When René Girard's ideas were all the rage during the Golden Age of blogging, the tone was triumphalistic. Here was a way of reading the atonement that solved all of our problems! Here was a vision of salvation that would usher us into an age of peace! 

This triumphalism, though, was misplaced. Recall, most of the people touting Girard's ideas online were evangelicals deconstructing penal substitutionary atonement. Their excitement and enthusiasm was due to being saved from a bad theory of atonement. Stated plainly, René Girard didn't save us from violence but he did save us from penal substitutionary atonement. And given how penal substitutionary atonement was experienced as such an oppressive influence, stepping out of its dark shadow was exhilarating and liberating. We'd been set free! But being set free from bad theology is not the same as being set free from human sin and depravity. Good ideas alone cannot dispel the darkness within the human heart. Better theories of the atonement will not save us.

Plus, there was a nagging problem with Girard's ideas. Specifically, if the gospels unmasked the scapegoating mechanism, liberating us from the myth of sacred violence at the heart of civilization, then why has so little changed since then? Violence has continued. Scapegoating rolls on. 

Of course, this doesn't mean that Girard's reading of the gospels is wrong. Or that, if we were converted by the gospels, it wouldn't have consequential impacts upon the world. It's just that, as I've described in these posts, the scapegoating mechanism keeps getting masked. Again, the gospels stigmatized scapegoating as scapegoating. No society self-consciously scapegoats people they know to be innocent. Rather, we attack people we deem to be threats. Our violence is, in our eyes, a justified response to danger. So while the gospels might have unmasked the dynamics at work in all this--how the innocent scapegoat is viewed as guilty--there remains the issue of evangelism and conversion. At every time and in every place we must, here and now, unmask the satanic dynamic at work, how our present attributions of "danger" and "guilt" have become instruments of evil. But such a transvaluation of values is so huge, a complete flipping of good to evil and evil to good, that it is impossible to achieve on a widespread basis. In short, while Girard's is a truthful description of what's going on with us, it provides few tools to create a more peaceful world. Good diagnosis, but little by way of prescription. 

In fact, the gospels might have made the world worse. Girard himself admitted this. What the gospels unmasked was the sacred legitimacy of sacrifice in archaic religions. The gospels demythologized the practices of ancient sacrifice. And in doing so, the gospels robbed mimetic rivalry of its cathartic release valve going forward. And without that cathartic release, violence would escalate. As Girard has written, "Christ’s Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. And yet, the Passion freed violence at the same time that it freed holiness." Archaic violence had been bound in "fetters" due to the sacrificial systems, constrained and limited, but this violence was "unshackled by the Passion--with the result of liberating planet-wide violence." Girard unpacks this: 

By accepting to be crucified, Christ brought to light what had been “hidden since the foundation of the world”—the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the Cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.

Freed of sacrificial constraints, the human mind invented science, technology, and all the best and worst of culture. Our civilization is the most creative and powerful ever known, but also the most fragile and threatened because it no longer has the safety rails of archaic religion. Without sacrifice in the broad sense, it could destroy itself if it does not take care, which clearly it is not doing.

Girard goes further and makes the provocative claim that "Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure." This is the vision that unfolds in Revelation. The gospels do not save the world. The world is doomed. 

What the gospels do provide is apocalypse. Revelation. Unmaking. Exposure. History has been laid bare. And in this unveiling, a pathway toward salvation is opened. As Peter declared in the very first gospel message in Acts 2, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” And as Revelation pleads in regards to Babylon:

“‘Come out of her, my people,’
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her crimes."

And Babylon is then destroyed. John 3 puts it this way:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.

Or, as Jesus said: "For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

As Tolkien observed, history is a long defeat. As depicted in Revelation, we will not be saved from within history. Help must come from the outside. Salvation must be a eucatastrophe. 

As Girard admitted, the scapegoating mechanism might have been unmasked in Christ's Passion, the light coming into the world, but that exposure has not turned the tide of violence within history. People love the darkness. What the gospels have given us, however, is moral clarity. The cross has gifted us illumination. The light shines. But the path is narrow. And the time is short. 

Psalm 129 is noteworthy for a very striking and vivid image of oppression. The image comes at the end of the opening lament:

“Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth” —
let Israel now say —
“Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth,
yet they have not prevailed against me.
The plowers plowed upon my back;
they made long their furrows.”

The embodied nature of the agricultural metaphor—plowers digging out long furrows upon a person's back—makes me wince. Most scholarship views the image as describing forced labor. Verse 4 describes God cutting “the cords of the wicked,” an image of being freed from the yoke. But other scholars don't see the image as being that of yoked oxen but rather of a violated, torn-up field. If the speaker of the psalm is corporate Israel, then the metaphor speaks to violence done upon the land by oppressive invaders and overlords. The back of Israel has been torn up like a plowed field. Still other scholars see the metaphor as a reference to violence inflicted upon the body, the furrows are images of physical beatings and scourging. Some see references to sexual violence in the image of “plowing” (see, for example, Judges 14.18).

All told, then, the image is one of the most embodied metaphors describing the experience of oppression. Images of forced labor, military conquest, scourging, and sexual violence are all invoked.

Consequently, given the violence imagined, it's not surprising that Psalm 129 turns to imprecation:

May all who hate Zion
be put to shame and turned backward!
Let them be like the grass on the housetops,
which withers before it grows up,
with which the reaper does not fill his hand
nor the binder of sheaves his arms,
nor do those who pass by say,
“The blessing of the Lord be upon you!
We bless you in the name of the Lord!”

