After raising a lot of questions in Chapter 1 of Love Wins Rob Bell turns to a discussion of heaven in Chapter 2.

The title of Chapter 2 captures the gist of Bell's discussion of heaven: "Here is the New There." Or, in the words of Jesus: "May your kingdom come and will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

At root, Chapter 2 of Love Wins is trying to combat the other-worldliness in much of contemporary Christianity: The obsessive focus on the Judgment Day: The fetish of your ultimate destiny: The notion that the most important thing in the world, well, isn't even in this world. As Bell writes:

For all of the questions and confusion about just what heaven is and who will be there, the one thing that appears to unite all of the speculation is the generally agreed-upon notion that heaven is, obviously, somewhere else.

Bell, of course, isn't the first person to insist that heaven should have a lot more to say about this life than the next. Good places to begin dipping into this view are Moltmann's Theology of Hope and N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope. For my part, I think Bell should get a lot of credit for getting some of this theology out to a wider audience. This is popular theology doing what popular theology should be doing.

The best line of Chapter 2 might be the best line of the whole book:

Our eschatology shapes our ethics.

Your view of heaven and hell influences how you treat people. In my tradition, this has meant privileging bible study over feeding the hungry. Marginalizing justice in order to save souls. And in one sense, I can't blame the people I've known who have felt this way. They are just enacting their eschatology. Avoiding hell is the most important thing. Even if you are starving. There is more important than Here. But if we pray "Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven" we have a very different view. Here is as important as There.

I agree with all this, but I'd like to sharpen Bell's point. The dialectics that Bell uses are temporal and geographical. The relevant contrasts are Here vs. There and Now vs. Then.

I think those are fine but I believe they hide a deeper problem. The more fundamental contrast is Easter vs. Death. As I've written about before, the root problem behind the dysfunctions of Christianity isn't other-worldliness per se but a death-centered theology. Other-worldliness, in my view, is just a symptom of a death-centered faith.

The real problem is the idolatry of death.

One of the things I love about Walden is that it is a philosophical throwback, an example of when philosophy was about how to live. Nowadays when people think about philosophy, particularly academic philosophy, they imagine it to be a spectacular waste of time. It's all about abstractions that have little to do with how we should live. Once upon a time, philosophy was about wisdom. Not so much anymore.

Walden, by contrast, stands firmly in the Socratic tradition, a treatise that interrogates (perhaps a bit rudely) the person on the street--sifting through our ways of life, goading us to think, and trying to clear the path toward the good life.

In Chapter 1 of Walden Thoreau states as much:

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

That's what I like about Walden. It was an experiment in living, yes, but it was a philosophical experiment. It was an attempt to discern the best way to live. Not just theoretically but practically.

In this regard, I think theology can learn a lot from Walden.

Truth be told, there is a lot of theology out there that seems to me to be a massive waste of time. I have little patience for this sort of work. A part of this, I think, is due to my training in the social sciences. Clarity and concision of expression are prized in our academic writing. Say what you mean, say it clearly, and move on.

These are virtues that seem to go missing in a great deal of philosophical and theological writing, where obscurity appears to be a sign of depth. A confession: There are a lot of theologians out there who are widely lauded among theological bloggers who I find to be a complete waste of time. (Rule of thumb: If Hegel and a Heidegger emerge early in the discussion you're in for a painful experience.)

It's my belief that there are no deep, inaccessible thoughts. There are only bad writers and thinkers. That and a lot of posturing. Any theological idea worth discussing can be expressed in simple, direct, and clear sentences. True, without the requisite background it might take a lot of simple, direct, and clear sentences, but that is all you should need as far as tools go. Speak plainly! Anything more than that is posturing, pretension, and the self-protective habits of the guild.

But not all theology is like this. I recall meeting my friend Mark for the first time and asking him what his academic discipline was. He responded, "practical theology." Good Lord, I thought, Isn't that an oxymoron? Apparently it wasn't. I'm not qualified to give you a precise definition of practical theology, but at root it's an attempt to do theology for the church. It's the attempt to use theology in prophetic and pastoral ways to help equip the church for mission.

This doesn't mean that practical theologians won't engage in speculative discussions about God. It's just not speculation for the sake of speculation. Generally, there is a pastoral aim. For example, Wittgenstein famously argued that a lot of the philosophical problems philosophers debate are actually pseudo-problems created by an imprecise use of language. Basically, a lot of philosophical "problems" are due to muddled thinking and sloppy word use. Proper philosophical discussion, then, according to Wittgenstein, was to be therapeutic, an effort to show embattled philosophers that their debates were misguided and useless.

I think we need to do a lot of that sort of work in our churches. Many Christians have tangled themselves up into theological knots. So a lot of practical theology is about helping untangle those knots so that all that mental energy can get redirected into mission. "To show," in the words of Wittgenstein, "the fly out of the fly-bottle." Good theology should bring peace and calm. But a lot of Christians are theologically anxious, confused and tense. Good theology within the church can help with this, therapeutically speaking.

There is much more to say about all this. But I'm not the one to say it. Practical theologians can weigh in as they see fit. My main point is simply this: I think theology would do well to take a cue from Walden. I think theology should help "solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." Particularly the problems faced by the church. And, in fact, many practical theologians are doing just that. May their tribe increase.

In my last post I sketched a bit about how the Greek Orthodox think about Genesis 3 as a story about the etiology of death. In this post I want to go deeper into how the Orthodox view the Fall and salvation. To do this I'll be sharing extensive quotes from Orthodox theologian John Romanides' book Ancestral Sin. Romanides' work will pull together most of the threads of the earlier posts. What you'll find new in this post are first glimpses of the Orthodox view of salvation and the Christian life.

This is a long and quote-heavy post. But if you get to the end of it I think you'll find your efforts amply rewarded.

And it's possible that this post could turn you entire world upside down.

To begin, Romanides contrasts the Western and Orthodox views of sin and salvation. As we've noted, the Orthodox see the Fall as humanity's descent into corruptibility which leads to moral weakness and a continued bondage to Satan. This is a death/resurrection view. The West, by contrast, works with a sin/wrath matrix.

In the East, the fall is understood to be a consequence of man's own withdrawal from divine life and the resulting weakness and disease of human nature. Thus, man himself is seen as the cause [of death] through his cooperation with the devil...The Greek Fathers look upon salvation from a biblical perspective and see it as redemption from death and corruptibility and as the healing of human nature which was assaulted by Satan...It is quite the opposite in the West where salvation does not mean, first and foremost, salvation from death and corruptibility but from divine wrath. (p. 35)

Given this focus on human corruptibility and how our mortal natures make us vulnerable to Satan and moral disobedience, the Orthodox work with a Christus Victor view of salvation, the defeat of Satan and death:

[T]he dominant thought of the Fathers...is the biblical view that Satan is the primary cause of transgression, sin, and death. (p. 79)

The only way to shatter the power of the devil is the resurrection of the dead through the trampling down of death. (p. 80)

God became man in order to destroy the devil and to trample down death. (p. 88)

Why this focus on death as the primary predicament of humanity? Again, as noted earlier in this series, death and human corruptibility (what St. Paul calls sarx) is the motive force behind human sinfulness. The following quote is very imporant in helping us connect a theology of the slavery to death to the psychological, social, and behavioral manifestations of sin:

Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in men gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus, Satan manipulates man's fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up sin in him...Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle, self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with his original destiny of unselfish love. This state of subjection under the reign of death is the root of man's weakness in which he becomes entangled in sin at the urging of the demons and by his own consent. Resting in the hands of the devil, the power of the fear of death is the root from which self-aggrandizement, egotism, hatred, envy, and other similar passions spring up. In addition to the fact that man, [as John Chrysostom has written,] "subjects himself to anything in order to avoid dying," he constantly fears that his life is without meaning. Thus, he strives to demonstrate to himself and to others that it has worth. He loves flatterers and hates his detractors. He seeks his own and envies the success of others. He loves those who love him and hates those who hate him. He seeks security and happiness and wealth, glory, bodily pleasures, and he may even imagine that his destiny is a self-seeking eudaemonistic and passionless enjoyment of the presence of God regardless of whether or not he has true active, unselfish love for others. Fear and anxiety render man an individual. (p.162-163)

Salvation, then, is being rescued from this slavery to the fear of death.

Hebrews 2.14-15:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Preaching on this text St. John Chrysostom elaborates:

[H]e who fears death is a slave and subjects himself to everything in order to avoid dying...[But] he who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil. For indeed 'man would give skin for skin, and all things for [the sake of] his life,' [Job 2.4] and if a man should decide to disregard this, whose slave is he then? He fears no one, is in terror of no one, is higher than everyone, and is freer than everyone. For he who disregards his own life disregards more so all other things. And when the devil finds such a soul, he can accomplish in it none of his works. Tell me, though, what can he threaten? The loss of money or honor? Or exile from one's country? For these are small things to him 'who counteth not even his life dear,' says blessed Paul [Acts 20.24].

Do you see that in casting out the tyranny of death, He has dissolved the strength of the devil?

Romanides puts the matter succinctly: "[S]alvation from death equals salvation from the rule of sin." (p. 166). Thus, "If Christ had not abolished death, sin would continue to rule." (p. 166).

In all of this we see the central role of death in keeping humans bound to evil/Satan/demonic impulses and to sin and self-interest. The key to salvation, then, is cracking death. Liberated from death humanity would be reconnected to the Divine Life and, thus, set free from sin, death, and the devil.

For the Orthodox what this means is that salvation is about revivification, about taking something that was dead and bringing it back to life. Born again. Raised to life. Resurrection. Revivification.

Paul identifies righteousness with vivification. Thus, the justification of the righteous, who were held captive by death and the devil unjustly or temporarily, is the very same thing as their vivification, in other words, as the imparting to them of the uncreated and life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit through the sacrifice on the Cross. (p. 94)

We see this clearly in Paul's discussion of sin and baptism in Romans 6. Note how liberation from sin is made possible by the liberation from death.

Romans 6.1-9
What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.

That's the key to being set free from sarx, a body "ruled by sin," to be connected to the life of Jesus because "death no longer has mastery over him." Nor over the baptized. As Romanides notes (p. 73): "Christians defeated Satan through baptism."

The idea here is that what was lost in Eden, participation in the life-giving energy of God, is restored through the gift of the Holy Spirit. With the Spirit we are no longer solely sarx/flesh. We have been restored to life via the Spirit. For "The carnal and animal man is the whole man who is bereft of the energy of the Holy Spirit that makes man incorruptible." (p. 141; cf. Gal. 5.18, 6.7-8; 1 Cor. 2.14-3.4; 2 Cor. 3.6; Eph. 4.30; 1 Thess. 5.19; Rom. 8.11).

Just as the death of the body is its separation from the soul, likewise the death of the soul is its separation from the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit. Only those who have the Spirit of God are partakers of the true immortality and life of God...This is why, when we speak of man's condition under the power of death, we mean not only the tyranny of the corruptibility of the body but also the separation of the soul from the life-giving energy of the Spirit. (p. 131)

The storyline goes like this. Humanity was on the path to perfection, immortality, and communion with God. But through the envy of the devil and human cooperation death entered the world. Humanity was, thus, severed from the Image/Spirit of God. Humans were now animals, biodegradable creatures, flesh, sarx. And as biodegradable creatures humans became enslaved to their fear of death. Self-preservation at all costs became the rule of life in the Darwinian, post-Eden ecosystem.

To save us from this situation we had to be reconnected to the Source of Life. In the cross Christ defeats death and the devil and allows the Spirit to be poured out on flesh/sarx. This occurs on Pentecost and throughout the book of Acts. Salvation is revivification, Spirit pouring onto sarx, a reconnection with God. Eden restored. Adam fell off the path. And we, inheriting the mortal condition, were powerless to get back on the path. Christ came and restored the lost connection, setting us back on the path.

Salvation in Christ is the restoration of man to the path of perfection and immortality through the communion of the Holy Spirit. (p. 152)

So, via the Spirit, the connection has been restored. Those in the Spirit are back on the path toward perfection, immortality, and ultimate communion with God. But here's the twist for Western Christians. We can fall back off the path. The connection can be re-broken. Salvation begins and is made possible with the gift of the Spirit. But we can thwart, reject and "grieve the Spirit." Salvation is a process, a journey, an end point. We have the Spirit, the life-giving connection, the hope. But we aren't saved yet. We have to fight. We have to go to war against sin, death and the devil.

Participation in the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit is not given permanently, once for all, by Baptism...Man is able to participate in the energy of God that can make him incorruptible only through the struggle for perfection...the personal and corporate struggle against the devil who reigns because of death. (p. 172-173)

Those who live in Christ belong to the realm of the Spirit of life, while the rest of the world belongs to the realm of death. Although the battle for perfection and immortality in Christ has been won by the triumphant saints who await the final victory, for the militant faithful, however, the communion in the Spirit of life that leads to incorruptibility is not yet an accomplished and permanent reality. On this side of the grave, those who live in Christ have not yet permanently acquired the Spirit's life-giving energy that renders man incorruptible. The permanent gift of immortality depends on how much labor the Christian undertakes to live according to the Spirit during this life. Thus, the faithful on this side of the grave, for the present, have only the "betrothal to the Spirit." (p. 140-141).

The communion [with God's] life-giving energy, however, is not the same in all the faithful. It ebbs and flows between mortal condemnation and the endowment of incorruptibility unto eternal life. "Indeed," according to what the great Basil said, "the worthy do not each partake of the Holy Spirit in the same measure; rather, in proportion to the faith of each man, He metes out His energy." (p. 141)

In this view, the Christian life is both developmental and militant. It is the constant and continual struggle against sin, death, and the devil in our lives and in the world around us. And through this fight we become perfected. More mature in the faith. Participating in greater portions with the Spirit. We build with precious stones rather than with straw:

1 Corinthians 3.10-15
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.

What, exactly, does this fight (this "building with precious stones") look like on a day to day basis?

Recall, what is the power of death in our lives? It's fear. Once again Hebrews 2: "to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death."

The battle of the Christian life, then, is the battle between fear and love. Between self-interest and self-giving. Between Incurvatus in se and Excurvatus ex se, from being "curved inward" on ourselves to being "curved outward" toward others. This is the moral nexus of the Christian life, the struggle between fear and love.

