Walking Truth – Forging Ploughshares

William Desmond on Being Between: Irish-Wise

As an introduction to William Desmond and the upcoming course Desmond is teaching for PBI, I presumptuously excerpt a small vignette from his most recent work, Wayward and Homebound,[1] in which he describes his philosophy and autobiography as “being between” as part of his being Irish. This work demonstrates how it is Desmond’s philosophy brings together the transcendent and immanent, grounding experience of the infinite in the immanence of subjectivity. I was very taken with his phrase describing this, the “intimate universal,” which he here develops as part of his experience. However, if my reading is any indication, this should spark recognition in everyone. This is partly what he means by “being between,” which he acknowledges may be an off-putting description, but as he describes, it pertains to his Irish experience and by extension to every particular experience, and the universal:

This concern has many dimensions, some more local and intimately rooted in my being Irish, some less localized and crystallized out of wanderings in a more ecumenical space. Being between is itself defined by extremities of intimacy and universality. We are drawn again and again to the question: Is there something like an intimate universal? Is there something in the intimacy of life that, for all its localized character, has something universal about it? Likewise, is there something about the universal that is not sustaining enough food for the soul, if it is only abstract, placeless and faceless? Intimacy risks our being too much there, and we cannot see the wood from the trees. Universality risks being nowhere at all, and in claiming to hover over wood and trees, we come down nowhere, and see neither trees nor wood. Is there a “being between” that is both intimate and universal? How speak about both the intimacy and the universality? Must it be from a position neither inside nor outside, yet both inside and outside; from somewhere in the midst of life, and from a somewhere that is nowhere, since it touches the void whence thinking comes forth and sometimes fructifies?

Does “being between” constitute a condition of Irish thought? We speak of the human condition; or of having a condition, meaning an illness; or of being in condition, meaning being healthy. One might say “being between” is a condition of thought, in a more general sense, but are there Irish conditions of mind that show themselves intimately cognizant of “being between”? Many special offers in Ireland have the proviso attached: Terms and conditions apply. Is “being between” among the terms and conditions presupposed by Irish minding?

Desmond describes his metaxological philosophy as arising from the betweenness of being Irish, which put him between two languages, and then his struggle to learn Dutch in Belgium, causing Irish to rise to the surface, and the feeling of an otherness residing with him. There may be one world but in Desmond’s worlds of experience, Ireland/America/Belgium, he found he could no longer be at home.

I was in the space between, and the between was not to be overcome. It was to be lived with, lived in, and traversed. This space of the between became a leitmotif of my thinking, in which different poles, though there might be communication between them, could not be reduced to a univocal unity or subsumed into a dialectical whole.

Maybe it was my experience of being between multiple places growing up (some ten different moves), recognizing multiple ways of being, and then moving to Japan cast all of these experiences as alien, or what Desmond calls being other. In Japan the constant reminder is that one is a Gaijin, or foreign other. As Desmond puts it:

It was a descent into the marvelous and sometimes horrifying otherness within one, intimate to one’s own selving. Indeed, by being outside the first home, by being no absolute insider in the second home, one comes home to oneself differently, by not-being-at-home. By being thus outside in the between one becomes intimate to the irreducible intermediacy within oneself, within us all, and between us all in the most intimate communications that both bind us together and respect our singular solitudes.

The awakening to the intimate universal captured for me my realization as a young teenager on the Texas prairie, when awakened to God, prayer, and transcendence, a new order of subjectivity grounded in communion, or an infinite communication. Desmond provides a prolonged explanation of this intimate universal, which as with Christ brings together the human and divine, but this Christic experience, is human experience. Desmond doesn’t say it this way exactly, as far as I know, but this is how his description fit my understanding and experience. The discovery of communication with God is a discovery of the ground of thought and communication, which is living and moving in the between, in the intimate universal.

Desmond brings together the rich Irish rootedness of his experience to describe how human experience merges with the divine. If you have not discovered William Desmond, or if you have and want to dive deeper, this course with PBI is a unique opportunity for a life transforming study.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] William Desmond, Wayward and Homebound: Irish Betweenings, Philosophical Thought, and Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025) quoting from the section on “Being Between: Irish-wise.

Peaceful Realism: “Peace I Leave with You”

“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful” (John 14:27).

In archaic societies there was no questioning the cosmic principles. Submission to the “order of things,” however that order was conceived, was as good as it gets. Karma, the Law, the gods or God, or fate, were conceived as the given realities, and though one might act with boldness or try to manipulate within the given parameters, there was no sense of getting beyond those parameters to the basic mechanisms undergirding society and the world. As I understand the Christian message, it is exposing the supposed foundations which enslave to violence, false religion, mental sickness, and slavish, unquestioning obedience. The principalities and powers which seem to be an unbreakable force, ruling through the social order, politics, religion, law, or simply tradition, were shown, through the work of Christ, to be suspendable, if not supplantable.

The Christian revolution is still working itself out, but it has sparked a series of revolutions, each of which share the realization that the order of things is not just a necessary given. Medicine, economics, politics, science, and even psychology, have exposed access to the controls, if not complete understanding or control. Sickness is not always inevitable or incurable. The economic and political order can be rearranged, and capitalism and socialism are the proof. Science presumes to get at the basic structure of things, though that structure has proven elusive and infinitely deep. The fears and neuroses which seemingly control the mind have an etiology that is not inevitable or unbreakable. This is more or less common knowledge, but how to maintain this knowledge and what to do with it, is not immediately clear. Part of this lack of clarity, is the failure to recognize the undergirding power of the dark cosmos addressed by Christ. That is the revolution instigated by Christ, resulting in a series of revolutions, has not yet culminated in the final revolution.

Strangely, the power interwoven with every other, structuring the order binding the human condition, but which is left unquestioned and largely untouched, is precisely that power most directly addressed by Christ. The coercive violence of society, the “absolute necessity” of sacrifice, war, and capital punishment, and the general sickness of masochism and sadism, continue to reign, in spite of the fact that this dealing in death was exposed and defeated by Christ. The realization of this victory was clear to the early church in the realms of war and government servitude and the understanding that restorative possibility had replaced retributive justice (while it was less clear when it came to slavery and patriarchy), but these early gains were eroded. For most Christians today, slavery is wrong and war inevitable.

The sentimental account of the Christmas truce of 1914 illustrates the point. German and American soldiers, killing one another the day before and the day after, emerged from the trenches and exchanged gifts and food and sang hymns such as “Silent Night.” Though the carnage was only briefly interrupted, this story is often told, without irony. The absurdity that Christians, sharing in the Body of Christ, celebrants of his birth and incarnation, could only halt the slaughter momentarily, escaped the participants and those who retell the event in the “Spirit of Christmas.” The numbness (dumbness?), or the general passive submission to “inevitable violence,” is on the order of an archaic resignation to the powers. The sense that Christ has defeated these powers is a non-sequitor.

In the “real world” it is obvious that the one with the biggest weapon, wins. Vengeance, or its threat, is the only possible security. It is reinforced by the violent content of mass media and the passive parameters of the form of spectacle. Those who seek center stage through mass shootings and terrorist attacks, recognize that to garner attention requires spectacle. Dirty Harry and the Columbine killers are bound by the same matrix. The towering infernos (the movie or the terrorist attack), the overwhelming crime, the pleasure of revenge, the necessity of killing, overwhelms any sense of a peaceful counter-agency to violence. The art of film sets forth the received deep structure of the cosmos. The degree to which the form accommodates or creates the impassive lack of agency is unclear, but the medium testifies to the inevitable nature of violence. (Even portrayals of Christ in popular media, such as The Chosen, shape Jesus according to the myth of violence.)

The case of Japan indicates that it is not just life following art, as the atomic holocaust unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seemed to produce the peculiar art form of Japanese cinema. Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah, and Gamera, embody the monstrous threat of total destruction that the nuclear age stirred up. Prior to the nuclear age Japan was able to ward off every enemy, and the samurai, the divine winds, the Yokai, the magic of the islands, cast a spell that could not be broken. The archaic world was broken by the “Christian West,” not through the Gospel but through the destructiveness of its perversion. It was the “Christian Nation” (the United States), which would martyr more Japanese Christians in a day than had been killed in 200 years of persecution. Christianity did not cause Truman the Baptist, Byrnes the Catholic and one of Truman’s closest advisors, or Charles Sweeney (pilot of Bock’s Car) a devout Catholic, or any of the long list of Christian advisors and actors to pause or refuse. Truman reported sleeping soundly and never having a second thought. The faith simply served to ease the consciences of its adherents. Though the image of Christian slaughtering Christian in genocidal proportions forever exposed the emptiness of the predominant form of the Western religion, it was precisely faith that blinded to this conclusion (I write about this here).

The blinding nature of this faith was brought home to me as a boy when I first encountered Christian nationalism. As a new Christian I was worried for Johnny French, whom my father employed for odd jobs, but who was often so inebriated he could not move. I found him in a stupor one day, and wanting to help, asked if he was a Christian. He seemed to suddenly sober-up and was angry that I could ask such a question. He said, “Of course I am a Christian. Don’t you know I was a ball turret gunner in the war.” The piety of being American, of having participated in its greatest sacrament, was proof of his American form of the faith. The fusion of loyalty to country and to God and serving this ultimate power by making it ultimate, were completely melded.

I would like to think, that in my childish way, I was attached to a more direct route to God, and that I was never completely duped by religious nationalism. I felt myself enough of an outsider, even frightened of normal society, that my retreat to nature, no matter how twisted by my own suffering sensibility, served a more universal and intimate form of the faith. “Outside society” I had come to a profound sense of communion with God, as if self-awareness was only fully awakened in this divine fellowship. I had few human companions, no real church family, but it was a glorious time of communion with God and nature, bent inward as it was, but nonetheless an awakening to transcendence. It had not occurred to me before (this transcendence), and I was awakened to a different form of subjectivity.

William Desmond describes this awakening as the arrival of the “intimate universal,” the “ontological way of immanence.” “The meaning of the most intimate immanence is just transcendence as communicative being.”[1] I understood others were called into this communion, but I felt uncomfortable in church society. My communion did not fit with this communion, though I may not have been able to articulate this. “We do not think of God and then, after thinking, try to make up a community with God. The thinking is always and already in that community, though it may not know that, and even though it may not recognize that, or may indeed entirely reject the suggestion of being in that ultimate community.”[2] It was not isolation, or an isolated subjectivity, but a deep communication. Dog, horse, prairie, rabbit, were my only fellow congregants in this communion, but I felt it a fine fellowship in God. “The porosity of being is opened in an ultimate communication, and the passion of our being is our passion for God.”[3] Prayer was my conversation and even if not consciously directed at God, the dialogue was open. “Praying is thought awakening to its original ground, waking in the intimate universal to its own most intimate being as a love of the endowing origin.”[4]

This was not an undisturbed or continual peace, but peace must begin here, and it is in no way regulated by the political, mediated by the social, or grounded in the national. In fact, it may only be tangentially related to the church as institution. The peace won by war, the peace by compromise – a temporary cessation of conflict, the peace of mutually assured destruction, have nothing to do with this peace of the intimate universal. This peace does not depend upon peace gained in the immanent frame. The peace of Christ breaks into this immanence, and this is the form of Christian witness to the world. Christians are not bound by the cosmos, but where they begin with the immanent frame, the political, the nation-state, the peace of compromise, and willingly participate in gaining peace through violence, they betray their primary witness. The peace beginning with infinite subjectivity, is the witness of the church, the power and purpose of the Christian faith. This is the peace the world cannot give.

