Category: Walking Truth

Weekly theological insight to a broad audience on living out Christianity, published every Thursday.

Beyond the “Now and Not Yet” of Salvation History and Apocalyptic Theology

The image of transition between two ages, two kingdoms, or even two bodies (mortal and immortal), captured in the phrase “now and not yet,” conveys a partial truth about the dynamic of the Christian life, but does not capture the New Testament focus on the fullness of victory in Christ. The phrase conveys the overlap and tension between two ages but limits Christ’s victory, picturing the Christian life more in terms of (a Romans 7) struggle rather than a (Romans 8) triumph. This is clearly the case in a salvation history approach, but is also true in an apocalyptic approach (though, I will suggest is not decisive). Ann Jervis argues that Paul does not refer to two overlapping ages (the old and the new), but to the present evil age (what she calls “death-time”) as opposed to “life-time” in Christ.[1]

She argues, those in Christ are not constrained by the old age (defined by death), but having been crucified and raised with Christ there is nothing partial, incomplete, or split, about it, so inasmuch as “now and not yet,” grounds salvation history and apocalyptic theology, this demonstrates their inadequacy. Christ’s victory over sin and death, the defeat of the devil, the exposure of the deception of sin, adoption into the family of God, resurrection life now, entry into the life of Christ, and an alternative experience (all of which are primary themes of Paul and the New Testament) are not pending, overlapping with something else, or partial and “not yet.” To characterize them as such is to mischaracterize salvation. The power of darkness and death or the power of futility or a lie are defeated by the light and truth unleashed in the person of Christ. Here there is no overlap, sequence, or interdependence of two ages, and the degree to which theology has focused on two ages, two kingdoms, or two orders of power in conflict, it misses that Paul is not describing two orders of time and reality, but two relationships: a relationship with law or a relationship with God. You can be a slave to the law and what is the same thing, to the fundamental principles of the world, or you can be a son or daughter of God (Gal. 4:6-7).

Salvation History Overlooks the Adequacy of Christ

In a salvation history perspective the focus is on the outworking of history through two ages. There is a flat dependence on history and time, and a failure to account for the completeness of Christ’s work, as completion must await the outworking of history and the return of Christ. History is continually moving toward a goal which it has not yet reached.[2] N.T. Wright, a salvation historical theologian (though he also wants to embrace an apocalyptic understanding) illustrates this overdependence on the unfolding of Israel’s history, such that he seems to bypass the need for God to break through the world so as to give his own Person as the subject of knowledge. Jesus claims he is the way, the truth, and the light, yet Wright has collapsed divine self-disclosure into history, identifying that disclosure too simply with the objective consideration of the historical events behind the texts of Scripture. God is known by our “critically realist” knowledge of his historical activity, given to us by the accounts of Scripture, behind which it lies. Scripture records and bears witness to these events, but the question is if the appearance of Christ is dependent on this history (see my blog here).[3]

Paul, in Galatians for example, is not interested in the history of Israel for its own sake, and is not trying to show how Israel’s salvation history would benefit either Jews or Gentiles. Paul may think Israel was in a different situation than the pagans in that he distinguishes between the child and the slave but this is in no way a description of some sort of intermediate state, as is revealed in his focus on explaining the similarities. All suffered a form of oppression and all in Christ have received adoption as children. So, the salvation historical focus on a historical “now and not yet” sells the work of Christ short in depicting it as incomplete. The question is if apocalyptic theology is equally guilty?

Salvation is Complete in Christ and Not an Age

Paul is not depicting two overlapping ages and does not speak of a new age, though apocalyptic theologians suppose this is implied in his use of new creation, kingdom of God, and eternal life.[4] As Jervis notes, contrary to the apocalyptic reading, “Paul regarded not the new age but life in and with Christ as God’s goal for humanity. Paul connects certain concepts with that life . . . but makes clear that new creation, kingdom, and eternal life are the consequences and conditions of life with Christ.”[5] Paul’s primary focus is on Christ, and there is no overlap of ages or new creation with the evil age. In Galatians 6:14-15 for example, the old world in no more for Christians. They are not living in two worlds or two ages, but are living in Christ: “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). “Not only is Christ’s crucifixion the foundation of new creation, but Paul strongly emphasizes union with Christ—not new creation—as the result of Christ’s crucifixion.”[6] Being in Christ is new creation: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor. 5:17). This is not a contrast of ages, but of being “in Christ” or living for the self and the flesh. “To be clear, new creation signals more than an anthropological concept—a new humanity that exists in the present evil age. It is a new humanity that exists in Christ.”[7]

So too, “kingdom” is not an entity existing apart from Christ or subject to other kings. It is his rule, his defeat of sin and death that marks his kingdom. “For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom. 14:9). His is not a kingdom separate from who he is, and the resurrection power he exercises is marked by all who are made alive in Christ (I Cor. 15:22). That is, the kingdom is constituted by those belonging to Christ (Gal. 5:16). As Jervis concludes, Paul’s references to “new creation” and “kingdom of God” focus not on new age concepts but on Christ. Paul did not organize his understanding of Christ’s death, resurrection, and exaltation within a two-age framework or a conception of the overlapping of the ages for believers.[8] Believers are entirely united with Christ, as a couple is united in marriage (I Cor. 6:17), and this union in Christ is the liberating reality freeing from the present “evil age” (Gal. 1:4).

