Walking Truth – Page 25 – Forging Ploughshares

Color Me Purple

If my early childhood was marked by a natural tendency toward discovering meaning (see my previous blog), the second phase of my life was marked by a strange loss of curiosity in things transcendent. My turn to the immanent frame was captured in a book published the year of my birth. Just as the Brothers Karamazov, would be the book that I would choose to characterize a later period of belief, there was one book that captured my early childhood cessation of a quest for meaning.

The first book which I checked out of the library and read as a child was Harold and the Purple Crayon. In the story Harold uses the purple crayon to create his own world and reality. He wants to go for a walk in the moonlight but in the absence of a sidewalk and moon, he uses the purple crayon to draw a walkway and a moon to walk by. (The editor to whom the author first sent the book, was confused as to where he drew the moon and walkway.) It was my first encounter with a first-person creation ex nihilo, in which the imagination is the blank canvas. There are no given parameters in Harold’s reality, other than the ones he fabricates. For example, at one point Harold needs directions so as to find home, so he draws a policeman who points him in the direction he should go (all determined by Harold).

In the beginning of the story, the sidewalk is straight and featureless and seemingly infinite, and so Harold cuts across a field and comes to a place where one should find a forest. Not wanting to get lost he draws only one tree – an apple tree. Realizing that the apples are unprotected and can easily be picked he draws a frightening dragon to scare people away. The problem is, the dragon frightens Harold so much that he falls backward, scraping the crayon as he goes, and he inadvertently draws an ocean into which he falls and starts to drown, but Harold saves himself by drawing a boat. The scenario repeats itself when he falls into a blank space on the other side of a mountain he failed to completely draw, but he rescues himself by drawing a balloon to float down on. His was a world of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, down to creating the boots, straps, and the abyss from which one needs to be pulled.

The author, Crockett Johnson (whose birth name was David Johnson Leisk), would strangely play out the Harold worldview in his own life. As he lay dying of lung cancer, two long-time friends came to visit – Andy Rooney (the journalist and television commentator) and psychiatrist Gil Rose. Johnson was afraid and in great pain, and in an attempt to relieve his anxiety and fear, Dr. Rose began to talk about his creations. He asked, “Well, what would Harold do?” As Crockett thought about what Harold would do, he calmed down. Literally, his creation came to provide him his dying comfort.

Johnson had served as art editor of the communist periodical, New Masses, and was a life-long labor union activist. His idea for the New Masses, to promote left-wing causes in a more subtle and attractive way, may not have been the explicit idea behind the Purple Crayon, but his book captures Johnson’s world. I am not saying Harold and his purple crayon sold me on this world, but it characterized a world I inhabited, one of my own limited fabrication. I did not recognize it as atheistic or existential or as anything, it was simply the blank-page-world that seemed to present itself, and I was content to dwell within the lines as they were being drawn.

Johnson drives the point home that one inhabits a world of their own making, when Harold becomes lost and cannot find his own home or his own window. He goes wild drawing a city of windows, none of which allow him entry into his own home. Then he remembers that he has to see his own home and window, framing the moon and world he has created, from the inside. He cannot find home by looking for it from the outside, but he has to view it from within. Thus, he is able to cross over and make his own bed so as to lie in it. Harold must literally draw the covers up under his chin so as to find their comfort.

The little bald-headed boy, alone in a room he has created, finally falls asleep and the crayon drops out of his hand. Through his own creation he has found home and a place to lay his head, in the same way his creator would find comfort in his own final sleep.

The Beginning of My Religious Pilgrimage

Like most children I was fascinated by Santa Claus, but I found his abilities and many appearances confusing. I concluded from the worship songs about him, “He sees you when you are naughty and he knows when you are nice,” that he is both omniscient and ethical judge. His legal standard was not entirely clear, but posed an impenetrable aseity (being “good for goodness sake”) that did not clarify what exactly he expected. Belief or faith in his existence, I understood, was the main thing. Receiving grace or presents entails believing and he who doubts stands condemned to be without presents – thus there is an inherent agonistic bind in which doubt is its own condemnation.

After sighting many incarnations of the Rotund One, I remember a deep confusion and the beginning flickers of a question. There was only the vaguest consistency in size, shape and tenor of his multiple department store and street corner incarnations. I drew Hindu like conclusions: Santa must be localized in what I assumed were temporary avatars, expressions of his True North Self. And this was the conclusion which led me to the idea of a northward pilgrimage.

Seeing Santa in his ontological essence I realized required an upward journey. Only his permanent/transcendent mode, his permanent home (I may have mixed in some heavenly metaphor) would enfold all of the lesser avatars into the singular Noumenal Jolly One. Just as the Earth is round but has a singular pole from which it unwinds, I assumed Santa emanated from his solid (to my mind, cold and solid were the same) North Pole Real Presence.

Yes, I was a bit vague on the metaphysics, yet wanting to believe and in believing to receive grace, I instinctively hit upon the idea of setting out across the desert. Aren’t all great pilgrimages a means of striving for the fullness of faith and perhaps in the process of obtaining the beatific vision?

I explained all of this to my good friend Danny, in brief, “You wanna find Santa,” I said. I convinced him that if we headed due north, we could run Santa to ground. He agreed, so we headed across the desert outside of Page, Arizona to the North Pole – two five-year-olds on a quest to find the meaning of life.

We may have both been a bit vague on geography, but if you have seen the high desert around Page, you could follow the logic: there is nothing due north and the North Pole is in the midst of nothing. Cross into this empty expanse and we would be knocking on Santa’s door in no time.

Of course, we understood we would need to provision ourselves for the journey, thus we carried a large cardboard box with us as we headed out. We were not too far into the desert when the Sun began to set. We figured we had better set up camp. One of us had to go to the bathroom, and luckily, we had brought our cardboard box, as we thought of it as a complete shelter with facilities. This allowed us to preserve what we had made with a pride which only two five-year-old boys could share.

What we were not clear about was how we would cross the Grand Canyon – and apparently this had occurred to the entire town of Page when we came up missing.

As the Sun set and darkness closed in, it occurred to me that I had forgotten one key provision. We were cold and I told Danny we would need to build a campfire. I told him to wait at the box, while I went into town to get some matches.

The neighbors and friends of Page had gathered and were making a northward sweep in a long single file line at the edge of town when I walked out of the desert.

10 Contrasts Between Romans 7 & 8 Proving 7:14-25 Cannot Be Describing the Redeemed

Part of the value in rehearsing failed theories of atonement is that the failure will follow a universal pattern, the same pattern that Paul is demonstrating in Romans 7 as it contrasts with chapter 8. I would argue, Paul is setting up a contrast between the non-Christian and the Christian Subject, with chapter 7 from verse 7 focused on the experience of Adam, or every man. The fact that Anselm, Augustine, John Calvin, John Piper and company read 7:14-25 as part of the normal Christian life is not an insight into Paul but an insight into a theology which could mistake non-Christian experience (that of the “wretched man” of v. 24) for Christian experience. I do not mean this as a dig against the spirituality of these men, but simply to say that their mistake (spelled out in my previous blog here) is the universal mistake which Paul is explicating.

To miss Paul’s point about the nature of sin is not simply an Augustinian or Anselmian error, it is the human error. It points not only to the blunder of Augustine in his reading of Romans 5:12 (described here), but the universal repression of the way in which sin is propagated. To miss that sin reigns through death is not simply a theological error but the human error (the work of the deception) that Paul is tracing throughout Romans. From 7:7-24 he is describing life under the lie (inclusive of vv. 14ff) at which point he introduces the deliverance of Christ, which he will explain in chapter 8.

As I put it in the above blog, it is the reign of death which accounts for the spread of sin and not vice versa. Interwoven throughout chapter 5 is the universally observable truth that death reigns (“death spread to all men” v. 12; “death reigned” v. 14; “the many died” v. 15; “death reigned through the one” v. 17; “as sin reigned in death” v. 21). As Paul concludes in verse 21, “sin reigned in death” and not the other way around and it is this explanation for the propagation and work of sin (to say nothing of salvation) that he will build on for the next three chapters. But there is a sense that human experience mitigates against a correct reading of Paul, as sin’s deception in the law of sin and death reigns.

If we have missed Paul’s point in chapter 5, we are likely to miss his point in the contrast between the orientation to death and the law (the “law of sin and death”) described in chapter 7 and how this contrasts with life in the Spirit in chapter 8. If we have understood 5 correctly (sin reigns through death), then we can see that he is drawing out his point about two forms of human life – in the first Adam (7:7ff) and in the 2^nd Adam (chapter 8).

1. The Cosmic and Corporate versus the Alienated “I”

Chapter 8 marks the transition in Paul’s argument to the description of an alternative understanding of the human Subject. Where 7:7ff is focused primarily on the isolated individual before the law (with its repeated reference to “I” with its clear reference to Genesis 3:10 and Adam’s self-description), ch. 8 speaks of a corporate identity in the Holy Spirit which has cosmic implications (“those in Christ Jesus” (8:1); “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (8.19)). Paul is still working in the universal categories he set out in chapter 5 in contrasting the two Adams, but now the cosmic implications are spelled out.

