A lingering issue from the last post is why, exactly, Adam's choice dropped the whole of creation into contingency. Why did the sin of Adam have cosmic ontological consequences?

Both the Bible and the Christian theological tradition point to an array of answers here. Below are my speculations.

Biblically, it seems clear that the fate of creation is tightly linked to the fate of humanity. This suggests to me a hamartiological and ontological connection. What, then, is the nature of this connection?

I want to suggest, along with many of the church fathers, that creation be considered an ontological whole. There are a variety of ways we might imagine this, but one way is to view creation through a Christological lens, positing a "cosmic" or "universal" Christology. I'll follow Maximus the Confessor again here, who describes created realities as the many logoi of the one Logos. Again, because creation is ex Deo all of creation is held together by the Logos. All reality is grounded in God. Thus, each individual and particular manifestation of created reality is a reflection of the Logos. Maximus calls these created realities the logoi, which is plural for logos. Consequently, there are many logoi but only a single, unified sustaining Logos. As Maximus says, 

We affirm that the one Logos is many logoi and the many logoi are One. Because the One goes forth out of goodness into individual being, creating and preserving them, the One is many. Moreover the many are directed toward the One and providentially guided in that direction. It is though they were drawn to an all-powerful center that had built into it the beginnings of the lines that go out from it and gathers them all together. In this way the many are one. (Ambiguum, 7)

So, when we look at created reality the many are One and the One is many. Each created reality is a particular expression (logoi) of the single, underlying reality of God (the Logos). 

If this is true, and here is my speculative leap, humanity represents the volitional aspect of the logoi of creation. If creation is a united "body" then humanity is creation's "mind." Humanity is creation's ability to say either "Yes" or "No" to God. And given that the logoi of creation reflect an underling ontological whole, as humanity goes so goes creation. Thus, when humanity rebels against God, primordially and continuously, the logoi of creation as a whole remains "dropped" into ontological contingency and thereby drifts into non-being. Creation will remain stuck in this "dropped" condition until humanity, as a whole, says "Yes" to God. All particular logoi must return to the Logos, the many converging back upon the One. In the language of Romans 8, "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." 

Again, as humanity goes, so goes creation. The many are one. Creation is saved as a whole, all together.

"the water has risen to my neck"

The image of Psalm 69 is that of person drowning. The water has risen to my neck and I am about to go under. So we cry out to God.

A lot of us are feeling this way. Drowning. Pushed to the edge. About to crack. At our limit. Holding on.

Perhaps the question I am asked the most when I spend time with churches and organizations is this: "Are we really having a mental health crisis, or are people just more willing today to admit mental health problems?" The question takes many forms, like "Are kids today really more anxious than prior generations, or are they just using the word 'anxiety' more than ever?" Or: "Has mental health terminology creeped into normal everyday speech and is now being used to describe normal everyday experiences?"

The answer is that no one really knows. We have patterns and trends which are open to various narratives or explanations. My sense is that it's a bit of both. Our mental health crisis might be artificially inflated by an overuse of mental health terminology and a quickness to self-diagnosis ourselves. But I also think people are struggling. I don't think we need to get overly fixated on if our mental anguish is greater than that of prior generations. Pain is pain. Like Psalm 69, people are really drowning.

So, where do we turn?

The other question I'm asked a lot concerns the role of God in mental health. Religious folks tend to go in one of two directions here. Some, generally conservative folks, dismiss or avoid mental health technologies, from medicine to therapy. In this view, mental health problems are, at root, spiritual problems. The other view, more likely held by progressives, is that mental health is wholly a medical issue and that God doesn't have a lot to do with it. 

I think both of these views are wrong. I don't think you can grow tomatoes by praying for them to appear out of thin air. There is this thing called gardening that God gave us to grow and cultivate tomatoes. In a similar way, God gave us technologies that promote mental health and well-being and it would be foolish not to use these when needed. And yet, I also think it's a mistake to ignore the role faith and spirituality plays in psychological well-being. As I describe in The Shape of Joy (due out in about two weeks), one of the best kept secrets of psychology is that faith and spirituality have been repeatedly shown to be predictive of health and happiness. God is good for you. 

This isn't to say we should approach God in a therapeutic, utilitarian manner. I know a lot of pastors and theologians who worry about reducing God to "the therapeutic." I tend to respond to this concern with Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. If God is our Creator and the ground of our being then it stands to reason that we'll thrive when we make contact with and abide in that ground. Mental health improves when psychology makes contact with ontology. Living in the real matters.

In the last two posts I've worked through some thoughts regarding a theology of creation. I'm doing that, as you might have picked up on the last post, to create some connections between theodicy and soteriology, how the "problem of evil" (theodicy) might be implicated in our theologies of salvation (soteriology).

In my thinking, the doctrine of creation I'm working through helps to connect a moral conception of the fall ("sin") with what I described in the last post as "the ontological drop," the drift of being into non-being. In many Protestant spaces these twinned aspects of the fall--sin and death--tend to become separated. Generally speaking, only sin is the focus of salvation and the ontological consequences of the fall are left uncommented upon. This impoverishes our visions of salvation and shifts questions away from soteriology toward theodicy. That is to say, when you lose a rich ontological description of the fall questions that should have been handled by your theology of salvation get left unanswered and are, therefore, dumped into the theodicy bucket. Theodicy becomes the leftovers of an undercooked soteriology.

Again, the "ontological drop" happens when Adam severs his dependence upon God. The contingent nature of creation starts being shadowed by non-being. Separated from God, creation slides toward non-existence. 

When did this "ontological drop" happen?

In another speculative move, perhaps the most speculative of the series, I want to borrow the contention from Maximus the Confessor that creation dropped "immediately." At the very moment of creation it fell away. This is, you know, not the normal idea. Generally, we think of Adam and Eve's sojourn in Paradise as lasting for a season. But on three different occasions in his writings, Maximus describes how humanity fell the "instant" we were created. For example:

"...our nature unnaturally fell at the instant it was created, thus depleting its whole potential." (Ambiguum, 42)

"But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity--the natural desire of the mind for God--on sensible things." (Ad Thalassim, 61)

Humanity was created whole and perfect, but the moment we stepped into contingent existence our passions pulled us away from God. Two things happen in this first instant. First, there is a moral separation from God. Sin is introduced. This creates a hamartiological rupture focused upon human volition. ("Hamartiology" is our doctrine of sin.) Following Maximus, at the instant of creation humanity falls and become morally separated from God. 

The second thing that happens is that, due to sin, created existence "drops" into its contingency and becomes shadowed by non-being. Separated from God's vivifying power, creation begins drifting away from life. Death, disease, decay, and damage begin to eat away at being.

One of the things I'm trying to do here is tightly link what is often described as "moral evil" and "natural evil." Moral evil is human sinfulness, and we can point to the harms caused by human beings. Natural evil, from cancer to earthquakes, causes suffering of a different kind, and can't be directly blamed on human choice. The theology of creation I'm sharing here is connecting the two. At the instant of creation sin ontologically drops us into contingency. At the instant of creation the potential shadow of non-being becomes actual. 

