Tag: Martin Luther

Redefining Luther’s “Justification” Through Žižek’s Extension of Girard’s Anti-Sacrificial Reading of Paul

Much of the theology and career of Martin Luther was driven by his obsession with notions of law and justice. He describes a “burning desire” to understand what Paul meant by the term “justice” in the book of Romans, not out of an idle curiosity, but because he was plagued and obsessed: “‘The justice of God is revealed in it.’ I hated that word, ‘justice of God,’ which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.” He describes, “that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience.” There was no assurance, no peace, no satisfaction. “I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, ‘Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments?’”[1]

The Gospel did not relieve his obsession with justice, but aggravated it: “Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath? This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.” The “righteousness revealed” in the Gospel did not help, until Luther discovers his understanding that Christ freely grants this righteousness through grace. He discovers that “faith” displaces works in achieving righteousness. In this new understanding, the justice of God is a “passive justice” in that faith accomplishes what works could not. He discovers, the just person lives by faith, and not by works. “All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates.” [2] He begins to read all of Scripture in a new light, recognizing that justice is God’s work throughout.

“Justification” as an Aggravation of Luther’s Struggle with the Law

Now this would make for a happy story, if on the other side of Luther’s discovery, he found peace, but though there may have been improvement, he cannot be said to have stilled his troubled conscience. His psychological and spiritual battles shifted from earning salvation to fighting depression, feelings of divine abandonment, and intense spiritual warfare against perceived demonic attacks. In his 95 Theses, he writes that self-hatred is something to be cultivated until entry into heaven: “The penalty of sin remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inner repentance), namely till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven” (Thesis 4). This self-hatred is posed from the perspective of the God of the law, that demands righteousness, and seems to have not changed in his attitude to sinners, in spite of grace. Even the cross is a sign of God’s hatred, but luckily Christ has born the penalty. However, God, in his hidden transcendence (Deus absconditus) continues to cause suffering and terror, and therefore it is refuge from God that is sought in God (Deus revelatus). “Thus, according to Luther, God reveals himself to sinners wearing a Janus face of both wrathful law and loving mercy. Consequently, believers should be ‘seeking refuge in God against God.’”[3] Luther needs to get rid of one half of God, but this angry transcendent God, the one behind the law, is primary in his thought.

At the same time, his struggle with the devil increased, as he felt the battle with evil was ongoing, within himself. “Christ and Satan wage a cosmic war for mastery over church and world. No one can evade involvement in this struggle. Even for the believer there is no refuge – neither monastery nor the seclusion of the wilderness offer him a chance for escape.”[4] Luther describes an ongoing campaign in which the victory is not yet secured, and he feels this in his mental and spiritual struggle. He describes still waiting on God’s righteousness, as he has yet to receive what is promised.[5] The irony of the shift from the early church’s belief in Christus Victor (defeat of sin, death, and the devil), to a legal righteousness, is that Luther may have solved one problem only to have it multiplied elsewhere. He continues to be tormented, concluding that it is not righteousness per se that is received in Christ, but the qualification for righteousness. We are made worthy to receive the gift, if not the fulness of the gift itself.

The weakness in Luther’s understanding of justification is that in pitting law against grace, he still pictures grace in terms of the foundation set forth in the law. Grace gives what the law demands, but the presumption is that grace still works according to the retributive justice and sacrifice of the law. Under grace, works of the law are accomplished by Christ, and his righteousness is legally imputed to believers. It did not occur to the reformers or to many of their Catholic forebears, that Christ sets aside sacrifice and retributive justice. He exposes and ends the working of sacrifice and the judicial system of righteousness built upon payment and retribution, and in fact the defeat of Satan is involved with, and can be equated with this overcoming of sacrifice. The absolutely transcendent God demands sacrifice under the law (God as a legislative authority), but Christ embodies the law of love and closes the gap between God and the world, posed by the law. According to Paul, “Christ is the end of the law” (Rom 10:4) as “He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross” (Col 2:14).

Paul’s Justification in Žižek and Girard as the End of Sacrifice

In Paul’s understanding, justification is making the world right, not through the law, but through Christ. Christ suspends the punishing work of the law, and brings an end to sacrifice. It is not a top-down legislation, but a bottom-up reformation of understanding of God and humanity. If one insists on the terminology of payment, Christ did not pay the price demanded by the law, Christ paid off the entire system, and defeated sin, death, and the devil in the process. Christ would end violence, including the violence of retribution and sacrifice, but also the violence of a masochistic conscience. As René Girard puts it, “The real meaning and function of the Passion” is “one of subverting sacrifice and barring it from working ever again by forcing the founding mechanism out into the open, writing it down in the text of all the Gospels.”[6] For Slavoj Žižek, Anselm’s doctrine of “divine satisfaction,” the legal basis of the atonement for much of Catholicism and the basis of Luther’s doctrine, serves this false economy of sacrifice and fails to penetrate the delusion of the fundamental fantasy (the lie) which grips the human subject. With the end of sacrificial religion (the end of the God of sacrifice and law), Luther’s Deus absconditus is exposed as a lie. The God behind the law of sacrifice, behind onto-theology, behind a metaphysical transcendent/immanent dualism is exposed as an idol, and so too the God presumed to be behind the plague of conscience is dethroned. The punishing, transcendent God of the law, is undone by the full revelation of God in the flesh. Paul addresses the anthropological, religious, and psychological nature of this displacement, but it may be that only the combination of Girard with psychoanalysis, can fully appreciate the apocalyptic nature of Paul’s theology.

Žižek’s Extension of Girardian Sacrifice into Psychoanalysis

Girard traces this work of exposure primarily in the realms of religion and religious sacrifice, and though he depends upon a psychoanalytic account of mimetic desire, he sees his work as demythologizing Freud and Lacan or psychoanalysis (in its focus on sex), along with religion. For Girard, the “other” is another person who acts first as model, then as rival, in the obstacle cause of desire, which is desire for life itself. The other person mediates desire and may be Other or divine-like, depending upon the “distance” between self and Other. He speaks of the passage from “external mediation” to “internal mediation” but he is referring to the felt proximity of the other. The external mediator remains distant and undisturbed by the desire he invokes, but in internal mediation the model is brought into the radius of the one following him, and is thus subject to mimetic desire and rivalry.[7] In Girard’s reading, by focusing on biology and sex, Freud missed the primary role of mimetic theory. Freud was too focused on the object of desire, the mother, and missed that primal desire was for being or life. Girard revises and rejects Freud, but as a result, his theory of mimetic desire seems to miss that sacrifice is not simply historically behind the rise of language and signs, but language continues, in the Lacanian portrayal, to exact a sacrifice. According to Marcus Pound, Girard “leaves little room” for “the practice of psychoanalysis, having eliminated “the conscious patricide-incest desire,” he does away with “the cumbersome necessity of the desire’s subsequent repression,” and along with it, “does away with the unconscious.”[8]

As Pound points out, it is Žižek, who “establishes the link between Girard’s thesis and Lacan precisely at the level of sacrifice.”[9] Žižek, building on Freud and Lacan, demonstrates how the sacrificial relation to language is not simply historical, religious, or cultural, but is the abiding reality in the human psyche. What Girard may not have appreciated about Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially as developed by Žižek, is that the Lacanian registers explain the psychoanalytic role of sacrifice. Freud laid out the basic parameters of this self-punishing system, which Luther gives every indication of being subject to all of his life, and Lacan explains the dynamic between the ego and the superego (or the law of the mind and the law of the flesh in Paul) as a relation within language (and not in biology or sex).

According to Lacan, following Freud, the other is not simply an outward model, but in Freud’s language, the image of the father is “cathected” or subsumed into one’s own image. As Freud describes, the “masochism in him creates a temptation to ‘sinful acts’ which must be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience” (The Economic Problem in Masochism, 266). Lacan pictures this punishing conscience as arising in the mirror stage, in which both the image in the mirror (the imaginary ego) and apprehension of this image through the language of the father (the symbolic or the law) constitute these others (the symbolic and the imaginary registers) as two sides of the self. That is, the external mediator, which is nearly identical for Girard and Lacan, becomes a constituent part of what is internal to the Subject, in the psychoanalytic understanding. The original sacrificial relation is established within the Subject (with passage through the mirror stage) between the imaginary (the ego or “I”) and the symbolic (the superego) which establishes the alienated distance from the real of the body.

For psychoanalysis, sacrifice not only controls external violence but it creates “control” over the inward threat of violence. In Freud’s depiction, the ego/superego split, evolves to channel the death instinct, or the energetics arising around the fear of death. Freud refers to the “id” as the origin of the death drive, which is then concentrated in the punishing superego (synonymous in Lacan with the acquisition of language). Passage through the castration complex is the resolution to what, in Girardian terms, would be the result of mimetic rivalry with the model. “The ritual background provides a stable imaginary/symbolic framework by which to answer the question of the desires of the real.”[10] The inner child (the ego) relinquishes the power of the father (the phallus) to the superego, or in Pauline terms takes up servitude to the law. According to Pound, the castration complex describes the inner dimension of Mosaic circumcision, ceding a part for the whole. “For example, in The Book of Exodus, God is about to kill Moses but is only dissuaded through his abrupt circumcision by his wife (Ex 4:24). His sacrificial act of circumcision, ceding his foreskin, serves to ensure the persistence of his being whilst at the same time giving presence to the terrifying God.”[11] Likewise, the sign of circumcision is the original mark of the sign in Abraham by which life is preserved in the face of death. “The cut of Abraham’s knife amounts to the cut induced by the signifier, which determines the subject and brings the differential system of signification into play.”[12] In the castration complex this passage is universal.

