Walking Truth – Page 8 – Forging Ploughshares

The Sublime Experience of God

If there were a singular term which could include the moral, rational, cosmic, and divine as part of a realization or part of an experience, the term “sublime” may come closest. At any rate, I want to build on the term, to name the ultimate Christian experience or to locate the point of Christianity. To call this an “experience” may already be problematic due to the way we presently divide up our world, but this is also part of the point. There is the need to reunite fundamental human experience with an explicit moral and cognitional content which accounts for the individual before God in the world.

In common usage, the sublime is a combination of experiencing fearsome, overwhelming phenomena such as a raging storm at sea, threatening cliffs or mountains, towering thunder clouds, before which we are normally reduced to insignificance in comparison to their power, but in the sublime experience, instead of feeling diminished, we are able to take it in and feel our own soul or imagination enlarged. As a boy in Texas, there were several occasions in which on a long ride, alone on the prairie, I was surrounded by distant thunder storms, an endless expanse of wilderness, and rather than being frightened I felt a great thrill, which I equated with an experience of God. I could not name this sublime experience, but I presumed correctly (I am now convinced, fifty years later), it was the center of my newfound faith.

There is a terrible beauty that makes of the fearful something attractive the more fearful and powerful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety. As Immanuel Kant describes the situation, “the irresistibility of [nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion.”[1] The sense of safety and wellbeing is at once physical (involving all of the physical senses) and yet it is centered in our soulish or cognitive capacity.

The problem with Kant is that he identifies the safety of the sublime with objective reason. He equates it with suprasensible reason or the recognition that it is through cognitive capacities or powers of reason that humans can count themselves above nature. It is not just that he may be confusing reason with God, but I believe he fails to understand the experience of God inherent to the sublime.

I think we can go beyond Kant, but Kant himself points beyond what he calls reason, by describing the pleasure of the sublime experience as mixed with something like displeasure or what he calls negative pleasure. Where he characterizes experience of the beautiful as a positive pleasure, the sublime calls forth an admiration or respect which he characterizes as a negative pleasure. What he did not have the psychological vocabulary to describe, but which he seems to be aiming at, is the notion of a limit experience.

A limit-experience is what it feels like to be undone, or to have the notion of the self as a unified subject thrown into question. A limit-experience according to Michel Foucault, is that which wrenches the subject from herself and which throws into question the notion of a unified subject. If we think of Freud’s reading of Kant, in which the reason behind his categorical imperative is identified with the superego, this negative pleasure might be mistaken for a simple masochism or what Freud called a moral masochism. That is, by not acknowledging the supreme limit which the sublime might be challenging, Kant neither faced the limit experience of death, nor the manner in which ultimate unity is linked to the divine. In other words, he fails to connect the sublime experience to the limit experience definitive of Christianity and in this failure, he fails at both ends of his description of the sublime.

He does not recognize that the ultimate experience of nature is to take it in all at once, either in the simple wonder at the fact that a world exists or in recognition of creation ex nihilo. His picture of the world and of human imagination limited it to a priori, necessary, and stable structures which he considered inherent to the world and necessary to the mind. His thought about the world (there are absolute and necessary laws) structured his depiction of the powers of human imagination. He allowed a role for intuition, but it was an intuition dependent upon an already existing framework of the mind. As Cornelius Castoriadis notes, “the imagination remained bound to functioning in a pre-established field in Kant’s theoretical work.”[2]

Castoriadis turns specifically to creation ex nihilo to suggest an alternative understanding of the human capacity for creation. He acknowledges that there may be a set of historical or natural conditions linked to creativity in general, but these conditions are not sufficient to account for that which is truly creative. Kant’s notion of the sublime only points to a derived realization. Much like the problem of cosmological arguments for God, the God that might be conceived within these arguments tends to be fit to the pattern of reason which implies his existence from the world.

Kant not only limited the extent of the human imagination in its positive mode, he also did not account for the height of the obstacles it might overcome. It is not simply creation from nothing, but the human experience of this creation power in resurrection faith, which he misses. He maintains that the sublime gives one a sense of immortality, but what should be posed against this intimation is the simultaneous recognition of one’s mortality. As in Paul’s definition of Abraham’s resurrection faith, he had faith in “the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Rom. 4:17). The existential realization of the reality of death and God’s ability to give life to the dead is the personal realization of his power to create from nothing. In other words, Paul is depicting the limit experience of death (as in the living death of being old and unable to have children) with the capacity to conceive of creation from nothing.

Kant is instructive as, in his failure of thought, he helps locate the distinctive difference contained in the Christian experience of the sublime. The overwhelming power and danger of the world are not subdued by an innately immortal soul, or immortal reason, but by the specific death dealing work of Christ. Just as the most powerful force in the world is the big bang behind creation from nothing, so too the personal realization of this power is to be had in Christian resurrection faith.

This is the Christian sublime: the simultaneous recognition of the overwhelming power and danger of the universe exploding into existence and the existential recognition that this power is unleashed in our own life in resurrection power. The ground of sublimity lies within each of us as we reflect upon what might be taken as fearsome, formless colliding galaxies and planets coming into being. Or as it says in Genesis, the world was a chaos in the beginning but in verse 2 the Spirit hovered over the waters and brings order out of the chaos. The same hovering, indwelling Spirit brings order out of the chaos of the human mind. This chaotic power brought to order within ourselves and in the world describes the ultimate sublime experience.

Being quite young, and having no name or developed understanding of Christian doctrine, I had no way of putting flesh on my first experience of the sublime. I thought it enough to reproduce the situation, returning continually to the prairie, so as to re-experience the wonder. As the years went by and I was taught to be more rational, and not to confuse faith and experience, my moments of bliss were whittled down. If I had been properly discipled, properly indoctrinated, I would not have been turned from these early experiences but I could have been turned to exploring and understanding them. Of course, we cannot live in continuous wonder and joy, but by putting a name and understanding to this experience, we can at any time or place experience the epiphany of the sublime.

First published November 5, 2020

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

[1] Critique of the Power of Judgment (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 261–262. I am referencing the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Kant’s notion of the sublime.

[2] (Castoriadis Reader 319-337). See https://iep.utm.edu/castoria/#SSH3aiv

William T. Cavanaugh: Recovering The Body of Christ from the Modern Nation State

Ivan Illich and William Cavanaugh both describe the development of the modern nation state as a displacement of the church by the state. Illich traces the first step in this transformation as occurring within the Catholic Church, as it transformed itself into “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”[1] The institutionalization of Christian charity, fellowship, and love, had the effect of assigning a divine-like status to bureaucracy, church-law, priest and pope, such that the Christian suspension of the weight of the law becomes instead, a divinizing of the law, which through history is shifted to the powers of state.

Cavanaugh provides a case study of this development with the Church in Chile, where the responsibility and reality once assigned to the church become the domain of State in shaping peoples’ lives. The divisions between soul and body, State and society, politics and religion, effectively assigned predominance to the State. Inasmuch as the Eucharist joins Christians to the body of Christ shaping the life and mind of communicants, the State, through coercive measures such as torture, took over this Eucharistic power.

Cavanaugh shows “how torture works to discipline an entire society into an aggregate of fearful and mutually distrustful individuals” functioning as the State liturgy in Chile, in disciplining the population. [2] “Torture is liturgy – or, perhaps better said, ‘anti-liturgy’ – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power.”[3] Just as the body of Christ transforms human imagination, so too the state (in co-opting the church), can shape and discipline human imagination in a drama of its own making. Rather than divinization and salvation, the state both produces and controls the “enemy” through torture. The drama is a demonstration of the omnipotence of the state to discipline, control, and destroy the revolutionary, the subversive, or the “filth” that would oppose it.[4]

Torture atomizes the individual, destroying the connections of family, society, and church, producing the isolated individual with a singular focus (the pain of torture). In turn, the torturer functions on behalf of the state, sacrificing moral integrity in the service of the larger cause. “By focusing on their own pain and sacrifice, no matter how disproportionate to the pain of torture, torturers deny the reality of the other and confer reality on the concerns of the regime alone.”[5] The only reality that concerns torturers and their victims is that of the state, and in the process of torture this reality takes on flesh. While there is no concrete reality to the idea of state, the process of torture inscribes these ideas in the flesh. “With the demolition of the victim’s affective ties and loyalties, past and future, the purpose of torture is to destroy the person as a political actor, and to leave her isolated and compliant with the regime’s goals.”[6] In Cavanaugh’s telling, the Church in Chile is complicit in these goals, inasmuch as she relinquished the realm of the political and the body to the State.

Chile is simply a type however, of what has happened throughout the West with the rise of the modern state and what might be called modern religion, inclusive of nationalism and capitalism. He argues in Modern Theology and Political Theology, “the kinds of public devotion formerly associated with Christianity in the West never did go away, but largely migrated to a new realm defined by the nation state.”[7] It is not that in the modern secular age we do without religion, rather the enchantments of religion have been invested in the nation state. The transcendent has been traded for an idolatrous immanence. As Eugene McCarraher in, The Enchantments of Mammon similarly describes (as in the subtitle of his work) “How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.”[8] “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.”[9] McCarraher and Cavanaugh suggest that, rather than disenchantment, modernity is simply “misenchantment,” with state and capital becoming the immanent frame of worship. The state and its economy become the unifying center, with the accompanying demand that its citizens be willing to sacrifice their lives for the nation as they might have once sacrificed for Christ.

In Cavanaugh’s narration of how sacrifice for the nation displaced Christian sacrifice, the “revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern state.”[10] The so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe evoked the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout. According to the liberal telling of the story,

liberalism … was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen … [11]

In this telling, the modern state arose to keep peace among warring religious factions. The state must step in to mediate between competing religious beliefs, and the secularization of public discourse and the privatization of religion were necessary to keep religionists from slaughtering one another.

Cavanaugh maintains this telling of the story is backwards: “The ‘Wars of Religion’ were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism” and “Catholicism,’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.”[12] Cavanaugh argues that “Wars of Religion” is an anachronistic misreading, as “religion” as it will come to be known – an apolitical and private sphere, and State as the proper realm of the political (and with it the embodied and public) did not exist apart from the creation of these categories through justification provided by the Wars of Religion. “The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects.”[13] Gaining this sovereign control explains why the religious wars pitted co-religionists against one another (sometimes Catholics versus Catholics or Protestants versus Protestants), as it was not religion but state power that was being contested, and religion was simply a justifying backdrop in this effort.

As religion was privatized and separated from the political, the State shifted from reference to the condition of the ruler or condition of the realm (in the medieval period) to an abstract and independent political entity: “a form of public power separate from both ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory.”[14] The result of the conflicts was an inversion of the previous ecclesial dominance over civil authorities, with the modern State dictating to the Church.

Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and Philip II, backed and insured this new arrangement. According to Luther, every Christian is subject to two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. “Coercive power is ordained by God but is given only to the secular powers in order that civil peace be maintained among sinners. Since coercive power is defined as secular, the Church is left with a purely suasive authority, that of preaching the Word of God.”[15] Luther assigned coercive power (the power of the sword) to the state (picturing the state as the peacemaker), attempting to disinvest the Church from such powers. In so doing , he left no clear jurisdiction to the Church. As he writes To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: “I say therefore that since the temporal power is ordained of God to punish the wicked and protect the good, it should be left free to perform its office in the whole body of Christendom without restriction and without respect to persons, whether it affects pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns or anyone else.”[16]

This sensibility among both Protestants and Catholics, explains not only the case of Pinochet in Chile, but the general relegating of the religious to the private and non-political. “Because the Christian is saved by faith alone, the Church will in time become, strictly speaking, unnecessary for salvation, taking on the status of a congreganofidelium, a collection of the faithful for the purpose of nourishing the faith. What is left to the Church is increasingly the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their bodies are handed over to the secular authorities.”[17] Cavanaugh goes to great lengths in showing the Wars of Religion were actually the wars of this emerging State dominance. “The new State required unchallenged authority within its borders, and so the domestication of the Church. Church leaders became acolytes of the State as the religion of the State replaced that of the Church, or more accurately, the very concept of religion as separable from the Church was invented.”[18]

This aggravated form of Constantinianism goes beyond the early Roman Church, in that the State as guarantor of freedom and peace with final authority over the body, becomes an end in itself. Freedom in Christ and that freedom and safety secured by the State are fused, and the State is the ultimate public good, while religion is relegated to soulish goods. “Wars are now fought on behalf of this particular way of life by the State, for the defense or expansion of its borders, its economic or political interests.”[19] In the words of Immanuel Kant, thus the State can “maintain itself perpetually.”[20] For Kant, the peace and stability provided by the State is integral to his theory of right, and it would be as wrong to attempt to overthrow the State as it would be to overthrow reason.[21] So the Church in Chile serves as a type of the Church in general, in imagining it could liberate itself from political alignments with the State, it became one of many privatized groups, subject to State domination and torture.[22]

Cavanaugh’s more positive conclusion is that part of the Church in Chile gradually found a way to escape the confinement to the private and the “soul” put upon it by the State, and it was able to “body forth the life of Christ” in resistance to the liturgies of State. He describes a small segment of the Church “performing the body of Christ” as it began to reconceive itself and its relation to the State, especially in conjunction with being the body of Christ in an imagination shaped by the Eucharist.[23] “If torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of the church.”[24] It is the means of resisting the state and being conformed to Christ so as to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1-2). The body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19) is a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[25] “The word anamnesis had the effect not so much of a memorial, as one would say kind words about the dead, but rather of a performance.”[26] The church resists state oppression by being the body of Christ and resisting the isolating, fragmenting, discipline imposed by the state.

In the words of Justin Martyr, the Eucharist is not a common bread or drink, but just as the Word becomes incarnate so Christians are to incarnate Christ. The “food over which thanks has been given by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.”[27] Those who participate in communion without love, with no thought for the widow and orphan, according to Ignatius, “will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again.”[28] Ignatius is reflecting on Matthew 25:35-36, “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Christians are to body forth and live out His life. Those who assimilate and discern the body of Christ partake of His suffering with the weak. As Augustine reports, he heard a voice say, “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”[29] By the power of His life, and the power of His body (tortured and killed and raised), His followers have a body which the powers of state, the principalities and powers, the powers of death, cannot erase or disappear.

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

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

[2] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 15.

[3] Torture, 30.

[4] Torture, 31.

[5] Torture, 36.

[6] Torture, 38.

[7] William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 1.

[8] Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. (Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition).

[9] McCarraher, 4.

[10] William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” (Modem Theology 11:4 October 1995 ISSN 0266-7177) 397.

[11] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1984), ρ 5. Cited in Cavanaugh, Wars of Religion, 397.

[12] Wars of Religion, 398.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol II, ρ 353. Cited in Wars of Religion, 398.

[15] Wars of Religion, 399.

[16] Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” trans Charles M Jacobs in Three Treatises (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1966), ρ 15. Cited in Wars of Religion, 399.

[17] Wars of Religion, 399.

[18] Wars of Religion, 408.

[19] Wars of Religion, 409.

[20] Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 136 [326]. Cited in Wars of Religion, 409.

[21] Ralph Walker notes that Kant “clearly regards the stability of the state as an end which the Theory of Right requires us to pursue (though he does not put this in so many words, so that the contradiction with his other remarks about ends does not become obvious)” Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 161. Wars of Religion, 409.

[22] Torture, 202.

[23] Torture, 253.

[24] Torture, 229.

[25] Torture, 229.

[26] Torture, 230.

[27] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 66, in The Eucharist, Message of the Fathers of the Church, no. 7, ed. Daniel J. Sheerin (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1986) 34. Cited in Torture, 231.

[28] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 6-7, Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 121. Cited in Torture, 231.

[29] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124 [VII. X (16)]. Cited in Torture, 232.

Deliverance From the Cloud Economy

In Paul’s depiction of the law, we are bound to serve some form of the Law (e.g., the Master, the superego, the conscience, the father) but this authority, even in Paul’s description is amorphous. We mistake the law for God, or we imagine that the symbolic order holds out life, while it offers only death and a futile servitude. The ultimate master, the force behind all fear and striving, is fear of death, but as in the Garden, the symbolic order, the knowledge of good and evil, the manipulation of the law, seems to hold out the possibility of life through the law. We would inscribe ourselves into the law, so as to attain life, but as Paul notes, “the law deceived and killed me” (Rom. 7:8). As Slavoj Žižek describes, “we are condemned to domination—the Master is the constitutive ingredient of the very symbolic order, so the attempts to overcome domination only generate new figures of the Master.”[1] With the internet and information technology dominating the economy, the symbolic order (the desire of the law) threatens to shape desire in a more controlling and explosive manner. The techno-oligarchs presume to have access to the mind and soul of the masses, such that they can manipulate desire through controlling the algorithms of consumption and want. No longer is it a straightforward master/slave sort of exploitation, or exploitation of workers by owners, but the enslavement is more insidious. It is a psychological enslavement and exploitation based on personal choices and production of data. It is no longer the body of the slave as commodity, but the mind and identity of the individual that is exploited.

Among the key theorists who have recognized this process is Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that capitalism is morphing into techno-feudalism.[2] We are toiling away in the fields staked out by Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon, but what is ultimately being mined from our toil, along with our identity, is our wants and desires. We are data-producing subjects confined to an infinitely reflexive world of personal choices. Our desire is the commodity that is being mined and shaped. “Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.”[3]

Capitalism depended upon profit and markets, which the techno-fiefdoms have replaced with digital platforms; all who enter pay a form of rent, what Varoufakis calls “cloud rent.” The owners in traditional capitalism, owned the land, the machinery, the buildings, and the means of transport, but the owners of cloud capital own and control digital information. Just as modern physics, after Einstein, recognized that the physical universe is mostly a dynamic of information, so too in the modern economy, information is capital. Whoever owns or controls the code is the final arbiter of power.

Capitalism is already a departure from traditional economies tied to materiality, in that capital is not just another commodity, but its exchange value is intrinsic to human desire and activity. Capitalism decoupled power from land or various material goods. As is evident with Bitcoin and its offspring in the digital age, capital “is, above all else, a reflection of our relation to one another and to our technologies; i.e. the means and the ways in which we transform matter.”[4] The step from capitalism to techno-feudalism is that as in the feudal age, the techno-barons own information just as the landed gentry once owned and controlled the land but the difference is that there is no end to the capital to be generated. There is no end to the depth of exploitation and control.

Varoufakis illustrates the difference with the common household tool Alexa:

It means that what begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of our control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. For once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate. Once it has won us over in this manner, we become more suggestible to its guidance. In other words, Alexa trains us to train it better. The next step is spookier: having impressed us with its Capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences that it selects in order subtly to condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us … ad infinitum.[5]

This infinite loop in the algorithmic network, an unseen force in the cloud, guides our behavior and choices, such that owners, manufacturing and curating our desires, directly profit through this manipulation.[6] Our identity is literally relinquished, through ID codes, purchasing records, familiarity (on Facebook and X) with whom and what we like. Every thought, every thing you have paid attention to, every opinion, is tracked, such that Apple, Google, Facebook, and X, know you and remember you better than you do.

The constant surveillance, the presumption of ownership over one’s life, the daily indignity of giving up something of oneself, and ultimately the fact of being rendered servile and brainwashed, describes a form of impoverished enslavement. It is as if the techno-oligarchs have claimed ownership of the law, and benefit according to how many cycle through the sequence of desire, sin, and death, Paul describes in Romans 7. The biblical picture of the loss of identity is not dissimilar though more exhaustive, in that pursuit of life through the law not only renders one a subject of the law but it identifies the deadly emptiness. The more one attempts to gain control the tighter the bind to the symbolic order, which contains only death in spite of or due to the effort expended. This also means that the salvation which Paul describes, perhaps more than at any other time, is a literal suspension of the economy which binds us in this modern age.

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

[1] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 20). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] Yanis Varoufakis, Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (New York: Vintage, 2023). Thanks to Matt Welch for pointing me to Varoufakis.

[3] Varoufakis, x.

[4] Ibid, 17.

[5] Ibid, 54-55.

[6] Ibid, 55.

Trump as Sovereign: The Theological Impetus Behind Donald Trump

Both the New York Times and the Washington Monthly have recently drawn a direct link behind Donald Trump’s pursuit of expanded presidential power and the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank built upon the thought of Leo Strauss and his mentor, the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.[1] The legal theory enabling Adolf Hitler, according to Damon Linker, has “risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.”[2] Schmitt viewed liberalism as containing a fatal weakness in refusing to recognize the nature of human evil (original sin) or its political expression in sorting out the world according to friends and enemies. Liberalism is too weak to draw the necessary line identifying enemies. There must be a decider in chief, as legislatures are fraught with indecision and internal factions, and the rule of law (determinations of friends and enemies) is through the singular leader who can enact the law. “That leaves the executive as the best option for decisive action. It was this line of reasoning that led Schmitt to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler’s efforts in 1933 to transform himself into Germany’s sovereign decider.”[3]

Trump in his deployment of the military to the southern border, imposing tariffs, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to round up migrants, trying to end birthright citizenship, investigating his critics, suspending funds appropriated by Congress, firing the Inspector Generals, turning over personal data of Americans to Elon Musk, and making more emergency declarations in the first weeks of his presidency than any previous president, is setting himself up in the mold of Schmitt’s sovereign leader. It is not that Trump is reading Schmitt, but advisors such as Russel Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, are working a definitive plan, in which power flows through the presidency. According to both Linker and Shapiro, Trump is surrounded by ideologues who are implementing the philosophy of Schmitt, Strauss, and the Claremont Institute. The President’s approach to politics, “to cast supporters as friends and critics as enemies,” is precisely the formula of Schmitt.[4] As Shapiro concludes, “This is not muddled thinking or engineered chaos. It’s a coherent view of politics that supersedes the debates between a strong versus weak presidency. A new battle over Trump’s Schmittian approach to America has begun, and the outcome is unsettled.”[5]

The Sovereign Power of the Leader as Rule of Law

While it may not be as obvious as Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism, and the alignment of evangelicals behind Trump, this understanding is consciously theological (Schmitt began his career as a devout Catholic) both in its understanding of the leader as sovereign, and the necessity of this strong leader due to evil (original sin or Hobbes state of nature). People are driven by fear of violent death (the ultimate evil), and this fear is a healthy realism which drives them to the protections offered by a strong leader.

Schmitt justified the rise of Hitler to the position of sovereign leader on the basis of what he calls metaphysics. He contends that religious and metaphysical assumptions translate directly into political organization, and (he presumes) nominalist voluntarism is the proper underpinning of the role of the secular state. Nominalism pictures God, in his essence, as beyond human cognition and therefore we only have access to God’s law. This law is not based on human reason or notions of morality, but coming as it does from God, it is to be accepted in and for itself (sometimes called “divine command theory”). God does not obey laws of morality because they are moral, but the law is moral because he so commands (thus voluntarism). He is the originator of morality; it does not rest upon anything other than his decision (“God said it, and that settles it”).[6]

The voluntarist God translated into politics means that just as God is sovereign (and this is the ground of morality and law), so too the president or leader is sovereign and his word is law. The leader is the instrument of God and he enacts divine sovereignty through his decisions. Legislators, judges, and courts serve the president, who is the arbiter of the law. Legislatures and bureaucrats cannot make unified and uncontested decisions; this is the sole domain of the absolute leader. Thus, Trump has declared his “authority is total,” he stated his intention to be a “dictator from day one,” he does not intend to uphold the constitution (as he recently revealed), and the Supreme Court has agreed the president cannot break the law while acting as president (he is the embodiment and enactor of the law).

