to a cousin who farmed and being rewarded with a lecture on the difficulty of competing with Brazilian soybeans. No doubt some remember those unbelievably impressive old consul radios able to reach almost anywhere in the world, which were a staple of many of our grandparents. It’s no wonder that their descendants found missions a congenial field. Lincoln, and regional Bible Colleges, had an immediate impact in missions, partly due to the agricultural environment, but also due to the fact the student body included many veterans of WWII.

The endorsements in Lincoln’s catalogue (and many others) by the American Legion as well as references to the GI Bill of Rights make it clear that many of the students were veterans of WW2 and Korea, and thus older and more disciplined—perhaps even more aggressive–than previously entering students. Such descriptions as more mature, more serious or solemn, and even more sophisticated may have been appropriate. Thus, we see the balancing of a specific regional area with a cosmopolitan emphasis—encouraged by the World Wars but already there, both of which impacted Lincoln and its influence on Independents.    

The conception that a Bible college can serve as a regional center for evangelism did not originate with Lincoln. Aside from historical examples (e.g., medieval western monasticism), probably the first example among the Independent Christian Churches was the formation of Pacific Bible Seminary, a Cincinnati clone, in 1928.  Alberta Bible College and Atlanta Christian College had similar missions before WW2. Yet, Lincoln—started after the war—demonstrated that the model was indeed productive. The one caveat is that Lincoln’s success was evangelism not in any simple or pure sense but largely by strengthening existing congregations. Especially in their early days, the faculty and many of the students were able to support themselves through supply preaching or even regular pastorates. 

Historically, then, the preference for Bible colleges came out of Lincoln, in the fifties. It appeared to have phenomenal success in rejuvenating congregations there (they regularly talk about 500 congregations within a hundred miles), and the model of a Bible college as a center of evangelism was born. The lack of interest in producing new liberal arts colleges was a combination of factors: (1) money—most of the supporting churches were rural and small; (2) public university education was strong and inexpensive in these states; and (3) liberal arts colleges (e.g., Eureka and Culver Stockton) had demonstrated both a susceptibility to critical views (which were not acceptable in this wave) and a declining ability to produce preachers. While Lincoln inspired the creation of Bible colleges as centers of evangelism, the staffing of them usually fell to other schools (e.g., Johnson, Minnesota, Cincinnati).

The other notable shift that was centered on Lincoln was the focus on theology. At a time when higher criticism was influencing churches and seminaries, all three of the seminaries of Independents opposed critical scholarship in the first generation. Emmanuel did the same as Butler and embraced it in the second generation. The other two in the second had degrees largely outside formal seminary areas, and often these disciplines are not particularly fond of NT scholarship, often considering it a kind of exotic scholasticism. During this period the preeminent discipline in our seminaries became theology, especially the work of Jack Cottrell at Cincinnati and James Strauss at Lincoln. With the closing of both Cincinnati and Lincoln, schools seem to be returning to an emphasis on basic biblical exegesis.

However, the lasting focus on preachers and preaching may be the result of Lincoln and other regional schools. The supply of preachers seems to have upgraded the position of the sermon. While preaching has always been important, often its most skillful practitioners had been certain professionals such as circuit riders or evangelists. In this period the sermon tends to take on a position as an essential part of the service, almost like a sacrament or ordinance that must be part of the service, even if it is delivered by one untrained in theology or church history. 

This focus on preaching, supported by Lincoln and regional schools, must be combined with two other key influential figures. It is difficult to understand the ministerial ethos among Christian Church preachers without understanding P. H. Welshimer. He took a congregation of 350 in 1903 and within 20 years had one of a couple thousand with an emphasis on the Sunday School, the simple Gospel and considerable sophistication in methodology. He was becoming prominent about the time a young man named Donald McGavran was graduated from Butler University, which gave Welshimer an honorary doctorate. The “church growth” McGavran later described in missionary terms he first saw personified in Welshimer.  McGavran took-up Welshimer’s emphasis on the priority of evangelism and “the simple gospel,” which has resulted in a kind of theological minimalism in the church growth movement and his successors in big churches. Ministers of large churches (even more so with the prevalence of business training) especially concentrate on adding members with a minimum of theology and a maximum of activity—ranging from familiar good works (e.g., Habitat for Humanity, prison work) to aerobics to parenting, debt-reduction or even pie-making workshops.

Thus, the key influences of Lincoln, have been the focus on preaching, on regional emphases and needs, practical ministries, church growth, and theology. With the closing of Lincoln, there is no question which, among these, will be its enduring legacy.[1]

Reflections on “The End of Lincoln Christian University: Why it Matters“

By Paul Axton

C. J. Dull is one of the premiere historians and Greek scholars among “Independents”, so I asked him to reflect on the significance of the closing of Lincoln Christian University.