There is a distinction "between those who live according to Satan and death and those who struggle in Christ to attain to unselfish love that is free of self-interest and necessity." (p. 133)

The salvation of man is dependent upon how much, under the guidance of God, he is capable of exercising himself in the cultivation of a genuine, unselfish, and unconstrained love for God and his fellow man. (p. 121)

The will of God, like the purpose of the Church's existence, is the salvation of men through perfection in love for God and one another. (p. 120)

It is clear that any denial of Christ out of fear was regarded by the ancient Church as a real lack of unselfish faith and as a fall into the hands of him who has the power of fear and death...The Lord did not hesitate to speak to man's instinct of survival or self-preservation. (p. 118, 119; cf. Matt. 16.26; Mark 8.36-37; Luke 9.25)

Love that is free of self-interest and necessity fears nothing...All human unrest is rooted in inherited psychological and bodily infirmities, that is, in the soul's separation from grace and in the body's corruptibility, from which springs all selfishness. Any perceived threat automatically triggers fear and uneasiness. Fear does not allow a man to be perfected in love...Being under the sway of death and not having real and correct faith in God, man is anxious over everything and is ruled by selfish bodily and psychological motives and, thus, he is unable to love unselfishly and freely. He loves and has faith according to what he perceives to be to his own advantage...Thus, he is deprived of his original destiny and is off the mark spiritually. In biblical language, these failures and deviations are called sins. The fountain of man's personal sin is the power of death that is in the hands of the devil and in man's own willing submission to him. (p. 116-117)

Just as God, above all, is free of every need and self-interest, the spiritual man who has the Spirit struggles and becomes perfected in the love according to Christ, love that is delivered of all need and self-interest. "If the Son, then, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." [John 8.36] (p. 153)

That is a whole lot to chew on. But with these understandings firmly in hand can now start to make a slow turn from theology to the lived experience of the Christian, to the dynamics of fear and love in day to day existence. And to help make the turn let's add some more passages to help guide our thoughts forward.

Hebrews 2.14-15:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

I John 3.7-10, 14-18
Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.

We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

1 John 4.16b-21
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous. And we know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. For anyone who does not love remains in death. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?

There is no fear in love.

In this world we are like Jesus.

A thought heading into the weekend...

I saw that the meaning of life was to make a living,
its goal to become a councilor,
that the rich delight of love was to acquire a well-to-do girl,
that the blessedness of friendship was to help each other in financial difficulties,
that wisdom was whatever the majority assumed it to be,
that enthusiasm was to give a speech,
that courage was to risk being fined ten dollars,
that cordiality was to say "May it do you good" after a meal,
that piety was to go to communion once a year.

This I saw,

and I laughed.

--Søren Kierkegaard

Thanks to Lawton for passing on this link to a recent article in Relevant Magazine by Brandon Peach entitled Will the Internet Kill Christianity?

The article starts by citing the recent argument made by Christian apologist Josh McDowell suggesting that young people are rejecting Christian fundamentalism because of the Internet:

“What has changed everything?” Christian apologist Josh McDowell asked his audience on July 15 at the Billy Graham Center in Asheville, N.C. His talk, titled “Unshakeable Truth, Relevant Faith,” had detailed a certain uncomfortable fact in anticipation of the question: that young Christians in America are rejecting Christian fundamentalism—and doctrinaire concepts such as absolute truth and biblical infallibility—in droves. Why is faith in God being supplanted, earlier and earlier, by relativism, secularism and skepticism? McDowell’s answer was simple: the Internet.

What, exactly, is going on with the Internet that is making this happen? According to McDowell, young Christians are being exposed early and often to secular and atheistic arguments found online. Peach seems to agree with this assessment, suggesting that the Internet is dominated by the voices of irreligion:

The fact is, a relationship between irreligion and the Internet was bound to happen. Religion has long enjoyed a culturally accepted free space in which to share rhetoric—the Church. Atheism has suffered the exact opposite. America’s wariness of (or its outright antagonism toward, in its greatest excesses) irreligion has forced atheism to the fringes of its society. What the Internet has provided is a free space for atheists in this nation to connect with those across the globe whose cultural milieus are more inviting of all brands of irreligion; indeed, some in which secularism is a majority viewpoint.

It is no wonder, therefore, that atheism is gaining steam in the U.S.

I don't know if these assessments are correct. But I do think that marginalized voices at the local level can aggregate and gain steam, facilitated by the Internet, at the global level. That is, I don't think the Internet is more atheistic, but it is more pluralistic.

Regardless, I'm not sure what McDowell's solution is. Information quarantine?

Here's a radical idea. Rather than sticking our heads in the sand, why don't we come up with some better answers to the questions the kids are asking.

The new freshmen have arrived at ACU!

This morning, as a part of our Passport and Welcome Week activities, I got to visit with some of our incoming Psychology majors to get their first semester schedules worked out. This Thursday our faculty, along with spouses and kids, will eat dinner with all of our new majors.

Interacting with our new majors today I was struck by the diversity of their emotions. Some were already homesick. Some were scared and overwhelmed. Some were excited and bouncing off the walls with energy and excitement.

Thinking about our new freshmen, and all our ACU students, I was looking for a psalm of protection to pray over them. Psalm 121 is a leading and quirky contender:

Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD watches over you—
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;
the LORD will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore.

Two quirky details draw me to this psalm. These occur in verses five and six.

In verse five we read that the LORD is your shade at your right hand / the sun will not harm you by day.

If you haven't heard, Texas has been baking all summer. The projected highs for the next seven days in Abilene are: 104, 103, 106, 107, 105, and 104 degrees. You get the idea. So, yes, the incoming freshmen need Psalm 121 prayed over them: the LORD is your shade at your right hand / the sun will not harm you by day.

The second quirky detail immediately follows the petition for protection from the sun: the sun will not harm you by day / nor the moon by night.

Beware the moon! Pray that it will not harm you. Pray for protection from both sunstroke and moonstroke. (BTW, that's how The Message renders these verses: God's your Guardian, right at your side to protect you / Shielding you from sunstroke / sheltering you from moonstroke.)

I worked for four years at an inpatient psychiatric hospital. Invariably, after some evening when the night shift reported all sorts of acting out by the patients, some grizzled veteran of a nurse would say, "Well, it was a full moon last night." The moon was always invoked by the staff to explain the crazy behavior of the patients on nights when the moon was full.

I've found that is is very common. In just about every profession that has to deal with a population in the evenings--hospital workers, police, prison guards, dorm supervisors--the moon is often invoked to explain why, when the moon is full, people seem to lose their minds.

Of course, you know that this is where we get the words "lunatic" and "lunacy" from, the ancient (and persistent!) notion that the full moon makes people a little nutty. It's what sits behind the whole werewolf myth, the sense that there is a "monster" inside us that gets pulled out by the sight of the full moon.

Is this a pagan notion? Well, there it sits in Psalm 121: A prayer for protection from the moon.

Which brings me back to my college students. Sure, they need protection from sunstroke in West Texas. But what they really need is protection from moonstroke. From the lunacy of college nights. Full moon or not. Their howling at the moon during the semester is probably the greater threat to their sanity, morality, life and limb and GPA.

