Rowan Williams – Forging Ploughshares

Reflections on the Dynamics of Participating in the Trinity

Trinity as ultimate reality means reality is relational. Ultimate reality is not a monism or one thing in three modes, nor is it three substances within a single abstraction, but the Trinity is a relational dynamic. This has implications for nearly everything; for how we conceive human experience, the church, creation and relationship to God. As Nicholas Lash describes, Trinitarian doctrine is the grammar, the structure, of the Christian school of discipleship.[1] This Trinitarian grammar provides for a creative and generative dynamic, which the early church and the church today is continuing to realize.

The Unpredictable Nature of Trinity

The problem is, the Trinity has political, social, anthropological, and even economic implications, which are impossible to predict. As Raimon Panikkar notes, “The Trinity is an irritant to any monarchic ideology, be it religious (monotheism), political (imperialism and colonialism), economic (global market), academic (pensée unique), or even lifestyle (technocracy).”[2] The Trinity is a doctrine to be realized, and “the world” mitigates against this realization in its attachment to an ever collapsing dualism (an identity through difference that reduces to sameness). This collapse (the violence of the world) in its various political, ethnic, and psychological antagonisms is predictable, but the positive overcoming of the mechanism of violence (peace) cannot be predicted or captured in a theory. Paul describes it as passage from slavery to sin to freedom in the Trinity.

The Passage from Trinitarian absence into Trinitarian Realization

In Romans 7, Paul pictures the ego pitted against the law as controlled by death, which amounts to a Trinitarian absence, which becomes clear in Romans 8, with the Son displacing the isolated ego, and Abba displacing the law, and death being displaced by the Spirit. Human violence against the self and the world is working out its trinitarian absence, a struggle undone through entry into the Trinity: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God . . . (Rom, 8:2, 15-16). Slavery to sin is characterized by fear and death and the impenetrable law which split the ego. This is displaced by a relation to Abba, in the Son, which is life in the Spirit. The realization of this unity not only shows itself in a psychological reorientation but in bringing together categories which were seemingly beyond reconciliation. God and world, matter and Spirit, heaven and earth, typically pitted in a dualism, are harmonized in a Trinitarian synthesis. Quite simply, realization of the truth of the Trinity is entry into peace and reconciliation, which is salvation.[3]

The Organic Nature of Salvation

This is not so much a cultural project (Christendom) or an institution or religion (Christianity) but it is this realization, corporately and individually of the wholeness to be found in the Trinity. According to Jesus, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20-21). God does not indwell an organization or a civilization but people. The civilizational and religious project have tended to obscure the point of the faith, to enter into Trinity and to live out the implications of being the kingdom. Christendom is on its last legs and Christianity as an institutional religion is in sharp decline, but this opens up the opportunity to the reality of “being in Christ” as a personal realization.

Which is not to say the project is individualistic, but the point of the ecclesia is as an organism and not an organization.[4] This organic understanding means not just personal growth, but recognition that relation to this truth is not like that of a religion or organization but is entry into the full realization of relationship. We are realizing but have not yet realized the fullness of this truth, either as it relates to ourselves, to other religions, or to the world as a whole, but we can participate in this growth without full comprehension. We are growing into Christ who, through us, is growing in the world, but we can only follow the form from our present perspective. “But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Co 12:7). The kingdom is in process and is not historically complete, and this unifying work, certainly involving knowledge (beyond full comprehension) is giving rise to an intelligibility.

The kingdom is in your midst for the common good, but no single mind or organization or hierarchy controls or has a handle on this kingdom. It is a process of discovery and realization, which cannot be predicted or conceptualized or reduced to a set of doctrines or propositions. It is an unfolding story, which involves who God is in Christ. As Rowan Williams describes, there is no single institutional project or clear course of engagement with other traditions, other than the concrete future of a Christlike humanity, that is a humanity “delivered from a slavish submission to an alien divine power and participating in the creative work of God.”[5] It is not our place to provide a universal theory or explanation of how this might work in particular places, cultures, and religions. Though we may not know the universal how, we do know that it is in and through specific human encounter with the ever-expanding story of Jesus Christ and the church.

Conclusion: The Process of Salvation as a Trinitarian Realization

The unfolding relational nature of Trinitarian theology could never assume to speak the last word. “To the extent that the relation of spirit to logos is still being realized in our history, we cannot ever, while history lasts, say precisely all that is to be said about logos . . . We know that the unification of all things through Christ is not a matter of a single explanatory scheme being manifested to us, but of the variousness of human lives being drawn into creative and saving relation to the divine and to each other.”[6] We are in the midst of the purposeful groaning (Rom 8:26-27) working itself out in creation and the body of Christ. “Being Christian, if it means acting for these goals and for these reasons, is believing the doctrine of the Trinity to be true, and true in a way that converts and heals the human world.”[7]

[1] Nicholas Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology, vol. 2, no. 3 (1986), 183-96. Cited in Rowan Williams, “The Trinity and Pluralism,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Edited by Gavin D’Costa (New York: Orbis Books, 1990), 13.

[2] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, (New York: Orbis Books, 2013), 224-225.

[3] The experience of the synthesis of the Father and Son, time and eternity, Creator and creation, is through the Spirit. The Spirit is the realization of synthesis in an ever-abiding dynamic (Rom 8:26–27). Trinity as the structure of reality shows itself in being between (creation in process), and this relational betweenness constitutes not just a third, but is the truth of the whole. Time is not pitted against eternity, as if God is incapable of the temporal, but in Christ the Creator is groaning with creation (Rom 8:22). Just as the Father is through the Son, so too the eternal is in time. Panikkar calls it “tempiternal” in that just as the Father and Son cannot be separated neither can time and eternity be separated.Ibid, 226.

[4] Raimundo Panikkar, “The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges: Three Kairological Moments of Christic Self-Consciousness,” in Hick and Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, (New York: Orbis, 1995), 104

[5] Williams, 11.

[6] Ibid, 12.

[7] Ibid, 13.

Julian of Norwich and the Reversal of Theology

If there is a single voice in the West which consistently develops a theology of originary peace, matching the leanings of Maximus and Origen, it must be Julian of Norwich. She develops a theology focused on the personal revelation of the love of Jesus Christ, dispelling any notion of unworthiness, with realization of the self with and in divine identity, very much on the order of theosis or apocatastasis. In the midst of the plague and death of her own family and some 50,000 citizens surrounding her, she feels the “woe” or heaviness of life, and then the realization of being secure in the love and goodness of God. Her feelings of personal brokenness and despair, and then entry into joy and love, in a deeply personal experience, describes the universal arc. She sees the typical theological focus on guilt, wrath, and law, as something of a necessary anthropomorphism, limiting redemption and God to negative terms characterizing human experience, and she presumes God is the unmoved, loving agent drawing humankind into divine identity.

Rowan Williams refers to her work as an “anti-theology” in that she turns the usual understanding upside-down. Rather than agonizing over God’s satisfaction, she turns from “squaring the circle” of how “God has to ‘do justice’ to his own justice.”[1] The point is not that God must pay himself a fair price. “Anger happens in us; it is that atmosphere of bitter conflict and fear which holds us away from peace, being at one with ourselves, living in atonement.”[2] We are the ones in need of satisfaction. As God says to her, “If thou art apaide, I am apaide.”[3] God would bring us fully alive, into the satisfaction of his love – believing that we are loved – by pouring his life into us. “To be ‘apaide’ in Julian’s theological world is to discover that we cannot pull apart human need and divine self-enactment and make them struggle for resolution.”[4]

Julian explains that there are two levels of judgement, the first in which “I must necessarily know myself a sinner. And by the same judgment I understood that sinners sometimes deserve blame and wrath,” but these judgments reside in myself, not God.[5] Movement beyond guilt and wrath, into the second level, is the deeper working of grace (potentially “filled with endless joy and bliss”).[6] This entails a necessary and eternal progression: “And therefore this belongs to our properties, both by nature and by grace to long and desire with all our powers to know ourselves, in which full knowledge we shall truly and clearly know our God in the fulness of endless joy.”[7] The common teaching, perhaps necessary, misses the deeper focus: “I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be. Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity and his unity do not allow him to be angry.”[8]

While we are in process, still our nature is complete and perfect in oneness with God, which she treats as an accomplished reality. “I saw that our nature is in God whole.”[9] In Christ, God has taken on our nature and shared his nature with us. “God is knit to our nature that is the lower part, in our flesh-taking: and thus in Christ our two natures are oned.”[10] Reality in Christ is without beginning but is integral to God’s plan and identity: “I understand in our Lord’s signifying, where the blessed Soul of Christ is, there is the Substance of all the souls that shall be saved by Christ.” So that “I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God.”[11] Christ, for Julian, is so tied to humanity that “When Adam fell, God’s Son fell,” as God’s Son cannot be separated from Adam. Christ’s incarnation insures no ultimate separation between fallen humanity and God: “for the Son to be the Son is for the Son to be the one who has always been the lover and companion of Adam’s race.”[12] God is who he always was and is, and to pull this apart is an unsolvable conundrum.