The imaginary stage, prior to differentiation, resolves into the ego/superego split, which can be directly laid over the Girardian picture of the sign arising over the body of the scapegoat. The Subject bears the mark of the original sign perhaps literally in their body, which reflects submission to the letter of the law in the castration complex. Prior to the slain victim in Girard, or passage through the mirror stage in Lacan, there is a lack of social order or order in the Subject, respectively. In Girard, hominization and civilization arise around the body of the slain victim, and in Lacan the biological body plays the same role. [13]

In the explanation of Žižek, the passage is from being a body to establishing a symbolic distance from the body (and having a body): “The body exists in the order of having – I am not my body, I have it” (Organs without Bodies, 121). Self-consciousness arises simultaneously with the realization and refusal of the body and its mortal contingencies (sexuality/castration) so that the Subject arises over and against the real of the body. The symbolic or the soul “has to be paid for by the death, murder even, of its empirical bearer” (The Žižek Reader, vii). Where Paul speaks of being split, Žižek describes two bodies, the physical body and the body under the sign (or the soul). That body which one might think can be reduced to the biological dimension is refused: the “subject turns away from her biological body in disgust, unable to accept that she ‘is’ her body” (Organs without Bodies, 93).[14] The price for entry into language, separation from the mother (passage beyond the mirror stage), is an ongoing alienation. The Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration) and sacrifice guarantees that “the Other exists: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice” (Enjoy Your Symptom, 56). This is felt as an all-pervasive inadequacy or guilt. From within the economy of the law (the law of sin and death), the excessive superego injunctions (giving rise to perverse questions such as, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound” (Rom. 6:1)) “no longer imposes specific, determinate, prohibitions and/or injunctions . . . but just reverberates as an empty tautological Prohibition: don’t” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 104).[15] There is no satisfying this all desiring and all-consuming law.

The Sacrifice of Christ as Confirmation of the Obscene Law

In Paul’s description of his first encounter with the law, in Romans 7, the law gives rise to what it forbids, and creates a life filled with death. This absolute law requires infinite payment, in Anselm’s estimate, and even this infinite payment does not satisfy the continual pressure of the law’s demands. There is the sense, as attested by Luther’s digression into depression, that Christ’s payment simply confirms the omnipotence of the big Other behind the law. “Christ’s death cannot but appear as the ultimate assertion of the Law, as the elevation of the Law into an unconditional superego agency which burdens us, its subjects, and with a debt we will never be able to repay’ (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 103).

Giving in to the obscene superego demand of the law gives rise to an interior sacrificial economy continually aimed at meeting the all-consuming desire of the law, which is taken up within the self in the split between the ego and superego. It is this perverse superego pressure, equated with the law, which Žižek describes as connected to the reversal of the law’s commands into acts of disobedience (equating the law with sin and sinning that grace may abound).[16] To read the sacrifice of Christ within this economy, with Luther and much of the Christian tradition (reaching back to Anselm), is to reinforce the punishing law in the sinful Subject rather than relieve from subjection the punishing law.

The Faith Of Christ as an Overcoming of a Law-like Faith In Christ

Perhaps the contrast is succinctly captured in the notion of faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice or the faith of Christ in which disciples participate. Faith in Christ is supposed to replace works of the law, but then the problem for Luther and for his Calvinist heirs, is if their faith is adequate, or an authentic faith. Faith in Christ has to do with faith in the propitiating power of Christ’s payment for sin (we can trust in Christ who has paid the penalty), but how much faith is required and how much can we muster? Faith initially seems to relieve the suffering of works, but then there is the same agonizing over the degrees of faith that might be necessary. Luther sees faith as simultaneously positing wrath and love, and he sees suffering very much like the friends of Job, as caused by God’s wrath. Job, and the widow of Nain, in his sermons, are examples of God causing suffering, and faith acknowledges this and is saving, only if it does not give in to despair.[17] Given these requirements, faith seems to induce a doubtful suffering, picturing God as randomly causing suffering and demanding a steady un-despairing faith.

In contrast, the faith of Christ calls for participating in Christ’s faith (walking as he walked and living as he lived) and this constitutes a deliverance, as people are freed from sin, not by Christ’s death as such (as a sacrifice), but by sharing in Christ’s death, by dying to sin, to the way of the flesh (and sacrifice). There is the faith that claims, Christ died and we do not have to, or the faith that would take up the cross and follow Christ. Propitiating the works of the law through dying is only something Christ can accomplish, and the believer is reduced to a spectral witness and belief, very much as on the order of the spectral relation to the law (being outside the law and being outside of Christ).

The alternative is to take up the subject position of Christ and “die to” the identity found in Adam (the subject of the superego) – having the faith of Christ (ridding one’s self of the superego supplement to the Law and sacrifice) or one can have faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice. It is a choice of understanding the death of Christ as a sacrifice, under the law, with Luther, or recognizing that the law is not the basis for understanding Christ.[18] In this second, apocalyptic understanding, the Subject is so drastically reoriented through identifying with the death of Christ that this constitutes a new form of the Subject. “Here enters the ‘good news’ of Christianity: the miracle of faith is that it IS possible to traverse the fantasy, to undo the founding decision, to start one’s life all over again, from the zero point – in short to change eternity itself” (On Belief,148). This making right is not by the scale imposed by the law, but it is a new cosmic order (as in Girard’s ending of sacrificial religion) and a new sort of Subject (as in Žižek’s non-sacrificial Subject).

[1] Martin Luther, Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Works (1545) Translated by Andrew Thornton (https://www.bluffton.edu/courses/humanities/2/ml-1545.htm).

[2] Preface to Luther’s Works.

[3] Sasja Emilie Mathiasen Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God”: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God (Open Theology 2018; 4: 658–674) 659. Citing Luther, “Operationes”, WA 5, 204, 26-27: “… ad deum contra deum confugere.”

[4] Heiko A. Oberman, “Luther Against the Devil,” Christian Century 107 no. 3 (1990): 75-76 Cited in Tenzan Eaghll, Martin Luther and the God Who Acts: Finding Common Ground in the Current Debates on Justification, (University of Calgary, MA, 2010) 23.

[5] “The world is a house… but I am outside the house, on the roof, not yet in heaven, but also not in the world. I have the world beneath me, and the heavens above me, and so I am suspended in faith, alone, between life in the world and eternal life” (WA 1. 199, 3.) Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 223. Cited in Eaghll, 42.

[6] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) 181.

[7] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 64). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] Marcus Pound, Lacan and Girard: Sex and Non-violence (Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 2003, 21, 1:///), 6.

[9] Pound, 6.

[10] Pound, 7.

[11] Pound, 7.

[12] Pound, 8.

[13] Pound fuses the Girardian and Lacanian passage: The mirror image is the monstrous double, the surrogate victim who promises to bring wholeness by standing in for the community as a whole. It is thus synonymous with the imaginary phallus, which is nothing but the imaginary “I” whose sacrifice gives birth to the ego ideal.”Pound, 8.

[14] See my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 119.

[15] Psychotheology Sin, 118.

[16] Psychotheology, 118.

[17] Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God.”

[18] Psychothelogy, 122-123.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Torture, 30.

[4] Torture, 31.

[5] Torture, 36.

[6] Torture, 38.

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

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

[9] McCarraher, 4.

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

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

[12] Wars of Religion, 398.

[13] Ibid.

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

[15] Wars of Religion, 399.

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

[17] Wars of Religion, 399.

[18] Wars of Religion, 408.

[19] Wars of Religion, 409.

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

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

[22] Torture, 202.

[23] Torture, 253.

[24] Torture, 229.

[25] Torture, 229.

[26] Torture, 230.

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

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

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

Justification By Faith: Unconditional Good News or the “Accursed Gospel”

The gift of the Reformation and of Martin Luther to the world is recovery or rearticulation of the unconditional, free grace of the gospel which can be summed up as “justification by faith.” The problem is, this same phrase can be used to describe the opposite; namely conditional salvation defined and bound up with the base line condition of the law. The unconditional good news is easy to understand, but the goodness and joy of the good news can and has been twisted so that this simple gospel truth, justification by faith, has (most?) often been made to fit Paul’s description of “the accursed gospel” (Gal. 1:6-8) which is no gospel at all but the human problem repackaged as the solution. It may be easiest to start with the good news, as this is uncomplicated, unconditional, singular, and straight forward but we (certainly I) may have missed it due to all the obstacles thrown in the way. So, the implications of this good news and the ways in which it may be twisted into bad news needs to be spelled out so as to secure the love, peace, and profound joy that comes with the unconditional gospel of Jesus Christ.

Alvin Kimel has done us the favor of gathering up and gleaning through a variety of sources, and through 40 years of effort as he describes it, “the unconditionality of God’s love for humanity.”[1] Kimel describes his discovery of the work of the Torrance brothers, James and Thomas (which first came to my attention through the work of Douglas Campbell), Robert Jenson, and Gerhard Forde – two Reformed and two Lutheran theologians, respectively. He describes his moment of awakening in encountering James Torrance’s description of the significance of the Reformation (worthy of extended quotation):

The important thing is that in the Bible, God’s dealings with men in creation and in redemption—in grace—are those of a covenant and not of a contract. This was the heart of the Pauline theology of grace, expounded in Romans and Galatians, and this was the central affirmation of the Reformation. The God of the Bible is a covenant-God and not a contract-God. God’s covenant dealings with men have their source in the loving heart of God, and the form of the covenant is the indicative statement, ‘I will be your God and you shall be my people’. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God who has made a covenant for us in Christ, binding himself to man and man to himself in Christ, and who summons us to respond in faith and love to what he has done so freely for us in Christ. Through the Holy Spirit, we are awakened to that love and lifted up out of ourselves to participate in the (incarnate) Son’s communion with the Father.