Paul’s point (throughout Romans and elsewhere) is for Christians to recognize that death or the old age no longer pertains to their reality: “How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom. 6:2). They may struggle with sin, but only because they have failed to fully realize the reality of being in Christ. Christ has defeated death (Rom. 6:8-10) and the Christian is to live the reality of this victory: “consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). This eternal (αἰώνιος) life is not a form of life which participates in mere finitude, though the Christian may occasionally fall back into the delusion of life controlled by death. If there is overlapping and partiality, it is not because the Christian has to defeat an enemy not yet conquered, but because they are not “presenting the members of their body dead to sin” (Rom. 6:13). The deception of sin is not partially removed, in some sort of half-truth and the sting of death does not survive in half-life half-death. Christians are made alive in Christ and the truth of Christ has completely dispelled the lie. “The fact must be acknowledged that the apostle speaks not about the old age and the new but rather about the present evil age and Christ.”[9]

Then What is the Status of Apocalyptic Theology

Apocalyptic theology might be served by Jervis’ critique (though she does not pose this possibility) by recognizing that the problem of sin and deliverance do not pertain to impersonal “ages,” or “kingdoms,” but to a personal enslaving deception and liberating truth. Early apocalyptic theology so identified human enslavement with the demonic that it missed human subjectivity. As the question was put to Ernst Käsemann (among the original modern apocalyptic theologians), “If God’s intervention on the human stage, exorcising the world of its demons, is 100% of the equation, where is human subjectivity in any recognisable form?”[10] Louis Martyn, as Beverly Gaventa points out, has practically removed the role of human initiative or any notion of personal faith.[11] “Martyn’s avoidance of conversion language and earlier individualistic readings of Galatians has taken us too far here, so that even the function of Paul’s self-reference in the letter’s argument (or re-proclamation) does not become clear.”[12] The focus on the demonic or the powers has tended to miss the explanatory power of the personal plight (deception) and Personal resolution (truth) in Christ. According to Bruce McCormack, readers “are left with a rich battery of images and concepts but images and concepts alone, no matter how rhetorically powerful, do not rise to the level of adequate explanation. How is it that the ‘rectification’ of the world is achieved by Christ’s faithful death?”[13]

Jervis is not concerned to rescue apocalyptic theology, though she deploys her own apocalyptic-like categories (with life-time displacing death-time). Her death-time points to the deep personal deception surrounding death: “God permits God’s foes a limited range of influence, allowing humanity to choose to exist in the illusory dead-end temporality grounded in defeat (what I term “death-time”); which is in reality non-time.”[14] “Paul thinks that believers have experienced two types of time: one ruled by death, from which they have been liberated, and one of life, from which death has been expelled . . .”[15] In her explanation, Paul describes Christ’s defeat of death and sin as simultaneous, as death has enslaved to fear, and Christ liberates from this enslavement. Though Jervis does not deploy “apocalypse” as part of her position, nonetheless her depiction of death’s deception and how Christ makes a world of difference, potentially supports an apocalyptic perspective.

Paul’s depiction of deception in regard to death poses the possibility of cosmic and personal enslavement, which explains how Christ’s defeat of this lie is of cosmic proportions (appropriately described as apocalyptic). Explanation of death’s deception provides explanation that focus on the demonic, the powers, the ages, the kingdom or even anthropology has not provided (see my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation).

[1] L. Ann Jervis, Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023)

[2] Jervis,17.

[3]  Grant Macaskill, History, Providence and the Apocalyptic Paul” – https://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2164/7574/History_2c_Providence_and_Apocalyptic_Paul_SJT.pdf;jsessionid=FA0FD8F9F020B597D401884CE00C1150?sequen

Douglas Campbell spells this out quite brilliantly in Deliverance, but is available in his review of Wrights Volumes on Paul and The Faithfulness of God – https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/douglas-campbell/

[4] Jervis, 48.

[5] Jervis, 49-50.

[6] Jervis, 51.

[7] Jervis, 52.

[8] Jervis, 55-56.

[9] Jervis, 60.

[10] “A Tribute To Ernst Käsemann and a Theological Testament,” 391. Cited in David Anthony Bennet Shaw, The ‘Apocalyptic’ Paul: An Analysis & Critique with Reference to Romans 1-8, (Fitzwilliam College, 2019, unpublished dissertation) 145.

[11] Shaw, 143

[12] Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Review of Galatians by J. Louis Martyn,” RBL, 2001. Cited in Shaw, 145.

[13] Bruce L. McCormack, “Can We Still Speak of ‘Justification by Faith’? An In-House Debate with Apocalyptic Readings of Paul,” in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter, ed. Mark W. Elliott et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 167. Shaw, 160.

[14] Jervis, xiv.

[15] Jervis, 73.

The Practical Apocalypticism of Ivan Illich: How Grace and Love are Transformed by the Church into Condemning Fear

Ivan Illich (1926-2002), the Catholic priest and key critic of Catholicism and modern Christianity, describes the apocalyptic or world-changing ideas inaugurated by Christianity and demonstrates how it is that the corruption of the best (New Testament Christianity) is the worst (modern Western society). Illich, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, pictures Christianity as potentially unleashing a power for evil, first in its revolutionary remaking of the world for the good (in freedom from law and the opening to the Personal) and then in the transformation of this highest good into the worst (the lonely fear of hell and suffering under the law of conscience). “Apocalyptic,” which is not Illich’s word, captures the unmaking of the world in both its recreative and destructive phases, which also describes the deep insight of Illich’s work.

