Wittgenstein – Forging Ploughshares

Sorting out Apocalyptic Theology

Apocalyptic theology, as an alternative to what is referred to as a Lutheran (a useful misnomer) reading, or a salvation history approach (represented by N. T. Wright and others) to Paul, presents a largely unified front in what it is not. While this departure is key, there has not been as much work done in providing a full coherence to an apocalyptic approach. Beverly Gaventa’s criticism of Douglas Campbell, that in throwing out the tepid bathwater of justification theory or Lutheranism, he seems to have forgotten the baby altogether, is not altogether accurate or fair but the point is well made that in doing the hard work of showing the failings of other theories, a great deal of work still has to be done in describing exactly what sort of force sin, death, and the devil constitute. Is the problem primarily anthropological or does the emphasis fall on the satanic and demonic, and exactly how is it that Christ breaks in and undoes this system?

While apocalyptic theology has a genealogy through Albert Schweitzer and Wilhelm Wrede, which emphasized demonology as the problem and eschatology as the solution, this sort of reduction has mostly been abandoned. There is still an appreciation of the cosmic nature of this focus but there has been a mass departure from reduction of the power to demons and the solution as future. However, the present emphasis on an inaugurated eschatology and a folding of demonology into an animate sin and death, does not mean that there is a unified or clear agreement on the meaning of apocalyptic theology. Disagreements and ambiguities prevail in both descriptions of the problem and solution. What I will suggest in the conclusion is that my work on Romans 6-8 may provide a bridge between disparate descriptions of the problem and solution and how, specifically, the plight of sin is addressed by the death and resurrection of Christ.

Following the format, which I have already criticized, it seems necessary to begin to describe apocalyptic theology by describing its departure from other approaches. The failures and inconsistencies in salvation history, Lutheran theology, and the insufficiencies of the new perspective on Paul, point to the need for something like an apocalyptic understanding.

As Douglas Campbell explains it, an apocalyptic understanding stands in sharp contrast to a contractual or Lutheran theology. (I have explained this in some detail here.) A Lutheran Plan A/Plan B approach is one in which one must travel through Plan A to get to the better plan B. In this understanding, trying to observe the Law teaches one that she is a guilty sinner and so needs to move on to plan B with Jesus. This contractual or Lutheran approach has inherent contradictions (e.g. there is the simultaneous need to rationally recognize one’s failure yet this sin entails rational incapacity), it contradicts Paul (e.g. Paul, as a Pharisee, had a clear conscience and never seems to pass through Plan A), and it seems to entail inherent anti-Semitism (Jews are the prototypical sinners and Judaism is the archetypical failed religious system, and they should be smart enough to realize their sinfulness so they must be the most recalcitrant or most unreflective of people).[1]

The New Perspective on Paul has attempted to mitigate several of these elements in that “works of the Law” are not equated with works righteousness but with boundary markers of being Jewish, such as circumcision and food laws. Wright has attempted to take this insight and apply it to his own version of the problem, in that his Plan A is not about the individual but it pertains to all of Israel. His salvation history project does not so much reject, as expand upon the Lutheran project. For Wright, Plan A is now the story of Israel’s historical and corporate journey to arrival at Plan B, the church. He attempts to fully incorporate the Old and New Testament, intertextually and progressively, making the Old necessary for the New: the church’s story is told in relation to Christ’s story; Christ’s story is told in relation to Israel’s story; Israel’s story is told in relation to Adam’s story. The focus on knowledge of God’s presence and activity within history imagines history must always be read in one direction – from Adam forward till we come to Christ. As Campbell points out, there is no clear explanation as to how a still unstable Plan A, now focused on sociological boundaries in the new perspective, points to belief in Jesus. The Lutheran model, with its relief of guilt from sin etc., at least made sense.

The critique of Wright by other apocalyptic theologians, beyond his overdependence on the particular unfolding of Israel’s history, is that he seems to bypass the need for God to break through the world so as to give his own person as the subject of knowledge. Jesus claims that he is the way, the truth, and the light, yet Wright has collapsed divine self-disclosure into history, identifying that disclosure too simply with the objective consideration of the historical events behind the texts of Scripture. God is known by our “critically realist” knowledge of his historical activity, given to us by the accounts of Scripture, behind which it lies. Scripture records and bears witness to these events, but the question is if its own disclosure and communicative character are obscured?[2] The New Testament, in an apocalyptic understanding, reads history and reality the other way round, from the vantage point of Jesus Christ, who is not explained by history but serves as the interpretive key for history.

In the American context, the work of Louis Martyn has been central in setting up the parameters upon which most apocalyptic theologians will agree. In his work on Galatians, Martyn maintains Paul’s argument is not intended to describe the progress of salvation history but to say you can live in one of two relationships: a relationship with law or a relationship with God. You can be a slave to the law and what is the same thing, to the fundamental principles of the world, or you can be a son or daughter of God (4:6-7). The focus is not on history but on what world a person occupies, and transference from one world to the other depends upon God’s intervention into the first world and delivery to the second.