[1] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) location 2514.

[2] Ibid, 2520.

[3] Ibid, 2525

[4] Ibid, 2525

Reflections on the Dynamics of Participating in the Trinity

Trinity as ultimate reality means reality is relational. Ultimate reality is not a monism or one thing in three modes, nor is it three substances within a single abstraction, but the Trinity is a relational dynamic. This has implications for nearly everything; for how we conceive human experience, the church, creation and relationship to God. As Nicholas Lash describes, Trinitarian doctrine is the grammar, the structure, of the Christian school of discipleship.[1] This Trinitarian grammar provides for a creative and generative dynamic, which the early church and the church today is continuing to realize.

The Unpredictable Nature of Trinity

The problem is, the Trinity has political, social, anthropological, and even economic implications, which are impossible to predict. As Raimon Panikkar notes, “The Trinity is an irritant to any monarchic ideology, be it religious (monotheism), political (imperialism and colonialism), economic (global market), academic (pensée unique), or even lifestyle (technocracy).”[2] The Trinity is a doctrine to be realized, and “the world” mitigates against this realization in its attachment to an ever collapsing dualism (an identity through difference that reduces to sameness). This collapse (the violence of the world) in its various political, ethnic, and psychological antagonisms is predictable, but the positive overcoming of the mechanism of violence (peace) cannot be predicted or captured in a theory. Paul describes it as passage from slavery to sin to freedom in the Trinity.

The Passage from Trinitarian absence into Trinitarian Realization

In Romans 7, Paul pictures the ego pitted against the law as controlled by death, which amounts to a Trinitarian absence, which becomes clear in Romans 8, with the Son displacing the isolated ego, and Abba displacing the law, and death being displaced by the Spirit. Human violence against the self and the world is working out its trinitarian absence, a struggle undone through entry into the Trinity: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God . . . (Rom, 8:2, 15-16). Slavery to sin is characterized by fear and death and the impenetrable law which split the ego. This is displaced by a relation to Abba, in the Son, which is life in the Spirit. The realization of this unity not only shows itself in a psychological reorientation but in bringing together categories which were seemingly beyond reconciliation. God and world, matter and Spirit, heaven and earth, typically pitted in a dualism, are harmonized in a Trinitarian synthesis. Quite simply, realization of the truth of the Trinity is entry into peace and reconciliation, which is salvation.[3]

The Organic Nature of Salvation

This is not so much a cultural project (Christendom) or an institution or religion (Christianity) but it is this realization, corporately and individually of the wholeness to be found in the Trinity. According to Jesus, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20-21). God does not indwell an organization or a civilization but people. The civilizational and religious project have tended to obscure the point of the faith, to enter into Trinity and to live out the implications of being the kingdom. Christendom is on its last legs and Christianity as an institutional religion is in sharp decline, but this opens up the opportunity to the reality of “being in Christ” as a personal realization.

Which is not to say the project is individualistic, but the point of the ecclesia is as an organism and not an organization.[4] This organic understanding means not just personal growth, but recognition that relation to this truth is not like that of a religion or organization but is entry into the full realization of relationship. We are realizing but have not yet realized the fullness of this truth, either as it relates to ourselves, to other religions, or to the world as a whole, but we can participate in this growth without full comprehension. We are growing into Christ who, through us, is growing in the world, but we can only follow the form from our present perspective. “But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Co 12:7). The kingdom is in process and is not historically complete, and this unifying work, certainly involving knowledge (beyond full comprehension) is giving rise to an intelligibility.

The kingdom is in your midst for the common good, but no single mind or organization or hierarchy controls or has a handle on this kingdom. It is a process of discovery and realization, which cannot be predicted or conceptualized or reduced to a set of doctrines or propositions. It is an unfolding story, which involves who God is in Christ. As Rowan Williams describes, there is no single institutional project or clear course of engagement with other traditions, other than the concrete future of a Christlike humanity, that is a humanity “delivered from a slavish submission to an alien divine power and participating in the creative work of God.”[5] It is not our place to provide a universal theory or explanation of how this might work in particular places, cultures, and religions. Though we may not know the universal how, we do know that it is in and through specific human encounter with the ever-expanding story of Jesus Christ and the church.

Conclusion: The Process of Salvation as a Trinitarian Realization

The unfolding relational nature of Trinitarian theology could never assume to speak the last word. “To the extent that the relation of spirit to logos is still being realized in our history, we cannot ever, while history lasts, say precisely all that is to be said about logos . . . We know that the unification of all things through Christ is not a matter of a single explanatory scheme being manifested to us, but of the variousness of human lives being drawn into creative and saving relation to the divine and to each other.”[6] We are in the midst of the purposeful groaning (Rom 8:26-27) working itself out in creation and the body of Christ. “Being Christian, if it means acting for these goals and for these reasons, is believing the doctrine of the Trinity to be true, and true in a way that converts and heals the human world.”[7]

[1] Nicholas Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology, vol. 2, no. 3 (1986), 183-96. Cited in Rowan Williams, “The Trinity and Pluralism,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Edited by Gavin D’Costa (New York: Orbis Books, 1990), 13.

[2] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, (New York: Orbis Books, 2013), 224-225.

[3] The experience of the synthesis of the Father and Son, time and eternity, Creator and creation, is through the Spirit. The Spirit is the realization of synthesis in an ever-abiding dynamic (Rom 8:26–27). Trinity as the structure of reality shows itself in being between (creation in process), and this relational betweenness constitutes not just a third, but is the truth of the whole. Time is not pitted against eternity, as if God is incapable of the temporal, but in Christ the Creator is groaning with creation (Rom 8:22). Just as the Father is through the Son, so too the eternal is in time. Panikkar calls it “tempiternal” in that just as the Father and Son cannot be separated neither can time and eternity be separated.Ibid, 226.

[4] Raimundo Panikkar, “The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges: Three Kairological Moments of Christic Self-Consciousness,” in Hick and Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, (New York: Orbis, 1995), 104

[5] Williams, 11.

[6] Ibid, 12.

[7] Ibid, 13.

The Trinity as the Foundation of Human Experience and Truth: Drawing Together the Thought of William Desmond and Raimundo Panikkar

The Trinity is not simply a complicated or obscure way of describing the Christian God, but the foundation of truth at the root of true human experience. Trinity as the guide into truthful experience goes beyond an objective and abstract correspondence theory of truth, which pictures human intellect as the adequation or correspondence of human intellect to things. It goes beyond a coherence theory, with its immanent self-consistency, beyond idealism, which would equate being and thought, or pragmatic theories in which truth is that which works. All of these theories hit upon a description of truth which may allow for a certain utility, but the full existential and personal dimension is left out, not only that ultimate truth is personal (Trinitarian) but the reception of this truth fills out human personhood (trinitarian).

Each of these other trues contain a drive to absolute possession and control, within the self, which belies their inadequacy. Truth may be absolute, but that form of truth that requires absolute possession is not absolute truth. Humans are not God, we cannot possess this truth as that which completely corresponds to us, or coheres in us. The human relation to truth is not as maker or possessor, as truth is divine. We can seek it, desire it, and participate in it, which already speaks of a relation that is sought (but not possessed). Both Raymondo Panikkar and William Desmond describe this relationship as being between.

According to Desmond, “This being in the between, the metaxu, defines our participation in the milieu of being within which our own middle being intermediates with the truth, truth that might well be beyond us, though not out of relation to us.”[1] The nature of our being is not as originators or makers or owners of truth as this truth, in its very constitution, is beyond us but this beyond is not beyond relation but constitutes our relation, both to ourselves and truth. It is prior to us, after us, surrounding us, permeating us, such that we are in this space of truth as the mediating reality of who and what we are. Just as God is constituted in the relationship of the Trinity, we too are who we are only in relationship. “There is a call of truth on us that is coeval with our being: it is constitutive of the kinds of beings we are. It releases us into a certain freedom of seeking, but this freedom and release are not themselves self-produced.”[2] Our relationship to truth, which is beyond us and calls us, is who we are.

Truth does not simply pertain to our search or simply to us, though it pertains to everything about us. Our pursuit calls for a fidelity to the form of truth, which will presume neither that it is absent nor that it can be manufactured or possessed. “Despairing nihilism” or an “intoxicated will to power,” miss that truth is granted through truthfulness to its form. We are neither completely ignorant nor totally in possession of truth, and our truthfulness is a testament to that condition. To be truthful is to answer the call of truth upon us: “to be open to something other than our own self-determination, something that endows us with a destiny to be truthful to the utmost extent of our human powers.”[3] One dedicated to the truth, to living truthfully, is called to a life of fidelity (faith) which shapes self and experience.

As Panikkar writes, we are between the created and uncreated, or between anthropomorphism (understanding everything in human terms), and theologism (understanding everything in divine terms). He calls this a theandric spirituality, which is both divine and human. “The proper balance of the scales is upset when one ceases to look at the centre; if one gazes at God one is blinded, if one gazes at man one is deafened.”[4] This betweenness is between “body and soul, spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, action and contemplation, sacred and profane, vertical and horizontal – in a word, between what one may continue to call divine and what one has been accustomed to call human.”[5] For Panikkar this “theandric” betweenness is determined by the realization of the Trinity in the God/man, and it is through this paradigm that he finds all human religious experience converging.

Trinity rules out both a completely immanent or transcendent God; a judging God above or a material God below. “The Trinity in fact, reveals that there is life in the Godhead as well as in Man, that God is not an idol, nor a mere idea, nor an ideal of human consciousness. Yet he is neither another substance nor a separate, and thus separable, reality.”[6] It is through Trinity that the unified nature of all reality can be accounted for without falling into pantheism or atheism. The place in which we necessarily encounter Trinity is in human experience, through which we can arrive at a model of a unified reality. A person is neither an isolated monolithic individual nor a corporate plurality. “A singular isolated person is a contradiction in terms. Person implies constitutive relationship, the relationship expressed in the pronominal persons.”[7] A person is constituted as I/thou or a We/you or a as a he/she, the place where the I/thou relation takes place. This is neither wholly objective or subjective but is between subjectivity and objectivity. “Modernist ‘subjectivity’ is erroneous when it eliminates objectivity; but even more erroneous is juridical objectivity – and legalism – when it stifles all true subjectivity.”[8] We can turn completely inward to subjectivity or completely outward in clinging to a law or proposition, and both are a betrayal of the self.

The subjective and objective, as realms apart, consist of the same category mistake as making God transcendent or immanent. In Christ the immanent and transcendent are given an ontological link (in his person). Just as God is himself only in conjunction with Christ so too, we are only ourselves in our integration into this conjunction. God is not enclosed either within himself or within us, in the subjective and immanent or the transcendent and objective. There is a convergence and overlapping of God with transcendence and immanence and humankind is located in and with this convergence. The fully human is “penetrated by this divine dynamism.”[9] This describes the place of the Son, but it also describes the human place in the Son.