My tenure at Lincoln was only one year, and in that year, I studied almost exclusively with James Strauss. Though I could not always understand his precise point, Strauss’s charisma, breadth of reference, and enthusiasm worked a profound influence. His mode of doing theology inspired his students, like myself, to pursue higher degrees in theology. My work, in psychoanalytic theory and philosophy, may be unusually arcane but is one example of the directions inspired by Strauss. Though Strauss, like most all of his contemporaries, was limited by the paradigms of modernity, his legacy at Lincoln seems to have created space for those working in postmodern theology, philosophical theology, and historical theology. Strauss was a large personality and a dynamic speaker, with a wide presence and visibility in our churches, such that he made room for the subsequent outstanding theological faculty which gathered at Lincoln.

In the classroom, Strauss was famous for his various witticisms. When he would ask a question and receive no reply, he indicated we could ask any passing truck driver on Hwy 30 to answer. He referred to the slow infiltration of the “principalities and powers” into the Church as the frog in the kettle syndrome. The frog is happy to sit in the warm water and misses the fact that he is adjusting gradually to being boiled to death. Maybe evangelicalism as a whole, but certainly Independents, are now submerged in the boiling waters of pragmatism.

C J describes the cross purposes in Lincoln’s focus on preaching, church growth, practical ministries, and theology. Theology turns out to be the loser in a group geared toward church growth and pragmatics. It is not clear theological depth can survive among Independents. Lincoln was the key exception and now the primary exhibit, that this is the case. Sadly, any truck driver on Hwy 30 probably knows this.

[1] There are some interesting ways in which the regional schools have had something of an enduring effect.  One more salient aspect, but probably mostly under the radar, is the position of communion in the order of service.  Most older congregations continuously operative almost universally have preserved communion at the end.  Virtually everyone else has it just before the sermon.  Of course for years, if not decades, having a regular preacher was at best a luxury.  It was often the practice to have the song service and end with communion following.  If a preacher was available, his contribution was added after communion and became the de facto end.  The ready supply of preachers made available by the regional schools then systematized the position of communion in the center of the service so successfully that most members now cannot conceive of any other position.

Beyond Justification: Revelation, Love, and Salvation

Guest Blog by Jonathan DePue

I recently had the privilege of being interviewed by Paul Axton on his Forging Ploughshares Podcast about my forthcoming book, co-authored with Douglas Campbell, Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (March 2024). Paul and I decided that it might be helpful for folks, or at least peak people’s interest in the book, if I wrote a summary of the book as a companion to the podcast episode–explaining some of the key moves that Douglas and I made throughout. 

But instead of simply jumping right in, I wanted to take some time to explain the rationale of the book more generally. I have been working with Douglas for just over a decade, having first met him when I matriculated at Duke Divinity School in 2013. And prior to that I was fortunate enough to have begun studying Paul and learning Koine Greek during undergrad from 2009 to 2013. There I was introduced to some of the best Pauline scholarship that rejected what I knew then as the “Lutheran” reading of Paul (a term coined by the famous Lutheran scholar and minister Krister Stendahl). I could sense that this dominant, so-called “Lutheran” reading was destructive (especially towards Jews), highly individualistic, and depicted a God that clashed fundamentally with the God of cosmic reconciliation revealed in Jesus Christ–a God who was irrevocably committed to his people, Israel. But I found the alternatives, especially from certain advocates of the New Perspective on Paul and of the Sonderweg (“two-ways of salvation”) approach, to be less than compelling.
 
Then, for the first time in 2013, I read The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (henceforth DoG). Everything started clicking into place.

I began to understand that the conventional construal of Paul that I knew as “Lutheran” had problems that were deeper, broader, and harder than most scholars had grasped. Douglas demonstrated that the issue was not just a bad reading that could be attributed to Luther or to the Reformation per se; it was that there was a whole prior construct at work informing the interpretation of Paul’s words, sentences, paragraphs, and key theological claims. Douglas dubbed this “justification theory” (henceforth JT). JT isn’t so much a reading that can be lifted directly out of the text (this in itself is an impossibility) but functions much like what Hans-Georg Gadamer called a Vorverständnisse or a “pre-understanding” which combines received expectations concerning what certain words and phrases mean in just under 10 percent of Paul’s texts. This prior construct then informs and controls how one interprets Paul’s justification data, and goes on to capture what Paul wrote everywhere else. It is, like theologian Willie James Jennings has put things, a “Christian imagination.” JT is just in the water. 

What, then, are we to do with the fact that Paul has been colonized by a harsh, retributive, and contractual prior construct–namely, JT–that prioritizes a particular reading of a minority data set and exerts influence out of all proportion onto the rest of what Paul wrote?