I've made this comment before in this series, but it bears repeating. Many liberal and progressive readers of Scripture get anxious about the imprecatory Psalms. But I find this timidity hypocritical. Progressives love to see themselves as sticking up for victims. And yet, when these victims speak in Scripture, victims of physical beatings and sexual assault, the progressives rush to silence them. Psalm 129 is an excellent example of this and makes the point even clearer. Progressives routinely cite research on how trauma affects and changes the body. The body keeps the score, right? (I’m not interested here about the contested science surrounding that claim, just making an observation about trauma discourse.) Here in Psalm 129 we find a metaphor pointing toward the embodied memory of the victims, the damage and violation etched onto the body itself. And in response to that you want to silence the voices of those bodies? I thought we were supposed to listen to the traumatized body. And yet, that's precisely what progressive readers of Scripture do when they approach the imprecatory psalms. They silence the bodies of traumatized victims.

Soon after the publication of Unclean I was asked to present a paper, for the very first time, at a theological conference. The conference was devoted to the work of René Girard and I was asked to share how I integrated Girard's work into my research with disgust psychology. 

My paper shared the analysis from the last post, how attributions of disgust, marking an individual or group as "unclean," selects the scapegoat and masks the scapegoating mechanism. 

During the Q&A after the presentation I got into my first debate and disagreement with Girardian thinkers. 

The issue went to a footnote in Unclean where I named anxiety as a cause of social scapegoating, an anxiety rooted in scarcity. This goes against Girardian orthodoxy which places mimetic desire at the heart of the scapegoating mechanism. What I discovered in that exchange was how central mimetic desire was to many of Girard's followers. For many Girardians, mimetic desire is the anthropological key that unlocks the treasure trove of sociological and theological insights. My interest in Girard was less anthropological. My feeling is that scapegoating has lots of sources and causes, not just one. In fact, I believe that scapegoating is caused more due to fear than mimetic rivalry. Scarcity, I felt, was the main driver of scapegoating.

For example, as I pointed out at the conference, there is an assumption of scarcity behind Girard's theory of mimetic desire and rivalry. Girard's model is often diagramed as a triangle between a subject, a model, and an object. I observe a model desiring an object. And through mimesis, I imitate that desire. Consequently, my desire brings me into rivalrous competition with the model over the desired object. Two of us are now wanting the same thing.

Notice, I shared at the conference, how there is only one object of desire for two individuals. That's an assumption of scarcity. Two are fighting over an object only one can possess. By contrast, what if there were many objects being desired by the model? What if we assume abundance instead? In that situation, my mimetic desire wouldn't bring me into competition or rivalry as there would be plenty to go around. My point was that desire only brings about competition when the object being desired is scarce, where there will be winners and losers, haves and have nots. 

An assumption of scarcity also sits behind rivalries due to superior status, like we see in racism and nationalism. It's a game of King of the Mountain. Only one party can be "the best," sitting atop the hierarchy of value. Only one nation can be "the greatest nation in the world." Same with rankings of racial superiority and supremacy. If everyone, by contrast, could be the greatest or best we wouldn't be fighting over that top spot. But since only one among the many rivals can be "the best" we fight over that scarce, only-one-can-have-it, designation. By definition, there can only be one GOAT. 

I think these are good arguments, but you can rest assured that the Girardians had their rebuttals at the conference. And they were good ones. Look at children, they said, playing with toys. There can be plenty of toys around, but one child will want the toy another child is playing with just because that child is desiring it, having fun with it, even when there are plenty of identical toys at hand. Plus, what about mirror neurons! And so on, and so forth.

But here's my point. We can both be right! Like I said, I think scapegoating happens for lots of reasons, and not just mimetic desire. And I'm convinced that scarcity is one of the major reasons, or paranoia about a potential future scarcity, real or imagined. Why, for example, did the Nazis scapegoat the Jews? Perhaps it was due to mimetic desire. But I think one of the major reasons was the economic hardships the Germans suffered due to the Treaty of Versailles. That experience of scarcity and loss, economic and in terms of national shame, caused the Germans to look around for someone to blame. Hitler pointed the finger at the Jews. And continued, during his rise to power, to point the finger at the Jews as a persistent and ongoing threat and danger. Fear, again, plain and simple.

Think also about how illegal immigrants get scapegoated. They are taking our jobs and soaking up our benefits! Illegal immigrants are stealing scarce goods. Throw in descriptions of illegal immigrants as rapists, drug traffickers, and criminals, as dangerous threats, and a lot of fear gets stoked, fear that comes out in scapegoating. And listen, I'm not here to adjudicate the shape of a just and humane immigration policy. I'm just asking, as a psychologist, what best explains "Build That Wall!" xenophobia? It could be mimetic desire. But I think the simplest reason is scarcity and fear. Fear, real or delusional, that an illegal immigrant is going to take away a job, receive undeserved social benefits, or hurt someone. 

But again, Girardians have their answers to all this. The theory has to stay pure and uncontaminated. Only one cause for scapegoating is allowed. Everything must get stuffed into the explanatory box of mimetic desire. My view, by contrast, is that people scapegoat for lots of reasons. Mimetic desire is one. Scarcity-based anxiety, legitimate or paranoid, is another. You can think of some more. 

And if this is so, we reach another dim conclusion. Anxiety is endemic to the human condition. As I describe it in The Slavery of Death, as biodegradable creatures in a world of real or perceived scarcity fear will be our constant companion. Given this, more is needed than simply exposing the mimetic roots at the heart of sacred violence. Overcoming our anxiety is necessary. Which means overcoming the biological and material realities of human finitude and limitation. And Girard's theory just doesn't traffic in those sorts of ontological issues. Simply put, Girard's theory of "atonement," how we are saved, does nothing to address the harsh material realities that cause human persons and societies to act self-interestedly and violently. 

