David Bentley Hart – Forging Ploughshares

Salvation as Defeat of the Powers

The depiction of the armor of God in Ephesians (6:10-19) is often taken as a colorful illustration, which makes for great sermonizing, but is not usually considered as central to the gospel. Defeat of the powers and personal engagement in this defeat, to say nothing of the notion that Christ came to defeat evil, are often displaced by theories of the atonement focused on deliverance from the wrath of God, and limited to a legal remedy of imputed righteousness, none of which allows for primary focus on personal engagement with and defeat of evil. In this understanding, the gospel is thought to pertain to more effervescent and transcendent categories rather than depicting how it weaponizes those who bear it and wear it with a capacity to engage and defeat evil. Thus, what the early church and Paul considered the very heart of salvation is dismissed as a fun allegory, more suited to children’s choruses than serious theologizing. How this came to be is largely explained by the Constantinian shift.

Constantinianism is a form of Christianity which has abandoned Christ’s strategy for what it presumes is a more effective method. As Nathan Kerr describes it:

Constantinianism most fundamentally names a certain orientation toward the political meaning of history which is rooted in a heretical eschatology based upon a misconception of the relation of Christ to history. Most importantly, Constantinianism proceeds as if what happened in the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus had not profoundly altered history, and it provides for the church a way of acting politically in history which is not entirely determined by the lordship of Jesus Christ.[1]

According to John Howard Yoder, Constantinianism (true to the vision of Constantine), moves the sign of the cross from Golgotha to the battlefield, and conquering under this sign no longer entails taking up the cross as an instrument of self-giving sacrifice but it reinforces sacrificing one’s enemies in violence and warfare.[2] As Jordan Wood describes, Yoder “is not merely claiming that ‘Constantinianism’ tempts Christians to disobey the commands of Jesus, but that it tempts them to renounce their destiny to be like God.”[3] In Yoder’s estimate this temptation becomes reality in the undoing of the church/world distinction, such that the church disappears and the Roman State takes its place:

Before Constantine, one knew as a fact of everyday experience that there was a believing Christian community but one had to “take it on faith” that God was governing history. After Constantine, one had to believe without seeing that there was a community of believers, within the larger nominally Christian mass, but one knew for a fact that God was in control of history.[4]

Prior to Constantine the persecuted and martyred Christians marked the church state distinction, but with the Constantinian embrace of Christianity, all Romans were (mostly) Christian and the church became an indistinct part of the masses, while Rome’s rule in the name of Christ was interpreted as the arrival of the kingdom. Thus, every Roman soldier was required to be a Christian, and soldiering for Christ was sublated by literal killing and service to the State. This ideology persists in Christendom, such that Paul’s illustration is often allegorized and spiritualized away.

Four key points need to be made regarding the gospel armor in Ephesians 6 to regain the meaning and centrality of this passage:

1. If Ephesians is, as I have argued (along with the early church fathers such as Origen, and contemporary scholars such as Douglas Campbell – here) the center and summary of Paul’s gospel, then Ephesians 6 as a summary of all that Paul has said in Ephesians, encapsulates Paul’s understanding of how the gospel works to defeat evil and bring about salvation (as I demonstrate below).[5] As Joshua Greever notes, Romans 13:12–14 is a parallel text, in which Paul urges Christians to “put on the armor of light” (13:12), but then follows this up in 13:14 with “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” “suggesting that putting on the armor of light is nothing other than putting on the Lord Jesus.”[6] In other words, by encouraging them to put on this armor Paul is urging them once again to “put on Christ” and is summarizing his gospel with the added urgency to do this and thus defeat the powers.

2. Paul’s gospel is built upon resistance to evil. The genius of Walter Wink is in recognizing (and one could point to the failure of theologians such as David Hart and John Milbank, who both eloquently describe a peaceful ontology but fail to recognize) what Wink calls the third way of the gospel. This third way is not nonresistance or violent resistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. As Wink writes, “Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We are not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and yet nonviolent.”[7] Christ does not promote passive resistance or violent resistance, but Christ offers the singular solution – the gospel.

3. In Ephesians 6:10-19, Paul is describing salvation. Salvation defeats evil in the form of the powers of this world and the only way these powers are defeated is through the means provided by God. Taking Ephesians as a whole and Ephesians six, in particular, as descriptive of salvation, means salvation is not deliverance from God but deliverance from the cosmic powers of evil, death, and the devil. The captivating power, the darkening power, the death dealing power, is not the power of God but the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers (the cosmocrats), the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (6:12). The cosmic struggle is not removed from the historical, political, and earthly, and so too, the Christian engages these spiritual forces through their earthly manifestations. Ideologies and institutions manifesting the various forms of individual and corporate violence and oppression (e.g., nationalism, fascism, racism, sexism, legalism) constitute the cosmos of darkness. There is no mystery as to the power of evil (this power of death and violence is the coin of the realm of the kingdoms of darkness) undone by the gospel of peace, truth, and righteousness.

That the mode of this salvation is provided by God is made clear in the armor passages Paul is echoing. The description of God’s armor in Isaiah (which Paul must be following) and God’s saving is Israel’s only hope: “And He saw that there was no man, And was astonished that there was no one to intercede;Then His own arm brought salvation to Him, And His righteousness upheld Him” (Is 59:16). God alone can accomplish this salvation and he alone has this armor.

Why can only God save? The obvious answer is in Paul’s depiction of the power of God (equated at 6:10 ff. with the armor) found (as he has explained) in Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and reign over the powers:

what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion (Eph 1:19–21).

Paul has explained the strength of the Lord and how believers appropriate this strength, thus his command to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might” (6:10) is a reiteration of the opening of the letter. It is through the gospel that God in Christ defeats death, and the powers that depend upon death. Christ is seated at the Father’s right hand in the heavenly place and this exaltation of Christ implies the disarming of all cosmic powers, and this disarming power is to be appropriated by each Christian.

4. Salvation involves a real-world defeat of the principalities and powers in the life of the believer. There is simultaneously the corporate empowerment (implying an army), but the focus in this passage is on the individual soldier. To state it most succinctly: to be saved is to be saved from the powers as outlined in the armor passage. This is inclusive of the thought (head), action (feet), and heart (breast) of the individual. The armor weaponizes the individual against the “fiery darts of the evil one” by creating a new plan of action (feet shod with the gospel of peace), a new world of thought (the head and mind transformed by the helmet of salvation), and a new ethic and worldview (the breast plate of righteousness and the belt of truth girding up the whole outfit). Defeating the powers, though it may not be a full explanation of salvation, is synonymous or at least synchronous with salvation in that the fulness of the gospel is required (with all of its positive benefits) to counteract, as Ephesians puts it, “the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16).

Paul’s picture of salvation through the defeat of the powers focuses on the perspective of the individual soldier. This soldier has the resources of his Lord seated at the right hand of God, but he only sees the battle in the limited perspective of one directly engaged in warfare. It is only the commander on high who can survey the entire field of battle and he alone understands how this battle is to be won. One must trust that God is in control of history, as only the immediate warfare is in plain sight. The temptation is to judge this methodology ineffective and to replace the armor and weaponry of the gospel with the sword of state. The kenotic self-sacrificing power of the cross, the feet shod with the gospel of peace, the head protected by salvation, are unlikely strategies for victory by the standards of worldly power, so the soldier must have faith in his weapons and his commander or abandon the gospel. The final outcome is assured only in the eschaton.

[1] Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene: Cascade, 2009) 7. Quoted in Jordan Wood, Assessing the “Constantinian Shift”: A Defense of the Theological Question, Presented at “For the Good of the Many”: Constantine and the Edict of Milan on Its 1700th Anniversary St. Louis, September 20, 2013.

[2] The description is from John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984): 145. Quoted by Wood, 7.

[3] Wood, 7.

[4] Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 137. Quoted in Wood, 4.

[5] Throughout his description of the armor, Paul is appealing to his former key points (a few examples must suffice): “the strength of his might” of 6:10 is defined by resurrection and ascension at 1:19; “put on the whole armor of God” has its parallel explanation at 4:24, “put on the new self”; “the schemes of the devil” (6:11) are explained at 4:14 as “deceitful schemes” and the Ephesians are warned “give no opportunity to the devil” at 4:27; the first three pieces of armor—peace, truth and righteousness (6:13-15) are defined earlier by Christ. Truth is directly equated with Jesus (4:21), and truth and righteousness are found in the one new man created and embodied in Christ (4:24; cf. 2:15), and the original preacher and resource of the gospel of peace is Jesus (2:17); the defeat of the rulers and authorities of 6:12 has been explained at 1:21, as Christ (resurrected and ascended) is far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, inclusive at 2:2 of the authoritative ruler of the air and at 3:10 the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. For an exhaustive list Joshua M. Greever, The Armor of God, the Gospel of Christ, and Standing Firm against the ‘Powers’ (Ephesians 6:10–20); [JBTS 5.1 (2020): 72–89].

[6] Ibid, 84.

[7] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (p. 101). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World: The Defeat of Evil as the Revealing of the Mystery

Paul describes Christ as revealing the mystery which has remained closed to every previous generation of humankind (Eph. 3:5). Matthew pictures Christ as fulfilling the words of the prophet: ”I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35). René Girard explains that this mystery hidden since the foundation of the world is the mystery of scapegoating, that which organized primitive culture and religion and which controlled violence. The violence unleashed on the innocent victim served to channel violence to a singular sacrifice (rather than unleashing violence of all against all) and it made of the scapegoat the sacred deliverer, delivering the sacrificers from whatever plague or sickness they imagined threatened. And as Girard explains, the scapegoat really did deliver from uncontrolled violence, and allowed the crops to be planted and the society to survive, rather than succumbing to all-out violence.

The efficacy of the scapegoat, however, depended on its true function being a compounded mystery. In the first instance, the innocence of the scapegoat is not a possibility that poses itself in the original murder, but then the murder itself is obscured as the myth of the scapegoat as a sacred deliverer hides the murder. Those who kill the scapegoat do not know what they are doing, first in the blind rage in which they kill the scapegoat and then in the myth which hides the murder. The killers are blind (they are doing it but obscuring the fact) to the murder and then to the sacralization of the innocent victim. The end of the story, in Girard’s telling, is that the innocent victim Jesus, speaks for the oppressed scapegoat and reveals the scapegoating mechanism as that which stands behind all sacrificial religion, and he makes impossible the mystery, that up to his exposing it, stood at the center of religion and society.

Girard’s theory, for many, provides a complete theory of the atonement and an omnicompetent explanation of the work of Christ. Whether Girard saw it that way may be beside the point, but it is no critique of his theory to suggest that what he describes is a pattern that repeats itself in a variety forms, not limited to sacrificial violence but characteristic of the lie that stands behind all violence. That is, the mystery of which Paul speaks and which Jesus exposes, is a mystifying lie, an obscuring of origins, a false dialectic, which stands behind sacrificial religion but which also stands behind all human violence at an individual and corporate level. The equation of violence and power is the original form of the lie, that expresses itself in the scapegoating mechanism (among other forms of the lie). Violence not only reifies and deifies the scapegoat, but this is always the work of violence. The larger principle is not simply that the violence directed against an innocent scapegoat sacralizes and reifies the scapegoat, but all violence “mystically” reifies.

