Psalm 119.89-90:

The LORD exists forever;
your word is firmly fixed in heaven.
Your faithfulness endures to all generations;
you have established the earth, and it stands fast

The year 2020 has been nothing but frantic for the United States. We started off the year with a threat of war between the US and Iran. Then, word came of a virus in Wuhan, China that would rapidly spread to rapidly change the life of the whole globe. After a few months of social distancing and isolation, a nation was inundate with protests after witnessing police brutality against George Floyd. Just this weekend, my own state of Mississippi voted to get rid of the state flag that contained a confederate symbol. The state of our country and even my state has changed rapidly this year.

Life can often change and change rather quickly. The lyrics of Don Henley’s song “New York Minute” testifies to this: “In a New York minute/Everything can change/In a New York minute/Everything can change.” A sudden accident or new of a terminal illness can change a person’s life in an instant. Add on top of that the way technology has made life change rapidly, as we are more able to get information and respond more rapidly to whatever challenges that are faced than any point in human history. The way we used to do things are giving way to new methods and practices, with new technology to make it happen, which means we need to learn new things to move ahead in the world. In the midst of all the changes, we can sometimes feel pretty lost. What are we supposed to do?

Such rapid change can make us feel like there is no truth. With the constantly having to unlearn and relearn, it can make life feel like simply a bunch of surface appearances, with no real depth and deep, persisting meaning. What is true today is gone tomorrow.

The prophet Isaiah was familiar with the changing nature of life, even if it wasn’t as face-paced change as we regularly face today: “The grass withers, the flower fades.” (Isa. 40.8a) As the seasons passed, so too did the world show all the signs of change, with nothing lasting forever. Isaiah even compared all people to grass (Isa. 40.6), recognizing that social life is a series of changes that come and go. The only real difference between our day and Isaiah’s day is how quickly the changes come and go, but the impermanence of human life is as true today as it was for Isaiah.

Yet, amidst the changing truths of who was in power and without power, who was living in prosperity and who was living in destitution, the prophet Isaiah says with bold confidence: “The word of our God will stand forever.” (Isa 40.8b) Even as human life and purposes change, God has an unrelenting, endless purposes for human life. A time was coming when all the people would see the glory of God, where there would be no division between those who were set up in high places and those whose life had left them on the margins because God had raised the valleys and lowered the mountains (Isa. 40.3-5). Even as the world changes, God purpose is endless and continues to seek to bring forth His purposes for human life.

A.W. Tozer said: “The idea of endlessness is to the kingdom of God what carbon is to the kingdom of nature. As carbon is present almost everywhere, as it is an essential element in all living matter and supplies all life with energy, so the concept of everlastingness is necessary to give meaning to any Christian doctrine.” Without the eternity of God’s purposes, the Christian faith would be at risk of being an outdating, useless relic of eras long past. Indeed, if religion was simply about human efforts to strive for God, then this would be true, but the Gospel is about God’s ongoing purposes and activity in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit to bring about the full blessing of human life through the revealing of God’s glory to the world.

This is why we as followers of Jesus continue to obey His word, as Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Even as the world rapidly changes, sometimes even witnesses the transformation of the seemingly changelessness of the mountains and the valleys, our faith is not in human power and purposes, but the loving power and purposes of God to accomplish what He has promised. So the words of Christ are for us today as valid as they were two millennia because they transform us to be agents of God’s purposes, because in the living and doing of them by the Spirit who leads us, we can become empowered to act in accordance to God’s wisdom in this rapidly changing world. While such teachings may seem outdated to many, it is Jesus’ words that invite us into a transformation of our own way of life through the Spirit so that we can bring God’s purposed peace and well-being amidst the chaos that rapid change brings about.

Psalm 19.1-4, 7-10:

1 The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
2 Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
4 yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
…
7 The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the decrees of the LORD are sure,
making wise the simple;
8 the precepts of the LORD are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is clear,
enlightening the eyes;
9 the fear of the LORD is pure,
enduring forever;
the ordinances of the LORD are true
and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey,
and drippings of the honeycomb.

In theology, there is a regular debate on the relationship between natural theology and revealed theology. At its simplest, it pertains to how we can know about God. Can we know God through nature? Or do we only know God through revelation? While such theological questions are interesting and important, there is an important spiritual reality that is often masked in this discussion: our life in creation forms our confession in God. When we gather around a meal and give thanks to God for it, our faith in God is determined by what God has created. When Christians gather together at an Easter sunrise service to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the rhythms of creation serve as a testimony to the foundation of our hope. Christian faith lived on the ground is much more complex than the various debates in theological epistemology, for better and worse.