Two things are therefore together in a biblical understanding of grace, the covenant of love made for man in Christ, between the Father and the incarnate Son. (a) On the one hand, it is unconditioned by any considerations of worth or merit or prior claim. God’s grace is ‘free grace’. (b) On the other hand, it is unconditional in the costly claims it makes upon us. God’s grace is ‘costly grace’. It summons us unconditionally to a life of holy love—of love for God and love for all men. The one mistake is so to stress free grace that we turn it into ‘cheap grace’ by taking grace for granted—the danger of the ‘antinomianism’ against which Wesley protested. The other mistake is so to stress the costly claims of grace that we turn grace into conditional grace, in a legalism which loses the meaning of grace.

The fallacy of legalism in all ages—perhaps this is the tendency of the human heart in all ages—is to turn God’s covenant of grace into a contract—to say God will only love you and forgive you or give you the gift of the Holy Spirit IF . . . you fulfill prior conditions. But this is to invert ‘the comely order of grace’ as the old Scottish divines put it. In the Bible, the form of the covenant is such that the indicatives of grace are prior to the obligations of law and human obedience. ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I have loved you and redeemed you and brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, therefore keep my commandments.’ But legalism puts it the other way round. ‘If you keep the law, God will love you!’ The imperatives are made prior to the indicatives. The covenant has been turned into a contract, and God’s grace—or the gift of the Spirit—made conditional on man’s obedience.[2]

The foundational shift Torrance describes is from contract to covenant. A contract describes a condition, such as payment or an “if” statement (if you do this, I will do that), where a covenant is an unconditional promise without prior obligation or requirement. God has acted in Christ to redeem the world and to deliver all people from bondage. This apocalyptic, cosmic deliverance is nothing short of recreation, new birth, or death and resurrection. Torrance carefully describes, this is neither antinomianism nor legalism but is “unconditional in the costly claims it makes upon us.” This gift requires our life but of course it is not an exchange of life for life, but the relinquishing of the grip death has upon us in order to live. Costly grace costs everything, but this everything amounts to nothing as we have invested ultimate value in a lie.

Part of the problem in receiving and fully comprehending this good news is the confounded (deceived) nature of the bondage. “The house of bondage” from which God delivers is a full-blown “reality,” inclusive of a world economy and psychic reality. That is, the full extent of the unconditional, apocalyptic and universal nature of the deliverance may not be appreciated apart from an accurate description of the bondage. Legalism, in Torrance’s description, captures a prime manifestation of this reality but the all-inclusive nature of the bondage (constituting its own world) undergirds legalism.  But before turning to describing how covenant may fall back into contract, the absolute unconditional, free grace needs to be clearly staked out.

Kimel turns next to Gerhard Forde, who expresses the absoluteness of unconditional grace, asking, “What must we do to be saved?” His answer:

absolutely nothing! We are justified freely, for Christ’s sake, by faith, without the exertion of our own strength, gaining of merit, or doing of works. To the age old question, “What shall I do to be saved?” the confessional answer is shocking: “Nothing! Just be still; shut up and listen for once in your life to what God the Almighty, creator and redeemer, is saying to his world and to you in the death and resurrection of his Son! Listen and believe!” When one sees that it is a matter of death and life one has to talk this way. The “nothing” must sound, risky and shocking as it is. For it is, as we shall see, precisely the death knell of the old being. The faith by which one is justified is not an active verb of which the Old Adam or Eve is the subject, it is a state-of-being verb. Faith is the state of being grasped by the unconditional claim and promise of the God who calls into being that which is from that which is not. Faith means now having to deal with life in those terms. It is a death and resurrection.”[3]

Forde seems to recognize that his “nothing” may raise questions, but the point is to firmly drive home the unconditional nature of grace. He says, the “‘nothing’ must sound, risky and shocking as it is.” We have entered into new territory, a new way of thinking and conceiving the world, thus the silence that should follow the “nothing.” Once one is grasped by faith, this becomes the lens through which everything is perceived. No longer does retribution, punishment and fear determine reality, and no longer can anyone claim advantage over another, as all have fallen short, all have walked according the ways of the prince of this world, all were in bondage, and the same “all” are those who are delivered. When asked why this makes people so angry, Forde gives the following response:  

Why indeed? Because it is a radical doctrine. It strikes at the root, the radix, of what we believe to be our very reason for being. The “nothing,” the sola fide, dislodges everyone from the saddle, Jew and Greek, publican and pharisee, harlot and homemaker, sinner and righteous, liberal and orthodox, religious and non-religious, minimalist and maximalist, and shakes the whole human enterprise to the roots. It strikes at the very understanding of life which has become ingrained in us, the understanding in terms of the legal metaphor, the law, merit and moral progress. Justification, the reformers said, is by imputation, freely given. It is an absolutely unconditional decree, a divine decision, indeed an election, a sentence handed down by the judge with whom all power resides. It is as the later “orthodox” teachers like to say, a “forensic” decree: a flat-out pronouncement of acquittal for Jesus’ sake, who died and rose for us…

The gospel of justification by faith is such a shocker, such an explosion, because it is an absolutely unconditional promise. It is not an “if-then” kind of statement, but a “because-therefore” pronouncement: Because Jesus died and rose, your sins are forgiven and you are righteous in the sight of God! It bursts in upon our little world all shut up and barricaded behind our accustomed conditional thinking as some strange comet from goodness knows where, something we can’t really seem to wrap our minds around, the logic of which appears closed to us. How can it be entirely unconditional? Isn’t it terribly dangerous? How can anyone say flat-out “You are righteous for Jesus’ sake”? Is there not some price to be paid, some-thing (however minuscule) to be done? After all, there can’t be such a thing as a free lunch, can there?

You see, we really are sealed up in the prison of our conditional thinking. It is terribly difficult for us to get out, and even if someone batters down the door and shatters the bars, chances are we will stay in the prison anyway! We seem always to want to hold out for something somehow, that little bit of something, and we do it with a passion and an anxiety that betrays its true source—the Old Adam that just does not want to lose control.”[4]

One’s very being or ontology is changed by the breaking in of love and grace. This is a different way of conceiving God, the world, and humans. Prior to the work of Christ death was the controlling factor in life, and this was the condition put upon everything. The law seemed to provide a measurement or condition to deal with death, just as idolatry attempted similar negotiations. Psychology drives home the point, revealed in the Bible, that the fear of death (sometimes called God) which may be conscious or unconscious, is determinative of the psychic struggle. No one but God has the power to deliver from death and this has occurred in the death and resurrection of Christ. Reality is on a different ground, producing a new world order and a recreation of the human psyche.

The relinquishing of the old order may be disturbing, as some like Paul, may have exceeded their peers in religiosity, moral progress, and attaining heaven, but now all of this is counted as garbage. The human salvation system, which promised life, only produces death and this may be anger provoking news for those who invested everything in saving their own life. The reality may be slow in sinking in as the enslaved have found security in their enslavement. For Adam, the reality of death is determinate and this reality seemingly must be negotiated. A contract must be drawn up, consciously or unconsciously, and the terms of exchange enacted. This fear of death reigns, and only in Christ can we defeat this enslaving fearful orientation. To simply break open the tomb (the tomb which makes life conditional), and give life where death was the bottom line, means the conditions we have negotiated no longer apply.

As Kimel concludes in regard to his approach to ministry, “This liberation requires nothing less than our death and resurrection. The preacher is so much more than an encourager to live well and do good works. He is a prophet of the Kingdom, speaking the Word of God that accomplishes what it proclaims (Isa 55:11); he is a priest of the eschaton, giving to communicants the Body and Blood of the glorified Lord.”[5] This is the good news that the preacher, evangelist, and prophet proclaims. Everything must give way in support of this gospel message, which will mean a redefinition of what it means to be human, a reworking of epistemology, and a relinquishing of every form of conditionalism, with its focus on death, punishment, and retributive justice.

The problem in apprehending free grace lies in the failure to reorder and apprehend everything in light of its unconditional nature. In short, this unconditional gospel is universal, apocalyptic (or a breaking in to a world and system of a different order.) It is not retributive, imagining that suffering is required for penalty and payment, and thus it is not focused on God’s anger but on the love of God (and wrath as a subcategory of love). There is no room for God being eternally angry and there cannot be a category of eternal punishment. Most importantly, the nature of human bondage is directly tied to death, law and punishment, so that the manner in which justification by faith may be misconstrued, is simply an example of the universal human bondage to sin, death, and the devil from which unconditional grace saves.

 Douglas Campbell works out this misconstrual, working in close conjunction with the Torrances, but he calls this failure “justification by faith.” Paul, after all, initially accords the name gospel to those who are preaching what he then says is no gospel at all, but is an accursed message. So too there is “justification by faith,” the answer to the problem, and then there is “justification by faith,” the problem repackaged as the solution. Though it may appear a confounding of problem and solution, sorting out the two simply means following Paul’s argument concerning a law-free gospel, and that “gospel” which the false teachers bind to the law. The law always requires conditions and the gospel frees from every form of conditionalism. “Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:24–26). The law is not the standard for faith, but faith, trust, and covenant are primary.   

The false teachers’ accursed gospel makes the law primary and Christ secondary, so that Christianity is reduced to a contract rather than a covenantal relationship, and though we are still calling it justification by faith, both justification and faith have taken on a different meaning. In short, justification is measured by the law. Rather than justification or righteousness referring to the world changing apocalyptic breaking in of the love of God, righteousness is measured and distributed according to the law. Faith, in turn, is defined in conjunction with Christ’s meeting this condition in his death (his life, resurrection, the church, and the Holy Spirit, are rendered secondary), so that the death of Christ becomes the primary and perhaps singular focus. One is saved by applying the legal benefits of Christ’s death to one’s personal law books. One is not saved by taking up the cross and following Christ and being loving and faithful with and through his extended body. One might or might not do such things, but this does not pertain to salvation.   

In brief, according to this understanding, Old Testament law and natural revelation are a system in which one is justified or made right in the eyes of God through works of the law. No one can keep the law perfectly, and therefore everyone fails to be justified. This produces feelings of guilt and depression, but the gospel allows justification, not by works but by faith, which is the new condition (in Arminianism at least). Whenever anyone hears the gospel, they are so happy to be relieved of their burden of guilt for sin. Now they realize that all they have to do is have faith and their sin problem is taken care of. The exchange between the Father and the Son has taken care of the condition, and now one believes this fact and they are saved.

