The last of the five features of the pentecostal worldview described by James Smith in his book Thinking in Tongues is "an eschatology that engenders a commitment both to mission and to ministries of empowerment and social justice, with a certain 'preferential option for the marginalized'..."

As James continues, "one of the signs of the eschatological inbreaking of the Spirit into the present is the subversion of the powerful by the weak--who, in the Spirit, function as the very power of God."

The early church was both a charismatic community and a community of the weak.

1 Corinthians 1.25-28
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.

It's still this way worldwide. Within Christianity charismatic spirituality is the spirituality of the poor and oppressed.

In my life, charismatic spirituality is the spirituality out at the prison where I teach on Monday nights and it's the spirituality at Freedom Fellowship where we walk with the poor and homeless.

This, perhaps more than anything, is why I've embraced the spirituality at Freedom. It is Christian spirituality at the margins.

James Smith's reference to "the preferential option for the marginalized" is a generalization of "the preferential option for the poor" associated with liberation theology. And what is important for me about "the preferential option for the poor" is that it functions as a hermeneutical principle, even, I'd argue, as a regulating test of orthodoxy. The gospel is most faithfully interpreted by, with and among the poor.

Stated more forcibly, the gospel is what the poor say it is.

And if that's the case, you don't know what the gospel is until the poor teach it to you. You can't learn about the gospel in the seminary or in the suburban mega-church. You can only hear the gospel faithfully proclaimed by the poor.

True, many will chaff at this hermeneutical privileging. It's illiberal and undemocratic. But that's why they call it a preference. There is no unbiased reading of the gospel. You have to pick a bias. And God's bias is the bias of the poor.

And while the gospel on the lips of the poor may sound like foolishness it is a foolishness that shames the professors and doctors of this age.

That's why I go to Freedom. That's why I worship with and among the poor.

I have to leave my college campus. I have to leave my degrees on the wall. I have to leave the bookshelves behind.

I have to go to a place where the poor will teach me the gospel.

So that I might become a student of the foolishness of God.

The fourth aspect of the pentecostal worldview described by James Smith in his book Thinking in Tongues is that pentecostal spirituality is "rooted in affective, narrative epistemic practice."

More simply stated, pentecostal spirituality is "rooted in the heart and traffics in the stuff of story."

As we know, pentecostal spirituality is very emotional. And as I described in the very first post of this series, this was the part of worship at Freedom that took a lot of getting used to. Historically, the Churches of Christ have been very rationalistic and wary of emotional displays. So a shift to a more charismatic and emotional style of worship was a big change for me.

The worry with such emotionalism is that it is antirationalistic. But according to James Smith the better way to see the situation isn't to see charismatic worship as antirational but as a critique of excessive rationalism.

The heart has ways of knowing that the head knows nothing about.

Once again, I've seen all this play out in my own experience at Freedom. Before my life at Freedom I'd say I was trapped in my own head. My faith, such as it was, was very cerebral, rationalistic, intellectual, and propositional. But when I encountered the spirituality of Freedom I quickly realized how stunted and limited this rationalism was.

I'd look at my brothers and sisters at Freedom and say to myself, "I have a PhD. I have written three theology books. But these people know something about the faith, about God and Jesus, that I know nothing about." Intellectually, I knew many things. But on another level I didn't know a thing. Despite my intellect and education I felt like a child among spiritual adults.

This is why James Smith describes pentecostal spirituality as an "epistemic practice," as a way of knowing. And as James recounts, modern psychology has pointed out to us that our emotions often function as pre-cognitive filters in how we interpret and ascribe meaning to the world. Emotions, in many ways, are primary. Cognition is often secondary, given the task of making sense of the emotional data. You have to explain to yourself, in a post hoc fashion, why you feel the way you do. You have to "make sense" of your feelings.

This has huge implications for spiritual practice and formation. As James writes,

[I]f our emotions construe the world before and more often than our intellectual, cognitive perceptions, then the shape of our emotions makes our world most of the time--in which case, discipleship would be more a matter of training our emotions than of changing our minds. It is this intuition that I think is inchoately central in pentecostal worship and spirituality.

That's a pretty important insight. Emotions make our world. And if emotions make our world then attending to the emotions is a critical, perhaps even the central, task of Christian discipleship. Discipleship is more a matter of training our emotions than of changing our minds.

Consequently, as a result of my life at Freedom I've come to focus more and more on orthopathy (right affection) than upon orthodoxy (right belief), and even upon orthopraxy (right practice).

For a progressive Christian like myself this has been an important shift. As we know, many progressive, liberal and emergent Christians have shifted focus toward orthopraxy over orthodoxy. I've done this myself. It's a move I highly recommend, especially if you struggle with doubts.

And yet, I've discovered two inter-related problems with this focus on orthopraxy.

First, when progressives think of "practices" they tend to think of social justice. As they should. But they don't, as a rule, think of praying, fasting, and worshiping, the practices of what David Kelsey has called doxological gratitude, which I consider to be key to the formation of a loving, Christ-like spirit (see The Slavery of Death for this argument). 

This is why, in my estimation, many progressive Christians, despite their focus on social justice, still struggle with being kind, gentle, forgiving and loving human beings. If you aren't attending to the affections in your pursuit of social justice you're prone to becoming harsh, angry and judgmental. Or just burnt out. Joy rather than righteous indignation has to be what carries you forward.

This lack of attention to the practices of doxological gratitude is also why I think progressive Christians chronically struggle with spiritual dryness, listlessness and cynicism.

Which brings me to the second issue, the role of the church. The practices of doxological gratitude, the rituals that shape our affections, are often practiced corporately. That is, when progressives think of "right practice" they don't often think of the practice of the church. Because, on the surface, there's not a lot going on at the church that has anything to do with social justice. And that's true. But as I've experienced Freedom Fellowship I've come to see how the practices of doxological gratitude in our charismatic worship, which privileges the emotions, are shaping my affections and, thus, fueling and supporting my interests in social justice. Orthopathy is supporting orthopraxy.

Concretely, given how my affections are being shaped by the charismatic worship at Freedom I'm more joyful and at peace. My heart has grown softer and more tender.

