#i had a rendered version but im beginning to realize no colouring is way more appealing to me then my stupid ass colours

[vnknowcrow]

There's my beautiful amazing wife and uh, that ginger loser

[encephalonfatigue]

epiphany and atonement

this post arrives somewhat later than i hoped. it’s long, (too long), maybe four times longer than my first post. so it’s probably best read in shorter segments. i’ve split it into eight parts. this will be my last post of the series. it is likely the most overtly theological of the four posts. some of the things i touch upon here include Camus’ “The Stranger”, Gauguin’s “Yellow Christ”, a thought from the neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon, a Giotto fresco, Lisa Randall on dark matter, liberation theologians like James Cone and Andrew Sung Park, a poem by Jorie Graham, Judith Butler on eschatology, a Pasolini film, and the relation of meat consumption on ‘third world’ food security. (links to prior posts in this series: 1, 2, 3)

What does it mean when Christians say “Jesus died for your sins”? I won’t pretend to have any definitive answer, but it’s a question I will preoccupy myself with here.

For many Christians this idea called “penal substitutionary atonement” is almost equivalent to the Christian faith itself. Or at the very least it is very central to Christianity, and the primary lens its sacred texts are read through. When you encounter sidewalk Christian proselytizers who ask to share their faith with you, I have found that they often want to share some version of this atonement theory with you.

So what is “penal substitutionary atonement”? At risk of being excessively reductive, I would maybe summarize it as the suggestion that God, being perfectly just, cannot allow sin to happen without consequences. Only ‘perfect justice’ is acceptable to this God, and this ‘perfect justice’ requires punishment in order to even up some type of cosmic tally, which God’s reputation as a ‘just’ God somehow depends on. That is what Christ’s death supposedly does according to this atonement theory. All humans are sinners deserving of divine punishment, but are acquitted of such punishment if they accept Christ’s crucifixion as a ‘substitute’ for the punishment they rightly deserve. Often, evangelical Christians imagine this avoided punishment to be ‘eternity in hell’.

“Penal substitutionary atonement” is a rationalization of what I think to be a rather abstruse assertion New Testament writers make, that ‘Jesus died for our sins’. That atonement was never formalized into the creeds (put together at the major ecumenical councils of Christian history) I think is a testament to atonement’s relative lack of doctrinal consensus, especially as to how atonement works.

Very broadly, atonement in Christianity has come to refer to attempts at making sense of Christ’s death. The etymology of ‘atonement’ however alludes to becoming ‘at one’ with God — i.e. ‘reconciliation’ — which already makes attempts to move towards making Christ’s death more comprehensible.

I: Christ’s Death and the Task of Making Meaning

More ‘liberal’ Christians often emphasize the diversity and multiplicity of ‘atonement theories’ throughout Christian history. I imagine this is often done in an attempt to minimize the predominant hold ‘penal substitutionary atonement’ has on Christian imagination, because these Christians feel relatively embarrassed by such an explanation of Christ’s death. (Andrew Sung Park gives a fairly good overview of these atonement theories in his book, “Triune Atonement”.)

While one should not invest too much stock into thinking these ‘theories’ to be rigidly bounded systems of explanation (as many of these theories overlap and theologians are often purveyors of more than one theory), what I do think the multiplicity of ‘atonement theories’ gets at is this: since there are so many different explanations of Christ’s death, there is also implied to be a certain initial incomprehensibility regarding Christ’s death. If Christ’s death was initially comprehensible in an obvious way, I would think there would more likely be a single central explanation for such an event. But already as early as the New Testament (basically the earliest documents we have of Early Christianity) there are a variety of explanations for Christ’s death. They are not wholly contradictory with one another, yet they don’t quite fit together as perfect puzzle pieces either. They form more a mosaic of collective theological perspectives.

Such initial incomprehensibility suggests Christ’s death, first encountered, to be in a sense ‘absurd’. ‘Absurd’ in the sense that Early Christians certainly saw Christ as innocent (even under Roman law) and therefore saw his death as a senseless murder, just like how Camus’ protagonist in The Stranger senselessly murdered an Arab man, because he saw such an act as equally meaningless as any other daily activity. Victor Brombert, in summarizing Sartre’s thoughts on ‘the absurd’ regarding Camus’ novel, writes:

“The stranger, then, is man facing the world, man realizing the gap between the eternal nature of the universe and his own finite nature, and perceiving how much his worries are out of proportion with the futility of all his efforts. Even worse, man is not only a stranger facing the world, but a stranger also in relation to himself. That is what Sartre calls the divorce between the physical and the spiritual nature of man. Sometimes the stranger sees himself in a mirror, but does not recognize his own face. Such a realization of the absurdity of man's fate inevitably leads to rebellion. If God does not exist, if nothing makes sense, then everything is permitted. All scales of value disappear. All experiences become equivalent and are to be measured quantitatively. To smoke a cigarette or to kill a man, to desire a woman or to gobble a meal, amount to the same thing. All these actions have the same value or lack of it, for all are equally devoid of real significance.”

In the gaping vastness of the universe in relation to the tiny negligible event of Christ’s death in a backwater Roman colony, how did Early Christians come to believe that such a death was of cosmic significance?

We construct meaning collectively. Often without realizing, we are always in the midst of constructing interpretations of the world around us. It is a human habit with a long history. Yet Camus never believed there was an objective meaning to existence. He believed the universe to be silent about such matters, and what he referred to as ‘absurdity’ was a conviction he held that we would never arrive at a fully adequate answer regarding this ‘meaning’. As Ronald Aronson writes:

“Camus’s understanding of absurdity is best captured in an image, not an argument: of Sisyphus straining to push his rock up the mountain, watching it roll down, then descending after the rock to begin all over, in an endless cycle. Like Sisyphus, humans cannot help but continue to ask after the meaning of life, only to see our answers tumble back down.”

This is in some sense how I see the tasks early Christians faced when confronted with the horrible execution of their Messiah. Yet Jesus somehow left them with the interpretive resources to make sense of something as terrible as his state-sanctioned murder. And each new generation of Christians are also faced with the task of making sense of Christ’s death. It is a continuing endeavour draws communities together over food and over good conversation to argue over old texts which have been argued over for millennia.

I think a work of art that beautifully reflects such an approach to atonement is Gauguin’s “Yellow Christ”, which renders Christ on the cross in the style of ‘primitive’ aesthetic tropes local to Brittany in Northern France, especially derived from the Tremalo Crucifix near Pont-Aven.

The crucified Christ is framed by devout Breton women gathered around him, as if their intense piety itself is conjuring up a vision of Christ as tangible as the Breton landscape around them.

It is an honest recognition of what Gadamer referred to as a ‘fusion of horizons’. Our own experiences will inescapably and deeply colour our understanding of profound events, just as contemporary experiences will inevitably shape the way Christians understand Christ’s crucifixion today.

Even the bright yellows and figurative shapes jar the viewer out of any assumptive artifice that misunderstands this painting as somehow a ‘replication’ of history.

I think this notion which Gauguin makes explicit here, was most often never made explicit enough in the history of Western Art. A lot of the deep racism that pervaded a lot of Western Christianity can be traced back to artistic portrayals of Christ as White, as detailed in Blum’s and Harvey’s book, “The Color of Christ”.

That’s why I think that, in a way, works like Jae-Im Kim’s “Who is Greatest?” (above) and “The Lord’s Supper” (below) continue the work of Gauguin by again jarring its viewers out of their unchallenged presumptions.

Yet I believe Gauguin was not only fusing the horizons of the crucified Christ and the pious Breton women, but also his own strange and incomprehnsible experiences that must have been troubling him. Gauguin had visited Brittany in the North of France, both before and after the period he spent with Van Gogh in Arles. This painting was done shortly after Gauguin left Van Gogh in Arles. His departure followed the rather disturbing incident where Van Gogh (at least according to Gauguin’s diaries) cut off his ear (or a part of his ear).

There are biblical resonances here of Peter who cut off the Roman soldier’s ear shortly before Christ’s crucifixion. For Peter this event was a traumatic moment of desperation as all his hopes and anticipation for the coming of God’s kindom were crumbling around him.

Did Van Gogh see himself as the Roman soldier who was taking Christ to his crucifixion? Or as Peter who cut off the Roman soldier’s ear, before ‘betraying’ Christ three times? Or possibly both?

Cutting off one’s ear is a fairly senseless thing to do, and I like to think Gauguin was trying to make sense of Van Gogh’s disturbing actions as he was putting together “The Yellow Christ”. He was trying, I believe, to enter the psychology of these Breton women who stood within their farm fields ‘as if’ God existed, and of all things, existed as victim of such terrible human cruelty. Such an attempt at making sense of the ‘absurd’ through painting Christ on the cross recalls for me Brombert paraphrasing Sartre:

“If God does not exist, if nothing makes sense, then everything is permitted.”

That for Sartre, was the starting point of existentialism. He is recapitulating Dostoyevsky’s question (via Dimitri): 

“‘without God… All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?”

That is the question at stake in Camus’ “The Stranger” when Meursault murders an Arab man with little explanation beyond that the heat and sunlight were bothering him. It’s the same chill you get listening to Johnny Cash sing, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Yet if meaning does not exist in such a world, why would such events be any more shocking than sitting at a table eating a carrot. This question in the Brothers Karamazov about all things being lawful is probably from 1 Corinthians 6:12, where Paul says:

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.

