If I were to attempt to summarize the history of theology in Western Christianity around a single theme that most readily describes the development and theological diversity, it would be the concept of divine agency. The anti-Pelagian theology of Augustine who established the need of God’s grace in human life, Luther’s understanding of salvation by faith as a matter of God’s agency rather than human agency, Calvinism’s soteriological program built upon the basic foundation of the divine agency of God’s unconditional election, Wesley’s emphasis on grace throughout the course of the human life, and Barth’s prioritization of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ all present key points in the history of Western theology that have taken the concept of divine agency as a critical, key component in understanding Christian faith.

Why is that about the concept of divine agency stands at the center of religious transformation? For one thing, insofar as theology has consistently been about the awareness and knowledge of God throughout history, understanding God’s significance to human life necessary entails the concept of divine agency. While we reguarly witness various attempts to make theology serve the epistemic tasks of other, various social and psychological agendas, the story of Western theology has had a dynamic, transformational pulse to it because, I believe, of the Augustinian emphasis on divine agency in grace. Why? Because the renewed theological study and imagination about divine agency can function as a protest, resistance, and reversal of various social and cultural realities that human agency is understood to have created.

Barth’s theological bombshell was written in an age where the dreams of the progress of human society, effectively placing hopes in a collective human agency. In Wesley’s day, the sense of divine agency had become increasingly cornered off into a rationalistic deism and colonized the Christian way of life. The Protestant Reformation set itself up against the most powerful social institution in Europe at the time. Augustine was resisting the theological incursion of a conception of free will that would make human agency the center of life and righteousness.

This is perhaps why Romans has been the catalyst of theological transformations throughout the centuries. The repeated emphasis upon divine agency strewn throughout the letter stokes the heart and imagination of believers to dream afresh and anew of God’s activity and purposes in the world, redeeming and transforming us from the various human agencies that have had a hand in creating our life, including even our own agency.

We are, yet again, societally ripe in the present day for another theological transformation. In the present world that has eviscerated most sense of awareness of divine agency in human existence and life, various religious traditions have become tempted to treat God more like a painting made by arists long ago that one is affected by based upon one’s own attention and rumination on the painting. Consequently, the theological conception of ‘God’ has become yet again a legitimation and justification of one’s various personal and social agendas that the idea of God inspires within us (rather than the inspiration of the Spirit which we critically discern), where we think we confidently know and comprehend the will of God at the first glance of the love of Jesus, while trying to avoid any sense of awareness of one’s own remarked propensity towards sin and evil. This ‘God’ has become the supporter of our own social and political agendas, while resisting other agendas, but not the God who says ‘no’ to us and them alike, who says ‘repent and believe’ to us and them alike, who says ‘follow me’ to us and them alike, who says ‘yes’ to those who are in Christ.

Of course, the critical question is this: if a theological renewal and awakening were to occur today, what sort of conception of divine agency will emerge? That is the important, critical question. Even as the concept of divine agency may be a dramatic catalyst for theological transformation, whether this theological transformation will move us closer towards God’s purposes in Jesus Christ or away will be determined by whether our understanding of God’s agency is attuned to and formed by the specific pattern of God’s action. In other words, how do we specifically understand God’s agency? Is He acting like a king, ordering and commanding others? Is He act liking a political demagogue, who tells us what we already believe and want to hear? Is He acting like a liberator, looking to take down the agents of injustice and oppression? Or, is He acting like a servant who gives Himself for others? And is He like a teacher, seeking to gradually inculcate an awareness of His purposes where we are ignorant? Can it be that God is like a healer, seeking to give strength to those who have been weakened, scarred, and maimed by injustice? It is these last three images that I would put foward are the most critical and Scriptural understanding of divine agency that can be put forward.

Since the late 19th century, the concept of a worldview has been an important analytic concept for Protestant Evangelicalism, rooting in the Reformed theology of Scottish Presbyterian James Orr and Dutch Neo-Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, who aspire to a description of Christian faith that was “a robust, systemic vision of the reality” so that Christian could “meet the challenges of the modern world head-on.”¹ The concept has become thoroughly diffused witihn the Christian intellectual tradition that it has been taken from it original, ‘rationalist’ presentation of the Christian message in a Calvinist form to a basic building block of historical and theological interpretation of the Bible. Most prominently, n The New Testament and the People of God, N.T. Wright outlines four key features that make up worldviews as the basic presuppositions that determine how people and cultures interpret the world around them: stories, questions, symbols, and praxis.²

However, while Wright’s work on worldview owes to research in cultural anthropological and the social science, the concept of a worldview finds it origins in the Weltanschaung of German scholarship, including notably its one usage by the philosopher Immanuel Kant that Kant’s successors used to refer to the “perspective of the human knower.”⁵ As anthropologists studied the differences between various cultures more thoroughly, they began to observe the impact that culture had on how beliefs are form.⁶ Since then, it has been increasingly used to describe the way people make sense of, comprehend, and categorize the world in cognitive terms, as if the way different people and cultures live can be understood through persisting cognitive patterns that generally operate outside of the awareness of the interpreter.

However, the concept of a worldview has not gone without its criticism. James K.A. Smith presents his concerns the modern analysis of worldviews “retains a picture of the human person that situates the center of gravity of human identity in the cognitive regions of the mind rather than the affect region of the gut/heart/body.”⁷ In place of it, Smith looks to Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary that focuses on the understanding that emerges from particular practices to replace discussions on worldviews.⁸ Wright’s response to this criticism of worldview is to broaden the concept of worldview to include the affective elements of human life such as desire, love, and worship.⁹ Wright’s suggesting broadening of the concept of worldview begins to shift the conception of worldview from understand broader cultural patterns of thinking to including the experiential elements of human life, thereby shifting the original purpose of the concept of worldview.

However, instead of broadening the concept of world, as per Wright, or abandoning the concept of worldview, as per Smith, perhaps a better option is to (1) make a sharper distinction between the difference between the shared and diffuses patterns of cognition from the individual experience while (2) recognizing that insofar as a society is able to successful enculturate people within its zone of influence, its members will experience the shared worldview differently. For instance, Christian faith within even the same theological tradition may create different emotional experience from the same share beliefs, such as an emphasis on overcoming anxiety among the more anxious whereas among those who are more ambitious, they may find in Christian faith a storehouse of wisdom for their dreams and leadership. By trying to incorporate the affective into the concept of worldview, we make the concept increasingly unstable in the face of the diversity of human life, affectivity, and experience. On the other hand, replacing worldview with a praxis-oriented conception of social imaginary, we lose a sense of the original ambitions of worldview analysis: to understand the share systems of reasoning people of a culture.

Smith’s mistake, if I may be so bold, is to draw a sharp distinction between affect and cognition, as if affect is the absence of cognition. By contrast, an alternative view of the relationship between cognition and emotion is that while specific cognitive states of thinking do not define our analysis of people’s emotions and affect as we also have behaviors, facial expressions, vocal tone, physiological states, etc. that all fall under different forms of affect, different forms of affect do have corresponding cognitive states that have some sort of mental representation.¹⁰ Rather than emotions being non-cognitive, they rather provide a source for specific type of mental representations of the world that are grounded in the present physiological state of the person in relationship to the environment, other persons, and even themselves. As such, affective experiences are different source of people’s mental representations that is available alongside their memories from the past, including their memories that constitute their worldview. Consequently, the mental representations generated by affective experiences can both influence and be influenced by the mental representations that comes from acculturated worldview, leading to people’s cognitive states being a blend of affective experience and worldview.

This distinction between worldview and experience and the unstable, dynamic relationship between the two that allows us make sense of two other observed, social phenomenons: ideology and cultural transformations. On the one hand, ideologies may be understood as those set of ideas and beliefs that have a more or less entrenched status within the members of its society. Ideologies do not simply give us cognitive resources to help interpret the world, but ideologies have the effect of ruling out alternative construals, no matter the circumstance. As a consequence, ideologies often times reject and repudiate any sort of experiences and understanding of those experiences that conflict with the ideology. For instance, with political ideologies, negative feelings of anger and derision towards ruling powers and their philosophies are not just considered unwarranted or wrong, but a source of evil and division. We can understood ideology functioning in this case as an instance where worldview dominates over affective experiences.