If life is like being on the Titanic, my problem isn't that you and I desire the same lifeboat. Our problem isn't mimetic desire. Our problem is scarcity, that there are not enough lifeboats to go around. You and I want the same boat because, tragically, there is only one of them left. And if your "plan of salvation" is to encourage frighted animals to give up their seat on the lifeboat in an act of heroic self-sacrifice, to "stand in solidarity" with the doomed, well, best of luck with that. Most people are going to try to get their loved ones onto that boat, at the expense of you and yours, and be very tempted to jump aboard themselves. This is a natural human response. As I describe in The Slavery of Death, fear tempts us toward self-interest. And there's nothing in Girard's theory, insofar as it eschews ontological issues, that can help us escape the underlying anxiety of the human predicament.  

As I mentioned in the last post, I was an early adopter and enthusiast of René Girard's ideas. And I'm still a fan. I shared Girard's ideas online in the early years of this blog and put them to use in my first book Unclean. 

Unclean was my "arrival" onto the theological scene. 

My scholarly career has had four phases. All of this can be traced on my Google Scholar page. 

Phase 1 (1998-2003) was publishing mostly empirical clinical psychology research in peer-reviewed journals. 

Phase 2 (2003-2011) was turning away from clinical psychology to psychology of religion as my research focus, still publishing this research in peer-reviewed journals. During this time I published the work that has had the most impact upon the research literature, studies on attachment to God, quest religious motivation, and terror-management theory. This phase culminated in my co-authoring, with my graduate student Andrea Haugen, the chapter on Christianity for the APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. During this time, in 2007, I started writing online. 

Phase 3 (2011-2015) saw my first academic books come out, Unclean, The Authenticity of Faith, and The Slavery of Death. These books flowed out of my prior empirical research, and they represent my first attempts to "do theology." 

In Phase 4 (2016-Present) I turned to popular and general-audience Christian writing. This phase started with Reviving Old Scratch followed by Stranger God, Trains, Jesus and Murder, Hunting Magic Eels, and The Shape of Joy. In 2021, I started cross-posting the original blog, which is still going, over on Substack. 

Anyway, like I said, Unclean was my theological coming out party. And in Unclean I made use of René Girard's scapegoat theory. 

Unclean is about the impact of disgust and contamination psychology upon religious belief, experience, and practice. That might seem to be a peculiar lens through which to explore religion, but it is a rich vein to mine. Notions of purity regulate much of our experience of the sacred, divine, spiritual, and holy. 

Because of this, disgust and contamination affect how we experience moral and social categories. These are often conflated into what psychologists call "sociomoral disgust," how we perceive "sin" and those whom we deem "unclean" because of their sin. Since disgust is a boundary-monitoring and expulsive psychology it creates a "social distancing" dynamic, where the unclean are expelled from the community in order to maintain purity and holiness. (Relatedly, when this disgust becomes internalized people come to experience themselves as "unclean" and therefore unworthy of community.) And it's precisely here in Unclean where I use the work of René Girard.

Specifically, I ask two questions. First, how are scapegoats selected by communities? And second, if the gospels have unmasked the evil mechanism of scapegoating why does it keep happening? In Unclean I use disgust psychology to answer both questions.

First, disgust helps us select scapegoats because disgust has always been used to stigmatize, marginalize, and dehumanize out-group members. As Martha Nussbaum has observed, 

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

Second, disgust psychology masks the scapegoating dynamic. That is to say, once identified as "unclean," think of the Jews in Nazi Germany, these individuals and groups pose, in the view of the in-group, a threat to the social order. Consequently, when I scapegoat a group I don't see myself as scapegoating. I don't see the out-group as a victim, but as a danger. And this is why scapegoating continues. The mechanism has been masked. 

So, even if it's true that victimizing innocent victims has become for us an evil thing, stigmatized by the gospels, the people who oppress and victimize others aren't scapegoating in a self-conscious way. Otherwise, they'd stop. In short, the argument I make in Unclean is that social scapegoating is often hidden by purity psychology, the expulsion of the "unclean" as a dangerous threat to the community. We can't see the evil we are perpetrating because we believe we are doing something holy, righteous, and good. The old dynamic persists, hidden in the background. God is still being used to justify our violence. And no one sees it as scapegoating.

Which is a very pessimistic argument to make, and goes to a bit of what I want to say in this series. René Girard's theories may be perfectly correct as a suite of descriptive and explanatory ideas. But the underlying dynamics at work, the depth of human sin and depravity, may not be so easily overcome.

In this series I want to make a simple point. Specifically, René Girard's scapegoat theory is a moral influence view of salvation. And because of this, René Girard's scapegoat theory is an impoverished, and therefore doomed, vision of salvation. 

Why is this so? Well, if it's up to us to save ourselves, that's not going to happen. As Tolkien put it, history will prove to be a long defeat.

A further problem is how, according to Girard, the scapegoating mechanism has been exposed and unmasked for two millennium. And yet, scapegoating is still rolling on. In fact, as Girard would come to see late in his life, violence is escalating. Exposing the scapegoating mechanism, it seems, might not have saved us. It might have made things worse. 

On a personal note, this series is also about my journey with René Girard, from early adopter and enthusiast toward a deeply appreciative but critical posture. 

(Also, after having finished this series I went down another rabbit hole related to Girard. Specifically, how tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been going around talking about the Antichrist from a Girardian perspective. So, this seven-part series about Girard and moral influence views of the atonement is immediately followed by a five-part series reflecting upon the Antichrist, the katechon, and Christian nationalism.)

To kick this series off, let us begin at the beginning. 

Many longtime readers won't need this review, as I wrote about René Girard a lot in the early years of this blog. I also used Girard's theory in my first book Unclean. This was during the time, early in Web 2.0, when Girard's theory was all the rage among Christian bloggers, especially among those in the Emerging Church movement who were looking for non-violent views of the atonement. Girard's theory was viewed as the perfect alternative to penal substitutionary atonement. 

