"He shewed a littil thing the quantitye of an hesil nutt"

 

In Chapter 5, Julian continues to meditate upon her first showing, Christ wearing the crown of thorns. But within this showing there is nested another vision, the most famous showing of The Revelations: 

Also in this He shewed a littil thing the quantitye of an hesil nutt [the quantity of a hazel nut] in the palme of my hand, and it was as round as a balle. I lokid there upon with eye of my understondyng and thowte [thought], What may this be? And it was generally answered thus: It is all that is made. I mervellid [marveled] how it might lesten [last], for methowte it might suddenly have fallen to nowte [naught] for littil [littleness] . And I was answered in my understondyng [understanding], It lesteth [lasts] and ever shall, for God loveth it; and so all thing hath the being be the love of God. 

In this littil thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God kepith it.

Over the last few chapters I've pointed out how Julian's spirituality is connected to Christ's "dearworthy" Passion. And how this can be off putting to contemporary and progressive readers. But here in Chapter 5 we encounter one of those visions that has made Julian so famous and beloved. 

In popular iconography of the vision, a literal hazel nut is depicted. But what Julian sees is something that is "the quantity of a hazel nut." This was a unit of measure at the time. So the object Julian sees is a bit unclear. One could imagine the earth shrunk down to the size of a hazel nut, like a blue-white marble, sitting in the palm of your hand. But the voice in the vision says, "It is all that is made." The entire cosmos. So perhaps we should imagine a black marble flecked with pinpricks of light from all the galaxies floating within it. 

What strikes Julian is the littleness of the thing. A littleness that creates a sense of ontological precarity and existential panic. "Methought," Julian says, "it might suddenly have fallen into nothingness because of its littleness." How can such a little thing exist and continue in being? It's so small it teeters on the edge of nothingness.

The answer comes: "It lasts, and ever shall, for God loves it." 

Before pushing on, let's define what I mean by "hopeful eschatology."

Many people just talk here about "universalism." And by "universalism" we mean that, in the end, all of humanity comes into full union with God. What might be called "universal reconciliation." That is to say, "universal" means 100% of humanity.

That's okay as far as it goes, "universal" as an arithmetic statement, but it also misses a whole lot, which creates a lot of confusion. Confusions that are relevant to the goals of this series.

For example, a lot of "universalists" believe in hell! This is such a rudimentary point but, goodness, it's so often missed. It's taken as almost axiomatic that, if you believe that "all shall be saved," to borrow from the title of David Bentley Hart's book, that you "don't believe in hell." But this is a confusion.

So, let me try to sketch out here a taxonomy of "hopeful eschatologies."

First, there is a contrast between pluralistic versus Christocentric (exclusivist) eschatologies. Pluralistic eschatologies are those that preach that all world religions are "different paths up the same mountain." In a pluralistic universalistic eschatology, no exclusive claim is made about Jesus Christ as the sole and only path toward salvation. Christocentric (exclusivist) eschatologies, by contrast, believe that Jesus is the only path for salvation. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, etc., will, one day, confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Son of God. The biblical texts for the exclusivist view are numerous. For example:

John 14:6

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Acts 4:12

“There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”

1 Timothy 2:5

“There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 2:9–11

“Every knee will bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

John 3:18

“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already.”

And so on.

This contrast between pluralistic versus Christocentric visions of universalism is important for our reflections about evangelism. For example, I mentioned in the last post the lack of evangelistic urgency in progressive, liberal Christian spaces. A lot of this is due to many progressive, liberal spaces working with a pluralistic eschatology, that all spiritual roads get to the same place. It's a radically inclusive and postmodern posture that refuses to make exclusivist claims about Jesus. This pluralism would protect against any and all colonialist temptations, and would, of course, radically dampen any evangelistic and missionary urgency.

A Christocentric universalism, by contrast, wouldn't be shy about proclaiming Jesus as the sole and only savior of the world. Consequently, the Christocentric universalist, in their proclamations of the gospel, would look a little "judgey" and "colonialist" in pluralistic Christian spaces.

Next, there is the scope of reconciliation. The church fathers didn't talk about "universalism." They talked about apokatastasis, the restoration of "all things." The view here is cosmological rather than anthropological, restoration of the whole of creation rather than the forensic salvation of human beings. The contrast is important for a few different reasons. First, the salvation of creation creates a more holistic soteriological vision that supports and informs theological warrants for creation care. If trees and dogs are going to be saved, then we have "new creation" moral obligations toward trees and dogs. If, by contrast, only humans are being saved, through a penal/forensic view of salvation, then we might not have any moral duties in regard to creation (since it's all going to burn anyway).

Beyond creation care, a more esoteric issue implied by apokatastasis concerns the salvation of fallen angels. Since angels are creatures, and apokatastasis concerns the restoration of the whole of creation, that would necessarily involve the salvation of fallen angels, Lucifer among them. This conundrum is avoided, however, if salvation is restricted to human beings and not the whole of creation.

A third issue concerns the temporal shape of "universal" salvation. By "universal" salvation, do we mean that people are, upon their death, immediately or quickly ushered into heaven? Call this "immediate universalism." Purgative universalism, by contrast, contends that lost souls are cast into the outer darkness upon their death, where there is, to use Jesus' words, "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Purgative universalism believes in hell. The contrast between purgative universalism and traditional views of hell, often described as a belief in "eternal conscious torment," concerns not the reality of hell but its function and duration. According to eternal conscious torment, hell is everlasting and retributive. Purgative views of hell, by contrast, describe hell's duration as finite (though perhaps lasting beyond the calculative powers of human imagination, like a googolplex of lifetimes) and restorative. The point for the purposes of evangelism is that, according to purgative universalism, hell can be very, very bad. Bad beyond imagination. So bad, in fact, that there is a great deal of moral urgency to spare people from this fate.

A fourth issue concerns the degree of certainty with which the hopeful eschatology is espoused. A contrast is often made between a "dogmatic" versus a "hopeful" universalism. Dogmatic universalists are 100% certain that "all shall be saved." By contrast, hopeful universalists are not sure that all will be saved, due to their biblicist scruples, but they are hopeful, perhaps even optimistic, that all shall be saved. The agnosticism here has an impact upon the urgency of conversion. Belief affects behavior. Consequently, if you're told "all will be saved," you might take that as an excuse to prolong and indulge your sinful ways. There is a worry here that preaching a dogmatic universalism would have deleterious moral consequences. Since humans are wired to privilege short-term pleasures over long-term consequences, proclaiming a dogmatic universalism, even if true, tempts people into prolonging their suffering and harming of others. And ethically speaking, we should act in such a way as to reduce suffering and harm. Thus, on purely pragmatic grounds, it might be argued, we should practice an eschatological quietism, shifting from a dogmatic to a hopeful register when it comes to the ultimate salvation of all of humanity.