Though historical or temporal categories are present in Galatians they serve the purpose of illustrating the problem of cosmic bondage. Paul recounts his personal history and alludes both to the history of Israel and to the history of the Galatians to illustrate the problem of slavery in each instance. Paul conflates the history of Israel and the history of the Galatians, as he and his fellow Jews were enslaved under the elementary principles, and he associates these same elements with the Galatians’ former life in idolatry. If the Galatians were to embrace circumcision, it would constitute a return to the very same elements to which they had been enslaved when they were pagans.

Paul was transformed through a direct intervention by God on the road to Damascus, revealing his Son to him, just as the Galatians were transformed as God intervened and gave his Spirit when Christ was portrayed as crucified before their eyes (3:1). Paul’s purpose is not to provide an overview of salvation history, but to explain the nature of the Galatians’ transition from slavery to freedom as they have been transferred to a new world “in Christ.” Paul is not interested in the history of Israel for its own sake, and he is not trying to show how Israel’s salvation history would benefit either Jews or Gentiles. Paul may think Israel was in a different situation than the pagans in that he distinguishes between the child and the slave but this is in no way a description of some sort of intermediate state, as is revealed in his focus on explaining the similarities. All suffered a form of oppression and all in Christ have received adoption as children.[3]

Sigurd Grindheim maintains, time in relation to world history, salvation history, or cosmic history is not interesting to Paul. The Galatians’ history, their move from slavery to freedom is the only history Paul is interested in. Paul’s references to his personal history and to the history of Israel serve to illustrate the nature of this transfer and to describe the two domains that the letter intends to contrast: slavery under the law and adoption to sonship.[4] The Galatians and Paul have been liberated from slavery by God’s direct intervention through Christ’s act of redemption and, by extension, so have all Christians.

To summarize Martyn, in his own words, and the parameters he lays out:

Paul’s view of wrong and right is thoroughly apocalyptic, in the sense that on the landscape of wrong and right there are, in addition to God and human beings, powerful actors that stand opposed to God and that enslave human beings. Setting right what is wrong proves then, to be a drama that involves not only human beings and God, but also those enslaving powers. And since humans are fundamentally slaves, the drama in which wrong is set right does not begin with action on their part. It begins with God’s militant action against all the powers that hold human beings in bondage.[5]
•J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 87.

In Campbell’s depiction, “The unconditional, revelatory, transformational, and liberational aspects of this event mean that it is appropriately described as ‘apocalyptic.’”[6] The world has been taken captive, and Christ is the liberator from this captivity.

In the words of Beverly Gaventa;

Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death).
Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: John Knox, 2007), 80.

Apocalyptic clearly refers to cosmic bondage and liberation but what, exactly, is the identity of the cosmic power that has enslaved? Where Ernst Käsemann assumes Paul means the demonic, in a literal sense, Martinus C. De Boer assumes Paul speaks of sin in this way to make an anthropological point.[7] Though Martyn speaks of “real enemies” and “genuine powers,” Shaw suggests the phrases are ambiguous. As he says, “he identifies the curse of the law as chief among them, which, given his account of the law, can hardly be a demon by another name.”[8] There is an “ontological incompetence,” in Campbell’s words, but its cause is not clear or agreed upon. As Shaw concludes, deploying the words of Colin Gunton, the contemporary apocalyptic interpreters appeal to the demonic for its power of metaphorical characterization “which would otherwise defy expression.”[9]

Demonizing sin may at times serve in place of explanation of both the problem and its solution. The role of faith, for example, and how an individual comes to faith are not clear. As the question was put to Käsemann, “If God’s intervention on the human stage, exorcising the world of its demons, is 100% of the equation, where is human subjectivity in any recognisable form?”[10] As Gaventa has put it in her critique of Martyn, “Martyn’s avoidance of conversion language and earlier individualistic readings of Galatians has taken us too far here, so that even the function of Paul’s self-reference in the letter’s argument (or re-proclamation) does not become clear.”[11]

As long as the demonic is in view the tendency is to see the solution in terms of a purely future eschatological solution (e.g. Schweitzer, Wrede). Where sin and death are the focus, as in contemporary apocalyptic theology, there is focus on a realized eschatology in the death and resurrection of Christ, but the burden becomes one of saying how the work of Christ defeats these powers and how the individual incorporates or is incorporated into this victory.

There is a near equal divide among the apocalyptic theologians with some suggesting there is an ontological release (e.g. Gaventa) from the powers and the others suggesting it is a revelational epistemological release (e.g. Martyn), but even here the explanation is considered wanting. According to Bruce McCormack, readers “are left with a rich battery of images and concepts. But images and concepts alone, no matter how rhetorically powerful, do not rise to the level of adequate explanation. How is it that the ‘rectification’ of the world is achieved by Christ’s faithful death?”[12] While participation in Christ through the Spirit (e.g. Campbell) and revelation or an epistemological release (e.g. Martyn) are pointers, explanation is left wanting.