In short, by eschewing the church and the practices of doxological gratitude I think progressives have often failed to attend to the heart. To be clear, progressive Christians are amazing theologians. In the pews they may be the best theologians in all of Christianity. But theological sophistication can be a trap. It trapped me. In my head.

But as I learned in the charismatic worship at Freedom, the heart has a way of knowing that the head knows nothing about.

In honor of Yom HaShoah a post of mine from 2008.

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I’m currently in Germany studying with some students from ACU. One of the classes I’m teaching is called The Psychology of Ideology. In the class we are studying three cases of ideological change, confrontation, or conflict: WWII, the Cold War, and the Reformation.

Last week we toured the Buchenwald concentration camp outside the town of Weimar.

Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz. It was a labor camp. Still, the atrocities committed at Buchenwald are chilling. Buchenwald operated from 1937 to 1945. During its time it housed over 250,000 prisoners. Over 55,000 died here.

There is a crematorium at Buchenwald where the dead were reduced to ash. The ovens housed there were the prototypes of those made for Auschwitz. The ovens at Auschwitz were destroyed so the only place to see such ovens is at Buchenwald.

As my students and I moved through the “autopsy” room (where the dead bodies were plundered for their gold tooth fillings) and the oven room in the crematorium many were overcome with emotions. It is difficult to describe your feelings standing in front of those ovens or looking at the cold tile tables fitted with drains in the autopsy room. The evil and horror and terrible sadness overwhelm you.

One of the things that haunts me is the Buchenwald zoo.

One of the first things the prisoners had to do in the early years of the camp was to create a little zoo for the SS officers, their families, and their dates. The zoo was a place for the SS to enjoy nature and leisure time. Horrifically, and I still can’t shake this, the zoo was placed just outside the camp fence, in clear sight of the muster grounds where the prisoners lined up for inspection, often standing for hours at a time. The Buchenwald prisoners looked almost directly across at the zoo, watching SS families and girlfriends take in the pleasures of the place. Even worse, the zoo was just a hundred yards from the crematorium. This proximity boggles the mind. As an SS officer sat with his date looking at the swans he could casually watch the smoke coming out the smokestack from the ovens.

This vast separation of circumstance—a day at the zoo versus facing the ovens—is cynically captured on the gate a Buchenwald. As the prisoners mustered each day they could glance across the fence at SS personnel enjoying the zoo while the words built into the gate faced them: Jedem das Seine.

To each his own.

In many ways the Holocaust presents my discipline with a horrific challenge. Can psychology come to grips with how such evil could occur? Can psychology understand how a zoo and a crematorium can exist side by side?

Roy Baumeister, in his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, suggests that the answers to these questions begin with looking at the stories both the victims and the perpetrators tell about the events.

What do we hear when we listen to the stories of victims and perpetrators? Baumeister notes that victim narratives are often governed by what he calls “the myth of pure evil.” That is, victims often feel that the actions of the perpetrators were random, motivationless, and sadistic. The perpetrators did what they did because they love cruelty. No doubt sadists exist, but these persons account for only a small portion of evil. So when we step across to ask for the stories of perpetrators we tend to hear narratives that are very much driven by motives, good motives in the eyes of the perpetrators. To understand evil we must understand these motives.

Two motives are relevant to the ovens at Buchenwald. First, much evil is caused by idealists. Once a person is governed by an idealist ideology, be it political, moral, or religious, “evil” becomes a means to a glorious end.

The Nazis were utopians. Their worldview was dominated by the notion of building a perfect society, one sanctioned by God. This idealism and utopianism allowed them to justify their actions at places like Buchenwald. Their evil was instrumental, a means to an end.

A second motivation for evil is darkly ironic. Very often when you inquire into the motives of someone who has victimized a person you hear the story of a victim. Perpetrators of evil often feel they have been victimized first. Victims—real or imagined—often victimize others. This is very common in domestic abuse cases. But it can be seen in a variety of situations from the 9/11 attackers to Rwanda to the Nazis. Specifically, after WWI large parts of Germany felt victimized by the treatment they suffered. Massive economic hardship poisoned many. This broad sense of victimization in Germany fueled much of the horror in WWII.

Baumeister’s analysis is a good place to begin to analyze the ovens of Buchenwald but more is needed. True, the Nazis were idealists who felt like victims. This may explain a great many wartime atrocities but it doesn’t explain the ovens or how close the zoo was to the crematorium at Buchenwald. That kind of coldness requires a bit more explanation.

What needs to be explained is not simply “normal” anti-Semitism but what Daniel Goldhagen has called eliminationist anti-Semitism, a hatred that demands not just the removal but the eradication of the despised group. How did this eliminationist anti-Semitism take hold?

It partly had to do with the psychology of purity, disgust and contamination. Disgust and revulsion are mainly aimed at monitoring oral incorporation. This visceral response is governed by a logic of contagion/contamination. This logic has (among others) four features (this analysis is based on the work of Paul Rozin):

Contact/Proximity: When a contaminant touches or is close to a foodstuff the food is considered contaminated. For example, if I place a bug on your sandwich or, to up the stakes, touch it with feces, you’ll push the sandwich away.

Irreversibility: Once the foodstuff is deemed “contaminated” nothing can be done to the food to render it pure. For example, if I put a drop of urine in your gallon of milk generally little can be done (filtering, boiling) to get you to drink it.

Dose Insensitivity: There is no “dosage effect” with contamination. In the prior example, one drop of urine is not any better or worse than an ounce. In short, very little of the contaminant is just as bad as very much of it.

Negativity Dominance: Contamination flows one way. That is, if I drop some wine into a bottle of urine the wine doesn’t make the urine palatable. But a drop of urine can render a huge vat of wine undrinkable. The negative of the contaminant dominates the positive of the chosen foodstuff.

This logic of contagion is relevant as it governs the emotions of disgust and revulsion. This is critical in that disgust isn’t only involved in oral incorporation. Sociomoral disgust occurs when disgust properties are applied to people. When we find a person or a class of persons revolting, icky, disgusting, or loathsome sociomoral disgust is at work.

