In 2021 I shared a series of reflections on Karen Kilby’s essay, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity.” At the time, I was sorting through the oft-repeated claim that “the Trinity is our social program.” 

In the years since, I’ve kept returning to Kilby’s argument. Her cautions about political projection—the temptation to baptize our preferred social visions with divine authority—have become even more compelling. I’ve also kept circling back to a question that remained unresolved at the time: whether, and in what sense, the Trinity carries positive social, relational, or political implications.

To start, we need to review the debate between classical versus social trinitarianism, and how social trinitarianism lead to the maxim "the Trinity is our social program."

Classical trinitarianism is notoriously abstract. The Nicene consensus insists that God is one substance (ousia) and three persons (hypostases). The doctrine of the immanent Trinity—the life of God in se—is complex, arcane, and difficult for most Christians to grasp. 

Social trinitarianism emerged in the last century in the work of theologians like Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf, partly as a response to the abstractions of classical trinitarian theology, but also to challenge the way that doctrine had historically been used to justify hierarchy, empire, and colonial projects. Its central move was to emphasize relationality: what binds the Trinity together is love, expressed dynamically in perichoresis, often described as the “divine dance” of mutual indwelling and self-giving. In this way, the Trinity became more than a metaphysical puzzle—it became a vision of harmonious, self-giving love, a pattern for human relationships and social life.

This relational vision is then pressed into the social and political sphere. If God is relational and communal, human communities should reflect this mutuality. Families, friendships, organizations, communities, and nations were called to emulate the Trinity’s pattern of existence. The slogan “the Trinity is our social program,” popularized by Miroslav Volf, expresses this vision. The Trinity becomes a source of moral and social inspiration, a model to which human institutions should conform.

It is against this background that Karen Kilby’s critique takes shape. 

According to Kilby, social trinitarians had made the doctrine tangible and compelling, but in doing so, they ran the risk of projection: reading their preferred politics into the divine life and then claiming God as the source and warrant of their political vision.

In her essay, Kilby traces the typical pattern this argument would take:

1. Introduce the Trinity as a society of persons:

“Most basically, social theorists propose that Christians should not imagine God on the model of some individual person or thing which has three sides, aspects, dimensions or modes of being; God is instead to be thought of as a collective, a group, or a society, bound together by the mutual love, accord and self-giving of its members.”

2. Make perichoresis attractive:

“God is presented as having a wonderful and wonderfully attractive inner life. I already mentioned Moltmann’s notion of ‘the most perfect and intense empathy’ existing between the persons. Another proponent… writes of the Trinity as ‘a zestful, wondrous community of divine light, love, joy, mutuality and verve,’ where there is ‘no isolation, no insulation, no secretiveness, no fear of being transparent to another.’”

3. Project social ideals onto the world:

“In the hands of these thinkers, then, the claim that God though three is yet one becomes a source of metaphysical insight and a resource for combating individualism, patriarchy and oppressive forms of political and ecclesiastical organization… not a philosophical stumbling block but something with which to transform the world.”

Again, Kilby calls this a problem of projection. We project our preferred social and political visions onto God—and then turn around and claim God’s inner life as a justification for those same visions:

“Projection, then, is particularly problematic… because what is projected onto God is immediately reflected back onto the world, and this reverse projection is said to be what is in fact important about the doctrine.”

Kilby's caution here is prophetic. She concludes:

“Theologians are… free to speculate about social or any other kind of analogies to the Trinity. But they should not… claim for their speculations the authority that the doctrine carries within the Christian tradition, nor should they use the doctrine as a pretext for claiming such an insight into the inner nature of God that they can use it to promote social, political or ecclesiastical regimes.”

Let me give a concrete example of how this projection works. For example, some theologians argue that democratic socialism is more relational and mutual than free-market capitalism. From there, it becomes “trinitarian”: socialism is read as more aligned with the pattern of love and mutuality in the Trinity, while capitalism is cast as less so. A straight line is drawn from the Trinity to a particular political arrangement. To be clear, my sympathies are more socialistic than capitalistic. So I like this line of argument. But I'm alert to Kilby's caution and concern about how “the Trinity is our social program” can be used to give divine sanction to preferred political positions, turning the Trinity into a mirror of my politics. 

Kilby’s alternative is apophatic trinitarianism. Apophatic theology emphasizes God’s mystery, the impossibility of speaking definitively about God, and the way human descriptions inevitably fall short. Kilby writes:

“The doctrine of the Trinity… does not need to be seen as a descriptive, first order teaching… It can instead be taken as grammatical, as a second order proposition, a rule… for how to read the Biblical stories, how to speak about some of the characters… how to deploy the ‘vocabulary’ of Christianity in an appropriate way… its importance lies in structuring Christianity rather than providing a picture of God’s nature.”

Her point is sobering. Human analogies—perichoresis as a divine dance, love as a model for human society—can be beautiful, but they can never be literal. Even John of Damascus, after describing perichoresis, concludes:

“It is impossible for this to be found in any created nature.”

This is where Kilby haunts me and why I keep returning to her essay. Do we get too literal, too cozy, too confident in drawing direct lines from the Trinity to politics? Kilby's apophatic approach is a powerful reminder that idolatry remains a constant temptation whenever we speak about God, especially for political purposes. As Kilby remarks in her talk "Trinity and Politics: An Apophatic Approach" this is actually one political takeaway from her position, that we should be wary of any totalizing political system and ideology. She says:

If one cultivates an awareness of the ungraspability of God, the impossibility of finding an image, or model, or integrating vision of the the Trinity, if one cultivates the capacity to live with questions to which we have no answers, might this be correlated, not with a particular political commitment to one form of socio-economic system or another, to one social vision or another, but with a resistance to an absolute confidence in any system and any social vision? Economic and political regimes do, after all, tend to take on a sacred aura. They tend to demand unconditional commitment, to imagine themselves as the end and goal of history. If Christians are schooled by the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as in other ways, to know that God is not within our grasp, that we possess no concept or overarching understanding of that which is highest, then we are in a sense schooled into suspicion of systems that present themselves with a kind of sacred, all-encompassing necessity.