Zizek provocatively titled an article he wrote “If there is a God, then anything is permitted” after something Lacan said. He briefly acknowledges the way such a statement is true for fundamentalists who use God as a means of justifying things like terrorism or oppressing women, but also mentions the Grand Inquisitor section where Christ is accused of caring too much about freedom, which undermines the great mission of the Inquisition to control people. And so when Paul says that all things are “lawful” but not all things are “expedient” as the Authorized Bible translates it, because different ‘laws’ refer to different authorities. By saying “I will not be dominated by anything” I understand Paul as suggesting that how we choose to live has everything to do with the way we locate power as a society.

And so meaning and value, like Foucault would suggest, has everything to do with power. That’s why the question of “meaning” for Sartre has everything to do with God’s existence, which more fundamentally is a question about power. And so the question naturally arises that if God who is so powerful really does exist, and is the source which sustains our systems of value and meaning, why does such meaningless suffering exist in the world?

Philip Clayton, as a process theologian and theist, approaches the question of God’s existence from “the probability that there is no God”, and works out from there. It’s like when Bonhoeffer said,

“And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [translation: "as if there were no God"].”

Slightly different from Pascal’s Wager to “live as if God exists”. How would we live life differently if we lived ‘as if’ there were a God or ‘as if’ there were not a God? Both I think are helpful thought exercises. Here we enter the register of imagination, central to the theology of Walter Brueggemann. This is what Ricouer called the world of the ‘as if’. Margaret Atwood alludes to this thought exercise beautifully in her recounting of a story told in Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”, concluding afterwards: 

“So we like the story with the tiger better. We like the story with God in it better then we like the story without God in it. Because it's more like us, it's more understandable, it's more human... More human with God because the story without God is about atoms. It's not about somebody we can talk with in theory, or that has any interest in us.... Whereas the universe, with an intelligence in it, has got something to say to us because it's a mirror of who we are. How about that? ...I like the story with the tiger better than the story without the tiger... It’s a better story.”

Whether God exists or whether the ‘meaning of existence’ exists, such questions are inexhaustible, because these words are so ambiguous — they refer to so many different things. Which might suggest that even if ‘meaning’ or ‘value’ does not exist, we certainly act “as if” it does, and the assumption that meaning exists probably helps us to move through life more productively and less like the cold-blooded murderer that Meursalt was in “The Stranger”. We do believe that some things mean something. Killing someone means something. It is not a ‘meaningless’ act. Terrence Deacon, the neuroanthropologist at UC Berkeley, poses some interesting thoughts about the ‘absential’ quality of ‘meaning’ in the opening to his book, “Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter”:

“Consider the following familiar facts. The meaning of a sentence is not the squiggles used to represent letters on a piece of paper or a screen. It is not the sounds these squiggles might prompt you to utter. It is not even the buzz of neuronal events that take place in your brain as you read them. What a sentence means, and what it refers to, lack the properties that something typically needs in order to make a difference in the world. The information conveyed by this sentence has no mass, no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity, and no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere. More troublesome than this, the sentences you are reading right now could be nonsense, in which case there isn’t anything in the world that they could correspond to. But even this property of being a pretender to significance will make a physical difference in the world if it somehow influences how you might think or act. Obviously, despite this something not-present that characterizes the contents of my thoughts and the meaning of these words, I wrote them because of the meanings that they might convey. And this is presumably why you are focusing your eyes on them, and what might prompt you to expend a bit of mental effort to make sense of them. In other words, the content of this or any sentence—a something-that-is-not-a-thing—has physical consequences. But how?”

And here is what I’m getting at: whether you are a Christian or not, the Christian doctrine of atonement probably matters, in the sense that it effects how many Christians relate to the world. The meanings Christians ascribe to Christ’s death has physical consequences, just like Deacon suggests sentences have physical consequences. The meanings within sentences (including those about atonement, like “Jesus died for our sins”) change and transform people, for better or for worse. And words like ‘better’ or ‘worse’ presume ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ both somehow ‘exist’, even if only heuristically. James Cone said that:

“The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted.”

Christ’s earliest followers had to make sense of Christ’s death, because there was no one obvious way to interpret it. Maybe the most obvious explanation that the ‘subjects of the Roman Empire’ might have had for Christ’s death was social and political: Caesar was in power, and they were not. If Christ was a political dissident who in any way threatened the peace, order, or stability of the Roman colony by subverting local leaders they put in charge there, the Roman empire would snuff him out without blinking an eye. In short, this is what Cesar thinks of the so-called ‘King of the Jews’. You can have your title, we retain our monopoly over violence. That is what ‘real power’ consists of.

II: Narrative Resources Behind Atonement Hermeneutics

Yet early Christ followers did not ultimately accept this meaning of Christ’s death, nor of ‘power’, because they resisted the idea that Caesar was truly the one in charge. By reframing Christ’s death as a divine act of ‘redemption�� (a Passover/Exodus word referring to liberation from slavery), marginalized followers of Christ were communally participating in an act of imagination that itself redeemed the very state-sanctioned execution of their Messiah. This was not a fruitless escapist act that ignored the reality of defeat. It was one interested in transforming reality, by reassigning power and authority from Caesar to God instead. To them Christ was not merely a passive victim, but his crucifixion for early Christians was somehow seen as a divine act. A divine act that shared some continuity with the great ancient tradition they were a part of as Jews, and a sort of revelation, that helped clarify the ancient texts they regularly gathered around. Like Richard Hays suggests, these early Christians were involved in the practice of “reading backwards”. In his book “Reading Backwards”, Richard Hays elaborates on this notion by way of Rowan Williams who elaborates on how Christ’s crucifixion was such a radical epiphany (‘revelation’) for his followers:

“In the opening chapter of The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams writes: “Christian faith has its beginnings in an experience of profound contradictoriness, an experience which so questioned the religious categories of its time that the resulting reorganization of religious language was a centuries-long task.” The “experience of profound contradictoriness” is, of course, the crucifixion of Jesus as the event that somehow brought God’s salvation to the world: “the paradox of God’s purpose made flesh in a dead and condemned man.” The “reorganization of religious language” to which Williams refers is the subsequent process of retrospective reinterpretation of Israel’s traditions and of the earliest stories about Jesus, in dialogue with one another, and in light of the events of the cross and resurrection. It is, in other words, a process of reading backwards in light of new revelatory events. We see the beginnings of this “reorganization” within the NT itself in the NT writers’ reinterpretations of Israel’s Scripture.”

Therefore the meaning of Christ’s death, for early Christians, was made comprehensible by way of the Hebrew Bible (or the so-called ‘Old Testament’). There is a constellation of images in the tradition that were integral in bringing meaning to Christ’s death for these early followers of Christ — resources for them to divert authority from Caesar to God. Their worship of God was at the same time a negation of Caesar’s authority.

We have as one of these images what is frequently called the “The Binding of Isaac”, a frankly horrifying story (especially in Kant’s interpretation of it) with which Kierkegaard wrestled in his great existentialist work “Fear and Trembling”. For Jewish interpreters like Jon Levenson, the story about the near-sacrifice of Isaac is the founding legend on which the Jerusalem Temple is built upon for Jews, the archetype by which Christ’s death is understood for Christians, and an act of heroism recounted in the Qur’an in which the son remains unnamed (and is thought to be Ishmael by some Islamic exegetes). Ultimately Levenson sees the story as part of a broader category of “first fruits offerings”, which include things like the first sheaf of barley at Passover or the first first-born of a flock. They are acts of gratitude towards God, and a recognition that all belongs to God, and is but a gift from God. Still, “The Binding of Isaac” is very unsettling for secular modernist ears.

The Passover lamb then is seen as a substitute for the first born child, as the angel of death ‘passed over’ each first-born Israelite in Egypt because of the lamb’s blood on the door posts, just as the ram was a substitute for Isaac on Mount Moriah. Passover again, was about reassigning power from Pharaoh, the enslaver and oppressor of Passover’s observants, and on towards God. Recognizing God’s power was an act of negating Pharaoh’s. “First fruit offerings” (such as Isaac in the Moriah narrative) functioned as a way of reminding observants of the three Abrahamic faiths that everything belonged to God, not Pharaoh. Especially power.

It has been frequently recognized that Christ’s cruxifixction, while often primarily perceived as an act of atonement, was situated at Passover time, not Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). And therefore, as N.T. Wright has suggested, the primary lens by which Christ’s death is to be parsed through is that of liberation from slavery, before it is then understood by way of ‘atonement’ (i.e dealing with sins). Yet Christ’s death in the New Testament is processed through an intermingling of both of these themes: the liberating event of Exodus and an atonement for sins. The main way this is done is by personifying sin as a slaveowner like Pharaoh. This still rings true thousands of years on as we continue to be slaves of war-mongering and state-sanctioned violence, of social injustice and inequality, unbridled consumption and wealth accumulation.

So when the Gospel of John says, “Behold the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world”, there exists an undeniable allusion to the Passover lamb — to some yearning anticipation for an Exodus from our enslavement to sin — that is a liberation from our collective enslavement to the ways of oppression, violence, injustice, inequality, environmental degradation — all of which lead to death. As Andrew Sung Park points out, this ‘salvation’/’liberation’ is meant of course for the sinner (oppressor) who is enslaved to their sin but also of course for the victims of such sin, whose enslavement and oppression are far more tangible. Park defines sin in an anti-oppressive framework that does not only liberate the oppressor from their habits of oppressing others, but relieves and heals the victims of such horrible oppression.

