Category Archives: Staurology

The Scandal of Easter

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The early Christian community spoke of the scandal of the particular–the God of the universe revealed in flesh and blood. They felt the strange, incongruous power of this idea. They felt too the awful strangeness of beholding the very image of God in a human being broken and beaten and hanging on a cross. The scandalous, revelatory power of the particular. It has a special claim on the Christian imagination. It shapes and refracts what we find significant, how we live, against what powers we struggle.[1]

–Douglas Burton-Christie

18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

20 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

–I Corinthians 1:18-25

The Christian is no stranger to strangeness; indeed, it might even be said that the Christian is no alien to the foolishness and weakness of the things of God in Christ. It is this theme, the scandal of particularity, the foolishness and weakness of the cross, the notion that the very God who upholds all of seen and unseen reality by the Word of His power, became flesh and dwelt among us; that He dwelt among us even as a mere man, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. It only takes a matter of moments of meditation, spirated by the Holy Spirit, to become consumed by this tremendum mysterium et fascinans, the majesty and reality of the cosmic Christ; the notion that the eternally triune God freely and graciously became ensarkos. I think if most people, especially Christians, allowed this fact to become the very grist of their daily lives, that all there would be left to do is worship. How does this God of gods squeeze Himself into the flesh and blood of a particular human being, into a man from the squalors of the Galilee in Nazareth? It remains a miracle; for some to the point that it is the ultimate skandalon upon which they cannot get past; and instead, indeed, they inhabit a stumbled-existence all the days of their vain lives. God forbid it if this becomes the trajectory of the professing Christian.

Barth writes presciently on this particular scandal of Eastertide,

It is content simply to tell the story—this is how it was, this is how it happened. There is interpretation only in the lightest and sometimes rather alien strokes, of which we have to say much the same as we did of what we called the softenings occasionally found in the first part. The real commentary on this first part and the whole is, of course, the Easter story, which we can describe as the third and shortest part of the Gospel history. This tells us that God acknowledged this Jesus of Nazareth, the strange Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, by raising Him from the dead. It tells us of forty days in which this same One—whose history this was and had to be—was again in the midst of His disciples, differently, but still actually in time and space, talking with them, eating and drinking with them, beginning with them a new Gospel history, the time of His community, the time of the Gospel as the good news about the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, the time of the proclamation of this event. He Himself was and is this event, the origin, the authority, the power, the object of the proclamation laid on the community. He Himself, He alone: He who was alone and superior and majestic in Galilee; He who was again alone but beaten and humiliated in Jerusalem, in the very midst of Israel. He, the Judge who allowed Himself to be judged, lives and rules and speaks and works. He is Himself the word which is to be proclaimed to all creatures as the Word of God. That is what the Easter narrative tells us. It gathers together the sum of all that has been told before. Or, rather, it tells us how the sum which God Himself had already gathered together in all that had gone before was revealed as such to the disciples—again by Jesus Himself. The Easter story is the Gospel story in its unity and completeness as the revealed story of redemption. The Easter story is the record of how it became what it was (in all its curious structure a history of redemption) for the disciples—not by their own discovery but by the act of God in the word and work of Jesus Himself. It tells us, therefore, that this history, Jesus Christ Himself as He exists in this history, is significant in and by itself. It tells us that all the significance which Jesus Christ as the subject and subject-matter of this history can acquire for individual men by means and as a result of proclamation (which has Him as its origin and object), has its basis and truth and practical and theoretical power in the fact that He is significant in and by Himself—even as He exists in this history. What is significant in itself has the power to become significant and will in fact become significant. But only that can become significant which is already significant, and in such a way that this being is the power of the corresponding becoming.[2]

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη Christ is risen! He is risen!

[1] Douglas Burton-Christie, “The Scandal of the Particular,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) vii-viii.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §59 [227] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 220–21.

God’s Triune Wrath as First an Instance of His Love

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God is love. Unfortunately, for some, this entails an inherent Marcionism. Simplistically, this entails the notion that the God of the Old Testament is not the same God we encounter in the New Testament in Jesus Christ. Often people cannot imagine how the “God of war and wrath” in the Old Testament could ever correspond with the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ in the New Covenant. But I would simply say that without the God of the Old Testament the God of the New Testament makes absolutely no sense. Jesus came as the Prophet, Priest, King (triplex munus); Jesus came in fulfillment of the Aaronic and Levitic priesthood framework; He came as the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world, as the second and greater Adam, as the seed of the woman who bruises His heel while crushing the serpent’s head. God’s wrath is really just an instance of His triune love. God is a jealous God who loves His creation more than He loves Himself (this is a rhetorical hyperbole). As such, when God sees His very good creation in a ruptured relationship with Him, He will not countenance such brokenness. His wrath is conditioned by who He eternally is as Father-Son-Holy Spirit love (which is simply a Self-givenness, one for the other, one in the other, which coinheres in the Divine Monarxia [Godhead]). He created humanity in His image, who is the Christ for us (cf. Col. 1.15); He created humanity in Christ’s humanity to be in an eternally ascendant and thus elevated and koinonial relationship with Him. The nothingness and concupiscence of sin broke that, and as a result He became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’).

God is love. He loves all of humanity in His vicarious humanity which stood in the gap between He and us because no one else could or would. Jesus, as the Baptizer exclaimed, is indeed the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’ As the author to the Hebrews (Paul) says: “there no longer remains any other sacrifice for sin.” Christ is God’s first human, the firstborn, the first fruits of God for the world/us. This is how we know God’s wrath is first an instance of His love for us, in that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’ God’s wrath cannot ever be thought away from or apart from His conditioning triune love. When ‘our theologies’ fall into that trap we end up with a distorted and nomist view of God, wherein God becomes simply the Judge, and not the Judge judged for us (pro nobis).

