Tag: Leslie Newbigin

Practical Universal Salvation Through the Church

The disconnect from and justification of the blatant evil in Gaza by many American Christians reveals the dark side of a faith, apparently open to genocide.[1] Rather than heightening empathy and taking up the cause of defenseless women and children and a starving population, could it be the faith enables support of mass slaughter, as it did in previous colonizing tendencies? The forced resettlement and genocide carried out on the American native population (in the name of America as the new Zion) is being repeated and consciously embraced in modern Christian Zionism, or simply evangelical or Christian nationalist sensibilities. The incapacity to recognize annihilation cannot be “deserved,” no matter the evil that may have been perpetrated or the “practical necessities,” demonstrates not only a mental but a moral failing. The question is, how is it that the Christian faith, as it is commonly practiced in this country, has become a force for evil?

Jesus Confrontation with Evil is Displaced by Legal Theories of Atonement

While there is probably no singular reason, what is clear is that Christianity as the defeat of evil has been displaced with a religion focused on individual salvation and legal justification, allowing evil to run its course. Rather than seeing the cross as a defeat of Satan and the inauguration of the reign of Christ over evil, the satanic is left undisturbed. This church is not a counter kingdom deploying the nonviolent ethics of Jesus in his reign over evil, but is a waiting room for saved souls. There is a complete disconnect between the cross and the kingdom, as the work of the cross provides legal benefits rather than constituting a real-world defeat of evil. The captivity to sin, death, and the devil, is not addressed in legal theories of the atonement, and the the cross is emptied of its kingdom purposes.

This is evident in such theories as Christian Zionism, premillennialism, and dispensationalism (see here), but all of these theories arose in the vacuum created by legal theories of atonement such as penal substitution and divine satisfaction, which displaced the New Testament understanding that Christ releases from captivity to sin, death, and evil. Legal theories deal in the theoretical realm of imputed righteousness, and what is lost is the need for a kingdom of atonement, a counter kingdom to the kingdoms of this world, in which a people can be shaped and redeemed in a practical sense (rather than in a legal or theoretical sense). The embodied, social, and practical nature of redemption means salvation is corporate and by definition a community of practice, but legal theories fragment salvation into the particular, the individual, and the disembodied, leaving aside political and social practice. Where salvation is not real-world redemption, evil is a practical necessity to participate in the politics of the kingdoms of this world. Christians are taught they must be violent, they must participate in the killing machine of nation states, as the practical necessities of this world demand wielding the sword. Enemies must be excluded and slaughtered, not loved and ushered into the kingdom. The evil of the world is too great to lay down the sword.

Sin is Participation in a Counter-Kingdom

What is missed in this worldly Christianity is that sin is participation in a kingdom. The kingdoms of this world are in rebellion against God and in league with evil, not in some abstract legal sense, but in the deadly sense of being willing to destroy the other. Salvation and safety require that the stranger, the foreigner, the enemy, be excluded, and when they encroach on “our land” or presume they can gain citizenship in our country they must be taught a lesson. Crosses outside the city, walls of exclusion, Alligator Alcatraz’s, ice agents in masks, will save us from being the door mat of the world. Where the church is a universally open kingdom, and for this reason is not a kingdom of evil, the kingdoms of this world are exclusive and this exclusion is definitive of the kingdom of sin.

While we might refer to the church as a “spiritual kingdom,” what is meant by spiritual has come to mean not embodied or practiced, and thus is a means to not love the enemy, to not turn the other cheek, or to refuse taking up the cross. These are “spiritual” and other worldly and not meant for kingdoms of practice. In other words, sin is rebellion against God (not just weakness or sensuality), a defiant will to power, in which we would live from our resources, from our strength, from our kingdom, and not God’s. Spiritualizing the commands of Jesus and his kingdom is one way to remain good citizens of the kingdom of sin.