What I would point to in conclusion, is that the role of deception which has certainly been noted in an apocalyptic understanding, can potentially bring together the ontological and epistemological divide. I believe sin as a lie, oriented to death by deception in regard to the law, can also go some way in detailing exactly how Christ’s death is a defeat of the power of sin and death and it can help resolve the continuing question and divide over the law.

In the original debate between Käsemann and Bultmann, part of what was at issue was the role of the body and the corporate or individual implications of embodiment and language. As Käsemann would note, in a very Wittgensteinian mode, communication of the self with the self is rendered possible by an already existing communication with and in the environment (language is an embodied capacity). At the same time, this poses the possibility for a simultaneous disruption within the self and between the self and the environment, where communication is broken through deception. The biblical term “body,” as with Wittgenstein, is inclusive of the linguistic capacity that sets man simultaneously into communication and poses the possibility of confrontation or a split within himself, with others, and with God.

In Paul’s depiction, within deception lies the simultaneous possibility for cosmic and personal alienation and enslavement. The fact that the satanic and demonic are consistently linked with the lie of Genesis, but also the lie of religion (the covenant with death, in Isaiah), and that this lie is equated with sin, points to how Christ’s exposure of this lie is both ontological and epistemological in its cosmological import.

In brief, Paul pictures creation and the Creator as containing an infinite depth of communion and communication that has been displaced by a world of deception. In my next blog I will spell out in detail how this understanding fills in the gaps in contemporary apocalyptic theology.

[1] Campbell spells this out quite brilliantly in Deliverance, but is available in his review of Wrights Volumes on Paul and The Faithfulness of God – https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/douglas-campbell/

[2] “History, Providence and the Apocalyptic Paul” – https://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2164/7574/History_2c_Providence_and_Apocalyptic_Paul_SJT.pdf;jsessionid=FA0FD8F9F020B597D401884CE00C1150?sequen

[3] Sigurd Grindheim, “Not Salvation History, but Salvation Territory: The Main Subject Matter of Galatians,” New Test. Stud. 59, pp. 91-108 © Cambridge University Press, 2013, doi:10.1017/S0028688512000264 accessed here – https://www.sigurdgrindheim.com/Salvation%20History.pdf

[4] Ibid, Grindheim

[5] I am here utilizing the fine dissertation by David Anthony Bennet Shaw, The ‘Apocalyptic’ Paul: An Analysis & Critique with Reference to Romans 1-8, Fitzwilliam College.

[6][6] Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 66.

[7] Shaw, 139.

[8] Shaw, 143

[9] Shaw, 144

[10] “A Tribute To Ernst Käsemann and a Theological Testament,” 391. Shaw 145

[11] Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Review of Galatians by J. Louis Martyn,” RBL, 2001, Ibid

[12] Bruce L. McCormack, “Can We Still Speak of ‘Justification by Faith’? An In-House Debate with Apocalyptic Readings of Paul,” in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter, ed. Mark W. Elliott et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 167. Shaw, 160.

A New Ordering of the Body of Thought

We can trace three psychological types in the New Testament, which correspond to three psychoanalytic descriptions, in which the coordinates between the mind and the body are determinative of alternative perceptions of reality. What might be called the inside out person is completely subject to the valuation of cultural norms, such that there is no interior conflict or alternative awareness, at least at a conscious level (here we encounter the most common type and the most frightening possibilities). The second type is someone who begins to question the order of things (the cultural norms, the symbolic order, the law) but the struggle with these norms is still determinative, as there seems to be no way forward or no escape. The third type has not exactly escaped appearances or phenomena arising from the symbolic or cultural order, but there is a turn to an alternative order of experience. Deploying the work of the philosopher Michel Henry, it is this third type that I want to explore in depth, but a description of the first two orders of experience will indicate the way the third order of experience is constituted.