Because creation is ex Deo, when humanity fell away from God, both hamartiologically and ontologically, "evil" is movement toward non-being, nothingness. When humanity rejects God, the only positive existent good, we can only be choosing nothingness. This where creation ex nihilo is the flipside of creation ex Deo. If you turn away from God you are turning toward nothingness. Sin is choosing non-being, non-existence, and death. When you walk away from God you walk into the void. This is the hamartiological aspect of the fall.

The ontological aspect of the fall is what I've already described in great detail, the slide of being into non-being. Consequently, natural evil, like moral evil, is movement into nothingness. If you want a scientific frame for this, for creatures our drift into non-being appears as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the drift of order into disorder. Life toward death. This is the ontological aspect of the fall.

Summarizing, "evil" is the word creatures use to name non-being. Non-being might look like sin or it might look like entropy, but these are two sides of the same coin. One side is hamartiological and the other side is ontological. Since creation is both ex nihilo and ex Deo movement away from God is movement into nothingness. We move either toward God or away from God, toward either Being or non-being. Goodness names one direction, evil names the other.

Now, I do want to be clear in all this that if you're looking for a "solution" or "answer" to the problem of evil in this post, it's not being offered. Again, what I'm floating here, which isn't novel but really a summary of a great deal of patristic thought, is a twinning of soteriology and theodicy, linking sin and death, into a whole gestalt. As a reminder, the point of this series is some systematization, to pull a lot of theological threads together into a comprehensive, coherent whole. 

The "win" here, in linking hamartiology and ontology, is that when we turn to soteriology and eschatology in the posts to come we have before us a single problem, creation's movement toward non-being. 

Having described the fairly non-controversial doctrines of creation ex nihilo and ex Deo, in this post I want to share something more speculative and, perhaps, more controversial. 

If creation ex nihilo declares an absolute ontological contrast between God and the world, what is the nature of that contrast? As described by many theologians, this contrast concerns necessity versus contingency. Where God exists in the necessary fullness of His own Being, creation exists in contingency and is bounded by finitude. 

Now, why might is fairly straightforward observation lead to controversy? 

Well, because it seems to me that a tension exists here between finitude and the claim that creation was created primordially "good," as declared in Genesis 1. Genesis 3 describes a "fall" from an Edenic Paradise. And yet, everything in this life that we describe as "natural evil"--damage, disease, decay, and death--flows out of creation's contingency and finitude. 

To my eye, there is a tension here. On the one hand, we were created in a state of "goodness." But if we are created as finite, contingent creatures this seems to imply that were are necessarily prone to damage, disease, decay and death, the very experiences we describe as "evil." You see the tension. As creatures we are contingent. Contingency implies natural sufferings we describe as "evil." And if this is so, how can we claim that creation is "good"? Being born/created into contingency seems to be a bad thing. 

Of course, the move here is to quickly point to Adam's fall, our descent into the consequences of contingency. The idea here is that, in our prelapsarian condition, we were protected from the consequences of our contingency because of our connection to God's divine life. 

(By the way, "prelapsarian" is a theological term of art. It comes from the Latin words "prae" (before) and "lapsus" (fall). Life after the fall is described as "postlapsarian.")

But the point I want reiterate is that creaturehood is inherently shadowed by contingency due to its finitude. Stated in a more metaphysical register, creaturehood is always tending toward non-being. If not connected to God, creaturehood drifts into non-existence. Necessarily so. And this drift into non-being is experienced by the creature as "evil," as it must be described given that this movement into non-being is movement away from God. Upon Adam's fall, about which I'll have more to say in the next post, creaturehood experiences an "ontological drop" away from God and begins drifting into non-being. 

But again, to return to the point, while protected from these consequences in the prelapsarian condition before the fall, creaturehood is already "shadowed" by contingency and finitude simply because we are creatures. That is, there seems to be a potential for "evil" baked into the very nature of creaturely existence. 

And if this is so, is there a threat here to the claim that creation is inherently and primordially "good"?

We might start here by pondering the Hebrew word tov that is translated as "good" in Genesis 1. Tov has a range of meanings--happy, pleasing, good, desirable, perfect, content, favorable, beneficial. If we interpret tov in Genesis 1 as descriptive of God's pleasure and happiness with his creative acts, then we lower the stakes in claiming that creation has some sort of primordial value of "goodness." Creation is "good" simply because God is happy with it. Creation is "originally blessed" because God smiles upon us. 

Basically, even though creation is shadowed by contingency and finitude God is pleased with us as the creatures that we are. We are good simply because God delights in us, creatures though we be. Stated more strongly, our finitude, our humanness, in all our frailty and nonpermanence, is good, just as it is and just as we are.

But what about goodness from our perspective? Can the creature name its creaturely existence as "good" given that creaturely existence is always tending toward non-existence? Might we be tempted to describe this existence as an "evil"? For example, Ecclesiastes seems to worry about the “goodness” of our nonpermanence.

I have two responses here. 

First, creaturely existence is only experienced as an "evil" when it is separated from God. Once creaturely existence "drops" from its ontological connection with God it becomes shadowed by non-being. These shadows we name "evil." "Evil," in this view, is a term describing our tending away from God's own being. 

Second, I want to float Augustine's notion of privatio boni here, that evil is the privation/absence of the good. If creaturely existence is ex Deo (from God), and continuously ex Deo, then life and being are rooted in God's own Being and therefore a positive good. Non-being is "nothing," the privation of the good. Since creaturely being exists in God it can only ever be a positive good. Creation-as-being is wholly good. Anything we experience as "evil," therefore, is creaturehood encountering its drift into non-being. "Evil" is the word creatures use to describe slipping away from life. 

To summarize: Whenever we point to the damage, disease, decay and death of creatures we are not pointing to created realities, we are pointing toward the shadow of non-being. Existence and being can only ever be good given their rootedness in God. 

When we point at evil we point at "nothing," the encroachment of non-being upon being. Given our finitude, creaturely existence is bounded by nothingness, being abutting non-being, a dance between and sunlight and shadows.

To start, let's dive into a theology of creation.

The critical ontological border that was established and patrolled by Jewish monotheism was the Created versus Uncreated divide. Christianity adopted and maintained this contrast. 

The doctrine in Jewish and Christian thought that established the ontological contrast between God and creation is creation ex nihilo, that God created the world "from nothing." At the time this doctrine was formalized among the church fathers there were a variety of rival cosmologies being espoused by pagan philosophers. One idea was that the world was formed by God out of some pre-existent, formless matter. Another idea was that creation was an emanation from God, that God was like the sun and creation poured out of God like sunbeams. 

Creation ex nihilo pushed back on these rival cosmologies to preserve and protect the ontological contrast between God and creation. Regarding the notion that God formed the world from primordial, formless matter, where did that matter come from? Plus, how could something exist eternally "alongside" God if God did not create it? Regarding views of emanation, there were a few different concerns. A big one concerned God's free choice to create. If creation is an emanation, light flowing from the sun, then creation is a necessary outflow of God's Being rather than a free act of grace. Creation ex nihilo, therefore, was a doctrine intended to protect the idea of grace, that creation doesn't have to exist, that life is a gift. Also, to protect the ontological contrast between God and creation there had to be a time when God was shining prior to our coming into being. Phrased more simply, God's existence doesn't necessarily imply our existence. Where God exists necessarily, we exist contingently. 