Desmond refers to this place between subjective and objective as “transsubjective.” We are endowed with something beyond us and it is in this sense “objective,” but it is in intimate relation to us and fundamental to who we are. Being true involves a fidelity to this form of truth, which Desmond characterizes as “finesse.” This finesse is a readiness for an intimate knowing, an “embodied mindfulness” which is witnessed and imitated. “Finesse refers us to the concrete suppleness of living intelligence that is open, attentive, mindful, attuned to the occasion in all its elusiveness and subtlety. We take our first steps in finesse by a kind of creative mimesis, by trying to liken ourselves to those who exemplify it, or show something of it.”[10] Finesse is a realization of an ontological givenness and the recognition that truth is received – a patient reception. The acceptance of finitude is the recognition we are not our own fathers or our own creators, the rejection of which is a kind of self-hatred. Desmond likens it to a “flower trying to ingest its own ground – impossible, yet were it even conceivable, it would show the inner self-hatred of the flower that must only destroy itself in this way of absolutizing itself.”[11] It is no more possible to dig beneath the flower to discover its origins than it is to definitively name the Father apart from the Son.

We know the Father through the Son, as everything the Father is he transmits to the Son, and the Son returns to the Father. There is a mystery in this exchange. The Son in not the origin, as the Father begets the Son, but as Jesus tells Philip, “if you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 14:9). The “Son is the is of the Father.”[12] As Panikkar puts it, “To know the Son qua Son is to realise the Father also, to know Being as such implies to have transcended it in a non-ontical way.”[13] God is the Father through the Son. He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

To ask what he is beyond this, or in God himself, is nonsense, as it implies an origin, other than that of the Father of Christ. The Son does nothing on his own, yet he is the alpha and omega, the beginning and end. He is God made flesh, God made available, God made human, God made being. The Father causes the Son’s emergence but there is not another preceding the Son. “This of-God is precisely the Son. It is the Son who acts, who creates. Through him everything was made. In him everything exists.”[14] “The phrase ‘God in himself’ already implies a ‘reflection’ which presupposes already this ineffable God (whose ‘self’ we are asking for) and derives from there the notion of a ‘self’ of God which already has an origin and is thus no longer original and originating.”[15] This ineffable self-reflection is no longer the Father.

This sui generis origin, unrelated and totally transcendent, is the contradiction on the order of being one’s own father (the tormenting superego). This impenetrable god is beyond comprehension as he is a contradiction. There is no God alone, apart from the Son. The only approach to the Father is the Son. The Father has no “I” apart from his relatedness to the Son, and this is a primal insight into the human “I” or ego. Personhood is in relatedness, and it does not presume to get behind the origin of this relation or go beyond it, as the relation is the reality. God is not the ground of God, which would amount to an infinite regress, but the Father begets the Son and being of–God, which is definitive of the Son, is definitive of all created in his image.

We do not have ourselves apart from this reality, but the human sickness expresses itself in dividing the Father from the Son, or in objectifying or splitting self from self. To “think my being” or to “have my being” is a refusal of life. We can refuse the gift of life, refuse to receive ourselves in our efforts at self-determination. The fear of losing life, in Panikkar’s description is already an indicator of the nonvalue of this life. “‘Life’ which can be lost is not Life. Nor is existence which can be lost real existence.”[16] This misplaced love of life is neither life nor love, as true life and love would relinquish all for love, and this is stronger than death. According to Desmond, “We can so insist that everything be subject to our self-determination that we betray the joy of this gift, in the overriding of our own self-affirmation.”[17] Refusal of mortality and finitude is a refusal of the gift of life from God, while consent to death is the reception of life. “None of us is exempt, and we will all come to the fearsome challenge of this harder consent. In a certain regard, we are always coming to this consent, or fleeing it, in every moment of our life.”[18]

We can build our life on a lie, fleeing mortality and finitude. “When we realize that we are not seen through entirely by human others, we make our bodies into masks. We become more adept at being liars.”[19] Shame can play a positive role in the feeling of being unmasked, but at the extreme, the mask becomes a complete façade of shamelessness. Both shame and laughter point to the porosity or received nature of the self. Both may expose the absurdity of the self-grounding lie. “There is ontological receiving before there is existential acting. As something ontological, this receiving is constitutive of our being as selving, but it is not self-constituted.”[20] As Desmond goes on to say, “Where the energy of laughing comes from is mysterious, and its ‘point’ often dissolves into nothing, beyond all self-determination. Laughter can be festive and can reveal an ontological affirmation at play deep in our being, preceding logic, exceeding logic.”[21] To be put to shame, or to recognize in laughter the absurd we may cling to, is not the worst thing that could happen. Perhaps there is a little death, an exposure or falsification in both laughter and shame, that opens us further to consenting to death.

In Panikkar’s picture, to consent to death is the reception of the Spirit: “The Spirit comes only after the Cross, after Death. It works in us the Resurrection and causes us to pass to the other shore.”[22] According to Desmond, “In this care, we may be released beyond ourselves in a minding of the other potentially agapeic.”[23] We can invest our lives in patient service of the truth, which relinquishes self-determination and is open to the divine. The Spirit enables this alternative perspective, in which one feels himself addressed by God, and is turned from an “I” to a “thou.” The calling of God is the granting of being (Is 42:6). “In so far as man has not had the experience, in one way or another, of being a Thou spoken by God, in so far as he has not discovered with the wonder of a child (because it is full of mystery) that he is precisely because the I calls him (and calls him by his name, the name representing here his self-hood, his being) he has not yet reached the depth of life in the Spirit.”[24] The deepest realization of self is one of porosity or openness to the Spirit, in which the absolute is relinquished for relationship.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death . . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:2,15). The experience of the Trinity fills out personhood, as the “I” or ego is displaced by identity in Christ, which is the Spirit of adoption, by which there is direct relation to Abba! Father! This Trinitarian self is the reality of the self for which we were made.

[1] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 2012) 188.

[2] Strangeness of Being, 189.

[3] Strangeness of Being, 190.

[4] Raymondo Panikkar, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (New York: Orbis Books, 1973), 74.

[5] Panikkar, 73.

[6] Panikkar, xiii.

[7] Panikkar, xv.

[8] Panikkar, 3.

[9] Panikkar, 31.

[10] Strangeness of Being, 192.

[11] Strangeness of Being, 197.

[12] Panikkar, 46.

[13] Panikkar, 46.

[14] Panikkar, 51.

[15] Panikkar, 44.

[16] Panikkar,

[17] Strangeness of Being, 198.

[18] Strangeness of Being, 201.

[19] William Desmond, Godsends: From Default Atheism to the Surprise of Revelation (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 142.

[20] Godsends, 143.

[21] Godsends, 152.

[22] Panikkar, 66.

[23] Strangeness of Being, 201.

[24] Panikkar, 68.

Do We Need the Insight of Islam to See Ourselves Rightly?

One of the most successful bridge builders to other religions was the Catholic Monk, Thomas Merton, who emphasized the need for a Christocentric understanding for engagement with other religions and traditions. His was not the watered-down approach which imagined it was enough to reason together, but like Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, he saw the times as requiring drastic and emergency measures. With Bonhoeffer he concurs, people with good intentions who imagine that a little reason will suffice do not understand either the depths of evil or of the holy. “The news that God has become man strikes at the very heart of an age in which the good and the wicked regard either scorn for man or the idolization of man as the highest attainable wisdom.”[1]

Merton’s advocacy of peace, without compromise, at once appreciated that other religions recognize peace and goodness are to be equated with God, but he also recognized that reasoning together was inadequate to stand-up against political expediency. “Men do not agree in moral reasoning. They concur in the emotional use of slogans and political formulas.”[2] The persuasive power of fear and desire, such as that dealt out by the Nazis or our own Nazified political situation, is untouched by the call to ethical considerations. The evil done in the name of religion, in the name of the good, by those committed to lies and murder, will be unphased by moral or religious theory. The evil and destructiveness of the day, seemingly determined to ignite a world conflagration, is the necessary preparation for man to become a god, or for the president to be the Messiah.

We might have wished the Nazis saw themselves through the eyes of those they were destroying. Shouldn’t we wish the same thing for the United States at this moment. That it might see itself through the eyes of the hundreds of parents slain at a girls school, that it might see itself through the eyes of those suffering oppression and terror in Iran and Gaza. Bonhoeffer understood that the church of his day had failed, as it had been coopted by the Nazi regime. The sickness was too deep for a sermon, a philosophical correction, an ethical or religious discussion, but doesn’t that describe this present moment in the United States? Isn’t the best thing that could happen, in order to expose this present delusion, recognition that Iranians – those whom our military would destroy, may also be in the best position to expose the lie of the times? Isn’t that the point of loving the enemy, that we be enabled to see things through their eyes? If we simply demonize the enemy, and make no attempt to see the good in them, then we also will not appreciate where they are right in their judgment of us. According to Merton, “As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth.”[3]

We are living at a time when Christians would identify themselves over and against the culture of Islam, imagining the West is a Christian culture. In the rhetoric of various evangelical leaders (as Franklin Graham has put it), Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion” and war seems to be part of a “necessary” clash of religions and civilizations? This seemingly Medieval perception is precisely that – Medieval in its theological roots. Steve Bannon, perhaps the key thinker behind Donald Trump, believes the United States is a Christian nation, not just in the sense that a majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, but also in the sense that the country’s culture is Christian. This means our war with evil is a literal war against Islam: “We” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or we will be overrun by dangerous outsiders (Islamists) who will impose a different identity upon us. In a speech at the Vatican, he said, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism.” An article in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Vatican-vetted journal, singled out Bannon as a “supporter of apocalyptic geopolitics,” the logic of which is “no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.” This notion of a clash of civilizations is a delusion.

Christians are not those who align with Western civilization over and against Islamic civilization. The fear of Islam is on the order of a previous generation’s fear of socialism. As a child in Texas, it seemed all of the evils of the world could be attributed to the communists and socialists, and what we were blind to was the “socialist” aspect of the gospel. Because of this inability, Christianity was reimagined as a capitalistic religion, in which concern for the poor was largely absent, and the injustices of Western oppression were excused or made invisible; which is not to excuse or deny the problems of communism, but the demonization of the enemy blinds to the value in their critical perspective on ourselves.

If this is true of “godless communism,” it is even more profoundly true of our coreligionists. Islam shares the early texts of the Bible and a high regard for Christ. The goodness, beauty, and love of God, as with Christians, is a first order reality. According to Islamist Seyyed Nasr, “All reality issues from the One, Who is the sole absolute Reality, which is also absolute Beauty. As the One manifests the many on various levels of cosmic existence, this absolute Beauty is also manifested along with existence, of which it is the splendor like the aura around the sun.”[4] In Sufism, aesthetics is part of ethics and spiritual discipline. One is trained to recognize Absolute Beauty as of God, and it is God for whom the soul yearns in its appreciation of the beautiful. Nasr appeals to Plotinus: “the soul strives after beauty and beauty is a manifestation of that spiritual power that animates all levels of reality. The Sufis agree completely with this view, which once dominated Western aesthetics but was marginalized in the West. . .”[5]

Aesthetics, in Islam, developed as a recognition that all beauty is a reflection of divine beauty, a profound spiritual insight, which may not be entirely lacking in the West, but in my branch of the faith at least, aesthetics has never been a focus. Yet who could disagree with Nasr’s assessment: “The supreme beauty is the beauty of the Supreme Reality; absolute beauty is the beauty of the Absolute. Even the most intense beauty experienced in this world in the beautiful face of a loved one or a supreme work of art or of virgin nature or even the perfume of the soul of a saint is a reflection of divine Beauty.”[6] As the Song of Solomon states it, “For love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, The very flame of the Lord” (So 8:6).