First, he describes (in a series of books) how schools inhibit learning, hospitals threaten health, and prisons aggravate crime; each professionalizes or institutionalizes caring for basic human needs, creating a symbolic buffer around direct and personal experience. Then, toward the end of his life, he conducts a series of interviews filling out his original claims in two key areas. Jesus’ introduction of love and focus on the personal, also poses the possibility of betrayal, which is the new understanding called sin. There arose however, through perversion of this freedom, by Church and society, a new interior legalism (the modern individual), a constitutive part of the modern Nation State. According to Illich, “the Church would transform itself into what a later church council called ‘a perfect society,’ an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.” [1] In Paul Kennedy’s summation of Illich, the modern West is the result of the Roman Church’s institutionalization of the Christian gospel, not only in education, health services, and economics, but in relationships, or lack thereof, definitive of modern life. All can be traced to the Christian originals and their historical perversion.

In Illich’s description, the incarnation loads depth and weight onto the human condition, divinizing relationality and friendship, and displacing a cosmic or closed order. As in the Gospel of John, the cosmos of darkness is broken open by the light, revealing the Person beyond cosmic law. As Illich says, “I therefore believe that the Incarnation, the ensarkosis, the Greek word for the enfleshment of the biblical, the koranic, the Christian Allah represents a turning point in looking at what happens in the world. And this is an extraordinary surprise and remains a surprise.” Where in traditional society the self is constituted by the web of family and tribe, which provide exacting rules of how one is to be (even in modern Japan, in my experience, the constant refrain is “we Japanese” and all one must do is follow the formal structures – good mother, good wife, good student, etc.) the incarnation suspends the defining structure, replacing the formal with the personal. The “I” defined by the “we” simply makes the individual a particular instance of the corporate, with the law and custom buffering direct relationship, but Christ removes this buffer.

Jesus ushers in the possibility of freedom from law, custom, tribe, ethnos, and custom, replacing this binding impersonal world with love, in which ultimate meaning is embodied, fleshly, and relational. According to Illich, “If I rightly understand the point of the Gospel, it’s crucifixion. That is, Jesus, as our saviour, and also as our model, is condemned by his own people, led out of the city, and executed as somebody who has blasphemed the community’s god.” The god of the law, is displaced by God in the flesh, making ethnic identity and law relative and response to Christ absolute, with the spirit of the personal displacing the letter of the law.

Love, after Christ, is not dictated by the strictures of the society, or by the family into which one is born. “It makes it possible for me to choose anywhere whom I will love and thereby destroys or deeply threatens . . . the basis for which ethics has always been ethnos, the historically given ‘we’ which precedes any pronunciation of the word ‘I.’” With the new horizon of love however, there arises the danger of institutionalizing it: “the attempt to manage, to insure, to guarantee this love by institutionalization, by submitting it to legislation and making it law, by protecting it through the criminalization of its opposite.” Love made a duty converts it into another ethical norm or rule, rather than an unconditioned response to the personal.

The failure of love is not simply the breaking of a rule, but the betrayal of relationship, which is the new possibility of sin. “Since that moment, since this possibility of a mode of existence was created, its breakage, its denial, infidelity, turning away, coldness has acquired a meaning it could not formerly have had. Sin, as a divinely revealed possibility for Man, did not exist before this moment. Where there was no freely, arbitrarily established relationship which is a gift from the other, which is founded on a glimmer of mutuality, the possibility of its denial, of its destruction could not be thought.”

However, when the church institutionalizes hospitality, it also begins to exercise a new order of power, making its fortune off the exercise of charity. “And if you study the way in which the Church created its economic base in late antiquity, you will see that, by assuming the task of creating welfare institutions on behalf of the state, the Church’s claim to money, and practically to unlimited amounts of money because the task was unlimited, could be legally and morally funded.” Regulated charity, inhibits the inherent freedom of the personal response to the neighbor. “Something which Jesus told us about as a model of my personal freedom of choice of who will be my other (as in the story of the Good Samaritan, at the center of Illich’s description) is transformed into the use of power and money in order to provide a service.” Freedom and faith pass from the personal to institutional power, and gradually the power of the Word (made flesh) is institutionalized, and it is in this passage that Illich locates the anti-Christ – the institutionalization of sin.

“The idea that by not responding to you, when you call upon my fidelity, I thereby personally offend God is fundamental to understanding what Christianity is about. And the mystery which I’m interested in contemplating, the consequences of the perversion of faith throughout history which haunts us at the end of the twentieth century, is exactly related to my understanding of sin.” Illich is simultaneously describing the possibility for sin, and then showing how this betrayal of the personal (definitive of sin) is intrinsic to institutionalized Christianity and the institutions of State. According to Cayley, “The new possibility of personally facing one another has produced as its perversion a vast architecture of impersonal institutions all claiming, in some sense, to care. The vast engines that drive our world engines of education and health, as much as those of economic and technological development — all derive finally from a cooptation of the gospel’s promise of freedom.”