Sociomoral disgust sits at the heart of genocide. And it goes a fair way in accounting for the ovens at Buchenwald. As Martha Nussbaum has written:

Disgust is all about putting the object at a distance and drawing boundaries. It imputes to the object properties that make it no longer a member of the subject’s own community or world, a kind of alien species of thing…Thus, throughout history, certain disgust properties—sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness—have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, groups by reference to whom privileged groups seeks to define their superior human status.

What created the eliminationist anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was that purity—national, racial, and blood purity—was elevated to the level of an ideology. An ideological purity applied the logic of contagion to the Jews. Contact or proximity with them was polluting. This contamination couldn’t be reversed or cleaned up. Only cutting out the contaminated stock would work. A quarantine logic emerged. But worse, dose insensitivity dictated that even a small number of Jews were just as dangerous as millions of them. Only a “final solution” of eradication could deal with this.

In the end, this ideology of purity helps explain the zoo and the ovens. To the SS officer walking a date in the zoo what was being fed into the ovens only yards away were not human persons. Something sub-human and dangerous was being destroyed. The ovens were morally justified acts of self-protection in the eyes of the SS.

It is entirely possible that this analysis, by being an analysis, diminishes the horror of Buchenwald. Analyses in front of the ovens may seem obscene. No doubt evil can’t be accounted for in reductionistic theories. But this analysis wasn’t done in front of the ovens. It was done afterwards, in the wake of the questions that came from my students. Why? Why did this happen? What I write here is just a bit of the answer I gave my students. But at the end of the day I don't know if such evil can be explained. Words and thought fail in front of the ovens at Buchenwald.

To end on a personal note, Jana and I allowed my 10 year old son to go into the crematorium. We were fearful he was too young to know about all this. But he did well. Afterwards Jana and I sat with him and I spoke, with tears in my eyes:

“Brenden, I want to talk about why we came here. We came here because some of the worst things humans ever did happened in places like this. We came here to remind ourselves that these things happened. And we came here to honor those who died.

We came here to remember so that this will never happen again.”

[pictures taken by Richard and Jana Beck at Buchenwald Memorial June 13, 2008]

The third aspect of the pentecostal worldview described by James Smith in his book Thinking in Tongues is "a non-dualistic affirmation of embodiment and materiality."

In the "distinctive belief in the healing of the body" James Smith sees within pentecostalism an implicit theology that keeps the soul tightly tethered to body. James writes,

[Among pentecostals the gospel is] a message of liberation from sin and its effects, including the material effects of illness and disease, as well as oppression and poverty (Luke 4:18-19). Deliverance and liberation, then, are not just "spiritual"; the gospel is not just a tonic for souls. Implicit in this affirmation of bodily healing is a broader affirmation, namely, a sense that the full gospel values the whole person.

Intriguingly, James goes on to suggest that this vision of salvation--liberation of both body and soul--is what so often connects pentecostalism to the prosperity gospel:

We might note that it is precisely the holism of this aspect of pentecostal spirituality that might also explain why pentecostal spirituality is also often attended by a prosperity gospel. That is, the prosperity gospel (for all its failures) might be an unwitting testimony to the holism of pentecostal spirituality. The prosperity gospel--which often attends pentecostalism whether in Africa, Brazil, or suburban Dallas--is, we must recognize, a testament to the very "worldliness" of pentecostal theology. It is one of the most un-Gnostic moments of pentecostal spirituality that refuses to spiritualize the promise that the gospel is "good news for the poor." In this sense, we might suggest that the implicit theological intuition that informs pentecostal renditions of the prosperity gospel is not very far from Catholic social teaching or liberation theology. It is evidence of a core affirmation that God cares about our bellies and bodies.

Now that's quite an argument. Bet you never saw anyone compare the prosperity gospel to liberation theology. And whether you agree with that assessment or not, I agree with the core contention: that we refuse to spiritualize the good news for the poor. God cares about our material well-being.

One of the things that I love about life at Freedom is that we always serve a meal. No strings attached. During our weekly Wednesday night gatherings a meal is served from 6:00 to 7:00. Worship starts at 7:00. Many people stay for the worship. But many don't. Again, no strings attached.

And after the service is over many go back to bag up the leftovers to take home for another meal or two. And across the street is the community garden planted by Bob, one of our elders. Many bags of freshly picked vegetables are taken home after worship at Freedom.

Prayer requests at Freedom focus very much on material needs. People need rent money. Electric bills need to be paid. Food to get through the last days of the month.

There are needs for a car or car repairs. Needs for dental work. A place to sleep at night. A shower. Some new clothes. A blanket. The next meal. Bus fare.

There are prayers for healing and health. Prayers for addiction and recovery.

We don't believe in a prosperity gospel at Freedom, but we are awash in material as well as spiritual needs.

You can't leave the body behind at Freedom. Bodies are ever present. In their needs, brokenness, sweat and smells. It's bodies and souls together.

We will worship, yes. But before that, we eat. We always eat.

Recently these search terms brought someone to the blog:

is scooby doo demonic?

Strange question, right? But why would this blog have an answer?

In 2011 I wrote a blog post entitled "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: On Disenchantment and the Demonic."

In that post I suggested that on the surface Scooby-Doo appears to be a parable of disenchantment, as the snooping kids find that behind the ghosts and ghouls there is just human trickery.

But inspired by the work of thinkers like Walter Wink and William Stringfellow at the end of the post I flip that conclusion on it's head.

In short, yes, Scooby-Doo is demonic. If we have the eyes to see it.

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The other day Aidan was watching Scooby-Doo on Cartoon Network.

And watching it with him I got nostalgic and then slipped into a theological reverie.

When it comes to Scooby-Doo I'm kind of a 1969-1971 purist. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! premiered on CBS on September 13, 1969 with the episode "What a Night for a Knight."

Here are what the opening credits looked like for that very first episode of Scooby-Doo:



Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! was eventually picked up for a second--1970-1971--season. And added to the opening credits was Austin Roberts' now iconic theme song:



My all-time favorite Scooby-Doo episodes are the seven second season episodes that featured a song by Roberts during the chase scenes. Most episodes of Scooby-Doo feature a scene with the monster chasing Scooby, Shaggy and the gang. And during these seven second season episodes one of Austin Roberts' pop songs created the score for the chase. In my estimation those are the very best Scooby-Doo episodes, the classics.