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, attaches great significance not only to the original garden scene of paradise, but to its reenactment in human love. Christians may have lost this significance of peace and love preserved at the heart of Islam: “According to the Quran and a saying of the Prophet, the greeting of the people of Paradise, of the Garden, is salam, or peace; hence the ordinary Muslim greeting, al-salām” ‘alaykim, or ‘peace be upon you.’”[7] Christians might learn from the Islamic mystical tradition, in its assigning spiritual significance to human sexuality: “a sacred reality, hence to be governed by the Sacred Law, [and] not as a sinful act simply resulting from the fall.”[8] Could it be that Western Christianity, plagued as it is with sexual transgression, might benefit from the understanding that “sexual union, which is the most powerful sensuous urge within most human beings, is in reality the search of the soul for union with God, especially when human union is combined with love”?[9]

Connecting human beauty to the divine also comes with a certain realism, seemingly lacking in Western youth driven culture. Outward beauty tends to fade, absent liposuction and face lifts etc., and is primarily the domain of the young. “As we grow older our actions based on our choices and free will become evermore reflected in our outward countenance, and inner beauty, in the case of those who possess such beauty, begins to dominate the outward while the original God-given outward beauty usually fades away.”[10] Still, there is an unabashed recognition of beauty: the “female face reveals a Divine Quality and unveils a Divine Mystery.”[11] Lovers of God in Sufism, are lovers of beauty, which is inseparable “from the Divine Reality and which, being related to the infinitude of the Divine, brings about total peace and liberates the soul from all fetters of restrictive existence.”[12] Shouldn’t Christians share this profound sense of beauty which “liberates” and brings “peace”?

A Christianity and a Western culture driven by egoism also might learn from the Islamic notion that love “is always combined with some degree of dying to one’s ego, to one’s desires, to one’s preferences for the sake of the other.” This is the case “because human love is itself a reflection of Divine Love, which we can experience only after the death of our ego, and can lead to the Divine those souls who are fortunate enough to have experienced this love.”[13] Are Western evangelicals blind and forgiving of the rape culture surrounding Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and the Catholic and Evangelical Church because they are missing the insight which Sufism might provide? Desire of the ultimate kind is fulfilled only by the Divine.

Maybe it is time to listen to our so-called “enemies” to gain the insight gone missing in Western Christianity, the insight to which Islam appeals: “When we ponder the terms pace, shalom, shanti, and salam in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam respectively and their ubiquitous usage by the followers of these religions, as well as terms with the same meaning used elsewhere, we become aware of the universality of this yearning.”[14] Absent focus on the peace longed for in the world religions, the gospel is perverted and its potential to address the hope of the nations relinquished.

When Christians take up the sword in civilizational war imagining this crusader mentality is Christian, they have missed the Christian faith. This civilizational security is not the security of Christ. In addition to denying enemy love, taking up the sword and slaying the enemy is to slaughter the very prophetic voice that is needed. As Christians faced with a Medieval form of Christianity, we must turn firmly from the means and method of empire or Christian civilization. We are not to seek power and security through the defeat of Islam in war. The danger is that in aligning with the powers and methods of empire, Christians have joined forces with the counter-Kingdom of the anti-Christ and have slain the very enemy who might have provided kingdom insight – that of the loved enemy.

[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 58. Merton is quoting but Bonhoeffer, but gives no footnote.

[2] Ibid, 59.

[3] Ibid, 63.

[4] Seyyed Hossein, Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper One, 2007) 71.

[5] Ibid, 72.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 78.

[8] Ibid, 65.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 74.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 66.

[14] Ibid, 78.

Abraham Heschel’s Sabbath Realized in the Person of Christ

Abraham Heschel has written one of the most profound reflections on Jewish conceptions of Sabbath, and I could not help but feel the beauty of his book pointed throughout to Christ. His expansive picture of the Sabbath is in no way diminished by this interpretation, as its universality is inclusive of both Judaism and Christianity. What this interpretation makes clear, is the personal reality and dynamism behind Heschel’s description. Perhaps the great offense of Christianity to Jews, is that all that Judaism claims about holiness is thought by Christians to be fulfilled in the person of Christ: the embodiment of the holy law, the holy place, the holy time, and ultimately of the holiness of God, but this holiness in the Bible never existed as an entity unto itself, but is preceded by and conjoined with the Sabbath (indicative of a fulfilled messianic time). Holiness (qadosh), the word which is representative of the divine, is not first connected with a holy object, a holy mountain, or a holy altar, but it is first introduced in Genesis at the end of creation as a holy time.[1] “Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Gen 2:3). This is not the usual religious thinking, concerned at it is with holy places, but it is connected to a holy time and voice, speaking of himself to all creation. “It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”[2] The holiness of the Sabbath preceded and extended beyond Israel, with its land and feasts and temple and the Jews as a people, and is directly connected with God’s universal sanctifying presence. “According to some it is the name of the Holy One,”[3] a day into which all humans are invited.

The Bride of the Lamb/Sabbath

“The love of the Sabbath is the love of man for what he and God have in common.”[4] In this time humans are joined to God, joined to this time permeated by the eternal presence, and are thus literally made in his image through this union. This is universal man, Adam, and not a particular race or religion. The Jewish people preserved the Sabbath, but it was never theirs alone. The completion of man by woman means creation is an open-ended process, in which the whole inner basis of humankind (contained in the name Adam) is an ongoing realization of love, an ongoing realization of the divine image through marriage.[5] “This is what the ancient rabbis felt: the Sabbath demands all of man’s attention, the service and single-minded devotion of total love.”[6]

In the interpretation of the rabbis, all the other days are paired and the Lord says to the Sabbath: “The Community of Israel is your mate.”[7] Sabbath is God’s search and longing for man, a reversal of the usual picture. “The six days stand in need of space; the seventh day stands in need of man. It is not good that the spirit should be alone, so Israel was destined to be a helpmeet for the Sabbath.”[8] Welcoming the Sabbath is likened to meeting one’s bride and its celebration is like a wedding.[9] “We are the mate of the Sabbath, and each week through our sanctification of the Sabbath, we marry the day.”[10] A wedding feast for all.

The rabbinic focus, and that of the early Christians, on the Song of Songs indicates that the depth of love is lit by the flame of Yahweh’s presence (8:6). The one flesh relation between male and female is realized only in the presence of this binding, passionate, presence. According to Rabbi Akiba: “All of time is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all of the songs are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of holies.”[11] Early Christians concurred, reading it as an allegory of the marriage between Christ and believers. It was cited by Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, Origen, and Augustine and in medieval Western Christianity it became the most popular biblical text.[12] In the Jewish conception the promise of the Sabbath is this depth of love, being conjoined to God in the spirit in the love of a day. In Christian thought the two becoming one in Genesis is the mystery fulfilled through Christ and the church (Eph 5:32). The Second Adam completes the human capacity for image bearing and the second Adam and his bride join the human and divine for eternity.

It is not so much an observance as an alternative existence in and through relationship. The marriage of and to this day contains the movement and purpose of personhood and history. This time, this event, this personhood, is what God and humans share and in which they are conjoined. The Church as the bride of Christ indicates Sabbath predestination was always the unfolding telos summing up all things. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32). Sabbath pointed to and contained the reality of Immanuel, “God with us.” God has come to his Temple, he has been joined to his creation, inclusive of the cosmic order but most particularly his habitation in and with the human soul.

Sabbath Rest as Redemption and Arrival of the Spirit

Rest or menuha is not simply a ceasing from work, but from the futile toil of labor as described in Genesis, outside the presence of God. Heschel describes civilization as caught up in the struggle of toil, subduing the earth, forging instruments of war and technology, being “within” the world without being able to surpass the world. Sabbath is this surpassing possibility.[13] Even at the beginning, it is the creation of something new, in that tranquility, serenity, and repose, with God are made possible. There is a divine dignity in labor, which Sabbath does not diminish but ensures, by providing a time of freedom from the all-consuming demands. On this day the toil, the futility, the worship of money, are halted.[14] We can do without such things, such possessions, such values. “The seventh day is the armistice in man’s cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man; a day on which handling money is considered a desecration, on which man avows his independence of that which is the world’s chief idol.”[15] Heschel equates menuha with happiness, stillness, peace, and harmony. It is the root word Job used to describe the after-life he was longing for, or the state in which troubling wickedness and weariness, fighting, strife and fear are abolished. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters (the waters of menuhot).”[16] “All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God. This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe.”[17]

The Sabbath is the foretaste of the miracle of redemption, sometimes considered as the arrival of the soul unto itself (a second soul). As Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: “The Holy One, Blessed be He, gives a person an additional soul on Shabbat eve, and at the conclusion of Shabbat removes it from him, as it is stated: “He ceased from work and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17).[18] It is not the creation of the soul but the reception of more soul, or spirit. It is also described as the “resurrection of the soul, of the soul of man and of the soul of all things. A medieval sage declares: The world which was created in six days was a world without a soul. It was on the seventh day that the world was given a soul.”[19] As Heschel describes referencing the rabbis, man is given a “supernal soul” or a soul which is “all perfection.” “It is ‘the holy spirit that rests upon man and adorns him with a crown like the crown of angels….”[20]

This granting of the soul or Spirit, completed through Christ, is the end point of God’s in-breathing of his image. No longer will death and death-dealing inclinations intervene, as life and peace are an enduring presence in the Spirit. “He gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34). In Judaism the spirit comes and goes with the passing of the Sabbath but as the writer of Hebrews describes, Christians enter into a continual Sabbath rest (Heb 4). This abiding presence is to be coveted and desired above all things. “It seeks to displace the coveting of things in space for coveting the things in time, teaching man to covet the seventh day all days of the week.”[21] “Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest” (Heb 4:11).

The love, joy, peace, and long-suffering, granted by the Spirit, were already to be present in the joy of the Sabbath. As Heschel writes, “Not only is it forbidden to light a fire on the Sabbath, but, . . . “Ye shall kindle no fire– not even the fire of righteous indignation.”[22] There is to be no sadness, anger, or mourning on the Sabbath. This is not simply a day, but the beginning of the realization of paradise, in which wrath, and strife are overcome. The Sabbath was always anticipation of the messianic age in which there is an enduring Sabbath: “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.”[23]

Sabbath Time Giving Significance to Space

Sabbath is the entry of the eternal into time, an eternalization of the moments of time. Time can be “spent” in subduing nature, in gaining control through technical means, and thus one can build houses and barns but these things are not what is required for the soul (Luke 12:20). Barn building technique enlarges the physical habitation but does nothing for the expanse of the soul. The six days of toil are not to reign over the seventh, but are subordinate, as life spent in gaining power, wealth, and control is a form of slavery, if not conjoined to the eternal. “The manufacture of tools, the art of spinning and farming, the building of houses, the craft of sailing-all this goes on in man’s spatial surroundings.”[24] All of these describe a preoccupation with space, and this aim of spatial dominance tends to infect even religious understanding. In Japan, for example, sacred groves, sacred rocks, sacred mountains, constitute the “places” of the holy. People tend to “locate” the divine in space, and time and history are not assigned spiritual significance. The question of “where” and not “when” is primary.

