What is necessary for a person to be saved? This has been a common question that gets asked and opined upon within Christian circles. What are the minimum necessities of Christian faith? On the surface of it, this question seems noble in intentions, as it tries to not make Christian faith too inaccessible or exclusive and it tries to take seriously that we come into the life before God through faith and not some prior accomplishments for our record. However, lurking under this question is darker idea that can get inculcated by it: what I labeled min-max Christianity.

What is min-max Christianity? Min-max Christianity is the pattern of religious belief and behavior that is focused on the getting, than the giving, that is focused more on the rights and privileges rather than commitment and servant hood. Central to min0max Christianity is a focus on defining the benefits of “membership,” whether the membership being in the people of God, a specific denomination, etc. that are considered to inalienable, obligatory, and binding while keeping expectations low. When we talk about the minimum requirements of the Gospel, we are often explicitly expressing the minimizing part of the min-maxing.

What if someone asked “What is the minimum I have to do to become a pastor” or “What is the minimum I have to do to be a scholar” or “What is the minimum I have to do to have a long, happy marriage?” (All things that I myself aim for that I am most familiar with; you can insert your own equivalent examples) What would I tell them? Don’t expect to be a pastor, don’t expect to be a scholar, and don’t expect to get a happy marriage. Why? Because each of those three things entail the whole person being set and formed for those things. If you try to get by with only the “necessities,” you will likely fall short of the goal. Having been a pastor, having engaged in scholarship, and having studied relationships and marriages, you can not successfully min-max your way to being an effective pastor, a learned scholar, and a continuously warm marriage. You will fall short, flame out, or become overwhelmed time with that attitude.

Now, there is a different way to frame the original intention of the question about the minimum necessities: what is the starting point? How does one start towards being a pastor? Prayer, Scripture reading, service, and learning theology years before you even step foot in a pulpit. How does one starts towards being a scholar? Reading, researching, and focused reflection long before you are a scholar. How does one start towards a happy marriage? Building warmth and passion through kindness, affection, and attentiveness from the first date. But here is the secret about those three things: the starting point is also what keeps you going as you get closer and closer to the goal and keeps you sustained once you have intially reached the goal. The starting point is not a bare minimum, but it is the very attitude, it is the very practices, it is the very way of approaching your future that enable you to receive and be changed to be those type of people.  However, if one has a min-maxing attitude, then once the goal seems to be reached, then one begins to rest on their laurels and may even develop a sense of entitlement about those things.

I would teach the same about the Christian faith. Our journey with God is not something we min-max, where we do what is necessary to get an exchange from God, the church, etc. Rather, there is the starting point of faith that God is showing us the way to Him in Jesus Christ, and it is this starting point that guides and leads us to run the race set before us to the finish. The gift of eternal life is living in the journey, which we can not just readily min-max. This doesn’t mean we need to be perfect or achieve some high standard of performance before God to continue to enjoy eternal life, but it means that a min-maxing attitude may leave us precariously short as we leave behind what started us on the journey for other things, which will take us on different journeys towards different destinations, but not the future God has willed for us. This faith forms how we understand our life circumstances and how we are called to love God and love others in the midst of them, but if we are simply min-maxing, we will not be long for continuing to see with faith.

Perhaps the best analogy to frame this is a child and learning. How does a child grow up to be a nuclear physicist? He starts by learning how to read and write, how to add and subtract. But then, as he masters those materials, he begins to learn new materials, such as how to understand stories and how to multiple and divide. After mastering that, he learns something new at the next level, and so on, until she or he finally reaches the type of learning and research that a nuclear physicist has. A min-maxing attitude will never allow them to run the race. However, the way they start is the way they trudge forward and is the way they finish and they as a person and their memories are formed towards the telos of nuclear physics.

There is no minimum of the Gospel. Rather, it starts, continues, and finishes in us where it all began, but with progress from where one started. Min-maxing cuts off progress at some point.

The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. For many Christians, it is the source of great fear and trepidation, as they understand this act means that one will never be forgiven by God, that one will be relegated to an eternal hell fire. However, what makes it so scary isn’t simply what is thought to be the punishment, but because Jesus doesn’t explicitly define what the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is. This has lead to no small amount of fear and speculation about it.

I want to make two points about this idea that can redefine how we understand the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. First, I will take a look at the consequence that Jesus spoke of it on the lack of freedom rather than everlasting judgment. Second, I will take a look the vocabulary about time that Jesus uses. Thirdly, I will then try to provide a sense of what the act specifically is. Finally, it will try to sum up these observations into a theological account that attempts to make sense of the seriousness of this blasphemy.

In the three synoptic accounts of Matthew 12.31-32/Mark 3.28-30/Luke 12.10, there are two cognate words used that most translations render as either forgive or forgiveness: ἀφίημι in Matthew and Luke and ἄφεσις in Mark. Neither of these terms, in their normal usage, specifically mean forgiveness by default. They rather refer to an act of releasing someone or something. Certainly, we can imagine that forgiveness may be understood as a form of release, but that is simply one possible metaphorical extension of the idea.

Another way to understand these terms is closer to the idea of being freed from the control that a sin may have on the person, both in the hold it has on the person and in the potential discipline or punishment that may come upon the person for committing such an act. We see this dual focus in Hebrews 10.14-18, where the transformation of the person in God’s instruction being put into people’s heart and God’s “forgetting” of sins is connected to a release (ἄφεσις). Put in common theological language, the releasing of sins can be understood to entail both releasing of the person from the power of sin and the guilt of sin.

With this in mind, when Jesus warns those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit will not be released, Jesus isn’t alluding to the final judgment where God sends people to heaven and hell. Rather, he is referring to the present reality that actively binds the person. The Matthean version says they will not be forgiven in this age or in the future, suggesting this is about the present as well as the future (more to come on this temporal vocabulary in a moment). People who commit the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not become freed from it but will remain controlled by it, even as other people are freed from other sins.

This leads us to the vocabulary about time in the Matthean and Markan versions. Matthew’s versions describes the persistence state of the sin being in the present age (τούτῳ τῷ αἰῶνι) and what is about to come (ἐν τῷ μέλλοντι). αἰών is used to refer to a specific time period, often with a sense of historical epochs. Meanwhile, μέλλω often conveys a sense of immediacy as to what is to come next in time, though it can be used for the future in gelera. Using the present participle τῷ μέλλοντι in conjunction with τούτῳ τῷ αἰῶνι suggests that Jesus is referring to the next ‘age’ that is coming in succession. In other words, the act of blaspheming the Holy Spirit will be present in two different ages, not just simply one.

The significance of this phrase can be readily lost on us who think Jesus is simply talking about heaven and hell. However, we can look to two, interrelate ideas that are expressed the four canonical Gospels we have: that Jesus is going to inaugurate a new age of history in the kingdom of God and this new age will be characterizing by a new activity of the Spirit. Jesus alludes to the transitioning to a new age and a novel ministry of the Spirit in Matthew 12.28. This explains what Jesus means about the present age and what is about to come: the lack of releasing from the blasphemy of the Spirit is not something that is going to change when the kingdom of God because historically inaugurated.

While Mark does not have this explicitly expressed in this scene, the beginning of the Gospel of Mark in 1.1-15 can be seen as implying this transition in age, where the Holy Spirit will be active (baptized in the Spirit) in a way He was not previously and the nearness of the Kingdom. So the Markan account about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit would have had this idea of an emerging historical epoch in the background. This transition into a new historical age is expressed in the phrase εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. Mark then provides a further explanation of this by describing the person is answerable to an sin that is described as αἰωνίου. While many translations render this word eternal, the word can also be used to define as lasting for an age. Context is critical to determining if it means long-lasting or everlasting, and in this context, it is better to understand it to refer to the time period of τὸν αἰῶνα, translating the end of the verse as “he is accountable for an age-long sin.”

At the heart of both the Matthean and Markan accounts is that the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is going to have a consequence for the person that the new age that Jesus is inaugurating through the Holy Spirit is not going to take away or change. The immediate future will provide no release for the words of anyone who might have transgress this boundary.

So what exactly is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit? It is important to understand the moral language about blasphemy. Blasphemy is not something that is simply offensive or wrong. To say that something is blasphemous is to say the words of a particular severe, egregious, moral evil.

In the context in which Jesus refers to blasphemy, the Pharisees have said that Jesus has been casting out demons by Beezlebul as ruler of the demons. To say this is tantamount to saying that Jesus is acting by the power and dictates of the most powerful force in opposition to God. What makes such speech blasphemous is that it attributes the good work of God through Jesus and the Spirit to the very force standing in direct opposition to God. It is to, in to call the miraculous good work of God its opposite: an extreme evil. This is not simply an error, a mistake, skepticism, or an offensive word. Such speech reflects the entire inversion of the moral order in the minds of those who speak, calling a great good a great evil. The reality of such speech is that the specific Pharisees are in their hearts set to resist the new work that God is doing in Jesus through the Holy Spirit, as they deem it something horribly, wickedly, evil.

So, what sort of theological insight can we garner from these three exegetical observations? I would put forward that the problem of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is that the new historical age that Jesus is inaugurating is going to be an age where the Spirit is going to be bountifully bestowed. If someone has spoken such a strong, blasphemous word about the Spirit’s life-restoring and life-giving power that they deem it an egregious, demonic evil, they are the type of people who will never be released from the effect of this sin: they will never be able to receive and live with the power of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of the coming age. Their heart are so set against the good work of the Spirit, that they will be resistant to the very Spirit that has come upon Christ and is setting people free from their sins.

In other words, Jesus may be effectively understood as saying “You will have no part in the power of the age to come,” excluding them from having the religiously-instituted authority and power over people that they presently enjoy and have. As they do not rejoice over the releasing of a person from the bondage to demons, they will be forever accountable to their words and will not have access to the power of the Spirit to bring life as part of God’s coming kingdom. While Jesus certainly welcomes scribes and Pharisees into the fold, those Pharisees whose hearts were so corrupted that they could only call the miraculous life-giving gift of freedom from demons an act of the devil have sowed their own future that they will reap: they will have no part in the age to come that Jesus is bringing to the world.

With this, we can look at the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit different. Rather than fearing, we can look at it as something that if you truly love God and you love people and seek for their good and hope for God’s power to work in their lives, you are not the type of person who would call a powerful, amazing good work of the Holy Spirit as some terrible evil conjured up by the ever-persistent enemy of God and His purposes.

There is a prevailing in which we think about sin in the modern day, especially among Protestants. When we sin, there is some mark made against us in the registers of heaven that when God forgives through the death of Jesus, God blots out and forgets. After it is committed, sin is thought to exist in some ethereal space, some cosmic guilt that will eventually catch up with us if Jesus’ blood doesn’t cover us.

However, in light of recent research in Paul when it comes to embodiment, it seems more like to suggest that the principal concern about sin in the New Testament is how it inhabits the person, not so much some sense of a “transcendent guilt” that it brings about. In Romans 7.7-25, Paul talks about sin causing the person to sin when he heard the commandment against coveting. In v. 14, he specifically says that he is made of flesh and has been sold slavery to sin. The imagery portrayed here and throughout Romans 7 casts sin as inhabiting the body. The problem of sin is not understood in a non-bodily sense, but it is recognized as a bodily problem. Hence, Paul repeatedly describes the flesh as the source of sin in people’s lives.

However, the anthropological implications of the relationship of the body and sin has not been well developed in Protestant theology. For instance, in the 19th century, Charles Hodge explicitly reject sin as a physical evil, consider it to be associated with dualist gnosticism that regards sin as eternal and suggesting it is inconsistent with theism, disregards sin as a moral evil, and negative human responsibility.¹ He later rejects “the sensuous theory,” where the lower desires of the body overcome the higher values of the spirit, associating it with Roman Catholic doctrine.² Rather, the Protestant doctrine of sin has focused on sin as a transgressive action in relation to God’s law that demands rectifying. As a result, sin is principally as “moral” problem related to ignorance and the lack of self control, which is ultimately a “spiritual” problem in need of a “spiritual” solution.

However, if we take Paul’s connection of sin with the flesh more seriously, it would lead to the consideration of how the body and sin are related to each other. Certainly, the danger that lies here is the gnostic dualism, treating the body as the source of evil that we must be released from. This isn’t the Paul’s view of sin and the body though. Rather, it is the reverse: the body is in need of redemption from sin. Paul speaks of disciplining his body in 1 Corinthians 9.27 right before describe the sin of Israel in the wilderness in chapter 10. While he doesn’t explicitly make the connection, it seems that just as he gave an example of sin enslaved the person in their flesh in Romans 7, Paul sees his apostolic journey entailed the enslaving of his body through usage of the metaphor of exercise. This explains why Jesus’ death and resurrection is so central to Paul, as it enables the person to overcome the control of sin through death with Christ and the ultimate redemption of the body in the general resurrection.

However, the stranglehold of sin over the body is not rooted in some sort of timeless, sinful nature present at birth. Rather, in Romans 7.7-14, Paul intimates that knowledge of the commandment about not coveting lead to the proliferation of coveting, leading to the ‘resuscitation’ of sin and the death of the person. Briefly put, the continuous enactment of sin, especially the knowing enactment of such, gives power to sin over the person’s life. To that end, Paul’s picture of sin isn’t that far off from the psychological theory of habit-formation.

The advantage of this is that we can more naturally connect why Jesus’ death and resurrection is an atonement for sin: as death and resurrection occurs in the body of Jesus, so too does sin inhabit and enslave the bodies of people. Rather than having to posit some metaphysical scheme that explains why the death of Christ atones for what ultimately amounts to be a non-physical problem, the bodily atonement Christ atones for the bodily problem of sin; the reference to the body at the end of Romans 6.1-14 is explained as how the union with Christ’ death and resurrection actualizes itself among believers. The effect of this shift is to move away from atonement as primarily bearing forgiveness, but rather atonement as bringing about change and transformation in the bodily life of believers.

But at the Last Supper, doesn’t Jesus say that his blood was the blood of the covenant for the forgiveness of sin (Matthew 26.28)? Not actually. The Greek word usually translated as forgiveness, ἄφεσιν, is conventionally used in both the LXX and the NT to refer to an act of releasing. There is perhaps good reason for treating this word as release. In the description of the scape goat in LXX Leviticus 16, the goat that is released in the wilderness is said to be sent εἰς ἄφεσιν, just as Jesus’ blood is εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν. There is likely a comparison here, where Jesus is likened to the goat that is slaughtered and sin is like the goat that is released into the wilderness, away from the people.

However, the idea of “releasing of sins” sounds rather odd to our ears, because we don’t typically consider sins to be something tangible, so letting them go seems hard to metaphorically imagine. However, if it was understood that sin had an effect on the actual person, that sin somehow left a trace of itself in the person, we can begin to imagine how a “releasing of sins” could work metaphorically.

We something like that being expressed in LXX Proverbs 11.17, where a merciless person is said to destroy their body. However, we see a more explicit relationship between sin and the nature of the body come up in the Wisdom of Solomon. In Wisdom 1.4, a body is said to be indebted (κατάχρεῳ) to sin, metaphorically entail some sort of control of the body by sin. In Wisdom 8.19-20, the child who had a good soul and was good had an undefiled body.

Furthermore, when Jesus talks about impurity, Jesus says what comes out of a mouth defiles them, rather than what goes in the mouth (Matthew 15.11). Given that impurity was understood to be about the body, it would be a natural extension to suggest that Jesus understood sinful actions as somehow defiling the body, in line with how the Wisdom of Solomon consider being a good child prevents the defilement of the body. It is not out of bounds then to consider that Jesus understood sin to leave a trace of itself in the body, rather than it being simply a “spiritual” problem.

If this is the right way to read Jesus, and Paul, this leaves us at an interesting place of exploring the relationship of Christian theology and psychology, particularly when it comes to increasing recognition of the relationship of the body to the mind, including the possibility that memories are encoding not just neurally but within the body itself. We are readily aware of the relationship between the body and memory when it comes to trauma, given the particular extreme effects that trauma can have on bodily experience, but there are plenty of reasons to connect memories to our body in cause of non-trauma. In that case, we may be able to go so far as to suggest sin, both in its doing and being the ‘victim’ of interpersonal sins, leaves a trace within out bodies. While we need to careful not to confuse the ancient metaphysics of the body with the more scientific understanding of the body, or try to create an artificial “interface” between the two to “explain” the atonement in relationship to modern science,³ this is a fruitful route for exploration in my mind.

Over the past few years, I have steadily and progressively moved away from the often standard Christian teaching that only those who believe in Jesus go to heaven, whereas everyone else goes to hell, in both its strict exclusivism form entailing explicit belief in Jesus and the generous exclusivism that allows for a secret or implicit faith. The impetus behind this has not been to cast aside the idea of hell or God’s judgment. While our conceptions of them may be varied and confused, I can find no strong exegetical warrant to reject the idea that there is a potential judgment of eternal punishment. Rather, it has been due to the way that the fear of hell has damaged me and others that has motivated me to look closely and, upon reading the New Testament over the years, finding no Scripture that speaks of faith and unbelief as the criteria for God’s final judgment.

Faith and justification is certainly instrumental in not facing God’s judgment as Paul in Romans 5.9 states. However, the problem has been that our understanding and significance of faith in the Bible, and New Testament in particular has been too connected to our future fates at death, as judgment, etc. and not as much about how faith leads us in the present state of affairs, as NT Wright and others have made a strong emphasis in their scholarship and teaching to pointing out. As a consequence, when we read about things like faith, life, and death, we are prone to fit this language with the frame of our final destination. John 3.16 is the best example of this.

The way John 3.16 has been used and understood enscapsulates so much of the heaven-hell mentality evangelicalism. It mentions faith, eternal life, and perishing. The contrast between perishing and eternal life seems to must naturally connect with the heaven-hell contrast so well that it seems intuitively obvious at this point.

But let me ask you to join in a thought experiment. Pretend you had no doctrine of heaven or hell. You may have had a vague sense of the doctrine of the bodily resurrection sometime in the distant future, but it is something that seems to be on the margins of your most important beliefs. Rather, pretend your most important beliefs were centered around the God of Israel as the only and true God, that God chose to have a specific relationship with Israel among all the other people’s of the world, and that the most important thing for you to do because God has called you and your people is to obey His instructions. In other words, I am asking you to pretend you are a first century Jew. So, when you hear the words “perish” and “eternal life” would you hear heaven or hell, concepts that had not really been developed in your mind? It is unlikely you would.

How then should we understand John 3.16? Is it an echo of the doctrine of the resurrection? I would suggest not, at least not directly, but rather if we read the Scripture fresh in its context, we can begin to get a glimpse. But I will go ahead and give state what I believe to be the way to understand what is happening is best understood against the backdrop as Jesus as the Teacher who heals people from the teachers of Israel.

John 3.16 is on the tail end of a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. There is an important element to this conversation that we often times overlook, but would likely have not been missed in the early readers: both Jesus and Nicodemus are considered to be teachers. Nicodemus calls Jesus a teacher that has come from God (John 3.2) and Jesus recognizes Nicodemus as a teacher of Israel, albeit yet with a hint of sarcasm behind it (John 3.10). Imagine in our day a gathering of Biblical scholars such as NT Wright, Ben Witherington, Douglas Campbell, etc. and them having a discussion about what the kingdom of God is. Anyone who knows who those people are would not take the meeting between them to just be some conversation like the strangers we see talking in the coffee shop: it would be a conversation between heavyweights, with everyone paying close to attention what is said and who brought the best points up. The conversation between Nicodemus, as leader of the Pharisees, and Jesus would have be looked at as an intellectual gathering of local heavyweights around Judea.

I would suggest then that when we hear the Gospel of John talking about believing in Jesus, it needs to understood within a pedagogical context. Not simply that one believes in Jesus as a great figure, but believes He is the teacher from God because He is the only begotten Son of God (τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ).¹ To believe in Jesus is to be receptive to Jesus as God’s teacher in a way far greater than one would be for any other teacher.

However, why is it that believing in Jesus as the one from God who teachers us is connected to eternal life rather than perishing? To understand this, we need to go back to John 3.14-15. There, Jesus compares Himself as the Son of Man to the serpent that Moses lifted in the wilderness in Numbers 21. In that narrative, the Israelites had complained for the umpteenth time, not trusting God after the numerous times He had provided for them when they previously complained. So, God sent serpents among the people that killed many of them. They call out to Moses to help and God ordered Moses to make a bronze serpent for the Israelites to look at and be healed: the bronze serpent healed the Israelites of the serpents that were in their midst.

By Jesus making reference to this event in the context of the conversation with Nicodemus, we have a suggestion for what is happening here: Jesus is the teacher from God who heals those who believe in Him from the teachers of Israel. While not spoken of in the Gospel of John, both John the Baptist and Jesus did refer to the Pharisees as brood of vipers on various occasions, suggesting that Jesus’ own identification of Himself with the Bronze Serpent may be connected to His work to undo the teachings of the Pharisees, whom he identified as vipers. However, the problem with the Pharisees isn’t that they are inherently evil, but that they, like most everyone else, have become ignorant. Some are perhaps evil, yes, but people like Nicodemus who come to him show that the Pharisees are not by nature a lot of intentionally evil people, but people who even themselves need to be healed from their own teachings by the teachings of Jesus.

Now, there is one significant difference between the serpents in the wilderness and Jesus: God is said to have sent (ἀπέστειλεν in the LXX) the poisonous serpents in Numbers 21.6. While Jesus is also spoken of as being sent in John 3.17 (ἀπέστειλεν), it is not to condemn but to save and rescue. Whereas God’s sending the serpents was an act of judgments against the persistently faithless Israelites in the wilderness, the sending of Jesus is God’s act of love to redeem the world.

So, when we go back to John 3.16, we see that God is said to give His Son (ἔδωκεν). While often times taken as a reference to Jesus’ death and crucifixion, this language of giving fits better with the language of love. When heard in comparison and contrast to the story of the serpents in the wilderness, we can hear of God’s life-giving purposes in the sending of Jesus, to give to the world just as He gave to Israel many times in the wilderness.

So, when we hear the language of eternal life and perishing, we can hear it against the backdrop of God trying to preserve the world from the “wilderness” it is in. Not perishing isn’t about avoiding hell and eternal judgment, so much as it is preserving the people what they need so that they can progress forward towards God’s future for them. In this case, it is about not allowing the teachings of the Pharisees to so take a hold and grip that people become lost within it to the point that evil predominates and they are not even willing to come to the light of Jesus. The Pharisees searched the Scriptures because they believe the Scriptures themselves have life (John 5.39), essentially replacing the Giver of the Scriptures and life with the gift of Scripture as itself the source of life (cf. John 5.42), but it is Jesus who gives life.

In the person of Jesus, God’s provision of life is demonstrated and given, made known and shared in a way that God provides what was lacking among the teachers of Israel. While Jerusalem would face judgment for ultimately killing Jesus, the sending of Jesus was not about judging and destroying, but about a gracious gift to restore and renew Israel’s life, and by implication of Israel being a light to the nations, the world. To believe in Jesus is to be brought into the way of life that brings us to the place where we can successfully reach the end of the wilderness journey, both the smaller wilderness we experience in our lives now that brings us to some good in the present time and also the larger wilderness journey that brings towards new creation and the resurrection of the dead.

I will conclude with this one final point: those of us who aspire to be and are Christian teachers, we find the healing of our ministries and our effectiveness of agents as God’s love and redemption when we bring our hearts and minds and even our bodies to attend to the words of Jesus and following His own life, so that in dying with Him we may be raised with Him. We can be readily tempted to make the Christian life the explication of set of theological ideas and practices. The problem comes when our purposes for using those theological ideas and practices aren’t really being used purposively to point to and lead us to God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, but rather used for other immediate and direct purposes our theology and practices can be used for, both good and bad. We can begin to replace the Giver of Scripture and Wisdom with the gifts of Scripture and our understanding of God’s wisdom, making the various benefits of the latter, good as they may be, take center stage over the One Who gives gifts and orders our lives. As a result, we can often times revert to believing in the name of Jesus and not believing in Jesus, and in that place and at that time, God can send us a nudge, a word, or even an apparent calamity as a form of disciple to heal us as teachers, so that we can teach and demonstrate in our lives what was made known and possible by what Jesus taught and did. This is an occupational hazard that we as teachers can all face, so it behooves us even more to go back to Jesus as the one who guides and leads us through the Spirit to teach about God with grace and truth.

Blaise Pascal once penned these famous words, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by reason but by the heart.” And yet, throughout Western history, the heart and it various synonyms, such as the passions, emotions, etc. have been set apart and against the “cold” and “hard” calculus of reason. The Stoics were immensely suspicions of the passions. The Enlightenment put up an artificial barrier between reason and emotions. The common dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity is often a veil form of the distinction between the rational head and the emotional heart. However, if philosophers like Pascal and recent scientists, such as Antonio Damasio, have good reasons to suggest that emotions are integral to and partners with reasoning, why is it then that the West drew the conclusion that the heart and reason were antithetical to each other?

On factor is that, phenomenological, reasoning and affect appear to be different phenomenons. My conscious aware about reasoning is largely disconnected from my awareness of my desires, the interoceptive awareness of my body, etc. Meanwhile, our awareness of emotions, desires, etc. engage the body as a whole in addition to our thoughts. Given the way the intellectual tradition of the West has relied upon the analytic usage of binary categories in which the two categories are considered fundamental opposites and thus share little to nothing in common, it became intuitive to distinction emotion as the absence of reasoning. Nevertheless, the reality is that emotions and reasoning go hand in hand neurologically and physiologically, even if the intellectually enculturated conscious awareness of the West has had a hard time connecting the two together.

However, this is not a satisfactory explanation in my book. Rather, I want to suggest that the heart and reason were treated as distinct because of a fundamental orientation that has existed in the intellectual tradition of the West: the will to power. One may sense echoes of Nietzsche, but I want to suggest what Nietzsche was attuned to his definition of humanity was more so to a deeply unconscious, yet pervasive orientation of Western philosophy and motivations about knowledge: to construct the world according to our ideal image.

Why would this orientation create the division between mind and heart? Simply put, the world does not so easily succumb to our wishes and wants. It provides resistance of various forms and can remain quite unpredictable. Life doesn’t go according to our plans. When we have a specific purpose or goal in mind, this can become quite frustrating. In some cases, it leave us deflated and feeling ready to give up. In that case, then, if one wants to continue form the people and the environments around themselves according to one’s dreams, one has to begin to disconnect the conscious purposes one seeks to realize and the various emotions that can be evoked when one’s purposes frustrated. The separation of our ‘rational’ understanding of the way things are and should be from the ‘affective’ heart is a psychological and even biological necessity if one wants to continue to strive to form the world according to the image in one’s mind.

The result of this orientation to will to power is that our knowledge about the world is largely condition to the ways things are in this moment and what we wish to make it to be. We divide reason between reality and norms because the will to power makes salient the regular dissonance between our goals, hopes, expectations, norms with our understanding of reality. In other words, the fact-value distinction emerges as a prevalent form of intellectual analysis due to the way the will to power makes the resistance to power salient.

Furthermore, as the will to power continues to seek the realization of its ‘rational’ goals, it continuously looks for increasingly reliable knowledge that it can effectively use to achieve its ends. As a result, there is a latent push to reach for perfection latent within the will to power. Anything that is not clearly observable, analyzable, and understandable is useless to the will to power, if not even a threat if those things are present as roadblocks to one’s goals. As a result, the will to power prioritizes knowledge about those things which are readily clear and distinct over the irreducibly complex and mysterious. This leads, ultimately, to the devaluation, if not even the rejection of God and various hard to observe and define parts of life.

How different is the will to love from the will to power.

The passion for the well-being of the beloved provides the reasons for which one acts. The sharing of deep love can not be separate into the fact-value distinction, but they are seamlessly joined together as one. The will to love recognizes what is most vital principle about the other is not in what is seen but in what can not readily seen and often expressed indirectly. As much as there are things we can say about love, in the end, the will to love can never entirely take away the mystery of love.

In love, the heart gives reasons for our reason.

It isn’t that we either live out the will to love or the will to power. We can live out both. But what, however, is the will that drives you the most? Is it the will to power, that is tempted to treats the objects of one’s love as objects in service to one’s rational goals? Or, does the will to love motivate use to the will to power for the goals of the well-being of the other?

We as human creatures are controlled by concerns for reliability. We want to understand what people will do, how things act, what is true in a way that we can have a confident sense of expectations for the future. From our first days in the world, we are learning to develop a sense of a specific type of reliability: trust in another person. As we grow older, we are trained in school to become reliable thinkers and knowers. We ourselves are also brought up to be reliable/trustworthy people ourselves. Trust and reliability is the hidden glue that keeps our own lives together, personally and socially; without a sense of reliability, we would be locked into a sense of fear and protectiveness.

However, most of the time, we are not consciously reflecting on the reliability of persons or things. We primarily develop an intuition about reliability without direct, rational reflection on who and what to trust. For instance, I don’t rationally reflect about the floor of second story of my parent’s house and whether it will hold with my next step. In fact, until this moment, I don’t think I have ever rationally reflected whether the floor would hold or not. Nevertheless, I know the floor is trustworthy. I am certain of it.

However, I suppose it could be technically possible that rot had developed that I could not see at some part of the floor, which would make it unstable if I put weight on it. Given that the house seems to be in good condition, it seems unlikely that there would be any significant rot. Yet, it could still be possible and I have no way of knowing for sure unless I tear about the upstairs to investigate the wooden base. So, I am not entirely certain the floor will hold up.

So, am I certain or not about the floor?

In epistemology, there is a concept known as pragmatic encroachment, in which the perception of whether we have knowledge about something or not is related to the pragmatic circumstances we are in. In the classic example of pragmatic encroachment, there are nearly two identical scenarios where a couple is driving home on a Friday afternoon and needs to make a deposit at the bank. As they drive by, they notice a long line at the bank. In the first scenario, it is not important for them to make a deposit and the wife is confident the bank will be open the next day on Saturday. In the second scenario, it is important for them to make the deposit, and the couple is not confident whether the bank will be open the next day. The sense of whether they ‘knew’ the bank would be open or not was inversely proportional to the importance of the task. The more important it was to make the bank deposit, the less certain they were that the bank would be open on Saturday.

The point behind pragmatic encroachment is that our purposes and goals impact our sense of knowledge, reliability, and certainty. If something isn’t very important, there does not seem to be much lost if what we think to be true ends up being wrong. If something is important, then our confidence in our knowledge becomes much more salient.

Now the logical thing might be to say that the more important something is, the more we should be open to the evidence, but this doesn’t usually seem to be the case. Instead, as Leon Festinger’s study of a cult that produce popular psychological concept of cognitive dissonance demonstrated, the more important and committed people are to something, the less likely people on average are to be open to counter evidence. On the surface, the example of pragmatic encroachment doesn’t seem to gel well with Festinger’s observations about cognitive dissonance.

However, if we were to try to synthesize the ‘logical’ example of the couple going to the bank with Festinger’s study of a cult, we might come up with a basic hypothesis: that there is a “middle zone” of importance of their goals and values where people are most open to considering the evidence, but when things are deemed to be unimportant or of most vital importance, people are less likely to be more open to considering opposing evidence. In fact, our willingness and openness to assess evidence may be considered to be linked with the Yerkes-Dodson law, which stipulates that either too little or too much arousal decreases performance. Insofar as our goals and purposes are linked to our motivation controlled by our states of arousal, then our willingness and capacity to consider how certain we are and how reliably know about the things we seek and are wanting will come to pass depends on us being in a moderate state of arousal. If something isn’t important, we are not likely to give too much though to whether our knowledge is truly reliable or not. If something is very important, we will be in a similar boat.

This doesn’t mean, however, we have the same exact type of epistemic performance in insignificant and extremely significant purposes. When I am walking on the floor upstairs, I don’t really place much importance of thinking about the floor because I have developed an implicit sense of trust in the sturdiness of the floor. I just don’t think about it. However, in the case of cults, they are actively trying to rationalize why their central, most important beliefs remain true, even when it seems to be false. The cult actively tries to obtain a sense of certainty about their religious beliefs, whereas I am principally unconcerned to determine if there is rot in the floor that I am unaware of. In my case, I simply don’t try to think about the floor, whereas in the case of the cult, they are actively thinking, but in a very poor fashion.

I bring this forward to try to present a case for understanding Christian faith and the desire to have certainty about our faith. Especially Post-Enlightenment where religions has been treated and regarded as a superstition, beneath the intellectual superiority of science, Christians have had a chip on their shoulder, often with the felt need to try to prove through apologetics, personal testimony and experience, etc. the validity and certainty of the Christian faith. Certainly, this is not a bad intellectual task for us to take up.

However, the problem with such deeper pursuits of certainty comes when we live with the mentality that my beliefs about God, Jesus, the Church, etc. are of critical, essential importance. When living in a state of religious hyper-arousal, we are inclined to reason poorly about our faith in the hopes to reaching certainty. We get locked into certain types of readings and interpretations of the Scriptures, unable to become more fluid readers based upon what is given. We become overconfident in our understanding of the meaning and significant of our own religious experiences. We become rigidly attached to specific construals of theological doctrine. All of this happens because we overlook the complexity and ambiguity of our sources for faith and theology because we think what we believe and think is of a matter of huge, essential, critical purposes.

Allow me to suggest, however, that this is a fundamental error. It is not my faith that is of the most central importance. It is God who is of the highest importance. I have no control of God, however. God is free to be as God is. We come to trust and know God, but it is what God does that is more important for my life than what I think about God.

To be sure, what I believe about God is the most important thing I can do for my life, but God is more important to my well-being than my beliefs about God at this specific moment of time. God is more important to my well-being that my feelings at this specific moment of time. God is more important to my well-being than my actions as this specific point of time. My beliefs, my feelings, my actions are of moderate importance, whereas God Himself is of the utmost importance. I believe that because God is merciful to the righteous and the unrighteousness, that His love is more important than my own faith.

When we can make the distinction between our own religious and spiritual lives from God, then we are not at risk in getting caught up in the persistent hyper-arousal that makes us poor thinkers. When I overestimate the importance of my own thinking about God, implicitly making myself more important than God, then I begin to become blind to how God makes Himself known, but instead become tempted to rationalize and project upon God.

So, when Christians place a high degree of importance on the certainty we have about our faith in God, salvation, etc., we begin to replace the importance of God with the importance of ourselves, and as a consequence, we get locked into a form of religious hyper-arousal experienced in the form dogmatism that can be hard to break out of and see through.

There is nothing wrong with finding and searching for good reasons for our faith. However, when we egocentrically think our own certainty is more important than God Himself, we replace God with ourselves and yet we feel certain we know God. If, however, I recognize that each choice I make, each step I take to understand God and His will more clearly, each act of worship and submission I participate in is not of the utmost immediate importance now, but over the course of my lifetime it will be the most important decisions I make, I am freed from myself so that I can know God more than I can know the self I try to project onto God. I can search and grasp for a deeper understanding than can deep my sense of faith and confidence, while at the same time, I don’t feel the need to explain away the ambiguities that come with knowing God through the Scriptures, through tradition, through reason, and through my experiences and come to an overconfident, rationalize ‘faith’ that is more in service of my own identity than God.

The one factor that has been the most persistent influence of the hyperarousal of the Christian consciousness has been the belief that “if I don’t believe, I will be eternally punished.” This belief has so strongly reinforced the notion that what I think is of crucial, immediate importance, because if I get it wrong, there is much for me to fear. Such reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s wrath throughout the Bible. If one takes the Old Testament and New Testament seriously, God judges, there is no denying this, and this judgment can be fierce and scary, there is no denying it. However, the ever persistent criteria for God’s judgment is what one has done, not what one believes.

The belief that the lack of faith makes one automatically condemned to eternal judgment is in large part due to a combination of a partial misreading of the language of belief and unbelief in the Gospel of John and overstating the centrality of Pauline justification in conversion. As a consequence, we have treated faith and judgment in terms of a binary, true or false, because we have treated faith and salvation as an “exchange.” Therefore, those who do not have faith do not make that “exchange.” As a result, we encourage a sense of hyperarousal as to the decision to come to faith, making people believe their decision right there at that moment is of the central, most important decisions that they will ever make.

Now, faith is certainly instrumental in our redemption, because of which we have an assurance that God’s transformation of us will have us in the resurrection of life. It is the single most important thing across the course of my entire life. But my choices from one moment to the next is not of the utmost important; it is God who shows grace and mercy who is of the utmost importance. Once I recognize this, I am freed to wholly receive God’s grace in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and learn from the Triune God over the course of my life. My life is set on the trajectory of new creation and the resurrection of life, giving an assurance that I could not arrive to apart from faith. With the faith of the Gospel, we come to learn and know God deeply and see our transformed selves as those who share communion with this God through the Spirit.

Without this faith, we are not automatically cast into the fires of hell, but we are left unable to see and understand who God knows us to be, unable to know what awaits our future. Coming to faith isn’t some exchange that immediately changes everything in that moment, as if we have left certain destruction, as much as gives us the relationship that will change us over the course of our entire lives, that we can go from ignorance and deep uncertainty to having assurance of everlasting life. Coming to faith is important, but it isn’t more important than the God who shows mercy.

This faith that is not built upon the hyperarousal rooted in a sense of an exchange does not try to build a false certainty about God that believes I can pierce the epistemic veil between God and me. Rather, I am freed to allow God to be God and allow me to be myself. I can accept that the living God is most important for my well-being, whereas my choices of faith, obedience, worship, etc. simply brings myself into a place where I learn and grow more deeply, freeing myself to know God as He makes Himself known, without trying to reach for a false certainty. It allows me to live in the middle-zone of arousal, recognizing my faith in God and life lived before him are important, but isn’t more important than the God who shows mercy and grace.

According to Kenneth Collins in Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace, John Wesley made a distinction between two types of faith: the faith of the servant and the faith of the child of God. In the case of the faith of the servant, there are two different types of persons: those who have a faith that exclude justification, which is how Wesley used the term broadly, and those who have a faith that are justified and yet are ignorant of having received forgiveness, which Wesley seldom uses in only specific instances. What distinguishes the narrowly referenced faith of a servant and the faith of the child of God is that those with the latter have an assurance that those with the former do not.¹

Wesley’s distinction between the different types of faith reflect both the early Protestant emphasis on justification and Wesley’s own experience at Aldersgate, where justification and the knowledge of justification is the dividing line between believers. On the one hand, justification by faith was a central theological motto of early Protestantism, so it is only natural that faith be defined in relationship to justification. Secondly, Wesley’s own assurance of faith at Aldersgate would put him firmly as one who had the faith of the child of God.

Without further expanding upon Wesley’s understanding of faith, there is a certain insight in Wesley’s distinction between different types of faith. If we read Romans 8.14-17 and Galatians 4.6-7, Paul describes an assurance that Christians have because of the Spirit who has been poured out upon them. Furthermore, there is the evidence of Christians who share all the signs of genuine life lived in Christ and yet they struggle with assurance for various reasons. By coordinating the Pauline understanding of assurance, justification by faith, and the experience of various believers, Wesley’s distinction between the faith of a servant and the faith of a child of God provides a synthetic theological construct to explain and understanding the nature of Christian faith.

However, from an exegetical angle, Wesley’s distinctions is a bit artificial.  Romans 8.14-17 and Galatians 4.6-7 do not specifically address faith, but rather the outpouring of the Spirit in the hearts of believers. While certainly associated with faith, this doctrine of ‘assurance’ is not connected to a knowledge of one’s own forgiveness of sins. Rather, in both passages, there is an overriding moral concern that being children of God pertains to. In Romans 8.12-13, the concern is being people who put to death the deeds of the flesh, which Paul will later restate in Romans 12.1-2 as part of the way of life that ceases to live in conformity to the world. Being a child of God is about a specific moral assurance that one can continue in faith to the point of suffering with Jesus.

Whereas for the Galatians, there have been some teachers that have suggested that they needed to obey “works of Torah” in order to be righteous. However, for Paul in Galatians 3.1-5, the Spirit who the Galatians received and started working in them is also (implicitly) the one who will bring them to completion (ἐπιτελεῖσθε). Paul later goes on to say in Gal 5.5-6:

through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.

The consistent theme here is that the hope of achieving a particular way of life in the future in grounded in the work of the Spirit in conjunction with faith. Thus, to be a children of God through the Spirit is to recognize that one already has what one needs to live as God is calling believers to live.

While this can certainly be consider thematically related to justification, if we understand justification as God’s creative word over us, recognizing our future life with God even as we are yet sinners, Paul’s discussion on the Spirit and crying out that God is one’s Father is not about assurance of forgiveness, per se, but assurance about our access to God who leads and guides us to resist the ways of the world and to not need to be depend upon other resources to enable a Christian maturity. Certainly, we can suggest the two go hand in hand, but they are distinct exegetically and theologically.

Nevertheless, I would put forward the idea there are two modes of faith a useful insight from Wesley for making sense of two phrases that occurs in the first three chapters of the Gospel of John: (1) believing in Jesus (πιστεύω ἐν αὐτῷ) and (2) believing in Jesus’ name (πιστεύω εἰς τό ὄνομα αὐτοῦ). While it is customary to often treat these two phrases as synonymous with each other, there are reasons to suggest that they take on distinct significane in the Gospel of John.

Regarding the latter phrase (πιστεύω εἰς τό ὄνομα αὐτοῦ), Craig Keener suggests τό ὄνομα is an allusion to the God’s divine name.² F. Dale Bruner thinks it refers to the person of Jesus.³ D.A. Carson things similarily, giving it an expression that describes a person’s character or the person.⁴

While Keener’s suggestion is possible on theological grounds, given the theological weighty prologue that intertwines Jesus with God (1.1-18) in which the phrase first occurs (1.12), it’s use the narratives is rather ambiguous. John 2.23 does not intimate that the people believed in Jesus’s name understood it in reference to the divine identity. John 3.18 seems like it could, but that Jesus is referred to as the Son of God there suggests that, strictly speaking, the divine identity is not explicitly in view but rather something unique to the person of Jesus. Bruner’s and Carson’s suggestion doesn’t fit well with John 2.23. The phrase θεωροῦντες αὐτοῦ τὰ σημεῖα ἃ ἐποίει (“seeing his signs which he was doing”) suggests a causal explanation for believing in Jesus in virtue of the present participle. As the emphasis here is on Jesus action’s in performing signs, the focus would be more so focus on what Jesus was capable of, rather than simply on Jesus as a ‘person.’ Rather, it seems better to suggest τό ὄνομα refers to Jesus reputation based upon his performance, which is the fourth definition that BDAG mentions. This can certainly explain the description of Jesus as the Son of God in 3.18, as the identity would convey implicit information in the discourse about the power that Jesus bore.

If πιστεύω εἰς τό ὄνομα αὐτοῦ pertains to believing in Jesus’ reputation, then we then have a good reason for understanding why John 2.23-25 then transitions into the story of Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus in John 3.1-15. Keener understands John 2.23-25 to be a warning about “untrustworthy believers,” whereas “Nicodemus professes a measure of faith in Jesus based on his signs, but has not yet crossed the threshold into discipleship,” but will as the narrative progress.⁵ Keener seems to imply that Nicodemus is understood as somehow distinguished from the untrustworthy believers. However, it seems that Nicodemus is better understood as an example of those who believer in Jesus’ name in 2.23-25. As the people at the Passover festival believed based upon the signs, so too does Nicodemus express a belief that Jesus is a teacher sent by God because of the signs Jesus did. Furthermore, just as Jesus does not entrust himself to those who believed in His name at the Passover festival, Jesus does not disclose teaching about heavenly matters to Nicodemus. In addition, Jesus speaks to Nicodemus about being born above in 3.3-8, whereas John 1.12 speaks of those who believe in Jesus’ name as having the authority (ἐξουσίαν) to become God’s children. It seems best to suggest that the Gospel of John was written with the idea that Nicodemus is an example of someone who believes in Jesus’ name based upon Jesus’ deeds.

If this is the case, then those who believe in Jesus’s name may be considered to be people who operate on the threshold of becoming a disciple of Jesus. It isn’t quite believing Jesus quite yet, but it is the point where people have the opportunity/authority to move towards become God’s children because they recognize the works of God’s Son, even if they don’t recognize Him as that quite yet. We see this idea of believing in Jesus’ works come up against in John 10.37-38, where believing Jesus’ works is explicitly distinguished with believing Jesus about His identity as God’s Son. There, it is spoken of as if it an option one might take if one has not yet recognized Jesus as God’s Son, as it may be able to lead them to the recognition that the share union between Jesus and the Father.

By contrast, in John 1.43-41, we have in the person of Nathaniel someone who, upon hearing that Jesus knows where Nathaniel was prior, immediately recognizes that Jesus is the Son of God and King of Israel. Jesus then describes him as believing and tells him that Nathaniel will see greater things, including the angelic glorification of Jesus. In other words, Jesus has established a teacher-disciple relationship with Nathaniel that He is going to entrust more about Himself, contrasted with the way Jesus does not entrust himself to those who simply believe in his name.

Something distinguishes Nathaniel from those at the Passover festival: their moral character. Nathaniel is a person of integrity (1.47), whereas Jesus did not entrust Himself to those as the passover festival because He knew what was in them (2.24-25). This is consistent with John 3.18-21, where those who believe in Jesus are not condemned because they are the type who do what is true. By contrast, those who actively reject Jesus⁶ are condemned because they have not reached the transitional, liminal state of believing Jesus’ name. In other words, those who do evil are not even willing to recognize the great signs and wonders and what this begins to say about Jesus. This suggests that those who believe in Jesus name are not considered evil, but nor are they like Nathaniel, but their character operates in the threshold. We might refer to these people as “decent people” who do not actively seek to harm any others and even try to do some good for others, maybe much like the “Almost Christian” in John Wesley sermon, but are not yet those who Jesus’ brings into discipleship. 

In other words, the first three chapters of the Gospel of John seem to narratively portray to distinct modes of faith. There are people like Nicodemus who believe in Jesus’ reputation but are not yet brought into a teacher-disciple relationship. These people are at a point where they have the capacity/authority to make the transition into being a children of God, but things lurk within them that simply hold them back. While repentance is not a prominent theme in the Gospel of John, it is in the synoptic Gospels, and it is perhaps those who believe in Jesus’ name are people who are in need of repentance and taking the public teachings of Jesus seriously. However, they may at some point become like Nathaniel, who, for whatever reason, are people who believe not simply in Jesus’ reputation, but actively recognize Jesus as the one sent from God. Jesus entrust Himself to these people in a way He does not to those who believed in Jesus’ reputation, and so they become embedded in a teacher-disciple relationship with Jesus where their learning grows beyond the earthly and the visible signs of Jesus.

I present to suggest that there seems to be understood within the Gospel of John that there is a development of faith. In a similar manner, we can suggest this in the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 2.1-3.4, where people first come to faith in God’s power, analogous to faith in Jesus’ reputation, but then there is a point of deepening where those who love God receive God’s wisdom, much like those in believe in Jesus are entrusted deeper understanding. However, in order to be able to receive that wisdom, their lives must not be lived according to the competitive conventions of the time.

To be clear, this distinction is not the basis for some sort of gnostic esotericism, where there is a different class of special teachings that those who are only beginners in faith are walled off from. Rather, the relationship between the two modes of faith seems to be much more akin to moving from recognition to comprehension. In the Gospel of John, those who believed in Jesus’ name don’t yet comprehend who Jesus really is, even as they recognize there is something about Him. However, those who believe in Jesus recognize Him as the Son of God. Similarily, in 1 Corinthians, those who believe in God’s power don’t yet fully understand the nature of God’s power in the crucified Jesus, but those who understand God’s wisdom comprehend the fullest significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The comprehension of the mature is about a greater understanding about what one has already recognized.

To give an analogy of this movement from recognition to comprehension in the more familiar rhythyms of life, consider the example of a woman and a man who are romantically attracted to one another but are not yet aware of these feelings for each other. They can not see each other’s feelings of attraction, but they can recognize the way positive responses they recieved from each other. As the smiles, the mild flirting, the time spent near each other begins to add up, one or the other or both may begin to recognize that the other person seems to treat them with warmth and admiration, but they don’t necessarily comprehend that the other person is romantically attracted to them. However, there may come a point where one person may come to comprehend what they are recognizing in the other person: a hope for a romantic relationship.

Now, this analogy importantly differs from degrees of faith as the comprehension about Jesus pertains to Jesus’ identity as the one from God rather than comprehension of another person’s intentions and hopes, but nevertheless, the relationship and distinction between recognition and comprehension holds between the two. 

Now, while I wouldn’t call believing in Jesus as in the Gopsel of John and recieving wisdom rooted in the love of God in 1 Corinthians 2 the “second half of the Gospel,” I do think there is a basis here for comprehending how it is those people come and growth in faith, from perhaps starting to believe in the reputation of Jesus, even that Jesus with the *reputation* for being son of God, God in the flesh, the second person of the Holy Trinity, etc. However, at some point along the way, this initial faith in the truth conjoined with repentance leading to holiness guides people into the deeper comprehension of Christian faith, where they comprehend Jesus for who He is and not simply recognizng the reputation He has.

I am going to put forward a basis thesis: the overriding narrative of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, is God’s actions to redeem His people and the world they live in from the effects of evil. The way this works itself out is manifold and complex, and perhaps with a sense of development as it leads up to Jesus Christ, the One in Whom we are redeemed from the powers of sin and death.

This is not to be overly reductive about the whole Biblical narratives. There are other themes we can trace through the OT and NT: themes of righteousness and holiness, God’s power, God’s judgment God’s faithfulness, etc. are all present in various forms throughout the Bible. However, I would suggest they all ultimately narratively integrate around the idea of God’s rescue, salvation, and redemption of His people and the creation they live within.

If this is the case, then this leads to a particular conclusion: the knowledge that the Scriptures can be legitimately understood to be primarily providing is about redemption, including most significantly the One who makes God’s redeeming love visibly known to us, Jesus Christ.

There is another corollary to this though. If the primary knowledge of the Scriptures is about God’s redemption of humanity and creation, then that means that a lot of the other knowledge we think we derive from the Bible may be mistaken. For instance, we don’t get answers as the problem of evil. The closet we get is the book of Job, and even then, we are left in the end with more questions than answers if our goal is to give a clear statement about the problem of evil. Nor does the Bible give us a full account of everything that is right and good. Certainly, the Scriptures provides a basic sense of right and wrong about what might seem to be some pretty obvious things, but it never tries to give a comprehensive system of righteousness, holiness, love, etc. Nor does the Bible attempt to tell us everything about God’s ontological nature. There are statements here and there about the nature of God’s power, for instance, but it doesn’t reach to the level of the sweeping, systematic claims that can sometimes be taken from it. Nor, does the Bible even give us a metaphysics of salvation and redemption, as if we can give a precise description of what happens to people and the world in the work of salvation. The Bible does not portray itself as a scientific textbook, telling us how everything came in a way that is satisfactory for scientific narratives.

Each of these forms of knowledge I mentioned have a common theme: they are types of knowledge rooted in the ambitions to have a comprehensive  knowledge about a particular domain or topic. Even as the Scriptures do speak to things that are related to the domains of evil, ethics, ontology, accounts of how people go through redemption, and science, the writers of the Scriptures never attempt to give a comprehensive account of those fields.

The drive for comprehensive knowledge is related to other ambitions: the ambition for expertise and authority. The former is related to our skill sand understanding and the latter is related to how people perceive us, particularly in relationships to these skills and the knowledge base. When you combine the ambition for expertise and authority with theology, it can become a quite potent combination for motivation to push further and further in our understanding and knowledge. Other ambitions may be that there are specific personal struggles or questions one is facing and that we brings those questions to the Scriptures, hoping to find some resolution from a confident base of knowledge we can pull from.

Here comes the problem though: when we can not find what we are looking for, we have one of two tendencies we fall into: we can either recognize that we will not get what we want or we can begin to rationalize why what we want is there in the first place. When we fall into the latter, we begin to feel the need to push our interpretation of the Scriptures deeper and further while not being careful to consider whether there are exegetical warrants for our reading. To be clear, we can all do this from time to time. However, when the ambition for a comprehensive understanding on a topic or a satisfactory answer to our deeper struggles can not be satisfied with the “it isn’t here,” there is the danger of persistent lack of discipline and care in our readings. We expect to find an answer that isn’t there.

The Scriptures do not provide this sort of knowledge in a comprehensive form. They, rather, direct us to the nature of God’s power and love for humanity and the world and the One in whom this redeeming God is made known in: Jesus Christ. What Jesus says, what Jesus teaches, what Jesus does are ultimately related to God’s redemption of us and the creation. So in faith, we trust in Jesus Christ to be the one whose teachings and life we can find the redemption that God brings. We don’t necessarily come to a complete understanding of how this redemption works, but faith has never been about a completely sure foundation of knowledge that we can explicate confidently, but rather that there is a recognition, and intuition even, that Jesus provides the way to God for us. As we walk on this journey, as we exercise the use of our bodies in following Jesus, we begin to leave behind old things and discover new things. Our hearts and minds are reformed to understand and make sense of life from a fresh new perspective and angle.

The problem is that we then often times begin to define faith in terms of these other forms of knowledge. We can often times be much more like the Corinthians, who Paul had to remind them to put their faith in God’s power and not human wisdom (1 Cor 2.5) and called them away from the type of propositional knowledge found in Hellenistic philosophy towards the specific propositions about God, Jesus, and their creative power (1 Corinthians 8.4-6). Much like the Corinthians, we can put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Fortunately, faith and salvation are not things that are exchanged only when we get faith exactly right, but rather faith is the means by which we can experience God’s redemption in Jesus.

When we wrongly substitute this trust in Jesus as the one who brings God’s salvation and redemption to a particular type of theological knowledge base, we distract ourselves from the real source of redemption: God’s glory being realized within our lives. To be clear, wrong beliefs can certainly hamper this work on redemption, but when we think redemption is about specific domains of theological knowledge, we begin to treat the Scripture as testifying to something other than what we know in the person of Jesus. We begin to lose track of what God is doing and more so begin to think we have confident answers about God, the world, other people, etc.

Here is something more to ponder: perhaps the reasons we cling so tightly to these other forms of knowledge is that we need it to secure our own confidence in something asides from the experience of redemption. Whether it be we have forgotten our own experience of redemption or we never had it, whether it be because we have given into the epistemic anxieties about certainty and confidence that the world has foisted upon us, whether it be because of a litany of other reasons: we can be tempted to cling tightly to these other forms of knowledge before the knowledge of redemption, which to be more precise, is actually God’s knowing of us first.

So, this leaves me with a final question: what are we searching the Scriptures for? This isn’t a veiled attempt to say if it isn’t legitimately Jesus, the One in whom we are redeemed, you are like the Pharisees in John 5.39-40. The Pharisees are the Pharisees for many reasons. But what we can say is that the further away we are from connecting our understandings of the Scripture to Jesus, the more we risk misunderstanding what God is doing in and through us.

Rather than my longer, drawn own forays and pondering on a topic, I am going to experiment with a briefer, most concise discussion on a topic, without justifying or explaining all the reasons for what I present.

What follows is a social hypothesis about the degrees of complexity that conflicts can take and how they correspond to entitlement.

1) Humans are complex creatures, whose desires, wants, dreams, goals, hopes along with their joys, fears, frustrations do not follow a simple, law-like progression and consistency from one moment to the next. We like what we like for various sorts of, we don’t like what we don’t like for various sorts of reasons, but these can change without our knowledge based upon changes in situation, changes in life experience, etc.

2) Furthermore, humans have a wide range of goals and expectations that we learn to negotiate between, both within ourselves and with other people.

3) The more things people feel entitled to, the more of their goals and expectations they feel others have a moral obligation to give to them.

4) At the root of social conflicts are feelings of violation of these basic sense of moral obligations.

5) The more people feel entitled to, the more likely they are to perceive multiple violations.

6) When moral violations are perceived, we tend to impute many of our negative feelings towards the perceived violator. The graver the perception of the violation, the more of the negative feelings we impute to them.

7) Ergo, the more entitled people feel, the more complex and complicated their involvements in conflicts makes the conflict.

8) Since the proverb “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” plays out to be true often times, the type of complexity we perceive in conflicts are often times determined by those who have a greater degree of entitlement, as they are more willing to demand.

9) However, not all feelings of entitlement are equivalent, nor are the perception of their violations. For instance, abuse is often times the expression of a very simple form of entitlement: to not wrongfully threaten, control, or inflict blatant harm onto someone. These type of entitlements are different to other forms of entitlements. So, entitlements are not necessarily wrong nor complex in terms of what is expected, even if they can be complicated in trying to make ones case in a conflict.

10) In managing and resolving complex conflicts, the first imperative question comes down to investigating and boiling down to what are the basic sense of entitlements of the people involved and whether these entitlements are recognized as protected or not and recognized as violated or not.

11) When this basic imperative is not taken seriously, the squeaky wheel of highly entitled people get the upper hand.

12) When this basic imperative is taken seriously, one may more accurately distinguish between the different entitlements.

13) In conflicts, perceptions of violations of entitlements makes socially aggressive people (who tend to feel highly entitled in the first place) resort attempts to (mis)represent what the other party feels entitled to, thereby increasing the perceived complexity of the conflict and lessening the likelihood that the other party’s side will be heard and listened to. People who are socially protective, by contrast, tend to focus more on representing their side and insofar as they represent the other party, it will be framed in terms of specific violations, fear, and ambiguity.

14) When people’s sense of entitlements have been violated, their engagement with the conflict will change based upon the perception that others recognize the violation of entitlement. In other words, trust that is lost in conflicts is restored the more the reasons for those violations are recognized. As trust is reestablished, their contribution to the complexity of the conflict will decrease.

15) Furthermore, sometimes, people can relent on their sense of entitlement for various reasons. Usually, this is because a person has an internal sense of moral convictions that lead them to say “I am not entitled to that.”

16) However, people who have a persistent feeling of entitlement, whether due to an egregious violation or due to their personality feeling entitled to much, that are not acknowledged by others will either increase their involvement in the conflict or disengage, depending on the situation and their own internal sense of morality and ethics.

My generation was mislead as children, adolescents, and college students.

Not intentionally, mind you. Most everyone who raised us and taught us growing up  intended well. They wanted to do everything they could to ensure our success. They tried to make it easier and easier to think creatively and to discover our own vocations, callings, and purposes in life. They tried to protect us from various problems. While it is embedded in the passing of the torch that one generation wants the next generation to be better and more successful than they were, to have a better live, it was my generation of Millennials who were the first to experiencing the widespread streamlining of our education and upbringing, trying to make a future available for everyone.

The vision that my generation had was one where we would take our place in the world to shape the world as we finally grew up, as we finally reached the place where our education had prepared us with the skills and know-how to make the world a better place. The future was bright and we simply had to reach for it.

But, then it all came shattering down. For some of us, we experienced the some of the hard realities of life that our upbringing did not prepare us for: the world was not malleable to our dreams and visions, but there were many forces resisting our dreams. We discovered that the nice, glossy sheen of the future that had been presented to us was more like a high-budget, blockbuster theatrical production. With all the hopes and dreams being given to us, we began to inhabit an imaginary world that looked similar to the real world, but masked a dark truth from us:

The world does not want to be healed. The world does not want to change for the better. The world does not want to bring about life. The world remains in inertia, with forces arrayed against changing it. These forces are not nefarious, evil forces lurking around the corner, trying to pull people’s strings. These forces are people’s own needs, desires, pains, struggles, and sins. These forces are people who are attached to some parts of the way things are, even as they want to change other parts of the way things are. Everyone wants change, but not everyone wants the same change, and so we see our dreams resisted by other people’s dreams. Our hopes being attacked by other people’s hopes.

Here is the truth that was veiled: people are people. They have always been so, they continue to be so, and they will always be so into the future. People are people in all their goodness, badness, beauty, and ugliness. The thing is we can never come to a satisfactory enough agreement on what is good, bad, beautiful, and ugly with everyone, or even most everyone. The end result is that our dreams are resisted by others.

This leads us to another truth that was veiled from us: my power is not sufficient to change the world to fit to our dreams. Even the most influential people in the world receive resistance to their plans. There is not a person on the planet earth who has the power to change the world for the better. This remains true when we change from the singular to the plural: our power is not sufficient to change the world to fit to our dreams. No matter how many people we can gather together in agreement and unison, there will always be those who stand against us. In fact, the more support we gather, the more they are galvanized to gain support for their side.

So, we are tempted with two options: upon the discovery that this cruel, yet beautiful world was veiled to so many of us when we were younger, we were tempted to either keep pushing further to accomplish our dreams, leading to further resistance from those who opposed us, or to live in despair and accept that the optimism planted in our dreams, hopes, and visions are relics of our childhood, adolescence, and college years that are simply a nostalgic, bygone word of days long past that are never coming back.

Now, those of us who have tasted much of the pain, the cruelty, the mourning, the grief, and the loss in our early years had something locked within us that made us never really buy in and to see something of a mirage, even if we couldn’t really fully express it at the time. We wanted to buy into it; we wanted to dream with others; we even tried it. We even bought into it some.

But as more responsibility was laid upon us, as we were seen no longer as passive receptacles of knowledge brimming with potential that should be watched over, but became  now expected to be active participants in the world around us, the gloves came off. We were protected, but no longer. The promises that we had heard were not honored, but they were forgotten as promises that were never made by the people who were expected to honor them. In fact, many of those making the promises were not the ones expected to honor the promises, but they passed it off onto others. Then, others made hopeful promises because the world around them had taught them this was the right thing to say, only to be unwilling to honor the words they had said.

As the sudden realization of this world began to hit us, often times traumatically, some of us saw the truth. What seemed to be a world where our hope and dreams would thrive was actually only part of the world, partitioned off by a veil that had been casting a shadow where the light of those hopes did not and could not penetrate. The world was harder, more difficult, more in darkness than we had been taught. We had been living in a Disneyland.

We had never really been taught how to fight through difficulty, to struggle with the darkness of life. When we encountered it, we thought that good would just win by having an incredibly feat of human strength and capacity, just like many of the superhero comics and movies had seduced us into imagining. My generation as a whole never had to face the long, tedious task of struggling with the darkness. We never realized the persistent conflict that we might have with others. Once the constructed facade of our power and our capacity to meet the challenge was broken, we were left to fear or to continue to delude ourselves about what we can do.

However, there is another option: redemption.

Redemption isn’t just making things better. Redemption isn’t solving a few problems and saying we have accomplished our world. And there is no Amazon Prime for delivering redemption. Redemption is slow and hard.

Redemption is more like a farmer who plants seeds and waters them, waiting for them to grow, constantly caring and watching for them until the fruits are ready to harvest. The work is hard, is tedious, is constant, and there may not seem to be any noticeable change day-to-day. Many things get in the way that threatened what one has planted: floods, droughts, and infestations. And just because you had a good day one day doesn’t mean the next day will necessary get any easier. Slacking off will certainly make things harder the next day, but working hard doesn’t take away the hard work that the next day brings. Redemption is the process where an empty, unprepared land is worked, tilled, cared for, and protected for a mature harvest, but it doesn’t get easier before the harvest arrives.

Maturity, true maturity, is the resulting work on our hearts that comes as we till the land we have plowing, sowing, watering, and hoping to harvest from.  It is not simply someone who has a set of know-how and skills; it is not simply someone who presents well. Maturity is becoming someone who understands what it takes to make a harvest and is willing to see it through as the intersection of hope, trials, and practice produces in us a fruit of maturity, even as we hope for a harvest elsewhere.

Mature people no longer think about changing the world, at least not directly. We want to bring a harvest that others will enjoy and celebrate, that will bring thriving and hope where people are struggling to survive in the darkness. In maturity, we may still wish to be heroes, but we seek to become heroes of the mundane. Our super powers are not the swift, ferocious, and mesmerizing power that the world lifts up, promising more than they ever really deliver, but our super powers are steadfastness, patience, faithfulness, and struggling tenacity to bring a harvest. But lest we fear those other powers, maturity can teach us how to disarm those with the power of these ferocious weapons with only the utterance of a few words so that the real, redeeming, harvesting work of love can start back.

The truth about maturity is that the more we take on, the harder things can get without letting up, but that, at the same time, the more we mature, the easier the harder things get.