The inside out person, the individual who knows who she is based on the scale of values afforded by complete identity with the law or the symbolic order, is at one level the most transparent and the most dangerous. Paul, during the phase in which he is arresting and presumably aiding in killing Christians, is transparent in his identity. He describes this phase of his pre-Christian understanding as guilt free in which he regarded himself “without fault” in regard to the law. As he describes it in Philippians, he considered himself righteous, zealous beyond his peers, and bearing the highest qualifications and impeccable credentials: “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless” (Php 3:5–6). Paul has a clear conscience. No introspective guilt-stricken conscience here. By reason of his birth, his descent from Benjamin, his linguistic and cultural identity as a Hebrew, Paul considered himself faultless and head and shoulders above his peers. His status as a Jew is his identity. This is an inside out world, as we understand this Paul by the outward markers of the law and his Jewishness. Inside out characters must be the most predominant: the Adolph Eichmanns of the world, willing to find their identity in the bureaucracy, the law, the legal proceedings, making sure the trains to the death camps are running on time. Their ambitions, hopes, and desires, are determined completely by the particular symbolic world in which they find themselves. Perhaps we all come to age as petty bureaucrats, presuming the order of things and the scale of values are those set out by the social order.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis this type is dubbed masculine, not because it necessarily pertains to gender, but because of complete identification with societal authority or the father figures of a particular cultural order. As Paul describes this type, “the law dominates the man for whatever time he lives” (Romans 7:1 DBH translation). Paul will identify this type, according to his own experience, as ignorant of their own actions and an incapacity to discern evil. There is a fusion between sin and the law so that Paul, at the time he was doing it, could not discern the sort of evil in which he is engaged. As he describes, in a parallel passage in Galatians, his zeal for the law and his advancement in Judaism were marked by his persecution of the church and his desire to destroy it (Ga 1:13-14). For Paul, the law was not a marker of sin and evil but was fused with sin such that he could not perceive his own evil due to his zeal for the law. As he advanced in law-keeping and in Judaism he simultaneously advanced in his participation in evil. It did not occur to Paul the Pharisee that there was a reality which exceeded the measure of the law. Clearly, Paul is not imagining that in this understanding he has rightly perceived the law; quite the opposite, as he dubs this orientation as “having confidence in the flesh.” [1] The problem is, the flesh marked by the law, has become a principle unto itself.

The second type of subject questions the cultural symbolic order but this questioning and challenging become definitive of this individual. Paul devotes most of chapter 7 of Romans to describing this individual, continually tossed about by their orientation or disorientation to the law. While this person is perhaps a step-up morally and spiritually from the first type, this psychologically tormented individual is consumed with their personal struggles. Sometimes these folks bring a breath of fresh air into our lives with their willingness to challenge all the norms but ultimately, they are exhausting as we realize there is no end to this pursuit of freedom against the law.

Ironically, in kicking over the traces, shedding all the shackles of culture, this person is oriented to a transgressive questioning of the law, but it is still the law that defines them. This radicalized freedom might express itself philosophically, politically, socially, or as is most often the case, sexually (e.g. democratic revolutions including the American Revolution in which freedom is enshrined as an end in itself, in Marxist and communist revolutionary movements, and in the gender revolution of the moment). The possibility of reconstructing, from scratch, what it means to be human unleashes a plague of possibility. Beyond good and evil, unchained from the worlds sun, not only describes a philosophical realization but a nearly unbearable psychology and a new form of personality or personality disorder. The two most common psychological disorders might be traced to this agonistic questioning. Where obsessional neurosis is structured around the question of existence (think here of the Cartesian cogito in attempting to establish being through thought), hysteria is structured around human sexuality: “Am I a man or a woman?” or “What is a woman?”

The problem of the first two subjects is that their life is defined by the symbolic order. This order might be associated with law, culture, normative values, or simply language. The problem is how to suspend this order so that a person’s life is not spent in service to an artificial construct. Slavery, bondage, deception, and exodus, redemption, and truth, are the motifs under which the Bible poses the problem and solution. The passage is described as new birth, recreation, adoption into a new family, or citizenship in an alternative kingdom. At its most radical it is depicted as an exchange of one cosmic order for another or one sort of body (the body of death) for another (the body of Christ). The movement is not away from embodiment but towards a different sort of body, constituting a different sort of world.

The way that Paul pictures this as happening in both Colossians and Ephesians is in and through Christ’s flesh. “He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body” (Col. 1:22) “by abolishing in His flesh the enmity” (Eph. 2:15). The enmity with the symbolic order is taken up in the sickness of the self that is definitive of the human disease. To state the reversal of this state most succinctly, the Life that is God (as opposed to death under the law), revealed in and as Christ, is communicated to us through the incarnation, in which we can become participants (through the body of Christ). At a basic level, this is to give absolute significance to embodiment. Where the human body is written over with the law, it appears as a medium for the true significance of the symbolic order. But the body is not a medium but a source of significance in itself, and this distinguishes it radically (substantially) from other things (which are lent their significance symbolically in language).

As Wittgenstein put it, “The best picture of the soul is the body.” It is because there are human bodies that there is a world of communication and it is by my body that I belong to this world. But there is a profound sense in which we are dispossessed of ourselves, of our bodies, as the flesh becomes symbolic of something else. The first two sorts of subject inhabit a world controlled by the flesh and the desires of the flesh, not because they occupy their bodies, but because the flesh is written over with a significance in which it takes on an alien principle. Paul describes it as giving rise to hostility as it pits the self against the self, the self against God, and the self against others. Paul’s “confidence in the flesh” speaks of an objectifying and distancing from the center of life. There is a sense in which we are restored to ourselves, to our own bodies, without interference, only through the incarnation of Christ. That is, we become incarnate (peace is restored, the dividing wall of hostility is broken down) as we become as he was, incarnate, truly inhabiting our bodies, and this is definitive of true life.