Original Evil in Fear of Violent Death

The peculiar role of evil for both Strauss and Schmitt is built upon the work of Thomas Hobbes, who grounds the work of the state in warding off violent death. Strauss referencing Hobbs maintains, “the fear of death, i.e. the emotional and inevitable, and therefore necessary and certain, aversion from death is the origin of law and the State.”[7] Fear of the other, my potential murderer, is prerational but it gives rise to the drive for self-preservation which undergirds all morality. “For death is not only the negation of the primary good, but is there with the negation of all goods, including the greatest good; and at the same time, death-being the summum malum, while there is no summum bonum – is the only absolute standard by reference to which man may coherently order his life.”[8]

The fear of death, or the negative and prerational (and perhaps preconscious) is the root of the more positive “preservation of life,” but the negative fear is the ground of the positive drive. “Only through death has man an aim . . . [the] aim which is forced upon him by the sight of death the aim of avoiding death. For this reason Hobbes prefers the negative expression ‘avoiding death’ to the positive expression ‘preserving life’.”[9] Hobbes concludes that fear of death is the root of virtue and the reason for the State: “consolidating peace, [and] protecting man against the danger of violent death.”[10]

Schmitt, taking up Hobbes’ root cause (fear of violent death), concludes that the essence of politics is discerning friend from enemy (the one to fear): “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”[11] Just as good and evil in the moral sphere and beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, are basic to these realms, so friend and enemy functions as the foundation of the political: “it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these.”[12] No other binary gets to the root cause of human striving: “The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.”[13] The fear of death at the hands of the enemy, the other, the stranger, or the foreigner, is not based upon anything else; it may or may not pertain to economics, business or competition. “But he (the enemy) is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”[14]

This fear of death is the fundamental fact, having nothing to do with any outward cause: “the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word.”[15] The fear of the other is the basic state of nature, and “the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses.”[16]

For Schmitt it is not simply that the friend/enemy distinction is the given reality, but it is the necessary reality for being human. A world of peace, without this distinction or without politics, would be a world without meaning: “It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings.”[17] Meaning is created through death – the fear of death, the warding off of death, the shedding of blood, killing other humans, and sacrificing one’s life in this killing. Where would be the meaning in a world of peace?

Schmitt does not believe peace could prevail, anymore than he thinks it possible for humanity to exist without politics. “If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them. Such a declaration does not abolish the reality of the friend-and-enemy distinction.”[18] It just means that those who do not recognize our enemies have become the enemy. Having the same enemies is key in determining our friends. Someone who says they have no enemies is simply trying to stand outside the reality of a political community. For a nation to attempt such friendliness is dangerous: “If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule.”[19]

“What always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived.”[20] War is the situation in which the fulness of meaning is made clear: “For only in real combat is revealed the most extreme consequence of the political grouping of friend and enemy. From this most extreme possibility human life derives its specifically political tension.”[21] This tension is the very substance of meaning and war makes this clear. Hobbes, through his experience of war, discovered war wipes away any illusions: “then all legitimate and normative illusions with which men like to deceive themselves regarding political realities in periods of untroubled security vanish.”[22] War washes away delusions of untroubled security and reveals the state of nature which prevails beneath political realities: “In it, states exist among themselves in a condition of continual danger, and their acting subjects are evil for precisely the same reasons as animals who are stirred by their drives (hunger, greediness, fear, jealousy).”[23]

Man is evil, and this reality once exposed stands behind true politics: “What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”[24] While the educator may be optimistic that all can be educated, and a judge must presume innocence, and the moralist must presume a freedom of choice, the political philosopher must recognize the reality of evil and the necessity of controlling this evil. The theologian and political philosopher begin with the reality of human evil. “A theologian ceases to be a theologian when he no longer considers man to be sinful or in need of redemption and no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen.”[25] By the same token – “Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with an anthropological optimism.”[26]

Recognizing the reality of human evil or being duly frightened by evil is necessary to both theology and political philosophy: “The fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man leads, just as does the distinction of friend and enemy, to a categorization of men and makes impossible the undifferentiated optimism of a universal conception of man.”[27] There are friends and enemies and enemies are deadly. It may be necessary to frighten people into recognizing this basic human condition, along with the need to find protection. Afterall, “No form of order, no reasonable legitimacy or legality can exist without protection and obedience.”[28] The role of inducing fear is played by key political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Fichte who “presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy . . . Their realism can frighten men in need of security.” By frightening men one can instill in them the fundamental recognition of the need for protection rendered by the state. Schmitt compares recognition of the need for the state protection to the Cartesian cogito: “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state. A political theory which does not systematically become aware of this sentence remains an inadequate fragment.” [29]

As John McCormick sums up Schmitt, “fear is the source of political order. Human beings once confronted with the prospect of their own dangerousness will be terrified into the arms of authority.”[30] Schmitt sees his task as building on Hobbes view of humanity and to keep fear alive through posing the realism of the basic human condition, demonstrating the continual threat of war, convincingly showing that only a state under the control of a sovereign leader can provide security.[31]

Conclusion: An Alternative Theology and Politic

Donald Trump’s politics of fear, of multiplying enemies, of sovereign power vested in himself, of determining law above and beyond its written and judicial forms, and of holding out the possibility that only he can provide safety, has a clear lineage through Carl Schmitt and in failed theology. Nominalism and voluntarism constitute the abandonment of the identity of God in Jesus Christ, the true Sovereign, leaving a political blank slate on the order of the theological blank slate (filled in by law). Schmitt extended this theological error to include the political rule of law through the sovereign; a necessity in order to control this world which has been handed over to evil (in the absence of a robust understanding of the cosmic and universal work of Christ). The two-tiered concept of reality (God made inaccessible in heaven) displaces the revelation of God in Christ with law (which does not resolve but regulates evil). However, by identifying Christ as the final and full revelation of God (God in the flesh), the one who defeated evil and overcame death (even violent death on a cross) along with its enslaving fear, including fear of the enemy (displaced with love of enemy), in this faith there is a suspension of the punishing law, in the politics of the Kingdom (Rom. 6-8). This Christian vision is precisely what is missing in the political theology of Trump.

[1] Damon Linker, “These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful”, New York Times (May 4, 2025). Robert J. Shapiro, “The German Political Theorist Who Explains What’s Happening in Washington” The Washington Monthly (February 10, 2025).

[2] Ibid, Linker.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, Shapiro.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Jack Huchison, “The Political as a Theological Problem in the Thought of Carl Schmitt” A dissertation submitted to the Department of Government, the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2018.

[7] Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, Transl. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) 17.

[8] Strauss, 16.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid,18.

[11] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) 26.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 27.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 35.

[18] Ibid, 51.

[19] Ibid, 52.

[20] Ibid, 35.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid, 52.

[23] Ibid, 59.

[24] Ibid, 61

[25] Ibid, 64.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 65.

[28] Ibid, 52.

[29] Ibid, 65.

[30] John McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Nov., 1994) 622.

[31] Ibid, 623.

Recovering the Neo-Chalcedonian Resolution

The divide between the Eastern and Western church rests upon two very different conceptions of Christology, cosmology, God, predestination, and salvation. Where the West would divide the Logos from the person of Jesus, the East has a long tradition of identifying Jesus directly with the Logos. Where the East has (mostly) consistently identified Christ’s suffering and death as divine suffering and death, the West has tended to mitigate through two natures the suffering and death so that it is only the human Jesus and not the divine Logos or divine Son of God who suffers. This has resulted in two very different pictures of God’s relation to creation and the nature of salvation (with the West focused on legal theory and the East focused on deliverance and healing). While in the name of ecumenism, it might do well to downplay this difference, the history of the difference is one of being glossed over until discussion has broken down and two very different Christianities have resulted.

The Lutheran theologian who devoted most of his life to recovering the unique sensibility of the East may be best qualified to tell this story. In Robert Jenson’s telling, the early creeds and councils did not so much resolve controversy as temporarily contain it through compromises which would ultimately end in schism. Even the power of the emperor, backing the impetus of the councils to reach a unified understanding (and the force of excommunication), did not contain the controversy and contradiction. It was not just Arianism, but even within the parameters of the creeds two irreconcilable positions, surrounding the issue giving rise to Arianism, survived. In the broadest terms, in one understanding the gospel tells of work done by a God antecedently and otherwise determined and in the other the gospel itself determines who and what God is.[1] The starkness of these two alternatives was mediated through a series of secondary issues such as the role of Mary (Theotokos?), the nature of the Logos, the nature of Christ as Son, distinctions within the Trinity, but what was at stake was the degree to which the story of Jesus of Nazareth could be identified with the story of God.

The identification of Jesus of Nazareth with God, certainly did not fit the philosophical understanding of God’s impassibility. Subordinationism was the initial response for those committed to a Greek understanding but Nicaea accentuates the dissonance in identifying “one who underwent gestation, birth, growth, a human career, rejection, torture and execution as ‘true God.’”[2] Subordinationism had said Jesus was less than God and had thus relieved the strain, as these things were assigned to one less than God. Nicaea forced a new expression of the same problem.

The Alexandrian school of Christology acknowledged the dissonance in a position Jenson summarizes as: “We have no idea how the Son, who is true— and therefore of course impassible—God, can have suffered, but somehow it happened.”[3] The Antiochene school refused the dissonance and attempted something like the Arian compromise by distinguishing between Jesus the Son who suffered and God the Son, who alone is “true God.” God the Son is divine, and therefore does not suffer but within this same person is another “nature” which suffers with humanity. The Antiochene escape is the Arian escape “moved a notch.” [4] Now instead of subordinating the one who suffers to less than God, no longer allowed by Nicaea, the Antiochenes make a distinction within Christ, assigning part of him to deity (the impassible) and part of him to humanity (the suffering). The philosophical ontology could be spared by prying open a different place within Jesus. The split within Christ would be negotiated in a variety of terms but the Antiochenes prevailed inasmuch as the unified image of Christ was displaced by distinctions identified with deity (e.g., Logos, Word, Son of God) which were something other than the human Jesus. “Thus theology was set a new problem: of construing a unity between two distinct and metaphysically polar entities.”[5]

The unified understanding of Jesus as “Christ,” “Logos,” “Son of Mary,” “Son of God,” the second member of the Trinity was once assumed, but a gap was opened, in which Jesus is “one with the Son” or “one with the Word” as a relation rather than as direct identity. As Theodore of Mopsuestia describes, in his development of physeis (natures): “He |Jesus| is God because of his close conjunction with that divine nature who really is God.”[6] In his commentary on John he sorts out each clause of the narrative so as to assign it to either the Logos (with its deified conjunction) or the man.[7] Jesus of Nazareth is not himself directly the Logos or one of the Trinity, but inasmuch as he is Son, Logos, or Word, he exists in relation to the second identity of the Trinity. There is a clear distinction between his two “natures,” conjoined as they might be. Even the saving assigned to Jesus is more a result of this conjunction of two natures. “Jesus saves,” or his flesh is “life-giving” only in being conjoined to God. While Jesus shares in the Logos, and is thus deserving of worship, this conjunction is not direct identity. The Logos precedes the man, and by the same token the Logos does not suffer nor is he son of Mary. Theodore’s distinction of Logos from the man Jesus, would become standard in Antiochene thought and among those subject to its influence.

