I wrote about the publication of the First Nations Version of the New Testament when it first came out. The First Nations Version, published by IVP Press, is a translation of the New Testament in the cultural idiom of the indigenous and First Nations peoples of North America. 

This year, thee First Nations Versions of Psalms and Proverbs was released. I've been using the FNV Psalms for my morning and evening prayers this month. 

One of the interesting aspects of the FNV Psalms is their translation for the Hebrew name of God (YHWH). This was something that wasn't an issue for the New Testament. In the FNV translation of the New Testament, the Greek word "God" was typically translated as "Great Spirit" or "Creator." But the Hebrew name of God was a new and different challenge for the FNV translation committee. 

As I expect you're aware, most English translations do not translate the Hebrew name of God. Instead, they use LORD in all caps whenever the Name is used. This is similar to Jewish practice, where the Name is replaced with Adonai ("Lord") or HaShem ("the Name"). So, how would the FNV handle this replacement?

The FNV committee felt that the use of "LORD" would have been inappropriate given the egalitarianism of first nations cultures. But the replacement needed to be term of reverence, honor, and respect. The choice the FNV made was to use the designation "Grandfather." 

In justifying the use of "Grandfather" over "LORD" the FNV shares:

For the FNV Psalms and Proverbs, we followed the Jewish tradition of replacing YHWH with another name. We considered a First Nations name that would be meaningful, honoring, intimate, and intertribal. We needed a unique name we had not used in the New Testament since the New Testament Greek does not translate the name for YHWH.

The title Grandfather was proposed...This title carries the relational weight of the name. This name meets the criteria of intertribal and is often used at powwows and other First Nations gatherings. In all Native cultures, grandfathers and grandmothers are highly honored. Grandfather is a name of honor, dignity, intimacy, and loving authority. Over and over again, Black Elk, a respected elder and author from the Lakota, used Grandfather (Tunkashila in Lakota), often combined with Father and Great Spirit, to make it clear who he was referring to...One example from Black Elk is, "O Father and Grandfather Wakan-Tanka, You are the source and end of everything. My Father Wakan-Tanka, You are the One who watches over and sustains all life."

In a recent series of mine I floated an analytic framework to describe different aspects of faith and their interrelationships. 

It was a three-layered structure involving a moral layer that flows out of an existential/narrative/symbolic layer which in turn flows out of an ontological layer. Pictorially:

Moral

↑↓

Existential

↑↓

Ontological

I went on to describe how the layers beneath the moral layer have been slowly jettisoned in the increasingly post-Christian West. The Judeo-Christian moral vision, broadly espoused by liberal humanism, has been divorced from its narrative and symbolic world. This creates an existential loss. Symptoms of this loss involve our current mental health crisis, increased deaths of despair, political polarization, and what has been called our "crisis of meaning." 

In addition, narrative and symbol have been separated from the Real, the ontological layer. This leads to drift of both the moral and existential layers, mostly evidenced in the political capture of the Christian ethic and story. This happens in different ways on both the political right and left. This moral and existential drift away from the Real also manifests in a consumeristic, bespoke, DIY approach to spiritual practice, where people can shop around and select stories and myths that support their lifestyle without any concern about if the myth they've selected for themselves has any correspondence to our ontological.

In my series I described some of the reasons why the ontological layer was rejected. For example, there was the rise of reductive materialism during the New Atheist moment. I also discussed the impact of post-modernism on making ontological claims in a pluralistic and liberal world. But I was recently put in mind of another reason why the ontological claims of Christianity are rejected. Specifically, if the ontological claims are true there are, we can say, implications. Implications we'd rather not face. Here is that case as made by  the theologian Robert Jenson:

Yet I think there is another reason for our skittishness with the gospel's truth claims...So soon as we pose the question, "What indeed if it were true?" about an ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences begin to show themselves that go beyond anything we dare to believe, that upset our whole basket of assured convictions, and we are frightened of that. The most Sunday-school-platitudinous of Christian claims--say, "Jesus loves me"--contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds; it commits us to what have been called revisionary metaphysics, and on a massive scale. That, I think, is the main reason we prefer not to start [with the question "What indeed if it were true?"] and have preferred it especially in the period of modernity. For Western modernity's defining passion has been for the use of knowledge to control, and that is the very point where the knowledge of faith threatens us.

"eating the bread of anxious toil"

The opening verses of Psalm 127 describe the vanity and futility of human effort separated from God:

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Unless the Lord builds, we labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches, we watch in vain. It is vain to rise early and go to sleep late, eating the bread of anxious toil.

What’s striking in the final line is how those who trust in the Lord, the beloved, are given sleep as a blessing. The picture is one of anxious fretting contrasted with peace and rest. And the critical issue is trust.

What drives us to eat the bread of anxious toil? What is at the root of this vain striving? Why can’t we find rest?

In The Slavery of Death I describe how our lives become ensnared by basic and neurotic anxieties. Basic anxieties concern survival and resource-based concerns. These are the anxieties highlighted in Psalm 127. Building shelter. Watching over a city to prevent attacks. Working hard to provide for your material needs. Trusting in the Lord in the face of these basic anxieties means expressing confidence that the Lord will provide and protect. We are finite creatures and we must live into a glad dependence upon the Lord.

Beyond basic anxieties, there are also neurotic anxieties. These worries are less about survival than with self-esteem. Neurotic anxiety concerns our anxious striving for significance, how our self-esteem becomes entangled in contingent metrics of worth. Think about workaholism. At some point, you’ve worked enough to provide for yourself and your family. The concerns of basic anxiety have been addressed. So why won’t you rest? Well, because the work has shifted into a neurotic register. You’re pushing to achieve some vision of success and significance. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, you’re addicted to your superhero complex.

Neurotic anxiety doesn’t seem to be a primary concern in the opening lines of Psalm 127. But I am struck by the description “beloved.” That the beloved of God sleep well. The reason we become trapped within our neurotic hero games is because we don’t experience ourselves as God’s beloved, unconditionally and fully so. There is still some game of love-worthiness we are trying to win. Neurotically pursuing success and significance, we eat the bread of anxious toil.

Only the beloved can truly rest.

In Colossians 1.13, Paul declares, "He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son."

