Regular readers know that I used to write a lot about Halloween and monsters. A chapter in Unclean is devoted to the psychology of monsters.

Last Wednesday I was asked last minute to do the lesson at Freedom. So, given that Halloween was just around the corner, I dusted off that old monster material and did a class on "The Gospel According to Monsters."

I talked about four classic monsters--werewolves, vampires, mummies and Frankenstein--and I used each to talk about our spiritual predicament.

Werewolves remind us that we have a "beast" inside us. We like to think we're in control, but we are very much not in control of ourselves.

Vampires remind us that evil is attractive, even sexy and romantic. But behind the allure, is death and a parasitical existence.

Mummies remind us that, although we are shambling around, we are dead inside.

Finally, in an interesting twist, the story of Frankenstein reminds us that we're actually not very good a locating monsters. In the Frankenstein story the mob is the monster. In hunting monsters we've become the monster.

So given all that mess, what is the gospel according to monsters?

I read Romans, but changed a single word:

"God loved us while we were yet monsters."


I hope you have a blessed and haunted Halloween.

I want to follow up on the posts from last week about cultivating a covenantal imagination within the church.

Again, a covenantal imagination is fostered when we see church as a place where we make and keep promises to each other. Love is expressed in the hard work of forgiveness and fidelity across the years. Church is the sacramental and communal outworking of God's hesed, God's long faithfulness.

This hesed is what carries us through the disillusionments with church. In this, as Bonhoeffer pointed out, disillusionment can be a grace. Disillusionment is the threshold of hesed, the testing and proving ground.

As I pointed out last week, what binds us together as a church beyond liking each other? Liking each other isn't a substantial enough foundation for the long faithfulness. There has to be more. There has to be promise keeping in the face of disillusionment.

We are not the body of Christ because we like each other. We are the body of Christ because we promise to each other. That is what allows us to practice the long faithfulness.

Given the size of our study, we have about sixty guys in the room, it's hard to have intimate, vulnerable conversations. It's one of the things we wish we could do, but it's a trade-off. Limit the study to the few, or take as many as we can? We take as many as we can, and even then we have the longest waiting list to get into the study of any study currently going.

But this week, Nate got very vulnerable. We were talking about our ups and downs in this Christian walk, the way we fail over and over again.

Nate spoke up and started talking about his struggles with depression, dark moods that suddenly descend upon him and bring him to despair. The pain of being separated from his family. Being unable to hold his daughter in his arms. The weight of guilt and shame when he morally stumbles and falters.

The emotion with which Nate communicated all this was powerful and brought him to tears. I've never seen a more vulnerable and real moment in all the years I've been coming to the study.

I know it's hard, in policy debates, to generate compassion for criminals. But when you see suffering face to face you have to have a pretty hard and calloused heart not to be moved.

I wish the world could have seen Nate's tears on Monday night.

A lot of our struggles with church stem from disillusionment. Because the church aspires to be the People of God, the visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God, the church always triggers our idealism. We're attracted to church because of what it could and should be.

But the church rarely is what it could or should be. So the church both raises and dashes our hopes. You can't help but become idealistic when talking about the church, but that idealism creates expectations that human communities cannot meet. So hopes crash and disillusionment follows.

But might disillusionment actually be a great grace? Might our disappointment with the church be a gift? That's the argument Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes in Life Together:

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.

The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of the local church, how the kingdom of God has an address on a neighborhood block.

In that post I described the kingdom of God as a people gathered who make and keep promises to each other. That particular description of what it means to be the church is becoming more and more important to me.

Last week I was in Tacoma talking to church leaders and pastors, and one of the things I said to them was that cultivating a covenantal imagination is the most vital and counter-cultural thing we can be doing in our churches.

Without that covenantal imagination--making and keeping promises to each other--the only binding agent available to the church, our only social glue, is liking and preference.

And you can't accomplish anything remotely missional, cruciform, sacrificial, or kenotic if all you have is liking and preference.

When all you have is liking and preference there is no capacity for spiritual formation. All you are left with is persuasion.

Without a covenantal imagination, all a pastor can do is try to persuade people to be like Jesus.

I have a passion for the local church. Rolling out of bed on a Sunday morning isn't the hot, cool thing to be doing as a Christian. But to me, it's one of the most radical and counter-cultural things we can be doing.

And yet, for church leaders and pastors working in small, struggling congregations, leading a church can be hard, demoralizing work. Especially as America walks deeper into the post-Christian wilderness. The demographic tide is sweeping the church away.

So it is also a passion of mine to encourage local pastors. If you're leading a small, local church I want you to know you're a hero of mine.