According to Nestorius, even the popular liturgical expression acclaiming Mary “Mother of God” (Theotokos) is mistaken. Mary did not bear deity but a man and “the incarnate God did not die, but raised him in whom he was incarnate. . . .”!”[8] This was a step too far for the Alexandrians, and they find a champion in Cyril of Alexandria, who takes up the Alexandrian cause in opposing Nestorius. According to Jenson, “His great concern was for continuity of divine agency throughout the gospel narrative, for theological warrant to read the Gospels whole as God’s own story. It is throughout the story God the Son who becomes human and who by what he does as human unites us to himself and his Father.”[9] According to Cyril: “We confess that the very one. . . who is only-begotten God—and who is indeed according to his own nature impassible—suffered in the flesh for us. . . .” Confession must include “the death according to the flesh of the only-begotten Son of God.”[10] Cyril insists, everything one might denote by Christ, God the Son, Jesus, or any of the other biblical names or titles ascribed to him, all are predicated of the one subject, the incarnate God. As Cyril puts it, “The sacred writings proclaim him sometimes as a whole and single human who is, in the Incarnation, the understood subject of his deity, and sometimes, vice versa, as God who is the understood subject of his humanity.”[11] His point is a direct refutation of the Antiochene doctrine, aimed at dividing Christ.

In Theodore’s examples, “God the Son has a mother” and “Jesus is lifegiving,” demand two different natures (as God has no mother and God alone, and not Jesus, gives life), but Cyril identifies what is two, in Theodore, with one subject. “Therefore we say the body of Christ is divine since it is the body of God. It shines with unutterable glory and is incorruptible and holy and life-giving.” Likewise in the other direction: “When we read he “grew in wisdom and knowledge and grace’ this must be predicated of (the incarnate Son)… and so also hunger and thirst. And indeed, even when we read that he petitions the Father to escape suffering, we attribute also this to the same one.”[12] According to Cyril, we confess “one nature, of God the Logos, that has been enfleshed.”[13] Cyril is directly deploying Theodore’s term, not to refer to two natures but to show that there is a singular Subject (the Logos is human). Cyril acknowledges that it may be legitimate to speak of two natures, if by this we mean Jesus is everything required to be God the Son and this particular human being. He instantiates each in who he is. There is an abstract understanding allowing for two natures, but not a concrete distinction.

Unfortunately, the Council of Ephesus (449) and then the council of Chalcedon (451), though setting forth a statement in light of Cyril’s strong claims, once again aimed at appeasing the Antiochenes. Pope Leo sent representatives to the councils, along with his Tome or letter, which would be appended to the councils’ statements, including the following crude formulation: “For each nature is agent of what is proper to it, working in fellowship with the other: the Word doing what belongs to the Word and the flesh what belongs to the flesh. The one shines forth in the miracles, the other submits to the injuries.”[14] In other words, each nature does its own thing and goes its own way depending on the circumstance. Leo’s representatives insured that his views were reflected in the final statement by picturing the natures as existing “in” Christ rather than allowing that Christ is abstractly “from” these two natures hypostatically united in him. For the Western church, Chalcedon was identified with Leo’s position, while the Egyptian and Syrian churches remained suspicious of Chalcedon, eventually becoming separate churches.

Those of Cyril’s followers who remained in the imperial church would interpret Chalcedon and hypostasis with a Cyrillian slant. They made hypostasis mean what they thought it should, making it the “’synthetic’ agent of the whole gospel narrative, both of what is divine in it and of what is human in it and they identified the eternal Logos as himself this hypostasis.”[15] According to John of Damascus, “Since Christ is one and his hypostasis is one, it is one and the same who wills and works divinely and humanly. . .. And since Christ is one and the same who wills according to each nature, the concrete will is one and the same… .” Thus, “He did not do human things in the human way, for he is not only man but also God. Whence it is that his sufferings are life-giving and salvific. Nor does he do divine things in the divine way. . .. Whence it is that he performed divine signs by touch and speech. .. .”[16] Also John is clear, Jesus is the Logos: “God the Logos was not united to flesh antecedently hypostasized in itself, but… came in his own hypostasis to dwell in the womb of the holy virgin, and hypostasized .. . , from the holy blood of the virgin, flesh animated by a rational soul. . . .”[17] This understanding, which identified hypostasis with Logos as the one agent of salvation, marks Neo-Chalcedonianism. The Cyrillians insure that at the Second Council of Constantinople (made up mostly of Eastern bishops in 553) this Neo-Chalcedonian understanding was made dogma, though it had little effect outside the communion surrounding Constantinople (the Western church mostly ignored Constantinople of 553).[18]

Maximus the Confessor (579-662) inherits and builds upon the Neo-Chalcedonian identity. Neo-Chalcedonians included both Cyril’s “from which he is” and the Chalcedonian “in which he is” and Maximus adds “he (simply) is”: “Christ, being according to nature from both deity and humanity, and in deity and humanity, is by nature God and man. And another factor there is not at all.”[19] The hypostasis is not a synthesis in addition to the natures, but the hypostasis is both of the natures. He is not alternatively one and then alternatively another but he is directly “from” both. Not “from” as a sequential relation (e.g., in time or before time) but simply as an abstract description made concrete in Jesus Christ. According to Jenson, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[20]

What God is doing in Christ is not secondary to who he is, but Jesus in his healing, peaceable, kenotic love, is God. Thus, Maximus claims that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. This is not a suffering exterior to God but God suffering in the Son – “suffering God” in Maximus phrase.[21] The early church, from Melito of Sardis (100-180) affirmed straightforwardly and paradoxically, “The Impassible suffered… .” “God was killed. . . .”![22] The Neo-Chalcedonian developments of Maximus do not ease the paradox so much as accentuate it in that “the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[23]

The near loss of this Neo-Chalcedonian insight in the West has stunted Western theology in nearly all of its phases, but most particularly it has helped foster a violent image of God and a violent atonement. While both East and West have embraced various levels of violence, it is ultimately the Neo-Chalcedonian understanding, in its identity of God with Christ, that most fully opens up the possibility of the peaceable nature of God and his Kingdom as the saving purpose of Christianity.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 22nd https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology: volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 165.

[2] Jenson, 125.

[3] Jenson, 125.

[4] Jenson, 126.

[5] Jenson, 126.

[6] Catechetical Homilies, 57, cited in Jenson, 127.

[7] Commentary on the Gospel of John, ed. & tr. into Latin, J.-M. Vospe, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (Paris: Louvain, 1940), vols. 62-63. Cited in Jenson, 128.

[8] “First Sermon against “Theotokos,”” Friedrich Loofs, ed., Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius (Halle: 1905), 251-252. Cited in Jenson, 128.

[9] Jenson, 128-129.

[10] Second Letter to Nestorius, ed. Schwartz, i.i.1.25-28.6. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[11] To Theodosius, on True Faith, ed. Schwarz, i.i.1.25-28.29. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[12] First Letter to Successus, ed. Schwartz, i.i.vi.151—157.10. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[13] To the Noble Ladies, on True Faith, ed. Schwartz, i,v,62—118.10. Jenson, 129.

[14] Epistola Papae Leonis ad Flavianum ep. Constantinopolitanum de Eutyche, cited here from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:79.3-7. Cited in Jenson, 131.

[15] Jenson, 133.

[16] John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, 59.193-196. Cited in Jenson, 133.

[17] John of Damascus, 46.24-30. Cited in Jenson, 133.

[18] Jenson, 133.

[19] Ambigua 91:121B. Cited in Jenson, 136.

[20] Jenson, 137.

[21] Ambigua, 91:1037B: “theos pathetos.” Cited in Jenson, 137.

[22] Antonius Caesar, 13.16. Cited in Jenson, 125.

[23] Jenson, 137.

Solving the Puzzle of Christology

The primary issue in the development of doctrine, as it passed through a variety of heresies and their repudiation, is the identity of Christ. How are the humanity and deity of Jesus to be understood? Is it that Christ is divine only inasmuch as he is not human, or human apart from his divinity? Is His suffering limited to His humanity, preserving his deity from the passion and cross? Or is it that Jesus in his suffering in Gethsemane and Golgotha is revealing the true heart of God? What is clear, is that Jesus Christ poses a new model, a new relationship between humanity and deity, and understanding how God is at work in the humanity of Christ is the key to understanding how he is at work in our humanity. The key question is, according to Rowan Williams, “how does Christology itself generate a new and fuller grasp of the ‘grammar’ of createdness?”[1]

Recognizing and knowing Christ, gives us a fuller grasp of who He is, simultaneous with recognizing the world in which we live and who we are. What Christology “seeks to articulate presses us to work at the logic, or grammar . . . of speaking about God” characterized by “intelligence and love” and the logic of creation.[2] Talking about God and Christ provides “a credible environment for action and imagination, a credible means of connecting narratives, practices, codes of behaviour;” ultimately it offers “a world to live in.”[3] The refining of Christology is not simply the practice of the individual Christian, but is definitive of one of the primary activities of the Church, with the errors and their correction providing a way forward in knowing Christ.

The manner in which Christology is misconstrued, demonstrates that the primary error is trying to fit Christ into an already realized understanding. God incarnate is made to fit an already existing world pattern, which inevitably denies the reality of God and human brought together in one person. Docetism would deny the bodily incarnation; adoptionism holds that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God from eternity but was adopted by God at some point; Sabellianism and Modalism hold that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are simply different manifestations of God; Arianism teaches that Jesus is not fully divine; etc. etc. In the first five centuries of the church there were some 30 distinct heresies concerning the person and work of Christ. All these heresies share the form of trying to conceive Christ along an already accepted understanding, and if nothing else this is what the early church councils refute.

The focus of the church councils was aimed at countering heresies which would reduce the reality of Christ’s identity. The first council of Nicaea (325) condemned Arianism and defined Father and Son as consubstantial; Constantinople I (381) also condemned Arianism, but also Macedonianism which denied the divinity of the Spirit; Ephesus (431) condemned Nestorianism, which denied the unity of the divine and human in Christ; Chalcedon (451) condemned Monophysitism (or Eutychianism) which denied Christ’s human nature; Constantinople II (553) recondemned Nestorianism; Constantiniple III (680) condemned Monothelitism, which held Christ only had a divine and not human will which arose as a reaction to Monophysitism which taught Jesus had only a divine and not a human nature; Nicaea II (787) condemned adoptionism which held Christ was not the Son of God by nature. The consistent problem was a reduction in the reality of the New Testament portrayal of the identity of Jesus.