2. Living Death Versus Life in the Spirit

The Holy Spirit does not appear in ch. 7 but is the theme of ch. 8 (mentioned nineteen times explicitly and the main subject of each section of the chapter). Where ch. 7 focused on describing the dynamics of the body of death (7:24) and agonistic struggle, ch. 8 counters each of the Pauline categories constituting the Subject addressed in ch. 7 with the work of the Spirit, which constitutes a life characterized by peace (8:6). This is perhaps the key contrast; that between the living death of chapter 7 and new life in the Spirit. The Spirit can be equated with life (8:2, 10-11), and with the introduction of the Spirit in 8:2, 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 fear and slavery under the law of sin and death, with its work through deceptive desire aroused by the law, became “another law,” but this law is now voided along with all of its various machinations.

3. The Ego of Desire or What is Seen Versus a Life of Hope

Paul’s depiction of desire, as with the first couple, is focused on the register of sight. In chapter 7 Paul describes a law of sight (βλέπω v. 23), which as with Adam is connected to the rise of shame and the repeated “I” (I heard, I was afraid, I was naked, I hid, 3:10). Paul’s “I” (ἐgὼ) is exchanged for a life of hope, focused not on the seen but on the unseen (v. 24), which brings about a conformity to the image of the Son (v. 29) (who is not an image or object for the eyes but occupies the Subject position in place of the ego) and a reconstitution of the Subject. As a result, the “I” does not appear in chapter 8 but as in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives within me.”

4. Suffering Under the Law Versus Suffering as a Co-Heir with Christ

Paul describes two forms of suffering in chapters 7 & 8. The work of the law (the law of sin and death) is displaced by the law of the Spirit of life (v. 2) which results in freedom from slavery to fear due to relationship to God as “Abba, Father” (v. 15), reconstituting the Subject a child of God. Paul ties this new relationship to God directly to a different experience of suffering. An implicit element of Paul’s agonistic struggle (in ch. 7) is a depth of suffering which he cannot endure. “Who will rescue me,” he cries, as this suffering is deadly, arising as it does from within. In contrast, the suffering of chapter 8 (the source of which is outside the self), is a sharing in the suffering of Christ which marks one out as a co-heir with Christ of glory (8:17).

5. The Body of Sin and Death Versus Resurrection Life Now

The “body of sin” (6:6) or “body of death” (7.24) is displaced in the resurrection life of the Spirit (8:10-11) which is not a departure from the material body or material reality but the beginning of cosmic redemption (“the redemption of our bodies” (8:23) and the redemption of the cosmos (8:21)). The only resolution to life in the flesh, in the brand of Christianity that reads chapter 7 as the normal Christian life, is future. But in chapter 8, Paul is describing an enacted resurrection life which has defeated this sinful flesh principle in the follower of Christ.

6. Through the Work of Christ People are Made Righteous Versus a Failed Righteousness

There is no work of Christ in Paul’s description of his sinful predicament but only the work of sin and the law (in chapter 7:7ff), but chapter 8 describes how the work of Christ changes up this damnable sort of existence. The punishing effects of the law of sin and death can no longer condemn, as God has condemned the law of sin through the death of Christ (8:1-3) ushering in the law of life in the Spirit. Where 7:7ff described the characteristics of this living death (marked by incapacity), ch. 8 describes life in the Spirit, which sums up the difference God’s righteousness makes. The body is dead due to unrighteousness but the Spirit is life and this is God’s righteousness imparted (8:10). This then results in the capacity to “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:4). This walk is characterized in all of its phases by the power of life which enables the mindset and hope of the Subject in Christ.

7. Living in the Lie Versus the Truth of Christ which Exposes the Lie

Paul is describing sin in terms of a deception on the order of the deception foisted on the first couple by the serpent in the Garden. In the opening verses of chapter 8 (countering the opening of 7:7-11), Paul explains how Christ defeats and exposes the lie of sin in the particular death he died. The punishing effects of the law of sin and death (the condemnation he has described in chapter 7) are finished so that there is no condemnation in Christ (8:1). God has “condemned sin in the flesh of Christ” (8:3) so that it can no longer deal out death (an active taking up of death) by deception.

Paul adds to his description in 8:3 by saying “and as a sin-offering.” The sin offering was for the ignorant or unwilling sin, which answers the problem of sin of the “I” (7:15) who does not “know” and does not “will” what he does.[1] Christ does not die for a general wrongdoing but to address the particular work of sin as it appears in ch. 7. This sin which works through deception and ignorance brings about disobedience unto death, and the one who was obedient even unto death makes obedience possible (5:18-20). The disobedience unto death describes an orientation founded in deception (it cannot obey God – it is hostile to God, 8:7) and obedience unto death recognizes death but obeys in light of the resurrection life by which it is empowered (8:11-12). Living according to the lie is to actively die (in death resistance) while to live, in spite of death, is the death acceptance of living in the truth.

8. Life in the Flesh Versus New Life in the Body of Christ

In ch. 7 Paul locates the law of sin “in my members” (7:23), in the flesh (7:25), or as “sin that dwells within me, that is, in my flesh” (7:18). The place from which sin works death is the flesh. As N. T. Wright explains, the reason there is now no condemnation is “because God has dealt with sin in the flesh, and provided new life for the body.”[2] Those in Christ experience the death to sin and the new life which he provides. The sentence of death is passed on sin in the one who was in the true “likeness of sinful flesh” (8.3), so those who are found in his likeness through baptism (6:5) will also experience this death to sin rather than death by sin.

9. Life in the Split “I” Versus Participation in the Unity of the Trinity

The key difference between the living death of 7:7ff and life in the Spirit of ch. 8, or another way of describing the difference between life and death, 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 (8:3) who leads by his Spirit (8:14). The Father is the primary agent who subjected creation in hope (8:20), who makes all things work to the good for those who love him (8:28), who has foreknown and predestined those he called (8:29) and these he has justified and glorified (8:31). This communion is “in Christ Jesus” who was sent to free from the law of sin and death (8:2, 3) by condemning sin in the flesh (8:3), who gives his Spirit of life (8:9) so that those who suffer with him will be glorified together with him (8:17) and who died and was raised and intercedes so that nothing can separate from the love of God (8:34-35). The Spirit is the source of life (8:2) who empowers the walk and mindset of those in whom the He dwells (8:9). The Spirit is God’s righteousness (8:10) whose resurrection power will “give life to your mortal bodies” (8:11) as by his life “you put to death the deeds of the body” (8:13). Through the Spirit adoption as sons enables his sons to cry “Abba” (8:15) and He helps the saints in their weakness and through prayer by interceding for them (8:26-27). The Trinity is a communion in which and through which the new humanity walks (8:4), has their mindset (8:5-8), sonship (8:15), endurance of suffering (8:17) and saving hope (8:20, 24).

10. Shame Versus Glory and Love

Paul, from 7:7ff, is providing a commentary on Genesis 3 which describes the shame of the first couple. He is giving us an interior view of that shame, which is marked by an incapacity for being present for the other (love). Shame marks not only the loss of God’s presence but the possibility of interpersonal love – being there for the other. The anatomy of jealousy, anger, and violence are to be traced in this genealogy of shame. Those who are hiding cannot be present for others or even for themselves but are set in an antagonistic relation with God, self, and others. Paul, in chapter 8, is describing a love that is indestructible and indivisible – nothing can separate us from the love of God found in Christ (8:28).

To miss this contrast between Romans 7:7ff and chapter 8, (which I have only partially filled out) would seem to be on the order of missing the reality of Christianity. There is no prayer, no hope, no Spirit, no Abba, no love, no work of Christ, and no other but only law, desire, deception, unendurable suffering, alienation, and death, in 7:7ff. Compounded with this, to mistake Paul’s description of the damnable (κατάκριμα) life of sin as if it is salvation, would seem to leave one stranded in a punishing life from which there is no deliverance.

[1] Wright, Romans , 579.

[2] Wright, Romans, 575.

(Recent critiques of my blogs on John Calvin, Augustine, and penal substitution have mainly focused on what was not said in a particular blog, when I have usually covered the topic in an accompanying blog. To answer some of these critiques here is a guide to what I have written:

Critique One: “Axton does not reference Calvin directly.” My article on his development of penal substitution is an engagement with the Institutes, “Did John Calvin Invent Penal Substitution?” to be found here and my depiction of his purported confusion of sin and salvation is an engagement with his commentary on Romans, “Has John Calvin Confused the Lie of Sin with Salvation?” is to be found here. My depiction of his work on predestination also deals with the Institutes, “The Gospel as the Mystery Revealed Versus Calvin’s ‘Incomprehensible’ Anti-Gospel” is here. I reference the Institutes in this article dealing with Calvinist assurance of salvation, “Are Calvinists Saved?” which is here . In this piece on Calvin’s view of the necessity of evil, “Acknowledgement of the Problem of Evil as a Test of Authentic Christianity” here I deal with his depiction of evil in the Institutes.

Critique Two: “Axton does no history,” (or something on this order). I have dealt with the Constantinian shift and its impact, “The Shift from Love to Freedom is the Turn to the Law that Kills” here and “The Gospel Versus Constantinian Commonsense” here and here “A Different Form of the Faith: The Constantinian Shift” deals with the history and references a series of primary works. I have dealt with the Augustinian misreading of Romans 5 here in “The Real Tragedy of Augustinian Original Sin.”