And the reason is quite simple. If the kingdom of God is going to show up, it shows up among a people who gather to make and keep promises to each other, where the people of a community struggle through the generations to love each other and their particular place.

The kingdom of God is not found at conferences, on social media, in a book, or in your headphones. If you're listening to a speaker, scrolling through your iPhone, reading the pages of a best-seller, or jogging to your favorite podcast, you're not really encountering the body of Christ.

The kingdom has an address on a neighborhood block.

As we struggle toward a better future in America in the arena of race relations, it has often been pointed out how Martin Luther King, Jr. gets weaponized. King's non-violence, rooted in Christ's call for enemy love, is often used to silence or critique modern movements like Black Lives Matter.

It is true that we need to be reminded over and over again that King was not the tame figure we've enshrined in our cultural consciousness. King was a dangerous man, an agitator. Let us keep reading "The Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to remind ourselves of this.

That said, I do think it important to pay attention to the metaphysical, theological shift that has occurred among modern movements seeking racial equality and justice.

For example, I'd like to compare the metaphysics of King to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

King, we know, believed in the Christian metaphysical worldview. The American civil rights movement was rooted in the black church. King always saw himself as a minister of the gospel. Local churches organized the movement.

King's non-violence flowed out of this worldview and its hopeful eschatology. The arc of the universe bends toward justice. Because of this, one could give one's life away as a vital contribution toward bending that arc.

Christian theologians have long made that point, that non-violence and eschatology go hand in hand. If the arc of the universe is not bending toward justice, and your death doesn't contribute toward that future, then you should fight to preserve your life. It's as simple as that

If this is the only life you have, and your death won't matter, eschatologically speaking, then you shouldn't throw it away.

That is precisely the argument Ta-Nehisi Coates makes in Between the World and Me. Because Coates doesn't believe in God he has an ambivalent relationship with the American civil rights movement. Having rejected the Christian worldview, Coates cannot accept King's non-violence or hope.

This is what makes Ta-Nehisi Coates so grim and hard for many to understand when they try to fit him into King's worldview. As Ezra Klein recently wrote, "Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you." And I'm not suggesting that he should. And it is not, and will never be, my place to tell a black person what to do with their body in a white supremacist society.

My point is that there is a difference between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Martin Luther King, Jr., and it is rooted in eschatology. King and Coates have very different metaphysical worldviews, worldviews which inform their attitudes toward non-violence.

Without God, non-violence isn't really an option, not for race relations or for anything else. On this point, Coates diverges from King. As Coates said during his appearance on Klein's podcast, "I think these things don't tend to happen peacefully."

One nice thing about having tattoos is that they give you something to talk about at the prison.

I have two tattoos. My first one was a half sleeve on my left arm, a tattoo of Rublev's icon. The tattoo is my hospitality reminder. I look at it and am reminded that the person standing in front of me is to be received as Christ.

Last spring I got a second tattoo, inspired by some knuckle tattoos I saw in Brazil. I was at a community gathering to promote CURA Brazil, talking with a local guy who that three knuckle tattoos. A crown on one knuckle, a cross on a second, and a dove on a third. "What do those represent?" I asked. "The Father, Son and Holy Spirit," he replied, "The crown is for the Father, the cross for the Son, and the dove for the Holy Spirit."

I loved that, but didn't think knuckle tattoos were going to work in my social location. But the idea stuck. I had also wanted to get a tattoo with the Latin Deus Caritas Est ("God is love"). So last spring I combined the ideas for my second tattoo, a band on my upper left arm, the words Deus Caritas Est with the crown, cross and dove icons in between the words.

As you can imagine, the Men in White have tons of tattoos.

My favorite tattoo out at the prison are Cody's tears.

This is going to be hard to explain without a visual, but on the inside of Cody's index fingers, just below the knuckle, there is a small tear tattoo, one on each finger. Since it's small and on the inside of the index finger, it's a really inconspicuous tattoo, one of the most inconspicuous you'll ever see.

But when Cody bends his fingers and lifts his knuckles to the corner of his eyes--like the hand position indicated here, but with the index fingers more exposed--the tear tattoos appear, as if he were crying.

"These are my tears," Cody showed me one day lifting his knuckles to his eyes.

Hidden tears, that he always carries with him. Secret tears, that he allowed me to see.

Two years ago, I wrote a post describing the "purity psychology" at work within progressive Christianity.

Recently, while speaking in OKC, the topic of purity psychology among progressives came up. The post also bounced around Twitter again last week.