The philosopher Michel Henry begins with the realization that experience of life, pure subjective experience from within, contains the only direct phenomenological access to life. Life reveals itself in itself through the flesh. Everything else presents itself from a distance and poses a gap between the perceiver and the perceived. In his exposition of the Word become flesh in John, Henry points out that if this is the way the Word becomes human, then relationship with God is to be had in and through the flesh. The flesh is not an obstacle but is the locus of our identity with God.[2] This explains why the Word becoming flesh is revelation (John 1:14). It is not that another body among many has appeared, but the flesh of the Word is the revelation. To say the Word became flesh is not to add something else to the Word. This is the cogito as it should be, without any gap between the subject and object of reflection, but pure revelation. There is not, as with ordinary human words, the possibility of duplicity or misrecognition. As Henry puts it, “Because the Word has become incarnate in Christ’s flesh, the identification with this flesh is the identification with the Word—to eternal Life. ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.’”[3]

The danger is that we might reduce the body of Jesus by allowing a symbolic significance to reduce it to a sort of mystical writing pad. So, step one is to acknowledge the primacy of the incarnate Jesus. The story of Jesus is the story of Trinity. The mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal generation of the Son. There is nothing secondary, shadowy, or even analogous about Jesus. Jesus is the reality of God incarnate. Jesus is the absolute truth and an absolute morality. The mystery of God revealed as Trinity does not unfold from a fleshless (asarkos) heavenly realm but from an embodied earthly realm. In turn, all human bodies are accorded their full meaning as they participate in this fullness of incarnate significance.

This reconstituted world through the flesh is determined by the incarnate Christ. This world is not a symbolic order pointing elsewhere but meaning inheres in it. There is a world where law might reign or where it has not yet been determined what one should do or can do. In Christ’s embodied life what we should do is determined and what we should not do is determined. “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). What we are to do flows from the absolute which is the body of Christ. Notice that it is Christ Jesus – the incarnate Christ. His human body is the source of significant behavior. His body and our body and human embodiment is the place from which the absolute flows, not from a transcendent law, or a vague situational principle, or a symbolic order utilizing the body and the world as its medium. The body is not a tool or a medium for writing, or a megaphone for the voice, such that we are inside of it, manipulate it, and “have” it. The flesh of the body is our incorporation into the world, community, communion, and communication.

The hostility of the flesh written over by the law is undone in Christ. Living significance (as opposed to a dead letter) is restored as “now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13). As we inhabit his body, we are no longer divided in ourselves, from one another, and from God. “For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall” (Eph. 2:14). Entering this peace is synonymous with life and meaning and is a first order experience which serves as its own ground of meaning. This is a self-validating and self-evident truth and not a truth that refers elsewhere or mediates something else. This truth is without the gap between signifier (I think) and signified (I am) as the life is in this Word of truth. There is no gap in this order, as it is a Word enfleshed, a direct access to life and the realization of life as a first order experience.

[1] Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 247-51 Lacan dubs this most common human a “pervert.” Perversion does not refer so much to abnormal sexual practices as to a structure in which the subject sides with the law in the attempt to escape its punishing effect and to partake of its surplus enjoyment. Every individual, religious or not, who presumes to sit in judgment and to punish others in the name of the law, God, Jesus, the Nation, etc. is acting out the simple formula Paul epitomizes as the sinful orientation: the law is completed or established through sin. There is a denial of sexual difference and of death in what Žižek describes as giving oneself completely over to the symbolic without regard for finitude and mortality: “Perversion can be seen as a defense against the motif of ‘death and sexuality,’ against the threat of mortality as well as the contingent imposition of sexual difference.”

[2] Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh (Northwestern University Press, 2015), 124.

[3] Words of Christ, 124. I am following John Behr’s exposition of Henry in, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 296 ff.