By contrast, cultural transformations can occur when worldviews lose their legitimation and status among the members of their society, in which case people’s own experiences become much more important to construing life. The worldview does not simply compete with emotional affectivity, but it is being actively eroded by people’s experiences. Romanticism’s rebellion against the Enlightenment and post-modernity’s incredulity towards the ‘progress’ of modernity represent two instances where people’s own experiences takes precedence over the worldviews.

However, even as worldviews and affective experiences are often conflict with each other like a king seeking to take down a subversive rebellion, more often than not are like two lovers, joined together in an embrace where their hearts and minds can not be readily divided from each other even as they are different, but they must be understood in terms of each other.

This is because worldviews are not just how we make sense of the world in some distant, dispassionate sense, but worldviews are part of our cognitive resources we use to survive and thrive in the world, particularly in the face of threatening experiences of our own mortality. In Shattered Assumptions, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman describes a set of assumptions that are part of conceptual system operating outside of conscious awareness that has been variously described (including as a worldview): “developed over time, [the conceptual system] provides us with expectations about the world and ourselves. This conceptual system is best represented by a set of assumptions or internal representations that reflect and guide our interactions in the world and generally enable us to function effectively.”¹¹ These assumptions in the West include beliefs that the world is benevolent and meaningfully, that the self is worthy and that we can control what happens to us.¹²  However, powerful, traumatic experiences can threaten these assumptions.¹³ However, one of the problems with Janoff-Bulman’s understanding about the function of these assumptions is that it does not readily explain the trauma that onlookers and supporters of trauma victims who were not directly threatened by an event also experience and who, while empathizing, don’t experience the extreme emotions of those with the trauma experience.

An alternative, based upon Terror Management Theory, is that our worldviews provide us a buffer us from anxities about life, particualry our mortality. Consequently, worldviews may be seen to operate similar to the function of defense mechanisms such as denial, projection, sublimation, etc. by psychoanalysis: to protect a person from unpleasants feelings,¹⁴ especially insofar as these unpleasant feelings evoke feelings about our fraility, weakness, incapacity, and mortality. To that end, we may suggest that worldviews actaully function to regulate and modulate our emotional experiences, as the experiene of our more complex emotions are often time contingent upon our cultural learning.¹⁵

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the development and diffusion of worldviews is largely contingent upon the operation of these psychological defenses. Whether it is the more mature and ‘reality’ based mechanism or the less mature variety of defense mechanisms, worldviews are built upon the social ‘oughtness’ of specific types of defense mechanisms that are embedded, diffused, and legitimated by specific stories and practices that are treated as normative. For instance, self-denial of the cross may be understood against hte backdrop of sublimation of one’s own desires for another goal, in which case Christian worldviews reguarly contain elements of sacrifice, selflessness, etc. that give people a greater sense of meaning in the face of difficult trials. As the individual person experiences these stories and practices as addressing their affectively in a positive way, they become more inclined to rely upon them in the future. Repeating this again and again as it is deemed necessary, both by social prescriptions from others and personal direction, will fashion a worldview that is motivated by affective experiences and structured by the defense mechanism that provide a satisfactory emotional regulation.

However, this is not intended to be reductive, as the development of worldviews is only contingent upon the function of defense mechanisms to regulate affect, particuarly negative emotions related to one’s mortality. Cognitive and neural causation can not be reduced to single causal factors that we observe in the world, but that our cognitive and neural states are a conglomeration of many causal factors that impinge upon our experience. As such, one can recognize a critical role of the Holy Spirit in the inculcation of a Christian worldview without reject the psychological element of defense mechanisms. Worldviews are sensitive to various aspects of our thinking and experiences over the course of our lives.

What, however, is at stake is the recognition that worldviews are both responsible for and susceptible to emotionally laden experiences that the worldviews can not account for. Worldviews and affective experiences are not the same, but they have a reflexive causal relationship to each other that both blend and contrast with each other.

If this is the case, then Wright’s response to Smith’s critique of worldview is not necessary, as it is Smith who sets the cognitive functions of worldview  against affective experience, working under the (Cartesian inspired?) dualistic separation of cognition and emotion. Rather, there are both synergistic and agonistic relationship between worldview and affective exerience in which both ‘contribute’ mental representations that influence the contents of our cognitive consciousness in a bottom-up manner. Then, worldviews and affective experience can indirectly influence each other in a top-down manner, in which the contents of consciousness modify affective experience and/or the encoded memories responsible for the worldview. The experience of tension between worldview and affective experience in the contents of consciousness would approximatley reflect the psychological tensions between the super-ego and id in Freudian psychoanalysis, but yet also recognizing that worldview and affect can also function synergstically (which Freud’s psychoanalytic theory does not readily allow for).

If this is the case, then one way we can relate worldviews and affectivity is through theorizing how the elements of worldviews, such as narratives and practices, embed specific ways of thinking that function to encourage and activate specific type of defense mechanisms in response to anxieties and threats to the well-being of (1) oneself, (2) people upon whom one feels dependence, and (3) the environment they depend upon for their well-being.

In atonement, there are two primary questions that are asked: (1) what does atonement through Jesus Christ accomplish in regards to our sins and (2) how does atonement work? Briefly, I want to put forward an answer the the first question. Atonement is where the death Christ through the Spirit simultaneously (1) instructs the believer about God and His righteous purposes and (2) redeems the believer from their sin. Both work together as two sides of the same coin in Jesus Christ.

If correct, the implication of this, then, is to come up with a theory of atonement that accounts for both instruction and redemption, and not just simply redemption as most accounts focus upon. This inclusion of instruction into the understanding of the atonement of Christ is warranted in light of Isaiah 53.5c reading more appropriately from the Hebrew: “upon his was the discipline (מוּסַ֤ר) that made us whole,” which corresponds to the LXX: “the instruction (παιδεία) of our shalom was upon him.”

In Romans 5.1, there is a difficult matter that complicates the interpretation of the passage. The manuscript evidence has two variant readings: the indicative verb ἔχομεν (“we have”) and the subjunctive verb ἔχωμεν (“let us have”). The latter read has a far stronger support in ancient witnesses, including the church fathers, but the majority of scholars today favor the former reading because they feel it matches the mood of the passage. They read Romans 5.1-5 as declarative that the indicative fits, rather than exhortative which the subjunctive would suggests.

However, not all scholars are convinced, as Bruce Longenecker argues for the subjunctive rather than the indicative. However, he observes that important concern for understanding 5.1 is the notion of peace/shalom (εἰρήνην), which was about “completeness” and “fullness” as much as it was about the cessation of conflict.¹ As such, one could argue that the subjunctive is used to encourages believers to proceed from their status as justified to some experience of their relationship with God. This is consistent with taking the whole of Paul’s presentation of Abraham in chapter 4, both the justification ‘event’ and Abraham’s continued faith to the receiving of God’s promise. The subjunctive would essentially function to encourage Paul’s Roman audience to proceed forward from their status as those justified by God towards pursuing the deeper peace/shalom that occurs with continuing in faith.

However, while I do think εἰρήνην can be thematically connected with Abraham’s reception of God’s promise, I do think it is a mistake to minimize the “cessation of conflict” in understanding Paul’s discussion of shalom. If my thesis that I have written on a few times is that Romans is addressing some sort of movement towards a Maccabean-like zeal for resisting Roman Empire that texts like 1 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, and Wisdom of Solomon could be seen as inculcating and legitimating, then we would have exegetical grounds to also consider the “cessation of conflict” side of shalom in Romans 5.1. Put simply, the call for the audience to pursue shalom is a call for them to pursue God’s blessings by seeking God’s promises through continuing in faith as part of boasting in the hope of sharing God’s glory (Rom. 5.2) rather than by boasting in Torah as part of a dream of projecting Jewish national power against the Roman Empire. Whereas the interminable stresses and fears of Roman power may have tempted some of the Jewish Christians in Rome to give into the Maccabean-like zeal they witnessed among other Jews, Paul is encouraging them to pursue the blessings of God’s shalom through continuing in faith like Abraham, even as it comes with suffering. To take the zealotry route is to abandon the transformation of character and the attitude of hope that suffering brings (Rom. 5.3-5), seeking instead to take vengeance for the sufferings created by injustice (cf. Rom. 12.17-21).