So might we not imagine that an important political contribution of Christian thinking about God be then, not that it provides us with something like a shortcut to formulating a distinct alternative of our own, but that it helps us call in question, helps relativize, all such systems that we find we might be enticed by? Might there not be a correspondence, in other words, between a resistance to idolatry in relation to God and a resistance to ideology in relation to political systems?

This is excellent, and a much-needed reminder. But it still leaves the pressing question: does the Trinity have any positive social, relational, or political implications? Kilby’s apophatic trinitarianism makes me nervous because, if pushed too far, it risks rendering the Trinity morally, socially, and politically inert—precisely the problem she is trying to resist. If the Trinity becomes an apophatic vacuum, it can be co-opted or ignored, deployed to justify almost anything. The apophaticism of the Trinity would promote political quietude, allowing it to exist comfortably alongside any regime, good or evil. If the Trinity has nothing to say about our politics, then anything goes.

In the face of this concern, I do think there is a way to connect the Trinity to our politics, and Kilby herself points the way. She is correct that words like perichoresis give us no window into what the Trinity is in se. This is an observation about the immanent Trinity, the mystery of God’s very life. But that’s not all we have when it comes to the Trinity. We also have the economic Trinity—the revealed and visible actions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in salvation history.

In short, I think Kilby is wrong to assume that we are only ever drawing from human models of love and relationality and then projecting those onto the Trinity. Of course, we do this a lot, and whenever we do, we risk idolatry, using God to justify our preferred politics. But that’s not all we are doing. When I think about God, I am mostly engaging with the revealed actions of the economic Trinity to understand what the immanent Trinity might be like. Rahner's rule applies: The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity. To be sure, this is a fraught process—temptations to idolatry lurk on every side—but when it comes to the Love that exists between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, something of that Love has come into view in Jesus Christ. And that Love, I would argue, gives us a glimpse of what perichoresis might be like. Not because it exists in any created thing, but because the Trinity has entered into human history and made itself visible.

Having made itself visible, I think we can most definitely say that this Love carries relational, social, and political implications. Kilby herself gestures toward this in her talk “Trinity and Politics,” where she focuses on the Incarnation and the political implications of first-hand engagement with brokenness and suffering. Her point is subtle, and it stays true to her apophatic approach: Jesus’ engagement with oppression does not yield concrete policy proposals. Politics at a given time and place are too historically and contextually dependent. But what Jesus’ engagement does reveal—and reveals to me as I follow him to the cross—is a clear sense of what is broken and dislocated in the world.

As Kilby points out, we are never lacking in totalizing systems or high-altitude analyses. Political think tanks abound. Elites always have answers about how to fix the world. The trouble isn’t that we lack political opinions, it’s that our opinions often lack a direct, gritty engagement with what is actually happening “on the streets.” Following Jesus to the cross keeps me on the streets, close to the suffering, close to the people and stories that are often invisible in centers of power. Phrased simply, my politics is blind without the cross.

Thus, I would describe Kilby’s approach as an incarnational politics—a politics that starts with, and stays close to, the suffering and pain of the world. Yes, there may be diverse and competing policy proposals about how to ameliorate that suffering, but an incarnational politics keeps my attention focused on this hurt and perpetually engaged in its healing.

All that to say, when it comes to politics, Kilby turns to the economic Trinity. Grounded in the Incarnation, I would argue that there is a Trinitarian politics. And while this does not give me concrete, one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions, it does shape how I engage politically in the world: humble, attentive to the hurt, close to the pain, incarnational, and rooted in the Love revealed in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Jana and I have long loved the music of Rich Mullins. In college we got to see him in concert, which he preformed in a white t-shirt, torn jeans, and barefoot. I was smitten! 

We loved not just his music, but his life and witness. Rich Mullins was a pilgrim who embodied a restless search for God amid the failures of institutional Christianity and his own personal brokenness. 

I was recently listening to Andrew Peterson's live concert album celebrating the music of Rich Mullins (on Spotify here and Apple Music here). I was interrupted by Peterson's cover of "Calling Out Your Name." (You can listen to the original here on YouTube. And here is Peterson's cover, from a different live album, on YouTube.)

What interrupted me by Peterson's cover of "Calling Out Your Name" was the poetry of the lyrics. Weeping by the time I reached the end of the song, I felt to myself, "That's an Easter hymn."

"Calling Out Your Name" by Rich Mullins

Well the moon moved past Nebraska
And spilled laughter on them cold Dakota Hills
And angels danced on Jacob's stairs
Yeah, they danced on Jacob's stairs
There is this silence in the Badlands
And over Kansas the whole universe was stilled
By the whisper of a prayer
The whisper of a prayer

And a single hawk bursts into flight
And in the east the whole horizon is in flames
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

I can feel the earth tremble
Beneath the rumbling of the buffalo hooves
And the fury in the pheasant's wings
And there's fury in a pheasant's wings
And it tells me the Lord is in His temple
And there is still a faith that can make the mountains move
And a love that can make the heavens ring
And I've seen love make heaven ring

Where the sacred rivers meet
Beneath the shadow of the Keeper of the Plains
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

From the place where morning gathers
You can look sometimes forever 'til you see
What time may never know
What time may never know
How the Lord takes by its corners this old world
And shakes us forward and shakes us free
To run wild with the hope
To run wild with the hope

The hope that this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in a song not sung in vain
And I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

And I know this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And with the prairies I am calling out Your name

The Lord has taken this old world by its corners, shaking us forward and shaking us free. 

Christ is risen!

May you run wild with the hope. 

"Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars."

Psalm 148 is a song of cosmic praise. Structurally, we behold a layered cosmos. The song begins in the heavens:

Praise the Lord from the heavens.

And then we move toward the earth:

Praise the Lord from the earth.