There are several problems in this system, in that law is the standard of measure for Christ and faith, rather than Christ setting aside the law. Justification or righteousness, rather than referring directly to God, refers to law (perhaps a kind of secondary manifestation of God), leading to a depersonalized or fictional element to the entire procedure. Faith consists in believing Christ has met the conditions of the law, and in this sense, faith goes nowhere, as it seems to reduce to faith in faith (that which meets the condition). In this system, to speak of imitating the faithfulness of Christ makes no sense, as Christ’s primary work is in conjunction with meeting the requirements of the law, which is inimitable. Again, faith is not so much participation in or being joined to Christ, as it is the application of an imputed righteousness (a kind of legal fiction).

At the same time, this justification by faith sets a very high standard on both human capacity and incapacity. Jews have the law through revelation and scripture, but what the Jews have through special revelation, everyone else has through the law written on the heart or natural revelation. Under this system everyone, both Jews and Greeks, recognize that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and just and that he has a law which everyone must obey perfectly, if they are going to be justified. So, all have the capacity to recognize God and his absolute standard, but no one has the capacity to live up to this standard.

In the doctrine of Original Sin, as we get it from Augustine, everyone knows enough about God to know his perfect standards, but no one knows enough or can do enough to keep this standard. We all know enough to feel really depressed about our situation in life. In fact, if one does not feel guilty and depressed they have missed the first condition of coming to Christ. They may feel proud, and they may be stubborn, a particular problem with the Jews, but most people finally reach the condition of feeling bad, then they are prepared to hear the gospel message. Luckily, Christ died to meet the requirements of the law, and now the problem with the law, the reason for the guilt and depression, is resolved.

I suppose we can all adjust our conversion story to fit this model, just as Paul’s conversion is pictured along the lines of Luther’s. On the road to Damascus, Paul must have been struggling with his introspective conscience, feeling guilty and miserable until he meets Jesus, who relieves him of his guilt and depression. He meets Christ and understands deliverance is now provided from the requirement of the law, as Christ has met the requirements, paid the penalty, and grace is now available in place of wrath and punishment.

Misery may be the anteroom to many forms of conversion, and perhaps we can chalk misery up to some form of consciousness that we have broken the law. However, after more than twenty years in Japan (a place largely unexposed to justification theory) I never met anyone who had this perception of God, sin and the law, and this is not the way Paul describes his former pride in his religious achievement. Paul narrates his pre-Christian understanding as guilt free and “without fault” in regard to the law (in fact, this fits common Japanese self-perception). As he describes in Philippians, he considered himself righteous, zealous beyond his peers, and bearing the highest qualifications and impeccable credentials: “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless” (Php 3:5–6).

Romans 7 might be cited as support of Paul’s guilty conscience, but this chapter is Paul’s retrospective view, about either himself or Adam, from the perspective of a Christian. This is not a narrative about conversion, but about being trapped, and deceived. There is no clear route from Romans 7 to Romans 8, apart from the appearance of Christ and the breaking in of a new order. Romans 7 describes the pre-Christian condition and the nature of deception, and it is a lie that includes Paul’s notion of self-salvation as a Pharisee. It is a lie in which one is entrapped by the law of sin and death, and the law is the object of deception, and the deception is such that one is not aware of his own condition.

The question arises as to exactly what law both Jews and Gentiles share, and obviously, it is the law of sin and death (the law of deception). But in justification theory, law plays a key role in making one guilty about their sin, so the law is a primary force in prompting acceptance of Christ. But what law? If it is something along the line of the ten commandments, do we expect everyone to know about sabbath keeping, and the details about sexual morality? If it concerns the details of the Jewish law, should we expect everyone to know in their heart about not eating blood, about not cutting the forelocks, and about circumcision?. Can we glean a universal ethical standard from the Jewish law, separate from the details of this law?

Maybe there is not one law code but two, and then not one ethical system but a mix, but then we end up with a tightly regulated and specific ethical system, and a more general natural law. Since the law directly reflects the character of God (in this theory), and all infractions are duly punished, the two-system method seems flawed.  As Douglas Campbell concludes, “Either the model must claim that the Jewish law, in all its detail, is derivable from the cosmos through natural revelation or it must work with two ethical systems – one a more general set of ethical principles applicable to all and discernible in the cosmos, and the other a more extensive set with additional distinctive practices incumbent only on Jews and accessible primarily through revelation and texts.”[6] This system is grounded in retributive justice, so that according to how well people do with the prescribed rules, this will determine their punishment. But is this retributive justice on the basis of two distinct standards – the Jewish and Gentile standard? The exact perfect standard by which all are judged is unclear.

On the other hand, if the law is posited, as Paul explains in some detail in Romans and Galatians, not as the anteroom to the gospel but as the law of sin and death, then the universality of deception in regard to the law (Mosaic or otherwise) is accounted for. The law does not set the condition for salvation, but is what unconditional salvation delivers from.

There is clearly a problem in the presumed disjunction between what all people are capable of knowing and what none of them are capable of doing. On one hand they have intellectual capacities, I am suspicious are non-existent. Is it really the case that all people can derive the same basic facts about God, such as his omniscience, his omnipotence, and his righteousness, from nature? Can they then go on and deduce the same uniform ethical requirements – and then, though they are capable of all of this, are they completely incapacitated to do what they know is right? All of this feeds into the false gospel’s notion of faith and justice. “Justification theory posits a God of strict justice who holds all people accountable to a standard they are intrinsically unable to attain, and this seems unjust.”[7]

Or could it be that this perception of God, as law-giver, punisher, and destroyer is the pagan equivalent of deifying death? Isn’t this the lie from which Christ delivers rather than a truth he verifies and satisfies?

There is a further conflict in exactly what it is everyone is expected to know and how this connects to faith. Christianity and Judaism are based on historical revelation, yet the presumed universally shared knowledge is not historically specific but more of a philosophical understanding. That is, the criteria by which people are judged are universal, yet no one can live up to these criteria, so we have Christianity, which is historically specific. So, we have one criterion to condemn and another to save, but what is key is both criteria serve as a condition. As Campbell concludes,

 It is of course a much less arduous criterion than the rigorous demand under the law for ethical perfection (or even for 51 percent righteousness), but it is a criterion nevertheless. It is Luther’s own incapacity, now ruthlessly exposed, that demands this significantly reduced criterion, but the need for a criterion per se is grounded in the model’s opening assumptions. Justification is a voluntarist model throughout, focused on the deliberations of a rational individual, so any such individual must at the crucial moment do something![8]

The answer to Luther: faith saves, not due to the prior criterion of the law nor on a presumed capacity and incapacity for knowing and doing, but on the fact that death reigns in the sinful, deceived orientation to the law, and Christ delivers from sin and death and this is, as Paul describes throughout his gospel, universal, cosmic, for all people and creatures, and is the consummating fact of the eschaton when: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Php. 2:10-11). Faith is not a condition for salvation, it is salvation enacted in the life of the believer. In the justification system, faith does not seem to address any issue, or change the person beyond believing a set of facts. And the question arises, why these particular facts? But in unconditional salvation, faith is the uprooting of the orientation to death, in that being found in Christ is to be found in his resurrection life.

I conclude where Alvin Kimel concludes, with the Apostle Paul:

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col 2:11-14).

This circumcision is not of the law but that performed on the heart by Christ. In the same way baptism, with its death and resurrection, is not an act of the one being baptized but a being acted on by Christ. Forgiveness is freely granted in the “making alive” of God through Christ. “The old Adam has been slain, and we now live in the Eucharist of the eschaton. We are saved by the nothing of grace because God’s love is absolute and unconditional: God wills our good, and he will accomplish it. He has sealed his commitment in the death of his Son.”[9] Through faith God is saving, cancelling the condition of the law (and its death dealing deceit) through the cross.

(Sign up for our next class, Romans: Salvation through the Body of Christ A theological study of the faithfulness of God revealed in Christ Jesus as articulated in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Focusing on Paul’s exposition of God making the world right through Christ. Starting September 4th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings) 

[1] Alvin Kimel, David Bentley Hart, Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation (p. 103). The Gospel of Universal Salvation. Kindle Edition.  

[2] James B. Torrance, “The Unconditional Freeness of Grace,” Theological Renewal (June/July 1978): 7-15. The article has been reprinted in Trinity and Transformation (2016), ed. Todd Speidell, pp. 276-287. Cited by Kimel, 104-105.

[3] Gerhard Forde, Justification by Faith—A Matter of Death and Life (1990), p. 22. Quoted in Kimel, 22.

[4] Forde, 22-23. Quoted in Kimel, 107-108.

[5] Kimel, 109.

[6] Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (p. 41). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[7] Campbell, 45.

[8] Campbell, 25-26.

[9] Kimel, 112.

Zen Versus Jesus

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. —Hannah Arendt

Philosophy may safely be left with intellectual minds. Zen wants to act, and the most effective act, once the mind is made up, is to go on without looking backward. In this respect, Zen is indeed the religion of the samurai warrior. —D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture[1]

The humble appreciation that God is working through all peoples, cultures and religions does not mean relinquishing the critical faculty of thought. While it is true the Christian can learn about Christ more completely through encounter with other cultures and religions (this is the very point of mission), it is also true that this humility still calls for a fulness of understanding. It was not uncommon in my experience to encounter in Japan (having spent more than twenty years there), the westerner (or even the western missionary) infatuated with all things Japanese, particularly Zen Buddhism, but what these connoisseurs of all things Japanese usually failed to understand was the xenophobic nationalism often attached to Japanese religion and identity. This in no way cancels out some of the insights to be gained in Zen but it also severely qualifies those insights should one be willing to critically examine the religion, yet the uncritical acceptance of the authority of the Zen master and Zen teaching (particularly about the critical faculty) is the ground for Zen practice.