But like everything online, fads and trends move on, and René Girard is much less mentioned today. Though he continues to have devoted followers. So if you are new to René Girard some summary and introductory remarks are in order.

René Girard (1923–2015) was a French literary critic and social theorist who developed a sweeping sociological theory that linked desire, violence, and religion. He first articulated his theory of mimetic desire, the idea that human desire is imitative and leads to rivalry, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (published in 1961). Girard would go on to expand this theory by adding the scapegoat mechanism, a social and mythological dynamic through which communities resolve their conflict by uniting against a victim, in Violence and the Sacred (published in 1972). Finally, in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (published in 1978), Girard argued that the Christian gospels uniquely expose and overturn the scapegoating mechanism by revealing the innocence of the victim, thus breaking the sociological cycle of violence as the foundation of human culture.

Let me briefly work through some of these ideas.

First, the notion of mimetic desire and rivalry. According to Girard, human desire is mimetic, that is to say, imitative. We come to desire the same thing. When this happens we are drawn into competition and rivalry over the shared object of desire. Thus, the social psychology of human desire inexorably leads to conflict which threatens the life of the community.

Next, the scapegoat mechanism. In order to deal with the mimetic rivalry that chronically crackles within the community, threatening its peace and cohesiveness, the group identifies a scapegoat, a victim to blame. All the negativity of the community comes to fall upon this person or community. The community rises up and kills the scapegoat thereby cathartically "discharging" the violence of the community. Sort of the way electricity builds up in a thunder cloud until it is released in a lightning strike. After killing the scapegoat, communal peace is restored. 

Basically, according to Girard, human communities solved the problem of mimetic rivalry through practices of scapegoating. Over time, the magical power of the scapegoat to restore peace and save the community became mythologized, sacralized, and ritualized. The gods come to demand the sacrifice of the victim. And when the victim is sacrificed disasters are averted. In short, human communities were founded upon rituals of sacred violence. 

Finally, how the gospels subvert these cycles of sacred violence. According to Girard, in the history of ancient religions the gospel accounts are unique. First, the gospels are religious texts that read as history. The gospels do no present as myth. Next, at the heart of the gospels is the story of a scapegoated victim--Jesus of Nazareth. But what is unique about this story is that we, as readers, know that the victim is innocent. Readers of the gospels are viewing the scapegoating mechanism from the inside. And due to this perspectival shift, the sacred legitimizations justifying the crucifixion of Jesus, from both the Romans and the Jews, are unmasked and exposed. Readers of the gospels know that the killing of Jesus is evil and unjust. The victim is innocent. As the centurion says at the foot of the cross, "Surely this man was innocent!"

With this powerful and potent set of ideas, René Girard sets before us a profound vision of how the death of Jesus saves us. We ask the perennial question, "Why did Jesus have to die?" And the answer, according to Girard, is that Jesus, as the innocent victim, had to enter into the machinery of sacred violence to expose the bloody lie at the heart of human civilization, how we identify and kill scapegoats to maintain group identity and cohesion. By dragging this dark secret out into the light, the gospels create the possibility for a new form of human community, a community based not upon sacrificial violence but on peace. Rather than scapegoating we now stand in solidarity with the victim. And in that moment of reconciliation we are saved. Jesus becomes the victim so that there would be no more victims. 

Stepping back, you can see the appeal of Girard's ideas for evangelicals who were deconstructing penal substitutionary atonement. According to penal substitutionary atonement, God demands and requires a sacrifice. And this, as we've seen with Girard, is what the gods have always done. The gods demand a killing. But on a Girardian reading of the gospels, we come to see that it is humans who need a killing. We, not God, require a sacrifice. The violence is all on our side. We're the blood-thirsty party and the murderous agents in the drama. According to Girard, this is the quintessential vision of human sin. Sacred violence is exposed as satanic. 

What this creates is a non-violent vision of atonement. God wills that Jesus go to the cross not to be appeased or satisfied by a blood sacrifice. God wills that Jesus go to the cross so that the violent machinery of human society might be exposed, judged, and destroyed. As readers of the gospels we stand with the innocent victim and perceive, from that moral vantage point, the unjust and evil nature of human civilization. More, we see ourselves exposed as complicit. We participate in the scapegoating of victims. That is how my sins are implicated in Jesus' death and why Jesus goes to the cross to save me from my sins. I am converted by the cross when I reject scapegoating violence to stand alongside the victims of the world. I am saved when I cease to victimize others. 

Goodness! This is, and remains, an amazing and beautiful vision. And it's true! I believe it. 100%

And yet, as true as it is, I have some concerns. After my early embrace of Girard's ideas, questions began to creep in. And late in his life, Girard raised some questions of his own.

Having finished another reading of The Lord of the Rings, a summer reading tradition of mine, I was working back through the Appendices. I don't always read these. But this time through Tolkien's supplemental material I was interrupted by a phrase uttered by Aragorn to Arwen as they speak before Aragorn's death.

Aragorn shares that he, as the last Númenórean king, was given the gift of a long life (three times that of normal men) and the ability to choose his time of death. Ready, now, to make that choice, Aragorn says that it is time for him to "give back the gift" of life.

That phrase--"give back the gift"--struck me. Specifically, I felt it to be an apt summary for how to live one's entire life. A life well-lived is a life devoted toward giving back the gift.

There are a couple threads I'd like to tie together here.

First, and most centrally, is the conviction that life is a gift. A phrase I've taken from David Kelsey in this regard is "doxological gratitude." Recognizing life as a gift means practicing doxological gratitude, living out of praise and thanksgiving.

Next, giving back the gift requires a non-grasping posture toward life. The seconds are ticking away, but I cannot hold myself in being. For most of us, this triggers an anxious survival instinct, a desire to grasp at life. To freeze time. To cling. To make life a possession that I can hoard and protect. 