Critique Three: “Axton does not recognize Calvin is following Anselm.” Some have objected to my notion that Calvin “invented” Penal Substitution, with reference to Anselm, suggesting he is the true culprit. I have probably written more on Anselm than any other figure and what is not to be missed is that he does set the context in which Calvin is working (along with a host of other factors), nonetheless Calvin is also innovating. I discuss the relationship between the two theories here in “Beyond Divine Satisfaction, Penal Substitution, and Christus Victor to a Healing Atonement” here in “Christ Defeated Sin, Death, and the Devil – Not God’s Wrath,” here in “The Lie Behind Penal Substitution and Divine Satisfaction” and touch upon it here in “Deconstructing ‘Absolute Truth’ to Arrive at the Truth of Christ.”)

Has John Calvin Confused the Lie of Sin with Salvation?

John Calvin may be typical of, or his view comes to typify, those who read Romans 7 as primarily a description of the regenerate, so that Paul’s description of his struggle with sin, his incapacity to carry out what he knows to be right, his alienation within himself, and his existence and identity in the body of death or the body of sin, this “wretched man that I am” (7:24), is as good as it gets on earth. As Calvin explains, “this conflict, of which the Apostle speaks, does not exist in man before he is renewed by the Spirit of God.” The Christian is one who is made aware of his sin condition, and he mainly hopes for a future rescue (when the flesh is gotten rid of) but meanwhile he is made to agonize over his sin and to feel, precisely in his redemption, the acuteness of sin’s effect. Final rescue is focused on deliverance from the wrath of God, provoked by the breaking of the law which contains his righteous decree. In this understanding, Christ died to meet the requirements of the law, and his death is not directly connected to explanation or necessity of an immediate reconstituting of the human Subject, such that he is rid of the sin principle. My argument is that (as depicted in Romans and elsewhere in the New Testament) Christ did not die, primarily, to meet a requirement of the law but to displace a deception which involved the law and in exposing this deception, the Subject described in Romans 8 is born: a Subject no longer controlled by sin and its deception. This means that it is not the law which explains Christ’s death, but sin as it is oriented to the law, and the point of his death is not to save from a future wrath (working according to the law) but from the present tense sin problem (which will certainly pertain to the future).

Is Sin’s Deception Resolved Through the Law or is it Confounded with the Law?

The two readings revolve around the concept of deception in Romans 7:11. I believe Paul depicts sin’s deception in regard to the law as key to understanding the human predicament. Calvin, in his Commentary on Romans, passes over sin’s deception in regard to the law and presumes that the law exposes the deception. It is, according to Calvin, “through the light which the law throws on the turpitude of sin” that sin is revealed. This does not explain why there is the possibility, as Paul presents it, of confusing sin and the law or why or how the law is the means of death and deception. Paul says explicitly (vs. 10), “The very commandment that promised life proved death to me.” Paul is describing how sin distorts the law in its relation to the sinful self. The “command which promised life” serves as an explanation for the content of the deception connected with sin.

James Dunn maintains that life is not to be had in the law (due to sin), while Günther Bornkamm thinks this positing of life directly in the law is the deception which sin always works.[1] Calvin maintains a separation between the deception and the law, and seems to miss what commentators like Dunn and Bornkamm are pointing to – sin distorts the law, such that we imagine that it contains life and righteousness in itself. As Calvin puts it (without reference to the deception), “the commandment shows to us a way of life in the righteousness of God.”

The obstacle contained within sin, according to Calvin, is “corruption.” But Calvin presumes this corruption pertains to the breaking of the law (which results in death) and not to an attempt to gain life through the law (where avoiding death is the motivating factor). He says, “it is incidental that the law inflicts on us a deadly wound, as when an incurable disease is more exasperated by a healing remedy.” The law then, in Calvin’s explanation, is part of the cure and not intertwined with sin and death in the human imagination. This leaves corruption something of a mystery, while Paul’s point seems to be to explain how sin works through the law by means of a deception.

Calvin renders deception as that which “led me out of the way” of the law. Rather than the law being the occasion for sin, which is Paul’s point, Calvin explains the verse as saying, “as we begin then only to perceive our erroneous course, when the Lord loudly reproves us . . .” That is, he is separating the “erroneous course” and the law, preserving the law from its entanglement with the deception. He renders the verse as making precisely the opposite of Paul’s point: “Paul says rightly, that we are led out of the way, when sin is made evident by the law.” Paul is not saying sin is made evident by the law, he is saying sin uses the law to obscure its sinfulness (holding out the promise of life in the face of death). Calvin’s explanation makes nonsense of Paul’s explanation, as why would sin being made evident by the law be the occasion for sin? Calvin seems to mean that sin was already present prior to the law but the giving of the law exposed what was already present. This is a perfectly logical thing to say, but it is not Paul’s point and does not accord with Paul’s overall argument. Paul is not explaining an easy thing or a thing that comes naturally, but the opposite; he is explaining how sin’s deception works through the law.

Set in the context of Genesis, the majority consensus as to understanding what law Paul is referencing and who the “I” is, there is not a time prior to the prohibition. The logical sequence of vv. 10-11 is that of Genesis 3: the prohibition posed the possibility of life; sin or the serpent deceived me; and “I” died. The prohibition or law is itself the indicator (the opportunity – ἀφορμὴν– the base of operations) that something more (life beyond God) is available – it points out the opportunity for life and knowledge. “You shall not die” (Gen. 3.4) indicates God is the liar and the prohibition a cover warding man away from enjoying the privileges of God. The serpent’s lie (3.4) negates death but then the negation is negated under a supposed truth (3.5) of life in the broken law (what Paul calls “the law of sin and death”). The serpent, which Paul simply calls sin, deceives in regard to the prohibition (“You won’t die, you will be like God”). Breaking the law or manipulating the law or making the law one’s own, in the depiction of the serpent/sin, will provide access to life without resort to God or to the tree of life.

The prohibition was only life-giving in the sense that it kept open access to God’s life, but the law per se is not life giving. The perception that ἐντολὴ ὴ εἰς ζωήν is the promise of life in the law is skewed by sin so as to remove the necessity of God as the giver of life. According to Dunn, to still imagine, after sin, that life is in the law, reflects a common Jewish misconception (is it also Calvin’s misconception?). Dunn raises the possibility that the law contains life: “Does Paul mean that the commandment was intended to bring about life, to lead to life (NEB, NJB), that is, a life not yet possessed?” Such a reading, he maintains, does not fit with Paul’s understanding of the law as stated elsewhere but reflects a misreading which Paul is repudiating. What is not to be missed, he concludes, “is the implied sharp reverse to and rebuttal of the traditional Jewish assumption that the law/commandment promoted life.” The correct nuance is to understand that the law keeps one in a life-giving relationship with God, but it is this relationship to God (and not with the law or the negative prohibition of Genesis) that is the true source of life.[2]

Calvin concludes that “we do nothing but wander from the right course, until the law shows to us the way of living rightly.” Paul’s depiction of how the law is distorted through sin, seeming to hold out life and in its deception producing death, is passed over by Calvin. He works with a blunt notion of sin that simply contrasts flesh and spirit, and equates being in the flesh or body as an incapacity to keep the law. In his explanation, all of human life stands outside of the spirit in its transgressive relationship to the law. In Paul’s version, according to Ernst Käsemann, the lie is embraced under the presumption that life is to be had in the law (7.10) through spiritual achievement – yet it is not clear how Calvin’s depiction of spiritual achievement (through Christ) is a departure from this lie.[3]

At a minimum, Calvin misses Paul’s explanation of the specific function of sin through the law and how this gives rise to a world of deception. The lie of sin is not simply a problem of the heart (though it is that); it poses itself as an alternative epistemology or means of gaining life and truth through knowing (the knowledge of good and evil). The lie of sin undermines truth: even God’s truth as given in the oracles of the law (Rom. 3.3) is subject to the deceit of sin. What truth can stand the distortion of the lie? This distortion is inclusive of the truth of the “I” or ἐγὼ; the most intimate truth, that of human identity. The human project is set upon saving the self, but the deception obscures access even to what a self might be. The notion that I have immediate access to myself or the law cannot stand in light of Paul’s picture of the delusion.

Does Christ Save from Sin and Death or from God?

If I am correct in my understanding of Paul, this also means that Calvin sets aside the work of Christ in defeating the lie of sin. By imagining a transparent access to God through the law and picturing the wretched man of chapter 7 as regenerate man, Calvin seems to be conflating Paul’s depiction of the problem with the solution. If the majority of commentators are correct, in seeing chapter 7 in connection to the portrayal of Adam, then Calvin is confusing the self-torturing sinful mind with a depiction of salvation. This fits with his notion of penal substitution, which reduces the work of the cross to a function within the economy of the law, which goes all the way with the lie that there is life in the law. This seems to miss that the biblical focus is upon salvation from sin and death, not deliverance from the wrath of the Father.

Taking into account that the original lie of the serpent was that the law could be manipulated so as to produce life and that God was perceived to be the obstacle to life, Calvin, in passing over the deception, seems to have reproduced it. By confusing the problem with the solution, is it possible that Calvinism is (at least at this point of confusion) a manifestation of the problem from which Christ saves?