So that's a brief tour about what is at stake in creation ex nihilo. 

I now want to turn to make a strong claim for creation ex Deo, that creation comes "from God." Due to those early concerns about emanationist theories of creation--God is the sun and we are the sunbeams--there has been much less conversation in Christian theology about creation ex Deo. And yet, creation ex Deo is the logical outcome of creation ex nihilo. If we were created from "nothing" then our being had to come from "something," and the only "something" that existed prior to our creation was God. True, there was a time when we didn't exist, as creation ex nihilo contends. There is an absolute ontological difference between God's Being and our being. And yet, our being comes from and depends upon God. More, our existence continuously depends upon God. In this sense, the emanationist vision of our relation to God has some truth. God is like the sun and we are like the sunbeams, our being continuously flowing forth from God. Creation isn't a distant, one-off event in the past. A primordial "Big Bang." Creation is, rather, our continuous ontological dependence upon God. The way the sunbeams are connected to the sun. Theologians call this creatio continua, "continuous creation."

So, our doctrine of creation begins with two ideas, creation ex nihilo and creation ex Deo. We are created from nothing and we are created from God. The former idea polices the ontological contrast between God and creation, and the latter describes our continuous ontological dependence upon God. Creation exists differently than God, but creation also exists "in" God. To make this perfectly clear, this is a panentheistic vision. Everything exists in God's own being. Everything is spiritual. As Paul declared in Acts, in God "we live, move, and have our being." And as Colossians 1 describes it, in Christ "all things hold together." God is the fabric of the universe. 

To sum this up, while there are points here where theologians might quibble, my sense is that there's broad consensus about both creation ex nihilo and ex Deo, though the ex Deo part is much less described or discussed. And some theologians don't like panentheism, but I don't see how you can describe the cosmos as existing independently "alongside" God without falling into confusion and incoherence. We either exist "in" God or nowhere at all. 

Welcome to a series with an overambitious title. 

There is a branch of theology called "systematic theology." The goal of systematic theology is exactly what you'd think, the attempt to pull diverse theological reflections into a coherent, consistent whole. A "system." A lot of theological reflection is topical in nature, reflecting on some particular issue, debate, or controversy. But some theologians aspire to write a "systematics," their big book (or books!) where they pull all their thoughts together to comment upon every major area of theological reflection. Writing a "systematics" is often considered to be the pinnacle of a theologian's career. To attempt a systematics is an ambitious undertaking. 

I'm a psychologist, so there's no way I would attempt a systematic theology. Being self-taught and eclectic in my theological reading, I have too many holes in my theological eduction to do systematic work. And yet, due to that very eclectic and topical approach, I've felt the need over the last few years to do some systematic work. My mind feels like a messy garage. I've collected a lot of theological tools over the years, each for very particular theological purposes, but these are scattered everywhere with no rhyme or reason. I need to clean up the garage and bring some order to this mess. 

More specifically, over the years I've thought a lot about a lot of different theological topics. Soteriology. Doctrine of creation. Eschatology. Theodicy. Pneumatology. Theological Anthropology. These have been the main areas, and they mark off much of what one would tackle in a systematic theology. Since 2007, I've shared here a lot of opinions about each these areas. And yet, I've often felt tensions and frictions between how my views in one area rub up against views I have about other things. Regular readers might also have noticed a lack of consistency in my thinking, ways I seem to contradict myself from post to post. 

Given this situation, for a while now I've been reaching for a "system," a theology of everything that can pull together all of my theological opinions into a consistent, coherent whole. This system has taken enough of a shape in my head that I'm going to work through it publicly in this series. 

In this series I will share my "theology of everything," my systematic attempt to pull together soteriology, doctrine of creation, eschatology, theodicy, pneumatology, and theological anthropology. This is a "sense-making" exercise, an attempt to clean up and organize the very messy theological garage in my head.

I hope you enjoy sorting out your own thoughts as you follow along. 

"Exalt him who rides on the clouds"

Biblical scholars will point out that what we see in this line from Psalm 68, and at other places in the Psalms, is some syncretism between Canaanite and Israelite religion. Yahweh, the one who rides upon the clouds and brings rain to the desert, is being depicted as a Canaanite storm god. 

Such observations are often deployed and taken in a deflationary manner. Dissecting Israelite religion from a purely sociological perspective is assumed to evacuate it of transcendent truth. But any pagan influence in depicting Yahweh as a nature god or a storm god need not be read this way.

For example, one of the things C.S. Lewis does in The Chronicles of Narnia is to baptize the pagan gods. For example, in Prince Caspian Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, leads a joyful procession, along with Maenads, fauns, satyrs, forest creatures, and a river god, to celebrate Aslan's liberation of Narnia. To be sure, J.R.R. Tolkien didn't like it when Lewis mixed and matched his mythologies in a jumble like this, but we can appreciate Lewis' vision. We need not choose between immanence and transcendence, for God is both. God is both within and beyond the world. Consequently, there a truth to the pagan vision of the world, a vision a great many disenchanted Westerners have lost touch with. The whole of nature is enchanted. A storm really does display the glory of God. Rain is spiritual. As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels Christians embrace a sacramental ontology. The natural world is a visible, material sign of an invisible, spiritual reality. The heavens declare the glory of God.

One of my favorite examples of this imagination comes from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1 "A Liturgy of Praise to the King of all Creation": 

Leader: Our thoughts of you,
O Lord, have been too small, too few—
for seldom have we considered
how specific is the exercising of your authority,
extending as it does into the myriad particulars
of creation.

 
People: There is no quarter over which you are not king.
And as creation hurtles toward its liberation and redemption,
the full implications of your deep Lordship
are yet to be revealed in countless facets unconsidered:

Christ, you are the Snow King.
You are the Maker of All Weathers.
You are The King of Sunlight and Storms,
The King of Grey Skies and Rain.
You are The Rain King,
The Sun King,
the Hurricane King.
You are the King of Autumn
and King of Spring.

And our thoughts of you,
O Lord, have been too small, too few.

The old and impotent gods
our ancestors once believed in were,
at their best,
but imperfect pictures of you,
whose strength and goodness
and creative majesty
and wonderful mystery and love
exceed those old rumors as sunlight exceeds
the tiny dimness of stars reflected
in a dark and wavering pool.

The fairy tales
crafted by our old cultures
hinted at you,
though they knew it not.
Yet their perfect princes
and blessed ends were
yearnings for all that has found
fulfillment in you.

You are the Lord of the Harvest.
The Grain King,
The Wine King,
The God of Plenty,
The God of Hearth and Home.
You are The Hill King,
The Wildflower King,
King of the Great Bears,
King of Canyons.

You are The Monarch of Meadows,
The Lord of the Lava Fields,
Ruler of the Desert Wastes,
The Polar King,
The Rainbow King,
The King of the Southern Cross,
and The King of the Northern Lights.

You are the King of the Rabbits,
and The Lord of Tall Trees.
You are the God of Youth
and the God of Age.
You are The Acorn King,
The River God,
The Swamp King,
King of Glades,
King of Dells,
Ruler of All Hummingbirds.

You are The Horse Lord,
The Crag King,
Lord of the Bees,
King of the Walruses,
Commander of Rhinos,
Lord of the Lightning Bugs,

Cave Lord,
Mountain King,
Ruler of the Grassy Plains,
God of the Valleys.