This is, of course, completely delusional. As the Star Trek fans like to say, resistance is futile. A more healthy posture is a non-grasping posture toward life. Instead of "grasping" we "let go." We step into the stream of our finitude. We surrender to time. We embrace our mortality. 

But again, this surrender isn't futile or despairing. It is filled with doxological gratitude. We recognize that life is a gift and we joyfully give back that gift.

Finally, I've often described love as the "allocation of our dying." Since we're always moving toward death with each passing moment we decide how to "allocate" our dying. We choose how we will die. We decide how to give our lives away. I think this is what Paul means when he says in 2 Corinthians, "death is at work in us but life in you." I can use my dying to help others flourish. That is the definition of love, and why love is described as sacrificial. A lot of us get triggered by the word "sacrifice," thinking that "sacrificial love" implies some harm to the self. But if we recognize that love is the allocation of our dying we come to see how any investment in others, like taking time to listen to a friend, is a sacrifice, a choice you are making about how to die. Love is sacrificial not because you're falling on your sword or putting your mental health at risk. Love is sacrificial simply because you're choosing to spend some of the few precious seconds of life in loving and caring for others. Love is sacrificial because you are choosing to die--that is, spend your time--in a way that gives life to others. 

So, dying well, which means loving well, is how we give back the gift. 

These, then, are three threads about what it means to "give back the gift" of your life.

First, doxological gratitude. Recognizing the gift as a gift.

Next, not clinging to or hoarding the gift but surrendering it back to the Giver.

And lastly, allocating our "giving back" in a way that gives life to others. To make our surrender a sacrifice of love.

"It shall be well with you"

Psalm 128 is a Wisdom psalm, expressing a vision of human flourishing for those who fear the Lord and "walk in his ways." The vision of flourishing ripples outward from the personal (vv. 1–2), to the familial (vv. 3–4), to the communal (vv. 5–6).

As you know, the Old Testament doesn't have a robust eschatological vision. There is no heaven in the Old Testament. The rewards and blessings of God, rather, concern this life and this world. Psalm 128 is a great example of this. Walk in the ways of God and "it shall be well with you."

As you also likely know, the logic of the obedience/blessing vision of this-worldly flourishing is where the prosperity gospel gets a lot of its traction. We could read Psalm 128 naively or triumphalistically, even judgmentally. But such readings do not go unchallenged in the Old Testament. The Psalms themselves raise the questions, to say nothing of the books of Job and Ecclesiastes.

This is one of the reasons Second Temple Judaism became more eschatological in orientation. You see this start to emerge in the book of Daniel. And by the time the lights come up on the New Testament, we begin to see some new things show up. Heaven, hell, judgment, and the afterlife.

We also see the emergence of Satan. That flourishing is scarce and difficult is increasingly blamed upon the oppressive and malevolent rule of "the god of this world" (2 Cor. 4:4).

The point is that Scripture recognizes that the promises of Psalm 128 can be delayed and contested. Those who walk in the ways of the Lord may suffer in this world. As Jesus said, in this world the faithful will mourn. They will hunger and thirst for a righteousness that seems absent and elusive. And yet, these are the ones Jesus calls happy and blessed.

That said, we don't need to set the Wisdom tradition up on the eschatological shelf, perpetually delaying its realization. As I recently argued in my series on well-being and ontology, there is a relationship between flourishing and the ground of our being. Take, for example, the vision of familial flourishing from Psalm 128. Are there not virtues that correlate with healthy marriages and families? True, in this world virtues are no guarantee of happy outcomes. But kindness, fidelity, humility, and love are good soil in which to plant a home. There is an integral relation between our sophiological ground and our flourishing. Yes, the blessing is contested and often delayed. But if you walk in his ways, it shall be well with you.

Having mentioned Black Elk this week, discussing the First Nations Version of the New Testament and Psalms, I was put in mind of my 2022 series "Christ and the Ghost Dance." Selections of that series are reshared here.

You might not know this, but Black Elk, well known for his reflections in Black Elk Speaks, encountered Jesus in the Ghost Dance, converted to Catholicism, and is now being considered as a saint. As Black Elk's grandson put it, Black Elk was a man comfortable praying with both his pipe and his rosary.

It might be surprising to some that Black Elk encountered Christ in the Ghost Dance given its association with the tragedy of Wounded Knee, the 1890 massacre of almost 300 Sioux Indians, many woman and children, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. 

Prior to the tragedy, a variety of tensions had been building on the Sioux reservations in South Dakota. Most significantly, in 1889 Congress approved the statehood of North and South Dakota. This prompted the government to take even more land from the Sioux, almost half of the Great Sioux Reservation. In addition, when the new, smaller reservations were created, a bureaucratic bungling slightly changed the border between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations. This displaced a group of Wazhazhas Brules from their settlements on Pass Creek. This band of Wazhazhas became the most disaffected among the Sioux in the lead up to Wounded Knee and they were among the very last holdouts. 

Beyond land disputes, the US government had also significantly cut the rations to the reservations. This caused widespread illness and malnutrition in the face of a measles and influenza outbreak in the two years leading up to Wounded Knee. 

Needless to say, the Sioux reservations were under considerable strain. Discontent was widespread, with rumors about uprisings breaking out. Tensions were high.

And into this volatile situation entered a new religious movement, the Ghost Dance. A religious movement that had surprising Christian aspects.

The Ghost Dance emerged among the the Northern Paiute (territories in Nevada and California) with the spiritual leader, rainmaker, and prophet Wovoka (also named Jack Wilson). The prophecies of Wovoka foretold a future restoration of Native American life, a future of peace and prosperity that would be inaugurated by the coming of the Messiah. To usher in this age, the Indians were to live at peace among the whites, to work, and to send their children to school. And they were supposed to dance. 