This spatial attachment, to land, to place, to objects, or to things, tends to mold our image accordingly. Memorials to the dead and sacred shrines to the deities are literally made of the same stuff. Remembrance and preservation of the dead, service of dead objects, exercise a kind of spatial tyranny. “Thingness” or material space seems to constitute reality. “In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived, by most of us, as a thing.”[25] The gods fashioned in our image, reflect back the tyranny of the material world over our self-conception. In Sabbath there is an engagement of time, not simply as passing, but as an intersection with the eternal. Our tendency to cling to objects and space as if they are not perishing, is an obvious falsehood. “Things perish within time; time itself does not change.”[26] Time does not pass or die, but things in time do. “Monuments of stone are destined to disappear; days of spirit never pass away.”[27] The desire to possess creates rivalry, but time cannot be possessed or owned. “We cannot solve the problem of time through the conquest of space, through either pyramids or fame.”[28] The Bible assigns primacy to time, and so history, generations, events, are more important than countries, geography, or space. Time bears the meaning of space and is assigned a significance to which space is relegated.

Heschel notes that the Jews, like other people, celebrated life in nature, with its respective agricultural celebrations, these were transformed into time focused celebrations. Passover, originally a spring festival became a celebration of the Exodus, the wheat harvest festival became the celebration of the day Torah was given, the festival of vintage became the celebration of the sojourn in the wilderness. “To Israel the unique events of historic time were spiritually more significant than the repetitive processes in the cycle of nature, even though physical sustenance depended on the latter.”[29] The Jews began like other peoples, focused on nature and things, but then the redemption from slavery, the giving of the law, the guidance through the wilderness, drew the focus to events in history.

Heschel maintains, “It was only after the people had succumbed to the temptation of worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a Tabernacle, of holiness in space, was commanded.”[30]The sanctity of time in the Sabbath, and then in the events of the exodus, were followed by a sanctity of space in the tabernacle, the temple, and then the land. “Time was hallowed by God; space, the Tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses.”[31] There is a holiness in time attached to sacred events. Each of these shifts however, come to be centered on the temple, which unlike the events proves subject to destruction. But then Jesus identifies himself as true temple and the significance behind each of these events.

Jesus as the Significance of Sabbath

Jesus disrupts the Passover sacrifice in the temple with a sign which, in his explanation, points to himself as true temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The Jewish holy place is turned once again into a holy event in his person. During the Feast of Dedication, celebrating the reconsecrated temple (in 165 BCE), Jesus describes himself as the “consecrated one” (John 10:36). This temple is not subject to destruction, and this “building” is no longer a place but a person and a people. John the Baptist’s introduction and summation of the work of Christ, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29), pictures both Passover and the Day of Atonement as fulfilled in Christ. The event of the Exodus (the passing over of death), becomes an eternal event and entry into God’s presence (atonement) a personal and permanent realization. At the Feast of Tabernacles (or Booths), Jesus describes himself in terms of this festival as the source of thirst-quenching water (John 7:37) and the light of the world (John 8:12) recalling the miraculous events in the wilderness, but this deliverance from out of bondage, homelessness, hunger and thirst are eternal events in time. Christ is identified as the true giving of the law written on the heart through the Spirit (John 3; Rom 2:14-16). Here is the creation of a holy people promised in the law. The passage is from space centered to a centering on events, but then the focus on the temple returns these events to a place. Christ turns them into a focus on the dynamics of his personhood and incarnation.

Conclusion

The threat of time, seems to be a series of empty and identical moments delivering to death and the loss of the world, but Christ as Sabbath fills time with eternal presence. As Heschel writes, “All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space. On the Sabbath it is given us to share in the holiness that is in the heart of time.” Here “Eternity utters a day.”[32] As the writer of Hebrews puts it, “So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Heb 4:9–10). The Sabbath rest is to be found in resting in his presence. The sanctification of time, begun in Sabbath, invades all of time in he who is the reality of Sabbath.

[1] Abraham Josua Heschel, The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005) 9.

[2] Ibid, 10.

[3] Ibid, 20.

[4] Ibid, 16.

[5] Ibid, xv

[6] Ibid, 17.

[7] Ibid, 51

[8] Ibid, 52.

[9] Ibid, 53-4

[10] Ibid, this is the summation of his daughter in the Introduction.

[11] Ibid, 98.

[12] See Karl Shuve, The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

[13] Heschel, 27.

[14] Ibid, 28.

[15] Ibid, 29.

[16] Ibid, 22-23.

[17] Ibid, 32.

[18] Beitzah 16a:12

[19] Heschel, 83

[20] Ibid, 88.

[21] Ibid, 91.

[22] Ibid, 29.

[23] Ibid, xv

[24] Ibid, 4.

[25] Ibid, 5.

[26] Ibid, 97.

[27] Ibid, 98.

[28] Ibid, 101.

[29] Ibid, 7.

[30] Ibid, 9-10.

[31] Ibid, 10.

[32] Ibid, 101.

The City of God Versus the Earthly City

Before Virginia Giuffre killed herself, she pronounced the entire society, which enabled Jeffrey Epstein to traffic her, as corrupt to the core. Not just those who had sex with her as a teenager, including those from academia, royalty, and the business world, but those from a much broader swath of society who never spoke up. The billionaires, media moguls, corporate leaders, political leaders, and those who carry influence and shape society, were represented by those who raped her, but they also made up the cadre of people who did not object. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were known as sex traffickers, it is the first line in Epstein’s Wikipedia profile, and had been for years, yet this was overlooked. Epstein was able to groom hundreds of young girls for sex trafficking, but at the same time the ruling class was willingly groomed by the same techniques. It is not just that he was friends with President Donald Trump and the Democratic President Bill Clinton, but he was able to worm his way deep into Harvard, MIT, Google, the Gates Foundation, and Goldman Sachs. Larry Summers the Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University, turned to his friend Epstein to get instruction on how to seduce a young woman he was mentoring. Mort Zuckerman, CEO of Boston Properties, owner and publisher of U.S. News and World Report, needed help getting a child into an elite school, so he reaches out to Epstein. Heads of state, heads of major institutions, elites from nearly every sector of society, willingly associated with Epstein, and there is no record of any of these individuals protesting or seeking to expose his activities.

The journalist, Anand Giridharadas, confirms Giuffre’s judgment, comparing Epstein to a kind of food poison passing through every major organ of the social body, proving the system is inherently sick.[1] There was no nausea, no vomiting, no diarrhea, no reaction. Out of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people at dinners and parties, no one who blew up at the circumstance or objected to the girls being abused or to the influence being traded. Epstein was a test, and though he is dead and gone, what he has proven is that the system lacks the capacity to react, to notice, to expunge this vileness, because the system is corrupt to the core. The institutions that shape society, the values and incentives held throughout the system, are sick and corrupt.

Add to the Epstein story his proven connections with Israel, and the genocide in Gaza and the war in Iran, and the depth of depravity, involving not just a culture of rape but one bent on murder is evident. Sex was the lure, but Zionism and genocide the goal, so that Israel could abolish the Palestinians and dominate in the Middle East. The problem for the Christian community, Catholic and Protestant, is not simply that the illness infecting culture has not been resisted by the church, but it could be argued, that the sickness proven by Epstein, is that of the church. There is no need to recount the levels of abuse to make the point: sexual abuse, avarice, greed, capitalism, and the grab for power, are not simply at the periphery of church institutions. Christian Zionism and with it, extreme nationalism, are forces that the church unleashed and made possible. Donald Trump is president due to the support of Christians, but this could also be said of the trends Trump and Epstein represent. The question is, why is the church now at the center of the problem?

Christianity began as a resistant community, resisting emperor worship and the ethics and religion of empire, so as to proclaim Christ as Lord and his ethical mandate as overriding the demands of empire. Even into the third century, Celsus (a late pagan traditionalist) is concerned that Christianity is causing the decay of the Roman Empire (not an accusation leveled against modern Christians). He considers Christianity completely subversive to the religious and social order of Rome, which he considers to be the true universal order. It is not monotheism to which he objects, “it makes no difference whether we call Zeus the Most High, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians,”[2] but the problem is Christian exclusiveness. The Christians reject the worship of “daemons and quote the saying of Jesus, ‘No man can serve two masters,’” and for Celsus this is “a rebellious utterance of people who wall themselves off and break away from the rest of mankind.”[3] The Christian teaching on humility, and against wealth, and their refusal of the traditions, their refusal to engage in war, or even to take part in public life, means they cannot be good citizens.

This accusation of being different, a testament to the resistance of the early church, describes the faithfulness of the early Christians to being a peculiar people. As Thomas Merton sums up, “Christians not only believed that Celsus’ world was meaningless, but that it was under judgment and doomed to destruction. He interpreted the otherworldly Christian spirit as a concrete, immediate physical threat.”[4]

Origen responded, however, that Christians are not simply subverting society but make good citizens:

Christians have been taught not to defend themselves against their enemies; and because they have kept the laws which command gentleness and love to man, on this account they have received from God that which they would not have succeeded in doing if they had been given the right to make war, even though they may have been quite able to do so. He always fought for them and from time to time stopped the opponents of the Christians and the people who wanted to kill them.[5]

The evident linchpin in this argument is the role of violence and war. Celsus presumes war is necessary for human society, while Origen argues for a more profound understanding of peace: “No longer do we take the sword against any nations nor do we learn war any more since we have become the sons of peace through Jesus who is our author instead of following the traditional customs by which we were strangers to the covenant.”[6] Origen makes reference to the passage in Isaiah, Christians are “to beat the spiritual swords that fight and insult us into ploughshares, and to transform the spears that formerly fought against us into pruning hooks.”[7]

Origen argues that Christians play their part in the city through their spiritual influence and activity, especially in prayer: “The more pious a man is the more effective he is in helping the emperors – more so than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops that they can.”[8] Christians as a “priesthood of all believers,” are not unlike the pagan priests who devote themselves to offering sacrifices: “that it is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of the sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders. And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests.”[9]

Origen counters Celsus’ notion that all citizens “help the emperor with all our power . . . and fight for him,” arguing that Christians offer an even greater service: ”We may reply to this that at appropriate times we render to the emperors divine help, if I may so say, by taking up even the whole armour of God.” He quotes Paul, who exhorts Christians to take up spiritual armour: “I exhort you, therefore, first to make prayers, supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings for all men, for emperors, and all that are in authority.”[10] If not even pagan priests kill in war, then neither should Christians offer violent resistance, but they do a higher service “keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed.”[11] Origen concludes, “We who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths and disturb the peace, are of more help to the Emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.”[12] As Merton notes, “If these evil forces are overcome by prayer, then both sides are benefited, war is avoided and all are united in peace. In other words, the Christian does not help the war effort of one particular nation, but he fights against war itself with spiritual weapons.”[13]

Unfortunately, this singular idea of the early Christians is gradually eroded with the Constantinian shift, and the rise of Augustinian theology, which now dominates among both Catholics and Protestants. In the two hundred years between Origen and Augustine, Constantine had his vision at the Milvian bridge in 312, and Christianity is officially recognized by Rome, and then in 411 Rome fell to the Goths. In 430, Augustine as bishop of Hippo, is confronted with the invasion of the Vandals and he develops his theory of just war. He understands Christians as split between two cities and two types of love. Confronted with the same objection Origen faced from Celsus, Augustine formulates a very different answer. Christians do not simply pray, but they may participate in the military, as long as the war is just, and as long as the Christian has the right motives. “Christians may participate in the war, or may abstain from participation. But their motives will be different from the motives of the pagan soldier. They are not really defending the earthly city, they are waging war to establish peace, since peace is willed by God.”[14] Origen would argue this false peace, through war, is unworthy of Christian peace, but Augustine succeeds in creating a lasting confusion.