In fact, Girard begins his theory with a reexamination of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex, which illustrates the point that the violence of the superego directed against the ego (death drive) reifies the split between the ego and superego, creating the registers of the Subject. The superego, in the voice of the father or the oppressive force of the law, is directed against the ego and the tripartite (ego, superego, id) dynamic is “born” (which is the wrong word, as this is a living death in Freud’s estimate). But what is to be noted is that the oppressive violence of the id, channeled through the superego, taking the ego as its victim, gives rise to the very notion of a self. Even if one rejects this Freudian picture of the dynamic of self, it illustrates the point, of how a lying violence gives birth to a fictional “reality.” Karl Marx’s picture of the functioning of capital, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s picture of the dialectic of life and death or something and nothing, and Peter Berger’s explanation of religion, all illustrate the same point.

As Berger explains, the phenomenon of religion depends upon a mystifying lie:

Whatever may be the “ultimate” merits of religious explanations of the universe at large, their empirical tendency has been to falsify man’s consciousness of that part of the universe shaped by his own activity, namely, the socio-cultural world. This falsification can also be described as mystification. The socio-cultural world, which is an edifice of human meanings, is overlaid with mysteries posited as non-human in their origins.[1]

In Berger’s depiction, the dialectic process of society consists of three steps – externalization, objectivation, and internalization.

Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, both in the physical and the mental activity of men. Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this activity (again both physical and mental) of a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves. Internalization is the reappropriation by men of this same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness.[2]

Berger concludes, “It is through externalization that society is a human product. It is through objectivation that society becomes a reality sui generis. It is through internalization that man is a product of society.”[3] The notion that religion or society is a sui generis or self-constituting construct blocks all questions of genealogy and simply poses the social world as reality itself.

Berger explains he is appropriating Marx and Hegel, who illustrate this three-step process in regard to capital and the human psyche. As he notes, “The terms ‘externalization’ and ‘objectivation’ are derived from Hegel (Entaeusserung and Versachlichung), are (sic) understood here essentially as they were applied to collective phenomena by Marx.”[4] Capital is externalized in paper and coins, objectivized as intrinsically valuable, and internalized as a prime marker of value. Hegel, Marx, and Freud are each building upon a constricted Judeo-Christian understanding. So, for example, Isaiah’s picture of the idolater (Is. 44:15-18), carving the idol with one half of a piece of wood (externalization), turning and cooking his lunch with the other half (allowing for the obscuring objectivation), and then turning back and bowing to the carved piece (internalization) as a god captures the same movement.

Religion is accounted for in this process as the obscuring or mystification of the process – the disconnect between externalization and objectivation. “The sacred or numinous begin as perceptions ‘externalized,’ projected upon the skies (thus sky-gods are recognized) and upon persons and natural objects (hence shamans and sacred groves and springs). The externalized sacred objects thereby acquire status as factors in social life (so magic, incantation, and worship arise).”[5] The religionist, like the idolater, does not recognize he is the one shaping the idol and reifying or absolutizing what is essentially a projection (a product of the imagination).

The religionist does on a corporate level what Freud describes is happening on an individual level. The Oedipal-self obscures the fact that it is the engineer arranging the oppressive self-relation as the religionist obscures or falsifies the fact that religion is a projection (a necessary sacred canopy) of the socio-cultural world. The child externalizes its own image as seen in the mirror, then it objectivizes or reifies the image as perceived through the projection of the superego, then the internal life is made up of this dialectic between ego and superego.

As indicated, Berger, Marx, and Freud, are building upon the dialectic first worked out by Hegel. An easy entry into Hegel is provided by Slavoj Žižek’s understanding of Hegel as building upon the cogito of René Descartes. Descartes’ isolation of himself in the “heated room” and reduction of the real world to a category of doubt and his reconstruction of that world, up to and including God, is pictured by Hegel, according to Žižek as following the course of every Subject:

when Hegel determines madness as withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul into itself, its ‘contraction’. … Was this withdrawal into itself not accomplished by Descartes in his universal doubt and reduction of the cogito … which … involves a passage through the moment of radical madness? … That is to say, the withdrawal into self, the cutting off of the links to the Umwelt, is followed by the construction of a symbolic universe that the subject projects onto reality as a kind of substitute – formation destined to recompense us for the loss of the immediate, presymbolic real.[6]

The passage into subjectivity involves the “ontological necessity of madness”… the mad gesture of radical withdrawal from reality that opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution.”[7] There is a sacrifice of one world and subjection to an oppressive symbolic order (the law has a totalizing effect). To maintain that the product of thought is objectively true, or to fuse thought and being, involves a form of madness that is at once so universal so as to be nearly inaccessible or a complete mystery.

As David Bentley Hart describes the Hegelian system:

the system in its entirety, depending on the angle from which it is viewed, is susceptible of every possible characterization or interpretation: disembodied abstraction or radical empiricism, mystification or disenchantment, absolute idealism or dialectical materialism, Mandarin detachment or bourgeois conformity, historical essentialism or essential historicism, a “totalizing metaphysics” or the ultimate “deconstruction of metaphysics,” and so on and so on.[8]

There is a seeming impossibility of getting beyond the all encompassing system described by Hegel, but this, I believe is precisely Paul’s depiction of what is accomplished in Christ. That is, the obscuring of origins through an originary violence or an originary hostility is precisely the dialectic Paul pictures as exposed by Christ.

Paul, in Ephesians, has in mind the peculiar dialectic of Jew and Gentile which creates a dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14), but which organizes the Jewish world (2:15: “which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances”). The enmity of the law which creates the fabric of this fictional construct is not a reality (created by God) but a human system built upon human enmity and violence (2:15 – Christ abolishes the enmity in his flesh, which is not from God but is cured by God in Christ). For a Jew, Gentiles are nothing at all and Jewishness is over and against the nothingness (of the Gentile) as an absolute something. The organizing hostility for Jews and Gentiles alike, something on the order of the sacrificial violence described by Girard, is undone in Christ: “to be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph. 3:6). This is the archetypical mystery revealed as Judaism depended upon this division, and Christ is reconstituting humanity, showing the divine purpose in creation: “by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity” (Eph. 2:15–16). Jewishness depended upon division and enmity and it was from this hostility, marked by the dividing wall in the temple that the religion, rightly or wrongly, was conceived. But Judaism is a case in point of the obscurity of every culture and religion founded upon a dialectic (inside/outside, near/far, citizen/alien, something/nothing).

In Paul’s depiction, there is a cosmic order of darkness dispelled in this revealing of the mystery. God’s will, God’s eternal purposes for the cosmos, have been revealed in Christ: “To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things” (Eph. 3:8). The purposes of creation, once obscured behind the mystery of enmity and division are now revealed in a unifying vision in which all things are being incorporated into God: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4–6).

The mystery revealed in Christ is the exposure of the lie, which pictures reality as a violent dualism (e.g., divine/human, creator/creature, nothing/something, life/death, Jew/Gentile, ego/superego, immanent Trinity/economic Trinity, heaven/earth, transcendent/immanent). The mystery revealed is an exposure of the mystification of evil, dependent upon alienation, dialectic, and dualism. The picture of God’s purposes worked out in Christ brings together absolute difference into a unified whole:

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.” In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. Eph. 4:7-10

[1] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Anchor; Reprint edition, 1990), 90.

[2] Berger, 3-4.

[3] Berger, 4.

[4] Berger, 21.

[5] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1966) 4-25. As summarized by James McClendon, Witness: Systematic Theology Volume 3 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000) 28.

[6]Slavoj Zizek, F.W.J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 8-9.

[7] Ibid.

[8] David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (p. 70). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

The Ongoing Creation Ex-Nihilo of Humanity

Is it possible to glimpse the nothing from out of which creation came and is coming? I do not mean in the Buddhist or Heideggerian sense in which nothing is an ontological category – a necessity for the something. The Christian nothing is not a dialectical necessity that accompanies all that is something, though the primordial darkness can only break through in the cracks of what is. It is not the ontological empty space into which God inserted creation. Christian nothing, or the ex-nihilo, is not something that precedes, grounds, or serves as a point of expansion; rather, the Christian nothing from out of which God called creation bears no quality and does not show itself other than through dissolution, absence, and death. The nothing may take on a dynamic, but it is the dynamic of destruction. Creation ex-nihilo that is, opens the possibility of evil as the return to the nothing from out of which creation arose. On the other hand, to picture creation as anything less than having an infinite destiny (theosis or divinization) makes of creation a dynamic of nothingness. Existence as something less than union with the divine entails turning creation over to the ex-nihilo from out which it arose. Creation without final cause and purpose which sinks back into the oblivion from which it arose is a creation dominated, not by God, but by nothing. On the other hand, a creation (especially of the rational kind) which is continually called forth from its beginning into exultant praise and participation in the divine life, fully and forever sheds itself of the remnants or possibility of the nothingness from which it arose.

The play and possibility of the nothing – the possibility of evil – is perhaps best understood and approached in Paul’s depiction of the dissolution of the dynamic of death in the believer. The “I” that is crucified with Christ is subject to dissolution as there is a dynamic taken up with the human interplay between the ego (a transliteration of Paul’s word for “I”), the law and what Paul calls the “body of death,” all of which is undone in Paul’s depiction of baptism (Romans 6:1-6). On the other hand, in the psychoanalytic approach to Paul there is the demonstration of how this nothingness – the deception of sin – can play a central and competing role in human life.

In Slavoj Žižek’s picture, the Subject arises from out of nothing, with the implication that this nothing precedes the Subject and is the primary “substance” constituting the Subject. In Žižek’s atheistic creation ex-nihilo (a creation from nothing) God and truth, subject and object, are preceded by death and nothingness, which he does not hesitate to call evil, but it is out of this originary evil that the Subject arises. However, there is only one step from Paul to Žižek, if it is understood that Žižek is expanding upon Paul’s sinful, deceived Subject.

For Žižek, evil is subject to manipulation but, inasmuch as it is prime reality, it is not something that can be finally and completely overcome; nor would one want to overcome it, as this nothingness is the only possible ground for the absolute freedom of the Subject. Absolute freedom and autonomy, the point of departure for German idealism (Žižek’s key resource), cannot, by definition, be constrained by a prior Good. The absolutely free, autonomous Subject can be preceded by nothing, and this is the Nothing and negation Žižek links to death drive (the primary dynamic in the Subject).

Even for God, in the depiction of Friedrich Schelling, if nothingness precedes and comes after God or perhaps God’s creation, then nothingness is the predominant ontological condition. The passage from nothing (the eternal nothing without beginning or end) to something (the beginning of God) is an act that is eternally repeated in the passage from eternity to time. In other words, everything, including God, ultimately arises from and tends towards this absolute nothing. In any case, even if it is only the human Subject that arises from nothing and returns to that nothing, then Žižek’s description fits with a so-called “Christian vision” in regards to most of the human race (in Augustinianism and Calvinism).

The theological import of this is that evil is a necessary part of the good. The gap in reality – nothingness, sin, death drive, and evil – is not overcome but accounted for and accommodated. Evil is not finally and fully subject to the good but the good arises from and is ultimately subject to the evil which precedes it. The Fall is at the origin of the Subject, so that transgression, sin, and evil, precede the very possibility of the “good.” In biblical terms, the very possibility of the “knowledge of good and evil” (of the symbolic) in Genesis is preceded by the serpent, temptation, and death.

The death of Christ, in this atheistic theology, does not overcome the gap but suspends the desire to overcome the reality of death and nothingness. The Hegelian notion of the “death of God” in Christ amounts to the death of the “transcendent Beyond” and this brings about the opening of reality from within (Metastases of Enjoyment, 39). The dynamic of nothingness (death drive), for Žižek, is necessarily at the foundation of subjectivity and its reconstitution, as it is in and through the death drive that “Nothingness is counted as Something” which gives rise to the Subject (Ticklish Subject , 157). Ultimately death or nothingness is the ontological (un)reality over which the Lacanian Subject is constructed (and which is the motive force behind the sacrifices in the name of the law (subjection to the punishing Superego).