The Greek word translated here as "domain" has a range of meanings, among them "power," "authority," and "dominion." But for this post I want to keep with the spacial meaning. We were once located in the territory of darkness and have been relocated and transferred to a new location, the kingdom of Christ.

In the last two posts I've been describing how Christ deals with curses. The Deuteronomic curses of Sinai concerning covenantal loyalty and infidelity. And the deeper, primordial Adamic curses of sin and death. I've described this work as "saving the story" of Israel. At the end of the last post I said that Christ has made Israel's story a "curse free zone." Free of the curses due to Adam's fall, and free of the curses due to Israel's failure. 

I want to use this notion of a "curse free zone" to describe Biblical references to the wrath of God.

As I mentioned in the first post, one of the concerns with penal substitutionary atonement is its individualistic focus. The wrath of God is directed at me, personally. I am the object of wrath. And it's this personalization--God is wrathful toward me--that creates the potential for psychological harm. Covenantal substitutionary atonement, I've pointed out, shifts away from this personalization. Jesus is substituting himself for Israel. A similar shift happens with the Adamic curses. Jesus substitutes himself for Adam, and as the new and second Adam Jesus is able to restart and recapitulate human history. This recapitulation vision of atonement isn't common nowadays, but it was a favorite one among the church fathers.  

In both instances, Jesus substituting himself for either Adam or Israel, there is a shift away from Jesus substituting himself for me on the cross. Of course, insofar as I am implicated in Adam's sin or locked out of Israel's story due to her failure, Jesus' death on the cross is very much "for me." But only in how I, along with all of humanity, are a part of a much larger, universal story. I'm most definitely a piece of this larger puzzle, but I'm no longer narcissistically playing the starring role in this cosmic drama. 

That said, without Christ I do stand under the curse. And this is where I think the metaphor of space, territory, and domain comes it. The entire world stands accursed due to Adam's sin and Israel's failure. Anyone in this territory--the "domain of darkness"--lives under the curse. Jesus, however, carves out a "curse free zone" within the world. Those who live in this liberated territory are freed from the Adamic and Deuteronomic curses and consequences. 

The point here is that God's wrath isn't really about you. Nor did you, uniquely, bring that ire into existence. The curses existed long before you showed up. You were simply born into the Accursed Land, and you suffer the effects--like suffering death and being locked out of the blessings made to Abraham--of living in that land. But due to the work of Christ, there is a land where the curses have been expelled and expunged. This is the Blessed Land. And here's the good news. You can go there. Right now, you can go. You don't have to live in the Land of Shadow. You can leave. 

You can be transferred from the domain of darkness to live in the kingdom of the Beloved Son. 

But the Deuteronomic curses were not the only curses that needed to be dealt with. 

Jesus substituting himself for Israel, becoming the Suffering Servant, saves Israel's story and rescues her vocation. But the primordial curse remains.

One of the curious things in the theology of Paul is the attention he pays to Adam. After the early chapters of Genesis, Adam doesn't feature much at all in the narrative of the Old Testament. All of Israel's failures are deemed to be due to her own rebellion and idolatry. No prophet points the finger at Adam for being the root cause of Israel's sin. 

For Paul, however, Adam becomes the primary explanation for sin. And not just sin, death as well. This focus on Adam is a theological shift in the Biblical narrative. The highlighted role of Adam in Paul's teaching would have been surprising to his Jewish audience. Romans 5.12-21:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—for sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam, who is a pattern of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. But law came in, so that the trespass might increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so grace might also reign through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

I have written extensively about this focus on Adam in the theology of Paul. For Paul, Adam explains Israel's covenantal catastrophe, how her story got stuck. Zeal for God's law, Paul's pre-conversion motivation, had led to the crucifixion of Israel's Messiah. According to Paul, the reason zeal could not produce covenantal faithfulness was due to the power of sin and death over human flesh. The sin of Adam had incapacitated our ability to obey and follow God's law. As Paul puts it in Romans 8: "For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God."

In short, there were two sets of curses Jesus had to overcome. There were the Deuteronomic curses and the primordial Adamic curses. To overcome the Deuteronomic curses, Jesus, as Israel's representative, had to perfectly fulfill the law and undergo the punishment, as the Suffering Servant, for Israel unfaithfulness. This Jesus does. But Jesus also had to undo the Adamic curses of sin and death, sin being that power which "reigns over" human flesh making us "unable" to submit to God's law. Christ overcomes this curse through his resurrection and the empowering gift of the Spirit. 

This is way too simplistic, but a sketch of how Jesus deals with all these curses would be:

Resolving the Deuteronomic Curses: Covenantal Fidelity and Infidelity

1. Fulfilling the Law as a perfect covenantal partner

2. Suffering the curse, as the Suffering Servant, for Israel's unfaithfulness

Resolving the Adamic Curses: The Reign of Sin and Death

1. Resurrection overcoming death

2. The gift of the Spirit to overcome sin

Summarizing, to save Israel's story, wholly and comprehensively, deeper work was needed. To rescue Israel's vocation Christ has to resolve the primordial curse that had undermined Israel's calling. And having done this work, Jesus cleansed Israel's life and made it a "curse free zone." In the next post I want to focus on this curse free zone to share some reflections about the wrath of God in gospel proclamation.

Over the years I've written about what I have called covenantal substitutionary atonement as an alternative to penal substitutionary atonement. 

The problems with penal substitutionary atonement have been well documented, often to the point of grotesque caricature. I, myself, in the early years of this blog/newsletter contributed to the pile on. 

There are two problems I want to highlight with penal substitutionary atonement. 

The first problem is that it focuses upon individual sin and guilt. This isn't to deny personal complicity. As 1 John says, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." But an overly individualistic focus can putrefy into the conviction that God hates you. Your soteriological predicament becomes God, leading the the odd notion that Jesus is saving you from God. 

A less commented upon problem is related to the first. Specifically, penal substitutionary atonement dismisses Israel and the Old Testament. In the standard telling of penal substitutionary atonement no reference is made to the promises God made to Abraham. Penal substitutionary atonement is ahistorical. By situating salvation within an abstract forensic context the narrative framework of Scripture is stripped way. All you have is a sinner in the dock. You're a sinner/criminal. Those sins/crimes have penal consequences. But Jesus paid/satisfied those consequences. No appeal to the Old Testament is needed. 