Consequently, we would have good internal grounds to support the subjunctive reading in Romans 5.1. Rather than construing Romans 5.1-5 as simply declarative of the benefits of being justified, the other indicative, declarative statements in 5.1-5 are seen as providing reasons for pursing shalom, as one has already obtained access to God, one can legitimately boast in God’s glory rather than the ultimately self-deluded boasts in Torah, and one can even boast and find righteous character and hope through the sufferings. This reading thereby joins the overwhelming testimony of the external manuscript evidence with the internal evidence of an interpretation of Paul based upon a plausible and warranted historical and literary thesis.

Over the past three years in which I have been away from the pulpit to engage in academic studies and write a dissertation (technically, a thesis in the UK), I have had the opportunity to reflect on many exegetical, theological, and philosophical topics and figure out how Scripture and orthodoxy do and don’t fit together with philosophy. In the midst of doing this, I have taken a foray through various topics of exegetical and theological significance and tried to address some of the philosophical assumptions and concepts at play.

One of those theological topics was Scriptural inspiration, which I wrote about previously, and how assumptions from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism have impacted how Scripture was understood to be used. To boil down my conclusion, the way we use Scripture to obtain ‘truth,’ an Enlightenment tendency, and to generate ‘meaningful inspiration,’ a Romantic tendency, is often times overly narrow, focusing on a singular ‘epistemic good’ that Scripture is to provide for us. By contrast, I made the point that Paul in 2 Timothy 3.16 saw Scripture serving various goals. While I didn’t expand on it there, it seems to me that the list of four things that Scriptures is inspired to do can be related to four primary tasks: (1) teaching the foundational Gospel narrative, (2) warning people about specific sins, (3) helping to correct for errors in people’s thinking, and (4) giving specific instructions and guidelines to help people seek to live righteously. On the other hand, the Scriptures were not inspired to give a any and all ‘truths’ that we could wrestle from the Scriptures nor was it intended to be a source of meaningful anecdotes that simply uplift the soul and encourage goodness.

However, now that I am returning back to the pulpit at the end of June, I am now faced with a daunting challenge, at least for me: how do I bring these tasks for which Scripture has been inspired? My own natural inclination when I was preaching was towards a “truth” conception of the Scriptures, and still can be. While I endeavored to make the “truth” understandable, I was focused on a high-grade representation of the Scripture to the church that can inform people’s faith and life lived before God. This seems to be the ambition from most of the people from my tradition, evangelical Wesleyanism. However, how now do I move away from this latent Enlightenment colonization of the Scriptures into something that still retains  the concern for ‘truth,’ but recognizes the purposes of Scripture were not for the mere communication of true information, but of transformation?

This is a question I will be exploring in the coming months and years. But there are a few brief points that I think hold true.

First, the task of preaching is not to distill the truth of Scriptures to the people, but to help people understanding the Scriptures so they can see truth, along with love, justice, etc. through the Scriptures. In other words, the task of preaching is not about telling as it is unveiling and showing. This is not to be accomplish simply by an expository sermon that expounds upon the informational details of the Scripture text, but one in which narrative and imagination provide an entrance into the historical and textual worlds of the Scripture. In terms of philosophical domains, this is a move from epistemology to hermeneutic in that we go from obtaining knowledge of truth to interpreting and comprehend in light of God’s truth.

Second, preaching is not about just giving three points or even one point that people can take home with one, but about a casting a Scripture laden vision that the three points or the one point can help us to see. I am just started to read Talbot Davis’ Simplify the Message, in which he discusses his approach to sermon crafting as boiling the message down to a singular point. It reminded me of a similar that Andy Stanley brought forward in his book, Communicating for Change, soon after which I saw that Talbot acknowledges Stanley’s influence on his preaching.

While I think there is definite value to one point preaching and I have only just begun to read his book, so I can not comment on where Davis goes, one thing that always strikes me about boiling a message down to points is this: why didn’t we have this in the Scriptures? Why is it in the epistles that are the closet to what we might expect to function like a sermon, such as Romans or Ephesians or Hebrews or 1 John, we don’t see anytihng that amounts to “points,” except perhaps in the occasional rhetorical propositio at the beginning of the leter. Instead, we see sprawling yet organized discussion on various theme around Christ in relationship to Israel’s Scripture and story or to present day situations and circumstances that merit people’s careful attention. Someone might say we have different attention spans today. Certainly true, and that is to be noted, but people have a longer attention spans for political speeches of candidates that they support, and political speechs are often times a foraying into various topics, although they typically have a cohernet center they stand around. Why then must preaching be centered around points?

The answer is that political speeches grab people’s attention because effective political speeches continue to evoke important themes and significant national memories, aspirations, and values that people have adopted over the course of years. Political rhetoric is, in part, designed to constantly echo the various “texts” of share memories, narratives, values, and events of national history, which keeps their audience attention. Meanwhile, in most churches, preachers are preaching to people who are either most biblically illiterate or, even if there is bibilical literacy, they haven’t really immerse themselves into the world of the Scriptures, but more so have adopted a theology that stands as to proxy to the Scriptures. There are few, if any, significant ‘texts’ and ‘narratives’ to echo in the memory of the one’s audience, and those that are there are often highly simplified theological narratives, such “Jesus died for my forgiveness” or “when I die I will go to heaven.”

Hence, we have to use points to keep people’s minds attuned and learning. To that end, I think reducing sermons down to a singular point is important. However, what is it we are seeking to accomplish in our singular point? Are we information, telling, and declaring something from the Bible or are we pointing to, showing, and imagining from the Scriptures? With the former, we guide people’s actions and particular beliefs. With the latter, we serve as a tour guidee inviting people to participate into a broader way of thinking and living that will give us hearts to understand how to act and form specific beliefs.

Third, I would put forward that preaching and teaching people in the Scriptures can be geared more so to help people hear the leading of God in their life by being able to help them recognize what God and His will and purposes are like. Recognizing God and His will requires us to have a heart that is willing to hear and respond to God and a mind that can identify God’s type of work. As such, moral instruction isn’t simply about “getting it right,” but about guiding people in their own practice so that by putting to death the deeds of the flesh, they are open to noticing and following the leading of the Spirit. Similarly, teaching doctrine is about primarily helping people to understanding the pattern of God’s power and loving purposes.

However, this purpose of preaching would call us out of the slumber of a practical deism, in which the truth of the Scriptures are the principle way that God engages and interacts with us, asides from the occasional momentous event and when we die, to having a more robust sense of faith in God’s redemptive and resurrection purposes at work in the world even today. This purpose of preaching calls forth people to use their faith and trust muscles before they work out their muscles for truth and for meaning.

These “three points,” beyond making me feel like the good stereotypical preacher, are more so places for consideration, relfection, and engagement through the Scripture, prayer, and experiences rather than being clear road-maps towards a particular style and purpose of preaching. We will see where God leads in the coming months and how I will respond, but I am exciting, while also a bit trepidatious, about the opportunity to return back to the puplit and see where things go from here. I love academics and research and do hope to return, but I do have a heart for teaching, one way or another.

In evangelical theology, particularly evangelical Reformed theology, there is a sharp, theological injunction against the idea of ever being able to boast in oneself. Because God is the sovereign author of salvation, making any sort of claim that one bears some responsibility in one’s salvation, including even saying one made a choice to believe, is taken to amount to boasting. Correspondingly, such a theological view encourages self-abnegation, in which it is sinful to notice one’s strengths and choices one makes in one’s lives.

This prohibition against boasting takes its launching point in the letters of Paul. In passages such as Romans 3.27-31, 1 Corinthians 1.26-31 and the three chapters of 2 Corinthians 10-12, we see a couple examples where Paul seems to be denouncing any sort of boasting, unless it is a boast to the Lord. Such a recurrence seems to demonstrate that there is some inherently wrong about all boasting, unless it is a boast in God, that Paul is concerned about. Reading this against the backdrop of a monergistic soteriology, it becomes very easy to read the prohibition against boasting as being against thinking anything one does in one’s life is of any eternal value or merit. God did it, you didn’t, end of story.