The Passover lamb is the narrative image from which the ’substitutionary’ aspect of Christian atonement is derived from. A lamb died in the place of each first-born Israelite son, yet Pharaoh confronted by such a traumatic tragedy of losing his own first-born son sets off a chain of events that liberate the Israelite slaves from Egypt. Yet even from the source material of the Exodus story, we get the sense that there are problems with this theory of atonement. For example, why are the Egyptian first-borns (basically innocent children) killed in the Exodus story? This is of course an allusion to the slaughter of innocent Israelite children at the time Moses was a baby. It’s quid-pro-quo violence. I think it’s subject to moral inquiry and challenge. (And I think while Jesus eludes another infanticide, as alluded to in the Epiphany lectionary reading of the Magi, and though we find a strong parallel between this New Testament infanticide and the one during Moses’ infancy, we find that there is no quid-pro-quo counteraction this time in the same way as preceding the Passover, although there is still perplexing violence on the cross, which is not wholly unrelated.)

Because this Passover imagery is appropriated in Christian atonement theories, we must again re-ask the question: is it not unjust to punish the innocent? This goes into traditional forms of ‘penal substitutionary atonement’ where Jesus, who is thought to be innocent, is punished by ‘God the Father’ for what others did. Is that not unjust? And, related to what Sarah Coakley refers to as the gift/sacrifice disjunction, is not ‘penal substitutionary atonement’ an erasure of God’s true forgiving nature? Why can’t God forgive people without violently punishing them or a substitute? There are many examples throughout the biblical text of God and Christ forgiving people without punishing them or anyone else. And, as many feminist theologians have pointed out: is not violent punishment a model after which domestic violence flourishes? And doesn’t the innocent Christ submissively suffering under such punishment suggest that other victims suffering under domestic violence or child abuse should silently and submissively suffer for and forgive their oppressors? This theory of atonement offers important connections to the Exodus narratives, but runs into many of these sorts of problems, which I don’t think Christians should too easily dismiss.

Secondly, the Exodus as a liberation from slavery is the image from which the ‘ransom theory of atonement’ is derived. The word ‘redemption’ refers to the purchasing of slaves from a slaveowner, in this case for the purpose of liberating these slaves. In the context of Christ’s death, the ‘payment’ metaphor also highlights how costly of an endeavour this was for God to redeem people from the slavery of sin. Yet, some theologians like Zizek do not find this a satisfying answer, as Zizek claims: “The death of Christ, is not any kind of redemption of commercial affair in the sense of Christ suffers to pay for our sins. Pay to whom? For what? And so on.” There have been many answers to this such as the payment was to Satan, to God’s self, or to some higher sense of justice, all of which are unsatisfying for Zizek. (Zizek elaborates on this in his conversation with the mythic Jack Miles.) There appears to be a breakdown of the metaphor here.

David Graeber, who’s written what I consider to be a seminal history on debt, highlighted how entangled debt is with slavery. Graeber wrote that the majority of persons in the 18th century who ended up as victims of the Atlantic Slave Trade were people who had fallen into debt they could not repay. And so while, I agree with Zizek that we need to move past the calculus of sin and God as some calculative accountant, I do think the imagery of ‘payment’ or ‘ransom’ points towards the liberatory action of God (in the archetype of the Exodus narrative) and how costly of an endeavour it was for God to do so. It was not an act of sheer force or fiat, but a radically enormous non-violent expenditure on God’s part. And while Jubilee and debt forgiveness is also an enormous expenditure, as well as social structures and institutions that ensure a dignified existence for all persons are as well, we have an example to follow in the atonement narrative.

Yet still, there exist many of these critiques of various atonement theories lurking about, demanding to be dealt with. I think that’s a good thing in the sense that, as Walter Brueggemann has suggested, we have to hold all of these so-called ‘theories’ or images together and recognize there’s still more metaphors to generate and think through as each new generation of the Church and each new Christian faith community wrestles to make sense of Christ’s death.

III: Epiphany As a Way Into Atonement

And so this time of Epiphany offers a very great opportunity to try reparsing and thinking through how Christ’s death makes sense for Christian communities today. I think the lectionary readings during this time of Epiphany are a resource to turn to, just as the New Testament writers were pouring over the Hebrew scriptures to make sense of Christ’s death two thousand years ago. At least three stories are widely associated with this time of Epiphany for Christian churches.

1)  The first is Christ’s first miracle in the Gospel of John, when Christ turns water into wine at the Wedding at Cana. In my last post, I mentioned Dostoyevksy’s “Brothers Karamazov” and how the protagonist, Alyosha, had an epiphany of his own about joy and how Christ’s first miracle was about “helping human gladness”. Ian Oliver, a chaplain at Yale, mentioned that wedding feasts were “the one truly over-flowing celebration of a poor Israeli peasant's life.” This reminded me of the way Alyosha’s oldest brother, Dimitri, spent all of his money lavishly and invited all the peasants to celebrate with him before walking away to what he planned should be his death. Dimitri, was one of the most unlikable characters in Dostoyevsky’s novel for me, yet is somehow redeemed filtered through the eyes of Alyosha while pondering the Wedding at Cana:

“‘He who loves men loves their gladness, too’ ... He was always repeating that, it was one of his leading ideas.... ‘There's no living without joy,’ Mitya says.... Yes, Mitya....”

Here Dimitri (Mitya) seems almost Christlike. He’s what Nadia Bolz-Weber might call an ‘accidental saint’. Setting Alyosha’s vision along side the shadowy funerary rites for Father Zosima’s dead body in the dark of night, I think Dostoyevsky rightly reminded his reader how the joyous and celebratory event that was the Wedding at Cana inescapably signified something Eucharistic. Yet it is remarkably strange how such beautiful joy is entangled with such unspeakable tragedy.

2)     Secondly, during Epiphany, another lectionary text that is commonly read is that of Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist. In my first post, I briefly alluded to how Pauline theology casts baptism into the narrative arc of the Exodus (i.e. liberation from slavery):

“all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” (1 Corinthians 10:2)

as well as Christ’s death and resurrection:

“Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:4)

That is, in some way for Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection embodies a way that recalls the ancient narrative of Exodus. Both these events of wine-making and baptism allude to what has become synonymous with Christianity: the cross. It’s one of the most perplexing things that such a gruesome imperial instrument of torture has become such a widespread symbol of faith. The season of Epiphany marks a certain closure to the Christmas season, and anticipates the coming of Easter.

3)     The third and likely most principal of the narratives that Epiphany calls attention towards is a brief passage from the Gospel of Matthew about the Magi. The Magi have been immensely generative within Christian imagination throughout the centuries. They show up in various forms in the Christmas carols sung during the past season. There’s even a 3rd century apocryphal Syriac text called the “Revelation of the Magi”, which Brent Landau says, imagines these sages from Shir, a distant and mysterious land that was at times identified with China.

The Magi often symbolize an outworking of God’s love pouring out to include Gentiles as well as Jews. Or rather, a reminder of God’s radical inclusivity. The apocryphal “Revelation of the Magi” takes this notion even further saying: “And now he has appeared in the world in a body, and the forms with him are seen in every land, because he has been sent by his majesty for the salvation and redemption of every human being.”

This is a rather fascinating statement that believes in the ‘universal revelation’ of Christ (i.e Christ is implicitly present in traditions outside of Christianity) as well as ‘universal salvation’. Just an interesting reminder that there’s quite a diversity in thought throughout Christian history, and again also with respect to Christian atonement. With Christianity in a position of power, it is of course risky to say that Christ is in every faith, because it implies Christianity to be the universal underlying reality which is at the heart of all faiths. That of course is to my mind an assertion of power. It reminds me of the critiques people have put forward for John Hick’s work. Yet I think there’s still some fascinating things this sort of stuff opens up. It especially reminds me of Julian of Norwich saying:

“they that be heathen men; and also man that has received christendom and lives unchristian life and so dies out of charity: all these shall be condemned to hell without end, as Holy Church teaches me to believe. And all this so standing, I thought it was impossible that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord shewed in the same time. And as to this I had no other answer in Shewing of our Lord God but this: That which is impossible to you is not impossible to me: I shall save my word in all things and I shall make all things well. Thus I was taught, by the grace of God, that I should steadfastly hold me in the Faith as I had beforehand understood, and with it that I should firmly believe that all things shall be well, as our Lord shewed in the same time.”

This always recalls for me Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?” or the eschatology of Barth. While this is relevant to ‘salvation’ and atonement, this is likely a diversion from what I do want to say about the Magi, and not the sort of thing I mostly want to preoccupy myself with regarding theology or atonement.

IV: Beauty Amidst Suffering

I do want to bring attention to a beautiful 14th century Giotto fresco cycle at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, which contains a rendering of The Adoration of the Magi. I love this painting not only because Giotto is among my favourite artists, but also because the star in this painting has some interesting speculations behind it. This of course is the star that the Magi were said to have followed in the Gospel narrative, and it’s rendered here as a shooting star. 

Lisa Randall, the Harvard cosmologist, believes that it is likely Halley’s Comet, which would have been a spectacular sight in Giotto’s part of the world from September to October in 1301 with an enormous tail that would have extended across a significant portion of the sky. Halley’s Comet is a short-period comet in the inner solar system that appears around every 76 years. The earliest record we have found for this comet is from 240 BCE.