She recasts the usual theological dilemma, characterizing it as an overcoming of refusal of God’s love. Like a neurotic who enjoys his sickness, imagining this is the kernel of who he is, our tendency is to ward off divine love. We would have God change, so as to accept us, as if it is God who is out of sorts. Julian shows, the “‘problems’ can be resolved only by the erosion of my anger, my refusal of life.”[13] Sin is precisely this refusal of life, and is thus always an embrace of death. “And thus we are dead for the time from the very sight of our blissful life.”[14] But this deadness does not change the truth of God. “But in all this I saw soothfastly that we be not dead in the sight of God, nor He passeth never from us.”[15]

There is a reciprocity involving a sort of divine necessity: “But He shall never have His full bliss in us till we have our full bliss in Him, verily seeing His fair Blissful Cheer.”[16] We are working out in nature what is fulfilled in God’s grace, but God is the undergirding reality. We may be confused about who God is and who we are, but God is not. We are coming to know ourselves and God, in the assurance, as Paul says, that he knows us (Gal 4:9). God’s knowledge, and not our own, is the sustaining center of who and what we are. The unreality of sin does not alter God, and he is the reality we are being drawn into. “Thus I saw how sin is deadly for a short time in the blessed creatures of endless life.”[17] It is just a matter of coming to see rightly: “Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love.”[18]

God is unchangingly himself, acting in his love to bring us out of our disasters into his peace. Redemption is not balancing the legal books, but is “the sheer outworking of who or what God is.”[19] God in Christ is tied to humanity so that the journey of Adam (of humankind), is God’s journey in Christ. It is not as if God started at some point to love mankind, this love is an eternal fact about us and God. Likewise, there is no anger for God to forgive as “between God and our soul there is neither wrath nor forgiveness in his sight. For our soul is so wholly united to God, through his own goodness, that between God and our soul nothing can interpose.”[20]

Anger, in her description, in both its source and object is purely human, and falls short of God’s unmoving love. Self-destructive anger obscures God and self, and misses the deeper identification of the soul with God’s unchangeable goodness. She acknowledges that this is not the common teaching of the church, and humbly submits to this teaching, but she also offers a counter-explanation. Man in his weakness and fallibility loses sight of God, “for if he saw God continually, he would have no harmful feelings nor any kind of prompting, no sorrowing which is conducive to sin.”[21] There may be the necessity for sorrow, wrath, and forgiveness, as if these are movements in God, but this describes the changeableness of humans, fallibility and sin, and not the fulness of divine peace and love. “For we through sin and wretchedness have in us a wrath and a constant opposition to peace and to love.”[22]

Sebastian Moore, in the spirit of Julian, describes this “refusal” to enter completely into the fulness of life, as the result of a deep attachment to the false self. It is not simply refusal of “obedience to God” but an unwillingness to relinquish attachment to death. “Some unbearable personhood, identity, freedom, whose demands beat on our comfortable anonymity and choice of death. Further, something that at root we are, a self that is ours yet persistently ignored in favor of the readily satisfiable needs of the ego.”[23] Moore though, like Julian, hits upon the necessity of a deeper identity with Christ: “What if Jesus were the representative, the symbol, the embodiment, of this dreaded yet desired self of each of us, this destiny of being human, the unbearable identity and freedom (freedom and identity being really the same thing)?”[24] The crucifixion of Jesus is not, at its deepest level, concerned with conflict involving Caiaphas and Pilate but it concerns “man’s refusal of his true self.”[25] The crucifixion is at once the ultimate evil and its defeat: the evil of destruction not just of a general “true” humanity, but of the individual’s true self. But recognition of this self-destruction in Christ is also the resolution of this evil. This recognition is already “forgiveness.” Evil is transformed into a specific and personal sin and sin transforms into grace. “And through this conversion the believer finds as his own that identity which first he rejected and crucified.”[26]

Our life is with God in Christ, and where we fall short, we turn to death. As Julian describes it, where we fall we die, and “we must necessarily die inasmuch as we fail to see and feel God, who is our life.”[27] We may pass from doing the nailing to being nailed to the cross, from being the crucifier to being the crucified. The life and self, invested in crucifying, is in reality the destruction of life and self. The passage is at first the refusal of our own death, the projection of it on another, and then the relinquishing of this false sense of self. The passage beyond the ego, the death of self, is the only means of “return” to the Father.

God accepts our failings and works with them to transform us: “grace transforms our dreadful failing into plentiful and endless solace; and grace transforms our shameful falling into high and honourable rising; and grace transforms our sorrowful dying into holy, blessed life.”[28] Grace is transforming who and what we are, turning our earthly shame and sorrow into heavenly honour and bliss, and our present sufferings into endless rejoicing. She concludes: “And when I saw all this, I was forced to agree that the mercy of God and his forgiveness abate and dispel our wrath.”[29] Not God’s wrath but our wrath is dispelled and abated. Likewise, God cannot forgive because he cannot be angry. “For this was revealed, that our life is all founded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live.”[30] God’s love is the ground and reality of life and it is into his life that we are being endlessly united.

Seeing ourselves as crucifiers, as filled with wrath, and recognizing this in the cross, gives rise to the recognition and possibility of God’s love. The recognition of evil in the crucified, awakens to love. We can see “evil’s visible effect. And this is the manifestation of God’s love: that extraordinary love that highlights our evil in order to leave us in no doubt that it is accepted.”[31] Moore describes this as “the deepest logic of the psyche, love is experienced in the vision of the Crucified.”[32] The killing of Christ and the exposure of the ultimate limits of human evil and possibility open directly onto new life.

Both Julian and Moore speak of the absolute ground, the penetrating force of God’s love. All human movement is in this love, leading to his peace. We may be victims of a temporary blindness but this unreality cannot compete with the reality of “God’s merciful protection.” God accepts us at our worst, and he exposes and accepts this worst in us, and this is the point of the cross. The defeat of this evil though, goes beyond our rational grasp, God making Christ sin exposes the depth of evil and reaches us in our sin. God comes to us in Christ, beyond our own capacities for self-acceptance, to make us his. “It is the mystery of God who comes upon us and loves us beyond the limits of our ego-organized potential.”[33]

We cease being self-organized or egocentric, and become Christocentric. In the words of Julian, “So I saw that God is our true peace; and he is our safe protector when we ourselves are in disquiet, and he constantly works to bring us into endless peace. And so when by the operation of mercy and grace we are made meek and mild, then we are wholly safe. Suddenly the soul is united to God, when she is truly pacified in herself, for in him is found no wrath.”[34] As Moore puts it, “I acquire sufficient selfhood to be identified with the crucified. This is the transition from man who ‘crucifies the Lord of Glory’ to man who is ‘nailed to the cross with Christ.’ It is the same man, changing only through self-discovery in Christ.”[35]

Williams sums up Julian as “saying that grace is God’s ‘no’ to our ‘no’: our persistent leaning towards nothingness, to the refusal of the act that is our very being, [this] is what is annihilated by openness.to God.”[36] Our “no” is annihilated, but this does not cancel creation, but is God’s crucifixion of evil. As Moore puts it, “In the ultimate order the ultimate sin, of crucifying the Just One, reverses itself, the victim giving life to the crucifiers.”[37] Evil takes on the only “being” possible in the ultimate effect, but in this form, it is defeated and annihilated. The effect of sin in the crucified is identical with its defeat and healing.[38] Our evil is made explicit in its annihilation. “When we say ‘no’, there is an abiding ‘no’ to this ‘no’ at the heart, of what we are.”[39] Death’s power and its denial of life and love are defeated in the cross. “Yet it is at the same time the reminder that God cannot be put to death and that the passion of Christ also declares the unchanging presence, of God in the centre of our being.”[40]

Julian is a counter-voice to the Augustinian tradition by which she was surrounded. She begins her theology where most theology leaves off, by focusing on the absolute unchanging love of God and works out all the movements of redemption through the logic of this love. Total identification with Christ opens a level of grace and love, which mark Julian’s unique perspective.

[1] Rowan Williams, Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 171.

[2] Ibid, 174.

[3] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library,2002) The Thirty Third Chapter.

[4] Williams, 173.

[5] Julian, The Forty-Fifth Chapter.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Fifty Seventh Chapter.

[10] Ibid

[11] The Fifty Fourth Chapter.

[12] Williams, 176.

[13] Williams, 177.

[14] The Seventy Second Chapter.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Forty-Fourth Chapter

[19] Williams, 175.

[20] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[21] The Forty-Seventh Chapter.

[22] The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[23] Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus is No Stranger (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) X.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid, XI.

[27] Julian, The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[31] Moore, 2-3.

[32] Ibid, 3

[33] Ibid, 6.