All that to say, the analysis remains timely and  relevant. My description of the purity psychology among progressives from 2015:

As I describe in Unclean, it's pretty much impossible for anyone to avoid purity psychology as purity seems to be an innate way we all, conservatives and progressives alike, reason about morality.

To be clear, the "purity culture" at work among progressive, liberal or radical Christians is very, very different from the "purity culture" at work with conservative and fundamentalist Christianity. The moral grammars at work among progressives and conservatives are very different. For example, where conservative Christians focus on things like sexual purity, for progressive Christians purity is focused upon complicity in injustice and oppression.

Again, as a progressive Christian, fighting against injustice and oppression is how I think about right or wrong. Justice is how I define moral "purity." Being "pure" or "righteous" in the eyes of God--in light of God's preferential option for the poor--means not being complicit in injustice.

In short, while a purity psychology is always at work whenever anyone thinks about being a good person--however they define it--I'm not saying that every expression of purity is morally equivalent. As a progressive Christian I don't think that at all. In fact, I think the exact opposite. As a progressive Christian I think conservative Christians should shift their purity categories away from sex to focus on oppression. I think the world would be a better place if we got our purity categories lined up with the right sorts of things.

So my observations about progressive Christian "purity" isn't to draw a moral equivalence between conservative and progressive purity. My observations are psychological in nature, descriptions of how purity psychology, of whatever sort, operates in a similar sort of way. Ways we should pay attention to.

For example, as I describe in Unclean, purity psychology is governed by a variety of contamination attributions. And one of those attributions is dose insensitivity.

Dose insensitivity is the contamination appraisal that even a small amount of the contaminating substance will have a catastrophic effect. For example, if I tell you that there is a very, very small amount of fecal matter in your pasta that knowledge ruins the dish for you. It doesn't take a full sized turd to ruin the dish. A very, very small amount will do the trick. Contamination is dose insensitive, a small dose will contaminate just as effectively as a large.

So let me illustrate how attributions of dose insensitivity work among progressive Christians. Here's a question that gets at the issue: How much complicity in injustice and oppression is acceptable?

Well, the answer, obviously, is none at all. Complicity is dose insensitive. Any bit of it is bad and needs to be eradicated.

This impulse to expunge every last trace of complicity sits at the heart of the radicalizing impulse within progressive Christianity, and progressive politics generally. This impulse is the psychological and moral imperative that moves you from liberal to progressive to radical. And let me again be clear, I'm not judging that trajectory at all. It's the trajectory of my life in both politics and religion.

But that trajectory, because of purity attributions such as dose insensitivity, is always going to be tempted in various ways. And one of those temptations is the temptation to point out or call out the complicity of others. Because any complicity at all is bad and worthy of being pointed out or called out it has to be expunged, even the smallest bits of it, even among well-intended friends and allies. And if you appear to be letting any complicity pass--for example, asking people to tone down the call outs--you're reconciling yourself to complicity. You're not centering the right things, not being a good ally. You're giving aid to oppressors.

Again, I'm not criticizing call outs. Call outs can be prophetic speech. What I'm saying is that call out culture is tempted in various ways by the purity psychology at work among progressives and that it's important from time to time to resist those temptations. For the sake of justice. For the sake of getting shit done.

For example, it's important to both admit and attend to the purity temptations at work among progressives because purity psychology often causes progressives to cannibalize and damage themselves in various ways. The effort to call out and expunge every bit of complicity among friends and allies sits behind the Twitter firestorms that leave so many disillusioned and disheartened.

Let me give two recent illustrations of what I'm describing.

On the progressive left you can't get two more different voices regarding Twitter activism than Freddie deBoer and Suey Park. And yet, in two recent articles both deBoer and Park make similar diagnoses about the purity dynamic at work among progressives, a dynamic that leads to a cannibalization which hurts the larger cause. Causes both of them--and many of us--are fighting for.

As a part of his conversation with Jay Caspian Kang--A Debate on Online Political Discourse--deBoer made the following observation about the damage social media firestorms cause when progressives rage with hashtags in calling out each other and potential allies:

It’s not unreasonable for people witnessing such things to conclude that the left will never stop harming itself sufficiently to do the work of changing the world. Here, too, I speak from experience. None of this is new or unique to the online space; left-wing movements are always in the process of blowing themselves up. I am discouraged by seeing so many of the typical ugly interpersonal dynamics of the left play out on Twitter over and over again. Many decent people who want to help are afraid to weigh in publicly on issues of controversy for fear of being ground up in a Twitter storm. Maybe that’s ridiculous; maybe they should just get over it; maybe they should get tougher. Maybe so. But they probably won’t, and I think we should all be able to take a long, hard look at how to better integrate potential friends into our movement, without being accused of not being an ally. Because the left needs friends.