To continue to bow to the “god of this world” and submit to the idolatry of Mot (the god of death) the realm of this aeon must maintain its integrity as a kingdom unto itself. It cannot be perceived as a counter-kingdom, dependent upon separation, rebellion, and alienation from God. The demonic servitude, evident in pro-genocide policies, can endure only where the power of the cross is evacuated by refusal to recognize the monstrous evil all serve in the kingdoms of this world. Sin is dismissed as “error” or “weakness” or “legal guilt” and the demonic delusion Christ exposed and defeated is allowed to continue.

To transfer our allegiance out of the kingdoms of darkness into the kingdom of Christ, we have to recognize Christ, the Lord of history, has defeated the principalities and powers. The old aeon of sin continues, but the reign of Christ has begun, which is not to say it is the consummate kingdom but it is the inaugurated kingdom of the new age (now and not yet). The reign of God in Christ is a present reality in which new birth, heavenly citizenship, new creation, resurrection life, is entry into this kingdom. Where legal atonement theory can hardly be connected to the kingdom, Christ’s defeat of evil can only be understood in a kingdom context. Exodus is not only for ancient Israel, but the cross means all are released from bondage to the Pharaohs of this world through serving a new King and kingdom.

Jesus is the Presence of His Kingdom

The passage from John the Baptist to Jesus, is from one of preparing for the kingdom to announcing the kingdom has come. “The time has come, . . . the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (1:15). Jesus “went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people” (Matt 4:23). In Paul’s view Christ has undertaken “an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things” (Eph 1:10). This administrative summing up is not a delayed or future reign. As Jesus says, “The kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt 12:28; Luke 11:20).

According to Leslie Newbigin, “If the New Testament spoke only of the proclamation of the kingdom there could be nothing to justify the adjective “new.” The prophets and John the Baptist also proclaimed the kingdom. What is new is that in Jesus the kingdom is present.”[2] “Jesus came into Galilee announcing the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, the reign of God is at hand: repent and believe the good news'” (Mark 1:14-15). Jesus proclaims the message of the kingdom and he does the work of the kingdom as in him the kingdom is dynamically active and present.[3] He said, “If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt. 12:28). He casts out demons, and this is the sign that Satan is bound: “Or how can anyone enter the strong man’s house and carry off his property, unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house” (Matt 12:29). As Paul describes, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way” (2 Thess 2:7). This is enacted at the cross, “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:31-32). 

In addition to casting out demons and binding Satan, the third mark of the presence of the kingdom are the miracles of Jesus. Jesus replied to John the Baptist’s question about the coming Messiah, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor” (Matt 11:4-5).  These are signs the kingdom of salvation has come: the healing of the blind points to Jesus power to heal spiritual blindness; the healing of the lame means Jesus can heal spiritual disability; the healing of leprosy testifies Jesus can purify; the healing of the deaf shows Jesus can penetrate obtuseness and deception; and the raising of the dead demonstrates Jesus’ power over death and the capacity to give life. This sign points to Jesus’ resurrection and the resurrection already available in Christian baptism (Rom 6:1). According to John (in Revelation 20), the resurrection from the dead has already occurred, and we need not wait on the millennium. According to Paul, we have already been raised up and made alive together with Christ (Eph 2:6; Col 2:12-13; 3:1).

Matthew provides a fourth indicator of the presence of the kingdom in his record of Jesus answer to John: “the good news is preached to the poor” (Matt. 11:5). The good news of the promised kingdom is specifically for the poor, the broken, and the enslaved (Is 61:1). A fifth sign of the kingdom, also predicted in Isaiah (as well as Jer 31:34; Mic 7:18-20; Zech 13:1) is the forgiveness of sins: “The people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity” (Is 33:24–Is 34). Jesus heals the paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins: “‘But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—He said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home’” (Mk 2:10–11).