[34] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[35] Moore, 7.

[36] Williams, 179.

[37] Moore, 8.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Williams, 179-180.

[40] Williams, 183.

Resurrection as the Confrontation and Defeat of Antisemitism and the Antichrist

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamín Netanyahu recently said “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan” while explaining the rationale behind military actions involving the US and Israel against Iran. Netanyahu, referencing the historian Will Durant, was arguing that the military action of the US and Israel against Iran, and presumably the destruction of Gaza, were examples of when morality is not enough, and strength and power must be exercised. According to Netanyahu, “If you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.” Ignoring the implications of out-eviling the evil through ruthlessness, the contrast between Genghis Khan and Jesus may have come to Netanyahu so easily, as one of the defining necessities of Israeli citizenship concerns Jesus and Christianity.

The Law of Return, defining who can be a citizen of Israel, refrains from defining the term “Jew,” but the Law simply states: “Every Jew is entitled to immigrate to Israel.”[1] However, in 1962 the High Court of Justice ruled that a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who had converted to Catholicism and had become a Catholic monk (Brother Daniel) could not immigrate to Israel, since he had converted to Catholicism. “The argument of the majority judges was that after his conversion to Christianity he is a member of a non-Jewish religion, and is not allowed to immigrate to Israel.”[2] The problem is that “Jew” was not specifically defined as pertaining to religion, but had been defined either as the child of a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism. Those with Jewish mothers were not required to be practitioners of Judaism, but the only requirement is that he/she be one “who is not a member of another religion.” Secularism, atheism, nationalism, and Zionism, are not considered as competing with Judaism as a religion.

The primary issue was in regard to Jews who had converted to Christianity or Messianic Jews, all of whom were disqualified as having the right to immigration. That is, the primary consideration for the right to Aliyah (immigration to Israel, and originally referring to the honor of being called upon in the synagogue to read from the Torah) was rejection of any other religion, with Christianity and Christ being of specific and primary concern. The ruling was passed down, “a Messianic Jew (i.e., the child of a Jewish mother who believes that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel) is of ‘another religion’ rather than Judaism.” As Justice Barak makes clear, an atheist or secular Jew along with religious Jews all agree, for purposes of immigration, there is no such thing as “a Jew who believes in Jesus.” Justice Barak expressed his opinion that even according to a secular outlook there is general agreement that “a Jew who believes in Jesus” is no longer a Jew, according to the national meaning of the term.[3] The key determinant of who is a Jew cannot be said to be either religious or ethnic identity, as converts are welcomed as well as the children of converts who are secular or atheistic, but not being a follower of Christ is the clearest unifying factor.

Given the history of the conflict between Jews and Christians and the persecution of Jews by Christians, it may be understandable that Israel would want to preserve an identity which is specifically and definitively not Christian, but it is also true that this conflict goes to the heart of Christian identity. The rejection and crucifixion of Christ, and recognition of this fact is the beginning point of Christian preaching. Peter, in the first Christian sermon, says, the resurrected Messiah, is the one “you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men” (Acts 2:23). Everyone knows, “The things about Jesus the Nazarene . . . how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to the sentence of death, and crucified Him” (Lk 24:19–20). This killing is not a vague result of general wrongdoing but is the historical and concrete result of the beliefs, practices, and religion, grounding Jews (and Romans), causing them to condemn and crucify Jesus. These people have blood on their hands, and it is this recognition that “cuts them to the heart” causing their repentance which leads to their baptism (Acts 2:37–38). A neutral or innocent audience is simply not addressed by the Gospel, but it is aimed at those complicit in the killing. This message cuts to the heart, as “the things concerning Jesus” pertain to those who are guilty, but this guilt is not simply Jewish.

“For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” (Acts 4:27). The “Gentiles rage,” and “peoples devise futile things,” and “all the kings of the earth” take their stand, “against the Lord and against his Christ” (Acts 4:25–26). The opposition to Christ is universal, including Israel, Gentiles, kings of the earth, priests, common people, or all that are represented in the gathering in Jerusalem, which seems to include the root of humanity. This city of man, Jerusalem, which is responsible for his killing, is also the site of the beginning of Gospel proclamation.

It is the crucified who is risen and who directly saves those involved in the crime of his murder. This is not generic or genetic guilt, but is specific, historical, and concrete.[4] It is in their role as “the Council of elders,” the “people assembled, both chief priests and scribes,” Annas as High Priest and Caiaphas, all who were of the “high priestly family,” as well as Pontius Pilate and Herod, or those who gather in Jerusalem (e.g., Lk 22:66; Acts 4:5-6). These are the judges who will be judged. The antisemitism is not in the details but the details contain the concrete reality that brought on the killing. Betrayal, scapegoating, victimization, judging, capital punishment, sacrificial religion, or the very modes of redemption in which Israel and Rome put their hope, killed Jesus. Where the first Adam encounters the second Adam, all that has gone into shaping and misshaping Adam, comes into play. The murder concerns the very ground constituting humanity, as it comes into conflict with the reality of his humanity.

They condemned him as a threat to their nation, to their temple, and to their religion and considered him a blasphemer (Mk 14:63–64). He is accused of colluding with Satan, of being insane (Mat 12:22, 24, 26, 27, 28; Mk 3:30; Jn 10:19–21), of having demons (Matt 12:25), and of wanting to destroy the temple (Mk 14:58). He is accused of being a malefactor (John 18:29–30), which may include being a sorcerer and may have been aimed at his miracles.[5] He was accused of claiming to be the rightful King of the Jews (Jn 18:33-38; 19:19). They crucify him because of the threat he poses, and the resurrection is a refutation of their legal-religious condemnation. It is a reversal and judgment on their “nailing him to the cross.”

It is not that Christianity is antisemitic, but Judaism is the specific site in which the Messiah reveals himself (universally), and he brings fulness and truth from out of the Jewish faith: “Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:27). He is in all of the Jewish Scriptures because none of it stands alone, it all requires relativization in the light of Christ. The law made absolute, the Jew made absolute, or even God, apart from Christ, made absolute, is captive to the orientation and power of death, which causes theme to condemn him. This God, this religion, this law, is built on crucifying. It absolutizes the tomb, and Jesus empties out this tomb religion, and this is the promised fulfillment of the law and the prophets (Is 28:14-28).

In light of the resurrection their accusations and understanding are proven false, the point of Christ’s vindication. Peter proclaims not only that Jesus’ resurrection vindicates him, but it indicts those who killed him, along with all their reasons for crucifying him. “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24). The “power of death” pertains to the deadly condemnation, but also to the nature of the worship, the religious nationalism, the essentializing identity, which drove in the nails. The condemnation, and the understanding and systems of religion and identity which brought it about, are judged by the resurrection. Peter distributes culpability to Jews (the “you”) and the Romans (the “godless men”) but all serve the power of death, which they presume is absolute and is theirs to manipulate. This essentializing, absolutizing, of death and their ability to wield it upon victims of their choice, is proof in the flesh (they imagine) of the truth of their power. The entire system, is overturned in the resurrection: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). Your beliefs, judgements, and religion (or at least the understanding of your religion), which brought about his crucifixion, stand condemned.

This confrontation of Peter with the Jews is the pattern of proclamation of the resurrection: Peter is himself confronted as a betrayer of Christ and all of the disciples share in the betrayal exemplified by Judas (the charge levelled by Jesus while washing their feet, in Jn 13:1-17). Peter is not shifting the blame but explaining how Jews and Romans are complicit in yielding to the bondage which killed Jesus. Some may not be persecutors on the order of Paul, deniers on the order of Peter, betrayers on the order of Judas, but may simply give themselves over to grief, like Mary at the tomb, but what all share prior to or outside the realization of resurrection is bondage to death. In a long explanation concerning the prophecy presumed to be about David, Peter explains that God has not abandoned Jesus to the grave, and this means life, and the Holy Spirit, not death, are the final reality (esp. Acts 2:33).

The message is a judgment on the judges, as the apostles condemn those who condemned Jesus. “On the next day, their rulers and elders and scribes were gathered together in Jerusalem; and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of high-priestly descent” (Acts 4:5–6). The same Jewish court that condemned Jesus condemns the apostles and demands their silence (Acts 4) but the apostles reverse the roles, and proclaim Jesus has judged the judges in his resurrection. This however is only the beginning of the message, as they have “acted in ignorance” (Acts 3:17) and through repentance and return, the wiping away of sin, and times of refreshing come through Christ (Acts 3:19–20). Absolution and forgiveness are possible through the power of resurrection.

The pattern is established: realization of complicity in the crime as the first step in a new sort of worship, a new sort of temple, a new understanding of Scripture and Israel. “He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:11–12). God judges human judgment, as the victim has become the vindicator, offering true justice. As Rowan Williams notes, “grace is released only in confrontation with the victim.”[6] Grace comes to those who recognize their complicity in the crime, reifying the law, opting for the nation over Christ (the law of sin and death).