You are The Captain of the Clouds,
The Wolf King,
The King of the Cockatoos.

And our thoughts of you,
O Lord, have been too small, too few.
For your claim over creation is vast. You are

The Lord of Antarctica,
the King of California,
the King of the Scottish Hills,
and the King of the Nile.

You are the weaver of
the unseen fabrics of the world.
You are Lord of the Atoms,
The Ruler of Electrons,
The Lord of Gravity,
and The King of Quarks.

Your dominion enfolds the earth and rises
beyond it to the furthest extremes of the stars.
You are Lord of the Vast Empty Spaces.
You are The King of the Constellations,
The Black Hole King,
Lord of Novas Exploding,
Lord of Speeding Light,
High King of Galaxies,
King of Orion,
King of the Moon.

And still, even still,
our thoughts of you
have been too small, too few.

You are the God of Justice,
The God of Wisdom,
The God of Mercy,
The God of Redemption.

You are The Lord of Love.

All of this is true.
But our thoughts of you are still too few,
for our minds are too small
to conceive of them all,
let alone to contain them.

You were before all things, you created
all things, and in you all things are
held together. There is no corner of creation
you will fail to redeem.

You are Lord of Lords,
and King of Kings,

O Jesus Christ,
our King of Everything.

Amen.

One more post reflecting upon the Dao--"This is the Way"--and Christian faith.

Specifically, while we've been reflecting upon Jesus as "the Way" and Christian community as "Followers of the Way," we should pause to make a comment about orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

I don't know if this is completely true, but I have a suspicion that the creedal debates that characterized the first three to four centuries of the church, the constant concerns over heresy, tipped Christianity toward an overemphasis upon orthodoxy, the espousal of "right belief." To be sure, theology matters. I'm not suggesting otherwise. But when faith is reduced to assent to metaphysical propositions, something vital is lost.

One of those things is the rabbinic context of the Gospels, where followers of Jesus were just that, followers of a rabbi. Jesus didn't present himself as a metaphysician, theologian, or a philosopher. Instead, Jesus set before the world a way to follow, a life to emulate. Following in this way is the mark of a disciple. 

The word to describe all this is orthopraxy, the "right practice" of the faith. And for many Christians, due to our bias toward orthodoxy, this is a foreign, exotic notion, the idea of "practicing Christianity." Along with the related notion of a "skilled Christianity." Any yet, if Jesus is "the Way," the Dao become visible in human history, then the life of faith can be viewed as a practice. There is believing in Jesus, and there is following Jesus. There is believing in Christianity, and there is practicing Christianity. There is a propositional Christianity, and there is a Daoist Christianity. 

There is orthodoxy, and there is orthopraxy. There is belief, and there is also the Way.

Yesterday's post explored intersections between the New Testament description of the Logos with the Chinese conception of the Dao (also spelled Tao). I made the argument that Christians have a vision of the Dao. When we point to Jesus we say, "This is the Way."

Interestingly, C.S. Lewis also makes use of the Tao (his preferred spelling) in his apologetical writings. Specifically, in The Abolition of Man Lewis makes the case for moral realism by invoking the Tao. As Lewis describes in Chapter 1: 

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. 'In ritual', say the Analects, 'it is harmony with Nature that is prized.' The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being 'true'. 

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. 

Following upon the last post, we see Lewis making connections here between the Logos and the Tao. Specifically, where in the West the notion of the Logos tips toward "Reason" we see Lewis use the Tao to fuse Reason with "objective value" to make the point that our lives can live in conformity or nonconformity with that value. We can walk within the Tao, or outside of it. 

In short, the issue here isn't being "reasonable" but conforming to the Way.

Our family enjoys The Mandalorian TV series on Disney+. Brenden, Aidan, and I enjoy the Stars Wars universe. Jana shows up for baby Yoda. 

Due to our fondness for The Mandalorian its tagline "This is the way" shows up every so often in our house. Recently, I went down a rabbit hole to appropriate that phrase for Christian purposes.

The trigger was learning that, in popular Chinese translations of the New Testament, John 1.1 is translated like this:

In the beginning was the Dao, and the Dao was with God, and the Dao was God.

My explorations concerned the degree of conceptual and metaphysical overlap between the Greek understanding of the Logos versus the Chinese concept of the Dao (also spelled Tao). There is, if you investigate, a lot of overlap, which justifies the decision of Chinese translators in translating Logos as Dao in John 1. Of course, there are some differences in these concepts and by connecting the Dao to the incarnation of Jesus Chinese translations of the Bible give the Dao a Christological form. 

Concerning the identification of Jesus with the Dao, there is a lot of material to work with here. As you probably know, while a very rich and nuanced metaphysical notion, the word Dao straightforwardly means "way" or "path." In the beginning was the Way, and the Way was with God, and the Way was God. Jesus describes himself in just such terms. "I am the Way" Jesus declares in John 14. Jesus tells his followers, "Come, follow me." The Greek word for "disciple" in the New Testament means "student," "follower," and "apprentice." Consequently, the earliest name for the Christian community was "Followers of the Way" (Acts 9.2, 22.4, 24.14). 

I think there is something profound in seeing Jesus as the incarnation of the Way in human history, the Path become visible to human eyes. Christians are those who become Followers of the Way.

In short, it is completely appropriate for Christians to say "This is the Way" in describing their faith, practice, and life. 

Last post in this series reflecting upon the psychology of Jesus as I describe it in The Slavery of Death, just to underline the big observations and draw out the critical implication for our lives.

Again, in The Slavery of Death I focus upon the claim in Hebrews 2.14-15 that the power of the devil in our lives is our fear of death. We have traced this fear through basic and neurotic anxiety, our scarcity concerns about having enough and being enough. In our attempts to cope with these anxieties we attempt to secure and control material resources and achieve self-esteem through performing in our hero game of worth, value, and significance. And yet, these fear-driven activities never wholly or permanently solve the problem of anxiety. Materially speaking, we perpetually face a world full of real and perceived scarcity. Regarding our hero games, these also, along with our neurotic performances within them, remain chronically precarious. In the end, never enough problems continue to haunt us, and the devil uses the attendant anxieties to keep us selfish and self-absorbed. 

Jesus, by contrast, stands before us as embodying an eccentric identity, a mode of living vividly illustrated at his baptism where Jesus receives himself as a gift from the Father. Where we struggle to secure ourselves in striving for ownership and self-esteem, Jesus rests secure in his Father. And having his life rooted in the Father, Jesus is emancipated from both material and neurotic concerns. This, I have argued, seems to the distinctive mark of Jesus' psychology, his non-anxiousness. No material loss or physical threat moves Jesus. Nor did Jesus experience any neurotic shame or embarrassment when he "took the last place" in social hierarchies of value as he "took on the form of a servant."

Stated even more simply, we look upon life as something we must "win," either materially or neurotically. Jesus, by contrast, didn't need to win, which allowed him to lose when that was what love demanded.

Which brings me to the big implication I want to underline in his final post, the association between anxiety and cruciformity.