And so, here at the start of the school year, let the righteous lift up this prayer of protection--Psalm 121--for the moonstruck college students the world over:

The LORD watches over you—
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

By my count, there are two ways you can end up in hell.

The first way is that God predestined for you to be there. In the second way, in contrast to the first, God wants you to be in heaven but you reject God's offer of grace. That is, you're in hell because that was your choice.

(There's actually a third way of going to hell involving Las Vegas, three chickens and a circus clown. But it's a rare that anybody goes this route.)

I grew up believing in the second way of going to hell. Specifically, I believed (and still do!) that God "wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2.4). If this is so, it stood to reason that if you ended up in hell you had rebelled and rejected God during your life. God wanted to save you, extended the gift of grace, and you rejected it.

When I was young, this explanation seemed perfectly cogent and reasonable. God makes a gracious offer. You refuse. You reap the consequences. Sure, hell is bad. But we shouldn't blame God. Everyone had their chance.

Or did they?

From time to time at ACU I've led a chapel where I've asked students the following question: If you had one question you could ask God what would it be? What question of faith keeps you up at night?

Overwhelmingly, having done this with hundreds and hundreds of college students, the responses fall into one of two groups: The problem of suffering and the problem of moral luck. Based upon my sampling, I'd wager that these are the two biggest stumbling blocks to faith: The problem of suffering and the problem of moral luck.

The title of Chapter 1 of Rob Bell's Love Wins is a question about moral luck: "What about the Flat Tire?" This question is associated with a discussion in the chapter about how we can expect people to accept Jesus if they have never heard the good news or if the "news" brought to them is messed up (i.e., a distortion of the gospel) or delivered by a faulty messenger (e.g., some huckster faith healer or hypocritical preacher). Basically, Bell is highlighting the contingencies inherent in the process of evangelism. So he writes:

If our salvation, our future, our destiny is dependent on others bringing the message to us, teaching us, showing us--what happens if they don't do their part?

What if the missionary gets a flat tire?

This is the flat tire of the title. It's not the only issue, problem or question Bell raises in this ramble of a chapter where he asks question after question. But the tire functions as a sort of metaphor, a metaphor for moral luck.

Moral luck is a termed coined by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Moral luck refers to how we extend moral approbation and disapprobation to people, thinking people "good" or "bad", when many of the factors affecting our judgements these people fall outside of their control. Some people are perceived as "good" when, in fact, they are simply very fortunate. Others are deemed "bad" when, in fact, they are mainly very unlucky.

"Who sinned, this man or his parents?"
"Neither."

Some of this is fairly straightforward. I might accidentally hit a child playing in the street with my car. Wrong time. Wrong place. And that death hangs over my head. Sometimes accidents happen and sometimes those accidents have a moral cloud.

That's unfair of course. If it was an accident there should be no moral blame involved. And yet, we aren't very good at keeping that distinction clear. Ever feel guilty for something that was out of your control?

And the picture gets even more complicated when start to think about accidents of birth. Some of us are raised in Christian, flag-waving, American homes. Some of us are born to devout and patriotic Muslim families in Iran. How quickly do the kids from those two homes make their way to Jesus? Not to say that radical change and conversion isn't possible. Biographies of this sort do exist (e.g., Saul's conversion to Paul). But conversions of this magnitude are atypical and rare. Most of us go along with the god of our culture and/or family. Few Christians ponder how resistant they are to Muslim evangelism to note how it would be the same if the shoe were on the other foot.

In short, should I get "credit" for being a Christian? Or am I merely lucky?

What about that flat tire?

All this is to say that I was very pleased to see Rob Bell raising the issue of moral luck at the start of Love Wins. As I said, I think moral luck is one of the two biggest stumbling blocks to faith. And as best I can tell, few young people feel that they are getting honest, direct, and substantive answers to their questions on this issue. I've seen very little popular (or academic for that matter) engagement with this issue. That's a problem. You have this huge stumbling block to faith with every little by way of recognition, engagement and response. No wonder young people are getting fed up with church.

Of course, if you're a regular reader here, you know I've cobbled together my answer to the question of moral luck. Not saying I'm right, but at least I recognize the problem and have struggled to find something substantive to say on the subject. I think it's time for the church to catch up. And for that, I appreciate Love Wins for pushing the question.

After setting out his famous summation of the modern condition--"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"--Thoreau goes on in Chapter One of Walden to describe a bit about why he thinks this situation has come to pass.

His first target is a thoughtlessness that resigns itself to the status quo. The attitude seems to be "Well, this is what everyone says is the 'good life' so that is what I'll do." More, this sentiment is less a conscious thought than it is unconsciously and unreflectively assumed. We just follow others. Doing what they do. Pursuing what they pursue. Wanting what they want. Admiring what they admire. Applauding what they applaud. Blessing what they bless. Cursing what they curse.

All without thinking.

Thus we are back to the great theme of Walden--living life deliberately. And a part of this deliberation is to step back and question the patterns of life that have captured us. Mainly because people just blindly follow everyone around them. This leads me to the next quote I'd like to highlight from Walden:

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

Here we engage with one of the other great themes of Walden: Nonconformity. The willingness to question, object, protest, and resist.

The connections here with the Christian faith are almost too obvious to mention. One famous passage will perhaps make the point explicit:

"Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world."

A confession: I'm a bit of a nonconformist. I try to dress differently. Think differently. Behave differently. I'm a little bit off. Not much mind you, but I'm not drawing precisely inside the lines. I try to blur the boundaries of every "pattern" I find myself in.

This often gets me into trouble. I go too far at times. I've offended people.

You can blame Thoreau. As I've said, this book has affected the way I live. I spend a lot of time repenting of my good behavior.

I could say a lot more about all this, how it all plays out in my life, but I've already gone too far in the direction of vanity in this post. If you are going to be a rebel don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. But I do want to say this.

If nonconformity is an important part of being a Christian--"Do not be conformed!"--then this is a skill that needs constant care and cultivation. And the main thing that needs to be cultivated is this: Indifference to the crowd. The main reason we conform is because we live in fear. Mostly fear of social censor or disapprobation. Fear of the sidelong glance, condescending smirk, and the whispering of the clique. We need to inoculate ourselves against these fears so that when the real tests come we have reserves of courage than can be drawn upon. We've got to get used to saying "No," used to going a different way, used to looking weird. You can't conform everyday of your life and then expect, when the heat comes, to do anything different. You have to inoculate yourself.

When the sun sets on our lives let us not lament: "What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"

Having talked a great deal about the interrelationship between sin and death I'd like to start sharing some thoughts about the Greek Orthodox view of Genesis 3.

To recap, across these posts I've been talking about the insight we gain if we switch the directionality of relationship between sin and death as typically understood in Western Christianity. The traditional understanding is this:

Sin causing Death

Biblical articulation: "The wages of sin is death." (Rom. 6.23)

The model I'm exploring aligns more with an Eastern understanding:

Death causing Sin

Biblical articulation: "The sting of death is sin." (1 Cor. 15.56)

Obviously, what we find in the biblical text is a bidirectional relationship. I think this is best imagined as the causal loop I sketched in my last post.