A parallel here would be how we treat theodicy. There are many theologians who would argue that specifying a precise theodicy is illegitimate. Evil should never be analytically "reconciled" with God. Evil must remain a mystery. The win here is our moral posture toward evil. We don't explain evil, we resist it. (This is an argument I make in The Book of Love.) In a similar way, we should never precisely specify our eschatology. The ultimate fate of humanity needs to be a mystery. The reason for this, like with theodicy, is moral in nature. Humans could treat the doctrine of universal reconciliation as a "get out of jail free" excuse to prolong suffering and harm. By keeping eschatology a mystery, similar to theodicy, we create a more healthy moral atmosphere. And evangelism within this context, calling people away from suffering and harm, would be an urgent and pressing intervention. (Embracing eschatological mystery on behalf of love is another argument I make in The Book of Love.)

More could be said about all this. But I hope this summary of the "varieties of hopeful eschatology" helps critics of so-called "universalism" see a bigger and more complex picture. As I said in my last post, I don't want to traffic in caricatures of those who espouse eternal conscious torment. I hope they would be charitable enough to extend to those who disagree the same respect. 

To conclude, the varieties of hopeful eschatologies: 

1. Pluralistic (Inclusivist) vs. Christocentric (Exclusivist)
2. Anthropological vs. Cosmological (Apokatastasis)
3. Immediate vs. Purgative Reconciliation
4. Retributive vs. Restorative Judgment
5. Dogmatic vs. Hopeful/Apophatic 

In The Book of Love I tell the story of my very first sermon. 

Here's that bit from the book:

When I was in middle school, I was invited, for the first time in my life, to preach a sermon for my small church. Growing up, we went to church twice on Sundays...These Sunday evenings, given the smaller audience, were a training ground for the younger generation...

The week prior I had encountered a tract in the church lobby...The pamphlet I had picked up was ominously titled “What Hell Is Like.”

The tract shared a transcript of a famous fire and brimstone sermon preached far and wide within our denomination and was similar to Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The “What Hell Is Like” tract was like walking through Dante’s Inferno. Vivid descriptions of hell were piled on top of each other—darkness, weeping, fire, and torment. I was stricken and terrified. “People need to be warned!” I thought to myself.

I’m embarrassed looking back at this memory. I have no idea why I thought people who came to church twice on Sundays needed a warning about hell. My audience were the devoted and committed. They weren't backsliding or lost. Still, I felt compelled to sound the alarm. The emotional shock of the “What Hell Is Like” tract had simply overwhelmed me.

I plagiarized the entire sermon. Point for point, I followed the outline of the tract. I’d announce some horrible description of hell—“Hell is filled with weeping and the gnashing of teeth” or “Hell is a place of eternal torment”—and read a passage from the Bible proof-texting the declaration. On and on it went.

But then, in the middle of the sermon, something inside of me cracked. Some deep sadness welled up. Halfway through the sermon I began to weep. I sobbed all the way to the end.

What brought me to tears that night was the incalculable sadness and pain I was describing. The weight of sorrow I was sharing was simply too much for my sensitive little soul to carry. The vision of torment was unbearable. My heart broke underneath my words.

I go on to share how weeping through my first sermon sent me on a spiritual journey, a journey that culminated in a more hopeful eschatology. To be sure, the Biblical passages concerning God’s judgment and wrath, along with Jesus’ many descriptions of hell, demand our attention. In a nod to my affection for Johnny Cash and his last great song, I have a chapter in The Book of Love entitled “When the Man Comes Around” where I share how to reconcile the Biblical vision of hell with the confession “God is love.” I’m not overly dogmatic in the book, and I try to create space for a diversity of viewpoints, even the traditional. In this series I want to tackle a related issue, the role of hell in evangelism.

By far the most common question you face when you share that you espouse a hopeful eschatology is the question of evangelism. The point is easily made. If everyone is getting into heaven in the end, then what’s the point of evangelism?

Now, the knee-jerk response here sounds like this: “Really? Evangelism means warning people that they are going to hell? Evangelists are selling fire insurance?”

I think this is a legitimate comeback. Evangelism isn’t selling fire insurance. And truth be told, there’s a lot of fire insurance being sold. But I do want to steel-man this argument in this series. I don’t want to traffic in caricatures. I don’t want to preach into my hopeful eschatology echo chamber. Because I have faced true curiosity about this question. It sure seems like the urgency of evangelism abates if hell is taken off the table. And it’s also true that progressive churches, who are pretty indifferent to evangelism, are squishy when it comes to sin, judgment, and hell. That connection isn’t a coincidence.

My point is this, while I will, to my dying day, resist reducing the gospel to fire insurance, I am legitimately concerned about the lack of passion and urgency I find in progressive and liberal Christian spaces when it comes to evangelism. There’s a real problem here, and it’s one of the reasons I describe myself as “post-progressive.”

In short, the issue, to my eye, concerns our experience of eschatological urgency and pressure. That urgency and pressure does seem to be lacking in progressive, liberal spaces. And it is a sharp disjoint with Scripture, both with Jesus and Paul. 

Consequently, I think there’s something here we need to explore.

Today is the publication day for The Book of Love: A Better Way to Read the Bible.

As you can tell from the title, the book is my attempt to show how we can read the Bible—Genesis to Revelation—as a "book of love."

In the Introduction—entitled "The Sermon"—I tell the story of a sermon I preached in college that, in many ways, was the start of my spiritual wanderings. The opening lines of the book:

Some days change your life. One of those days, in my life, was the day I faced a long line of very angry people.

I was at church and had preached the sermon that Sunday morning. Immediately, at the conclusion of the service, people jumped out of the pews to meet me as I came off the stage. Open Bibles in hand, each person had book, chapter, and verse ready to rebuke and correct me. I was a college student, after all. Young and impressionable. This was an opportunity to correct my errors before I became a heretic.

After the Introduction I have thee chapters in a section entitled "Daring to Trust." Before we can get to reading the Bible as a book of love, we have to deal with some preliminary issues. First, you have to recognize your hermeneutical (interpretive) commitments and assumptions. Readers of Scripture often like to imagine they are seeing "literal," "plain," and "clear" readings of the Bible. But as I point out, there is no single literal reading of the Bible. There are, in truth, many literal readings of the Bible—Biblical literalisms—and they don't agree with each other. And if that's so, you have to face the fact that literal readings of the Bible are, at root, interpretive. You can't avoid hermeneutics. I cover all this in the chapter "Don't Be An Ostrich."

After hermeneutics, I turn to attachment theory in the chapter "You Can't Read the Bible Scared." In my estimation, this issue—our attachment to God—is the real issue rumbling underneath our debates about Scripture. People cannot explore Scripture with an open heart and mind if they are fearful that God is going to damn them should they make a mistake.

The final preliminary chapter is "God Is Better." Simply put, your view of God determines your view of the Bible. So I push us to imagine God's love as being infinitely better than we can imagine and insist upon reading the whole of Scripture in light of that vision, and to never let a reading of the Bible fall short of that beauty and grace.

After the introductory chapters, we move into the Bible. The first section covers the Hebrew Scriptures. I then turn toward the Gospels. And we end with Acts–Revelation.