The key point, according to Illich, in the rise of an institutional faith, displacing the personal, occurs in 1075, when Pope Gregory VII issued the document “The Dictates of the Pope,” assigning legal supremacy to the Pope over all Christians and the legal supremacy of the clergy, the Pope’s emissaries, over secular authorities. The Church transformed itself into what a later council would call “a perfect society,” “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”

As farming innovations (e.g., horse harnesses) allowed for settled communities around a church (rather than around fields), steeples arose and the supervision of the church over life intensified, including regular private confession to a priest (as opposed to the public confession before the congregation). In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council proclaimed, “Every Christian will go, under penalty of going to hell otherwise, grievous sin, once a year to their own pastor and confess their sins.” The priest judges, in secret, offering forgiveness of sin, in an entirely new way, a juridical act. Both law and sin took on a new meaning, departing from Paul’s depiction of being “released from the law” as Christians live “not under law, but under grace.”

For Paul, sin was a denial of the freedom of grace, but with its transformation into a legal offense, according to Illich, a new age began: “The sense of sin of the first millennium becomes now a sense of sin as a transgression of a norm.” In the New Testament, according to Illich, sin is the denial of grace, not a legal offense, but always a personal offense against a person (an infidelity). Now the sinner stands accused before a priest who judges her transgression of Christian law. “Grace becomes juridical. Sin acquires a second side, that of the breaking of the law, which implies that in the second millennium the charity, the love of the New Testament, has become the law of the land.”

At the same time an “inner court” is taken up in human interiority. “Not only was a juridical state structure created and sin was criminalized, made into something which could be dealt with along the lines of criminal justice even if under self-accusation, but also the concept of the forum internum (internal) came up. Forum is the general word for the court in front of which you have standing.” The beginnings of modern conscience, necessary guilt and fear of punishment, displace the notion of sin as personal betrayal. Even Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” – followed by the reflection that “conscience makes cowards of us all,” reflects the new fear of hell.  As Caley puts it, “This new moral solitude into which modern persons are plunged is but one aspect of a larger change that Illich sees taking place as the church tries to install the Kingdom of God as a legal regime on earth.”

In 1215 — the same gathering that pronounced the duty of annual private confession — also redefined marriage as a contract between two individuals witnessed by God. In Illich’s description, “The constitution of the union or relationship of love in its supreme form, namely commitment of a man and a woman to each other for ever on the model of the Gospel became defined as a juridical act through which an entity comes into existence which is called marriage, and for this juridical act, God becomes, so to speak, the necessary instrumentality, asking him to be present and a witness to what you say to each other, therefore using God as a juridical device.” Where Jesus had set aside swearing oaths, oaths before God in marriage and family made this contractual arrangement core to society (the beginnings of social contract). And this idea of taking oaths with God as a witness reached a new high point when the Church defined the formation of the basic cell of society, the family, as a contract entered freely and knowingly by a man and a woman, constituting a legal reality with standing in heaven.

New Testament communities were not formed on the basis of contractual obligations, but were a community gathered by Christ: “in the Eucharistic assembly, a ‘we,’ a new ‘we,’ the plural of the ‘I’ was established which was not of this world, of politics in the Greek sense.” It was a community of the Spirit, sealed by the kiss of a shared breath or spirit. “The Christians adopted this symbolism to signify that each one of those present around the dining table contributed of his own, spirit of, if you want, the Holy Spirit, which was common to all, to create a spiritual community, a community of one spirit, before they sat down and shared the same meal, the Eucharist.” No longer would hierarchy, ethnic or sexual identity be determinate. “It gave to those who participated at the ceremony the idea that community can come into existence outside of or other than the community into which I was born and in which I fulfill my legal obligations, in which all those who are present equally share in the act of its establishment.”

Gradually citizenship in this alternative community became regulated. “And by the tenth century, the mode of performing this ceremony changed. The priest, instead of sharing the peace with everybody, kissed the altar as though he were taking something from the altar which stands for Christ, and then handing it down to the others.” The kiss moved into the background as did its spiritual (conspiratsio) significance, so that “during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries an instrument was developed called an osculatorium, a kissing object . . . which the priest kisses after he has kissed the altar and hands down to the community.” The symbolic is replaced by the embodied (and interpersonal) in a very literal fashion. “The breathing together of the spirit in the conspiratsio becomes the swearing together of citizens in the social contract that will eventually define the modern state.”

As Cayley puts it, “When the Roman Church adopted the rule of law, Ivan Illich claims, it laid down many of the tracks within which modern society would run. Conscience, as the inner imprint of the fear of judgement, and contract, as an oath sworn with God as a witness, are both ideas that will become crucial for the modern nation-state.” With Protestantism threatening, the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent, presented itself “as a law-based church whose laws were obligatory for the citizens in conscience.” The pronouncements of Trent, Illich thinks, finalized the perversion of the original beloved community: “Through this criminalization of love perverted . . . the basis was created for the new way of feeling citizenship as a command of my conscience, for the possibility of the state to claim raison d’etat, as guideline for its legislation which is obligatory in conscience, parallel to the Church’s ability to confuse church law and doctrine, or to diminish, abolish, make permeable the frontier between what is true and what is commanded.”