It is not just that wholesale acceptance of Zen practice entails acceptance of a diagnosis of the human predicament and its solution based on a worldview very much counter to an orthodox Christian understanding, but this practice has been involved from its inception in Japanese militarism, colonialism, and ultimately war crimes (which Japanese Buddhist and Zen authorities have acknowledged and for which they have apologized). As Brian Victoria notes, “The fact is that Zen leaders who supported Japanese militarism did so on the grounds that Japanese aggression expressed the very essence of the Buddha Dharma and even enlightenment itself. Thus, until and unless their assumptions are closely examined and challenged, there is no guarantee that Zen’s future, whether in the East or West, will not once again include support for the mass destruction of human life that is modern warfare.”[2]

Far from Zen being only peaceful it is directly connected to Bushido (the Way of the Warrior) and Bushido and Zen are thoroughly enmeshed in “the essence of Japan.” In the description of Nitobe Inazō, in his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Bushido and Zen are integral to one another: “I may begin with Buddhism. It furnished a sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with death. A foremost teacher of swordsmanship, when he saw his pupil master the utmost of his art, told him, ‘Beyond this my instruction must give way to Zen teaching.’”[3] Nitobe, a Christian, describes Zen as awakening one “to a new Heaven and a new Earth.”[4]

Victoria details the key instances when Zen was used to mobilize the country to war. The Chief Abbot of Eiheiji, Sōtō Zen master Hata Eshō (1862–1944) wrote on behalf of the “national spiritual mobilization” the following:

Buddha Shakyamuni, during his religious practice in a former life, participated in a just war. Due to the  merit he acquired as a result, he was able to appear in this world as a Buddha. Thus, it can be said that a just war is one task of Buddhism. Likewise, achieving the capitulation of the enemy country may also be counted as the religious practice of a Buddhist…. I believe the brilliant fruits of battle that have been achieved to date are the result of the power of the people’s religious faith [in Buddhism].[5]

Two Zen scholars, both affiliated with the Sōtō Zen sect, put forth a doctrinal understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and war which enabled institutional Buddhism to directly support Japan’s war effort:

In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful. We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of “killing one in order that many may live” (issatsu tashō). This is something which Mahayana Buddhism approves of only with the greatest of seriousness…. We believe it is time to effect a major change in the course of human history, which has been centered on Caucasians and inequality among humanity. To realize the true happiness of a peaceful humanity and construct a new civilization, it is necessary to redirect the path of world history’s advance from this false path to the true path. Rooted in this sublime view of history, the mission and responsibility of Mahayana Buddhists is to bring into being true friendship between Japan and China.[6]

Zen and Buddhism in general were utilized to mobilize Japan’s invasion and colonial domination of China and much of east Asia. In this mobilization Zen teachers appealed to a long history in which Zen supported warfare and it was common in the process to claim as Furukawa Taigo did, that Japan was not simply the most advanced Buddhist country but the “only Buddhist country.” Thus a means of spreading Buddhism most directly was through colonization, since all of Japan’s neighbors were lacking in true Buddhism. Japan is “presently using the sword in Manchuria to build a second divine country [after Japan], just as it would go on to do in China and India.” Furukawa appealed to all of his fellow believers: “All Buddhists in the country! Resolutely arise and participate in this rarest of holy enterprises. What difference does it make what the League of Nations does? Just who do England and the United States think they are anyway? The arrow has already left the bow. Do not hesitate in the least. A firm will makes even demons run away. The only thing is to push on resolutely.”[7]

Nonetheless Japanese Zen Buddhism is often perceived to be nothing more than a peaceful set of practices through which one can attain an enlightened understanding bringing about harmony and healing.[8] It is not unusual for western Christians to believe that Zen (which accords with both claims of Zen Priests and also Shintoists, who will also claim the same thing about Shinto) is so lacking in doctrine that it can be melded without disturbance with Christian faith. The focus on practice, of course, is not unique to Zen but is the way most religions (outside of the Christian west) are perceived by their practitioners but the mistake would be to imagine that practice does not entail an implicit or explicit worldview. As Bernie Glassman writes, “So if your definition of enlightenment is that there’s no antiSemitism in the state of enlightenment. If your definition of enlightenment is that there’s no nationalism, or militarism, or bigotry in the state of enlightenment, you better change your definition of enlightenment.”[9]  

The Zen practitioner begins with acceptance of “Buddhist” understandings of “enlightenment,” based on the authority of the Buddha (to even use terms like “Buddhist” and “Buddha” is already to have taken a modern stance in regard to the religion which will tend to cover the explicitly polytheistic world assumed by the Buddha).[10] Belief in Buddhist “enlightenment” entails belief in the authority of the Buddha who claimed:

Nobody is my teacher. Nobody is comparable to me. I am the only perfect buddha in the world. I have attained supreme enlightenment. I am conqueror over all. I know everything. I am not contaminated by anything at all… I have all the powers of the omniscient. I am an arhat (someone who has attained the goal of enlightenment) in the world. I am unrivaled in all realms, including those of the gods. I am the victor who conquered Mara.[11]

Being a practitioner at a minimum means taking the Buddha at his word: “Accept what I did not explain as ‘unexplained.’ Accept what I did explain as ‘explained.’”[12] Enlightenment begins by holding to the authority of Sakyamuni’s words; thus, one must rid themselves of metaphysical speculation or any subject the Buddha did not explain. This   subjugation to the authority of the Buddha will be utilized by the Japanese State in its creation of imperial-way Buddhism which translated subjugation of the Buddha into unquestioning subjugation to the Japanese Sovereign.[13]

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the New Testament claims Christ is the light that enlightens all men (John 1:9), one might wonder if the Buddha’s absolute claims are warranted? Buddha spoke these words to Upagu, who if he had caught the vision could have been Sakyamuni Buddha’s first disciple, but Upagu thought the man was a megalomaniac. Richard Cohen raises the possibility of two responses: “Would you have recognized the man as enlightened? Would you have discerned a spirit of universal peace, beyond politics, in words that valorize hierarchy, celebrate raw power, and speak well of battle?” Or would you be “puzzled that anybody would answer these questions in the affirmative. . ..”[14]

Sakyamuni’s claim is beyond the political or the religious as he alone dominates the world, and the claim is that his domination opens the way to full enlightenment. The question, particularly as it works out in the Japanese context, is whether the supposedly apolitical and areligious nature of Japanese Buddhism is simply a means for demanding its universal acceptance. As Victoria notes, “The ‘selflessness’ of Zen meant absolute and unquestioning submission to the will and dictates of the emperor. And the purpose of religion was to preserve the state and punish any country or person who dared interfere with its right of self-aggrandizement.”[15]

Zen has largely been received in the west from writings and evangelism of D. T. Suzuki, who is revered as the “true man of Zen,” yet Suzuki wrote that “religion should, first of all, seek to preserve the existence of the state.” Suzuki was thinking of the state’s invasion of the Chinese mainland and used Zen as a motivating factor as, “the Chinese were ‘unruly heathens’ whom Japan should punish ‘in the name of religion.’”[16] The oft quoted (in both east and west) Zen master Harada Sōgaku wrote, “[If ordered to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of Enlightenment]. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [now under way].”[17] The uncritical seeker after enlightenment must shoot and bang away, not pausing to consider the morality of what he is doing or the strange exclusiveness and inevitable “uniqueness” of the Japanese faith.

Japanese Buddhist practitioners, who are not alone in the pantheon of buddhisms claiming uniqueness throughout Asia, claim to be the one and only true purveyors of Buddhism. Fukuda Gyōei notes “that it was in Japan where “pure Mahayana [Buddhism]” was to be found. According to him, this is because Saichō (767–822), the eighth-century founder of the Tendai sect in Japan taught that “all Japanese had the disposition of bodhisattvas.” As bodhisattvas they were both “treasures and benefactors of the nation.” According to Gyōei, Buddhism in Japan was not Indian or Chinese Buddhism transplanted. The Tendai sect had been established “based on a deep understanding of the Japanese national character . . . as a religion to pacify and preserve the nation,” and this was made possible by the “gracious wish” of successive Japanese emperors.[18]

Dr. Shiio Benkyō (1876– 1971), a Jōdo sect priest who later became president of Taishō University declared that the Buddhism left in India and China is a failure and only in Japan is it “possible to draw near to a Buddhism like that of the time when Buddha Shakyamuni was alive.”[19] Benkyo explains, “Buddhism in India collapsed due to [the nature of] Indian culture. Buddhism in China collapsed because it ran directly contrary to the history and nature of the Chinese state, and was therefore only able to produce a few mountain temples. On the other hand, thanks to the rich cultivation Japanese Buddhism received on Japanese soil, it gradually developed into that which the Buddhist teaching was aiming toward.”[20] Japanese Buddhism is the only authentic Buddhist teaching, precisely because it has grown up in Japanese soil and has been shepherded by the Emperor: “The priceless customs and manners of our country are the fundamental reasons for this occurrence. These customs and manners are to be found throughout the land, but their heart lies with the emperor and the imperial household, through whose efforts they have been guided and fostered.”[21]

Thus all Japanese Buddhism is called “imperial-way Buddhism.” Since the emperor embodies the state, and Buddhism and the state are one, then the emperor and Buddhism are one.

In looking at the past we see that imperial edicts from successive emperors taught us the proper way to make offerings of even a single flower [to the Buddha], or offer even one stick of incense, or read the sutras with the correct pronunciation, or worship in the Buddha Hall. The power to select and protect each of the sects, to determine each and every temple observance—all have their roots in imperial edicts. Japanese Buddhism acts on the basis of imperial edicts. This is what distinguishes it from the Buddhism of foreign countries.[22]

In turn the practice of Buddhism entails a reverence for the edicts of the successive emperors “To venerate the Three Treasures [of Buddhism] means to revere imperial edicts without question.”[23] Japanese Buddhism is melded with Japanese imperialism, xenophobia, and nationalism.

