Back in 2008 Mary Lee, the adult education minister at our church, approached me to see if I had an idea for a class series on Wednesday nights. I said I did have an idea. I said I'd like to do a class on monsters.

I can't recall why I had gotten interested, theologically, in monsters. But in preparation for the class I read a lot of books about monster theory and then spun that material in a theological direction. Some of that material found its way into my first book Unclean. In Unclean I talk about how monsters tend to be ontological mixtures, like the fusion between a human and an animal or a machine. Such mixtures become even more monstrous when the mixture is transgressive, mixing the human with something that triggers a disgust response. For example, a human/horse hybrid might make a "creature" like a centaur, but we don't find that mixture overly transgressive or monstrous because we like horses, find them noble and beautiful. But a human/insect or a human/snake or a human/bat mixture strikes us an more monstrous as insects, snakes and bats tend to be disgust triggers.

Anyway, as regular readers know I shared some of my class notes in a blog series entitled "The Theology of Monsters." That series attracts all sorts of search terms, like this one from this week:

frankenstein theology

That's why you come here, right? Frankenstein theology.

As I discuss in the monster series and in Unclean, what I like about Frankenstein is that it inverts the monster story, flipping who is the victim and who is the monster. In the Frankenstein story we come to identify with the monster, seeing the monster as the one being victimized. Thus, the monster story becomes an interesting place to think about the dynamics of social scapegoating.

Beware the mob when it starts taking up pitchforks.

From the Baptismal Rite from The Book of Common Prayer:

Question:
Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?

Answer:
I renounce them. 

Question:
Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? 

Answer:
I renounce them. 

Question:
Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?

Answer:
I renounce them.

We don't talk a lot about renunciation in Christianity. Conservative Christians talk a lot about being forgiven but they don't talk a lot about renunciation. Progressive Christians talk a lot about justice but they don't talk a lot about renunciation.

The Latin root of the word renunciation means "to protest against." The contemporary definition of renunciation means "the formal rejection of something." Synonyms of renunciation are: abstention from, refraining from, going without, giving up, eschewal of, repudiation, rejection, and abandonment.

As The Book of Common Prayer indicates, renunciation rests at the heart of the Christian identity. To be clear, renunciation isn't the whole of the Christian identity, but renunciation is a critical part of the foundation. To say Yes to "Jesus is Lord" involves an associated No.

For Jesus, this renunciation was inherently a denial of the self, a denial that creates the shape of the cruciform life.

Luke 9.23
Then Jesus said to them all: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me."

Renunciation sits at the heart of Christian discipleship. Whoever wants to be a disciple of mine, Jesus says, must deny themselves.

This denial is also described as self-mortification--dying to the self.

Now I have to admit, I have an ascetic streak. It's joyful and grace-filled, but I'm a big believer that spiritual maturity and sanctification involves daily acts of renunciation and self-denial. I'm hard on myself and I think that's important.

But many people don't have the tolerance for this conversation as it raises the grim and grey ghosts of monastic severity or conservative legalism. To say nothing about how people think self-denial implies having low self-esteem.

But as I point out in my book The Slavery of Death, the cross is a multivalent symbol. As Luke 9.23 clearly points out, yes, the cross is a symbol of self-mortification. To "take up the cross" means to "deny yourself."

But at the same time the cross is also a symbol of self-giving, self-donation and self-offering. The cross is also a symbol of love.

Which is to say, the sacrifice of the cross is a dying to the self that allows you to give yourself to others.

You aren't denying yourself in order to earn your way into heaven. Self-denial isn't about collecting spiritual merit badges. Nor are you denying yourself because God is a Puritanical Judge waiting to zap you with lighting bolts if you eat chocolate, dance or have an orgasm.

No, the reason you deny yourself is so that you can make yourself increasingly available to others.

Love requires self-mastery. Love requires a denial of the self.

Love requires discipline.

Love is discipline.

Love involves the renunciation of sin in our lives. A renunciation of wickedness and the Devil.

Ponder the fruits of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

How much self-denial is involved in, say, being patient? How much restraint and self-discipline? 

What about gentleness? How much restraint, self-discipline, and self-denial is involved in being tender and gentle when you are frustrated, upset, angry, rushed, tired or irritable? Or when someone is being difficult, aggressive or hostile?

What about faithfulness? How much restraint, self-discipline, and self-denial are involved in fidelity, staying true to commitments, promises, and covenants?

My point here is that when we speak of "renouncing sin" we aren't thinking of Puritanism. We are thinking of self-discipline as a foundational capacity that allows the fruits of the Spirit to grow and flourish.

There are many things I love about my faith tradition, the Churches of Christ. And the thing I love the most is this:

The reason you go to church to participate in the Lord's Supper.

You don't go to church to worship or to hear a sermon. You go to church to celebrate the Lord's Supper. You go to church to remember The Story. You go to church to ritually reenact the story, to step into it, participate in it, make it your own. This is your Passover meal. You go to church to remind each other, this is his body. This is his blood. Broken and poured out. For you.

In the Churches of Christ we take our cue from Acts 20.7:

On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept on talking until midnight. 

The reason for the assembly on the first day of the week wasn't to hear Paul preach or to worship. The reason the early church gathered was "to break bread," the celebration of the Lord's Supper.

So, if you have to delete something from Sunday morning services you can safely delete the sermon. You can also safely delete the worship. But the one thing you can't remove is the Lord's Supper. Because the Lord's Supper is the reason you have gathered.

That's how we see it in the Churches of Christ. We are called to church to celebrate the Lord's Supper, to remind each other in ritual and word--"do this in memory of me"--of Jesus's life, death and resurrection. That is the central function of the Christian assembly.

In this the Churches of Christ are similar to Catholics. You go to Mass to celebrate the Eucharist. In the Catholic Mass the singing is minimal, the homily is short. The focus of the experience is on the Eucharist. That is why you have come. Which is very similar in theological impulse to the Churches of Christ.

To be sure, though, in the Churches of Christ our worship service and sermons can get out-sized. But the Lord's Supper is never skipped on Sunday. Any given Sunday, sermons will get shortened. Fewer songs will get sung. All done to accommodate the Lord's Supper. Any given Sunday you do what you have to do in worship planning to get the service down to the allotted time, but you cannot skip the Lord's Supper in the Churches of Christ.

Because the Lord's Supper is the reason we gather.

Growing up in the Churches of Christ I grew up worshiping with hymnbooks, singing songs a capella (without instrumental accompaniment) from a songbook. We'd turn to a hymn, sing, turn to another hymn and sing. Four to five songs before moving to the Lord's Supper and then to the sermon. A song of invitation and a closing prayer wrapped us up.

Most of the songs we sang were what we'd call "spiritual songs" rather than "praise songs" (songs of doxology/worship). Songs of praise are sung to God as act of worship and we didn't sing many of those. One song of doxology and praise that we did sing was "How Great Thou Art."

Most of the songs that we sang were "spiritual songs," songs the church sang to each other, rather than directly to God, as a form of encouragement.

For example, "Leaning On the Everlasting Arms" wasn't a praise song, a song of doxology. "Leaning On the Everlasting Arms" was, rather, a song of edification and encouragement:

What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.

Refrain:
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms;
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.

Oh, how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
Oh, how bright the path grows from day to day,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.

What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
Leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near,
Leaning on the everlasting arms. 