Augustine agrees with Celsus, against Origen, maintaining that war is inevitable, and universal peace impossible. Maybe the early church was too intent on the Parousia, but Augustine is more of a realist amidst the collapsing empire, and he felt war was unavoidable. The question was not if, but how Christians might fight in war, and thus appealing to Cicero, Augustine drew up his notions of just war theory. But even in a just war, the Christian must be only motivated by love: “The external act may be one of violence. War is regrettable indeed. But if one’s interior motive is purely directed to a just cause and to love of the enemy, then the use of force is not unjust.”[15] Augustine poses the new possibility of a distinction between interior motive and exterior action, which will have tragic consequences. The divide between church and world is more or less demolished, as the Christian can serve the world with his exterior body, and reserve his mind for spiritual activity. This divide marks Christian entry into serving state values and purposes. One can even kill fellow Christians, given the right motive and circumstance. For example, better to kill heretics and save their souls, which will become the motive behind the crusades. “And so, alas, for centuries we have heard kings, princes, bishops, priests, ministers, and the Lord alone knows what variety of unctuous beadles and sacrists, earnestly urging all men to take up arms out of love and mercifully slay their enemies (including other Christians) without omitting to purify their interior intention.”[16]

The contradiction of Augustine’s logic should be felt, and yet is not, even in this nuclear age, in which the world may need to be destroyed so as to achieve peace. The Augustinian logic consigns the world to hell, not imagining that the church or the Christian might act as a constraint on the voracious appetites of the flesh. Along with the Conquistadors, who felt the need to destroy civilizations in Christianizing them, and the inquisitors willing to torture to death so as to save, we, in the United States, are subject to a leader ready to destroy a civilization, supposedly in the name of peace.

Jeffrey Epstein, like one emerging from the primeval depths, exposed the lie undergirding our culture. As with Nazi Germany, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description, it is a “time of confirmed liars who tell the truth in the interest of what they themselves are – liars. A hive of murderers who love their children and are kind to their pets. A hive of cheats and gangsters who are loyal in pacts to do evil.”[17] If as Gandhi maintained, “The way of peace is the way of truth” then according to Merton, “lying is the mother of violence.”[18] A world of necessary violence and war is built upon a lie, and this lie serves in place of truth. As long as evil takes accepted forms and there are no objections, then it is “good.” The Augustinian (Constantinian) merger of church and empire through just war, the division between internal and external, creates a split mind and necessary duplicity. Killing in love makes nonsense of morality. The unfalsifiable claim of good intention opened the floodgate to the crusades, the inquisition, and ultimately to a series of holocausts. This church can no longer claim any likeness to the resistant New Testament Body of Christ or to the counter-ethics of Christ.

Merton quotes Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as the counter to the stink of this moral decay: “It is not astuteness, by knowing the tricks, but by simple steadfastness in the truth of God, by training the eye upon this truth until it is simple and wise, that there comes the experience and knowledge of ethical reality.[19] The truth, peace through Christ, is the singular resistant counter to the lie of the reign of death in the city of man. It is easy to convince ourselves that the lie is irresistible, that peace and purity are an impossibility, and that truth cannot endure, yet, Christ has spoken and those who hear his voice have a singular obligation to this Truth and Peace.

[1] See the interview on the Daily Beast, I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57xynBbVUuw.

[2] Origen, Contra: Celsum, tran. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) xvii.

[3] Origen, xix.

[4] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (New York: Orbis Books, 2004) 35.

[5]Origen, III: 8, 133, cited in Merton, 35.

[6] Origen, V: 33, 290, cited in Merton, 37.

[7] Origen, V: 33, 290.

[8] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37.

[9] Origen, VIII: 73, 509,

[10] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[11] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[12] Origen,Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37-38.

[13] Merton, 38.

[14] Merton, 40.

[15] Merton, 42.

[16] Merton, 43.

[17] This is Merton’s summation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 60.

[18] Ibid, 79.

[19] Ibid, 60.

Julian of Norwich and the Reversal of Theology

If there is a single voice in the West which consistently develops a theology of originary peace, matching the leanings of Maximus and Origen, it must be Julian of Norwich. She develops a theology focused on the personal revelation of the love of Jesus Christ, dispelling any notion of unworthiness, with realization of the self with and in divine identity, very much on the order of theosis or apocatastasis. In the midst of the plague and death of her own family and some 50,000 citizens surrounding her, she feels the “woe” or heaviness of life, and then the realization of being secure in the love and goodness of God. Her feelings of personal brokenness and despair, and then entry into joy and love, in a deeply personal experience, describes the universal arc. She sees the typical theological focus on guilt, wrath, and law, as something of a necessary anthropomorphism, limiting redemption and God to negative terms characterizing human experience, and she presumes God is the unmoved, loving agent drawing humankind into divine identity.

Rowan Williams refers to her work as an “anti-theology” in that she turns the usual understanding upside-down. Rather than agonizing over God’s satisfaction, she turns from “squaring the circle” of how “God has to ‘do justice’ to his own justice.”[1] The point is not that God must pay himself a fair price. “Anger happens in us; it is that atmosphere of bitter conflict and fear which holds us away from peace, being at one with ourselves, living in atonement.”[2] We are the ones in need of satisfaction. As God says to her, “If thou art apaide, I am apaide.”[3] God would bring us fully alive, into the satisfaction of his love – believing that we are loved – by pouring his life into us. “To be ‘apaide’ in Julian’s theological world is to discover that we cannot pull apart human need and divine self-enactment and make them struggle for resolution.”[4]

Julian explains that there are two levels of judgement, the first in which “I must necessarily know myself a sinner. And by the same judgment I understood that sinners sometimes deserve blame and wrath,” but these judgments reside in myself, not God.[5] Movement beyond guilt and wrath, into the second level, is the deeper working of grace (potentially “filled with endless joy and bliss”).[6] This entails a necessary and eternal progression: “And therefore this belongs to our properties, both by nature and by grace to long and desire with all our powers to know ourselves, in which full knowledge we shall truly and clearly know our God in the fulness of endless joy.”[7] The common teaching, perhaps necessary, misses the deeper focus: “I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be. Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity and his unity do not allow him to be angry.”[8]

While we are in process, still our nature is complete and perfect in oneness with God, which she treats as an accomplished reality. “I saw that our nature is in God whole.”[9] In Christ, God has taken on our nature and shared his nature with us. “God is knit to our nature that is the lower part, in our flesh-taking: and thus in Christ our two natures are oned.”[10] Reality in Christ is without beginning but is integral to God’s plan and identity: “I understand in our Lord’s signifying, where the blessed Soul of Christ is, there is the Substance of all the souls that shall be saved by Christ.” So that “I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God.”[11] Christ, for Julian, is so tied to humanity that “When Adam fell, God’s Son fell,” as God’s Son cannot be separated from Adam. Christ’s incarnation insures no ultimate separation between fallen humanity and God: “for the Son to be the Son is for the Son to be the one who has always been the lover and companion of Adam’s race.”[12] God is who he always was and is, and to pull this apart is an unsolvable conundrum.

She recasts the usual theological dilemma, characterizing it as an overcoming of refusal of God’s love. Like a neurotic who enjoys his sickness, imagining this is the kernel of who he is, our tendency is to ward off divine love. We would have God change, so as to accept us, as if it is God who is out of sorts. Julian shows, the “‘problems’ can be resolved only by the erosion of my anger, my refusal of life.”[13] Sin is precisely this refusal of life, and is thus always an embrace of death. “And thus we are dead for the time from the very sight of our blissful life.”[14] But this deadness does not change the truth of God. “But in all this I saw soothfastly that we be not dead in the sight of God, nor He passeth never from us.”[15]

There is a reciprocity involving a sort of divine necessity: “But He shall never have His full bliss in us till we have our full bliss in Him, verily seeing His fair Blissful Cheer.”[16] We are working out in nature what is fulfilled in God’s grace, but God is the undergirding reality. We may be confused about who God is and who we are, but God is not. We are coming to know ourselves and God, in the assurance, as Paul says, that he knows us (Gal 4:9). God’s knowledge, and not our own, is the sustaining center of who and what we are. The unreality of sin does not alter God, and he is the reality we are being drawn into. “Thus I saw how sin is deadly for a short time in the blessed creatures of endless life.”[17] It is just a matter of coming to see rightly: “Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love.”[18]

God is unchangingly himself, acting in his love to bring us out of our disasters into his peace. Redemption is not balancing the legal books, but is “the sheer outworking of who or what God is.”[19] God in Christ is tied to humanity so that the journey of Adam (of humankind), is God’s journey in Christ. It is not as if God started at some point to love mankind, this love is an eternal fact about us and God. Likewise, there is no anger for God to forgive as “between God and our soul there is neither wrath nor forgiveness in his sight. For our soul is so wholly united to God, through his own goodness, that between God and our soul nothing can interpose.”[20]

Anger, in her description, in both its source and object is purely human, and falls short of God’s unmoving love. Self-destructive anger obscures God and self, and misses the deeper identification of the soul with God’s unchangeable goodness. She acknowledges that this is not the common teaching of the church, and humbly submits to this teaching, but she also offers a counter-explanation. Man in his weakness and fallibility loses sight of God, “for if he saw God continually, he would have no harmful feelings nor any kind of prompting, no sorrowing which is conducive to sin.”[21] There may be the necessity for sorrow, wrath, and forgiveness, as if these are movements in God, but this describes the changeableness of humans, fallibility and sin, and not the fulness of divine peace and love. “For we through sin and wretchedness have in us a wrath and a constant opposition to peace and to love.”[22]

Sebastian Moore, in the spirit of Julian, describes this “refusal” to enter completely into the fulness of life, as the result of a deep attachment to the false self. It is not simply refusal of “obedience to God” but an unwillingness to relinquish attachment to death. “Some unbearable personhood, identity, freedom, whose demands beat on our comfortable anonymity and choice of death. Further, something that at root we are, a self that is ours yet persistently ignored in favor of the readily satisfiable needs of the ego.”[23] Moore though, like Julian, hits upon the necessity of a deeper identity with Christ: “What if Jesus were the representative, the symbol, the embodiment, of this dreaded yet desired self of each of us, this destiny of being human, the unbearable identity and freedom (freedom and identity being really the same thing)?”[24] The crucifixion of Jesus is not, at its deepest level, concerned with conflict involving Caiaphas and Pilate but it concerns “man’s refusal of his true self.”[25] The crucifixion is at once the ultimate evil and its defeat: the evil of destruction not just of a general “true” humanity, but of the individual’s true self. But recognition of this self-destruction in Christ is also the resolution of this evil. This recognition is already “forgiveness.” Evil is transformed into a specific and personal sin and sin transforms into grace. “And through this conversion the believer finds as his own that identity which first he rejected and crucified.”[26]

Our life is with God in Christ, and where we fall short, we turn to death. As Julian describes it, where we fall we die, and “we must necessarily die inasmuch as we fail to see and feel God, who is our life.”[27] We may pass from doing the nailing to being nailed to the cross, from being the crucifier to being the crucified. The life and self, invested in crucifying, is in reality the destruction of life and self. The passage is at first the refusal of our own death, the projection of it on another, and then the relinquishing of this false sense of self. The passage beyond the ego, the death of self, is the only means of “return” to the Father.

