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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels:

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

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

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

Lent is the season of the green martyrdom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And because of that, the Logos bleeds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

And yet in them we trust. 

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

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

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

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

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

Help, again, comes from the Torah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the last post, I described some of the issues at stake in the old debate about the doctrine of "once saved, always saved."

The specific tension I want to highlight is the very clear and pressing Biblical concern about endurance and perseverance in light of the possibility of falling away from the faith. Faith is, at root, a commitment to fidelity—the long obedience. And the Bible is very concerned that some people will not persist. As Jesus says in Matthew 10, "the one who endures to the end will be saved."

At the same time, the Bible calls us to confidence in our salvation. Grace is rock solid. As Paul says, "there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Salvation is not a precarious or tenuous thing.

What tends to happen in the old debate is that Scriptural passages on both sides are marshaled and pitted against each other. Hermeneutics becomes a zero-sum game, where some passages of Scripture must win over others. For one part of the Bible to win, another part has to lose.

I think the better way forward is simply to admit that there is a real tension here. Salvation is solid and secure—there is no anxiety in grace. And yet, it is also possible to fall from grace. Endurance and faithfulness are real challenges. Given this, the issue is not picking and choosing passages or rehashing the old debate in a zero-sum hermeneutical contest, but embracing a Biblical vision that holds these tensions together.

Let me sketch what I think such a vision would look like.

The first thing to do is go back to Leviticus. What is very clear in the book of Leviticus is that moral perfection is never expected. Sin is the norm. Failure is anticipated. If an ancient Israelite sinned, there was no existential panic that God would zap them on the spot, nor were they fearful of being excommunicated from the community. The reason there was no panic was that God, in His mercy, provided means of repair and atonement. A series of purification and guilt offerings were available to address sin and impurity. And annually, the Day of Atonement ritual cleansed the community. A moral spring cleaning, so to speak.

The point is that sin is expected, and means are provided to keep Israel in constant communion with the holiness of God. Here’s the key insight: the sacrificial system did not move someone from "lost" to "saved." The sacrificial system presupposed a saved relation—communion with God—and worked to maintain that ongoing relation.

This insight was lost in my tradition, where we felt that any sin would change our status from saved to lost. This created a back-and-forth dynamic, where the line demarcating God's grace versus wrath was crossed multiple times a day. But once we appreciate the Levitical backdrop, the following things become readily apparent:

1. Perfection is never assumed. Sin is expected.
2. In anticipation of sin, provision is graciously provided.
3. This gracious provision doesn't restore but maintains ongoing intimacy with God.

In short, because of grace sin does not create separation.

The issue in the book of Hebrews, regarding the provision for sin, concerns the weakness of the blood of bulls and goats in cleansing efficacy within the Levitical system versus the "once for all" cleansing provided by the blood of Christ. Again, the issue is not penal or forensic substitution, but the provision of (1) an on-going cleansing that (2) addresses the inevitability of sin in order to (3) maintain intimacy and communion with God. In the past, God provided this provision through the Levitical sacrifices, which had to be repeated over and over. But now this provision has been fulfilled in Christ’s sacrifice, done once for all, providing permanent and ongoing cleansing. When we sin, we do not have to beat a hasty retreat from God's presence in the Holy of Holies because the blood of Christ has wiped that space clean—and continually does so. Thus the exhortation of Hebrews 10: “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”

This is precisely why there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 1 John 1 describes it this way:

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Notice the Levitical framework. Sin is expected. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. The issue, just like in the Levitical system, is to recognize and confess our sin. When we confess, the blood of Jesus cleanses us, and we maintain fellowship with God. When we sin, we do not need to sacrifice a bull or goat, nor wait for the annual Day of Atonement. Critical here is the verb tense of "cleanses." The Greek verb is present tense. This cleansing is not in the past tense, as in a forensic situation. The cleansing is present and ongoing—a continuous washing, a standing and perpetual purification. The imagination here is that as sin emerges, it is immediately wiped away, over and over. All that is required of us is a humble and confessional posture.