Halley’s Comet is a reminder that, with or without our notice, throughout the centuries, all sorts of fascinating things are unfolding in our Solar System along vast timescales that are hard to wrap our minds around. The Magi are emblematic of people who showed a radical attentiveness to these things unfolding quietly in the background. They were ‘good listeners’, receptive to divine beauty unfolding all around them, in the expanse of the universe and within the intimacy of their dreams. They were sensitive to ‘revelation’. It’s quite incredible cosmologists are beginning to comprehend the complex dynamics behind these sorts of celestial bodies. Lisa Randall explains that:

“The Sun’s gravity binds the comets there only weakly so that even small disturbances can send objects out of their orbits, plunging inward toward the Sun. Even short-period comets, such as Halley’s comet, might have first been kicked out of a more distant long-period orbit into a shorter-period one in the inner Solar System.”

She goes onto describe how the mass of planets like Jupiter can be responsible for pulling comets into our inner solar system, and how all these rather contingent events lead to celestial bodies we see every few decades, generation after generation. A thread that connects us to Han Dynasty astronomers, Giotto, and Kepler. Yet underlying this fascinating and beautiful phenomena of cosmological processes is a long history of violent explosions and collisions. One of the speculations Lisa Randall is known for is the idea that:

“dark matter could effectively sling comets out of the Oort cloud so that they periodically catapulted into Earth, possibly even precipitating a mass extinction.”

Randall believes that dark matter may have been responsible for the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs and an estimated 75% or more of all species on Earth. Scientists believe there is a thin disc of dark matter spread throughout the galaxy, which they refer to as the galactic midplane. It is believed that our solar system bobs up and down as it orbits around the centre of the Milky Way, and each time it passes through this galactic midplane of dark matter there seems to be a higher frequency of meteoroid collisions on Earth. There also seems to be a periodicity to our passing through this galactic midplane, estimated to be around 30 to 35 million years, marked out by the peppering of our planet with meteoroids. And while Lisa Randall is hesitant to claim there is a relation, there is also a curious periodicity for mass extinctions of around 26 million years. 

So while it’s fascinating to ponder the grandeur of our cosmos like the great Romanticist poets did, we also recognize the great violence underlying evolutionary history. If the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, we probably wouldn’t be here, maybe mammals wouldn’t be here. It’s hard to tell. As Christopher Southgate writes about his book “The Groaning of Creation”:

“…we can no longer blithely or simplistically assert that creation is ‘very good’, as we heard in the passage from Genesis. Creation is a profoundly ambiguous place, full of beauty of all sorts of diverse kinds, full of ingenious strategies for being alive, but also full of disvalue, of creatures parasitized from inside, or subject to violent predation, living and dying in profound distress. Creation seems to be, then, both good and groaning. Now for most of Christian history people have tended to think that the groaning of creation was the result of the fall, of human sin corrupting the creation. One of the most important implications of evolutionary theory for theology is that this cannot be the explanation of the groaning. There was predation, and creaturely suffering, long before there were humans. Antelopes were being caught glancing blows by sabre-toothed predators, and dying in slow festering agony, long before our species existed.”

So while our ecosystems and their biological life, and all the cosmological, geological and chemical structures that compose the tapestry of undeniable beauty that is our universe, there still remains a terrible amount suffering which shaped that beauty. Christopher Southgate again:

“The American naturalist Holmes Rolston has a wonderful phrase to summarise this: he writes that ‘the cougar’s fang has carved the limbs of the fleet-footed deer, and vice versa’ – predation has sharpened the abilities of creatures to an exquisite degree, giving rise to the grace of the cheetah, the skill of the peregrine, the power of the killer whale, and all the avoidance strategies by which their prey survive. Suffering is not a by-product of the evolutionary process – it is one of the main drivers by which creaturely faculties are refined.”

So does the beautiful nature of our ecosystems and cosmos justify all the suffering that precedes it throughout the universe’s long history? The sacred texts don’t seem to provide us with any easy answers to this troubling theological question. A text like the Daodeching seems to provide a more reflective image of ‘Creation’ than the Genesis account. Laozi writes:

“Heaven and earth are not benevolent: They treat the myriad things as a straw dog.”

The straw dog being the thing that was burnt on the altar of Chinese ritual. The lines following read:

The Sage is not benevolent: He treats the common people as a straw dog.

This recalls for me the parable of the unjust judge in Luke 18:1-8 in which a widow pesters an unjust judge so persistently that he gives in to her, not because he cares for her, for justice or for God’s will, but because she’s so bothersome and he just wants to get her off his back. Many people place God in the role of that judge. Christians often claim he is that judge, but just, while others more skeptical of Luke’s sentimentalism might say God is the very unjust judge of the parable who is so indifferent and distant from such suffering, yet infinitely more deaf to the pleas of any such widow. Just like Laozi’s Sage. A congregant in my local church proposed: What if God is the persistent widow, trying to make demands of justice from the creation She birthed in such unfettered freedom. A creation which seems so indifferent to that suffering — humans of course themselves a part of that creation.

So while, the Bible does not directly explain why suffering exists in God’s creation, what the Bible does seem to be deeply preoccupied with conveying is God’s presence in that suffering, and God’s solidarity with those in suffering. For theologians like Zizek, God is a God in pain, in the midst of Creation, trying to give birth to a new world. The apostle Paul recognized such suffering in the cosmos, saying:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; (Romans 8:22)

And in the midst of such suffering and vulnerability, Paul recognized what Sarah Coakley refers to as the ‘impossibility of prayer’. In the midst of our silent and inadequate prayers — our groans — comes the very groaning of God’s Spirit — a wordless prayer on our behalf:

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26)

And so Paul asks a question near the end of Romans 8, and proposes an answer that is certainly relevant to how Christians are to understand atonement:

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” …For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35-39)

Paul himself certainly hoped this to be the case as he was one of the perpetrators of violent persecution of Christians earlier in his life, and these verses give a glimpse of what life must have been like for many early Christians who Paul was addressing here. 

Epiphany’s narrative also alludes to some of this pain and suffering, especially as we learn of the “Slaughter of the Innocents” where Herod in the gospel narrative orders the murder of all the male infants throughout Bethlehem, and Jesus happens to be spared just as Moses was spared in Egypt. For Jesus was to lead an Exodus one day too, from the perspective of Christians. Yet here Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt, and hence Jesus only survives this slaughter by becoming a refugee.

In reference to this human capacity for the sort of violence and cruelty which Herod exhibited, Thomas F. Torrance wrote that:

“We must also say that in the very act of assuming our flesh the Word sanctified and hallowed it, for the assumption of our sinful flesh is itself atoning and sanctifying action.”

The main thing I get from Torrance here is that not only was Christ’s death an act of atonement, but so too was Christ’s incarnation, especially if we understand atonement as becoming ‘at one’ with God. For Christ so well embodied the peace, justice, and love of God, that the Gospel writers call him Emmanuel, ‘God with us’. Therefore Christ’s entire life too must be seen as atoning in nature.

And so God chose to be with us, as a poor refugee fleeing from infanticidal violence, at the time of greatest fleshly vulnerability. And so what does it mean to love God and seek to be ‘at one’ with God in a world with 22.5 million refugees and 65.6 million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes (UNHCR 2017)? This is the flesh Christ hallowed and sanctified, because these people are to be the very site of devotion and holy contemplation. This is where Christ is present. It is no wonder that Jesus said,

“for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:35-40)

V: The Form of a Slave

Morna Hooker, speaking on Philippians 2:7, a verse from the great text on kenosis, said:

“Christ did not cease to be ‘in the form of God’ when he took the form of a slave, any more than he ceased to be the ‘Son of God’ when he was sent into the world. On the contrary, it is in his self-emptying and his humiliation that he reveals what God is like, and it is through his taking the form of a slave that we see ‘the form of God’.”

These are important pieces for Christians to take consideration of as they wrestle with trying to make sense of Christ’s death on the cross. With the long legacy of slavery in mind, I think James Cone’s hermeneutic move regarding racism in America strikes the heart of what it means to make sense of Christ’s death for our contemporary communities:

“Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

And so I return to an important verse that began my first Advent contemplation, where Paul, asks: “do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God” (1 Corinthians 6:19), and also remarked in the same epistle: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” (1 Corinthians 3:17)

I think the immensity of this language has too frequently slipped past me without adequate consideration. I think the way Julian of Norwich speaks of Mary carrying Christ in her womb helps us feel the gravity of speaking in such a way that Paul does about our bodies:

“I understood the reverent beholding in which [Mary] beheld her God and Maker, marvelling with great reverence that He would be born of her that was a simple creature of His making.”

As Christ (whom Christians think of as the Maker of the universe) dwelt within the womb of Mary, so the Holy Spirit dwells within the created bodies who choose to welcome God there. I think that’s a perplexing and vertigo-inducing notion. Meister Eckhart expanded on this, and John Caputo described it quite beautifully in his book “The Insistence of God”:

“Whatever the liturgical season, Meister Eckhart’s sermons are all “Advent” sermons, which take as their subject the advent of God into the soul, the birth of the Son in the soul, and hence the readiness of the soul for this coming. Advent takes place on the plane of the "event," of the insistence of God, which Eckhart stages as a scene of the hospitality the soul extends to God… That... is my complaint with the vocabulary of the "death of God" theologians, who need to consider becoming birth-of-God theologians. In my vocabulary the death of God would mean the desistence of insistence, the resistance to insistence, the refusal to come to its assistance. So God needs the soul, needs a little town in which to be born, even as the soul needs God.”

Caputo’s notion of Eckhart shares deep resonances with Rumi’s poem “The Body is Like Mary”, which opens by saying:

The body is like Mary, and each of us has a Jesus inside. Who is not in labour, holy labour? Every creature is.