What should you expect in these chapters? Nothing predictable! This isn't a book that will fit comfortably in our culture wars. Here's what I say in the Introduction:

Our problem is that we read the Bible from within our echo chambers. We are no longer surprised by Scripture. And books about how to read the Bible preach to their choir, sermons for the already converted. We go along with this. Since we already know what we believe, we read authors who confirm what we believe. The Bible becomes tribal, always voting on my side of the culture wars.

What most of us want when we pick up a book about how to read the Bible is cozy confirmation. We’re not interested in critical confrontation. We want authors on our shelves and podcasters in our ears who confirm our settled worldviews, political opinions, beliefs, and values. But when the Bible is always filtered through our beliefs and politics, it loses its holy capacity to surprise and startle us.

So, fair warning. The Bible you and I are going to talk about will unsettle and challenge you. Love refuses to be shoehorned into the box of our preferred politics. Neither progressive nor conservative Christians read the Bible very well. You and I will do something different.

There are chapters in The Book of Love that will unsettle conservative readers of the Bible. And there are chapters that will unsettle progressive readers of the Bible. This is not a good strategy for writing a bestseller! I expect every Goodreads and Amazon review will take a few stars off for the chapters they didn't like. But I am congenitally unable to write in an echo chamber or preach to a choir. So all I can say is that I do hope you find something in the book that will surprise and startle you.

Here are some of the things I talk about in the book: how the debates about Genesis and science are missing the point; how the Bible tells the best story about the problem of evil; how to read the violent stories in the Old Testament; how not to pit the God of the Old Testament against Jesus; how to take the death of Jesus on the cross seriously without that becoming moralistic (the progressive error) or forensic/penal (the conservative error); how best to read the apostle Paul; how to think about Judgment Day and hell; and, lastly, what to do with the book of Revelation.

I don't draw clear lines between readings of the Bible and doctrinal or political positions. I try, rather, to attack some of the knots within the Bible that prevent us from reading it, cover to cover, as a book of love. I try to open up the story of Scripture to let the story breathe. And my hope is that, in the generous spaces the book opens up, bright things might grow. One way to think about the book is that it's not a book about arrivals. It's a book about first steps. A book of beginnings rather than endings.

The book is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. It's also available as an audiobook.

And here's my ask for you today.

As you know, I don't charge or monetize my online writing. To be clear, I cast no judgment upon those who need such income streams. We got to do what we got to do to pay the electricity bill. But there is a cost to myself and my family, financially, to renounce so aggressively branding, self-promotion, monetization, paywalls, growth, social media presence, celebrity, and reach. Over on Substack I leave tens of thousands of dollars a year on the table. So, if you've ever wanted to support a Christian writer who takes such stands, today is a day where you can express that support. 

And let me be clear about what I want by way of book sales. I don't care to make bestseller lists. But I do want to sell enough books so that when I pitch my next idea to my publisher, they continue to say yes. Simply put: I want to sell enough so that I can keep writing.

And so, it would be much appreciated, to either say "thank you" for my free online writing or to support my future book writing, if you could do a few things for me today, and in the weeks ahead, as The Book of Love makes its way out into the world.

First, you can buy a copy of the book. I hope you love it!

Second, give the book some social media love today. Share on your social media accounts that The Book of Love is now out.

Third, if there is someone in your life who is struggling with the Bible, put this book in their hands. I think it might help.

Fourth, if you like the book, give it a positive review on Goodreads and Amazon.

Fifth, recommend the book to your church, pastor, Bible class, or book club to read.

Sixth, invite me to come speak about the book at your church, university, or organization. 

Anything you can do for The Book of Love today, and in the weeks ahead, would be much appreciated. And while sales are a metric of success for a book, I have my own way of judging success. As you know, there is a spiritual alchemy about books. A particular book finds you at a particular season in your life and magic happens. The words reach out over the waves and you cling to them like a lifeline. And the encounter functions to change your life. 

People share stories like this about the books I have written—how something I wrote changed their life for the better, sometimes years after the book had been published. You write something and throw it into the sea, a message in a bottle. And the words wash up on the shore of a heart, offering companionship, guidance, and hope.

Today I throw another message in a bottle into the sea. 

May it find those who need it.

Godspeed, little book, godspeed.

The reception of my book The Shape of Joy among some theologians is an illustration of why I think Barth and Schleiermacher need to kiss.

First, a confession. The Shape of Joy is an experiment in crypto-evangelism. On the surface, the book looks like just another offering of the self-help, pop psychology variety. Just look at the subtitle: “The Transformative Power of Moving Beyond Yourself.” Goodness.

And almost all of The Shape of Joy is concerned with sharing insights from empirical research in positive psychology in light of our current mental health crisis. But as that research is presented, I start pulling together its major conclusion: We flourish when we live in relation to transcendence. And it’s here, at this point, where the book begins to pivot from psychology to metaphysics.

The point is easily made: Is transcendence real? That is to say, when I encounter a reality larger than and other than my own, is that reality a fiction or a fantasy? Am I still just talking to myself? Is transcendence a mental game I’m playing on myself? If nothing is really “out there” from a materialistic, atheistic perspective, then is “transcendence” just a mind hack and a form of cosmic pretending?

The Shape of Joy follows the arrows of positive psychology to this question about transcendence. And there, on that threshold, it raises the issue of belief. Something “out there” beyond yourself is good for you. Is that “something” real? The Shape of Joy isn’t dogmatic on this point, but it nudges the reader to say yes, that "something" is real, and I will flourish when I live in trusting relation with that "something." This is the shape of joy.

Like I said, an experiment in crypto-evangelism. Start with our mental health crisis to raise a question about the nature of reality. Start with human experience to ask about a reality wholly other than our own. Start with Schleiermacher, end with Barth.

This pathway of reflection makes sense to me. But many theologians of a Barthian mind pit Scripture and Tradition over against human experience. Consequently, when they see a book like The Shape of Joy that begins with human experience, they fear a Trojan horse. Something humanistic this way comes! And Lord knows we wouldn’t want that. God forbid anything human creep into our conversation about God. The horror!

This horror often focuses on messages Barthian theologians perceive as being “therapeutic.” If a sermon or a worship song smacks of being therapeutic, that’s a death knell. Any therapeutic message is deemed far too accommodating, even coddling, of human experience. What human experience needs, rather, is some positivistic, take-your-medicine harshness. Not therapeutic affirmation but disciplinary ultimatums.

As regular readers know, I think this whole debate is confused. I’ve written many words defending the term “therapeutic.” Therapy concerns healing. And God is the Great Physician. What the Barthians are objecting to is affirmation. They think “therapeutic” means affirming the pathological, which would come as a great surprise to medical doctors and psychotherapists alike. All those doctors affirming cancer and psychotherapists affirming suicidal ideation! When we come to rightly understand the therapeutic, then of course God meets and heals our deepest diseases. This is exactly what Augustine was describing when he prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

And if this is so, why wouldn’t a conversation about God begin with the restlessness we find within human experience? Why wouldn’t a conversation about God start with our mental health crisis? Why wouldn't we ask if there is a balm in Gilead? 