And yet, there is a substitutionary logic at work in Scripture, a substitution that allows us, in the words of Paul, to escape "the wrath to come." But if not a penal substitution, what are we to do with this substitutionary imagery? 

This is where I've suggested a view I've called covenantal substitutionary atonement. The soteriological predicament in the Old Testament concerns the Deuteronomic curses. At the Sinai covenant sealed in Deuteronomy 28–30 Israel would suffer curses, culminating in her exile, if she was unfaithful to her vocation to be a light to the nations. These curses do transpire. And at this point, the story becomes stuck. 

Sitting in this narrative quagmire, the prophets of Israel begin to imagine a future restoration. But how to get around the Deuteronomic curses? The prophet Isaiah envisions a mysterious figure, the "suffering servant," who will take the curse of Israel upon himself:

Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

Jesus, in becoming the Suffering Servant, takes the Deuteronomic curses upon himself and cracks the covenantal impasse. What Israel could not do for herself, Jesus, in becoming the representative of Israel, brings to completion. Jesus fulfills the requirements of the Law and takes the curses of Israel's sin upon himself. Simply put, Jesus saves Israel's story and allows the narrative to carry forward. The vocation of Israel, to bring the nations to the worship of God, is rescued. The promises made to Israel becomes available to the nations. As preached by Paul, Gentiles become grafted into Israel's story through faith and baptism. 

Covenantal substitutionary atonement, therefore, recognizes the substitutionary logic of atonement but shifts it in critical ways. First, we pivot away from individual guilt to see how Jesus is substituting himself for Israel (as the Suffering Servant). Relatedly, the wrath of God is shifted away from a "sinners in the hands of an angry God" vision toward the Deuteronomic curses. The soteriological predicament solved by atonement isn't forensic but covenantal. What is being saved is Israel's vocation. The story is rescued. 

And most importantly, covenantal substitutionary atonement re-embeds the atonement within the Biblical narrative. Israel is placed back at the dramatic center. Where penal substitutionary atonement is ahistorical, covenantal substitutionary atonement bring the story of salvation back into view. 

That Thursday, I said some provocative things about Catholicism and Orthodoxy in relation to the first-century church. To be clear, my point wasn’t to disparage practices like infant baptism or Marian devotion, just to make a historical observation that these were not practices of the first-century Christians. These were later developments. Justifiable and beautiful developments, but developments nonetheless.

That I would point out such things goes to my denominational location. I’m a member of the Churches of Christ. Our movement is primitivist. That is, we’ve always sought the simplest and earliest expressions of first-century Christianity as the optimal template for church life, organization, belief, and practice. Anything, therefore, that shows up later in Christian history, from the 2nd century on, we view with suspicion.

To be sure, the dream of primitivism is quixotic, historically and hermeneutically, but I’m a primitivist at heart. My ecclesial tastes are simple and minimalist. Which is one of the reasons I remain Protestant and likely won’t convert anytime soon to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. I find much within those traditions beautiful, profound, rich, wide, and deep. But I also experience them as ornamental, baroque, and filigreed in doctrine, liturgy, practice, and ecclesiology.

Take, for example, the doctrine of the real presence. So much theology gets piled on top of that question. When and where is Christ “really showing up” in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist? 

My own tradition, the Churches of Christ, has been memorialist, denying the real presence. I find that sad and would love to recover a doctrine of the real presence within our tradition. Crucially, though, I don't judge the memorialist view as heretical or empty of spiritual power. Unlike so many online apologists, I'm not the Eucharist Police. For my part, my concerns about memorialism have to do with its metaphysical vulnerability toward disenchantment. So when I say I wish my tradition embraced the doctrine of the real presence I don't see this as moving from heresy to orthodoxy. I see it, rather, as deepening our mystical participation in the Supper. Good teaching shapes perception, and I'd like our people to see more in the Eucharist rather than less. Especially in the metaphysical vacuum of modernity. For me, this is more about spiritual formation than a concern about heresy. 

But here’s the thing. I don’t think you need a lot of theological and liturgical machinery to affirm the real presence. I think it can be secured on primitivist terms, and in the simplest and plainest way possible.

Jesus said, “For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

That’s it. That’s my doctrine of the real presence. When two or three gather in the name of Jesus, and in my tradition we gather precisely to celebrate the Supper, Jesus is really present. The universal and holy catholic church is realized in that gathering.

Now, will Orthodox and Catholic readers find this view woefully inadequate, underdetermined, maybe even heretical? I expect they will. But I will confess, for my part, that I sense something idolatrous in the anxiety to secure the real presence through metaphysical and liturgical systems of consecration. The earliest Christians experienced the real presence as quite simple, straightforward, and plain. 

When they gathered Jesus was simply there.

"Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy."

We find ourselves in an in-between place with Psalm 126, looking back and looking ahead.

The song starts with gratitude and remembrance for the Lord restoring the fortunes of Israel:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Our mouths were filled with laughter then,
and our tongues with shouts of joy.

And then, in verse 4, attention shifts to the future with a petition to restore the fortunes of Israel:

Restore our fortunes, Lord,
like watercourses in the Negev.

In short, there is praise for a past deliverance (verses 1–3) and a plea for a future restoration (verses 4–6). Hope for the future flows out of a past provision. Though this present moment is sorrowful, God acted in the past and God will act again. Thus the hopeful expectation: "Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy."

I'm struck by the suite of emotions in Psalm 126: gratitude, joy, sorrow, hope. The sadness is rescued because it is surrounded by what psychologists have called "self-transcendent emotions." As I describe in The Shape of Joy, these emotions are self-transcendent because they are oriented toward a horizon found outside and beyond oneself. 

For example, the hope we see in Psalm 126 has a eucatastrophic shape. Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy. This is the same eucatastrophic shape we see in the Beatitudes: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." Hope flows out of an expectation that God will act within our stories, transforming sorrow into gladness.

From a psychological perspective, this is the genius of the Christian message. Because of the resurrection, there is a radical open-endedness to human life and history. A closed and fatalistic system was broken open. That's what you behold when you look into the empty tomb: the eucatastrophic shape of the cosmos. And it's that hope, that eucatastrophic shape, which allows the poet of Psalm 126 to sing, "Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy."