Still, the whole cycle had to get kickstarted. And in the beginning it does seem that a Primal Sin introduces death into the world. So in that sense, sin caused death.

However, I'd like to nuance that simplistic vision.

To start, there are those who argue that the real issue at the heart of Genesis 3--the biblical story of "the Fall"--isn't to establish a causal model about the relationship between sin and death. The issue, rather, is a story about the etiology of death and about who is to blame for introducing death into the world. In this, Genesis 3 is more about theodicy ("Where did death come from?") than soteriology (a story about "original sin").

Historically and theologically speaking, I doubt the ancient Hebrews wrote Genesis 3 to provide Christians with an account of "Original Sin." So what were the writers of Genesis trying to explain? Well, they looked around, like we all do, and noted how death is the great scourge of humanity. We all, the Genesis 3 writers and ourselves, resonate with the teacher of Ecclesiastes:

Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.

So the question is asked: Why is there death in the world? And was death a part of God's plan?

The answer Genesis 3 gives is no, death wasn't a part of God's plan. Death wasn't created by God. As it says in Wisdom 1.13, "God did not make death." So how did death get here? Wisdom points out two different causes. The first is the Devil:

Wisdom 2.23-24a (NRSV)
[F]or God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil's envy death entered the world...

This jibes well with Genesis 3. The serpent is there at the start tempting Eve into eating the apple which ultimately leads to the introduction of death into the world.

But the Devil needed willing participants. Thus, Wisdom also puts a lot of the blame upon humanity.

Wisdom 1.12-16a (NRSV)
Do not invite death by the error of your life,
or bring on destruction by the works of your hands;
because God did not make death,
and does not delight in the death of the living.
For he created all things so that they might exist;
the generative forces of the world are wholesome,
and there is no destructive poison in them,
and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.
For righteousness is immortal.
But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death;
considering him a friend, they pined away and made a covenant with him...

In the first passage we have the "envy of the devil" as the cause of death in the world. Here in this second passage we have the "ungodly" who by their words and deeds "summoned" death. We can understand this last as both historical and ongoing. Adam and Eve summoned death and we, in word and deed, continue to summon death. We live life controlled by a "covenant with death." In the language of Hebrews 2.15 we are "slaves to the fear of death."

Note, again, the continued close association between death and the Devil. Prior to the onset of death the "dominion of Hades" was not on earth. But now, with the onset of death, the "dominion of Hades" rules our world (cf. Matt. 4.8; Eph. 6.12). More, it's unclear who the "him" is referring to in this text. In the phrase "But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death" the word "death" is actually "him." Literally, Verse 16 should read:

But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned him;
considering him a friend, they pined away and made a covenant with him.

So who is the "him"? The NRSV guesses that the him is "death" giving the reading above. But if you look at the context, right before Verse 16 we have the mention of the dominion of Hades. Thus, it seems reasonable to have the text read like this:

But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned the devil;
considering him a friend, they pined away and made a covenant with him.

Nothing much is riding on this point, but it continues to show the close associations between sin, death, and the devil in both the Old and New Testaments. Wisdom 1 is a parallel text to Hebrew 2.14 where we read of "the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil."

Sin, Death, the Devil. It's the unholy Trinity.

Returning to Genesis 3, we see how humanity is also blamed for the onset of death. But in all this what Genesis is giving us is less a description of a "fall from moral perfection" than a story about the etiology of death. Yes, human disobedience is a part of this story. But it's only a part. Narratively speaking, the devil/serpent is the true source of death. And here we are back to our Christus Victor themes. That Jesus came to earth less to solve our "sin problem" than to "undo the work of the devil" (1 John 3.8).

Summarizing, Genesis 3 is less interested in giving us a story about the origins of sin than it is about giving us a story about the origins of death. Phrased another way, Genesis 3 is less interested in explaining why humans are "depraved" than it is in explaining why we die.

This is one reason why the Greek Orthodox talk about "Ancestral Sin" rather than St. Augustine's "Original Sin." According to St. Augustine and everyone in Latin Christianity who followed him (which is just about everybody), the story in Genesis 3 is a story about how a spiritual taint or flaw was passed on from Adam and Eve to the entire human race. How exactly this "flaw" is passed on from person to person and what it consists of is notoriously unclear. (Is it genetic? Is it spiritual? No one really knows. It's a theological chimera.)

The Orthodox, however, and much to their credit in my opinion, didn't go along with St. Augustine. To be sure, we do inherit a predicament from the Primal Couple. But what we inherit isn't a moral stain. Rather, we inherit the world they left us. We are exiles from Eden. Which is just a fancy way of saying we die. Created for incorruption we are now corruptible.

We don't inherit a stain from Adam and Eve. We inherit a situation. The mortal situation.

That's the simple take home point of Genesis 3. It's just trying to explain the view out your window. "Look around you," says Genesis 3, "this isn't Eden." Death wasn't a part of God's plan for us. But now that death reigns, brought on by the devil and human disobedience, we find ourselves enslaved. We, and all of Creation, cry out for rescue.

Romans 8.22-23
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.

In preparing for the study I'm leading at the local prison I came across something that shed new light (for me) on Jesus' "I am the vine" discourse in the Gospel of John.

The insight came by coming to understand how a particular song in the book of Isaiah shaped Israel's understanding of her experience of exile. The song comes from Isaiah 5.1-7:

Now I will sing for the one I love
a song about his vineyard:

My beloved had a vineyard
on a rich and fertile hill.
He plowed the land, cleared its stones,
and planted it with the best vines.
In the middle he built a watchtower
and carved a winepress in the nearby rocks.
Then he waited for a harvest of sweet grapes...

The "Song of the Vineyard", as some translations designate the song, starts with verses telling the story of the "beloved" who creates and plants a vineyard and is now waiting for a sweet harvest. But Verse 2 ends on an ominous note.

...but the grapes that grew were bitter.

The song then turns, in verses 3-4, to compare Israel to the disappointing vineyard.

Now, you people of Jerusalem and Judah,
you judge between me and my vineyard.
What more could I have done for my vineyard
that I have not already done?
When I expected sweet grapes,
why did my vineyard give me bitter grapes?

Given that Israel has yielded "bitter grapes" despite all that God had done, the song concludes with God's judgments.

Now let me tell you
what I will do to my vineyard:
I will tear down its hedges
and let it be destroyed.
I will break down its walls
and let the animals trample it.
I will make it a wild place
where the vines are not pruned and the ground is not hoed,
a place overgrown with briers and thorns.
I will command the clouds
to drop no rain on it.

The nation of Israel is the vineyard of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.
The people of Judah are his pleasant garden.
He expected a crop of justice,
but instead he found oppression.
He expected to find righteousness,
but instead he heard cries of violence.

This Song of the Vineyard shaped how Israel explained her exile. Failing to produce "sweet grapes" Israel is now "overgrown" with oppression, no longer protected by "walls" and "trampled" by "animals" (read: Romans). What was once a "pleasant garden" is now "destroyed."

The hearers of Jesus' message understood themselves to be in the state of exile as expressed in the Song of the Vineyard. The messianic expectation was that the Messiah would come as a second Moses to lead a second Exodus. Given this expectation a part of Jesus' Kingdom-message was to proclaim the end of exile in his own ministry and person. And one way Jesus does this is by proclaiming a new ending to the Song of the Vineyard:

John 15.1-8
“I am the true grapevine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more. You have already been pruned and purified by the message I have given you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.

“Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned. But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want, and it will be granted! When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father.

What I found interesting about the exilic connection with Jesus' vine imagery is that I'd always considered "I am the vine" to simply be a quaint horticultural metaphor. But in the minds of Jesus' audience the image of a "true vine" that "bears fruit" to the glory of God is a radical and epic proclamation. It is the revolutionary proclamation that in the person of Jesus the long exile of Israel has ended.

Here and there on the Internet I've seen people discuss the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. Then, a few days ago, I ran across Milosz's poem "Meaning" at The Dish.

Suffice it to say, I was blown away. The poem is almost an exact expression (if the word "exact" is appropriate for poetry) of how I experience the life of faith. I've now got Milosz's New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 on order.

Meaning by Czeslaw Milosz

When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.

On top of the other things I'm writing about (e.g., my ongoing series on the Slavery of Death) I thought it time to write a bit about Rob Bell's book Love Wins.

Perhaps you've heard of it?

As most of you are aware, the publication of Rob Bell's Love Wins kicked up a storm of controversy and discussion. Some of it started immediately when the promotional video first hit the Internet.

LOVE WINS. from Rob Bell on Vimeo.

At the height of the controversy a few readers asked me to weigh in. I demurred. It seemed that a lot of the discussion at the time was among evangelicals trying to sort themselves out and, given that I didn't have a dog in that hunt, I didn't want to contribute to the noise. But now that some of the smoke has cleared I thought I'd spend some time working through the book.

To start, my plan is to write a post about each chapter, starting in this post with the Preface. But this won't be a book review. Mainly all I want to do is pick something out of each chapter that I find interesting, either because I agree with it, disagree with it, or simply find the point to be worthy of thinking about.

But if you care about my overall impression of Love Wins here it is: I think the book is very helpful and useful. For this reason. Prior to Love Wins there weren't many good "first book off the shelf" choices for those of us wanting to hand reading material to people coming to us with questions and concerns about the traditional doctrine of hell. When people came to us asking questions our first response was often "Have you read C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce?" That wasn't a bad recommendation as The Great Divorce is easy to read and it does expand one's theological imagination. Which, to start, is what a lot of people need. But The Great Divorce isn't for everyone. It's kind of an odd story and a lot of people have trouble working out the implicit theology in light of the biblical narrative. (Kind of how many evangelicals miss the Christus Victor atonement in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.)

Beyond The Great Divorce sometimes I would recommend George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons. But MacDonald's prose isn't easy. More recently I've been recommending The Evangelical Universalist or The Inescapable Love of God. But those two books are a bit too polemical for a person just starting to ask questions.

In short, as best I could tell there wasn't a good book out there that fit this very important niche. What did you reach for when someone came to you with troubling questions about hell? Nothing really recommended itself. But now I can hand over a copy of Love Wins and say, "Start here. If you like this I can point you in different directions if you want to go deeper." And that further exploration doesn't have to be into universalism. I could be about annihilationism or a deeper exploration into the history and meanings of Sheol and Gehenna.

So that's my overall assessment. Love Wins a wonderful read for those just starting to ask questions or for those whose faith is starting to falter, quite understandably, due to the traditional doctrine of hell.

With that out of the way, let's start with the Preface of the book entitled "Millions of Us." The quote from the Preface that I'd like to focus on is this:

Some communities don't permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: "We don't discuss those things here."

I don't care what you think about Love Wins, but I think Bell is spot on with this particular assessment. Too many churches say to their members, and their young people in particular, "We don't discuss those things here." And I think the younger generation has had just about enough of this sort of thing. And I'm quite tired of it as well.

A lot people smacked Love Wins because it raised more questions than answers. But truth be told, I think that is sort of the point. I sure as hell have more questions than answers. (Was that a pun?) So I appreciate Bell raising the questions and giving voice to them. That's the sort of book a lot of people need. They need permission to ask questions. Hence the title of the Preface, "Millions of Us." You are not alone in your doubts. You're not faithless, weird, or strange. There are millions of us.

I could go on and on about this, but let me just end with a story.

A few years ago I was teaching in my adult bible class at the Highland Church of Christ. I was doing a lesson on doubt. I started with this question, "Have you ever had doubts? If so, let's share them as I write them on the board." It was quiet at first, but then the responses flowed out...

I've doubted that God exists...
I've doubted that God really cares...
I've doubted that prayers make any difference...
I've doubted that there is a heaven after death...

So many doubts came out that I filled the board and it took all of the class time. After class I worried. I thought the class had gone really badly. I mean, all we did for the entire class was to list our doubts and put them on the board. There was no time for a "positive" response. No pretty bow affixed. No "take home point" or encouraging application. Just one long list of doubts.

A few days later a faculty friend and member of the Highland class shared with me this story. Apparently, a prospective ACU student, a highschooler, was visiting Highland with his parents on Sunday and had wandered into my doubt class. Hearing this, I inwardly groaned. I was sure the next part of the story was going to be the parents blasting me for destroying the faith or their son. But this is what the parents said to my friend: "When you see him, please tell Dr. Beck how important that class was for our son. It just might have saved his faith. He had been struggling with church for some time, but that class opened his eyes. Never in his life had he heard an adult admit to doubting God. Consequently, he felt he was strange and that religion wasn't for him. He felt alone, like no one understood what he was feeling and thinking. But hearing all those adults sharing their doubts made him realize that it was okay to doubt and that he really does fit in at church."

Yes, there are millions of us.

Soon after offering his apology for the autobiographical nature of Walden, Thoreau quickly moves on to one of his major themes summed up in the famous words:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Thoreau was writing in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. You don't see much of that revolution on the idyllic banks of Walden. But you do hear it. Thoreau, in the chapter Sounds, writes about the sound of the train that would disrupt the quiet of the woods. The Fitchburg Railroad track was about 1/3 of a mile from Thoreau's cabin and Thoreau would often walk the railroad track as this was the quickest route into town. Thoreau walked the track so much during his time on Walden Pond that, he wrote, the "men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently take me for an employee..."

It's an interesting juxtaposition, physically and spiritually. Walden Pond and the Fitchburg Railroad track. Side by side.

We tend to think of Walden as a retreat into nature, an escape from the smoke and coal and urban grime. And it is. But Thoreau's meditations on the railroad and the commerce associated with it reveal Walden to be a bit more nuanced. For example, Thoreau writes in Walden that "What recommends commerce to me is it enterprise and bravery." There was something about the railroad, in its power, energy, vitality, and regularity that won a grudging respect from Thoreau. The coming of modernity wasn't all bad. At the very least it gave him a quick path into town.