The Ghost Dance was a traditional circle dance, with some key changes. The dancers held hands and rotated in a clockwise direction. Men, women, and children participated, an egalitarian change from some male-dominated traditional dances. Even some whites were welcomed into the circle. As the circle turned many dancers fell and entered into a trance, which often lasted hours. Upon awakening, dancers shared visions of going to heaven where they encountered their dead loved ones. Given the amount of loss and grief experienced by Native Americans, these encounters with lost loved ones fueled the eastward spread of the Ghost Dance, eventually making its way to the plains reservations. Soon after Wovoka's first prophecies in 1889, the circles began to turn among the Sioux in South Dakota.

Given the tensions and rumors of uprisings, the federal authorities could only look upon the Ghost Dance with suspicion. While different in key respects, the circle of the Ghost Dance was rooted in traditional native practice. This represented a "reversion" in the eyes of the authorities to "non-progressive" and "primitive" native practices, a return to traditional culture and lifeways. This wasn't the direction the federal government wanted the Sioux to go. 

Plus, it was feared that the dance was stirring up revolutionary fervor. To suspicious and nervous reservation agents, hundreds of Sioux dancing and singing in a traditional circle dance was an ominous sign. And so, on November 15 the federal agent of the Pine Ridge reservation sent a fateful telegram, asking for federal troops to invade the Sioux reservations: "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection and we need it now."

The troops came. Tensions rose ever further. Events cascaded out of control. And on December 29 federal troops opened fire on unarmed men, women and children at Wounded Knee.

Thanks to the popularity of the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this is a sad and well known tragedy in American history. And yet, many don't know that the Ghost Dance was, for many Native Americans, a Christian movement. Many participants of the Ghost Dance identified the coming Messiah with Jesus Christ. Black Elk was one of these. As Louis Warren writes in God's Red Son, "Christ was everywhere in Ghost Dance visions as Christian teachings became embedded in or engulfed by the new religion." Many Native Americans even reserved the Ghost Dances for Sunday as a form of Christian worship. Many Ghost Dancers connected Wovoka's prophecies of a coming Messiah, as did Wovoka himself, with Jesus. As Warren observes, "most Ghost Dancers believed that they were seeing the same spirit presence evoked in the New Testament." 

Thus, the Ghost Dance "was effectively a new religion that incorporated a Messiah figure--for some, Christ himself--alongside older spirit powers." Warren summarizes the fusion and the desire to create a uniquely textured faith:

By 1890, missionaries counted nearly 5,000 Lakotas as Christian; thus, they were taken aback that growing church attendance in an "Indian country dotted over with chapels and schools" was followed by a surge in Ghost Dancers. Their only explanation was that many of their Christian converts had not yet understood Christian teachings. But the simultaneous enthusiasm of church attendance and the Ghost Dance was a paradox only if believers had to choose one or the other--Christianity or the old spirits. The Ghost Dance expressed not only the belief that the two religions could be combined but also their longings to do just that...

...[The Ghost Dance] elevated Eagle, Buffalo, and Bear to the same plane as Christ and made him a "friend" to Indians, like one of the guardian spirits of old...The Ghost Dance combined old spirits and a new redeemer...To believers, it was exhilarating...To authorities and most missionaries, it was terrifying.

That terror, we know, led to the massacre at Wounded Knee. But some observers, even some missionaries, were able to look upon the Ghost Dance with a more generous cultural perspective, as an attempt to fit Christianity into Native American culture. True, this process was messy and uneven. Not every Ghost Dancer was Christian. And theologians would be rightly worried if Christ became, for Ghost Dancers, just one among many spirit guides and guardians. If it hadn't been violently suppressed by the US government on the reservations, how the Ghost Dance would have evolved as it interacted with Christianity remains a tantalizing mystery. Regardless, what the Ghost Dance clearly showed was a desire for a uniquely Native American expression of Christianity, something that the Christian missionaries just were not providing. 

In short, a part of the tragedy of Wounded Knee was a failure of missiological imagination. Christianity for far too many reservation missionaries was culturally European in both content and practice. The goal was to get Native Americans to sit in wooden pews in a church building, pray from a pulpit, and sing out of a hymnal. Christian worship wasn't imagined as involving a traditional Native American circle dance. But at Wounded Knee it was.

Having written about the First Nations Version of the Psalms I thought I'd share an example. 

Here is Psalm 91:

All who make their home in the secret place of the One Above Us All will remain under the shadow of the Great Provider.

I will tell Grandfather, "You are the one who watches over me, my strong lodge of protection--my Creator. I have put all hope and trust in you."

He will rescue you from the snares the trappers left behind and from deadly sickness.

He will spread his feathers over you and keep you hidden under his wings. Like a breastplate and bone choker, his faithfulness is a medicine shield that surrounds you and keeps you from harm.

You will not fear the dark terrors stalking the night or the arrow that flies in the light of day.

You will not need to tremble before the disease that walks at night or the deadly sickness that attacks when the sun is high.

A thousand may fall to your left, ten thousand to your right, but no harm will cross your path.

You will only have to look with your eyes to see how the guilty face Creator's justice for what they have done.

For you have called Grandfather "my medicine shield" and have made the One Above Us All your home.

No bad thing will bring harm on you. No storm of trouble will come near your tipi.

For he will tell his spirit-messengers to care for you and keep you safe on the road of lie.

They will carry you safely in their hands to keep you from striking for foot against a rock.

You will walk without fear among mountain lions and poisonous snakes. Even strong young lions and deadly serpents you will trample under your feet.

"Because you have a love fro me that holds on tight," says the Great Spirit, "I will set you free and make you whole. I will lift you high to my place of safety because you know who I truly am.

"When my people call to me by name, I will answer and stand by them in times of trouble. I will deliver them and bring them honor.