There is an expansive understanding of Christ in the New Testament, in which Jesus could in no way be conceived within the received parameters of personhood. He is active in the life of believers, preserving their faithfulness: “awaiting eagerly the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end, blameless (1 Cor. 1.7–8); He is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). Christ is “alive” in believers (Gal. 2.20); as God’s Son he is restoring relations with God throughout the Cosmos (Rom. 8:21). He has died, and has been raised and is seated at the right hand of God (Rom. 8.34). In one of the most common phrases of the New Testament, believers are “in Christ.” He is the ultimate agent of divine judgment; He puts divine rule into effect, both in his ministry (exorcising demons, healing etc.) and the work completed upon his return; He is the means of the gifting of the Holy Spirit creating a new community through his body and acting as head of the Church. Christ is the identity and ground of this new community.[4]

“Who do you say that I am,” is the perennial question and human language and understanding through the centuries have approached an answer and explanation in a series of false starts, qualifications, and general pointers, such that there is a continual groping toward a fuller understanding of Christ (and through Christ an understanding of the world.) The understanding of Christ individually and corporately, however, can in no way be identified as one of steady progress. Entire epochs, modes of thinking, and developments within theology, have misidentified Christ. For example, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham (if not the Franciscans) found a mode of thinking (nominalism), which denies there is access to God’s eternality. According to Scotus, “the human soul and will of Jesus perform finite acts and those acts must be of finite worth.”[5] Likewise, “Ockham wants to argue that God’s power to bestow grace is always conditioned (as a result of his own divine choice, of course, in the ordering of the contingent universe) by the character of the subject receiving it, so that infinite grace cannot be given to a finite agent.”[6] Everything must be traced back to God’s unconstrained voluntaristic will: “God’s will and purpose were completely free and unconstrained by any created reality – and that must mean that God’s decision to be incarnate could have nothing to do with any quality inherent in humanity.”[7] This pure will on the part of God could make a stone or a donkey, as well as Jesus, the site of incarnation.

What becomes clear by the fifth century, according to Williams, is that speaking about Jesus must involve a new form of thought “in which the complete and unequivocal presence of divine action and human action inseparably united with one another was affirmed in a way that did not diminish the true and active presence of either and did not see them as related ‘side by side’, one of them influencing the other from outside.”[8] The puzzle solving involves recognizing the divine presence in Jesus of Nazareth, and continuing to comprehend the fullness of that presence. The Christological statement from the Council of Chalcedon is typical: a formula aimed at satisfying various perspectives in regard to that fullness, but more of a guideline, than a definitive statement:

We all teach harmoniously [that he is] the same perfect in godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a reasonable soul and body; homoousios with the Father in godhead, and the same homoousios with us in manhood … acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.

He is perfect in his humanity and deity, having homoousious with the Father (that is the same in being and same in essence), and also having the same essence and being as other humans; he has these two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. This statement is a long time in coming, but how do we grasp its meaning? As Williams notes, “Like most or many formulae of settlement, Chalcedon defines an agenda rather than a solution to the problems that have generated it.”[9] The agenda for Christology though, is now more clearly defined: Christ has two natures and two wills in one person.

Chalcedon, like all of the early Church councils, reflects the radical questions posed by the New Testament. The identity of Jesus with God, and the explicit claims of deity in his “I am” statements in John (e.g., “before Abraham was born, I am.” Jn 8:58) can in no way be approached according to some normative model as to how God reveals himself. Paul also provides descriptions that are pointed, clear, yet beyond immediate comprehension. In Colossians alone, Christ is the “image of the invisible God”, the “firstborn” over creation (1:15), with “all things created through Him and for Him” (1:16), “in Him all things hold together” (1:17), in Him “all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily” (2:9), through Him God “reconciles all things to Himself” (1:20), He is the “head of the body the Church” (1:18), sharing the glory of God with believers (1:27), He has preeminence over all things that “in everything, He might have the supremacy” (1:18), all of this results “in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself (2:2). Jesus Christ in these passages is identified as Creator, sustainer, reconciler, the visible image of God, and in each of these roles the work of the Father and Spirit are evident. It is through Him that the Father is revealed, that the Father reconciles, and that the mystery of God, the Trinity, is revealed. Knowing Christ is the goal, but this knowing involves stretching human understanding and experience.

Perhaps the most radical contemporary statement which comes closest to the radical biblical identity of God with Jesus, comes from the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson:

What Christology is—or ought to be—about is the Jesus who appears in the Gospels, as he is in fact the Son of God he was accused of claiming to be. Thus, if we speak of a “divine nature,” what the phrase in its way denotes must be this one. If we speak of a “human nature,” what the phrase denotes in its different way must be this one. If we speak of “a single hypostasis,” what the phrase denotes in its yet different way must be this one. And all of this language—as any new language we might devise—speaks truly about this one only as it displays him as the Son, that is, as it displays this one’s relation to the Father in the Spirit.”[10]

Jenson pointedly identifies the story of Jesus with the story of God. Where Williams is eager to distinguish the Word of God from Jesus of Nazareth, Jenson says explicitly these are not two but one and the same: “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him. May we now finally say that God the Son suffered, without evasive qualification? It was dogmatically settled before Maximus that ‘one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh.’”[11] This understanding may not be immediately comprehensible or reducible to our present understanding, but here the identity between God and Jesus set forth in the New Testament and the Church seem to take on its most complete form.

Who is Jesus in His divinity and humanity, in His relation to creation and the Church, and how do I come to know him more completely – is the driving question and impetus behind much of the New Testament, behind the various heresies and their repudiation, and behind the formulas arising from the councils, which require continued refinement and explanation. The task of every Christian, the theological task, which is never finished, is to identify the person of Jesus. This is not a task that can be closed out, as if one has fully achieved the fulness of the reality of Christ. Jesus’ identity, his question for each of us (“Who do you say that I am”), is not a mere summing up of his past history but is an ever-present demand.

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 6.

[2] Williams, 7.

[3] Williams, Intro, location 70.

[4] Williams, 48-49.

[5] Williams, 133.

[6] Williams, 134.

[7] Williams, 136.

[8] Williams, Intro location 81.

[9] Williams, p. 88. Unfortunately, as Jordan Wood spells out in some detail, Williams is guilty of the very thing he warns of – trying to fit Christ into preconceived frame. “What troubles me most about Williams’s christology is how keen it is to deny “exhaustive identity” between the Word of God and Jesus of Nazareth (159-60).” Also, “To the extent that Williams’s operative and determinative thought-picture is one of ‘two agencies’ and not, as in Christ, two agencies that are positively one and mutually interpenetrating in one agent, his picture furtively imports the very premise he wishes to deny throughout: that infinite and finite agencies are not to be conceived as two finite agencies that must impinge upon one another to be united.” Jordan Wood, “Against Asymmetrical Christology: A Critical Review of Rowan Williams’s ‘Christ the Heart of Creation’” Posted on Al Kimel’s Blog, Eclectic Orthodoxy (4 August 2019).

[10] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God (second edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 134.

[11] Jenson, 137.

A Historical-Theological Understanding of the Resurrection: From Wittgenstein and Hegel to Moltmann and Paul

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel, two figures not normally cited together, concur that the resurrection of Christ is the triumph of love, and has little to do with the miraculous. Focus on the miraculous aspect of the resurrection misses how resurrection is to be integrated into the life and identity of the crucified. Wittgenstein confides to his diary his struggle with the resurrection. He understands it is not simply a matter of believing another miracle, but a comprehensive shift in how the world is perceived – an alternative grammar in apprehending the world. “Just as ‘God’ does not pick out an agent or an individual among others, in the way a proper name does, so ‘resurrection’ does not pick out a specific event in chronicled history to set beside other events.”[1] Proof or evidence or even the factuality of the resurrection is not primary for Wittgenstein, but the shift in the global “reading” of facts entailing the founding of the church and living in faith. Belief in the resurrection is entry into an alternative world of understanding.

The Death and Resurrection as God’s Story

For Hegel also, the resurrection is not about the miraculous but is to be read as key to the story of God: “the full presence of both humanity and divinity, the despair that God himself is dead, and the reversal, the putting to death of death and the resurrection into life” is “a reenactment of the divine history.”[2] This history is Trinitarian in that the “abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[3] In Christ a difference in God is realized, in that the distant abstract God is made concrete (in the world), such that he is immediately accessible (in Spirit and love). Through incarnation and death, human finitude is “transfigured into the highest love” as God is poured out and made available in human interiority. The resurrection and ascension are an extension of the incarnation, as in this “exaltation Christ has appeared for immediate consciousness in the mode of actuality.”[4] Hegel refers to the resurrection as making God available for “envisagement,” which he equates with the defeat of death (the negative) and the “preservation in death itself” of the “highest love.”[5]

In Hegel’s estimate this story of God in the history of the “teaching, life, death, and resurrection” makes the community of love, the church, a possibility. This goes beyond an intellectual foundation: “This is the crucial point on which everything depends, this is the verification, the absolute proof. This is what is to be understood as the witness of the Spirit.”[6] This is the history of the kenotic outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which the sensible presence is transfigured into his real presence through the Spirit.[7] In the “eternal repetition of the life passion and resurrection of Christ in the members of the church,” lies the creation and preservation of the world.[8] The world is incorporated into the story of God.

Jürgen Moltmann, like Hegel, reads the resurrection as the unfolding story of God: “The union of Jesus with God and of God with Jesus was constituted . . . by ‘the resurrection of Jesus’.”[9] The risen Christ is the truth of the historical Jesus and the truth of God, and this is captured in the earliest formulas of the New Testament: “Jesus Christ crucified and risen” (1 Co 15:3–5). His resurrection, joined to his life course, teachings, and death, serves as the foundation of Jesus’ identity as Son of God, Lord, or simply God, and is the cornerstone of his eschatological kingdom. Resurrection means his entire life is the founding of the eschatological kingdom, and there is no divide between the life of Christ and the founding of the Church. Luke-Acts, the Gospels and the history of the Church are to be read as a singular movement of God pouring out his life for the world.

Resurrection: The Interpretive Key to All Things

Along with Hegel and Wittgenstein, Moltmann recognized resurrection is not just a fortuitous miracle or another historical event. The resurrection is the end of history as previously understood: “it is not a question of establishing the life and death of Jesus as a historical fact, and regarding the resurrection, the appearances of Jesus and the Easter faith as inter-changeable interpretations of that fact. That would not do justice to the rise of the Christian faith at all.”[10] The resurrection is the interpretive key to understand the life of Christ through faith. The resurrection “does not speak the ‘language of facts’, but only the language of faith and hope, that is, the ‘language of promise.”[11] In this world the cross is foolishness and a scandal, and by the same token the resurrection cannot be “proven.” The cross and resurrection can only be grasped through faith as an alternative world-view.

In the Wittgensteinian sense, for Moltmann the resurrection is the deep grammar by which the meaning of Christ is to be read into all things. Referencing I Cor. 15:14 (“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is vain”) Moltmann notes, “If one calls the cross of Jesus the ‘nuclear fact’ of Christian faith, one must call his resurrection the primal datum of that faith.”[12] In the early Christian community, there was little dispute about the fact of the resurrection. The issue was how to interpret Christ’s death in light of the resurrection in which light record of his life was preserved. “As a merely historical person he would long have been forgotten, because his message had already been contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he becomes a mystery and a question for every new age.”[13]

A Reinterpretation of God’s Righteousness

The Easter faith arose among those who fled the crucifixion, as God seemed to have abandoned Christ. However, where faith in Jesus was shattered at the cross, the resurrection expands faith to include a reconstitution of (Jewish) hope. No longer is righteousness on the basis of the law or Jewish eschatology. Jesus was a “lawless man,” a “rebel,” “abandoned by God” according to the law, but declared righteous by the resurrection. The Jewish apocalyptic says all should wait for the resurrection of the dead, but Easter faith is trust in Jesus resurrection from the dead.[14] “Between the eschatological Easter faith and the various forms of late-Jewish apocalyptic stood Jesus himself and his cross.”[15] The future and past of Judaism are made new in light of God’s identification with Christ. In the resurrection “God has identified himself, his judgment and his kingdom with the crucified Jesus, [with] his cross and his helplessness.”[16] God and life are found in the midst of death as the future kingdom of life is made possible: “namely reconciliation in the midst of strife, the law of grace in the midst of judgment, and creative love in the midst of legalism.”[17]

This is not faith that God will damn the unrighteous and save the righteous – a resurrection unto judgement. This is a different conception of God and righteousness – a trust in God’s righteousness. In the midst of suffering, evil, and death, God has made things right. “The Christian belief in the resurrection does not proclaim world-historical tendencies or anthropological hopes, but the nucleus of a new righteousness in a world where dead and living cry out for righteousness.”[18]

Reading the cross in light of the law makes of Christ’s death one more propitiating sacrifice, with the expiation or propitiation meeting the requirements of the law but the resurrection is the end of the law of just deserts, as executioner, betrayer, oppressor and oppressed alike are received into righteousness by grace. “God had answered the evil deed of men in crucifying Jesus in a glorious way by raising him from the dead (Acts 2.24).”[19] The resurrection read into the cross means all that have been delivered over to death due to unrighteousness will find life. “Through his suffering and death, the risen Christ brings righteousness and life to the unrighteous and the dying.”[20] His death on the cross makes the meaning of the resurrection evident for the unrighteous: as their representative in death provides new life in resurrection. There is passage from death to life for all who are subject to death.