But elsewhere in Walden Thoreau would treat commerce harshly. In the chapter Economy he writes:

But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

I think we understand the tensions Thoreau was articulating. There is something pretty amazing about the modern, technological world. Externally speaking, things look pretty good. I, for one, really enjoy my air conditioner here in West Texas (particularly given our recent heat wave). And I also like this laptop and the Internet. Etcetera. But internally, we sense a certain lassitude. Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age calls this the "malaise of modernity," a spiritual dryness the seems to infect most of life. And perhaps there has been no better description of this feeling than Thoreau's famous line: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

According to Charles Taylor we often confront this desperation in crises of meaning. In A Secular Age he writes: "Almost every action of ours has a point; we're trying to get to work, or to find a place to buy a bottle of milk after hours. But we can stop and ask why we're doing these things, and that points us beyond to the significance of these significances. The issue may arise for us in a crisis, where we feel that what has been orienting our life up to now lacks real value, weight...A crucial feature of the malaise of [modernity] is the sense that all these answers are fragile, or uncertain; that a moment may come, where we no longer feel that our chosen path is compelling, or cannot justify it to ourselves or others. There is a fragility of meaning..." And because of this void of meaning "the quotidian is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, in order to live has not meaning, beauty, depth, sense." Here in modernity we experience "a terrible flatness in the everyday."

Why has life become flat? Paul Tillich, in an 1958 essay for The Saturday Evening Post entitled "The Lost Dimension of Religion," shares an analysis that echos the spirit of Walden:

How did the dimension of depth become lost?...The loss of the dimension of depth is caused by the relation of man to his world and to himself in our period, the period in which nature is being subjected scientifically and technically to the control of man. In this period, life in the dimension of depth is replaced by life in the horizontal dimension. The driving forces of the industrial society of which we are a part go ahead horizontally and not vertically...

One does not need to look far beyond everyone's daily experience in order to find examples to describe this predicament. Indeed our daily life in office and home, in cars and airplanes, at parties and conferences, while reading magazines and watching television, while looking at advertisements and hearing radio, are in themselves continuous examples of a life which has lost the dimension of depth...

Nothing, perhaps, is more symptomatic of the loss of the dimension of depth than the permanent discussions about the existence or nonexistence of God--a discussion in which both sides are equally wrong, because the discussion itself is wrong and possible only after the loss of the dimension of depth.

When in this way man has deprived himself of the dimension of depth and the symbols expressing it, he then becomes a part of the horizontal plane. He loses his self and becomes a thing among things. He becomes an element in the process of manipulated production and manipulated consumption....

But man has not ceased to be man. He resists this fate anxiously, desperately, courageously. He asks the question, for what?

At root, Walden is asking this question, trying to recover or restore the lost dimension of depth. And to be clear, Thoreau's answers in Walden are more romantic than religious. Still, we understand why Thoreau went out to Walden Pond. We all know, deep in our bones, what he was looking for.

"[B]ecoming and being a saint does not mean being perfect but being whole; it does not not mean being exceptionally religious, or being religious at all, it means being liberated from religiosity and religious pietism of any sort; it does not mean being morally better, it means being exemplary; it does not mean being godly, but rather being truly human; it does not mean being otherworldly, but it means being deeply implicated in the practical existence of this world without succumbing to this world or any aspect of this world, no matter how beguiling. Being holy means a radical self-knowledge; a sense of who one is, a consciousness of one's identity so thorough that it is no longer confused with the identities of others, of persons or of any creatures or of God or of any idols.

For human beings, relief and remedy from such profound confusion concerning a person's own identity and the identity and character of the Word of God becomes the indispensable and authenticating ingredient of being holy, and it is the most crucial aspect of becoming mature--or of being fulfilled--as a human in this world, in fallen creation. This is, at the same time, the manner through which humans can live humanly, in sanity and conscience, in the fallen world as it is. And these twin faculties, sanity and conscience--rather than some sentimental or pietistic or self-serving notion of moral perfection--constitute the usual marks of sanctification. That which distinguishes the saint is not eccentricity but sanity, not perfection but conscience."

--William Stringfellow, from The Politics of Spirituality

Going forward I want to get this sketch out there so we can visualize how I'm understanding the relationships between the Fall, death, sarx, and sin:


Though we haven't gotten to it yet, the "Fall" starts the cycle off separating us from God, the Source of Life. The result of this separation is death and the mortal condition. This situation kicks off a reinforcing loop, a self-perpetuating cycle that "traps" us. Death creates mortality fears that put acute pressure on sarx, our biological contingency. Fearful and anxious to stave off death we move into sinful practices. Envy, greed, selfishness, paranoia, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, rivalry, and violence. We might call this the Malthusian, Hobbesian or Girardian condition based upon the work of Thomas Malthus, Thomas Hobbes and Rene Girard. Here's how Mark Lilla describes of the Hobbesian/Malthusian/Girardian situation in his book The Stillborn God (p. 81,82):

Natural man, according to Hobbes, is desiring man--which also means he is fearful man. If he finds himself alone in nature we will try to satisfy his desires, will only partially succeed, and will fear losing what he has. But if other human beings are present that fear will be heightened to an almost unbearable degree. Given his awareness of himself as a creature beset by desire--a stream of desire that ends, says Hobbes, only in death--he assumes others are similarly driven. "Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth," Hobbes writes, "he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts and passions of all other men." That means he can think of them only as potential competitors, trying to satisfy desires that may come into conflict with his own.
...
That is why the natural social condition of mankind is war--if not explicit, armed hostilities, then a perpetual state of anxious readiness in preparation for conflict. Even the Bible recognizes this tendency. Hobbes asserts: Cain killed his brother not because of an explicit threat but because he feared losing what he had and was ignorant of God's reasons for favoring Abel. Fear, ignorance, and desire are the basic motivations of all human activity, political and religious. One does not have to assume man is fallen, or evil, or possessed by demons to explain why those motivations produce war. One need only understand how these basic motivations combine in the human mind, both when man is alone and when he is in society.

Here's how the theologian S. Mark Heim describes the dynamics above, starting with the separation from God in the Fall:

Removed from Eden we are "[u]nourished by the divine energy, our existence fades into subjection to corruption and death. In such a state, our mortality becomes a source of anxiety. Futile attempts to defend ourselves from it lead us into active sin and estrange us from trust in God. Now sinfulness is more a result of mortality than mortality from sinfulness. To say that humans are 'conceived in sin' does not mean that some guilt or evil inclination is passed on to them in the act of their conception, but that what they inherit is a mortal human nature, which became mortal as a result of sin.

So, given human biodegradability, the fear of death moves us into sin. And this sin keeps us separated from God keeping us stuck in death. And the cycle repeats itself.

This is what I mean by "the slavery of death." Hence Paul's cry in Romans 7:

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?

In light of my recent series The Slavery of Death, particularly our discussions about "slavery to the fear of death," you might enjoy this piece from The Onion (h/t Steve): Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla it Will Die Someday.


Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

What follows are some notes on Paul's anthropology, with a particular focus on Paul's use of the words sarx and soma. The notes are based on James Dunn's The Theology of Paul the Apostle.

If we want to analyze the relationship between sin and death one of the things we need to do is get our heads around St. Paul's anthropology, his view of human personhood. And two of the most important terms in Paul's anthropological lexicon are soma and sarx.