[1] Dunn, Romans, 383. Bornkamm, Early Christian Experience, 90. Thanks to Matt Welch for editing and discussing this article.

[2] Dunn, Romans, 384.

[3] Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, 198

A Genealogy of the Lonely Modern

In the typical scenario, which comes loaded with the modern view of history, the question is posed, “Would you smother baby Hitler in the crib, given the opportunity?” What if we discover, perhaps with the deed complete, it was actually Hitler’s reading of Nietzsche, and that in fact there were many German boys of a peculiar intellect and disposition who, given bad philosophy, could fill the role of Hitler candidates. Smothering baby Nietzsche will not really help, as he too arises with the secular age whose end he envisions.[1] The problem with the scenario is contained in the presumption that Hitler is an isolated, unique individual, and not a product of his time and circumstance.

John Milbank though, has the perfect candidate for smothering. According to Milbank, Duns Scotus is the culprit who created the theological vision that ultimately disenchanted the world which has given rise to both modern experience and modern political structure, with all of its attendant disasters. Milbank would explain the modern and secular, whether modern American evangelicalism or modern global Christianity as a “thinned out version of the Catholic faith” – all the result of the theology of Scotus.[2] In turn, Milbank imagines that if we could recover medieval ecclesial and political structures the root problem would be addressed. He puts on display both a failed understanding of the nature and depth of the human predicament and its solution.

My point here is not simply to indicate the weakness in attaching blame for all of modern thought to one medieval scholar. Milbank, after all, is simply following a long line of modern scholarship (the very thing he is critiquing) which would attach supreme importance to one individual or a particular stream of history. While it is not exactly “the great man theory of history” (in which history is biography), it is something of a “disastrous idea theory of history” which attaches a near sui generis notion to particular ideas, periods and persons. For example, Leslie Newbigin, typical of the previous generation, wrote of Rene Descartes having caused the second Fall of humanity. He presumed that if Descartes had not gone into that warm room on a cold day and composed his meditations (beginning with “I think, therefore I am”) the modern period would not have commenced or would not have been so disastrous. The tendency is to think, “That darn Descartes, he ruined it for all of us.” This, “If it weren’t for that darn Descartes-that darn Scotus-that darn Hitler-view of history,” is faulty, not simply in its simplistic view of history but is attached, I would claim, to a peculiarly thin (modernist) theology which does not presume, as I think the New Testament does, something like a negative unified field theory of sin (addressed in the work of Christ).

It is not that we cannot or should not trace the genealogy of ideas, as we really do live in a world impacted by the thought of particular individuals and there really are streams of thought or historical circumstances that shape our horizons. It is true, that basic human experience is changed up in this secular age and that our world has been disenchanted, no matter our personal (religious or nonreligious) frame of reference. There is no passing over the depth of details to be found in Scotus or William of Ockham and their part in bringing about the secular. The mistake is not in tracing the genealogy of ideas, but it is in imagining that any one individual or any one age or epoch is a realm apart and thus does not share in a common root failure. Milbank’s intense focus on Scotus could and has been argued on the details but the larger error, whatever the merit or lack in the details, is to imagine this failure is a one-off event which can then be corrected by returning the world to something like its pre-Scotus state.[3]

Conceptually modernity, for example, with its turn to nominalism and the focus on divine sovereignty (divine power) in philosophy and theology (something like a pure formalism or legalism), with its juridical-constitutional model of autonomous state authority (the government is secular and the ecclesial powers are now subservient), with its presumption of bio-political control of the human body through the body politic (the biological body is written over with secular law), seems to simply be an aggravated reconstitution of Paul’s depiction of sin as a misorientation to law. The voluntarist conception of God (focus on the will or causal power of God) was secularized in the conception of the state and in the focus on the individual, and this raw power is codified in law and by legal (state) institutions.

The steps that lead to exclusive focus on divine sovereignty (as opposed to divine love or beauty) follows the course Paul traces as the universal predicament, in which the unmediated presence of God is traded for the force of the law. For Paul, the reality of every individual is understood in light of the experience or identity of corporate humanity (unregenerate humanity) in Adam and in Israel. In Eden, the law of the knowledge of good and evil literally displaces God and is made the means to life, and the law of Sinai is made to serve the same end. Part of the point of Christianity, perhaps the main point, is to separate out this obscene orientation to the law (psychologically and religiously) so as to be able to arrive at the law of love. Sin, in Paul’s definition, fuses itself with the law so that one who becomes a servant of the law (as Paul did, and as Adam did, and as, in Paul’s explanation, everyone does) becomes a servant of sin and incapacitates agape love.

The irony is that Christianity has done its work in extracting this condition (orientation to the law of sin and death) from religious enchantment. Now the law is not presumed to have any religious (ontological) ground but is a secular establishment, a bare and open law built upon raw power, that nonetheless reigns in the psychic and social orientation. In this nominalist universe no appeal can be made to an actually existing goodness, as the best we have – all we have – is the mediating power of law and legal institutions. “Might makes right” may have always been the case, but in the medieval period kings presumed they were the channel of a divinely bestowed power (and there was a check on this power), but in the secular realm power is its own legitimating force (there is no ecclesial legitimating power) so that war is the constituting power of the state to which it will need continual recourse. Making war makes the state. In the same way money, in the early stages of capitalism, was a sign of God’s blessing and depended upon this theological construct, now money need not appeal to any outside legitimation. Money is its own legitimating power. Human life is literally and metaphorically put on the market, so that life and time become a commodity to be bought and sold.

As Charles Taylor has described it, the immanent frame now prevails, or as Carl Schmitt (the famous Nazi jurist) has put it, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state but also because of their systematic structure.” As Schmitt describes it, “the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver” and with secularization we are left with omnipotent law.[4] It is no surprise then that miracles (due to natural law), become an impossibility, and by the same token, according to Mike Pompeo, there should not even be the possibility of questioning the constitution. The modern constitutional state reigns supreme (in place of the divine). The constitution replaces commandments, the nation replaces the community of faith, and at an individual level human decision and will is the final arbiter of ethics.

Among the many consequences of modern secularism is the rise of an intense and peculiar individualism, in which the organic and communal sense of the subject is displaced by the notion that the individual is a monad – an isolated entity. It is only with the secular that there needs to be a reaffirmation of a basic biblical understanding and an integral part of medieval culture: humans are constituted as part of a family or group. Hegel hits upon this truth as if it is a discovery. As he explains in the very beginning of “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” self-consciousness could be achieved only through being acknowledged by others. As the philosopher Immanuel Levinas has described it, at the most fundamental level, “self-consciousness is not one-sided action as people assume, but; it necessitates an other to reach it.” Facing with an “other” is not only necessary for the recognition of the self but it is also a must to have a self-consciousness.

The necessity to describe this mutuality would not likely have arisen in a traditional culture. As Taylor describes it, “One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are ‘buffered’ selves.” The traditional porous sense of self came with certain deficits in that the emotional and moral life did not exist in an inner, mental space and was thus subject to a variety of malevolent influences such as spirits, demons, or cosmic forces.[5] But the buffered individual has been removed from this world of fear at the price of a profound sense of isolation. An article in JAMA journal of psychiatry refers to this as an epidemic of loneliness responsible for the death of 1 American every 5.5 minutes due to suicide and opioid overdose, which is chalked up to the root cause of loneliness. An annual mortality of 162 000 Americans is attributable to loneliness (exceeding the number of deaths from cancer or stroke), which is a term that, according to the British historian Fay Bound Alberti, did not exist in the English language until 1800.[6]

Is not the destructive nature of modern loneliness an indication this is simply an aggravated condition of the objectified “I” which Paul depicts as arising in conjunction with the alienating law? In Paul’s depiction, this ἐγὼ or “I” is not subject to growth and change as it is an object fixed as part of a formal structure under the law, characterized by fear and struggle. The antagonistic dialectic between the law of the mind and the law of the body is, according to Paul, the very thing that produces this isolated ego desperately grasping after life and power through the law. Freud could be quoting Paul in calling the ego “the seat of anxiety” due to its fear of annihilation under the cathected law (the superego).[7] As Lacan will describe the ego (renaming it the imaginary), “Alienation is the imaginary as such.”[8] This fully interior or self-conscious ego, or this “I” which is one’s own is, in Paul’s description (and Paul is commenting on Genesis 3) the Subject of sin.

This is not an attempt to simply lump together all forms of sin, but it is to suggest that a true genealogy of the modern begins with a biblical diagnosis, which also promises more than a return to the medieval or artificial attempts to reenchant the world.

[1] Enough smothered babies equal a holocaust type strategy – Hitler was, after all, attempting to correct history. It is the strategy of the powers from Pharaoh to Herod to the late modern Democratic Party.

[2] See John Milbank, Beyond the Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of People, (Wiley Blackwell).

[3] If modernity is a turn to the individual, and society is pictured simultaneously as made up of individual monad’s, this is not an error corrected by imagining one individual has reconstituted the whole.

[4] Carl Schmitt, 1928 (2008), Constitutional Theory, transl. J. Seitzer, (Duke University Press, London), p. 36.