King Solomon, in a sense, maybe recognized this paradoxical tension of God’s infinitude dwelling in the small particularity of a temple ‘he built’. In 1 Kings 8, the narrative has Solomon say:

“But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8, NRSV)

However, maybe it wasn’t merely just wonder. Could Solomon’s conscience have felt uneasy, even skeptical that God’s presence could dwell in a temple built under the type of unjust socioeconomic circumstances that he (Solomon) enforced? Solomon claims he ‘built’ the House of the Lord, but did he build it, or did forced labourers (i.e. slaves) build that temple?

“This is the account of the forced labor that King Solomon conscripted to build the house of the Lord and his own house, the Millo and the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, Gezer” (1 Kings 9:15, NRSV)

When a country like Canada announces its agricultural GDP for the year, it often forgets the temporary migrant workers from Mexico and Latin America that work the fields and greenhouses, yet receive no permanent place in this country, after they are no longer ‘valuable’ to our economy. Each time I visit Singapore to see family, I recall how often people both inside and outside Singapore remark at how impressively ‘advanced’ and clean Singapore has managed to keep itself, often failing to mention the millions of migrant labourers who toil away constructing Singapore’s vast buildings and sweeping its floors, with little to no chance of every being welcomed permanently onto the island and enjoying the same dignities as others who happened to be born within its borders.

And how different are the so-called ‘highly developed’ countries from Solomon in their self-congratulation and ignorance of the suffering on which their comfortable lifestyles depend upon. In fact, we get a clearer idea of how Solomon treated his slaves when after his death, the people beg his son (who succeeded him on the throne) not treat them like his father Solomon did:

“Jeroboam and all the assembly of Israel came and said to Rehoboam, “Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed on us, and we will serve you.” (1 Kings 12:3-4)

To which Rehoboam responds:

“Now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.’ (1 Kings 12:11)

Yet the whips of Solomonic power are little different than the whips deployed across fields of cotton and other cash crops, which not so long ago undergirded what has become a hegemonic global super power — a so-called ‘Christian nation’ according to some. Yet Jesus made Isaiah 61:1-2 his mission statement in Luke 4, in direct contradiction to American history:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,    because he has anointed me        to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives    and recovery of sight to the blind,        to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

So despite Solomon’s ability to tap into the wonder of recognizing an infinite God dwelling in the finitude of a temple (albeit one built on the backs of exploited slaves), and despite Christians who tap into such wonder, Solomon (just like many Christians today) was not able to recognize the trace of God in the slaves and labourers themselves, who he exploited. He could not see the divine presence which dwelt along side the oppressed and within their very bodies.

In 1 Chronicles 16, as the Ark of the Covenant (which signifies the presence of God) is returned to the Tabernacle, David has his poets and artists and liturgical ministers sing and perform various Psalms, some slightly modified. One verse from Psalm 105 (verse 5) that was sung then goes:

“Remember the wonderful works [God] has done,    [God’s] miracles, and the judgments [God] uttered,”

Some liberal Christians think the God of their faith is a non-interventionist God (e.g. Gretta Vosper). A God who lacks agency. This is obviously not the conception of God, David has. Part of liturgically reflecting on God’s presence dwelling among God’s people means remembering God’s deeds and actions in history, which for God’s people centred on God’s liberatory action in the Exodus from Israel. The way David’s son Solomon cruelly exploited slave labour reveals that he did not adequately remember God’s divine act in the Exodus, because he was too preoccupied with the policy advice he was receiving from his father-in-law Pharaoh.

And so atonement (a supposedly ‘passive’ death of a Messiah, which early Christians reinterpreted as some sort of ‘divine action’), and the task of making sense of Christ’s death, can only be done in light of the mission statement Christ announced for himself from Isaiah 61. It hearkens right back to the Exodus. Christ’s death can only be understood by way of knowing that what we do to the ‘least of these’ (who are the very people of which Christ’s family consists of), is what we do to Christ. And we recognize the terrible suffering of Christ, when we recognize the terrible suffering of ‘the least of these’ around us. And we worship and love God, only to the extent that we love and care for these victims of violence, injustice, and neglect in their great suffering, and doing all that we can to make it stop. To hope and work for a world where “all oppression shall cease”. And what a circumspect way for “the Lamb to take away the sins of the World”. To show us that all our violence and cruelty we heap upon our own family (any human, animal, or any part of our planet’s wider ecosystems), we are heaping upon God’s very self.

VI: The Inadequacy of Omnis

All this being said, it’s a perfectly reasonable to wonder whether it could have been done another way? Why God would create creatures capable of such cruelty in the first place? I believe these questions have no easy answers though there exist a lot of these out there. I would speculate that these questions become less central when one does not invest too much in God’s omnipotence, which itself is not a word we find anywhere in the biblical text, but a philosophical extrapolation of poetic language and rhetorical flourish.

Zizek has joked about the ‘ontological incompleteness’ of reality by way of quantum theory, and compares God’s creation to a video game where there are these parts of the map that are not fully constituted. For example, in a video game, there might be a lake you can’t jump into or a building you cannot enter, because the programmer doesn’t have time to program every single aspect of reality, especially when it is not relevant to the game. Zizek suggests that this is in fact how reality itself is, when we get down to the quantum level. Zizek’s joke goes that God just got lazy, and didn’t expect humans to reach the sub-atomic level, so God didn’t bother programming every particle’s position and momentum, and therefore we can never really be sure where sub-atomic particles are, because they are the edge of the video game map of reality that God didn’t finish programming.

Walter Brueggemann has more seriously and articulately challenged notions of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence as Greek philosophical categories which have been imposed upon a more elusive and strange Hebrew God. A God which Harold Bloom calls an “outrageous character” belonging to a rich and complex narrative. A God who is in no way subject to such philosophical domestication.

Yet I don’t think these moves are a simple way of eluding theodicies and the great problem of evil. Many theologians have tried to hold onto a God that is on one hand omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, while also being perfectly good and loving on the other. I suspect that some of these theologians might consider monotheists who drop some or all of these ‘omni-categories’ as simply finding an easy way to explain away suffering as something God is incapable of dealing with or as something that God could not adequately foresee as Creator of the universe. While I don’t think challenging these ‘omni-categories’ as necessarily implying such conclusions, I do think that we don’t have a fully fleshed out theodicy in the biblical text. And making sense of evil is as much a task for Christians every generation as making sense of the evil perpetrated on Christ as he was crucified on a cross. Even Christ himself while on the cross cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” taken directly from Psalm 22:1. This recognition of God’s absence is an important part of a Christian faith that takes seriously the Hebrew faith tradition.

Challenging God’s omnipresence is common practice in the Psalms, which often seem to be written in the midst of great suffering at the hands of evil. The Psalms, in articulating God’s absence, never pretend that evil is not a problem. In fact the Psalms can only address evil by recognizing God’s absence. Marc Ellis whose Jewish background certainly brought the great Psalter themes to his attention also explores this notion little when he says:

“Once named, the Holocaust pervaded every corner of Jewish life including my own.. What did this event say to the order of worship where God is invoked with an unthinking regularity? If God has chosen us and promised to be with us, where was God in Auschwitz? And if Jesus is the saviour—the redeemer of all humanity—and is present to those who are suffering, where was Jesus, himself a Jew, during each moment of loss?”

Ellis asking where God is in this suffering is a valid question because suffering within the Priestly strains of the Hebrew Bible are deeply preoccupied with God’s absence too. This is at the heart of the sacrificial system (in Leviticus and Numbers, for example). 

VII: The Aporia of Divine Presence and Absence

Christine Hayes at Yale speaks on the work of Milgrom, who is a seminal Jewish scholar on this biblical theme:

“Jacob Milgrom has argued that there’s a kind of Archimedean principle at work here: every sin creates an impurity that encroaches upon the realm of holiness and displaces a certain amount of holiness. And eventually, God will be completely displaced and the community will be left in a godless state, without blessing or protection. So Milgrom sees the symbolic function of the purity system this way: if the sanctuary symbolizes the presence of God, and if impurity represents the wrongdoing of persons, then by saying that impurity is anathema to God and pollutes his temple, the priests are able to graphically convey the idea that sin forces God out of his sanctuary and out of the community. Jacob Milgrom sees a moral message at the base of this complex, symbolic picture. And that is that humans and humans alone are responsible for the rein of wickedness and death or the rein of righteousness and life. Human actions determine the degree to which God can dwell on earth among his people. So the goal or the objective of the Priestly construction or representation of Israel’s impurity laws was, in Milgrom’s view, to sever impurity from the demonic and to reinterpret it as a symbolic system reminding Israel of the divine imperative to reject sin, to behave in ways that attract the presence of God and do not repel him.”

Our socio-economic arrangements reflect in some sense God’s presence or absence. And so the oddity of this sacrificial system, is something that we cannot be too scornful of, as Walter Brueggemann has said:

“We should not… denigrate the ritual proposal because it strikes a modern person as primitive, for we have learned, even in contemporary communities of therapy, that guilt, estrangement, and alienation have a primordial force to them that does not lend itself to rational resolution.”

I’ve also had a particular prejudice against the Levitical texts which no doubt informed my resistance in the Advent post I made last year against the line from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, which goes: “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.”