So, can you ever fall from this grace? I'll turn to that issue in the next post.

In debates between Calvinists and Arminians there is an argument about a doctrine called the perseverance of the saints. This is colloquially called “once saved, always saved.”

At issue is whether a person who has been justified and saved by grace can, at some later point, “fall from grace” through willful sin and rebellion.

Biblically speaking, the case seems clear. Of course people can fall from grace. Concern over falling away and turning back, failing to endure and persevere, sits behind the whole narrative of Scripture, Old Testament and New. From Israel wanting to return to Egypt after the Exodus, to the exhortation in Revelation to return to your first love or have your lampstand removed from the presence of the Lord, the theme is pervasive. The book of Hebrews makes it all quite plain:

For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. (Hebrews 6:4–6)

Set aside, for a moment, the “impossibility” of restoration described here. (I am with Jesus on this one. With humans it is impossible, but with God all things are possible.) The situation clearly presumes a person falling from grace. And it is precisely this possibility that drives the pastoral urgency of Hebrews: “Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees.” I could pile on many other examples here.

But Calvinists have their own pastoral concerns. Specifically, if faith can be “lost,” then the security of grace has become fragile and provisional. What should be rest and peace has now become anxious and effortful. We must strain in order to “keep” our salvation. And beyond the anxiety and effort, there is the Calvinist concern about centering human work and will. Grace threatens to collapse into works.

While I am not a Calvinist, I do sympathize with this concern. Growing up in an Arminian tradition, which came pretty close to being outright Pelagian, I experienced firsthand the fragility the Calvinists worry about. So I understand their pastoral anxiety. Growing up in my tradition, you could lose your salvation multiple times a day. You were saved until you sinned. That put you back over the line with the lost. You had to quickly confess and repent to get yourself back over the saved line. And hovering over all this anxious shuttling back and forth--saved, lost, saved, lost, saved, lost--was the constant worry that some calamity would befall you while you tarried on the lost side of the line. Lord help you if a bus ran you over while you were in a state of unconfessed sin.

So yes, the Calvinists have a point here.

Thankfully, my tradition has done a lot of work over the last two generations. We are much more grace focused now. So much so that some of the older generations are starting to worry that we have lost our pastoral concern over sin and holiness. Grace, it is feared, has become divine affirmation. God loves you no matter what you do. Add to this the rise of cosmic and creational Christologies--where everyone already is in Christ--and more hopeful eschatologies--where no one will be lost--and there is a sense that the New Testament urgency about God’s apocalyptic judgment has been wholly lost. Practically speaking, what this amounts to is that “grace” becomes a baptized vision of “I’m okay, and you’re okay.” This is the Christian sacralization of liberal humanism that has devastated the mainline traditions.

But while Calvinists love to bang on about this, they have problems of their own. In some Reformed circles the doctrine of grace is so robust that one can get away with any sort of wickedness. I recall the evangelical worry over whether Trump really had a “salvation experience.” It turned out, in the eyes of those who inquired, in a classic case of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, that he had. And so Trump was a “Christian” no matter what he had done or continued to do.

Here is my point. There are many ways to go soft on sin. Progressive Christians have their ways. And evangelical Christians have theirs.

So those are some of the fault lines in this tired old debate. In the next post I'd like to articulate a balanced vision. 

Okay, so you have probably been wondering how the title of this series, “The Medicine of Immortality,” connects to the content of the first three posts. In this final post of the series, I will make that plain.

But to recap:

1. Due to the metaphysical impoverishment of the Christian imagination in modernity, especially in Protestant spaces, churches have experienced what I have called “sacramental drift.” That is to say, the sacraments no longer point to ontological realities. Rather, they have become moralized “sacraments of ourselves.”

2. While moralization and politicization were intended to make not only the sacraments but the whole of Christian life more relevant, this tendency has exacerbated and facilitated trends toward disenchantment. Moralization and politicization lead to functional atheism as churches talk themselves out of existence.