Defeat of Death, Evil and Sin

His is “resurrection from the dead” and not a revivification, reanimation or temporary raising, as it directly counters death (with all of its connotations of sin and punishment). It is not life after death, as conceived in many religions, presuming the immortality of the soul or the transmigration of souls. There is an annihilation of death; not mere life after death. The harshness of the crucifixion is an exclamation that death is a reality, and there can be no peace between this reality (a life lived in light of death) and the reality of crucifixion and resurrection (death defeated by life). This is not on the order of the raising up of Lazarus who would die again, but Jesus is no longer controlled by death: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again” (Rom. 6.9). “Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom. 9.15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death.”[21] One sort of history ends – “evil, death, abandonment by God” with resurrection marking the beginning of the new world of the righteousness of God.”[22]

He is “the first fruits of them that are asleep,” “the “pioneer of life,” the “firstborn from the dead.” He is “Jesus Christ”: “Jesus” binds him to his past, and “Christ” binds him to his future.[23]

‘Easter’ was a prelude to, and a real anticipation of, God’s qualitatively new future and the new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering. . . For the Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared in that prelude.[24]

Through the resurrection the death of Christ becomes the defeat of death for the living and the dead: “For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that he might be Lord of both dead and living” (Rom. 14.9). The resurrection does not relativize the cross (as a past event), but makes it the point of salvation, qualifying the crucified as Lord and Christ, filling the cross with the eschatological and saving significance of God defeating death in dying and being raised.

The Resurrection as Providing Theological Coherence

The resurrection is often tacked on to legal theories of atonement (e.g., a sign of sacrifice accepted), rather than integrating the resurrection into the life and death of Christ to form a theological coherence. The historical and the eschatological are separated, with Jesus life and death as one half of Jesus and the risen Christ as the other half.[25] His death, separated from his resurrection is a repudiation of what he said and did, but joined together the reality of the incarnation (God become man) is made complete and coherent: “his cross is understood in the light of his resurrection, his way to the cross in the light of the saving meaning of his cross, his words and miracles in the light of his Easter exaltation to be Lord.”[26]

Jesus is raised, which means not only that this single individual has overcome death but his life is extended to church and cosmos. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The life that lives in Jesus is the active source of all relations in the finite world; so it is natural that, in its human embodiment, it is creative of unrestricted relation in the human world – and indeed beyond, if we take seriously Paul’s meditations in Romans 8 on the dependence of the entire creation on the reconciling process that occurs in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”[27] The resurrection is not tacked on to history but is the transformative moment for history and the cosmos, as the indestructible life of God is activated from within history and the cosmos so as to become “all in all” (Col 3:11).

[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (henceforth CV), 64. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 218.

[2] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hegel, 131.

[5] Hegel, 131-2.

[6] Hegel, 145.

[7] Hegel, 149. As the editor notes, “For Hegel the resurrection of Jesus from the dead indeed entails an Aufhebung—an annulling of his sensible presence, yet a preservation of his real presence and its transfiguration into the modality of spirit.”

[8] Hegel, 152.

[9] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 161.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Moltmann, 173.

[12] Moltmann, 161.

[13] Moltmann, 162.

[14] Moltmann, 172.

[15] Moltmann, 166.

[16] Moltmann,169.

[17] Moltmann, 171.

[18] Moltmann, 177.

[19] Moltmann, 179.

[20] Moltmann, 185.

[21] Moltmann, 170.

[22]Moltmann, 169.

[23] Moltmann, 164.

[24] Moltmann, 163.

[25] Moltmann, 160.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Williams, 38.

A Historical Theological Understanding of Christ’s Death: From Hegel to Moltmann back to Maximus and Paul

Why did Jesus die? The inevitable theological response, “For our sins,” does not really explain (either sin or how Christ’s death helps) or deal with the historical circumstance of his death. Historically it is quite obvious Jesus died because of the threat he posed to both Israel and Rome, and yet this historical reality is often left out, which also leaves hanging explanation of how his death pertains to the present human predicament. However, Scripture and the early church understood the death of Christ as simultaneously pertaining to the historical outworking of what killed him.[1] Paul explains the universal appeal and answer found in the death of Christ, as the cross exposes and answers the universal predicament of sin (a death-dealing lie). Maximus the Confessor typifies the belief of the early church that Christ wielded death to defeat the enslaving grip of sin and death: “Thus the curse and death of my sin became the curse of my God, which prevented the transgression from progressing and producing the fruits of unrighteousness, but instead, in accordance with the commandment and divine righteousness, became a blessing and life without end.”[2] The death of Christ in this understanding had an immediate historical and personal impact with the historical explaining the theological.

In the modern period it is G. W. F. Hegel who returns to the historical so as to develop a practical theology, focused on the kenotic love of God poured out on the cross, providing the power to empty the self in love. Hegel sounds similar to the early church fathers, though he employs his own terminology in describing the power of Christ’s death: “The death of God is infinite negation, and God maintains himself in death, so that this process is rather a putting to death of death, a resurrection into life.”[3] Christ provides the race escape from enslavement to death. This practical historical development is most effectively taken up in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, which I focus on below.

So, rather than leap over the historical events in explaining the theological reason for the death of Christ (as in top-down legal theories), the reason posed in history can serve as the foundation of theological explanation (bottom-up theories). In other words, rather than creating a category in the mind of God requiring the death of Christ, the human necessity due to death (religious, political, psychological, and personal) which brought about his death not only explains his death but what it accomplished. There is a theological tradition grounded in the historical necessity (Christus Victor, Recapitulation, Girardian theory, Liberation Theology, etc.), which begins with the incarnation, and there are theories which begin with the necessities of God to explain the incarnation (legal theories of atonement). I argue that theories grounded in history provide the most thorough development for understanding the reason Christ died, but also for understanding God and the world as revealed in Christ. The most obvious development of this historical understanding in the modern period is through Hegel to Moltmann, and even if one disagrees with the application of this development, Moltmann provides one of the most compelling examples giving shape to a historical theological understanding. In his key work, The Crucified God, he plots the history behind the cross to lay the ground for explaining the real-world liberation found in Christ.[4] In following his argument (in the paragraphs below), I demonstrate the return to the early Christian understanding of the cross implied in Moltmann’s practical Hegelian insight.

At a basic human and historical level, beyond theory and theology, there is little question as to why Jesus died. He was killed due to fear on the part of the Romans and Jews that he threatened their religion and their nation. He threatened the temple, the sacrifices (Roman and Jewish), the hierarchy (Roman and Jewish), and ultimately, he posed a threat to their power. From the cleansing of the temple and Jesus’ intimation of its destruction (somehow connected to him), the Jews began to plot his death. They would kill him because he threatened what was taken as essential and absolute in their religious nationalism. At his trial he was condemned as a “blasphemer,” due to his disregard of the sabbath laws and markers of clean and unclean, and it is this disregard that pertains to his understanding of God. As Moltmann argues, “With arrogant authority Jesus proclaimed God as the one who in his eschatological condescension towards lost men is free from the human observance of the prescriptions of the law, and in prevenient love shows gracious mercy towards men. By so doing, Jesus placed his preaching of God, and therefore himself, above the authority of Moses and the Torah.”[5] Jesus demonstrates God is free, through his actions on the sabbath and in his revisions and reinterpretation of the law (as in the Sermon on the Mount). What was objective and legal is made personally binding in its direct application to the human heart.

Jesus disqualified himself as a traditional rabbi, deriving authority from Moses, in that he placed himself above the law and its limits, specifically in extending grace beyond and in contradiction to the law. He forgives transgressors, he abolishes contemporary distinctions between righteous and unrighteous, devout and sinful, and religious and secular. He set himself in the place of God as judge, which did not fit expectations of the Son of Man, who in the last days would judge sinners and redeem the righteous. Jesus turned toward sinners, which was not how God was expected to establish righteousness. The Jews assumed the Messiah would shame sinners and exalt those who keep the law. “Anyone who preaches the imminent kingdom of God not as judgment, but as the gospel of the justification of sinners by grace, and demonstrates it as such through his life with sinners and tax-collectors, contradicts the hope based upon the law, is deceiving the sinners and tax-collectors and is blaspheming the God of hope.”[6]

Both John and Jesus preach “The kingdom of God is at hand,” but Jesus’ depiction of this kingdom is not one of judgment. “Rather, anticipated by the word of the gospel which Jesus preached and his living offering of himself to the poor, the sinners and the tax-collectors, it comes as the unconditional and free grace of God, by which the lost are sought out and those without rights, and the unrighteous, are accepted.”[7] Jesus is not leading a repentance movement but is offering righteousness through grace. His appeal is not to the law but to himself and he is offering forgiveness and healing on the basis of grace; not an appeal to the authority of the law or Moses but a direct appeal to God. Grace for those outside of the law, beyond the authority of Moses, was by definition against the institutions of Israel. The conflict, resulting in Jesus’ murder, was due to Jesus’ incomprehensible claims of authority in discrepancy with the law.

Rather than a kingdom for the righteous and judgment for the unrighteous, Jesus opens the kingdom to unrighteous sinners. He preaches a different image of God; not the God of conquering power but a God defined through grace. Jesus position as a carpenter from Nazareth, his association with sinners and the poor, his healing of the sick, and drawing in of the outcasts, speaks of God in a novel fashion, identified with the weak rather than the strong or those in control. “For Jesus the ‘radicalization of the Torah’ and the ‘transgression of the Torah’ basically both amount to the same thing, the freedom of God to show grace. Thus the right which he claimed to forgive sins goes beyond the Torah and reveals a new righteousness of God in judgment, which could not be expected according to the traditions of the law.”[8]

The means of refuting this poor, weak carpenter was to relegate him to the place of slaves by destroying him on a cross. The cross was to be refutation of all that he represented, and yet through the resurrection this refutation is defeated, making of the cross God’s full identification with the poor, the lowly, and abandoned. His death is the point of conflict between the god of the law and the God of grace. The cultic god, the guarantor of the law, and his representatives, would eliminate Christ’s challenge to the law by eliminating him. Sinners are destroyed outside of the city gates, outside of the kingdom, and this death identified him as a sinner.

This is made obvious in that even his disciples abandon him, as his death signifies his powerlessness before the law and its guardians. He is seemingly rejected by God, thus even his disciples reject him as the cross destroyed his claims on behalf of God. “He did not die through chance or misfortune, but died by the law as one who was ‘reckoned with transgressors’ (Luke 22.37). He was condemned as a ‘blasphemer’ by the guardians of the law and of faith. As they understood it, his death was the carrying out of the curse of the law.”[9] In this they were not entirely wrong, but the curse is demonstrably not simply objective to the law, but the law itself is accursed (deadly), and yet suspended in its being nailed to the cross. The resurrection confirms or makes this interpretation possible, as for the first time it is realized life is beyond the law, and not in and through the law. “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Ro 10:4).