"Leaning On the Everlasting Arms" is pretty folksy, in lyrical content and music, but there were other more magisterial hymns that were trying to do the same thing. For example, "It Is Well With My Soul":

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
when sorrows like sea billows roll;
whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

Refrain:
It is well with my soul,
it is well, it is well with my soul.

Another example, which is a favorite of mine, "Be Still My Soul":

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change, He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake
To guide the future, as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice Who ruled them while He dwelt below.

Be still, my soul: the hour is hastening on
When we shall be forever with the Lord.
When disappointment, grief and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past
All safe and blessèd we shall meet at last.

Beyond these songs of trust during times of struggle and sorrow we also sang songs that reminded of eternal consolation and reward, songs like "I'll Fly Away," "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder," and "To Canaan's Land I'm On My Way." Some of these were African American spirituals like "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." And some were rooted in agricultural imagery and the farming life, like "Bringing In the Sheaves":

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Refrain:
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Some of these songs encouraged sharing the gospel, mission work, and evangelism. Songs like "Send the Light":

There’s a call comes ringing o’er the restless wave,
“Send the light! Send the light!”
There are souls to rescue, there are souls to save,
Send the light! Send the light! 

Refrain:
Send the light, the blessed Gospel light;
Let it shine from shore to shore!
Send the light, the blessed Gospel light;
Let it shine forevermore!

We have heard the Macedonian call today,
“Send the light! Send the light!”
And a golden off’ring at the cross we lay,
Send the light! Send the light!

Again, the focus of these songs was communal edification. These were less praise/worship songs sung to God than songs we sang to each other to console, encourage, uplift, challenge and care for each other. And most of the songs in our hymnbooks were songs of this sort. We mostly sang to encourage each other.

During the 80s and 90s in the Churches of Christ we experienced what many traditions call "worship reform." And a big part of that reform in our tradition was to push back on the congregation-focused singing we'd been doing to focus more on praise/worship songs, singing to God doxologically. The refrain was, "Worship is about God, not us." So a shift happened. Spiritual songs of mutual encouragement were gradually replaced with praise songs. And a lot of this involved putting the old hymnbooks away and turning to the praise songs being produced by the Christian music industry.

Lots could be said about this change, good and bad, but I'd like to just point to one little discussed aspect of the demise of the "spiritual song" in our faith tradition.

While I wholeheartedly agree that worship should primarily about the praise of God, I'd like to remind that we sing not just for God but also for ourselves. We are told by Paul (commanded, even, if you read the bible in a particular way) to sing songs for each other:

Colossians 3.16
Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. 

Worship songs aren't just for God. Worship songs are also for us, used to "teach and admonish" each other. 

Now I want to be clear here. I'm not suggesting that we pull out the old hymnbooks and start singing "Bringing in the Sheaves." (Though, to be honest, I'd love that, for nostalgic reasons and also for the looks of incomprehension on the faces of my college students.) I'm not recommending going back in time musically and lyrically.

But what I am trying to point out is that there is a horizontal aspect of singing--the church singing to and for each other--that has been largely lost in a lot of the contemporary Christian worship experience. And I think this is important because our almost exclusive focus on the vertical experience--singing songs to God--has meant that we've marginalized from our singing huge swaths of the human experience.

Lament in particular. Look back again, if you skipped over them earlier, some of the lyrics of those old hymns. "When sorrows like seas billows roll." "When sorrow, grief and fear are gone." "What have I to dread, what have I to fear?" To be sure, some of these songs can seem escapist, like the lyric from "I'll Fly Away": "Some glad morning when this life is o'er, I'll fly away." But the backdrop of that song is pain and suffering. Today is a sad day, a very sad say. So we wait for "some glad morning, when this life is o'er." Even a homey song like "Bringing in the Sheaves" speaks to the hardscrabble, poor, desperate, and back-breaking life experienced on farms, especially during the Depression era.

So again, while many of us might want to withdraw a bit from the other-worldly consolation in these old songs, what is clear is how these songs were speaking to pain, sorrow, loss, weariness, and longing. These songs were speaking into fatigue and hopelessness. These songs named the brokenness.

That is what songs do when they try to attend closely to the human experience. Such songs recognize and name the pain. Which is one reason why I think our worship was thinned out when we marginalized these songs. By attending almost exclusively in the praise song to the vertical dimension the horizontal aspect of human experience expressed in the spiritual song was marginalized. This unwittingly hollowed out our worship, removing much of the hymnody that expressed our lament.

And still to this day, at least in my church, when we want to express our lament we pull out one of those old spiritual songs like "When Peace Like a River."

When want to lament we don't reach toward the Christian music industry.

We open up those old hymnbooks.

At some point I knew my book The Slavery of Death would have to confront The Road, Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

I probably should have read The Road before writing The Slavery of Death. I knew, from what I learned about the book, that The Road would test the premise of The Slavery of Death. Maybe because I was fretful about this, I didn't read The Road beforehand. I didn't want The Road to overturn my theological apple cart.

So I wrote the The Slavery of Death knowing that there was a potential flaw, an issue at the heart of the book that The Road could possibly expose as a problem.

I wrote my book anyway and chose to read The Road afterwards as a sort of test. I'd make my argument and then let it face the toughest rebuttal it might find.

The Road.

Why, you might ask, is The Road the toughest challenge to The Slavery of Death?

If you've not read The Road or seen the 2009 movie based upon the book, what follows is a quick summary highlighting the aspects of the plot that are relevant to the argument in The Slavery of Death. Spoiler alerts ahead.

The Road follows "the man" and "the boy"--a father and son--who are traveling down a road in a post-apocalyptic American wasteland. We're not sure what has happened, but everything is covered with ash and food no longer grows. Most of the book follows the man and the boy searching for canned goods as they pass through empty towns pushing a shopping cart carrying all their belongings. A couple of times in the book, because they cannot find food, they come to the edge of starvation.

Beyond starvation, the other danger the man and the boy face are roving bands of cannibals. Because of the food shortages it appears that humanity has taken one of two moral paths. The man and the boy call themselves "the good guys" because they have chosen not to resort to cannibalism in the face of starvation. However, some others--whom the man and the boy call "the bad guys"--have resorted to finding and keeping people for food sources. They even, it seems, use pregnant women as food sources to eat their babies.

Consequently, much of the suspense in The Road is the man and the boy trying to stay clear of or having encounters with the bad guys, the people who have turned to violence in enslaving others to use them as food. The man carries a revolver with a single bullet. He is saving it to kill the boy should he ever be taken by the bad guys. And he also shows the boy how to shoot himself so that, should the man ever die, the boy can kill himself if he is ever about to be captured. In The Road it is better to shoot your child rather than have them eaten. Or to have your child preemptively commit suicide.

Depressed yet? Clearly, The Road isn't a happy book.

With this much of the plot in hand, let's pause to discuss why I consider The Road to be a sort of litmus test for The Slavery of Death.

In The Slavery of Death I make the following argument. We are biological creatures prone to anxiety in the face of death. As animals we have to be concerned about our survival. This makes us selfish and self-interested. As I argue it in the book, this biological need and vulnerability exerts upon us a constant moral tug causing us to put our needs above the needs of others. It's this inclination that sits at the heart of our "sin problem." It's this tendency--rooted in basic survival anxiety--that causes us to be incurvatus in se (curved/turned inward upon the self).