Since joining Substack, to create an email subscription option for my blog, I've been slowly exposed to the Substack ecosystem. While I use Substack to share my blog as a newsletter, I don't participate in many of the things the platform offers. For example, I don't monetize the blog/newsletter. I do, though, post quotes to Notes.

Notes, if you don't know, is the social media feed of Substack. Notes is the closest thing I've experienced to something like Facebook or Twitter, neither of which I've ever subscribed to. 

You witness a lot of tiresome debates on Notes. Some of the debates on Christian Substack happen between Orthodox Christians and Catholic Christians, or the Orthodox and Catholics teaming up against Protestants. These debates regularly concern who represents the "one true church." There is, to put it mildly, a lack of ecumenical charity in many of these conversations.

A lot of the negative and aggressive energy inserted into these debates is from men who have become recent converts to Orthodoxy. You might be aware of this trend and it's impact upon Christian social media. The main take of these Orthodox converts is that every branch of Christianity, from Catholics to evangelicals, is a theological failure. Heretical, even. Only Orthodoxy preserves the one true faith. 

This conceit, however, isn't limited to the very online Orthodox. There are also aggressive Catholics who denigrate Protestantism. And in response to these Orthodox and Catholic attacks, there have arisen aggressive Protestant defenders. 

Here's my hot take. I think many of these loud and aggressive converts are more in love with Christianity than they are with Christ. They love the creeds, the church fathers, the liturgy, the saints, the history, the culture of Christendom, the doctrine, the dogma, the theology, the Tradition. What they don't seem to love very much is Jesus, as evidenced in their becoming belligerent social media trolls. 

Also, I'm not convinced by arguments that Orthodoxy and/or Catholicism preserve a true, pure, faithful and original Christianity. I think the Catholic and Orthodox churches are profound and beautiful. Count me a fan. But the early Christians didn't baptize infants, they didn't pray to Mary, they didn't worship at an altar, they didn't venerate icons, and they didn't pray to dead Christians. To be clear, those practices are defensible. And I'm not saying they are wrong. Just that if you dropped the apostles into the Catholic and Orthodox traditions they would be surprised by some things. I think they'd get their heads around it once it was explained to them, but it would take a minute. And I think some of them would express concerns.

The Orthodox and Catholics also love to portray Protestants as schismatics. But the Orthodox and the Catholics invented that game. They are the OG schismatics. It's called the Great Schism for a reason, and their online vituperativeness conforms to type.  

I'm not here, however, to defend Protestantism. My point is that we've got a ecumenical situation on our hands and a little humility and charity is called for. 

So, where is all this vitriol coming from? To my eye, it's fear, plain and simple. I describe these dynamics in The Authenticity of Faith, how dogmatism is used to cope with existential anxiety. It is comforting to feel safe and right and smart. But when faith is deployed neurotically like this it spills out in out-group denigration. Fearful people are prone to hostility, and Christian social media is a great example. 

This is one reason we're seeing so many young men gravitate away from evangelicalism toward Orthodoxy and Catholicism. As sola scriptura Protestants these young men were raised as epistemic foundationalists. In standing on Scripture they stood on a firm, solid, and unshakeable foundation of Truth. The Bible provided them with every answer to every question. Epistemically, they were bulletproof. They were right and everyone who disagreed with them was wrong. This certainty provided existential comfort and consolation. Dogmatism was a security blanket.

Then they went off to seminary or down some YouTube rabbit hole and discovered that "Scripture alone" was hermeneutical quicksand. Suddenly, the edifice of security began to crumble. Where to turn? Where to find a firm and unassailable foundation? The Tradition! One type of foundationalism (the Bible alone) was exchanged for another (the Tradition). In both cases, the evangelical need for bulletproof certainty remained a constant. There has to be some "correct" place to land in the ecclesial landscape. It's utopianism in theological dress. But the underlying anxiety curdles the quest. Especially if, once the "one true church" is found, the old evangelical hostility and judgmentalism toward out-group members resurfaces. The underlying neurotic dynamic is carried over. Fundamentalism is merely rearranged. In order to feel secure and safe I need to scapegoat outsiders. Their damnation is proof of my salvation, their heresy confirms my orthodoxy. That's why the cocksure certainty of the new converts is so abusive, narcissistic, and hostile. 

People often ask me, "Why aren't you Catholic or Orthodox?" They inquire because I love these traditions and write about them a good deal. Orthodoxy is a huge part of The Slavery of Death. Catholicism in Hunting Magic Eels. And I could totally imagine converting to either faith. But I feel no anxious, neurotic pressure to do so because I find all the traditions beautiful. And deeply, deeply flawed. The Protestant. The Anglican. The Catholic. The Orthodox. And I have zero angst about getting to the bottom about which of these is "the real church." Precisely because such anxiety poisons the entire search. 

Now, of course, I want to be sympathetic to seekers who sincerely desire to honor God in finding the church and tradition they feel is most true, pure, and authentic. More power to such seekers. But if, after you find your new home, you become a toxic asshole, well, let me suggest that your motives for seeking weren't so healthy or sincere. Some dark fear was driving you and is now erupting in oedipal vitriol. If you're attacking other Christians online, especially after a conversion, you are, to put it simply, neurotic and unwell. You're having a love affair with Christianity and have yet to fall in love with Christ.

Okay, so what has this series been about? What am I chasing?

Well, ever since Hunting Magic Eels, and especially with The Shape of Joy, I've been making arguments about the relationship between faith and mental health. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, faith and spirituality have been consistency shown to be positively associated with well-being. As I've succinctly put it, God is good for you.

And yet, whenever I've made this argument I've kicked up some worries.

One worry we've already talked about in this series, the well-being of those who don't believe in either Jesus or God. Happy and flourishing atheists would seem to be a counter example to the claims I've made. 

In response, I've made two arguments in this series. First, I appealed to Maximus the Confessor's view that all virtue comes from God. And by virtue I don't want to restrict the conversation to the moral. By virtue we mean arete, the excellences that point us to eudaimonia, the good life. If God is our ontological ground then living with the grain of the universe would be deemed "excellent" and "virtuous." This is walking in attunement with the Tao, following the sophiological path of Wisdom, and living in integral harmony with the Logos. Basically, any goodness and flourishing we witness, no matter where we find it, is necessarily a participation in God. Joy comes from no other source.