Starting a conversation about God with psychology isn’t a Trojan horse. Healing concerns ontology. The Schleiermacherian move is a deeply Augustinian move.

To be sure, we have to push through human experience to get to the question of God. Joy, again, has a shape. Our flourishing points toward a question about metaphysics, a reality wholly other than our own. And that’s why it traces the shape of joy.

"where Jesus appereith the blissid Trinite is understand"

In Chapters 4-9 Julian begins to describe the first of her showings. As she shared in Chapter 1, this first showing was "of His pretious [precious] coroning [crowning] with thornys [thorns]; and therewith was comprehended and specifyed the Trinite [Trinity] with the incarnation..."

Julian begins to unpack this first showing in Chapter 4. She starts with the blood that flowed from the crown of thorns: 

In this sodenly [suddenly] I saw the rede blade trekelyn downe [the red blood trickling down] fro under the garlande hate [hot] and freisly [freshly] and ryth plenteously [right plenteously], as it were in the time of His passion that the garlande of thornys [garland of thorns] was pressid on His blissid hede [pressed on his blessed head].

From there Julian goes on to describe how, in this showing, she beheld the whole of the Trinity in Christ's sufferings:

And in the same sheweing [showing] sodenly [suddenly] the Trinite [Trinity] fullfilled [filled] the herte [heart] most of joy; and so, I understood, it shall be in Hevyn [Heaven] withoute end to all that shall come there. For the Trinite is God, God is the Trinite. The Trinite is our maker and keeper, the Trinite is our everlasting lover, everlasting joy and blisse, be our Lord Jesus Christ; and this was shewed in the first and in all, for where Jesus appereith [appears] the blissid Trinite is understand [understood], as to my sight.

Julian's reflections in the Revelations are very Trinitarian. She will mention the Trinity close to fifty times. Here in Chapter 4 the Trinity is described as our maker, our keeper, our lover, and our everlasting joy and bliss. 

Importantly, Julian keeps the Passion tightly connected to the Trinity. As she puts it, "where Jesus appears the blessed Trinity is understood." Thus, Julian's vision of the Passion resists any division between the Father and the Son. In Christ's sufferings and death there was no divine rupture or intra-Trinitarian conflict. For Julian, the sufferings of Christ reveals the unity of divine love. The Passion is not the Son suffering the wrath of the Father. Rather, the self-giving love of the whole Trinity is made visible in Christ. In the Passion of Jesus, Julian beholds the love of the Trinity drawing near to us. The cross discloses the heart of God as our maker, keeper, and everlasting lover. 

In Part 1 of this series I pointed toward Paul Tillich and Stanley Hauerwas as two modern examples of the Barthian and Schleiermacherian approaches to theology. While Tillich and Hauerwas were not exact contemporaries, their lives overlapped. Tillich died in 1965 when Hauerwas was 25 years old. Both theologians once graced the cover of Time magazine as the preeminent theological voice of their generation. And yet, as I've mentioned, the theological projects of Tillich and Hauerwas are antagonistic. Just as Karl Barth pushed back on Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hauerwas has pushed back on Tillich. As I mentioned in Part 1, Hauerwas has called Tillich "the great enemy of Christianity" in America.

It would be too much to summarize here the theologies of Tillich and Hauerwas. But I'll do enough to illustrate their conflict and why, in my opinion, they need each other.

Again, Tillich was a liberal theologian. Tillich privileged human experience, unpacking traditional religious categories as universal existential concerns.

For example, here's a passage from Tillich's famous essay "The Lost Dimension in Religion" which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1958 (Hauerwas would have been 18 at time):

The decisive element in the predicament of Western man in our period is his loss of the dimension of depth. Of course, "dimension of depth" is a metaphor. It is taken from the spatial realm and applied to man's spiritual life. What does it mean?

It means that man has lost an answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Where do we come from, where do we go to? What shall we do, what should we become in the short stretch between birth and death? Such questions are not answered or even asked if the "dimension of depth" is lost. And this is precisely what has happened to man in our period of history. He has lost the courage to ask such questions with an infinite seriousness--as former generations did--and he has lost the courage to receive answers to these questions, wherever they may come from.

I suggest that we call the dimension of depth the religious dimension in man's nature. Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt. Such an idea of religion makes religion universally human, but it certainly differs from what is usually called religion. It does not describe religion as the belief in the existence of gods or one God, and as a set of activities and institutions for the sake of relating oneself to these beings in thought, devotion and obedience. No one can deny that the religions which have appeared in history are religions in this sense. Nevertheless, religion in its innermost nature is more than religion in this narrower sense. It is the state of being concerned about one's own being and being universally.

Notice how existential and anthropological these moves are. "Being religious" does not mean being confronted by Barth's "Wholly Other" God. "Being religious" is, rather, "asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence." There is no object of metaphysical belief here, no ontological encounter, no God who is addressing us. And Tillich is explicit on this point: "being religious" doesn't mean "belief in the existence of gods or one God." "Being religious" just means "being concerned about one's own being." Elsewhere, Tillich would describe religion as having an "ultimate concern." "God" becomes that which we are most and ultimately concerned about. The concern above all concerns.

Can you hear Karl Barth rolling over in his grave?

The worry, again, is humanistic capture. If God and religion are just what humans are concerned about, then we end up worshipping ourselves. And that's precisely how religion goes sideways, like it did in Nazi Germany.

For his part, Hauerwas is not a systematic theologian, unlike Barth. Hauerwas is a theological ethicist, with a particular focus on virtue ethics. Consequently, most of Hauerwas' writing has been topical. One of his biggest topics has been his robust defense of Christian pacifism. Crucially for Hauerwas, Christian pacifism is an ecclesial witness where the alternative politics of Christ's peaceable kingdom become visible, in prophetic contrast and indictment, over against the war-making of the nation-state. Hauerwas' concern with Tillich is that Tillich's existentialism is unable to bring the particular politics of the kingdom, in its radical commitment to nonviolence, into view, and is too anemic, given its eschewing of a thick ecclesiology, to form the virtues required for such a radical witness (e.g., willingly embracing martyrdom). For Hauerwas, Christian pacifism is the very embodiment of what we mean by "cruciformity," Christ's acceptance of death rather than wielding the sword. And according to Hauerwas, there is nothing in Tillich's vision of "being concerned about one's being" that gets us to this ethical witness, nor forms us into a people able to carry it out. For Tillich, everyone is religious because everyone has an "ultimate concern." For Hauerwas, the issue isn't about being vaguely "religious." It is, rather, being Christian in a very particular way, a way that conforms to the nonviolence of Jesus.

So you see the battle lines and can hear the argument. Given this antagonism, why do I think Paul Tillich and Stanley Hauerwas need to kiss?