"I will give them a good long life an show them that I am the One Who Sets Them Free."

I wrote about the publication of the First Nations Version of the New Testament when it first came out. The First Nations Version, published by IVP Press, is a translation of the New Testament in the cultural idiom of the indigenous and First Nations peoples of North America. 

This year, thee First Nations Versions of Psalms and Proverbs was released. I've been using the FNV Psalms for my morning and evening prayers this month. 

One of the interesting aspects of the FNV Psalms is their translation for the Hebrew name of God (YHWH). This was something that wasn't an issue for the New Testament. In the FNV translation of the New Testament, the Greek word "God" was typically translated as "Great Spirit" or "Creator." But the Hebrew name of God was a new and different challenge for the FNV translation committee. 

As I expect you're aware, most English translations do not translate the Hebrew name of God. Instead, they use LORD in all caps whenever the Name is used. This is similar to Jewish practice, where the Name is replaced with Adonai ("Lord") or HaShem ("the Name"). So, how would the FNV handle this replacement?

The FNV committee felt that the use of "LORD" would have been inappropriate given the egalitarianism of first nations cultures. But the replacement needed to be term of reverence, honor, and respect. The choice the FNV made was to use the designation "Grandfather." 

In justifying the use of "Grandfather" over "LORD" the FNV shares:

For the FNV Psalms and Proverbs, we followed the Jewish tradition of replacing YHWH with another name. We considered a First Nations name that would be meaningful, honoring, intimate, and intertribal. We needed a unique name we had not used in the New Testament since the New Testament Greek does not translate the name for YHWH.

The title Grandfather was proposed...This title carries the relational weight of the name. This name meets the criteria of intertribal and is often used at powwows and other First Nations gatherings. In all Native cultures, grandfathers and grandmothers are highly honored. Grandfather is a name of honor, dignity, intimacy, and loving authority. Over and over again, Black Elk, a respected elder and author from the Lakota, used Grandfather (Tunkashila in Lakota), often combined with Father and Great Spirit, to make it clear who he was referring to...One example from Black Elk is, "O Father and Grandfather Wakan-Tanka, You are the source and end of everything. My Father Wakan-Tanka, You are the One who watches over and sustains all life."

In a recent series of mine I floated an analytic framework to describe different aspects of faith and their interrelationships. 

It was a three-layered structure involving a moral layer that flows out of an existential/narrative/symbolic layer which in turn flows out of an ontological layer. Pictorially:

Moral

↑↓

Existential

↑↓

Ontological

I went on to describe how the layers beneath the moral layer have been slowly jettisoned in the increasingly post-Christian West. The Judeo-Christian moral vision, broadly espoused by liberal humanism, has been divorced from its narrative and symbolic world. This creates an existential loss. Symptoms of this loss involve our current mental health crisis, increased deaths of despair, political polarization, and what has been called our "crisis of meaning." 

In addition, narrative and symbol have been separated from the Real, the ontological layer. This leads to drift of both the moral and existential layers, mostly evidenced in the political capture of the Christian ethic and story. This happens in different ways on both the political right and left. This moral and existential drift away from the Real also manifests in a consumeristic, bespoke, DIY approach to spiritual practice, where people can shop around and select stories and myths that support their lifestyle without any concern about if the myth they've selected for themselves has any correspondence to our ontological.

In my series I described some of the reasons why the ontological layer was rejected. For example, there was the rise of reductive materialism during the New Atheist moment. I also discussed the impact of post-modernism on making ontological claims in a pluralistic and liberal world. But I was recently put in mind of another reason why the ontological claims of Christianity are rejected. Specifically, if the ontological claims are true there are, we can say, implications. Implications we'd rather not face. Here is that case as made by  the theologian Robert Jenson:

Yet I think there is another reason for our skittishness with the gospel's truth claims...So soon as we pose the question, "What indeed if it were true?" about an ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences begin to show themselves that go beyond anything we dare to believe, that upset our whole basket of assured convictions, and we are frightened of that. The most Sunday-school-platitudinous of Christian claims--say, "Jesus loves me"--contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds; it commits us to what have been called revisionary metaphysics, and on a massive scale. That, I think, is the main reason we prefer not to start [with the question "What indeed if it were true?"] and have preferred it especially in the period of modernity. For Western modernity's defining passion has been for the use of knowledge to control, and that is the very point where the knowledge of faith threatens us.

"eating the bread of anxious toil"

The opening verses of Psalm 127 describe the vanity and futility of human effort separated from God:

Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Unless the Lord builds, we labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches, we watch in vain. It is vain to rise early and go to sleep late, eating the bread of anxious toil.

What’s striking in the final line is how those who trust in the Lord, the beloved, are given sleep as a blessing. The picture is one of anxious fretting contrasted with peace and rest. And the critical issue is trust.

What drives us to eat the bread of anxious toil? What is at the root of this vain striving? Why can’t we find rest?

In The Slavery of Death I describe how our lives become ensnared by basic and neurotic anxieties. Basic anxieties concern survival and resource-based concerns. These are the anxieties highlighted in Psalm 127. Building shelter. Watching over a city to prevent attacks. Working hard to provide for your material needs. Trusting in the Lord in the face of these basic anxieties means expressing confidence that the Lord will provide and protect. We are finite creatures and we must live into a glad dependence upon the Lord.

Beyond basic anxieties, there are also neurotic anxieties. These worries are less about survival than with self-esteem. Neurotic anxiety concerns our anxious striving for significance, how our self-esteem becomes entangled in contingent metrics of worth. Think about workaholism. At some point, you’ve worked enough to provide for yourself and your family. The concerns of basic anxiety have been addressed. So why won’t you rest? Well, because the work has shifted into a neurotic register. You’re pushing to achieve some vision of success and significance. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, you’re addicted to your superhero complex.