Cohen claims Buddhist enlightenment is on the order of the “Enlightenment” of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe which “provides the political context for understanding Buddhist enlightenment as the simultaneous, coequal, perfection of rationality, religiosity, morality, and humanity, beyond politics.”[24] Just as western enlightenment is the occasion for marking other peoples and times as part of the darkness (to be set aside or forcibly enlightened), so too in Japan, Buddhist enlightenment is beyond questioning and the politic connected to this enlightenment, associated as it is with the Japanese Emperor, is beyond question. As Saeki Jōin, a Hossō sect priest and chief abbot of Hōryūji, one of Japan’s oldest and most famous temples, writes, “If you receive an imperial edict you must revere it, for the ruler is heaven and the people are the earth.” Jōin concludes: “The emperor, being holy and divine, is inviolable…. The emperor’s edicts, being holy and divine, are inviolable … and they must always be revered.” Jōin defends this on Buddhist grounds,

As expressed in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha in his compassion regards [beings in] the three worlds [of desire, form, and formlessness] as members of his family. That is to say, he doesn’t think of his family as composed of just his blood relatives, or only the few members of his immediate family, or simply those in his local area. No, his family includes everyone in the whole world, in the entire universe. For him, everyone in the world is a member of his family. In fact, he does not limit his family members to human beings alone. Even animals and all living things are included…. There is nothing that the Tathagata [fully enlightened being] in his great compassion does not wish to save…. There is no one who he does not consider to be his child…. When this faith in the great compassion and mercy of the Tathagata is applied to the political world, there is not a single member of the Japanese nation who is not a child of the emperor…. This expresses in the political realm the ideal of a system centered on the emperor.[25]

Being apolitical and areligious is the means of asserting an absolute and universal hegemony. The Zen practitioner may or may not be fully aware of submitting to the final authority of the Buddha, but anything less than total submission disenables the practice. One either steps into the path of enlightenment, suspending critical thought concerning Buddhist enlightenment, or one does not enter that path. Accepting the practice is itself a metaphysical presumption in that the pragmatic, practical, surface, is given priority.

Cohen compares it to Martin Luther’s nominalism: “surfaces are able to sustain the burden of reality because, in fact, they do re-present an occult reality” beyond comprehension.[26] As he concludes, “let us recall how Luther coaxes readers to adhere to the surface of the Word, thereby avoiding a dangerous fascination with the transcendental unknown.” The commands and practices of the Buddha are like the literal plainness of Scripture. The good Calvinist also, has “the ability to take scripture at face-value, without wrapping it in enigmas,” and this “is possible only for one illumined by the Spirit. Only the elect can accept that god saves some and damns others gratuitously; only the elect can praise this god as perfectly just, when from a human perspective, he appears cruel, random, and malicious.”[27] In the Japanese code of the warrior, the cruelty and bloodletting of the sword must be understood as the loving prerogative of the master, and the Zen Samurai can no more question than a Calvinist the morality of his god.

Cohen defines a Buddhist, “as someone for whom a buddha is an ultimate authority; a Buddhist trusts that, because a buddha is perfectly enlightened, his command dharetha must always lead to beneficial results.” One may have to endure, like the good Calvinist, the seeming contradictory, but there is no questioning of enlightenment as set forth by the Buddha. “Insofar as one is a Buddhist, one’s abstract ideals, concrete cosmologies, economic pursuits, clothing and bodily comportment, even diet, can be traced back to one’s trust in enlightenment.” There may be disagreement among Buddhists over the details, but all agree there is a Buddha who realized unexcelled and complete enlightenment.[28]

This is not to say the Christian should not expect to find God at work in other cultures and religions, but this expectation should not include suspending critical judgment. Too often nationalism, religious fanaticism, and genocidal violence, are overlooked (perhaps set aside as having nothing to do with the religion), and Zen is a key example. The reality of Japanese Zen has a very different history than the popularized version of the religion which accords it only peace and healing.

[1] Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2006) quoted from the epigraph.

[2] Victoria, x-xi.

[3] Inazō Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 11. Cited in Victoria, 114.

[4] Nitobe, 11-12, Cited in Victoria, 115.

[5] Buddhist magazine Daihōrin, 36-39. Cited in Victoria, 111-112.

[6] Hayashiya and Shimakage, Bukkyō no Sensō Kan, 4. Cited in Victoria, 104-105.

[7] Taigo Furukawa, Rapidly Advancing Japan and the New Mahayana Buddhism (Yakushin Nihon to Shin Daijō Bukkyō), 51. Cited in Victoria, 110.

[8] For example, Ruben L. F. Habito, The Healing Breath of Zen (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2006).

[9] Bernie Glassman Buddhist magazine “tricycle” (1999) Cited in Cohen, xi.  

[10] As Richard Cohen remarks, “What are we to say of a doctrine which is sometimes represented as one of almost perfect Theism; sometimes as direct Atheism; sometimes as having the closest analogy to what in a Greek philosopher, or in a modern philosopher, would be called Pantheism; sometimes as the worship of human saints or heroes; sometimes as altogether symbolical; sometimes as full of the highest abstract speculation; sometimes as vulgar idolatry?” Richard S. Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, religion, modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 151.

[11] Raniero Gnoli, ed., The Gilgit Manuscript of the Sakghabhedavastu (Rome: ISMEO, 1977), 1:132. Quoted in Cohen, xii.

[12] V. Treckner, ed., The Majjhima-Nikaya (London: Pali Text Society, 1935), 1:432. Cited in Cohen. 154.

[13] Victoria, 95.

[14] Cohen, xii.

[15] Victoria, xiv.

[16] Victoria, Ibid.

[17] Victoria, Ibid.

[18] Quoted in Ōkura Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gokoku Bukkyō, pp. 185-209. Cited in Victoria, 97.

[19] Gokoku Bukkyō, 33, Cited in Victoria, 98.

[20] Gokoku Bukkyō, 50, Cited in Victoria, 98.

[21] Gokoku Bukkyō, 50, Cited in Victoria, 99.

[22] Gokoku Bukkyō 50-51, Cited in Victoria, 99.

[23] Gokoku Bukkyō, 130-131, Cited in Victoria, 100.

[24] Cohen, xiii.

[25] Gokoku Bukkyō, pp. 159-160. Cited in Victoria, 97.

[26] Cohen, 157.

[27] Cohen, 157.

[28] Cohen, 161.

Philemon and the Abolition of the City of Man

Slavery is the biblical motif which gets at the all pervasive economic, social, and psychological system of sin and it is against this background that exodus and redemption are also to be understood. Slavery is not simply the biblical metaphor for sin but is the concrete manifestation of what is meant by sin and in turn is precisely that from which Christ redeems. The very term “redemption” means that one’s life is no longer subject to commodification, objectification, materialization, or to circulation in an economy in which human life is reduced to bare life without intrinsic value.

In this human economy, the basic categories human/subhuman, citizen/alien, inclusion/exclusion, sovereign/subject, slave/free constitute the city of man. Being inside the city (with its laws and subjects) and outside the city (where there is no law) are marked by slave and free. The premise of the gospel is that being found outside the city, outside the law, outside the domain of what it means to be human (the exclusion which establishes the inclusion of the city), is the place occupied and exposed by Christ. Christ establishes a new organizational principle, a new family, centered on the koinonia of his body, in which exclusion is no longer the structuring principle of inclusion.

In the short book, Philemon, Paul masterfully knocks out all supporting presuppositions for continuation of a top-down master/slave order. After the gospel and after the writing of Philemon, slavery among Christians would seem to be excluded, and yet the reception of this smallest of books speaks of the troubled reception of the fulness of the gospel. The question arises, with a book like Philemon, whether Christians who fail to recognize the basis of this new koinonia (in which there are no slaves and masters but only brothers and sisters) fail to comprehend the gospel – and beyond this the question is as to where this incomprehension lies?

Philemon seems perfectly clear in its implications. Paul tells Philemon to accept Onesimus back as if he is Paul himself (v. 17). Philemon is to regard Onesimus “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord” (v. 16). Paul’s letter is filled with pathos as Onesimus is “beloved,” “my child whom I have begotten in my imprisonment” (v. 10) In Onesimus, Paul says he is “sending my very heart” (v. 12). Paul claims personal kinship with Onesimus and identifies him with his own deepest feelings – the very center of who he is. “If then you regard me a partner, accept him as you would me” (v. 17). It is doubtful that Philemon will regard Onesimus as anything short of a brother, which is Paul’s appeal: “For perhaps he was for this reason separated from you for a while, that you would have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (15-16). Here is Christ’s ethic applied, as Paul identifies himself with the slave, he undoes not only the oppression of Onesimus but the dehumanizing master/slave relationship in which the master too is degraded.

Paul’s point may include the freeing of Onesimus so that he might return to Paul and Paul’s ministry, but his ultimate point is to have Philemon regard Onesimus as a brother. This unity or koinonia is the point of the gospel and the gospel accomplishes these other things (ending slavery, ending oppression, and overturning the city of man) in the process. What is not mentioned, but is very much present in Paul’s maintaining it is Philemon that “owes him his very self” (v. 19), is that a human life is on the line. The unmentionable but lurking reality is that Philemon, as a master, has the right to crucify a runaway slave. Owning another human and denying them their humanity (the very opposite of what Paul has done for Philemon) is part of Roman slavery exemplified in the masters right to crucify his slave. Yet, it is precisely as a slave that Christ dies. Christ’s citizenship, his place in Israel, his existence as being fully human, is denied in his crucifixion, but in this way the counter-economy of the gospel is established. Crucifixion and resurrection remove the fear of death, the controlling factor in slavery, yet Philemon in maintaining the master/slave relationship would seemingly disregard the cross. This is the unspoken fact, but when Paul says charge to me whatever Onesimus owes (ultimately it his life he owes), he is imitating Christ in his willingness to identify with the slave. He is saying – take me not him.