In short, we are not intrinsically wicked. We are anxious. And that anxiety--the biological imperative to survive--is what causes us to become sinful in how we come to reduce human life to an animalistic, Darwinian game of survival.

Now, the argument of The Slavery of Death is that this basic survival anxiety can be overcome by love. Love can, in the words of 1 John, "cast out fear." Love can replace our selfish survival concerns with concern for others. We can, in love, "lay down our lives for others." Love transforms fearful animals into human beings. Instead of fear causing us to be incurvatus in se we can become excurvatus ex se, curved outward in love toward others.

But there is a problem with this formulation and I wonder if you noticed it when you read The Slavery of Death. Specifically, love is being built upon a very shaky moral foundation: the survival needs of a biological animal.

Specifically, all this conversation about love is all well and good when we have enough food, clothing and shelter. After we have met our basic needs we can share our surpluses with others. But what happens in the limit case? What happens in the face of a Malthusian catastrophe when there is not enough food to go around? Will not all this high talk about love collapse in the face of massive biological need?

Stated starkly, is not love a sort of moral luxury? Something we can spare until life become truly desperate?

I hope you can see in these question how The Road is a sort of test case for the argument in The Slavery of Death. For while The Slavery of Death is largely about our neurotic anxiety in the face of death (our worries about self-esteem and significance), The Road sweeps past neurosis to focus with laser-like intensity upon the relationship between love and basic anxiety, a fear not about being "significant" but about literal survival. It seems relatively easy to show how love can overcome neurotic anxiety, how I can forgo self-esteem enhancement to wash feet and serve in unnoticed locations, not letting my right hand know what my left hand is doing. But is it possible for love to overcome basic, survival anxiety in the face of something like mass starvation?

That is the moral question at the heart of The Road. And, thus, The Road is a test case for The Slavery of Death.

Can love emerge in the world envisioned by The Road?

Because if love cannot be found in The Road then biological need and vulnerability would be revealed to be the moral singularity of human existence. Love and humanity would be the moral luxuries of "civilization," useless surplus goods like a diamond ring. At root, we'd be revealed to be animals. Nothing more.

And so, with that as backdrop, let's return to The Road looking for love in a world of starvation and cannibalism. Looking for love in the limit case.

In this search I think we can find love in The Road in four places.

First, and most obviously, we find love in how the man loves the boy. If The Road is anything it is a prolonged meditation on the love the man has for the boy. This love also undergirds the spiritual themes of the book. In a widely quoted passage from early in the book:

He knew that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

So the love the man has for the boy is the primary story of love in the book. And throughout the book this love is described as the inbreaking of the divine. The boy is the "word of God" speaking to the man. And late in the book the boy is described as the tabernacle, the container of God's presence:

He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He'd stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. 

If I were being bold I'd argue that The Road is a prolonged meditation on the notion that "God is love." There is discussion of God in The Road. Prayers are offered to a grey, ashen sky. But God is absent and silent. God is, rather, found in the love the man and the boy have for each other. God is found in that love. God is that love.

A second place you find love expressed in The Road is the distinction made frequently in the book between the bad guys and the good guys, those who have turned to cannibalism and those who have not. And to be clear, the cannibalism isn't the eating of those who have died of natural causes but the enslaving or killing of others in order to use them as food.

This is a very bleak scenario, and The Road posits this vision as the inevitable moral outcome in a world of mass scarcity. In The Road the Darwinian survival of the fittest reaches this, its logical conclusion.

Morality here boils down to its final, ultimate question. The moral question behind all moral questions. The question you reach in the end if you push hard and far enough on a biological creature: In the limit case, would you kill and consume others?

Like in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy The Road posits two paths, one path is the path of virtue and holiness, the path of "the good guys." The other path is the path of depravity and wickedness, the path of the "the bad guys." Like Moses did with Israel, The Road presents a stark choice: Choose which way you shall go. Will you shed blood to live or will you refuse to kill even though you may starve? According to The Road this is the question that sits behind all ethics. This is ethics in the most extreme situation imaginable, the limit case.

And as we see in The Road there are "good guys." True, while many have been reduced to bestiality under the Darwinian pressures, there are those in The Road--the "good guys"--who refuse to kill others. The "good guys" retain their humanity. The good guys are not animals, they are human beings who see others as human beings. I count that as a form of love.

Let us now return to the love the man has for the boy.

At this point, a cynical, Darwinian reader might be saying, "I understand how the father loves the son. But this is familial, even mammalian, love. The love of a parent for his or her genetic offspring. Emotionally, yes, this is love. But is it true altruism? For is it not the case that all biological creatures selfishly benefit by ensuring the survival of their genetic offspring?"

This question brings us to a third location of love in The Road: the love of the boy for others.

True, in The Road the love of the man is almost fanatical in its focus on the boy. For the man, only the boy matters. All others will be sacrificed, must be sacrificed, in order to protect and ensure the survival of the boy. This mainly manifests in the book as the man's refusal to share food with anyone else other than the boy.

But throughout the book the boy--the "word of God"--begs and begs the father to share. And the boy is often successful in this. The father is constantly pulled out of his moral tunnel vision that only the boys matters. Where the father is blind the boy sees the needs of others. And so the boy and the man, in the face of scarcity and starvation, do share with others. This is altruism.

Finally, we come to our fourth example of love in The Road, the example that comes at the very end of the book. Remember, spoiler alerts.

Again, The Road is a prolonged meditation on the heroic sacrifices the man makes for the boy. If The Road is anything it is a portrayal of the endurance and fierceness of a father's love.

But is this the limit of morality, the best that love can do? In the limit case, is this--parental love--the zenith or morality? Or is there something that transcends this love?

The Darwinian critique noted above returns: Is the love of a biological parent for their child truly the highest form of love we can aspire to?

Is familial love the limit of love?

The Road answers no. There is more love in the world than a parent's love.

At the end of The Road the man dies. The boy is left alone and must now fend for himself in a world of bad guys.

The boy is soon approached by a man. Is this man a good guy or a bad guy? We find out that he's a good guy. He is also father, he has a wife and two boys. They are a family, something the boy has been longing for. And concerned about the fate of the boy now that the man has died this family welcomes the boy.

And the woman who adopts the boys speaks of God. The final scene in the book with the boy:

The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best  thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Again, the divine love on display in The Road is very much the immanent love between persons. The boy can't talk to God, but he can talk to his father, the one who loved him so passionately. And the woman who speaks of God compares the Spirit of God to the breath of humans--"the breath of God was his breath"--passed "from man to man through all of time." Again, I could argue that the theological theme of The Road is the notion that "God is love."

For our purposes, I'd like to draw our attention to how the adoptive love of the family for the boy transcends the biological matrix. The love of the man for the boy in the book is heroic and divine. But it's not the final or even highest act of love in the book. The final and highest act of love in The Road is when the family welcomes the boy--who is not one of their own--into their family. The family, in love, is willing to carry this extra survival burden. This is a love--a love associated with God--that transcends the Darwinian, biological struggle.

To conclude, let me say that this analysis of love in The Road does not exhaust the spiritual themes in the book. And many of these other spiritual themes are not as rosy and the themes I've pointed out here.

But I do think it clear that love is found in The Road and that love functions in the face of death very much as I describe in The Slavery of Death. I was gratified to find, in my estimation, that the vision I articulated in The Slavery of Death holds up under the test of The Road. In The Road when life is pushed to its absolute limit and placed under the severest Darwinian pressure love can be seen triumphing over death. Love can be seen making us human in the face of death. In the love of the man for the boy. In the refusal of the "good guys" to kill others in order to survive. In the love of the boy getting his father to share with others. And in the final adoption of the boy into a family speaking of God.