Resurrection as Escape from the Mud Swamp of the Nation State

Shūsaku Endō, in his novel Silence, portrays Japan as a mud swamp in which Christianity cannot take root. Endō’s mistake, of projecting onto the Tokugawa period (the novel is set in the 17^th century) a “Japanese” sensibility which developed much later with the Meiji period (beginning in the 1860’s), is itself an illustration of the strength of the ideology of the modern nation state. As odd as it sounds, the “Japanese people” with a supposed mud swamp essence (a distinct religion, language, and cultural identity) is a development which arises as Japan seeks to become a unified nation, prior to which identity would have been tied to the local clan and religion (making the country susceptible to both foreign religion and foreign invasion in the estimate of the ruling elites). The manner in which Christianity rapidly inundated 16^th century Japan, one of the most rapidly Christianized countries in Asia, demonstrates that Japan was fertile soil for Christianity (and the Shogun was warned this was the first step in a colonial take-over). The notion that Japan consists of an essence, a capacity for absorbing and reshaping every influence, is a modern development, demonstrated by the fact that the religion was driven underground, not because it could not take root in Tokugawa Japan, but because tens of thousands of Japanese Christians were martyred by a Shogunate fearful of Western invasion aided by subjects loyal to foreign religious powers. It was not simply, as in first century Rome, that Christians posed an internal threat. The links of the religion to colonial powers posed a political and military threat which would eventually give rise to Japan’s pursuit of British-like imperial power.

The ideology which would make Japan a mud swamp, warding off Christianity and foreign domination, was erected as a purposeful imitation of the modern nation state geared to meet foreign power with an equal and opposite force. The invention of the “Japanese people,” constituting a unique religious identity (State Shinto), a unique language (there was no shared language prior to the modern period and the language is still marked by mutually unintelligible dialects), a unique racial identity (Japan is a DNA melting pot of the Asian mainland) is a relatively modern innovation on the same order as the American, the British, or the French people. What is obvious to the foreigner visiting Japan is how the culture shapes individuals so as to forge a “unique” national identity.

What may not be so obvious to the Western, specifically American or U.S., observer is that this identity is a mirror image. The identity and counter-identity have both been forged by the same imperialism, colonialism, patriotism, and nationalism, which constitute the corrosive and overwhelming force of the modern nation state. If Japan is a mud swamp which has successfully warded off Christianity (which it is and has for the most part), it is by virtue of the same power which has shaped Christianity so as to fit modern Western identity. Where we might recognize Endō’s mud swamp, the corrosive effect of those same forces on modern Christianity may be less obvious.

A test, formulated by Paul for the Corinthians, to gauge the distance between the modern American form of the faith and New Testament Christianity is the role of bodily resurrection. The danger is we might imagine Paul is too heavy handed or is being hyperbolic when he suggests it is a choice of either belief in bodily resurrection or belief that the apostles are liars, God is untrue, and a Christianity without resurrection is worse than paganism. Eat, drink and be merry, for death reigns (I Cor. 15:32), he declares. It seems Paul has not considered the more sophisticated notion of disembodied souls going to heaven, which would separate out the earthly kingdoms from God’s heavenly focus. To say resurrection is salvation and that without it Christianity is futile; well, hasn’t Paul forgotten the main point about Jesus taking our punishment so we can go to heaven?

Paul says either embrace bodily resurrection or acknowledge the nihilistic darkness of an empty faith (along with lying apostles, remaining in sin, and being consigned to oblivion (I Cor. 15:12-19)). He offers no room for dualism or for the notion that a disembodied soul going to heaven is Christian salvation. This dualistic division (dividing faith from ethics, history from eternity, material reality from spiritual reality), apparently would mean Christians are left in their sin (even though they acknowledge “Christ died for my sins”). He indicates this is the delusion resurrection defeats.

In the following verses (20-28) Paul equates resurrection with an embodied this-worldly sort of salvation. Christ’s resurrection is defeating the powers (the dominion, power, and authority of this world’s kingdoms, v. 24), it is bringing about the reversal of all that occurred in the 1st Adam, and is the inauguration of a universal resurrection in which the reign of God will be made complete (with the establishment of the kingdom of God – his reign, his people, according to the principle of life). Christ’s resurrection will bring about the defeat of the final enemy and this defeat is in process (I Cor. 15:20-28). How can all of this be true?

It is the case only if the primary enemy is death and an orientation to death deployed by the “dominions and authorities” (human modes of reign and rule) defeated in resurrection. It is only true if the dualism which would split up body and soul, the City of God and the City of man, is not simply a theological or philosophical error but the lie of sin itself.

Resurrection as salvation (as an anti-dualism) makes sense where the “body of death” or the “body of sin” is constituted in a lie that divides (perceived as the self, divided between “body” and “soul”) in which the symbolic order of the law (the soulish, the spiritual) is pitted against the physical body. Sin, in Paul’s picture, is focused on the struggle and sacrifice of life within the “I.” The battle within the “I” is self-destructive and potentially violent – should “I” give way to the ever-present possibility of evil (Ro. 7:21). Sacrifice (masochistic or sadistic violence aimed at gaining life) is inscribed into the sinful economy – it is the agonistic struggle constituting the “body of death” – a Subject engaged in a struggle for life which kills.