Here is one of the small gems of the New Testament; revolutionary in its implications and a worked example of the apocalyptic implications of the gospel. This small book calls for a reassessment of what it means to be human. It calls into question the very founding structure and economy, the hierarchy of relations, the accepted reality of Roman society. Yet these seemingly revolutionary and obvious implications of Paul’s gospel turn out to not be so obvious throughout church history.

According to J. B. Lightfoot, the ancient church did not pay much attention to the letter because “the gospel is not concerned with trivia.”[1] As Demetrius Williams describes the opinion of the early church,

Although Philemon was included in some early canon lists, there was little to no comment on it because no one apparently found any occasion to mention it. The letter was thought to have no doctrinal content that might have led to its being quoted, no contribution to the development of Paul’s theology, or of Christian theology in general.[2]

Williams describes the early consideration of the letter as being trivial, banal, beneath consideration, and perhaps unworthy of the canon. Because of early attacks on the book, Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350-428) defends the book precisely by changing the import of its message. He “argued that God established different social roles and estates and every individual should stay in his or her proper role” and in some way the book supposedly demonstrates this.[3] Both Chrysostom (c. 347-407) and Jerome (c. 342-420), due to attacks on the book, also attempt to defend it. But as Williams demonstrates, theirs is a somewhat underhanded defense:

John Chrysostom found a purpose for Philemon in addressing the situation of converted slaves. He argued that when a slave is converted and faithfully continues his life as a slave, even unbelievers are able to see that slaves can become believers without questioning the present norms of the society.[4]

Williams follows an established pattern in interpretation of Philemon, in which the book is used to draw moral lessons about knowing one’s place and a demonstration of Paul’s humility, but the remarkable element is the seeming blindness to the moral implications of slavery spelled out in the book. There seemed to be a concern to protect against the radical interpretation of Philemon, and on this basis preserve it as part of the canon. Williams traces this line of reasoning up to and including the Reformers:

Martin Luther, in his 1527 Lecture on Philemon, viewed Onesimus as an example of a person who was misled by the idea of freedom. He argued that Paul respected the established legal rights of property and did not seek to abolish slavery. Calvin, too, affirmed respect for the prevailing order and also emphasized Paul’s request to receive Onesimus back into his service.[5]

There were those who advocated the abolition of slavery among Christians (e.g., the Donatists in North Africa, Gregory of Nyssa, and various anonymous Christians to which Theodore refers), but this radical minority were often silenced by the conservative majority’s appeal to Philemon, as if this book made the case for slavery and conservatism – which in modern eyes it clearly does not. What this history of interpretation seems to indicate is the stifling effects of Constantinianism, imperialism, Christian nationalism, and racism, on the gospel. Given the primary role slavery plays in Scripture, it would seem that to be blind to the gospel’s implication for this institution is simply to be blind to the fulness of the gospel. Perhaps the blindness entails a refusal of the radical nature of the gospel.

In Giorgio Agamben’s depiction, bare life functions as the basic stuff from which truly human life, or life within the polis or the city, is formed, but in this formation, there is a necessary distinction between life inside the city (that life accounted for in the law, in citizenship, in being fully human life) and that life excluded from the city. That is, within life there is a necessary division between mere biological life and the good life of the city, and the marker of these two forms of life is the biological life shared by all humans. Thus “when Aristotle defined the end of the perfect community in a passage that was to become canonical for the political tradition of the West, he did so precisely by opposing the simple fact of living (to zēn) to politically qualified life (to eu zēn): ‘born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good life.’”[6] Agamben demonstrates that the Aristotelian recognition of an opposition within life between unqualified life (zēn) and good life (eu zēn) is the structuring principle of the judicial and political order constituting the city. For there to be an inside, there must be an outside, so that excluded life is an essential part of the structure of the polis. The politics of human society is the place in which life must be transformed into good life and it does this on the basis of the exception. “In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men.”[7]

The power of the state or sovereign power establishes itself through this power of exclusion, the exception upon which the rule is built.[8] This is the power of the sovereign, to decide the state of exception or to decide who falls outside the city and is thus subject to random killing as in crucifixion. The slave determines the master, and the sovereign, in ordering this arrangement, establishes the law. To challenge this order would be nothing short of challenging the accepted consensus as to what it means to be human.  

Agamben notes that bare life is transformed through a particular relation to language. Through the instantiation of the voice (having a voice in the polis) the division is made within life, as the “politicization” of bare life brings about the good life (or having language – the logos). The fundamental division is not friend/enemy but the division accomplished through language, between bare life and political existence. “There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.”[9] Language, or having a voice in the polis, is the saving element which transforms bare life into human life. Those rendered voiceless (within the city) are synonymous with those outside the city or outside the polis and law.

The choice appears to be between the logos and city of man or the Logos and communion of Christ. There is no question that the implication of the gospel, as Paul presents it throughout his writings and as it is concentrated in Philemon, would challenge the status quo of the law, of social structures as they exist (in Judaism or in the slave trade), and that it speaks of an apocalyptic breaking in of a new order of culture and humanity, and yet the revolutionary nature of the gospel, particularly as it pertains to slavery has a very troubled history as reflected in the enduring nature of slavery and in the troubled reception of this little book. The issue is at the very core of the gospel and at the very core of the construction of human society, and it may be that it is the contradiction of these two realms that has caused this major issue (expressed in this minor book) to be so misunderstood.

[1] Demetrius K. Williams, “’No Longer as a Slave’: Reading the Interpretation History of Paul’s Epistle to Philemon,”

Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race, and Culture in Philemon (Paul in Critical Contexts), Matthew V. Johnson Sr., Demetrius K. Williams, et al. (Fortress Press, 2012) 11.

[2] Williams, 16.

[3] Williams, 18.

[4][4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 9.

[7] Agamben, 12.

[8] Agamben, 18.

[9] Agamben, 12.

“This is My Beloved Son Whom I Hate”: How Modern Evangelicals Have Come to Preach a Different Gospel

There is a compelling logic that unfolds from John Calvin’s penal substitution that goes beyond even where Calvin would take it. As I have argued (here), it is Calvin that creates the full formulation of the doctrine known as penal substitution, bringing together the notion of Jesus bearing eternal punishment in hell, innovating on the Apostles Creed and I Peter 3:18-22, tying the punishment of Gehenna to the chastisement of Isaiah 53, and then moving both of these passages to the context of the trial and punishment of Jesus. Calvin may not have felt the full weight or compelling nature of his innovation, as he will continue to provide orthodox readings of passages such as Psalm 22, quoted by Jesus on the cross and describing being forsaken by God and being reduced to a worm. But among his followers there are those who are willing to apply Calvin’s doctrine more consistently than their master.

In some Calvinist extrapolations, Jesus is pictured as being not only forsaken by God but the object of God’s hatred. As Dr. Abner Chou describes the significance of Jesus’ death: “In that death the wrath of God was poured out on Christ, and the darkness exploded. In that instant God cursed Jesus, putting Him in a position of absolute, perfect hatred. God hated Him and desired to make Him nothing.”[1] Dan Allender and Tremper Longman propose that, “God chose to violate His Son in our place. The Son stared into the mocking eyes of God; He heard the laugher of the Father’s derision and felt Him depart in disgust. . . . In a mysterious instant, the Father who loved the Son from all eternity turned from Him in hatred. The Son became odious to the Father.”[2] As Tim Keller put it on Facebook (and quickly revised, due to subsequent criticism), “If you see Jesus losing the infinite love of the Father, out of his infinite love for you, it will melt your hardness.”[3]

Even devout believers in penal substitution such as Joshua Farris and Mark Hamilton (from whom I have gleaned these quotes), realize there is an unfolding logic to the doctrine in modern evangelicalism that amounts to a different version of the Gospel:

From the academy, to the pulpit, to the pew, for those who affirm that the Son made atonement by being hated by the Father— albeit temporarily—Christianity has a new message, the simple logic of which goes like this. “The Son became sin; the Father cannot look upon sin without hatred; The Son willingly took our place of condemnation—and for an instant the Son bore the fury of God.”[4]

They raise the question and answer in the affirmative, “Is this the new logical deposit of an all-new dogmatic inheritance for American evangelicals? Some seem poised to accept it as such.”

While Farris and Hamilton want to extract penal substitution from the unfolding logic of the time, perhaps they have not realized the full weight of the logic of Calvin’s doctrine. Eternal wrath in hell as the focus of Christ’s saving work, with Christ becoming the object of wrath, seems to entail “the new logical deposit.” Those who are teaching what Farris and Hamilton dub the “Christus Odium” version of penal substitution, are drawing out the logic of Calvin’s original notion. That is, Calvin (certainly influenced by and extrapolating from Luther) created the context for a fully odious gospel that has been unfolding since he formulated it.[5]

With each innovation in atonement theory there seems to be an accompanying sociological shift. Just as Anselm works out his notion that it is God’s honor that is offended in a feudal society (very much concerned with honor), so too the reformers stressed the juridical, evident in their focus on Christ bearing the punishment of the law. Luther is concerned to point out “how horribly blind and wicked the papists were” in teaching that “sin, death, and the curse” could be conquered by “the righteousness of human works, such as fasts, pilgrimages, rosaries, vows, etc.” rather than “by the righteousness of the divine Law.”[6] Though Luther recognizes the Law has no power to save, he sees the Law of Moses as regulating the necessity of salvation: “a magistrate regards someone as a criminal and punishes him if he catches him among sinners and thieves” and “Christ was not only found among sinners” but due to the will of the Father and his own free will he “assumed the flesh and blood of those who were sinners” and “when the Law found Him among thieves, it condemned and executed Him as a thief.”