In 1972, after 25 episodes, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! was reworked to become The New Scooby-Doo Movies which expanded the episodes from 30 to 60 minutes and featured Scooby-Doo and the gang solving cases with famous guest hosts like the Harlem Globetrotters, Batman and Robin and the Three Stooges. It's at this point where the franchise jumped the shark. In my opinion, the Golden Years of Scooby-Doo were the first two seasons--the Scooby Doo, Where Are You! episodes.

If you've never watched Scooby-Doo, particularly the early episodes, the plot follows a standard pattern. From the Wikipedia entry:

Each episode featured Scooby and the four teenaged members of the Mystery, Inc. gang: Fred, Shaggy, Daphne, and Velma, arriving to a location in the "Mystery Machine" and encountering a ghost, monster, or other supernatural creature, whom they learned was terrorizing the local populace. After looking for clues and suspects and being chased by the monster, the kids come to realize the ghost is anything but, and - often with the help of a Rube Goldberg-like trap designed by Fred - they capture the villain and unmask him. Revealed as a flesh and blood crook trying to cover up crimes by using the ghost story and costume, the criminal is arrested and taken to jail, often saying something to the effect of "...and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!"

As I sat watching Scooby-Doo with Aidan the other day it struck me how Scooby-Doo is a perfect parable of disenchantment. In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor talks about how, over the last 500 years, the world moved from enchantment to disenchantment. Five hundred years ago the world was full of supernatural forces, witchcraft, and ghosts. A world full of thin places, where the border between this world and the Other world was porous and leaky. Five hundred years ago people could be demon possessed or afflicted by witches. The night was full of occult menace and magic. Black cats were bad luck.

Things are much different today. We live in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. We are moderns, where science, technology, and skepticism now rule. With electric lighting the dark forces of the night have been banished. There's no room for monsters. Medicine and psychiatry have pushed witchcraft and demon possession offstage. Worrying about black cats is just superstitious and irrational. And ghost stories are just that--fictional tales to scare the kids around the campfire.

Watching Scooby-Doo I realized how closely the show traces, in a single episode, this movement from enchantment to disenchantment. The episodes begin with enchantment, with a supernatural monster, specter, ghoul or ghost. But as the kids investigate they get suspicious, reason asserts itself and the monster--the agent of the occult--is eventually revealed to be Mr. Jenkins the greedy banker. The story ends with disenchantment. The supernatural was simply a "cover" for workaday greed, theft and corruption.

But then I starting thinking about how money and gain are repeatedly revealed to be the true motives behind the villains in Scooby-Doo. Money is the Power behind the occult force.

And this made me wonder if Scooby-Doo is as disenchanted as I took it to be. Given the close association between the demonic and the economic in the bible it struck me that there really was a spiritual Power at work in Scooby-Doo, perhaps the most demonic power of all. The final temptation of Jesus:

The devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

Soon after, Jesus preaches in the Sermon the Mount:

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."

As Paul wrote to Timothy, "the love of money is the root of all evil."

So as I sat there watching Scooby-Doo I began to wonder. Perhaps this isn't a tale of disenchantment after all. Perhaps Scooby-Doo really is a story about the occult and the demonic. We've just lost the ability to see it.

We moderns think the world has been rid of the dark forces--the ghouls, ghosts, demons and monsters. But these occult forces of evil haven't been expelled, expunged or exorcised. They still haunt and torment.

As we see in Scooby-Doo, the demons still possess us.

The second facet of the pentecostal worldview as described by James Smith in his book Thinking in Tongues is an "enchanted" experience of the world.

Specifically, as James writes, "pentecostal spirituality is marked by a deep sense of the Spirit's imminence" where "creation is 'charged' with the Spirit's presence."

Again, this description fits the charismatic spirituality I've experienced at Freedom Fellowship. The Spirit is alive and active, regularly encountered in everyday life. When good things happen, when prayers are answered, this is taken to be a sign of the Spirit's providential care.

And beyond the activity of the Spirit there is the experience of malevolent forces in the world. References to Satan and demons are common. Prayers are spoken asking for spiritual and angelic protection from these forces.

Once during a worship service at Freedom a women began howling and screaming and writhing, ostensibly in the grip of an evil spirit. Hands were laid upon her and prayers worded asking for deliverance. Eventually the woman stopped howling. She calmed. Praise was offered as the demon had been cast out.

I was driving some friends home afterwards. Talking about the shrieking lady Henry remarked, "I was freaked out. I got away from her. I didn't want that spirit coming out of her and getting into me. I don't like messing around with that stuff." Everyone in the car murmured their agreement. Lord Jesus, Sweet Jesus, protect us.

As Smith writes,

[T]here is a flip side of the Spirit's enchantment of creation: pentecostal spirituality is also deeply attentive to what we might describe as the mis-enchantment of the world by others spirits...There is a deep sense that multiple modes of oppression--from illness to poverty--are in some way the work of forces that are not just "natural."

Because of my life at Freedom I've come to talk a lot more about "the demonic" or about "Satan." Long time readers have likely noticed this shift. My interests in Christus Victor theology and frequent writing about "the principalities and powers." My attempt to articulate a progressive vision of "spiritual warfare." All these things flow out of my life with Freedom, me, a skeptical social scientist and progressive Christian trying to make contact with the enchanted world of my charismatic brothers and sisters.

In Chapter 4 of Thinking in Tongues James Smith spends a whole chapter discussing how to make sense of the "enchanted" worldview of pentecostalism in light of modern science. His proposal is interesting. Specifically, he makes a contrast between what he calls a non-interventionist/enchanted supernaturalism vs. an interventionist supernaturalism. According to James, a part of the trouble with "miracles," from a variety of perspectives, scientific and theological, is that they are often described as the actions of God "breaking into" or "interrupting" the natural world. In this view God is outside and separate from the system. This view, interventionist supernaturalism, James rejects as God is not outside or separate from the natural order. God is, rather, immanently present in all things. God is already on the inside. There should be no distinction between natural and supernatural. Thus, what might be called "a miracle" isn't God interrupting or disrupting the flow of events than a process of what James describes as intensification, God being more or less present at any given time or place.