Psalm 19 does not easily fit into the questions of theological epistemology. On the one hand, the heavens do testify to the glory of God. On the other hand, there is no speech or words that are understood, even as the Psalmist then says their voice goes throughout the world. There is a mysterious disclosure of God through creation, which neither leaves us ignorant of the Creator nor lets us really understand the Creator. Reflection on creation may bring about awe, wonder, and a sense of splendor, but like an infant who is satisfied with the mother’s love, we appreciate and recognize in creation what we do not understand.

In the midst of the mystery of God in creation, God’s instruction forms us. Where creation does not speak, God does speak. As the infant grows into a child who can understand and converse in speech with their beloved mother, so too does our infant-like worship of God in and through creation bring us to a place where we can pray to, hear from, and being instructed by God. It isn’t that we leave behind the goodness of creation to some ‘revelation’ apart from the creation, but that in our spiritual maturation, it is the light of God’s Word that teaches us how to live with and appreciate the creation. However, much like those who Paul says reputed themselves to be wise, we may be tempted to raise the creation and our understanding of it above the Creator (Rom 1.19-23); even if we don’t set out an idol and still talk about God, we are tempted to long for the gold and the honey drippings more than God’s Word. 

So, our sense of life and survival become tightly bound with the creation and not our dependence upon the Creator; we become lead by our individual experiences of creation rather than the Word of God. So, we find in the cross of Jesus Christ a call to the death to the world for us, the death of our attachments so that we can then be raised to new life in the world, with new sense of dependence upon God our Creator who gives to us our attachments. It is this Word of the Cross that restores our infant-like awe of creation with a dependence upon the God’s instruction to guide us. It is this Word of the Cross that points us to the Spirit poured in our hearts, who leads us into a (re)newed attachment to God and new desires for life in the fruit of the Spirit.

Ephesians 6.18a: “Through every prayer and petition, pray in every occasion in the Spirit.”

What is it about prayer that is important? Why is prayer central to the Christian life? Some answers may include (1) seeking help in time of need, (2) finding a place of intimacy with God, and (3) recognizing our dependence upon God. Each of these answers may have some place in understanding prayer, but I want to put forward from my own experience and understanding of the Scriptures that there is another, more overarching reason for prayer. Prayer is how we bring our hearts into unison with the leading and guidance of God’s Holy Spirit.

In Ephesians 6.18, Paul instructs the churches to prayer in the Spirit. Most translations do not do a good job bringing the centrality of the Spirit to prayer. Paul’s focus is on prayers that are offered in the Spirit. The point isn’t so much to say when to prayer or how much to pray (though Paul certainly endorses continuous prayer), but the very manner in which people prayer in all their various circumstances. Prayers are to be offered in the Spirit.

What exactly praying in the Spirit mean? At the core of Paul’s understanding of the Spirit is that Spirit leads people into holy desires that they may not themselves fully yet understand. In Galatians 5.16-26, the Spirit provides desires that comes into contrast with the desires of the flesh. In Romans 8.26-27, Paul expresses His hope in the Spirit who offers prayers that we can not possibly understand but that God who sees the heart can see, which Paul then connects to the good that God accomplishes for those who love God.

Prayer in the Spirit can be understood as bringing our own spirits with God’s Spirit, owning the hopes and dreams that the Spirit plants within us as our own hopes and dreams also. Our confidence that God answers our prayers is that God searches the hearts of those who love Him, but bringing our own life in accordance to God’s purposes is accomplish through our perception of and learning what it is the Spirit prays for within us.

Perhaps this explain’s Jesus instruction about prayer in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6.5-15). Jesus’ language about praying in private most likely doesn’t literally refer to one’s social location in the presence of other people, as Jesus would pray in front of others. Rather, Jesus is probably referring to the inner chambers of the heart that no person can go into, rather than focusing on the public praise. In the inner chambers of the heart one will find the Father who is in secret, whereas focus on the public prayers would distract from seeing and hearing from the Father in secret. Likewise, focusing on heaping up words is needless, as prayer is about coming to the Father in secret. Just like Elijah discovered God is found not in the powerful displays of the natural world, but in the calm, quiet voice, so too Jesus calls people to prayer to God in the secret place of their heart.