The modern individual interiorizes subjection to the law and as his own judge “is alone in a new and unprecedented way. As the subject of an internalized Christian law, he no longer enjoys that free, trusting, unmediated relationship with God and other people” which marked the New Testament community. “The criminalization of sin generating the idea of conscience also obscures the fact that the answer to sin is contrition and mercy, and that therefore, for him who believes in sin, there is also a possibility of celebrating as a gift beyond full understanding the fact that he’s being forgiven.” The possibility of contrition, forgiveness, and sweet acceptance are obscured by the legal conception of sin and self.

[1] Though Illich wrote extensively, the ideas expressed here come toward the end of his life and were only captured in an interview recorded by David Cayley, and presented as a series of podcasts https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich, for which Cayley has provided transcripts https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. Paul Kennedy moderates the overall podcast, with David Cayley, commenting in both the direct conversation and explanatory asides. Thank you to Brad Klingele for pointing this series out to me.

Universal Salvation as Fullness of Embodiment: From Paul, Irenaeus, Origen, Maximus to Lonergan

The fundamental lesson of the incarnation is that embodiment in general is the carrier of meaning, and that His embodiment is the fullness of meaning extended universally.[1] “Universal” has a double meaning, in that it is all-inclusive not simply of all people but of everything about them, most particularly their embodied condition. In an ordinary sense, the incarnation locates meaning, not in disembodied thoughts or souls but in the flesh, which is the human connection with the world. Given the truth and implications of the incarnation, there is no disincarnate language or disembodied word as the Word, the ground of language, is enfleshed. In the incarnation Christ stands in the place of this interconnectivity completing it and infinitely extending it. Incarnation or embodiment is the shared condition, which God took up in Christ to impart final and full meaning.

Incarnation Extends Meaning Through All Creation

Being found “in Christ” (ἐν Χριστῷ) as part of his body (the church), a partaker of his body in communion, baptized into his body, and imitating and following Christ, is the means of being incorporated into the meaning he imparts. Christ’s embodiment is extended universally (to all people and all things), throughout every phase of his life, death and resurrection. The Word made flesh is meaning incarnate to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, and is incarnate in the manner of his life. His teaching is manifest in the materiality of his words and his life enfleshed makes his life and teaching imitable. He embodies a new sort of human, a new human community, shared in its material and sensuous form. The incarnation is meaning shared (Logos given) as incarnation fills creation with divine life and meaning.

Resurrection Eternally Extends Incarnation

This meaning takes on its full universal scope in the resurrection, which is the inauguration of Christ’s embodiment extended to all people. The resurrection does not bring incarnation to a close but is the ongoing extension of the incarnation. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies” (Jn 11:25). Eternal life is through bodily resurrection enacted now. God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet 1:3). Christian salvation, now and future, is being joined to the death and resurrection of Christ: “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Ro 6:4). This hope of being found in Christ, through baptism, the church, the body of Christ, the eucharist, is the extension of Christ’s embodiment to all people for eternity.

The salvation of Christ begins then in the incarnation, continues through the resurrection, through which Christ’s embodiment of meaning fills creation (which is to say corporately or corporeally). There will be a final restoration [apocatastasis] of all things, as God promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21) . This restoration is cosmic as God’s purpose is “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Ephesians 1:9–10). “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). The hypostatic union of deity and humanity in the incarnation, bodies forth or makes Christ’s incarnate body the carrier of ultimate meaning, eternally extended (in heaven and earth), which constitutes salvation.

Alienation From Embodiment is the Human Problem

If resurrection or being re-embodied, restored, recreated, describes salvation, then salvation’s opposite is to be disembodied, dead, or alienated from life in the body. To wish for disembodied bliss in the Platonic Forms, or in Hindu melding with the One, or in Buddhist denial of the body, is the opposite of Christian salvation, but so too any form of refusal of the body, any form of death wish or orientation to death. In neurosis and psychosis, the mortal body is refused, such that one pictures the body as secondary. It is not that “I am my body,” but “I have a body,” and contained within my body is the special treasure of my soul or my essential self. (My body may have a toothache, in Wittgenstein’s mockery of disembodied notions of language.) There is an alienated distance from the reality of the body, as if salvation would be deliverance from the body, rather than eternalization of the body in Christ. The opposite of baptism or being joined to the body, is alienation, schizophrenia, or sacrifice of the body as (if it is) an obstacle. Masochism and sadism are an attack on embodiment. The biological, the fleshly, the mortal, is often viewed with disgust and is refused.

As Paul describes (in Slavoj Žižek’s extended interpretation describing the lie of sin), it is as if there are two bodies at work. Rather than acceptance of the body in baptism, in communion, in the church, in which the mortal is integrated and accounted for, there is alienation and antagonism (as depicted in Romans 7). The body or flesh is not an obstacle per se, but due to sin and the refusal of the created and embodied condition, the body (which is the self) becomes an obstacle. Salvation is not the overcoming of the obstacle of the flesh or body but the overcoming of this deception.