The Road depicts the Fall at its absolute, apocalyptic worst. William Stringfellow says that the goal of the Christian life is to walk humanly in the Fall. And in The Road, despite all odds, we see this happen. We see in The Road love conquering death. Love making us human. In the end, we don't have to become animals. We have a choice in the face of death.

We can be human.

We can love.

Instead of search terms this Friday I thought I'd point you to a article I wrote for The Table blog hosted by Biola University's Center for Christian Thought.

The post is entitled Learning to Lament: Giving Voice to the Winter Christian Experience and summarizes some material from Chapter 6 from my book The Authenticity of Faith regarding the Summer and Winter Christian faith experience.

In the article I also share some of the work done by my ACU colleague Glenn Pemberton in his book Hurting with God: Learning to Lament with the Psalms. Glenn just published a follow-up book After Lament: Psalms for Learning to Trust Again.

From the article:

The point in drawing your attention to this comparison is that many churches are ill-equipped to give voice to the Winter Christian experience. Our worship, to make this point sharp, isn’t biblical enough. And in failing to give voice to lament, as we see with the Psalms, we’ve given our faith communities an unrealistic expectation of what it feels like to be in relationship with God.

And from a spiritual formation perspective this is problematic for two inter-related reasons:

1. When we fail to give voice to complaint, doubt and lament these experiences become internalized and privatized. We begin to feel alone and isolated in our spiritual struggles.

2. When we fail to give voice to the Winter Christian experience we begin to pathologize doubt and lament. We send the message that lament and complaint is a spiritual failure, even a sin.

This creates a toxic mix...

 Click here to read the full article.

Many years ago I spent some time writing about William James, the American psychologist and philosopher. James has been important to me. In fact, James is on the cover of one of my books. I lean heavily on James's The Varieties of Religious Experience in my critique of Freud in The Authenticity of Faith.

William James is one of the founders of American pragmatism. And in a post in 2007 I made the argument that progressive Christianity--the emerging church movement was my focus at the time--should jettison its dance with post-modernity and embrace the epistemology of American pragmatism. As an epistemological home, pragmatism is a much better fit for progressive and "emergent" Christianity.

And while a 2007 reflection about the emerging church movement might seem a bit dated, I think these reflections are still very relevant to progressive Christianity.

Here is how I made the argument back then:

One of the distinctives of the emerging church conversation, and progressive Christianity generally, is an emphasis on orthopraxy over orthodoxy. That is, right living (orthopraxy) is considered to be more (or equally) important than believing the right things (orthodoxy). In Peter Rollins's phrasing, we move from "right belief" to "believing in the right way."

For example, below is a selection of Scot McKnight's article in Christianity Today on the Five Streams of the Emerging Church. One of the Five Streams is that the emerging church is praxis-oriented:

The emerging movement's connection to postmodernity may grab attention and garner criticism, but what most characterizes emerging is the stream best called praxis—how the faith is lived out. At its core, the emerging movement is an attempt to fashion a new ecclesiology (doctrine of the church). Its distinctive emphases can be seen in its worship, its concern with orthopraxy, and its missional orientation.

Again, this praxis-orientation elevates orthopraxy to the same level of importance as orthodoxy:

A notable emphasis of the emerging movement is orthopraxy, that is, right living. The contention is that how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes. Many will immediately claim that we need both or that orthopraxy flows from orthodoxy. Most in the emerging movement agree we need both, but they contest the second claim: Experience does not prove that those who believe the right things live the right way. No matter how much sense the traditional connection makes, it does not necessarily work itself out in practice. Public scandals in the church—along with those not made public—prove this point time and again.

Here is an emerging, provocative way of saying it: "By their fruits [not their theology] you will know them." As Jesus' brother James said, "Faith without works is dead." Rhetorical exaggerations aside, I know of no one in the emerging movement who believes that one's relationship with God is established by how one lives. Nor do I know anyone who thinks that it doesn't matter what one believes about Jesus Christ. But the focus is shifted. Gibbs and Bolger define emerging churches as those who practice "the way of Jesus" in the postmodern era.

Jesus declared that we will be judged according to how we treat the least of these (Matt. 25:31-46) and that the wise man is the one who practices the words of Jesus (Matt. 7:24-27). In addition, every judgment scene in the Bible is portrayed as a judgment based on works; no judgment scene looks like a theological articulation test.

Peter Rollins in his book How (Not) to Speak of God, a book that shaped the emerging church conversation and still articulates what many progressive Christians believe, goes a bit further than what is described above by McKnight. Specifically, Rollins defines truth as a soteriological event. Commenting on St. John's formulation "Whoever does not love does not know God" Rollins says this:

Here John equates the existence of religious knowledge with the act of love. Knowledge of God (the Truth) as a set of propositions is utterly absent; instead he claims that those who exhibit a genuine love know God, regardless of their religious system, while those who do not love cannot know God, again regardless of their religious system. Truth is thus understood as a soteriological event.

What Rollins is claiming here is fairly radical. And I agree with him. Loving (orthopraxy) saves us. Belief (orthodoxy) doesn't. Or, rather, believing in Jesus (orthodoxy) is to live like Jesus (orthopraxy).

In the formulation of St. John: Whoever does not love does not know.

A way to summarize all this is to say that truth and its consequences are impossible to separate. More strongly, in some contexts truth is determined by the consequences.

Now what I find interesting about all this, and this is my point, is that many progressive Christians are simply articulating the views of William James and the American pragmatists.

And strangely, as we saw with Scot's summary, much of the credit is frequently given to the post-modernists rather than to the pragmatists.

This wouldn't bother me so much if it were not for the fact that William James articulated these ideas (the relation of truth and action/consequences) over a 100 years ago. For example, in 1898 James first articulated the pragmatist's dictum:  

The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

More from William James:

"To develop a thought's meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance."

"The effective meaning of any philosophical proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive."

"The can be no difference which doesn't make a difference."

"Perceptions and thinking are only there for behavior's sake."

"Truth in our ideas means their power to work."

"Truth is what acts or enables us to act."

"Pragmatism asks its usual question. 'Grant an idea or belief to be true,' it says, 'what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value?'"

It's interesting to compare these statements from William James with passages in Rollins's How (Not) to Speak of God:

Thus 'right belief' becomes 'believing the right way.' Thus we break down the binary opposition between orthodoxy and heresy by understanding the term 'orthodox' as referring to someone who engages in the world in the right way--that is, in the way of love. Here religious knowledge is not something that it opposed to love, nor secondary to it; rather, the only religious knowledge worth anything is love. By understanding orthodoxy in this manner, it is no longer distanced from what the liberation theologians call 'orthopraxis"...we see that these two terms shed slightly different light on the same fundamental approach. This means that the question, 'What do you believe?' must always be accompanied by the question 'How do you believe?'

Or, Rollins says more simply:

God is not revealed via our words but rather via the life of the transformed individual.

Compare that statement from Rollins with this from William James:

The very meaning of the conception of God lies in the differences which must be made in our experience.

All that to say, I think progressive Christianity has tended to ground its epistemology in the wrong place. I don't think Continental philosophy or post-modern epistemology makes a lot of sense for progressive Christians.