3. We can fortify our ontological imagination regarding the sacraments and the Christian life through liturgical practices. As with the Catholic Eucharistic Revival, we can bring ontological realities back into view, perhaps for the very first time in some memorialist traditions.

All that brings me to a suggestion about how we might bring ontological realities into view when speaking about the Lord’s Supper.

Again, one of the big issues here concerns the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. In this regard, low-church Protestants can adopt liturgies that bring the real presence into view. Simply saying aloud, together, “The Body of Christ” and “The Blood of Christ” as we handle the elements helps here. Repeatedly saying that “Christ meets us here at his Table” brings his presence into view. Speaking in a particular way about the Table can do important work in pushing back against the dry, disenchanted imagination many modern Christians bring to church. And again, for me this has less to do with theologies of consecration and priestcraft than with recognizing that the gathered Body becomes a particular and specific ontological thin space, a site where Christ has promised to meet his people and act for their good.

Still, I have noticed that this language about the real presence, pneumatically understood, can feel ghostly, insubstantial, and overly spiritualized. This is especially so when contrasted with something like the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, where attention is focused on the physical elements being ingested. How might Protestants bring this ontology of divine action into view?

Here is my suggestion. Start calling the Eucharist medicine.

To be sure, this will sound strange in many low church Protestant spaces. But strange is the point.

Ignatius of Antioch, one of the very earliest church fathers, traditionally dated as martyred during the reign of Trajan (98–117 AD), described the Eucharist in a letter to the Ephesians as “the medicine of immortality” and “the antidote that we should not die but live forever in Jesus Christ.” Ignatius is echoing Jesus' words in John 6: "The one who eats this bread will live forever."

I find several things compelling about describing the Eucharist as medicine for sin, for mortality, and for our souls generally. Most importantly, it is a material rather than a purely spiritual or relational description. When we speak of Christ’s “presence,” most people imagine something invisible and spiritual. Medicine, by contrast, is neither spooky nor spectral. Medicine is a material substance that you ingest for healing and well-being. Describing the Eucharist in this way draws attention to the elements themselves, to what we eat and drink at the Table.

Calling the Eucharist medicine also highlights locality and occasion. You can experience Christ’s presence anytime and anywhere. But if you want Christ’s medicine, you have to go to church. There is nowhere else it is available. 

Finally, describing the Eucharist as medicine infuses the material world with spiritual power and potency. Something more than an affectional encounter with Jesus is taking place. There is an infusion of spiritual power as we partake of the elements. A real potency is at work in the sacrament, effective in liberating us from the powers of sin and death.

Now, of course, results will vary. Still, I strongly suspect that if a church were to regularly and liturgically describe the Eucharist as medicine--“The Body of Christ. The Blood of Christ. The medicine of immortality.”--people’s perceptions of the Supper would be shaped and formed. Most importantly for my purposes, they would be formed toward a more robust ontological understanding of the sacrament.

More than this, the spiritual uniqueness of the Eucharist would come into view. If you need medicine, there is only one place to get it. In a spiritual-but-not-religious world, more talk of “presence” is not local or material enough. Medicine is. And if you want this medicine, you have to go where it is dispensed. You have to be physically present.

In this way, the Eucharist becomes not only ontologically freighted but indispensable, a matter of life and death. And I don’t think we need a theology of consecration to accomplish this. All we need to recognize is that the Body gathered around Christ’s Table is a site of divine action and a means of grace. There is a power here that can be found nowhere else, and that power is medicinal.

You are dying, and medicine exists that can save you.

Come to the Table.

"The Lord is good to everyone"

Psalm 145 is one of my favorite psalms. It contains jewels like the following:

"The Lord is faithful in all his words and gracious in all his actions."

"The Lord helps all who fall; he raises up all who are oppressed."

"You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing."

"The Lord is near all who call out to him."

"The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and great in faithful love."

And, of course, the line I cited above:

"The Lord is good to everyone; his compassion rests on all he has made."