Why does this cannibalization happen among progressives? One of the problems, as I'm diagnosing it, is that allies, being allies, are often complicit in various ways. Which makes allies, per the logic of dose insensitivity, problematic in all sorts of ways. Yes they are allies, but are they good allies? Can't they be better allies?

Progressives perennially struggle with allies, how to work with sympathetic but complicit people. Consider just how much commentary is devoted to "the ally problem" in online progressive spaces. Notice the number of Tweets and words progressives devote to the issues they have with allies. Just this morning I read a 2,500+ word post at a radical website that was 100% about allies and their numerous faults. A post not about injustice or concrete policy proposals--you know, a post about actually getting something done in the world--but a post about the shortcomings of allies.

No doubt allies are flawed, but if allies are your central, defining problem, well, you can see why progressive causes have difficultly reaching the critical social mass needed to get stuff done in the world.

The left does need friends but the left, because of its purity psychology, is also very hard on its friends, fracturing a potential coalition from ever reaching the tipping point needed to change things. Friends and allies will be complicit in various ways, but if progressive Christianity is going to have any significant impact upon the world it's going to have to figure out how to work with complicit friends. And yet, as deBoer describes, that work is frequently being undermined by a purity impulse that keeps tempting us to "call out" and cannibalize ourselves.

And while I've been focusing upon allies, what is important to attend to is how this isn't just a problem with allies. Even people who aren't complicit in various ways, and there are very few of these, still have to demonstrate a purity in their moral performance on social media. Any flaw, inconsistency or failure in this moral performance, even a small one per the purity logic of dose insensitivity, can result in the same social media backlash that poorly performing allies regularly face.

For example, Suey Park is both an activist and a woman of color. She's not a blundering ally. And yet, Suey faced a huge social media backlash because her moral performance with #CancelColbert was judged to be a mistake by many progressives. And what is interesting is how in Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig's recent profile of Suey Park in the New Republic--Why Won't Twitter Forgive Suey Park?--Suey describes how her mistake was processed as a purity failure by progressives.

In the article Suey succinctly describes the dose insensitivity purity dynamic at work among progressives:

Park’s understanding of her Twitter presence carries a distinctly Christian note. “It’s a lot like purity politics in the church,” Park observed, referring to the tendency of Twitter groups to attack perceived wrongdoers. It is, she pointed out, a strategy that works for activists until it turns on them. “You do one wrong thing,” Park said, “and you’re tainted. You’re out forever.”

I had planned to end this series with the last post (which I wrote over the summer), but I'm inserting one more most today (here in October).

I'm just starting to read Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money. I'm barely into it, but Goodchild makes an argument that I'd like to tack onto this series.

It's important, I think, as Goodchild points out, that Jesus pitted God against Mammon. Why that particular choice?

It has to be because Jesus saw Mammon as God's one True Rival. That where God doesn't exist money fills the vacuum. When God is dead mammon takes God's place. When God is removed from the stage money becomes the great animating and unifying force in the world.  

When there is no supreme value--no metaphysics--money becomes our ultimate value, the supreme value, the value which judges all other values. The market is the Invisible Hand of god, the spectral force providentially guiding human affairs, rewarding the righteous and punishing the wicked.

The only way we can displace money is by making it submit to a higher value. Again, metaphysics. If God doesn't stand above money, then money fills the metaphysical vacuum to become the supreme value. That's the choice.

God or Mammon.

Metaphysics or money.

It's either/or. Submit to money, or make money submit to God.

Your call.

This is my last post in this series. And the point I'll be making is one I've made regularly here on the blog, our need for enchantment.

To live full, rich and human lives we need to experience sacred places and moments. We need places and moments where we can experience wonder, awe and transcendence. We need rituals to mark places, experiences and moments as hallowed, holy and set apart from the mundane and quotidian.

True, one doesn't Christian metaphysics to make this happen. Hallowing is a human universal, a deep human need. We'll do it with or without God.

Our nation helps us hallow as we flock to fireworks displays on July 4th to say Oooo! and Ahhh! Our holidays help us hallow as we enchant our houses with twinkling lights. We light candles on birthday cakes for each other. We flock to scenes of tragedy to light candles and stand vigil. We use or create rituals to solemnize marriages and deaths. Even if we don't pray we feel compelled to say to the suffering, "You're in my thoughts." We give gifts to celebrate new births.