Now, certainly Paul is concerned in various parts of his epistles to emphasize the agency of God over human agency. However, the problem with our modern Western lens is that we are inclined to think of the problem of sin and the gift of salvation is principally about the individual, in which individual people commit sin and deserve God’s punishment but the God’s grace comes in to free them to believe and be justified before God and have eternal life. Now, while Paul does not entirely ignore the individual in his account of sin and salvation, as Romans 6-8 is an account of God’s salvation in Christ rather than Torah that focuses upon the experience of the person, the individual is not front and center.

In setting Adam and Christ side by side in Romans 5.12-21, the individual experiences of people are not in view, but the history of humanity is in focus. Through Adam, sin entered into the human world and death through that, with the reality even manifesting itself in human history between Adam and Moses. However, people’s individual experiences do not come into play, but rather we see a discussions about reigns. Romans 5.12-21 cast human history as ultimately under the rule of two different ’empires,’ that of sin and death through Adam and that of righteousness and life through Christ. Human history after Christ is to be understood as the struggle between these two kingdoms. As such, Paul construal of humanity is more social than personal, with history as the backdrop to understanding the change in the fate of humanity.

What does this have to do with boasting? Everything. Boasting is not understood as a positive self-evaluation and self-expression of oneself, as if it is simply about the individual. Rather, boasting is more social, as it pertains to claims to social status and future expectations of victory over and against other people. To boast was to set oneself in a superior position over and against another person, or similarly, to set one’s own people as in a superior position to another people. Hence, in Romans 12.3, we see Paul admonishing people not to think more highly of themselves as they ought. As will be argued, Paul rejection of boast in Romans wasn’t about self-abnegation, but rather social status and social expectations, particularly as it related to expectations of God’s divine intervention in Roman history to exalt Torah-observant Israel while bringing low wicked Gentiles.

In Romans 3.27, Paul provides the question of a hypothetical interlocuter: Ποῦ οὖν ἡ καύχησις? Most translations render καύχησις as an abstract noun in virtue of the article, simply reading as “Where then is boasting?” However, I think it is better to take the article as either an anaphoric article or a well-known article (both of which in context I think functions the same discursively) which would render the phrase “Where then is that boast?” In that is the case, Paul is not giving a discussion on a general practice of boasting, but rather to a specific type of boast that is known by the Roman audience. In Romans 2.23, Paul makes reference to a Jewish teacher who made a boast in the Torah without further explanation, implying that there was a practicing of boasting in the Torah that he and his audience were familiar with.

I would put forward that this boast takes the death-bed speech of Matthias in 1 Maccabees 2 (LES):

⁴⁹ And the days approached for Mattathias to die. And he said to his children, “Now arrogance and scorn are well established, and it is the time for destruction and raging wrath. ⁵⁰ Now, children, be zealous for the law, and give your life for the covenant of our fathers. ⁵¹ Remember the works of our fathers, which they did to their generations, and you will receive great glory and an eternal glory. ⁵² Was not Abraham during his trial found faithful, and it was considered righteousness for him? ⁵³ Joseph in the time of anguish, he kept the commandment and became lord of Egypt. ⁵⁴ Phinehas, our ancestor, in his great zealousness received the covenant of the holy priesthood. ⁵⁵ Joshua, by fulfilling God’s word, became judge in Israel. ⁵⁶ Caleb, by his bearing witness before the assembly, received the inheritance of the land. ⁵⁷ David, by his compassion, inherited the throne of everlasting kingship. ⁵⁸ Elijah, by great zealousness for the law, was taken up as if into heaven. ⁵⁹ Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, because they believed, were delivered from fire. ⁶⁰ Daniel, by his innocence, was pulled from the mouth of lions. ⁶¹ And in this way, you should consider from every generation that all who hope on him will not be weak. ⁶² And from sinful man’s words, do not fear, because his glory will be as filth and worms. ⁶³ Today they will be exalted, and tomorrow they will not be found because they return to their dust, and their plan perished. ⁶⁴ And you, O children, be strong and courageous in your law, for in it you will be honored. ⁶⁵ And look, here is Simeon, your brother. I know that he is a man of counsel. Listen to him all the days. He will be for you a father. ⁶⁶ And Judas Maccabeus, he was strong in might even from his youth. He will be for you a leader of the army, and you will fight the war against the nations. ⁶⁷ And you will gather among you everyone who observes the law and avenge with vengeance for your people.

It is this speech in 1 Maccabees that can be seen as rallying cry of Torah-observance for the Maccabean revolt, as it expresses the hope that through courageously observing the Torah that the exaltation of the wicked will be replaced with the honor of those who observe the Torah. We can look to this speech as the prototype exemplar of boasting in the Torah, lifting up its value in the eyes of their fellow Jews. Similarly, in 2 and 4 Maccabees, we get two stories about the torture of Eleazar and of the seven sons and their onlooking mother. While both contain the speech of the torture victims who refuse to violate their ancestral customs of Torah observance, 4 Maccabees expands upon their speeches to become ornate boasts about the Torah as they speak words of derision and judgment towards King Antiochus.

That Paul has this specific type of boasting in mind is evident from a comparison and contrast between Matthias’ speech. Firstly, both make reference to Abraham’s justification, with both even using the same word to refer to what Abraham found/gained (εὑρίσκω; Romans 4.1). Just as Matthias commends the zeal for the law, Paul will address the Jewish zeal for righteousness in Romans 10.2. Human glory and honor is a recurring theme in Matthias’ speech, whereas Paul said all have fallen short of God’s glory (Rom. 3.23). The seemingly out of nowhere mention of David in Romans 4.6-8 corresponds to Matthias’ reference to David, with David’s compassion as the means of securing the everlasting throne being contrasted with the recipients of blessing coming through God’s forgiveness. Then, the boasting of Matthias implicitly sets a contrast between Jews and Gentiles, which would have been regularly picked upon by Jews in later time, whereas in rejecting the boast, Paul’s point is that God is God of both Jews and Gentiles. In short, there are many reasons to consider that Matthias’ boast, or at least a similar type of boast, is the target of Paul’s speech about boasting.

If that is the case, then boasting in the Torah was not about someone claiming to obey God and obtain salvation through human effort, as the early Protestant Reformation took it. Rather, the boast Paul is referring to is the exhalation of the Torah, with the expectation that one’s allegiance to Torah will provide an eventual victory over one’s exalted enemies as God also brings peace and glory to the faithful. This type of boasting could very easily have turn into a way of signaling “We are the faithful ones to God and you will rue the day,” much as we see taking place in the Wisdom of Solomon.

This thesis has some critical differences with Simon Gathercole’s thesis in Where is Boasting?, who observes the following about the boast in 3.27:

Fundamentally, the boast in 3:27 is tied up with two things, which in the Jewish mindset are really a unity. First, Israel’s election and gift of the Torah are (rightly) emphasized by the New Perspective. Second is the conviction that God would vindicate his people at the eschaton on the basis of their obedience.

First, the emphasis on the Torah is not principally about lifting up the election of Israel in their history as much as an emphasis on the belief in an imminent social and historical victory of Israel in face of the Roman political power. The story of the Maccabean revolt uses Israel’s past as a paradigm for how faithful Israel will obtain a glory in their present struggle; they are not trusting in the election and gift as much as they are trusting that their imitation of past figures through Torah observe will give them victory. Second, rather than a vindication at the eschaton, the boast in Torah is consider to be instrumental in changing the national fate of Israel on the world stage. Understanding the history of Maccabean revolt itself had no real need for eschatology, as Israel’s national fate was partially secured. Thus, appealing to such a Maccabean backdrop would not promote a concern about the eschaton, but about the present political realities under Roman imperial power and the hopes of changing them.

Rather, it is Paul who emphasizes God’s election of Israel and the eschatological vindication as being purposed towards and realized in Jesus Christ as a different vision of righteousness from a Maccabean-inspired nationalist zeal for Torah. What Gathercole observes about the “Jewish mindset” about election and eschatology as it pertains to boasting does not seem to be representative of all Judaism, or even of the form of Judaism that Paul is addressing, but is actually more so reflective of Paul’s Christ-o-centric Judaism, if one wants to call it Judaism, and what Paul emphasizes in contrast to the boast.