Being Embodied in Christ is the Resolution

Christian salvation is a defeat of the refusal of the body, a refusal of being incarnate, a refusal of God’s good creation. It is necessarily universal, in that embodiment is by definition, connectedness, communal, linguistic, and a shared condition. Recreation or restoration occurs through participation in a breadth and depth of embodiment. Thus, apocatastasis is universal in multiple senses. In Romans 5 all that are in Adam and all that are connected to him share in the world of which he is a part: the Garden which he tills, the children he bears, the wife that completes him, the earth which feeds him, and the cosmic order which provides him dimension and context. In Paul’s description all are found in Adam, and this all extends to the cosmos, which is in travail. Adam is not simply one separate body, but a body of connections, the head of a race, and the keeper of God’s good earth, co-creator with God in naming its creatures, and organizing their place. Adamah is not just from the earth, but constitutive of its purpose and goal.

To save Adam is to save all that he includes. Thus, the second Adam is by definition necessarily universal in his assumption of all that Adam is, which includes his body, his race, and the human world he constitutes. Death spread to all through Adam, and this is reversed in Christ. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). Salvation is corporate, corporeal, and cosmic in scope, exposing the lie behind alienation, isolation, absolute individualism, and disembodiment. Our tendency in sin may be toward the disincarnate, but in Christ we become fully incarnate in embrace of embodied reality.

Embodiment in Christ as Salvation is the Church’s Teaching

When Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom” (I Cor. 15:50), he does not mean that flesh and blood will be gotten rid of in the Kingdom, but will be transformed by the Spirit. As Irenaeus puts it: “Unless the flesh were to be saved, the Word would not have taken upon Him flesh of the same substance as ours: from this it would follow that neither should we have been reconciled by Him.”[2] Christ has reconciled us in the flesh by his flesh, not by getting rid of the flesh but adding to it the life of the Spirit, by means of which the flesh bears spiritual meaning. The hypostatic union is a fusion of God with humanity, and all this entails.

Origen describes an integrating of soul and body in Christ in a spiritual union with God, which does not separate but which eternally binds the human body, soul and divine Spirit: “For the Word of God is thought to be more in one flesh with the soul than a man with his wife. And, moreover, to whom is it more fitting to be one spirit with God than to this soul, which has so joined itself to God through love that it may deservedly be said to be one spirit with him.”[3]

The culmination of this understanding is found in Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 13 August 662), who maintains God’s purpose is to unite the world to Himself through incarnation: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[4]  The extension of ultimate meaning to the world through Christ is in and through shared embodiment, aimed to envelope all creation. In Bernard Lonergan’s rediscovery of this understanding, “the embodiment of Christ in the hypostatic union, with all that this embodiment entails in terms of Christ’s life and ministry and sufferings, makes Christ’s body a symbolic and incarnate carrier of meaning” extended to all creation.[5]

[1] See Bernard Lonergan, The World Mediated by Meaning, unpublished talk given at MIT, 1970. Bernard Lonergan Archive https://bernardlonergan.com/archive/23430dte070/ This talk is typical of the direction taken by Lonergan which inspired this blog.

[2] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, the title of book 5 chapter 14.

[3] Origen, On First Principles, Vol. 1, Edited and translated by John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 2.6.3.

[4] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7.22.

[5] Matthew Hale, Knowledge, Virtue, and Meaning: A Lonerganian Interpretation of Maximus the Confessor on the Embodiment of the Word in the Christian (Catholic University of America, Dissertation, 2022) 183. As Hale points out, this understanding is definitive of the thought of Bernard Lonergan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Hart, 10.

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

[5]  The Bride of the Lamb, 111.

[6] The Bride of the Lamb, 109.

[7] The Bride of the Lamb, 110.

[8] Hart, 244.

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

[10] The Comforter, 239.

[11] Hart, 15.

[12] The Comforter, 239.

[13] The Comforter, 242.

[14] The Comforter, 235-236.

[15] The Comforter, 233-234.

[16] The Comforter, 239-240.

[17] The Comforter, 234.

[18] The Comforter, 235.

[19] The Comforter, 241.

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

The Irreligious Arc of David Bentley Hart   

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem of Evil Looms Too Large

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

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

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

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

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

There is no Hope in the Church

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

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

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

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

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

Empty Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Repetition in the trinity of Self Versus Recapitulation in the Trinity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Law of the Father Versus Abba, Father

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

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

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

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

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

Recapitulation as Salvation

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

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

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

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

[2] Ecrits: Selection, 65.

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

[4] Jacques Lacan,  Seminar XI , 34.

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

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

The Scriptures, Gospel, and the Exegesis of Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Baer, 27.

Epektasis: Gregory of Nyssa and the Eternal Ascent of Redemption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[4] Gregory, Homily 8, 259.

[5] Gregory, Homily 8, 268.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[12] Gregory, Homily 8, 259

[13] Petcu, 774.

[14] Homily 8, 259-261.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 4.

[5] Ibid, 5.

[6] Ibid, 14.

[7] Ibid, 6.

[8] Ibid, 7.