I definitely like the idea that God is more intensely present in some places rather than in others. More intensely present in some events, experiences, times and people rather than in others. What I'm not sure about his how God's intense presence in any given location affects physical laws. I don't know how intensification relates to causality. That's an open question for me.

So how do I understand enchantment?

I understand enchantment in a way that borrows from James' description of what we described in the last post as a radical openness to God doing something different or new in the world, a radical openness to surprise. As I see it, James's description of being radically open to God's activity in the world is very similar to the experience of enchantment, the Spirit's activity in the world.

Given this similarity, what is interesting to me is how James describes a radical openness to God as a hermeneutical activity.

Specifically, James describes the events in Acts 2, the primordial account of the pentecostal experience. At the heart of Acts 2, James notes, is a hermeneutical act: Peter's re-description, re-narration and re-interpretation of the events talking place. James writes,

I take the central point of the narrative of Acts 2 to be Peter's courage and willingness to recognize in these strange phenomena the operation of the Spirit and declare it to be a work of God. To declare "this is that" (Acts 2:16) was to be open to God working in unexpected ways. In other words, the crux of the Pentecost story is not the spectacular events of Acts 2:1-4, but rather later, in 2:16, where Peter, with characteristic hermeneutical boldness, asserts: "This is from God!"

I believe this also applies to the experience of enchantment. The issue in enchantment--that God is intensely present--is less about "the spectacular event" (the "miracle") than the "hermeneutical boldness" (the re-interpretation of experience) in declaring that "This is from God!"

This parallels many of the musings I've shared on this blog, all driven by my experiences with Freedom.

In modernity we experience a "flatness" in life. Lacking depth or height life is just one damn thing after another. Under the naturalizing eye of modern science no atom is any more sacred than any other atom. They are all the same, interchangeable.

Enchantment, as I've often described it here, is the process of experiencing existential texture, depth and elevation. Enchantment is the experience of the holy, sacred, and divine.

The world is enchanted through rituals of hallowing. When we hallow we declare events, experiences, places, things and people to be holy and sacred, set apart and elevated from the regular flat flow of events where it's just one damn thing after another. Rituals of hallowing sacralize life in the hermeneutical act of boldness to declare "This is holy ground!" or "This is the gateway of heaven!" or "Surely God is in this place!"

Enchantment, then, is a hermeneutical activity, a way of re-reading, re-interpreting, re-describing and re-narrating our lives. Enchantment takes something "ordinary" and reads it as "extraordinary." Enchantment takes something "common" and reads it as "sacred." More from James Smith:

[In Acts 2] Peter stood up and boldly proclaimed: "This is God! This is what the prophets spoke about! This is what we've been waiting for! This is the Spirit!" Such a claim required a unique hermeneutic able to nimbly respond to the advent of surprise, as well as a kind of hermeneutical courage to make such a claim.

This is how I understand enchantment in my life at Freedom. Enchantment is the courage to read the world in a certain way. Enchantment, from Pentecost on, is hermeneutical boldness responding to the advent of surprise. Enchantment is the courage to read the divine in mundane happenings. Enchantment is the courage to read resurrection in the midst of death.

Enchantment is the courage to declare that this--this moment, this face, this life, this pain, this sorrow, this joy, this place, this time, this people, this tear, this touch--that this is holy and sacred and divine.

Enchantment is the hallowing of life, your life and mine, re-reading, re-describing, re-interpreting and re-narrating the world through prayer and the laying on of hands and the preaching of the Word. Hallowing through the water and the ashes and the bread and the wine and the oil and the incense. Hallowing through the song and the dance and the raised hand and the bended knee and the silence and the fasting and the washing of feet. Hallowing through the church as she is gathered as she is blessed as she is consecrated as she is commissioned and as she is sent.

The first facet of the pentecostal worldview described by James Smith in his book Thinking in Tongues is a radical openness to God, especially God doing something different or new.

Unpacking this James goes on to describe "a deep sense of expectation and an openness to surprise." Pentecostal worship "makes room for the unexpected" where "the surprising comes as no surprise."

Key to this experience is a posture of receptivity. As James says, "pentecostal spirituality is shaped by a fundamental mode of reception." This posture of receptivity creates the potential for surprise. All of which creates the experience of gift.

Again, all this is very much what I've experienced in the charismatic worship at Freedom Fellowship. And it's an important element in my book The Slavery of Death.

In The Slavery of Death, borrowing from David Kelsey, I connect the experience of gift to an eccentric experience of God. By eccentric I mean that God comes to us from "the outside" as it were. We don't own or control God. We can't erect a fence around God. God is not property, a possession of the faith community we must hoard and protect from others.

God is, rather, welcomed and received. Or waited upon. God is experienced as gift.

This is a critical insight in The Slavery of Death, this notion of eccentricity. Eccentricity is the term I use to point to the experience of gift, a posture of receptivity, radical openness to God, and a capacity to be surprised by God. And as I argue it in the book, the eccentric experience of God--and all it entails--plays a vital role in emancipating us from our slavery to the fear of death (Hebrews 2.14-15).

The eccentric experience of God is the experience of grace and gift which roots our identities in a foundation of joy and gratitude rather than fear, anxiety and worry.

And here's my point. I would have never made these connections if I had not experienced the charismatic worship at Freedom.

Prior to my life at Freedom I had God in a box. A rational, logical box. And when you have God in a box you lack the capacity to be surprised by God. And when you lack the capacity to be surprised by God you lack the capacity to experience grace.

And if you lack the capacity to experience grace all you have to rely on, spiritually speaking, is the neurotic junk rattling around in your own head and heart. All the vanity, pride, weakness, jealously, fear, woundedness and shame.

And that's not a pretty picture.

The charismatic worship at Freedom--in its radical openness to God and to being surprised by God--helped me identify and name something that I've come to think is the key to Christian faith and spirituality. The eccentric experience of God.

The experience of gift.

The experience of grace.

In his book Thinking in Tongues James Smith identifies five features of the "pentecostal worldview." These features aren't explicit propositional beliefs as much as they are implicit in pentecostal spirituality and worship. James is "reading" the pentecostal tradition and extracting these implicit beliefs, bringing them to the surface, conducting what we might call a sociological or anthropological exegesis.