To that end, Paul’s letter to the Romans would be a better contrast to the decades recurring rhetoric amongst conservative American Christians who want to “take back the nation.” While they do not espouse a violent overthrow like the a Maccabean zeal would have inspired, their long-standing emphasis on trying to reestablish the old glory of the “Christian” nation that has been hijacked by “liberals” bears much in common with the social dynamics of a Maccabean-like zeal. Furthermore, insofar as they emphasize public displays of righteousness as the means towards realizing this future, such as prayers in schools, putting public reminders of Christian faith everywhere, their public boasts in God and Christ as part of the plan to win the nation seem to be eerily similar to the boast in Torah, whereas Paul’s boasting in God was of a distinctly different way of life, in which one lived as a living sacrifice like Christ so that one could then come to understand the will of God, rather than boast as if one already knew the will of God and how to bring and restore former glory.

Hypocrisy is a charge that gets thrown out a lot of the time in today’s world. Especially in politics, we see people charges others with what they perceive to be hypocrisy. For instance, most recently, I have noticed ‘conservatives’ who want to reopen the US economically and then ‘progressives’ who want to stop open businesses being accused of hypocrisy when it comes to the role of states rights. On the one hand, some conservatives, who generally value states rights, want the states to open up in accordance with Trump’s expectations, whereas on the other hand, some progressives, who often associate state’s rights with racism, want the states to not be interfered with by the federal government and to stay closed. Each, then people who identify with one side accuse the other side of hypocrisy, while they don’t really pay too much attention to their side’s hypocrisy by the same definition.

However, I am not presenting this to be some in-the-middle moderate who engages in some false equivalence, saying everyone is simply equally in the wrong. Rather, my point is to show the lack of value for what mean today by hypocrisy. Today, when we talk about hypocrisy, we talk about some perceived inconsistency between people’s behaviors and people’s expressed attitudes. In other words, our modern day definition of could theoretically hypocrisy would apply to everyone except those who are perfect. It is so broad so as to be effectively useless, and when combined with the derision that we attach to “hypocrisy,” to become socially and politically toxic with no real redeeming value. It has the appearance of moral virtue with none of its actual value, risking tearing all people down and shaming them for their inconsistencies. Of course, as is the case with much of politics in this present era, it seems that most political rhetoric is 10% of truth and value and about 90% is a combination of pandering to one’s base and expressing toxic, prejudiced, stereotyping drivel against the other sides.¹

Similarly, the “charge” of hypocrisy gets readily thrown out against Christians. They who follow Jesus who espouses love at the same time can act in ways that can seem downright unloving to others. Of course, Christian faith is not about saying we are perfect, but that we are being redeemed by the One who is good, faithful, and loving to the whole world. Nevertheless, Christianity is often times portrayed as a religion of morality, and, as a consequence, the failure to love according to that morality gets used as evidence of hypocrisy.

Is it any wonder, with such a definition of hypocrisy, that we live in a culture that cultivates perfectionism? While we can typically throw off such language when it comes to politics because we have in part been immnized from it, when people in general have learned to throw out a divisive label such as hypocrisy and other equivalent claims of inconsistency that suggest a deep moral flaw about someone simply whenever they feel angry about something, what is the effect of this? Either defensiveness at the accusation such that people will be inclined to disregard any personal inconsistency to defend themselves from an exaggerated charge or submission that will risk leaving people feeling deep shame for their inconsistency as being portrayed as a deep, moral flaw. We have been taught, the lot of us, to think of moral inconsistency in a shame-ridden way simply in virtue of the inconsistency, rather than the nature of the offense done. We are readily inclined to shame people for imperfections, instead of shaming people for the harms they commit. This is what a focus on people’s ‘hypocrisy’ can do to us: make us more concerned about managing our own image before others than the actual result of our actions and behaviors towards others. When you focus on this type of hypocrisy, when you focus on finding people’s flaws from their values and extrapolating deep moral flaws simply in virtue of the inconsistency, you help to create a life of either masks or shame or both.

However, the reason we use such language of hypocrisy is that it is something rooted in the New Testament and Jesus’ language to the Pharisees. Many a scholar will tell you, and rightly so, that Jesus is not using hypocrisy to refer to moral inconstancies, but rather people who are acting like an ‘actor.’

However, we need to avoid making what I am referring to the semantic fallacy of identity,² which I find to be a cousin of the etymological fallacy, in which we think the name of someone or something determines its essential, fundamental character and meaning. In this case, you will see people trying to explicate the meaning of a hypocrite based upon the image of an actor, as if what defines the Pharisees is that they ‘righteousness’ is a self-righteousness that isn’t really genuine and true to God’s righteousness.

The words we used to identity someone or something, however, is intended to refer to something that is readily identifiable about a person or thing, not necessarily what is most defining of that person. To that send, the acting role of the Pharisees is something that Jesus identification of them as hypocrites allow people to identify them as a hypocrite, but that doesn’t mean the real problem of the Pharisees is simply an illusory self-righteousness. We might be tempted to think this is the case because Jesus calls them white-washed tombs in Matthew 23, but this inclination is rooted in salience we find attached to the ideas of inconsistency, particularly moral inconsistencies. However, the woes of Matthew 23 have a pattern of successive intensity of increasingly worse and worse moral characterizations, which climaxes in Jesus’s accusation of their murderous nature. The problem of the hypocrite isn’t their “self-righteousness” or their “moral inconsistency,” but rather that what lays at the root of their own inconsistency and their own self-righteousness is their own murderous nature in that they spill the blood of the righteousness. The Pharisees may be immediately recognizable by their “acting,” but their problem isn’t the “acting” but what the “acting” has covered up: their destructive nature, which echoes back to Jesus’ warning about wolves in sheep’s clothing.

In other words, I would put forward the semantic fallacy of identity has lead to us to think the problems of the Pharisees that Jesus points out is some bradly defined sense of inconsistency that we call hypocrisy, self-righteousness, etc., etc. However, that isn’t the real problem for Jesus, but I would say that is language that Jesus uses to help begin to identify those who have covered themselves up in a particularly egregious way. But the real problem for Jesus is that what this self-righteousness, this inconsistency covers is dangerous, not the mere existence of self-righteousness and inconsistency.

However, we don’t need to make the error of affirming the consequent. Just because these evil characters have masked themselves doesn’t mean, therefore those who mask themselves are evil characters. And, yet, this is implicitly what we do, each and every time in today’s world when we throw the label of hypocrisy against people who exhibit moral inconsistency, as if this inconsistency makes them worth of moral derision and avoidance. To be inconsistent to be human, is to be a sinner. However, because the Protestant caricatures of the Pharisees suggested their real problem was their self-righteousness that didn’t depened on “God’s righteousness” through faith to get them to heaveny, rather than the fake righteousness that mask a grave pattern of injustice, we have done much damage to various people, including the way we throw the hypocrite label and and also, especially, Jews who are treated as they have the same problems that the Pharisees had, based upon a semantic fallacy of identity that was reinforced from the Protestant impulse to carciatures the Pharisees’s error as, essentially not going the right way to gett one’s sins forgiven through to go to heavne, rather than the moral transformation of person through trust in the faithful, righteous, loving God. Perhaps, we can trace a realy line between the modern way we use “hypocrisy” and other synonymous terms back to the way we have wrongly understood the Pharisees.

The end result of this caricature of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees: we make moutains out of people’s moral molehills, being inclined to see people’s inconsistencies not in virtue of the actual harm or wrong done, but imagining the deep moral flaws and intentions that make them inconsistent. We may even believe this to be the case because Jesus talked about the heart and, therefore, we should be focused on the heart of people.

However, I would put forward that Jesus didn’t come to tell Israel about the heart and to focus on it; the Old Testament Scriptures testified to the heart repeatedly. Rather, Jesus language about the heart is about helping Israel to undersatnd the way the heart actually works, that what one consumes doesn’t make one inpure but rather what one says and does creates a defilement of the heart. That Jesus’ discussion about the Torah commandments in Matthew 5 isn’t about saying “the heart of the commandments” matter, but rather that one should also see how one’s heart can lead you to the breaking of the commandments, even if one has not yet to break the commandment. 