I argued against the idea of a God at war against us, and against the Puritan notion we get from Jonathan Edwards that we are ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’. I do think there is a place for holy anger at the injustices humans perpetrate against each other and against creation. But I think the Book of Job was deeply revealing for how mistaken one would be for reading any particular tragedy in the world as signifying divine punishment from God, as an act stemming from this holy anger. Of course there are tragedies that are anthropogenic from genocide to climate change, yet I find it difficult to read them as ‘divine punishment’. So I still don’t believe that “peace on Earth” and “reconciliation” can be read in such a way as appeasing an angry God. What I do think Milgrom shows us is that God’s presence and absence are notions that signify the presence or absence of justice and peace on Earth. Anticipating full ‘at-onement’ with God means anticipating an earth where peace and justice reign, and oppression and sin is no more. The lack of such a world filled with peace and justice in which oppression and sin are no more is not what we see around us, and therefore, we get the sense that God is absent in a very important way. A way very similar to what the priestly tradition in the Hebrew Bible was concerned with.

Therefore, what the priestly tradition helps us realize is that fostering God’s presence requires intentionality. And such intentionality unfolds in the context of community. As Christ says in Matthew’s gospel:

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:23)

For theologians like Zizek, it is this intentionally egalitarian community which constitutes the Holy Spirit. Or to put it less radically, there is a vital connection between communal gathering, and the fostering of God’s presence. God’s ‘with us’-ness functions not only by way that God is in the heart of the world’s pain and suffering, but that “in Christ” we also share Christ’s suffering, and therefore the suffering of the world Christ took upon himself. What we might call ‘compassion’ (‘suffer with’) a word in direct reference to the Paschal lamb. N.T. Wright has remarked that even with our modern sensibilities characterized by a strong aversion to violence, things like art exhibitions on Christ’s crucifixion continue to draw large attendance because there is something deeply compelling about the cross, even if it is not clear or obvious why that is the case. Not unlike a wonderful meal whose gastronomic intricacies and genius might slip past the average person, yet still remains an immeasurably enjoyable experience. I speculate the image of the cross continues to be so compelling, because we are physiologically wired to care about suffering, and we also relate to deep suffering in others because of our own experiences of suffering. Suffering is something that is universal, and hence we should maybe not be so surprised that we find God situated in such a universal domain in Christian imagination.

The New Perspective on Paul has been a very important discourse for highlighting the ‘participationist’ aspect of Pauline theology. The way Christ is read into Hebrew Bible passages from Isaiah and the Psalms (often originally interpreted to be about the people of Israel by Jewish exegetes) shows how Christ (the Greek word for ‘Messiah’) stands in for the ‘beloved community’. Julian of Norwich actually is a wonderful proto-New Perspectivist when she wrote:

In the Servant is comprehended the Second Person in the Trinity; and in the Servant is comprehended Adam: that is to say, All-Man... When Adam fell, God's Son fell: because of the rightful joining which had been made in heaven, God's Son might not be parted from Adam. (For by Adam I understand All-Man.) ...God's Son fell with Adam, into the deep of the Maiden's womb, who was the fairest daughter of Adam; ...By the wisdom and goodness that was in the Servant is understood God's Son; by the poor clothing as a labourer standing near the left side, is understood the Manhood and Adam, with all the scathe and feebleness that follows. For in all this our good Lord shewed His own Son and Adam but one Man.

The ‘participationist language’ of being ‘in Christ’ or the Church being the ‘body of Christ’ reveals how such a hermeneutic move is pervasively woven into the Christian Testament writings. In such a light, Zizek’s theological emphasis on Matthew 18:23 (“where two or three are gathered”) marking the community as the Holy Spirit makes more sense, that it is the members of such an egalitarian community that make up the “body of Christ” (that is God’s presence in the world). Paul identifies the crucifixion as the site by which we find ourselves “in Christ” to participate in Christ’s mission for the world “to bring good news to the poor, release for captives, freedom to the oppressed, Jubilee for the indebted” (Isaiah 61:1-2). So crucifixion is the site by which Christians are invited to abandon their old way of life and find new life “in Christ” for the purpose of fulfilling Christ’s mission as the body of Christ. As Paul writes:

“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

And so as Christ in his divine generosity loved us and ‘gave himself’ for us, we find the grace (the divine resources) to participate in the ‘giving of ourselves’ for God’s beloved children too as an expression of love. So as two or three gather, acting as the body of Christ, fostering God’s transforming presence here on earth, new life is to be the result. And it should be noted that Christ’s claim in Matthew 18:23 (“where two or three gather, I will be among them”) is derived from precedents found in the Psalter. The Authorized Bible’s translation of Psalm 22:3 goes: “But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.”

Meaning God does not dwell in the praises Christians have of American empire, military prowess, national security, sexual conquest, free markets, economic growth, corporate power, or technological spectacle. God does not dwell in the such a liturgy of idolatry. That is to say Christians cannot imagine God dwelling among them while they pay deference to such idols. The fact that idolatry (the underlying force behind all sin) is possible, means God’s absence is also possible. To revisit what Hayes writes of Milgrom: “by saying that impurity is anathema to God and pollutes his temple, the priests are able to graphically convey the idea that sin forces God out of his sanctuary and out of the community.” There is not room enough for both Mammon and God. Milgrom’s notion regarding the fragility of God’s presence in the face of sin, brings to mind a passage Bonhoeffer wrote about the “weakness of God” (which is language Paul uses in Corinthians). Bonhoeffer wrote in one of his prison letters:

“The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.”

In contradiction to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the strain of scriptural tradition that Bonhoeffer is drawing on imagines God as granting radical freedom, insisting that God does not coercively force divine presence upon people, but God’s weakness allows God to be “pushed out of the world”. God’s presence is only fostered by consensual intentionality of a community. By this logic, God persuades but does not coerce. And furthermore, according to Bonhoeffer, God’s ultimate alienation from God’s people is on the cross where God is “pushed out of the world”. And this alienation is not only felt between God and humanity, but within the Godhead itself, when Christ cries the great Psalter line: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Regarding this moment during the crucifixion G.K. Chesterton said:

“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god.They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

This is a quote that Zizek loves, but it does speak towards a deep recognition of God’s absence. Yet also God’s paradoxical presence in that absence. If one looks up that Psalm that Christ quotes on the cross, one will find the subsequent verse say:  “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”

And here we may recall how Paul writes that all Creation is “groaning”, and also the Holy Spirit’s prayers on our behalf are wordless groans offered to the Creator. So too Christ is in the midst of this groaning. It is only by recognizing God’s absence, that we recognize the power of Christ’s presence in that absence, and therefore for Christians, God’s presence in that absence.

One way one might approach this aporia between God’s presence and absence by contemplating the “Commemorative stelae of Nahr el-Kalb”, a UNESCO “Memory of the World” site. Historically massive statues have been a way imperial rulers have reminded their colonial subjects of the presence of their power in the far-flung territories they conquered. Stephen Wright says:

“Because travel was harder, it was especially important that rulers should be able to remind subjects in far-flung parts of their territory who was really in charge.”

Among the statues that once stood at this UNESCO site was one of Ramses II. His statue in Lebanon was an assertion of his power as Pharaoh and made his presence in this territory very tangible to the people living there or passing through. This is little different in my mind than enormous advertising billboards or logos of massive corporations that orient consumer subjects to the power of these corporations, and their ubiquitous presence.

Yet at the same time such a statue of Ramses II was a reminder that in different sense Ramses II was not there, and consequently needed a statue to remind the people of this distant land of his power.

A radical Jewish idea imagined their God to be the real ruler rather than a Pharaoh like Ramses II. This Jewish God did not have statues of stone constructed in Divine likeness in distant lands. So where could God’s images be found in the world? The Jewish idea was that God’s images could be found in God’s creatures – human beings – made in the likeness of God, to remind anyone anywhere the presence of God’s authority. It was this notion that became a revelation for Father Zosima, after contemplating the violence he had perpetrated on his military inferior:

““Yes, am I worth it?” flashed through my mind. “After all what am I worth, that another man, a fellow creature, made in the likeness and image of God, should serve me?” For the first time in my life this question forced itself upon me.”

When Zosima saw this victim of violence suffering at his own hands, he finally saw that he was destroying the very likeness of God. Each time a Christian sees another human, neighbour or stranger, they are to recognize them as bearers of God’s image. It was here that Zosima had his road-to-Damascus moment (his ‘Ultralight Beam’) and renounced his ways of violence and oppression. It was here he recognized the egalitarian ground at “the foot of the cross” where there is no hierarchy that positions some people as slaves and others as not (Galatians 3:28).

However just like when the ancients saw Ramses II’s statue, Christians might also paradoxically be reminded of God’s absence when they glimpse at a human body, particularly in both its suffering and its capacity for indifference to such suffering which constitutes the human condition. In Christ, Christians find an answer to this suffering and indifference, as Colossians 1:13-15 reads:

“He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;”

Here we find an affinity that links Christ (“the image of the invisible God”) with human beings (“created in the image of God”). And Christ for Christians is a strange paradox that identifies with the suffering found in God’s absence on the cross, and Christ embodying God’s presence in such an absence. Etymologically, ‘epiphany’ comes from the Greek word for ‘reveal’. The crucifixion ‘revealed’ (or rather ‘re-revealed’) how God was present in the midst of such terrible suffering. And ‘revealing’ must suggest a prior ‘absence’. N.T. Wright memorably critiqued an aspect of panentheism, which he thought did not adequately recognize this absential quality of God in the midst of suffering in the world. In “Surprised by Hope”, Wright says:

“But this image-bearing capacity of humankind is not in itself the same thing as divinity. Collapsing this distinction means taking a large step toward a pantheism within which there is no way of understanding, let alone addressing, the problem of evil.”