My earliest attraction to theology, in college, was through Tillich. As regular readers know, as a young person I was deeply attracted to existentialism. Early on, this was an interest in existential philosophy. During my graduate training in psychology this became an attraction to existential psychology. Viktor Frankl. Ernest Becker. Irvin Yalom. Consequently, when I encountered Tillich, a theological voice speaking in the register of existentialism, I was hooked. So when Tillich writes that "being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt," he was speaking directly into my heart. From my teenage years on, I was a person who has passionately asked questions about the meaning of our existence.

This existentialism can be found in much of my empirical research and first three books, Unclean, The Authenticity of Fatih, and The Slavery of Death. And it's this existential strain in my thinking that contributes to my theological liberalism and progressivism to this day. My theological thinking began with existentialism, Tillich, and liberalism. And my training as a psychologist biases my thinking toward human experience as I navigate the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Later on, however, I encountered Karl Barth and Hauerwas, along with all sorts of other theological voices, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. These encounters didn't knock the liberal out of me, but they did chasten my humanistic optimism. While I was, at heart, an existentialist, I also knew that the cruciform shape of the Christian life was deeply counterintuitive and paradoxical. I've always ended my books with a call to love, but the shape of that love is, to use a Barthian word, a "crisis" for humanism. Humanism reduces love toward a bland, inoffensive tolerance. But the vision of love we behold upon the cross is, to borrow from Fyodor Dostoevsky, a "harsh and dreadful thing." And the saints whom I most admired, because they put this love into practice, people like Dorothy Day, could never be mistaken for a "liberal humanist."

But that didn't mean I jettisoned my existentialism. In fact, over the last decade it has become clear to me that existentialism has become the leading edge of post-Christian evangelism. The demise of the New Atheists. Rising deaths of despair. The Jordan Peterson phenomenon. The crisis of meaning among young people. Our mental health crisis. Everywhere you look, people are "asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence," and are struggling to come up with good answers. In short, Tillich is back. That doesn't mean we end with Tillich. We've learned our lessons from Barth and Hauerwas. But in a post-Christian context evangelism will often start with Tillich.

As I described it in the last post, the Word of God must resonate with us, must be warm with possibility. And much of that warmth will come from our search for purpose and meaning. And yet, that existential attunement must push on to cruciformity, toward that vision of "true humanity" that comes into view in the life of Jesus.

In short, Tillich and Hauerwas need each other. 

Time to pucker up for a smooch.

Having set out their respective criticisms of each other, the Barthian and the Schleiermacherian, how am I proposing that they should reconcile and kiss?

I would hope that the point is easily made. We need both. If you have closely followed the last two posts, their implications should be obvious. Barthian theological postures need the Schleiermacherian in order to prevent sliding into chilly, inhuman, and positivistic denunciations of human experience. For its part, Schleiermacherian theological postures need the Barthian in order to prevent the eclipse of the prophetic voice in a humanistic reductionism. That is to say, the interplay of the Barthian and the Schleiermacherian has to be dialogical and dialectical. Theological distortions result when one voice in this conversation becomes silenced.

One way to describe the dialogical relation between the Barthian and the Schleiermacherian is what I will call “cruciform attunement.”

By “attunement” I mean how human experience must find “resonance” with the ontological claims of Christianity. I am borrowing the notion of “resonance” from Hartmut Rosa. Following Rosa, by attunement or resonance I mean that we experience an “I-Thou” relation, to use Martin Buber’s language, with reality. Something warm and alive is addressing us, something independent of my own reality. Following Barth, this reality is other than my own and falls outside my control. You can see both the Barthian and Schleiermacherian dynamics at play. The warmth and aliveness of the encounter speak to human experience, to the mystical, affective, intuitive, and aesthetic. I am wooed and drawn. And yet, from the Barthian side, the reality I encounter is, to borrow again from Rosa, uncontrollable and cannot be put at my disposal. As William James described, in these mystical experiences I occupy the passive role rather than the active one. The reality addressing me is wholly other than my own.

So I use the word “attunement” to describe how the address of God is fully humanistic. God’s voice is warm, resonant, appealing, and alive. What is human in me is being addressed. And yet this humanism of the address does not baptize all that I might gather within myself under the label of “human.” I might be tempted to name all that is twisted, dark, and distorted within myself as "human." And in a sense it is human, in that it is descriptive of universal human experience. But in the address of God I experience all this as failure and depravity, as a denial of what is most truly and fully human. Thus, in my confrontation with “the humanity of God,” to borrow from Barth, I experience exposure and alarm. I shrink back from the light. I experience my sin, my failure to be truly human, and I quail.

The best term I have for this prophetic encounter with the truly human is “cruciform.” To become truly human, to experience deep attunement and resonance with God, my humanity must conform to the cruciform shape of Jesus’ life. This cross-shaped vision of the human escapes the humanistic capture of liberal theology because it stands as a sign of contradiction to all that we set up as visions of human flourishing, power, success, achievement, and well-being. The bloody body of Jesus exists as a prophetic indictment, one we experience as coming from a wholly other reality.

In short, Barth and Schleiermacher need to kiss because the voice of God is human, warm, and alive. We experience attunement and resonance. But that voice comes to us with a prophetic and paradoxical vision of the human. Being "fully human" is not what anyone had expected it to be.

Having surveyed the Barthian criticism of a Schleiermacherian approach to faith, let’s flip it around. What concerns would liberal theology, privileging human experience as it does, raise about the Barthian emphasis upon Scripture and Tradition?

To make this case, let me call to the stand Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer’s story is intriguing. He encountered Barth early in his theological training, and Barth quickly became a decisive theological influence on him. This raised a few eyebrows among the liberal theologians who presided over the University of Berlin, where Bonhoeffer studied. Barth and Bonhoeffer were also allies in the Confessing Church movement, resisting the Nazification of the German national church.

But Bonhoeffer was to undergo a change. In Letters and Papers from Prison, written after his arrest for association with a group plotting the assassination of Hitler, a group that included his brother-in-law, Bonhoeffer voiced criticisms of Barth. These criticisms would come as a surprise to Barth when they were published after the war and Bonhoeffer’s death.

What were Bonhoeffer’s concerns about Barth?

As you likely know, in Letters and Papers from Prison Bonhoeffer was exploring with his dear friend Eberhard Bethge what he described as a “religionless Christianity” in “a world come of age.” What does Bonhoeffer mean by “a world come of age”? As he would explain to Bethge:

Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the "working hypothesis" called "God." In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without "God"--and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, "God" is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground...

This development would lead Bonhoeffer to reach the following conclusion: “We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.”

Personally, I think Bonhoeffer was wrong about this. I think he would have been surprised, here in 2026, by how enduring the religious instinct has been in the West. Still, since World War II, religious belief and affiliation have experienced a sharp decline, to the point of collapse in parts of Europe. So Bonhoeffer was rightly worried about the plausibility of the gospel’s claims in a post-Christian context. And it is here where Bonhoeffer expresses concerns about Barth’s talk of the “Wholly Other” God.