It's my argument that progressive and emergent Christianity, given its focus on orthopraxy, would do well to step away from Continental post-modernism toward William James and American pragmatism.

By their fruits you will know them.

So says Jesus.

So says progressive Christianity.

And so says the American pragmatists.

I wear a crucifix.

And because I'm a Protestant I often get puzzled questions from people at church.

"Why do you wear a crucifix?"

Because it is a bit strange, this bit of Catholic spirituality in a Protestant context. As we know, Catholics have the body of Jesus hanging on the cross--the crucifix. Protestants tend to display empty crosses.

And one reason for this difference is often inserted into the questions I get asked: "Why do you wear a crucifix? Jesus is no longer on the cross."

I tend to disagree. I think Jesus is very much still on the cross. Everywhere.

Which goes to the reason why I wear a crucifix.

When people at church ask me why I wear a crucifix I have to judge how to respond. In my mind I'm asking, "Would you like to hear a lecture about Girardian theology?" Almost everything about me has a long lecture behind it. It's an occupational hazard. For example, if someone casually asks about my tattoo of Rublev's icon--"Tell me about your tattoo!"--I'm going to talk for sixty minutes about the intersections of hospitality (welcoming God in the stranger), Trinitarian ontology and Eastern Orthodox iconography.

I've literally contemplated making cards and keeping them in my wallet so that when people ask about my tattoo I can just hand them some reading material. "Here, read this. Make sure you turn it over for the bibliography."

It's a similar situation with wearing a crucifix.

But I try to answer and keep it short. I say something like this:

I believe God is found among the victims of the world. God is hanging on crosses all over the world.

And so I wear a crucifix to remind me, to help me see.

In 2007 I wrote about a conversation Jana and I had about the biblical support for universal reconciliation in Christ. We mainly discussed the various New Testament passages relevant to this topic but we eventually turned to the Old Testament. For my part, I think the Old Testament is a little used but very relevant resource in working through these discussions. Particularly when it comes to describing the nature of God, which seems to me to be the foundational issue.

For example, while Old Testament doesn't say a lot about life after death and little about heaven or hell, in the Old Treatment there is a recurrent rhythm that after the worst of God’s punishments there will be restoration. Punishment is never the last world. Restoration is always the last word.

In my 2007 post I illustrated this idea by turning to the book of Hosea, a book we were then studying at church:

After the first three chapters of Hosea, where the extended metaphor of Hosea and Gomer is recounted, we find three of Hosea’s sermons. Scholars believe that each sermon was given in response to various military and political events in Judah and Israel.

Each sermon shares a similar structure, roughly as follows:

Part 1: Accusations of Sin
Sermon 1 (4:1-19), Sermon 2 (6:7-7:16; 10:1-15), Sermon 3 (11:12-13:3)

Part 2: God’s Punishment
Sermon 1 (5:1-14), Sermon 2 (8:1-9:17), Sermon 3 (13:4-16)

Part 3: Message of Hope/Reconciliation
Sermon 1 (5:15-6:6), Sermon 2 (11:1-11), Sermon 3 (14:1-9)

A running motif in each sermon, carrying over from the Hosea/Gomer saga, is that each sermon uses the language of a divorce proceeding. That is, Hosea is formally articulating God’s warrant for divorce from Israel.

The main metaphor in Part 1 of each sermon is whoredom. Israel has gone lustfully after other “lovers” (the Canaanite gods).

Given Israel’s unfaithfulness in Part 1, Hosea goes on to describe in Part 2 how God will punish Israel. These descriptions are some of the most shocking in all of Scripture. For example:

Otherwise I will strip her naked
and make her as bare as on the day she was born;
I will make her like a desert,
turn her into a parched land,
and slay her with thirst.

So now I will expose her lewdness
before the eyes of her lovers;
no one will take her out of my hands.

For I will be like a lion to Ephraim,
like a great lion to Judah.
I will tear them to pieces and go away;
I will carry them off, with no one to rescue them.

Ephraim's glory will fly away like a bird—
no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.
Even if they rear children,
I will bereave them of every one.
Woe to them
when I turn away from them!

Give them, O LORD—
what will you give them?
Give them wombs that miscarry
and breasts that are dry.

Ephraim is blighted,
their root is withered,
they yield no fruit.
Even if they bear children,
I will slay their cherished offspring.

This language of punishment in Hosea is some of the strongest in Scripture. It makes your hair stand on end.

But, miraculously (and I’ll come back to this word in a moment), after the harshness of the Part 2 declarations of punishment we see songs of love break out in Part 3. It is difficult to overstate the shock of this transition. The change from punishment to love seems inexplicable, unpredictable, spontaneous, and, thus, utterly mysterious. For example, after the shocking punishment language God starts talking like this:

"Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt….

I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.

"When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize
it was I who healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with ties of love;
I lifted the yoke from their neck
and bent down to feed them.

"How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I treat you like Admah?
How can I make you like Zeboiim?
My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.
I will not carry out my fierce anger,
nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim.
For I am God, and not man—
the Holy One among you.
I will not come in wrath.

What is going on in this crazy abrupt transition from punishment to love?

I think there is a deep clue in 11:9: “For I am God and not man."

Specifically, it appears to me that the link between Parts 1 (Sin) and Parts 2 (Punishment) is logical, like cause and effect. Given the “marital agreement” between God and Israel God’s responses (as harsh as they are) are predictable, even expected, given Israel’s unfaithfulness.

What is unpredictable and inexplicable and, thus, miraculous, is the transition from Parts 2 (Punishment) to Parts 3 (Love). The songs of love, tenderness, forgiveness, and reconciliation come from out of nowhere. Further, they are God’s unsolicited acts. Israel isn’t doing anything to get this response. We see this pattern enacted in chapter 3 where God tells Hosea to “go love a woman who has another lover.” That is, God initiates the act of love and reconciliation. It is an act of unpredictable and spontaneous grace.

And, interestingly, 11:9 locates the source of this grace in the very character of God. The movement from Part 1 (Sin) to Part 2 (Punishment) is human. The movement from Part 2 (Punishment) to Part 3 (Love) is divine. God acts in loving spontaneity because God is “God and not man.”

This brings me to a universalist reading of Hosea.

I believe one of the messages of Hosea is that while the punishment of God may be described with apocalyptic savagery in the end God’s love will be the Final Word. And this final word will be spontaneous, inexplicable, unpredictable, and mysterious. That is, our theological systems will not be able to anticipate or articulate this Final Word. All we have, as humans, are the logical links between crime and punishment. We don’t have the words to articulate the Final Word of grace.

This is one reason why I believe the universalist vision is not clearly articulated in Scripture. It can’t be written down in any obvious way. To write it down would decouple the proper links between crime and punishment. Thus, all our human conversations about God 's grace will tend to get bogged down in the the crime/punishment conversation. As it says in Hosea 11:9, that's just how we humans think. As humans we'll never be able to articulate a coherent theology of grace.

Consequently, any talk about universal salvation will appear disconnected, random, and inexplicable when framed in human terms and categories.

Grace transcends theology.

And finally, the other message I take from Hosea is this: God is always in your future. That is, no matter the punishments, as severe as they are, God is in Israel’s future. I think this is one of the deepest truths of Scripture: No matter what, even if the punishments are hellish, God is in your future. Part 1 (Sin) and Part 2 (Punishment) will always be followed by Part 3 (Love).