A Thousand Small Inanities or Radical Love: Adam Gopnik Versus Flannery O’Connor

My daughters often buy me books for Christmas and usually are quite successful in their selection, but this year I received a book by Adam Gopnik which, while written with the panache of a New Yorker staff writer, continually reaches points of incredible banality. Typical is the stirring conclusion: “The most you can say is that experience suggests that treating both the proposition that love is good and the proposition that the facts can be found as true tends to make more people happy.”[1] Or there is this riveting inanity defining liberalism: “A belief that life should be fair – or fairer, or as fair as seems fair.”[2] Gopnik’s daughter tries to gently point out the shallowness, as she and her father are cycling on their island retreat. They come upon a sign at a yoga studio: “In this house we believe that: Black lives matter – Women’s rights are human rights – No human is illegal – Science is real – Love is love – Kindness is everything.” His daughter says, “Dad, there’s your entire book!” Gopnik does not miss that she has reduced his entire effort to “one-sentence attitudes that comic book liberals like me are supposed to share.” However, he doubles down, and acknowledges the sloganeering captures the “liberal imagination.”[3]  I cannot disagree with the slogans, but it was hard to believe his conclusions (which literally appear on the wall of a yoga studio) serve as his deepest life principles. I kept reading the book thinking, there had to be more depth to come. I was wrong.

At the same time, I was reading Flannery O’Connor’s, The Violent Bear It Away,[4] and I realized Gopnik was the perfect stand-in for the protagonist in O’Connor’s novel. The teacher or Rayber, believes in science, reason, fellowship, and experience, but these are exposed as banalities by his nephew, Tarwater. Tarwater, due to his isolated upbringing under his great-uncle suffers sociopathic compulsions, and eventually murders his cousin (Rayber’s son). Rayber, who would save Tarwater from his great-uncle, imagines taking Tarwater to the Natural History Museum, exposing him to science and the ways of reason, will cure him of his evil tendencies: “He intended to stretch the boy’s mind by introducing him to his ancestor, the fish, and to all the great wastes of unexplored time.”[5]

Gopnik suggests exposure to Darwin, Mill, and Adams, and other exemplars of liberal principles, found in science, capitalism, and the bent toward a practical materialism, are sufficient for a rule of life. Both Gopnik and the teacher are committed to the lesson of experience and the notion that the individual creates values, based on their experience. On the basis of experience, Gopnik says, “people make up their values . . . they aren’t handed down from the past on high.”[6] Likewise the teacher imagines, “By virtue of kinship and similarity and experience, [he] was the person to save him (Tarwater) . . .”[7] Meeks, a travelling salesman, imparts the same wisdom, “He said he himself had graduated from the School of Experience with an H.L.L. degree. He asked the boy if he knew what was an H.L.L. degree. Tarwater shook his head. Meeks said the H.L.L. degree was the Hard Lesson from Life degree. He said it was the quickest got and that it stayed learnt the longest.”[8] Rayber attempts to extract the boy from the grip of his uncle’s fanaticism by similar appeal: “’There are certain laws that determine every man’s conduct,’ the schoolteacher said. ‘You are no exception. Experience is a terrible teacher.’”[9]

The boy and his great-uncle mock the ineffectual Rayber, though he is a regular topic of conversation. The problem is, they cannot remember him, or put flesh on their memories of him. “He had made a habit of catching his great-uncle in contradictions about the schoolteacher’s appearance. ‘I forget what color eyes he’s got,’ the old man would say, irked. ‘What difference does the color make when I know the look? I know what’s behind it.’ ‘What’s behind it?’ ‘Nothing. He’s full of nothing.’”[10] The man is so vague and empty, he cannot hold down an enfleshed image.

Imagine trying to build a life around Gopnik/Rayber philosophy. Certainly, as the boy says about the teacher, “He knows a heap. I don’t reckon it’s anything he don’t know.” As the old uncle explains, the problem is not in the knowing. “’He don’t know it’s anything he can’t know,’ the old man said. ‘That’s his trouble. He thinks if it’s something he can’t know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same.’” Rayber is incapable of recognizing his own self-deceived understanding, as knowledge is the cure to everything. Likewise, Gopnik does not admit the possibility of an evil, the very nature of which is self-deception. The old man describes this as the danger of being dispossessed of the self.[11]

To inculcate liberalism, or a “hatred for cruelty,” an admission we are not perfect, a “belief that sympathy can save us from clannishness,” a belief in “permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument,” and to be “open to the lessons of experience,” is Gopnik’s plan of salvation.[12] Certainly, no one can disagree that being nice, having public parks, trying not to be violent (though Gopnik hedges on this one), not judging people by race, parentage, or income, are worthy ideas, but being kind does not constitute a worldview. It is insufficient in the encounter with evil and radical goodness. Gopnik explains, “These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity – a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination.”[13] He does not consider the possibility that individual imagination may be inadequate, deceived, or captive to a particular time and place. He does not consider, as the old man explains, that he might be dispossessed of himself.

Gopnik may be among the best representatives of the modern perspective, which is not a political point of view (Republican or Democrat) but the liberalism which is the prevailing creed of our time. Most agree, cruelty is bad, conversation is good, egalitarianism and tolerance are to be valued, but to imagine this constitutes a world or takes account of reality, is to mistake the problem (human imagination) for the solution.  