However, the problem that occurs when we talk about hypocrisy and assume deep moral flaws based upon mere existence of inconsistency is this: we are distracting ourselves from what happens on the “surface” in people and what good or harm did or did not happen on the “surface” to focus on what we can not actually easily see or discern: the human heart. This leads us to a real problem: we can be easily inclined to draw conclusions about people not based upon what they do, but based upon our own fears, our own grievances, our own struggle, or even our own wants and sense who we think we are. We are inclined to whisk away the “surface” for the “deeper” truth, when in fact it is all the “surfaces” taken together that guide to the deeper truths of people in the first place. We are inclined to look for depth in a way that devalues the surface, leading us to readily percieve inconsistency between what is presented and what is in the heart.

However, when Jesus talked about wolves in sheep’s clothing, he does not tell people to focus on the “heart.” In the end, God alone knows the heart and it is human arrogance that we can do anything other than try to make coherent sense of the surfaces. Rather, he tells them to focus on their fruits: pay attention to the surfaces of their behaviors. Look at what comes from them. See what they do, and then you can see what type of people they are by what they do, and who Jesus is specifially warning people about isn’t simply people who have their own struggles, who are imperfect, who may not hurt people’s feelings from time to time, who make people feel uncomfortable at times, etc., but people who take and destroy life itself. That is what Jesus is concerned about: people whose hearts will be formed by what the Pharisees teach and do, to become twice the child of hell, to become a masked agent of deep injustice. Jesus’ teachings about the Torah and the heart makes known the dynamics of the heart and how Torah can be directed towards the perfect love of the Father but also how Torah can be directed towards the defilment of the heart towards evil by blinding people from the real problem. In so doing, Jesus is instructing people from the false solutions of the Pharisees, not because every Pharisee is evil, but that their teaching is of no value against the human inclination towards sin, which if left untreated can go deeper into gross injustice.

I am going to put forward an argument that is not as popular to make in Christian circles, especially outside of evangelicals, but it is an argument that I think is of vital importance when thinking about Christian witness in the West, amidst the pressures and social struggles we have faced and will continue to face in the future. Capitalism, not Marxism, is the more faithful expression of Christian faith through economics.

However, before making the positive argument, there is some brush clearing that needs to be done in this argument. I am not making an argument that capitalism as it is currently realized in the United States is a faithful expression of Christian faith. In fact, far from it, I would liken the present form of American capitalism to a golden calf, replacing the true worship of God. Of course, I don’t mean that to say that capitalism as an economic system is something divine, but only that that the goodness that is latent within capitalism has come to have been massively distorted because of a few factors. 

There are five primary factors I would point to. First, money, which is a means of economic exchange and a form of information used to make economic decisions, has itself become a value and end to itself. This thereby has distorted capitalism from an economic system focused upon free economic exchange to an idolatry of money. Second, there can only be truly free exchange if there is an approximate equity between exchange partners such that one partner in the exchange is not in a position or desperation or servility that requires them to make inordinate personal sacrifices for a minimal gain that only allows them to survive, but does not allow them to thrive. In other words, capitalism as free exchange is not simply about the minimization of overbearing interference from a central, federal government, but also the minimization of overbearing interference by citizens empower by influence and wealth. Third, and this will be something I develop a bit more, but capitalism has begun to be defined unhealthily defined by the competitive aspects of capitalism, where competition is not simply a general pressure to keep prices low and quality high, but it has become a value itself, much like money, where one seeks to maximize growth by cannibalizing the competition. Fourth, because the modern version of capitalism has been largely derived by the value of maximizing profits through the practices of increasing supply and then convincing people to buy product, rather than producing where one sees a niche in need of being filled, the modern brand of capitalism has had to rely on the forces of advertisement in order to maximize profits, leading to the predominant reliance upon appeals to the most basic emotions and motivational instincts of people, including most notably sex, that has an impact on the values of the culture as a whole. Additionally, and finally, this maximization of profits through increased production has contributed to the harmful environment alteration and slow-scale devastation of the globe. It is my contention and hope, however, that none of these five realities are  inevitable for an economy built upon free economic exchange, although it is not my purpose here to try to figure out, describe, or prove this.

My purpose, rather, is to present the reason why I think the economic tradition of capitalism, rather than the economic tradition of Marxism, bears the most hope for the future and is the most “Christian” of the two economic traditions. It relates to the engine of human interactions and pursuits that power both economic theories: cooperation or conflict.

On the surface, Marx and Engel’s Communism seems to present a more rosy picture of cooperation, as it imagines a state-less future where an equality rules through society where everyone has what they need, according to other giving based upon what they can. As lofty and ideal as this vision is, and it has drawn many a dreamer, it is not much better than Satan’s temptation to give Jesus what His vocation was pointing Him towards, to rule the nations. Why? Because just as Satan would have Jesus giving in to evil to realize the good of His vocation, Marx’s economic vision relies upon the social conflict as the fundamental engine of progress towards the dream. To the extent that Marxist historical analysis of the emergence of the communist future through periods off social conflicts and classes did not come to fruition, later, post-Marxist perspectives, such as critical theory, fundamentally relied upon social conflict as a means towards achieving equity and equality. It amounts to the means of physical and emotional violence being justified by the ends of peace and equality. Does that sound Christian to you? Or, for those who are progressively oriented and look to (post-)Marxist theory as some sort of economic solution, does it fit with what Martin Luther King Jr. said:

In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and, ultimately, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

Even as Martin Luther King Jr. was apparently influenced by the thought of Marxism, was not his means of catalyzing justice done through peaceful means, even as this means of peace stirred up conflict? Where do you think he learned that from, except from the King of Peace, who said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God?”

Or, shall I point to how (post-)Marxist understanding of progress through social conflict sounds eerily similar to social Darwinism, where to the victors of the conflicts go to the spoils? Dream that dream of the equitable future as much as you want, but the pathway to it through (post-)Marxism is a devil-inspired wisdom of conflict, spiraling towards war and justified injustices. Your ideal dream will not exonerate you from participation, because the pathway to hell is laden in pure gold bricks of good intentions. But that dream is used as sheep’s clothing that covers up what destroys.

Capitalism, as least in the ambitions as to how it is supposed to be realized, is the free economic exchange of people. Certainly, there are many mechanism that can distort free exchange with the result of drastic injustices, while it still remains labeled “capitalism.” But the dream of economic prosperity for all is to be realizing by the cooperation of people for each others good. Sure, selfishness can distort the motivations for our cooperation with each other, but does not the means of free cooperation with one another cohere with the ends of equality and well-being for all? Meanwhile, competition in capitalism is not generally understand to be a direct form of competition in which one seeks to take out the other side economically, but rather the competition is understood as bettering one’s own product and services.

If you were to compare the realization of well-being through cooperation or conflict, which one do you think looks closer to Jesus? Granted, Jesus Himself faced conflict that resulted in His crucifixion and warned His disciples that they would be persecuted, but nowhere in that struggle was a mentality of to the victor goes the spoils, at least to the first victor, although the first loser does become the last victor. Nevertheless, was conflict the means by which Jesus brings forth God’s blessing of Abraham to the world, or was it through His faithfulness to God in the face of such an grievous injustice that God’s blessing would be bestowed to the world by Him and by others through following Him?

So, think for a second: which is the economic pathway to walk towards the hope of social justice and holiness? Is it by finding the child of capitalism that can accomplish equity and well-being through free exchange or is it Marxism and his children? This doesn’t mean we can’t learn from Marxism, as Jesus certainly calls us to be shrewd as a serpent, which entails us knowing a bit about the insights of the unrighteous and seeing how they can accomplish things, but the innocence of a dove precludes us from following a system that ultimately relies upon the persistent justification of conflict to realize its goals instead of an economic system that allows one to be person who through one’s economic exchange brings peace, even in the midst of the competitive economic conflict.

To be clear, capitalism isn’t divine and it is susceptible to many distortions and is not immune from idolatries that can turn it into an agent of injustice. But, it is a lot closer to Abraham’s blessing than the children of the de…. I mean Marx.

I have mixed feeling about American evangelicals. On the one hand, it was among evangelicals where my faith was first brought forth and a deep appreciation and passion for Scripture was nourished. On the other hand, I look at evangelicalism and I am left wondering how it is that a people who so deeply respect the Scripture can turn out the way they do on so many social and political matters? Can we simply boil it down to a matter of how I interpret the Bible, which some might think was filled with “liberal” presuppositions and interpretations that would lead me astray?