That is the vision I believe in.

God's love is always in your future.

I've been reading some open theism posts the last week or so (see Greg Boyd's posts here and here and the ongoing discussions at the An Open Orthodoxy blog).

I'd like to use this post to sketch out my views regarding open theology. My view is, I think, I unique view, a relational view of God that seems to stand somewhere between open and process theology.

In general, I really like open theism. Mainly because it preserves a real and robust relational view of God as opposed to the faux-relationalism found in the deterministic vision of Calvinism.

To summarize quickly, open theism is, at root, a belief about the nature of the future. Open theism is not, as open theists repeatedly point out, a belief about God's omniscience. Crudely stated, according to open theism God does not know the future because the future does not yet exist. This does not limit God's omniscience because if the future does not exist then there is nothing for God to know. In short, the future is "yet to be," the future is "open" and unfolding.

The openness of the future in open theism is generally rooted in a libertarian account of human free will. Because humans have free will God does not know what exact future will unfold in the face of human choices. Thus, open theism is described as a relational view of God as God is waiting upon and responsive toward the free choices of individuals. God, being infinitely powerful and resourceful, will bring about God's purposes for the world, but how exactly that future will unfold is to be determined. God is playing, so the metaphor goes, a chess game with humanity. God will win the game, that outcome is "predetermined," but the exact course of the game is an unfolding and relational process given the moves humans will make and how God opts to respond as a consequence.

That's a quick and crude sketch of open theism. And at this point there are a variety of objections to open theism and some standard rebuttals to those objections. But for this post I'd like to point out where I demur from open theism and then describe the view I've constructed to take its place in an attempt to keep a relational view of God firmly in view.

Because, for me at least, that's the great attraction of open theism, its dynamic and relational view of God and humanity. I want to keep that vision. But I don't agree with how open theism gets us there.

Specifically, as stated the mechanism of open theism is libertarian free will. That's the lynch pin. The trouble is that, as a psychologist, I find libertarian visions of free will to be psychologically implausible. I'm just not sure how free will would operate psychologically. Of course, I'm willing to admit that I might be wrong in this instance, and I'm open to being persuaded on this point, but as things stand today I've had to build a different sort of model to create a different sort of open theism, a vision that doesn't rely upon libertarian versions of free will.

So, what is this new view of mine?

The vision I have in mind is one that is rooted in the disjoint between consciousness and science, what has been called "the hard problem of consciousness."

Specifically, science relies upon a third-person, publicly-adjudicated, and objective methodology. Consciousness, however, is a first-person, privately-experienced, and subjective phenomenon. Thus, there is an ontological and epistemological disjoint between the data (subjective experience) and the method (science). Simplistically stated, I can study, in an objective way, the way your brain acts when you smell apple pie. But the subjective experience of the smell of apple pie can never be captured on a brain scan. The phenomenon under investigation cannot be captured by the methods of science.

In short, as many others have argued before me, consciousness cannot be reduced to a scientific account. Let's call this the non-reductionism hypothesis.

We can go further.

It's not just that consciousness can't be reduced to physics. Consciousness has causal potency. We move away from things because they create the conscious experience of pain. We move toward things because they create the conscious experience of pleasure. The conscious experiences of pleasure and pain are causal forces in the world. Let's call this the causation hypothesis.

Now, if you combine the non-reductionism and the causation hypotheses you reach a pretty bold conclusion. Specifically, a reductive scientific account of the cosmos is impossible. Because there will always be aspects of causation in the cosmos--those related to conscious experience--that can never be captured, accounted for, explained, or reduced to physical, material or scientific accounts. To be sure, science has and will continue to explain much within the cosmos. But science will never be able to explain everything. The causes and effects related to consciousness will always remain a non-reductive residual to any scientific account of the world.

This argument is not new to me. If you'd like to read a good account of this position I recommend Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

Let me continue by articulating two more hypotheses to bring my theory fully into view.

If consciousness cannot be known from the "outside" then it can only be known subjectively, from the "inside." That is, knowledge of consciousness is experiential and participatory. And when you cannot experience things first-hand you have to proceed empathically. As the saying goes, to understand what it feels like to be you I have to walk a mile in your moccasins. Let us call this the experiential epistemology hypothesis, that knowledge of consciousness can only be gained experientially (directly) or empathically (approximately and/or imaginatively).

Combining all three hypotheses--the non-reductionism, causation and experiential epistemology hypotheses--what we have is this. I cannot know or predict what any given human being will do unless I have perfect knowledge of his or her subject experience. And since I can only know any given person's subjective experience approximately--that is to say, empathically or imaginatively--I can only make imperfect predictions about what any given person may or may not do.

The upside here is that the more and more intimate I get with a person--the greater and greater my ability to understand and empathize with him or her--the greater my predictive knowledge.

For example, I've gotten better over twenty-two years of marriage at buying gifts for my wife. I've gotten better at predicting Jana's future--for example, that Jana will love a particular gift--because of my improving empathic capacities--listening to and watching Jana over the years, getting a better and better sense of what it's like to "be Jana." Still, given that I'm a human being I will never know Jana fully and completely. Sometimes I predict wrong and the gift isn't so perfect. So you always have to keep listening and learning.

In short, it's this connection between knowledge and empathy that creates the relational dynamic.

Which brings us to the final of our four hypotheses.

My last hypothesis is this: the experiential epistemology hypothesis applies to God. Specifically, God cannot know what it feels like to be me from "the outside." If this is so, God cannot "compute" or "simulate" the future the way a super-computer might run an infinite number of simulations for a physical system. Because consciousness has causal effects all possible futures of the cosmos cannot be simulated in this way. No brute force calculation, even those of an Infinite Mind, can make perfect predictions of the cosmos. Due to consciousness the cosmos will not unfold like a chess game. Chess pieces don't scream "Ouch!"

Ouch will not compute.

This means that God can only gain predictive knowledge of the future the same way your or I do: with experiential participation and/or empathic imagination. That is to say, God can only know or come to predict the future through relationality.

God's full knowledge of the cosmos, particularly where humans are concerned, must be--necessarily and inherently--relational, experiential, empathic and participatory.

Stepping back, all open/relational views of God have to, in some way, limit God's omniscience. This is why they are so controversial. Openness views, as we noted above, tend to handle this by adopting a theory about the future, that the future doesn't actually exist and, thus, God not knowing a non-existent future puts no limit on God's omniscience. God can't be expected to know stuff that doesn't exist.

By contrast, in the view I'm presenting here I am arguing that God's knowledge is limited by an empathic gap. God's ability to know and predict my future is limited by God's ability (or inability) to know exactly what it feels like to be me, privately, subjectively and experientially.

I am arguing that God is limited in this way. Now, just why God is empathically limited in this way I cannot say. Perhaps, following someone like Moltmann, the empathic gap between God and humanity is due to the self-limiting withdrawal that God had to preform to "make room" for the creation. God's self-limiting in the creative act created a vacuum, a space in which I could exist. Perhaps that vacuum experientially externalized God to some degree, creating an experiential "gap"  between God and humanity.

Of course, that gap can be overcome. And should be. That is the drama of salvation. And it appears that God chooses to overcome this gap in a relational and non-coercive manner. Just like with any intimate human relationship. God has vacated my internal experiential space, and I must invite God back into that space. So that I can both know God and be known by God.