The line that sticks out to me is "The Lord is good to everyone; his compassion rests on all he has made." A universal note of beneficence is sounded here. And yet, even here in Psalm 145 the compassion and fidelity of God are described as delimited and contingent. For example, "The Lord is near all who call out to him, all who call out to him with integrity." The string attached is calling out "with integrity." And: "He fulfills the desires of those who fear him." The blessing is reserved for "those who fear" the Lord. The asymmetry and contingency are most clearly seen in verse 20: "The Lord guards all those who love him, but he destroys all the wicked."

So, how do we balance this? The universal and unconditional versus the contingent and conditional? This is a bit too oversimplified, but I think it's safe to say that progressive and liberal Christians lean into universality and unconditionality, whereas conservative Christians lean into the contingent and conditional. But both views, let me suggest, tend toward distortion. A balance must be struck between "The Lord is good to everyone; his compassion rests on all he has made" and "The Lord guards all those who love him, but he destroys all the wicked." And, of course, people work out this balance in different sorts of ways. Regular readers will know how I tend to negotiate the tensions here.

Regardless, I think all theologies, in the end, have a tilt, one way or the other. In my upcoming The Book of Love I look to Jesus' citing of Hosea 6:6 in his debates with the Pharisees as diagnostic of Jesus' tilt. According to Jesus, when push comes to shove we are to choose "mercy over sacrifice." We are to privilege "The Lord is good to everyone; his compassion rests on all he has made" over "The Lord guards all those who love him, but he destroys all the wicked." 

This is not to suggest that God's wrath doesn't burn against human wickedness or deny eschatological consequences. Just that our discernments about the character of God define, constrain, and determine all downstream commitments. 

As I suggest in the The Book of Love, this question—What is God like?— sits behind all our questions, and we discern it in various guises over and over and over again.

For my part, I think the Lord will prove good to everyone.

Let me again clarify what I'm after in this series. 

I'm not interested in convening a Sacramental Inquisition to adjudicate which sacramental practices are legitimate or illegitimate. My concerns about sacramental beliefs and practices concern spiritual formation and evangelism within modernity. As I've shared, I think Christ is really present in memorialist practices of the Lord's Supper. Jesus said he was really present, and he is. The Body gathered at the Table participates in ontological realities, there in a way found nowhere else. That said, memorialist practices of the Lord's Supper are vulnerable to moralization and to becoming functionally atheistic, a sacrament of ourselves. Consequently, we need to become more intentional in bringing ontological realities into view in regard to our sacramental practice.

Now, some readers will jump in here to say, "See, this is the problem, this appeal to intentionality. In traditions with robust sacramental practices and theology we don't have to appeal to intention and choice. The real presence of Christ, that ontological reality, is simply a given. Building a sacramental theology upon mere intention is erecting a house of cards, building upon a foundation of sand."

To respond. 

First, I'm with you. A cultural givenness and taken-for-grantedness has enormous advantages over appeals to intention. That said, these sacramental cultures (e.g., Catholicism, Orthodoxy) do not escape the need for intentionality. Consider the three-year Eucharistic Revival in the American Catholic Church (2022–2024), prompted by surveys showing that the majority of Catholics no longer believed in the real presence. Sacramental drift had occurred, a disenchantment, in a tradition with a robust sacramental liturgy and theology. The response was a call for intentionality, a Eucharistic Revival, to bring ontological realities back into view. 

My point here, one I made in a recent series, is that intentionality is inescapable, even in richly liturgical and sacramental traditions. This is a point so obvious it shouldn't need repeating. Just ask a parish priest what their number one problem is when it comes to their parishioners. It's the exact same issue Protestants face: intentionality. Showing up for confession. Coming to Mass. Taking the moral imperatives of the faith seriously. Cultivating a rich devotional life. I don't care what church you go to, the Christian life is entropic. Without constant intentional engagement we drift away, in both belief (like losing touch with the real presence) and practice.