I expect you have noticed across these posts how love involves facing down both basic and neurotic anxiety. We describe love as "sacrificial" for just this reason. Sometimes the sacrifice of love is material, which exacerbates basic anxiety. At other times, love demands that we step out of the spotlight of our hero game to wash feet. In those moments, neurotic anxiety hits us hard. Across the board, love demands non-anxiousness. As it says in 1 John, perfect love casts out fear. 

The implication, then, is that love only becomes a possibility to the degree we can step into and embody Jesus' eccentric, baptismal identity. Our ability to love is directly dependent upon our capacity for non-anxiousness, both materially and neurotically. Being "Christlike" isn't, therefore, first or primarily a moral endeavor. It is, rather, stepping into Jesus' distinctive psychology. Non-anxiousness creates the capacity for cruciformity. 

Returning to Hebrews 2, all this explains why fear is the power of the devil in our lives. Anxiety is the string the devil pulls to undermine our love. To cut this string we need to cultivate the psychological capacities that make love possible. I've suggested that Jesus' eccentric identity points the way toward loving non-anxiousness. 

And critical to providing the metaphysical ground of this eccentric identity was Jesus' defeat of death itself. As John Chrysostom once observed:

The person who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil...When the devil finds such a soul he can accomplish in it none of his works. Tell me, what can the devil threaten? The loss of money or honor? Or exile from one's country? These are small things to those "who count not even his life dear," said the blessed Paul.

Do you not see that in casting out the tyranny of death, Christ has dissolved the strength of the devil?

"let all the peoples praise you"

Out at the prison this week we returned to the book of Genesis. About ten years ago we started a cover to cover study of the Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending in Revelation. It took us a long time! Having finished that journey we're back at the start.

A crucial turn in the story of Genesis happens in Chapter 12, the calling of Abraham. This plotline is the plotline of the entire Bible. God says to Abram:

Go from your land,
your relatives,
and your father’s house
to the land that I will show you.
I will make you into a great nation,
I will bless you,
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt,
and all the peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.

There is here, right at the start, a dialectic between the particular and the universal. From all the families of the earth, God chooses this particular family to be his own special possession. But the vocation of this family is to bring all people to the worship of God. Israel exists for the nations. The universality of this vision shines throughout the Old Testament, especially in the prophets. We also see it here in Psalm 67:

May God be gracious to us and bless us;
may he make his face shine upon us
so that your way may be known on earth,
your salvation among all nations.

Let the peoples praise you, God;
let all the peoples praise you.
Let the nations rejoice and shout for joy,
for you judge the peoples with fairness
and lead the nations on earth.
Let the peoples praise you, God,
let all the peoples praise you.

I'm writing another book right now, tentatively titled The Book of Love, and in writing about the vocation of Israel I've been pondering this interplay of the particular and the universal in Israel's calling and vocation. Specifically, the universal is saved through the particular. All the nations will be blessed through Abraham. Why does it happen this way? 

One thing that strikes me is how salvation through the particular means being saved by difference. Were God to save us only through the particular, each of us on our own, we wouldn't have to encounter each other. We could stay in our isolated bubbles and silos of sameness. The same would happen if God saved us in a general and generic matter. But when the universal is saved through the particular we are forced to meet each other. In the language of Ephesians, the walls of hostility that separate us must be confronted. Salvation demands a social encounter. 

In the last post we described Jesus non-anxiousness in relation to material scarcity and even loss of life. But Jesus is also noteworthy in his indifference to pursuing self-esteem in relation to some sort of hero game. Jesus is free from both basic and neurotic anxiety.

Again, this seems to be due to Jesus' eccentric, baptismal identity. Knowing that his identity is secure in the Father, Jesus is immune to the sort of neurotic shame and embarrassment we feel when we step into low status roles or behaviors. Jesus can "take on the form of a servant" because his value and worth are not dependent upon social hierarchies of status and worth. You see this psychological connection quite clearly in John 13:

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

Knowing that "he had come from God and was going back to God" Jesus has the shame-resiliency to become a servant. As we see in Peter's response, the disciples are embarrassed for Jesus because they remain caught up in hero games of status. Jesus lacks this neurotic anxiety and is therefore immune to the embarrassment the disciples fear. Jesus can love because he is indifferent to shame. 

Consider also this famous text about Jesus from Hebrews 12: "Who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame." The cross involved both basic and neurotic anxiety. Basic anxiety, of course, because the cross involved physical torture and death. But Hebrews 12 points to the neurotic aspect of crucifixion as well, its shame. Jesus spurns not just death in his crucifixion but also its social stigma. We witness here, once again, Jesus' lack of neurotic anxiety, a non-anxiousness that enables sacrificial self-donation. 

There are other examples we could examine, but these suffice to make the point. Over the last two posts we've noticed two distinct features of Jesus' psychology, his lack of both basic and neurotic anxiety. This non-anxiousness flows from Jesus' eccentric, baptismal identity, an identity that enables Jesus to overcome the power of the devil in demonstrations of sacrificial love.

I have been arguing that Jesus' eccentric, baptismal identity allows him to be radically non-anxious. Jesus is free from the felt scarcities we experience in life and that gives him capacities of love which we struggle to actualize in our own lives.

In regards to basic anxiety, we can trace examples of Jesus trusting in the Father's care over worrying about securing and grasping material goods:

After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. (Mt. 4.2-4)

I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. (Mt. 6.25-34)

Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”

Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (Mt. 8.19-20)

This display of radical non-anxiousness, best captured in the "do not worry" passages from the Sermon on the Mount, illustrates the point about Jesus' relationship to basic anxiety. Namely, Jesus didn't seem to have much basic anxiety at all. In regards to material possessions, Jesus lived without worry like the birds of the air and the flowers in the field. This is what I meant in the last post that because Jesus possesses nothing, material speaking, he cannot be dispossessed. Receiving all things as gifts from the Father, Jesus cannot be taken or stolen from. Jesus is clear on this exact point: 

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal." 

Most worryingly for us, Jesus expects us to step into his eccentric, baptismal identity characterized by non-anxious, radical trust in the Father. In receiving our lives from the Father, we imitate Jesus' non-anxiousness in the face of "never enough" material concerns. 

The one place where we see Jesus tempted by basic anxiety in the gospels is in Gethsemane as he faces torture and death. This is the devil's high water mark, the closest Satan came to using basic death anxiety to get Jesus to chose self-preservation over love. But Jesus overcomes his fear of death by, once again, placing radical trust in the Father:

Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Mt. 26.38-39)

When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid, and he went back inside the palace. “Where do you come from?” he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. “Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above." (Jn. 19.10-11)

Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. (Lk. 23.46)

In many ways, the final words of his life--"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit"--perfectly capture Jesus' baptismal identity. Jesus' life was a gift from the Father and in the end he returns that gift back to the Father. Again, because Jesus doesn't own his life, he doesn't need to fight to preserve it. Rather, Jesus has the non-anxious capacity in the face of death to give his life away as a sacrifice of love. And not just at the end of his life. From first to last, Jesus gave his life away in love for others. 

In short, to go back to the last post, where we struggle to acquire and possess against the claims, encroachments, and threats of others, Jesus' radical non-anxiousness in regards to basic death anxiety gives him psychological capacities for radical self-offering and self-giving. Because his life is a gift, Jesus can give it away.

If, as I described in the last post, Jesus possessed an eccentric, baptismal identity, what sort of identity do we have by way of contrast?