Human life demands enchantment, it requires a sacred texture.

Again, metaphysics.

Existentially, we must sort our lives: These things are quotidian, these things are sacred. And everyone does this.

And for my part, the enchantments of the Christians faith are very attractive, outside of Jesus the most attractive thing about the faith in my estimation. The rituals, the Book, the liturgical calendar, the tradition, the saints, the spiritual practices, the aesthetics, the sacraments, the art, the music, the architecture. And on and on.

If you're looking for enchantment, Christianity is a great place to be.

In my last post I noted that the Judeo-Christian tradition provides the foundation for liberal and democratic moral axioms, like "all men are created equal" and that we are endowed with "certain unalienable rights."

But Christianity goes deeper that liberalism and humanism. Christianity is about love.

Cruciform love in particular.

Self-donating, self-giving, self-emptying love. Agape love. Enemy love. Sacrificial love. Servant-hearted love. Kenosis. Washing feet. Seeking the last, rather than first, place. 

Cruciform love is what makes Jesus so attractive, even to non-Christians. And it's here where Christianity cuts deeper than liberalism and humanism.

To be clear, there are liberals and humanists that shame Christians when it comes to sacrificial, self-donating love. What I'm speaking about here is metaphysics.

Cruciform love is not the moral ideal of liberalism and humanism. Yes, as I noted in Part 4, every human being is a location of inviolable dignity and worth, but that doesn't mean I'm morally obligated to live sacrificially for others, especially not for my enemies.

True, few Christians reach, or even aspire to, cruciform love. But cruciform love is our moral ideal in a way that just isn't for liberals and humanists. Yes, any given liberal or humanist could, for themselves, aspire to self-donating, self-giving, self-emptying enemy love, but they would most definitely be leaving the liberal/humanist matrix and moving in a much more Christian metaphysical orbit, an orbit that originated with Jesus.

Again, metaphysics. There is nothing empirically or scientifically self-evident about adopting cruciform love as your moral North Star. You just have to put a stake in the ground and say, "This is what I believe in." And I admire anyone--Christian or humanist--who puts that stake in the ground.

So cruciform love, it's metaphysics and it's Christian.

But is it attractive?

Yes and no, I think. It's attractive in the sense that we find Jesus beautiful and feel drawn to emulate him. But is cruciform love really, ever, going to be attractive?

I don't think so, and it's here where Christian morality parts ways with liberalism. And with most so-called "Christians."

But for the few who hear his voice, cruciform love most definitely is an attractive metaphysics.

We live into his promise and find it to be true.

In losing our lives, we've found them.

We finished watching Les Misérables this week. I've never seen such a reaction to a movie we've show out at the unit. The Men in White were so excited to finish it up and we had a great conversation afterward.

For my part, I focused upon the two candlesticks.

Recall, Valjean steals the silver from the home of a kindly old bishop who takes him in for the night. Valjean is captured and taken back to the priest. But instead of condemning him, the priest tells the police that he gave the silver to Valjean and that, in fact, he left some behind. The priest then gives Valjean two silver candlesticks, the most expensive items in the house. After the police leave, the priest tells Valjean to use the silver as a second chance, to become an honest man. In the wake of this act of mercy and grace, Valjean pledges his life to God.

And from there we witness Valjean keeping his promise to God. Saving Fantine. Cosette. Marius. Even his enemy Javert.

The entire story is watching the ripple effects of a single act of grace. Two candlesticks, and all the lives they save.

I wanted to underline this part of the story as the Men in White live in a very small and circumscribed world. They feel cut off from the events in the "free world." Consequently, they feel that they don't and can't make a difference.

But when you focus on the ripple effects of small acts of grace--two candlesticks--you come to realize that even small things can have large consequences. So be faithful in the small things, give someone two candlesticks, and let the Lord attend to the rest.

That was the message I preached to them.

As many cultural historians have noted, the universal ethic of Western humanism and liberalism--where every human person is treated as a sacred location of inviolable worth and dignity--is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That God sides with the slaves against their oppressors in Exodus now strikes us as obvious. The Golden Rule is almost trite. That there is "neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female" sits at the heart of liberal democracy.

As Rene Girard has pointed out, victims are the greatest moral authority in our ethical universe. And the very first stories that recounted history from the perspective of the innocent victim were the Gospels According to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

But again, metaphysics.

That humanism and liberalism take human worth and dignity as axiomatic is a metaphysical stance. There is no empirical or scientific account that can justify the notion that every human life should be treated equally. Our ethical foundations are inherently metaphysical. Axiomatic and nonnegotiable.