But more importantly, the appeal to intentionality is to create habit, givenness, and culture. Even the lowest of the low-church Protestant denominations have a liturgy and a culture. This has been a joke in my tradition, the Churches of Christ, for a few generations now: how, as very low-church Protestants, we didn't believe in "liturgy." But in point of fact we did have a liturgy, exact and traditional ways of conducting our worship services. We didn't have rote prayers, but we had rote stock phrases: "Guide, guard, and direct us" in our prayers, and "separate and apart from the Lord's Supper" to ritually sever the passing of the collection plates from Communion. And the vast majority of our celebrations of the Lord's Supper began with a reading, from the NASB, of 1 Corinthians 11: "For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread..."

The point here is that, while we begin with intentionality, the goal is to create culture, givenness, and taken-for-grantedness.

And if this is so, then an intentional approach toward our liturgies is how we bring ontological realities into view. Or back into view, like with the Catholic Eucharistic Revival. In the face of sacramental drift and functional atheism, liturgy is the lever we can pull. In our liturgies we can pivot away from moralization and toward ontology. We can point toward God and not ourselves. We can bring the spooky and the supernatural into view. We can keep the sacraments strange and weird.

In many ways, many Protestant churches have unwittingly participated in their own disenchantment. I call this the "mystical to moral shift" in Hunting Magic Eels. But one could also call it the "ontological to moral shift." In progressive Christians spaces it might be better called the "ontological to political" or "social justice" shift.

Here's what I mean when I say churches have unwittingly participated in their own disenchantment. Over the last two generations, pastors and preachers have sensed the creeping disenchantment among their parishioners and congregants. They have witnessed fewer and fewer people in the pews. They faced the New Atheist storm. The rise of "deconstruction." The pivot away from dogmatic religious beliefs toward being spiritual-but-not-religious.

Sensing this thinning out of ontological beliefs, many Protestant churches pivoted toward the moral. The gospel could be made relevant by connecting it to things like social justice. Something similar happened in the humanities and social sciences in the academy. What could make a literature class relevant? Connect it to radical politics. Suddenly, pouring over dusty old books was imbued with revolutionary importance. People often wonder how the humanities became so political, and I think this is the reason, the desire for relevance. The humanities had a crisis of confidence in itself, literature as literature as an intrinsic human good, and lacking any obvious vocational application, it made itself relevant by becoming a political movement.

A similar thing has happened in many churches. Having lost confidence in God as an ontological reality, churches have tried to make themselves relevant by becoming a political movement or a local non-profit.

Relevant to the topic of this series is how you can see this drift toward moralization affect how we talk about the sacraments in Protestant spaces.

In my church, for example, the Lord’s Supper is often narrated as a sacrament of our love for each other. The Eucharist is described as a family meal where "all are welcome" and where "everyone has a seat at the table." Jesus is mentioned, but what is highlighted about Jesus is how his love provides a model and exemplar for our love.

This is an increasingly common move in Christian spaces pivoting away from penal substitutionary atonement. The sacrificial imagery of the Eucharist is traded in for a moral influence view of the atonement. What saves us isn't Jesus' death upon the cross for our sins. What saves us is our love for each other and the world.  

Now, I have no problem talking about love during the Lord's Supper. But when the Supper is evacuated of ontological content, to become a sacrament of love, we’ve moralized the Eucharist. I’ve described this sort of thing as “functional atheism” because the Supper becomes a sacrament of ourselves, in this instance a symbol of our love for each other.

And it’s precisely here where we’ve unwittingly disenchanted ourselves. In seeking to make the sacraments relevant we point toward ourselves. You can see the appeal here, for what can be more relevant than ourselves? But this incessant moralizing and politicizing becomes, over time, functionally atheistic. Christian symbols, stories, and sacraments no longer point toward God. Christianity becomes, rather, a symbolic and convoluted way of talking to ourselves about ourselves.

I have described here, over the last few years, what I've come to call "sacramental drift." 

By "sacramental drift" I mean how the narrative and symbolic aspects of baptism and the Eucharist have become decoupled from their ontological realities. We can cite, once again, Flannery O'Connor's famous assessment about the Eucharist, how, if it's "just a symbol," then to hell with it.