[5] Charles Taylor, “Buffered and porous selves” https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/

[6] Dilip V Jeste, Ellen E Lee, Stephanie Cacioppo, “Battling the Modern Behavioral Epidemic of Loneliness: Suggestions for Research and Interventions,” JAMA psychiatry, 77(6) https://escholarship.org/content/qt47n6790s/qt47n6790s.pdf?t=q7c0kj

[7] Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (Standard Edition), 59-60.

[8] Jacques Lacan, Seminar III, 146

I Am Not Me!

My children bought me a birthday present in which each week I am given a writing prompt and then at the end of the year my responses will be put together in a book. I have written about my favorite dog (Mr. Magee, who could open his own cans of dog food, politely wiped his feet when entering the house, and who stole our Thanksgiving Turkey), memories of my grandmother (Grandma was a drag racer), my first job (a circus), etc. but this week the question, “Are you the same person you were as an adolescent?” seems to strike at the very notion of subjectivity, and yet it was an issue that occurred to me very early. Everything is changing so what of me endures? I presumed, instinctively, that memory must be the singular enduring thing about us, so I performed memory experiments. As the car was speeding down the road, I would look at a particular rock or telephone pole or tree and try to retain the object in my memory. “There’s a rock, a rock, a pole, a tree.” The high rate of speed made it difficult to pick out any particular object, but I presumed this accelerated condition reduplicated, in brief, everyday experience. I ran the experiment repeatedly, trying to remember any particular object. The unwritten rule I had formulated is that the ordinariness of the rock was part of the issue. A spectacular rock, by definition, would not qualify because if memory is to have any continuity it cannot be one spectacular thing after another (an inherent contradiction). If our own being depends upon the continuity of our memory, it must be in the continuity of ordinary memory. The issue of speed also, I presumed, should not in any way be an obstacle – whether fast or slow, memory should not be affected. Things happening quickly should not obstruct our being. Yet, no particular rock or pole proved to have an enduring image, so it seemed the details of memory are continually lost.

Around this time, I hit upon a formula which proved quite satisfying, and it seemed to resolve the issue: “I am me.” I don’t know if I literally pounded my chest at the discovery, but that is the spirit of the sentence. The existential realization, at least upon initial discovery, was a sort of alignment which proved very satisfying. I had only to repeat the formula to feel once again a profound feeling of coinciding with myself (I did not yet know the term “ipseity” though I had discovered the desire for achieving it). The pronouncement itself, at least initially, seemed to accomplish this coincidence and affirmed my being. That is, I did not experience it as an abiding reality which I had discovered, but the feeling came only as I made the pronouncement.

This very soon brought a moment of despair, as I realized that the “I am” and “me” were only held together in the sentence, and by repeating the sentence. I recognized that even in the sentence there was not complete coincidence or convergence between the two major terms. I tried saying the sentence with force – “I am, me.” Then I tried thinking it rapidly, as if I could close the gap between the “I” and “me” through force of thought or speed. What had initially appeared as a discovery or capacity proved to be the opposite. On the heels of feeling great satisfaction with my new formula I realized the formula (the need for it and the need to repeat it) was itself an indicator of a third term between I and me which disrupted my unity with myself.

I presumed that this third element between “I” and “me” was simply there, but I could not say it. I could pronounce “I am me,” but the discord or gap between the two could not be closed. To say that I literally attempted to access or posit this third element is not exactly correct but I turned, perhaps instinctively, to the unconscious. As I have described it elsewhere:

Flying over the desert of an evening, around Window Rock, over the Grand Canyon, the cool breeze a necessity for equilibrium and the star lit sky preferable for navigation; this was my singular capacity. With the veil of darkness, the arms pumping and as I gained confidence, the leap into a canyon or off a tall building (nearly absent in Page, Arizona) and I could just manage to obtain lift-off.

The ordinary family into which I was born had their abilities – special even – among mortals. I did not question their earth boundness, nor could I articulate the equation of flight with immortality, but this is how it functioned. I was not grounded by the contingencies of bipedalism. Flight was incomparable with the local means of achieving immortality – throwing a fastball or running bases – it constituted an ontological difference. My apparent incapacities as the youngest and smallest were simply a foil. The three-foot frame housed an ego temporarily fallen from the heavens. Though the slightest talent at anything might have tempered the necessity, but as it was, flying was my Kant and Plato – the equivalent of a philosophical proof of being – of innate immortality.

I assume that my slow development must explain my memory of what must be a universal passage – the passage through a growing awareness of self-identity and yet the unease and dissatisfaction inherent in the incompleteness of the process, and then some compensatory move in which we posit a third element. Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” must describe a universal passage to a presumed absolute knowledge – a foundation, and Kant’s notion that the thought (“I think”) and thinking thing (“I am”) actually constitute a disjunction, a felt noncoincidence, within the self. Isn’t this simply a description of the passage through adolescence and the dissonance this creates

As Søren Kierkegaard (or SK) describes it, there is a passage into despair in the self’s relationship to the self. “Despair is a Sickness in the Spirit, in the Self” in which there is a refusal (there is no continuity) or failure (there is incomplete continuity) to be a self. This despair has primarily to do with one’s relation within the self – between what SK calls the relation between the body and the soul. “In the relation between two, the relation is the third term as a negative unity, and the two relate themselves to the relation, and in the relation to the relation; such a relation is that between soul and body, when man is regarded as soul.” There is an antagonism built into the human self-relation which is definitive of the human disease and SK assigns primary importance, not to any one element of the relation (soul or body) but to the dynamics of the relation which might be a kind of negative incapacity to cohere.

SK suggests that this absence can be accounted for. “If this relation which relates itself to its own self is constituted by another, the relation doubtless is the third term, but this relation (the third term) is in turn a relation relating itself to that which constituted the whole relation.” He acknowledges that the relation can be constituted in a negative unity but he also offers another possibility: The one “which constituted the whole relation.” “This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation.”

The unease or disease of not being fully a self, an I that cannot arrive at its me, turns out to be the fundamental problem, the ultimate prompt which, if we do not take flight, points to the constituting Power of “I am.”

Saved From a Perverse God

Oh my name it ain’t nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side

Bob Dylan[1]

Bob Dylan’s, “With God on Our Side,” describes how one’s name or age or distinctive characteristics may not be a primary mode of identity, but having God on your side is an identity that overrides individual details. The song recounts the various wars of the United States, beginning with the slaughter of native Americans and ending with the necessity of launching weapons of mass destruction, with each verse describing a particular war and each refrain of the song assuring “God is on our side.” The conclusion, “And you never ask questions When God’s on your side,” certainly raises questions about the nature of this God and his subjects.

Dylan has captured in an uncanny manner the pervasive identity in which one’s life is defined by service rendered to an ineffable Other. Service to God and country describes a regional ethos, but it also fits exactly how identity can be had through being an object-instrument of this Other (God, country, the law). Dylan’s lyrics sum up what psychoanalysis describes as perversion and it depicts a predominant form of human subjectivity and the reigning view of deity throughout history. In technical terms, the pervert locates himself as object of the drive rather than being himself the subject (the subject who directly enjoys). The degree to which one is caught up in perversion may or may not be put on display in perverse acts, as psychoanalytic perversion refers not to acts but to a structure in which, as Dylan describes it, questions are rendered impossible. This structure may lead to evil acts, though this is not what qualifies it as perverse, but these acts, as with the perverse structure, cannot be questioned.

One may not buy the psychoanalytic explanation of how this structure evolves (a denial of the mother’s missing phallus or a denial of sexual difference and the attempt to cover over this difference or to fill in what is perceived as lacking) but there is no question that the perverse structure of serving and establishing the law (or the reigning symbolic order) is the predominant form of human subjectivity.

As Julian Jaynes has described it, we can mark the point at which a new sort of subject appeared in which the law began to be questioned. Historically, prior to this questioning, it was as if the left side of the brain existed as an unquestioned authority through which the various cultural authorities spoke. The burial of the important dead, as if they still lived and spoke, is common to almost all ancient cultures. The Egyptian pharaohs, preserved in their pyramids, the kings of Ur entombed with their entire retinues buried (sometimes alive) for continued service, along with food and drink and even yoked draft animals, point to a static (unquestioning) entombed culture.[2] The undead, and the authority they represented, continued to speak through hallucinated voices or through the gods (often the dead are simply deified). In Assyria, Mesoamerica, and Japan, the dead are directly called gods and the various mystics or priests might be possessed by the dead so as to give them voice. Hesiod speaks of a golden race of men who became the “holy demons upon the earth, beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.” Four centuries later, Plato refers to heroes who after death become the demons that tell people what to do and he has Socrates mention that in his own time “God-possessed men speak much truth, but know nothing of what they say.”[3] Socrates marks the point before which the human condition is to listen and obey but not to question or discern.

Jaynes is tracing a time when, in the bicameral period with its bicameral brain, everyone heard the voice of authority, but as the brain shifted only the possessed, idols, oracles, or mediums give voice to the gods. Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking, and the Old Testament refers to speaking idols (Terap) and depicts the king of Babylon consulting with several idols (Ezekiel, 21). Aztec history began, according to their reports to Spanish conquistadors (following their own perverse God), when a statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders and commanded them to set out across the lake so as to come to a new land. They were sent zigzagging here and there, following their own Moses, into a new land. In Peru the conquering Spaniards presumed the voice ordering the culture was the Devil. The first report back to Europe said, “in the temple [of Pachacamac] was a Devil who used to speak to the Indians in a very dark room which was as dirty as he himself.”[4] It did not occur to the Spaniards to question their own genocidal authority.