Because of this realization I can look out at the world and feel compassion, as if looking longingly at sheep without the Shepherd. My heart genuinely breaks for people who don’t have Christ; as Paul said “I wish all were like me, yet without these chains.” God desires to show His love in actualized ways wherein all of humanity might indeed ‘taste and see that God is good.’ God’s justice is coming, and yet has always already come in the cross of Jesus Christ. The very foundation of the cross is in fact the cruciformed (cross-shaped) triune life of the eternal God. If we don’t approach a reading of the Old Testament from this crossshaped lens we might fall prey to the siren call of the culture writ large as best represented in the thought and activity of Marcion (the heretic).

On a Crucifixional ‘Certainty’ of Faith as Knowledge of God: With Reference to Herbert McCabe

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Herbert McCabe on the certainty of the Christian reality (contra wishful thinking, so on and so forth):

Now there are some people who will admit even this. They will admit that Christianity is reasonable even in this sense, that it is not merely logically coherent, but also a pretty reasonable hypothesis. They will admit that there is a lot of evidence of one kind and another to suggest that Christian beliefs are true, just as there is a lot of evidence of one kind and another to suggest that telepathy is quite common or that Queen Elizabeth I was in love with Essex. What they find so unreasonable in Christians is that, instead of saying that Christianity is highly probable, they claim to be completely certain. When you do establish something by this kind of probable and convergent argument, you have every right to hold it as your opinion, but you have no right to claim absolute certainty and to be sure that you will never meet a genuine refutation of it. This is what finally seems unreasonable about faith to the openminded liberal sceptic. And here I can agree with him. In this sense I am prepared to admit that you might call faith unreasonable.

It is not unreasonable in the sense that it is absurd or incoherent. Nor is it unreasonable in the sense that there are not good reasons for it. But it is, if you like, unreasonable in that it demands a certainty which is not warranted by the reasons. I am completely certain that I am in Oxford at the moment. I have all the evidence I need for certainty on this point. It is true that I admit the logical possibility that I may be drugged or dreaming or involved in some extraordinarily elaborate deception. But this doesn’t really affect my certainty. Yet the evidence which makes it reasonable to hold, for example, that Christ rose from the dead comes nowhere near this kind of evidence. One might say that the evidence is spite of all probability does really seem to point to this fantastic conclusion, but it is certainly not the kind of evidence which makes me quite sure and certain. And yet I am more certain that Christ rose from the dead than I am that I am in Oxford. When it comes to my being there, I am prepared to accept the remote possibility that I am the victim of an enormous practical joke. But I am not prepared to envisage any possibility of deception about the resurrection. Of course I can easily envisage my argument for the resurrection being disposed of. I can envisage myself being confronted by what is seems to me to be unanswerable arguments against it. But this is not the same thing. I am prepared to envisage myself ceasing to believe in it, but I am not prepared to envisage either that there really are unanswerable arguments against it or that I would be justified in ceasing to believe it. All this is because, although reasons may lead me to belief, they are not the basis of my belief. I believe certain things because God has told them to me, and I am able to believe them with certainty and complete assurance only because of the divine life within me. It is a gift of God that I believe, not something I can achieve by human means.[1]

As a Christian, full of the Spirit, doesn’t McCabe’s thinking resonate with you? It certainly has resonance with the thinking of Barth on faith, and Christ’s faith for us as we find correspondence with His and from His by the Holy Spirit. It isn’t that there is no physical or historical evidence for such things, it’s that it goes way beyond such parameters. It isn’t that it is some type of existential foray into the mystical; indeed, as that might be generated by an abstract human’s innards. It is that God has made concrete contact with us through the interior life of His life for us, with us, and in us, in Christ. McCabe isn’t referring to some sort of epistemic certainty that satisfies our base hopes. Instead, He is referring to the triune God’s unilateral Self-determination to bring us, to elevate us into the very heart of His inner life; to share in the glory that the Son has always already shared with the Father by the Holy Spirit. This type of certainty of relationship comes with an inherent vulnerability to it, of the sort wherein a child is dependent upon their parent. This knowledge of God, of our relationship with Him, comes with a desperateness to it; of the type where the Christian knows that they know that they don’t continue to stand without their Father standing for them in the Son, the Savior of the world. It is a primordial situation wherein we just show up in this world, and our Father graciously comes to us, as if a babe tossed into the weeds and dust of the wastelands, picks us up, cleans us up, and brings us into the eternal life spring that is showering forth from the One in the bosom of the Father; indeed, in the Son.

I take what McCabe is referring to as a ‘taste and see that God is good,’ or an Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’) mode of being. And as I already noted, there is a primordiality to all of this. That is to say, as Barth’s theology does, that the Christian has entered into a new creation in the resurrected humanity of Jesus Christ. We are on a new playing field wherein the eyes to see the invisible as the concrete, are the eyes of the faith of Christ that we have come into union with by the grace of adoption into the family and triune life of the eternal and living God. Barth scholar Robert Dale Dawson communicates these truths in the following way, with reference to Barth’s theology of the resurrection (I’ve used this quote multiple times because I think it is helpful towards piercing into what Barth is after throughout his theological oeuvre):

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[2]

According to Barth, and I think the Gospel implications themselves, we are not thinking of reality in terms of a grace perfecting nature or a revelation perfecting reason (ironically, McCabe is a Thomist, but uniquely so); we are thinking from the new theo-logic that comes from a city not of our own making or machination. As Christians, and I see this in McCabe’s thinking, our bases for knowing God come from an otherworldly, that is indeed thisworldly reality. As such, we have a certainty about it in the ways already noted, but also in a way that this world considers both foolish and weak. There is a staurological (crucifixional) ground to this type of thinking that understands that knowledge of God comes first from a putting to death of what we consider “reasonable,” by our inborn lights, and a resurrection unto a new creation wherein what is reasonable is only determined by God’s pre-destination for His consummate and concrete Kingdom to come, and currently coming minute-by-minute. amen

[1] Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason (London: Continuum, 2007), 28–9.