God accepts our failings and works with them to transform us: “grace transforms our dreadful failing into plentiful and endless solace; and grace transforms our shameful falling into high and honourable rising; and grace transforms our sorrowful dying into holy, blessed life.”[28] Grace is transforming who and what we are, turning our earthly shame and sorrow into heavenly honour and bliss, and our present sufferings into endless rejoicing. She concludes: “And when I saw all this, I was forced to agree that the mercy of God and his forgiveness abate and dispel our wrath.”[29] Not God’s wrath but our wrath is dispelled and abated. Likewise, God cannot forgive because he cannot be angry. “For this was revealed, that our life is all founded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live.”[30] God’s love is the ground and reality of life and it is into his life that we are being endlessly united.

Seeing ourselves as crucifiers, as filled with wrath, and recognizing this in the cross, gives rise to the recognition and possibility of God’s love. The recognition of evil in the crucified, awakens to love. We can see “evil’s visible effect. And this is the manifestation of God’s love: that extraordinary love that highlights our evil in order to leave us in no doubt that it is accepted.”[31] Moore describes this as “the deepest logic of the psyche, love is experienced in the vision of the Crucified.”[32] The killing of Christ and the exposure of the ultimate limits of human evil and possibility open directly onto new life.

Both Julian and Moore speak of the absolute ground, the penetrating force of God’s love. All human movement is in this love, leading to his peace. We may be victims of a temporary blindness but this unreality cannot compete with the reality of “God’s merciful protection.” God accepts us at our worst, and he exposes and accepts this worst in us, and this is the point of the cross. The defeat of this evil though, goes beyond our rational grasp, God making Christ sin exposes the depth of evil and reaches us in our sin. God comes to us in Christ, beyond our own capacities for self-acceptance, to make us his. “It is the mystery of God who comes upon us and loves us beyond the limits of our ego-organized potential.”[33]

We cease being self-organized or egocentric, and become Christocentric. In the words of Julian, “So I saw that God is our true peace; and he is our safe protector when we ourselves are in disquiet, and he constantly works to bring us into endless peace. And so when by the operation of mercy and grace we are made meek and mild, then we are wholly safe. Suddenly the soul is united to God, when she is truly pacified in herself, for in him is found no wrath.”[34] As Moore puts it, “I acquire sufficient selfhood to be identified with the crucified. This is the transition from man who ‘crucifies the Lord of Glory’ to man who is ‘nailed to the cross with Christ.’ It is the same man, changing only through self-discovery in Christ.”[35]

Williams sums up Julian as “saying that grace is God’s ‘no’ to our ‘no’: our persistent leaning towards nothingness, to the refusal of the act that is our very being, [this] is what is annihilated by openness.to God.”[36] Our “no” is annihilated, but this does not cancel creation, but is God’s crucifixion of evil. As Moore puts it, “In the ultimate order the ultimate sin, of crucifying the Just One, reverses itself, the victim giving life to the crucifiers.”[37] Evil takes on the only “being” possible in the ultimate effect, but in this form, it is defeated and annihilated. The effect of sin in the crucified is identical with its defeat and healing.[38] Our evil is made explicit in its annihilation. “When we say ‘no’, there is an abiding ‘no’ to this ‘no’ at the heart, of what we are.”[39] Death’s power and its denial of life and love are defeated in the cross. “Yet it is at the same time the reminder that God cannot be put to death and that the passion of Christ also declares the unchanging presence, of God in the centre of our being.”[40]

Julian is a counter-voice to the Augustinian tradition by which she was surrounded. She begins her theology where most theology leaves off, by focusing on the absolute unchanging love of God and works out all the movements of redemption through the logic of this love. Total identification with Christ opens a level of grace and love, which mark Julian’s unique perspective.

[1] Rowan Williams, Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 171.

[2] Ibid, 174.

[3] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library,2002) The Thirty Third Chapter.

[4] Williams, 173.

[5] Julian, The Forty-Fifth Chapter.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Fifty Seventh Chapter.

[10] Ibid

[11] The Fifty Fourth Chapter.

[12] Williams, 176.

[13] Williams, 177.

[14] The Seventy Second Chapter.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Forty-Fourth Chapter

[19] Williams, 175.

[20] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[21] The Forty-Seventh Chapter.

[22] The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[23] Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus is No Stranger (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) X.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid, XI.

[27] Julian, The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[31] Moore, 2-3.

[32] Ibid, 3

[33] Ibid, 6.

[34] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[35] Moore, 7.

[36] Williams, 179.

[37] Moore, 8.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Williams, 179-180.

[40] Williams, 183.

Sabbath Healing: The Sharing of Divine Presence

Salvation in the Bible hinges upon the presence of God, linked to his relationship to creation in his Sabbath rest (or Sabbath peace), the sacred time into which he invites those (being) created in his image. God’s rest contains and extends the divine reflection, “It is good, it is very good.” This reflective time is returned to creation as revelation: “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Gen 2:3). This permanent day, without morning or evening, is God’s significance, his sanctifying presence, given to and revealed in this day. The six days of creation, of activity, of motion, of control of chaos, etc., are for and lead to the seventh, containing the divine reflexive goodness. It might be said nothing happens on this day, but this day is the happening, the significance, the meaning arising out of and enfolding the other days. It is the final marker, contained within the sequence of events, each with its own sort of goodness, but culminating in the eternal goodness. According to Sigve Tonstad, “By the act of hallowing the seventh day God drives the stake of the divine presence into the soil of human time.”[1]

This day, in the description of Maximus, has no “created origin, since it is the manifestation of realities beyond limit and measure.”[2] It is subsequent to the created realities of the previous six days, with their measured beginning and end, morning and evening. It is unlimited and uncircumscribed, as he is in this eternal day. This “perpetual day, is the unalloyed, all-shining presence of God, which comes about after things in motion have come to rest.”[3] Maximus links the day with eternality in three modes or through three ways: being, well-being, and eternal-being. It is not that God’s Being is contained on a continuum with being, but it is out of the “essence” of God” that creation’s being occurs. This is a potential, actualized through human well-being and free choice. Given the reality of creation and nature, there is the potential to enact (or not), well-being. Eternal-being, contains and fills out the potential and activity of the others, and it is not a “natural potential within beings.”[4]

Maximus sidesteps an ontotheology which would put God on a continuum with being, through the division of the six days from the Sabbath. We do not get to God through creation directly, due to its own nature or its own essence, but we come to God in creation as on the order of a temple or a resting place for God, in which the meaning is in the added divine declaration. The motion and free choice of that which has a beginning and whose activity and motion has an end, cannot come to eternality through itself. There is an eternality to which creation gives access, through Sabbath, but the motion of the other days must cease. All activity, evolution, creation, even of an infinite or ongoing kind does not come to eternality, in fact it ensures, in its continual beginning and ending, that eternity will be obscured. All process (as in materialistic evolution or continual creation) does not allow for encounter with the agent behind the process, and this is the meaning given in the seventh day, otherwise lacking. It links creation with the Creator, not only by implication, but through presence, enunciation, and participation.

Nature and creation are not everything, though the world religions build upon this presumption in worshipping nature, and human philosophy often concludes the world is all that is the case (materialism, atheism, animism etc.). Sabbath puts a limit on creation from within, which opens onto or is eternity. Nature and free choice have a potential but there is a limit to their powers and activity, but that limit is the eternal. Their limit accords with the eternal principle for which they were created. We might say time is circumscribed by eternity, but this seventh day is an interpenetrating time. It is encountered among the other days and time as goal, as eternal possibility. God speaks on the other days (manifest in what is made), but God’s Word on this day is a direct manifestation and reflection of himself. The other days can be seen in what they produce, but this day is devoted to God’s word, to his delight and declaration, and to hearing. This difference marks the limits of what is made (manifest, seen, objective) from what is unmade (God himself).

There is activity, creating, working, tending, and eventually sweating and toil (which must end but is not its own end), then there is God’s sharing of himself. Nature and free choice have a potential which grace fulfills, and this is the significance (the symbol and the reality) of Sabbath. It is not that the eternal is outside of creation, but in Sabbath the eternal is conjoined and resting in creation. The eternal is not limited by the finite, but the finite is precisely for and intersected by the eternal. Eternality, God, Goodness, True Essence, are not limited, as if eternity were limited by time, or God excluded or limited by creation, but the opposite is the case; the created and finite are limited by the Eternal. This day without beginning or end, without created origin, is not succeeded by another, but is the terminus of all days and ages. This terminus though, is met among the others, as its own day and an alternative way.

The problem is that Sabbath presence is obscured for humans, and the story of the Bible might be read as Sabbath (re)gained. The faith founded on divine presence begins with a Judaism dealing primarily in absence. God speaks to Abraham, but shows up intermittently, though “Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws” (Gen 26:5), which points to Sabbath remembrance. The first lesson of Israel in the wilderness concerns remembering Sabbath rest, which had already been given (Ex 16:1-31). They were to trust in God to provide double manna on the sixth day and to preserve it on the seventh, though they feared starvation. God shows himself in Sinai and the Tabernacle, but the Jews approached the sacred space only in trepidation and through representatives (Moses, Aaron, the high priest). He was hidden in the holy of holies, but then his glory absconded from the Temple entirely. The sacred space is lost in the exile, and sacred time is all that remains, but the prevailing sense is: “Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!” (Is 45:15). The Sabbath no longer claimed location, and its time was limited. The Sabbath was a remembrance of creation and God’s resting, holding out a promise of freedom, but in slavery, exile, and subjugation, the Jews seem unprepared for divine presence.

Jesus’ Sabbath controversies, his deliberate healing on the Sabbath, and his direct identity with God, fill out the revelation and meaning of Sabbath. Jesus explains, the Sabbath is not a day of doing nothing, but it is the day in which God is working in healing, redeeming, delivering, and saving: “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working” (Jn 5:17). Throughout, Jesus challenges the received Jewish understanding of Sabbath (as inactivity), to emphasize divine activity. In turn, the paralytic must carry his mat (Jn 5), the blind man must mix mud (Jn 9), both involving activity the Jews prohibited on the Sabbath. It is this Sabbath work of redemption, performed by God but including a joyous response (mud mixing, bed carrying, running and leaping). A burden is involved, but it is a joyous burden inclusive of healing.

Believers take up the burden of cross, the work of redemption of Christ, learning the rest of God is a cessation of one kind of work, synonymous with the work of redemption. Jesus’ direct identity with God (“I am” the life raising the dead, the light giving sight to the blind, the true water curing thirst) arises in healing, the lifting of crushing burden, exchanged for an easy life-giving yoke. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me . . . my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30). The healing is a proof of who Jesus is, but also of who God is. The absence and seeming indifference of God to human suffering is remedied in the curing of blindness, leprosy, paralysis, and death itself. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (11:28).

This violation and correction of Jewish Sabbath expectations involves reidentifying God in Christ, re-understanding the Sabbath, and accepting that God is present and revealed. There is a burden to bear, but it is not the weight and toil of the world, but the taking up of the cross, the burden of redemption. The Creator is the Redeemer, as Jesus is true light, true life, true glory, revealed in his seventh-day work. He is the Sabbath, the life-giving rest, giving God and rest in himself, to creation.