What if this, though, is a true picture of the dynamic of the lie that is displaced in Christ? Then it is possible to speak of self-participation – even a freedom of choice – in the creation of the Subject. That is, we are responsible for our own creation or lack thereof, as we can name the nothingness which clings to us and out of which we are arising.

This nothingness or dynamic of death is the creative force in a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame, but the danger is that a Christianity that sees creation as subsumed by or returning to the nothing (in whole or part) is giving ontological priority to the ex-nihilo. Where reality is not finally and fully grounded in the divine it is not clear that any finite creature “exists” in the fulness of the term. Especially in the case of the rational or spiritual creature, how can this rationality or spirituality be fully so apart from having as its final end participation in the reality of God. The fully spiritual and rational creature then, can be said to continue the most direct role of co-creator (the responsibility assigned in the dominion mandate of Genesis) through direct participation, as David Hart puts it, “in their own origination from nothingness.”[1] To quote Hart at length:

And only by this primordial assent does humanity in its eternal “multi-hypostatic” reality— as the eternal Adam of the first creation— freely receive its being from its creator: and this even though that assent becomes, on the threshold between the heavenly Aeon and time, a recapitulation of the Fall, an individuating acceptance of entry into the world under the burden of sin, such that every soul is answerable for and somehow always remembers that original transgression. In that moment, the spiritual creature concurs in its own creation, and God hands the creature over to its own free self-determination. Here, naturally, the language of past and future can devolve all too easily into a mythology of individual guilt historically “prior” to any person’s actual life; but, of course, there was no fall “back then” in historical time, either for the race or for the individual. Rather, the Fall “happened” only as belonging to the temporal unfolding of that eternal assent. It “happened”— or, rather, is happening— only as the lingering resistance of nothingness to that final joyous confession, the diminishing residue of the creature’s emergence ex nihilo. For no creature can exist as spirit in God except under the condition of having arisen from nothingness in order to grow into his or her last end. That passage from nothingness into the infinite, which is always a free intentionality toward a final cause, is the very structure of created spiritual beings. They could not be spirit otherwise.[2]

This is not the self-positing “I” of the Cartesian cogito but is precisely the defeat and undoing of this psychoanalytic or Pauline “I” in that there is a relinquishing or willing deconstruction of this Subject. The “I” that would posit itself through itself, freely and intentionally gives up on this project so as to be “in Christ” and thus through the Spirit to be joined to the Father. The Oedipal “I” or the Cartesian “I” would be its own father or originator. It is the free and willing abandonment of this project – the project of the Fall engaged by every human – that the Subject in its fullness emerges as one assenting to the eternal end, the continuation and completion of creation ex-nihilo.

A fundamental way of summarizing this understanding is the recognition that the play between life and death within the human creature is directly concerned with the life/Spirit given by God or a turning away from this Spirit so as to engage in death. Irenaeus (as I have shown here) describes the necessity of the Spirit of God, not as a force apart from man but as molding and blending the handiwork of God: “But when the Spirit here blended with the soul is united to God’s handiwork, the man is rendered spiritual and perfect because of the outpouring of the Spirit, and this is he who was made in the image and likeness of God.”[3] That is, the Genesis account is only completed through the active participation of God in the man as Spirit.

While all three elements, body, soul and Spirit, constitute the image of God in which man was created, Irenaeus’ (who is following Paul) use of Spirit (sometimes seeming to refer to God and man simultaneously) portrays the perfection of full co-participation between the divine and human while also allowing for a diminishment of participation: “One of these does indeed preserve and fashion (the man) – – this is the Spirit; while as to another it is united and formed–that is the flesh; then comes that which is between these two–that is the soul, which sometimes indeed, when it follows the Spirit, is raised by it, but sometimes it sympathizes with the flesh, and falls into carnal lusts.”[4] The Spirit “preserves and fashions” the man, so that there is no human apart from Spirit. The Spirit is not something added to man, and yet there is the possibility, in following lusts, that the role of the Spirit is diminished.

Hart, depicts how this beginning and end calls for willing surrender through free participation:

This is the ultimate reason that the first moment of the creature’s being is at once a vocation issued by God and yet also an act of free self-positing on the part of the creature. Just as the Holy Spirit is not some limited psychological individual consciousness possessed of an isolated self, who is first himself and who then only latterly assents to the Father’s self-utterance in the Logos, but is instead hypostatic as God’s own eternal assent to and delight in his own essence as manifested in the Son; so also the spirit in us is nothing but a finite participation in that eternal and infinite act of divine affirmation and love. The spiritual creature exists as always, in its origin and its end, wholly surrendered to God. And the chiasmus of the Spirit in us, in our creation and deification, is always the Spirit rejoicing in the love of Father and Son. The inmost reality of the spirit in each of us, that is, is nothing but that act of joyous accord with and ecstatic ascent into God.[5]

As he explains, “every creaturely spirit freely wills its own existence” but this is not a freedom exercised apart from God or who the creature is in God. “The eternal Yes of God to the creature is always already the creature’s eternal Yes to its creator, for the latter exists only within the eternal Yes of the Father to his own image in the Son, in the delight of the Spirit; and this is the Son’s Yes to the will of the Father; and this is also the Spirit’s eternal Yes to the Father’s full expression in the Son; and, in the end, these are all one and the same Yes.”[6]

There is a possible Yes and No to the unfolding creation and completion of the Subject in the life of the Spirit. The possibility of the ex-nihilo may threaten but for Paul the Subject precedes and exceeds the possibility of death and the constraints of the “I.” There is not only the possibility but the necessity, (due to the goodness of God) of a Subject apart from sin (the fall back into nothingness). A Christianity which does not acknowledge the end of creation in participation in the divine (divinization, theosis, apocatastasis) may take on the look of an atheism in which Subjectivity requires death, sin and nothingness as its primary “substance.”

[1] David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (Kindle Locations 2265-2268). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Hart, 2269-2281.

[3] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, Chapter 6, paragraph 1.

[4] AH 5.6.1

[5] Hart, 2324-2328.

[6] Hart, 2330-2334.

Can John Deliver Us from the Modern Gnostics?

Charles Hill’s examination of the reception of the Johannine corpus demonstrates that modern reception of John is more a reflection of the modern theological situation than it is a historical reality about the early reception of the Johannine literature. That is, the “Johannophobia” that Hill traces is a projection of the modern period upon the past which speaks of the modern fear or failure in regard to John.[1] In turn, the supposed gnostic “Johannophilia,” which Hill debunks, describes how modern reception of John has amounted to a reception of the book on the basis of a gnostic sensibility. My hypothesis is that the fear and love of the book of John, as Hill finds it in the early church, is precisely the opposite of what has been projected and this is because moderns tend to fear or reject a true reading of John and have succumbed to a gnostic reading. That is, the heretics feared and avoided the book and the orthodox made it central but in the modern period the book is mostly reduced to a heretical reading as the basis for its acceptance.

Part of the evidence that this might be the case is in the universal consensus which has developed around John in the modern period. As Hill describes it, before the Valentinians appropriated the Gospel through their novel interpretation of the Prologue, John was offensive to the heretics in its emphasis on the deity of Christ and the eyewitness testimony to this effect.[2] Yet, in modern scholarship the opposite has been presumed to be the case:

As is apparent from this review, the phenomenon of orthodox Johannophobia has been for several decades a generally recognized principle among scholars working in Johannine studies, and in New Testament and early Christian history. It has been endorsed by most of the trusted names in Johannine studies, one of whom declares it to be supported by ‘all our evidence’. Many of these scholars shaped Johannine studies, and New Testament studies in general, in the last half of the twentieth century. Others are highly qualified and respected historians of early Christianity. Their work is quite naturally relied upon by other Johannine scholars and by specialists in related fields. When one scholar wrote that ‘It is well known that the orthodox were unwilling to quote the Fourth Gospel in the second century, for it was much the preserve of heretics’, she was stating what is, in the mainstream of the academic community, utterly non-controversial.[3]

Hill meticulously refutes this modern consensus and concludes:

Surely one of the most striking results of this investigation, but not of this only, for other studies have been at least tending towards the same conclusion, is that the major use of the Fourth Gospel among heterodox or gnostic groups up until the Valentinians Ptolemy, Heracleon, and Theodotus, is best described as critical or adversarial. This exposes and should correct the tendency of earlier scholarship to assume that any Johannine borrowings or allusions in gnostic literature are evidence of gnostic/Johannine affinity, or of a common family history.[4]

But Hill leaves his readers wondering how modern scholarship and modern sensibility could make such a mega-blunder.

After Hill’s book and the earlier work of Martin Hengel, according to John Behr, the idea that John’s Gospel was viewed with suspicion by the orthodox church should be a dead letter,[5]but the fact that this notion has been given life and continues to survive seems to speak of the strange theological situation in which we find ourselves. The major influence which John exercised on the early church is largely read out of the history of modern scholarship, and one can only speculate that this is due to the silencing of John in the modern period. This silencing is not an overt exclusion of the Johannine literature but is an exclusion of a Johannine theological approach.

My own, admittedly anecdotal, witness to this silencing of John comes from teaching John to undergraduates. John’s theological approach to the life of Christ, as I am sure I inadequately presented it, either opened students to a new way of reading the Bible or it made them angry. Students attenuated to a flat reading of the life of Christ through a flat reading of the synoptics were not used to finding the sort of theological significance and depth which are unavoidable in John. The strange yet blatant theological echoes of the Hebrew scriptures, the linking of the divine name and action to Jesus’ miracles and identity, the cosmic dimensions of recreation through Christ, the time-bending apocalyptic nature of John, the peculiar theological focus upon the manner of the death of Christ (an accomplished fact that pervades the Gospel), the implication of all the apostles in the sin of Judas as definitive of darkness, etc. etc.; these themes either created excitement or brought out defensiveness. In other words, the Johannophobia which Hill traces among academics is present at a popular level among ordinary believers.

John is not normally read in the universally accepted manner in which the early church read him and this serves to blunt his message, which is directed at the heresy which has the modern church in its grip. The flat reading of the Logos as the disincarnate Christ, the heaven and earth duality, the legal abstractions which pass for atonement theory, the focus on the individual, the elitism of the saved, the focus on souls going to heaven, and the denigration of this world and the flesh amounts to a form close to Gnosticism. Is the peculiar scholarly reception of John and the popular misreading of John a reflection of the fact that the modern church has succumbed to gnostic tendencies against which John writes?

The offence of John against gnostic sensibilities is the focus on the incarnation or the divine Word becoming flesh. The Gnostics believed matter was evil and it would be impossible for the divine to become flesh. The Word made flesh and the high view of the deity of Jesus made John repulsive to the early Gnostics. Only disembodied spirit could be divine and only those who, through special knowledge linked to an original divine spark, gained gnostic knowledge.

What renders John inoffensive in the modern period is a downplaying of John’s anti-gnostic themes. The incarnation is muted in modern sensibility as focus is put upon the pre-incarnate Christ. In turn, the goodness of creation or the sense in which it is a fit-dwelling for God, is displaced by the notion that redemption amounts to abandonment of God’s creation (rather than recreation, as portrayed in John). Focus on individual assent of the believer to a doctrinal formula accords with disembodied gnosis as adequate for salvation, which also fits with a focus on the inward and “spiritual” as standing over and against the outward and fleshly. This all fits with the peculiar elitism of the Gnostics (of the first and 21st century): only a special few are saved and most are damned and there is no cosmic salvation or cosmic recreation in gnostic-like readings of John.