Luther becomes woodenly literal in understanding how Christ became sin (2 Cor. 5:21) and a curse (Galatians 3:13) which accords with the notion that God momentarily hated him. He says Christ is, “the greatest robber of all, the greatest murderer, adulterer and thief; the greatest desecrator of temples and blasphemer; the world has seen none greater than this.” He describes Christ taking on eternal punishment in his commentary, but he first describes the nature of this punishment as flowing from human evil: “He took upon Himself and abolished all our evils, which were supposed to oppress and torment us eternally.” He draws back from the sort of split he finds in Calvin’s explanation of the two natures of Christ, and depicts a more coherent unified fulness of deity in Christ:

the curse clashes with the blessing and wants to damn it and annihilate it. But it cannot. For the blessing is divine and eternal, and therefore the curse must yield to it. For if the blessing in Christ could be conquered, then God Himself would be conquered. But this is impossible. Therefore Christ, who is the divine Power, Righteousness, Blessing, Grace, and Life, conquers and destroys these monsters—sin, death, and the curse—without weapons or battle, in His own body and in Himself, as Paul enjoys saying (Col. 2:15): “He disarmed the principalities and powers, triumphing over them in Him.” Therefore they can no longer harm the believers.

Calvin and his followers would disagree with Luther, claiming Christ was damned and that he bore the full weight of the curse which is also eternal. Though both Calvin and Luther subscribe to several images and theories of atonement, both rely heavily on Anselm’s satisfaction theory and both translate satisfaction of debt into payment of punishment under the law. They share reliance on the metaphor of the criminal justice system in their theology (the apprehension and punishment of the guilty) and the presumption is that Christ became the sin that God hates (though Luther’s failing and grace may have been his inconsistency).[7] But it is Calvin’s innovation, his notion of penal substitution, that wipes away the relative significance of any other theory.

There is nothing more logically weighty than substitution for eternal torturous punishment, in which God’s wrath takes on the singular hue of eternal white-hot destruction (how can this not be hatred?). Thus, mere finite imagery and categories, such as those found in ransom theory and Christus Victor (still to be found in Calvin), will be gradually displaced in his most influential followers for focus on penal substitution. John McArthur, for example, concludes that any theory other than penal substitution is false (listing theories such as ransom theory and Christus Victor).[8]

There is a gradual and logical whittling down of other theories as penal substitution takes center stage through George Whitefield,[9] Jonathan Edwards,[10] Charles Hodge, and into modern times with J. I. Packer, John Piper,[11] D. A. Carson, and John McArthur. What evolves in these thinkers is the central weight that must be given to penal substitution, even when there is acknowledgement of other theories. It is inevitable that penal substitution be given central focus, more than Calvin gave it, as it bears a logical eternal weight that diminishes all finitudes (death, the devil, sin, evil). For Packer, this doctrine is the distinguishing mark of evangelicals, “namely the belief that the cross had the character of penal substitution, and that it was in virtue of this fact that it brought salvation to mankind.” He believes penal substitution “takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel.”[12] For McArthur, “The doctrine of penal substitution is the only view that incorporates the full range of biblical principles regarding atonement for sin.”[13] As Carson puts it, “if one begins with the centrality of penal substitution, which is . . .  grounded on a deep understanding of how sin is an offense against God, it is very easy to see how all the other so-called “models” of the atonement are related to it.”[14] For Carson, penal substitution provides internal coherence to the gospel, bringing all the theories together. “In other words, it is easy to show how various biblical emphases regarding the atonement cohere if one begins with penal substitution. It is very difficult to establish the coherence if one begins anywhere else.”[15] Of course he is correct (assuming penal substitution is the case), as all other theories pale into insignificance next to penal substitution. In light of being saved from eternal torturous wrath, mere finitudes such as death, the devil, sin, and evil, (the actual focus of the New Testament) must take second place.

What Farris and Hamilton miss is that the “Christus Odium,” the new gospel of divine wrath and hatred, is simply the final step entailed in Calvin’s innovation.[16]

(If you are interested in pursuing this topic further sign up for our class on the atonement with PBI starting at the end of January.)

[1] https://www.adamsetser.com/blog/2015/7/25/the-big-picture-of-gods-mission-a-concise-over[1]view-of-the-entire-bible-by-dr-abner-chou. [June 19, 2018] Quoted from Joshua R. Farris & S. Mark Hamilton, “This is My Beloved Son, Whom I hate? A Critique of the Christus Odium Variant of Penal Substitution” (Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies, Volume 3, Issue 2).

[2] Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, In the Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, [1999] 2015), pp. 184-85. Quoted from Farris and Hamilton.

[3] https://calvinistinternational.com/2017/07/27/tim-keller-the-cross-and-the-love-of-god/ From Farris and Hamilton

[4] Ibid, Farris and Hamilton

[5] Farris and Hamilton almost acknowledge that the origins of penal substitution are with Calvin: “Despite some recent and rather awkward attempts to forge a genetic link between contemporary evangelical articulations of this doctrine and the Fathers and Medieval Schoolmen, proponents of the penal substitution theory ought to be cautious when looking for the origin of this theory not to look much beyond the Reformation, particularly John Calvin.”

[6] This quote and the following from Luther are from Martin Luther, On Galatians 3:13 (Luther’s Works 27.276-291). The commentary on Galatians 3:13 is quoted in full on the website https://wolfmueller.co/did-martin-luther-claim-that-jesus-was-an-adulterer/

[7] This is the way Joel B. Green and Mark Baker characterize it in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts, (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000) 142.

[8] John McArthur, “The Offense of the Cross,” From his website,  Grace to You,  (Wednesday, February 10, 2021), https://www.gty.org/library/blog/B210210/the-offense-of-the-cross

[9] George Whitefield for example, probably the most famous religious figure of the eighteenth century, with newspapers referring to him as the “marvel of the age,” and who is estimated to have reached an audience of some 10 million hearers, would focus on penal substitution. (From Christian History, published by Christianity Today https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/evangelistsandapologists/george-whitefield.html)  In his Sermon entitled “Of Justification by Christ” (1771-1772a), Whitefield emphasizes the need for penal substitution. 

 “he [God] hath also given us both a natural and a written law, whereby we are to be judged and that each of us hath broken these laws, is too evident from our sad and frequent experience. And if we are thus offenders against God, it follows, that we stand in need of forgiveness for thus offending Him; he demands our obedience to that law, and has obliged us universally and perseveringly to obey it, under no less a penalty than incurring his curse and eternal death for every breach of it unless some means can be found to satisfy God’s justice, we must perish eternally.”

George Whitefield, 1771-1772a. Sermon 46: Of Justification by Christ. In The Works of the Reverend George Whitefield, Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics Website, http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe= Quoted from WOOD, MAXWELL,THOMAS (2011) Penal Substitution in the Construction of British Evangelical Identity: Controversies in the Doctrine of the Atonement in the Mid-2000s, 76, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3260/

[10] It was Jonathan Edwards who may have most colorfully and successfully spread Calvin’s version of penal substitution, with his focus on being saved from the torments of hell as in his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Where even Whitefield refers to eternal death, Edwards makes death and the grave a refuge from the eternal torturous hell of divine punishment. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.”

[11] Prior to the atonement he says, “God was not my Father. He was my judge and executioner.”

[12] J.I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution” The Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture, 1973. https://www.the-highway.com/cross_Packer.html     

[13] McArthur, Ibid.

[14] D. A. Carson, The SBJT Forum: The Atonement under Fire, https://s3.amazonaws.com/tgc-documents/carson/2007_forum_penal_substitution.pdf

[15] Carson, Ibid.

[16] Which in no way denies the lineage of missteps that can be traced from Augustine, Anselm, Scotus, and Luther, which lead to Calvin.

Two Possible Futures for American Christianity Exemplified by Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Christian journey is not simply individual but corporate so that salvation is being joined to a new society (the body of Christ) called the Church. This is not a parallel kingdom, an alternative reality, or (as in Luther’s notion of the two kingdoms) what God is doing with his left hand on earth while his right hand is busy with the spiritual realm in the heavenly kingdom. The tragedy (always subject to reversal) unfolding in the American church, attached as it may be to this two-kingdom notion, might best be recognized (and averted) when viewed in conjunction with the wartime experience of the German church, and in particular, in the lives of the two most famous German Christians. Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer exemplify the outworking of a two kingdom theology and the alternative, respectively, portending two possible theological outcomes in the American context Continue reading “Two Possible Futures for American Christianity Exemplified by Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer”

The Church Emerging from a Failed Evangelicalism: The True Restoration Movement

In the 500-year cycles Phyllis Tickle locates in the history of the Judeo/Christian faith we are one year into the emergence of a new form of Christianity (501 years removed from Luther nailing the theses to the church door, 500 years prior to the Reformation takes us to the Great Schism, when Eastern and Western Christianity split, and 500 years from then takes us back to Gregory the Great and the so-called Dark Ages, etc.) We are well into what I would call the “Great Return,” giving rise to new forms of Christianity (emergent, new monasticism, missional, small church, cyber-church, deep church) most all of which are concerned with a return to forms of church which involve doing life together in some significant form.  While for many this return has meant a return to Rome, Canterbury, or Constantinople, for others it has meant a return to the economic practices of the first church (a shared purse) or a return to the land (sustainable living), or a return to community living (the new monasticism). The way of summing up the failure of evangelicalism and the emerging Great Return is in terms of ecclesiology or the doctrine of the Church: evangelicalism, according to Derek Tidball never had a developed theology of the church and, according to George Marsden, was characterized by a “general disregard of the institutional church;”[1] the Great Return is occurring in the wake of this abandonment of the centrality of the Church with a return to understanding the Church as the substance of salvation. Continue reading “The Church Emerging from a Failed Evangelicalism: The True Restoration Movement”