The second argument I've made borrows from Karl Rahner's description of anonymous Christians. Given that God addresses every human person in their inmost reality, everyone has dealings with God. This is true no matter who you are or what you believe. For Rahner, being addressed by God defines what it means to be human. We cannot exist outside this supernatural relation. But this does not imply universalism. We can ignore, repress, or deny God's self-communication in our innermost being. We can shut our ears to the still small voice speaking within our soul. 

Many, though, choose live in relationship with the transcendent call they experience within themselves and permeating the cosmos. Life is sufficed with truth, beauty, and goodness. In the face of our failures and guilt we do not forgive ourselves but experience ourselves as both seen and forgiven. We know our lives to be valuable and meaningful. We express cosmic gratitude for the gift of existence and feel ourselves blessed. We believe love is our highest calling. And where such experiences and convictions have yet to coalesce into propositional belief we are, nevertheless, Christian in our ontological direction and trajectory. 

The second worry I've encountered is one we've yet to talk about in this series, but it's the concern that has motivated me to write these posts. 

Specifically, whenever I've expressed the conviction that "God is good for you" I've routinely encountered a concern that I am reducing God to the therapeutic. Now, what might this mean, that God is therapeutic, and why is it a worry? 

Much of the worry, and I've written about this before, comes from Christian Smith's description of what he calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." According to Smith, moralistic therapeutic deism has come to be the default creed of many Christian youth. A basic tenet of this creed is that God wants us to be happy. This happiness is achieved by feeling good about yourself. God's main role in your life, therefore, is "therapeutic." That is to say, God doesn't make demands of you and God doesn't judge. God wants you to feel good about yourself and to help you solve your problems.

The point I've raised with Smith is his choice of the word "therapeutic" to capture the worldview he is describing. I think Smith should have chosen a word like "affirmation" rather than "therapeutic." Medical therapy is about curing disease. And psychotherapy isn't about affirmation. Psychotherapy involves taking an honest look at your dysfunctional patterns and doing the hard work of getting yourself straightened out. In both cases, medical and psychological, the goal is change, not the acceptance of a diseased status quo.

Still, due to Smith's coining of the phrase "moralistic therapeutic deism," great suspicion exists about how we come to use God for self-affirmation and the pursuit of a shallow happiness. So I've had to clarify what I mean when I say "God is good for you." By "good for you" I don't mean that God traffics in cotton candy and daises, smiling benignly and beneficently upon our every choice and desire. God is good for you, but that goodness flows out of an attunement with our ontological ground. And attunement is different from affirmation. In fact, if you go against the grain of the universe you're going to harm and injure yourself. That's a sophiological inevitability. The ontological ground of being doesn't change in response to our whims. The Tao doesn't change in response to our preferences. Our preferences must conform to the Tao. 

The point here should be obvious. When I say "God is good for you" I'm speaking ontologically rather than therapeutically, as Christian Smith uses that term. Simply put, the ontological is not the affirmational. God is good for us because God is the source of being and our ontological ground.   

Over the last few posts a question might have been raised in your mind. If well-being can be pursued "non-religiously," Karl Rahner's anonymous Christian, then isn't the "mechanics" of well-being open to natural reason? 

One way to think about this is the Protestant contrast between common grace and saving grace. Common grace is the grace that is extended universally to all people, no matter who they are. In light of this series, we could say that contact with our ontological ground, as described over these last few posts, is an experience of common grace. As our ontological ground and transcendent horizon, God is always available to every human person. And insofar as we make contact with our ground and make the "outward turn" toward our transcendent horizon (as I describe in The Shape of Joy) we are walking the sophiological path of the Tao and tracing the shape of the Logos. 

This vision, however, tends to be very moralistic. For example, both John Henry Newman and C.S. Lewis describe our inner ontological encounter with God as the voice of "conscience" or the "moral law" within. Lewis even explicitly calls it the Tao. But I'm suggesting in this series that more than morals is involved in this ontological encounter. I am arguing that discussions about Sophia, the Tao, and the Logos need to expand beyond the moral to take in the whole of human flourishing more broadly. Our vision of virtue couldn't be reduced to the juridicial but should embrace a fuller, larger, and richer vision of eudaimonia, the good life, in all its richness and depth. True, ethical action is a part of human flourishing, but it's not the whole of it. 

If this is true, more than the inner voice of conscience is universally available to humanity. A whole vision of flourishing is gifted, as common grace, to our inner being. More, we should expect to see some regular, even lawful, regularities to human flourishing, regularities amenable to empirical investigation. Because flourishing flows out of a particular ontological situation--the Tao, Sophia, and the Logos--we should expect to see flourishing manifest in particular material, political, economic, social, and personal arrangements that attune with our ontological ground. That is to say, flourishing isn't the product of random happenstance but manifests a coherent underlying ontological logic. 

More simply put, you can have a science of flourishing that is wholly empirical. Since access to our ontological ground is common grace, the regularities of human flourishing are universally available to human reason. We can observe the empirical impacts of those who move with or against the grain of the universe. Not just morally, but holistically. Our well-being has a logic.

This view of things was expressed in the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas. Again, most people read Aquinas' description of the human pursuit of "the good" in very narrow juridical terms. By "good" we mean "morally good." But if we broaden our definition of the good to include the eudaimonic, the good life holistically envisioned, then we have a much richer picture. With this eudaimonic vision of the good in hand, here's Aquinas connecting ontology ("being"), universal natural reason, and the human pursuit of the good:

Now a certain order is to be found in those things that are apprehended universally. For that which, before aught else, falls under apprehension, is "being," the notion of which is included in all things whatsoever a man apprehends...Now as "being" is the first thing that falls under the apprehension simply, so "good" is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of the practical reason, which is directed to action: since every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good. Consequently the first principle of practical reason is one founded on the notion of good, viz. that "good is that which all things seek after." Hence this is the first precept of law, that "good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided." All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this: so that whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man's good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided.