Recognition that God is on the cross is not simply a message for Jews but is a message for all people; the principalities and powers, forces for death, killing and suffering, are undermined by the power of life beyond death. The kingdoms of Israel and Rome were politically and religiously united in killing Jesus as crucifixion is a Roman execution inflicted upon slaves and insurrectionists. The Pax Romana brings about peace through recognition of Caesar; the sort of peace the Jews submitted themselves to in shouting down Jesus as King. “We have no King but Caesar” was there final pledge of allegiance – politically and religiously. The kingdoms in conflict are not Roman and Jewish, but Jesus Kingdom and the kingdoms of this world.

It is not a matter of separating out the political and religious but separating out two kinds of kingdom: the violent versus the non-violent, the coercive and militant versus the peaceable, the legal versus the loving, the rich versus the poor, law versus grace, or ultimately, Caesar versus Jesus. Loving enemies and praying for those that persecute you, is a revolution “not of this world.” “God comes not to carry out just revenge upon the evil, but to justify by grace sinners, whether they are Zealots or tax collectors, Pharisees or sinners, Jews or Samaritans, and therefore, also, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.”[10] Jesus opposes both the legalism of Israel and Rome, in promoting the kingdom of righteousness through grace. He set free from the law of vengeance and the power of death, characteristic of this world’s kingdoms. “He denied that human beings, Zealots and Romans, had the right to pass judgment and execute vengeance in their own cause: ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone’ (John 8.7).”[11] Christ reveals God is not a righteous avenger set to judge and destroy. God is a God of mercy and grace, and Jesus’ preaching sets humans free from the legalism of their gods of vengeance so as to establish His different kingdom.

This is why they kill him, as his opponents understood he was attacking their basic religious and political principles. He opposed Israel and Rome alike: “The freedom of Jesus and his proclamation of God’s law of grace affected not only the Pharisees and Zealots, but equally the cultic and political religious foundations of the Pax Romana and the archaic conceptions of righteousness held by all men.”[12] This is demonstrated in the subsequent persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. The Christian rejection of emperor worship was simultaneously political and religious: “By their irreligiousness they were introducing revolt into the heavenly world amongst the gods and were therefore bringing revolt into the religious and political world on earth which corresponded to those gods.”[13] Jesus and his followers alienated the anti-Roman Jews and the anti-Jewish Romans, as he challenged their ground rules. A Christianity which begins with some supposed “pure theology,” free of politics and history and aimed at a private sphere between God and self, misses both what Christ opposed and what enslaves nations, empires, and kingdoms and citizens of this world.

This understanding of the death of Christ provides a traceable, universal continuity through history to theology. It also directly connects sin with evil, which strangely tends to be separated in legal theories explaining Christ’s death. Philosophical problems of evil or the notion of radical evil (the lying possibility of evil or its representations having an ontological ground) are often dismissed from theology and thought to pertain only theoretically or philosophically.[14] Yet, it is obvious in the New Testament that the reification of death, hades, and the devil, (the power of nothingness in Hegel’s terminology) as ultimate powers, is the lie exposed by the death and resurrection of Christ. The state exercised power by presuming the absolute nature of death, and Christ overturned this satanic notion.

The presumption of the first Christians is that it is only in the death of Christ that God and world are fully revealed. The hypostatic union of the incarnation reveals God’s relation to the world, but it also reveals the deepest truth about God, that he is a “suffering God” who suffers with and for us. In Paul’s explanation, the sufferings or groanings of the cosmos are taken up into God, through the Son and the Spirit, and the Christian joins in this cosmic, intra-Trinitarian intercession into the world (Rom 8:22-26). The suffering of the Son simultaneously pertains to the identity of God and the world as the uncreated God, who is for us is, revealed in His humanity. “This mystery is for Maximus ‘the ineffable and incomprehensible union according to hypostasis of divinity and humanity’ that brings created and uncreated natures ‘into perfect identity.’ In this very identity—the one wrought in history from conception in Mary’s womb to cross to Resurrection to Ascension—every being (not just the man Jesus) ‘receives its beginning and end.’”[15] The story of God and the world are known only through the particular history revealed in Christ. “This is the mystery that circumscribes all the ages, and which reveals the grand plan of God, a super-infinite plan infinitely pre-existing the ages an infinite number of times. The essential Word of God became a messenger of this plan when He became man, and, if I may rightly say so, revealed Himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying in Himself the very goal for which creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.”[16]

Maximus describes the defeat of sin and the deliverance of creation as a simultaneous movement: “This mystery brings about the utter destruction of all the properties and movements contrary to nature that were introduced into nature through the primal disobedience. It also produces the perfect restoration of all the properties and movements that were previously in nature, according to which absolutely none of the principles of beings can ever be adulterated.”[17] In Maximus explanation, Christ defeated the Evil One who was holding us captive to death, and he “snatched us away” through the resurrection as he is our rest and healing and grace: “Rest, because through His brief life He abolished the law of our dire slavery to the flesh. Healing, because through His resurrection He healed us from the wound of death and corruption. Grace, because through faith He distributes adoption in the Spirit of God the Father, and the grace of divinization to each who is worthy.”[18] The deliverance from sin is a historical and practical reality, immediately addressing the human predicament, and in and through this rescue, the full reality of God is revealed.

[1] To call this sin becomes confused in modern parlance, as sin is often not connected to either the death dealing predicament that killed Christ or that which infects the human race as a murderous lie.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Maximos Constas (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press) 62.8

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 370.

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)

[5] Moltmann, 128.

[6] Moltmann, 129.

[7] Moltmann, 129-130.

[8] Moltmann, 132.

[9] Moltmann, 133.

[10] Moltmann, 142.

[11] Moltmann, 143.

[12] Moltmann, 143

[13] Moltmann, 144.

[14] As N. T. Wright puts it, “Theologies of the cross, of how God deals with sin through the death of Jesus, have not normally grappled with the larger problem of evil. Conversely, most people who have written about ‘the problem of evil’ within philosophical theology have not grappled sufficiently with the cross as part of both the analysis and the solution of that problem” (N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2006), 77). Here is the middle way between radical evil and privation theory in that radical evil is an objective possibility as part of the lie of sin but is exposed in the cross of Christ as having no ontological ground.

[15] Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (p. 90). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[16] Wood, 90.

[17] Maximus, 63.19.

[18] Maximus, 64.7.

Reconstructing the Temple in Christ: Revelation as Salvation

Jesus action in the Temple (Matthew 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; John 2:13–16) symbolizes he is the true Temple, the reality behind the Temple’s cosmic representation, that is God communing with the world, displacing death, and inaugurating life and peace (I argue here). However, if Jesus action in the Temple, and Christ himself, are reduced to the sacrifice in the Temple on the day of atonement, this misses the shift in meaning inaugurated by Christ. According to Paul (in Galatians 4), Judaism and the law are subject to the elementary principles of the cosmos. To interpret Christ through the law is to subject him to enslaving elementary principles of this world, rather than reconceiving the world in light of freedom in Christ. Paul warns Christians that by prioritizing the law, rather than Christ, they remain enslaved to the world (ta stoicheia tou kosmou), like Israel and all people. By following Torah, by observances of days, months and seasons, by concern with circumcision and food laws, by following and prioritizing Judaism, they are returning to idolatry (4:8) (enslaved to the stoicheia). The meaning of Christ is not to be fit into Judaism, the Temple, the sacrifices, rather, this world is undone in Christ. As Paul says to the Colossians, having died with Christ to ta stoicheia tou kosmou, they should not be submitting to decrees any longer (2:20-21). Is Christ sent by God to be a sacrificial victim, in which he is understood in light of the law (the sacrifice of atonement), or is the revelation of Christ providing a new, salvific, meaning. This is what is at stake in the debate around one key word, hilastērion, in one key verse, Romans 3:25.

The piece of furniture in the Temple, the Ark of the Covenant, with its covering – the Mercy Seat (hilastērion), is the semiotic point for understanding both the work of Christ and Temple symbolism in Romans 3:25. Does hilastērion here refer to the Mercy Seat, or by means of metaphor or metonym, is this verse referring to Christ as (commonly rendered) the “sacrifice of atonement” or “propitiation”? What is at stake in the rendering of this key verse and key word are two opposed ways of conceiving the work of Christ.

Hilastērion is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word kapporet, which is the cover or Mercy Seat of the ark upon which the blood was sprinkled on Yom Kippur. Hilastērion is not the sacrifice or the blood, but is the place the blood of the sacrifice is applied, though the common rendering (in verse 25) is to relate Christ directly to the sacrifice: “Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood” (ESV); or “whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” (NRSV). Contrary to this interpretation, many argue that Jesus is to be identified with the place, the Mercy Seat, and not with the sacrifice.[1] Daniel Bailey states the case bluntly, “hilasterion never designates a sacrificial victim, the NRSV lacks support.”[2] Jesus as Mercy Seat “involves more than just forgiveness based on cultic atonement. Like the old mercy seat, Jesus is the focal point of the revelation of God and his saving righteousness” and this best fits Romans 3:21-26.[3]

The Mercy Seat was the place Moses would come to speak directly to God, and God would provide an interpretation and even revision and addendum to the law. Exodus 33 describes Moses habit of pitching the Tent of Witness so he could confer with God face to face. Numbers names the place explicitly as the Seat of Mercy: “Moses went into the Tent of Witness to speak to him [God], and he heard the voice of the Lord speaking to him from above the ἱλαστήριον, which is on the Ark of Witness between the two cherubim, and he spoke to him” (Num 7.89). Numbers 12 also describes this face-to-face meeting: “When there are prophets among you, I the LORD make myself known to them in visions; I speak to them in dreams. Not so with my servant Moses; he is entrusted with all my house. With him I speak face to face—clearly, not in riddles; and he beholds the form of the LORD” (Num 12:6–8).

Though the law is already given at this point, the conversation regarded interpreting the law, and even revision of the law. As Nathan Porter shows, in response to a question, God made exceptions for rules regarding uncleanness during Passover (Num 9:7-8). God tells them that anyone who is unclean in a particular way should still keep the Passover (9.10). “In other words, God has reinterpreted the laws previously given, in accordance with the new events in Israel’s life. . .. Moses is not simply to keep the Passover according to the law (νόμον), but also according to its interpretation (σύγκρισιν; 9.2).”[4] Interpretations are provided, allowing for the changing circumstances of Israel, which already indicates the coming radical shift.

As Porter concludes, “Paul refers to Jesus as a ἱλαστήριον because he is the place where God reveals the definitive interpretation of the law to his people. The faith of Jesus Christ is the content of this revelation, the true meaning of the law.”[5] Christ is where God is revealed and the means by which access to God is provided. He is the location and means of the final and full self-disclosure. In Bailey’s translation, “God set out Jesus in his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith.”[6] It is through faith, or the faithfulness of Christ and imitation and entry into this faithfulness, that both Jews and Gentiles have put on righteousness.

“He is the righteousness of God revealed” (Rom 1:17). God’s righteousness is the content of revelation as salvation through Christ: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Rom 3:21-22). The law attested to this righteousness and yet is separate or “apart”, as God made Christ the true Mercy Seat, a revelation of his righteousness (25-26). This is not simply a rehashing of the cultic meaning of hilasterion, but its deployment in an overturning of its identity with the Jewish cult.