Since we face perpetual never enough problems, always dealing with basic and neurotic anxieties over having enough or being enough, we form identities of possession and performance.

In the face of basic death anxiety, where we worry about survival and resources, we attempt to own and possess some part of the world. Here's how Arthur McGill describes this dynamic:

What is the center, the real key, to sinful identity? It is the act of possession, the act of making oneself and the resources needed for oneself one's own. This act can be described with another term: domination. If I can hold onto myself as my own, as something I really possess and really control, then I am dominating myself. A sinful kind of identity surely requires aggression or appeasement; it requires defenses against others and against the threat of death as final dispossession. But fundamentally, a sinful kind of identity consists in the act of domination. I am because there is some section of reality which I own, which bears my name and I truly own it; it truly bears my name because I dominate it completely, because it is an instrument of my identity and my will...

Frankly, I think McGill overplays it a little bit here. To be sure, the thirst for possession does sit behind our desire for domination and domination leads to aggression. History is full of examples of how a desire for possession, an unquenchable and greedy thirst for more and more, led to conquest, exploitation, and environmental devastation. 

But many of our temptations here are smaller, more intimate, and domestic. For example, the American dream is to own a house and have a stable job with a decent salary that provides us with health insurance and a retirement plan. We think that if we own and possess these things that our basic anxiety about "having enough" will be satisfied. And true enough, such a life is much less precarious. And yet, does "making it" in regards to the American Dream finally and fully deal with our concerns over basic anxiety? The answer is no. For the simple reason that jobs can be lost, the stock market can crash, your health can decline. Yes, having insurance and some cash in savings can help during these seasons, but they cannot wholly protect you. As Kate Bowler says, there is no cure for being human. 

My point here is that, yes, the desire for possession has been associated with some of the worse evils in history. But there's also a delusional aspect here as well, the assumption that if I can get a pile of cash (in a health insurance and a retirement plan) between myself and death that I'll be protected. But I won't. Further, even if life is going well right now, financially speaking, this success is perpetually haunted by the possibility of loss. It's only one pink slip, economic downturn, or medical diagnosis away. In short, possession provides no final solution to basic death anxiety. 

Beyond possession, our identities are also driven by performance within our hero games to overcome a felt neurotic scarcity of not "being enough." 

Let's go back to work-related issues. A lot of us are burning out a work. Why? Some of this due to basic anxiety. If we're stuck in the gig economy, juggling a lot of part time jobs to make ends meet, well, that's stressful. But many of us have secure jobs and still find ourselves pushing and pushing. Basic anxiety is no longer an acute concern. We have enough. And yet, we keep trying to climb. What's driving this climb is the neurotic pursuit of self-esteem, our heroic vision of success. Our basic economic needs are being met, but we still want "more," but the "more" here has shifted into a neurotic register, a narcissistic thirst for status, recognition, adulation, influence, control, attention, esteem, and respect. 

And yet, just like with an identity rooted in possession, an identity dependent upon performance remains chronically vulnerable to setback and failure. You might not get that promotion. You might get stuck in a job that doesn't feel much like a career, calling, or vocation. You'll inevitably meet someone who is better at the thing you're so good at. If you're playing a neurotic hero game, you're always vulnerable to losing by way of achievement or social comparison. Real and potential failure will always haunt you.

The point of all this, to return to the psychology of Jesus, is that in receiving his identity as a gift Jesus doesn't form his identity around possession or performance. Where we remain perpetually vulnerable to basic and neurotic death anxiety, Jesus is emancipated from fear. Why? Because Jesus cannot lose. In not claiming ownership over anything, Jesus cannot be dispossessed. In not performing in any hero game, Jesus is immune to the shame of failure. 

This, then, is the key contrast between Jesus' identity and our own. We build our identities through possession and performance and thereby remain perpetually anxious. We think we can thwart the power of the devil by securing a pile of cash and winning our hero game. But all such attempts are anxious delusions. Jesus, by contrast, by receiving his identity as a gift, is emancipated from fear. In the Father Jesus receives everything he needs and desires. This frees Jesus from the fears that perpetually haunt our lives and is the critical psychological difference between his identity and ours.

In the first post of this series I mentioned how the gospels are notorious for not revealing much about Jesus' inner life. This makes any description of "the psychology of Jesus" a highly speculative task. 

And yet, the mystery here might actually be a clue. That's the suggestion of the theologian Arthur McGill: 

In the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, nothing is more striking than the lack of interest in Jesus' own personality. His teachings and miracles, the response of the crowd and the hostility of the authorities, his dying and his resurrection--these are not read as windows in Jesus' own experience, feelings, insights, and growth...However, this portrayal is understood to be a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing. 

Phrased differently, Jesus stands before us a non-neurotic human being. A non-anxious human being. Positively stated, Jesus is tranquil and secure within himself. Thus, following McGill, the lack of depiction of Jesus' inner life in the gospels isn't due to biographical oversight or disinterest but is, rather, "a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing." The neurotic storms that make our egos loud and noisy didn't seem to plague Jesus. Jesus appeared to posses what psychologists describe as a "quiet" ego. 

As we'll get to, the security of Jesus' identity and the quietness of his ego liberated him from both basic and neurotic anxiety. And lacking these fears, Jesus stood free from the devil's power. But before turning to how Jesus' psychology related to anxiety, let's step back to analyze how this identity was accomplished.

Readers of The Slavery of Death and regular readers of this blog/newsletter will already be familiar with the argument I'll make here, leaning upon Arthur McGill and David Kelsey. Specifically, McGill describes what he calls Jesus' "ecstatic identity." I've preferred Kelsey's description of an "eccentric identity." To combine the two, I'll share McGill's descriptions of Jesus' psychology below but replace "ecstatic" with "eccentric." Here, then, is the secret to Jesus' psychology:

[T]he center of Jesus' reality is not within Jesus himself. Everything that happens to him, everything that is done by him, including his death, is displaced to another context and is thereby reinterpreted...He himself does not live out of himself. He lives, so to speak, from beyond himself. Jesus does not confront his followers as a center which reveals himself. He confronts them as always revealing what is beyond him. In that sense Jesus lives what I call an eccentric identity.

If this is so, the issue becomes how this psychological configuration, this eccentric identity, is achieved. McGill continues: 

In all the early testimony to Jesus, this particular characteristic is identified with the fact that Jesus knows that his reality comes from God...Jesus never has his own being; he is continually receiving it...He is only as one who keeps receiving himself from God.

I've talked about Jesus' eccentric identity ever since the publication of The Slavery of Death. Regular readers know this is a drum I tend to beat. It shows up in Hunting Magic Eels and takes center stage in my upcoming book The Shape of Joy. With my students, however, I describe Jesus' eccentric identity as his "baptismal identity." I think the narrative of Jesus' baptism makes what might seem to be an abstract notion more tangible and concrete.

When Jesus approaches his baptism he does so prior to any performance or accomplishment. There are no bullet-points yet on his resume. Prior to stepping into the hero games of life, the neurotic striving to establish and secure his identity, Jesus dips under the waters of Jordan. There Jesus surrenders himself to the Father, dies to himself. The neurotic slate of the ego is wiped clean. Upon coming up out of the water the Spirit falls upon Jesus with the Father's declaration, "This is my beloved child." 