The refusal to recognize the resurrected Jesus is a refusal to recognize God is with the victim. This coin though, has two sides: the refusal of Jesus places one on the side of those who killed him, but victimizing through scapegoating, is also the crime that killed him. Jesus can be overtly or implicitly rejected, but on both sides of the equation are the guilty. The “not Christian” as the essence of Jewish identity performs the same work as antisemitism. Each is defined by the same reifying process. The scapegoating which killed Jesus is the same scapegoating which was turned on the Jews. That is, Zionism and the modern State of Israel may preserve the identity which, along with Roman complicity, brought about the death of Christ, however Christian antisemitism (e.g., the crusaders’ accusation that Jews are the “Christ killers”) repeats and preserves the same reifying identity which brought about the death of Christ. The reification of the law and the temple on the part of the Jews is repeated by those antisemites who also reify Jewish identity. Antichristian, antichrist, and antisemitism, are made of the same stuff in that each makes an absolute of the negative. While the tendency may be to quickly pass over “who killed Christ,” not only the sin of antisemitism but all sin is defeated by exposure and proclamation of what caused the death of Christ, as it is precisely the scapegoating reification which Christ confronts, judges, and defeats. Indeed, antisemitism is simply a case in point of what killed Jesus. Othering Jews or Romans, is of the same order as blaming Jesus, and in this victimization of the Other there are no innocent bystanders.

[1] Joshua Pex, “Immigration to Israel according to the Law of Return after conversion to another religion?” OFFICE@LAWOFFICE.ORG.IL, Updated on: 29/06/2025

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd LtD, 2002) 2.

[5] Deuteronomy warns, “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, . . . that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death” (Dt 13:1–2, 5). Later sources also indicate it may have been the accusation of sorcery which got him killed: Evidence of Jewish opinion at the time of Lactantius is the following passage from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 43a: “On the eve of the Passover Yeshu [the Nazarine] was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Any one who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.” See John W. Welch, “The Legal Cause of Action Against Jesus in John 18:29–30” Celebrating Easter: The 2006 BYU Easter Conference, ed. Thomas A. Wayment and Keith J. Wilson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University), 157–75. Accessed here: https://rsc.byu.edu/celebrating-easter/legal-cause-action-against-jesus-john-1829-30.

[6] Williams, 4.

The Unity of Creator and Creation in Christ-Consciousness: A Meditation on Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose

The incarnation means there is no gap between the finite and infinite, such that the ordinary is on a continuum with the eternal. Feeding the hungry, providing a drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, involves eternity: “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me” (Matt. 25:40). This is not hyperbole. God is not a discreet object, an intrusion, or something beyond. God is in history, in the finite, in the “mundane.” Due to our distinctions between “the natural and the supernatural” we may think ordinary life, outside those special religious moments in prayer or church, are not adequate for the spiritual. Salvation, after all, is often conceived as departure rather than an embrace of the immediate reality, such as sharing a cup of water. We are prone to miss the spiritual in the ordinary and pass over reality in imagining it lies beyond, but there is no creature closed off from its Creator or one moment closed off from the eternal as the one depends upon the other, just as the Son relates to the Father. Reality is not discreet stuff contained in consecutive space and time but is a relational interdependence, in which the part is dependent upon the whole and the whole is in and through the parts, and in which Christ is holding all things together. Like Christ his disciples are to hold things together as mediators of order, bringing unity out of chaos, peace out of violence, care out of indifference, quenching thirst, hunger, and loneliness.

The problem which bad reflection and bad theology pose is to introduce conceptual distinctions into reality, such that the ultimate or absolute is beyond and the finite is only itself in distinction from the infinite. As Rowan Williams argues: “there is no ‘alterity’ – no sense of ‘one and then another alongside’ – between Creator and creation, between Word and humanity in Jesus; just as there is no ‘one and then another’ in the relation between Father and Son. In neither context can we talk about items that could be added together.”[1] Life is often a striving beyond itself (definitive of death) while eternal life is immediate. There is a harmonious whole in the relation between Father and Son poured out upon all things through the Spirit. The priority of deity over humanity does not mean they are discreet, anymore than the Father and Spirit are discreet.

Creation is most fully itself, just as the Son is most fully himself, in relation and dependence: “the fully responsive and radically liberating dependence that is the filial relation in the divine life is the ground of all created dependence on the Creator, and so the logic of creation includes a natural trajectory towards this kind of life-giving responsiveness.”[2] The goal and ground of creation, as realized in the Son, is participation in Trinitarian life, but this participation is not beyond the finite, as if finitude were an incapacity. God is knowable in the Son, within finite capacities, as God has poured himself out in the Son by the Spirit, so he is present in human ways by human means, offering a drink, offering food, offering himself, to be known and loved in human ways.

Christ, the heart of creation, is not beyond creation but its center, so uncreated love, uncreated understanding, uncreated knowledge, as exercised in the Word, are opened to creatures made for eternity. However, unity with God is attained in a particular finite context. Just as Jesus comes in a particular context, so he finds us in history and time. It is not by escaping or transcending the context of createdness, but by coming to the fullness of the historical, the physical, the humanness that eternity is mediated.

The obstruction of sin, cuts off eternity in time and Christ reconciles us to this confluence. There is an opening to creation, as Christ restores or heals the broken relation, not only with God, but with reality. Createdness is an opening to the infinite as the discreetness, the alienation, the separation, the loneliness, are overcome in relatedness. The unity of the subatomic with the organic and the organic with the social and the social with the spiritual are part of a field, a form of consciousness. There is no gap to be bridged but the removal of the false obstacle is the coherence of Christ.

The convergence of visible and invisible is in and through the unifying head: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible . . . He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Col. 1:16–18). This headship is inclusive of consciousness, of shared experience, of life in the Spirit, which participation in the body under the head entails, but it is realization of the infinite (consciousness) through immanence. The infinite does not transcend the finite in the sense that the finite annuls the infinite, or the infinite annuls the finite; they are interpenetrating.

God, taken as a discreet object, reduces to a mysterious transcendence in which ignorance passes for knowing the infinite as absence. As Gillian Rose notes in her meditation on Hegel, “If the infinite is unknowable, we are powerless. For our concept of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities.”[3] God brings coherence out of chaos and this coherence is itself knowing God. Ironically, the insistence on absolute distinction between the finite and infinite, between God and the world, between the knowable and unknowable, is posited by consciousness. A consciousness which would only relate to an unknowable infinite, or which depends upon the unknown, grounds knowing in the negative.[4] In this manner Kant saved his rational foundation. The Kantian or modern notion of the infinite would separate it from the finite and sensuous, making the infinite utterly different and exterior. As Rose points out, “it is deprived of all characterization, and hence turned into an empty abstraction, an idol, made of mere timber.”[5]

In this hollowing out of the infinite is a “hallowing of a finitude that remains as it is” and the relations of domination, violence, exploitation, are legitimized.[6] To bring together the finite and the infinite, the domination of human reason must give way. God, the infinite, participates and enjoys creation as a fit dwelling, and the ethical infinite expressed in Christ is made an actually existing ethical finite. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount takes precedent over the particular laws of any place. There is an infinite ethical imperative that disrupts commitment to the infinitizing of human ethics and will.

We can only fall silent about God apart from Christ, but this knowing in Christ is not apart from creation, or apart from ethics, or apart from the normal. We can see the Father in Christ (John 14:9) and more. By partaking of the divine nature in discipleship, enacting Trinitarian life, taking up the cross, it is not as if God appears alongside the self or the world. God does not disrupt creation or personhood, but orders and opens it as the place of his indwelling. There is a unity of consciousness in which opposition between thought and its objects, the finite and infinite are dissolved, as consciousness takes on the unifying wholeness of the Head.

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (p. 218). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (New York: Verso, 2009) 48.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 104.

[6] Ibid, 105.

Missing the Mark Exposed by Christ

Sin is one of the most complicated concepts in the Bible, yet in modern teaching and preaching it is often reduced to breaking a law and legal guilt and then in turn the work of Christ is reduced to getting rid of guilt. The richness of the original context reduced to the judicial or legal, misses the variety of words and concepts in the Hebrew, translated in the Septuagint as “hamartia.” The TDNT notes that the Hebrew poses a special difficulty because the terminology is not exclusively religious or theological, and in fact none of the Hebrew words can be captured in the English word “sin.”^[1] It can involve something as slight as a “misdemeanor” or “negligence” or it may mean “to bend,” to “go astray,” to “miss the right point,” to “fail to find what you are seeking,” or it may refer to “those who have lost their way.” There is sometimes only slight or even no moral culpability, so sin cannot automatically be associated with guilt. At other times it may indicate a criminal offense such as murder and is inclusive of guilt.^[2] But sin does something other than just cause guilt, as in a strictly legal understanding.