For example, if a person suggested on CNN today, from a eugenics perspective, that cognitively disabled people should be sterilized, we'd shout that person down as a moral monster. It's taboo to even think such a thought. It's blasphemy. Heresy.

Again, metaphysics. Our ethical system is inherently religious.

But it might not be religious enough.

Yes, human worth and dignity is metaphysically grounded, but in liberalism and humanism it's more axiomatic than religious, given to us ex nihilo rather than grounded in a metaphysical account of the cosmos. In the Judeo-Christian tradition human dignity and worth is rooted in the account of the Imago Dei, the belief that humans are created in the image of God. In liberalism and humanism human worth and dignity is simply taken as a given, but it's not really rooted anywhere. There's no account for it.

Which makes it very vulnerable. All lives have the same dignity and worth. Unborn lives? The lives of prisoners on death row? The lives of our enemies in war?

To be clear, the Imago Dei is vulnerable in Christianity as well. Christians don't agree on abortion, capital punishment or war. God has been and is used to take and diminish life.

But since Christianity is religious, and not merely axiomatic, it has the metaphysical resources to critique itself. You can use the Golden Rule against Christians, and since it's their own rule it should give them pause. And if it doesn't, you can point out the contradiction. And keep pointing out the contradiction. You can call them hypocrites, using their own faith against them. There is moral traction for self-criticism.

But in a purely axiomatic account there are fewer resources for self-criticism. You can't use an axiom against itself. If push comes to shove, you can just reject the axiom to pick a different one. As an example of this, consider the ethical system of the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer. Singer starts with some very different moral axioms from those liberals and humanists inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the moral conclusions Singer reaches--which are perfectly logical given his starting axioms--are very different from those espoused by many liberals and humanists.  Moral monster worthy stuff if shared on CNN. But it's all perfectly logical and defensible given his moral axioms.

Again, I'm not mounting evidence that the Judeo-Christian axiom of universal human dignity and worth is more "true" than Singer's axioms, or any other axioms in rival moral systems. That's sort of my point. It's a metaphysical game we are playing. Pick your axioms. And by the way, science can't help you.

My point is simply that Christianity has an attractive metaphysics.

Christian metaphysics gives us an account of universal human worth and dignity and that account is robustly metaphysical enough to spark and sustain moral self-criticism in a way that a purely axiomatic account does not.

One of Karl Barth's great criticisms of liberal Christianity, and liberal humanism generally, was how it lacked the prophetic resources to stand against Nazi Germany.

The guiding idea behind liberal Christianity is to unpack all the metaphysical and "mythological" material in the Bible in purely humanistic terms. Replace the transcendent with the immanent, the divine with the human, the sacred with the ethical.

But as Barth pointed out, the trouble with liberal Christianity is that if God is just the good then God becomes a cipher for whatever the prevailing culture says is good.  

The biblical term for this conflation is idolatry, making God into our own image.

The evil potential of idolatry is that when human beings turn to the dark side God comes along to legitimate that darkness, or at least stand placidly to the side. This is why liberal theology lacked the prophetic resources to stand against Hitler. Liberal theology reduced God to the Volk (the people, nation and race), and then the Volk went dark side. And the the German church followed.

But God, said Barth, is Wholly Other. God cannot be reduced to the human. God cuts across the Volk.

God's Wholly Otherness creates a prophetic capacity, the prophet's ability to utter a "Thus sayest the Lord!" over against the Volk.

Again, metaphysics. Metaphysics creates prophetic capacity, a place where the prophet can stand above and against the Volk--the nation, the people, the race.

To be sure, one doesn't need to invoke the Hebrew and Christian God to stand as a prophet. But one does need to claim a metaphysical perch, a universal moral perspective that stands above the ethics of a nation, people or race. If a person tries to work within the system they are not a prophet, they are a politician. And while much good and great work can be achieved by politics as usual, there are times when prophets are required. And prophets, by definition, don't work within political systems. Prophets stand outside the system, as a voice crying in the wilderness.

So again, metaphysics.

And one of the great attractions of Christian metaphysics is its Hall of Fame roster of prophets.

From Moses ("Let my people go!") to the prophets of Israel ("Let justice roll down like a river!") to John the Baptist to Jesus.

Self-esteem is a comparative social metric that registers in our psyche as neurosis.

We compare ourselves to our colleagues, neighbors, friends, family and cultural standards of success and worthiness. If we measure up as "average" to "above average," we experience satisfaction. However, this satisfaction is tinged with anxiety about the potential for loss and failure.

If we measure up as "below average" we experience feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.