[2] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.

The Ethics of the Resurrection: Applied to Transgenderism

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I was contemplating the absurdity of the man who claims to be a woman, who then puts on a swimsuit, enters a woman’s swim-meet, wins the contest, and then is declared the fastest swimmer among some of the top-tier women swimmers in the world. As I contemplated this, I tweeted the following: “You can identify as a bird all you want, but the second you step off the Golden Gate Bridge physics take over.” I elaborated further on Twitter, this way:

And just to be clear, physics isn’t the judge, God is the Judge. When people rebel, and physics, physiology, psychology, presses back against their rebellion, it isn’t those components that have an inherency of their own; they simply reflect God’s recreative order. People aren’t simply being “metaphysical rebels,” they are acting out according to their sin nature; the nature that self-possessively and viciously maintains that it is God, and that the real God is not. When they rebel, they are loving themselves, and not God. And it is this self-love, incurved upon itself, that leads to the various aberrations and disaffected expressions we see all around us. According to the logic of self-Godhood, even when something clearly bespeaks aberration, new logics must be constructed in order to persuade the self and others that in fact their personal expression of sin is no aberration at all; that it is in keeping with the kingdom they have constructed as “self-God.” The problem arises because these self-declared self-Gods inhabit the only genuine and living God’s creation, and recreation in Jesus Christ. As such, we end up in a diabolical spiritual battle wherein all of humanity is born believing itself to be God, while all along being confronted with the fact that they live in a universe that inherently declares the very opposite by the wisdom of the cross. The wisdom of the cross, and/or the staurologic therein, is the ground of the new creation that finally attests that the old has gone the new has come. It declares that God is God, and we are not. It isn’t until the person ‘repents’, bows the knee to the wisdom of God in Christ, that the Son finally sets them free indeed. But to the logics of the world the freedom of the Son looks like bondage because it contradicts the very essence of what the world takes to be the way, the truth, and the life; that they are God, and God is not.

I want to be clear that creation itself has no built-in or abstract value-center of its own; that’s why I refer to staurologic or the wisdom of the cross. The original creation, I take it (protologically), to be created so that Christ might be born (see David Fergusson). In other words, the created order is eschatologically conditioned by God’s free choice to be for the world, in the world, in Jesus Christ; i.e. He is the telos of creation. As such, when He comes into this world order in ‘Bethlehemic flesh,’ it serves as an irruption, of the sort wherein this world finally comes to understand its actual orientation. So, the new creation that God accomplishes in Jesus Christ was always already the reality of this world’s trajectory to begin with; sin, in this sense then, becomes an aberration that only God, extra nos (outside of us), could invade, take to Himself, enter it from the inside/out, and put it to death. It is as this ‘seed’ fell into the ground, died, that new life could come to blossom, such that the old becomes the new, but under the pressures of a totally elevated and/or actualized sort. In other words, what I am attempting to articulate, is that the point of continuity between the old and the new isn’t an inherency that the “original creation” had potent within itself. The point of continuity between the old and the new is God’s choice, before creation, to be for the world and to create the world for Christ; but not without us, but with us. He is the order of this world, the new has left the old behind, but the old bore witness to the coming of the new insofar that the new was in fact the origination of the old to begin with; that is in God’s free election to be God of the humanity of Jesus Christ.

Hence, the aforementioned entails that what it means to be human was already actualized prior to creation in God’s choice to be human for us in the ‘to be’ enfleshment of the Son (Deus incarnandus). Since His humanity is the ground of the created order, even as that is given subjective-distinction in the particularity of ‘our humanity’ as ‘images of the Image,’ this entails that creation itself is not free to be free in abstraction from its root and reality in the vicarious and archetypal humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, judgments about what is right and wrong are not left to self-proclaimed human agents, as if this was an obtainability inherent to simply being created. Human agents, as has been observed, are not free unless they are living in and from what it means to be humanly free coram Deo (before God). It is only in this freedom, since anything outwith is bondage, wherein right and wrong before God comes to be known, internalized, and with the possibility of creational reversal and transformation through the re-creation of creation’s telos and esse in the resurrection of humanity in the eternal Logos’ Self-assumed humanity in the man from Nazareth.

It is from this continuously irruptive reality that a human agent comes to understand the order of the Kingdom, as that has always already had a cruciform shape. It is in this mode and posture before God in Christ whereby creatures, as participants in God’s life through the grace of God’s humanity in Jesus Christ, come to have the capaciousness to discern the straight from the crooked. This vicious desire to be self-God becomes non-directive for the creature attempting to live against their ‘election’ to be genuinely human in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, and thus they come to have the lights to live from the Light of God. There is an experience of freedom that invades their lives with the result that the new life of the new creation explodes upon them such that God’s order becomes the only order for them that appears safe and secure. Living outwith this order becomes as distant as the old is to the new; as Barth says: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.” This ‘first word’ becomes the norming norm for the new-creatures’ life, and, for example, being born a biological male, rather than female, or vice versa, is lived into as the order and telos that God recreated as the eschatological bliss He saw fit for the world to begin with; just as the bride to the groom symmetry bears witness to the beauty of God’s design in Christ to His Church.