The sixth mark of the kingdom’s presence was Jesus new teaching about its internal realization: “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21). To say it is internal does not, of course, exclude its corporate and embodied nature. His is a spiritual kingdom in that it is not the nationalistic kingdom Israel expected – a caution to those who would equate Christ’s kingdom with territorial or material kingdoms. As Paul says, “The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).[4]

Universal Salvation Through the Church

As Newbigin sums up, in Christ “we are talking about the reign and the sovereignty of God over all that is, and therefore we are talking about the origin, meaning, and end of the universe and of all human history within the history of the universe.”[5] The Bible describes the blessing of all nations, not just one, and the completion of God’s purposes in all of creation and not just some part, as the history it records is bringing all of creation and history to its divine end. The body of Christ is the means of an all-inclusive salvation: “there is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:6).

According to Sergius Bulgakov, “One should not diminish the ontological significance of this unity by transforming it into merely a figure, a simile: like a body or similar to a body. On the contrary, the apostle speaks precisely about one body (Eph. 4:4–6), in direct relation with the unity of God. The Church is not a conglomerate, but a body; and, as such, it is not quasi-one, but genuinely one, although this unity is not empirical, but substantial, ontological.”[6] The unity increases in and through God as it “grows with a growth which is from God” (Col 2:19). It is the realization of the ontological unity of the Trinity, the experience of the foundation of creation experienced in the perfection of creation. This unifying work has no limit: “Christ is the head of humankind and therefore lives in all humankind.”[7] Bulgakov ties this universality directly to the church: “The Church is the general foundation of creaturely being, its beginning and goal. The problem of the Church is posed here outside of historical concreteness, outside of the limits of space and time, outside of specific church organizations.”[8] There are no limits to the church mystically or ontologically, anymore than there are limits to the incarnation: “the incarnation of the Lord as the divine-human person of Christ consisted in the assumption of the whole Adam, “perfect” humanity. There are no limits to this assumption, either external or internal.”[9]

Christ is the goal of all humanity, and thus all humanity “belongs to the Church.” The good tidings are for “all people” (Luke 2:10–11) and the salvation is “before the face of all people: a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel” (vv. 30–32). “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men” (Titus 2:11). God “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). Those who would limit the number or who would divide the means, contradict the identity of Christ. There are no limits to the Logos’ assumption of humanity (“becoming flesh,” in John 1:1) or limits to the Holy Spirit. As Peter says on the day of Pentecost, quoting the prophet Joel, ‘it shall come to pass in the last days, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh’” (Acts 2:17). The “whole universe belongs to the Church. The universe is the periphery, the cosmic face of the Church.”[10] To put a limit on the work of Christ, by means of Israel or an institutional church, or to imagine the purposes of God can be delayed or thwarted by human means, or that God is only concerned with some of creation or some people is to refuse the “all in all” work of Christ.

Conclusion

How does the kingdom of God come if not in the incarnation? If it is dependent upon physical and political Israel, or on the kingdoms of this world, it will come through killing, (killing Palestinians, starving their children, killing their doctors, destroying their water, blowing up Iranians, assassinating nuclear scientists, committing murder mayhem and bloodshed). Christians who reject the cross as the reign of God demonstrate their worldly citizenship in their commitment to violence. Christians who follow Christ practice the way of the cross, not by putting people on crosses but by taking up the cross, knowing this is the cosmic reality unfolding in His millennial kingdom.

[1] There is no possible debate about the facts, or about the use of the term genocide, as this is the term chosen by two Israeli human rights organizations and by multiple Israelis. The New Yorker this week cites Moshe Ya’alon, former defense minister under Netanyahu calling it “ethnic cleansing.” Omer Bartov, a leading historian of the holocaust and a veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, says what is happening in Gaza is not a war but “genocide” – “it is the attempt to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza.” Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, says “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of devastation: indiscriminate killing of civilians. He calls it war crimes.” He says, “It is not a few bad soldiers, but government policy knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.” Two hundred and fifty former officers in the intelligence establishment, including three ex-chiefs of Mossad, signed an open letter of Protest. A thousand Israeli Air Force veterans signed a letter describing it as a useless political and personal ploy. 

[2] Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,1978) 44.

[3] See Kim Riddlebarger, A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding the End Times (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2013) 122.

[4] I am following Riddlebarger, 122-124.