That said, I don't think celebrations of the Eucharist within memorialist traditions like my own, where we explicitly believe the elements of the Supper are symbolic, are devoid of spiritual power, potency, or profundity. As I've also shared, Jesus promised us that he is "really present" when two or three gather in his name. Christ's "real presence" in the Supper is experienced pneumatically rather than through a ritual of consecration upon an altar carried out by priests.

Regardless, I do have an interest in (re)connecting symbolic Christian practice to ontological realities. Less to move a practice from failed and illegitimate to successful and legitimate than as a part of my larger project of "Keeping Christianity Weird." For my part, I believe Christ is really present in a memorialist practice of the Lord's Supper, for the simple reason that I believe Jesus tells the truth. But from a spiritual formation perspective, I have a concern about the metaphysical and ontological impoverishment of the Protestant mind in modernity. Five hundred years ago, with the Reformers, this wasn't a problem. Those dudes were enchanted. But five centuries downstream of the Reformation, the Protestant mind has become metaphysically deracinated, uprooted from an enchanted ontological worldview. Our minds default to the Newtonian, the causal, the material, the scientific, the reductionistic, the deterministic, and the mechanical. This is my concern about exclusively symbolic practices of Christianity. Sacraments are visible, material signs that point to and participate in invisible, ontological realities. But if your default assumption is that said realities "don't exist" because we "can't see" them or can't "scientifically observe" them, well, the symbolic practice becomes disenchanted via sacramental drift.

So my interest here isn't to play Eucharist Police or Sacramental Cop. I'm not the ICE of the Real Presence, busting into denominational spaces to arrest and detain your sacramental theology and practices. My interests here are about resisting the materialistic metaphysics of modernity. And one way we can do that is by reinvigorating a more robust ontological imagination when it comes to the sacraments.

An invisible reality needs to be made visible.

Whenever I've shared a talk or lecture about the Devil, as the author of Reviving Old Scratch, the most common thing disenchanted and progressive audiences get hung up on isn't really Satan. They can get their heads around evil, however conceived. What they trip over, as I described in Part 2 of this series, is the phrase "spiritual warfare."

Why is this?

There are a few reasons.

Some of it is personal history. Among disenchanted and progressive Christian audiences many are ex-evangelicals, and ex-Pentecostals in particular. And among these persons the language of "spiritual warfare" is associated with a lot of bad and hurtful experiences. Consequently, trying to rehabilitate or reconstruct the language of "spiritual warfare" is like revisiting an old wound. And beyond being a haunting memory, there is a legitimate concern about perpetrating harm. Isn't the language of spiritual warfare, along with all this "devil talk," dangerous and prone to abuse?

A related worry here is how many associate the language of spiritual warfare with Frank Peretti's novel This Present Darkness, published in 1986, which has sold over two million copies. The plot of the book concerns a small town that is being taken over by demonic powers. Here's a bit of the plot summary—Spoiler alert!—from Wikipedia:

As the investigation continues, Marshall and Bernice begin to realize that they are onto something much bigger than they thought. They slowly uncover a plot to take over the town by buying the college, which is being carried out by the Universal Consciousness Society, a powerful New Age group and "worldwide front organization for Satan." The college's psychology professor, Juleen Langstrat, is part of the Society. She teaches meditation, which brings practitioners in contact with spirit guides (demons), as well as witchcraft and New Age beliefs. Members of the community are thus influenced by Satan, including Brummel and the pastor of the liberal United Christian Church. 

You can see the culture war tropes. A liberal college and a psychology professor. New Age beliefs and witchcraft. Meditation as communion with demons. A liberal mainline church. Peretti fuses the culture war with a florid vision of spiritual warfare where angels walk alongside the evangelical protagonists and demons sit on the shoulders of the secularists and liberals.

Such associations with the phrase "spiritual warfare" make it a damaged brand in progressive Christian spaces. If by "spiritual warfare" you mean something like Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness, well, we'll take a hard pass.