The Apostle Paul, Feuerbach, and Bonhoeffer in Convo: On a Crucified Knowledge of God

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“For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” -Galatians 1.11-12

“God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.” – Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

The Apostle Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit writes the aforementioned; the philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach writes the aforementioned under the inspiration of the Spirit of antiChrist. Nevertheless, both identify important aspects about ultimacy, or as Christians we might say: God! Paul understands that knowledge of God is not based on philosophical speculation; whereas Ludwig reflects a person who takes philosophical reflection to its logical conclusion. Philosophical speculation, as it programmatically starts with the self can only end with the self. Thus, Feuerbach concludes that God is only a human projection; a projection of what the self would like to imagine itself to be. Ironically, the self under Feuerbach’s machinations ends up relying on classically understood divine revelational categories, or philosophical categories, and imagines that this is in fact representative of what humanity actually is in se. This is ironic, to me anyway, because Ludwig helps to illustrate just what a god imagined under the constraints of philosophical reasoning naturally reduces to; viz. it reduces or collapses the classically philosophical categories for divinity into the human being as the ultimate terminus for who and what ‘God’ is. I can agree, as a Christian, with Feuerbach. If our notion of God is based upon philosophical speculation, and the subsequent imagining that this speculation fosters, then this God, indeed ends up being a God who “man … made . . . in his image.”

Contrariwise, as already alluded to, the Apostle Paul doesn’t know the God that Feuerbach, or the philosophers in general have imagined. Paul’s knowledge of God is purely based on God’s confrontation of Him, quite literally, on the road to Damascus. Paul’s theological schooling, post-first-encounter, is given to him directly by the risen Christ. Paul doesn’t claim to imagine or construct his notion of God based on philosophical speculation, but he bases his knowledge of God in the category of revelation. Revelation, for Paul, is based on God’s irruption into the world, in and through the risen Christ, and in an ongoing way, as the risen Christ actively and event-ually continues to confront him, and all Christians (and all would-be Christians) through personal encounter; and thus, the disruption of Grace for the world. Paul’s God, clearly, is grounded in a Hebraic understanding, such that God just is the One who freely has chosen, and continues to choose, to confront us with His life of new-creation for the world in Jesus Christ. This notion of God cannot be reduced to a mode of human projection, precisely because it definitionally begins in a question proposed to us from without rather than from within us. Ben Quash gets at it this way as he develops the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to think God:

[T]he opening up of a ‘third term’ in the confrontation between the recipient(s) and the medium of revelation is something that all good theologies of revelation in the modern period have had to attempt in different ways. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has left us with what is arguably one of the most suggestive and fruitful, with his affirmation of the penultimate (the rational, empirical, social domain) in its intimate closeness-in-distinction to the ultimate. The ultimate opens up within the penultimate in the form of a question, as we confront and examine the phenomena of our earthly existence. It is not our own question—it is given to us. And although it is given to us phenomenally (in the penultimate), its answer is not. The question is “Who Is Jesus Christ for us today?’ (Bonhoeffer 1966: 30: 1971: 279). This question draws us along the way of the cross into dispossessive relationship with one who is the non-circumscribable ultimate of existence. We find him incognito, ‘hidden in empirical history as empirical reality, “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3)’ (Janz 2004: 220). He is the definitive revelation of God by allowing himself to be pushed out of the world onto the cross, in this way showing us the God who is not an agent in competitive relation to other agents in the world—not just one who makes particular differences—but one who makes all the difference, in but not in addition to all the differences that there already are. [Ben Quash, 342.]

This, in my view, represents the genuinely Christian way for thinking God. It isn’t something that we construct, but something we are proposed with, actively, as our very capacity for thinking God is put in its rightful place. The Christian way for knowing God is, we might say: staurological (that is, it is a crucified knowledge). The Incarnation and cross of Christ itself shows us that the human animal, left to its own abstract self, can only arrive at the reality that God is us. This is what we see finally in Feuerbach, and the sort of theological modernity he represents. An uncrucified knowledge of God can only be one that starts and ends in the circle of the self; this, ironically, is the pronouncement of the cross of Christ. The cross of Christ, the ‘wisdom of God’, takes Feuerbach, and the spirit he thinks from, to its ultimate conclusion; it shows how the humanly conceived notion of God finally has an end. It is out of the ashes of this projected god that the living God rises victoriously, and in and through recreation of humanity, in Christ’s resurrected vicarious humanity, human beings have come to have the capacity to think and know God as God genuinely is in Himself for us.

One cash out of the aforementioned, from my perspective, is that what is implied is that any notion of God that is based on our own inner-desires, rather than being based on the One who confronts us from outside of ourselves, even from within ourselves in the humanity of Christ, is as Barth says: the No-God (Isaiah says this too). And so, many unbelieving Christians end up counting on a God who indeed represents a projection of the God that they want God to be. This God allows them to live in any variety of sin that we could imagine; this God, this Jesus Christ, smiles on and affirms them in their sinful lifestyles. This God does not contradict or confront them, or tell them to repent. I would suggest that this is the God who largely funds the American religion known as evangelicalism, progressivism, and mainlinism.

A Reflection on Galatians 6:14-16: The World Crucified to Me, and I to the World

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14 But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 15 For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. 16 And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. –Galatians 6:14-16

This has got to be one of my favorite passages of Holy Scripture. The idea of the world being crucified to me, and I to the world could not underscore the Primacy of Jesus Christ more! The amount of concrete hope this gives me is unsurpassable. When I look at the world, like the Psalmist, there is nothing of this world [system] that I desire. To know that the very ground of my life is rooted in the new creation of God’s vicarious humanity for me in Jesus Christ gives me hope inexpressible. To know that this ‘Israel of God,’ Jesus Christ, is the ground of all reality, and that His life, ever anew and afresh, breaks into the surly bonds of this dying creation is more hopeful than anything this world has to offer. And that’s precisely the point: this world has nothing to offer me except pain, suffering, and death. It is only the new creation, the new humanity of God for us in Christ wherein this old world under an unwanted futility springs to life. It is as the hope of tomorrow disrupts the anguish of today, that today comes to be in-spired by its full redemption in the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. This primal reality, that is the resurrected and ascended humanity of the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ, gives this weary soul a hope and power to live life from that is unsearchable in its wonder.