What Hill finds, in contrast to a phobia of John in the early church, is the profound influence of John in every sector of the early church:

After the Johannine Epistles, the influence of this Gospel is evident in the writings or oral teachings of Ignatius, Polycarp, ( John) the Elder, Aristides, Papias, the longer ending of Mark, the later portions of the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistula Apostolorum, the Ad Diognetum, all before about 150. These represent the Great Church in at least Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. The witness of Papias and his sources is of particular magnitude, as it seems to represent a substratum of tradition about the four Gospels which became widely diffused. This witness is consistent with the eminence of the four Gospels which is assumed by the longer ending of Mark, well before the comments made by Irenaeus in the 180s.[6]

Hill goes on to describe what must have been the universal appeal and shaping force of John in the early church. John’s “strong representation among the surviving papyrus fragments of early Christian writings” and the very early testimony of Aristides (in the 120s) and Justin (in the 150s) that the reigning emperor read John. Hill maintains that, “By the middle of the century, when Justin Martyr, Tatian, Valentinus, Ptolemy, and Hegesippus were in Rome, this Gospel must have been quite a well-known and prominent Christian authority.”[7] Hill argues, contrary to the received consensus, “there is no good evidence that any of the writers of the Great Church opposed or rejected the Gospel according to John in the second century, least of all for being gnostic or docetic, and not even for being inauthentic.”[8]

He points to the early catacomb paintings in Rome (around 200 A.D.) which testify to the unique influence of John in depictions of Jesus as the good shepherd (John 10), the conversation with the Samaritan woman (from John 4), the healing of the paralytic (from John 5), and the raising of Lazarus (from John 11). The use of “good shepherd” chalices (in the third century), and popularity of depictions of the wedding at Cana and the healing of the man born blind in baptistries, in Christian tombs, in glass and ceramic art, and in mosaics, testify to the popularity of the Gospel of John.[9] Far from a heretical love of John and an orthodox fear, Hill concludes that John was a “stubborn obstacle to docetism” or the denial that Christ was fully human. John preserved the orthodox church against the heretics, rather than providing an opening for their split between the humanity and deity of Jesus.

John’s focus on the eternality and deity of Jesus, as described in the work of Herbert McCabe, Robert Jenson, John Behr, and Rowan Williams, has been largely subdued if not lost in the modern sensibility, and this may account for the peculiar gnostic-like malaise of the church. The failure of Johannine scholarship seems to be the manifestation of a broader failure of appreciation of the theological focus of John which preserved the orthodoxy of the first church. What we find in the early church, and what has been largely lost in the modern period, is the centrality of the Gospel of John.

Maybe the prime representative of a Johannine theological approach, today condemned as a heretic, is Origen of Alexandria. My point in turning to Origen is to suggest that what has been lost in the modern church, in its flat reading of John, is best represented in the theological richness of Origen, which is today an understanding often reviled and repudiated.

As Ronald Heine describes in his introduction to Origen’s commentary on John, “Perhaps no book of the Bible, certainly none of the New Testament, was so suited to Origen’s exegetical approach as the Gospel of John. In his Commentary on the Gospel of John we have the greatest exegetical work of the early church.”[10] Ambrose directed Origen to write on John, as he had been saved out of Valentinianism by Origen, and apparently the Gospel had become key in his understanding. Origen’s spiritual exegesis of Scripture takes its inspiration from John and Paul. He referred to them as the “princes” of the New Testament and he refers to John as the “high priest” of religion of the Logos, as it was John who attained to a spiritual vision. He credits Revelation 14:6 as inspiring his understanding of the spiritual gospel, and his reading of John provides an abundance of examples of this spiritual reading.

In the commentary he will refer (in Book 6) to the crossings of the Jordan as a type of baptism; to the paschal lamb as a type of the crucified Christ (Book 10); to the tabernacle and the temple as types of Christ (Book 10.60); and in his discussion of John 2:13 he proceeds from the Passover in Exodus to Christ to I Corinthians 5:7 to Jesus words in 6:53-56 regarding eating his flesh and blood.[11] Origen finds Jesus Christ in the Law and the Prophets and is the center of his interpretation of every book of the Hebrew scriptures. In other words, Origen sets the pattern in a theological interpretation, inspired by John, that would become common in the early church.

Eusebius (260-339 A. D.) calls him the greatest Christian theologian, while Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215 A. D.) calls him the true gnostic. Gregory of Nyssa considers Origen his theological master while Gregory of Nazianzus demonstrates a primary reliance of Origen. According to David Bentley Hart, it is Origen and Origen’s reading of the Bible that will exercise the key influence on the early church:

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the Church how to read Scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought.[12]

And as Hart continues, it is Origen who is most disgracefully treated as a heretic by both East and West.

What is lost to us in the critical reception of Johannine literature in modern scholarship and in the flat reading of John with its gnostic-like presumptions, is the richness of the theological program inspired by John and passed along by Origen. Apart from the recovery of John’s theological reading it is not clear that deliverance from modern Gnosticism is possible.

[1] Charles Hill, The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[2] Hill, 444.

[3] Hill, 56.

[4] Hill, 466.

[5] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 43.

[6] Hill, 465.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Hill, 468.

[9] Hill, 469.

[10] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John Books 1-10, Translated by Ronald E. Heine (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 3.

[11] Origen, 14-15.

[12] David Bentley Hart, “Saint Origen,” in First Things (October 2015). Thank you Matt for the reference and for your great enthusiasm for Origen.

A Review of David Bentley Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse

As I have previously described (here), it may be hard to trace the survival of the fullness of the gospel in particular periods of church history, and to assume that it is fully traceable historically or institutionally (in the tradition) would be a category mistake. It would be to assume that the victors are capable of writing a history of losers (those who take up the cross). At the same time, to presume Constantine or the Dark Ages or American Evangelicalism wiped out any trace of the authentic gospel, presumes Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Protestantism, with their various institutions and formulations, are the sole purveyors of the gospel. I assume that the word of the cross is, as Paul describes it, a suspension of the symbolic order in which the law and its oppressive force is rendered inactive. The symbolic order is that place where things are thought to endure, where history is written, where people make their mark, where institutions reign, and it is where order is maintained through an established hierarchy (the arche of this world), but this is precisely what the gospel is not.

David Bentley Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse,[1] concurs with my understanding that the truth of the gospel continues to unfold, but not necessarily in ways that are traceable through history and doctrine. As he points out, his work may not provide any immediate practical benefits in sorting out the paradox that the teaching of the New Testament and the institutions and doctrines which claim to be passing on this teaching may be (and often are) in complete contradiction. But the book, in pointing to a future eschatological coherence, does an important work in indicating the form of salvation in which that coherence would consist. In turn, the attempt to paper over the contradictions is in danger of misconstruing salvation (at least this is implicit in Hart’s argument). For example, the drive to unify church history and doctrine in a coherence it does not intrinsically possess is in danger of making salvation a matter of forensics, a matter of adhering to authority, a matter completely summed up in doctrine and history, and under the domain of various institutional manifestations and authorities.

Hart nowhere states it this plainly, as his is a concerted effort to imagine an open-ended element to every distortion in which there is more than meets the eye. The “truest in tradition” has not yet been “delivered over” – so there must be the “yet more” consisting of “the nimbus of the unseen that shines all around the seen, a boundless excess of meaning that lies beyond the scope of every formulation of the faith” (pp. 1632-1636). To foreclose too quickly the contradictory elements in history and doctrine is to miss out on the unfolding nature of the truth of Christ which will only be fully realized in the eschaton.

Hart provides an abundance of examples indicating that what is at stake in embracing his open-ended take on tradition is the understanding of salvation. Negatively, a salvation that devolves to “forensic justification” and “a happy hereafter” will have missed the story of “a real union of creatures with God himself” brought about through the mediation of the Son and Spirit, in which “God became human that humans might become God” (p. 123). Positively, salvation as theosis bears an unfolding and not yet realized coherence which relinquishes final trust in the Christian tradition’s historical forms, the failures of which can be fully admitted, such that “believers might surely rejoice to some substantial degree in the collapse of Christendom” (p. 172).

Part of the problem is that the constraints of his project do not allow for a clear definition of either Christendom or the exact nature and extent of its failure. From an Anabaptist perspective, one need not wait for the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the modern nation state, the collapse of the so-called Christian empires, to declare Christendom collapsed – Christendom is itself a collapse (of the gospel). But Hart’s point is to define the tradition in such a way as to escape this conclusion while at the same time acknowledging the failures of Christendom. It is not clear that he succeeds.

He acknowledges “even the most prominent features of the faith were altered almost beyond recognition by the imperial culture into which the faith was integrated from the time of Constantine on.” According to sound historical judgment “essential elements of the Christianity of the first generations became at best accidental to the Christianity of the next few centuries, and then as often as not entirely absent from the Christianity that ensued in the next few centuries after that, as social, political, and ideological conditions shifted around the communities of believers” (pp. 534-538). The Constantinian shift would end the early communalism of shared goods and condemnation of accumulated wealth and private property. It would end proscriptions against military service, participation in capital punishment, disdain for those who lord it over others and for those who dwell in palaces and wear fine clothes (pp. 538-551).

He suggests that what we call Christianity in contemporary America cannot possibly be made to fit into the original understanding of the faith, with its commitments to a “comfortable bourgeois cult of civic respectability and personal prosperity, or to the free-market capitalist orthodoxies and ridiculous gun-obsessions and barbarous nation-worship . . . (even among many Catholics and Orthodox).” One would be hard pressed to say “how any of this (and similar departures throughout church history) could truly be regarded as a single continuous faith, rather than merely a series of historical ruptures, divagations, accidental sequelae, and frequent total inversions” (pp. 552-557).

His conclusion makes one wonder what can be said to have survived of the original faith. The “entire way of life” which was once the essence of being Christian, with “its contempt for wealth and its civic dereliction and its hostility to the mechanisms of power by which societies and nations and empires thrive and survive and perpetuate themselves, is the very way of life to which most Christian culture throughout the centuries has proved implacably hostile.” Modern Christians would be precisely those condemning the lifestyle of the first Christians as equivalent to hippies, delinquents, unpatriotic sentimental snowflakes or seditious socialists. “It would be no exaggeration to say that, viewed entirely in historical perspective, cultural and institutional ‘Christianity’ has, for most of its history, consisted in the systematic negation of the Christianity of Christ, the apostles, and the earliest church” (pp. 560-563). His scare quotes around “Christian” indicate he is suggesting that this “Christian” has erased the authentic kind.

Is there any survival at all in a Christianity which has “consisted in the systematic negation of the Christianity of Christ, the apostles, and the earliest church?” He describes the “church surviving” – but this survival seems to be by way of totally abandoning anything that would make the church the church. “Certainly, the church survived after the time of Constantine as much by virtue of the early Christian principles it abandoned, belied, or inverted as those it preserved and ‘naturally’ developed” (pp. 742-744). Is it a mystery so grand that words such as failure, contradiction, and negation are rendered equivocal and possibly mean the opposite? Is there no possibility of an apostate church, and if there is must it remain a mystery as to which church, which place, which time, which teaching, this must refer?