The first usage of hamartia in the Septuagint, is in God’s warning to Cain prior to his slaying of Abel: “sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen. 4:7). God equates sin with an animate desiring force that can and will gain mastery. Sin, like diabolos (διάβολος), is not a person but a power of “separating.”^[3] Sin takes on an animate quality (“crouching,” seeming to speak, lying), in the serpent or the devil and “tries to disrupt the relation between God and man.”^[4] Sin or “the satan” (this sub-personal force) causes enmity, and the fact that an angel sent by God is called the adversary or the satan, the one confronting Balaam and the one confronting Joshua the High Priest, indicates it is a force and not a particular personage (Num. 22:32; Zech. 3:1ff).[5] More often sin or the devil is “the one who separates,” “the enemy,” “the calumniator,” “the seducer.”^[6] This force is a malicious liar aiming to create enmity and separation from God.

In the fall the serpent points to obtaining knowledge (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) rather than life with God (the tree of life representing God’s presence) and in acting on this lie the first couple are cast out of the garden. The text focuses on the shift in desire, from desiring life with God (the tree of life) to desiring the fruit of the other tree: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate” (Gen. 3:6). Adam and Eve in rejecting the model of God become the model: “In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God” (Gen 5:1). “When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image” (Gen. 5:3). There are varying degrees of individual moral turpitude in refusal of God (self targeting) but there is a downward inclination from Cain, to Lamech, to the generation of Noah, until humanity is corrupted by violence and separated from God.

The corruption involves a displacement of the divine model, as Cain turns his jealous attention off of God onto Abel, Lamech is filled with revenge and focused on his enemies, and the generation of Noah turn on one another and away from God: “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). The focus off God onto parent, brother or enemy creates an exponential desire in pursuit of an unobtainable goal. “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11). The target (indicated in hamartia) that poses itself in sin is a false goal based on a deadly deception, and this understanding, as pictured in Genesis 3, is thematic. The mark or goal is not external to God, but in sin the target is obscured.[7] As Isaiah indicates, “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Is. 59:2).

Sin is missing the desired mark, but the mark is not only obscured but displaced by what is unachievable, creating exponential desire. In Genesis 3 knowledge which would achieve divinity displaces knowing God (as with Adam and Eve); in Genesis 4 a sacrifice of the brother so as to attain his place of favor is focused on the obstacle (Cain focused on Abel); endless revenge enacted to obtain justice is focused on the enemy (as with Lamech and the generation of Noah). In each instance an obstacle, sin, satan, a lie obscures God. Knowing God, finding favor with God, and enacting justice are worthy goals, obscured and displaced. (As will become clear in the New Testament, the law becomes an obstacle as it becomes the goal and this is the archetypical problem.)

The New Testament clarifies the nature of the deception and the hostility it creates. According to the TDNT, “A complete transformation takes place when the NT uses ἁμαρτία to denote the determination of human nature in hostility to God.”^[8] With the coming of Christ culpability comes to bear as the deception and blindness are exposed: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:21). Jesus exposes the murderous intent of the scribes and Pharisees, not because they are peculiarly bad, but because they are perhaps the best, and what the best would do when confronted with God in Christ is kill him (in a fatal case of mistaken identity?). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer states: “When a human being confronts Jesus[,] the human being must either die or kill Jesus.”[9] The ego or “I” becomes the false goal and Jesus is unambiguous; either the false self, given over to sin dies, or one joins in those who kill the Messiah. As Rowan Williams puts it, in Christ the falsehood is exposed, “so that if we do not accept the mortality and death of our human logos we are going to be complicit in the death of the Word of God.”[10]

In the midst of their plotting to kill Jesus, the leading Jews are deceived about their violence and opposition to God: “If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” (Matt. 23:30). They know their forefathers were deceived but cannot recognize their own delusion, made obvious in their opposition to Jesus: “So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers” (Matt. 23:31–32). They are deceived killers and Jesus exposes this reality: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:27). According to Luke they are like unmarked graves that men unwittingly walk over, and the danger is falling into the deadly trap (Luke 11:44). The corruption is hidden in the façade but the intent is clear in their action.

The history of murder is now revealed, and Jesus’ persecutors are culpable: “upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (Matt. 23:35). The image of God obscured by sin is fully revealed in Christ, but due to sin they destroy the true image so as to preserve the false image. As in the parable of the evil winegrowers (Mark 12), they destroy the Son so as to obtain ownership. Israel as a nation is committed to murder and has always been dominated by the same deadly spirit: “the blood of all the prophets, shed since the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation” (Luke 11:50). Jews are the prime example of the universal problem, as in them is exposed the spirit of murder and violence which would take by force the life that is freely given.

Their intent is exposed with the destruction of the Messiah, which will be followed by the destruction of Israel (Mark 13:2; Luke 19:43-44). The absolute destruction brought on by all-out violence is fulfilled in 70 A.D., but this cataclysmic violence pertains to all nations: “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be frightened; those things must take place; but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will also be famines. These things are merely the beginning of birth pangs” (Mark 13:7-8). Jesus describes war and violence, not as the instrument of God, but as the culmination of evil. The violence on display against the Messiah and surrounding Jerusalem’s destruction will ultimately infect every level of humanity: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death” (Mk. 13:12). The end is upon the world as Jesus exposes the nature of violence, marking the beginning of the end. So, when Jesus accuses the scribes and Pharisees of murderous opposition, theirs is a type of the violence which will ultimately infect the world, in its pursuit of life through death.

Judaism and the law do not save from sin but the law (as both means and end) becomes the characteristic obstruction to God. The law becomes the Thing, holding out life, and there is no life in the law. The question that Paul raises in Romans 7:7 has to do with confusing or equating law and sin: “Is the law sin (Rom. 7:7b)?” Sins confusion, trying to obtain life through the law, makes it seem that the problem is with the law but the problem is in confusing the law with the goal. The law is not God, nor the power of God, nor the presence of God. The law does not contain life, but to imagine it does, creates the impossible situation of making the law the goal, which in Paul’s explanation points to the purpose of the law: “The Law came in so that the transgression would increase” (Rom. 5:20).

Paul does not mention the serpent in his commentary on Genesis 3, but identifies its role directly with sin and the law: “sin taking the opportunity through the law . . . produced in me coveting of every kind” (Rom. 7:8); “sin became alive” (7:9); “sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom. 7:11). Sin’s deception creates the unobtainable goal, the big Other, the false god, the desirable, and the inherently unobtainable.

In the light of Christ, “the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature” (Heb 1:3) the true image and target (becoming like Him) are a reality. The deception is exposed and there is the possibility of defeating sin: “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness” (Heb. 3:13). Now there is the possibility of recognizing, along with the prodigal son, the broken relationship caused by sin: “I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you” (Luke 15:18). The son’s prodigal action of abandoning his father becomes clear. The parable illustrates Jesus’ understanding that sin is to betray the Father for a false reality. “It is going out from the father’s house, i.e., godlessness and remoteness from God working itself out in a life in the world with all its desires and its filth. The event achieved through the coming of Jesus is recognition of this sin and conversion to God.”^[11] In Christ we recognize the true image of God and we can thus be victorious over the deluding effect of sin, causing us to miss the mark.

Sin as missing the mark or failing to achieve a desired end, reduced to a judicial sense, misses the relational, emotional, and the desiring connotation of the biblical word and context. The judicial understanding imagines that the desired end is in view, and misses the biblical notion that sin deceives through a desire that obscures the goal. There is a broken relationship as the lie of sin directs desire onto an unobtainable object. Eve is focused on the fruit, Cain on his brother, the prodigal son on his inheritance, the older son has his eye on his brother, and the Pharisee is focused on the law. God as goal is obscured, but in Christ the root of sin, the obscuring animate lie, is exposed.

^[1] Quell, G., Bertram, G., Stählin, G., & Grundmann, W. (1964–). ἁμαρτάνω, ἁμάρτημα, ἁμαρτία. In G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 1, p. 269). Eerdmans.

^[2] Ibid, 267ff. .

^[3] Foerster, W. (1964–). διαβάλλω, διάβολος. In G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 2, p. 71). Eerdmans.

^[4] Ibid, 76. As in the case of the fall, in the case of Noah, Abraham, in the Exodus, in the episode of the golden calf, in the case of David, and throughout the history of Israel.

[5] “The angel of the LORD said to him, ‘Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out as an adversary, because your way was contrary to me.’”

^[6] Ibid, p. 72.

[7] Thanks to Jonathan Totty for this thought.

^[8] Ibid, ἁμαρτία, 295. Especially in Jn. in the synon. formulae ἔχειν ἁμαρτίαν (9:41; 15:22, 24; 19:11; 1 Jn. 1:8).

[9] The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013) 286. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (p. 186). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[10] Williams, 186.

^[11] Ibid, ἁμαρτία, 303.