To start, the word soma. Of the two terms under consideration soma is by far the less controversial and contested. This is largely due to the fact that soma seems to have a fairly uniform and consistent meaning in Paul, and among the ancients generally. For the most part soma is best translated as "body." For example, for Homer soma always refers to a dead body or corpse. And in Paul soma often has that straightforward connotation. However, as Dunn points out, soma often has a larger, more abstract meaning, more akin to the notion of "embodiment." Dunn states (p. 56) that soma "denotes the person embodied in a particular environment." And it's through this embodiment that we come into relationship/contact with one other. For example, in Romans 12.1-13.14 Paul describes how the Christian community is to relate to itself. And the word soma regulates how we understand these relationships: presenting our bodies as living sacrifices in Christ we, though many, form one body, with each member belonging to all the others. In short, Christian life and ethics is embodied, physically and socially. And all in all, Paul sees this embodiment as a good thing. Paul, we could say, has a positive view of "the body" (soma).

But things are bit different when we turn to the second term--sarx. Sarx doesn't seem to be a good thing and the meaning of sarx is hotly contested. Which is unfortunate as sarx is one of Paul's most important anthropological terms. So if we want to get a handle of the relationship between sin and death we need to wrestle with the interpretation of sarx. As we'll see, the three--sin, death, and sarx--are intimately related.

Sarx occurs 91 times in Paul's letters, 26 times in the book of Romans. Generally, sarx is translated as "flesh." But sarx is also translated as "human limitation," "natural limitation," "weakness of the flesh," "the weakness of our natural selves," "the weakness of our human nature," "the weakness of our sinful nature," "sinful nature," "fleshly desires," and "sinful flesh."

You get the idea. Where soma--the body, embodiment--is good and its meaning straightforward, sarx is bad and its meaning is much more obscure, allowing for a variety of interpretive choices.

But what's the difference? Isn't the body (soma) made of flesh (sarx)?

Dunn tries to tease apart the meaning of sarx by placing its uses by Paul along a continuum, from neutral to very bad. Sometimes sarx seems to function a lot like soma, as a morally neutral observation that we are physical creatures. Some of the time sarx seems to refer to moral "weakness." And sometimes sarx seems to be a ontological force akin to the Devil. Here's a sketch of Dunn's continuum with textual examples (pp. 64-65); note how sarx starts off neutral then takes on a darker and darker meanings as we go along:

1. Sarx as a morally neutral reference to the body:
Romans 11.14: "in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people [sarx] to envy and save some of them."

2. Sarx as weakness or limitation with no moral connotation:
Romans 6.19: "I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations [sarx]."

3. Sarx as weakness or limitation with a moral connotation:
Romans 3.20: "Therefore no one [sarx] will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin."

4. Sarx as the sphere/location/domain/realm of sin:
Romans 7.5: "For when we were in the realm of the flesh [sarx], the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death."

5. Sarx as a morally destructive force, opposed to the Spirit (pneuma):
Romans 8.6: "The mind governed by the flesh [sarx] is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace."

6. Sarx as source of moral corruption and hostility to God:
Romans 8.7: "The mind governed by the flesh [sarx] is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so."

The struggle, obviously, is to find a common thread that might link all these uses of sarx, from a morally neutral reference to the body to a force warring within us in hostility to God. More, how does sarx relate to soma?

On that particular question 1 Cor. 15.35-50 seems diagnostic. Here Paul suggests that the heavenly existence will have soma, embodiment. The change is from a "natural body [soma]" to a "spiritual body [soma]." Again, Paul seems to have a high view of embodiment. We aren't going to be floating around in heaven as disembodied spirits. We'll have a soma.

But Paul then goes on to state that "flesh [sarx] and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." In short, embodiment (soma) will be a part of heaven but sarx will not. Sarx is left behind.

So what is sarx? What links all the disparate usages?

Following Dunn, it seems that sarx is expressing some quality about soma. The problem isn't soma per se, but the sarx-like qualities it manifests.

So what is this quality? Whatever it is, it seems clear that, at times, it can be described in a morally neutral, blandly empirical manner. And yet, this quality can also be described as the location and theater of sin. More, this quality can be antagonistic to the pull of the Spirit.

So what quality can capture all this? Dunn's assessment, and I agree, is that sarx is describing the mortal aspect of soma. Sarx is describing our biological contingency, our mortal and animal nature. And this conclusion seems to be supported by 1 Cor. 15.35-50. Soma can inherit the kingdom of God but sarx cannot. Why? Because "the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable." What is left behind is "perishability." In heaven perishability--sarx--is exchanged for imperishablity. In this the soma becomes "immortal," "spiritual," "imperishable," it has shed and left sarx behind.

This understanding seems to cover all the diverse uses of sarx. On the one hand, the fact that we are biologically contingent creatures is simply an empirical fact. Sarx can be described, thus, in morally neutral, even scientific terms. More, biological contingency is also the source of our "animal nature," our carnal cravings and impulses. This is generally what is called to mind when we render sarx as "flesh." So Dunn summarizes (p. 66):

Sarx denotes "what we might describe as human mortality. It is the continuum of human mortality, the person characterized and conditioned by human frailty, which gives sarx its spectrum of meaning and which provides the link between Paul's different use of the term.

With this understanding in hand we can proceed to analyze how sin and death affect sarx. Specifically, we can see how sarx can become enslaved to death and is the theatre of sin. As biological creatures we are driven by our instincts for self-preservation. And given that pleasure and pain regulates this instinct we become selfish and hedonistic. In short, we become sinful. Animalistic as it were. Further, given that self-preservation is the ethic of sarx we can see how we can become enslaved to death. Mortality fears push and pull on sarx, manipulating our animal instincts for survival and self-preservation. In all this we see how sarx drives us toward sin and is in bondage to the fear of death.

This is why translating sarx as "sinful nature" is misleading. It is not that sarx is inherently evil and sinful. Sarx is, rather, weak, finite, perishable, and vulnerable. And it's this weakness that makes sarx vulnerable to selfish instincts. Biological vulnerability isn't inherently "bad," but it reliably produces sin. Biological contingency produces a mode of living, what Paul calls kata sarka ("according to the flesh"), that is driven by biological/animal appetites, cravings and desires. Dunn again (p. 78):

Our fleshness attests to our frailty and weakness as mere humans, the inescapableness of our death, our dependencies on satisfaction of appetite and desire, our vulnerability to manipulation of the appetites and desires.

This analysis brings us back to Hebrews 2.14-15:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Why does the fear of death hold us in slavery? Because of sarx. Being "flesh" the Devil, who holds the power of death, can use death to draw sarx into sin. And given that we are sarx we are defenseless to this power. Death has power over sarx. And the Devil holds the power of death. And using death, the Devil keeps drawing sarx into sin and rebellion.

With this understanding now in hand we get a clearer picture about what is going on in Christus Victor. As sarx, as biologically contingent animals, we are drawn into sin by the fear of death. This dynamic is a form of slavery that, as sarx, we cannot escape. We need an "outside intervention" as it were. Someone to liberate us from this trap, the sarx-death-sin dynamic where our carnal cravings, driven by the instincts of self-preservation, lead us into sin.

In light of this bondage, salvation comes to us when Christ "breaks the power of him who holds the power of death." Free from the fear of death we can live a resurrection life, freed from the sarx-death-sin dynamic to live life according to the Spirit. Read Romans 5-8 for more on this.

Romans 7.21-25a
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!