It is through the Holy Spirit that the Father communes with us. Our act of prayer, then, is to give attention to the will of God through the Spirit leading us rather than give attention to all the other motivations and displays in the world. To pray in the Spirit is to acknowledge and own what God is already doing in our midst, both personally and corporately. It starts with the basic acknowledgement of our own relationship to God the Father, where the Holy Spirit brings the cry of “Abba! Father!” into our hearts (Rom. 8.15-16; Gal 4.6), but as we grow, so too our prayers in the Spirit grow as we can give expression to what was previously inchoate.

I speak this from the perspective of a person who has gone through serious trauma many years ago to the point that my memories and emotions were frayed and scattered. While I had a basic cry in my heart for God, for many years I didn’t know what to really pray for myself. I did pray for others when I saw the immediate need, but my heart was so frayed that personal prayer was not something I really even had the mind to engage in. Nevertheless, there were inchoate cries within my heart, cries for justice, cries for healing, cries for a new life that I couldn’t express and verbalize except occasionally in the throes of pain. In the course of healing these past few years and rediscovering the passion for the Lord that I had previously, I can say that my prayer life has become more tuned to this leading of the Holy Spirit, to seek for the good desires for the world that the Spirit brings forth in us.

We don’t pray so as to get from what is good from God, as God already sees and knows, but we pray so as to bring ourselves into union with God’s good purposes being planted within us by the Holy Spirit. We don’t pray so as to experience intimacy with God, but rather it is in intimacy with God that we focus on the groanings of the Spirit within us. We don’t pray so as to acknowledge our dependence, so much as we pray because we discover as God’s People that we are ultimately dependent on God’s Spirit.

Matthew 5.8: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

In taking a hiatus from theological and exegetical topics, I am hoping to give myself an opportunity to “stretch” the other part of my “spiritual muscles.” I have always been naturally inclined to the traditional “intellectual” topics of Christian faith such as theological doctrine and exegesis, but I felt like somewhere along the ways this was to my impoverishment, both intellectually and spiritually. Spiritual formation is something that over the years has drawn my attention, even though I have never given it dedicated focus. Understanding Spiritual formation is one of the places where the intellect meets the (affective) heart. While I am by no means an expert in Spiritual formation, I have a background in psychology, I have ruminated, investigated, and experience the work of the Holy Spirit, and I have a deep appreciation for the important of Pneumatology in the New Testament and theology.

So, my hope over the next few months is to read and think about the life of transformation through the Holy Spirit, largely from the Scriptures, some from the masters of Spiritual formation, and even occasionally through spiritual reflections on poetry. The hope at least is that by blogging about it, I will have that added motivation to really exercise myself in a way that I have not done so.

My first thought actually relates to what may be part of the reason I felt a desire to take a hiatus from exegetical and theological topics: I have an  increasingly deep conviction that the Christian life is not about about right interpretation and right belief (orthodoxy) before it is about God’s vision of the good life for humanity in creation and His work to redeem us for that good life. Orthodoxy and exegesis is important, but it is instrumental to this deeper, more abiding purpose: to be transformed into the image of God in Jesus Christ in order to be fully restored to our God-given vocation in creation. Exegesis and orthodoxy are important in that while not all errors and wrong beliefs are dangerous, there are some beliefs, such as heresy and justifications of sin and injustice, that if they take a hold can cause great damage to others and can mislead people away from God’s purposes for humanity. However, not all errors are of the same degree of importance; most errors are opportunities to learn that we need to have the humility to understand but they do not present immediate threat or dangerous to the Christian faith.

However, there is a strand of intellectualization of Christianity that seeks to pursue what may be referred to as the “purity of doctrine.” I understand the “purity of doctrine” to refer to the intellectual motivation to get to the precise, correct, and exhaustive understanding of what is true about God, Jesus, the Bible, Christian doctrine, etc. This mindset is common in conservative Christianity, which historically was influenced by an aspiration to be an alternative Christian “enlightenment” to the Enlightenment.

Given my inherent penchant to notice errors and mistakes in myself, I have been tempted towards this route from time to time with the following implicit belief: if we can somehow find the perfect theological or Scriptural understanding, everything in our lives will be set right.  Having come to faith in Christ from within the religious culture of conservative Christianity, my own sensitivity to error found an initially pleasant intersection with the aspirations for a “purity of doctrine” that often lead to social reinforcement: “Hey, you know a lot about theology.” “You are a dissertation idea machine.” “I have never seen anything like what you can do.” Combine this with my “theological ax” to grind against some of my Southern Baptist background, I had various motivations to try to find the “purity of doctrine.” However, underneath this intellectual life was a growing discontent; not with learning itself but with the fact that it left a continually gnawing sense of sadness and exhaustion underneath. I remember many times in college where I would dedicate large chunks of time to Bible study and theology to then conclude with a feeling of being tired and almost sad. Nevertheless, I persisted with the pursuit of “purity of doctrine” because I did find pleasure in the activity and it was often socially reinforced.