Because it's a comparative social metric that is a source of psychic pain and suffering, self-esteem is also a source of rivalry, competition and violence. Since self-esteem is rooted in social comparison, self-esteem creates a rivalrous, competitive relationship between ourselves and the world.

In sum, these are the two problems of the ego: neurosis and violence.

How can we escape this comparative, competitive dynamic?

Many wisdom, religious, philosophical, and therapeutic systems have proposed pathways toward a "quiet ego." A common theme in these systems is how quieting the ego (reducing neurosis) is critical in cultivating compassion (reducing violence). Again, neurosis and violence go hand in hand.

A key part of this process is transcendence, extracting the self from the matrix of social evaluation and comparison, allowing the self to stand above cultural standards of beauty, worth, and significance. A metaphysical self. But where is this transcendent, metaphysical self located?

In Christianity the transcendent self is located in God. We are "hidden in Christ." David Kelsey, in an insight I borrow in The Slavery of Death, calls this an eccentric identity, an identity located outside of ourselves, an identity that is received as gift.

The power of eccentricity to alleviate neurosis is described by Howard Thurman in his book Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman explains why African Americans in the United States were so powerfully attracted to Jesus. The reason, according to Thurman, is that Christianity allowed blacks to extract and protect their identities from the social metrics of a white supremacist society. With their egos now hidden in Christ, black Christians had transcendent, metaphysical identities that made them immune to shame and stigma. Thurman describing this:

The core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God...This idea--that God is mindful of the individual--is of tremendous import...In this world the socially disadvantaged man is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: "Who am I? What am I?" The first question has to do with a basic self-estimate, a profound sense of belonging, of counting. If a man feels that he does not belong in a way in which it is perfectly normal for others to belong, then he develops a deep sense of insecurity. When this happens to a person, it provides the basic material for what the psychologist calls the inferiority complex. It is quite possible for a man to have no sense of personal inferiority as such, but at the same time to be dogged by a sense of social inferiority. The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.

[Seeing oneself as a child God establishes] the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth can absorb the fear reaction. This alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value. The first task is to get the self immunized against the most radical results of the threat of violence. When this is accomplished, relaxation takes the place of churning fear. The individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs. 

Again, the Christian approach isn't the only path one could follow to quiet the ego. But some sort of metaphysical answer has to be given to the fundamental issues of identity: cultivating a profound existential assurance of belonging, counting and mattering. Especially for socially disadvantaged persons. For without this metaphysical answer--the axiomatic givenness that you do matter, that you do belong, that you are of inestimable worth--one is trapped in the neurotic, violent matrix of social evaluation and comparison, forever dogged by a profound sense of insecurity and the fear of what Brene Brown calls "the shame based fear of being ordinary."

Why believe in Christianity?

Christian apologetics is a difficult, fraught task. And while I don't think that it's possible to argue that Christianity has an exclusive corner on the market for metaphysical truth, what I do think you can do is two things.

First, I think you can make a reasonable case that some really, really important things require some appeal to metaphysics. And by that I mean a simple axiomatic givenness that can't be grounded in a purely scientific, empirical, descriptive account. I'll illustrate what I mean by "axiomatic givenness" in the posts of this series.

Second, I think you can go on to make a reasonable case that Christianity has a suite of metaphysical beliefs that are really attractive.

Basically, we need a metaphysical system and Christianity has a really attractive one to offer. So I'd like to take a few posts to sketch out some metaphysical ideas in Christianity and why I find them attractive.

To start, I find Christian anthropology to be very powerful and important.

By anthropology I simply mean "What are humans like?"

Almost every ethical, political, economic, educational, therapeutic and social system has, at its heart, a view of humanity.

Democrats have a view of humanity different from Republicans.

Marxists have a view of humanity different from capitalists.

Freud had a view of humanity different from Jung.

Hobbes had a view of humanity different from Rousseau.

And on and on.

Are humans rational or irrational? Good or bad? Competitive or cooperative?

These aren't abstract philosophical questions. Your answers to the questions affect everything from how you parent, to how you vote, to the school you send your kids to, to how your therapist approaches your issues, to how trusting you are of your fellow human beings and human institutions (from the government, to the markets, to the police).

In the background there is a working model of human nature and it governs almost everything we see around us, along with our own attitudes and behaviors.

Like I said, metaphysics. A working, axiomatic assumption about human nature that guides politics, parenting, ethics, education, economics, therapy and our default attitude about human beings and human institutions. Odds are, when we disagree about some controversial issue--from war to the legalization of drugs to corporal punishment to schools to taxation--what sits behind these disagreements are conflicting views of human nature.