While in the heavens, celestial beings are called upon to praise the Lord: angels, the heavenly armies, the sun and moon, the stars, the highest heavens, and the waters above the heavens. 

On earth, all terrestrial beings are called to praise: sea monsters, ocean depths, lightning, hail, snow, clouds, and stormy winds, mountains and hills, fruit and cedar trees, wild animals and cattle, creeping animals and birds. Lastly, the whole of human society is called to praise: kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and judges, young men and women, the old and young together.

What strikes the reader is the anthropomorphism of creation. The stars giving praise. The sun giving praise. Oceans giving praise. Animals giving praise. Storms giving praise. Trees giving praise. Mountains giving praise. 

Earlier in this series on the Psalms I described how the imagery of the Psalms opens up the possibility of a baptized paganism, viewing the powers of nature, visible and invisible, as subject to the lordship of Christ. I shared how C.S. Lewis presents a vision of this baptized paganism in The Chronicles of Narnia. It's worth sharing again this lovely illustration from The Magician's Nephew where the children bear witness to Aslan creating the world:

The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long, warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure, cold, difficult music. Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters."

It was of course the Lion's voice. The children had long felt sure that he could speak: yet it was a lovely and terrible shock when he did. Out of the trees wild people stepped forth, gods Fauns and Satyrs and Dwarfs. Out of the river rose the river god with his Naiad daughters. And all these and all the beasts and birds in their different voices, low or high or thick or clear, replied:

“Hail, Aslan. We hear and obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know.”

Lewis is here blending nature mysticism with Christianity. Creation is alive and awake. And because alive and awake, capable of the praise we behold in Psalm 148. 

Praise the Lord, shining stars. Praise the Lord, every tree. Praise the Lord, sun and moon. Praise the Lord, all you seas. 

Last post in this quixotic series trying to get people to cozy up to the word “impassibility.”

To start, let me just say this by way of clarification. God “knows” and “experiences” our pain. As the Ground of our being, God is intimately present to every human experience. God is closer to your pain than you are. God holds our tears in existence. God holds our blood in his hands. Blood and tears could not exist without this intimate connection. So if your heart aches, God is not distant from that ache, but present to it more deeply than you can comprehend. The issue here concerns the way God knows and experiences in contrast to our own. The debate about God’s impassibility isn’t about whether God “knows” or “experiences” our pain, but the mode of that knowledge and experience. We are tempted to imagine God’s knowledge as if God possessed a biological nervous system, undergoing emotional reactions in a cause-and-effect sequence. But that is a mistake. God doesn’t have an amygdala. The mode of God’s intimacy with our pain and suffering is beyond our comprehension. The claim of classical theism is simply that God’s intimacy with our pain does not introduce change within the divine being, given that our pain is already held within and sustained by God’s very life. Phrased differently, God is not a bounded object in the midst of other bounded objects who collide in competitive zero-sum interactions. God is not a limbic billiard ball. God is what holds your limbic system in being. Given that ontic intimacy, you can be sure God knows what you’re feeling. That you can feel anything at all is because God gifts you those feelings.

Still, as I mentioned in the last post, there are a lot of people who really want God to experience feelings and emotions as if God possessed a nervous system, because feelings and emotions are experienced within human love relationships.

In response, it might be helpful to ponder what we mean by a “love relationship.” Are we imagining some tortured, stormy, and turbulent love affair? Or are we imagining love as steady commitment, care, and fidelity?

To be sure, many famous contemplatives in the tradition leaned into the passionate and erotic in their relationship with God. The soul ecstatically yearning for God like a lover longing for the beloved. And that passionate relationship has its moments of desolation, as described by St. John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul. But God is never imagined as an unfaithful or unreliable lover. There is a passionate intensity in the relationship, and all the drama that entails, but God as lover remains faithful and true. Once again, this is the good news of divine impassibility. God is not an inconstant, cold, abusive, or unfaithful spouse. In the marital union with God, the soul is safe with the Beloved.

Most of us, though, experience our love relationship with God as a parental relation, paternal and maternal. Here the experience is less a torrid love affair than one of constant nurture and care. The pathos of God’s emotions shifts toward the delight and dismay a parent feels toward a child. Here our conversation becomes less entangled in God’s “feelings,” because in this parental framework the definition of love shifts away from emotions toward commitment. What defines parental love as parental love is not the storm of its passions but the unconditionality of its acceptance and care. Which is precisely what is highlighted by the good news of God’s impassibility, the constancy of God’s love.

And this is also true for the romantic and marital framework described above. In the marital relation, turbulent and infatuated passions settle down into sacrificial care and lifelong fidelity. Like parental love, as marital love matures it becomes less characterized by emotional infatuation than by relational commitment. Once again, notice how that issue--relational constancy--keeps coming up. The good news of divine impassibility.

In short, the pathos of love is less about turbulent emotional swings between two unsteady lovers than about the fierceness of a relational commitment, like a parent’s love for a child or the love found in a lifelong marital union. God’s feelings and emotions are always expressions of that fierce relational commitment, the constancy of God’s love and care. Because of our unsteadiness and inconstancy, there is a drama and pathos to God’s relational commitment, and we describe that drama and pathos using the language of emotions as analogies of relation. But that relation is loving precisely because it doesn’t wobble or change.

This has been a key point I’ve been trying to make. Love shouldn’t be “emotional.” Because emotions are, by definition, variable and volatile. We know this. When we describe someone as “very emotional,” we are not describing a steady, constant person. A “very emotional” person is an unpredictable person. In a similar way, we don’t want an “emotional” God. It is not good news if God is a hot, unpredictable mess. True love, we know, loves despite emotion. So this whole debate about whether God has “feelings” or “emotions” is really a waste of time, because what is good news in this debate isn’t the emotionality of God but God’s constant posture of commitment and love. And it’s this constant posture that makes the doctrine of God’s impassibility such good news.

To wrap this series up, let me just confess to a degree of perversity on my part. Regular readers are aware of my contrariness, my delight in sticking up for unpopular ideas and going against popular trends. Shoot, I’ve defended the prosperity gospel! So it’s not overly strange that I’d be defending an idea that many people find repulsive and cold. So, what’s the win here, for me? I shared that win in a Substack Note yesterday:

So, I’m in the middle of a three-part series about “The Good News of God’s Impassibility.” This rehabilitation of divine impassibility is a quixotic provocation on my part, and it unsettles progressive Christians. But here’s what I’d like to say: Friends, can you not see that, when you argue for God’s “emotionality,” it is through that very door the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon will walk, along with visions of God’s “wrath” being “satisfied” upon the cross? Can you not see how, in your embrace of an “emotional” God, you are aiding and abetting all that you say you oppose? If so, join me in closing this door.

And if you claim that, by “emotion” all we always and ever mean is love, well, can you not see you agree with me already?

In the last post I argued that God’s impassibility is good news. God is love, and God’s love never changes no matter what humans might do. That is good news.

And yet, there is some predictable pushback here.

The first is from a pagan, anthropomorphic reading of the Bible. That is to say, we imagine God the way the ancient pagans imagined their gods, as having psychological lives just like humans. Think of the gods in a Percy Jackson novel or movie. In this pagan approach to Scripture, when we read about God’s “wrath” or about God “repenting” of an action, we treat that language as a straightforward expression of human-like psychology.

Classical theism rejects this pagan way of imagining God. God is not like Zeus or Odin. The emotions of pagan deities were as unpredictable and unstable as human emotions. Just like us, the gods of paganism were a hot mess.

Beyond a pagan reading of the Bible, another objection to divine impassibility is that some people just really want God to have feelings, as feelings are the very stuff of affection and relationality. There is a strong desire for God to have emotions, no matter what classical theism might say.

I sympathize with this desire, but I want to keep hammering away at the point that when people express this desire for God to have emotions and feelings, they generally limit God’s feelings to the positive. God feels joy, love, and pleasure with us. People do not, as a rule, wish God hated them. In short, this desire for God to “be emotional” or “have feelings” is really just a shell game for the confession that God is constant love. Sure, we change the adjectives to make it seem that God has “different feelings”--delight, kindness, love, joy--but we are still in the word cloud of “God is love.”

Another concern comes from biblical literalism. As mentioned above, biblical literalists point out how God’s “wrath” is described in Scripture. Conservative readers of the Bible are right to draw our attention to these texts, and they are comfortable reading these emotional descriptions as literal depictions of God’s inner life. But for many progressive readers of the Bible this is, to put it mildly, a really odd and frequently hypocritical move. For example, open, process, and relational theologies aren’t known for their biblical literalism. Just ask them how they read Genesis 1 in light of modern science. And yet, these same folks, when it comes to emotional descriptions of God, suddenly become as literalistic as the fundamentalists. There’s just no good reason to imagine that the emotional descriptions of God in Scripture are literal depictions of God possessing a human-like psychology. A wee bit of apophaticism would do a world of good for the open, process, and relational folks given their biblical literalism. As pointed out above, these literalistic readings are pagan depictions of God.

Lastly, people will point to Jesus’ emotional life as somehow refuting God’s divine impassibility. A little church history would help here. At the Council of Chalcedon it was asserted that Jesus is one person with two natures, and that the two natures exist “without confusion.” That is to say, according to Chalcedon, the human nature of Jesus, which is passible, is not mixed or confused with his divine nature, which is impassible. Rather, the two natures remain distinct and unmixed even as they are united in the one person of Christ.

Stepping back, I have written about all this before. What I have suggested, in response to many of the above concerns, is that the emotional language in Scripture describes our relation to God’s love. For example, “joy” and “delight” describe the relation of righteousness to love. By contrast, “wrath” and “disapproval” describe the relation of unrighteousness to love. As classical theists maintain, love remains constant, but our relation to love changes based upon our choices, and we describe that relation using the language of emotions and feelings.

Here is a simple metaphor. Imagine fire. If you stand close to the fire, you describe that relation as “warm.” As you move farther from the fire, you describe that relation as “cold.” The fire remains the same, but your experience of the fire, warm or cold, changes depending upon how close you are standing. In a similar way, our experience of God--joy or anger--expresses how close to or far away from God we are standing. If we are close to God, we experience the relation as “joy” and “delight.” But if we are standing far away from God, we experience the relation as “wrath” and “displeasure.”

Given how this relation can change in light of our actions, we speak of God’s emotions as an analogy. God is described as “pleased” or “angry” not because he undergoes emotional swings like humans do, his countenance changing from stormy to sunny. Rather, emotional language conveys an analogy of relation.

And the good news is that you’re always in a relation with love.

I have regularly defended the classical theist claim that God is impassible. This can be jarring for readers who come to this conversation from open, relational, and process perspectives. For them, divine impassibility often implies relational inertness, distance, or coldness.

As I have written many times, the problem here lies with the word impassible. When we hear it, we assume it means that God is emotionally distant or unresponsive. But that is not what impassibility means within classical theism. To say that God is impassible is simply to say that God is not emotionally conflicted or turbulent. As I have said recently, it means that God is not a hot mess.

The key point is to remember that God is love. So when we say that God is impassible, we are saying that God’s love never wavers or changes. God’s love is never conflicted or hesitant.

The irony is that open, process, and relational theologians actually agree with this claim. When they describe God as constant and unchanging in love, they are affirming precisely what classical theism means by divine impassibility. God’s love does not suffer violent emotional swings from wrath to love. This is why, as I have recently argued, classical theism stands in tension with versions of penal substitutionary atonement that posit a change in God’s emotional posture toward us as a result of Jesus’ death on the cross.

Theologically stated, when we confess that "God is love" we are confessing that God is passion but not passible. 

Further, because God is love God’s posture toward us is always and essentially relational. Because God is love, God is open and responsive to our choices and actions. Just like a loving parent is in a responsive and dynamic relationship with their child. Acting our unfolding life story, God engages with us in an ongoing, attentive, particular, dynamic, relational responsiveness. But this dynamic and unfolding back and forth does not imply God's love experience affective fluctuations. So let me say this clearly: God's impassability has nothing to do with God's relationality. Relationality and emotionality are two different issues, and we need to keep them separate. 

So, the issue regarding God’s impassibility is not whether God is relational. The issue is whether that relationship is safe. The constant and unchanging love of the parent is what keeps the dynamic parent/child relationship from curdling into something dark or abusive. For the relationship to remain healthy and safe, the child can be a hot mess, but the parent cannot be. And that is precisely the good news of divine impassibility: God’s constant posture of love.

I have said all this before. And yet, people still want to hold onto the view that God has emotions. I do understand the appeal, given that human love is experienced as pathos. From the Greek πάθος (páthos), pathos means “to suffer,” “to undergo,” or “to experience.” Consequently, if God is love, would not God’s love display pathos? Would not God suffer, undergo, and experience love just as we do? There is a romantic longing on our part to answer in the affirmative. We want to experience our love affair with God as a relationally symmetrical experience.

Again, I sympathize with this desire. But let me underline the key point. By divine pathos, we never envision God suffering, undergoing, or experiencing His side of this love affair in a way that changes His love. Underneath all these relational and passionate visions of God is the confession of divine impassibility, that God’s love never changes.

To illustrate this, we need only ask a simple diagnostic question of any description of God's emotional life. In God’s love affair with humanity, can God suffer to such a degree, or undergo an experience so great or extreme, that God could or would come to renounce or reject His love for us? That is, is there a pathos that God could experience in His love that would cause God to reject us as an object of His love?

My strong suspicion is that the answer would be “No.” And if so, all the suffering, undergoing, and experiencing in the pathos of God is not putting God’s divine impassibility at risk. And this has been my point. By “pathos,” you do not really mean a change in God’s love. And since God’s love never changes, no matter what human persons might do, we are right back to the good news of classical theism: 

God’s divine impassibility.

Let me summarize the last two posts.

First, both Calvinists and Arminians are striving to defend something good. Calvinists want to defend the doctrine of grace, and Arminians want to defend God’s moral reputation.

Second, problems arise in this debate because we impose explanations, often mechanistic explanations, upon mysteries. Calvinists speak of providence and predestination. But nobody knows how that works. Arminians appeal to things like free will. But nobody knows how that works either. The debate is interminable because Bible verses are aggressively exchanged, yet the Scriptural veneer masks a deep ignorance on both sides. Ultimately, no side in the debate knows what they are talking about.

Given this situation, as I mentioned in the first post, I would like to offer a conciliatory reflection. Not that I think it will settle the matter.

First, I have no idea what free will is or how it works. Personally, I do not think liberationist visions of free will are coherent. My view of human volition is more Augustinian. That is to say, freedom is a capacity we develop over time through the grace of God. Regardless, for the purposes of the Calvinism-Arminianism debate, all I think we need to assert is that our “yes” to God is experienced as one of self-authorship. I feel my “yes” to be mine. I experience in my “yes” volitional and psychological integrity. That is to say, I do not feel coerced or compelled, either externally or internally. My “yes” is not experienced as alien or disjunctive. In saying “yes,” I feel like myself.

Second, when I reflect back upon this yes, and all the yeses since, I experience it all as grace. While the yes was mine, as an integral act of my selfhood, my response is one of praise and thanksgiving. I view my yes doxologically. My yes was my yes, but I also know my yes was a gift of God.

And finally, we should stop right here, with this phenomenological account. I experience my yes as both mine and as grace. This is what I feel, self-authorship and thankfulness held together in simultaneity. Was this yes fully and completely my own? Yes, it was. Was this yes the grace and gift of God? Yes, it was.

Now, how can that be so? Well, I have no idea. And neither do you. The problem comes when we try to impose mechanistic explanations upon this mystery, parsing divine and human action or adjudicating between predestination and free will. I think all of that is a mess. So let me make this appeal: Refuse to replace the experience with a mechanism. Embrace the phenomenological mystery and refuse to impose explanations on things that cannot be explained.

"Hallelujah!"

Psalm 147 is the last in the series of what scholars call the "Final Hallel" psalms. The Final Hallel psalms—Psalms 146–150—are contrasted with an earlier set of psalms called the “Egyptian Hallel” (Psalms 113–118), which are used in the Passover liturgy. 

In the Hallel psalms the word "hallelujah" appears at the beginning, at the end, or in both places.

"Hallelujah” is a direct transliteration of the Hebrew phrase הַלְלוּ־יָהּ (halelu-yah). The word is composed of two parts. Halelu means “praise!” This is a plural imperative, meaning “You all praise.” The second part, yah, is a shortened form of the divine name YHWH (the LORD). So, the most straightforward translation of "Hallelujah” is “Praise Yah” or more fully, “Praise the LORD.” "Hallelujah" isn't an exclamation of awe but is, rather, a command and an imperative. "Hallelujah" is calling the congregation to praise.

Interestingly, "Hallelujah” is only found in the Psalms. We find it nowhere else in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, "Hallelujah" is only found in Revelation in its Greek transliteration of allelouia (ἀλληλούϊα).

As The Shape of Joy describes, being "turned outward" toward a transcendent reality other and bigger than your own is positively associated with mental health. Let me underline those two words, "other" and "bigger."

By a reality "other" than our own I mean that in experiences of wonder, awe, and cosmic gratitude we aren't still covertly talking to ourselves. Specifically, is transcendence real or just a mental fiction we project onto a blank, inert reality? I deal with this question in the chapter entitled "Sunlight or Shadows." When I describe transcendence as a reality other than your own I mean that transcendence is real and not a mental mind hack or a psychological trick we play on ourselves. 

With a reality "bigger" than our own I mean that we find ourselves connected to and a part of a greater whole. In the research on awe this is called the experience of "the small self." Not small as in insignificant, but finding your place within a greater whole. The small self is a connected, relational self, a self in attunement with reality. 

All this connects with hallelujah because it can be hard for the buffered, introverted, self-referential, neurotic, and disenchanted self to make contact with this other, bigger reality. So we notice, again, that hallelujah isn't an experience or exclamation. Hallelujah is an ask. Hallelujah is a directive, a command and an imperative. 

Which means that hallelujah can be a practice. As I describe in the The Shape of Joy, we can practice gratitude and we can bring ourselves into contact with what the psychologist Dacher Keltner calls "everyday wonder." In the end, hallelujah is a practice of what David Kelsey has called "doxological gratitude." 

Hallelujah is a practice of stepping into life as an experience of gift.

Before I get to my conciliatory reflections regarding the Calvinism–Arminianism debate, let me say something in this post about why this debate is so intractable and, therefore, interminable.

There are, at the very least, two deep mysteries at work in this debate.

The first mystery concerns how divine agency relates to human agency. So many debates swirl here: monergism, synergism, secondary causality, divine concurrence, primary and instrumental causation, occasionalism, concurrentism, double agency, cooperative causality, non-competitive agency, asymmetrical causality, participatory causation. The sheer number of these terms should give us pause. These are not markers of insight but are, rather, attempts to force conceptual clarity where none is available. We're attempting to impose an explanation upon a mystery.

The second mystery concerns free will itself. No one knows what “free will” even means. Again, the debates and positions swarm: libertarian freedom, compatibilism, incompatibilism, hard determinism, soft determinism, agent causation, event causation, Frankfurt cases, indeterminism, causal determinism, self-determination, autonomy, moral responsibility, compatibilist freedom, and non-causal accounts of choice. Like I said, no one knows what "free will" even means.

A third mystery would be God’s plans, purposes, will, foreknowledge, and providence. But when you pop the hood on this mystery, you inevitably reach one of the first two mysteries. How, for example, can God predestine human persons and still hold them morally responsible and accountable for their actions? In short, the mystery of providence is not a new problem, it is simply a recombination of the intractable tensions we have already highlighted.

Here’s the point. The Calvinism–Arminianism conflict cannot be resolved because no one can penetrate the mysteries at its heart. No one knows how any of this works. The debate is an exercise in imposing explanations on the inexplicable. Worse, many of these explanations are mechanistic, built on crude cause-and-effect models. They pit divine agency against human agency, causality against freedom, and God’s sovereignty against human moral responsibility. These agonistic frameworks inevitably tempt us to “cut the baby in half,” each side claiming different pieces, each side justifying different compromises. That is the Calvinism–Arminianism debate in a nutshell: a quarrel over tradeoffs imposed on what cannot be divided, explanation imposed upon mysteries. 

This is especially true if both parties in the debate function under a sola scriptura framework. All they do is trade Bible passages back and forth. This proof-texting seesaw creates a zero-sum dynamic, as the combatants are forced to choose a part of the biblical vision at the expense of the whole where all tensions and paradoxes are left intact. A falsifying simplicity and clarity is imposed upon rich and unfathomable mystery.

I’d like to make some conciliatory comments about the perennial debate between Calvinism and Arminianism. But before I do that, we need a quick survey of the terrain.

To start, what is this debate about? And what is at stake in each position?

At the risk of oversimplifying, the debate concerns divine and human agency with regard to salvation. Often the debate focuses on the role of “free will” in the human response to God’s offer of grace. Two issues swirl here.

One issue concerns the capacity and ability of the will--its "freedom"--given its fallen nature. Specifically, according to Calvinism, if the will is enslaved and in bondage to sin then the will lacks the ability to set itself free. A capacity for a righteous response to God, therefore, has to be imparted and gifted to us. Simply put, our ability or capacity to say yes to God is impossible for sinful creatures. Thus, choice itself has to be given to us as grace. God graciously gives us the gift of choosing him. The incapacity of the will to choose God is called “total depravity.” God giving persons the gift of choosing him is called the doctrine of “election.”

A second and related issue concerns the role of human agency in effecting salvation. According to Calvinists, if the human will, via its own natural powers, can say yes to God, then salvation is not 100% grace. If the choice is mine, and that choice is decisive, how can you avoid the conclusion that human agency is, to some degree, effecting our salvation?

Arminians, for their part, push back on much of this. Their concerns are located elsewhere. Specifically, if a capacity for free choice is a gift of elective grace, and only a few people receive this gift, then how does that affect the moral reputation of God? If God elects to save only a few and allows the many to suffer eternal torment, how can we describe God as loving, kind, merciful, good, and just? This debate often swirls around the question of whether God wills and desires to save everyone, the Arminian view, or only the few or elect, the Calvinist view. This is where the issue of free will shows up. If God wills to save everyone, as the Arminians claim, then why have the many rejected God? Answer: free will. These people have, of their own volition and choice, rejected God’s free offer of grace.

For their part, Calvinists defend the moral reputation of God through an appeal to God’s sovereignty. They baldly reject the claim that there is any legitimate criticism here. God is God, and we are sinners who are getting exactly what we deserve. So if God chooses only to save a few, that is God’s sovereign prerogative. Arminian pearl-clutching about God looking evil or wicked in light of the doctrine of predestination, God predetermining whom he will choose to save or elect, is dismissed as illegitimate.

Summarizing, wanting to preserve a key theological claim about God--that God wills and desires to save every human soul--in order to protect God’s moral reputation as loving, good, and just, Arminians are forced to posit a role for free human choice and decision. People are damned, not by God, but by themselves. An appeal to free will shifts blame away from God’s election and toward the rebellion of human persons. This is a significant win. But once free will is introduced into the economy of salvation, all the concerns about free will described above reappear. For example, if humans are blameworthy because of their refusal of grace, would that not mean they are praiseworthy for making the better choice? And if praiseworthy, does that not undermine the view that all is grace?

Stepping back, there is a lot going on here. But this brief survey allows us to see what is at stake in the debate. Wanting to defend and protect a strong vision of grace (by denying free will), Calvinists have to face objections about the moral reputation of God. For their part, wanting to defend and protect the moral reputation of God (as lovingly desiring to save all people), Arminians have to face objections about their doctrine of grace (because they have introduced free will to get God off the hook for the damned).

That is the basic debate: Our doctrine of grace versus God’s moral reputation. Calvinists defend a doctrine of grace at the expense of God’s moral reputation. Arminians defend God’s moral reputation at the expense of their doctrine of grace. And the flashpoint in the debate is the role, or lack thereof, of free will in salvation.

I shared this reflection from Hunting Magic Eels during Lent three years ago, making a connection between Celtic Christianity and ascetical practices. This is a point often missed in discussions about Celtic Christianity and Lent is a good time for a reminder.

As I mention in Hunting Magic Eels, Celtic Christianity has become very commercialized. There are many authors and speakers who market themselves as purveyors and teachers of "Celtic" spirituality. But lot of that stuff is hokum, warmed over New Age spirituality with an Irish twist. 

A case in point is how many modern teachers of "Celtic" spirituality never reckon with the centrality that severe asceticism played within the Celtic monastic tradition. (Paul Kingsnorth is a delightful exception to this rule.) The Celtic saints called this "the green martyrdom," in contrast to the "red martyrdom" of shedding blood for Christ. 

For the Celtic Christians there were two ways to die, red or green.  

As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels:

The Celtic Christians adored and emulated the Desert Fathers, with their severe fasting, penances, and mortifications...The Celtic monks reveled in nature, but they regularly sought harsh, forbidding locations in which to live. And lacking caves like their heroes the Desert Fathers, the Celtic monks built austere beehive-shaped cells out of stacked rocks. There is a life-affirming sensuality to Celtic spirituality, but Celtic Christian practice was also disciplined and ascetical...And similar to the Desert Fathers, the spiritual potency of the Celtic holy men and women was directly related to the severity of their ascetical practice. The Celtic saints who most severely mortified and disciplined themselves were the ones with the greatest miracle-working powers. For the Celtic Christians, enchantment wasn’t just a frolic among the shamrocks. Magic implied mortification. Enchantment flowed out of ascetical discipline.

...Celtic Christianity loves food, but it also loves to fast. The Celtic Christians called these ascetical practices the “green martyrdom.” (The Celtic word here is glas, which could be translated as “green” or “blue.” Most translators go with “green martyrdom,” but you sometimes see it translated as the “blue martyrdom.”) An old Celtic sermon describes the green martyrdom as “fasting and hard work,” through which Christians “control their desires or struggle in penance and repentance.” Never forget that Ash Wednesday is just as Celtic as Fat Tuesday.

In short, penance, self-mortification, and fasting is very Celtic. Lent is a very Celtic time of year. 

Lent is the season of the green martyrdom.

There is what is known as a “cosmic Christology.” Taking cues from John 1 and Colossians 1, a cosmic Christology describes Christ, as Logos, as the ontological ground of created being:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1.1–3)

For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers. All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1.16–17)

Patristic writers also describe a cosmic Christology, where all created being exists via ongoing participation in the Logos. As Maximus the Confessor writes, each created being is a small logos (plural logoi) that is held in being by Christ the Logos:

Because [Christ] held together in himself the logoi before they came to be, by his gracious will he created all things visible and invisible out of non-being...a logos preceded the creation of human beings [and] a logos preceded everything that receives its becoming from God...Through this Logos there came to be both being and continuing to be, for from him the things that were made came to be in a certain way and for a certain reason, and by continuing to be and by moving, they participate in God. For all things, in that they came to be from God, participate proportionally in God...

This cosmic vision of Christ is lovely, and I subscribe to it. That said, cosmic Christologies can morph into spiritual-not-religious, affirmational woo-woo. Everything is Christ. A blade of grass is Christ. A tree is Christ. A bird is Christ. The breeze in my face is Christ. All of it is Christ. Everything is divine. Everything is spiritual. Everything is god. And that includes you and me. You are divine. You are Christ. Atman is Brahman. As Jesus said, we are gods.

For my part, I affirm all this, as long as there are some qualifications. Following Maximus, I would rather say that all things participate in Christ. Everything that has being exists because it is grounded in Christ. And I am with David Bentley Hart on this point, that this essential ontological relation and affinity between our being and Christ is what creates the ontological possibility for theosis and divinization. Nature is open to supernature because nature is, at its ontological ground, already open to supernature.

That said, this “everything is divine” vision can become overly optimistic. Both natural evil and moral evil intrude. Grass might be Christ, but what about a tsunami? How about cancer?

Morally speaking, you and I are Christ. But what about sex traffickers? How about school shooters? How are oppressors divine? Of course, as human beings, as bearers of the imago Dei, everyone possesses sacred value and worth. But stepping back, you get my point. “All is Christ” is lovely, but there are some dark things going on in the world, and we do not want our cosmic Christology to hide or affirm any of that darkness. In fact, it is morally urgent to keep much of this suffering steadily in view. Woo-woo platitudes are impotent in the face of radical evil.

And it is precisely here where the bloody body hanging on the cross comes into view. The Logos, the ground of created being, is bloody. Embrace a cosmic Christology, but everywhere you look the Logos is wounded and bleeding. Atman may be Brahman, but Brahman cries out in pain upon the cross. The Logos is in agony.

Calvary is how we keep our cosmic Christology from drifting into spiritual-not-religious sentimentality. All things exist in the Logos. All things are held in being by the Logos.

And because of that, the Logos bleeds.

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation."

Welp, that's my political theology in a nutshell. I like how the NLT renders this passage:

Don’t put your confidence in powerful people;
there is no help for you there.
When they breathe their last, they return to the earth,
and all their plans die with them.

Truly, I do not get how evangelicals treat Donald Trump as a Messiah-like figure. Recall when Trump said, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" He's right! 

To play fair, progressives had a similar love affair with Barack Obama.

For my part, I have such a pessimistic view of political power that I cannot see why anyone would put their trust in princes, mere mortals, who cannot save. 

Sure, vote your conscience. I don't mind any and all efforts to create a world where people are safe, free, and flourishing. What bothers me is the misplaced trust, placing our hope in partisan politics and the machinations of politicians. Why do we place so much confidence in sinful, broken human beings?

If the Epstein files prove anything it's that powerful people are some of the very worst people on earth. They are royalty. Leaders of industry. Billionaires. Presidents. Prime Ministers. Politicians. Spiritual gurus. Intellectuals. Financiers. Tech founders. Celebrities. 

Why put trust in any of these people?  Have they deserved any of our confidence?

No.

And yet in them we trust. 

Final post in this series reflecting upon "falling from grace."

The point I made in the last post was that, in the Levitical imagination, sin does not imply separation from God. In fact, the entire sacrificial system was set in place because sin was expected. Consequently, atonement did not restore relation with God but maintained it.  

This Levitical assumption would have been good news to my anxious childhood self, where I assumed that sin severed relation with God, changing my status from saved to lost and prompting a rushed and anxious scurrying back over the line with a quick prayer of confession. Properly understood, atonement stabilized and secured communion with God. And now that Jesus has provided a once for all sacrifice, this security has only deepened. Grace is not a fragile thing.

Still, what about all the Old and New Testament concerns about perseverance and endurance? As Paul says in Galatians 6: "And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." The prospect of falling away, giving up, and turning back is a pressing concern in Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. 

So, sin does not imply separation and grace is not fragile. But it does seem that falling from grace is a possibility. How to make sense of this?

Help, again, comes from the Torah.

In Numbers 15:30–31, a contrast is made between unintentional sin and "high-handed," brazen sin:

But whoever acts high-handedly [i.e., "defiantly" (NET), "brazenly" (NLT)], whether native-born or an alien, affronts the Lord and shall be cut off from among the people. Because of having despised ["treated with contempt" (NLT)] the word of the Lord and broken his commandment, such a person shall be utterly cut off and bear the guilt. (NRSV)

In the rabbinic reception of this text, a contrast is being drawn in the Torah between two types of sin.

On the one hand were sins that arise from human frailty, weakness, or desire. The covenantal stance in these instances remains intact, as indicated by a remorseful, confessional posture. Such sin is repairable through the sacrificial system. This is echoed in 1 John 1. If we say we have no sin we are a liar. But if we confess our sin the Lord is faithful to forgive us because the blood of Jesus continually cleanses us. Sin is expected and atonement keeps the relationship secure and stable.

In contrast to this, the high-handed sin described in Numbers 15 is a defiant posture. “High hand” was a Hebrew idiom for brazen, insolent defiance. Such a sin is committed with contempt for God’s command, spurning, provoking, and casting off God’s authority. The yoke of Torah was being thrown off. The covenantal stance is being willfully rejected. This brazen rupture of relationship, the high-handed sin, falls outside of ritual remediation. This vision is carried over into the New Testament in Hebrews 10: "For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment."

The high-handed sinner was to be exiled and cut off from the community, handed over to a ritual and communal "death." Instead of atonement, the sinner had to, in the words of Numbers 15, bear their own guilt. And yet, even if one has to bear their own guilt, suffering chastisement and death, this did not mean that forgiveness and restoration were impossible. Only that the sin falls outside of the Levitical remedies. Mercy and restoration would have to come from God directly, from beyond the sacrificial system. And this is something God does. The Lord "resurrects" Israel from the dead after she had been "cut off" in the exile. God forgives Israel's high-handed rebellion, a mercy that God extends from beyond the sacrificial system. Israel carries her own guilt, but the Lord's mercy brings that to an end. Not through Levitical remedy, but through a eucatastrophic act of mercy. Isaiah 40:

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.

Stepping back, the point for our conversation about falling from grace is that sins of weakness and desire, when accompanied by humble confession and contrition, do not sever our relationship with God. For these sins, the blood of Christ provides continuous cleansing. Brazen and defiant sin, by contrast, rejects the covenantal stance by willfully severing relationship and seeking rupture. Contempt for God is diagnostic here. 

To be sure, the balancing I am attempting here will not fully ease the minds those who suffer from a morbid scrupulosity. Some will still worry: When does a sin become brazen and high-handed? What if your confession is slow, sluggish, and delayed? Calvinistic readers might start to grin here. "See, there's that anxiety creeping back into grace!" But let me be quick to point out that Calvinism has never been immune from anxiety, given how you worry about if you are, indeed, one of the elect. Sure, when you see a fellow believer "fall away" you can console yourself and protect your dogma with "they weren't one of the elect" in the first place. But your doctrine has become functionally and pastorally meaningless. Sure, Arminians might be anxious over losing their salvation, but Calvinists worry about if they are saved in the first place. Seems like six of one half-dozen of the other. All we're doing in this debate is anxiety shifting.

As I've tried to articulate in this series, I think the better view is to split the difference in the old debate by embracing the vision set forth the in Torah. There are two key pieces here. First, salvation is stable because sin does not imply separation. Sin is expected and the sacrificial remedy has been graciously provided, offering constant and continual cleansing.

That said, and this is the second piece, high-handed rebellion and contempt for God is out of bounds. Here the notion of covenantal stance is key: Are you wanting to sever your relation with God? To use a marital analogy: Are you handing God divorce papers? If so, you willfully remove yourself from all sacrificial remedies. You step away from the blood of Christ.

And yet, even then, God is able to restore relation. God raises Israel from the dead and woos back the spouse after the exilic divorce. This reunion, though, doesn't come through atonement but through the painful consequences of exilic separation and divine chastisement. Grace transcends the sacrificial system.