Paul’s “body” (σῶμα) is not referring to only the physical body but to the Subject, with sin and death describing the orientation or existential reality of the Subject. Body denotes the full reality which comes with embodiment: humans embodied in a particular environment, the body being that which constitutes them social beings, a being who relates to and communicates with her environment. As in a Wittgensteinian understanding, the Subject is a body such that self-alienation might be experienced as “having a body” rather than “being a body” (Paul’s body out of control, as Bultmann describes it, means a Subject out of control). So, to be joined to the body of Christ in baptism is to close the gap within the self. Sin is an apparent dualism defeated in salvation.

The gap within the self (self-antagonism between body and soul) constitutes a myriad of possible worlds and alternative means of constituting the self through opposed pairs (dualism). John notes this same world order so as to show in these apparent dualisms light defeats darkness, truth defeats the lie, and life overcomes death. The knowledge of good and evil is the deep grammar of sin dependent upon an apparent dualism (Hegel references the fall into the knowledge of good and evil as a cognitive necessity to inaugurate his dialectic). Jew and Gentile, male and female, thought and being, soul and body, East and West, inside (Japanese) and outside (foreigner), all pose the possibility of identity through difference. Or as Paul puts it, the body of death pits “the members of my body” against “the law of my mind” and this makes “me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members” (7.23-24). Sin is a way of being, an epistemology, a world, constituted in what Paul describes as a death dealing lie.

A modern contractual Christianity tied to the lie in the name of Christ (life is in the law because Christ meets its requirements) might favor a Cartesian version of modernity (the discordant dualism of “I think therefore I am”). In this philosophical individualism truth is apprehended within (thought, one side of the dualism, provides being, the other side of the dualism, and thus faith is its own reality). The modern theological conservative might trust empirical apprehension of reality (laws of nature, laws of science, laws of reason, over and against the mind), in which faith is a cognitive affirmation of historical reality. Both, though, begin with a given reality as posited through a modern Western frame of knowledge and modern notions of self (a self divided between empirical reality and inward essence). It is presumed one has access to an already posited reality, and Christian faith, ethics, and truth works within this framework (as I summed it up here). What is obscured is Paul’s third law – the law of sin and death – the divide within the Subject which secures this reality and the resurrection which defeats it.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8.2). Paul pictures the “body of sin” as being reduced to the “nothing” from whence it came (Rom. 6.6) through a reversal of the power it exercises. The “body of death” is put to death in Christ for those who have died in Christian baptism. Baptism is the ontological alternative to the “body of death” as the Subject of baptism, instead of being joined to negation and death, is joined to the resurrected body of Christ. This is not a departure from the material body or material reality but the beginning of cosmic redemption (‘the redemption of our bodies’ (8.23) and the redemption of the cosmos (8.21)). This truth cannot be bent by the mud swamp of modernity as it names the lie of dualism, of doing identity in the law, in the state, in human religion, or in modernity.

The modern nation-state constitutes identity through difference in its own dualism (Orient/Occident, Eastern backwardness/Western progress, etc.) and modern contractual theology with its focus on Western notions of individual faith (constituting the modern self), tied to Western notions of democracy, patriotism, and nationalism, is precisely what Japan’s ruling elite sensed – the ideological forerunner to colonization. The question is if an American faith subject to this same colonizing power can escape its grip?

The way of escape is clear: “He has abolished all rule and all authority and power” (I Cor. 15:24) as resurrection is the counter-power to a world built on death. “He has put all things in subjection under His feet . . . so that God may be all in all” (I Cor. 15:27-28) as resurrection defeats the apparent dualism by closing the gap of a failed identity.

Training in Resurrection

Matthew describes a jarring post-resurrection scene in which the 11 remaining apostles “saw him, worshipped him; but some doubted” (Mt 28:17). Some of them are stuck between two epistemic orders, hovering on the edge of a new understanding but unable to escape the gravity of their former world. It is not only Thomas who presumes he can apprehend the resurrection through a measured, proto-Lockean accumulation of facts – “seeing the nail marks, put my finger where the nails were, put my hand into his side.” The perspective of an alternative epistemic order comes late to Peter, even after the women report the resurrection: he “got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened” (Jn 20:12). The women told him what had happened but as John explains, “their words seemed like nonsense” (Jn 20:11). As with Thomas, and perhaps the entire modern epoch, Peter is left “wondering,” just short of an epistemic shift.

As with the doubting among the 11, it is not simply that more data must be collected, more apologetic arguments presented, so that a preponderance of evidence will tip the scales toward grudging belief. This bland, earthbound, Humean religion is a possibility even in the resurrection appearances, but what we also see, first in Mary Magdalene, is an alternative way of knowing. She is having a discussion with a local gardener when this man speaks her name, and she turns again and she would cling to him as she seems to recognize, not only the grave but earth will no longer hold him. Her own understanding, perhaps the first instance of resurrection faith, is ascended or suspended from heaven to where he would ascend. As with the two on the Road to Emmaus, the transformation is not in what she sees but in her comprehension. As with some of the 11 though, it may be that this epistemic transformation momentarily falters, so that one needs to undergo a sharpening of perspective, a growing understanding, of how the world coheres where death no longer reigns.