We vote and parent differently because of metaphysics.

For me, what makes the Christian view of human nature so appealing is its dialectic between humanity being created in the Image of God and the Fall.

More on this in a later post, but our primal, fundamental nature is good. Humans are created in the Image of God. As Danielle Shroyer puts it, our identities flow out of "original blessing." Goodness is our origin and goodness is our potential.

And yet, this goodness is marred, wounded, damaged and eclipsed by "fall," by sin, depravity, wickedness, ignorance and evil.

Again, Christianity doesn't have exclusive rights on having a mixed and ambivalent view of human nature, but it is one of the great attractions of our faith. The Christian view of human nature spans the universe of human action and history. Christianity can stand alongside the most optimistic, romantic and humanistic accounts of human goodness and potential. There is no flower child that Christianity can't get behind.

But at the same time, there is no horror or atrocity--from torture to abuse to genocide--that Christianity cannot predict, envision or fathom. Christianity descends to the darkest depths of human depravity.

In Image and Fall, Christianity grasps the entire bandwidth of human morality and potential.

There is no view of human nature on offer more expansive or complete.

The movies the chaplain's office has for use in our study aren't all that great. From God's Not Dead to The Passion of the Christ. To be sure, the inmates love these movies, but I struggle with them.

So in an attempt to broaden their horizons, theologically and artistically, I brought in Les Misérables. Last week we watched what is Act One in the musical, up through "One Day More." We'll finish up this coming week.

Showing the movie was a bit of a risk. The plot is hard to track, with big jumps in time and setting. The historical context is foreign. Finally, there's the operatic style. I, of course, can sing every word of every song from start to finish. But would the men be able to track what was going on? Especially the guys who mainly speak Spanish?

To help with this, I did two things. First, we activated the Spanish subtitles. Second, we stopped after each scene--when the movie jumps to a new year--to recap what happened and set up what was about to happen. If anything was missed in the plot we got everyone on the same page.

So how did it go?

Really well, I think. A surprising number of the men had either read the novel at some point or had seen the musical before their incarceration. These guys really loved the movie. And everyone else seemed to as well.

Inmates, it seems, can identify with Prisoner 24601.

The mysticism of nationalism has tended to occlude any discussion of class divisions. We are convinced that we are e pluribus unum, one united from many.  Policy debate shies away from any discussion of class; those who raise the issue of class are accused of making class warfare, which strikes me as the equivalent of accusing the fire department of arson because they keep showing up at house fires.

--William Cavanaugh, from Field Hospital: The Church's Engagement with a Wounded World

I've spent years trying to get into the imagination of Jesus, trying to see the world through Jesus's heart and mind.

And today I'm struck by the influence of nature upon Jesus:

"He causes his sun to rise...and sends rain."

"Look at the birds of the air."

"See how the flowers of the field grow."

"Every good tree bears good fruit."

"The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew."

"Foxes have dens and birds have nests."

"The harvest is plentiful."

"I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."

"What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind?"

"You brood of vipers!"

"As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown."

"When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared."

"Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches."

"A net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish."

“When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’"

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going."

"Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest."

“I am the vine; you are the branches."

We've been going through the gospel of John out at the prison on Monday nights for our Bible study. We came to John 4, the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.

And we stayed there for three weeks. For three weeks we talked about this woman.

That happened because the men in the prison deeply identified with this woman, the shame she carried and her marginalization.

When we came to John 4 I started by ticking through all the ways this woman should not have been on a Jewish man's radar screen. Students of the Bible know this list very well, but walking through this list out at the prison had a huge emotional impact.

First, the woman was a Samaritan, looked down on for ethnic, cultural and religious reasons. The Samaritans were traitors to their race and their God.

Next, she was a woman in a Middle-Eastern culture, she was to be ignored by men.

Finally, she was a sinner and social pariah, discarded by five men and illicitly living with a sixth. Shunned by the Jews, he was also shunned by her own people. And outcast of the outcasts. The lowest of the low.

Jesus couldn't have picked a more marginalized person to have spoken to that day.

And that's want resonated with the men in the prison, they found themselves within her shame.

They were the outcasts among the outcasts, the lowest of the low.

I want to keep putting the opioid epidemic in front of you because I don't think progressive/liberal Christian spaces talk enough about addiction generally, and the opioid epidemic specifically.

So if you have Netflix, take some time to watch the new documentary Heroin(e), a story following three women--a judge, a fire chief, and a street missionary--battling the opioid epidemic in the "overdose capital" of America in West Virginia.