None of this reality is contingent upon what I have done for God; it is purely dependent upon what He has unilaterally done for me, for us in Jesus Christ. Again, this is the hope; that is that this old world has already been put to rights; that this world of old has been put to death and raised anew in the re-created humanity of Jesus Christ. This is the hope, the reality that this world could never imagine; and even if it could start to it would never have the power to make it real. At base, it is this primal event in Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection that puts the world on notice that the only place where real human life happens is in its death, burial, and resurrection in Jesus Christ. It requires eyes of faith to see this; for the Christian walks by the faith of Christ, not the sight of the heart that is darkened beyond feeling. I live my life by this faith; its touchstone is the smiling face of Jesus Christ shining through this broken vessel that I typically know as my body. ‘For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ’ (I Corinthians 3:11). The Christian life is purely about God’s work for us, and none of our works for Him; this is God’s grace, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God’s work for us, just as He is God’s eternal Logos who freely elected our humanity for Himself that we might come to participate in His Divine Life of Triune intimacy. This is what the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world comes to: that is, the indestructible life of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah; the eternal Son of the Father in the bond of Holy Love breathed over by the koinonial refreshment of the Spirit. This is my inhabitatio Dei. To God Alone be the Glory 

My Redline: A Soldier for Christ Until the Eschaton

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10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. –Ephesians 6.10-13

I still wonder, at times, why the Lord didn’t take me home through my incurable cancer; why didn’t he allow the statistics to hold true in my case with regard to the type of monstrous cancer I had. I usually arrive at a singular conclusion: it is because I am a soldier for Jesus Christ on this earth. It is because He desires that I would bear witness for Him, for the risen Christ, contra this evil age and its god, the devil. It is because He has prepared me to fight the good fight of faith through the hellish crap He has walked me through in many seasons of the past (and those He walks me through in the present). It is because He wants someone as weak as me to reflect His strength so that His manifold wisdom might be made known to the world, and the principalities and powers who seek to steal, kill, and destroy. I see myself, along with the rest of the communio sanctorum, as part of a great drama; a drama that transcends the seeming mundanities of the everyday world, and charges it with the life of the risen Christ. I see myself as dead to sin, and alive to Christ. I see myself as standing against the tide of evil and deception in this world as an ambassador of Jesus Christ. Because of this I am not seeking to be your friend, but a true brother in Jesus Christ. I am not attempting to fit into the strictures that the culture[s] says are acceptable and fitting. I am simply a Christian who is here to bear witness to the fact that Jesus Christ has triumphed making a public spectacle of the devil and his minions (the losers!). I am here to remind people, along with the Apostle Paul, that we are in a great spiritual battle; a battle that shapes and implicates the political and cultural systems which we inhabit. I am here to bear witness to the fact that God’s Yes in Christ has triumphed, and in so doing has said No to the destruction of the devil and this fallen system he finds sustenance within; like a cancer feeding on acid. Once these tasks of mine are completed I fully intend on entering the presence of the Lord where there is peace and joy forevermore. Until then I fight along with the rest of the church militant. I am contra mundum (against the world) insofar as this world system is the haunt of the already destroyed devil and his serpentine minions. Screw you devil. Let God be true and every man a liar!

I Am a Theologian of Crisis

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I see myself as a theologian of crisis. This mode has a pedigree in the development and history of theological ideas and movements. Theology of crisis often is understood in synonymy with the more pejorative label of NeoOrthodoxy. Karl Barth, in its most fulsome iteration, is known as one of its primary progenitors. Some might see this from within the frame of an existentialist mode, and that’s fine. It clearly has that element to it, but it cannot be reduced to that. In general terms Martin Luther might be understood as theology of crisis’s originator (or maybe even Jesus Himself, in his office as Prophet and Priest ought to be understood as its originator). Peter Fischer describes theology of crisis this way:

The theology of crisis had its origin from the revival of Reformation studies. The so-called “Luther renaissance,” perhaps stimulated by the approach of the jubilee year of 1917, produced a number of monographs of significance and also saw the publication of several major journals. Barth’s now famous Römerbrief appeared soon after the onrush of Reformation studies and in a sense can be considered as part of the “renaissance.” In it Barth addressed the twentieth-century church in the name of the first century church interpreted in the spirit of the sixteenth. It will therefore serve our purpose to consider crucial changes in Protestant theology against which the theology of crisis movement reacted. This will of necessity be an abbreviated image, telescoped, foreshortened, even caricatured. But it ought to serve to establish a perspective.

Like its twin, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation has been viewed from all sides, and with each new angle of view has appeared to be something different. It has also changed hues according to each interpreter’s set of values. But also like the Renaissance, it has retained certain persistently recurring emphases; and none of these is more persistent or more characteristic than the freedom of the living God in relation to man (a fine study of Luther’s theology by P. Watson is appropriately entitled: Let God be God). This emphasis is so strong that critics have frequently confused Luther’s free God with Ockham’s arbitrary God. In its own judgment, the Magisterial Reformation had the primary task of reminding Christendom that God’s free mercy and grace alone are the reason of human salvation. This is the essence of the doctrine of predestination held by all sixteenth century reformers. In the manner of the Old Testament prophets, they pointed to the transcendent, all-powerful one who had shown himself freely when and where he chose, who was not to be confused with philosophical ideas of his existence or attributes. Broadly speaking, the Protestant Reformation was a part of that large revival of piety of the period, which accused the church of having lulled to sleep the consciences it should have awakened. The Brethren of the Common Life, the Christian Humanists, the Oratory of the Divine Love, the congregation of Clerks Regular, individual daring preachers of reform, not to speak of the whole Anabaptist stirring, are other examples of the vast movement of revival of vital piety. It was the outcry of the age against the cheapening of grace, against religious superficiality, against the familiarity with holy things, against the reliance on quasi-magic religious practices that made for easy religion. Luther’s “justification by faith alone” and his “theology of the cross” epitomized the Protestant form of this protest.[1]