DoG offered what I think is the only successful solution to this problem if we want Paul to be a coherent thinker (and I think we should). With extraordinary historical-critical insight, linguistic mastery, philosophical rigor, and theological depth DoG was a force that Pauline scholars could not ignore—although they tended to misunderstand and misrepresent its arguments (see, well, pretty much all of the reviews of DoG that dropped shortly after its publication). To be fair, it was a difficult book that surpassed 1,000 pages in length and was perhaps rhetorically structured in such a way that immediately turned off those who committed to JT (whether they called it that or not) as if it were a theological golden calf. 

In 2018, nearly a decade after DoG’s publication, I felt it was well past time to repackage the arguments of the book by prefacing and then explaining them in a way that was a bit more rhetorically sensitive and accessible–not just for scholars of Paul, but for students, pastors, and lay people. These realizations coupled with my intense desire to share the decades of research that Douglas had done with as many people as I could was really the impetus for our book, Beyond Justification. And thankfully, I was able to persuade Douglas to co-author it with me. 

The book itself has taken on many iterations over the years, but Douglas and I eventually settled on a structure, argumentative flow, and tone that we believe will help readers grasp what Douglas has been trying to say about Paul and the gospel for years. 

Chapter one, “God’s truth,” kicks off the book with the correct theological starting point–the epistemological question concerning how we know the truth about God. We know God by attending to where he has chosen to reveal himself, namely, in and through his Son, Jesus Christ, and by the Spirit. And Paul himself attests to this starting point centered on Jesus quite clearly. Paul’s experience with the risen Lord was quite dramatic and unique, so many other people in his churches probably did not experience revelation in the same way. And Paul knows this. His converts are able to be drawn into the dynamic of revelation as the divine Spirit of Christ searches the depths of God and further reveals the truth about God to them. And we too, wherever we are, are encountered by God’s revelation in Jesus Christ in just the same way–a truth mediated to us by Christ’s Spirit. We don’t find it; it comes to find us. The key thing is that the same process of revelation arrives under the control of the sovereign, self-revealing Lord of the universe and extends from Paul’s own experience, to his churches, and to us thousands of years later.

In God’s self-revelation, we now learn critical things about who this God is. In chapter two, “God’s Love,” we argue that Paul attests to a God of three persons; God is actually constituted by these persons–a divine family of relationships. And not just any sort of relationships but ones of love. God, therefore, is love. And we see this love most clearly in the event of God sending his beloved Son to die for a hostile humanity before they do anything in response. God’s love therefore must be unconditional, and he has always been this way even from before the foundation of the world. Indeed it is this loving divine communion that explains the creation of the cosmos. God elected to create a people to share in this divine communion, and he did this all out of his deep love for us. This is guaranteed by the free activity of God’s Spirit who draws humanity into fellowship with God in Christ forever. We are effectively adopted into God’s loving family to be holy, happy, and blameless–despite whatever tries to knock this divine plan off track. God will always rescue his creation because this is the sort of God revealed in Christ. This is the divine secret (Gk mystērion) that lay at the heart of the cosmos–a loving family that never lets go or gives up on its children.

So if this is what God is really like, how does God respond to attempts to interfere with God’s loving purposes for the cosmos in order to reestablish his divine plan? This is what we address in chapter three, “God’s salvation.” In the light of who God is, we need to know exactly what is messing things up. Paul says quite explicitly that the cosmos is enslaved to the powers of Sin, Death, and the Flesh–along with associated evil powers roaming about. Creation is in bondage with no way to set itself free. We are utterly incapacitated. God’s solution to this dismal plight can be summarized as a two-part story of descent and ascent.

First, God the Father sends his Son to enter into this enslaved cosmos and take on human flesh. Christ assumes all that is harming, damaging, and incarcerating us; he bears all of this as he journeys faithfully to the cross. He is executed, and Sin, Death, and the Flesh are terminated in his execution. Second, Christ is of course raised from the dead and enthroned on high where he is acclaimed as Lord in a transformed body not of flesh but of pneuma (spirit). Through Christ’s Spirit, we are grafted on to this journey of descent and ascent as we enter into the extinction of our current sinful condition. Christ died therefore we all have died. And in Christ, we are raised with him beyond this enslaved state and are set free to respond to God with a full and joyful obedience. Christ’s resurrection is our resurrection. We live out of this resurrected location now and await our final resurrection when we too will be given new spiritual bodies like Jesus. We are saved, then, as we participate in Christ’s faithful life, death, and resurrection. Indeed God’s plan for the cosmos is brought back on track through Jesus and the Spirit. This is Paul’s gospel–his Good News (Gk euangelion).

In part two of this blog post, I will continue summarizing the chapters of Beyond Justification, beginning with a certain construal of Paul, namely, JT, that appears to be doing something very different from the gospel that we have presented thus far.