Here is Jesus' baptismal identity, I tell my students. Jesus doesn't neurotically strain to establish his ego over against the world. Rather, Jesus receives his identity from the Father. Instead of an anxious inner struggle asking himself "Who am I?" Jesus has his identity gifted to him: "This is who you are." 

In this, Jesus' baptismal identity is his eccentric identity. Jesus is one who continually receives himself from the Father. As McGill describes it, in the waters of Jordan the grounding of Jesus' self is displaced and relocated. The center of Jesus' reality is shifted away from himself and found within the Father. His identity is flipped inside out. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, borrowing from Augustine, Jesus is not incurvatus in se, "curved inward" upon himself. Jesus' baptismal identity is, rather, excurvatus ex se, "curved outward" and eccentrically grounded in the Father. 

This baptismal identity is the secret to Jesus' psychology. In the posts to follow I'll describe how this identity creates a non-anxious posture in the face of our never enough problems, how a baptismal identity quiets the ego and creates a capacity for sacrificial love. 

"You have tested us"

Describing this testing, Psalm 66 uses a metallurgical metaphor: "You have purified us like silver." 

Every semester in my Experimental Psychology class I break the students into research teams. I give them a list of variables to choose from and they pick one for the research project they will do together during the semester. This semester one of the teams selected the psychological construct of "grit" to study.

Grit has gotten a lot of attention since 2018 when the psychologist Angela Duckworth published her best-selling book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. A lot of people have used grit to beat up on kids today, and I don't want to do that. But it is true that doggedness and perseverance, pushing through obstacles, hardships, and failures, and sticking with things to achieve long-term goals is an important trait. If you lack grit there will be a lot of things in life you'll never experience or achieve. 

So, what about grit in the spiritual life?

Throughout the Bible, God is described as testing us, a testing that produces grit. A famous passage in this regard comes from Hebrews 12 (which also cites Proverbs 3):

“My child, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord
or lose heart when you are punished by him,
for the Lord disciplines those whom he loves
and chastises every child whom he accepts.”

Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children, for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children. Moreover, we had human parents to discipline us, and we respected them. Should we not be even more willing to be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share his holiness. Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

Jesus also says in John 15, "Every branch that bears fruit my Father prunes to make it bear more fruit."

There is also, of course, the entire tradition known as the spiritual disciplines. And while grit isn't often mentioned in spiritual formation conversations, grit is cultivated by many of these practices. Eugene Peterson's description of the spiritual life as "a long obedience in the same direction" is the very definition of spiritual grit--consistency and perseverance of effort in the pursuit of a long-term goal.

Again, I don't want to beat up on the younger generations. I'm GenX, so my cohort wasn't especially known for its grit. And the Boomers were flower children. So people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. But I do think there's a general concern that a lot of our descriptions of the spiritual life have tipped toward the therapeutic and traffics a great deal in affirmation. The church tends to match the culture in that regard. And to be clear, I've affirmed much of this within the church. I think the message of God's unconditional love and affirmation is central to the gospel and medicine for the soul. But at the same time, messages about spiritual grit are also important. It's not fun to talk about or experience, but God tests, tries, refines, purifies, and prunes us. The life of faith demands discipline and perseverance. We need some grit.

Brené Brown's best-selling book Daring Greatly came out two years after I published The Slavery of Death. 

In Daring Greatly Brown shares a wonderful analysis about how scarcity sits at the heart of our emotional, relational, and social ailments. Brown describes scarcity as "the never enough problem," and it's a great way to share the insights we've walked through over the last two posts. If you don't think terms like "basic anxiety" or "neurotic anxiety" will preach, just start quoting Brené Brown on "the never enough problem." People will sit up an listen.

Here's Brown describing the impact of scarcity upon our lives:

We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

Brown goes on to share this assessment from Lynne Twist: 

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn’t get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of…Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack…This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.

Notice how these two quotes trace the exact psychology we've described over the last two posts, how scarcity as the "never enough problem" pinches both basic and neurotic anxiety. The basic anxiety: Never enough safety, resources, time, or sleep. And also neurotic anxiety, an "internal condition of scarcity" of feeling inadequate and losing games of social comparison. And we also see the moral fallout described, failures of greed, jealousy, and prejudice. It's everything we've observed over the last two posts, how basic and neurotic anxieties, driven by the experience or perception of scarcity, become the power of the devil in our lives.

With my students I map "the never enough problem" onto basic and neurotic anxiety this way. Basic anxiety is not having enough. These are the survival concerns about having enough security and resources. Neurotic anxiety, by contrast, is not being enough. These are the self-esteem concerns about being successful enough in your hero game. 

This is how scarcity, the never enough problem, becomes the power of the devil. Back to the puppet master analogy, there are two strings the devil pulls to control us. Not having enough. And not being enough.

And if this is so, I think it sheds some light upon the psychology of Jesus. 

We'll turn to that analysis next.

Hebrews 2 describes the "power of the devil" in our lives as a "the fear of death." Recall, psychologists divide this anxiety into basic death anxiety and neurotic death anxiety. In the last post we traced the impact of basic death anxiety through our moral lives. In this post we turn to neurotic death anxiety.

If basic anxiety concerns survival neurotic anxiety involves self-esteem. We're moving here up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, away from physical and material needs to focus on internal motivations for establishing an identity and positive self-regard. But how, it will be asked, are these motivations being affected by death anxiety? Where the impact of basic death anxiety is easy to observe in our lives, the influence of death anxiety upon our self-esteem seems a bit murky.

The seminal works here are Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil. According to Becker, in the face of death we confront a crisis of meaning. Death threatens to destroy all that makes life significant and worth living. This is the lament of Ecclesiastes:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.

No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them. (1.1-4, 11)

In the face of this existential vacuum cultures step in to provide us with routes toward a significant, meaningful life. Becker calls these lifeways "cultural hero systems." Cultural hero systems provide us with "symbolic immortality." With my students I describe this by using an alumni award we give every spring commencement called "The Outlive Your Life Award." The name of the award perfectly captures the notion of symbolic immortality, how, in the face of death, we can have a durable and lasting impact upon the cosmos. We can "persist" in the face of death and this legacy of influence allows us to to escape the existential futility expressed in Ecclesiastes.

Self-esteem, therefore, becomes a metric reflecting how well we are performing within our particular hero system. This is how death anxiety manifests in our lives as neurosis. Are we hitting our marks in the hero game we've set for our lives? Are we winning or losing our version of the Outlive Your Life Award? As I tell my students, we're all playing some game of worth and significance. The game varies, of course, but we're all invested in playing the game. Henri Nouwen once said that the three temptations of life are the temptations to be powerful, relevant, and spectacular. Notice how each of these temptations are neurotic in nature, temptations that have little to do with satisfying basic needs but play out in the hero game of our self-esteem.

And so, that's the second way the devil gets his claws into us. Where basic anxiety causes failures of generosity, sharing, and hospitality, neurotic anxiety is implicated in our struggles with our ego and self-image, our desire to be powerful, relevant, and spectacular. Worse, when we experience failures in our hero game the devil poisons our minds with shame, self-loathing, and chronic insecurity. 