So, surveying pentecostal worship and spirituality James suggests that the following features characterize the pentecostal worldview (what follows are quotations, emphases in the original, from page 12):

1. A position of radical openness to God, and in particular, God doing something differently or new...

2. An "enchanted" theology of creation and culture that perceives the material creation as "charged" with the presence of the Spirit, but also with other spirits (including demons and "principalities and powers"), with entailed expectation regarding both miracles and spiritual warfare.

3. A nondualistic affirmation of embodiment and materiality expressed in an emphasis on physical healing...

4. ...[R]ooted in an affective, narrative epistemology.

5. An eschatological orientation to mission and justice, both expressed in terms of empowerment, with a certain "preferential option for the marginalized."

No doubt, if you have experience with pentecostal or charismatic traditions, you might have some questions or comments about this list. Two quick points. First, I don't think James is trying to be comprehensive. And second, this list has an aspirational quality about it. These features represent what the pentecostal and charismatic worldview should and could be.

Regardless, this list does do an excellent job in capturing what I've found distinctive and valuable at Freedom Fellowship, the charismatic community I worship with.

Radical openness to God. Enchantment. Embodiment. Affective. Narrative. An eschatological orientation regarding justice. Tthe preferential option for the poor.

In the coming posts I'll be working through these features in more detail.

As regular readers know, I worship at a church, Freedom Fellowship, that reaches out to the poor and homeless.

Freedom is a church plant of the Highland Church of Christ. And while Churches of Christ have tended to be pretty unemotional and undemonstrative, due to our historically impoverished theology of the Holy Spirit, worship and life at Freedom are distinctively charismatic.

Worship at Freedom is full-bodied. Hands are raised and people sway and dance in the aisles. Once, a sort of Holy Ghost conga line broke out as worshipers formed a line and danced around the sanctuary. (I stayed in my seat and just gave people high fives as they passed me.) At Freedom we lay hands on in prayer. We anoint with oil. Praise veils are waved. We pray to cast out demons. We relish in personal testimonies of God's work amongst us. At Freedom we expect miracles.

Things happen at Freedom that are just hard to describe. Darrell, one of the elders at Freedom, and I have a joke about how when stuff happens at Freedom we just have no words to describe it to those back at Highland. We say to each other, "How could we possibly describe this to people at Highland?" Because there is no describing it. Or if you did describe it it would sound crazy or incomprehensible. You just have to be there. I never want to miss Freedom as I'm afraid I'll miss something.

At Freedom we are not Pentecostal, we don't speak in tongues, but we are very charismatic.

Needless to say, this has been a huge culture shock for me. Born and raised in the Churches of Christ the spirituality of Freedom was foreign and at the beginning I often felt uncomfortable. Theologically, I didn't know how to process what was going on. Holy Ghost conga lines left me a bit flummoxed.

And to be honest, I still struggle with my inhibitions at Freedom. I still feel self-conscious to the point where I've never raised my hands in worship. I sway. I clap. But I don't raise my hands. Not sure why. Some of it is how I've been raised. Some of it is embarrassment. Some of it is my excessive rationality. Some of it is my fear of losing a critical distance where I can "discern the spirits." Someone needs to keep their wits about them, right? If everyone is drunk on the Spirit don't we need someone to be the designated driver? And some of it, I'm sure, is my sin, my holding something back, my wanting to keep or control something and to not let it go.

And yet, I've never been more spiritually alive than when I'm at Freedom. Spiritually speaking, outside of my bible study at the prison, Freedom has been the best thing that has ever happened to me. Though I'm still inhibited and doubt-filled, I love the charismatic worship and spirituality at Freedom. Freedom has filled me with the Holy Spirit. I'd even say that Freedom has saved my faith.

And so I've been trying, over the last few years, to make theological connections between my "liberal" and existentially-oriented faith with the charismatic genius of Freedom. There is a charism--a spiritual gift, a location of grace--in the spirituality and worship at Freedom that I want to welcome into my life, faith and theology.

Well, it has already affected me and I'm trying make sense of it all.

If you're regular blog reader you've already seen the effects of this theological collision--a progressive, doubting Christian worshipping with charismatics. It came out in my "On Warfare and Weakness" series (see the sidebar) when I tried to make connections between spiritual warfare and progressive theology which generally eschews belief in literal angels and demons and finds the whole "spiritual warfare" notion to be spooky and superstitious. Who would have ever attempted such a ridiculous project? Well, someone like me. Someone who struggles believing in literal demons but who worships with people who do and who pray over others asking God to cast out demons. I'm trying to reconcile and make sense of these things in my own life. I'm not a professional theologian. I don't write about theology to publish in academic journals or go to academic theology conferences. This blog isn't an academic outlet. This blog (and the three books that flowed out of the blog) is my spiritual memoir, the theological pebbles I've collected along the way as I try to make sense of my own life and faith.

So, how do I make sense of my life with Freedom?

Well, to help me with all this I finally read James Smith's book Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy. In this book James (I think his friends call him Jamie) describes what he calls a "pentecostal worldview." James then goes on to unpack the features of this worldview, describing the logic and genius of Pentecostal and charismatic worship and practice. According to James, Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality and worship provide a way of knowing and living in the world, a way of knowing and living that functions as a critique to a lot within Christianity and in the secular world.

I've found James' analysis to be very helpful in helping me make sense of my experiences at Freedom. And while I'm more theologically "liberal" than James, his philosophical analysis of Pentecostal spirituality and worship has helped me uncover and articulate what I've found to be so profound and life-giving in my life with Freedom.

And so, in the next six posts I'd like to share from Thinking in Tongues, making connections between James' analysis and my life as a progressive, inhibited and skeptical Christian sharing life with charismatic brothers and sisters, and how these brothers and sisters--with their Holy Ghost conga lines--have become my teachers and mentors in the faith.