In fact, in Hart’s depiction of New Testament salvation as a defeat of archons and powers and the ushering in of “a cosmic dispensation under the reign of God” (see pp. 568-581), one wonders if a Christendom, which stands for a negation of New Testament Christianity, is not among the very powers to be defeated by the Christianity of Christ. In his own estimate, there are specific beliefs which are “preposterous and alien to the actual teachings of scripture.” Penal substitutionary atonement, limited atonement, imputed righteousness, salvation through faith apart from good works, eternal conscious torment in hell, inherited guilt, arbitrary predestination – beliefs that, he concludes, “could not be true in any possible world” are taken to be the very core of the faith. These teachings which contradict Christianity have been presumed, “in various epochs and regions of the Christian world,” to be “the very essence of the faith” (pp. 597-601). So, there is, at least in these instances, no clear doctrinal survival of the essential core of the faith.

His attack on the institutions of Christendom is only slightly less negative. Mythic and retroactive notions of apostolic succession, the development of cults of the saints, tautologous notions of authority in which “every claim to authority turns out to be reducible simply to itself,” a “mythical consensus partum” and notions of “all but infallible testimony of the ‘holy fathers’, are accorded an authority and authenticity “too absolute and uncomplicated to correspond to reality” (pp. 174-175). Hart pictures his approach to the tradition in the positive light (which he acknowledges, “many do not crave”) of enabling liberation “from too great a reliance on organs of authority” entangled with “a very great deal of ideological and institutional myth” (p. 173).

Lest there is any doubt, he spells out who might be guilty of belief in this myth: “The Protestant fundamentalist clinging to literalist scriptural inerrancy, the Catholic traditionalist clinging to a brutally reductive concept of infallible dogmatic pronouncements, the Orthodox traditionalist clinging to the nonexistent unanimity of the fathers – all are merely clutching at whatever bits of flotsam seem to them most buoyant atop the ocean of historical contingency, following the shipwreck of Christendom” (p. 179).

He raises the question of any possibility of connection between the unhouseled (those who have not received the Eucharist as the peculiar institutional encrustations which render it the “Eucharist” have not developed) and those social recusants (the anti-institutional) “that constituted the church of the apostolic era” – how can these have anything to do with “the enfranchised and powerful institutions of imperial or national Christendom?” The implied answer – there is no continuity, no “organic vitality,” no “living idea” which can possibly connect them (pp. 826-829). His project is not such that he is advocating full liberation from institutionalized notions of authority (a clear break with the institutional church), but it is clear that he holds such notions loosely. Though he still holds to the legitimacy of church offices, he does not explain on what basis he holds this position or to what extent.

One cannot disagree with his premise that the truth of the gospel continues to unfold in spite of not being able to trace it in the history and doctrine of the tradition. One can agree that this is a mystery and that the love of Christ breaks through in most every situation, by ways and means that we know not of. One can agree that the eschaton will bring about a coherence which will only be realized in retrospect. This is all helpful, but Hart seems unwilling to address the very gaps he notes which make later forms of the faith a contradiction of the Christianity of the New Testament and the early church. He admits he is offering no practical solutions and no program of action.

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

[1] David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse (Baker Publishing Group, Kindle Edition).

Living in the Desert of the Real

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

Psalm 107:4-6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope Against Hope: The Ground of Faith and Love

Of the three enduring pillars of Christianity (faith, hope and love), hope is often neglected in light of the more obvious qualities of faith and love. The three, though, are necessarily linked, as faith and love exist in hope. Without hope, faith and love are unbalanced and ultimately rendered impossible or, at least, of a different order of meaning than biblical faith and love. Hope transports the realm of faith and love beyond the temporal and its limited possibilities. Hope is unseen because it defies earthly, mortal, deathly, expectations, bringing the eternal into faith and love.

While there are earthly versions of all three, it is hope which specifically contains the biblical element of a continual dying to the world, of passing through death, to an expectant life in God which is no longer grounded by the delimitations of death. Thus, the curative element: the cure of fear, the cure of the curtailments of reason and the earthly perspective, which might be attached to all three, are ensured by hope.

Faith and love might speak of an ordinary finite degree of possibility but hope surpasses what is possible and clings to the otherwise impossible. This can be easily demonstrated in the qualifiers which could be potentially added to faith and love but which are excluded when combined with hope. Limited, temporal, finite, faith and love may be the norm but hope extends faith and love to the unlimited, the a-temporal and the infinite.

We might speak of a dogmatic faith but never of a dogmatic hope. Hope, by its very nature, cannot be paired with hard-headed knowing. This is why David Bentley Hart’s dogmatic universalism, as compared to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s hopeful universalism, seems to miss the point. The point of biblical end time imagery is not to illicit rational certainty or exhaustive explanation, but hope. Hope is the reworking of the imagination on the basis of what is not approachable by sight. Rational sight-bound categories may give us a deity driven by the necessity of human reason – but hope relieves us of such necessities at the same time that it frees the imagination. Hope takes us beyond the temporal and its suffocating rational possibilities. The danger of Hart’s dogmatism is that it would make universalism bear an explanatory weight which would relieve the imagination of doing any work. But this is the entire point of the Christian end-time kingdom imagery – to bring about a reworked imagination which is not bound by temporal-rational possibilities.

Faith and love might be conceived of apart from anticipation but there is no hope without expectation. Rightly understood, faith and love are grounded in this expectation of hope. Both speak of a future in which they are proven to have been true and worthy. Hopeless love would be a quickly passing malady, as there is no expectation of a brighter, fulfilled future for the beloved. Hopeful love presumes this expectation of the best for the beloved. So too, hopeless faith would be a static, time bound belief which does not presume to transport the believer elsewhere. Hope brings an eternal dynamism (the future ever-transforming the past and present) into faith and love. Hope speaks of a living possibility imputed into faith and love. Living by faith and love is the dynamism hope delivers. Living out this hope (the certainty or assurance of faith in Hebrews 11) brings the eternal into time, not as a fully realized achievement, but as an actively lived possibility. It is in hope that human experience of time is transformed by eternity – as the eternal possibilities open a way forward, where time presented impenetrable obstacles.

Where faith and love might be qualified or constrained by the possible, hope makes for unqualified-impossible love and a seemingly impossible faith, as with God there is nothing that is impossible. Jesus tells us that with God all things are possible (Matt 19:26) – an understanding Jesus connects directly to belief in goodness. Given the circumstance of the world camels cannot be threaded through a needle, the rich are hopeless, and goodness is unachievable. Reason cannot resolve the problem of evil even in its conception of the goodness of God. Hope leaps over this impossibility – having faith in goodness and unqualified hope in love. Though bad faith and ill-conceived love may be the norm, hope is hope in an “impossible” goodness. Hope implies a confidence in a good outcome which is not constrained by bleak necessities.

Abraham, as the case in point of hope beyond hope (Ro 4:18), is faced with an impossible, irresolvable situation, apart from divine intervention. His is a journey in which the earthly expectancy of propagating his name is foreclosed (faith rendered impossible) and this is where hope begins. It is not simply his faith isolated from hope that is exceptional, as his hope translates the future expectation into the possibility of moving forward – going into the unseen far country. Faith apart from hope would remain a static possibility, but hope enlivens the eternal possibility in the present so that the journey is energized now by the possibilities of its end.

What is relinquished in the process are not simply the possibilities of earthly hope but with it the weight of earthly desires and necessities. Apart from hope, Abraham’s childlessness, homelessness, and old age, would constitute a final despair – and that is precisely where hope begins. The divine hope (the hope beyond hope), over and against human hope, begins at that point where there is no natural, rational, earthly way forward. At that point where earthly expectations have been exhausted and despair would kick in, eternal hope begins.

The presumed obstacles to Abraham’s faith – hardships, frustrations, suffering, failed expectations – are the ingredient of the hope beyond hope. The impossibility of his circumstance may appear as an obstacle to his faith, but if it is understood that his faith is grounded in the hope of eternity, then the obstacles can be seen as moving him from hope in time to hope in eternity. Hopelessness, despair, and death, prompt the living hope which leaps beyond the world to presuming one’s own incapacity and the necessity of divine intervention.

Maybe this is why faith and love, apart from hope, not only do not imply suffering but seem to be challenged by suffering. Hope presumes suffering but the suffering itself is rendered secondary. As Paul describes it in Romans 8, the suffering with which the creation is infused is on the order of childbirth. “We ourselves,” he indicates, “groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body” (8:23). This suffering is an expectant suffering which presumes there is a point to the suffering.

As Paul pictures the contrast between two types of suffering, suffering, apart from hope arises from within the individual (their desire) and there is no relief from this hopeless desirous suffering closed up within the self. This self in relation to itself – pursuing and desiring itself, only further isolates itself in its turn inward. Paul’s despairing cry, “Wretched man that I am, Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24), gets at the isolated hopelessness. The specific element giving rise to suffering in the midst of hopelessness is the futility of this unfulfillable pursuit. There is an incapacity to persevere in the midst of this desire, which seems to empty out any positive, outside possibility. As Kierkegaard describes it, imprisoned air develops a poison all by itself.”[1]

On the other hand, Paul pictures varieties of suffering (tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword (8:35)) but these outward forms of suffering are no obstacle to the love of God grounded in hope. Thus, the perseverance of hope presumes that what it is persevering in is suffering but the suffering points beyond itself. Faith and love do not seem to have this presumption of a persevering through suffering apart from hope.

It is not too much to claim Christian faith and love require hope.

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, 2009. Works of Love, ( trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong. New York: Harper Perennial), 231.

The Shift from Love to Freedom is the Turn to the Law that Kills

If the church fell with Constantine, as medieval scholastics describe it, I presume this fall is like the first. The love of God is traded for the law/knowledge of good and evil in which death will become the means to life. The Constantinian corporate version of the Fall imagines peace and harmony will be achieved through war, death, and violence. With Constantine, Caesars, princes, and soldiers, in spite of their killing, were permitted into the church under the legal provisions of just war, which though it was an exception to the rule, would result in a theological shift. The main stream of thought continued to forbid priests to be soldiers, and penance was required of princes or their soldiers who participated in killing. Shedding blood continued to disqualify a potential priest for ordination. Nonetheless, with Augustine’s neo-platonic notion that one could both kill and love their enemy, allowing not only for just war but for the use of the sword against heretics, the equivocal nature of common vocabulary was made to float around the hidden counsels of God. God determines what is good so that his will is the good, and this turns out to be quite arbitrary. As the biblical writer says, “Who oh man are you to question God?” So, if God wills it, by definition it is good.

The shift in ethics that is occurring in the Constantinian church comes at a steep price, as this requires focus on God’s essence as freedom or will. Rather than presuming the love of God as primary, the shift in ethics implicitly requires focus on the will of God. This may have been an unconscious necessity, but the point as outlined by Augustine, is to make it clear that God acts “beyond any external necessity whatsoever” so as “to shape the destinies of all creation and the ends of the two human societies, the ‘city of earth’ and the ‘city of God.’”[1] As Brad Jersak sums it up, “Augustine begins with God’s freedom to love and forgive and save, in which he is accountable only to himself. . . But Augustine is quick to add that it works both ways. God is also free to judge and condemn and damn.”

As Ron S. Dart depicts it,

Augustine took a position at times quite at odds with the Alexandrian Christianity of Clement and Origen. It is in Augustine that notions such as election, double-predestination, God’s sovereignty, just war and God’s willing and choosing reach a place and pitch that has much in common with the God of Biblical Judaism. . .. [We see] in Augustine the return to a willing, choosing sovereign God, not bounded by goodness or justice. Such a God could and would use his freedom to elect whom he willed for salvation and whom He willed for damnation. This is not a god [we can] truly trust.[2]

This focus on sovereignty will continue in the Voluntarism of medieval theology, which will be definitive of the Protestant Reformation. Voluntarism also places God’s will prior to his goodness in an effort to protect God’s freedom, and it is particularly concerned to explain God’s complete freedom. God’s own nature is thought to be at stake and so there is a primary emphasis on God’s sovereign will as the primary attribute of God. His will is absolute, even beyond good and evil, so that it is not good or evil which constrain God, but that which is good is good because God decrees it. God’s will is a singular absolute, as this is thought to be the only way to preserve God’s freedom. Nothing constrains God, so that he can forgive or condemn as it pleases him, and to try to say why he does anything is to endanger his freedom with something other than pure, unadulterated, will. God is God, law is law, power is power, or will is will, and to suggest that any finite category, such as goodness, love, or evil, might impinge upon this absolute freedom of the will is to degrade God’s sovereignty.

Calvin goes where all before him had hesitated, and suggests that all events, even evil ones, take place by God’s sovereign appointment. There is no difference between God’s permission, God’s purposes, or what God allows or what he commands. Calvin turns to Romans 9, and the example of Jacob and Esau, to argue that what God does depends upon nothing other than God’s will:

You see how he refers both to the mere pleasure of God. Therefore, if we cannot assign any reason for his bestowing mercy on his people, but just that it so pleases him, neither can we have any reason for his reprobating others but his will. When God is said to visit in mercy or harden whom he will, men are reminded that they are not to seek for any cause beyond his will.[3]

Calvin makes it clear, God’s mercy and his condemnation are purely gratuitous: “the covenant was gratuitous at first, and such it ever remains.” While one might momentarily think David bases God’s favor “according to the cleanness of my hands,” Calvin points out that God’s unfathomable pleasure precedes this favor. “In commending the goodness of his cause, he derogates in no respect from the free mercy which takes precedence of all the gifts of which it is the origin.”[4]

Calvin concludes:

The devil, and the whole train of the ungodly, are, in all directions, held in by the hand of God as with a bridle, so that they can neither conceive any mischief, nor plan what they have conceived, nor how they may have planned, move a single finger to perpetrate, unless in so far as he permits, nay, unless in so far as He commands; that they are not only bound by His fetters but are even forced to do him service.[5]

So, the evil of the devil and the evil of wicked men cannot be permitted to somehow exist apart from the volition of God. As Jersak concludes, “Every act of terror, every rape and murder, every genocide or infanticide, every cancer and heart attack, every famine and plague are all in the service of God’s ultimate purpose: that you would fear him and glorify his name.”[6]

Another way of understanding focus on pure freedom and will is as a turn from the person of God (defined by love) to a focus on impersonal power. Personhood does not really figure into the discussion of freedom, as the normal constraints of personhood are set aside. To say that one’s choices are unconstrained – unconstrained by circumstance, unconstrained by time or place, etc., – in the case of a human is clearly contradictory. Someone constrained by nothing would have to be dead or nonexistent, but of course this is the ultimate constraint. But the same thing holds true for God – to say that nothing constrains his will would mean that his personhood is sublimated or overridden by his arbitrary choices. This is not a description of a person but is a description of pure arbitrary or “gratuitous” power (in Calvin’s words).

I would suggest that the Constantinian shift is a repetition of the Fall – as with all sin. The turn from love to freedom, as definitive of the divine essence, is simply a return to the law. To imagine that there is life in the law is synonymous with the reduction of God to raw power. In this system, one does not speak of relationship, covenant, and love prior to the law, but one begins with the law itself as if it is its own reason. “The law is the law – yours is not to question but to obey.” This primary focus on the law is definitive of the sin which the writers of the New Testament are putting to rest.

Paul explains that the law – the law of sin and death – is the power that has been unleashed on the world and which is being defeated by Christ. The Mosaic law per se, Paul explains, was not the problem, but we can follow what was done with the Mosaic law to perceive the problem. This law was grounded in a promise fulfilled in Christ, but the Jewish inclination is to forget the love, to forget the covenant, and to focus on the marker of the law.

John explains that the law was not an end in and of itself. The law is not grace, the law is not truth, as this is the place of Christ (Jn. 1:17). Jesus corrected, reinterpreted, completed, and suspended the law as he is the final and full revelation of the loving truth of who God is. “God’s essence is not pure will. His essence is selfless love. God’s primary attribute is not freedom. God is first of all good.”[7] We know who God is through Christ, and to presume otherwise is to return once again to the law.

As David Bentley Hart has put it, “It is a sort of ‘oblivious memory’ of Paul’s message that all the powers of the present age have been subdued, and death and wrath defeated, not by the law – which, for all of its sanctity, is impotent to set us free – but by a gift that has cancelled the law’s power over against us.”[8] The sovereignty of man (the man Constantine) and the will of humans are playing the decisive role in the turn from love to freedom. God’s sovereign purposes are thought to reign supreme in the Sovereign Constantine, so that all the benefits of law and freedom seem to be accruing, through history, by a different means than the love of Christ. As is always the case with law – there are advantages to those who wield this weapon. God willed, it was thought, that some be rulers, some be powerful, some be on top. God willed it, that settles it, bow before this casuistry. In Western history the devolving focus on pure will makes it obvious that one can take hold of this force and wield it – should he be uber-man enough. The will to power, the will to freedom, the will to throw off all constraints, except as those constraints accrue to my benefit, describes the modern end of the turn to freedom.

Throwing off the constraints of tradition and religion and turning to the “I am that I am” of the cogito, founds the absolute law of reason and of the individual. This “thing that thinks” is as mysterious and unapproachable as the God who wills. This autonomous, isolated, immortal, entity, is dependent upon no contingency. There is only the free movement of the will, as neither body nor thought impinge upon this mysterious automaton. The problem is that this thinking thing is as removed from thought as the council of the sovereign God is from history, from Christ, and from love. The curse of this power is that it operates beyond reach, beyond reality, and beyond love. This thinking thing is constrained by nothing – and this death and nothingness is its curse – the curse of the law.

With Paul we might cry out, “but who will deliver me from this law of death. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! . . . Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Ro 7:25, 8:1).

[1] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions of Saint Augustine, (Minneapolis, MN: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC., 2008), 7. Quoted from Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel (p. 314). CWR Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Jersak, 64.

[3] John Calvin, Calvin’s Institutes, 3.23.6. http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/Calvin%20Institutes%20of%20Christian%20Religion.pdf

[4] Calvin, 3.17.5

[5] John Calvin, Calvin’s Institutes, 3.17.11. Reference in Jersak, 315..

[6] Jersak, 66.

[7] Jersak, 79.

[8] David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 319. Thank you Matt for this gift that keeps on giving.

A Hermeneutic of Peace: The Spiritual Reading of the Old Testament Through Christ

What difference would it make to our theology if Jesus had died in bed of old age or if he had been killed as an infant? If his death is primarily a sacrifice of appeasement, then an infant sacrifice might be quite fitting. If he is a model for right living, then modeling dying in old age would be most fitting. What is missing in old age dying or infant sacrifice, and a theology which might accommodate such a death, is the political nature of his death. He was a political prisoner killed by imperial power on an instrument designed to reinforce the subjugation of slaves and noncitizens. His was a political death brought about by human violence. The point is not to isolate the political, but to recognize that the violence that is accentuated and exposed on the cross (which is political) pertains to every human sphere. The political along with its violence is not isolated from the religious, the social, and the personal. Each of these spheres are addressed in the New Testament, but not discreetly or separately. The New Testament uses battle imagery, legal imagery, family imagery, or psychological imagery, so as to describe the form of universal enslavement and emancipation (another image). There is no singular way of describing the problem and solution as both are pervasive and pertain to everything, while overlapping in a central nexus. It is, in the language of the New Testament, of cosmic proportions, pertaining to the word and world, so that we speak it and live in it. If the problem is violent (dealing in death throughout) then the danger is that we will miss it. More than a danger, the interpretive frame focused on the cross as a religious sacrifice or Jesus as a moral example, demonstrate the violence remains. This interpretive frame is demonstrably subject to an overlooked pervasive violence, which means a peculiar hermeneutic is necessarily part of the answer.

The incarnation tells us the answer is worked from the inside out, and this pertains to our hermeneutic strategy. As Paul describes, Jesus came “from a woman, coming to be under the Law” (Gal. 4:4). A sacrificial theology “satisfied” with a dead Jesus, or an ethical theology content with a moral Jesus, or even a political theology focused on a revolutionary Jesus, all suffer from attempting to contain the solution in the problem. In Paul’s language, they make Christ fit the Law. They all suffer from fitting the answer to a facet of the problem. By the same token, if we fit Jesus to the frame of the Old Testament, he might be taken as another sacrifice, another prophet, or another revolutionary. This explains the interpretive strategy demonstrated in the New Testament in its reading of the Old Testament and the predominant hermeneutic of the church fathers. The presumption is not only that Christ is the interpretive key to the Old Testament but this key entails suspending a literal, flat, violent, reading.

Paul, in explaining the significance of Mount Sinai says, “These things are told allegorically” ((Gal. 4:24) in David Bentley Hart’s translation). As Hart explains in a note to his translation, “Again, one should not assume that Paul does not mean precisely what he says, and does not take the tale to be essentially (not merely secondarily) allegorical. His interpretive habits are rarely literalist.” Paul is explaining the significance of the Law, but in his explanation, he is also making it clear that all people, both Jews and Gentiles, were enslaved to the fundamental elements or principles of the cosmos (τὰστοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου in 4:3) which included the Law. These “elementary things” might entail any number of things and there is a sense in which the obscurity and plural valence of the term gets at its inescapable nature. According to Hart, the “Stoicheia” might refer to material constituents of the world, the elementary aspects of language, or they might refer to idols. Paul may be likening the religions of the world to children’s earliest lessons prior to Christ, much as he describes the Law as a schoolboy’s tutor or custodian. Perhaps it is something like the deep grammar which religion and language share (in a Girardian sense) with the Law.

His argument in verse 8 is, if Galatian Christians return to the law this would amount to returning to idols or the impoverished Elementals which formerly enslaved. All religion, and particularly the Jewish religion, in Paul’s explanation, suffered from this deep grammar or this elementary way of talking that enslaves all religionists prior to Christ. To read the Old Testament and the law literally, as of equal weight and as a guiding prefix to Christ, would be nothing short of “turning again to the weak and impoverished Elementals” and to once again be enslaved (4:10). Paul is teaching the Galatians that the Law, including the story of Hagar, Jacob and Esau, and the story of Sinai, have a role on the order of a maidservant. To treat the maidservant as if she is the freewoman is to mistake freedom for bondage. “Cast out the maidservant and her son, for by no means shall the maid servant’s son inherit along with the freewoman’s son” (4:30). The allegorical interpretive strategy puts the container of the Law in its proper place. It was a tutor, a maidservant, a part of what is now counted as among the impoverished Elements.

In Corinthians Paul explains that to miss the allegorical sense in which Christ was present in the Law is to miss the true spiritual food and true spiritual drink for “the rock was the Anointed” (I Cor. 10:4). Paul makes the point throughout that in light of Christ, “Now these things have become typological figures for us, so that we should not lust after evil things, as indeed those men lusted” (10:6). To take the letter of the Law as an end in itself, or as Christ says, as if it contains life, is to fall under the same principal under which the Israelites lusted and which caused them to be idolaters. In both Galatians and Corinthians, Paul is describing a fundamental desire connected with the Law and elemental principles which caused them to “go whoring” after idols (10:7-8). He once again emphasizes that the correct reading is the spiritual understanding which reads Christ as the end of the lesson: “Now these things happened to them figuratively, and were written for the purpose of our admonition, for whom the ends of the ages have arrived” (10:11).