Win or lose your hero game, either way the devil's got you. 

I teach a class at ACU entitled "Psychology and Christianity" where I explore intersections between psychology and Christian faith and practice. In one of the units of the class we work through insights from my book The Slavery of Death.  

During a lecture covering this material I share that one of my objectives is to describe "the psychology of Jesus," to get inside his head to try to understand how he experienced the world. To be sure, this is a highly speculative endeavor as the gospels are notorious for not revealing much about Jesus' inner life. Still, using the core ideas in The Slavery of Death I make an attempt.

The Slavery of Death is a theological and psychological meditation on this passage from Hebrews 2:

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

The most striking thing about this passage is how it describes the fear of death as the power of the devil in our lives. Anxiety is the devil's tool. We are held in slavery by our fear of death. The devil is the puppet master, we are the puppets, and anxiety is how he pulls the strings to make us dance.

Psychologically speaking, how does this work?

The first thing to appreciate is how psychologists make a distinction between basic death anxiety and neurotic death anxiety.

Basic death anxiety is easy to understand. Basic death anxiety is survival and resource anxiety. Think of the bottom parts of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 

As I describe in The Slavery of Death, as biological creatures in a world of real or perceived scarcity we grow anxious when threatened or when our resources become depleted. Scarcity drives basic anxiety. Some people in the world are facing acute basic anxiety right now as they live in war zones or face famine. But everyone knows what basic anxiety feels like. We face seasons where money is "tight." We face scarcities of time and energy when we don't have enough time or energy to get done everything that we need to get done. We face scarcities of sleep. 

I like to remind my students of that first weekend of COVID when everyone ran to the stores and bought up all the toilet paper. Basic anxiety, our fear of not having enough, caused massive hoarding behavior. When basic anxiety is high sharing and generosity evaporate. That first weekend of COVID there was a fear that there might not be "enough," so we grabbed more for ourselves. Think also of how economic scarcities, real or perceived, affect the moral climate of a nation. When unemployment is high, wages low, and the cost of living soaring, the generosity and hospitality of a country declines. Scarcity creates xenophobia. If I perceive, either realistically or delusionally, that there's not enough for me I become concerned about outsiders soaking up scarce goods and resources. This simple threat/scarcity/anxiety dynamic explains why fear sits at the heart of our political discourse. If a politician can create a sense of either threat or scarcity the resultant basic anxiety can move votes.

In the next post I'll turn to neurotic death anxiety. But this brief analysis of the role of basic death anxiety in our lives, and its link to moral failure, points us in the direction we'll be heading. Specifically, when people describe Jesus they tend to describe his goodness and love. We're going to try to pop the hood on that goodness to take a look at the engine, the psychological dynamics that gave Jesus the capacity to live such a distinctive and singular life. Taking a cue from Hebrews 2, we're going to give particular attention to Jesus' immunity to "the power of the devil," his freedom from both basic and neurotic anxiety. 

To go back to the puppet imagery, the devil tried to pull the strings of scarcity and anxiety when he encountered Jesus. But (with a nod to Pinocchio here) Jesus had no strings. In facing Jesus' non-anxiousness, the devil had no power over Jesus. And it is here, with the devil's lack of power over Jesus, were I believe we get a window into "the psychology of Jesus."

The final feature we'll consider from Lloyd Gerson's description of Platonism is antinominalism. 

This is likely the most abstract feature of Gerson's list. I don't expect many people know what "nominalism" means, which would make "antinominalism" a bit obscure.

Simply stated, nominalism is the denial of universal properties or principles, the contention that only individual objects exist. For example, "redness" isn't a universal property or reality that exists independently from the collection of things that are red. "Redness" is just a name (hence the label "nominalism") for a shared feature (the color red) a collection of individual objects share.

Reading that description of nominalism you might be wondering what's at stake, philosophically and theologically, between nominalism and antinominalism. There are a few things.

First, a nominalist approach to reality would deny transcendentals such as the True, the Beautiful and the Good. This isn't to say that nominalists don't have a version of the true, the beautiful and the good. In the nominalist account of, say, the beautiful, the word/name "beautiful" is simply a word/name that describes a collection of objects we label "beautiful." More simply, in a nominalist account "beauty" is subjective, a word to describe our subjective judgements about what we consider beautiful. An antinominalist, Platonic account of Beauty, by contrast, argues that the Beautiful exists independently of objects and our subjective judgments. Beauty is not subjective. Beauty is real. The same goes for the True and the Good. 

What's at stake, therefore, between nominalism and antinominalism is what theologians describe as a participatory metaphysics. The patristic imagination of the church fathers, which was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, imagined salvation as participation, coming to share in the divine nature and life of God. Things become increasingly true, beautiful, and good the more they participate in the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, which is God's very own life. For human beings, this participation in the life of God is called theosis or divinization. 

While we're here talking about nominalism and Christianity I should also mention the debates that swirl around the nominalism of Duns Scotus. 

John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was an influential medieval Scottish philosopher and theologian. According to thinkers associated with the movement called Radical Orthodoxy, theologians like John Milbank, Scotus represented a poisonous turn in Christian thought. According to Radical Orthodoxy Scotus turned away from the participatory metaphysics of the church fathers by introducing nominalism into Christian thought. This turn toward nominalism, as argued by Radical Orthodoxy, helped usher in the secular, modern age which has led to widespread skepticism, secularism, disenchantment, and religious disaffiliation. 

The particularly toxic aspect of Scotus' nominalist thought, according to the Radical Orthodoxy crowd, concerned Scotus' assertion about the univocity of being. Recall, according to nominalism a word like "existence" is just a name for a class of individual objects. That is to say, we can gather a group of objects--a dog, a chair, an apple--and say that these things "exist." Just like my example of "red" above. Now, according to the church fathers up to the time of Thomas Aquinas adding God to this group of objects that "exist" was deemed illicit. God existed, true, but existed differently from physical objects. Being/existence is not "univocal," doesn't mean the same thing when applied to physical objects versus God. There only existed an "analogy of being" between God and physical objects. The existence of physical objects was analogous to God's existence, but fundamentally different. 

According to Radical Orthodoxy, Scotus rejected the analogy of being and replaced it with the univocity of being when talking about God and physical objects. That is to say, God and physical objects existed "in the same way." The universal property of Being and Existence was rejected for a nominalist account of existence. Objects didn't exist because they participated in Being. "Existence" was, rather, just a name for a collection of objects, God among them. 

Basically, nominalism flattens our imagination when it comes to existence. Our understanding of existence becomes literalistic. "Existence" comes to mean "physical object" rather than the mystical vision of God as the Being of being. And you can see how this turn would have ushered in the scientistic, materialistic vision of existence, the contention that only physical objects exist because existence is just a word we use to gather together a collection of physical objects. Existence isn't a property of the cosmos, existence is just a label, just a name, for a set of objects. 

Turning back to our series. 

We can see here how antinominalism is associated with an enchanted view of the world. Antinominalism claims that transcendentals such as the True, Beautiful and the Good are real. Because of this antinominalism sets before us a participatory metaphysics. We share God's life, become like God in the process of theosis. And finally, antinominalism preserves the ontological contrast between God's Being and the being of physical objects. God and physical objects don't exist "in the same way." The Mystery of Being persists.