It is dark
now
but not for long
not for long
the waiting is almost over.
See behind you
the sun is searching for us
her fingertips reaching through
the open church door.
The vigil passes, ages.
The weary labor nears the end
to rest
as low tired candles sway finishing
their quiet hopeful work
reminding us that even in the dead
among the dead
in the dead of night
there is a flicker
a whisper
and a portent of grace.
Dear brothers and sisters
I see you now
for the first time.
For the dawn is upon us
and the Light is washing us clean.
I can see.
I can see
you dancing
newborn and alive.
And this is how I always will see you.
This is how I will always see you.
Children in the Easter light.

In my Monday night bible study out at the prison we've been working through the book of Isaiah. We got to the famous Chapter 53, the suffering servant text:

Isaiah 53.3-6
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

Today is Good Friday and we all know that the church has used this text to interpret the crucifixion of Jesus. Isaiah 53 has come to be an important text for atonement theology, especially substitution theories of atonement. "By his wounds we have been healed." And later in Verse 12: "For he bore the sins of many."

These associations--Jesus bore our sins on the cross and by his wounds we have been healed--are automatic for most Christians. But in our study out at the prison I wanted to go back and address the question about who the Suffering Servant was during the time of Isaiah. Who was Isaiah (or the particular writer or writers of Isaiah 53) speaking about in his time and place?

Who is this servant who is crushed for our iniquities?

There's been a lot of scholarly debate about who the servant might be in Isaiah 53. The theory I'm most drawn to, and the one I shared out at the prison, is that the servant is the faithful remnant in Israel.

Roughly, Isaiah is broken up into two historical sections. Chapters 1-39 come mostly before the Babylonian exile. So these chapters are mainly portents and warnings about Israel's unfaithfulness. (Though there are some bright spots like good King Hezekiah and the failure of the Assyrian invasion.)

Chapters 40-66 come after the Babylonian exile as the Jews start heading back home.

Sprinkled throughout Isaiah are oracles that before, during and after the exile there will be a faithful remnant. Though Israel has turned her back on God and gone over into idolatry there are a few, sprinkled amongst the wicked masses, who remain faithful to YHWH. God sees this faithful remnant and promises to rebuild Israel upon them. The remnant are a seed that God will plant to re-grow the people of God.

Isaiah 6.13
And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
But as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down,
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land

Isaiah 10.2-23
In that day the remnant of Israel,
the survivors of Jacob,
will no longer rely on him
who struck them down
but will truly rely on the Lord,
the Holy One of Israel.
A remnant will return, a remnant of Jacob
will return to the Mighty God.
Though your people be like the sand by the sea, Israel,
only a remnant will return.
Destruction has been decreed,
overwhelming and righteous.
The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out
the destruction decreed upon the whole land.

As you can see in both these texts, YHWH sees the remnant but the punishment of exile is still going to happen. Even upon the remnant. And that's the key. Exile falls upon the innocent as well as the wicked.

However, after the punishment/exile is over the faithful remnant "will return" and become a "holy seed" so that Israel can experience a new birth in the land.

In short, when God punishes Israel God knows that the faithful, innocent remnant is also being punished along with the wicked, idolatrous masses. The remnant is, thus, "bearing the sins" of others. The remnant, though innocent, is also "stricken by God" just like everyone else being sent into exile.

Isaiah 53.8-9
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.

And yet, if the remnant bears the exile faithfully--"He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth."--the remnant will be the eventual salvation of Israel. The wounds inflicted upon the patiently enduring remnant will be how Israel gets saved and restored. In the end, by suffering faithfully alongside the wicked, the faithfulness of the remnant will be rewarded:

Isaiah 53.11-12
After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.

How this vision connects with Jesus, then, is straightforward. Especially if you've read a lot of N.T. Wright.

As the gospels open Israel is back in her homeland, back from Babylonian exile. However, there is still this sense that the full restoration has yet to occur. There was a sense, in the face of things like Roman occupation, that the exile had not fully ended. God had not yet returned in person to Zion and to the Temple (Spoiler alert: Triumphal Entry).

God, it seemed, was still punishing Israel.

So what was needed was a truly faithful and truly innocent remnant to become the "holy seed" out of which a restored People of God would grow. But according to Isaiah 53, that faithful seed would experience the punishment and pain of exile alongside his brothers and sisters. But if this holy seed were, perhaps, fully blameless and fully sinless and fully innocent then perhaps his death would bring about the full and complete liberation of Israel. The Gordian knot of the Deuteronomic Covenant--where Israel willingly agreed to experience exile if she was unfaithful--would have been fully and finally cut. The cloud of the Deuteronomic Curses, which had hung over Israel for generations and generations and generations, would finally be lifted. And with that cloud lifted, the Kingdom and Rule of God promised to come to the nations through Israel could finally break out into the world (Spoiler Alert: the Great Commission and the Book of Acts).

So, Jesus becomes this faithful seed as the truly Innocent One who bears the Deuteronomic Curse alongside his wicked brothers and sisters so that their exile may finally come to an end.

[Drop mic and walk out.]

But a question might be raised at this point...

[Come back and pick up mic.]

Is what I'm describing the calculus of penal substitutionary atonement, with its vision of a wrathful God?

Sort of, but not quite. There is a penal vision at work here, but it's the penal framework agreed to by YHWH and Israel when they got "married"--formed a covenant--in Deuteronomy. Any legal frame goes back to that moment. Basically, this isn't really about you or I going to hell. To be sure, all this affects you and I, but the penal issues, the judgment and wrath of God, are historical and covenantal in nature.

Basically, when the bible speaks about "the forgiveness of sins" it is referring to the forgiveness of Israel's sins. 

More precisely, the "forgiveness of sins" is the end of Israel's exile in Jesus Christ. Which was needed for the Kingdom of God to expand out from Israel and into the whole world. Thus, the forgiveness of sins--the end of Israel's exile--leads to salvation reaching you and I in the gospel proclamation that the Kingdom of God has spilled out into the nations, that "Jesus is Lord of all."

In short, any "penal substitution" is covenantal and historical in nature. Consequently, rather than penal substitutionary atonement I've suggested that we speak of covenantal substitutionary atonement. 

That's the logic at work in Isaiah 53, for both the faithful remnant during the Babylonian exile and in the Christian understanding of what took place on the cross.