However, another idea took hold of me today, as I was returning from a trip to a nearby commercially owned garden that I love to visit and walk in when I am in North Georgia. What if the problem with evangelicalism is that they convert but they never converted from their conversion? To be clear, I am not talking about de-converted from their faith in Jesus Chirst, but rather I am talking about the cognitive systems of meaning and understanding that gets generated when one first gets converted.

Whenever our meaning systems begin to go through a major transition, such as in religious conversion but can also happen with falling in love for the first time, the experience of deep trauma, etc. is that our new belief systems emerges from a combination of the new information, ideas, or experiences we are incorporating into our meaning systems and some of the old information, ideas, and memories. The emergence of new meaning systems is always a hybridization of old and new. In fact, it is the more entrenched and enduring parts of our older meaning systems that remain that allow us to draw inferences and further meaning from what is novel and emerging in our beliefs. When we first start learning something new, part of what is previously understood informs what it is we are not learning. When we incorporate new information into our meaning systems, we can only incorporate the new information in its “surface” form that we then use our already given beliefs to help give “depth” of understanding to the new information.

So, what happens with American evangelicalism is that when people “convert” to Christian faith, people begin to understand God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit through the background of their experiences. For a complex set of reasons that we need not get into here to make my point, most of the conversions made in the United States to evangelicalism tend to be politically conservative, patriotic persons. The end consequence of this is that they begin to filter their understanding of God and Jesus through the lens of their cultural backgrounds, leading to beliefs such as God blesses America insofar as it will be a “Christian nation” (rather than God is blessing the world including the United States through the blessing of Abraham). Concerns about moral righteousness is as much about God making the United States great again as it is loving God and being a blessing to others, although clearly such concerns are readily pushed aside when other, pragmatic considerations are lead to be able to achieve the same goal. Seeking God’s will in your life essentially amounts to realizing the two staple forces of the present form of American capitalism: (1) what job you will have that brings in the money and (2) who you will have se…. I mean get married to.¹ Even the evangelical reasons for understanding marriage that aren’t reduce to marriage being an excuse for having sex can get understood in terms of something distantly related to capitalism: the eventual creation of labor through reproduction. Furthermore, as whites are predominant in American society, evangelicalism as a predominately white brand of Christian faith largely sees the world in a way that does not recognize the complaints from minorities whom they do not spend as much time around, particularly African Americans. To be sure, some of this is more explicit in what people say and some of it is perhaps more implicit, operating simply at the level of desire and not formally expressed.

Now, much of this is not something radically new to the public discussion of religion in the United States. It has been a common complaint for a while. However, what isn’t as common or readily understood is the solution to the problem? For some critics, the solution essentially amounts to becoming politically progressive. However, some of what is prescribed in progressive politics comes into tension and sometimes outright contradiction with Scripture, to which many progressives have tried to change the way they view Scripture to reduce the dissonance. Certainly, evangelicals are selective in their reading of Scripture also, but one does not change people’s thinking by devaluing the way they use and value their sources of knowledge. Most epistemic practices are deeply rooted that you can not convert people by directly going after their epistemology. Progressive politics is, for better and worse, seen as an outside, foreign way of life and knowledge to evangelicals.

Perhaps another way to change the issue is some critique form within Christian faith, such as can be offered by some applications of Barthian and apocalyptic theologies. For instance, I engaged in a brief twitter conversation of a person who criticized white evangelical’s epistemology as essentially being the same as that of Christians in Nazi Germany. In place, he advocated for a Barthian perspective. The fundamental error of drawing from the inferences similarities between two distinct periods of times and cultures, however, is one’s epistemology does not unquestioning developed in certain stages. In other words, similarities of epistemology does not determine the future of American evangelicals, as epistemology is more so used to address the specific challenges are faced in that time period rather than simply leading to the thoughtless recapitulation of the past.

Also, Douglas Campbell in The Deliverance of God and also in his chapter “Apocalyptic Epistemology” in Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination is highly critical of epistemic foundationalism, which may be taking as a distant, indirect critique of evangelicalism through Campbell’s characterization and criticism of “Justification Theory.” While I share some sympathies with parts of Campbell’s project, I find most readings and understandings of Paul in light of “apocalyptic” to be woefully unwarranted, but largely rests of the evidential foundations of (1) the historical presupposition that Paul was Jewish, with the possibility implication that he shared some things in common with the patterns seen in apocalyptic literature and (2) some similarity of language and thenes that can also be seen in apocalyptic literature. While both (1) and (2) are merited, it does not warrant the idea that the interpretation and understanding of Paul should be primarily understanding around apocalyptic conventions, as Paul was neither only an “apocalyptic” Jew and much of the language Paul uses that is similar to apocalyptic literature language and themes are more wide-spread and not primarily exclusive to apocalyptic literature.

However, notwithstanding both of my methodological and historical critiques of the two options provided above, there is a reason these two options are insufficient option in response to evangelical theology, either in corrected it or as an alternative to it. Our epistemic praxis is not something we generally engage with and change directly through intellectualization about epistemology. Rather, we discover new epistemic practices. Transformation in the manner in which we learn are often accompanied by unplanned for epiphanies and discoveries of a new way of understanding and comprehending that challenge old epistemic practices, especially after our cognitive faculties have become fully developed.

Furthermore, and this is critical, there is no real overarching, systemic advocacy for specific epistemologies in the Scriptures, at least epistemologies in the traditional sense of epistemic sources and epistemic rationality. While the Apostle Paul provides a little bit in 1 Corinthians 8 in virtue of providing a contrast with Stoicism, who understood the field of logic to include thing we would now today call epistemology, it certainly is not extensive, particularly not extensive enough to prescribe some alternative epistemology. Based upon my research, I would say the two epistemic concepts that can be legitimately observed in Paul is the apocalyptically-inspired concept of epistemic resistance, where there is a subversion and tear down of previous bodies of knowledge and the practices that are used to construct them, and epistemic social dependence, which essentially describes the way we rely on specific people or God to teach and instruct us. These two concepts, while may be unfamiliar in analytic description would make intuitive sense to most evangelicals, as they both understanding being different from the culture and the idea of Jesus as a Teacher. However, beyond this, it would be rather hard to systematically and wholly engage with Americanism evangelicalism with deeply foreign epistemic practices, both explicit and implicit, to produce a change within evangelicalism, especially ones that can not be readily demonstrated to others in Scripture in a relatively common sense manner, but relies upon certain intellectual presuppositions and training to even be able to perceive them.

So, what then is the solution? I think the solution may be had in the problem: the concept of conversion. Within evangelicalism, conversion is portrayed and understood primarily as an event, something that happens in ones life that causes people to shift their allegiance from being on the outside to the inside. It is this event of conversion that is highly sought after. While certainly, continued discipleship and training is expected by many evangelicals, there is something implicit in the idea of Christian conversion that is expressed in John Newton’s famous line in Amazing Grace: “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind but now I see.” Put simply, once we become converted, we now have the right knowledge in virtue of faith in Jesus, that we now know the truth that we didn’t know prior. There is something momentous that often times happens when we come to our first understanding of Christian faith, especially for those who were not raised in an explicitly Christian home, and this dramatic change of belief can certainly feel like a sudden new insight, an epiphany in which everything now makes sense.

However, there is a problem with this: when we first come to faith, we do not necessarily understanding Jesus as the Father knows Jesus, but as Jesus makes sense to us from our flesh (cf. 2 Cor. 5.16), even if we have been taught by the Father previously. Even as God has accommodated to our old forms of understanding and knowledge and broken them open in calling us to Christ, we are still largely dependent on our prior understandings to make sense of the significance and purpose of Jesus. But, if in that moment, we begin to think we understand ourselves to have some new truth, some new fountain of knowledge and understanding, what will happen? We will grow highly confident, if not arrogant, in the understanding that emerges from our growth in faith, as we take the epiphany of faith in Christ to be a legitimation of all our Scriptural interpretations and theological understandings. The personal epiphany of Christ slowly grows into an epistemic ideology that increasingly and indiscriminately justifies the blending of old and new in the emerging development of faith. If at conversion one sees, often metaphorically referring to an accurate understanding, then one will grow exceedingly confident in the syncretistic combination between the American culture and Christ, even as this syncretism is overlaid with distinctly Christian language whose meanings are understood as they are significance to the traditional American life.