Wright’s more liberal interlocutor Marcus Borg was a well-known advocate for panenthiesm (God pervades every part of the universe) based on Acts 17:28 (For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’). Wright believes that panentheism is an ‘over-realized eschatology’, in the sense that God’s fully realized presence is only something that is to come, and the presence of Evil signifies the absence of God. What Wright is alluding to by using the term ‘evil’ is, I believe, our human capacity both for cruelty and violence on the one hand and indifference to such cruelty and violence on the other. Yet there is something to Borg’s panentheism in as much that it both:

1.) erodes any arrogant presumptions that Christians have a monopoly over God, ‘the divine’, or ‘the spiritual’, (and neither do Americans)

2.) and also, signifies the solidarity that God displayed with human suffering to bring attention to such suffering.

VIII: Faith, Doubt, and the Slow Epiphany of Eschatology 

But what panentheism might appear to lack for theologians like N.T. Wright is an eschatological dimension. Here we enter the faith-doubt paradox regarding whether this hope and anticipation ever be fully realized. I believe that a faithful reading of the Hebrew Bible locates ‘faith’ not in the domain of ‘ontology’ (God’s existence or non-existence) but rather covenantal eschatology (the fulfilment of divine promises for a more peaceful and just world). Yet if we are indeed free and the future is open and uncertain, then we cannot help but find a paradoxical mixture of both faith and doubt regarding a more just and peaceful future. Certainty does not allow for faith, but it is doubt which constitutes the possibility of faith in the first place.

Even in secular sociological discourse we find this tension between pragmatic doubt on the one hand and stubborn faith in some seemingly impossible ideal on the other. Davina Cooper in her book Diversity and Equality suggests that we

“contemplate equality of power as an unattainable, but nonetheless necessary, aspiration, whose contradictions and tensions offer a productive surface for debate. One of the errors, in my view, of certain strains of anti-perfectionist poststructuralism was taking the claim that power and inequality would never end as a reason for binning ideals judged to be unrealisable.”

This orientation towards eschatology can be found in one of the seminal texts of social gospel theology. In Christianity and the Social Crisis, Walter Rauschenbusch wrote:

“At best there is always but an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but coming. But every approximation to it is worthwhile.”

Rauschenbusch understood that we could never reach our ideal society of peace and justice, yet that was not a sufficient reason to give up trying. Rauschenbusch wrote:

“It is true that any effort at social regeneration is dogged by perpetual relapse and doomed forever to fall short of its aim. But the same is true of our personal efforts to live a Christian life; it is true also of every local church, and of the history of the Church at large. Whatever argument would demand the postponement of social regeneration to a future era will equally demand the postponement of personal holiness to a future life.”

And maybe this attitude derives from Christ saying “The poor will always be among you.” It’s fairly obvious Jesus does not have a notion of absolute poverty in mind, but a relative conception of poverty which has everything to do with inequality. (That should say something to economists’ self-congratulation over growth and decreasing absolute poverty at the expense of equality. Foucault also believed equal power relations were impossible, because power relations were always present, implying some inequality of power. One might say the ‘genealogy’ of this notion leads back to Jesus, back through all the way to the Pentateuch.

It is easy to see how Christ’s remark might have appeared cynical. I only noticed after watching Pasolini’s cinematic rendition of Matthew’s gospel that right after Jesus makes that remark, Judas goes to betray him.  (This happens in Mark’s gospel also.)

Yet Jesus’ remark about the poor is actually a quote from Deuteronomy, the great social gospel book of the Pentateuch, which goes:

“For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.” (Deuteronomy 15:11 KJVA)

This was not a cynical remark by Christ, but a recognition of the women with the expensive  ointment in the alabaster box who poured it over Christ’s head, as an exemplary example of such open-handed generosity that Christ’s followers would do well to follow. It was an affirmation of living open-handedly as Deuteronomy taught despite the perpetual nature of inequality.

Maybe Judas was just one of those anti-perfectionist poststructuralists Davina Cooper was talking about, who thought we should throw away all unrealizable ideals. Or maybe he was a utilitarian like Peter Singer. Either way, one might see this sort of move implied when Judith Butler (in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, p. 40) speaks of how Levinas offers us a way to push this ideal outside of history:

"For Levinas, then, messianism seems linked with this fact, that judgment does not and cannot occur in history... we cannot regard historical events, no matter how terrible or felicitous, as enacting or revealing moral judgments of some kind... If messianism is engaged with a form of waiting, a waiting for the Messiah and, indeed, a waiting for justice, it also is precisely a kind of waiting that connot be fulfilled in historical time. Messianism is distinguished from eschatology."

I think this idea Levinas has upholds the thesis we find in the Book of Job that some suffering does not have some deeper meaning to it, but is just meaningless, and one most often cannot read tragedy as some sort of divine punishment. Yet we can read some causality into the suffering of others such as the way climate change can be linked to war or famine. So in that sense ‘judgement’ can be read into history.

Secondly, separating this unrealizable Messianism from realizable eschatology is of course of interest for Butler because it offers an eschatology divorced of militaristic Zionism as carried out by the state of Israel.

The problem to my mind with the Zionism that Butler critiques has less to do with its place in history and more to do with its injustice in history. And therefore there is still some sense of waiting for justice that has to be oriented towards historical time even if never fully actualized, or what sort of justice does Levinas refer to? A justice that remains wholly in the realm of the ideal, and does not spill over into temporality?

This Messianism that places some ideal outside of history but is somehow also related to history can be found in some Islamic eschatologies according to Hamid Dabashi:

“The Shi’is believe that their charismatic leaders are infallible (or Ma’sum) and thus outside the cross-current of materiality and history. By far the most revolutionary aspect of Shi’ism, however, is their doctrinal belief in ghaybah, or occultation, or simply the belief that the last of their charismatic leaders is well and alive but out of sight. He is present but absent, evident but invisible. The doctrine of ghaybah is constitutional to Shi’ism and its sense of insurrectionary expectation. They are always waiting for their Hidden Imam to arrive, and that expectation gives their attendance upon history a critically anticipatory disposition.”

This fascinating theme between being both “present but absent” is at the heart of Christian eschatology also, as well as Jewish conceptions of God. Paul Tillich wrote that:

"Inherent in anticipation is a temporal image of a perfect consummation that is coming. This temporal image is a symbolic form essential to all eschatological thinking; it cannot be dispensed with, although its directness can be broken."

What I gather from such a statement is that we never quite have direct unbroken access to this “perfect consummation”.  This is important because many fundamentalist eschatologies claim an almost direct access to such ‘perfect consummation’ whether it is militaristic state Zionism, millennial dispensationalism of the Left Behind series, or the Dabiq hadith ISIS has laid claim to as elaborated on by Suleiman Mourad in “The Mosaic of Islam”. Leaving eschatology up to such fanaticism does no justice to the very people who need and hope for such eschatological healing, peace, and justice. So such a gap of uncertainty is required between our eschatological hopes and the yet unknown reality that will unfold. Therefore this is a matter of faith not certainty. We don’t know exactly what form eschatological peace and justice should or will take. But eschatological peace and justice are symbols that point to something beyond the inadequacy of the status quo.

But if our eschatological goals of peace and justice are merely unrealizable ideals whose continued mention are merited for heuristic reasons alone, and if the “kingdom is always but coming”, we might get the idea that we are paralyzed here by some reiteration of Zeno’s paradox and believe once again in the impossibility of movement.

Kierkegaard joked that a disciple of Heraclitus wanted to take his teacher’s idea one step further and deny movement itself:

"One must go further, one must go further." This urge to go further is an old story in the world… Heraclitus the obscure said: One cannot walk through the same river twice. Heraclitus the obscure had a disciple who did not remain standing there but went further—and added: One cannot do it even once. Poor Heraclitus, to have a disciple like that! By this improvement, the Heraclitean thesis was amended into an Eleatic thesis that denies motion, and yet that disciple wished only to be a disciple of Heraclitus who went further, not back to what Heraclitus had abandoned.”

At the beginning of Repetition, Kierkegaard takes this theme up again, joking:

“When the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, came forward as an opponent. He literally did come forward, because he did not say a word but merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them.”

Kierkegaard believes in movement, but he does so within the peculiar framework of repetition. The poet Jorie Graham colours this archetypal repetition of death and resurrection as a mending of the earth—a type of healing, as Christ’s death and resurrection was for Christians. If that’s not a wondrous eschatological image that does not deny motion I don’t know what is. In her poem “I Watched a Snake” from her poetry collection “Erosion”, there is this gorgeous passage that goes:

And this hunger, this deep yearning desire, we feel at a very bodily and physiological level is site of eschatological hope. Yet beyond hope is something possibly more difficult, that of ‘faith’. Kierkegaard challenged the detached theological liberalism of his time as well as any purely otherworldly eschatology by insisting faith to be oriented towards a temporally actualized fulfilment against all impossible odds:

“Yet Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life. In fact, if his faith had been only for a life to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order to rush out of a world to which he did not belong. But Abraham's faith was not of this sort, if there is such a faith at all, for actually it is not faith but the most remote possibility of faith that faintly sees its object on the most distant horizon but is separated from it by a chasmal abyss in which doubt plays its tricks. But Abraham had faith specifically for this life—faith that he would grow old in this country, be honored among the people, blessed by posterity, and unforgettable in Isaac, the most precious thing in his life,”

This insight by Kierkegaard was revelatory for me. I had not realized prior to this that when Paul defines faith he defines faith according to Abraham’s faith, which is not an ontological faith but an eschatological faith.

“Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness... For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” (Romans 4:3, 13)

This is not a credal faith of God’s ontology, but it is focused on God’s promise that Abraham would ‘inherit the world’. Early Christian Jews were picking up on these promises. One example comes directly from Christ’s beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Christ sees the gentle and non-violent of his followers as emblematic of such an eschatological future, directly in line with what was promised to Abraham. Yet it was not only Christ, but the Psalmist who Christ draws on, who wrote:

But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. 

(Psalm 37:11, Authorized Version)

Christ is reaffirming an old vision that sees the future world as one that is ultimately peaceful and one where exclusive hierarchies no longer exist. That is why Paul in using participationist language of being “in Christ Jesus” identifies such members of Christ’s body as “Abraham’s offspring”:

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28-29)

And so participating “in Christ Jesus” means embodying in the present a future where hierarchy is no longer a thing (justice and the cessation of oppression) and people are meek (peace). In this way, Christians can faithfully pray: “Thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven.”

This promise of God is about hope, and about living in prefigurative community, which lives out the peace and justice it both yearns for and anticipates to come. Christ’s resurrection is thought to be the first fruits of God’s promise to set the world right, and restore justice and peace in this world of violence and injustice. That’s the promise God made to Abraham, and which Christians are to have faith in. Not about escaping to heaven, while all the godless people Christians tolerated on earth burn in hell. Colossians 1:20 reads:

"through [Christ] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace..."

For Christians, Christ’s death was God’s act of reconciliation performed by entering a world of injustice and becoming a victim of that injustice so as to expose that injustice with a divine gravitas and importance. And Christ’s resurrection was seen as the ‘first fruits’ of New Creation and an inauguration of a new arrangement of peace. And so Christians are to be a prefigurative community that anticipates that fully actualized world of peace and justice. Cornel West highlights this prefigurative attitude that liberation theologians share with Councilist Marxists:

“The Councilist stream, often labeled left-wing Marxism, derives from Rosa Luxembourg’s Social Reform or revolution (1899) and “Organizational Questions in Russian Social Democracy” (1904), Anton Pannekoek’s “Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics” (1912), and Karl Korsch’s “Fundamentals of Socialization” (1919)… The Councilist position endorses the doctrine of prefigurativism: the notion that the revolutionary organization of workers which seizes power should prefigure the kind of socialist society to be created. It views workers as producers who educate and cultivate themselves—on technical, cultural and ideological levels—for the coming (peaceful or violent) takeover of society… This normative commitment to prefugrativism, along with an adamant anticapitalist and anti-imperialist stance, is the distinctive feature of Councilist stream in the Marxist tradition. Coucilism is to Marxism what liberation theology is to Christianity: a promotion and practice of the moral core of the perspective against overwhelming odds for success.”

And this future of peace and justice by all accounts seems completely at odds with the reality of suffering, inequality, injustice, environmental degradation and war we find all around us. Yet a voice calls out an invitation to act out and perform just such a community of peace and justice, here, right now, in anticipation of its full arrival. We learn more of a promise God made to Abraham, after the Binding of Isaac, which would become the heart of Early Christian eschatological thinking:

“By myself I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.” (Genesis 22:16-18)

This promise is in part quoted in Acts 3:25, and so it was certainly on the minds of early Christians. It was the promise they were eagerly waiting to be actualized. Acts has a very generous and inclusive orientation to God’s love that seems to be all encompassing. Like the God imagined in Genesis, it too wanted God’s people to be a blessing to all the nations. To everyone, friends and strangers alike. Yet it was the author of Colossians who arguably gives us an even more encompassing claim that: “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things.” (Colossians 1:20)

Andrew Sung Park’s ‘triune atonement’, following such a generous notion, provides one of the most overflowing atonement theories I’ve ever encountered, which preoccupies itself not merely with sinners, as most traditional atonement theories have done, but also with direct victims of sin; and not just humans, but all of creation:

“When we talk about Jesus’ blood, we usually think of it as being shed for sinners. As a matter of fact, the Gospels tell us that Jesus primarily lived among the marginalized, served them, and experienced their deep agony. He suffered with them and opposed the exploitation and oppression of the religions and political authorities and died for the causes of justice and divine rule for the sake of the downtrodden. Jesus’ life and death can be explained with the Korean term han… In Korean, han is a deep unhealed wound of a victim that festers in her or him.

...Beyond human han there is the han of animals and nature, who suffer from abusive treatment by humans yet are unable to protest against it… Presently the whole creation is groaning under sin and han. According to Worldwatch Institute report, we have crossed one threshold—the limit of nature. If we cross a second threshold, there will be an unprecedented and irreversible change in climate. We can still avert that happening. Crossing these thresholds creates nature’s han. Nature tries to cope with all the stress it has received, but when it is unable to bear the burden any more, it will collapse. That is han.”

And these issues of ecological suffering are not unrelated to human suffering, as humans are a part of the ecosystem. We are a part of nature. What results in ecological suffering will result in human suffering. How can we better understand the consequences of our interactions with ecosystems? One approach point would be our diets, for food is the bounty which our ecosystems provide for us. We could not eat without the natural processes unfolding to generate food we eat each day. Paul West et al. in an article for Science wrote:

“Meat and dairy consumption is increasing globally and generally increases with wealth… Although crops used for animal feed ultimately produce human food in the form of meat and dairy products, they do so with a substantial loss of caloric efficiency. If current crop production used for animal feed and other nonfood uses (including biofuels) were targeted for direct consumption, ~70% more calories would become available, potentially providing enough calories to meet the basic needs of an additional 4 billion people. The human-edible crop calories that do not end up in the food system are referred to as the “diet gap.”“

Philip McMichael, a professor at Cornell, in his book Development and Social Change writes:

“Consumption of animal protein became identified with "the American way of life;' as meat came to account for one quarter of the American food bill by 1965… By 1966, feed grains were the biggest single earner of export dollars for food companies. …Animal protein consumption reflects rising affluence in the Third World as the people of these countries embraced First World diets beyond those staple (grain, primarily wheat) diets promoted directly through food aid. The German statistician Ernst Engel formulated a law correlating the dietary move from starch to grain to animal protein and fresh vegetables with rising incomes. But instead of just reflecting individual choice and mobility, the difference in diets reflects who holds the power to produce certain fods and how patterns of consumption are distributed among social classes.

An example of such intervention in shaping the food chain comes from Costa Rica, a Central American state with a history of government and multilateral support of beef production. Between 1963 and 1973, in Guanacaste province, cattle herds increased by 65 percent while peasant bean production fell 41 percent. Declining food security for the poorer segments of Costa Rica forced its government to use foreign exchange earnings from exported beef to purchase basic grains on the world market to feed its citizens. On the global level, Engel's law may be effect, as different classes of people dine on different parts of the food chain, but it is a managed effect. As wealthy (often foreign) consumers dine "up" on animal protein, local peasants, displaced by cattle pastures, face an increasingly tenuous low end of the food chain, typically depending on low-protein starchy diets.

In an age when the "global epidemic of malnutrition" refers to the matching of the 1.2 billion underfed by the 1.2 billion overfed, we might wonder why, or how, development has come to be identified with affluent diets centered on animal protein.”

Andrew Sung Park is a very perceptive theologian who recognizes these sorts of realities where privileged people who consume large quantities of meat have a direct effect on the food security of poorer nations, where grains or soybeans are sold to feed animals abroad rather than poor peasants at home. Park goes on to make a keen observation of a Pauline text, writing:

“Paul said that he would never eat meat that was offered to an idol, if that food might cause a weak believer to fall. For him, eating meat in such a case was an act of sin against a fellow believer and thus against Christ (1 Cor. 8:12-13). Is it time for Christians to consider eating less meat and other animal products, if such a decision may help the hungry of the world and alleviate the suffering of farm animals and the burden on the environment?”

It’s fascinating to reread Paul’s words in light of the contemporary relationship between meat consumption by overdeveloped nations and food insecurity in 'developing’ nations: 

Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall. (1 Corinthians 8:13)

Hauerwas has joked that: "Eschatologically we are obligated to be vegetarians, but I'm a Texan." By that he meant he liked steak too much, and he also was indirectly alluding to this eschatological vision we find in Isaiah 11:6-9:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,    the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together,    and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze,    their young shall lie down together;    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy    on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord    as the waters cover the sea.

Ultimately Isaiah is alluding to reconciliation to heal our deep seated alienation from each other, and its a wide open “each other” which includes all the tiny critters and growing things that constitute the ecosystems we inhabit and affect. It is a reconciliation on terms that embody both peace and justice. This, I believe, is a part of the promise God makes to use “Abraham’s offspring” to bless all the nations, and the subtext of God reconciling all things to Godself. In 2 Corinthians we find Paul say one of his most Barthian lines:

“For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.” (2 Corinthians 1:20)

That is the faith Paul has. How are we to square this demanding notion of faith with such insurmountable odds we face that tell us such a blessing of peace and justice is but an impossible realization. I believe Kierkegaard offers us a way to reclaim faith that is beautifully expectant by offering us what he came to call a “double movement”. A way past the inevitable ‘infinite resignation’ we feel when facing reality, and into into one of miraculous faith. A faith that shapes life into one oriented towards an eschaton with deep anticipation, yet a faith whose value is located in the type of life it produces here and now, a way of life that would be worthwhile even if that eschaton is never realized, thought it still maintains it will happen. It is existentialism at its best, for me, far more beautiful than what I find in Sartre or Camus. Such a double movement is best explained by a most exquisite story Kierkegaard tells in Fear and Trembling. It is the best and only way I can end this excessively long and meandering contemplation on atonement: