If I were to describe my theological framework that I work from, I would describe myself as a blend of John Wesley and Karl Barth. From Karl Barth, I derive a deep appreciation of the concrete, specific, particular action of God to make Himself in Jesus Christ. On the other hand, from John Wesley, I am finding myself to be increasingly congenial to aspects of his Spirit-based epistemology while maintaining the importance of the synergistic union of God’s grace and human response. While certainly, the epistemic emphases of Christ in Barth and Holy Spirit in Wesley are congenial to each other, Barth’s Reformed background makes his construal of the event of God’s Word in a unilateral way, conflicting with the more synergistic account of Wesley.

Barth’s argument in CD I.1.6.3 supposes that synergistic theories where God’s determination and human determination both play a contributing role are out of bounds. He says: “No determination man can give himself is as such determination by God’s Word. Nor is there any place here for the view that this experience is a kind of co-operation between divine determining and human self-determining.”¹ He expresses the inability to attribute the experience of God’s Word to ourselves if we have a role in its receiving:

If man lets himself be told by the Word of God that he has a Lord, that he is the creature of this Lord, that he is a lost sinner blessed by Him, that he awaits eternal redemption and is thus a stranger in this sphere of time, this specific content of the Word experienced by him will flatly prohibit him from ascribing the possibility of this experience to himself either wholly or in part or from dialectically equating the divine possibility actualised in this experience with a possibility of his own.²

In other words, God’s revelation will come in such a clear way that one can and must distinguish it from ourselves. Barth presupposes that God’s self-disclosure will always result in a clear communication that this comes from outside of ourselves. Divine self-disclosure doesn’t just effect the person, but it provides a clear hermeneutical capacity to recognize where this power emanates and comes from. Therefore, human determination, in so far as it exists, is wholly determined by the content of God’s disclosure as an independent entity that comes from outside oneself. While Barth doesn’t exclude human response in the event of revelation, it is simply a function of God’s self-disclosure.

Meanwhile, he rejects the synergistic theories as essentially distant abstractions of an onlooker who assumes these two existing determinations are in competition with each other, overlooking the co-existence of God and human determination in the experience of God’s Word.³

In summary, if I am reading him correctly, Barth’s argument for a more monergistic account rests upon the 1) the determined hermeneutic recognition of the origins of God’s revelation and 2) the distant abstraction that synergism entails. However, I would suggest both of these accounts fail when we take into account Paul’s account of faith.

In Galatians 3:1-5, Paul attempts to try to determine the origination of God’s work among the people when their faith started. He essentially makes an hermeneutic argument, asking them to interpret when God’s provision o the Spirit and power was and is demonstrated among them. Paul’s argument is this: God worked powerfully when you heard with faith. Paul does not ask “when and how do you determine that it is God speaking to you?” but rather, “when do you determine God started working in your midst?” For Paul, the human response to God is conceived as happening in a separate sphere from the work of God; human hearing and faith is not reducible or determined to God’s works, but rather human heart and faith is the context in which God’s pouring of the Spirit and working miraculously occurs. For Paul, the hermeneutical argument concerns  connecting God’s work and human response.

However, this is not Paul’s account of how conversion happen, per se, but rather a call for a post-hoc reflection on the event of their inclusion by the Spirit. So, one could perhaps argue this is not an account of what happens in the event of God’s self-disclosure. But then in Galatians 4:6, Paul recounts how people come to recognize they are children of God, which he describes as occurring because “God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts.” So, here we are getting a description of the event or receiving the Spirit that Paul asked them to reflect on in 3:1-5. Here, the language of who is crying “Abba! Father!” on the surface seems ambiguous. Is it the Spirit that cries or our hearts that cry? Grammatically, the verb for cry (κρᾶζον) is singular, suggesting it is God’s Spirit. However, the logic of the discourse dictates that it is people, not the Spirit, that are called children of God, so it is the people that cries. This grammatical and logical tension can be explained that is it the singular Spirit that gives the plural people a united recognition of their spiritual family. As a consequence, Paul is suggesting this experience of the Spirit emerges as part of the experience of the community. This recognition of Spirit and human hearts is not some distant, abstraction about God and a singular human, but a recalling of the initial formation of this specific community of Christians in Galatia. The recognition of two agents in the cry emerges from the concrete, lived experience, and not some distant, abstract notion.

Furthermore, the integral relation between the Spirit and the inner nature of the human person in the recognition of one’s spiritual family is exhibited more clearly in Romans 8:15b-16: “When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” (NRSV) There is a clear division of God’s Spirit and the human spirit in the cry such that the recognition and determination is recognized as happening from two different sources. God’s Spirit is clearly primary, being the the subject of the verb for “bearing witness,” whereas the human spirit is in the dative case, backgrounding the role of the human spirit in the witness. Nevertheless, the two spirits are conceived as a) separate while b) being in unison in recognition of one’s spiritual family.

Also, the fact that what the Spirit testifies with our spirit is not the origin of the divine disclosure, but rather one’s relationship to God. The human is enabled to hermeneutically identify their relationship to God, not the ontological origins of their knowledge as Barth suggests. Keep in mind that this is what Paul derives from the Galatians intial come to faith in Galatians 3:1-5, although Paul does not anyone say this hermeneutical recognition is a formula for the initial reception of the Spirit.⁴ So, the reception of God’s Spirit does not entail an ontological recognition of the origins of God’s Word such that we recognize nothing comes from within ourselves; there is simply the concrete emergence within human experience of God’s Spirit with human hearts/spirits of the adoption by God.

In other words, for Paul, human recognition of one’s inclusion in God’s People is experienced and understood1) as a bilateral work between God’s Spirit and ourselves that 2) emerges from a generalization made from the concrete experiences of Christian communities and not from some abstract, distant observation. Rather, I would suggest Barth’s attribution of an abstract distance to synergistic accounts is not fair,⁵ but that one can derive from the bottom-up an account of two distinct, independent determinations from within human experience that does not logically entail a hermeneutical recognition of the ontological status of God’s Word except that the Spirit is doing something separate from ourselves.

Furthermore, I would like to emphasize the correct hermeneutical recognition is not even the initial condition of inclusion in the community of God. In 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, Paul expresses a concern that the Corinthians faith be grounded in the power of God, rather than in the wisdom of men. This implies that Paul does think that the Corinthians have a misdirected faith, not actually and fully recognizing the nature of God’s power. But nothing in Paul’s correspondance to Corinth suggest that Paul does not think they have genuinely encountered God; indeed, they have many of the marks of being redeemed by God and have the giftings of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, their faith, while including them within God’s community, is misdirected. They don’t truly comprehend God’s power, which comes from outside of the word, but they still construe their faith according the standard expectations of wisdom in this world, which would have been influenced by a Stoic pantheism that obliterates almost any distinction between God and the self. Despite this, Paul considers them as in Christ, but they are largely ignorant of what the nature of God’s power is or how it works in dramatic fashions that does not operate according to the wisdom of the world. In other words, the Corinthians are an example of Christians who have been impacted by God’s self-disclosure through the preaching of the word the cross of Christ and the powerful demonstrations of the Spirit, and yet they do not amount to anything that suggests they have a clear, ontological recognition that what God has disclosed is entirely outside of themselves. Instead, this is something that with maturity, people can and would come to recognize as in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16.

Thus, what is essentially Barth’s rejection of any serious synergism in my mind fails on grounds to adequately explain the Pauline witnesses. Nevertheless, there is something legitimate to Barth. When we are maturing, growing in wisdom in Christ, putting to death the deeds of the flesh and living by the Spirit, we do come to the recognition that what we are being transformed into is fundamentally coming from God’s Word and Spirit, rather than truly from within ourselves, even as our selves, body and mind, are including in this work. Or, rather, more precisely, God is forming us with the result that we will recognize that God’s power that is working to leading us to glory does not originate from anything of this world or ourselves. Thus, I would shift Barth’s ontological hermeneutics of the source of revelation to an apocalyptic-eschatological hermeneutics where the telos of human history towards the glory of Christ in the resurrection originates from outside of the world, not within it. But in Corinth, this would firstly entail a rightly directed faith towards the power of God, rather than the discourse of human wisdom, which then enables the recognition the in-breaking of God into the world and ourselves from the outside. Put in reverse, I would suggest, though I don’t know, what is the nature of wisdom about the apocalyptic-eschatological in Paul, Barth treats as an ontological paradigm of all revelation and self-disclosure that he labels as God’s Word.

So, Barth’s insights can be appropriated and appreciated, insofar as we demythologize Barth’s ontology of revelation and recontextualize it to the apocalyptic eschatology of Paul. Barth and Second Temple apocalyptic are not equivalent, even if there share some common features about the distinctiveness of God from the world, as Barth seems to have the role of time in God’s self-disclosure in the background, wanting to put the full force of revelation within the singular event. But for the apocalyptic, time is also an essential factor for God’s work and purposes. So, in other words, if we recontexutalize Barth’s ontology of God’s disclosure into the context of time, both time for maturation of the Christian and time for the outworking of God’s power in Christ and Spirit in the world, Barth’s theology can bear much fruit and can be brought into line with a Wesleyan-Arminian synergism.

Faith is a personal journal but it is not a solitary one. The understanding of what it means to be a follower of Christ and a part of the Body of Christ is formed in the tension between the individually committed and the deeply networked person.  As a consequence, sometimes understandings of faith swing to the extremes, sometimes going to the one side of defining faith as simply a solitary journey that one can do without the other. On the other hand, the other extreme can present that community is where God is experienced.

The present trajectory of devout Christians in today’s world, at least those who I am aware of via personal connections, social media, etc. is to emphasize the communal aspects of faith. It is largely obvious that solitary Christian is a fundamentally mistaken notion that almost becomes a oxymoron, if not outright being entirely self-contradictory. Compensating for this deficient understanding of faith and the spiritual life, fighting the trajectories of Western individualism, there is the emphasis on the other pole, the communal aspect of faith. And if you read the Bible, or even more specifically the New Testament, you would be right; the corporate, communal nature of life is very important.

But why is it important? The answer is important because not only does the theological answer serve to legitimate the pursuit of relationships and community in a religious, spiritual context, but it will direct the way we understand the purpose of community, which will direct our attention attention in our relational and communal engagement, formed our expectations of what to expect in relationships and community, and from our attention and expectations, direct in what ways we will act. The answer we provide, I would suggest, can amount to the difference between engaging in the authentic community of Christ and engaging in a community that is formed and controlled out of self-interests, the difference between the community of the redeemed and the cult of the controlling.

There are two important theological “data points” to briefly make. I won’t go into a thorough exegetical and theological rationale for them here, as it will distract from the ultimate point.

Firstly, God created us as people-in-relationship in order to accomplish the purpose of being in God’s image. Let me unpack this a bit. When humanity is said to be formed in the image of God in Genesis 1, there is often times the implicit assumption that this is some ontological statement about who we are as persons. We are in the image of God, so we have some special, divinely attuned capacities because of this. But I don’t think this is the right understanding. Rather, being in the image of God is God’s purpose for us in the created order; it is a designation of the function and role we are to place in this world. We are not ourselves images of God, but rather we are made in the image of God, which is a metaphor used to describe our relationship to creation. We represent the rule of God in the world, acting in accordance to that authority.

Consequently, we are given specific capacities that will enable us to fulfill this role. Three capacity that I think that are implied in Genesis narrative 1) love for each other, 2) capacity for creating (largely but not exclusively through reproduction), and 3) the capacity for language. It is each of these three things that become disrupted by the fall, such as the murder of Abel by Cain, the disruption of sexual order by the “sons of Gods” with the “daughters of men” before the flood, and the finally the God-caused disruption of language at the Tower of Babel. These capacities are not themselves the image of God, but they enable this Divine purpose when they are rightly directly. But with sin, these capacities become wrongly directed, to the point that God frustrates even further in disrupting language lest even greater damage occur.

In other words, the God-given purpose of humanity to be in the image of God entails our relational capacity in love, creating, and language but these can be wrongly directed for other purposes. So, if humanity is to be restored to that purposes, these capacities must be rightly directed again, including how our relatedness is an expression of these capacities.

Secondly, redemption in Christ through the Spirit comes through practice and experience, not in the absence of it. When Paul describes in Romans 5:2-5 how hope springs forth in our hearts, he doesn’t suggest the Spirit inserts hope into our lives as we are in silence and solitude, separated from the struggles of life. Spiritual maturity is not a sophisticated form of avoidance. Rather, it happens through the tribulations that try people. Later in Romans 8, Paul calls people to take on the thoughts of the Spirit, which are life and peace, while they put to death the deeds of the body. This entails thinking that occurs in the midst of practice and struggle, not aside from it. This reflects the Stoic influence on the Apostle Paul, who were deeply concerned about practical thinking rather than theoretical thinking; while in many ways Paul shows clear signs of rejecting, subverting, and reversing Stoic patterns of thinking because Paul is no Stoic, nothing seems to suggest he rejects the practical nature of thinking that the Stoics emphasized.

However, what is redemptive isn’t the experiences we have themselves, but the way the God who brings something new and unlike the present patterns through Christ and the Holy Spirit. God from the outside (and commonly, though not exclusively, from human agents) plants within us the seeds of this redemption that brings something new. 

So in other words, the redemption that comes from Christ and the Spirit occurs through our practice and experience, not in isolation from it. An implication we can draw from this then is as follows: What we avoid, will remain unredeemed.

So bringing these two points together is this. In order for us to fulfill our purposes of being in the image of God, we as humans must exercise our capacity for love, creativity, and language in a rightly direct manner as known in and coming from Christ and the Spirit to fulfill this purpose. When we don’t exercise, we are influenced by the reality of sin in the world away from our Divinely-given purpose, and maybe even ourselves engaging in actions that actively resists this purpose. Therefore, for us to be redeemed by what God is doing in us personally, we must work it out in the various capacities that we are given to fulfill this overarching purpose.

Therefore, to fulfill our purpose of being in the image of God entails the corporate, communal, relational capacities that we have to be rightly directed. This redemption comes through engaging our relational capacities, both through what is happening in ourselves but also what is happening in others that can impact us. The latter role Hebrews recognizes in that other people can help breaked the hardening that sin can cause. But if we do not seek to engage our social capacities, neither will we a) experience the redemption and transformation of these capacities nor b) will we rightly direct these capacities to fulfill our purpose. God’s work in creation and redemption is resisted when we neglect or refuse to engage our faith in relation to others.

But this is different from a similar form of theological reasoning: that we experience God in community. Certainly, this is true insofar as it goes, because we believe that God is at work in the entire cosmos. But it is potentially misleading because it suggests that God is working in a special way in the community that He does not do elsewhere. This presents the risk of deification of the Church, where it becomes assigned a status not merely as a redemptive work but its specific communities and networks of these communities (such as in larger denomination and theological traditions) as itself the necessary and/or sufficient means of redemption. This happens in the Roman Catholic Church in history that understood there is no salvation outside the Church to mean one must be part of the RCC to be saved. This routinely happens in smaller, religious movements that border of cults, suggesting their communal gatherings have a special power and presence of God. This can even happen more subtly within denominations without such dramatic and grandiose pretensions, which feel their current arrangement and existence as a network is necessary for God’s work.

However, when we understand God’s redemption occurring through a) universal history through the sending of His Son and b) the personal engagement through the sending of His Spirit as we put this into practice, the corporate, universal nature of redemption and the personal nature of redemption are met together in the communities and networks of Christian faith. The community of God’s People is what emerges from God’s redemption, as we seek to direct our relational capacities for our purpose of being in the image of God. But this community is never deified. Paul doesn’t say the believers/community is “the image of God,” but we are said to be “IN the image of God” recognizing there is a difference of being God and operated with the agency and purposes of God. The community is not itself the person of Christ, but is said to be merely the body of Christ, recognizing that Christ is still independent from ourselves individually and corporately.

Therefore, redemption happens as part of the community of faith because it is in relationship to others that we can realize God’s redemption to exercise our God-given capacities in the way to fulfill our God-given purpose to be in the image of God. The community should never be deified as the presence of God, but rather recognized as the outworking of God’s power that points us to the presence of God in the Lord Jesus Christ and in the outpouring Holy Spirit. Community as the exercise of redemption allows us to place God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit at the center of our relationships through worship, prayer, practice, and reflection; community as the presence of God risks making our communities authoritarian and/or cultish. The rationale for our communities is important for how our communities are formed, so let us select the exercise of God’s redemptive work as the reason we meet together.

In writing this blog post, I am going to be perhaps stepping on the toes of many of my clergy colleagues. In the United Methodist, we will talk about our “Call to Ministry.” The idea expressed by the word “called” is that God has made a specific choice or invitation for a person to participate, whether it be called to life in Jesus Christ or as Paul says about his own calling to be an apostle. Callings convey a sense of Divine legitimation to the direct one’s life is taking. But if we pay attention to the way calling is used in the New Testament, it is not directed towards the work of ministry within the church. People are not “called” to ministry.

Rather, firstly, they are gifted for ministry. Ephesians 4:7-13 uses this language of gifting to then describe the work of apostles, prophets, pastors, and teachers. 1 Corinthians 12 describes things similarly, with different gifts being given to different people.

Secondly, people are formed and prepared for ministry. While Paul talks about the Spiritual giftings the people of Corinth, he also rebukes them for how they fail to understand the right uses of these gifts. Underneath their heart is competitve, status-oriented atmosphere that has not learn to use gifts for the purpose of the higher way of love. They must be formed to use their gifts with the appropriate purposes. Then, when we look at the requirements for positions like elders and deacons in the Pauline Pastorals, we see a set of moral qualifications that are suggestive that the person has been rightly formed.

However, thirdly, it should be noted that there isn’t the commonly implicit notion that we have that we are bestowed a position that we then use our gifts in. Rather, it seems to me that the reverse is true, we employ and use our gifts in a rightly directed fashion and that can lead us to coming into specific positions.

Put simply, you are equipped and formed for ministry as you put your gifts into practice. While God makes provisions for the work we do, nowhere do we see the New Testament making a general pronouncement that the positions within the church are gated only for those who have a “calling to ministry.” The closest thing we see to this is Paul’s own expression of his calling to be an apostle. But most likely, this isn’t Paul saying that being an apostle is determined by a specific calling of a person’s life, but rather is a description of how God specifically and specially brought Paul in to be an apostle through his Damascus Road experience, even though he didn’t have the otherwise necessary prerequisites, such as being a disciple of the Lord during His time on the earth and seeing Him resurrected. God’s calling on Paul’s life was a special one in that it broke the apostolic mold and one that still was to be recognized by the other apostles, so God’s specific purposes for the individual person Paul would entail dramatic action by God to make such a purpose realized. But the general role of apostleship wasn’t necessarily a “calling.” So, we don’t need to generalize from Paul’s own calling to a general theory of calling for ministry.

Now, this isn’t to deny the experiences of many people who have felt lead towards the ministry, which they may refer to as a “calling.” People have seen the threads in their life weave together to lead them to work in some area of ministry. People have these strong urgings and inclinations towards more formal work within the Church. These are very real, and I believe to be a result of the work of God in our lives, but I would not call these “callings.” Even though I am not always a good Wesleyan, I do believe that emergence of God’s work in our lives is a result of the synergy of God’s gracious action and our own response, including the responses of our hearts, to God’s grace. These strands and urges can very well be the result of God’s work in our lives. But, I would suggest this is part of God’s equipping and forming of us as we seek to put these gifts into practice in our imagination and in action. The direction towards ministry emerges from this Divine-personal dance of grace and love.

But this isn’t a “calling.” Callings are purposes that are unilaterally defined, such as when God makes a clear command to “Go!” or offers a decisive invitation “Will you go?” This also not simply a feeling laid upon a person’s heart, but God makes it dramatically clear, such as with Samuel, Isaiah, Paul, etc. While a person can say yes or no to God’s calling, the purpose one is directed towards is not chosen by the person; it is determined by God and bestowed to the person. This is also what happens when we are called in Jesus Christ; the life of following Christ isn’t a result of negotiation between God and us, but it emerges from God’s specific call and purpose for us. But, in so far as there are callings to specific people that are not given to other people, Samuel, Isaiah, and Paul are example of God’s calling, where God unilaterally sets out a purpose for their lives. It does not emerge from the Divine-person dance of grace and love.

Sometimes, there are people who have specific callings on their life. But before you become jealous, wish you were called, and/or implicitly think “callings” should be more democratic, if you take careful note, when God calls specific people to specific purposes, it can come at a great cost of personal loss, pain, difficulty, and suffering. God’s calling isn’t a position of privilege, but God’s calling is a specific purpose in one’s life that one must be specifically set and formed for. When you have some freedom to select the path in your life in service to God, all your hang ups, struggle, difficulties, neuroses, or whatever you want to call the rough edges in your life don’t have to be addressed as you can select the areas that those problems won’t contribute to. When you have some freedom to select the path in your life in service to God, you can choose to adjust course from the difficult and thorny patches that may be a difficulty for you. To be faithful to a specific calling does not afford such a freedom, however. For those calling to specific purposes, they may be subjected to the spiritual grinder so that can be transformed from their own problems and be prepared to face the problems they will have to deal with. Let’s be honest: while you can take on a specific call upon your life for love of God, you don’t want a specific call on your life.

So, having tried to elucidate the different between a leading to ministry and a specific calling, there are a few reasons why we should not speak about callings to ministry, as it relates to ourselves as ministers, the positions we take, and the nature of the Church as a whole.

The language of calling forms perceptions that ministry is gated off from the laity – Every time we talk about a “calling to ministry,” we are implicitly and subtly reinforcing a basic notion: you must have had a specific story or a specific feeling that we label a “calling” to be involved in ministry. This only reinforces the difference between the clergy and laity, creating a special class of the “called” and “the rest of us.” But if the pursuit of ministry emerges from the Divine-personal dance of grace and love, then it isn’t that specific people have had a calling, but that certain people have sought to follow Jesus so deeply that the work of God’s grace has lead them in a direction of a more formal, vocational ministry. Their deep love and attentiveness to God’s will has contributed to the emergence of this direction in their life. In other words, the work of ministry, whether matched with a vocational role and formal position or not emerges from the equipping and formation of God met with our response of love to God. Thus, ministry is the work of the whole Church that God corporately equips that emerges from our collective and corporate love for God.

Saying we are “called” can mask our own feelings – Let’s be honest here. There are many reasons people can want to be in a vocational position of pastor or other forms of ministry, and they are not always rooted in the love of God. Perhaps we saw the power a pastor have over the people and we wish we had that power for ourselves. Perhaps we have some deep desire to address some problem of injustice and seek to take on the ministerial role to address this injustice. There are a variety of motivations of different moral values that can guide us into the formal positions of ministry, but they don’t necessarily have the love of God as the center. But when we say we are “called” without offering a clear, dramatic calling experience, we have a tendency to overlook our own reasons for the passion of ministry, but we may be projecting our own desire onto God that we then say that He legitimates in the notion of a “calling.” But when we can’t argue that God unilaterally legitimates our position but rather that we must be equipped and formed for the position, we are challenged to deal with the truth of our own motivations both from within ourselves and those who evaluate us.

Saying we are “called” implies that we have a right to a position – Let me state something bluntly and honestly. You do not have a right or entitlement to any position in the Church of God. Even if you have had a specific and clear calling in your life, you are not entitled to a position. You are either directed and/or called to a purpose, and you seek to learn how to live that purpose in the opportunities and other positions than may be available. But that doesn’t exempt you from being people who should be equipped and formed for ministry. You may be a gifted teacher, or you may be a wonderful empathizer and counselor, and you should seek to utilize those gifts, but positions span beyond narrow purposes and specific gifts. If you are gifted but unformed, you shouldn’t have a formal position, let me blunt. Or, if you are formed but you aren’t gifted for the positions, you should haven’t a formal position that would entail those gifts. But when we talk about “calling,” it is often time said with an implicit presumption that others should and are obligated to recognize this “calling” and give us what we expect, or the problems rests within them. The language of “calling” conceals a certain sense of prideful expectations, which can circumvent the pursuing of giftedness and using of these gifts along with being formed for the usage of them.

In other words, when we are not careful for how we use the language of “calling,” it can breed elitist attitudes by the clergy and divisions within the Church, while the clergy are distracted from their own motivations, and feelings of entitlement that circumvents the process of seeking giftedness and use them and being formed.

But in the end, remember this: even if you are genuinely called, you are not called to a position, you are called to a purpose. And if you are genuinely called, God will put you through the spiritual grinder. So, my words of hopeful wisdom born in experience is to say this: don’t seek or desire to be “called” to anything other than the life that is within Jesus Christ; answer the call to be part of God’s Kingdom. Do recognize the giftings and desires for ministry that God places and forms upon you and seek to put them into practice, but don’t overstate your claim or feel entitled to anything. Be faithful to the purposes of the leading, or even the calling if God has given you a specific calling, that God places upon you.

Life is about struggles. Sometimes, these struggles are outwards. Struggles between peoples, as people, groups, or even entire nations can fight for what they believe and even rationalize that they deserve. Social life is a struggle for the recognition of various status or persons that will the either legitimate or delegitimate their interests.

Sometimes, these struggles are inwards. As Freud observed, the neuroses of people are often times the conflict of different drives; while Freud didn’t accurately identify the nature of these drives, the struggle between them, along with the nature of the unconscious, were his seminal contributions to our psychological understanding. Life doesn’t provide us what we want. Sometimes what we deeply want doesn’t come, so we experience the conflicts between our experiences and our desires and dreams. Sometimes, we are ambivalent, simultaneously wanting opposites, neither satisfied with one or the other. At the core, there is the conflict between our own interests.

Nevertheless, whether we are talking about outward or inward conflicts, there remains the fundamental problem of struggle in human life. The story of Adam and Eve recollects this reality due to sin. Because of sin, God tells Eve she will have a desire to control her husband but he will control her. Because of sin, God tells Adam that his toil will not produce a harvest but rather thorns. Because of sin, the world is inhabited by those like Cain who murder their brother Abel. Fundamental to the problem of sin is the struggles and conflicts it places within human existence, but interpersonal conflicts and intrapersonal conflicts.

Now, throughout the Bible, the interpersonal conflicts are primarily highlighted. Occasionally, we get glimpses of the inner struggles such as in the lament Psalms where the psalmist is torn between the complaints about the person life and seeking and trustingly hoping in God’s future faithfulness. But it really isn’t until the New Testament where we begin to get more than just glimpses of the inward conflicts. The temptations of Christ are a presumptive story of Christ’s own inward conflicts, not just with the devil but his devotion to God while being famished. Then, as he is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, he feels the inner conflict of what he knows God is calling of him to go to the cross and the inner desire to not be subjected to this. Meanwhile, right before this, he sees his disciples have dozed off and he speaks of the experience of the struggle he himself has gone through and is going through, saying “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” This inner struggle gets taken up by the Apostle Paul in his explanation about the powerless of the Torah in Romans 7, recognizing that knowledge of what we should do doesn’t stop us from doing it but can actually make the struggle more acute and worse, giving greater power to the forbidden impulses.

Nevertheless, the New Testament does not speak of a world of a hyper self-consciousness that we have experienced in the modern, therapeuticized world. Whereas the New Testament is aware of inner worlds but places the focus on what God is doing in Christ and through the Spirit for the solution of human sin, our modern therapeuticized world is not only aware of the inner worlds but tries to solve the problems and tensions from within. We must find the resources from within ourselves to sort the conflicts out; we need to find contentment and acceptance, or we need to assert ourselves and change the world for our own sense of peace. Whatever the proposal is, the solution is to always look to something within the person to be the source of healing. But at the end of the day, much of what this therapy is doing is resolving the dissonance and conflicts by giving precedence to one sets of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors over another. Sometimes, all people need to do to overcome the inner conflicts is to just pick one side of the inner conflict and go with it, and then they will find their inner conflicts subsiding as they put this into practice.

Now, in making this observation, I am not condemning this practice. Indeed, sometimes we need to pick one side of the inner conflict over the other and learn to live with what comes from that way of life. Healing from within is in many instances a perfectly legitimate option much of the time. However, inner healing from within is not the nature of transformation in the Gospel. For the Apostle Paul, the work that is happening in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit is something that we do not see, have not heard of, nor can even imagine on our own capacity; instead, it is something that Paul can only call a new creation. While this transformative work includes our inner nature and being, the transformative work does not come from within but from without.

For Paul, transformation is the work of the Father through His two chosen instruments, His Son and His Holy Spirit. On the one, there is the story of Jesus Christ in his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and glorification/ascension. On the other hand, there is the powerful work of the Spirit who demonstrates power just as it was demonstrated in the cross, who provides revelation and discernment of wisdom that is embodied in Jesus as the Lord of Glory. Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit working in unison, with one providing a specific image of who God is and what His will looks like when embodied and the other providing further exemplification and understanding of what has happened in the other. In Christ we see the face of God’s glory, through the Spirit we come to understand what this glory is about. Jesus gives us a picture of holiness, and the Spirit gives us the right thoughts about this picture. Perception through narrative imagination and hermeneutical interpretation through inspiration. The transformative work of the Trinity is caused by the Father’s sending and directing, encompassing the entirety of human thought in being passive perceivers and active interpreters to cease to be conformed to this world by the renewal of our minds.

This sort of works comes from without, coming from outside of ourselves. It doesn’t come by selecting one side of our conflict or the other, forming us into the image of the side of the inner tension we select. Rather, the whole of ourselves are formed, all sides of the inner tensions we face become brought comprehensively in line with the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ through the transformation of the Spirit. Apart from worship, prayer, study,  attentive reflection upon, and faithfulness of the heart to God which directs us and attunes us to the one who does what does not come from within, there is no place we go within ourselves to find this healing or make it our own. We do not seek this type of healing for its own sake as that misdirects our attention away from God; we don’t find some power within us that we then put into action as this redirects our formation into the images that direct our own actions. Rather, we behold and come to comprehend God through the sending of His Son into the world and His Spirit into our hearts.

While there are times to pursue inner healing from within, sometimes the act of navel-gazing can only heighten the conflicts and leave us deeper in the problem, especially when the reality of life in is joys and heartbreaks, its peace and conflicts, its loves and hates resist finding any sort of peace and contentment from within. Picking one side only leads to the other side to fight harder, especially so far as our inner conflicts are connected to our outer conflicts where people refuse to align their interests to ours but can be threatened by our own efforts and resist. Navel-gazing in these contexts can only solidify us, harden us into our patterns, making us less flexible, less open, less receptive to the whole of life or others, causing the conflicts and tensions to heighten. Hence, healing must come from without, come from one who can do what we can’t see, hear, or imagine.

I am going to make a very general division between traditional and progressive Christians, which is no doubt painting with broad brushes but I do think there some truth to the designation. Traditional Christianity tends to be a more theological Christianity, with emphasis on doctrine, whereas Progressive Christianity tends to be a more prophetic Christian, with an emphasis on calling out moral injustices. This distinction isn’t absolute, as there was many, many progressives who have a love for theology and I am aware of traditional Christians who have a flair for the prophetic. Nevertheless, I would suggest the broad religious trends of traditional and progressive Christianity are related to how central they take the theological and the prophetic tasks.

I would suggest it is important to make a distinction between theology and prophecy. They are very different forms of discourse, with different purposes and tasks. Theology, on the one hand, is about the dissemination of a certain way of thinking and reasoning. Doctrines such as the Holy Trinity, atonement, etc. are propagated so that people can develop a certain way of thinking and acting, and sometimes even feeling. Hence, theology tends to be general and abstract in terms of communicative content. On the other hand, prophecy is about the targeted challenge to action within a specific social context and circumstances. Prophecy calls down the injustices of powers against the helpless and calls people forward to a new destination. Given the circumstantial nature of prophecy, the content of its communication is more specific and particular.

As a consequence of the different purposes and types of content theological and prophetic discourse have, they are not immediately “translatable” to each other. Biblical prophecy isn’t about handing down some knowledge about God but more so about pointing the directions one should or should not go; the discourse is largely contextualized to the circumstances in which prophecy is uttered. By contrast, Biblical doctrine speaks more about what is true in more a universal or general sense, such as the universal reality that Jesus is Lord of all creation or the general reality that the Spirit convicts and guides people. Prophetic and theological discourse at their core are making very different types of truth claims.

For instance, compare the prophetic utterance of Micah 6:8 with the Apostle’s Paul theological emphasis on faith. Do we come to God in faith as Paul suggests or do we come to God with our moral/ethical way of life? Micah 6:8 is a popular verse used to encourage people to a certain moral/ethical way of life that is popular in more prophetic/progressive expressions, whereas the Pauline justification by faith is routinely emphasized in more traditional Protestant expressions. There seems to be a tension between these two discourses.

However, I would suggest the tension is more a problem of how the prophetic discourse gets translated into a universal or general claim. Micah’s statement is said in the context of Israel that had a) largely forgotten the justice that was to given to the people but b) maintained the religious traditions including the sacrificial system with the presumption of God’s continued favor. In this context, Micah 6:6-8 is spoken as a way of calling people to, essentially, get their priorities straight, paying attention to how they lived among each other with and in their own attitudes in relation to God in humilty rather then presumption, rather than their focusing on the sacrificial system. Micah was speaking something that was targeted to the specific realities of the southern kingdom of Judah. While there may be other situations that such a type of discourse may be suitable, Micah is speaking in a targeted, specific fashion. He is not propounded a general theological, or even ethical theory, but he is provided a specific Divinely inspired called to action for this specific nation.

Is there much to learn from this? Yup. However, can we do theology from Micah? Only carefully, with a theological system already in place to integrate the insights. The prophets did not speak from a vacuum, but they addressed the religious practices that had their own theological traditions. The prophetic utterance was not so much a new teaching that was previously unknown, but a call to renewal what is claimed to be God’s original purposes and plans. This is why Micah says: “He had told you, O mortal, what is good.” This was the knowledge that the kingdom of Judah had already had, but they overlooked and lost it along the way. This knowledge was put into the context of its larger theological traditions.

My point is this: prophecy, on its own, makes poor theology. It is this that stands at the heart of much of my criticism of progressive theology. Much of what they say is needed to be heard to heed the people that have been forgotten and that teachings that have been overlooked and rationalized away. But Biblical prophecy doesn’t reject its traditions but renews and revitalizes them, calling to memory and bringing more attention to what is there and then to call others to act accordingly. Prophecy serves and renews theology rather than establishes it. When the prophetic becomes disengaged from the theological traditions, it becomes a ship without an anchor or rudder that gets pushed around by whatever societal wave and wind, but not necessarily the Divine wind of the Spirit.

I would not turn the statement around though. Theology doesn’t necessarily make poor prophecy. Certainly, true prophetic inspiration is from God, so in a sense, theological doctrine does not itself directly create such inspiration. But firstly, the prophetic inspiration uses the theological resources at hand; take a look at Revelation and its innumerable allusions to the Old Testament Scriptures and the religious theological traditions of 1st-century Jewish apocalypticism. Secondly, good theology finds a place prophetic discourse, such as the Apostle Paul engaging in a prophetic discourse against rampant, hypocritical judgmentalism in Romans 1:18-2:16 that sets ups his theological discourse on the nature of redemption in Christ and through the Spirit.

What can happen, however, is that theology loses its place for the prophetic, that it treats the only legitimate truth claims as being in the general, theological mold and due its generality, becomes distracted from all the specifics of the theological traditions and how they are to be rightly employed. But this isn’t the problem of theology, per se, but of the ever-present human tendencies to habituation that distracts our attention and focus on the legitimation of what is, blinding us to see the flaws with how things are. We might say the human reality of the flesh leads us to de-propheticize, or even more severely de-Spiritualize, our theology, but that is not the problem of theological discourse and knowledge itself. But the same theological traditions can be revitalized and made new.

The same is not true of prophetic discourse. Prophetic discourse is not itself to be revitalized. It may be recalled as an example, much as Martin Luther King Jr. found inspiration from the Biblical prophets for his own fight for racial justice. But the prophetic utterances themselves are not capable of providing a real, theological foundation; they are calls back to the foundations instead. The prophetic utterances without the theological foundations will be re-contexutalized to whatever concerns are in the present circumstance. Without careful awareness and consciousness of this, this process of recontextualization may overlook the premise that what God would speak to this different circumstances may be dramatically different from the previous circumstances. Even if things on the surface look similar in the presence of idolatry and/or injustice, the hearts of people in different circumstances may be dramatically different, even if they share in common some very broad sense of idolatry and injustice. God who sees the hearts of people will speak as He will for the purposes He has for those people, and this may be dramatically different for what may seem to be similar situations on the surface. Prophetic discourse is thus not something we as humans should readily generalize in an authoritative, overarching manner; nor does it provide a direct legitimation for our own prophetic action. Rather, it is something that can instruct us as it is integrated within a larger theological framework and tradition.

Prophetic discourse is deeply specific to the circumstances that present a need for a challenge and call. This is important, but for this very reason, prophecy makes poor theology. Similarily, this is why I would say much of the spirit the motivates, inspires, and directs progressive Christianity runs into deep problems: strident calls for justice and progress are needed, but they do not really provide a clear, coherent, reliable foundations for what should be; when they try to provide such theological framework, it ends up looking very different from the historic Christian faith, leading me to ask the question “Was the Church basically treading on the edge of apostasy the whole time due to their great ignorance about the truth of God? Or is it those who would act in a prophetic manner that have forgotten their role and purpose?”

Jesus taught us to love. Most everyone in the Christianized West ‘knows’ this. This is seemingly so obvious that it has approached the level of a cliche. The nature of cliches are such that what is understood by cliches are so trite and minimal that we can use the cliche in variety of ways to get it to say whatever we want to. Offhand, I can think of a few ways Jesus’s “call to love” is used: to justify specific social and/or political arrangements, to shield people from judgment, to baptize romantic and sexual relationships and leave them with a shiny veneer of spirituality, as a moral exhortation people to overlook dividing issues so we can all just get along, as a reductive ethical outlook that eschews any rules and can best be expressed by the lyrics of “All You Need is Love” in the Beatles’ popular song. Really, “Jesus calls us to love” was a meme where we can insert anything into it before the meme culture of the internet existed. As with all memes and cliches, everyone knows them but they increasingly lose their original meaning. Memes and cliches are used to mean whatever you want them to mean.

As a consequence, when we approach the passages in the Synoptic Gospels that talk about the most important commandment, such as Matthew 22:35-40, we tend to overlook the specifics of the words. We glaze over the words, as if we really know what is truly being said. But let’s note a few observations about that passage that challenges our meme-hermeneutical practice.

The love of God and the love of neighbor are different – Jesus didn’t say “love everyone, God and people.” He quoted two Torah passages and connected them by saying the second commandment was like the first. There is a similarity between the two commandments, but Jesus didn’t summarize the two commandments as “love” as if you can simply insert God or people after the word “love” Rather, he connected these two commandments, with their specifics together, which leads me to my next point.

The nature of these two loves are specified – Jesus didn’t say “love,” but this quotations from the Torah expressed the specific shape and nature of these loves. The love of God was something that was all-encompassing of the person, impacting the various zone of their life. The love of neighbor is said to be “as yourself,” which in its original context in Leviticus 19:17-18 isn’t about “love yourself so that you can love others” or even “treat them as would treat yourself”¹ but rather in recognizing that we are connected to our neighbor, so we should reprove neighbors for wrongs done, giving them a chance to address problems, rather than hate them and act with vengeance; what happens to them also impacts us. In other words, the love of God is rooted in being all-encompassing of our life and the love of neighbor was rooted in recognizing and maintaining our connectedness.
So, if your love for God is a mild appreciation that leads you into occasional forays of spiritual or religious practices that are easy and convenient for you and your lifestyle, you aren’t following the first commandment. If your love for another is selective that instead of speaking truth to them you would seek to hurt them, you are failing that commandment, so a culture that fears being “judgmental” and thus never speaks up for fear of unsettling other people’s feelings are not actually following the Torah commandment to love that Jesus references.
I don’t express these two potential ways of failure to be condemning and shaming if what I said is true of you, but only to point out that you have yet to really reach the type of loves that Jesus calls for.

Love is not all you need – Jesus was not answering the question “What do we need to to be a moral person?” Jesus was answering the question “Which commandment in the Torah is the greatest?” The question is not about setting out the boundaries and limits of all ethics. Nor is the question about defining exhaustive ethical and moral knowledge. It is specific to what, of the many commandments of the Torah has the highest place and prominence. The question assumes all the commandments should be followed, not just the most important ones, and Jesus doesn’t reject this assumption but his statement “On these two commandments hang all the Torah and the prophets” presumes the rest of the commandments should also be following, but that they derive their force and application from the two greatest commandments.

Love is not about ethics – The topic was about commandments. While we in the West with the diffusion of governmental power and regulation into our personal lives and the increasing awareness of our obligations to society, we are inclined to see prescriptive pronouncements as being about right and wrong in some moral or ethical framework. But that isn’t what is happening here. The commandments were personal. God gave Israel specific things to do not because He was pronouncing an ethical theory, but because they were His people. Thus, the commandments impact the nature of the relationship of God to the people of Israel, and more broadly even of all people. Hence, the most important commandment is the love of God, because all the other commandments, even the love of neighbor, derive their raison d’etre from this central relationship. So, there is no ethical theory being proposed here, but a prescriptive framework for a relationship with God and then with other people.

Now, there is no reason to expect the average reader, or event an expert reader, of the Bible to pick up all of these various nuances and particularities. When I first read these passages, I didn’t pick up on all them. In fact, a couple of these observations I made myself as I was studying and reflecting in writing this blog post. These are not things you will just automatically know.

But, the problem is how our reading of the Bible is meme-ified. This tendency has only been amplified in our modern, internet culture, but it has been a trajectory long in the making. When preachers preach on Biblical passages to give people some basic moral or idea, we were reinforcing meme hermeneutics for a long time before memes as we know them now became a thing.

At the core of the problem is this deep, underlying assumption: the Scriptures are meant to convey specific ideas to me that come from decoding the passages rightly. Therefore, once we get the right ideas, the Scriptures function more like a rule-book that we used to justify and legitimate these ideas against oppositional claims, but it is the knowledge and ideas that we derive that are actually the most important thing. Then, having obtaining mastery of the ideas, the actually words of the Scriptures becomes a husk. Let’s call this a spiritual gnosticism.

This pattern even effects those of us who do try to dig deeper. Whenever we dig deeper and we discover new ideas and meaning that we had not previously unearthed, we can be inclined to say “The Bible is always teaching us and giving us more and more.” This is often said with a hint of Spirituality behind it, as if the Holy Spirit has locked all these different ideas and meanings into the text for us to then discover. But, what is happening here isn’t that all these different ideas are encoded into the text for us to extrapolate, but rather that our reading hasn’t been as entailed and specific. It is more analogous to how we overlook where we put our keys when we are ready to go because we weren’t paying attention in the first place.

Overlooking the nuances of Biblical passages is going to happen to all of us, because we do not have the capacity to pay attention to everything all the time. Our minds make conscious and unconscious decisions about what words and meanings we will pay attention to in our readings, so we will overlook the significance of other words and meanings. But when we think the significance of the Bible is as a vehicle to convey abstracted ideas and meanings, we only deepen this tendency because we are subconsciously primed to think “aha, here is a new idea. I have understood” and therefore short-circuit further attention because we have gotten what we needed.

Furthermore, the way we direct our attention in our reading will be directed towards the ideas and meanings we already find significant and important. Angry about some form of political injustice? Well, you can read Jesus’ words about love as a justification for your political proposals. Tired of feeling looked down upon for how you treat others? Go to Jesus words about not judging others. Frustrated that people don’t think like you do on some important topic? Find that passage that you use to support your doctrinal view. But we won’t necessarily try to read deeper to see if these passages really are addressing the ideas and meanings we have, but we assume that they are vehicles of these specific ideas.

To get philosophical for a minute, this isn’t an issue of saying there is no meaning in the text in the first place. While I am influenced by post-modernity in the sense that I don’t think texts in and of themselves have meanings but that we assign meanings, I do think texts are products of causal-forces (including the witnessing of specific events and the inspiration of God when it comes to the Scriptures) which we should seek to reconstruct ourselves through interpretation so that we can understand those causal-forces for ourselves. But when I derive some meaning, it doesn’t mean I have exhausted the text, but that I am on the way towards reconstruction. And, if I believe the Scriptures are, in some manner, inspired by God and if I seek to love God with all that I am, I should seek to go deeper and with greater specificity so that through my interpretation, I am coming to a deeper understanding that can align my heart and mind to God more and more. While specific meanings and ideas are useful ways that my thinking, feelings, and actions are formed and directed by this act of reconstructive interpretation, the Scriptures are for me sought as a way to attune myself to the heart and will of God in a deeper fashion through various, multitudinous ways. If we think a specific set of abstract ideas and meanings we derive from reading is all we need, if we simply employ these abstract ideas and meanings for the concerns that we have, we short-circuit the process of deepening, more pervasive understanding that impacts the whole of who we are.

So, I would make an appeal from the greatest commandment to our hermeneutical style: if you want to love God with your whole person and being, don’t read the Bible simply to get useful ideas, meanings, doctrines, laws, etc. Those may emerge, but don’t stop there; and challenge what ideas, meanings, doctrines, and laws you derive in your mind by going deeper into those specific passages and wider by looking deeply at other passages to see if they are truly warranted. Otherwise, a meme-ified hermeneutic will short-circuit the work that a deeper reading will have in an all-encompassing love of God. Stop being spiritual gnostics and instead move towards having a deepening faith, hope, and love directed towards the God who makes Himself known through Jesus and His Holy Spirit.

Chuck DeGroat wrote an incredibly insightful post a couple weeks about the nature of the American Church and the structures of narcissism and its narcissistic leaders. Prayerfully and hopefully, he longs for a dying-and-rising of the American Church, as do I and a host of other people. In trying to find hope for the future, he provided a set of suggestions for doing some soul-searching and discovering the problems within individual churches and organizations. His 5 suggestions can be categorized under two umbrellas: 1) pay attention to yourself and your church and 2) seek out specific resources and knowledge. These suggestions are very important, and I believe they would be of great value for rectifying the symptoms and illness that has infiltrating the way of life of churches.

But, I would suggest the American Church as a whole needs go even further, to do a deeper analysis of the deeper powers that pervade and contributed to the formation of colonies of spiritual narcissism in the Church in America. While the gates of hell shall never prevail against the Body of Christ, that doesn’t mean we are invulnerable to illness that must be treated. It would have been better off if the Church had the wisdom and insight to avoid the dark direction things took, but because we didn’t, prophetic judgment had to be leveled against us so that God could remove what was ailing the Church. But knowing now that things weren’t healthy, knowing that the Church in America had habits that furthered the spiritual darkness rather than reflecting the light of Christ, it will be fruitful for the future for theological and spiritual reflection to grapple with the more subtle and pervasive forces, currents, and trajectories that infected the Church.

It can be tempting to blame narcissistic people, to blame narcissistic leaders, to blame narcissistic governing structures and think the solution is had by getting rid of this enemy of “narcissism.” While those persons whose narcissism contributed to the injustice and harm should be brought to accountability, if all we do is simply punish individual people and try to remove them, we are essentially scape-goating, leaving ourselves vulnerable for the problem to reemerge, because evil can be cunning and shrewd and rear its ugly head in new ways that would evade detection based upon the past patterns. In the ned, I would suggest that the problem didn’t occur because narcissistic people had the intentions to abuse the Church, but rather the Church has participated in the forces, currents, and trajectories that formed narcissism within us, while also making us vulnerable to it. The problem runs deeper. As the Apostle Paul says, “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12; NRSV)

However, the way this truth of a spiritual war manifests itself in Paul’s letters isn’t some analysis of the devil and their wily ways; Paul is not a demon hunter, although certainly, Paul believes in demonic powers. But if we take Paul’s letter to the Romans as a containing a veiled form of criticism of the culture of the Roman Empire by emphasizing the cosmological and anthropological causes of sins that emanates from the flesh and leads to the dominion of sin and death (Romans 5:21) rather than directly expressing a criticism of the culture and political powers itself, wisdom will comes from recognizing 1) the universal reality of our flesh and how it contributes to sin and death and 2) how this universal reality gets particularized within specific cultural and political values and desires. But, to be clear, this isn’t a systemic analysis that simply tries to figure out how bad results occur that is common within a leftist critique of Western society with concepts such as white privilege or patriarchy; as much as these analyses may bear some truth in the end that we need to hear, these forms of analysis largely amounts to a sophisticated analysis of actions that looks at the behavioral aggregate but fails to truly take into account deeper human nature from which these injustices emerge. Rather, what I suggest that Paul engages in is closer to a meta-systemic analysis of the human heart and how hearts are molded by the practices and customs of the cultural and political worlds in which we inhabit. Our practices form what we love, determining what we become. As James K.A. Smith says in Desiring the Kingdom:

We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends. So we are not primarily homo rationale or homo faber or homo economicus; we are not even generically homo religiosis. We are more concretely homo liturgicus; humans are those animals that are religious animals not because we are primarily believing animals but because we are liturgical animals—embodied, practicing creatures whose love/desire is aimed at something ultimate.¹

To put this all a bit more concretely, as I spoke above from a much more analytic and intellectual perspective to provide warrant for my conclusions, we need to learn to see clearly how it is that the people and practices have changed us as persons in the Church, often times for the worse, so as to avoid letting these loves of self, which is at the core of narcissism, and other types of loves that take primacy in the the Church so that it blocks our hearts from coming to and rightly knowing God as He is making Himself known in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the question: “How did the American Church get so narcissistic?” But I will provide a few considerations I have from my own experiences and studies that can be weighed for their suitability as potentially insightful explanations. But one word of caution: sounding plausible does not mean it is true. This answers we accept should not come from things that sound plausible upon a first hearing, but as the Church in the apostolic era had to weigh and discern the prophetic utterances for their validity and true meaning, we should not just accept explanations at face value.

1. America has been trending towards narcissism – Firstly, it is important to take stock that the problem of narcissism is not simply a problem in the Church of America. This should be obvious, but it needs to be clearly stated as the secular, post-Christendom society will be inclined to treat the narcissism in the Church has of an entirely different problem than the narcissism in the wider society. America has a strong predilection towards narcissism, but the reason for this isn’t that we teach people to be narcissistic: there have been many efforts to try to get people to be nice to each other. But at the core of the narcissism isn’t a direct pedagogy, but a subtle one: we have trained people to have huge expectations about themselves and their futures.
   
   At the core of narcissism is self-grandiosity, believing that one’s future should be wonderful and amazing. Insofar as we have encouraged people day-after-day to dream and dream big, and do this repeatedly again and again and again, the more we are encouraging a self-absorption of big, huge expectations. It isn’t that imagination is the problem, but it is an undisciplined imagination that can not bear the truths of reality that stands at the heart of narcissism. As our larger expectations are not matched by reality, we are forced into a stark experience of cognitive dissonance that challenges us. In these instances of strong emotional alarm from such stark, painful dissonance, it is rare for our expectations and dreams to shift to something more realistic: instead, we are prone to either to let go of our dreams entirely and go into a deep, dark phase of depression and anxiety or we are left to rationalize why we can and/or should have what we dreamed and expected. The more we go down the route of rationalization, the more we move down the route of narcissism.
   
   One contributing factor to engaging in such rationalization is the cult of self-esteem, that tries to get people to feel better about themselves when life doesn’t go as they wish. While trying to treat the self-esteem of the abused is a good thing as they need to resist the lies and distortions that have brought them down, when self-esteem is used to treat simply the pain of broken expectations and dreams, it doesn’t fight the lies but it encourages the rationalization that encourages narcissism.
   
   So, the more the Church engages in the larger societal practices of undisciplined imagining of one’s future and indiscriminate boosting of self-esteem, we, like the rest of society, can encourage the creation of cocoons of rationalization that fertilize the seeds of narcissism (apologies for the mixed metaphor).
   
   However, we should not blame everything on the wider society, as if the Church has simply been hapless victims of the larger societal trends. Firstly, we have been rather undiscriminating about the practices of society, focusing on getting good, immediate results to get people to do things for Jesus through our methods rather than taking the long-road of building the spiritual infrastructure for holiness. Secondly, there are some aspects of the Christian way of life which, when blended with the cultural narcissism, can have an effect of amplifying narcissism. The Church has its own unique problems with narcissism. However, as we see the causes narcissism that are more unique to our practices, we do need to remember to heed the call of Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (NRSC)
   
   
2. Church decline in America has lead losing trust in God and a panic that has us looking for heroes – The Church in America has been in decline in the past few decades. However, to be clear, the decline isn’t simply a numerical decline of attendance. Rather, the decline is the increasing marginalization of Christian discourse in public that means people are less inclined to attend and are less inclined to give credibility to Christian speech. Going to church has ceased to be a practice of status, which has led to denominations and churches, such as my own United Methodist Church, to struggle with diminishing attendance and membership numbers along with declining financial situations. In addition, the looming fear of the lack of governmental protections for Christian speech and life has also contributed to a fear, which isn’t entirely out of line as various social and political groups do have an antagonism towards the Church (the reasons behind this are complex and should not be stereotyped). Such a spiritual and religious reality has sparked anxieties about the future of the Church, causing believing that the Church may no longer exist in the future, which betrays a lack of faith in the power, love, and purposes of God. Trust in God declines, failing to see how the current social reality may be a refining, exiling judgment of the Church to cast out the dross so that we can rediscover the faith and glory of Jesus Christ.
   
   In this gap of faith, we are increasingly prone to look towards leaders who we believe can provide us the readily implementable solutions that will fix our decline. We look for supposed experts on Church growth, systems, and leaders. Consequently, some people stumble upon something that has worked in some situations, and then praise and resources are heaped upon them by others, providing these views of themselves with views of themselves that can become increasingly grandiose, even as they didn’t start there. Then, some people bluff their way through smoke and mirrors to obtain the prestige and status that comes with being considered a leader and hero. Whether it starts off genuinely or manipulatively, the spiritual and religious anxiety of Christians in America creates the practices of glorifying cultural heroes and making us vulnerable to sophisticated charlatans, and leaders with every combination of this two principles, causing narcissism to litter the landscape of our leadership.
   
   
3. Narcissism can look like spiritual discernment when there is a lack of appreciation of rules – As the Church has increasingly believed in the insufficiency of laws and rules to regulate Church life and leadership, for both good and bad reasons, with both good and bad results, it leaves us more inclined to consider goodness and wisdom to be more circumstantial. Indeed, life can not be fit into nice, easy boxes and it entails wisdom and insight that can shift based upon situations and circumstances. But, the gift of discerning insight and the arbitrariness of narcissistic thinking can look similar on the surface of things. Narcissistic thinking, just as true discernment, can be bound and determined by the immediate circumstances, but with narcissism, the circumstances are consciously and unconsciously assessed in terms of how to benefit and glorify oneself. Consequently, they can spout apparent wisdom that looks like discernment when they may in fact be confabulating and/or manipulating what might sound plausible to other people (and even themselves) for their own benefit. But since we do not have direct access to the minds of the discerning and the narcissistic, they can look remarkably similar on the surface, with both seeming to bear some semblance of remarkable expertise, plausible understanding, and spiritual insight.²
   
   Therefore, insofar as we in the Church has indiscriminately eschewed thinking in terms of rules, we have made ourselves more susceptible to narcissistic style leadership that manipulates our understanding of situations and circumstances for their own benefit. While rules will not stop narcissism when narcissism is empowered, appreciation of rules, even as we qualify and see the limit of their values, can give us a potential hermeneutical insight to identify narcissistic leadership, as narcissism will seek to undermine the rules that limit them whereas spiritual discernment can recognize and appreciate the rules even while still seeing the sometimes darker reality that they can possess. Without an appreciation for rules and principles, the difference between prophetic discernment and sheep’s clothing can be hard to discern.

I provide these three explanations not to be all-encompassing, but to highlight the potential way our practices rooted in our hearts form who and what we love in such a way that allows narcissism to emerge. To that end, this is more an attempt to provide rudimentary examples of a meta-systemic analysis of the human heart as it pertains the narcissism in the American Church than it is to give final answers. 

In Barth’s cry out against the trends of Christian theology, he makes a radical move from within the Reformed tradition to rule out any human capacity for receiving God’s Word. He rules out any human capacity in at least two way. Firstly, he rules out any moving within the person toward’s God’s Word, saying, “God’s Word is no longer grace, and grace itself is no longer grace, if we ascribe to man a predisposition towards this Word, a possibility of knowledge regarding it that is intrinsically and independently native to him.”¹ But going beyond just rejecting a disposition towards God’s truth, he goes furthers to say:

To be sure, it is not these formulae which describe the real content of the Word which God Himself speaks and which He does so always as these formulae indicate, the real content of the real Word of God, that tells man also that they can be no questin of any ability to hear or understand or know on his part, of any capability that he the creature, the sinner, the one who waits, has to bring to this Word, but that the possibility of knowledge corresponding to the real Word of God has come to him, that it represents and inconceivable novum compared to all is ability and capacity, and that it is to be understood as a pure fact, in exactly the same way as the real Word of god itself.²

Barth goes on to ground this assertion in an exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2:6-16, suggesting that the ψυχικὸς ἄνθρωπος (“soulish/natural man”) cannot access the thoughts of the πνεῦμα (“Spirit”). God’s wisdom is not something that has been seen, heard, or thought about in the heart. Thus, humanity has nothing within themselves that can allow them to accept and receive God’s self-disclosure, so it all comes purely from God himself.

But there is an inconsistency between Barth’s principle anthropology concern about human capacity and Paul’s discourse. Paul is talking about the specific content of ideas and thoughts and the incomprehensibility these ideas apart from God’s own disclosure.³ Paul’s focus is more phenomenological, focusing on the specific contents and the way they are received, whereas Barth’s focus is on the ability to even come to these ideas. Thus, there are two different theories of not receiving God’s disclosure: incomprehensibility vs. incapacity.

Let me demonstrate the difference via an analogy. When I was in my first semester of college I was in engineering and I was required to take calculus. So I step into Calculus I with a bit of confidence; I was always a natural of math. I never did spend a lot of time trying to refine my mathematical skill, but I was said to have by a college algebra teacher during my senior year of HS (which I took simply to refresh my algebra when I went to college the next year) that “he has a natural math mind.” So, walking into calculus, I thought I could get it. I had a natural predisposition to such knowledge.

But then reality hit, but only slowly. My first exam I made 80. Not great, but not bad. But then as the semester progressed, my grades became progressively worse, moving towards 50 and then 20. Before my final exam, I had an average hovering in the 50s, a clear, without a doubt, failing grade. I had never failed anything in my life. Desperate not to fail, my mother arranged for me to get some tutoring from a brilliant math whiz. He sat with me and taught me the basics of calculus, starting all the way back from the beginning. The problem that had occurred was that I never really grasped the fundamentals early in the class. I could master the algorithmic process of the early parts of calculus enough to get a decent, B grade in it, but I didn’t really, truly understand what it was all about. I could get the results, but I didn’t actually comprehend what I was doing.

After the tutoring I received, I was prepared to take the final exam. While I never found out what my final grade was, it was apparently a good enough quality that my final grade ended up being a D instead of an F. A D-grade was somewhere between 60-70. I had to still retake Calculus I because you had to make at least a C to advance to  Calculus II, but when I then took it again, I made an A. I had obtained a comprehension of Calculus I that I previously didn’t have, even despite my capacity and ability to do it.

What was the block for my comprehension? You could say multiple things. I always struggle with ADHD, so maybe it wasn’t that I was paying close enough attention. Maybe it was my overconfidence that made me think I didn’t really have to focus, until the reality of the grades hit me. Maybe it was being my first time away from home and my parents and dealing with the emotional transitions that come with that. Maybe it was the depression I was struggling with. There are many explanations one might provide, but there was sufficient grounds that block me from comprehending Calculus I, even if I had the capacity to do such. But once a person took me along, suddenly I was introduced into a whole new world of math that I was previously unfamiliar with.⁴

Contrast this with trying to train a primate in calculus. For them, it isn’t a matter of a block that prevents them from comprehension. They do not have the prerequisite neural “machinery” in place that can allow them to make the necessary abstractions to comprehend calculus, much less lesser forms of mathematics such as algebra. For them, there is an absolute incapacity to comprehend calculus, much less even reproduce the right algorithm to get the right answers.

Barth’s anthropological view is analogous to the ape’s inability to do calculus. Nothing exists in the person to make them able to comprehend God. Just as some evolutionary force would be necessary for the species of ape to even begin to comprehend calculus, but the apes have no control over this, God must also do something to a person for them to be able to receive God’s disclosure. Thus, in Barth’s eyes, the image of God has been entirely defaced and destroyed in the Fall, which one sees if one reads his response to Brunner’s “Nature and Grace.”

Undergirding this view of the block of reception of grace is the notion of power, implicit within the notion of capacity. The Reformed tradition built its theological framework based upon the premise of God’s unilateral power to act. God has all power, and thus humanity has none of this power.

But what if the New Testament concern isn’t, strictly speaking, about divine power and the lack thereof, but of the nature of love. The language of grace isn’t a focus on God’s power, although it certainly presumes the superiority of God over humanity, but is focused upon God’s benevolence towards humanity. To construe grace in terms of a zero-sum view of power, where for humans to have power means it takes away power from God is to miss the entire point of Paul’s language. Yes, God is powerful. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to reveals what the nature of this power is in the crucified Christ. God’s power manifests and comes to realization even in the Son’s powerlessness, which is the thrust of 1 Corinthians 1. Meanwhile, the thrust of Romans 5 is to define the nature of this power has love as its core. Grace highlights the nature of God’s benevolence towards humanity as one who has the upper hand, but it is not some specific statement or definition of God’s power in relation to human-power.

So, if love is at the core of God’s grace manifested in Jesus Christ and the Spirit, then perhaps what blocks the reception of God’s self-disclosure may be understood in relational terms, rather than capacity and power. Rather than knowledge of God being blocked because of human incapacity that God must create in the person, the knowledge of God is blocked primarily because we on a personal level are blocked from receiving this divine self-disclosure.

In short, what we love determines what we will receive, and that which threatens what we love we do not receive, but we push away. When there is someone we are angry at or scared of because they threaten our sense of survival and well-being, or even hate, we are not inclined to truly comprehend that person. We avoid them, characterize them as threatening, dangerous, evil, etc. and thus we justify not coming to understand them as a person in any way beyond how we construe them in threatening terms. Perhaps our perceptions of this person are correct. But what if these perceptions are not correct and true? Then, in our ignorance, we block true knowledge of who this person is. Because we perceive this person as a threat to our interests, we close off comprehension of who this person really is. We are capable at a cognitive level of coming to grasp who this person really and truly is, but our hearts prevent us from doing such.

I use this only as a demonstration of a deeper principle, and not as the all-encompassing explanation of why we do not receive God’s self-disclosure. At the heart of the human heart is a resistance to contradiction and dissonance with who and what we value, and so we push away anything that threatens what is laid within our hearts, whether it be done through controlling, violence, denial, ignoring, etc. Then, in this act of pushing away, our understanding of who or what threatens what we value is controlled and framed by our own self-interest.

To be sure, Paul’s explanation would go a bit deeper than this. There is also the reality that we can not known what is not presented to us. If we love someone, we can’t know about them simply because we love them, but because they present themselves to us. Love motivates understanding, making comprehension possible, but love is not sufficient for knowledge. Hence, the Spirit must reveal God’s thoughts, because they are not something we can grasp for ourselves, there is nothing that humanity has seen, heard, or imagine in their heart that matches what God has in store for those who love Him.

But, the human capacity to block reception of God’s self-disclosure does explain the failure of persons to receive what God does make known of himself through Jesus and His Spirit. This is Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 3: Paul cannot teach the wisdom of God to the Corinthians because their love for individual teachers and human wisdom rather outweighs their faith in and, ultimately, their love towards God. Their nature as people oriented towards the flesh makes them think in such a way that blocks the ability to comprehend God’s wisdom, causing them to fight within the community of faith.

For Paul, it is a matter of who and what one trusts and loves that determines whether one can receive the wisdom of God. It isn’t a matter of capacity and power, as much as it about love. Sure, there is importance that one can only know what God makes known, but Paul assumes that God’s will is for the people to know God and thus makes this knowledge possible. Rather, the problem rests in human hearts that resist reception of God’s disclosure.

Herein is where the Wesleyan tradition’s emphasis on the synergism of God’s work and human response is better able to pick up the nuance of Paul’s discourse over the Reformed tradition’s tendency towards unilateral monergism that tends to present the relationship of God and humanity in a zero-sum game of power. Wesleyan synergism accepts that God’s power is a necessary part of the process of the divine self-disclosure, but what is more immediately relevant to the God-human relation is the mutual reciprocity of love that allows for knowledge to flourish. Where the human response of faith and love towards God is hindered by the flesh, there exists what blocks the reception of God’s self-disclosure. This sets up the absolute grace of God, whose makes the nature of His own love known in such a powerful yet counter-intuitive way as to break the hardness and resistance that is set up within our hearts; it is not merely that God makes our reception of God possible, as both the Reformed notion of regenerating grace and the Wesleyan notion of prevenient grace affirms, but that God’s demonstration of love makes the drawing out of our love for Him possible.

So, I end with this basic conclusion: God’s grace is about the way this superior being makes His love known. The appropriate emphasis is on the benevolence of God, not the power of God. So, insofar as the Reformed tradition, and Barth through the Reformed tradition, accentuates the power of grace as the main thing rather than the love that grace describes, there will be an overemphasis on power and capacity that can mask the importance of love and its role in the reception of knowledge. Grace breaks down the motivated ignorance we may have, not just simply any sense of incapacity that blocks our knowledge of God.

Having gone through a full year in the Logos Institute of Analytic and Exegetical Theology, I am left in a period of reflection on the value of the analytic style into theology and even Biblical Studies. While a specific definition of the analytic style or even analytic theology is something that can be debated, Michael Rea gives a good summation of what the analytic style entails, coming from one of the first readings we had in the program:

P1. Write as if philosophical positions and conclusions can be adequately formulated in sentences that can be formalized and logically manipulated.’
P2. Prioritize precision, clarity, and logical coherence.
P3. Avoid substantive (non-decorative) use of metaphor and other tropes whose semantic content outstrips their propositional content.’
P4. Work as much as possible with well-understood primitive concepts, and concepts that can be analyzed in terms of those.
P5. Treat conceptual analysis (insofar as it is possible) as a source of evidence. ¹

This expressed so much of what analytic theology is in its style. But upon first becoming familiarized with it, it felt like a daunting task. It felt like to me that we were trying to tread into the domain of intellectual wizard, who had mastered magical skills of analysis that we could never wield. However, as we hurried our way through what felt like a never-ending stream of papers our first semester, somewhere along the way I, and I would say even we, began to get into the spirit of what the analytic style is about. But having developed a working capacity in it, though far from mastery, the question still looms at me: why is this needed? If I were to talk to someone who was skeptical of analytic philosophy, on what grounds could I try to persuade them to see the value of analytic style?

If may proffer a possibility, it is rooted in the nature of how language works. This echoes the analytic turn to language in Wittgenstein, but my suggestion is no mere attempt to reproduce the early Wittgenstein’s skepticism of philosophy as simply a problem of definitions or late Wittenstein’s turn to normal language, though it echoes many of these sentiments. In fact, the value of language may actually be a positive response to deconstruction in Jacques Derrida, who thought the meanings of language being unstable with no fixed point or concept by which we can then understand everything else; context always makes meanings transient and elusive to finally pinning down.

Much criticism against Derrida can be offered, and I would suggest Derrida’s view of language while being important didn’t adequately express the nature of all language. Rather, his view of language was much more useful to a certain class of words: abstract words.

Essentially, abstractions are concepts that lack ostensive representation: I can not point anywhere to show you specifically what love, justice, peace, etc. is. I could point to a couple kissing on the bench at the beach and I could call it “love” but I am not referring to the specific shows of affection. I could talk about a person who has been abused and ignored being acknowledged and recognized and call it “justice,” but what I mean by justice isn’t in the specific acts of acknowledgement.

Because of this, I don’t learn about abstract concepts purely by observation of the world as I would learn about concrete things such as apples, tables, bodies, etc. Instead, I primarily learn about abstract concepts through other language; I learn what justice is by the ways the word justice is describe by the usage of other words,. For instance, someone might say, “justice is giving people what they deserve.” Then, I might hear of scenarios in the news of people “getting what they deserved,” but I only able to understand these news events as justice because the concept of justice has been bequeathed to me through the other words used with “justice.” Abstract language emerges from seedbed of language itself; concrete words are the roots that give birth to the trunk, branches, stems, and leaves of abstraction.

But this leaves abstract concepts being very fluid, because I could define justice different than you define justice because justice was paired with different words in my life. Consequently, I may define justice more so in terms of proper relationships of people towards each other rather than in terms of merit and demerit; indeed, I think this is the difference between Biblical views of justice/righteousness and Western visions of justice. But it isn’t even that different people have different definitions of abstract terms; it is that the same people may use abstract terminology in different senses. I could see a community at peace with one another as “justice” and a trial handing a verdict of guilty towards a murderer as “justice,” but I may be using the two terms in very different senses. Scientific studies have actually shown that abstract words are used in very different linguistic contexts (“justice” used as part of discourse describing the courtroom and as describing a community) and also get used with a diversity of different senses (“justice” as merit and as right relations).²

So, what determines with what sense I use abstract words, if I am communicating, or understand abstract words, if I am interpreting, largely depends on the context in which the usage occurs; context impacts what sense I will understand an abstract word by. But one who communicates and one who interprets may be impacted by the same context in a different manner, so even the same immediate linguistic and non-linguistic contexts will not fully fix with what sense an abstract term, like justice, is used and understood by different people. People themselves are contexts, whose experiences of the usage of abstract words different because of their own personality, their family upbringing, their culture, the events of their lives, etc. Hence, the practice of finally and ultimately pinning down the meaning of abstract words is highly prone towards obfuscation.

What the analytic style does is to essentially counter this tendency by, in a sense, re-concretizing language. But to clarify what I mean by that, I don’t mean getting rid of abstracts; anyone who reads analytic philosophy or analytic theology knows it is filled with abstracts. Our current society will not be able to operate without the power of abstractions to manipulate and interpret non-sensory information, so there is no going back from this apart from an occurence of a modern dark age. Nor does re-concretizing mean to reify words by treating an abstract concept as concretely real. Nor is re-concretizing trying to get all abstract words to mean the same thing. Rather, by re-concretizing it is to pin down the meaning of abstract words for this specific context and to be clear about that. This is the spirit of the positivism that analytic philosophy emerged from in trying to emerge from empirical reality, but without the metaphysical and epistemic baggage that positivism brought with it.

The analytic style, then, re-concretizes language such that Derrida’s view of the instability is language is no longer as valid. While even concrete words can be used with subtly different shades and senses based upon context, the divergence between different linguistic senses isn’t as dramatic for concrete words as it is abstract words. Thus, communication between parties is more effective in more concrete discourse than it is in abstract discourse. Furthermore, within ourselves as persons, by defining our meaning more, we can have a clearer sense of what it is we are thinking about, clarifying the muddle that often times arises with the usage of abstract concepts. The analytic style bears great cognitive and communicative value for both intrapersonal and interpersonal processes.

But more specific to theology and Biblical Studies, the analytic style helps us to understand the object of our faith, God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. When Karl Barth’s criticism of much of the edifice of Western Christian theology in both Protestantism and Catholicism sounded, it presented the seminal forms of a new paradigm for theology and even Biblical Studies. Barth wanted dogmatic theology to be much more radically concrete and particular to God Himself as made known in Jesus Christ; theology wasn’t a set of abstract ideas but theology was the knowledge that comes to us from the revelation of Jesus Christ and this knowledge was of the person of Christ and not knowledge about something else. While there are many grounds to critique Barth, the spirit of Barth’s theology, as Karl Hunsinger as helpfully summarized in How to Read Karl Barth, makes theology focuses on what is and what happens when God discloses Himself and acts, rather than on trying to build a theology upon abstract concepts we use to interpret what is and what happens when God discloses Himself and acts. Barth’s theology, in my mind at least, is the move towards re-concretization. While all paradigmatic transitions are messy, hence there are many problems in aligning Barth’s theology with the Biblical witnesses, they provide a sign post for a new way of doing things. Hence, the analytic style is deeply conducive to the process of re-concretization that Barth’s theology is pointing towards.

Hence, in doing this, we can move more towards an appreciation of the Biblical witnesses to God’s disclosure and actions. Rather than trying to read the words of Scripture as containing a wide array and set of abstract propositions and ideas that themselves are necessary for us, whether they be of a doctrinal, experiential, or moral content, we read the Biblical witnesses as witnesses to things that have happened, where it be Jesus of Nazareth ministering, being crucified, being raised, ascending and being glorified, or whether it is Jesus calling down to Saul, or whether it is the dramatic work of the Spirit, or whether it be the revelation and discernment of wisdom that the Spirit gives, re-concretizing our language allows us to move towards seeing the witnesses in this way: they are talking about something that God has done, is doing, and expects God to continue to do. The more abstract language, such as the language of justification, is not some attempt to propound some abstract idea about forgiveness or acceptance that we can then use in variety of different senses within our imaginations but rather is an abstract word that is trying to explain the divine cause for the specific reality that Christians experience when they come to faith in God.

In the end, concrete words are effective witnesses; hence 1 John starts by addressing the concrete realities of their own experience in hearing, seeing, and touching as it came to Jesus. An increasing predilection towards highly abstract language, by contrast, tends to muddy things up between persons and within persons due to the differing linguistic senses of the words; thus abstraction obscures witness. And, if I may suggest for my own Methodist context where we have facing stark divisions over theology and ethics, being demonstrated through our conflict over concerns about sexuality, this tendency towards abstract has contributed to this division. United Methodism is inhabited by different groups who use the same words but in dramatically different senses because our differing theologies largely determined by different cultural rules we have for theological word usage. Consequently, the implicit epistemology in United Methodist is informed by this immersion in the implicit idea of the intellectual superiority of abstraction for determining theological matters. Hence, I previously wrote that there is perhaps a need for an epistemic conversion among United Methodists that becomes radically particularized to the person of Christ.

So from my perspective, the analytic style by re-concretizing can bear fruit more generally for understanding and thinking, more specific to the Christian faith by taking God Himself as known in His Son and Spirit as the central, primary content of theological knowledge, and offering a potential way forward through the morass that is United Methodist division. Whether these things will happen is another question and matter, but I will do what I can to try to develop my analytic skills more and employ them in this manner for these purposes.

In recounting the trends of Protestant Biblical Scholarship as it pertains to Christology, N.T. Wright makes the following observation regarding trends in trying to reconstruct what the true faith really is:

The second tendency has often been in tension with the first, but still exercises a powerful influence. Protestantism appealed over the head of later ecclesial developments to the fountain-head: to the Bible and the Fathers, against the medieval church. If one went back to the beginning, one would strip off folly and rediscover faith. With the Enlightenment, the ‘bad period’ was quietly extended: now, everything between the Bible and the Enlightenment itself was under judgment, and the Bible itself was picked apart for signs of a genuine early religion, whether that of Jesus himself or at least that of Paul. At the same time, Romanticism constantly implied that the ‘primitive’ form of any movement was the genuine, inspired article, the original vision which would fade over time as people moved from charisma to committees, from adoration to administration, from spontaneous and subversive spirituality to stable structures and a salaried sacerdotalism. ¹

Latent within Protestantism was this constant reform movement built within it. This occasionally lead to the emergence of more radical reform movements that tried to reproduce the original faith, such as the Anabaptists, the Pietists, the Stone-Campbell movement, etc., but each of these radical movements didn’t have a real sustaining power in religious discourse, but they either tended to fade away (Anabaptists), their principles integrated into other religious movements (such as Pietism into early Methodism), or stabilize into some establish church on the periphery of mainstream (Stone-Campbell into the Churches of Christ). Rarely do such radical reform movements establish any type of sustaining power.

But then for the trends that N.T. Wright mentions, we might label these as led radical reform tendencies, which are baked more so into the mainstream culture. As much of Protestantism tried to maintain some continuity with its tradition, it sought the true understanding of faith over and against the Catholic stranglehold. This got passed onto the Enlightenment, switch from the faith itself to search for a religion of reason. Romanticism in protest of many of the trends of the Enlightenment sought for the true religion of authentic experience. Projecting into the future, I would say we see the same trends in religion in the more recent era, with liberalism trying to fine the true religion of universal humanity, contemporary progressivism trying to find the true religion of love, fundamentalism the true religion of doctrine, and evangelicals the true religion of sin-avoidance.

What all these movements share (sans perhaps liberalism, which tended to be more mainstream in modernity over and against the fundamentalist protest of modernity) however, is a deep suspicion of religious hierarchy. Protestants, the Enlightenment, and the Romantics all share a deep suspicion of priests and religious structure. Similarly in the modern era, Fundamentalists think the church leaders hiding the true doctrines of the church, evangelicals see sin being permitted and allowed to reign by the religious leaders, and progressives see hatred being peddled by religion. So the thinking goes that the reason the Gospel/true religion is veiled from the people is that the religious hierarchy are the true source of the problem. So, if we just clean up the leadership, if we just clean up the structure, if we just clean up the processes, we will be able to find and practice what the true religion really is.

No doubt, this was baked into Western Christianity once Jewish religious leadership of the Pharisees we taken as being proto-Catholics by the Protestant Reformation. The Pharisees became all the problem and were the ultimate source of all the problems that were faced. They stood in the way of the true religion of Jesus, who is so commonly taken as authorizing whatever we think true religion ahead of time is, so they are the source of the problem.

And yes, the Pharisees and scribes are seen as Jesus’ main, though not only, enemies. They bear a large responsibility in the circumstances that lead to his crucifixion. They are characterized in ways that we might today call petty, narcissistic, hypocritical, angry, oblivious, etc. There is no denying they were a terrible enemy that Jesus had to face. 

But herein lies the problem: if we are to take Jesus’ teachings and life seriously, if we are to take the rest of the New Testament witnesses at their word, then the reason the true religion is hindered isn’t because of our enemies, and thus it isn’t because of some religious hierarchy in and of themselves. The Pharisees are not the Nazis of Christian faith.

Jesus wasn’t out to take the names of his Pharisee enemies down and beat them down one by one. In John 3, Jesus meets with the Pharisee Nicodemus, who was bit oblivious at the time during the whole discussion of a new birth, but was gradually brought forward to being on Jesus’s side. In Matthew 13:52, Jesus provides a place for scribes in the kingdom of God, where they can provide treasures from both the Jewish scriptures (“old treasures”) and the emerging kingdom (“new treasures”). The problem wasn’t itself the religiosity. The Apostle Paul, who had many a conflict with many opponents throughout his apostolic tenure, says later on in his life in Ephesians 6:12: “”For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Meanwhile, in talking about the Jews who opposed the Gospel of Christ and opposed Paul, he finds in Romans 10:1-2 that firstly, he desires their salvation and can commend them for their zeal, while recognizing there is a distinct problem of the knowledge that informs their zeal. If we take all of this seriously, then, the problem for Jesus and then later Paul isn’t human enemies, even in the forms of religious leadership.

If we think seriously, the problematic aspects of religion are more symptoms than they are the true causes of the problems. It would probably be more accurate to suggest that religious hierarchy manifests the problems rather than causes them; I would suggest a similar reality for political leadership. Outside of the few instances where those with authority have forcibly instituted their will upon people apart from any consent, most leadership arises because they reflect in some way the values of those they lead. But this wasn’t the Pharisees, their authority rested more in popularity than in fiat power. Then, once they get authority, some can use their power in self-serving ways, but there can even be punitive ‘saints’ who do nothing but what they have been called to do and they can cause problems also. In other words, religious leadership (and other leadership) can be a source of problems themselves, but the reason they are problems isn’t generally themselves, but there is something deeper; something cultural; something more insidious and pervasive; something that Paul can only really refer to by talking about spiritual forces of darkness.

But if we read Paul carefully, he never rails into a littany of the powers of the devil, as if the solution is to fight off demons, but his main explanation roots around one basic, human reality: the flesh. The flesh isn’t code for sinful nature; nor is it a reference to the fact of bodily existence; nor is it a reference to life when used by itself, as it is when used in the phrase “flesh and blood.” Rather, the flesh is a reference to our present form of embodiment in the world absent the full transformative work of Christ and the Spirit. There is a weakness to the flesh that outright blocks people’s ability to please God. Similarly, Jesus, speaking to his sleepy disciples while he was praying in the Garden of Gethsamene said similarily, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” which perhaps echoes the experiences of his own wilderness and temptation experience that came before Jesus’ ministry fully began.

This is the power that is present among all of us as humans; none of us are free from its presence. From this, we can say, all the other problems emerge or take advantage of, including the evil spiritual powers, including the religious hierarchy, etc. We can include with this also our modern discourse of the systemic and cultural sins that we see so present in our society; we can include the political zealotry that shoots first and often and fails to ever ask questions. Moving away from personal evils, we may even include a host of impersonal evils that is not anyone’s fault, such as mental illness, physical disease and illness, etc. We can include a whole host other problems, sin, brokenness, and injustices that ultimately stem from our present embodied life absent the full transformative work of Christ and the Spirit.

The solution to this for Paul was to behold the power of God through the narrative traditions of Jesus’ own life, crucifixion, resurrection, and glorification paired with the powerful works, revelation, and discernment of the Spirit that comes. In this, the veil of the present age is pulled back, sometimes for just a brief glimpse that can not be readily understood, and one begins to see the glory of God in Christ that the Spirit makes known. It is here that reign of sin and death as forces inhabiting the flesh are pushed back, their strongholds successfully sieged, their battle lines broken.

Religious hierarchy can fight this, but they are not really the ultimate problems nor are they the enemies. Rather, the real struggle and the source that stymies the true faith is the very human reality we all share; the very human reality of weakness that God is seeking to make into new creation. Hence, the powerful moves of God doesn’t occur by winning battles against human authority, but rather in rediscovery of the work that God has been doing and continues to do, even if the veil has long covered our eyes from seeing it until we in our rightly directed faith turn to the Lord of glory. And what we find isn’t some set of principles or rules that make true religion, as true religion isn’t something immediate useful for simply our present conflicts and concerns that most reform movements are inspired by, but rather a relationship to God that is defined by πίστις/faith, which we can refer to as a trusting attachment and attitude towards God that then impacts the whole of what we expect from God and seek ourselves.

The Protestant Reformation, in seeking to be justified by faith brought forth something very important from the New Testament witnesses. At the same time, they didn’t really understand what the significance of faith in the New Testament was, using it more as a contrast with religious practice, structure, and hierarchy. As a consequence, the concerns of religion became more concerned by the conflicts latent with the social and political principles of whatever the present age was, and thus the search for true religion always had the face of society as its end result which it projected back onto God in a Feuerbachian sort of way. But, for Paul and the New Testament, faith was in contrast to the normal human mode of life that we all exist within apart from God’s own self-disclosure and our acceptance of it. This is why Christ was without sin to the point of the crucifixion and was then raised from the dead: to demonstrate God’s power over sin and death that inhabits the flesh. So, to have faith in the God who makes Himself known in Christ and the Spirit is to cease to be indomitability ruled by this flesh.