Since, however, good has the nature of an end, and evil, the nature of a contrary, hence it is that all those things to which man has a natural inclination, are naturally apprehended by reason as being good, and consequently as objects of pursuit, and their contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance. Wherefore according to the order of natural inclinations, is the order of the precepts of the natural law. Because in man there is first of all an inclination to good in accordance with the nature which he has in common with all substances: inasmuch as every substance seeks the preservation of its own being, according to its nature: and by reason of this inclination, whatever is a means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles, belongs to the natural law. Secondly, there is in man an inclination to things that pertain to him more specially, according to that nature which he has in common with other animals: and in virtue of this inclination, those things are said to belong to the natural law, "which nature has taught to all animals" [Pandect. Just. I, tit. i], such as sexual intercourse, education of offspring and so forth. Thirdly, there is in man an inclination to good, according to the nature of his reason, which nature is proper to him: thus man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society: and in this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law; for instance, to shun ignorance, to avoid offending those among whom one has to live, and other such things regarding the above inclination.

We could cite other texts in Thomas, but this passage suffices to make the point. As Thomas argues, the human mind can "naturally apprehend" good and bad outcomes in human social arrangements. Insofar as humans seek, as all animals do, "the preservation of their own being," we can empirically observe the "means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles." Basically, a science of human flourishing is available to everyone who wants to take a look. We can make empirical observations across various domains of existence—Thomas mentions human sexuality, social relations, and education—to note where and how humans are thriving. In my world, this is the project we call "positive psychology."

If all that seems complex, a good metaphor here would be gardening. The ontological logic of good gardening, the science of flourishing flowers and tomatoes, is universally available to human reason. Gardening is a common grace shared by all, Christian and non-Christian alike. An atheist can be a master gardener.

In a similar way, we can observe the ontological logic of human flourishing. Humans flourish, for example, when they are free, have access to education, and are materially secure enough to have time for leisure and creative pursuit. And for the purposes of this series, humans flourish when they come to embody virtues such as justice, temperance, humility, and generosity. Importantly, none of this is arbitrary or accidental but flows from an attunement and synchrony with the Real. You can garden with the grain of the universe or against it. And if you garden against the grain of the universe, say, by refusing to water your plants, you'll reap an ontological consequence. In the same way, we can arrange societies and live our personal lives with or against the ontological grain of the universe. A society might oppress or promote freedom or education, and each choice affects societal flourishing. On a personal level, I might go through life with no self-control or temperately, and reap the consequences accordingly.

To be sure, virtue is no guarantee of bliss. Read the book of Job. But that life has a general logic of flourishing to it is what all the great virtue and wisdom traditions have long observed. Like gardening, there is a science and art to human flourishing. And this logic is available to human reason anywhere and always as a gift of God's common grace.

In the last post I described Karl Rahner's description of making contact with our ontological ground. And recall, Rahner argues that this encounter is available to everyone always. God's offer of himself is constant and universally available. We only have to listen.

But what might that involve? The line that struck me in Rahner's description of God's self-communication was this: "it is this person who experiences himself as one who does not forgive himself, but who is forgiven." 

That line echoes a passage I used in The Shape of Joy from Francis Spufford's book Unapologetic. In The Shape of Joy I wanted a religiously skeptical and agnostic reader to make what I call the "outward turn" toward transcendence. But not transcendence as propositional belief but as an encounter with our ontological ground. Describing how that ontological encounter might be achieved and experienced is difficult to put into words, but I think Spufford does a great job at getting at it. Which is why I share it in The Shape of Joy. And what's interesting for this series is how Spufford echoes Rahner's description of how this encounter is experienced as one of forgiveness. 

Here is the passage from Spufford, longer than the one I share in The Shape of Joy:

We live in a noisy place, inside and out, and the noise we hear pours into the noise we make. It's hard to listen, even when misery nudges you into trying.

Fortunately, the international league of the guilty has littered the landscape with specialized buildings where attention comes easier. I walk in ... The calm in here is not denial. It's an ancient, imperturbable lack of surprise. To any conceivable act you might have committed, the building is set up only to say, ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down? I sit down. I shut my eyes ...

... [W]hen I block out the distractions of vision the silence is almost shockingly loud. It sings in my ears. Well, no; metaphors are inevitable here but we might as well try to use them accurately, and to prune out the implications we don't want. The silence has no tune. It doesn't sing. It hisses; it whines thinly at a high constant pitch, as if the world had a background note we don't usually hear. It crackles like the empty grooves at the end of a vinyl record ... Which is welcome, because it's the unending song of myself that I've come in here to get a break from. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out. I breathe in, I breathe out ... and so far as I have to have something to concentrate on I concentrate on that ... I breathe in, I breathe out. The silence hisses, neither expectantly nor unexpectantly.

And in it I start to pick out more and more noises that were too quiet for me to have attended to them before. I become intensely aware of small things happening in the space around me that I can't see ... I hear the door sigh open, sigh closed. I hear the creak of the wood as someone else settles into a pew ... The audio assemblage of the world getting along perfectly well without me. The world sounding the same as it did before I was born, the same as it will do after I'm dead.

I expand. Not seeing, I feel the close grain of the hardwood I'm sitting on ... My mind moves outwards, to the real substance of things that are not-me beyond the church walls. I feel the churchyard grass, repeating millionfold the soft green spire of each blade ... the scratchy roughness of each suburban brick. Out and out ... receding higher and higher ... the limb of the planet, shining in electric blue; the ash-colored moon; the boiling chemical clouds of the gas giants; the shining pinprick of our star; the radiant drift of the Western Spiral Arm; the plughole spin of one galaxy ... Breathe in, breathe out. Yes, time. Expand again, not from this particular place, but this particular moment, this perch on one real instant in the flood of real instants. Breathe in, breathe out. Day opens the daisies, sucks carbon into every leaf, toasts the land, raises moisture in the clouds. Night closes flowers, throws the protein switch for rest in mobile creatures, condenses dew, pulls the winds that day has pushed. Breathe. Dark cycles into light ... this cycle measured in hours spins inside others timed in weeks and years and eons ... The forests ebb and flow. The hills themselves melt like wax. The ice advances and retreats ... This instant at which I sit is as narrow a slice of the reality of the whole as a hairline crack would be in a pavement that reaches the stars ...

But now it gets indescribable. Now I register something that precedes all this manifold immensity that is not-me and yet is real; something makes itself felt from beyond or behind or beneath it all. What can "beyond" or "behind" or "beneath" mean, when all possible directions or dimensions are already included in the sum of what it so? ... Beyond again: but I'm not talking about a movement through or out of shape altogether, yet not into vacuum, not into emptiness. Into fullness rather. Into an adjacent fullness, no further away than the thickness of everything, which feels now as if, in this direction that can't be stated, it is no thickness at all. It feels as if, considered in this way, every solid thing is as thin as a film in its particular being, and is backed onto some medium in which the journey of my attention's been taking, toward greater and greater solidity, richer and richer presence, reaches an absolute. What's in front is real; what's behind is the reason for it being real, the source of its realness. Beyond, behind, beneath all solid things there seems to be a solidity. Behind, beneath, beyond all changes, all wheeling and whirring processes, all flows, there seems to be flow itself. And though I'm in the dark behind my closed eyelids, and light is part of the everything it feels as if I'm feeling beyond, so can only be a metaphor here, it seems to shine, this universal backing to things, with lightless light ... It feels as if everything is backed with light ... And that includes me. Every tricky thing that I am, my sprawling piles of memories and secrets and misunderstandings, float on the sea ... [I]t's not impersonal. Someone, not something, is here. Though it's on a scale that defeats imagining and exists without location ... I feel what I feel when there's someone beside me. I am being looked at. I am being known; known in some wholly accurate and complete way that is only possible when the point of view is not another local self in the world but glows in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being seen from the inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of.

On one level I can feel that this is absolutely safe. A parent's safe hold is nothing compared to this ... But on another level, it's terrifying ... Being screened off by my separateness is all I know in my dealings with somebodies who look at me. This is utterly exposed ... It takes no account, at all, of my illusions about myself. It lays me out, roofless, wall-less, worse than naked. It knows where my kindness comes checkered with secret cruelties or mockeries. It knows where my love comes with reservations. It knows where I hate, and fear, and despise ... It knows all this, and it shines at me. In fact it never stops shining. It is continuous, this attention it pays. I cannot make it turn away. But I can turn away from it, easily; all I have to do is to stop listening to the gentle, unendingly patient call it stitches through the fabric of everything there it is. It compels nothing, so all I have to do is stop paying attention. And I do, after not very long. I can't bear it, for very long at once, to be seen like that. To be seen like that is judgment in itself. As a long-ago letter writer put it, someone who clearly went where I've just been, it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. Only, to be seen like that is forgiveness too--or at any rate, the essential beginning of forgiveness...

Call it our ontological ground or the light backing all things, this encounter is, as I said, available to everyone always. And at the heart of this meeting is an experience of being both seen and forgiven.

"Those who trust in the Lord are as secure as Mount Zion"

The translations render the first line of Psalm 125 slightly differently. The line above is from the NLT. I picked it for the word "secure" as security is the poetic image. The CSB renders the line this way: "Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion. It cannot be shaken; it remains forever." Other translations use the word "moved" instead of "shaken." Since Mount Zion cannot be moved or shaken, neither will those who trust in the Lord be moved or shaken. They stand secure upon that foundation.

Stability and security is a huge theme in The Shape of Joy. (And just a reminder, the book is now out in audiobook.) For example, one of the traits of a humble person is that they have a secure and grounded identity. But what does that mean? How do you know if you have a secure and grounded identity?

One of the things to pay attention to is how reactive you are to ego threats. Ego threats are situations or experiences that challenge our self-concept, self-worth, or identity. Common ego threats are failure, criticism, rejection, and social comparison. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, most of us are tangled up in a "hero game" of meaning, worth, and significance. Will Storr calls these "status games." Henri Nouwen describes the three great temptations of these hero and status games as the temptation to be relevant, the temptation to be spectacular, and the temptation to be powerful.

The trouble here is that these hero and status games destabilize our egos. When I fail, and I will, my identity becomes threatened. My worth is undermined. Social comparison becomes a gauntlet where every encounter with the successes of others creates envy, resentment, and jealousy. Our lives become embroiled in neurotic rivalries. Rejection hammers us, from the vocational, to the creative, to the relational. You're passed over for the job. The publisher sends back your book proposal with a "No thanks." You get ghosted by the person when you thought the first date went well. And then there are the criticisms. Nothing you do seems to be good enough. We live with what Brené Brown has called "the shame-based fear of being ordinary."

In The Shape of Joy I describe all this as the "trap of self-esteem," how we are trying to achieve emotional well-being through self-regard. But as we know, self-regard is a fickle and fragile thing.

So when I read Psalm 125 I think of psychic security and stability, an identity that cannot be shaken or moved. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tells the church to be "steadfast" and "immovable." How? Because we know that "in the Lord your labor is not in vain." As I describe it in The Shape of Joy, we escape the ups and downs of our status game by securing our identity on firm transcendent ground. The ego threat of failure—"Is all my work in vain?"—is escaped because this work is grounded "in the Lord." Identity has been stabilized. For those who trust in the Lord are as secure as Mount Zion. They cannot be moved or shaken.

They are immovable.

In Gaudum et spes, Vatican 2 describes the vocation and fate of the Christian: 

The Christian man, conformed to the likeness of that Son Who is the firstborn of many brothers, received "the first-fruits of the Spirit" (Rom. 8:23) by which he becomes capable of discharging the new law of love. Through this Spirit, who is "the pledge of our inheritance" (Eph. 1:14), the whole man is renewed from within, even to the achievement of "the redemption of the body" (Rom. 8:23): "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the death dwells in you, then he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also bring to life your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who dwells in you" (Rom. 8:11). Pressing upon the Christian to be sure, are the need and the duty to battle against evil through manifold tribulations and even to suffer death. But, linked with the paschal mystery and patterned on the dying Christ, he will hasten forward to resurrection in the strength which comes from hope.

Gaudum et spes then continues on to consider those outside the church:

All this holds true not only for Christians, but for all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way. For, since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.

In short, Gaudum et spes holds out the possibility that the soteriological gifts enjoyed by Christians are available to "all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way." God "offers every man the possibility of being associated with [the] paschal mystery." How this can be is a mystery that is "known only to God."

A passage from Vatican 2's Lumen gentium offers a similar vision: 

God [is not] far distant from those who in shadows and images seek the unknown God, for it is He who gives to all men life and breath and all things, and as Saviour wills that all men be saved. Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life.  