[5] Nebigin, 32

[6] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (p. 258). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition.

[7] Bulgakov, 261.

[8] Bulgakov, 265-266.

[9] Bulgakov, 266.

[10] Bulgakov, 267.

How Theology Became Boring

I assume connectedness, integration, and beauty, are key elements in the make-up of that which is compelling and interesting. We engage in what grabs and pertains to us. In turn, boredom arises with disconnectedness and irrelevance.  This means the most basic, broadest, most interconnected of topics, such as theology, should be the most compelling – which for most is self-evidently not the case.

This is nowhere more obvious than among supposed students of the Bible, which I found through long experience, require convincing that theology is pertinent to their goals in ministry. As David Wells and Mark Knoll noted years ago, even the highest achieving seminarians can be dismissive of theology and eager to get to the real work of ministry. They both put the blame on the culture of pragmatism, but neither thought to look at the treatment of the topic itself. Neither considered the role of theology in giving rise to a culture, even a culture within the church, which no longer was concerned with what would seem to be foundational. It is clear that this subject, theology, which once engaged the greatest minds in history, even the greatest philosophical and scientific minds, as the queen of the sciences, has been displaced and theologians may have ensured this result.

The problem with turning to theology as giving rise to its own failure is not so much about agreeing that this may be true.  The argument is mostly about who is to blame. Who or what gave rise to “onto-theology,” or “classical theism” or the focus on metaphysics? While the incremental steps which gave rise to an irrelevant theology might be debated (e.g., the Constantinian shift, Augustinian dualism and doctrine of original sin, Anselm’s self-grounding philosophy and atonement theory, Scotus’ univocity of being, Calvin’s penal substitution, etc.) the end result is that theology became a perceived ghetto – the realm of those who have nothing pertinent to contribute to reason, science, and modern society.

One might point to Anselm, who presumed final solutions reside within the rational subject as there is a “natural” interiority which can function as the equivalent of revelation. The human word attains the Divine word and human self-presence equals the presence of God.  In other words, Anselm poses a world in which the resources for attaining to God lie within human reason and interiority rather than in a community of faith.

Leslie Newbigin suggests the real culprit in dividing faith from reason is Thomas Aquinas: “The Thomist scheme puts asunder what Augustine had held together, and as a result of this, knowledge is separated from faith. There is a kind of knowledge for which one does not have to depend upon faith, and there is another kind which is only available by exercise of faith. Certain knowledge is one thing; faith is something else. In Locke’s famous definition, belief is ‘a persuasion which falls short of knowledge.’” Augustine and Anselm held that faith was the beginning point, and “faith seeking understanding” held the two realms together. Subsequent to Aquinas, according the Newbigin, certainty is presumed to be a matter of knowledge, not of faith. “Faith is what we have to fall back on when certain knowledge is not had.”[1]

John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Radical Orthodoxy would lay the primary blame for a failed theology (and the failures of modernity in general) on Duns Scotus. His “univocity of being” presumes to find in all being what constitutes it as an individual existing thing. The being of the world, like the being of God, contains its own haecceity or integrity of being. According to the story told in Radical Orthodoxy, Scotus is to blame for making God like all other being, which results in secularism and atheism as God is subsumed by the being of the world.

Nearly everyone piles on Rene Descartes as the true culprit behind the division between faith and reason. Newbigin even suggests he is the cause of the second fall of man. In the midst of the crisis of authority represented between Protestants and Catholics, but more broadly between science and faith, as a paid apologist for the church, Descartes develops his argument for God, beginning, not with faith, but with doubt. He argued that knowledge of God and the soul was the business of philosophy, and the particulars of Christianity stood apart from the certain knowledge provided by natural reason. He presumes that since he has certain knowledge within himself, this knowledge is distinct from the realm of his body and the “outside” world. He concludes his soul is independent of the outside world and that the mind is distinct from and superior to matter. It is his soul, he argues, which does the real seeing, hearing, and perceiving, and not his physical eyes, ears, or physical body. He presumes any eye could be stuck in his eye socket, even a dead animal’s eye, for his soul to see through. Thought and action, belief and practice, the realm of the mind and the world of social relations are divided as a result.