Neurotic anxiety doesn’t seem to be a primary concern in the opening lines of Psalm 127. But I am struck by the description “beloved.” That the beloved of God sleep well. The reason we become trapped within our neurotic hero games is because we don’t experience ourselves as God’s beloved, unconditionally and fully so. There is still some game of love-worthiness we are trying to win. Neurotically pursuing success and significance, we eat the bread of anxious toil.

Only the beloved can truly rest.

In Colossians 1.13, Paul declares, "He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son."

The Greek word translated here as "domain" has a range of meanings, among them "power," "authority," and "dominion." But for this post I want to keep with the spacial meaning. We were once located in the territory of darkness and have been relocated and transferred to a new location, the kingdom of Christ.

In the last two posts I've been describing how Christ deals with curses. The Deuteronomic curses of Sinai concerning covenantal loyalty and infidelity. And the deeper, primordial Adamic curses of sin and death. I've described this work as "saving the story" of Israel. At the end of the last post I said that Christ has made Israel's story a "curse free zone." Free of the curses due to Adam's fall, and free of the curses due to Israel's failure. 

I want to use this notion of a "curse free zone" to describe Biblical references to the wrath of God.

As I mentioned in the first post, one of the concerns with penal substitutionary atonement is its individualistic focus. The wrath of God is directed at me, personally. I am the object of wrath. And it's this personalization--God is wrathful toward me--that creates the potential for psychological harm. Covenantal substitutionary atonement, I've pointed out, shifts away from this personalization. Jesus is substituting himself for Israel. A similar shift happens with the Adamic curses. Jesus substitutes himself for Adam, and as the new and second Adam Jesus is able to restart and recapitulate human history. This recapitulation vision of atonement isn't common nowadays, but it was a favorite one among the church fathers.  

In both instances, Jesus substituting himself for either Adam or Israel, there is a shift away from Jesus substituting himself for me on the cross. Of course, insofar as I am implicated in Adam's sin or locked out of Israel's story due to her failure, Jesus' death on the cross is very much "for me." But only in how I, along with all of humanity, are a part of a much larger, universal story. I'm most definitely a piece of this larger puzzle, but I'm no longer narcissistically playing the starring role in this cosmic drama. 

That said, without Christ I do stand under the curse. And this is where I think the metaphor of space, territory, and domain comes it. The entire world stands accursed due to Adam's sin and Israel's failure. Anyone in this territory--the "domain of darkness"--lives under the curse. Jesus, however, carves out a "curse free zone" within the world. Those who live in this liberated territory are freed from the Adamic and Deuteronomic curses and consequences. 

The point here is that God's wrath isn't really about you. Nor did you, uniquely, bring that ire into existence. The curses existed long before you showed up. You were simply born into the Accursed Land, and you suffer the effects--like suffering death and being locked out of the blessings made to Abraham--of living in that land. But due to the work of Christ, there is a land where the curses have been expelled and expunged. This is the Blessed Land. And here's the good news. You can go there. Right now, you can go. You don't have to live in the Land of Shadow. You can leave. 

You can be transferred from the domain of darkness to live in the kingdom of the Beloved Son. 

But the Deuteronomic curses were not the only curses that needed to be dealt with. 

Jesus substituting himself for Israel, becoming the Suffering Servant, saves Israel's story and rescues her vocation. But the primordial curse remains.

One of the curious things in the theology of Paul is the attention he pays to Adam. After the early chapters of Genesis, Adam doesn't feature much at all in the narrative of the Old Testament. All of Israel's failures are deemed to be due to her own rebellion and idolatry. No prophet points the finger at Adam for being the root cause of Israel's sin. 

For Paul, however, Adam becomes the primary explanation for sin. And not just sin, death as well. This focus on Adam is a theological shift in the Biblical narrative. The highlighted role of Adam in Paul's teaching would have been surprising to his Jewish audience. Romans 5.12-21:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—for sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam, who is a pattern of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. But law came in, so that the trespass might increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so grace might also reign through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

I have written extensively about this focus on Adam in the theology of Paul. For Paul, Adam explains Israel's covenantal catastrophe, how her story got stuck. Zeal for God's law, Paul's pre-conversion motivation, had led to the crucifixion of Israel's Messiah. According to Paul, the reason zeal could not produce covenantal faithfulness was due to the power of sin and death over human flesh. The sin of Adam had incapacitated our ability to obey and follow God's law. As Paul puts it in Romans 8: "For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God."

In short, there were two sets of curses Jesus had to overcome. There were the Deuteronomic curses and the primordial Adamic curses. To overcome the Deuteronomic curses, Jesus, as Israel's representative, had to perfectly fulfill the law and undergo the punishment, as the Suffering Servant, for Israel unfaithfulness. This Jesus does. But Jesus also had to undo the Adamic curses of sin and death, sin being that power which "reigns over" human flesh making us "unable" to submit to God's law. Christ overcomes this curse through his resurrection and the empowering gift of the Spirit. 

This is way too simplistic, but a sketch of how Jesus deals with all these curses would be:

Resolving the Deuteronomic Curses: Covenantal Fidelity and Infidelity

1. Fulfilling the Law as a perfect covenantal partner

2. Suffering the curse, as the Suffering Servant, for Israel's unfaithfulness

Resolving the Adamic Curses: The Reign of Sin and Death

1. Resurrection overcoming death

2. The gift of the Spirit to overcome sin

Summarizing, to save Israel's story, wholly and comprehensively, deeper work was needed. To rescue Israel's vocation Christ has to resolve the primordial curse that had undermined Israel's calling. And having done this work, Jesus cleansed Israel's life and made it a "curse free zone." In the next post I want to focus on this curse free zone to share some reflections about the wrath of God in gospel proclamation.