Whether or not Jaynes is correct in his description of brain development, there is no question that the world has gone and is going through a shift in notions of subjectivity and personhood in which the old voices of authority, the authority of the law in Paul’s description, once unquestioned and absolute have now grown silent. In psychoanalytic terms we might say that human history has been predominantly perverse in its service of God and the law, and perverse unquestioning personalities have certainly been in the majority. The individual who protests, who questions, who challenges, is usually in a small minority. In fact, in most cultures the notion of questioning the order of the culture is a near impossibility. It is hard to imagine someone from a traditional culture, say an Apache brave in the old American Southwest, objecting to the whole “macho-warrior image.” I supposed it never occurred to any brave to say, “Chief, I am going to hang back at the teepee today to play my flute and think about life. I am just not feeling the whole raiding and pillaging thing today.”

Perversion functions at both a corporate and individual level, but what is obvious is that corporate perversion, while more socially acceptable and even socially commendable, is also likely to be more profoundly evil as one is incapable of challenging authority and presumes the law, the father, or God, justifies one’s actions, no matter how evil. Corporate perversion is the most compelling and predominant, as the oxymoronic nature of “individualistic Nazis” gets at the point, murderous perversion is most easily mass produced. But whether corporate or individual, to challenge the evil deeds would be on the order of questioning the authority of God, whether it is participating in genocide in an unjust war or publicly exposing oneself in a theatre, the act is rendered in unquestioning service of the structure (the Other).

If this predominance of perversion is the case, then could it also be true that Christianity and Christ are primarily aimed at defeating a perverse notion of God and a perverse subjectivity? Isn’t it precisely the leading Jews’ notion of God which would result in the death of Christ and isn’t it this notion that he defeats? He defeats it, first of all in the incarnation and the fleshing out of what God is really like, and then defeats death and the perverse orientation in his death and resurrection. Perversion depends upon being able to project upon God whatever human structure, personal or corporate, needs support in the symbolic order. God as the ambiguous Other who justifies the worst forms of human perversion is defeated by God in the flesh. Flesh itself is changed up in Christ, no longer written over with a perverse orientation to the law.

The Apostle Paul describes himself as one who excelled in the law and law-keeping and this excellence was precisely what made him the chief of sinners. He only had access to God and himself on the basis of this perverse orientation to the law. The problem is not, of course, with God or the law but with the orientation to both, produced by the deceit of sin. Christ’s defeat of sin in the flesh is precisely aimed at the overcoming of this universal perversion. As Paul argues, the Jewish problem of doing identity in accordance with the law is universal. All people suffer from some form of the prototypical sin of the Jews and of Paul himself, at least that is the thrust of Paul’s argument.

The tragedy we are living through at the moment is that Christianity, through penal substitution, Christian nationalism, and a fusion of right-wing politics and religion has become the main support of a perverse form of the faith. In this understanding, Christ died to meet the demands of the law, and God’s righteousness is equated with the law. This translates, in response to such issues as white supremacy and critical race theory, into a literal unwillingness to question the constitution and the laws of the land.

According to Mike Pompeo, “If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That’s really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of our country.” To question the construct of race or whiteness or to question the law, is anathema in this religion. Yet, the recognition that this country’s law and legal institutions not only privilege one race but served to establish that race is simply another manifestation of the biblical depiction of the function and malfunction of the law. Jewish privilege and Gentile exclusion constitute the hostility built into the law (the wall in the temple was a concrete representation of the law as a dividing wall of hostility). White privilege (or receiving unwarranted advantage) and black and brown exclusion from privilege, it should not be a surprise, is structural and legal. It is not those who receive the privilege but those who are denied it (Gentiles, slaves, and women, in Paul’s description) or those made to suffer under the law which notice its disparities. As long as the Jews insisted on law keeping, entailing their privileged position, and as long as they insisted on the primacy of the law, this excluded them from Christian salvation (freedom from the law).

Where the religion is reduced to the law, the constitution is not to be questioned, the powers that are ascendant are not to be questioned, lest the foundation of the country be undone. The sexual perversions of this religion, on continual display in the failings of evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr., Ted Haggard, Ravi Zacharias (etc. etc.), the perversions of evangelical political leaders in their devotion to the most obscene of presidents, and their devoted unquestioning followers, are simply a pointer to this perverse structure. In other words, rather than Christianity doing the work of saving from perversion, the faith is made the primary support of a perverse religion on the order of that which killed Christ.

Christians should be the most sensitive to the hostile divisions incorporated into law, undone only in Christ, and the fact that it is evangelicals protesting the loudest, seems to indicate the perverse structure of their religion. The notion that justice and righteousness (life) are enshrined in law, the very definition of sin in Paul’s depiction, is a case in point of the universal deception and perversion. Christians are those who are no longer deceived by this sin in regard to the law (Romans 7:8), but where Christianity is made the support of deception and perversion there is a doubling down on perversion in making the problem the supposed Christian solution.

[1] Thanks to Matt for the suggestion of this song, several other suggestions, and the editing of this blog. Also, thanks to our Tuesday night class for the inspiration behind the blog.

[2]Even the ordinary dead were often treated as if they still needed feeding. In Mesopotamia it is recorded a dead person was buried with 7 jars of beer, 420 flat loaves of bread, 2 measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support, and 1 bed.

[3] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (p. 161-341). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

[4] Jaynes, 174-175.

Living in the Desert of the Real

Some wandered in desert wastelands,
    finding no way to a city where they could settle.
They were hungry and thirsty,
    and their lives ebbed away.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he delivered them from their distress.

Psalm 107:4-6

A theme of scripture, seen in Israel’s exodus from Egypt, is the longing to return (a topic I began to address last week here). We see the same thing in Abraham’s exit from his home and people, as God’s taking him to a new home and a new place requires that he never go back, though the temptation is to return to a Babel-like (self-propagating) horizon of meaning. Literal slavery or slavery to a delusion offers its protections from the realities of finitude (death in the desert or a death in childlessness). Faced with the harsh wilderness conditions, the Jews began to grumble and say, “Let us go back to Egypt where, it is true we were slaves, but at least we had plenty to eat” (Exodus 16:3). In The Matrix, Cypher (the Judas figure of the film) knows that the Matrix is a computer-generated virtual reality but this does not subtract from the pleasure of his virtual steak or for his desire to “be someone” virtually important in the virtual world: “someone like an actor.” There may be nothing more satisfying than to be reinserted into a warm vat of embryonic fluid and to once again become part of a simulated ordering of reality. The slavery and delusion are a temptation, largely because reality turns out to be cruel and deadly. Morpheus refers to the harsh, crushing reality outside of the Matrix as the “desert of the real.” Once taken out of the Matrix, returning (as Cypher chooses to do) is portrayed as a Judas-like forsaking of the fight for freedom, though this fight seems to be a lost cause. In the case of the Jews, Abraham, or The Matrix, there is no unseeing the reality of enslavement but the vision is necessarily had from the desert, in which the old horizons of meaning have been deconstructed and homelessness ensues.

The church in Hebrews is compared to Israel and the admonition is not to return to slavery and thus fail to enter into rest. The danger, which came to pass in Constantinianism and Christendom, is that the church would settle for the false rest of an Egyptian-like slavery. The end result of this false rest has been exposed in the secular nihilism which is now predominant in our culture. This historical moment, in which Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God is for most a fixed reality, is also an irreversible vision from the desert. The inherent nihilism of Christendom, Enlightenment, and modernity have been exposed but it may be hard to comprehend this failure from within.

As Mark Colville, one of the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven serving time for his actions in protest of nuclear weapons (they cut a hole in a security fence and entered the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base singing and praying and spray-painted slogans and hammered a replica of a Tomahawk missile), reports from his imprisonment:

An authentic Christian faith practice, in other words, is not centered on doing good works; it is centered on resisting evil. Little wonder, then, that the bulk of the New Testament itself was written either in prison, underground, or from political exile. And on a personal note, no wonder my own discernment seems to become so much clearer when it is undertaken inside the U.S. empire’s hellholes. I guess that’s why I always end up coming back![1]

There is no returning (though the temptation is pervasive) to imagining there is an American Christian culture in which being well-adjusted is synonymous with being Christian. At this point, those of us who are not in prison, or those who are not in exile from a comfortable institutional-cultural Christianity, may need to answer for ourselves.

We have passed out of that womb like existence, or as Friedrich Nietzsche described it, “Our world has been unchained from its sun.” The God of the law, the God of the philosophers, the God of Christendom, is no longer with us. Modern culture’s loss of ultimate meaning in the loss of Christendom, in the loss of scientism, in the loss of philosophical rationalism, in the loss of the God of the philosophers, is a loss that does not touch upon the truth of Christianity. It is Christ who calls us into exile outside the walls of the city.

It is Christ who does away with the comforting structures of his culture in his assault on the Pharisees and the ruling authorities. He assaulted the mediating structures of Temple, Cult and Law, and the impetus to throw off the kingdom and empires of Christendom was made of the claim that we all have equal access to God through Christ. Those made in his likeness can also throw off the old encrusted patriarchies. We may long to retreat to Christendom, to the premodern, to the 1950’s or before, but we have set out on a journey into the desert. The God who comes to us in Christ has indeed died upon the cross, but this means he is a God who can travel with us in the desert amongst the crumbling horizons of meaning.