Beyond this connection between "spiritual warfare" and evangelicalism, there are many progressive Christians who just get hung up on the metaphor of "warfare." To describe the loving way of Jesus as "warfare" is theologically problematic. And, again, there is a concern that such a metaphor is prone to abuse. So, while many audiences are happy to talk about Satan, they are less enthused about using the phrase "spiritual warfare" to describe this struggle.

I sympathize. There are many metaphors we might use to describe our relation to evil. If you don't want to describe that relation as "fighting," "doing battle," or "going to war," softer metaphors like "resist" might be better. I think the metaphors of gardening, repairing, and healing can do good work. For example, there are forces that stand in a satanic—adversarial—relation to your garden. Poor soil. Lack of water. Weeds. Pests. Etc. If you do nothing, the garden will suffer. So, you have to act. You have to attend, invest, care, work, and sweat. This garden can be your soul, your home, your relationships, your workplace, your neighborhood, your nation, and the world writ large. Call all your work to bring flourishing your version and vision of what others call "spiritual warfare."

I don't mind anyone doing good story work here. I love deploying a diversity of metaphors for the spiritual life. All I really care about is that the metaphors call you to watchfulness and action.

That said, I don't have a problem with the metaphor of "warfare." It's richly Biblical. As I pointed out in Part 2 of this series, the key is keeping the Christological framework firmly in view. Jesus wins his military victory by dying on the cross. And the enemies Jesus defeats are spiritual powers. Sin, death, and the Devil. Here's how Paul describes it in Colossians 2:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

The vision here is of a Roman military victory, how the Caesars would parade the spoils of war and their defeated enemies through the city. Jesus is portrayed as leading that victory parade. But notice Christ's weapon. Not guns, cannons, or bombs. The weapon is the cross. And notice who the defeated enemies are: Death, sin, and the spiritual powers holding us captive.

The most famous military metaphor is Paul's description of the armor of God in Ephesians. Recall the "weapons" in that list: Truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God.

We could also work through Revelation and how it describes the "War of the Lamb."

All that to say, whenever I run into skepticism of "spiritual warfare" as a metaphor, my knee-jerk reaction tends to be:

"People, it's a metaphor."

"who trains my hands for battle"

I picked, here, the most triggering line from Psalm 144. Psalm 144 is a royal psalm, and it's opening lines call upon the Lord to be an aid in battle:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock
who trains my hands for battle
and my fingers for warfare.
He is my faithful love and my fortress,
my stronghold and my deliverer.
He is my shield, and I take refuge in him;
he subdues my people under me.

Narratively, we understand how these petitions functioned in the life of David as he fought with the peoples around him. But once we step outside of that story, how do we apply such texts to our time and place? Especially as war rages again in the Middle East. We can see how texts like Psalm 144 can be easily coopted as prayers for our war-making efforts. 

So let me say this: Reading the Bible is hard.

This is one of the points I make at the start of The Book of Love. I recently shared this quote from the book on Substack Notes:

In the book, I go on to make the following observation, which I think has great applicability when it comes to reading texts like Psalm 144:

Consider what you have to go through to obtain a driver’s license. To become certified as a safe operator of a motor vehicle, you must take a written exam, spend many supervised hours behind the wheel, and pass a driving test where you are asked to make turns, change lanes, and parallel park. And parallel parking is hard! Driving takes practice and skill. Getting a driver’s license is a laborious and stressful process. But it’s important because, when you get behind the wheel of a car, you’re putting all of us at risk. Driving is high stakes, a matter of life and death. Your life and mine. Given those risks, we demand that everyone undergo rigorous safety training.

Reading the Bible is also high stakes. You can harm people with a car, and you can harm people with the word of God. To read the Bible well, we need safety training. Like driving, reading the Bible takes practice and skill. We don’t hand out licenses to untrained drivers, but we regularly give Bibles to untrained Christians, unskilled in the virtues of kindness, gentleness, self-control, wisdom, and love. The outcome is predicable. We crash into people in the name of God, doing massive amounts of damage. The Bible is a book of love, but it takes some training to read it properly.