Again, recall that Barth was worried about God becoming “captured” by human experience. To protect God from this capture, and thereby preserve the prophetic capacity of God’s Word, Barth defended a radical separation between God and human experience. Barth felt that policing this contrast was the only way to prevent idolatry, our chronic temptation to use God to justify ourselves personally, religiously, politically, and nationalistically. While this project is well-intended, Bonhoeffer began to worry that this radical distinction between God and the human would lead to God being experienced as alien and incomprehensible. A “Wholly Other” God, in relation to the human, would be, by definition, inhuman, unhuman, and antihuman.

The Barthian response here might be summarized like this: “Well, boo hoo for human experience. When God speaks, humans need to jump, no matter how alien that voice might sound.” To this, Bonhoeffer had the following to say in Letters and Papers from Prison:

Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his really great merit; but he put in its place a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That isn’t biblical. There are degrees of knowledge and degrees of significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation. The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith, and so mutilates what is — by Christ’s incarnation! — a gift for us. In the place of religion there now stands the church — that is in itself biblical — but the world is in some degree made to depend on itself and left to its own devices, and that’s the mistake.

By dismissing human experience, Bonhoeffer describes Barth’s theology as “positivistic.” That is to say, religious claims are presented to the human person as raw metaphysical propositions. As “wholly other” revelations, these propositions lack human resonance, appeal, or warmth. They are, rather, chilly, alien assertions, theological horse pills that one is forced to swallow.

Appealing to the incarnation, Bonhoeffer rejects theological positivism. God becomes human to make his appeal to humans in a human way. God embraces human experience as the very mode of his self-communication. Rather than being “Wholly Other” from the human, in Christ God’s Word is humanistic.

The point for the purposes of this series is this. While the world has not wholly “come of age” in a comprehensive and thoroughgoing renunciation of faith, we have entered a secular age. And in our post-Christian culture, the prediction of Karl Rahner has become increasingly relevant:

The devout Christian of the future will either be a “mystic”—someone who has “experienced something”—or will cease to be anything at all.

That is to say, where culture once carried and bolstered faith, experience must now step in and take its place. Otherwise, the metaphysical claims of faith risk becoming increasingly “positivistic,” implausible assertions aggressively posed to the world with a “like it or lump it” demand. As William James observed in his essay “The Will to Believe,” the mind needs to warm toward beliefs, sensing in claims some vitality and life. Lacking a cultural consensus to warm Christian doctrines, our “experiencing something” must provide the needed heat, warming positivistic propositions into plausibility.

This, then, is the Schleiermacherian criticism of Barthianism. When human experience is marginalized or ignored, Scripture and Tradition become positivistic. Evangelism becomes “like it or lump it.” Christianity speaks to the world in an alien, chilly, and inhuman voice.

Having set out the tensions in the last two posts, let me turn toward how each side—the Barthian and the Schleiermacherian—expresses concern and criticism toward the other.

In this post we'll reflect on the Barthian critique of Schleiermacherian liberal theology.

Recall from part one that Karl Barth launched his attack against liberal theology in 1919 with the publication of his commentary on Romans. This commentary was the “bomb on the playground of the [liberal] theologians.” But what caused Barth to throw this bomb?

The main precipitating event was World War I and how Barth's liberal theology professors quickly jumped on the nationalistic bandwagon in support of the war. Witnessing this apostasy, God being used to justify nationalism and war, Barth came to realize that liberal theology had been evacuated of any prophetic potential or capacity.

The point is easily made. When God becomes identified with and reduced to human experience, as happens in liberal theology, then there is nothing outside of human experience that can criticize or indict with any sacred, moral, or transcendent force. And this becomes a pressing and urgent concern when human experience takes a dark turn, like it did in World War I. Barth needed to proclaim a God who was “Wholly Other” from the world so that God could, in times of moral crisis and confusion, speak a prophetic word. Otherwise, the voice of God would collapse into the voice of men, those clamoring for nationalism, jingoism, and war.

Simply put, Barth threw his bomb against the bombs.

And then it happened again.

During the 1930s, as National Socialism began to assert itself in Germany, the German church fell in with Hitler, baptizing the Führer as an agent of God. Barth was provoked again into action, becoming the main author of the Barmen Declaration. Published in 1934, the Barmen Declaration became the guiding document of the Confessing Church movement, of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a notable leader. The goal of the Barmen Declaration was the same as Barth’s commentary on Romans: to get some prophetic distance between God and the world, in this case a world—and a church—bending the knee to Hitler. As the Barmen Declaration would declare, “Jesus Christus ist das eine Wort Gottes.”

Jesus Christ is the only Word of God.

Crucially, the Barmen Declaration sought to prevent the church from becoming a tool of state power and control, the religious wing of the Nazi party devoted to sacralizing and baptizing the state. And it might be helpful for American readers to remember that European states, like England and Germany, had national churches. The American “separation between church and state” was not operative. Consequently, there was a preexisting overlap between church and state in Germany that created the potential for slow, incremental bureaucratic creep as the Nazis worked to bring every national institution, the national church included, under party control. Like a python, the Nazis slowly squeezed the church into submission. The Barmen Declaration saw the squeeze and tried to help the church wiggle free before it was too late. Sadly, the Declaration failed.

Importantly for this series, this historical tale has continuing contemporary relevance.

On the political right we continue to see the church tempted toward nationalism, along with a fascination with authoritarian, charismatic leaders. Like the Nazis, there is a longing for a virile, powerful, masculine Christianity, the church as a nationalistic war cult. The cross becomes eclipsed by a Nietzschean will to power. By and large, these are the demons evangelical Christians must face.

On the political left, Christianity folds into liberal humanism. The moral imperative becomes tolerance. This robs Christianity of prophetic power. Christians must not judge. Sin and the judgment of God fade from the church. Faith comes to baptize and legitimize choice and autonomy as ends in themselves, without reference to any transcendent value or obligating good. The church becomes the handmaiden of the culture and fades into irrelevancy. By and large, these are the demons progressive and mainline Christians must face.

For both groups, right and left, God has collapsed into the human. On the right the collapse looks like nationalism. On the left the collapse looks like humanism. Either way, the church loses its prophetic capacity. Evangelicals find themselves unable to call out the nationalism in their midst. Progressives don't know how to talk about sin and Judgment Day. Both wind up in an echo chamber of ideological sameness, insular political cul-de-sacs, where God is put to use for partisan agendas.

This, then, is the Barthian criticism of Schleiermacherianism: the eclipse of prophetic capacity, the reduction of God to the human, and the inability to hear the Wholly Other who speaks from beyond all human categories, institutions, nations, politics, worldviews, cultures, religions, movements, ideologies, philosophies, and histories. The Word of God who speaks to us outside the categories of right and left, secular and religious, Democrat and Republican, national or foreign.

"I would that His peynes were my peynes."

In Chapter 3 Julian finally tells the story about the origin of her showings, some details of which I've already shared.

As Julian recounts, when she was "thirty yers old and halfe, God sent me a bodely sekeness [bodily sickness] in which I lay three dayes and three nights, and on the fourth night I tooke all my rites of Holy Church and wened not a levyd [believed I would not live] till day; and after this I langorid [languished] forth two dayes and two nights."

Julian's priest comes, sets before her a crucifix, and says: "I have browte [brought] thee the image of thy maker and Saviour. Louke thereupon and comfort thee therewith."

As Julian gazes at the cross her vision of the room dims, but the cross remains illuminated: "it was all derke [dark] about me in the chamber as it had be night, save in the image of the Cross wherein I beheld a comon light..." And then, the pain Julian had been experiencing goes away: "sodenly [suddenly] all my peyne [pain] was taken fro me, and I was as hele [well]." But this sudden healing comes as a disappointment for Julian: "the feleing [feeling] of this ease was no full ease to me, for methought I had lever a be [rather have been] deliveryd [delivered] of this world." And it's here where Julian remembers her prior prayer to be given the gift of three wounds:

Than came suddenly to my minde that I should desyre [desire] the second wounde of our Lords gracious gift, that my body might be fullfilled with minde [awareness, consciousness] and felyng [feeling] of His blissid passion, for I would that His peynes [pains] were my peynes, with compassion, and, afterward, longeing to God. But in this I desired never bodily sight nor sheweing of God, but compassion as a kinde soule might have with our Lord Jesus that for love would beene a dedely man [was willing to become a mortal person], and therefore I desired to suffer with Him.

As you likely know, this notion of participation in the sufferings of Christ was a prominent feature of medieval spirituality. And it promoted extreme practices of self-mortification, like self-flagellation. To this day, there is a serious concern, from both outside and inside the faith, that Christianity promotes and valorizes suffering. So we need to tread carefully here.

And yet, the spiritual genius of Christianity is that we're the only major world religion with a dead body. We worship a Crucified God. A Victimized God. And because of this there are unfathomable riches within Christianity about God's identification with our suffering and with the victimized. There is also a vision of the sacrificial nature of love, of the cost of self-giving and self-donation. 

Thus, there is the constant Biblical refrain that the Christian life is a sharing and participation in the sufferings of Christ:

Philippians 3:10: “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,”

Romans 8:17: “and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”

2 Corinthians 1:5: “For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too."

2 Corinthians 4:10–11" “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”

Colossians 1:24: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church,”

1 Peter 4:13: “But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.”

1 Peter 2:21: “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.”

Or, as Julian said:

"I would that His peynes were my peynes."

I have a diverse reading audience, from academics to my mom. (Hi, Mom!) I, myself, am not a formally trained theologian. But I do delight in popularizing and making accessible the theology I have been able to read and understand. Consequently, my online writing can swing pretty drastically from the rudimentary to the academic. Today’s post is rudimentary and introductory.

But that doesn’t mean unimportant! In this post I’d like to introduce the Wesleyan Quadrilateral to those who haven’t heard of it. And while the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is well known to theologians and pastors, it is a helpful framework that should be more widely known outside theological and biblical studies circles.

The reason I want to introduce the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is because it can help describe and set up the tensions I was discussing in the last post.

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral was first described by Albert Outler in his study of John Wesley (1703–1791), the famous theologian and evangelist. Wesley endorsed prima scriptura (“Scripture first”) in reaching theological conclusions. This is a bit different from sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”). “Scripture first” argues that, while the Bible should be given pride of place, there are other considerations when formulating doctrine. If so, what are these other considerations, voices, and data that supplement our reading of the Bible? Outler argued that when you look at the work of Wesley, he drew his conclusions from four sources, what Outler called “the Wesleyan Quadrilateral”:

1. Scripture: the Bible.
2. Tradition: the historic creeds and teachings of the Church.
3. Reason: human rationality and logical reflection.
4. Experience: reflections upon the human condition and flourishing.

Let’s walk through these and bring the Wesleyan Quadrilateral into conversation with what I described in the last post.

First, the Bible. This should be obvious. Scripture sits at the heart of what theologians call “special revelation.” As Thomas Aquinas argued at the start of the Summa, there are things about God we would never know if it weren’t for God revealing himself to us.

Second, tradition. All that said, the Bible is hardly clear in places. The church had great battles in order to reach an authoritative consensus on matters of doctrine. Most Christian denominations look to the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as definitive descriptions of orthodoxy. Beyond Trinitarian dogma, Christians also look to well-established and traditional teachings across a range of issues, from worship to morality.

Third, reason. As we reflect upon the life of faith, we naturally seek harmony and rational consistency. We draw reasonable, justifiable conclusions.

Lastly, human experience. This is a subspecies of what theologians call “general revelation.” General revelation concerns truths that are universally available to the reflective human mind, regardless of faith commitment. For example, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, positive psychology, as an empirical science, can investigate the causes and correlates of human flourishing. Consequently, we can examine how religious beliefs relate to human experience. We witness how some religious beliefs cause harm, abuse, damage, hate, extremism, and violence. We can also observe how some religious beliefs produce joy, peace, health, and love.

So, these are the four sources of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. Scripture was the primary authority for Wesley, but his theological conclusions examined all four sources. And like Wesley, in the push and pull of these voices we are guided in our reflections and toward theological conclusions.

Okay, so how does the Wesleyan Quadrilateral relate to my reflections in the last post and my agenda for this series?

Let’s step away from Wesley and prima scriptura and let the sources stand on their own in a value-neutral framework. Once we do that, some obvious questions arise. For example, when Tradition and Reason come into conflict, which should be privileged? Or when Scripture and Experience come into conflict, which should be privileged?

This is a very crude reduction, but broadly speaking, those who would describe themselves as conservative, traditional, or orthodox privilege Scripture and Tradition over Experience. Not that there aren’t Quadrilateral tensions within this group, with Protestants privileging Scripture over Tradition in contrast to Catholics and the Orthodox. Regardless, all these groups tend to rank Experience lower in their theological considerations.

Progressive and liberal theologians, by contrast, tend to privilege, or give greater credence to, Experience in relation to Scripture and Tradition. For example, when progressives see a location of human virtue and flourishing that doesn’t jibe with plain-sense readings of the Bible or the traditional teachings of the church, they will adjust their hermeneutics so as to make their readings of Scripture congruent with human experience.

Mapping all this onto the “Barth” and “Schleiermacher” contrast from the last post: By “Barthian” I mean theological positions that privilege Scripture and Tradition over human Experience. That is to say, in these perspectives, if human experience contradicts Scripture and Tradition, then human experience is wrong and has to change. Conversely, “Schleiermacherian” theological positions privilege, or at least elevate, human Experience over Scripture and Tradition. That is to say, when we observe locations of human flourishing that contradict plain-sense readings of the Bible or traditional Christian teaching, these readings and teachings should change. Relatedly, when we see plain-sense readings or traditional Christian teachings causing harm or undermining human flourishing, these readings and teachings should also change.

Stepping back, then, one way to describe the topic of this series is to view it from within the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. 

Specifically, how are we to balance Scripture and Tradition over against human Experience?

Goodness, how obscure is that title?

Before you run away, just know that I'm about to explain it in a very accessible way.

To begin, this is a series about how I approach theology. To do that I want to explore how I attempt to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable theological visions. And as you can guess, the "Barth" and "Schleiermacher" in my title represent these rival theologies. 

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was a German theologian and philosopher often called the “father of modern liberal theology.” Seeking to defend Christianity in the face of Enlightenment criticism and rising secularism, Schleiermacher located the heart of religion not in doctrine or morality but in the “feeling of absolute dependence,” a deep, immediate awareness of God. Simply put, Schleiermacher grounded faith in human experience, a move that laid the foundation for modern liberal theology. When I was an undergraduate Bible major, I was warned about the liberalism of “German theology.” Schleiermacher was the godfather of this movement, which later boasted theologians like Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), and, in a later and more complicated form, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). While this is a very crude simplification, these liberal theologians unpacked Christian dogma in moral, historical, existential, symbolic, and experiential terms. The Christian faith and the Bible increasingly functioned as expressions of human religious consciousness and the human condition, rather than as descriptions of a supernatural, ontological reality.

Simply put, the leading edge of liberal theology is human experience. So, the reference to "Schleiermacher" in the series title is gesturing toward theological frameworks that privilege and emphasize human experience. 

In 1919, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth published his famous commentary on Romans. The Romans commentary was described as "a bomb the fell on the playground of the theologians." The theologians in question were those liberal, German, Schleiermacherian theologians. Barth’s Romans rejected the entire liberal theological trajectory. For Barth, God was Wholly Other from human existence, the Lord who confronts humanity in judgment and grace. Revelation, thus, does not grow out of history or emerge from within the human condition, but breaks in from beyond, as crisis and apocalypse. Barth took explicit aim at Schleiermacher’s "turn to the subject," wrenching theology free from its captivity to human experience and returning it to the sovereign, self-revealing act of God in Christ. 

Simply stated, for Barth revelation doesn’t emerge from within human experience, as a dawning awareness of a “Christ consciousness” or inner moral feeling. Rather, Christ confronts human experience from the outside, as crisis, judgment, and indictment. So, the reference to "Barth" in the series title is gesturing toward theological frameworks that privilege and emphasize special revelation—Scripture, dogma, and doctrine—over human experience. 

Hopefully, now, you can see the provocation of my title "When Barth and Schleiermacher Kiss." I'm proposing in this series an intimate reconciliation between two opposed and fiercely warring theological systems, Barth and Schleiermacher's own visions and all their contemporary theological offspring. For example, I toyed with entitling the series "When Hauerwas and Tillich Kiss." Hauerwas as a contemporary example of the Barthian stream, and Tillich an example of the Schleiermacherian stream. In March 1959, Time magazine placed Paul Tillich on its cover, calling him the “foremost Protestant thinker” in the United States. In September 2001, Time named Stanley Hauerwas “America’s Best Theologian.” As for the ongoing war between these two streams of Christian theology, Hauerwas has called Tillich, as a liberal theologian, "the most supremely apologetic/accomodationist theologian of our time" and "the great enemy of Christianity in this country." So, imagining Hauerwas and Tillich kissing would have been quite the provocation. But I wanted to go back to the origins of liberal theology—Schleiermacher—and its early, fiercest, and most influential critic—Karl Barth. 

A sketch of where we are going. 

I often feel that I am a theological platypus. I'm in-between a lot. Too Barthian for the progressives. Too Schleiermacherian for the conservatives. Too heterodox for the orthodox, and too orthodox for the heterodox. I am a huge fan of both Stanley Hauerwas and Paul Tillich. In fact, as I'll try to argue in this series, I think Hauerwas and Tillich need each other. Otherwise their theological visions, and this is also true for Barth and Schleiermacher, become twisted and distorted. 

Thus, the need for these visions—Barth/Schleiermacher and Hauerwas/Tillich—to kiss.

In my Psychology and Christianity class this week we were speaking about the soul. 

That discussion reminded me of a short series I shared in 2023 about what we are talking about when we talk about the soul. Our default assumption is that when we talk about the soul we are talking about a spectral substance or ghostly object that inhabits our body. But I would suggest that when we speak of the soul were are talking less about a substance than about the deepest aspects of what it means to be human.

To start, the soul is the arena of moral drama in our lives.

Every day and every moment we are in a moral drama, playing a high-stakes game. And what is won or lost in this game is our very soul. When we say “soul,” we name this fight, this struggle. William James once described the drama of human existence:

“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

Where in us does this moral drama take place? You could say it’s happening in the brain, but that seems inadequate as the stakes of this game are “for our very soul.” Something sacred and integral to my identity is in play and at risk. 

Relatedly, the soul is also the place where we experience what psychologists call moral damage. When we act in ways that violate our deeply held and most cherished values, or when we witness things that morally traumatize us, we feel that the soul is wounded, seared, or scarred. And the location of this damage isn’t biological. The brain not damaged by moral wounds, it is the soul that is hurt.

Beyond being the arena of moral drama, the soul is also the container of human value and worth.

Physically and materially, there isn’t much value in a human person. Reduced to our elemental components, the human body is made mostly of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The cost of these chemicals, as chemicals, is around $160. 

Obviously, this purely chemical description is unable to capture what is priceless about human persons. So, where does this value adhere? What is the container, the receptacle, of human worth?

Biblically, Christians confess that every human person is created in the image of God. And while the Imago Dei can mean many things, it has always included the idea of human dignity and worth. Because we bear the divine image, our value is inviolable. 

When we say “soul,” therefore, we are naming what is priceless about the human person. The soul is irreducible to a purely material accounting and valuable beyond any economic reckoning.

Finally, to speak of the soul is to speak of the eschatological horizon of human life.

Now, I don’t want to get bogged down in the doctrinal details. We can debate if the soul is immortal or not, if we should prefer a Platonic or a more embodied vision. We can debate Judgment Day, heaven, and hell. But however we work out the details, when we say “soul” we are thinking eschatologically about human persons and the moral content of our lives.

To view yourself eschatologically is to believe that you have come into existence for a reason and that your life has an ultimate destiny. Having a soul means human life is teleological. Your existence is not due to chance, accident, or happenstance.

And if we have a destiny, if we are here for a reason, that means it matters what we do with our lives, morally speaking. Life has moral weight and consequence. Maybe you believe in heaven or hell, maybe you believe we leave behind a “moral echo” that ripples through time, maybe you believe in karma. Regardless, the consequences of our actions outlast our lives, for good or ill. When we say “soul,” we are pointing to this eschatological aspect of human life. Human life exists for a reason, a reason rooted in a moral drama that persists beyond the temporal bounds of biological existence. 

In summary, to possess a soul is to experience life as cosmically sacred, existentially valuable, morally charged, and purposively directed. 

To have a soul is to be human, with all the pathos this entails.