This was a development of theology, as far as intentional movement, that developed in the wake of the shocking atrocities of WWI. The human suffering exposed and perpetrated during that time, one that the world itself could not escape, confronted a whole stable of [German/Swiss] theologians, inclusive of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. But the material point of theology of crisis is that the theologian is confronted, afresh, with some sort of human crisis, and then God in the midst of that crisis. It is an attempt to think God afresh and anew prompted by the uncomfortable circumstances the viator is constantly confronted with as they live in this fallen and chaotic world. It is in the verities of human crises where the person, like the Apostle Paul, who ‘had the sentence of death written on him, that he would not trust himself, but the One who raises the dead’ (cf. II Cor 1.8-9), is forced into encounter with the living God / the risen Christ. In this encounter, the Christian theologian learns to submit all that has come before, in the theologies of the past, and all her categories and emphases, under the specter of Christ’s fresh and forging face.

This is my experience and mode of theology. It is an attempt to think God from within the crises of daily life; with the Pauline sense of the sentence of death being upon me. It is with Luther’s sense of anxiety and torment that I operate, only able to find refreshment and theological reality in the One who raises the dead. As I am ‘constantly being given over to Christ’s death, that His life might be made manifest in the mortal members of my body,’ that I come to know who God is; and thus come to have the capacity to genuinely bear witness to Him in all speech seasoned with Grace. This will always be my mode as a Christian theologian. This means I will repudiate speculative or analytic modes for thinking God. I will only think God from a dialogical or relational mode wherein I first came to know the voice of Christ as a 3 year old little boy. That’s who I have known, do know, and will know finally in beatifico visio. This is my confession coram Deo.

[1] Petr B. Fischer, “Theology of Crisis in Perspective,” The Centennial Review Vol. 8, No. 2 Theology Issue (Spring 1964): 218-19.

The Old Testament God of ‘Genocide’ and the New Testament God of the Cross: An Eschatological and Staurological Theory in Relief

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The God of the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, also known as Yahweh, is often derided as a menacing vengeful God who is seemingly bloodthirsty for anyone’s blood who isn’t one of his “chosen” covenant people. We see God commanding His people, upon entry to Canaan, to wipe out whole nations; sparing no one, not even child or mother. This seems not just harsh, but for some it is akin to outright genocide. We have concepts like the ‘ban’ in place—just open to the Book of Moses and you’ll see this—under which, as noted, when the tribes of Israel entered into ‘The Land’, they were to engage in a scourged-earth campaign wherein EVERYTHING was to be wiped out; including certain types of vegetation. People often read these passages in the 21st century, under such sensibilities, and attempt to cohere ‘this God’ with the God we encounter in the New Testament, in Jesus Christ. They see an almost absolute disjunction between Jesus, and the God of the Old; to the point that they engage in creative reading practices that attempt to attribute the Old Testament understanding to the purview of the people of Israel, rather than to who God actually is in Himself (in se).

Frankly, such things as the ‘ban’ are not easy teaching; indeed, it is hard teaching. My strategy, in regard to engaging with this difficulty, has been to recognize that what was going on in the Ancient Near East (ANE) millennia ago, represents worlds and worlds of difference from what is going on currently in the 21st century under the pressures of modernity (although, honestly, things aren’t really that different when we start comparing the similarities between the wickedness that prevailed then, and the wickedness and blood-shed that prevails currently). It is within this acknowledgement that I am able to say: “okay, God was accommodating Himself and His ways, to the currents of that time, rather than the currents of my time.” I am able to conclude that God’s Providential ways have worked through every periodized period of history in such a way that He has been able to unfold and accomplish His purposes as those are entailed by the reality of His elect Son, Jesus Christ.

But something hit me tonight, as I was reading Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 §14. It involves a theological understanding, more pointedly, a christological understanding of just what might have been going on with the seeming brutality of the ‘ban’, and the way God commanded His people to act when encountering the Canaanites upon entry into the ‘Land of Israel’ (or what would become that). We know, explicitly from the context of the text, that one of God’s purposes was to keep the people from mixing with these corrupted nations; to keep them from adopting their cultural traditions and gods, in order to remain ‘sanctified’ unto God for His peculiar purposes. But this begs the question: ‘why?’ Why was this so important to Yahweh? Why was God so concerned with covenantally preserving the Hebrews? Why was God so intent upon keeping them untouched by the surrounding nations? Here is what cajoled my thinking towards an answer to the “why” of the questions I have just noted:

The Old Testament like the New Testament is the witness to the revelation in which God remains a hidden God, indeed declares Himself to be the hidden God by revealing Himself. In and with this attested revelation a judgment is pronounced upon the whole world surrounding it, since God—here and now actually present—declares the whole world surrounding His revelation to be godless, irrespective of what it apparently believed itself to possess in the way of divine presence. And by this judgment this entire surrounding world is as such destined to die off, to pass away. If it has a hope, it is not to be found in itself, but only in connexion with the divine presence which breaks out fresh in revelation, and is the only real presence. But in the first instance it has no hope. If must first of all pass away. The nations settled in Palestine, which were in certain respects highly civilised nations, were struck with surprise and horror at the nomad nation that broke in from the desert with their first and second commandments, although it was really questionable how far even they understood and followed these commandments themselves. The revelation which was the origin of this nation was the revelation of the one, only God, to be acknowledged without analogy and to be worshipped without image. What invaded Palestine was the radical dedivinisation of nature, history and culture—a remorseless denial of any other divine presence save the one in the event of drawing up the covenant. If there were any pious Canannites—and why should there not have been such?—the God of Israel must have appeared to them as death incarnate, and the faith of Israel as irreligion itself. But admittedly no time was left them for such reflections. In remembering this hiddenness of the Old Testament covenant-God, we also understand that the question, as it was obviously put to Israel in the time of Joshua and the Judges down to and including Samuel, consisted in the frightful dilemma: either God’s presence, guidance and help and therefore fidelity and obedience to the covenant on the nation’s side, or peaceful assimilation into the nature, history and culture of the country, i.e., a common human life with its inhabitants. Or the question put the opposite way: either surrender of the covenant with consequent loss of the presence of God in the nature, history or culture of the country, even involving the physical elimination of its inhabitants. The whole inexorable sharpness of the difference between Yahweh and the baalim, between the prophets on the one hand and the nation and the kings and the “false” prophets on the other, which constituted the theme of the history of Israel down to the Deuteronomic reform and beyond, is understandable in the light of the typical either/or, which according to tradition, constituted the end of the wandering in the wilderness and the beginning of the history of Israel in the country of their fathers (or, rather, in the country of Yahweh). Was it nationalistic narrow-mindedness, religious fanaticism, hatred of men and lust for blood that commanded this people to take such a stand and to act upon it? According to the unanimous testimony of the Old Testament, it is rather driven, against its will and amid numerous attempts to carry out its own opposite will, along this hard. [sic] inhumane way. It would have been very like them to become one civilised Canaanite nation among others, and to be religiously open and pliable or at least tolerant. King Saul, whom Samuel had to withstand, and later King Ahab, whom Elijah had to withstand, must in their way have been outstanding representatives of this naturally human Israel. But Israel could not do as it wished. Wherever the voice of its prophets thundered and was heard, the abyss reopened between the gods and men of the country, and the holy nation, the natural, human Israel was accused, it was called back to the offensive attitude of unconditional resistance. It is not its religious and natural peculiarity that is the restraint here—it would never have been so unconditional in its resistance—but its God, who cannot become manifest without at the same time becoming hidden. The country belongs to Him. It cannot therefore belong to the baalim also or even at all. No other loyalty is compatible with loyalty to Him. Since by its own existence Israel pointed out God’s revelation to the world around it, it had to deny their gods, i.e., their very deepest, best and most vital thing, the supposedly absolute relations in which they thought they stood. Israel had to point out to this world the end, the judgment coming upon them. That Yahweh’s exclusiveness is fundamental, that His revelation really points out the judgment coming upon the world, is to be seen in the fact that the prophetic accusations and threats, which apart from Israel are in Amos still directed only against the nearest nations, reach over in the later prophets to the great world nations on the Euphrates and the Nile. From this later message of judgment we shall have to read off the meaning and trend of the earlier one.

The revelation of God in Jesus Christ is actually the end and judgment, the revelation of the hidden God which the Old Testament indicates. In the cross of Christ God is really and finally to become hidden from the world, from this æon. And thereby judgment will be passed upon this æon. The old will have passed away in the incarnate Word of God. The history of Israel runs to meet this Word and so this passing away. It only runs to meet it. But it does run to meet it. It signifies the proclamation of world judgment in fulfilled time. It is the time for expecting it. But because it is the time for expecting it, it is itself revelation-time.[1]

I am not going to attempt to exegete what Barth offers. I simply wanted you to see what prompted me to some of my own thinking on this issue; it is related, of course. I also wanted you to have the opportunity to be prompted to your own thinking by reading this passage from Barth.

But what hit me takes us back to Genesis 3, and the satanic temptation of Adam and Eve. We see ‘in the Beginning’ that the devil has been intent on thwarting the purposes of God, and that he will go to great lengths to undo the ‘very good’ creation that God is willing to give His own and eternal Life for. We see Cain, Nimrod, and Noah’s generation rising up under the inspiration of the devil’s lisp in a demonic attempt to rise up against God’s proto-evangelium (Gen 3.15), and thwart God’s plan to redeem the world. We see in the post-diluvian world (post-flood) a new generation rising up, one that took various trajectory through the lines of Noahic genesis; a trajectory wherein nations were birthed through the seed of the women. These nations, from their inception, were seemingly under the spell of satan’s deception; constructing cultures and gods who were systemically aerated with the breath of the Serpent.

My thought, within the aforementioned context of the ‘ban,’ was that these nations, from the beginning were constructed in such a way that their purpose was to keep God’s plan from fruiting. It would be through the intermixing and watering down of God’s covenant people that God’s people, as mediators of the Messiah, were intended on thwarting God’s plan. Even as we read in Barth, this is exactly the sort of waywardness that Israel was so prone to. What we see is that even in the mixture of “God’s people” with the ‘secular nations’, even in the failure of God’s people, as they were allowed to grow and mix with the nations and their ways; we see that God’s Way could not be thwarted. No matter the imperfection of these people, “His people,” He would mediate Himself through their loins, as the Lamb of God come to take away the sins of the world. But it seems that early on as Yahweh was bringing His people into The Land, that the intent was to carve out a space where His sanctified and vivified people might begin to flourish as they moved towards the ‘fullness of time’ (Gal 4).

In a way this helps me understand what was going on in the ‘ban’ period of God’s people as they invaded the Canaanite lands. In the midst of that there was a foreshadowing of the ultimate judgment to come, as that would be realized in the flesh of God in Jesus Christ. Up until that ‘revealed-time’, God worked as leaven in the ‘lost-time’ of the nations with the sole purpose of bringing His rightful judgment of them to an end in the unrightful judgment of Himself as the ‘Judge judged’; which is His Grace enacted. But the harshness of the judgment meted out on these nations, I contend, was ultimately for their own good. It signifies just what is at stake in the coming of the Son of Man, and the harshness of the judgment He bore for them and all of us.