Through identity of Christ with the Mercy Seat, the focus is on the revelation of Christ, Jesus as the ideal sanctuary (cf. Exodus 15:17), not a fitting of the meaning of Jesus into the Temple but taking Christ as the point of meaning, with Jesus becoming the new center of worship, the new cosmic meeting point of God and humans, and the key to interpreting the law. The law was interpreted originally with the aid of the divine voice at the Mercy Seat, and now Christ is the “semiotic portal,” in the words of Anthony Barlett, through which meaning is apprehended. Bartlett renders Rom 3:25: “The redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as the portal of mercy (divine nonviolence) by his blood working through faithfulness.” As he goes on to note, “It is the simultaneous deconstruction of the Temple and the generative event of the cross.”[7] Christ is not just another Temple sacrifice, a means of propitiation or expiation, but the identity of Christ with the Mercy Seat opens a radical new semiotic portal that is salvific.

[1] Daniel P. Bailey, “Jesus as the Mercy Seat: The Semantics and Theology of Paul’s Use of Hilasterion in Romans 3: 25” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1999); Bell, “Sacrifice and Christology in Paul,” 17–20; Stökl Ben Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity, 197–205; Markus Tiwald, “Christ as Hilasterion (Rom 3:25): Pauline Theology of the Day of Atonement in the Mirror of Early Jewish Thought,” in Day of Atonement (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 189–209; Vis, “The Purification Offering,” 2012, 312–18.

[2] Bailey, from the abstract of his dissertation.

[3] Bailey, 221.

[4] Nathan Porter, “Between the Cherubim: The ‘Mercy Seat’ as Site of Divine Revelation in Romans 3.25” (Journal for the Study of the New Testament 1 –26) 7.

[5] Porter, 3.

[6] Bailey, 221.

[7] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 190.

Jesus’ Nonviolence as the Final and Full Revelation of God

Jesus is not a partial, false, or misleading revelation of God, but in Christ the reality of God is made known, where previously this reality was obscured. As Paul describes, the reality veiled by the law remains (2 Cor 3:7–18), as something inherent to Judaism obscures the reality of God, or is “a ministry of death” (3:7). However, “death’s ministry by way of scriptures engraved in stones” according to Paul, “is being abolished” (3:7 DBH). The nature of this “abolishment” (καταργουμένην, or being “wiped out” or “set aside,”) includes the deadly part of the ministry of death. The scriptures are not set aside, but death and killing, which scriptures (apart from Christ) fostered, are abolished – “in the Anointed it is abolished” (3:14). Paul describes passage from the ministry of death focused on the scriptures, to the ministry of Christ, who removes the veil and provides a new interpretive principle of life and Spirit. Which raises the question of Christ’s relationship to Judaism.

Jesus is Jewish and thoroughly situated in Judaism, and yet his teaching and life are interpreted by the Jews as an attack on Judaism and particularly an attack on the temple. The accusation against him at his trial involves his action and teaching in regard to the temple and that he claims equality with God in forgiving sins (which is to say the same thing). His association and acceptance of sinners (those beyond the pale of Jewish acceptance), his healing of the same on the sabbath, and his teaching regarding his own kingdom and kingship, struck at both the religious and political power of Judaism summed up in the temple. As E.P. Sanders has written, if Jesus claimed that his followers (the least) would be the greatest in the Kingdom and that he, and not the religious leaders in Israel spoke for God, this was a blow against the religio-political entity constituting Israel.[1] Sanders concludes, “Jesus opposed the scribes and Pharisees during his teaching activity (whether basically or only marginally), but he was killed either because the Romans (perhaps on the advice of the Jerusalem leaders) took him to be a Zealot or because he offended and threatened the Jewish hierarchy by his challenge to the temple.”[2]

His interruption of the temple sacrifices (e.g., Matt. 21:12-13) gets at the heart of both Jesus’ threat and the significance of his death. It is not that Herod’s Temple is an abuse of God’s intended purpose and Jesus hoped to clean up the economy of Herod’s temple, but the fact that the temple was temporary and only symbolic of the reality of God revealed in Christ. Jesus’ interruption of the principal function of the temple, sacrifice, points to the contingent and temporary nature of the institution (evident from the inception of sacrifice). The issue was not primarily money-changers or the selling of animals, as the sacrifices had always included these services.[3] The function of the temple was sacrifice, and Jesus disrupted the purpose of the temple as a sign of his permanent disruption of sacrifice. The temple deals in the death of animals, which did not touch upon the deadly attitude of the human heart, and Jewish response to his interruption of the killing is the motive for killing Jesus.

As Josephus points out, whoever controls the temple controls the Jews: “Whoever was master of these [fortified places] had the whole nation in his power, for sacrifices could not be made without (controlling) these places, and it was impossible for any of the Jews to forgo offering these, for they would rather give up their lives than the worship which they are accustomed to offer God” (47. XV.248).[4] Not only the ruling Jews but the Romans exercised control by maintaining ultimate jurisdiction over the temple and its precincts. As long as the Jews were making sacrifices for the Roman Emperor, goodwill was maintained. But Josephus points to the beginnings of Jewish revolt and ultimate destruction of the temple as arising with a sacrificial crisis. Eleazar persuaded the priests who were then serving “to accept no gift or sacrifice from a foreigner.” Josephus describes the result: “This action laid the foundation of the war with the Romans; for the sacrifices offered on behalf of that nation and the emperor were in consequence rejected. The chief priests and the notables earnestly besought them not to abandon the customary offering for their rulers, but the priests remained obdurate” (BF II.409.f).[5] The discontinuation of sacrifices on behalf of Rome unleashed the violence which would destroy the temple. The sacrificial crisis, in the description of René Girard, was unleashed, fulfilling the threat the Jews felt from Jesus: “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (Jn. 11:48).

Jesus’ death would hold off Rome for a period, the point made by the high priest, Caiaphas: “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (Jn. 11:50), but the deeper meaning was not that Jesus would preserve the temple for another forty years or so, only delaying the inevitable: “Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (Jn. 11:51-52). In their shortsighted understanding, the Jews understood the Romans were appeased, just as they were, through the continued sacrifices. They would begin to plot Jesus’ death from that day forward, thinking they were saving Israel, when, in fact, their action brings the purposes of the temple and Israel to a conclusion. So, the deadly aspect of the temple is exposed and ended by the murderous plots of its defenders.

Everyone understood Jesus’ action in the temple was symbolic, but it was not the symbolism of clearing (cleansing) the temple of trade, but the symbolism of destruction (the destruction of the temple and its sacrificial system). Jesus makes this clear in John, when he says “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn. 2:19). Yes, he is talking about himself (the real significance of the temple) but it was clear that temple destruction (obsolescence of the temple, at a minimum) was involved with his identity and his death and resurrection. They killed him as he threatened their sacrifices, which point to their lack of efficacy (the heart was left untouched). Eventually an army would destroy the temple, and it would take nothing less, but Jesus clearly posed this possibility within himself; not so much the literal destruction of the temple, but the relative unimportance of the temple compared to the reality.

The temple is not really the problem, anymore than the law is a problem. Judaism, the law and the temple are adequate, as long as they are understood as having a limited purpose. The early Christian community continued to meet in the temple precincts (Acts 2:46; 3:1) and Paul would even offer a sacrifice in the temple to demonstrate his good standing in Judaism (Acts 21:26). The early Christians did not consider the temple as somehow impure. Their continued association with the temple demonstrates that its symbolic importance is overridden and rendered relatively insignificant, as it did not touch upon the reality of Christ. They could remain Jewish, with all that entailed, as this did not pertain to the deeper and true significance of Christ. Yet, this relativizing of the temple and Judaism seems to have been the problem for the Jews.

The non-Christian Jews did not consider the Christian attitude toward Christ, in comparison to the law and temple, to be quite so harmless. The accusation against Stephen, which Luke notes is false, is that this “man incessantly speaks against this holy place and the Law” (Acts 6:13). An examination of Stephen’s speech, which occasions his stoning, has him pointing out from Scripture (Is. 66:1) that the temple was never to be taken as anything but symbolic (Acts 7:49). This combined with his focus on their rejection of the “Righteous One” sets them over the edge. They kill Stephen as they did Jesus, which he explains is their ancestral habit: “you are doing just as your fathers did. Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become” (Acts 7:51-52). The temple, the law, and Judaism have not resolved the problem of murder, killing, and death, but aggravate and accentuate the problem. It is a ministry of death which shows itself in the murder of the Messiah, which in Paul’s words, brings this ministry to an end.

The manner of Jesus death on the cross subverts violent sacrifice and replaces it with the nonviolent offering of love, forgiveness, and life, which Paul sums up as the ministry of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:8). Jesus did not absorb the wrath of God but the wrath and violence of men and his defeat of death or his own murder, in the manner of his death and resurrection, makes death as inconsequential as the ministry of death which killed him. It proved death and the covenant with death empty. Death as final, ultimate, eternal, in the world’s sacrificial systems, seemingly provides an “infinite” fulcrum of power to leverage life from others. Jesus explains that prior to him and his kingdom, violence is the primary means of obtaining the kingdom: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt. 11:12). The days of John the Baptist include all of those days that precede Jesus, so that kingdom building up to this time, whether that of Jews or Gentiles, is violent. As Anthony Bartlett puts it, the violent “are taking over or hijacking God’s kingdom and its meaning. This is the key. Violence as a theme and activity violates the kingdom.”[6]

It is not that Judaism did not contain its own nonviolent sort of kingdom, but this evolving peaceable kingdom was subverted by murderous impulses. According to Bartlett, Jesus’ comparison of John the Baptist to Elijah, numbers even John among the violent, who like Elijah, imagines fire from heaven (consuming the prophets of Baal) is the divine means of establishing the kingdom. Jesus has those sent from John report back that his kingdom is very different from that of the old ministry of death: “Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. ‘And blessed is he who does not take offense at Me’” (Matt. 11:4-7). Jesus’ peaceable, healing, inclusive ministry to the poor and outcasts may be grounds for even John to take offense. “Thus, the problem about accepting Jesus is the radically changed code he offered – forgiveness and nonviolence, and each entirely coincident with the other.”[7] The transition between John and Jesus must be what Paul identifies as passage from the ministry of death to the ministry of the Spirit.

Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection proves death is not nearly as fatal or powerful or necessary as was thought. Jesus shows death is not efficacious, by pouring out his life, not only in one moment of death, but in a life of sacrificial love which defeats the orientation to death (the ministry of death). Thus his followers are commanded to take up their cross, as his manner of life defeats the reign of death: “but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10); “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb. 2:14-15). Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, inclusive of the temple incident, is not then, a display of violent power but putting into effect the counter-power of non-violent deliverance from death.

The one who enters triumphantly into Jerusalem on the foal of a donkey (Matt. 21:6) is the humble (ani, which translates as “poor,” “oppressed,” or “afflicted”) king (of Zech. 9:9). The term elsewhere describes the victim of murder (Job 24:14) or the poor man who must give up his only cloak to secure a loan (Deut. 24:12-13). According to Bartlett, “In contemporary terms, we could easily say this king is unarmed, powerless, and so must bring deliverance without violence.”[8] This is the point of Zechariah enacted: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; And the bow of war will be cut off. And He will speak peace to the nations; And His dominion will be from sea to sea, And from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zech. 9”10). The gentle, meek, non-violent, king, riding on the foal of a donkey is victorious over death and violence. His ride into Jerusalem, and entry into the temple, is the sign the ministry of death represented by the temple is ended (Mk. 11:14) and the living spiritual sacrifice of the Peaceable Kingdom is inaugurated.

[1] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985) 296.

[2] Sanders, 57.

[3] Sanders, 63.

[4] Cited in Sanders, 64.

[5] Cited in Sanders, 64.

[6] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 155.

[7] Bartlett, 156.

[8] Barlett, 164.