The Broken Middle and the Metaxological: William Desmond’s and Rowan Williams’ Opposed Readings of Hegel

Both William Desmond and Rowan Williams are advocates of a metaphysics from the middle or between, with the difference that Williams arrives at this understanding through Gillian Rose and G.W.F. Hegel while Desmond claims to be going beyond Hegel. “The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of ‘dialectical’ mediation, which unites them in a higher unity.”[1] Williams along with Rose, argues that Hegel is not seeking some final synthesis or resolution, as though difference were an obstacle to overcome, but there is the “agon” of existing between or in the middle. In the agon of difference we do not seek synthesis but we endure the anxiety.[2] In their description of the middle or between Williams and Desmond are sometimes indistinguishable: “The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal.”[3] What both are centered upon is the tense relation of betweenness.

As John Caputo notes in the Desmond Reader, “Desmond calls attention to a “between,” a community, a relation to the other.”[4] There can be relation only after the moment of difference. There cannot be a collapse into oneness nor a relation that does not build upon difference. In Williams’ Hegelian terms, there is a “tarrying with the negative” (difference), as one recognizes vulnerability and the possibility of failure while there is an openness to the other. There can be neither total identity nor absolute difference, but one negotiates between these without closure (not aiming at a final absorbing synthesis). There is growth and change, the devastation of the egocentric self (the seeming loss of self) necessary to acknowledging the other. In Benjamin Myers description, “Williams took up Rose’s Hegelianism and transmuted it into a Christian theology of identity, difference, and sociality.”[5]

The problem with the Christian tradition, which Desmond and Williams recognize, is God as absolute Other undermines knowing (see my full depiction of Williams’ reading of Hegel here). The difference lies in Desmond’s continued focus on Otherness (beyond knowledge) and Williams appreciation (through his encounter with Rose) of Hegel’s focus on knowing God. In Rose’s description: “Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought. How can the absolute be thought, and how does the thinking of it have social import? The idea which a man has of God corresponds with that which he has of himself, of his freedom. If ‘God’ is unknowable, we are unknowable, and hence powerless.”[6] An unknowable absolute means everything is absolutely unknowable. A misrepresented absolute means a misunderstood and misrepresented society and people. The Self, mediating all knowledge is not simply human but the Divine Trinitarian Self (inclusive of the human) who makes thought possible. For Hegel, “no otherness is unthinkable,” as “an unthinkable otherness would leave us incapable of thinking ourselves, and so of thinking about thinking – and so of thinking itself.”[7] Consciousness and thought begin with the recognition of the self in and through the Other. God is not an isolated Subject but gives himself to the world in his Son. He gives himself for thought, and makes thought and self-consciousness possible.

Though Desmond is also critiquing the traditional metaphysical understanding, he thinks Hegel posits a false God in place of the transcendent God: “Hegel enacts a project in reconstructing God, in constructing his ‘God’, a project deriving from religious sources, but also diverging from them in a decisive reconfiguration of divine transcendence.” He asks rhetorically, “Does the reconfiguration amount to the production of a philosophical surrogate for the God of religious transcendence? Is this ‘God’ a counterfeit double of God?”[8] According to Desmond, Hegel’s God is not “Other” enough: “transcendence must stress the importance of some otherness; the trans is a going beyond or across towards what is not now oneself. If God is third transcendence (beyond ordinary human transcendence and the transcendent otherness of objects), there is an otherness not reducible to our self-determining.”[9] Transcendence must not fall into a “determinant” understanding: “It would have to be ‘real’ possibilizing power, more original and other than finite possibility and realization. It would have to be possibilizing beyond determinate possibility, and ‘real’ beyond all determinate realization.”[10] God cannot be dependent on the determinate reality of the human, even in Jesus.

According to Desmond, Hegel is too taken with the Self and this takes away from divine transcendence: “The issue of transcendence as other (T3) is reformulated in terms of a self-completing of self-transcendence: transcendence from self to other to self again, and hence there is no ultimate transcendence as other, only self-completing immanence.”[11] In short, Hegel’s is a projection of human transcendence onto the divine. According to Desmond, “We seem to have no need for an other transcendence. Hegel, I propose, seeks a dialectical-speculative solution to the antinomy of autonomy and transcendence. There is no absolute transcendence as other. . . God, as much as humanity, it will be said, is given over to immanence. Indeed, this immanence is itself the very process of both God’s and humanity’s self-becoming.”[12]

Desmond concludes Hegel’s picture of the resolution of self-antagonism (the I pitted against itself) undone in Divine self-identity, does away with “otherness.” He recounts Hegel’s picture of self-antagonism overcome through divine forgiveness: “Here is how it goes in Hegel: ‘The reconciling Yes, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the “I” which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowing’ (PhG, 472: PS, § 671).”[13] (Hegel, in Slavoj Žižek’s reading, may be taken as an extended reflection on Paul’s picture in Romans 7, in which the “I” is pitted in a deadly struggle, and Romans 8 in which one is rescued from this “body of death” through Christ). Desmond finds this too subjective, as for Hegel it just comes down to “self-absolution.” “The importance of pluralized otherness, the other to me as irreducibly other, even in forgiveness, is not strongly enough marked.”[14] He acknowledges that Hegel is picturing this movement as dependent upon knowing God, but the combination of God rightly knowing himself, Desmond assumes, dissolves into self-mediated knowing: “if this is ‘God’ appearing, it is also clear that the meaning of this is ‘pure self-knowing’. As he later puts it: The self-knowing spirit is, in religion, immediately its own pure self-consciousness’ (PhG, 474-475; PS, § 677).”[15]

In Williams reading, Hegel pictures human self-consciousness as dependent upon God’s self-consciousness shared/realized in the historical person of Christ, and given or realized in the Spirit. [16] In Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers and Maximus, down to Sergius Bulgakov, there is a dynamic personalism in the Trinity realized in the incarnation (such that the life, death and resurrection are eternal facts about God), and this is the sensibility with which Williams seems to be reading Hegel.[17] But Desmond concludes that Hegel is foreclosing God’s transcendence: “In truth, the divine life is the always already at work energy of the whole mediating with itself in its own diverse forms of finite otherness. There is nothing beyond the whole, and no God beyond the whole.”[18]

For Williams as for Hegel, the condition for thinking is nothing less than the doctrine of Trinity, creation, reconciliation, and incarnation. “Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”[19] In the words of Hegel, “The abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son—this then is death. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[20] For Desmond, Hegel’s Trinitarian dynamism dissolves to immanent sameness: “’God’ is coming to know itself in the human being coming to know itself as being ‘God’. That there is no difference is more ultimate than the representational insistence that there is a difference.”[21]

The question is if the difference between Williams’ and Desmond’s reading of Hegel stems from two very different interpretive traditions, sometimes (too generally) characterized as a Western and Eastern reading of Chalcedon?

[1] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) Location 66.

[2] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 293.

[3] Reader, 73.

[4] Reader, 199.

[5] Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (London: T & T Clark, 2012) 53-54.

[6] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009) 98.

[7] Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007) 36.

[8] William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003) 2.

[9] Hegel’s God, 4.

[10] Hegel’s God, 3.

[11] Hegel’s God, 4.

[12] Hegel’s God, 5.

[13] Hegel’s God, 64.

[14] Hegel’s God, 64.

[15] Hegel’s God, 64.

[16] Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 41.

[17] Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 41.

[18] Hegel’s God, 66.

[19] Williams, Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 36,

[20] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[21] Hegel’s God, 67.

Solving the Puzzle of Christology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Williams, 7.

[3] Williams, Intro, location 70.

[4] Williams, 48-49.

[5] Williams, 133.

[6] Williams, 134.

[7] Williams, 136.

[8] Williams, Intro location 81.

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

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

[11] Jenson, 137.

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

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

The Death and Resurrection as God’s Story

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

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

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

Resurrection: The Interpretive Key to All Things

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

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

A Reinterpretation of God’s Righteousness

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

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

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

Defeat of Death, Evil and Sin

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

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

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

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

The Resurrection as Providing Theological Coherence

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

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

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

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

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hegel, 131.

[5] Hegel, 131-2.

[6] Hegel, 145.

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

[8] Hegel, 152.

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

[10] Ibid.

[11] Moltmann, 173.

[12] Moltmann, 161.

[13] Moltmann, 162.

[14] Moltmann, 172.

[15] Moltmann, 166.

[16] Moltmann,169.

[17] Moltmann, 171.

[18] Moltmann, 177.

[19] Moltmann, 179.

[20] Moltmann, 185.

[21] Moltmann, 170.

[22]Moltmann, 169.

[23] Moltmann, 164.

[24] Moltmann, 163.

[25] Moltmann, 160.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Williams, 38.

