"Exalt him who rides on the clouds"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are The Lord of Love.

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

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

You are Lord of Lords,
and King of Kings,

O Jesus Christ,
our King of Everything.

Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"let all the peoples praise you"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have tested us"

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

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

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

So, what about grit in the spiritual life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brown goes on to share this assessment from Lynne Twist: 

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

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

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

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

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

We'll turn to that analysis next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychologically speaking, how does this work?

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

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

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

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

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

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