[1] Sigve K. Tonstad, The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day (p. 37). Andrews University Press. Kindle Edition. Thank you Jonathan for the gift of this book, and putting me onto Tonstad.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol II, trans. Nicholas Constas, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 279.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 277

Resurrection as the Confrontation and Defeat of Antisemitism and the Antichrist

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamín Netanyahu recently said “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan” while explaining the rationale behind military actions involving the US and Israel against Iran. Netanyahu, referencing the historian Will Durant, was arguing that the military action of the US and Israel against Iran, and presumably the destruction of Gaza, were examples of when morality is not enough, and strength and power must be exercised. According to Netanyahu, “If you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.” Ignoring the implications of out-eviling the evil through ruthlessness, the contrast between Genghis Khan and Jesus may have come to Netanyahu so easily, as one of the defining necessities of Israeli citizenship concerns Jesus and Christianity.

The Law of Return, defining who can be a citizen of Israel, refrains from defining the term “Jew,” but the Law simply states: “Every Jew is entitled to immigrate to Israel.”[1] However, in 1962 the High Court of Justice ruled that a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who had converted to Catholicism and had become a Catholic monk (Brother Daniel) could not immigrate to Israel, since he had converted to Catholicism. “The argument of the majority judges was that after his conversion to Christianity he is a member of a non-Jewish religion, and is not allowed to immigrate to Israel.”[2] The problem is that “Jew” was not specifically defined as pertaining to religion, but had been defined either as the child of a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism. Those with Jewish mothers were not required to be practitioners of Judaism, but the only requirement is that he/she be one “who is not a member of another religion.” Secularism, atheism, nationalism, and Zionism, are not considered as competing with Judaism as a religion.

The primary issue was in regard to Jews who had converted to Christianity or Messianic Jews, all of whom were disqualified as having the right to immigration. That is, the primary consideration for the right to Aliyah (immigration to Israel, and originally referring to the honor of being called upon in the synagogue to read from the Torah) was rejection of any other religion, with Christianity and Christ being of specific and primary concern. The ruling was passed down, “a Messianic Jew (i.e., the child of a Jewish mother who believes that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel) is of ‘another religion’ rather than Judaism.” As Justice Barak makes clear, an atheist or secular Jew along with religious Jews all agree, for purposes of immigration, there is no such thing as “a Jew who believes in Jesus.” Justice Barak expressed his opinion that even according to a secular outlook there is general agreement that “a Jew who believes in Jesus” is no longer a Jew, according to the national meaning of the term.[3] The key determinant of who is a Jew cannot be said to be either religious or ethnic identity, as converts are welcomed as well as the children of converts who are secular or atheistic, but not being a follower of Christ is the clearest unifying factor.

Given the history of the conflict between Jews and Christians and the persecution of Jews by Christians, it may be understandable that Israel would want to preserve an identity which is specifically and definitively not Christian, but it is also true that this conflict goes to the heart of Christian identity. The rejection and crucifixion of Christ, and recognition of this fact is the beginning point of Christian preaching. Peter, in the first Christian sermon, says, the resurrected Messiah, is the one “you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men” (Acts 2:23). Everyone knows, “The things about Jesus the Nazarene . . . how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to the sentence of death, and crucified Him” (Lk 24:19–20). This killing is not a vague result of general wrongdoing but is the historical and concrete result of the beliefs, practices, and religion, grounding Jews (and Romans), causing them to condemn and crucify Jesus. These people have blood on their hands, and it is this recognition that “cuts them to the heart” causing their repentance which leads to their baptism (Acts 2:37–38). A neutral or innocent audience is simply not addressed by the Gospel, but it is aimed at those complicit in the killing. This message cuts to the heart, as “the things concerning Jesus” pertain to those who are guilty, but this guilt is not simply Jewish.

“For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” (Acts 4:27). The “Gentiles rage,” and “peoples devise futile things,” and “all the kings of the earth” take their stand, “against the Lord and against his Christ” (Acts 4:25–26). The opposition to Christ is universal, including Israel, Gentiles, kings of the earth, priests, common people, or all that are represented in the gathering in Jerusalem, which seems to include the root of humanity. This city of man, Jerusalem, which is responsible for his killing, is also the site of the beginning of Gospel proclamation.

It is the crucified who is risen and who directly saves those involved in the crime of his murder. This is not generic or genetic guilt, but is specific, historical, and concrete.[4] It is in their role as “the Council of elders,” the “people assembled, both chief priests and scribes,” Annas as High Priest and Caiaphas, all who were of the “high priestly family,” as well as Pontius Pilate and Herod, or those who gather in Jerusalem (e.g., Lk 22:66; Acts 4:5-6). These are the judges who will be judged. The antisemitism is not in the details but the details contain the concrete reality that brought on the killing. Betrayal, scapegoating, victimization, judging, capital punishment, sacrificial religion, or the very modes of redemption in which Israel and Rome put their hope, killed Jesus. Where the first Adam encounters the second Adam, all that has gone into shaping and misshaping Adam, comes into play. The murder concerns the very ground constituting humanity, as it comes into conflict with the reality of his humanity.

They condemned him as a threat to their nation, to their temple, and to their religion and considered him a blasphemer (Mk 14:63–64). He is accused of colluding with Satan, of being insane (Mat 12:22, 24, 26, 27, 28; Mk 3:30; Jn 10:19–21), of having demons (Matt 12:25), and of wanting to destroy the temple (Mk 14:58). He is accused of being a malefactor (John 18:29–30), which may include being a sorcerer and may have been aimed at his miracles.[5] He was accused of claiming to be the rightful King of the Jews (Jn 18:33-38; 19:19). They crucify him because of the threat he poses, and the resurrection is a refutation of their legal-religious condemnation. It is a reversal and judgment on their “nailing him to the cross.”

It is not that Christianity is antisemitic, but Judaism is the specific site in which the Messiah reveals himself (universally), and he brings fulness and truth from out of the Jewish faith: “Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:27). He is in all of the Jewish Scriptures because none of it stands alone, it all requires relativization in the light of Christ. The law made absolute, the Jew made absolute, or even God, apart from Christ, made absolute, is captive to the orientation and power of death, which causes theme to condemn him. This God, this religion, this law, is built on crucifying. It absolutizes the tomb, and Jesus empties out this tomb religion, and this is the promised fulfillment of the law and the prophets (Is 28:14-28).

In light of the resurrection their accusations and understanding are proven false, the point of Christ’s vindication. Peter proclaims not only that Jesus’ resurrection vindicates him, but it indicts those who killed him, along with all their reasons for crucifying him. “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24). The “power of death” pertains to the deadly condemnation, but also to the nature of the worship, the religious nationalism, the essentializing identity, which drove in the nails. The condemnation, and the understanding and systems of religion and identity which brought it about, are judged by the resurrection. Peter distributes culpability to Jews (the “you”) and the Romans (the “godless men”) but all serve the power of death, which they presume is absolute and is theirs to manipulate. This essentializing, absolutizing, of death and their ability to wield it upon victims of their choice, is proof in the flesh (they imagine) of the truth of their power. The entire system, is overturned in the resurrection: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). Your beliefs, judgements, and religion (or at least the understanding of your religion), which brought about his crucifixion, stand condemned.

This confrontation of Peter with the Jews is the pattern of proclamation of the resurrection: Peter is himself confronted as a betrayer of Christ and all of the disciples share in the betrayal exemplified by Judas (the charge levelled by Jesus while washing their feet, in Jn 13:1-17). Peter is not shifting the blame but explaining how Jews and Romans are complicit in yielding to the bondage which killed Jesus. Some may not be persecutors on the order of Paul, deniers on the order of Peter, betrayers on the order of Judas, but may simply give themselves over to grief, like Mary at the tomb, but what all share prior to or outside the realization of resurrection is bondage to death. In a long explanation concerning the prophecy presumed to be about David, Peter explains that God has not abandoned Jesus to the grave, and this means life, and the Holy Spirit, not death, are the final reality (esp. Acts 2:33).

The message is a judgment on the judges, as the apostles condemn those who condemned Jesus. “On the next day, their rulers and elders and scribes were gathered together in Jerusalem; and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of high-priestly descent” (Acts 4:5–6). The same Jewish court that condemned Jesus condemns the apostles and demands their silence (Acts 4) but the apostles reverse the roles, and proclaim Jesus has judged the judges in his resurrection. This however is only the beginning of the message, as they have “acted in ignorance” (Acts 3:17) and through repentance and return, the wiping away of sin, and times of refreshing come through Christ (Acts 3:19–20). Absolution and forgiveness are possible through the power of resurrection.

The pattern is established: realization of complicity in the crime as the first step in a new sort of worship, a new sort of temple, a new understanding of Scripture and Israel. “He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:11–12). God judges human judgment, as the victim has become the vindicator, offering true justice. As Rowan Williams notes, “grace is released only in confrontation with the victim.”[6] Grace comes to those who recognize their complicity in the crime, reifying the law, opting for the nation over Christ (the law of sin and death).

The refusal to recognize the resurrected Jesus is a refusal to recognize God is with the victim. This coin though, has two sides: the refusal of Jesus places one on the side of those who killed him, but victimizing through scapegoating, is also the crime that killed him. Jesus can be overtly or implicitly rejected, but on both sides of the equation are the guilty. The “not Christian” as the essence of Jewish identity performs the same work as antisemitism. Each is defined by the same reifying process. The scapegoating which killed Jesus is the same scapegoating which was turned on the Jews. That is, Zionism and the modern State of Israel may preserve the identity which, along with Roman complicity, brought about the death of Christ, however Christian antisemitism (e.g., the crusaders’ accusation that Jews are the “Christ killers”) repeats and preserves the same reifying identity which brought about the death of Christ. The reification of the law and the temple on the part of the Jews is repeated by those antisemites who also reify Jewish identity. Antichristian, antichrist, and antisemitism, are made of the same stuff in that each makes an absolute of the negative. While the tendency may be to quickly pass over “who killed Christ,” not only the sin of antisemitism but all sin is defeated by exposure and proclamation of what caused the death of Christ, as it is precisely the scapegoating reification which Christ confronts, judges, and defeats. Indeed, antisemitism is simply a case in point of what killed Jesus. Othering Jews or Romans, is of the same order as blaming Jesus, and in this victimization of the Other there are no innocent bystanders.

[1] Joshua Pex, “Immigration to Israel according to the Law of Return after conversion to another religion?” OFFICE@LAWOFFICE.ORG.IL, Updated on: 29/06/2025

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd LtD, 2002) 2.

[5] Deuteronomy warns, “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, . . . that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death” (Dt 13:1–2, 5). Later sources also indicate it may have been the accusation of sorcery which got him killed: Evidence of Jewish opinion at the time of Lactantius is the following passage from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 43a: “On the eve of the Passover Yeshu [the Nazarine] was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Any one who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.” See John W. Welch, “The Legal Cause of Action Against Jesus in John 18:29–30” Celebrating Easter: The 2006 BYU Easter Conference, ed. Thomas A. Wayment and Keith J. Wilson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University), 157–75. Accessed here: https://rsc.byu.edu/celebrating-easter/legal-cause-action-against-jesus-john-1829-30.

[6] Williams, 4.