Joy

In Scripture the path to joy is to be found in and through the presence of God (Psalms 16:11, Isaiah 61:10, Psalm 9:2), through being present with/to others (Romans 15:32, Romans 12:15) and this joy is integral to salvation (1 Peter 1:8-9). Joy is linked to ecstasy (Acts 15:32), or going outside of the self, which accords with being present with and loving others. There is a mutual indwelling, a giving, a going outside of the self, which is definitive of love, joy, and peace. The reason the presence of God is linked with joy is that God is, by definition, continually pouring himself out in Kenotic self-giving love (Philippians 2:7). As Dionysius describes, “He who is the cause of all, in His beautiful and benevolent longing (eros) for all, is carried outside Himself in His providential wills for all creatures through the superabundance of His loving goodness, being, as it were, beguiled by goodness, love, and intense longing.”[1] God is by definition, ek-static, or always going outside of himself (in the self-giving of the Father, through the Son by the Spirit). Though some may think of God as above all and removed from all, He comes to all in Christ. This ecstatic power of love is inseparable from who He is. God is defined as love (I Jn. 4:7), and this intense love is a longing for the beloved, and thus we are drawn to Him as His great love attracts us to Him. As David describes, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God” (Ps. 42:1). We were made for God and for love, and this love is as necessary to our spiritual well-being as water is to our bodies. God moves us as he moves toward us, or as Maximus puts it, “He thirsts to be thirsted for, and longs intensely to be longed for, and loves to be loved.”[2] As John says, He ignites in humanity a desire for Him: He “will draw all men unto Me” (Jn. 12:32).

But there is a reciprocity in this drawing, in that those drawn to and by the love of the cross, must take up their crosses and follow Christ (Matt. 16:24-26). There is a giving and receiving, in which the receiving calls for a giving, and this reciprocal identity (in and through the other) nurtures an outward bound, and continually expanding love. Just as Christ is consubstantial with the Father and Spirit, we are conjoined in a body whose identity is ever-enlarging. Just as we are drawn into the love of God, so too others are drawn into the love we carry (John 13:35). As we open our life to the life of others, we expose the lie of self-contained self-sufficiency (the world’s definition of happiness). Whether we know it or not, everyone seeks mutuality, reciprocity, the sustenance of life with the other.[3] True eros or desire recognizes the infinite opening of love, true desire, true love. As Rowan Williams states it, “this means that finite being tends towards being spoken, being apprehended, represented, regenerated in human response and engagement.”[4] We are made for communion and interpersonal love, which means that like God, we are to be continually moving out of ourselves, beyond our person, beyond our nature. In the explanation of Maximus, “man is not his person, nor his nature, nor even a sort of an addition of them, but his wholeness. . . (is) something beyond them, and around them, giving them coherence, but itself not bound with them.”[5] To be fully human (like Christ) is to be in continual synthesis, moving toward the other, toward mutual indwelling, toward participation.

The Bible gives us a variety of metaphors or pictures of this synthesis. Baptism is to be joined to Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-4); communion is a partaking of Christ (Mark 14:22–24); the Holy Spirit is for indwelling (I Corinthians 3:16); to be joined to Christ (as pictured by Paul) is on the order of being joined in marriage (Eph. 5:31-32). Christ as Logos is God’s way to ecstatically offer himself. He offers himself in the incarnation as Logos (Jn. 1:1) but this Word is interwoven in Creation: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). The Logos, the person, “upholds all things by his powerful Word” (Heb. 1:3); “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). He is the ordering person or arche behind all things. He is the world’s reason, at multiple levels, to be experienced intellectually, erotically, or emotionally. He is for apprehending, speaking, and consumption.

As I have written previously (here), Michael Polanyi, a scientist and philosopher, describes the research scientist as being drawn in by the world, in a kind of longing for satisfaction, in which a presence in the world seems to look back at the scientist looking into the world. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[6] Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[7] There is a presence, a deep joy, a profound satisfaction, in discovery, understanding, and meaning, all of which can be attributed to synthesis with the Logos, which is all-inclusive.

As Paul says, there is “the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph. 1:10). There is only one person, one energy, one principle operating in and through all things. God interpenetrates the universe and he also interpenetrates persons, and the realization of this synthesis is holistic – knowing God, knowing others, knowing the world. Caught up in this exchange, we lose our enclosed egos and are made alive in Christ: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). I or ego is crucified, opening the self to life in Christ (inter-Trinitarian love), and escaping the bonds of self-enclosure.

If participation in God is joy, then non-participation is hell. Hell seems to be a world of our making, inspired by the devil (Matt. 25:41) as the one who would be God, envies God, who refuses to participate in God, and who declares that freedom is self exploration.[8] The danger is in being seduced by something less than the divine, perhaps our own image, our own ego, and instead of being drawn to life, love and ecstasy, we are drawn into a suffocating finitude. In our sin, we would obtain being, obtain life, obtain self. In Christ’s warning in each of the Gospels, those who would save themselves lose themselves (e.g., Matt. 16:25). The rivalries, the imitated desire, the jealousy, the earthly, all describe a failure to escape the self. Paul describes this stifling world as compulsive, neurotic, law bound, Godless, spiritless, and ultimately as the body of death (Rom. 7:24). This self-enclosed ego is split between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and no Other appears on the horizon for this sick soul (of Romans 7). The lost treasure of self requires a constant turn inward. All one can do is enjoy their symptom, and compulsively repeat, in the deadly drive toward possessing the self. Instead of ecstasis, there is stasis in the refusal to enter into dialogue with God, the world, and nature. Here there is no history, no movement, no growth, no reciprocity, no meaning, and certainly no joy.

This dark picture (summed up in Romans 7), stands in contrast to the joy of chapter 8. This joy, which resonates throughout the chapter, is built upon being joined to the love of God in Christ (8:38-39). In Paul’s description, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Throughout, he is describing a metamorphosis as we are “set free” (v. 1), through mind transformation (v. 7) and through the gift of the Spirit (v. 9) “made alive” (vv. 10-11) and adopted as God’s children and enabled to call God Abba (vv. 15-16) as we are transformed into the image of the Son (v. 29) through love. Being joined to God, participating in the body of Christ, finding love, means transformation through this inter-hypostatic, synergistic, reciprocal, joyfulness.[9]

[1] On the Divine Names, IV.13, PG 3: 712AB. Cited in Nicholas Loudovikos, “Analogical Ecstasis: Maximus the Confessor, Plotinus, Heidegger and Lacan” (https://www.academia.edu/20373350/_Analogical_Ecstasis_Maximus_the_Confessor_Plotinus_Heidegger_and_Lacan), 1-2.

[2] Ambigua, PG 91: 1206C. Cited in Loudovikos, 2.

[3] See Rowan Williams, “Nature, Passion and Desire, Maximus’s Ontology of Excess” In Studia Patristica, LXVIII, 267-272.

[4] Ibid, 271.

[5] In the summation of Nicholas Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will” in Participatio: The Journal of the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (https://tftorrance.org/journal/v4/participatio-2013-v4-14-Loudovikos-258-286.pdf) 285.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 19.

[7] Ibid, 21.

[8] Nicholas Loudovikos, “Ecstatic or reciprocal Meaningfulness?: Orthodox Eschatology between Theology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis” (www.academia.edu) 6.

[9] Ibid, 11.

Rowan Williams and the Rereading of Hegel

Perhaps there is no philosopher more blatantly misinterpreted than G.W.F Hegel. Hegel is said to be a pantheist, reducing all that is external to the self into possession of the rational self (“the same”) such that all difference is made univocal, monological, and subject to reason (synthesis). Hegel is made the boogeyman, whose pretensions must be opposed so as to preserve the Other, and the finitude of reason must acknowledge absolute difference and otherness, resisting synthesis (sameness). Hegel is portrayed, variously, as a super-rationalist or as marking the end of reason, and he is either an atheist or a heterodox Christian who imagines God in process. In much (most?) of what is written on Hegel, though there is not a lot of agreement, his Christianity and his self-description as an orthodox Christian working within the parameters of Trinitarian theology, is often not accounted for or mentioned. The exception to this reading, are those theologians reading him from an Eastern Orthodox orientation, such as Sergius Bulgakov, or even the Swiss Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar. In this list I would include Rowan Williams, who wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Lossky, though he credits Gillian Rose with his reconsideration of Hegel. Williams recognizes that Hegel is not effacing difference in synthesis and sameness, but in Christ this difference is preserved but overcome.[1]

This reconsideration of Hegel is important, as Hegel develops a full appreciation of the meaning of Trinity and the Trinitarian necessity for thought. As Williams points out in his key article on Hegel,[2] thought is ultimately dependent upon what God has done in Christ. For Hegel, “no otherness is unthinkable,” as “an unthinkable otherness would leave us incapable of thinking ourselves, and so of thinking about thinking – and so of thinking itself.”[3] God, in the tradition, is portrayed as completely Other to the world, which means he is unthinkable, discrete and independent. But this notion of God leaves out the fulness of a Trinitarian understanding. In his philosophy of religion, the culmination and final project of Hegel, “God is defined as ‘the living process of positing his Other, the world, which comprehended in its divine form is His Son.’”[4] The “consummate religion” in Hegel’s description of Christianity, in this final work of his life, is “the religion that is properly related to itself, the religion that is transparent to itself, thinks itself – spells out the inseparability of thinking God and thinking the reconciled consciousness; it also, very importantly, explains why such a religion can only be a historically determined (‘positive’ or ‘revealed’) faith.”[5] Consciousness and thought begin with the recognition of the self in and through the other. God is not an isolated Subject, but gives himself to the world in his Son. He gives himself for thought, and makes thought and self-consciousness possible.