A spiritual or theological reading will find Christ in the Old Testament, so that the focus is not on the text per se (or the intent of the author, etc.) but on Christ. As Paul explains in 2 Corinthians, God is the authority in whom we should have confidence due to Christ (3:4) and not the words of scripture. It is God, “Who also made us competent as ministers of a new covenant, not of scripture but of spirit; for scripture slays but spirit makes alive” (3:6). A text-based faith or a letter-based competency is a “ministry of death” (v. 7) but the spirit and the spiritually based hermeneutic lifts the veil of the Law, in Paul’s simultaneous explanation and demonstration of this interpretive method. This spiritual reading is not focused on the historical events but on the lesson to be drawn, allegorically, for the admonition and edification of contemporary readers.

As Hebrews puts it, God has spoken in the Old Testament through a multiplicity of sources and in a variety of ways. This plurality of words and messengers is contrasted with the singular message and messenger in which this plurality is overcome (Hebrews 1:1-3). Hebrews, like Galatians, argues that the former word or Law from God was imperfect because it came by way of secondary mediators – angels, or prophets, or Moses – and the message did not come directly from God. The implication is that the human mediators marked/marred the quality of the message and this is in contrast to the perfect representation of Christ. This imperfect message shaped by imperfect messengers resulted in its hearers perishing in the desert, missing both the promised land and the promised rest. They were bound to death by the imperfection of the message but now the full message has resulted in freedom from bondage to the former message.

As Romans states it, “But now we have been released from the Law, having died wherein we were imprisoned, so that we slave in newness of spirit and not in scripture’s obsolescence” (7:6). It is not that the Law or the scriptures are abolished but their punishing effect, or the idolatrous desire which they accentuate and aggravate, have been suspended. “For when we were in the flesh the passions of sin, which came through the Law, acted in our bodily members for the purpose of bearing the fruit of death” (7:5). Paul’s cumulative description of this Law includes Moses, Sinai, Jacob, Esau, and the various commands subsequent to Abraham. The Law and scriptures (or the gramma or word) must include much of the Old Testament, but it is also connected at a deep grammatical level (the elementary principle, the childish language, the idolatrous inclination) with the universal law of sin and death. At points in Romans, it is not clear what law he might be referencing (the prohibition in Genesis, the Mosaic law, or some sort of natural law) and it no long matters, as all law is the law of sin and death.

Origen draws out his allegorical hermeneutic from this Romans passage (7:1-3) but his larger point is to bring about peace, inclusive of peace between the Old Testament and the New.

The word ‘woman’ doubtless stands for the soul that was held fast by the Law of Moses, and about which it is said, ‘so long as her husband lives, she is bound by the Law.’ But if her husband, doubtless, the Law, has died, he calls her soul, which seems to be bound, ‘released.’ Therefore it is necessary for the Law to die so that those who believe in Jesus should not commit the sin of adultery.

He concludes that Moses is dead and the Law is dead “and the legal precepts are now invalid.” He patterns his claim, an allegorical hermeneutic rightly handling the Law, after the Apostle and with an appeal to Jesus. “Do you want me to bring forth proofs from the Scriptures that the Law is called Moses? Hear what he says in the Gospel: ‘They have Moses and the Prophets, let them listen to them.’ Here, without any doubt, he calls the Law Moses.”[1] The woman, according to Origen, stands for every soul bound by the Law and thus drawn into adulterous desire. The dead husband stands for a Law that no longer rouses adulterous desire. And all of this in a series of sermons on Joshua.

His point is, like this woman defined by the Law and subject to desire, now that we understand Joshua is Jesus (the same name in the Hebrew) we can also understand the true enemy. What is slain by Joshua is this adulterous sin that afflicts the soul:

You will read in the Holy Scriptures about the battles of the just ones, about the slaughter and carnage of murderers, and that the saints spare none of their deeply rooted enemies. If they do spare them, they are even charged with sin, just as Saul was charged because he had preserved the life of Agag king of Amalek. You should understand the wars of the just by the method I set forth above, that these wars are waged by them against sin. But how will the just ones endure if they reserve even a little bit of sin? Therefore, this is said of them: “They did not leave behind even one, who might be saved or might escape.”[2]

The battle the Christian has joined with Jesus/Joshua is against sin. Both the surface (the wars and carnage) and deep violence of the Law (sinful desire) are suspended in Christ as hermeneutic key. In this sense, one can agree with the refrain to “sanctify war,” as it is a war to become holy in body and spirit by destroying “all the enemies of your soul, that is “the blemishes of sins.” The battle is one in which you “mortify your members” and you “cut away all evil desires” and you are crowned as a victor by Christ Jesus – our true Joshua.

Origen’s point, as he states it plainly in Homily 12, is “that the wars that Jesus/Joshua waged ought to be understood spiritually.” He references Hebrews to make his case that the entire Mosaic system, inclusive of the tabernacle, the sacrifices and the entire worship are a “type and shadow of heavenly things,” and so too the wars that are waged through Jesus, “the slaughter of kings and enemies must also be said to be ‘a shadow and type of heavenly things.’”[3] He defends this allegorical suspension and transformation of the Law by appealing directly to Paul: “All these things, which happened figuratively to them, were written for us, for whom the end of the ages has arrived” (I Cor. 10:11).[4]

Origen expands on Paul’s argument (referencing Corinthians and Romans) to make the case that one who clings to a fleshy reading or a literal circumcision also clings to wars, the destruction of enemies, and Israelites seizing kingdoms. This literal sense mistakes Joshua the son of Nun for the son of God.[5] The one who is an outward Jew and who insists on circumcision, in Origen’s explanation of Paul’s allegory, is committed to reading the violence of Joshua literally and in the process misses what it means to be a Jew secretly and to receive the circumcision of the heart. This fleshly reader of scripture misses Jesus’ casting out and destroying those powers ruling our souls so as to fulfill his word, “Behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

This violent non-allegorical or non-Christocentric hermeneutic of the original readers will only increase the violent work of the Law and will not achieve peace:

Then that Israel that is according to the flesh read these same Scriptures before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, they understood nothing in them except wars and the shedding of blood, from which their spirits, too, were incited to excessive savageries and were always fed by wars and strife. But after the presence of my Lord Jesus Christ poured the peaceful light of knowledge into human hearts, since, according to the Apostle, he himself is “our peace,” he teaches us peace from this very reading of wars. For peace is returned to the soul if its own enemies—sins and vices—are expelled from it. And therefore, according to the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we indeed read these things, we also equip ourselves and are roused for battle, but against those enemies that “proceed from our heart”: obviously, “evil thought, thefts, false testimony, slanders,” and other similar adversaries of our soul. Following what this Scripture sets forth, we try, if it can be done, not to leave behind any “who may be saved or who may breathe.” For if we gain possession of these enemies, we shall fittingly also take possession of “the airy authorities” and expel them from his kingdom, as they had gathered within us upon thrones of vices.”[6]

Origen concludes that apart from this non-violent allegorical reading of scripture it is questionable that “the books of Jewish history would ever have been handed down by the apostles to the disciples of Christ.” Christ “came to teach peace so it is only by transforming these tales of “physical wars” into figures of “spiritual wars” that these books are made worthy of being read in the churches. “For what good was that description of wars to those to whom Jesus says, ‘My peace I give to you; my peace I leave to you,’ and to whom it is commanded and said through the Apostle, ‘Not avenging your own selves,’ and, ‘Rather, you receive injury,’ and, ‘You suffer offense’?”[7]

It comes down to a choice between the violent, fleshly, inheritance of the Law and Moses or the peace of Christ, and to cling to the fleshly reading, according to Origen, is disqualification from the inheritance of Christ. “If, therefore, you wish to be made worthy to pursue the inheritance from Jesus and if you wish to claim a portion from him, you must first end all wars and abide in peace, so that it may be said concerning the land of your flesh, “The land ceased from wars.”[8] Origen’s Christocentric allegorical hermeneutic has the peace of Christ as its continual aim and only the defeat of sin and violence are worthy of Christ. He suggests that the primary enemy of Jesus is the root of “bitterness” (the meaning of “Amorite”) that continues to dwell in those who continue to “strike out violently” (the meaning of Edom) and may linger on even in those who dwell in peace (the meaning of “Salamin”) but the lesson is clear:

The ones who strike violently are those who, placed in contests, endeavor to overcome devilish abodes and structures. But peaceful ones are those who produce peace for the soul after overcoming fleshly desires. Nevertheless, a hostile power, bitterness, steadfastly continues and strives to persist in both.[9]

Origen extends the reading of Paul, in what he describes as a cruciform hermeneutic applied to Joshua.

To what then do all these things lead us? Obviously to this, that the book does not so much indicate to us the deeds of the son of Nun, as it represents for us the mysteries of Jesus my Lord. For he himself is the one who assumes power after the death of Moses; he is the one who leads the army and fights against Amalek. What was foreshadowed there on the mountain by lifted hands was the time when “he attaches [them] to his cross, triumphing over the principalities and powers” (Col. 2:14-15).[10]

This allegorical reading, far from unusual, is the hermeneutic that prevailed in the apostolic period, the early Church, and it was the approach of much of Judaism in the first century. It is the approach of Hebrews, Galatians, I & 2 Corinthians, and Romans. As Hart points out, “Philo of Alexandria was a perfectly faithful Jewish intellectual of his age, as was Paul, and both rarely interpreted scripture in any but allegorical ways.”[11]

The literal interpretation, with the peculiar meaning it will take on in the modern period (literalism) is a development arising only with the Reformation, prior to which the spiritual reading was normative. “From Paul through the high Middle Ages, only the spiritual reading of the Old Testament was accorded doctrinal or theological authority.” Hart’s conclusion seems to echo Origen, “Not to read the Bible in the proper manner is not to read it as the Bible at all; scripture is in-spired, that is, only when read ‘spiritually.’”

To read the Bible as if it encourages violence or as if God is violent is to miss Christ, the New Testament, and the predominant witness of the church. To read the Bible through the hermeneutic born in the sixteenth century is, according to Hart, “at once superstitious and deeply bizarre.” This late Protestant invention is “not Christian in any meaningful way.”

[1] Origen, The Fathers of the Church: Homilies on Joshua, vol. 105, Translated by Barbara Bruce, (Washington D. C. The Catholic University America Press) p. 29. This blog is the product of a discussion with Matt Welch who prompted me to read Origen, provided me the text, and then pointed me to the key passages which I have deployed above. Matt has also pointed me to Hart and provided me with his translation of the New Testament. Matt’s friendship and dialogue through the years have been a key demonstration to me of Christ’s peaceful hermeneutic.

[2] Origen, 94

[3] Origen, 120

[4] Quoted as the opening to Homily 13.

[5] Origen, 125

[6] Origen, 130

[7] Origen, 138

[8] Origen, 168

[9] Origen, 204

[10] Origen, 29

[11] David Bentley Hart, Good God? A Response, a post in response to Peter Leithart on his blog at https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/good-god-a-response/ All the Hart quotes are from this blog.