All that is just speculation about how the empathy gap was created. But that an empathy gap existed I believe is the clear testimony of Scripture. Specifically, in Hebrews we read:

Hebrews 4.14-16
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. 

If we read this text in a straightforward way, it seems to argue that the Incarnational participation in the human experience increased the empathic capacities of God. Because of the Incarnation God comes to understand the human experience "from the inside." The Incarnation ushers in a new, more empathic relationship between God and humanity.

Let us, then, call the fourth and final hypothesis the Incarnational hypothesis, the hypothesis that the Incarnation--God's participation in the human experience--increased the empathic capacities of God.

Now it's here where my view dips into process theology a bit. I'm positing that the Incarnation changed God in some way, that God "learned" something in the Incarnation. Specifically, God "learned" about the human experience through participation in the Incarnation. And because of the Incarnation God is better able to empathize with us.

And if I may be still more bold, let me add this last bit of speculation.

I'd argue that, because the Incarnation was, well, incarnated, God's experience of humanity was limited in certain ways. Jesus was, for example, a man. Jesus never gave birth. Jesus never faced Alzheimer's. Jesus was never married. And so on.

Thus, I'd argue that even after the Incarnation God's empathic capacities were limited in certain ways. We might say that the Incarnation created the capacity for a generalized empathy but that, after the Incarnation, there remained the need for particular empathy, the narrowing of the empathy gap between God's Jesus-experience and your particular life experience.

Narrowing that gap, it seems to me, is a story by story, biography by biography process. This is where I think we insert a pneumological account, how the Spirit of God takes up residence within us so that God's Spirit and our own can do the particular individualized work of relational intimacy. Similar to my example above about intimacy with Jana. This will be a love story that plays out between each person and God in unique and individualized ways. The goal of which is the contemplative, experiential, participatory "union" between God and the individual.

Right now God and I see each other but dimly, as in a mirror. One day we will see each other face to face. And in that moment I will both know and be fully known.

The experiential gap will be fully overcome in the process of uniting the human with the divine. I am describing here theosis and perichoresis.

But right now, today, I am well short of those marks. I am not fully known. There are parts of me that remained blocked off from both myself and God, hidden by my sin. I can grieve the Holy Spirit indwelling me.

Thus the ebb and flow of ongoing relationship, surrender and intimacy.

So this, then, is my theory.

As best I can tell, though I have borrowed all the bits and pieces from others, I can't recall coming across this particular viewpoint anywhere else. If you've encountered this theory before please let me know.

In meantime, let me tentatively name this view "Empathic Open Theism," an account that roots the relationally open dynamics of the human/divine relationship in an empathic gap between God and humanity where each partner works to overcome that gap in deepening intimacy until "perfect knowledge" is achieved in the union of theosis and perichoresis.

Recently these search terms brought someone to the blog:

the prayer of jabez made me sad

I thought that was a pretty funny search term.

Did the book The Prayer of Jabez make this person sad? Or was it the actual prayer of Jabez in 1 Chronicles?

Anyway, that search term linked to this blog because last autumn I wrote a post about the prayer of Jabez as I taught it during my Monday night bible study out at the prison.

If references to the prayer of Jabez make you cringe, I hope you'll find these reflections from the men in prison to be both poignant and profound.

///

In the prison bible study we were working through 1 Chronicles and we came to the prayer of Jabez:

1 Chronicles 4.9-10 (NKJV)
Now Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, “Because I bore him in pain.”

And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying,

“Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!”

So God granted him what he requested.

A lot of you, when you hear "the prayer of Jabez," think about the best-selling Christian book The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life by Bruce Wilkinson. The Prayer of Jabez took the evangelical world by storm in 2000 when it was first published. But it also drew a fair amount of criticism.

Specifically, some felt that Wilkinson took the phrase in the prayer "Bless me, and enlarge my territory" in a prosperity gospel direction. You pray the "prayer of Jabez" so that God might bring you success and good things in life--the expansion of your "territory."

But that's not how the men in the prison study heard the prayer of Jabez. They heard something quite different.

The men didn't focus at all on the "expand my territory" line. Rather, they were drawn to the fact that Jabez means pain (or sounds like pain in Hebrew).

A child named pain.

Apparently named so because of the pain he caused his mother in childbirth: "His mother called his name Jabez, saying, 'Because I bore him in pain.'"

Given the life histories of the men in the study, they could identify with a child named pain.

And the child named pain grows up to pray a prayer about pain. A prayer that he might be protected from pain or that he might not be the cause of any more pain.

There appears to be some interpretive ambiguity on this point. Most translations have the prayer being a request for protection from pain and harm:

NRSV:
that you would keep me from hurt and harm

ESV:
that you would keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain

NIV:
keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain 

That seems to be the consensus view, that the one named pain requests to be protected from pain.

But for some reason, the New King James Version goes against the flow and gives a different meaning:

NKJV:
that I may not cause pain

That might be a bad translation, but most of the guys in the study carry the NKJV so that was the line that most of them read in the prayer of Jabez. And that was the line that most affected them. Most profoundly affected them.

A prayer that I might not cause any more pain.

Because these men have caused a lot of pain. A lot of pain. A pain that goes on and on. In the lives of their victims. In the lives of their loved ones and families. In their own lives.

More, it's a daily struggle not to cause more pain. To not add pain upon pain.

Such a great, sad, awful, soul-crushing weight of pain.

These men, their name could be Jabez. Their name is Jabez.

So the prayer of Jabez that night in the prison was not "expand my territory." The prayer of Jabez was something different. Something full of sadness, loss, shame, regret, guilt and sorrow.

I pray, Dear God, that I might not cause any more pain.

This was the prayer of these children of pain.

This was the prayer of Jabez.

Put on compassion,
kindness,
humility,
gentleness,
and patience.
Be tolerant with each other
and, if someone has a complaint against anyone,
forgive each other.
As the Lord forgave you,
so also forgive each other.
And over all these things
put on love

I had a thought the other day about the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22.

Incidentally, I like to go with the Jewish description (the Akedah) of this event--the binding of Isaac--rather than the typical Christian description--the sacrifice of Isaac--because, well, Isaac was bound for a sacrifice but wasn't actually sacrificed.

Many modern and liberal readers of Genesis 22 are rightly horrified that God would demand a father to sacrifice his own son. Even if it's just a test. The request seems cruel and inhumane.

And no doubt it is. But the other day I had this thought about the Akedah. What if the story of the Akedah was an apology for Canaanite neighbors?

We know that Israel's neighbors practiced child sacrifice. A practice that many Israelites were drawn into. For example:

2 Chronicles 28.1-3
Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem sixteen years. Unlike David his father, he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord. He followed the ways of the kings of Israel and also made idols for worshiping the Baals. He burned sacrifices in the Valley of Ben Hinnom and sacrificed his children in the fire, engaging in the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites.

Thus the various prohibitions in the OT. For example:

Leviticus 18.21
Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.

Now my point here is this. Israel's faith wasn't to include child sacrifice but that was a part of neighboring religions. And I wonder what sort of religious debate this created. Specifically, if you came from a religion that practiced child sacrifice what sort of criticisms would you make about a religion that didn't have child sacrifices? I'm wondering here about Canaanite criticism of YHWH and the followers of YHWH. What form did that criticism take?

Here's my guess. The criticism questioned the religious commitment of the Israelite religion, questioned the depth of the zeal of the Israelite faith. And it's easy to see how such a criticism could be made. The Canaanites did not withhold their child from the gods. The Israelites did. So you tell me, who looks more committed? Who is more "sold out" for their faith?