For most of our contemporaries in Europe and for a growing number in North America, religious belief is culturally and psychologically spent. The old man in the sky, the law giver, the God of reason is mostly dead, though as Nietzsche noted, not everyone has heard of his demise.[2] Modernity has given rise to nihilism and the danger is that of retreat in the face of the harsh reality of the desert, but this is the same sort of ambiguity Abraham and the Jews and the early Christian’s faced. Secularism reigns, and the world cannot be reenchanted with fairies and demons, but this is not a condition to be lamented but calls for a coming to terms with the irreversible nature of history and a continual unfolding of the meaning of Christian revelation.

If we would break down human history into Paul’s psychological categories, historically we have passed beyond the age of the law, that comfortable time in which the church ruled culture, in which even the emperor begged at the gates of the Pope. In our culture’s psycho-historical journey we have passed into a questioning of the law, a questioning of the God of the philosophers. The culture passed into the notion of rational individualism in which for a brief historical moment the “I” or ego reigned. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, were all given impetus by the desire for individual freedom. They all signaled that the old religious and cultural authorities were no longer adequate. They all attempted to throw off inquisitions and the murderous authority of religion. Christendom had become corrupt in tying itself to tsars, and kings, and popes, but this throwing off of Christendom (as Hart points out), is a continuation of the Christian story, which is irreversible.

The danger is that the deconstructive power of Christ will only leave us harking to return, to retreat once again into the protective realms of the womb, of the law, of nationalism, of Christendom. We are surrounded by right wing fundamentalists, right wing Catholics, right wing nationalists, right wing atheists and religionists. For some it may be the comfort of psychotherapy or drugs – we are a country plagued by mental illness and drug addiction. As the old religion fails the new forms of retreat have taken a variety of forms. If we have passed from the age of law to the age of the ego, the ego is besieged by an unconscious drive toward death.

We need a world to inhabit but many of our contemporaries would craft the new world in the mold of the old. They may call this world that of the Republican or Democratic Party, that of Nationalism, or simply that of rational autonomy. The desire to return, the impetus behind the fascism which surrounds us arises, as for many it as if they have been turned out into the darkness in an inhospitable desert. The exodus toward freedom – the pursuit of freedom as its own end – has cleared out a host of demons, only to create a more binding spiritual enslavement. We understand now that spiritual forces surround us in a certain psychological-political orientation which has possessed our neighbors and which has perhaps tempted all of us.

We cannot escape the reality of the desert we occupy. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of God’s death is a fact, as Plato’s God cannot be resurrected and the attempt to revive dualism through fundamentalism, religious nationalism, fascist authoritarianism, are all signs of retreat and return to an age that cannot be restored and to a form of faith which Jesus confronted in his contemporaries. There is no returning to Egypt, no returning to the law, no return to the enlightenment. The epochs of human phsyco-history are not reversible. The re-founding of human subjectivity undertaken by Christ is not reversible. We cannot rebuild the idols of scientism, pre-critical rationalism, or of a naïve individualism. The contradictions are exposed and the idols are toppled, but this is an outworking of what Christ implemented. Christendom fell because of Christianity and the attempt to restore the notion of a Christian nation, to imagine that secularism is not the case, has become dangerous.

The answer is not retreat or return. The sickly nostalgia and resentment of the right, the political and religious right (the Catholic right, the evangelical right) – but maybe just the notion of some sort of final restoration or return infects us all. We of the Restoration Movement should not imagine that we can restore New Testament Christianity by turning back the clock. New Testament Christianity is precisely that which has driven us to this moment in which the idols are fully exposed. I do not mean that we are mere products of this history, as it was an apocalyptic form of the faith that has always been delivering us from mere genealogy and history. History is not historicism but it is a ground of learning and moving forward, resisting the nostalgia for a womb-like security and the resentments of a failed age. We are not journeying back to Eden, there is no lost golden age, but we are called out of the impulse to return so as to move forward. It is not God that has died but a certain image of him, which is tied to the past, is dead and we should not mourn his demise.

What we see in Scripture is an unfolding of a new kind of human – a born again, new Adam type of human. From Abraham to Christ, we see the depiction of a new type of human subjectivity. The dynamic Word at work in the world is unfolding or enfolding new meanings as the old Egypt, as the law, as Babel, is displaced with Jerusalem. But we must acknowledge we are in the desert, between two places.

[1] https://kingsbayplowshares7.org/2021/07/mark-colville-the-discernment-of-spirits-in-mdc-brooklyn-july-8-2021/?fbclid=IwAR1RGm0cmGmWbwkVH41EJybThUvOwr0LpO_A3eVgbmHeIFc-9y2-c9u_O5M

[2] As David Bentley Hart has recently described in, “No Turning Back,” in Commonweal which partly inspired this blog.

Truth as Resisting the Longing for Return

Yeonmi Park, in telling of her escape from life in North Korea, describes the depth to which she was shaped by North Korean propaganda. Though starvation and cannibalism were commonplace at the time of her birth, Park says she presumed she was living in the best country on earth, a socialist paradise. She presumed that all countries and peoples worshipped the Dear Leader, and that North Koreans had nothing to envy but were the envy of the world. She describes the great pride and gratitude she felt in being among the chosen. She viewed the Dear Leader with pure love and knew nothing of what she was deprived. She had never seen a map of the world and had no concept she was Asian – she just knew she was of the race of Kim. Time is not marked by B.C. and A.D. but begins with the birth of the Kim dynasty. There is no history before this beginning. Concepts such as love or freedom, which one might assume are instinctive, she claims are nonexistent in North Korea. She says, there is no concept of romantic love but all affection is directed to Kim Jong-un. So not only love between wife and husband but between mother and daughter or between family members or between friends is forbidden. Even love for the self is denied. The Dear Leader is the center and definition of all affection. Thus, when she saw the film Titanic, an alternative world began to open to her. She describes North Korea as if it existed on another planet. Good and evil, in this Animal Farm like society (the book that opened her eyes), are subject to engineering and manipulation, such that it becomes clear that human thought can be shaped to any mold by the form of life to which it is subjected.[1]

In this political moment many have been made aware of this “manufactured consent” (left and right) on the part of cultural elites – and she compares what she encountered at Columbia University and the promotion of political correctness with North Korean tactics, but it is not just that we are all susceptible to deception but there is a shocking depth to the degree deception might be at work upon us. What the North Korean experiment reveals, like the Stalinist and Nazi experiment before it, is that there is no human concept that is not open to manipulation. One’s basic humanity, experience of the world and of self, what is seen and heard is subject to manipulation and interpretation.

Park quotes the other George Orwell classic, 1984, “He who controls the language controls the thoughts.” Where there are no words for liberty, justice, or human rights, these concepts do not arise – they have to be taught. There is no direct access to a world of truth apart from the filter of language and cultural-political-religious construction. There is no built-in or biological world of instincts and concepts which we might fall back upon. The objects and ideas which make up subjective experience are enmeshed in a world which can be undone or redone. Park says she feels as if she now exists on a different planet and that she is completely disconnected from the person and experience which defined her in North Korea. But then surprisingly, she does not indicate that she completely likes having left this other world and other self behind. She says she longs for home. She longs for this lost world and this lost self but she feels the only way she could return to it is by returning to North Korea and certain death.

Her ideological shift describes what Helen Keller reports at an even more fundamental level. Where the words are absent the objects of water, doll, teacher, and mother, are also absent. It is only upon learning the names for objects that they become a distinct entity in experience. The world opens for Helen with her discovery of words and language including the world of other people and her own sense of self. Strangely, she reports the sensation of guilt as the first of experiences which comes with her discovery of her sense of self. The specific guilt is over having broken her glass doll, which she reports as coming with a feeling of delight, as it seemed to be the breaking apart of the world she formerly inhabited. Helen, two times over, remarks on the “keen sense of delight” she felt at the shattering of the doll but then she feels guilty for this lost world.

Park reports a longing for home which she saw in her father, who decided he would rather go back and be executed in North Korea and be buried in his home country. The interviewer suggests to her that the United States might be this new home for her but she indicates it is an idea to which she is still adjusting. Is her reported longing of return made of the same stuff as every child’s feeling of having given up one world at the expense of another?

As Lacan and Freud describe, there is an imaginary violation the child passes through, in which there is a relinquishment of a sort (the castration complex) in the process of language acquisition. It is not that sight or sensation provide a first order experience to which language is then attached but the objects of sight and sensation, up to and including the self, become recognizable only with the acquisition of language but with this acquisition there is also the sense of a relinquishing of a world. Prior to recognizing the body as the self, there is the realization of separateness and the possibility of disintegration and dismemberment (the first stirrings of death). The linguistic medium, connecting the child to the world, establishes at the same time the subject/object or self and world between which an exchange is made possible.