Paul’s “Futility” Versus Hegelian Dialectics

Given creation ex nihilo (creation from nothing), one can either recognize with Paul (in Romans 8) and Gregory of Nyssa, Origin, and Maximus, that creation continues toward an eschatological realization of pleroma or fullness in which the nihilo (the chaos, disorder) is reduced and eventually has no place, or one can assume the nothing is part of a cosmic dualism giving rise to fullness (fullness of knowledge or a fullness of salvation). The difference pertains to two readings of Scripture and two modes of ordering reality. Do we read from creation to Christ and understand who Christ is on the basis of creation or do we apprehend creation as being fulfilled or completed through Christ?

Our reading will make a world of difference in how we define sin and evil and how we picture the work of Christ. The Hegelian mistake, in that it sums up the human mistake in giving first place to an immanent frame within creation, is key in regard to the nihilo. Hegel’s dialectic fully articulates Paul’s depiction of the reign of death through the reifying of nothing. Given subjection to this understanding our tendency will be to misread Paul (in the manner of the Western theological tradition?) and to imagine Romans 8 depiction of futility and its defeat pertains simply to sin (a sin reduced to the individual). To put it anachronistically, the world is with Hegel (and by extension the forebears and heirs of Luther) in Paul, while salvation is deliverance from out of this order.

Nonetheless, there is a certain value to be gained in engaging Hegel through Paul. The theological concepts of sin and evil tend either toward reductions to misdeeds and perverse thoughts or toward abstractions of cosmic battle which do not easily translate into the fabric of human experience. Even in our reading of the New Testament we may be so focused on individual transgression that we miss how sin can be definitive, not simply of some experience, but of experience per se as it is filtered to us through our world (so much so that it becomes a mode of reading the Bible). In Marx’s language, we might recognize the failures of the bank robber and even of the banker, but we tend to miss the definitive role of capitalism, which gives us both (bankers and bank robbers). Understood rightly, the nihilo of creation ex nihilo (a key point of departure for understanding God) is not simply an abstraction about the order of creation in relation to God but concerns the “fleshing out” or the overcoming of futility accomplished by Christ. If evil is a privation or a nothing given its opportunity in the manner of creation (i.e. it is without any metaphysical or ontological ground but a parasite on the good), this not only locates sin’s origin in the contingency of creation but its ongoing point of access in human experience as a “counter-force” or absence. Hegel gives full and positive articulation to this understanding.

The point at which Hegel and Paul converge pertains to the psychological or experiential reality of this imagined dualism (nothing and futility as a necessary something) in its constitution of human experience. Both will refer to it as a form of enslavement – even agreeing upon its point of entry in and through human cognition. For Hegel, “we are the activity that thought is.”[1] For Paul, human words and thought are deployed in an attempt to displace God and found an independent realm. Its specific point of entry is futile or deceived thought: “they became futile in their speculations” (1:21). Ματαιόω – is “to present what is vain” or “to deceive.”[2] Though Romans 8:20 (“the creation was subjected to futility”) does not “solve the metaphysical and logical problems raised” by this futility it explains that it has a beginning and end.^[3] It arises with finitude and contingency and taken as an end in itself this lie turned them into fools (1:22). But this futility is delimited in those who put on Christ: “the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (8:21).

Paul consigns this force to its original contingency as part of the unfolding of creation: “For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (8:22). The pain of childbirth is no more necessary to the fully formed child than the nihilo is to creation. To assign death, futility, and suffering, to part of the constitution of the finished product is to serve the futility. It is to hollow out reality with the unreality of a lie. Creations purpose fulfilled in Christ consigns this futility to a passage through suffering forgotten or subsumed by the eschatological end point of creation: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Ro 8:18).

Paul, in an appeal to the Hebrew Scriptures, depicts the advance of futility through empty human speech and its embodiment as a lie incarnate: “THEIR THROAT IS AN OPEN GRAVE, WITH THEIR TONGUES THEY KEEP DECEIVING,” “THE POISON OF ASPS IS UNDER THEIR LIPS”; “WHOSE MOUTH IS FULL OF CURSING AND BITTERNESS” (Ro 3:13–14). Paul describes the phenomenology of the lie as characterizing all forms of humanity (the original contexts of his quotations point to both Jews and Gentiles), originating as part of the universal man (the first Adam in Ro 5) and as definitive of individual human experience (Ro 7). Collective experience, universal experience, individual experience, which is inclusive of human religiosity, human sexuality, and human ethics, all fall under this futility – the exchange of the truth for a lie (Ro 1:21-23).

Hegel (and I presume Hegel is indeed the master thinker – truly summing up the alternative to Paul and the New Testament) gives primacy to human knowing (it is the true creation or outworking of spirit) while Paul presumes that this incarnate lie is an enslaving power and is not part of a creative dialectic. For Hegel enslavement necessarily precedes freedom; slave/master, nothing/something, evil/good are the terms of truth and freedom but also the substance of experience. For Paul, this presumed dualism and its defeat explains his form of dialectic in Romans 7 and Romans 9-11. There is for the individual, the law of the mind and the law of the body constituting the law of sin and death which gives way to the body of Christ (7-8), and there is the corporate experience of Jews and Gentiles fluctuating between disobedience and mercy which results in a Pauline synthesis: “For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all” (11:32). This is not a dialectic between nothing and something but a false dialectic of the lie and disobedience defeated individually, corporately, and cosmically. The lie (disobedience, misorientation to death and the law) is countered by the truth or by the Word (the final Word of creation, the completion or fullness of creation).

The opening to Romans 6 points to sin as the slaveholder but it also indicates the perversity of the Hegelian notion that maintains the necessity of this enslavement for freedom (Ro 6:1). Even those who recognize “sin reigned in death” (5:21), are in danger of positing a dialectic between sin and grace: “Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” (6:1). In both Paul and Hegel the dialectic of sin is definitive of human experience. For Hegel, perhaps the archetypical sort of Christian perverter of the Gospel Paul has in mind, the dialectic of sin is normative for Christian thought. Paul recognizes dialectic is liable to be carried over into Christian understanding at key points in 6-7. “Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” This is to allow sin to “be master over you” (6:14-15). For Hegel this explains why history is necessarily a “slaughter bench” while for Paul the violence of history definitive of human activity (3:9-18) is a futility overcome in Christ.

Paul’s description of how the dialectic arises through an orientation to the law gives rise to his pithiest dialectic formula: “Is the Law sin?” (7:7). He seems to have recognized the danger of pitting grace against law, such that the law itself is perceived as the problem (perhaps a succinct formula for the Protestant dilemma). But of course, it is not that law is the problem but sin coopts even the law of God. It is not simply that the Jewish law, due to this lie, reduces to the law of sin but all human religious and ethical striving – even the best, even that built upon God’s law, is sin possessed. Thus, Paul concludes that all are unrighteousness and all are misoriented to the law. In the progressive argument of Romans there is a flattening out of all law to the law of sin and death.

The difficulty, where sin and evil are pervasive, is to be able to name this thing – to name and recognize the idol (the ideology, the politic, the value system, or even the theology by which Paul is read) by which we measure and experience. Paul does not presume to have a place from which to begin to describe sin apart from the Gospel. The law provides an opening to sin and serves as a point of revelation only in conjunction with the Gospel. Romans opens with the good news (a proclamation of everything being made right) and part of this news concerns the universal reign of sin and death. God’s saving power (1:16-17) to redeem all of creation (8:19-23) simultaneously reveals that the world spirit is not God but the enemy defeated by Christ.

In David Bentley Hart’s depiction, for Paul we are living in the midst of transition between two worlds: “we are living in the final days of one world-age that is rapidly passing and awaiting the dawn of another that will differ from it radically in every dimension: heavenly and terrestrial, spiritual and physical.” This is a story of “invasion, conquest, spoliation, and triumph” in which “nothing less than the cosmos is at stake.”[4] The world has been made subject to death in and through some form of malign governance (“angelic” or “demonic”). These archons, or what Paul calls Thrones, Powers and Dominions, divide us off from God. Whether arising from a sub-personal or demonic realm, Christ exposed these powers and this exposure is part of their defeat. Given that evil’s modus operandi is a lie, exposure is the beginning of defeat.

Indicators that we have to do with a deadly lie, with philosophy gone bad, with corrupt powers of state, is that sin’s defeat is through life giving truth; it has to do with the transformation of the mind enabling a capacity to know and do God’s will (12:1-2), which is integrated with and gained in new forms of human community (12-15). The futility of the nihilo is displaced with hope (5:1-5; 8:24), peace displaces bloodshed (5:1; 14:17; 15:13), and joy and love displace despair and condemnation (8:1ff; 15:13). While this describes a radical alteration of human experience it is a difference grounded in an alternative reality and alternative world.

The resurrection is the opening and summing up of this world as it defeats and exposes the reign of death which saturates this world order. Cosmic and individual enslavement is a servitude to death definitive of sin and Christ’s death and resurrection dethrone death so that his followers can now face down the powers. The death dealing power can no longer separate from God. “Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” or being “slaughtered as sheep” separate from the love of Christ? (8:35-36). There is a confrontation that continues between Jesus followers and the principalities and powers, but Jesus Christ, “He who died, yes, rather who was raised” has determined the outcome of this confrontation (8:34). “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Ro 8:38-39).

To miss this vision would seem to endanger the opportunity to “crush Satan under your feet” (16:20) and to instead give way in the conflict and be overcome by “deceitful men” who may pose as slaves of Christ. Paul warns, “such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ but of their own appetites; and by their smooth and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting” (16:18). These deceivers appear to be turning once again to a preference for human speech over God’s Word. How many have been drawn in by their “flattering speech” which would diminish sin and smooth it over through human speech or dialectic?

In summary, sin entered through the opening of nihilo and is accentuated and spread out through human futility. Death, the ultimate futility, entered through Adam and continues to reign through the offspring of Adam, who are its helpless victims. Sin is not a force to simply be forgiven, placated, or satisfied. It is not a force that God can overlook and it is certainly not a force humans can pass over. It is a beast before which one kneels (in the form of nations and kings), a value system by which one gauges all achievement (mammon), and an all-consuming impetus giving rise to human thought and action. It is a mode of thought passed on in this worlds wisdom and it constitutes a philosophical tradition (Colossians 2:8). It is a principal or power that is either served or defeated.

The question is if a Gospel focused on imputed righteousness (a dialectic between law and grace), penal substitution (a dialectic that presumes suffering and death accomplish God’s will through Christ), deliverance from an eternal torturous existence (a dialectic which gives primacy to futility), has anything left of the Gospel in it. In David Bentley Hart’s estimate such a gospel, may have terms “reminiscent” of those used by Paul, “at least as filtered through certain conventional translations”; but “it is a fantasy” to imagine it coincides with Paul’s Gospel. He concludes, “that a certain long history of misreadings of the Letter to the Romans . . . has created an impression of his theological concerns so entirely alien to the conceptual world he inhabited that the real Paul occupies scarcely any place at all in Christian memory.”[5] A recovery of the Gospel, lost as it has become in misreadings of Romans, will of necessity have to begin again with reading Romans.

The notion that sin primarily has to do with guilt and forgiveness or with personal deliverance or private spiritual blessing through a violent sacrifice is not simply inadequate but would seem to be part of the deception. It is deceived in its diminished depiction of sin and in its failure to realize the scope of salvation.

[1] https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=phil_facpub 105

[2] Bauernfeind, O. (1964–). μάταιος, ματαιότης, ματαιόω, μάτην, ματαιολογία, ματαιολόγος. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 4, p. 523). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans

^[3] Bauernfeind, O. (1964–). μάταιος, ματαιότης, ματαιόω, μάτην, ματαιολογία, ματαιολόγος. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 4, p. 523). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

[4] David Bentley Hart, Theological Territories, p. 373, University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[5]Hart, p. 371-372.