 In the novel, Rayber is bowled over by the impudent boy. “The boy had overtaken him, given him a thunderous blow on the head, and then disappeared. And with his disappearance there had come such an overwhelming feeling of release that Rayber had waked up with a pleasant anticipation that his guest would be gone.”[14] Best to ignore and get rid of the evil, rather than to acknowledge the challenge the boy poses to his world. It is not only his nephew though, but his son, Bishop, who challenges his world. He had tried to drown the boy, due to his disability, but had failed. Meanwhile, “he sent him to a school for exceptional children and he had made great strides. He could wash himself, dress himself, feed himself, go to the toilet by himself and make peanut butter sandwiches though sometimes he put the bread inside.”[15] The boy was independent enough that Rayber could mostly ignore him, but then he would once again be confronted with reality: “the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity.”[16] He is unnerved by his son’s complete innocence (in his value system he should be drowned), so that he is afraid of his love for a boy who is worthless in regard to reason, science, and knowledge. “His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate.”[17] If there were an “image of God” he understood, his son fit that likeness, but this reality represented by his son was one that his world could not afford:

The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.[18]

How can this irrational, “idiot” love have a place in a world where, in Gopnik’s terms, “reasoned conversation” is supreme?[19] The extremes of goodness and evil, love and hatred, cannot be accounted for. Rayber’s hatred for his nephew, and his unwillingness to include his son in the realm of his values, consist of the same stunted imagination. Both challenge a world of liberal values: material concern, reason, science, and the power of imagination. His nephew is positively evil and his son worthless in regard to the potential of imagination. They do not really qualify as human, in the Gopnik/Rayber world.

Rayber’s uncle recognizes that his nephew’s worldview is such that he cannot love what does not fit his standards: “And once, only once, the old man had leaned forward and said to Tarwater, in a voice that could no longer contain the pleasure of its secret, ‘He loved me like a daddy and he was ashamed of it![20]” The old man and the disabled boy are both beyond the pale of Rayber’s values. As O’Connor explains, “Bishop looked like the old man grown backwards to the lowest form of innocence.”[21] In this narrow world of modern liberal values, the grotesque, the disabled, the fanatics, the zealots, have no place. They should not be, and only when we progress beyond such malformations can liberal values and imagination take hold.

In a weak attempt to ameliorate the boy, Rayber says they are a alike, but the boy accuses his uncle of being deluded: “’I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.’ He was looking at his uncle now with a completely fresh contempt. ‘It’s nothing about me like you,’ he said.”  Rayber would receive and leave the world as he found it, but the boy – as strange and crazy as he is – has no such intent: “I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all.”[22] The boy’s world was wrecked from the beginning, as he was literally born in the midst of the car wreck which killed his mother, but out of this experience, “He had always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special, even though nothing of consequence had happened to him so far.”[23]

It is this wrecked sort of outsider and his strange world that Rayber/Gopnik cannot abide. Such weird grotesqueries must be submitted to the normal, reasonable, stable world of the enlightened. This world has no room for enchantment, depth of spirit, or for acknowledgement of radical evil or radical love. Gopnik/Rayber certainly acknowledge love – with Rayber praising its practical value in the life of his sister, and Gopnik meaninglessly acknowledging “love is love,” but there is a different order of love that is dangerous: “It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”[24] The love for a child that is “worthless” or an old man that is insane or love for a world which ultimately cannot contain such love. “It began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated. He always felt with it a rush of longing to have the old man’s eyes—insane, fish-coloured, violent with their impossible vision of a world transfigured—turned on him once again. The longing was like an undertow in his blood dragging him backwards to what he knew to be madness.”[25] He could not afford the price of radical love as it reeked of inexplicable spiritual madness.

The choice is between the stable orbit around a human imagination grounded, as Gopnik describes, in “reason, good conversation and debate,” and committed to “egalitarian social reform” and “ever greater tolerance” (though obviously “not absolute”)[26] or the enchanted possibilities of a world lit with an inexplicable grandeur, open to radical love and enabled to grapple with radical evil. One is an engagement with flesh and blood reality, and the other cannot bear the weight of reality. Flannery O’Connor is posing both possibilities, without making her case, beyond the fact of an inexplicable love and evil. Much like Rayber, it seems Gopnik cannot afford a world beyond “a thousand small sanities.”  Insanity may be lurking in anything more. O’Connor describes this absolute faith in sanity as constricting: “He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness, and when the time came for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”[27] Only a flat world, devoid of extremes of love and evil, allows balance, choice, and human imagination to reign supreme.

O’Connor expresses the other choice in the voice of a small child, an “evangelist” in a Pentecostal meeting who confronts Rayber:

“Do you know who Jesus is?” she cried. “Jesus is the Word of God and Jesus is love. The Word of God is love and do you know what love is, you people? If you don’t know what love is you won’t know Jesus when He comes. You won’t be ready. I want to tell you people the story of the world, how it never known when love come, so when love comes again, you’ll be ready.[28]

Extreme love is unacceptable to Rayber, its insanity and crudity threatening and beneath his consideration, so he runs into the night.

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

[1]Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2019) 216-217.

[2] Ibid, 80.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kindle Edition, 2007).

[5] Ibid, 39.

[6] Gopnik, 81.

[7] O’Connor, 33.

[8] Ibid, 17.

[9] Ibid, 53.

[10] Ibid, 16.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Gopnik, 80.

[13] Ibid, 81.

[14] O’Connor, 39.

[15] Ibid, 32.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Gopnik, 24.

[20] O’Connor, 20.

[21] Ibid, 32.

[22] Ibid, 53. Unfortunately he probably means he intends to kill Bishop, as his act of “uprooting” though even this evil works a kind of grace.

[23] Ibid, 12.

[24] Ibid, 32.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Gopnik, 23-24.

[27] O’Connor, 33

[28] Ibid, 36-37.