As we pass from one world to another, from one home to another, the longing for return (repetition) may be the most pronounced of sensations. Is it not a longing for unfreedom for an absence of ambiguity and choice (the longing for the North Korea of the unconscious – a return to the womb of pre-subjectivity)? To refer to this as a false consciousness may be slightly inaccurate (are their false sensations?) but are the stirrings and sensations, which may sometimes overwhelm us, to be trusted? Does the discovery of truth entail also a capacity to recognize and name that which would block us from entering the truth? Are our basic desires reliable guides or is our conscience to be trusted?

I have previously referred to this initial human subjectivity, following Lacan and Žižek, as a deception, but maybe this seemingly necessary passage is only a deception where the impulse to return or the compulsion to repeat or the longing for home overwhelms. The truth would be to forge ahead and to not give way to death drive (the compulsion to repeat), to the longing for the indistinguishable sensations of a loveless pre-subjective existence.

[1] Yeonmi Park: North Korea | Lex Fridman Podcast #196

Philosophy with Paul and Freud

Before laying out the philosophical possibilities of Paul and Freud, it should be noted that both provide a peculiar impetus for engaging in philosophical discourse: people are sick and philosophy is a means of aiding the diagnosis. Philosophy is not a realm apart from what it means to be human but is a concentrated articulation of this predicament. The reason for taking up philosophy with Freud and Paul is not the reason with which philosophy tends to justify itself – as a quest for ultimate reality, the articulation of what is ontologically the case. Philosophy puts on display the failures we all experience but it also provides an alternative means of understanding the needed cure. So, the point of delving into philosophy in this instance (which is not every instance), is primarily theological. Philosophy provides alternative access, a well-articulated demonstration, a clear presentation of the human disease addressed by the Great Physician.

The Apostle and the founder of psychoanalysis describe the human subject as consisting of three registers, which are simultaneously interdependent and antagonistic, and these registers not only pertain to the (sick) individual but describe the three possibilities of philosophy. This philosophy in three parts revolves around three facets or three surfaces created by language functioning as prime reality. Philosophy, like the human subject, consists of language as a medium, language as providing an object, or language as a mode of negation. Paul refers to these three parts as the ego, the law, and the body of death, and Freud references the same basic parts as the ego, the superego, and the id (or it). The English word “ego” is a transliteration of the Greek word Paul deploys to refer to himself, and he situates this “I” as an effect of its relation to law and death (thus he will speak of the dissolution of the “I” as a cure).

Freud, in his final period, arrives at his three-part construct with his recognition that Eros (sex, life, pleasure) is inadequate to explain the sickness of the subject, so he posits Thanatos or death as a second instinct, and with his positing of this death instinct he arrives at the tripartite subject. This would amount not only to a new topography of the Subject but a different understanding of the energetics at work in the Subject. No longer did Freud see mankind as controlled by one goal, rather man seemed bound towards death in and through the detour that is life. It was not that death as a force (independent of man) overwhelms man, but that man stands opposed to himself and brings about his own destruction. He takes death up into himself, all the time imagining that it is the means to secure or save the self (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 54). Jacques Lacan will note that with this positing of a second instinct, all of Freudian theory can be translated from the biological into a linguistic realm. He pictures the three parts of the subject as three sides of a primordial or founding linguistic construct (a lie). In this sense (and Lacan notes as much), it is a spreading out of the Pauline category of law, and the human problem with the law, to include language per se.

How we read Paul in regard to the law will determine the role accorded to language and philosophy. If we read Paul and the New Testament as primarily concerned with reconciling us to the law, this is an indicator of the philosophical stance that will result. It is no accident that it is Anselm, who posits the definitive nature of the law in our approach to God and in the meaning of the atonement, while at the same time incorporating Platonic philosophy into theology. The point is not to blame Anselm but to point to his founding of scholasticism (the fusion of theology with Greek thought) as the end point of a process in which language per se (in the law, in his description of the subject, in his description of reality) becomes primary. Thus, the philosophical/theological task is, like the job of every good lawyer, to describe/prescribe the law of the Father (Anselm pictures it as a zero-sum game in which there is a precise logic at work). This is the Aristotelian Philosopher king sort of philosophy in which there is an unquestioning wisdom attached to this order of knowing, not perhaps so much in the details as in its very authoritative status as an order of wisdom.

In this understanding, determining reality and how it is to be negotiated is the joint undertaking of philosophy and theology as both are engaged in the same discourse (law, logic). The law of the Father gives us metaphysics, Newtonian science, and consists of a singular (conscious) surface which prevails from Plato to Descartes. Anselm’s law of the cross is precisely a philosophical, legal, requirement and his approach to God is through a linguistic formula (the ontological argument). Everything is ontological, or in Freudian terms “phallocentric,” so that theology is an extension of philosophy (ontotheology) as language puts all things in our grasp. The law is the logos is the Logos without interruption.

On the other hand, if we recognize that Paul is actually suggesting that the law is in no way normative or even regulative but is, in fact, enmeshed in contradiction (due to sin), our philosophical stance will be a turn from metaphysics (concerned as it is, primarily, with how to describe a harmonious reality). Now we have to do with a discontinuity, a questioning of the law, and a turn to the human subject. Paul describes two contradictory laws at work in the mind and body and we are, according to Paul, ruled by a law that, by definition, we do not know. Sin has deceived us with regard to the law and we do not any longer have control or understand what law is at work within us. Now our concern is not so much with keeping the law, describing the law, extending the law, but there is a questioning of the law.

With the passage through Luther and the philosophic shift from Kant to Hegel, philosophy as psychology comes to this second element of the subject. Prior to Kant it was just a matter of looking into the mirror of nature and allowing Being to disclose itself but now the categories of perception receiving the phenomena of the world are removed from the thing in itself (the noumena). Just as Kant notes that Descartes’ “I think” in no way discloses “the thing that thinks,” he notes that there is a necessary obscuring in perception of the reality which stands behind it. It is not that perception is an illusion but it contains apriori categories (the ontic) which do not coincide with the ontological. This difference is illustrated in a series of unresolvable antinomies: time and space are limited by a perceived beginning and yet are infinite and necessary categories; the world is composed of simple parts and yet these simple parts are nowhere in existence; spontaneity is part of the causality of the universe and yet the world takes place solely in accord with the laws of nature and without spontaneity; there belongs to the world a being that is absolutely necessary and yet this being nowhere exists. Where pre-Kantian philosophy would mark this up to the illusion of false appearances, which it is the task of philosophy to get beyond, Kant does not denounce this appearance of reality as secondary but he raises the question as to the very possibility of appearances.

With Hegel there is the presumption that the Kantian antinomies are not mere gaps in understanding but pertain to reality. Reality itself is incomplete, built on antagonism, and dependent on death and absence. God himself, in Hegel’s taking up of Luther, is made complete only in his dying on the cross. Sin and salvation, or good and evil (among other contrasting pairs), have the same ontological ground (to which there is no alternative), so the same structure and categories inform each. The goal is not to overcome the gaps or difference (to defeat evil) but to conceive the gaps, which seem to keep the subject from arriving at full self-identity, as the origin of the Subject (and thus to reorient the Subject).

Philosophy up to Hegel is seeking to harmonize reality, presuming that the gaps or antinomies can be explained or covered over. Kant posits the impossibility of this overcoming while Hegel begins with the necessity of this difference. Hegel too is presuming a comprehensive program for philosophy, but he presumes it is just a matter of counting in the antinomies, gaps, death, and nothing, as not only part of reality but productive of reality. The antagonism at the heart of identity through difference, the dialectic, is at the very center of the negative force generating reality.

In Lacanian terms, we pass from the masculine identity with the law to a feminine questioning of the law. The masculine-superego-metaphysical attempt to say it all is ruled out of court as the thing that thinks – the subject herself – eludes us. Thinking of Richard Rorty, nature turns out to be a mirror that excludes us from its reflection. The history of philosophy might be mostly reduced to one long gaze in the mirror, and with post-Kantian philosophy the mirror comes up for examination. The philosophic mirror stage was a long time in coming but now the phenomena of knowing becomes the primary concern as “taking a look” turns out to be inadequate.

Between this masculine, superego, law-based register and the feminine, ego, contradictory and inaccessible law-based register there stands the id or the real or the third phase in philosophy. Here the focus is upon what underlies the difference between the masculine and feminine – the pure absence or nothing. The Freudian, Lacanian place in philosophy would assign this idic or real the primary role. If there is a positive unfolding of nous or spirit in Hegel, here there is no question that primacy is given to death and the power of death taken up in the negating power of a lie. Thus, this third phase is the necessary pointer to that which lies beyond the subject and the powers of philosophy. The atheism of Lacan and Žižek is a full-blown Pauline sort of recognition of the necessity of suspending the law and the God associated with this sinful orientation. The punishing effects of the sinful orientation to the law, or the disease of being caught up in the antagonism of dialectic, is the domain of this idic third phase in philosophy. Here philosophy becomes most theological as this diagnosis of the human condition is the proper realm of theology – a realm relinquished by theology and which thus made room for and gave rise to psychoanalysis.

I do not mean to suggest these three possibilities are exhaustive of the relation between theology and philosophy. This clears the ground though, for a different sort of exchange, neither masculine nor feminine nor idic, between philosophy and theology. This fourth way begins where Romans 7 and where Žižek and Lacan leave off, in that it proposes a dissolution of the real and a suspension of the power of death as the controlling third term in the subject and in philosophy.