Isaac Newton, who considers himself a theologian above all else, wanted to correct the primary mistake he found in Descartes of excluding God from science. Newton depicts God as inserting the created world into an already existing time and space (the laws of nature like the laws of reason are uncreated). He presumed God needed to occasionally correct the great machine of the universe and allows for God in the gaps, but his natural theology mostly closes the universe and promotes mechanical philosophy. As Pierre-Simon Laplace replies to Napoleon, inquiring where God is in his theory, “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.” Laplace assumed he had closed the gaps in Newtonian theory.

Wherever the blame is placed, it seems undeniable that a cleavage develops between the God of philosophy and science and the God of the Bible.  The former is demonstrable through apologetics and philosophical arguments while the latter is known through narrative and history. The God found in narrative does not provide for the sort of certainty found in the God of reason, and thus the God of reason and certainty becomes definitive of the God of faith. Natural theology, the study of metaphysics, and the notion of God as efficient cause, trumps the personal trinitarian God revealed in Christ. The being or the existence of God becomes the primary thing about him and his redemptive work in Christ and history are often rendered secondary to the brute fact of his existence.

The focus on God’s relation to time and history, the implicit privileging of monotheism over trinitarianism, arguments about immutability, impassibility, and sovereignty come to dominate much of the theological conversation. The notion of the world as a limited whole shapes theology such that the universe is no longer sacramental. Rather than the universe shining forth with the grandeur of God, it is a problem for God. Mechanical philosophy, evolutionary biology, or the pervasive tendency to reductionism, threatens to shut out God entirely, so that theology becomes consumed with proofs.

 In the realm of biblical studies, the primary effort becomes one of warding off scientific attacks, defending against higher criticism, and defending the inerrancy of the biblical text. Harmony between the Old and New Testament, harmony within the Gospels, harmony within the doctrine of the Bible, becomes the prime imperative among conservatives. The Bible not Jesus, history and not Christ, becomes the presumed ground of the Christian truth claim. Propositions about Christ tend to displace the centrality of his person. Historicism displaces the Word revealed in a continuum of history, as the Spirit of history becomes the history of spirit. In the general tenor of theology, like that of the culture, doubt displaces trust, certainty is sought to avoid risk, and facts are preferred over narrative. In the words of Paul, taken up by Origen, the spirit is displaced by the letter.

Origen might refer to the boring form of theology today as the faith of the “simple ones.” These simple ones believe in the creator God but they read Scripture without the Spirit, and are left, not simply with the literal text but the letter devoid of the Spirit. He commends their high view of the creator but concludes, they believe things about God that would “not be believed of the most savage and unjust of men.”[2] He says the reason for this, and the reason for the false teaching of the heretics and the literalism of the Jews, can be assigned to a singular cause: “holy Scripture is not understood by them according to its spiritual sense, but according to the sound of the letter.”[3] Those that miss the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Word, or the Spirit of history, “have given themselves up to fictions, mythologizing for themselves hypotheses according to which they suppose that there are some things that are seen and certain others which are not seen, which their own souls have idolized.”[4] The boring/simple ones reduce God to being after their own likeness and they miss the sacramental nature of the word and world delivered through the Spirit.

[1] Leslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 18.

[2] Origen, On First Principles 4.2.1.

[3] Ibid. 4.2.2.

[4] Ibid. 4.2.1.

A Genealogy of the Lonely Modern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[8] Jacques Lacan, Seminar III, 146

Beyond Medicine, Miracles, Reason, and Science: What Difference Marks the Experience of the Christian?

I was asked this excellent question recently and wanted to share the thoughts it provoked.

“Is preaching all there is to the kingdom of God in this present age? Does God not work miracles through men anymore? Must we have only rational ideas to be in the kingdom of God?” Continue reading “Beyond Medicine, Miracles, Reason, and Science: What Difference Marks the Experience of the Christian?”