The solution then, is an epistemic conversion of sorts, of a converting of the converted. However, this conversion is not rooted in simply giving a new confidence of our understanding, but rather obliterating much of the understanding so that we can come to learn afresh about God and His purposes from Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit. By helping people to understand that leaning not on our own understanding isn’t code for “all knowledge but your theological or exegetical knowledge,” but that one commits one’s ways of life and even one’s knowledge to the provision of wisdom and guidance from God across the journey of our lives. Rather than the calling being a time where we go from blind to seeing, it is a time where we move from blinders to really blurry lenses, where God’s calling becomes when we living in darkness unexpectedly see a brief flashing of light that shows us the way out of the darkness, but we must pursue and go towards that light without presuming we know exactly what the light is and where it leads. Literally understanding this metaphor, it means that we begin to know God through the face of Jesus Christ, but we can not fully understand Jesus Christ, what He teaches, and the way of life He calls us to through the cross until we follow and obey because we believe and trust He is God’s light.

This epistemic conversion is comparable to falling in love with someone you feel deeply familiar with and yet is at the same time like a stranger , beckoning you to understand and know who they are in a way that is deeper beyond the surface of what one immediately sees and hears in them, but when they continue to be available and makes themselves known to you, you can come to understand who they are that helps us to comprehend what we see and hear, but only by paying attention to and listening to them. It can start off as starling and sudden and unexpected, much as I imagine Boaz felt when Ruth uncovered his feet, but then proceed to a life together in which one comes to share life with and come to know the other (excuse the attempt at humor as an inside joke if you don’t get it).

In the end, I would say that evangelicals need to converted from their conversion, which in the course of time can lead them to cast off all the old things that hinder them from living fully faithfully to God, so that they can become progressively open to the fullness of God, who is testified to in the Scriptures. Evangelicals need to go through what Paul seeks to bring about in the Corinthians, moving them from one mode of faith that largely leaves them reflecting their Greco-Roman culture, to another that leads people to a knowledge based upon love. On the surface, much of what happens may look like a deconversion or deconstruction at times, because such a liminal transition entails abandoning a lot of the false beliefs and dangerous ideas built upon the foundation of the old in order to build more on the foundation of Jesus Christ, but such “apparent deconversions” or “apparent deconstructions” are actually the movement towards a a surer way of coming to know the God testified to in the Scriptures and at work in our lives in a more secure, Trinitarian fashion. This is because going from lost to found isn’t about our epistemic understanding and certainty about God, as if we have securely found the knowledge about God, but about the God who knows us, so that the conversion of the convert may leads people to wander but they are not lost, even if they feel lost, if in their in their wandering they were called by God and seek to follow Jesus to His cross.

After all, didn’t the preacher of Hebrews, who talked about Jesus as the reflect and exact imprint of God and God and His glory and lauded Jesus as the pioneer of faith we follow say that every created thing will be shaken at the voice of God, which certainly includes our minds and its knowledge, so that what remains is what is unshaken? Ironic that my early faith which had been so developed by an evangelical fear of sin influencing my reading of Hebrews is now found to have been shaken by the voice of God in accordance with the way of knowing God through Jesus that the preacher of Hebrews commends.

There has been an implicit assumption within the intellectual tradition of the West that goes as far back, at least, to Socrates and maybe even in the pre-Socratics. It is an implicit assumption that is so pervasive, so fundmental to our way of thinking that when it began to be questioned by post-modernity, it lead to a lot of hostiltiy from various corners of the intellectual world. Unfortunately, in not being able to really see the pervasiveness of this assumption, the prevailing reponse to post-modernity by modernity was to continue to buttress this basic assumption, rather than come up witha new assumption that would simultaneously lift up some of the the value of the intellectual tradition of the West, particuarly the advances made in the Enlightenment as it came to science, while at the same time accept the critque of post-modernity in such a way that it the intellectual tradition could correct itself while also insulating itself from the corrosiveness of post-modernity.

What is this assumption? That critical thinking under its various names, such as reason, analytic thinking, etc., leads us to the truth. What is the assumption I would put forward instead? That analytic thinking is truth-therapy, healing us from a specific class of errors we are prone to make, but analytic thinking does not itself provide us epistemic access to truth. In so arguing, I am admitting a deep inspiration by Wittgenstein’s notion that philosophy is a form of therapy, but I am giving a broader account of human cognition in relationship to questions of truth that spans beyonds simply the specific practice/discipline of philosophy.

One area of philosophy that I think can nicely demonstrate the implicit idea of reasoning as therapeutic can be seen in the three well-known philosophies of science: (1) the view of the positivists that posited that scienitific knowledge is grounded upon the verification of theories, (2) the Popperian view that scientific knowledge are theories that have withstood falsification, and (3) the Kuhnian notion of scientific paradigms that provides answers to the questions and problems that scientiests are engaged in. 

A therapeutic view of reasoning aligns with Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, as scientific reasoning functions to challenge various errors that might be present in our scientific theories. According to Popper, we do not arrive as a confirmation of our theories as much as our theories have stood the test of various challenges to its veracity. While Popper’s account of science does not fully express a therapeutic view of reasoning, it does express one of the fundemntal features of analytic thinking: its ability to cast away errors from our thinking. However, if one were to morph Popper’s falsification into a broader, therapeutic understanding of scientific reasoning, it would provide the basis for explaining many of the reasons that undergird the acceptance of the positivists and the Kuhnian views of science.

On the one hand, by helping to correct us from errors, analytic thinking allows our minds to come to a place of cognitive openness to pay fresh attention to the focus of our questions by getting rid of previous confidences and assumptions we have challenge and rejected in virtue of analytic thinking, thereby allowing our thinking to be more attuned to our observations. In so doing, the therapeutic role of analytic thinking can seem to function to also verify truth in scientific reasoning. However, at the same time, science is contingent on the processes of attention and perception to progress towards truth, which are not cognitive processes that are analytic in nature but rather are increased because of analytic thinking. What seems to be “confirmation” is really the processes of attention and perception creating and consolidating our theoretical knowledge. Thus, insofar as science gives us true theories, it rest not in scientific reasoning itself, but the cognitive process of attention and perception that scientific reasoning then alters.

On the other hand, the Kuhnian understanding of science can fit under a therapeutic conception of analytic thinking. Insofar as as the shift in scientific paradigms are determined by the failure of previous paradigms to address specific problems and questions, the processes of scientific reasoning by scientific communities that leads to to shifts in paradigms can be understood as the truth-therapeutic functions of analytic thinking, challenging and dispelling the old paradigms and their errors with a new paradigm that has been enabled by the cognitive openness to new understandings that analytic thinking was instrumental inculcating.

This brief foray into the philosophy of science is meant to demonstrate the explanatory value of analytic thinking as truth-therapy, allowing us to incorporate some of the insights of the positivists, Popper, and Kuhn in a relatively coherent account, while whisking away some of the more problematic accounts of the positivists and Kuhn.

How then would analytic thinking as truth-therapy change our intellectual atmosphere? On the one hand, it would cast down the arrogance of Enlightenment and its child of modernity that suggested reason was a fountain of progress towards truth. While it certainly instrumental in coming to an account of truth, the skills of critical reasoning do not themselves ensure that we have the truth but that we can be receptive to what is true in virtue of analytic thinking. However, we still need to have epistemic access to the truth that happens independent of whether we are thinking analytically or not. On the other hand, it would cast down the high-octane skepticism of reason in post-modernity, recognizing that there is a real value to analytic thinking that is instrumental in providing truth, even as it does not provide truth directly.

Another benefit that comes in theologically is this: the acquisition of religious truth about God is conditioned upon God’s gracious intiative to make Himself know to us, although there is still a role for analytic thinking in Christian faith for healing our personal faith and theologies from the errors that otherwise hinder our recognition and comprehension of God. Human reason doesn’t lead us to directly know God, but it can help correct us of many of our own errors when God makes Himself known to us.