Just a note to alert you to the podcast I did with Ben Howard over at On Pop Theology. Many thanks to Ben for the opportunity.

In the podcast Ben and I talk about my fit within the Churches of Christ (Note: there are now two streams within the Churches of Christ, the ecumenical stream and the sectarian stream), how psychology influences my theology, why I'm not on Twitter, why I blog at blogspot.com and about some of the topics from my book The Slavery of Death.

You also learn what was my last Google search at the time of the podcast.

It was...this: "effect sizes for small N designs."

For better or worse, I am a social scientist.

My son Brenden and I both saw the movie Noah separately. So when we finally got to talk about the movie we spent a lot of time talking about the Watchers and the Nephilim. We also talked a lot about the tensions in the movie between the descendants of Seth and Cain.

A lot of conservative Christians have been offended by Noah, thinking that the movie takes too many liberties with the biblical story.

But the biblical story is really weird, and a lot of the plotlines in the movie are true to various streams of interpretation.

For example, the movie made Brenden and I revisit a post I wrote about the Nephilim and the descendants of Seth:

Genesis 6.1-4 (NIV)
When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. 

Who were the Nephilim?

Genesis 6 say that the Nephilim were the offspring of "the sons of God" and the "daughters of men." Children who go on to become "the heroes of old, men of renown." Along these lines, some think the Nephilim were giants as the only other appearance of the word Nephilim occurs in Numbers in the description the spies bring back about the people in the land of Canaan:

Numbers 13.32-33
And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

As to the etymology of the word Nephilim the consensus seems to be that it comes from the root npl (נָפַל) "to fall" suggesting that Nephilim means "the fallen" or "the fallen ones."

There are many curious things about the Nephilim in Genesis 6, but perhaps the most curious thing has to do with their origins. What's going on with all this business about "sons of God" having sex with "daughters of men"?

There have been two schools of thought about this: the fallen angel theory and the descendants of Seth theory.

I think most are familiar with the fallen angel theory. In this view the "sons of God" refer to angelic beings who lust after human women and have sex with them. The children of these unions are the Nephilim who seem to be like demigods. This view gains some support from various noncanonical sources like the book of Enoch where we also read about the Watchers.

The second theory has to do with marriage between the descendants of Seth and the descendants of Cain.

In Genesis 5 we begin to transition out of material related to the first family and into the story of Noah and the flood. To mark this transition there are some genealogies given in Genesis 5. One of the things you notice in these genealogies is that it seems that Seth is contrasted with Cain, with Seth being good and Cain being bad. The descendants of Seth are the good bloodline and the descendants of Cain are the bad bloodline.

One sign you get of this has to do with the 7th descendent in each line. The 7th descendant on Seth's side is Enoch who we are told "walked with God" and who did not die but was "taken away by God."

By contrast, the 7th descendant on Cain's side is Lamech who comes across as a general badass, a sort of super-duper Cain as I've written about before.

All fine and dandy, but why would human descendants of Seth be called "sons of God"?

The idea goes back to how Seth seems to be the "image bearer" of God as his father Adam was:

Genesis 5.1-3
This is the written account of Adam’s family line.

When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created.

When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. 

The argument here is that the "image of God" is carried through the line of Seth.

So the problem in Genesis 6 is that these "sons of God"--the descendants of Seth--"fall" when they begin to intermarry with the descendants of Cain ("the daughters of men").

In Noah we don't see this intermarrying, but in the movie we do see the worry emerge in Noah's resistance to find wives for his sons from among the daughters of Cain.

Some readers have asked for a Q&A regarding my recent book The Slavery of Death. So lets do this thing!

In The Slavery of Death I try to use psychology to describe what Hebrews 2.14-15 means when it says we have been "enslaved, all our lives, to the fear of death" and why this slavery to the fear of death is described as "the power of the devil." And in describing all this I lean upon the notion from Orthodox theology that death, rather than sin, is the primary human predicament.

In the final part of the book I then move to describe how we might become emancipated from our fear of death to create the capacity for love. For love, according to 1 John, is how we know that we have "moved from death to life." Love is the experience of resurrection here and now, the life of Jesus manifest in our own lives. 

As I describe it, our emancipation from our slavery to the fear of death is achieved, first of all, by a prior experience of death. We overcome death by dying. We take up our cross to deny ourselves and die "in Christ." I call this a martyrological identity. In the book I describe this martyrological identity, this meeting death with death, as fundamentally the renunciation of the cultural hero-system, the cultural self-esteem project. By renouncing the idolatrous ways our culture defines worth and significance we extract ourselves from the power of death and the devil as these idolatrous pursuits are, deep down, enslaved to the fear of death.

From there, after the dying involved in renouncing all the death-driven and idolatrous ways we've constructed our identities, we then receive our identities as an experience of grace. I call this, borrowing a term from David Kelsey, an eccentric identity, an identity that isn't owned as a possession but is always and continually received as a gift. This experience of gift lessens our anxious grip on life, on our very selves. In sum, the degree to which this experience of grace and gift saturates our lives is the degree to which "perfect love has cast out fear."

Abstractly, these are the processes, the pincer movements of the martyrological (death) and eccentric (resurrection) identities, that create the capacity to love others fully and sacrificially. Regarding concrete practices that pull us deeper into these identities I describe, for the eccentric identity, the practices of doxological gratitude (again borrowing from David Kelsey). And for the cultivation of the martyrological identity I talk about the small, daily acts of asceticism of the "little way" of Thérèse of Lisieux. It is the assessment of Arthur McGill that "the way of Jesus is the way of self-expenditure." That's a scary prospect, but the little way helps ease us into a life lived for others.

Okay, that's a snapshot of the book. Parts 1 and 2 articulate our fundamental human predicament, our slavery to the fear of death. And Part 3 articulates an answer to that predicament, how perfect love can come to cast out fear so that we might move from death to life.

Time for Q&A. If you've read the book and have any questions you'd like to ask me please post them in the comments. If you've not read the book something in my summary above might have sparked a question. Feel free to leave your questions as well.

I'll let these questions gather over the week and then respond in a post in a week or so. (I doubt I'll be inundated with questions, but if there are a lot I might have to be selective in responding.)