The nations, under the devil’s own motivations, sought, unconsciously, in the spiritually dead state they took formation within, to thwart the means of their own so desperately needed re-conciliation with God. In order to look at this sort of ‘judgment’ for what it is, this requires that we approach this eschatologically, under the staurologic (cross-logic) of God’s ultimate purposes to reverse the curse spawned by the Serpent’s word, by bringing His Word (Logos) to the concretization that the Christ is. But in order for my theory to be persuasive, the primary premise that must be accepted is that Israel was (and is) God’s covenant people; a people with the ‘seed’ (Gal 3) in its loins that would ultimately be the salvation not just for them, but even the nations under Yahweh’s judgment. These things must be thought through this lens, or my thesis falls apart, and we are reverted back to the Enlightenment-critical reading that sees the Old Testament referring to a God of the Hebrew’s own projection. FWIW

[1] Barth, CD I/2 §14, 87-8.

God’s Governmental Providence as Cruciform in Shape: Human Suffering and Death, with Reference to Nabeel Qureshi

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“The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; 2. for he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters.” Psalm 27:1-2

The Psalmist captures a reality that many in the world do not like; he identifies a truth that kicks against a self-possessed humanity who thinks it belongs to itself. But the Christian finds great comfort in realizing that this is the reality; that the world and all its bounty belongs to the living God of heaven and earth. The Apostle Paul sharpens this idea from a Christocentric angle; the idea that not only is the earth the LORD’s, but that we, as his people do not belong to ourselves; that God in Christ, owner of the heavens and the earth, penetrated our humanity with his in Christ and replaced our self-possessed selves with the recreated reality of a new humanity that realizes that it is only possessed by the living God. Paul writes pointedly: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”[1] This is almost an unfathomable reality, but one that has been made known as what is real through the goodness and graciousness of God revealed in his cruciform life in Jesus Christ.

These passages could be applied in a variety of ways, but what I want to highlight, at a theological level, is how this works towards thinking about God’s care, about his providential sustenance of the earth. And I want to use that context to discuss life and death; with particular focus, in this instance, on the life and death of Nabeel Qureshi, and all those in the world who are suffering in untold ways. I want to see if I can work toward making sense of it all from the big vantage point of God’s providence.

There are at least three ways to think about God’s providence: 1) Conservation, 2) Concursus, and 3) Governance. I want to focus on God’s governance; i.e. how in a God/world relation we might conceive of his inter-action with his creation in an active way; but in such a way that he remains in control, and thus not conditioned by the creation even as he enters it in the Incarnation (Logos ensarkos). In an effort to bring clarity to what is meant by the third prong of God’s providence—his governance—let us read how Dutch theologians Brink and Kooi develop this idea:

3 Finally now, the third aspect of divine providence: God’s gubernatio (governance), or directio (leadership). Traditionally, this part of God’s providence was conceptualized in rather static terms, as if God rules the world as a manager does a company, doing what needs to be done, minding the store. The Bible, however, speaks in much more dynamic—more precisely, in eschatological—terms about God’s rule. The fact that God rules the world means, first and foremost, that he guides it in a particular direction, toward the final realization of his plans and promises. Therefore, history is geared toward the kingdom, for also in his rule the Father works via—and thus in the mode of—the Son and the Spirit. For the time being, God rules “from the wood of the cross” (Venantius Fortunatus, sixth century), that is, in spite of all kinds of misery, setbacks, and experiences of loss. History becomes ever more similar to Jesus’s road to the cross, just as the apocalyptic portions of the New Testament teach. In addition, it should be noted that God works through his Spirit and not by (human) might or power (Zech. 4:6). We should often pay more attention to small things than to powerful revolutions or major changes in society. Where people are touched by the s/Spirit of the gospel and on that basis experience a decisive renewal in their lives, there God is at work, guiding the world to its future destination. So, God’s direction often proceeds via small things and detours, another reason that God’s providential rule is first and foremost a matter of faith and not something that can be gleaned from a newspaper. But it is precisely this faith that is certain that the outcome will not be a failure.[2]

My guess is that when you first heard the words God, providence, and governance, that your mind, like mine did, turned immediately to the description Brink and Kooi started their paragraph with: “…Traditionally, this part of God’s providence was conceptualized in rather static terms, as if God rules the world as a manager does a company, doing what needs to be done, minding the store.” But, as was encouraging to see they made the turn, as they should, to the reality that God’s governance of the world, of his good earth, is cruciform in shape; that he rules this earth by penetrating it in and through the humanity he assumed in Jesus Christ. That his governance is in his humiliation and vulnerability in his being in becoming man, and his reign climaxes in his exaltation of humanity in his risen and ascended humanity as the God-man who can sympathize with the yet broken humanity; but as the one who has conquered the brokenness of this world precisely at the point where it looked like he was going to lose it.

When I think about the death of Nabeel Qureshi, and think about it from the backdrop of God’s governance as described by Brink and Kooi, I have hope. I don’t have all the answers to the questions that I have, but I have hope because the God who is in control is not an aloof deity governing the world like some sort of removed corporatist; he instead became the One for the many, by becoming one of us, entering our fallen humanity and redeeming it from the inside out. He reigns supreme and providentially over the creation as one who has tasted his own creation; all along remaining distinct from his creation in the miracle of the hypostatic union, of God become human in the singular person of Jesus Christ. This is the hope that Nabeel Qureshi lived and died his life from; from the death and life of Jesus Christ.

Not only is Jesus the Lamb Slain, but he is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah risen; the One who is prime and supreme over all of creation. He governs the world from the reality of his resurrection, with hands still bearing the scars of their piercing for us. Nabeel, and all those who die in Christ, currently behold those nailed scarred hands; the hands that hold this world together, and for the purpose that all creation, that the sons and daughters of God in that creation, will finally behold the hands of such a King and ruler as this.

 

[1] I Corinthians 6:19-20, NIV.

[2] Cornelius van der Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink, Christian Dogmatics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 243-44.