In The Theology of Paul the Apostle, James Dunn starts his first chapter with the following statement about Paul: 

Paul was the first and greatest Christian theologian. From the perspective of subsequent generations, Paul is undoubtedly the first Christian theologian. Of course, all who think about and express their faith as Christians can quite properly be called “Christian theologians,” or at least be described as functioning theologically. But Paul belongs to that group of Christians who have seen it as part of their calling to articulate their faith in writing and to instruct others in their common faith, and who have devoted a considerable portion of their lives to so doing.¹

This view of Paul has a long pedigree amongst Protestants, primarily for the reason of highlighting justification by faith as the center of Paul’s theological thinking. Particularly within the Reformed tradition, one can trace a set of ideas that Paul expresses in the letters that provide a systematic expression of Christian faith.

However, in recent years, this portrayal of Paul and his letters has come under fire by Biblical scholars who word from a social perspective. For instance, in Conflict and Identity in Romans, Philip Esler makes the following observation about the tendency in Biblical scholarship to read Paul as if he is a theologian:

Paul did not restrict himself to the ideational dimensions of being a follower of Christ, nor did he produce systematic treatises of “theology,” and it is therefore anachronistic to describe him as a “theologian.” It is difficult not to gain the impression that to refer to Paul as a “theologian” serves the useful social purpose pose of enrolling him as an honorary member of the same club to which those who wield such designations already belong.²

Undergirding the social perspective on Paul is the idea that Paul’s letters were intended to address particular situations. In their mind, they are like an academic lecture on a particular topic, but a more pastoral response to exigent circumstances. While this style of reading Paul doesn’t necessarily deny anything that can be assembled into theological content that can describe what Paul believed, it highlights the situatedness of Paul’s communication.

But to draw an analogy, the difference between seeing Paul’s letters as presenting theology vs. a response to circumstances in Paul resembles a tension that more generally exists in the psychological and social sciences: can we define people according to a set of enduring traits, emotions, habits, thoughts, etc. or should we highlight the role of circumstance in what people think, say, feel, and do? In social psychology, one of the first things that are taught to students is the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is the tendency to overstate dispositions in explain people’s behaviors while underlooking the role of situation. Similarly, in the study of anxiety, there are distinctions that are made between trait anxiety and state anxiety.

The tension between enduring characteristics and situational exigencies can be described as not being any sort of ontological “way things are” but rather the default approach we take to as people to explain other people. “Traits” and “circumstances” don’t exist in some real, ontological sense, but are rather a way of making sense of patterns. But the two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. If we recognize that enduring characteristics have a tendency towards overgeneralization and interpretations of situational exigences have a tendency for undergeneralization, we can come to an approximate synthesis of these two approaches: enduring characteristics are those thoughts, feelings, words, and actions that reproduce itself in more diverse circumstances. This approach does “favor” the enduring characteristic approach, but it recognizes that there is a set of circumstantial constraints that determine when and how the characteristic will be expressed.

To bring this to the particular question about Paul and theology, we can ask a fundamental question: to what extent are Paul’s letters expressing ideas of enduring characteristics? If Paul is expressing theological ideas that are used and explained in various circumstances, then the possibility remains that we can see Paul’s letters as being theological. This would then lead us to the question of communicative intention and purpose in the letter: does Paul intended his audience to take the ideas that he is expressing to be applied more generally, or is he only address the specific circumstances? If so, are these ideas about God?  On the other hand, if there is not an enduring core to his communication, then Paul’s letters can not be adequately described as theology.

There is one major epistemological constraint on this project, however. In virtue of extending the perspective of modern social science to the study of Paul, we are using a framework of explanation that works upon a larger quantity of observations and data. Whether dealing with an individual person or a large society, the explanatory frameworks of modern social science require a lot of ‘information’ of a wide sample before they become reliable. We do not have that from Paul. In the approximately three decades of Paul’s life as a follower and apostle of Jesus Christ, we have anywhere from seven to fourteen letters depending on how narrow or broad one considers Paul’s authorship to be in the New Testament. Then, we have the books of Acts that presents some biographical data, depending on how much reliability one attributes to it. Even if one has a maximalist approach, what we have from Paul is a very small set of “snaphots” from his life.

Further complicating matters is that some of Paul’s letters seem to be addressing same or similar circumstances. For instance, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians and maybe Phillipians all seem to be written to address the circumstances created by divisions between Jews and Gentiles, including the role of the Torah which was the most salient dividing line between them. While the circumstances for each of these letters are somewhat different, they all share very similar situations. While exegesis of these four letters can reveal a set of ideas that seem to endure across them, the question would still remain of to what extent those ideas should be considered ‘applicable’ to situations outside of ethnic tensions. Similarly, 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians address the same congregation that is influenced by Greco-Roman wisdom, particularly philosophy, and the socially competitive spirit of the Greco-Roman world that influenced the pursuit of wisdom. For instance, should Paul’s discourse about God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself in 2 Corinthians 5.19 be taken as a central key to Paul’s theological thinking? Or, is the language of reconciliation primarily used in response to the competitive, agonistic culture that is influenced the Corinthian’s response to their teachers, including Paul?

In other words, a more inductive, semi-empirical approach to determine the theological nature of Paul’s letters is not doable. This does not mean, however, that the question is left unanswerable, but rather that we are going to need to take a closer look from another angle that the typical, information-driven, implicitly foundationalist, approach of Biblical scholarship. A more abductive explanation that provides a coherent account of Paul’s letters individually and in the aggregate can provide us a different way of approaching the question.

However, the problem with abduction is that our appeal to the best explanation is limited by the type of explanations we are aware of and can appeal to in the first place. If a person looks out and sees the ground is wet, but for some reason has no prior knowledge about dew and the condensation process, they will be limited to explaining the wet ground to rain. Put differently, abduction is more appropriately described as an appeal to the best *available* explanation.

Since we are talking about Paul’s letters and whether they possess an enduring theological meaning, we are addressing the phenomena of cognition. But the two sides of the debate implicitly and unconsciously structure the cognition of Paul in one of two forms. Theological interpreters typically consider Paul’s letters to provide ideational or propositional content, whereas social interpreters of Paul implicitly frame the meaning of his letters in terms of goals and purposes that emerge from the circumstance. Both the representational and utilization forms of cognitive thinking are a part of our cognitive repertoire, but there is another form of cognition that serves as a functional link between representation and utility that is known as expectations. Expectations emerge as the result of the construal of our circumstances through the usage of our ideational-conceptual resources to make implicit predictions of outcomes that then generate responses to either ensure or alter the expected outcomes.

I want to suggest at this point that Paul’s letters can be more adequately made sense of within the framework of expectations: both his own expectations about God and what he deems to be the good and problematic expectations of his various audiences. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 1-4, Paul addresses the false expectations that the Corinthians have of their human teachers as teachers of wisdom, whereas it is actually God who is the Teacher of wisdom in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit who collaboratively inspires the various teachers. Or, in Romans 7, Paul addresses the false expectations that some Jews may have had about the effectiveness of the Torah to make people righteous; Paul instead appeals to the Spirit and Christ as those who enable human righteousness in Romans 8. This similar theme of expectation in relation to righteousness gets expressed in Galatians 5:5: “through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.” Then, in Romans 1.18-32 Paul deals with the Jewish expectations of judgment against a pagan society, to then surprisingly turn that narrative of judgment against Jews who act in similar ways in the next chapter, which we might consider motivates the Corinthians to consider adopted a different eschatological narrative of God’s faithfulness as ultimately expressed in Romans 8.31-39.

I give these samples from three of Paul’s letters not to decisively prove my case, as that is impossible given the relative paucity of data, but demonstrate that trying to explain Paul’s discourse in terms of cognitive expectations about God, Torah obedience, teachers, etc. can serve as a fitting abductive explanation of some of the material. Furthermore, appeal to cognitive expectations can give an account for the eschatological material that is strewn throughout all of Paul’s letters.

If Paul’s letters are primarily addressing specific expectations, most particularly about God and those beings or things that come from God as in Jesus, the Spirit, Torah, etc., then we have a basis for interpreting Paul’s letters as theological, but not in a simplistic, systematic sense. Rather than providing an overarching, representational sketch of God and other theological events like justification, sanctification, glorification, etc., Paul engages more so with the expectations of what God is doing and will continue to do in the narrative of human redemption. Justification isn’t about some idea of being forgiven by God as much as it is about God’s forgiveness bringing human life into a distinctively different life-arc through their faith. Rather than the Holy Spirit as the intellectually necessary explanation for human faith and understanding of God, the Spirit is the expected agent of transformation in the various events of believer’s.

It is here where I propose that we can find a reliable, enduring cognitive thinking that permeates Paul’s letters individually and aggregately that is not as reliably present in the ideational interpretations of Paul’s theology. Paul’s expectations have been radically changed in light of the revelation of Jesus Christ to him such that his expectations are saturated in the full narrative of Jesus Christ’s teachings, baptism, trial, death, resurrection, and glorification and the Holy Spirit who is the vital link between believers and Christ. God’s actions in creation are directed towards a specific, eschatological telos, which Paul expects to be understood through the pattern of God’s righteousness as made known in Jesus Christ.

With this in tow, I would then suggest that the aspects of the circumstance of Paul’s discourse can be observed in the various implications and offshoots of this core set of theological expectations. Theological ideas such as justification by faith are not the core of Paul’s theology, but rather they help to explain the way God as known in Jesus Christ is at work in specific circumstances, such as addressing the role of Torah.

Furthermore, since the cognitive expectations we hold are largely influenced by our experiences and interpretations of the past, this account also provides an integral role to history, particularly the history as outlined in Israel’s Scriptures. The Old Testament Scriptures are seen as being fulfilled in Christ, which fits within an expectation-realization scheme of cognition. But these expectations do not mere from an ideational reading of the Old Testament that gives a specific, precise representation of what will happen in the future, but rather the very character of God as seen in His actions and relations with Israel is “pregnant” with Christ. Jesus as the image of God is the prototype/πρωτότοκος of humanity (Col. 1.15). Jesus is the promised seed of Abraham (Gal. 3.16). Jesus is the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness (1 Cor. 10.4). The story of creation, Abraham’s promise, and Israel’s journeys are “pregnant” with Jesus Christ, even though he is not being directly described by the passages. These narratives of God’s actions and promises provide the broad shape and contour God’s nature that provides the expectations for what is realized in Jesus Christ. While Paul’s coming to Christ did not develop in linear progression from interpreting the narrative leading to the emergence of expectations that he then recognizes as fulfilled in Christ, this pattern of cognitive expectations nevertheless provides an explanation for how Paul conceives of the relationship of Israel’s Scriptures to Jesus Christ.

So, are Paul’s letters theology? I would say yes, if we are talking about theology in terms of theological expectations. They are not a systematic exposition on a set of overarching, representational ideas about God, but rather they express a core of expectations about the nature of and shape of God’s redeeming action in Jesus Christ through the Spirit. It is this core that determines the more ideational/propositional content of his letters that are expressed in response to various, circumstantial exigencies. Put in metaphysical terms, Paul’s expectations fit within a particular understanding of God’s agency and human, experiential phenomenon, rather than the Hellenistic categories of substance and essence.³

While I have never been formally diagnosed, I personally struggled with the symptoms of PTSD. I am well enough that it can be contained so that it doesn’t have a severely negative impact at any single point of time, but I am also broken enough for it to flood my thinking and feelings with things I wouldn’t feel on most days. The best way I can describe what it is like to a person who doesn’t quite understand it is that it is like there is a ghost that is always howling in the back of my mind. Most of the time you can tune the noise out, but occasionally something happens that gives the ghosts a megaphone and what becomes a howling you can ignore becomes a shout you can’t get away from.

Now, there isn’t a literal ghost haunting my mind. Nor would I even try to turn that voice into the devil, though as a Christian I do believe in a transhuman, but not transcendent, force or power that works towards evil. This “ghost,” to my best understanding, emerges from the way my amygdala in the brain has ‘developed’ due to various events in my life. For most people, the amygdala works outside of our conscious awareness, processing our sensory experiences for anything that resembles encoded memories of threats, and only “triggers” our awareness when some very salient, potential threat is detected. However, for me, it is best described as emotional tinnitus, that is always only the margins of my awareness. Most of the time, I become ‘aware’ of something being a potential threat, only to think about it for a second and to know what I am worried about isn’t actually a real concern. However, there are still times where the fear floods me, and thankfully I have learned to isolate myself during such events, and it can even subtly impact my behaviors in ways that I am not even consciously thinking about.

I mention all this to say that I feel like I have a unique vantage point to talk about what it means to be human. My specific experience with PTSD has brought me to place where I am (a) aware of a lot of what happens underneath the surface to people who are usually unaware of how fear impacts them and (b) can contrast between being controlled by fear and not and the differences in thinking and living that operates between the two. Allow me to frame this discussion with a Biblical passage from the Apostle Paul in Romans 8.5-8 based upon my own translation of the Greek:

For those who are acting according to the flesh think about the things of the flesh, and those who are acting according to the Spirit think about the things of the Spirit. For the flesh thinks¹ about death, and the Spirit thinks² about life and peace. Therefore, the thoughts of the flesh are hostile towards God, for it does not submit to God’s Instruction³ because it is unable.

There is a little bit of brush clearing we need to do here before I can connect this to my experience with PTSD. The “flesh” (σάρξ) is not the “sinful nature” that many evangelical translations rendered the term as. Certainly, the flesh is responsible for human sinfulness in Paul, but Paul does not define the flesh by its negatives outcomes but as the personal experience of human embodiment with all its compulsory desires and overriding impulses (cf. Gal. 5.16-17, 24). This is to be distinguished from the body (σῶμα) which is a more “objective” thing that we perceive with our eyes rather than with our feelings. Paul does not envision the human body as evil due to the presence of sin. Rather, the body is something to be redeemed (Rom. 8.23).

However, we need to further clarify Paul’s understand of the flesh and its desires. Paul is not simply thinking about the bare existence of something we now today call a desire. Emotional experience in Paul’s day was largely defined by the Stoic account of emotions and passions, which understood emotional experiences and desires in terms of those passions that overwhelm and control human thinking. Thus, the flesh refers to the predilection of human embodied experience to have desires that entirely controls their thinking and impulse towards action.

A good example of this is an obsession, in which a person becomes fixated on something they want or fear and their thinking is unable to let go of it. For instance, think of the way modern society talks about sex and love in popular media. Their portrayal of love and sex is best described as an obsession in which a person may experience a desire for sex and romance that controls everything they think about and do to the point that they can not let it go or act appropriately. Or, in my case of PTSD, there are moments where I can not let go of the fear that someone is out to pull the rug out from under me. While not quite a full-blown obsession as I can recognize I have no real knowledge of this nor that I have no real control of it at the moment even if it were true, when I get in that mode of thinking I am distracted from adequately focusing on anything else. It is this type of psychological phenomena, both in its full-blown obsession and it’s lesser form of dysfunctionally distracted thinking that characterizes the Stoic concern about the passions and Paul’s understanding of the desires of the flesh.

So, with that in mind, here is where my thinking about PTSD overlaps with Paul’s discussion on the flesh in Romans 8. What I have come to comprehend about PTSD in a way that a textbook never taught me is the way that our bodies are geared towards survival. This is the case even when one is not actively feeling fear. Much of what we desire as something good is deeply connected with the instinct for surviving and our need to get away from it. The desire for a good career and to save money is connected to the sense of survival. The desire for sex can be a form of distracting oneself from the struggle with surviving, whereas the desire for a romantic partner is connected to someone to take care of our needs. While the most basic existence of the instinct for survival and the desires it can elicit are not bad or evil, it is the very predilection of our own embodied experience to become fixated on our own desires to the point that they become controlling, survival complexes (to use a term from the history of psychology).

To that end, it overlaps with what Paul says about the thinking of the flesh is death. Far from simply describing the cessation of all physical life, death for Paul refers to the suffering in the world that both emerges from sin and contributes to the emergence of sin.⁴ As a consequence, the flesh is thinking about death in terms of alleviating the suffering that is deeply associated with death.

Now, in our modern Western world, we might be inclined to think of death as symbolic for negative emotions and life and peace as symbolic with positive emotions. We might think Paul is describing the leading of the Spirit as bringing about the experience of happiness. However, this is a huge mistake. Paul is not thinking like a Western, Cartesian thinker who has a deep introspective awareness of all of his emotional experiences. Death is not code for “bad feelings” and life and peace is not code for “positive feelings.” In fact, this is far from the truth. Emotional experience is subtly different from desire and fears in that emotional experience is determined by the realization of what we want or fear. Positive emotions are often very intense and strong when we are trying to survive. I remember one person who after later reflection I suspect grew up in a situation of emotional abuse or deprivation, and when I showed them kindness, they responded to my kindness with an extreme, almost abnormal emotional reaction. They were experiencing a great positive emotion as a person who was trying to survive. Or, consider the susceptibility and power of addiction to people whose life situations are incredibly stressful and burdensome: whether it be drugs, alcohol, sex, money, popularity, etc., they get a huge emotional high as they are trying to survive. When we feel we are trying to survive, when we are trying to stave off suffering, we experience huge emotional highs that come when our wants, hopes, and goals become realized; of course, the reverse is true in that we can also experience incredible emotional lows when things don’t go as we wish or even as we fear.

Rather, I want to describe Paul’s contrast between the flesh and the Spirit as the difference between surviving and thriving. Whereas the thinking of the flesh is based upon survival, the thinking of the Spirit is based upon thriving, that is, living well.

In recent years, there has been an increased discussion in theology, philosophy, psychology, and politics, and sociology has focused on the idea of human flourishing. Martin Seligman’s Flourish and Miroslav Volf’s Flourishing represent two books specifically on the topic in the past decade. I do not think flourishing is the best description of what Paul is getting at. Flourishing is too associated with the modern notion of positive emotionality and the social and economic conditions for it to adequately describe Paul’s understanding of the Spirit. For instance, Seligman refers to a study by Felicia Halpert and Timothy So that define the core features of flourishing as (1) positive emotions, (2) engagement, interest, and (3) meaning, purpose. All three of these terms convey some sense of an affective state. While Paul does associate the work of the Spirit with positive emotions (Gal. 5.22-23), the focus on affect presents an epistemological dead end as positive emotions can also be experienced in a state of survival, but nevertheless, people in such a state and experience are not necessarily in a positive place. My concern isn’t that emotions are unimportant or to diminish the affective life, but rather to provide a more fitting interpretation of Paul that I feel common understandings of “flourishing” can not provide.

Paul defines the Spirit’s thinking as being about life and peace. It is actually probably more appropriate to think of the Greek term εἰρήνη as closer to the Hebrew concept of shalom. Shalom is a more relational term that concerns the relation of people to each other and the well-being that emerges from right relationships (that is, righteousness), whereas the modern understanding of emotions and affective experience and those concepts based upon them as a unit of analysis are a risk of methodological solipsism that dovetails into epistemic skepticism and strong relativism.  In other words, shalom looks at the well-being of life in terms of one’s relationships and the factors that constitute to shape of those relationships, such as trust, shared norms (e.g. covenants), resources and skills to be shared, etc.

Paul’s inclusion of εἰρήνη/shalom in Rom. 8.6 serves to demonstrate that the differences between the thinking of the flesh and the thinking of the Spirit is not just simply a binary opposition between good and bad, but perhaps more significantly, that there is a qualitatively different way of life that emerges from the think of the Spirit. Rather than the difference between flesh and Spirit operating simply along the lines of personal experience of life and death, it is also a contrast between positive relations (εἰρήνη) of the Spirit, with the negative hostility (ἔχθρα) towards God that the thinking of the flesh engenders. The way of life of the Spirit can not be distinguish between the flesh along the lines of any single way of evaluating between the two, but they operate as demonstrably different ways of thinking and living. When transferring this understanding into my understanding of experience in more modern terms, I describe this qualitatively different way of life as “thriving” largely due to its rhyming with “surviving” so as to connect the two while distinguishing them apart.

What would I say from my more modern psychological perspective that distinguishes between surviving and thriving? I wouldn’t say it is the presence of positive and negative emotions. Rather, I would align it more closely with a basic, overarching way people respond to and cope with the fulfillment of their desires, goals, hopes, etc. Underneath the survival mechanism is the high degree of contingency between our sense of well-being and specific experiences. People who are in survival mode can respond to many of their experiences almost as if it is a matter of life and death, even when there probably isn’t truly a threat.

But what is key to understanding “surviving” isn’t that one feel bad, unhappy, or continuously threatened. If you are a person who fears not having enough money and you have saves millions upon millions of dollars, you likely aren’t going to feel like you are trying to survive financially. Now, if you regularly choose to save money in the face of other important needs for yourself or others, some might consider it being greedy. However, sans the moral judgment, that type of behavior is part of a survival “complex”  that continues to be activated even though poverty is not even a remote threat. That you are perpetually successful at ‘surviving’ doesn’t mean you aren’t still trying to survive. At the core of trying to survive isn’t whether we are succeeding or failing, but whether we can or can not let go of something we value in the moment.

Now, before proceeding, I am not calling the survival instinct bad. There are situations and circumstances in our life where we do have to immediately if we are to protect our well-being. The problem is when the survival instinct transforms into a survival complex, which usually becomes focused on specific desires for money, social approval, sex, social distance, etc. and fears such as not having enough, abandonment, being harmed, etc. when there is no warranted reason to consider those things highly important or a threat in the moment. The survival instinctive is highly adaptive, the survival complex is maladaptive.

But even if maladaptive, one can still be successful in one’s maladaptive behaviors. One can be on top of the “food” chain, but one can still be trying to survive, with the results that other people have to pay the consequences for their maladaptive behaviors. This is where the problem of pervasive sin enters into the picture: when we are perpetually trying to survive by staving off death, suffering, and the fear of them, we can act in ways where we routinely and wrongly transmit consequences, pain, suffering, and even death onto other people. No wonder the preacher of Hebrews talks about the devil as the one who has the power of death and the people’s slavery to fear in the same breath in Hebrews 2.14-15.

By contrast, to be working towards thriving is to be experience a more flexible approach to life, that allows us to respond to our desires, fears, emotions, etc. with greater flexibility such that we can readily sacrifice one thing we value for something else that we determine to be more important in the moment. For instance, the thriving millionaire is able to give generously to a person in need, because they are able to value the well-being of another person more than some voice in the back of their mind that tells them they need to save their money. Furthermore, life may throw a person who is thriving some difficult circumstances, but so far as what we might refer to as their “coping resources” aren’t entirely depleted, they can face those trials without falling into the trap of feeling the need that they have to always survive. People who are thriving can negotiate their various goals, desires, and fears based upon the reasonable and even some of the unreasonable situations that they face.

But, to be clear, this flexibility isn’t what defines a thriving person, but rather it is a condition that is necessary for thriving. The ability to have the sort of flexibility that a thriving person has comes from the combination of general and specific life circumstances and the way we appraise them. A person who is surviving readily sees their situations teetering towards a significant threat, whereas a thriving person explains situations in a way are more reasonable and apropos to the circumstance.

Now, in connecting surviving and thriving to Paul’s discourse in Romans 8, one might be tempted to draw a connection between personal prosperity in thriving by the Spirit or Christian faith. But that isn’t what Paul is precisely getting at. A key, overarching theme of Romans, particularly Romans 1-8, is the theme of God’s righteousness. Righteousness is primarily about acting appropriately, justly, and in a trustworthy manner towards people who engages with and is obligated to. Essentially, to live righteously is to act appropriately in our obligations and commitments, both with God and others. So when Paul is talking about the thinking of the Spirit brings about life and peace, Paul is not thinking simply of personal thriving and prosperity. Rather, people lead by the Spirit are those people who through the Spirit’s leading bring about life and peace; they cultivate thriving. The Gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t a gospel of personal prosperity, but it is a Gospel that promotes relational and communal well-being.

What distinguishes the Gospel of Jesus Christ from all other forms of human morality, economics, therapy, and politics isn’t the possibility of thriving. Believers and non-believers alike can thrive. What distinguishes them from the framework of the New Testament is that by union with Christ through the Spirit, believers can become reliable agents of thriving. We as people can stumble upon thriving through chance that delivers us the right environment, learning, and opportunities to thrive. The Gospel brings order to a chaotic world of sin and death so that the promise of blessing for the nations given to Abraham can become realized through the people called to and Spiritually formed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The redemption of the Gospel, far from just bringing us well-being, actually makes us agents of thriving, makes us peacemakers, or perhaps more appropriately, shalom makers.

This transformation occurs through the realization of the death of Jesus Chris in our own life. Far from some masochistic death wish, the union of believers to Jesus Christ that Paul talks about in Romans 6 can be framed in part as an acceptance of suffering, pain, and death, though not surrender to it. When we experience such negative outcomes without viciously struggling to stave off the threat, we fight against the survival complex that binds us in fear and keeps us locked into a cycle of sin that emerges from our need to survive that devalues our obligations and commitments to others. To put it in Paul’s language in Romans 12.1, to be a living sacrifice means we are putting to death the deeds of the flesh and its way of thinking. Then, by presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice that experiences the suffering that comes with refusing to give in to the dictating desires of the flesh, the mind, which was previously enslaved by the powers of sin and death inhabiting the flesh/body (Roman 7.14-25), becomes freed to be renewed by the Spirit of God so that we can discern God’s will for blessing and thriving and the way He seeks to bring that about.

It is at this point, then, that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is critical to being agents of the thriving that comes from God’s promised blessing. The world is marred by sin and death. As a result, we can’t simply learn from the world to know how to bring about thriving that comes from God’s blessing. Much of the ‘wisdom’ that the world produces is a wisdom of how to survive, which ultimately culminates in a hyper-competitive, conflict-oriented style of behaviors that protect me and my own. James calls such “wisdom” earthly, unspiritual, and devilish (James 3.14-16). Natural ethics may have some ideas that overlap with God’s will and purposes such that we can even find some “agreement” between some of the teachings of Scripture and various forms of ethical reasoning, but because such wisdom is derived from a marred creation, it is a wisdom that continues to self-perpetuate the damage it seeks to free itself from. Thus, we need the Spirit who formed us into the image of Christ to bring the whole of God’s will into our awareness and concern, not just isolated parts to indiscriminately mix in with other philosophies. Thus, we need the Spirit to creatively inspire us to learn anew and afresh ways to be agents of shalom, blessing, and thriving that we can not just learn from study and observation of the world. But to receive this discernment and to be agents of this shalom, we must first be united to and formed in Christ.

Multiple Christians with celebrity status have mentioned recently that they have either lost or are struggling with their faith. A couple of weeks agao, Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye in the 90s and pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland from 2004-2015 said he was no longer Christian. Most recently Marty Sampson, the former lead singer of Hillsong, has said that his faith is standing on shaky ground. Such high profile cases of losing faith or struggling with faith grab the attention of Christians and the reasons for such can be speculated upon.

I saw one person on Twitter, who I will not name, suggest it was due to the lack of theological depth. But such an answer sounds more to be like the intellectual pretensions than a solid answer and explanation. While the study of theology can contribute to solidifying faith, it an also run it around. This is not to mention that theology can readily become a source of projection upon God if we think it is our theology and ability to keep ourselves thinking right that keeps us secure in faith. At the end of the day, to explain the loss of faith is due to a lack of theological depth is to treat human reasoning as the condition of faith, rather than theology as the response of faith in God’s power and love.

Rather, I was to suggest a different way to look at the nature of unbelief from those who have had one point had faith. But it will need us to stop asking the implicit question “What did they do wrong?” as if people’s struggles with or loss of faith is solely determined by their actions and thinking. This is to embrace and individualist view of faith that blurs into methodological solipsism: a person’s faith or the lack thereof is solely the consequence of their actions and thinking. When analyzed up close, assuming that people did something wrong that lead them to lose faith is not just exhibit a bad implicit theology, but it also overlooks how human thinking is conditioned to our experiences and environment, much of which they have little direct control over.

This isn’t to embrace a fatalistic view of faith and the lack thereof, but it is only to not assume that people’s loss of faith is attributable to something that is wrong with them. Perhaps, there is something seriously wrong elsewhere, like people being misled about what God is like, people enduring tremendous suffering, etc. But the idea that unbelief automatically condemns one to eternal hell has lead us to place too much of an emphasis on people getting to belief, trying to control their thinking so they come to faith, manipulate them with false ideas to get them to believe, etc. As a consequence, we overlook other factors, including our other people’s contribution to a person’s struggle and/or loss of faith. The sermon to the Hebrews readily exemplifies how in the midst of people’s struggles, others are to encourage people in faith and support them in the midst of their struggles.

I am personally familiar with this. As a Christian who holds to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I have had to endure some storms where I seriously questioned my faith and some people who were more concerned with me getting it right rather than helping me became to me like Job’s friends: accusers who could not understand. In Job, we have a story that should be a reminder to all Christians that their response to the suffering can become a source of hurt and, ultimately, risks speaking falsely because they don’t understand what it is they are talking about.

So, allow me to approach an explanation of unbelief from a different direction. I want to explore the cognitive conditions that lead to the lack of faith. And I will take a much broader view of faith in this based upon a certain principle: while our faith in God is specifically conditioned to God’s Word and Spirit, the conditions that allow for any form of faith is  analyzable in general fashion. In other words, the explanation for when people do or do not believe in God is separate from the explanation of how people come to believe in God.

Here is what I posit: the necessary condition for faith is when our remembered experiences are consistent with our expectations. The corollary to this is that the necessary condition for unbelief is when our remembered experiences are dissonant with our expectations.

Allow me to use trust in marriage as an example. A person has a certain expectation of their spouse will not cheat. This expectation itself is not faith or trust, but it is a value. Now, if the person does not have a problem with persistent mistrust, then by a combination of experience the ways their spouse is honest with them in addition to the lack of any evidence of cheating going on, that person’s experience will match their valued expectations. They have not proven that their spouse has not cheated, but their experience is such that what they remember from their experiences, which is most often an implicit rather than explicit remembering.

But even then, one instance of cheating may not entirely evaporate trust. Say a person obtains evidence of their spouse cheating once. This would certainly be a blow to the relationship but does it automatically erode all trust forever? Not necessarily. If the cheating spouse takes responsibility and owns what they did, then a severely broken trust may be restored if the other spouse is willing to risk. In this case, the cheating partner takes responsibility and through that restores trust over time, thereby strengthening the faith that had been seriously weakened.

However, this example I present only focused on the first “variable,” remember experience. However, it tries the expectations as fixed. But sometimes, faith or the lack of faith is also the result of our expectations changing rather than our remember experiences.

For consistency sake, I will use a similar but subtly different example: two unmarried people who are not dating and there are different expectations about what relationship they have. In the ambiguity that often occurs prior to the initiation of a romantic relationship, people’s expectations are forming about the other person, but they do not necessarily form equally. The first person is slower to warm up and thinks they are friends but that they have an interest in the other, whereas the other person is head over heels in love and thinks they are basically in a romantic relationship. Because of these varying expectations, their communication and behavior towards each other can become rather crossed. For instance, the slow and more deliberate approach by the first may make the second person respond evasively or become avoidant. In the case that the first person, thinks the other person isn’t interested because of their avoidant and evasive behavior, they might then develop an interest in someone else. The second person might find out about this and think the first person has essentially cheated on them. At this point, we are left with a situation much like the marriage situation: both people have different expectations that are dissonant with their remembered experiences. This creates a lack of faith: in the first person, they don’t have faith the other person is interested in them. In the second person, they don’t have faith the other person is honest.

Often, these types of problems end up in conflict. Usually, it is because one person or the other does not respect the perspective of the other and refuses to listen to them. However, there are cases where communication can lead to the changing of expectations. Say the second person is actually willing to listen to the first person and the person says “I thought you weren’t interested.” If the second person is willing to believe that this is genuine and not some manipulation, then they might adjust their expectations, which means they would look at their remembered experiences differently. They would no longer think the news that the first person went out with someone else as evidence of cheating but as a person moving on because of a (mistaken) belief.

Now, analysis of remembered experiences and expectations and the way they can change can become endlessly complex as there are various factors that go into what we remember and what we expect. Further complicating the matter is that what we remember can change our expectations, and our expectations can change what we remember, while at the same time being different from each other. So, I don’t present these necessary conditions for faith and unbelief as intending to portray it as being simplistically reducible to two factors. It is rather presented as a lens that can help us to assess what is going on.

What does it tell us about the Christian faith in God? I want to suggest that when cautiously considered, the greater, although not, the sole cause for the struggles with faith is our expectations about God rather than our remembered experiences of God. Now, we see this theme throughout Scripture. For instance, in 2 Peter 3.9 explains that the apparent slowness of God is God’s allowance of an opportunity for people to repent. Whereas humans are inclined to expect God to hurry things up with His promises, God is operating in a way that brings other people into the fold. Whereas we can be rather inclined to have egocentric expectations about God doing what we want when we want it, God works differently than human expectations.

But, rather than just focusing on trying to get people to change their expectations, I want to additionally focus on the source of expectations that can lead us to unbelief. It is what Paul refers to the flesh and what later theologians like Augustine and Barth referred to as incurvatus in se: it is living life according to the expectations of our own embodied nature, isolating our thinking away from the presence of God. We should avoid reverting to some sort of methodological solipsism as if false expectations simply emerge from the errors of individual thinking. The inward thinking of the flesh is why we are unable on our to come to know God, but it doesn’t rule out the social elements that are responsible for expectations about God. The source of false expectations may come from other people, who acting from their flesh, propagate false expectations about God, either directly or indirectly.

One salient way this can happen is in the prosperity “gospel” and its multiple variations. Take, for instance, Matthew 17.19-20. One common way of reading Jesus’ answer to the disciple as to why they could not cast out the demon is as a chiding for the little faith, as if their faith wasn’t even to the level of the mustard seed. As a consequence, the parable Jesus gives gets interpreted as “if you just have enough faith, you can get what you seek and ask for.” This idea then gets spread with the expectation that God gives us what we ask for, especially in an immediate manner. But, many people deeply believe and trust something to come from God, and it doesn’t happen. If their expectation of God is that having enough faith will get them what they seek, then their faith may turn to unbelief the more they are let down.

But allow me to offer a radically different interpretation. Jesus is not connecting answered prayer with the “size” of faith. He is not chiding the disciples for not having even a little bit of faith at the size of the proverbial mustard seed. Rather, I want to suggest that Jesus is directing His disciples to understand the relationship between faith and power. The mustard seed is intended to be a description of the smallness of faith the disciples had, but the employment of seeds also has some agricultural implications operating behind it. Seeds are planted and then they grow. While the disciple’s faith was small, and it was the reason they could not cast out the demon, the point of the parable is to highlight that even a little faith is a sufficient starting point towards being able to cast our demons and move the proverbial mountain, but that the faith must, like a seed, be planted and grown. Rather than portraying faith as the cause of having such power, faith is the starting point that can allow one to grow to have that power that the disciples were seeking. Faith is the beginning of the journey, not the culmination of it. Then, to contextualize this within the rest of NT canon, in faith one can begin to discover the charismatic gifts that the Spirit has given the person and cultivate their using of them for the purposes of building up God’s Kingdom.

Now, I am not claiming this interpretation must be the right interpretation, though I do think it is the right one. Rather, imagine how this expectation changes how people relate to their remembered experiences. Rather than not interpreting their failed prayers as a sign that God is not real, does not love them, they don’t have enough faith, etc., etc., they would see it as part of the journey of discipleship. Their expectations of God change from God as the one who gives us the power to do what we want to the teacher who shows us how to powerfully act on behalf of God’s Kingdom. Remembering experiences that would be dissonant with the prosperity “gospel’s” portrayal of God is not dissonant with the expectation that God is the One who teaches. But thinking according to the flesh and the inward disposition does not respond well to the development across time.

For a more indirect example, people who see themselves as the protectors of orthodoxy, rather than God Himself, can propagate false expectations about God. Due to orthodoxy’s historical reliance on Hellenistic philosophy to express itself, it has an inclination to homogenizing God in such a way that there is no variability of God in any manner as if the God of the Bible must fit into the intellectual, cognitive forms of thinking diffused from Hellenistic philosophy for what the Scriptures testify about God to be true.¹ As a consequence, they regard God more like an object that they have scientific theories about. Then, when someone complains about not understanding where God is in the midst of something, they can heap judgment on that person for not seeing God, as if the person complaining automatically has something wrong with them.² What are they communicating about God in that moment? They are often implicitly communicating that God does not care about your pain and what happened, but only saying and believing the ‘right’ things.

What can happen then in such a hypothetical case? Sometimes, the figure in the position in Job may reject what the human protectors of orthodoxy try to foist upon him. But, in some cases, the protectors of orthodoxy implicitly “convert” the person to this type of thinking and form them into a more radicalized version of that thinking: God simply cares about saying and believing the right things, and not about who we are people. This can then launch that person into a never-ended quest to discover the truth because that’s what they expect God cares about and how he is known. Their faith in God is determined by the expectation that God is cognitively known in a clear, intellectual, analyzable manner, rather than known in the concrete embodiment God in Jesus Christ (and not simply in the abstract idea of incarnation) and the inspiration of the Spirit. But, if in their quest to find the absolute, theological truth to know God because that is their expectation, they find that God is not knowable in the way they expect, their faith can turn to unbelief. Their remembered experiences about their understanding of God is that of confusion, of mystery, of potentially endless skepticism if they discover their theological exploration is nothing but straw with no other expectation about God to replace that failed expectation.

What is the antidote to this false expectation? I would say to help them to grow their faith by changing their expectations from a God who is primarily known in a clear, propositional manner to a God who in Jesus Christ loves and serves through themselves following the leading of the Spirit to become as servants so that they can comprehend Christ’s servanthood, rather than the often implicit competitive attitude that can come with intellectual accomplishment if people’s seeking for achievement is rooted in the flesh. In that case, they will find, discover, and experience the God who serves, because they themselves understand and have that sort of expectation about God. Additionally, by adopting a servant attitude, they can be a servant to those who they deem to be weak in faith, to build them up, rather than act in such a manner to injure the “weak’s” conscience in the name of their “knowledge” much like Job’s friends risked doing.

My task here, in the end, is to offer an illustration of the principle about the way faith in God emerges from the relation of remembered experiences and expectations but is not intended a fuller, analytic description. I offer it as a way to reconceptualize the struggles that people have in faith in the hope that it can help us to let the Spirit direct us in our understanding of and the helping of people struggling with faith rather than addressing it from the perspective and interests of the flesh that often propagates false expectations of God, thereby risking reinforcing unbelief.

Critical theory, the ideological child of Karl Marx, the grandchild of Georg William Friedrich Hegel, is a major intellectual force in present-day politics, being one of the main driving forces behind modern progressive politics around matters of race, gender, sexuality, etc. What critical theory ultimately is a complex question to answer as it, unlike Marxism, is not defined by the ideas of one or a couple people, but rather it started more like a collaborative project between many intellectuals such as Mark Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and more recently Jürgen Habermas.

However, critical theory can be understood historically as a process of the resolution of cognitive dissonance between the hopes that Marxism promise and the failure of it is to accomplish what it said was assured in history. Marx thought his vision of socialism and the emerge of a stateless society was an inevitable development of capitalism. To risk oversimplification and to put in different categories than Marx did, capitalism was a liminal phase in the social transformation from the authoritarian feudal society that would eventually lead to a non-authoritarian society. With the gradual accumulation of capital leading to investment to increase profits rather than given to labor, eventually, the proletariat would rise up against the bourgeoisie and the revolution would lead to the emergence of a stateless society.

This didn’t happen, however, particularly in Western Europe. Marxism failed to predict and deliver what was promised, and so those entranced by its ideals began to try to rationally understand why Marxism was failing. Communist party members like George Lukács in Hungary and Karl Korsch in Germany began to question the orthodox Marxism and set in process a reformulation and new understanding of the ideas of Marxism ¹. While Lukács eventually recanted of his work under pressure, their and others work lead to the permanent creation of the Institute for Social Research at Geothe University in Frankfurt, which later becomes colloquially known as the Frankfurt School. It was here that people like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse met and collaboratively worked together. 

They ultimately found Marxism to have had weaknesses on multiple fronts, such as overemphasis on dialectical materialism at the cost of an understanding of subjectivity. In place of Marxism, they sought to bring the social sciences to bear upon understanding and changing society. However, at the core of their project was a similar vision to Marxism: that of liberation. However, even that changed. Marxism imagined the liberation of an authoritarian society to a stateless one. Critical theory is more concerned about the liberation of individuals. One implication of this is is that whereas Marxism was primarily a political and economic theory, critical theory is more concerned about the various aspects of personal and social life, hence it has been used to analyze and understand race, sexuality, and gender.

What I am going to suggest, however, is a criticism that is consistent capitalism that critical theory sought to criticize, but like the critical theorists criticism of Marxism leading to a view of liberation that is more personal than simply political and economic, I am seeking to understand the social foundations that both energized capitalism and lead to its ultimate dysfunction. It is this: human persons are primarily concerned about bettering their position in life and those closet in their social networks and they seek to position themselves in a way to gain the biggest advantage for the least disadvantage.

What the transition from feudalism to capitalism accomplished was a greater degree of freedom for individuals persons of the lower class to change their position than had previously been afforded to them. But by freedom, however, I do not mean the ability to determine the course of one’s life, but rather the freedom to redirect the course of one’s life. Early capitalism was still brutally oppressive, but there was less resistance to people’s attempt to change the course of their life than there had been previously. The lower class were still devalued, but at least the hierarchical control over their life had become more limited through the increasing recognition of personal rights. The emerge of liberalism allowed people to seek to define themselves, but they were never freed from the presence of social obligations and limitations but there were free, in a sense, to seek the modify their place in life and the limitations and obligations placed upon them.

What is known as classical liberalism had a particular power to it: it marshaled the natural human drive to personal betterment and allowed more people the opportunity to do such. While this freedom to redefine one’s position in one’s life was never universally offered, as various classes of people were neither really afforded the opportunity, such as women or ethnic minorities, or were given the resources necessary to take advantage of the opportunity, such that those living in long-term, systemic poverty, liberalism allowed for the transformation of society by allowing individual persons the opportunity to change their social standing.

However, this sense of liberty is a much more pragmatic understanding of liberty, rather than ideological. Freedom was not some idealized state that people were to reach, but rather it was something people were given and allowed to act based upon. Freedom was the condition of human action, not its consequence. As a result, freedom was moral imperative of a political society that was used to legitimate the potential to change one’s status, but it was not an ideological lens by which to understand society nor was it something to possess in any absolute or existential sense. That is why the United States, a society built on the concepts of liberty and freedom but not on its consistent application, only reluctantly and with struggle gave freedom from women and blacks and it is why libertarians are a rather small and relatively uninfluential political party. Freedom was never an overarching, moral ideology, but it was a moral concept with a pragmatic purpose: to allow people to change their standing in life.

This vision of freedom in classical liberalism and capitalism is different from freedom in Marxism and critical theory. While commentators such as Isaiah Berlin have tried to define positive and negative freedoms, I feel this is a much too abstract description of freedom. What I feel is fundamentally different is that classical liberalism does not free oneself from negative circumstances, but provides freedom to change one’s negative circumstances. Critical theory, by contrast, seeks to free people from negative circumstances. Put differently, the freedom of classical liberalism is about the possibility of creating change, whereas the freedom of Marxism and critical theory seeking some sort of guarantee, whether the historical inevitability of the revolution or the guarantee of rational institutions that govern life.

This begins to explain why I think Marxism failed and why critical theory will also eventually fall under its own weight. Part of what the critical theorists determined is that Marxism failed to bring about the promised and hope for change because of the failure to take subjectivity into account. Revolution happens when people decide to revolt; it is not simply some event that happens apart from people taking it upon themselves to see it out. But if you think it is an inevitable process of “fate,” you are disinclined to really take action yourself because you think it will inevitably occur. Thus, the critical theorists felt that the move towards liberation is only maintained and sustained through the ongoing impulse for systemic change and they sought to organize and educate people in such a way as to perpetually participate in the processes of change.

But herein lines the unsustainability of critical theory: human motivation does not naturally incline towards wide-spread change. While there are individuals exceptions to the rule, most people prefer no or slow change. Those who naturally comfortable with rapid and sweeping change are a rare lot. Rather, the desire for rapid and sweeping change is more of an adaptive position out of feelings of desperation, and so people must be stoked towards change through a sense of grievance and vulnerability. However, *most* forms of grievance by individual persons dissipate overtime in so far as their life circumstances allow them to adapt and better themselves otherwise. Wide-spread and persistent unrest occurs when people “collaborate” together as a social group to remember their grievances in such a way as they see their grievances still operating and existing in the present. That is to state that revolution is essentially motivated by a persistent grievance narrative reinforced by the telling of grievances.

This didn’t occur in the West in large part due to classical liberalism’s defusing of such desperation and unrest by providing the possibility for people to change their circumstances as individuals. That combined with the Christian virtue of ‘forgiveness’² allowed for the defusing of these social tensions. People’s freedom to try to change their personal circumstances was sufficient to defuse such revolutionary instincts among most people. And that classical liberal societies gradually, even if reluctantly, included more people into this freedom help to reduce the grievances.

As a consequence, the necessary conditions for the type of social change and transformation that critical theorists envision can only primarily develop within educational settings in a classically liberal society. It is in universities and other similar settings that people who have a natural, sustained motivation for a specific intellectual topic and passion congregate. Then, they take willing students who are relatively unformed in their thinking and helped them to see the world in a different way through readings, lectures, and various practices. While this defines higher education as a whole, it is in this setting that critical theory survives. A society that has otherwise immunized itself from long-term grievance narratives is vulnerable to the very institutions that are charged with challenging the way the society thinks and functions.

However, there is a real social limitation of being reliant upon university education. The traditional pedagogical methods of university education is a theory first education. That is to state that one is presented with a set of ideas and theories that are to explain a specific domain of inquiry and then after mastering the concepts, the students then begin to see how the theories apply to life situations and circumstances. The limitation of this is that critical theory requires mastery of the concepts to comprehend, but the ideas of critical theory are not readily apparent apart from the theoretical apparatus that undergirds it.

The result of this is that the impulse towards societal transformation as advocated for by critical theory is limited by its ability to educate people into its theory in the first place. In order for the transformation of society to occur that critical theorists and those they influence seek to inaugurate, it has to effectively escape the confines of the educational institution. That is to state, it must become popularized, much like Marxism become popularized and its popularizations served as catalysts for social revolutions. But Marxism had an intuitive feeling to it in drawing the battle lines in a simple way between the proletariat and bourgeoise, even if Marx’s own theory and analysis of capitalism was immensely more complex. In virtue of its highly critical, intellectual stance, critical theory can not be popularized in such a way as to readily understand its core principles. To try to popularize critical theory is to grievously distort it as its methods of social analysis are incredibly complex out of necessity in understanding subjectivity (a brief read Habermas reveals that readily).

By contrast, classical liberalism didn’t require people to truly understand freedom to transform society: it simply had to remove roadblocks to people’s natural inclination towards bettering their situation. Classical liberalism works with what is more generally true about human nature, whereas critical theory relies upon the nature of the intellectual elite. One can say that the way of thinking and living in classical liberalism can be learned in multiple ways. While one can come into it from a theoretical understanding of freedom to then have the practical understanding of seeking to better your life circumstances, it is much more easily learned by people being taught to act freely to better themselves.

Put differently, classical liberalism thrives due to its ability to appeal to what is more broadly true about people across the board, whereas critical theory thrives only within a bubble. In the West, it thrives in the bubble of higher education that allows for the development of a narrow range of highly intelligent people according to patterns of specific theories. I would compare critical theory more to a religious cult, with an insider language that only those initiated into it can readily comprehend. While religious cults typically do not target highly intelligent persons due to their ability to see through appearances and the rationalizations that occurs when the dogma fail, critical theory is the result of an incredibly complex process of cognitive dissonance (far more complex than what occurs in many religious cults) emerging from the failure of Marxism that it has an impressive set of rationalizations that can sustain even the most intelligent of people.

In presenting this, this is not intended as a criticism of many of the goals of critical theory, but rather the unsustainability of critical theory’s methodology and definition of freedom. The critique could extend further. For instance, the ever adaptive nature of human beings to resist attempts to be controlled in order to better their own life leads people to adapt to and resist the forms of social analysis that they deemed is used against their values and goals, thereby changing the very social landscape. In other words, the presentation of a social theory leads to a form of change and resistance to that social theory that makes the theory less reliably. While a meta-theory can take account for this type of change, one can not create reliable social theories that accurately predict and explain in the face of social and political resistance. But I chose to focus on the topic of human nature and learning to highlight its critical theories ultimately fragile, social standing.

This criticism is not coming from a classical liberal. I am not a classical liberal because I feel that this social and political project of the Enlightenment has grievously failed a wide range of the population. I considered myself to be a Christian that takes the vision of new creation of all people in a very serious way, and I find that classical liberalism and capitalism does not accomplish it. That said, I think classical liberalism is immensely more able to accomplish what it was set out to do in the Enlightenment than what Marxism was able to do and what critical theory will ever be able to accomplish.

The significance and meaning of forgiveness can be, somewhat ironically, a divisive topic. It gets no more divisive than when we talk about abuse victims and abuse. Should an abuse victim forgive their abuser even when the abuser is recalcitrant towards taking responsibility? Some would say yes, that is a necessary part of their healing and growth. Forgiveness is about what you do as the offended. Others would say no, that that forgiveness requires repentance. To forgive an abuser is to deny the pain and anger, not to mention some abusers expect forgiveness from their victims as part of their repertoire of manipulation to get away with the abuse.

Part of the reason for this disagreement about forgiveness is that the meaning of “forgiveness” isn’t necessarily precise and clear. Does it essentially mean regarding the past offense as if it didn’t happen, as proverbially summed up in the phrase “Forgive and forget?” Or, it is simply about forgoing vengeance, to not engage in an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth sort of vindictive behavior? Further complicating this is the purpose of forgiveness is not always agreed. Forgiveness is often portrayed with a therapeutic purpose. On the other hand, it can be responded that forgiveness is sacrificially about the other person, not one’s own well-being.

While addressing the different ideas of forgiveness is impossible to do in a blog post, and even impossible to do adequately in a full book, the different understandings of forgiveness can be looked at through two lenses: (1) how many parties are involved in the act of forgiveness and (2) what exactly does forgiveness entail? Regarding the number of parties in forgiveness,  the offended party forgives the party regardless of the action of the offending party. In two-party forgiveness, the offending party must respond appropriately (repentance, amends, etc.) for the offended party to forgive. Regarding the question of what forgiveness entails, it can be seen as forgetting the past and acting like it didn’t happen, as not taking vengeance, etc. Additionally added to this question is the nature of the relationship of the two parties: does the offended party allow the offending party the type of access and influence they had that wrongly used in the first place?

What I am offering here is an attempt to treat forgiveness through a different lens in seeing forgiveness as a teleological act that has a specific purpose in mind.

I want to suggest at the heart of forgiveness is the vision of shalom, of life being well-lived. But this shalom is not about a specific individual’s shalom, but the shalom of the whole. In that, I want to suggest that forgiveness is an act that frees the offending party by not purely defining them by their sin such that they can be free to live and act appropriately in a community defined by shalom. Forgiveness is an act of liberation that invites the offending party into a new way of action as part of a community of shalom.

However, allow me to clarify: I don’t take the liberation in forgiveness to be a freedom from consequence. Wrong actions, and especially evil actions, should be met with the appropriate response due to the loss of trust their actions have fostered. Disciplinary actions are a necessary consequence of such actions. However, forgiveness as an act of liberation allows for the possibility and space that the perpetrator can be different. As such, forgiveness does not seek to take disproportionate actions in response to wrong and evil acts that have been committed that would keep the wrong-doers metaphorically “locked up.” To use an example that isn’t controversial to illustrate, a manager who acted in a very irresponsible with the budget and money under their control would not be automatically blacklisted from such a position in the future elsewhere, although it may lead to the ending of their present employment with no possibility of rehire. Furthermore, forgiveness makes an appropriate space and path for the offending party to live and act differently. By appropriate I mean it does not either put the offended party into highly vulnerable situations nor does it put an onerous and burdensome sense of requirements and litmus tests upon the offending party that far outweighs the act done. For the hypothetical manager mentioned above, they would need to show they have taken the appropriate responsibility for their irresponsibility by getting the necessary training for handling money and then show their reliability in the future by working their way back up. They would not be given the same position immediately in the name of “forgiveness” nor would they be submitted to needless requirements, such as having to make amends with their previous employer.

In other words, forgiveness as an act of liberating the perpetrator allows the perpetrator to learn, grow, and live differently. This vision of forgiveness is an attempt to take the language of forgiveness in the New Testament seriously. The primary word used for forgiveness by Jesus in the Gospels is ἀφίημι, which is a word used for release and was regularly used in the context of the obligations of debt, whether literal or metaphorical debts. Then, in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6.12, Jesus defines forgiveness as a releasing from one’s debts (ὀφείλημα). Then in the parable about forgiveness in the parable of the unforgiveness servant, Jesus again uses the language of debt and the imprisonment that a person in debt can experience to illustrate forgiveness.

What has happened in a lot of Protestant circles, however, is that we have grown to learn to define forgiveness as freedom from consequence rather than a freedom to be and experience something different. When prevailing concerns about God’s forgiveness is about whether one will go to eternal hell or not, the primary lens by which we have learned to see forgiveness is in terms of its consequence. As a result, we don’t readily recognize God’s forgiveness as our liberation so that we can be freed from the risk of such a judgment. It becomes easy then to transfer this understanding of forgiveness to the social, horizontal acts of forgiveness towards each other as freedom from consequence, rather than a freedom from being irredeemably locked away.

What has furthermore gotten lost is that forgiveness is not about a transfer from an all negative status to an all positive status. Protestant accounts of God’s forgiveness treat God’s love as regarding the repentant sinner as on the same spiritually footing as the long faithful saint. In fact, in Protestantism, it is often the case there can not even be a real distinction between the sinner and saint, but that we are, in the words of Luther “simul justus et peccator.” While the original intention of this was good and needed, it is has had the effect of flattening out our view of people without making distinctions based upon actual actions and practices rather than redirecting people to recognize the heart of the Gospel is the liberation of the sinner and recognizing the process of transformation that is concomitant with the appropriate response to liberation.

As a consequence, we don’t have an understanding of liminality, which is a state in which people are going through a process of change that is positive but has not yet reached its intended goal. For instance, I would say in 1 Corinthians 2, Paul does make a distinction between people who are saved and have faith in God’s power and then those people whose faith in God has grown to the love of God; those with faith are in a liminal phase of transition from the old way of thinking and living to a new way demonstrated in Christ and realized through the Spirit. The consequence of this loss of liminality is that we have a hard time recognizing the state of liminal transformation that forgiveness has the potential to initiate. Forgiveness is seen as immediately getting us to the freedom from consequence and just moving on past what happened, rather than forgiveness allowing us the space to grow and learn to be a new person and appropriately participate in a community of shalom under God’s rule.

To that end, forgiveness as an act of liberation is an act in which the perpetrator is invited into a new way of acting and living, as founded upon the person of Jesus Christ as both the exemplar par excellence of liberating forgiveness that comes from God and the exemplar par excellence for how God calls us to live in this world. But forgiveness is the initial, one-party invitation of the offending party into this shalom, it is not the culmination of shalom. The perpetrator is invited into and given the opportunity for a process of change and transformation that will involve them taking responsibility through repentance and confession, making the appropriate amends to the victims, progress through time to establish one’s trustworthiness where one broke trust, etc. Meanwhile, when that type of process is respectfully engaged in without being used as a form of manipulation and coercion by the perpetrator to try to involuntarily obligate and guilt their victim to a certain type of feeling or response towards them, it also allows the victim an easier path towards shalom through healing.

As a consequence, this view of forgiveness doesn’t define forgiveness along the lines of the interests of specific individuals, although it does preferentially take the interests of the victim at heart as an integral part of the process that forgiveness initiates and makes possible. In the short run, the process that forgiveness invites into takes the concerns of the victims into account, although in the long-run forgiveness is about the opportunity of the perpetrator. Forgiveness is a teleological act directed towards the realization of the shalom of the community that includes both the victim’s concerns for well-being and healing and the perpetrator’s possibility of learning how to live responsibility within a community of shalom and experiencing it afresh again. From the victim, they must allow the possibility for people to be different and accept when the invitation is not taken without vengeance, while not denying the wrong done or being obligated to fit their feelings and behaviors into some pattern that acts as if it didn’t happen. From the perpetrator, they are given a route to move forward, but they need to learn to accept the forgiveness that has offered, rather than think some other definition of “forgiveness” entitles them to anything more than the opportunity for liberation.

One of the joys of taking a day off from a research project and writing is that you sometimes get to explore a related topic that branches off, but has your curiosity piqued, but you don’t have to time to really address it. One area of interest that I have had, which I briefly expressed the other day, is the relationship of 1 Corinthians 10.1-13 and Exodus 23.20-23. In brief, I suggested the idea that Paul’s discourse implies a connection of Jesus to the ‘messenger’ (מַלְאָךְ) of the Lord who goes before the Israelites, but I didn’t have space to expand the idea in that specific post.

Before explaining the connection, I want to situate this within the setting of 1 Corinthians as a whole. In 1 Corinthians 1-4, Paul addresses the topic of wisdom; the concern for the Corinthians is that they are failing to comprehend how Gods teaches wisdom. They regarded wisdom to be taught much as they expected in the prevailing forms of Greco-Roman wisdom, in which different people reputed to be wise would obtain a large following (Paul’s near-contemporary Epictetus is an example of the celebrity that comes with being considered wise). However, this leads to social competitions between various people considered to be wise to determine who was right and wrong through the demonstration of their wisdom. The Corinthians had treated the various Christian teachers, apparently including even Jesus, as operating in competition with each other and failed to truly comprehend that it was God who was at work in them in the crucifixion of Christ and the giving of the Spirit and failed to understand the significance of this when it comes to the life of gatherings. In 1.30-2.16, Paul defines Jesus as the source of God’s wisdom and that the teachers collaboratively together, not competitively, have the mind of Christ in virtue of the diverse inspirations of the Spirit working together. While Paul primarily emphasizes God’s work through the Holy Spirit in 1 Cor. 2, what is also at stake is an understanding of who Jesus is. He is not merely a teacher of wisdom pitted against others teachers, but He is the source of God’s wisdom, echoing a familiar theme in Proverbs 8 and Second Temple Judaism of a hypostatized wisdom that was in involved in the creation and operation of the world.

What were the Corinthians primarily thinking about Jesus? It is difficult to pin down exactly what they were thinking because we only have Paul’s side with a few briefs hints. However, a few clues could point us in the right direction. Firstly, the philosophy of Stoicism was the prevailing philosophy of the day in circles of Roman power. One of the bigger themes that the Stoics taught about God is about the providence of God. There is a regular order and function of the world and cosmos, and Stoics like Seneca and Epictetus identified this order as “God” or “Zeus.” Occasionally, noteworthy and virtuous figures of wisdom would come around who exemplified some imitable trait. For instance, Epictetus in his Discourses 3.26.27-28 says the following:

Does any good man fear that he may run out of food? The blind don’t run out of food, nor do the crippled; so will a good man run out of it? A good soldier doesn’t fail to find someone to employ him and pay him his wages, nor does a good workman or a good cobbler; so will a good man fail to find anyone? Does God so neglect his own creatures, his servants, his witnesses, the only people he can make use of as an example (παραδείγμασιν) to the uneducated, to prove that he both exists and governs the universe wisely, and doesn’t neglect human affairs, and that nothing bad ever happens to a good person, either during his lifetime or after his death?

The idea is such that particular people show off the nature of God’s providence to the world. That the Corinthians are thinking about God’s providence is evident in Paul’s demonstration of their contradictory beliefs about Jesus’ resurrection and the general resurrection in 1 Cor. 15.12-19. In v. 19 he concludes his rebuttal of their contradictory beliefs by saying: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (NRSV) This verse here perhaps identifies what is happening with some of the Corinthians: some are thinking that Christ is a hope for the present life alone. While the connection isn’t directly in the text, so we there is no proof of this, it is plausible to suggest that the Corinthians’ believed Jesus to be an example of God’s own caring providence, similar to how Epictetus reasoned. Perhaps some Corinthians thought Jesus as a teacher who taught the wisdom about the way the world presently is, rather than one in whom God has demonstrated His world-changing wisdom in the resurrection. Christ did not simply teach some wisdom about God and the world, but in His very person, the events of His life, crucifixion, and resurrection have revealed the very nature of God’s wisdom to be a world-changing, world-shaking wisdom from God.

Now, this brings us to 1 Corinthians 10.1-13. Before getting into its relationship to Exodus 23, we can imagine one possible purpose for Paul in this discourse for the Corinthians in their hearing. If they have understood Christ as simply a teacher that made known God’s providence, then what is the harm of failing to obey? In the Stoic philosophical, wisdom was in part about aligning oneself to the way the world is ordered. But in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul portrays Jesus as actively involved in the life of Israel in the wilderness. This is no mere providence that failure to obey simply lead to some mild consequence based upon failing to be appropriately aligned to the order of things; Israel’s disobedience leads to God’s displeasure and action even as Christ was providing for them. This would serve as a warning to the Corinthians that even as they are experiencing the blessings of Christ through the Spirit, God could be displeased with their behavior.

What I want to first highlight here is that Paul does not portray Christ as the destroyer. He is Israel’s protector and provider, but as stated in 1 Cor. 10.9, Israel’s response to Christ (or the Lord depending on the manuscript) lead to the appearance of serpents. Paul doesn’t say that Christ sent the serpents, but only suggests there was a connection between the two. But if you take a close look at the passage Paul is referring to, Numbers 21.4-9, the only people being said to be spoken against is God and Moses (v. 5). While those of us who are confessional, orthodox Christians might be tempted to connect Jesus in 1 Cor. 10.9 to God, the Old Testament did not express a latent Trinitarian theology. What I want to suggest, however, is that Christ is identified by Paul as the one that joins God and Moses together; that is, a messenger who both expresses God’s will and guides Moses. To speak against both God and Moses, therefore, is to speak also against Christ.

This is where Exodus 23 comes in. The figure introduced is described in Hebrew as a מַלְאָךְ. If you were to peruse through the Old Testament, מַלְאָךְ would often be used to refer to figures that we ourselves would refer to as angels, such as the angel who comes to Abraham in Genesis 22.9-19. But מַלְאָךְ is not used exclusively for what we would refer to as angels. Numbers 20.14-16, for instance, uses the word to refer to a messenger sent by Moses and a messenger sent from God. The word here can be clearly used to refer to human messengers in addition to the “messenger” that God sent to protect Israel. In other words, מַלְאָךְ doesn’t have to mean angel.

The problem that has occurred with our reading of the Old Testament is what I would describe as an ontic assumption of semantic meaning: that is to state that the meaning of a word is determined by what it is used to reference. For instance, a cat refers to a figure that we know in our head as a “cat.” The ontic assumption of semantic meaning is a regular feature of Western philosophy where to know something is to know its substance/essence/nature. We know something by knowing what it is. When this way of thinking penetrates into language, we think “our language refers to what something is.” So, when we see the word מַלְאָךְ, we are tempted to think “angel.” But then, this type of reading deconstructs in Numbers 20.14-16. מַלְאָךְ isn’t an angel, but rather a messenger. מַלְאָךְ seems better defined as describing the role someone has taken rather than a description of their nature. The sense of the word מַלְאָךְ is not to describe an ontological class of beings, but rather the purpose these entities have in relationship to Moses and to God.

In other words, I would say Exodus 23.20-23 is not referring to an angel, but to an entity that serves the purpose of guiding and directing Israel. We see this explicitly stated of this messenger in 23.21: “Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him.” This figure had the role of instructing Israel as he led Israel along the way. However, as the narrative develops, we don’t see this figure teaching Israel. It is Moses who teaches Israel.

I would suggest it is in this narrative silence that allows Paul sees Christ as guiding and leading Israel, including but not limited to leading them through Moses. Hence, he can consider Christ being tested when God sends the serpents. However, we also see him being the one who followed Israel (1 Cor. 10.4) just as the messenger of the Lord followed the camp of Israel (Exodus 14.19).¹ Furthermore, the messenger of the Lord in Exodus 23.20-23 is never spoken of as attacking people, but rather the Israelite’s response to the messenger will determine how God acts and responds to his enemies; likewise Paul does not describe Christ as destroying the Israelites. Finally, and for the cherry on the top, this messenger is said to have “[God’s] name in him.” (Exodus 23.21)

However, it needs to be clarified: if this is the case, this is not Paul reading Christ as appearing all throughout the Old Testament when there are various figures that are sent by God. Paul is not identifying Jesus with all messengers/angels in the Old Testament. To do so is to treat Paul’s reading of the Old Testament like a textbook where specific terms have technical meanings that are used the same way again and against. In a previous post when I mentioned this idea about Exodus 23.20-23 and 1 Corinthians 10.1-13 in brief, I suggested that there was an early heresy among early believers that reduced Jesus to an angel, which I take the letter to the Hebrews to be evidence of. Had the early Church made a connection between Jesus and the messenger in Exodus 23.20-23, those people influenced by a more Hellenistic way of reading might have interpreted the מַלְאָךְ (or ἄγγελος in the LXX) under the direct or indirect influence of Greek philosophy and saw it as a description of the figures nature rather than function. In that case, if Exodus 23.20-23 was an early passage used to connect Jesus to God, a Hellenistic influence might have made them think Jesus was angel, rather than Jesus was the one who God sent. Speculative as that is, what we an say with some confidence is that for Paul, he is identifying Jesus with God’s protective and redemptive purposes in Israel’s story. He is identifying Jesus acting in Israel’s narrative to help the Corinthians understand the role that Jesus should have among them, in addition to showing how God responses to those who disregards His messenger. He is not trying to do Old Testament ‘ontology,’ but rather elucidate the significance of the Old Testament narrative.

To conclude with a final thought, the conjunction of Paul’s understanding of Jesus as the wisdom of God and as the one who directed Israel highlights the nature of his high Christology. Paul does not simply identify Jesus with some figure connected to God in the Old Testament. Rather, it seems more plausible and simply to suggest that Paul identifies Jesus with God, and as a consequence, he then identifies Jesus with the messenger of the lord and with God’s wisdom. What this means, however, is that understanding Jesus in His role as Lord and the Son of God can not be reduced to what is known about those figures in the Old Testament, but that He is one who encompasses those literary references but is more than what those literary references originally referred to.

In recent months, I have become incredibly interested in the topic of Scriptural inspiration. It largely draws from studies in 1 Corinthians 2 and my growing conviction that 1 Cor. 2.6-16 is Paul describing the way that God’s wisdom emerges in the community, and not individual teachers and believers, in virtue of the Spirit’s diverse inspiration of various teachers and the mature to understand wisdom. While Paul’s account there is explicitly NOT an account of Scriptural inspiration, there is a certain idea that I found particularly compelling to consider for understanding Scriptural inspiration: that of collaborative inspiration of persons.

To understand what I mean by collaborative inspiration, it is first necessary to look at a similar concept of inspiration before I describe the account of collaborative inspiration. Thomas à Kempis wrote in his classic The Imitation of Christ that “TRUTH, not eloquence, is to be sought for in Holy Scripture. Each part of the Scripture is to be read with the same Spirit wherewith it was written.”¹ In this account of inspiration, we find something that differs from many standard accounts of Scriptural inspiration today. Many understandings of inspiration consider the Scriptural text itself as inspired, with the implication that anyone who reads the Scriptures can then possess the truth. While the author is inspired, the reader doesn’t have to be inspired themselves to possess knowledge of the truth. Instead, can come to know the truth in virtue of rightly interpreting the Scriptures, which among the more dedicated and reflective readers of the Bible may lead to the question of Biblical hermeneutics. However, Kempis’ account of inspiration treats the inspiration of the reader as a necessary condition for understanding, not just the author. While Kempis does not expand this idea further, one can try to provide a model for what can explain Kempis’ account, although we do not need to treat the extrapolated accounts of necessarily being authentic to Kempis.

One way to develop this account is to suggest that the Holy Spirit influences the Scriptural reader to direct their understanding of the words in the right way so as to understand what the inspired author wrote. That is to state that a person can understand the truth from the Scriptures because the Spirit provides what is missing in the mind of the interpreter to make sense of the words that are given. My problem with this account, however, is that it treats the Scriptures essentially as containing a secret knowledge that can not be rightly understood at all (or at least, usually won’t be rightly interpreted if one imagines the uninspired persons are simply ignorant but not being actively hindered from understanding it) unless a person is inspired in their comprehension. It isn’t actually reading the words that provide the ability to comprehend the Scripture. Reading is largely a superfluous activity, but the Spirit comes in to provide the right reading. This feels a bit too much of a “God-of-the-gaps” for human cognitive and hermeneutics for me to be comfortable with the idea.

Another account is to suggest that the inspiration of the Spirit leads the reader to understand the same content as the author, but the inspiration does not come in the act of reading, but it comes through other events prior to reading, such as in prayer, service, or even as per Kempis work, imitating Christ. In this case, the act of reading and interpreting the Scriptures is instrumental for a person to come to a knowledge of the truth, but it can only be done successfully by the Spirit’s inspiration of the person in other parts of their life. I consider this a stronger account than the first model for that reason. In addition, it corresponds to what I deem to be the cause of Spiritual comprehension by the mature in 1 Cor. 2.15: the ethical formation of people by their behaviors that are consistent with the leading of the Spirit rather than working against the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 3.1-4; 6.14-20).

Nevertheless, I think this account falls short for another reason. The problem is with the idea that the purpose of the Scriptures is to provided truth. To be clear, I am NOT rejecting the idea that Scriptures convey something we can call the truth. However, notwithstanding the thorny philosophical problems that are connected to defining what exactly truth is, is a more pragmatic concern: knowledge almost never is SIMPLY about possessing truth. Most forms of knowledge in day to day life can be considered to generally provide other epistemic goods in addition to the epistemic good of truth. For instance, the knowledge that a therapist possesses does not simply help them to accurately understand the thoughts and feelings of their clients; it is also instrumental in helping their clients to change from old patterns into new patterns. The professional knowledge of a therapist provides not just truth but also effective action.

For a more religious example, the Sermon on the Mount is not generally considered to provide a true account of Jesus’ ethics. To simply be able to know ethical truths about God’s will and speak about them isn’t the intention of the Sermon on the Mount. One can simply speak such truths while lacking it in actions, such as the wolf in sheep’s clothing which uses the expression of the truth to cloak their destructive behaviors. Jesus’ words of wisdom should also deliver a sense of moral virtue that is consistent with the truth. And, it seems that the way Jesus distinguishes himself from the common hermeneutical practices (5.17-48) and religious practices (6.1-5) of the Pharisees and hypocrites does more than simply say “This is what is true” but can actively direct the audience to a form of knowledge that directs them to be different in their religious and moral behaviors.

In other words, while the Scriptures can convey knowledge truth,² the Scriptures are normatively intended to provide more than just knowledge of the truth. It also provides knowledge that can direct people in wisdom, form people in virtue, provide comfort and direction in trying circumstances, etc. etc. Most evangelical accounts of inspiration tend to focus on the epistemic good of truth and overlook the rest.

This is where I can consider a collaborative inspiration fitting in: the inspiration of the Spirit provides the capacity for the interpretation of Scriptures to be direct towards the right epistemic goods, besides or in addition to truth. That is to state that an inspired interpreter is inspired to have the sort of knowledge from Scripture that delivers the epistemic goods that God purposes. An inspired interpreter does not simply reconstruct the thoughts of the inspired author, but rather uses what the author inspired for purposes that the author did not have directly in mind. In other words, the interpreters of Scripture are inspired in the usage and application of Scripture and knowledge that comes from Scripture.

Let me use Jesus’ teaching on divorce as an example. One can clearly see that Jesus teaches against divorce, describing divorce as causing of adultery (Matthew 5.31-32). However, in some very conservative, evangelical circles, they consider the Scriptures to provide an inspired knowledge of the truth, and they consider this form of knowledge to be in the form of as a universal moral rule that allows for no exception. If a woman is in an abusive marriage, they may be encouraged to remain in that marriage rather than getting out of it. For them, the Scriptures are inspired to provide truth, and then through their own ways of transforming the ethical truth into a universal moral rule, apply that knowledge is a way that supports marital abuse.

My account differs in that while the inspiration of the author makes the Scriptures reliable for coming to the truth, the interpreters are inspired to know how to use that knowledge in the appropriate ways that are consistent with God’s will and purposes. For instance, in 1 Cor. 7.10-11, Paul shows awareness of Jesus’ teaching about divorce. However, in 1 Cor. 7.12-16, Paul seems to allow an “exception” to Jesus’ teaching under conditions of an unbelieving spouse who leaves. What I would suggest, however, is that Paul isn’t making an exception, which assumes that Jesus’ ethical teaching on divorce should be understood as a universal moral precept. Rather, Paul considers the Spirit to be leading him to provide instruction about martial matters as he concludes his instructions on marriage in 1 Cor. 7 with the statement “I think that I too have the Spirit of God” in 7.40b. I take this to be Paul’s way of stating his authorization to present the teaching about marriage that he does from 7.12 to 7.40a: the Spirit has inspired him to provide ethical instructions regarding marriage, including providing freedom to the spouses of unbelievers that they are free if their spouse leaves. As Paul’s expression in 1 Cor. 7.12-16 has the knowledge of Jesus’ teaching in the immediate context, one can consider the Spirit to have inspired Paul in the application of Jesus’ teachings. In a similar, an inspired interpreter who recognizes God’s purposes for life could recognize that Jesus’ teaching on divorce should not be used in a way that compels such abuse for the sake of keeping a marriage together.

However, I want to clarify my point here. My model for understanding the inspiration of the interpreter by the Spirit is not that the Spirit simply provides a specific application of Scriptural knowledge. One can come to the conclusion that Jesus’ teachings on divorce should not apply to situations of abuse based on some other form of moral reasoning that doesn’t necessitate the inspiration of the Spirit. For instance, one can interpret Jesus’ norms against the background of a consequentialist ethic that considers the consequences of when and where one applies Jesus’s teaching on divorce, coming to the conclusion that it is wrong because it leads to an evil result in perpetuating abuse. Rather, the Spirit inspires the interpreter to recognize good and evil in a more expanded sense by teaching them to recognize and pursue God’s purposes. The Spirit inspires the interpreter of Scripture to comprehend the larger vision of God’s will that the Scriptures testify to, rather than just getting the application right in a specific circumstance or type of circumstance.

This vision of inspiration can apply to more than just ethical application, however. It can also provide a basis for biblical theology and theological exegesis. Understanding the meaning of a specific passage or even a specific book, which is the task of traditional exegesis, is different from connecting the interpretations of various parts of Scripture together to a coherent whole. On the assumption that God did inspire the various producers of the whole canon of Scripture for the Christian tradition and that this inspiration included true beliefs about God, then the diversity of portrayals of God throughout the Scripture can be considered to be able to be brought together into a coherent understanding. The account of collaborative inspiration would suggest that the authors of Scripture did not have to have the larger, coherent account in mind to communicate within the specific communicative situation, but that in virtue of God’s inspiration, their inspired communication can be regarded as consistent with that of another person’s inspired communication, even if the way to hold the accounts as consistent may not be easily or readily apparent. However, an inspired interpreter could have the ability to make sense of the whole that the original authors of Scripture did not. In so doing, their inspiration provides a form of truth and knowledge that is (a) entirely dependent upon the Scriptures and its interpretation but (b) is not reducible to the Scriptures and its interpretation.

However, once again, this account of inspiration does not state that the Spirit provides a theological account of the whole Scripture and knowledge of God. One might consider it possible that a person who is not inspired to come to an understanding of the Scriptures as a whole can still derive true beliefs about the Scripture. However, it is the Spirit who provides a deeper sense of understanding of God and God’s will that enables theological exegesis.

The distinction I am making between the getting the right ethical application of Scripture of a right theological interpretation and the Spirit who inspires people to understand of God and God’s will that determines the way they interpret the Scriptures is that the inspiration of the latter is reliable in a way that people in the former conditions can not be. Put differently, the uninspired interpreter may get the right application of theological understanding in virtue of some reason other than understanding God, which means that the rightness of their interpretations and applications are contingent upon how much their other reason corresponds to God.

For instance, let’s assume the doctrine of the Trinity is true and an uninspired reader, whether a believer or an unbeliever, and believes the New Testament is rightly understood through the lens of the Trinity. Their knowledge about the Trinity in the abstract sense will impact how they interpret the references to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. However, if the Spirit has inspired a person to understand God in a Trinitarian manner in a more concrete way that resembles God’s own self-knowledge, the way that they might interpret those same references will differ in virtue of their concrete rather that differs from the abstract form of knowledge of the Trinity. In this case, we can imagine that the inspired interpreter will be more reliable than the uninspired interpreter.

To conclude, the reason this account is a collaborative account is that the inspired interpreter is absolutely dependent upon the inspired communicators of Scripture. The Spirit does not provide them a form of knowledge or wisdom that makes them independent of the priests, prophets, apostles, witnesses who were inspired in their communication. They don’t get a God’s-eye view of the God and the world that allows them to judge the inspired communicators of Scripture and accept or dismiss them in virtue of having some criteria of truth to make such a differentiation. A person that God inspires in interpretation is always dependent upon God’s inspiration of other persons. Furthermore, a collaborative account recognizes that the inspired interpreter may bring something new to the table from God that can not be reduced to what the Scriptures say.

However, what is brought “new” isn’t necessarily some new, big idea that everyone needs to accept to be faithful to God part from situation and circumstance, but it is a newness that is for the specific range of situations and circumstances that God intends. While, hypothetically, God could provide a new revelation that all believers should accept, I would say from my own personal feeling and thinking that God’s inspiration is primarily focused on bringing something new not on a universal scale but to specific circumstances and needs. In other words, to be an inspired interpreter is not to have a wide, sweeping epistemic authority across various people that should be accepted, but that God is bringing about His will and purposes within a specific context or contexts through the Spirit’s inspiration of an interpreter.

Finally, this view of inspiration still allows for the role of interpretation of the Scripture through traditional hermeneutical principles and the possibility that they can be instrumental in getting at a right or true interpretation. The inspired interpreter isn’t necessarily getting the true knowledge as directly expressed in Scriptures in virtue of their inspiration, but rather the application of the Scripture as a different epistemic good or the theological comprehension of Scripture as a different type of truth than the form of truth expressed in Scripture. It does not rule out the role of education and learning in some sort of anti-intellectual aversion, but it does place a fence around the role that education can and does have in the interpretation of Scripture for the purposes of God’s Kingdom.