Ephesians – Forging Ploughshares

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.

Understanding the “Time” of Origen and Paul Through Ephesians 3:9-10

Origen considered Ephesians the center of Paul’s thought[1] and according to Richard Layton he defined “this epistle as the spiritual ‘heart of Paul’s letters, a repository of mysteries at which the apostle only hinted in other correspondence.”[2] As Layton explains, “The imagery of Ephesians moves in celestial realms and encompasses the vast reaches of eternity, inviting cosmological speculation. The language of Ephesians is particularly vivid at precisely the points where Origen’s teachings kindled controversy.”[3] One might read Origen as an explanation of this cosmological time and space bending book (Ephesians), which provides entre into Pauline theology. Though Origen and Paul are often read through Platonic conceptions, Origen is making a clear break with Platonism (most clearly on such issues as the intersection of time and eternity) and his is a demonstration of the unique logic of Paul and the New Testament. What Origen demonstrates is that Paul, in his conception of time (and eternity), is neither Greek nor Hebrew but is setting forth the peculiar implications arising from the incarnation of Christ and His consummation or summing up of all things (Eph. 1:10).

A key component of Origen’s thought is derived from Ephesians 3:9-10 in which Christ is said to be “the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things; so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.” Origen pictures Christ as the Wisdom of God, which as he notes from this verse is “manifold” or containing the different principles or arche upholding creation. The Wisdom of God “administered” through Christ captures the point of intersection between God, who is timeless, and his dealings with time and creation. While this Wisdom is also beginningless in its reference to the Son, it is also interwoven with the creative act of the Son:

The son of God is also called wisdom, made as a beginning of his ways to his works, according to the Proverbs, which means that wisdom existed only in relation to him of whom she was wisdom, having no relation to anyone else at all; but the son of God himself became God’s benevolent decision and willed to bring creatures into being. This wisdom then willed to establish a creative relation to future creatures and this is exactly the meaning of the saying that she has been made the beginning of God’s ways.[4]

Wisdom, through the Son, creates and is itself made part of creation, in that the reason or arche of all things is found in the Son. As Paul says, “in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17) and yet He is “the firstborn of all creation” (Col.1:15). As Origen explains, he “is the oldest of all created beings and … it was to him that God said of the creation of man: ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness.’[5] “Wisdom” is regarded as “created” in the “body” of Christ, such that the passage from uncreated to created is present in Christ.

Origen pictures the first creation account of male and female as referring to the arche or logoi from out of which the next chapter records the creation of the man from the dust and the woman from out of the side of Adam. As Panayiotis Tzamalikos describes it:

The “reasons” is what God created in the beginning. Taking into account that the term logōi means both “words” and “reasons”, Origen’s view is that these logōi are the words of God when he was speaking to his son in the creation of the world according to Genesis. These logōi of God are but the creative . . . fiat out of which the notion of “coming into being out of non-being” began to make sense. It is certainly God who brought them into being but the act of this “creation” is portrayed as an “utterance” of the father to the son. These “utterances”, in Greek called by Origen logōi (which means “utterances”, “words” and “reasons”), is what actually came into being out of non-being.”[6]

The “manifold wisdom” of which Paul speaks, is known through creation and Christ, the wisdom of God is manifest in creation. Wisdom as given through the son, Paul explains (and Origen notes), is the means of bestowing the divine mysteries. What was once hidden in God is manifest in Christ, which Paul notes in acknowledging that God created all things. So, there is a creaturely, created aspect (the logoi) which is from the uncreated, timeless divine wisdom, but which is made known in and through the work of creation.

In his commentary on Ephesians, Origen refers to Paul’s specialized usage of the term “foundation” (Eph. 1:4) to suggest a similar idea.

καταβολῆς is properly used when something is thrown down and is placed in a lower place from a higher one or when something assumes a beginning. For this reason also those who lay the first foundations of future buildings are said καταβεβληκ ναι, that is, they are said to have thrown down the beginnings of the foundations. Paul, therefore, wishing to show that God devised all things from nothing, ascribes to it not making, not creating and formation, but καταβολῆ, that is the beginning of the foundation, so that something from which creatures were made did not precede creatures in accordance with the Manichaeans and other heresies (which posit a maker and material), but all things subsist from nothing.[7]

Origen makes a clear distinction between Creator and creation, which is worked out in his understanding of a two-fold notion of wisdom in Christ. There is the uncreated Wisdom, but then the manifold wisdom or the logoi. Origen maintains there is a separation between these two. The wisdom of God, which is Christ (I Cor. 1:24), contains the arche. The Logos is not the creator, but the means of creation. (Origen is explaining how it is that “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (Jn 1:2–3).

As Origen writes,

And in the Epistle to the Hebrews the same Paul says: “At the end of days he has spoken to us in a Son whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds,” teaching us that God has made the worlds through the son since the only begotten had the “through whom” when the worlds were made. So here too, therefore, if all things were made through the Word, they were not made by the Word, but by one better and greater than the Word. And who would this other one be except the Father?[8]

God the Father made the worlds through the Son, who is himself “begotten of the Father.” First, there is the reality of God in himself, then as Paul expresses it in Eph. 3, there is the manifold or multiple, or as Origen will put it, there is the “decorated” or “multi-embroidered,” wisdom through which creation came about out of non-being. In this first instance, we do not have yet to do with material or corporeal reality, as it is Christ who is the Wisdom of God, but through this Wisdom (singular and timeless) there arises the manifold (many, various) or “multi-embroidered” wisdom. As the TDNT puts it, “The wisdom of God (→ σοφία) has shown itself in Christ to be varied beyond measure and in a way which surpasses all previous knowledge thereof.”[9] This then explains the preparation of the beginning from which creation occurs:

And in relation to this, we will be able to understand what is meant by the beginning of creation, and what Wisdom says in Proverbs: “For God,” she says, “created me the beginning of his ways for his works.” It is possible, of course, for this also to be referred to our first meaning, i.e. that pertaining to a way, because it is said, “God created me the beginning of his ways.”[10]

There is a created aspect contained in the Word.[11] This initial phase does not reference the material creation or the corporeal body of Adam, but pertains to the one who is true Adam or the beginning from which creation comes. The archetype is Christ, the true image bearer of humans but containing the arche of all creation. As Tzamalikos explains, “When, therefore, Origen speaks of ‘first’ creation which was ‘incorporeal’ he does not refer to any ‘incorporeal world’ whatever. For in a strict sense there is no world at all. The reality is the “body” of Christ, which was ‘embroidered’ by those ‘made’.[12] This incorporeal nature is created but not of the material created order, yet it is in this incorporeal nature that embodied humans come to their fulness.

Paul illustrates this in regard to himself, in two passages Origen often cites: Paul says, “I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) and he speaks of the husband and wife as being “one flesh” which pertains to Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31-32). The embodied, corporeal person takes up the fulness of the image through Christ as Christ imparts the incorporeal logoi of his life.

In the Ephesians 3 passage, this accomplishment of wisdom shared and received is made known “to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:10). He says the “rulers and authorities” we “ought to understand as saints and ministers of God” though he acknowledges that “some take them to be the prince of the air (Eph. 2: 2) and his angels).”[13] Origen makes the bold attempt to describe the place of the devil, who may stand behind the “principalities and powers.”

In other places, he describes a singular counter-power which could stand behind these powers. “Thus he speaks of “one, who fell from the bliss”, further he speaks of “one” applying the adjective “ruler” without stating any noun again; “while there were many rulers who were made, it was one who fell.’”[14] There is a failure or fall (the fall of the devil) which precedes the fall of man but which (even before the fall of man) pervades all of creation. The corporeal creation contains a divide, from its inception, which is the result of this fall. Origen quotes Paul as proof, “All creation groans and travails until now (Rom. 8:22)”[15] He surmises, “Creation was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope,” that bodies and doing bodily things, which is . . . necessary . . . for one in a body, might be vanity. He who is in a body does bodily things unwillingly. For this reason, creation was subjected to vanity unwillingly.”[16]

This travail and vanity explains some of the peculiar characteristics of time and its relief in Christ. There is an original unity in the “body” of Christ, but with multiplication of wisdom (the logoi) there arises the distinctions of space-time. The beginning constituted in Christ (which is timeless), is that from which time unfolds, and time pertains to change and ultimately to decay and death, which explains Christ’s incarnation: “because our Lord, on account of his love for man, took up death on behalf of us” and he “took our darknesses upon himself that by his power he might destroy our death, and completely destroy the darkness in our soul.”[17]

This freedom from death and darkness explains the sort of time travel, or passage out of time which characterizes Ephesians. Christ is the “summing up of all things” in heaven and earth (1:10) and Christians are, in the present tense, seated with him at the right hand of God (1:20). His body “fills all in all” (1:23; 4:10) and the church is made “one flesh” with Christ (5:32) defeating “the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (6:12). And this involves a fundamental apperception in which “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened” (Eph. 1:18). The peculiar intersection of time with eternity brings about a new form of knowing and a new unity and peace as God’s eternal purposes carried out in Christ have been made known (Eph. 3:11). This is not a discursive knowing but knowing by revelation: “By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit” (Eph. 3:4–5). Origen, who provides the earliest commentary on Ephesians, rightly sets it front and center in understanding the mystery revealed in the Gospel.

(Sign up for our next class beginning January 30th: Philemon and Ephesians: Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Paul https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] F. Pieri and Ronald E. Heine, “Recovering Origen’s Commentary On Ephesians from Jerome,” The Journal of Theological Studies NEW SERIES, Vol. 51, No. 2 (October 2000), pp. 478-514 Published By: Oxford University Press

[2] Richard Layton, “Recovering Origen’s Pauline Exegesis: Exegesis and Eschatology in the Commentary on Ephesians” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8:3, 373–411 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Origen, Fragmenta 1-140 in Joannim, fragment 1. Quoted in Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The concept of Time in Origen (Published by ProQuest LLC, 2018) 53.

[5] Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) 5.37.

[6] Tzamalikos, 58.

[7] Jerome and Origen, The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, trans. by Ronald Heine (Print ISBN 0199245517, 2002), 84.

[8] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John Books 1-10, trans. Ronald Heine (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 2.72.

[9] Seesemann, H. (1964–). ποικίλος, πολυποίκιλος. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 6, p. 485). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

[10] Commentary on John, 1.101.

[11] Origen does not believe the Son is created, as the “Son is the brightness of eternal light” and just as there is no brightness apart from light, neither then is the Father without the Son or the Son without the Father. “How, then, can it be said that there was a ‘when’ when the Son was not? For that is nothing other than to say that there was a ‘when’ when Truth was not, a ‘when’ when Wisdom was not, a ‘when’ when Life was not, although in all these respects the substance of God the Father is perfectly accounted.” Origen, On First Principles Vol. 2, trans. John Behr, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 4.4.1.1

[12] Tzamalikos, 72.

[13] Commentary on Ephesians, 149-150.

[14] Tzamalikos, 76.

[15] Commentary on John, 1.98. “Creation was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope,” 151 that bodies and doing bodily things, which is . . . necessary . . . for one in a body, might be vanity. 152 He who is in a body does bodily things unwillingly. For this reason creation was subjected to vanity unwillingly.

[16] Ibid. 1.99

[17] Commentary on John, 2.166.

The Violence of the Law Which Killed Christ

The depiction of Matthew is that the violent would take the kingdom of God by force (Matt. 11:12). This verse marks the transition from Jesus to John the Baptist, which in John is accompanied with the comment that “the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ” (Jn. 1:17). According to Paul, the period of violence, in which the kingdom would be violently manipulated through the “hostility” of the law is exposed and defeated by the one who “is our peace” (Eph. 2:14). As John the Baptist explains upon seeing Jesus: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Here is the victim of violence who takes away the violence of the world; the Lamb who absorbs and defeats the violence. The explanation comes in verse 18: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:18). Jesus is the full explanation or message or exegesis of God. The difference between Jesus and the law defines his message: the law does not take away violence and sin, but in John’s depiction violent men will kill Jesus following their understanding of the dictates of the law. In this killing and being killed is the problem and solution of sin.

As Walter Benjamin depicts the law, it is established through violence and enforced through violence and apart from violence there would be no law.[1] This may seem an unlikely statement, but Benjamin demonstrates the law obscures its inherent violence.

In the notion of natural law (a body of unchanging moral principles), the end point of the law is to establish justice and morality, and violence is a justified means to this end. The violence cannot be posited as part of the goal (as an end) but is presumed to be the means to an end. For example, the Jews invade the promised land and commit genocide so that their nation and law might be established. White people came to the Americas and obliterated the populations of brown and red people who are excluded by this founding of the law. The law is being inaugurated from out of this originary violence. The question does not arise in natural law whether violence “could be a moral means even to just ends” but violence is taken as a raw datum – a fact of nature or a necessary means. The deployment of violent means to just ends is “no greater problem than perceived in a man’s right to move his body in the direction of a desired goal.” The way you get from point A to point B is the movement of violence. Violence is a “raw material” or means “the use of which is in no way problematical unless force is misused for unjust ends.”

Though Benjamin sees this as a problem predating the modern, he references Darwinian evolution as “rekindling” the presumed naturalness of violence in the modern age. Darwin’s biology, he maintains, “regards violence as the only original means, besides natural selection, appropriate to all the vital ends of nature.” It is a short step from the popular notion of natural history “to the still cruder one of legal philosophy, which holds that the violence that is, almost alone, appropriate to natural ends is thereby also legal.” Just as peace is established through war so too final justice calls for final solutions. And of course, the holocaust (the final solution of the Nazis) looms around Benjamin’s text in our backward-looking perspective.

On the other hand, positive law or those laws created by and passed down through human institutions, presume that violence is a product of history. Violence is certainly part of the means in positive law, but the violence is thought to be a regulative violence. This “limited” violence is judged legal according to its application and who applies it. Where natural law judges in terms of ends, positive law is focused on means. The presumption is that just means will automatically bring about just ends. Where in natural law, the ends justify the means, in positive law, the means justifies the end. The paradox or blindness is created in the two sides of the law, in which in neither instance is the role of violence ultimately questioned.

The inherent injustice is rendered visible when natural law and positive law are set side by side. The understanding that the inauguration of law is through an originary law-making violence exposes the true nature of law-preserving violence. For example, the United States constitutes itself as a legal entity only in denying or deconstituting subjection to the British monarch. If the United States had lost the Revolutionary War, the entire notion of independence would have been illegal. Perhaps the chief perpetrator of the crimes against the monarchy, George Washington, would have been declared the chief criminal, and executed according to the law (law-preserving). To constitute a state is to simultaneously defy the law, and to imagine a people not yet formed as the constituting entity. The violence will have been legal only in the case of victory.

This founding violence is not disconnected from law-preserving violence, as it is always possible for violence to get out of hand. The laws of the state must be enforced for the state to continue to exist. The law founds and preserves the state through the same violence, so that law enforcement is foundational both at the beginning and in the continuation of the state. Benjamin’s point is that what seems to be two forms of violence (law founding and law enforcement) cannot be separated. The law is always in the process of being constituted and legitimated through violence.

The modern police force demonstrates the overlap in that, though they are thought to be about law enforcement, certain situations call for discretionary judgements which, like the founding violence of the law, will have been made legitimate (in hindsight) because the police embody the law. Just as a king is not able to break the law (he is the embodiment of the law), unless his rule is overturned, so too the police retain a semblance of this original embodiment, if not in theory at least in practice. They are always in the business of establishing the law, and in establishing it making it legitimate.

When the police rob and terrorize citizens, as happened over a long period in Baltimore, it becomes very difficult to bring the law to bear upon the law. In Baltimore, as in the Nation as a whole, this was largely due to the fact that police brutality was focused on the black population. “The fact that the legal order not only countenanced but sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination for most of our Nation’s history-and the fact that the police were bound to uphold that order-set a pattern for police behavior and attitudes toward minority communities that has persisted until the present day.”[2] The black population bears similarities to the Jewish population in Nazi Germany or the Native American population in the period of discovery and settlement. The force of the law makes its primary mark in excluding those who fall outside of the law’s protection.

In the New Testament, Ephesians brings out the inherent hostility of the Jewish law in the portrayal of antagonism of Jews toward Gentiles. Christ “broke down the barrier of the diving wall” as he “abolished the enmity, which is the Law” (Eph. 2:14-15). The Jewish law was built upon exclusion of Gentiles, as this exclusion was definitive of what it meant to be a Jew. The markers of the law in sabbath keeping, in the food laws, and in circumcision, marked out the Jews. The Jews were marked in the flesh, they were marked through special time, and they were marked by special food. Gentiles did not fall within but stood outside of Jewish law. Roman law functioned in a similar manner through the special mark of crucifixion. Roman citizens were those protected from crucifixion and those who could be put on crosses were not counted as citizens.

This explains who killed Christ (the law enforcers) and why. The sabbath law, the laws of cleanliness and restricted association (no Samaritans or Gentiles allowed), the rules governing the sacredness of the Temple, and the laws against blasphemy are all going to be leveraged by the Jews to kill Christ. As Jesus explains, this is a fulfillment of their law: “But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause’” (John 15:25). Their use of the law blinds them to their violence.

The Psalm Jesus is referencing directly links the action of the persecutors to a lie: “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause; mighty are those who would destroy me, those who attack me with lies” (Ps. 69.4). As the Psalm describes, those doing the persecuting have a murderous zeal for the temple which consumes their victim (69:9). It is their zeal for the sacrificial system rather than a true understanding of God’s desire that has them persecute and oppress this messianic figure. The prayer of the Psalm is answered in Christ as “their own table before them [has] become a snare” and “their sacrificial feasts [have] become a trap” (v. 22). The Jews would destroy the true Temple and the true embodiment of the law to preserve their law. In the end, the Jews forsake their own religion and national messianic hopes by proclaiming, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). In order to fulfill their zeal for the law by killing Jesus, they forsake their law and religion.

The Romans, in the person of Pilate, would mock Jewish pretensions to independent nationalism by declaring Jesus the Jewish King and then having him beaten and crowned with thorns. The crown of thorns, the royal robes, the declaration of Jesus as King of the Jews, may be Pilates means of deriding all things Jewish. The Romans are going to do their part in destroying the Temple, as Pilate is concerned to quell an insurrection by enforcing Roman justice, despite his own declaration that Jesus is innocent (John 19:4). He is afraid of uncontrolled violence should insurrection occur.

When the Jews appear before Pilate, he tells them to judge him according to their own law (John 18:31). They later indicate that this is precisely what they have done: “The Jews answered him, ‘We have a law, and by that law He ought to die because He made Himself out to be the Son of God’” (John 19:7). This frightens Pilate, as this is to usurp not only Jewish law but the foundation of Roman law, embodied in the son of God – Caesar. Roman law and Jewish law converge then, in the necessity of killing Jesus. The Jewish high priest speaks for both Jews and Romans in proclaiming, “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (John 11:50).

In Giorgio Agamben’s depiction, the supposed universal condition of law is established by the particulars of exception. The very root of human polity is structured around a necessary exclusion of one form of life, bare life (homo sacer). It is only where bare life is structured and ordered in the city that it can be said to be “good life.” The power of the state or sovereign power establishes itself through this power of exclusion, the exception upon which the rule is built.[3] Homo sacer is stripped of legal status and falls outside the political community and is among those continually and unconditionally exposed to the potential of being killed. This power of death, deciding who dies outside the city, establishes the life of the city.

Jesus dies outside of the city, beyond law and religion, reduced on the cross to bare life. Christ as the exception, however, forever exposes the basis upon which inclusion and law are constructed.

“For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, 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. 2:14-16).

Jewish law, Roman law, and the universal violence of law are defeated, for he has abolished the enmity of the law, he has broken down the hostility of the law, and he Himself is our peace. Law-founding and law-preserving combine to destroy the One who embodies the true law of love but, as indicated in the Temple incident, out of this destruction Christ raises up the true Temple of peace.

[1] Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 19-3-1926 (The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1996) this single article can be accessed at https://fswg.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/benjamin-critique-of-violence-new-translation.pdf What may be less obvious is how the United States “War on Terror” or even the “War on Drugs” implies and justifies holocaust like violence as a justified means toward a just end. For a goal as illusive as a pure race, the destruction of all terrorists, the end of the drug trade, all out and continual violence is seemingly justified.

[2] Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, “The Evolving Strategy of Police: A Minority View” in Perspectives on Policing, (Published by the U. S. Department of Justice, no. 13, January 1990).

[3] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 18.

Are There White Christians?

The mode of doing identity through difference (Jew versus Gentile, free versus slave, male versus female) is, according to Paul, set aside in Christ. At one level the provenance and end of these categories is uncomplicated (oppression, discrimination, inequality, are to end) but at another level, considering all that is included in Paul’s categories (ethnicity, religion, biology, social class, economics, culture, behavior, gender, sex, etc.), setting aside these categories entirely will not be possible and negotiating around them so as to make Christ the prime identity will be no easy task. Most every element of what is normally considered as constituting humanness will have to be reconstituted, deconstructed, reoriented, recreated, and so, a great deal of Paul’s effort will be spent in explaining how oneness in Christ is to be implemented. Jews and Gentiles will have to renegotiate nearly every element of their life – how and what to eat and the role of ethnic and religious identity. Men and women cannot simply continue to identify themselves through the gender and sex roles of the surrounding culture. Slaves and free will have to undergo a radical reevaluation in their relationship, as now they are of the same family in the body of Christ.

Identity will no longer be through oppositional difference but will be “in Christ.” However, what needs to be obliterated and what needs to be preserved and reconstituted would seem to work out differently in each of the opposed pairs. “Master Christians” and “slave Christians” resonates very differently than “male Christians” and “female Christians.” The slave/master relationship is undone in that in Christ all become the slaves, or at least the servants, of one another. The same principle, of relinquishing self-interest, applies in gender roles but Paul specifically warns the Corinthians against a unisexuality. So, there are some things which need to be obliterated – there are no master Christians – while there are other things that are changed up and yet preserved. Jewishness, for example, is preserved but changed. It is not simply assimilated into the dominate Gentile mode but neither does it maintain its segregated stance. Clearly all must relinquish the self-interest which is the prime force in privileging one half of the pair.

The precise thing that is obliterated between the opposed pairs is the “hostility” or the alienating force or the principalities and powers which divide and darken. The dualisms that divide – Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female/, or most recently and most clearly white/black, all gain meaning (political, religious, ethnic, or gendered meaning) through an interdependent difference. The difference cannot be absolute or there would be no point of comparison, but to describe the difference as necessarily inhering in the pairs creates an instability. There is no essence in either of the parts; there are no masters without slaves, no men without women, no Jews without Gentiles, no white without black.

James Baldwin captures this in his description of the American invention of whiteness. He claims, in fact, that there is no white community. Whiteness is a false construct created by shedding Irish, Italian, German, English, and Jewish identity but this becomes a unified identity over and against what it is not. “No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” It became a white country on the basis of what was done to “red,” “brown,” and black humanity. “White men—from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.” America became white on the basis of subjugation of people of color. “No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie.”[1]

Whiteness describes a relationship of power. To the degree that people depend upon this power, to the degree they live off this power, to the degree that this power defines, to that degree their identity is dependent on the genocidal form out of which this identity emerges. This genocidal hermeneutic, in Willie Jennings description, continues to center “the good, the beautiful, the intelligent, and the noble” around whiteness, creating a regime of whiteness. This whiteness “disciplines fantasies of becoming (becoming human, mature, cultured, civilized, authoritative,)” such that whiteness continues to colonize through these ongoing effects. Jennings refers to it as Caucasia’s capital.[2]

He raises the question, “Can white people be saved?” The question, as he explains does not pertain to the efficacy of salvation in regard to a category of people. The point is that whiteness is a way of being in the world that stands opposed to the Christian way of being in the world. Whiteness, he explains, is “a deformed building project aimed at bringing the world to its full maturity.” It is conceived as part of the idea of progress as Europeans colonize(d) the world. This new world is not allowed a voice but is named in reference to the colonizers. “These Europeans answered the question without the voice or vision of the peoples of the new worlds. They self-designated.” And they designated a vast variety of peoples in reference to their self-designation. They began to “suture different peoples, clans, and tribes into racial categories. They, the Europeans, were white, and the others were almost white, not quite white, or nonwhite, or almost black, not quite black, or black.” Metaphorical and literal genocide began with denying these “non-white” people a voice, so that whiteness was projected into their world as an order of meaning, very often in the name of Christ and missions. “Death expanded its reach by designating peoples and the earth in reductive categories, isolating lives into fragments in order to make them useful, turning everything into commodities.” Christian conversion became an event toward whiteness “as a formation toward maturity.”[3]

So, whiteness does not pertain to birth or biology but it refers to a particular form of agency and subjectivity by which progress is gauged. To merge Christian with whiteness is to reverse the valuation system of the former: being an owner rather than owned, being a citizen of the first world rather than a stranger, and gauging the departure from darkness by being seen as white. Whiteness can be equated with ownership and having a voice, whereas to be non-white amounts to literally being owned or being material in the production process. To be a citizen of Caucasia meant taming the wilderness, subjugating native inhabitants, and by this means establishing an identity in the new nation. Citizenship in nationalism is a pure construct, not grounded in the land but taking ownership and control of the land, rather than being integrated into the land and its controls. The labor of whites took on a different order of meaning than the labor of blacks in that it was a labor of ownership and control to establish whiteness and citizenship. Native and black, in Jennings description, were perceived as “closer to nature and its raw condition of unproductivity.”[4] In this understanding, whiteness is a condition of lostness: one is lost due to a misplaced notion of ownership and control, a misplaced citizenship, and a misplaced value system.

In a similar but differently articulated vein, James Cone maintains that God is not the God of all people as he is against the oppressor and is the God of the oppressed. He concludes, “So-called Christianity, as commonly practiced in the United States, is actually the racist Antichrist.” This “false Christianity . . . of the oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed.” In other words, to claim to be a white Christian is to miss the oppressive genealogy of this identity.

In Paul’s depiction, the principalities and powers exercise this alienating force through the dualisms that divide. The full weight of the Christian Gospel is aimed at defeating this division, this mystery that has us entrapped. The mystery of division is one we naturally inhabit in the way we organize ourselves in dualistic identities. The mystery divides and confounds our thinking. It is a mystery concerning the relationship between creation and Creator in which the one (the created order) is idolatrously pitted against the other. The idolater self-designates, imagining all else is relative to his created image, and imagining oneself as his own father-creator. Paul depicts passage from out of this mindset as the opening of this obscurity that darkens every mind. The passage from “once hidden” to “now revealed” marks a new historical consciousness.

According to Ephesians, it pertains to “things in heaven” and “things on earth” and to God’s predetermined purposes for all things. No longer should we posit a gap between God and creation, heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile. Christ has bridged the gap. Paul will refer to the broad sweep of history in Romans 9-11 as the unfolding of this mystery and he will refer to the breaking down of the “dividing wall” between Jews and Gentiles as pertaining to a fulfilled cosmic order previously hidden (Eph 2:14). People are reconstituted as a singular family in which their personhood involves a new consciousness – holistic and personal. Given this insight, all divisions are exposed as a false order of identity.

To be Christian is to break out of the division of whiteness as an identity, a value system, or a form of citizenship. Perhaps all we can expect is to gradually learn to be something other than white, something on the order of citizens of a different sort of kingdom. This begins, in Paul’s description, through a different order of embodiment – finding ourselves embodied in Christ. This is not an abstraction but a real-world connection to other people as a means to receiving grace and gifts of the Spirit. This is not identity by segregation but a preservation of unity provided by Christ. “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).

To be Christian is to give up on ownership and first-world citizenship so as to identify with a different citizenry, dispossessed and poor in this world. The space Christians are to occupy is neither coveted nor contested as it is outside the city, where doing life together is the singular economy and value. As Jennings puts it, we must be saved “from being or becoming white people.” As we relinquish white capital we can begin to enjoy “the gifts from on high.” “But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Eph 4:7). This is capital enough.

[1] James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies,” https://bannekerinstitute.fas.harvard.edu/files/bannekerinstitute/files/on_being_white.and_other_lies_baldwin_0.pdf

[2] Willie Jennings, “Caucasia’s Capital: The Ordinary Presence of Whiteness,” https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/divinity.duke.edu/files/documents/faculty/Jennings-Caucasias-Capital.pdf

[3] Willie Jennings, “European Christian missionaries and their false sense of progress” in The Christian Century, (October 31,2018). https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/european-christian-missionaries-and-their-false-sense-progress

[4] Ibid.

The Gospel as the Mystery Revealed Versus Calvin’s “Incomprehensible” Anti-Gospel

That which was once hidden (“hidden since the foundation of the world”) but which has been revealed is not an esoteric secret on the order of Scientology (how to “go clear” of the body) or Mormonism (induction into the secrets of the Mormon Temple), or a secret on the order of the Gnostic mystery cults (a secret knowledge or experience), but it is a secret like Poe’s purloined letter – hidden in plain sight. It is a secret hidden in plain sight in the Old Testament, in the parables of Jesus, and in human experience. This mystery is one we inhabit in the way we organize ourselves into nations and religions, it is a mystery of interpretation (of the Old Testament but of reality in general), it is a mystery concerning the relationship between creation and Creator. Paul depicts the opening of this secret or the passage from “once hidden” to “now revealed” as marking a new historical consciousness as to the purposes of creation.

According to Ephesians, it pertains to “things in heaven” and “things on earth” and to God’s predetermined purposes for all things. Paul will refer to the broad sweep of history in Romans 9-11 as the unfolding of this mystery and he will refer to the breaking down of the “dividing wall” between Jews and Gentiles as pertaining to a fulfilled cosmic order previously hidden (Eph 2:14). This reference to the breaking of a literal wall in the Temple taken as a cosmic representation, such that divided people will be made one but also that the divide between heaven and earth will be broken down, is itself a deployment of the revealed hermeneutic apart from which the mystery remained. Paul’s allegorizing or spiritualizing interpretation of the most sacred precincts (the literal inner core) of Judaism (a mode he will apply to Hebrew Scriptures) pertains cosmically and personally. People are reconstituted as a singular family in which their personhood involves a new consciousness – holistic and personal. This new family fulfills the temple purposes of the cosmos in which heaven comes to earth: “in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” (Eph 2:21–22). Gentiles and Jews are no longer divided, the individual is no longer divided and heaven and earth are no longer divided in this fulfilled cosmic arrangement. As Paul describes it in Galatians, the binaries (Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female), which are not simply a convention of language but a mode of identity and understanding, no longer pertain in this new mode of identity and thought.

The scheme of “once hidden” and “now revealed,” in taking in the full scope of history, may encompass “the age of the cosmos” in which people were “dead in their trespasses” (Eph 2:1-2), but is the mystery of that former age constituted by “the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (2:2). Is the mystery simply a result of sin’s deceit or darkness? If the mystery is equated with the darkness of sin, then the mystery revealed would be reduced to the overcoming of sin (the reduction of some theological systems). But Paul connects the mystery to two epochs of history inclusive of creation and its fulfillment, such that the mystery or the concealment disclosed by the revelation of the Gospel is part of the divine plan.

In Ephesians 5 Paul connects the mystery to a primal goodness which precedes sin; which is not to say that Paul equates the mystery with the one-flesh relationship of marriage (described in Gen 2:24 and which he quotes) but the unity or oneness of the marriage relationship partakes of the mystery unfolded or fulfilled in Christ (5:31-32). Like the valence between creation and fulfillment, the once hidden significance of marital oneness is disclosed in the relation between Christ and the Church – an order inclusive of all humanity. It is not that the union between Christ and the Church, like the unity of marriage, is incomprehensible. What is revealed in this union, is the cosmic breadth of the marriage like unity brought about in Christ. Creations purpose remained an undisclosed and unfulfilled mystery which is now disclosed (made known, preached, realized, in a new unity) and realized in the Spirit.

This “Spiritual” understanding penetrates or unveils the mystery at two key junctures: the mystery of the Anointed “has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit” (Eph 3:5); and this revealing works on the inward person “who is strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man” (3:16) so as to plumb new depths of comprehension (3:18-19). Spirit is interwoven with the realization of the revealed mystery in each of its appearances in Ephesians (1:11; 3:16; 5:26 speaks of a spiritual washing; and 6:19 evokes the power of the Spirit to work in Paul in making the mystery known) so that it is clear that the Spirit is the means to unity – inward and outward, cosmic and local. The unity of Christ and the Church, the unity of Jews and Gentiles, the unity realized in “the inward man,” is a reconciliation in Christ sealed by the Spirit summed up as peace. This peace is not simply an interlude between wars but is a state of unity and participation in God. Being “in Christ” means participation in the cosmic plan unfolding in a unified humanity founded in peace.

All of this seems to refer back to the fact that, “He made known to us the mystery of His will” (Eph 1:9). The Gospel is nothing less than an opening up of the will of God to human understanding. We now understand what God has foreordained or predestined for the world through his Son. Strange then that there is another gospel which claims that God’s plan or his reasons for predestination are wholly internal to his being and are opaque to humanity – completely incomprehensible.

Calvin maintains that God’s predestination is mysterious and “utterly incomprehensible.” He believed this impenetrable mystery will inspire wonder and reverence in that confounding people, God’s mysterious decrees will be revered in their “wonderful depth.” Calvin warns in the opening of his chapter on predestination that we must restrain curiosity and not ask after the secret things of God, as these are forbidden. “Let us not be ashamed to be ignorant in a matter in which ignorance is learning. Rather let us willingly abstain from the search after knowledge, to which it is both foolish as well as perilous, and even fatal to aspire.”[1] In this alternative gospel, Calvin determined (from Ephesians 1:4) that there is no passage from hidden mystery to mystery disclosed; rather God’s mysterious predestination is to elect some (and to damn others) and this election is equated with holiness. There is no room for living out this inward and outward unity, lest these achievements be confused with meritorious works. For Calvin then, the gospel is not so much a mystery revealed as a mystery compounded. The question is if a gospel that misses Christ’s disclosure and fulfillment of cosmic purposes, preordained before the foundation of the world, qualifies as Gospel, or is it in fact a counter-gospel or anti-gospel?

In Paul’s depiction the Gospel is a revealing of God’s purposes for all of creation. In Romans, Paul equates “the Gospel of God” with that “which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures” (Ro 1:1-2) – the Hebrew scriptures. In the scriptures the Gospel was present but concealed until Christ retroactively brings out or delineates their prophetic element. As T.J. Lang puts it, “This does not diminish the revelatory function of the scriptures; it simply means that the Christ event is hermeneutically determinative, restructuring the perception of reality on either side of its occurrence.”[2] In Paul’s depiction, what Christ does for the Hebrew scriptures, is what he does for all of creation and for the Temple (a microcosm) and its religion. Just as the secret of the Old Testament is disclosed in Christ, so to Christ becomes the hermeneutic key for understanding human and cosmic purposes. It is not only the scriptures but God’s will for time, for all reality that are summed up or opened up in Christ: “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph 1:9-10). The mystery disclosed pertains to all things and this is the Gospel.

[1] Calvin, Institutes Book 3 chapter 21.

[2] T. J. Lang, Mystery and the Making of a Christian Historical Consciousness: From Paul to the Second Century, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/37749844.pdf

The Power of Resurrection Knowing Demonstrated in its Defeat of Death Dealing Knowledge

From Genesis there unfolds the picture of two modes of knowing and two objects of knowledge. God was at the center of human understanding prior to the Fall, and with the Fall human language, in the knowledge of good and evil, simply referred to itself, serving to displace the role of God (as life-giver and as the center to the determination of ethics). The lie of the Fall is that knowledge of a certain kind holds out life and defeats death. Note the necessity of dialectic, difference, and the real-world alienation and murder this produces. The reality is that this sort of knowing is death dealing in its immediate experience and in the experience of those who take it up. The feeling of exposure and shame experienced by the first couple (the picture of what it feels like to die), the murder of the second son by the first, and the rise of a generation of psychopathic killers, can all be traced to a trade in knowledge. Here is the experience of entrusting oneself to human power and human language.

The question of how and what we know is not set aside in Scripture but is thematic and it is a theme taken up in the New Testament. The Gnostic tendency, which the Gospel of John and several of the New Testament epistles address both directly and indirectly (in its proto or incipient form) seems to be a particular manifestation of how a certain form of human knowledge is interwoven with evil. Gnosis or knowledge as the direct experience of the absolute might seem harmless but it is associated in John with the anti-Christ. Knowing as an end in itself apparently cuts one off from the love and knowledge of Christ in a very similar manner to the way in which knowledge of God was traded for the knowledge of good and evil.

The modern psychological and philosophical experience of this failed knowing reduplicates the problem and might be described in the same manner. G. E. Lessing’s divide between the eternal truths of reason and the contingent truths of history seem to reduplicate the Platonic divide between the absolutely transcendent forms and the world of time and matter. But it also might describe the psychological divide between the law of the mind (static, unchanging, impossible) and the law of the body (subject to the contingencies of embodiment). The philosophical divide reduplicates the psychological predicament and this can be traced throughout human experience and philosophy. The tendency of failed human knowledge is to work one side of this divide against the other: the subjective or the objective, the immanent or the transcendent, the historical or the eternal, the social or the universal, the inductive or the deductive, ad infinitum. In the theological realm the historical Jesus is pitted against the eternal Christ, natural theology is detached from revelation, and personal piety is pitted against realism (as in Niebuhr’s political realism). This has resulted in a split Christianity, which in one form is focused primarily on going to heaven and in the other on the Social Gospel. In each instance, there is a discord between thought and practice or ultimately between God and the world.

Deism may simply describe the experiential reality of living in a secular world in which belief in God is not integrated into the realities of the everyday world. It is not simply cosmology and science that are free of the necessity of God but psychology, sociology, human sexuality, economics, and politics are presumed to be self-ordering arrangements. Christian belief often fails to engage the realities of the secular world as it is presumed the secular is an adequate ground in itself. The cutting loose of the world from the constraints of God is not reversed by an intensity of belief or piety. That is, the evangelical, the theological liberal, the agnostic, or the atheist, seem to breathe the same air and experience this “freedom” as a sort of trauma. The angst, mental illness, violence, and sexual perversion of the age are of epidemic proportions inside and outside of churches. This form of freedom seems to generate new forms of enslavement and it is not clear yet that this same angst will not bind itself to the worst sort of political tyranny (in the name of freedom).

This divide, if we understand that it is of the same order as the problem addressed in Scripture, is simultaneously identified with evil (sin and death, violence and hostility) and is what Christ rescues us from. Paul pictures it as the “dividing wall of hostility” in which humanity is pitted against itself in an enslavement to the law of sin and death. The history of murder (Matthew 23:34-36), hostility among people, self-directed violence (Romans 7), and the ultimate evil of crucifying the son of God are all pictured as flowing from this same divided knowing. But the enmity which resulted in the death of Christ is also transfigured – “abolishing in His flesh the enmity . . . 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” (Ephesians 2:14-16, NASB). The great mistake of a Christianity captured by modernity is to picture this abolished enmity, this new humanity, this defeat of death, as if it is occurring in a world that is still divided. That is Christian thought is often not cosmic or Christian enough in its proportion. Ephesians depicts the closure of the gap as occurring between heaven and earth and resulting in a restored cosmic order and a new form of humanity through which this restoration work is channeled.

At the same time, evil as arising from a divided humanity, a divided knowledge, a divided social order is exposed in the manner of Christ’s restoration work through an alternative community, a Temple community. The Jewish Temple was representative of the coming together of heaven and earth, and Christ as the true Temple accomplishes what the earthly tabernacle represented. The hope of Israel was that God, who had abandoned the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile would come back. The post-exilic prophet Malachi said, ‘the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple’ (Mal 3:1). The story of creation culminates in Christ coming to the Temple (John 1, Ephesians) as the Temple always pictured this cosmic reconciliation, accomplished in the incarnation. The living God and the living human – Christ, and a new form of humanity constituting the body of Christ – the Church, bring together what was separate and give rise to a new form of knowing and a new way of being human (re-creation). Christ appearance in the Temple inaugurates the accomplishment of this final reconciliation and New Testament theology is predicated on the belief that this primary promise has come true in Christ.

Christ’s death and resurrection can be seen as achieving this reconciled knowing and being if it is understood that dividedness and death work hand in hand. Resurrection is where Christ takes control of the principalities and powers (1:21-22), as cultural and political powers are founded on hostility (antagonism, dividedness, and death). “Through the Church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers” as they are now disempowered – denied the power of death and dividedness. True wisdom is not dependent on division as it is from and “in the heavenly places” (3:10). As in Romans 8 so in Ephesians, the inheritance is heaven and earth come together. Both depict something like the fulfillment of Isaiah 11:9: “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” Now there is the hope that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened” (1:18) as in Him is “the message of truth” which has been made manifest (1:13). This was realized when “He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places” (1:13). The resurrection power of Christ is now being shared, as one age is breaking into another as in the Temple community are those “raised up with Him and seated . . . with Him in the heavenly places” (2:6). Heaven and earth are bridged in the resurrection power of the body of Christ. Where resurrection power is put into place the power of death, the orientation to death, is undone and this constitutes a new order of knowing and a new sort of community.

Ephesians depicts this community as foundational and perhaps, counter-foundational, as this foundation takes precedence over world-historical foundationalism: it is “before the foundation of the world” (1:4). The mystery hidden since the foundation of the world has exposed the inadequacy of the immanent foundations constituting a world divided. The clash of foundations may be most evident in the common sense treatment of Christ’s resurrection. For conservatives the resurrection is a miracle disconnected from cosmic recreation and for liberals it is not to be taken literally and is inconsequential to the faith. But in the New Testament resurrection is the inauguration of cosmic redemption as it is a reversal of cosmic failure. God affirms the goodness of the created order, making it over, starting with the physical body of Jesus Himself.

Step one in appreciating the all-inclusive ramifications of both evil and its resolution in resurrection, is to recognize the peculiar social and cognitive working of evil, countered in resurrection community. Evil is corporate, social, cognitional, and thus we cannot think ourselves free of the world, the history, the culture, or the knowing that binds us where death reigns. As Bernard Lonergan has noted, common sense is not up to the task of thinking on the level of history as it is itself a product of a particular history. The surd nature of “common sense” is made evident in the continual irruption of war and violence in human history and in the story of decline of Western civilization and every civilization. Death reigns in multiple senses in this sort of knowing. God is not going to show up on the wings of human progress. Though it has brought an abundance of blessing, it has also given rise to holocausts, global destruction, and the possibility of omnicide (the obliteration of the human race). It is inherently dependent on violence and death. In gnostic thought, or maybe just human thought, this is no cause for abandoning the course upon which we are set, as escape through the possibility of total destruction, or death and dividedness, are the sole means to life. Christ, in addressing this culture and knowledge of death, sums up (in the depiction of Ephesians) all things.

There are many approaches to summing up the failure of human knowledge (psychology, religion, sociology, philosophy) but the summing up that frees from any particular historical moment is found in Christ: “the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” as all things in a world divided are brought together (Eph. 1:10). The incapacity for any other mode of summing up (any alternative epistemology), gets at Paul’s holistic depiction of the new Temple community found in Christ. Knowledge of him is revelation and the foundation of an alternative wisdom and knowledge (1:17). A new power has been unleashed as “you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (2:1). The new Temple community, the Church, is a direct challenge to the Temple of Diana of the Ephesians, the temple culture and wisdom at the Areopagus, and the modern temple of secular knowledge. It is a challenge to every order, sacred and secular, derived from the immanent frame of dividedness.