So what I'm wondering here is if the story of the Akedah is working as an apology in the face of that Canaanite criticism, that the followers of YHWH are less committed to their god because they don't practice child sacrifice. Because that seems to be precisely the point of the Akedah: that YHWH does not demand child sacrifice but that the followers of YHWH are just as committed to their god as are the Canaanites to theirs. The Akedah is a story that says that child sacrifice cannot be used as the ultimate test of religious devotion. And no doubt it was being use as such a test as the Israelites and Canaanites compared religions.

That YHWH doesn't demand child sacrifices is no reflection upon the love, faithfulness, and commitment of the Israelites. Abraham, as the founder of the faith, demonstrated this once at the beginning so no further tests are needed. The point has been made:

The passion and commitment of YHWH's followers in this new non-sacrificial faith is secured in the founding story of the Akedah.

One of the arguments I make in The Slavery of Death is that we become enslaved to the fear of death because we form out identities through the act of possessing. Arthur McGill calls this an "identity of possession."

As should be obvious, an identity based upon possession is vulnerable to anxiety, worry and fear as the possibility and threat of dispossession is ever-present. The potential for loss infuses the psyche. We become enslaved by this fear of loss, slaves to the fear of death.

These fears become particularly acute when we live in what Brene Brown has called a "culture of scarcity" where everyone is "hyperaware of lack," worried about not having or being "enough."

As I argue it in the book, the path toward an emancipation from our slavery to the fear of death is to reconfigure our identities, to "die" to an identity built around possession so that a new identity might be "resurrected" to take its place.

If so, what sort of identity? The answer I give is an identity based not upon possession but upon the experience of gift.

Interestingly, though I didn't include this in The Slavery of Death, I think this analysis is supported by a reading of the book of Ecclesiastes.

A central question in the book of Ecclesiastes is this: What gain is there in life?

The question comes right at the start of the book, in 1.3:

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

The word translated as "gain" here is yithron. Yithron only occurs ten times in the OT, all of those occurrences in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Yithron is variously translated as gain, profit or advantage. The basic idea is that of accumulation, excess, and remainder--what is "left over."

According to Ecclesiastes because life is hebel--mist, vapor--efforts to "gain" are futile and vain. This is why most translations translate hebel as "vanity" or "meaninglessness."

In Ecclesiastes we walk through a couple examples of this pursuit of "gain" in Chapter 2, where the Teacher variously chased after "gain" via riches, pleasure, wisdom and work. But in every instance death washes the "gain" away. Riches, pleasure, wisdom and work are all hebel--fleeting as the mist and vapor. The pursuit of "gain" is revealed to be like "chasing after the wind."

But here's the really weird part. In other locations in Ecclesiastes pleasure, riches, wisdom and work are all praised and commended.

So what's the deal with this switcharoo? Are these things good or bad?

To be sure, there are no easy or consistent answers for the complex testimony found Ecclesiastes, but I think one way to make sense of the paradox observed here is rooted in the argument I make in The Slavery of Death.

Specifically, when we pursue things with an eye on possessing them, when our strivings are motivated by yithron, the prospect of death dominates our lives. Anything we think we've "gained" will be washed away. As noted above, an identity of possession is vulnerable to the prospect and inevitability of loss. Thus the angst we see--symptomatic of a slavery to the fear of death--expressed by the Teacher in Ecclesiastes: "All is vanity."

But the problem isn't with riches, pleasure, wisdom or work per se. The problem comes only when we pursue and hold onto these things as possessions, as "gain." Because "gain" is ever-vulnerable to loss.

But if these same things are received as gifts then what was previously found to be "vanity" is now experienced as a "blessing."

Ecclesiastes 5:19
Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the ability to enjoy them, to accept their lot and be happy in their toil--this is a gift of God.

Pursued as gain life is vanity. But received as gift life is transformed into blessing.

In short, I think a key insight to how the Teacher in Ecclesiastes variously condemns and praises aspects of life--money, pleasure, wisdom, work--hinges upon the contrast between "gain" and "gift" in the face of death.

And this is the same contrast that sits at the heart of my analysis of identity in The Slavery of Death.

What does redemption mean?

That was a question I was dealing with the other night out at the prison bible study.

It's an interesting question as other than a vague sense that redemption is synonymous with "salvation," I don't know if many Christians have a ready definition for "redemption."

What I pointed out in my study was how redemption has strong associations with Christus Victor views of salvation, the notion that "salvation" is fundamentally about deliverance, liberation, freedom and emancipation from dark enslaving forces.

The idea that Christ is a "redeemer" goes back to the Old Testament notion of the goel, what is sometimes translated as "kinsmen-redeemer." The kinsmen-redeemer is related to the Hebrew word ga'al which means to buy back, to regain possession of by payment, or to ransom. The kinsmen-redeemer is the one who buys back and pays the ransom.

The basic function goes back to Leviticus 25. When Israelites fell into debt they sometimes would have to sell their ancestral property. When this happened the kinsmen-redeemer was to buy the land so that the land remained in the family:

Leviticus 25.25
If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and sells some of their property, their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have sold. 

This role of buying back--redeeming--ancestral land to keep it in the family is nicely illustrated in the book of Ruth where Boaz, as kinsmen-redeemer, seeks to buy the ancestral land of Elimelek, Naomi's deceased husband. 

But sometimes things would get worse and an Israelite would have to sell more than the land, he would have to sell himself as a debt-slave. When that happened the kinsmen-redeemer was to rescue their kinsman from debt-slavery by buying him back:

Leviticus 25.47-49a
If a foreigner residing among you becomes rich and any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to the foreigner or to a member of the foreigner’s clan, they retain the right of redemption after they have sold themselves. One of their relatives may redeem them: An uncle or a cousin or any blood relative in their clan may redeem them. 

Basically, the idea of "redemption" is rooted in the notion of debt-slavery. To be "redeemed" or "ransomed" is to be bought back from slavery, from the ownership of another person. And the one who makes the payment is the goel, the kinsmen-redeemer.

In the book of Isaiah God becomes identified as the goel, as the Redeemer of Israel. For example,

Isaiah 41.14
"Do not fear, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel; I will help you," declares the LORD, "and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel. 

And while the name "redeemer" doesn't occur in the New Testament, in many places Jesus is described as performing the role of the goel. For example,

Mark 10.45
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Ephesians 1.7
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace

1 Peter 1.18
For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors...

The words "redemption" and "redeemed" in these texts tend to obscure the OT echoes. That is, I don't think many modern readers know how to translate the word "redeemed." Though you do notice echos of the OT economic, buying-back overtones when we do things like redeeming coupons at the store. Translation-wise, I think the rendering of the NLT does nice job of highlighting the kinsmen-redeemer overtones in some of these NT texts:

Ephesians 1.7
He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins.

Ephesians 1.14
The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify him.

The connections here with Christus Victor theology should be obvious. The function of the goel--the "redeemer"--has to do with emancipation and liberation from slavery, the "buying us back" from the ownership of another person.

And as should be clear, there is little in any of the NT texts that suggests that we were once enslaved or in bondage to God. No, our bondage was to dark spiritual forces. Thus Jesus, as kinsmen-redeemer, saves us by securing our liberation from these enslaving forces.

That is the meaning of "redemption."