Lumen gentium describes how non-Christians can "attain to salvation" if they "sincerely seek God" and are "moved by grace to do His will as it is know to them through the dictates of conscience." There are people who will be saved who "have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God" but who, with God's grace, "strive to live a good life."

The Catholic theologian Karl Rahner had a name for this mystery as described by Gaudum et spes and Lumen gentium, how saving grace is at work in the lives of non-Christians in "an unseen way," "men of good will" who follow the "dictates of conscience" and who "strive to live a good life" though without "explicit knowledge of God." Rahner called these people "anonymous Christians." People who are Christians who don't know they are Christians. 

How could this be? How can someone be an anonymous Christian? 

I'm no Rahner scholar, but having read his Foundations of the Christian Faith let me try to offer a simple summary of anonymous Christians.

The central idea, as I see it, is that God wills to save everyone. Consequently, God creates human beings with a capacity to respond to grace. This capacity, given supernaturally by God, is primarily an inner experience of transcendent seeking, longing, and recognition, which may or may not become explicit confession or belief. In this experience of transcendence, universally present and available, every person encounters what Rahner calls God's "offer" of Himself. Some say "yes" to God's offer and begin to navigate their lives in light of this experience.

Rahner says that this experiential preparation must precede the gospel proclamation, otherwise the gospel would arrive stillborn, falling on indifferent or uncomprehending ears. Without a prior experience of God the gospel wouldn't resonate with lived human experience, and be perceived as either alien or inert. The gospel proclamation converts us because it provides an explanation for something we've already experienced and know to be true. As Rahner writes,

Christian teaching, which becomes conceptual in reflexive, human words in the church's profession of faith, does not simply inform man of the content of this profession from without and only in concepts. Rather it appeals to reality, which is not only said, but also given and really experienced in man's transcendental experience. Hence it expresses to man his own self-understanding, one which he already has, although unreflextively.

Notice the moves here. Christian teaching, the verbal and conceptual aspect of dogma and doctrine, the "human words" of the faith, do not impart content and information "from without." Rather, we already know the gospel, but this knowledge is experiential rather than verbal and propositional. Consequently, when I first encounter the gospel I hear a message that "appeals to reality," something I've already "really experienced" in my life. As Rahner says, "It is not the case that we have nothing to do with God until we make God conceptual and thematic to some extent. Rather, there is an original and unthematic experience of God, although it is nameless." The propositional knowledge of the gospel, putting everything into words, is simply a confirmation of something I've known to be true my entire life. When I hear about Jesus I recognize him as the one who has always been with me. As Rahner says, "the world is our mediation to God in his self-communication of grace, and in this sense there is for Christianity no separate and sacral realm where God is to be found." We encounter God everywhere in the world and in our experience. 

Here's how Rahner describes this pre-propositional, pre-verbal, pre-dogma, pre-conceptual experience of God:

We can say without hesitation: a person who opens himself to his transcendental experience of the holy mystery at all has the experience that this mystery is not only an infinitely distant horizon, a remote judgment which judges from a distance his consciousness and his world of persons and things, it is not only something mysterious which frightens away and back into the narrow confines of his everyday world. He experiences rather that this holy mystery is also a hidden closeness, a forgiving intimacy, his real home, that it is a love which shares itself, something familiar which he can approach and turn to from the estrangement of his own perilous and empty life. It is the person who in the forlornness of his guilt still turns in trust to the mystery of his existence which is quietly present, and surrenders himself as one who even in his guilt no longer wants to understand himself in self-centered and self-sufficient way, it is this person who experiences himself as one who does not forgive himself, but who is forgiven, and he experiences this forgiveness which he receives as the hidden, forgiving and liberating love of God himself, who forgives in that he gives himself, because only in this way can there really be forgiveness once and for all. 

Rahner goes on to say that this experience might be stronger or weaker for some individuals and vary over time. But most importantly for Rahner, this experience, either weak or strong, is the experience of every human person and exists prior to and independently of explicit religious knowledge, belief, and confession: 

The experience which we are appealing to here is not primarily and ultimately the experience which a person has when he decides explicitly and in a deliberate and responsible way upon some religious activity, for example, prayer, a cultic act, or a reflexive and theoretical occupation with religious themes. It is rather the experience which is given to every person prior to such reflexive religious activity and decisions, and indeed perhaps in a form and in a conceptuality which seemingly are not religious at all. In God's self-communication is an ultimate and radicalizing modification of that very transcendentality of ours by which we are subjects, and if we are such subjects of unlimited transcendentality in the most ordinary affairs of our everyday existence, in our secular dealings with any and every individual reality, then this means in principle that the original experience of God even in his self-communication can be so universal, so unthematic, and so "unreligious" that it takes place, unnamed but really, wherever we are living out our existence.  

Now, is this universalism? No. Again, the experience Rahner describes here comes in the mode of an "offer" made by God to every human person, an offer sensed deep within the soul. People can reject this offer. Others, though, accept the offer, and live in harmony and attunement with it. That said, not everyone brings their acceptance of the offer into full, explicit Christian confession and belief. Such persons are Christian in their yes to God's offer, but anonymously so. Should full confession come the person experiences the onset of conceptual understanding, the arrival of words, as giving name to a reality already experienced, and harmoniously so. The experience of an unknown God is given a name--Jesus Christ.  

Having shared all this, let's return to the question raised by this series, the relationship between well-being and ontology. Recall the question we're asking: If our flourishing flows from our attunement with the Real, and Jesus Christ is the ontological ground of the Real, whence comes the flourishing of non-Christians? Karl Rahner's thoughts, I think, are helpful here. The notion of "anonymous Christians," along with the vision of Vatican 2, suggests that non-Christians can live in contact with our ontological ground. This vision supplements Maximus the Confessor's claim that all virtue, no matter where we find it, participates in God's own life. Goodness has no other source. Virtuous and flourishing non-Christians, therefore, pose no puzzle. God makes his offer to every person, universally. We can say yes or no to that offer. We live in attunement with our inner experience of God's self-communication to our souls, or we suppress that inner voice of longing and conscience. We also go on to experience the lived consequences of our choice. All of this precedes any explicit confession of faith or intellectualized belief, which might never happen in this life. 

Still, contact with the Real is being made. An unseen grace is at work.