Much like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy aimed at dispelling the notion of private language (specifically as illustrated in Augustine), Hegel pictures self-consciousness as dependent upon God’s self-consciousness shared/realized in the historical person of Christ, and given or realized in the Spirit. “To think myself is to discover my identity in the alien givenness of the past, and to think history is to find it in my consciousness (thereby discovering that there is no such thing as a consciousness that is ‘privately mine’).[6] Thus, Hegel defends the melding of thought and being, but this defense is part of his explaining the doctrine of the Trinity, the work of Christ, the meaning of createdness, “which leads to the full and mature thinking of God, as spirit in community.[7] The condition for thinking is nothing less than the doctrine of Trinity, creation, reconciliation, and incarnation.

This is why Hegel focuses on Anselm’s ontological argument, which in Anselm’s version he judges inadequate, but which he would rescue. While he is not unappreciative of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, picturing God in his simplicity as unthinkable, Hegel would transmute the Christian tradition of divine simplicity “into the terms of a process” rather than in terms of pure negation.[8] For example, Anselm would equate the greatest thought with God, and yet Anselm erases all content for this thought. The God that is thought (to be or to have existence) is absolutely different from any other existing thing, such that the world is rendered comparably nonexistent. Hegel’s point is that this notion of absolute otherness is at once contradictory, rendering thought an impossibility. “If there is what is not and could not be thought, there would be some sort of life or reality with which consciousness could not be in relation.”[9] Hegel may be thinking of Kant, but also Kant’s critique of the ontological argument, maintaining Kant is confused. “We should have no word or idea for such a ‘reality’ (we could not even call a reality what we could not in any way engage with).”[10] As in Anselm’s cosmological argument, in which he pictures God, in comparison to the world and normal thought, as “absolutely different,” there is a contradiction. If something is “absolutely different” than there is no comparison to be made and no thought of God whatsoever. “For Hegel, an otherness that couldn’t be thought would not even be a negation, because it would not negate anything that could be thought (if it did, it would not be absolutely other; part of its definition would be given as ‘not x’).”[11]

Anselm is in a line of thinkers who picture thinking absolute difference as the thought of God. Hegel’s point is this destroys thought itself, as God is Truth, the ground of truth and reason, and to leave God out of thought – as the impossible thought – destroys thought. The universal and eternal Truth of God holds all things together, and knowing anything is to enter into this relational understanding. “To say that there was thinking and . . . whatever, that there was no identity between nature, action, history, law, society or religion and thinking, would be to conclude that thinking is not what we do, and that therefore we cannot think what we are.”[12] Thinking is based on a relational understanding, in which thinking and knowing relate to the self, the other and to God, but where things are imagined to exist discretely (without relationship) than nothing is thinkable. “Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”[13]

If God is beyond thought, Williams is quick to point out, this also means that not only thinking and knowing are rendered impossible, but sensation, emotion or love are also empty. Hegel’s point, in the Logic is, “there are no discrete and simple objects for thought . . . “ as “thought is bound to dissolve the finite perception, the isolated object, as such, moving from the level of diversity (a contingent multiplicity of things) to that of complementary opposition: each ‘thing’ is defined by not being another, lives only in the absence of another, and so ‘passes over’ from being a discrete object to being a moment in a complex movement.”[14] This complex movement allows for no final resting place for thought, no static presence, or no end to movement. Certainly the self, is not a discrete object for thought or something we come to possess. The self-presence which a misoriented desire is in pursuit of, is that static letter of the law, that immovable written word, that object in the mirror, and is not focused on a Person or the personal.

Again, it may be helpful to think of Anselm arriving at his final thought, the place of the word arising within himself, and yet this word cannot speak as it is before language (it is the place of language). He pictures an end to the movement of thought, but this end is no-thought, no-movement, no-place, but an unthinkable apophatic interiority. Anselm thinks the greatest thought by ceasing all other thoughts. As with Descartes, all relationality, all movement, all embodiment, is excluded. One is left with an empty, static thought, in which there is an end to thinking. Rather than demonstrating the existence of God, the God who is beyond thought, establishes doubt, darkness, and nothingness, as prime reality.[15]

In contrast, Hegel is picturing thought, in its dialectic form as that which “outlives and ‘defeats’ stable, commonsense perception, not by abolishing it from the outside, but by the penetration of its own logic and process.”[16] It opens up to and requires relating thought as that which is grounded in God. “Everything can be thought” and “nothing is beyond reconciliation” as thought is the “overall environment” establishing harmony and relationship between all things. God is where thought begins and, in this light, there “can be no such thing as unthinkable contingency.”[17] The particular is thinkable in its relational harmonies and this relational entry into understanding is made possible by the fact that God gives himself for humanity, for thought.

This is the power and love of God. “God’s goodness has to give way to God’s power – but to a power which acts only in a kind of self-devastation.[18] God’s kenotic self-giving love makes God available in the Son through the Spirit. “It means both that the life of God comes to its fullness in the world solely by the death, the stripping, of the human – the human, that is conceived as something solid in itself, as the finite negation or contradiction of the divine, and that human fragility and mortal weakness are not ‘outside’ God, in the sense that they do not prevent union with God. After Calvary, then, human self-awareness, the human knowledge of humanity as vulnerable and finite, becomes inseparable from awareness of God.”[19]

Human weakness is not the end but the beginning of human understanding. Weakness is not something alone (something in and of itself) but this weakness is “a moment in the life of God.”[20] It is the place God meets us and we meet God. The dispossession of the self and of the thought of self in self-emptying, is the entry into the life of the Spirit. “Only through a history of the emptying out or bringing to nothing of the fullness of Spirit” can “thinking establish itself, because only in such an event can we definitely lose the pretensions of the individual consciousness.”[21] The self as a thinking thing is beyond thought. Despite Descartes, and the confused reading of Hegel, this is not a fusion of subject and object (sameness) in some mystical synthesis. It is itself a sign of the limitations of thought without God, or of what Verstand (understanding) alone can only think fragmentarily or episodically.”[22] The Cartesian cogito splits thought and the reality of self, isolating thought from the body and the world.

The condition for thinking is impossible apart from God who is mediated through the Son and Spirit to himself and the world. The “Christian vision is of a God who is quintessentially and necessarily mediated in a divine self-hood that is simultaneously its own absolute other. And Hegel concludes, the complete transparency of self in the other that is God’s act of being (as ‘Father’ and ‘Son’) is what constitutes God as ‘Spirit’, as living consciousness proceeding into the determinate otherness of the world.”[23] In the words of Hegel, “The abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son—this then is death. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[24]

Hegel’s continual refrain in this final lecture, is the love of God, expressed through the Son and realized in the Spirit.[25] The “concluding message of the Philosophy of religion lectures is that concrete freedom is unimaginable, unrealizable, if thinking revolts against the triune God, against thought as self-love and self-recovery in the other, against thought as ecstasis.”[26] Thinking is the realization of self in reconciliation with God. “Hegel asserts that the ‘reversal of consciousness begins’ at Calvary. The beginnings of the Church have to do with the discovery of reconciliation, the discovery that freedom is realized on the far side of dispossession so total that it is now impossible to think of a God who claims the ‘right’ to be separate from humanity.”[27] “That this is so is the Holy Spirit itself, or, expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love.”[28]

[1] See the article on Williams by Matheson Russel, “Dispossession and Negotiation: Rowan Williams on Hegel and Political Theology,” in On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Cascade Books, 2014) 88.

[2] Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007).

[3] Ibid, 36.

[4] Ibid, 41.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39 And here to avoid equating Hegelian theory with something like process theology, the Maximian formula, creation is incarnation, enters in. God is always creator, and always the Father of the Son.

[9] Ibid, 36.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 36.

[14] Ibid, 37.

[15] Ibid, 47 “God’s ‘exceeding’ of thought cannot itself be thought or spoken, and, in this regard,” we see Hegel’s convergence with Wittgenstein.

[16] Ibid, 37.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 45.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid, 38.

[23] Ibid, 42.

[24] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[25] It brings to mind the work of Julia Kristeva who pictures all dialogue as an act carried out in love (see here).

[26] Hays, ibid op. cit., 44.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid, 42. Williams is quoting Hegel, but provides no reference.