The various witnesses grow into this alternative epistemic order. When we first see the women at the tomb, the two on the road to Emmaus, the apostles gathered and hiding, Jesus is still accursed in their sight, death has won out, the grave has consumed him, and their understanding is bound by this reality. They are so constrained by their earthy, Euclidean, cause and effect ordering around the absolute of death, that the risen Jesus, even as he stands before them, is a stranger, a gardener, unrecognizable. With Mary it is him saying her name, with the two disciples it is his breaking of the bread, with Peter it is not simply the miraculous haul of fish; John identifies for Peter the stranger on the shore as the Lord. The flesh and blood intonation of a name, the sense filled breaking of the bread, the dawning of a new day on the shore of a lake, get at the embodied, creation encompassing, shift. The earthy, salty, fleshly, focus of their new insight is at once commensurate with their world and ours. Seeing the resurrected Jesus, where the vision was previously obscured, casts everything in a new – heaven suspended – Jesus is Lord – perspective but it is not simply that the Kierkegaardian leap or the Barthian strange new world vision is fixed or incommensurate with the world that came before.

Nor is their reconstituted insight simply the popularly predicated “historical truth of the resurrection.” As Wittgenstein puts it, theirs is not the belief appropriate to a historical narrative. Belief simply in the historical truth of the resurrection, Wittgenstein maintains, still rests its weight on the earth. There is a growth in their perspective such that one sort of belief, even though it sees the resurrection, leaves them doubting, mis-recognizing him (he had already appeared prior to the miraculous catch of fish), looking into the sky, as they are still confined to horizontal and vertical symmetries short of the asymmetrical, fully developed, resurrection faith. The bonds of an earth-bound knowing cloud their vision and comprehension – even in the midst of worshipping Him they doubted.

It is important to say both things: there is a shift in perspective but this shift is one they grow into. It is not that they did not firmly believe but then collected more data, examined the testimony, made a thorough analysis of the eye witness testimony, compared notes, and came to a belief in the historical truth of the resurrection. Their belief is not this sort of speculative calculation; it is not simply the capacity to entertain a dispassionate historical truth, or to arrive at a singular isolated conclusion. But neither is it that they saw and instantaneously everything changed, such that what came before and after is such a sharp disjuncture that we cannot trace the second glance of Mary or the burning realization of the two on the Road to Emmaus. Even in the upper room in which Jesus suddenly appears, their understanding follows his greeting and his showing them the scars of the crucifixion. They “were overjoyed when they saw the Lord” (Jn 20:20) but the seeing is noted subsequent to explanation and seems to dawn gradually. By the same token, the implication of the resurrection (full resurrection faith) has yet to be worked out, and is clearly miscomprehended by Peter (not yet sure about the cost of feeding sheep), at the close of the Gospels. It is precisely the possibility beyond historical affirmation and an incommensurate realization which opens us, who have not witnessed the resurrection, to the epistemic reconstitution of resurrection faith.

Paul, in I Cor 12:3, contrasts two orders of knowing orbiting around either the core affirmation, “Jesus is cursed” or “Jesus is Lord.” The difference marks the understanding granted by the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit which, in all their variety, promote a practical realization of Christ’s resurrected Lordship. If the accursed Jesus is the crucified, rotting in the grave, dead Jesus, and Jesus as Lord is the resurrected, death defeating, ascended Jesus, then the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of life and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, enable a resurrected order of knowing. Paul describes this heaven ascended/suspended knowledge as participation in the Trinity: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work” (I Cor 12:4-6, NIV). The Holy Spirit distributes or bears the gifts, which serve Christ’s body (they are service gifts, or servant gifts for the body of Christ) and in this they are the embodied, creation redeeming work of the Father. It is heavenly knowledge in that it is divine but it is God come to earth incarnate knowledge. It is an understanding not bound to earth but which addresses and overcomes the earth binding condition of death.

There is a modernist Christianity that believes the resurrection on the basis of a preponderance of historical evidence – which seems to coerce the possibility of belief, with doubt always hovering, as there is no change of epistemic order. Here one might think of the spiritual gifts as accentuated capacities enabling belief in the resurrection as one sifts through historical consideration, scientific validation, or accumulated apologetic argument. On the other hand, there is a Christianity that imagines the gifts enable an ecstatic, incommensurate, heavenly vision which does not engage practical, lived out, realities. Both are a far cry from the belief “Jesus is Lord” and the practice of this realization in the incarnate body through the spiritual gifts. The gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, power, prophecy, tongues and interpretation are all communicative/communion gifts to be used in cultivating the different epistemic order extrapolating from and returning to “Jesus is Lord.” Here is the communion of the Trinity opened to us through the communicative reality of knowing the risen Christ.