Somewhere along the way, I knew in my head that the “purity of doctrine” wasn’t enough but that what one does and the way one loves is of vital importance, but yet I still kept reaching for it. I knew one need to treat other people with grace, mercy, and kindness, but I was so increasingly focus on the “purity of doctrine” in myself and in others. I felt the appearance of a tension between grace and truth, which was really the tension between love and “purity of doctrine” that was increasingly motivated by a need to address every stray thought and idea. While I did not engage in such a pursuit with an idea of disdain for others as I myself saw myself filled with errors, there are some people who do not appreciate a striving for a “purity of doctrine” for various reasons. For some who struggle with self-esteem, the idea of being in error makes them feel attacked or worthless. For others who are in the beginning to learn, they may be overwhelmed by the information presented in pursuit of the “purity of doctrine.” For others with a more authoritarian streak, they may simply not want any accountability for or contesting of what they say or so. There are likely other motivations that I have yet to think of. Whatever the various motivations may be, when the “purity of doctrine” goes from being a personal goal to a social practice, it can feel like nails on a chalkboard to many. I myself have been guilty of letting the “purity of doctrine” needlessly lead my voice to become more like a noxious noise.

However, I don’t feel like I ever got to the worst form of pursing the “purity of doctrine,” though my own opinion does not exonerate me, but there is a darker, social impulse that this pursuit can present: the predilection towards judgment of all who do not share one’s ideas. When the “purity of doctrine” is motivated by a strong moral impulse that regards right belief as a deep, moral imperative, it has lead to endless amounts of spiritual and religious conflicts, if not even at times spiritual and religious abuse. I remember one time during seminary engaging with a fan of Karl Barth who was socially connected to a couple people who did not like me very much and in the midst of our back and forth on intense intellectual discussions, which I usually enjoyed, I was occasionally receive what seemed to be some personal jabs (and maybe he saw the same in me), including one time implying that I might be like those who say “Lord, Lord” in Matthew 7.21-23.  I had experienced what seem to be the more toxic forms of “purity of doctrine,” where theology is used more as a weapon than it is as a tool for building up. Fortunately, I did not let that turn me away from learning the positives about Karl Barth later at the University of St. Andrews from scholars such as Alan and Andrew Torrance

The thing is this: Jesus does not call us to “purity of doctrine.” Again, certainly our teaching and thinking is important, but its importance is instrumental to the way it leads and protects our devotion to God away from heresy and injustice, not as an end unto itself. Jesus instead describes as blessed those who are “pure in heart.” Far from simply describing the affective life, the language of the heart indicates the whole of what leads and guides a person. This includes  what we consider our emotions, our intelligence, and our motivations. The “purity of heart” is one that engages the full devotion of the whole person towards God’s will and purposes. If we can consider the Beatitudes as sort of a general description of people’s growth under the kingdom of heaven, then the “purity of heart” is the (long) step of Spiritual growth before becoming a peacemaker.

This is why the “purity of doctrine” is a potential diversion. The pursuit of a “purity of doctrine” doesn’t brings our whole hearts to God in Christ to form our right affect (orthpathy) and right practices (orthopraxy), but an *unrelenting* and *perfectionistic* concern for orthodoxy and right interpretation can squelch it. While orthodoxy and right interpretation is very instrumental in Spiritual formation as, among other things, it protects the way we know God through the three persons of the Holy Trinity, the relentless pursuit of the “purity of doctrine” risks engaging in a form of intellectual Pelagianism wherein our ability to get everything right and correct is practically considered to be the basis of our spiritual life, even if we repudiate Pelagianism intellectually. It in effect ignores the wisdom of the Proverbs 3.5-8:

5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
6 In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
7 Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.
8 It will be a healing for your flesh
and a refreshment for your body.

However, there is good news for orthodoxy. The well-formed emotional life by the Spirit  and well-formed practice in following Christ can be instrumental in deepening our understanding of orthodoxy and the Scriptures, but with a view to the deeper significance that connects to the rest of our lives rather than simply an attempt to find a “purity of doctrine,” because it is the “pure of heart” who will see God so as to be able to understand Him as testified in the Scriptures and in the orthodox tradition of the Church. This is what I lacked in my pursuit of the “purity of doctrine” during my early exegetical and theological training. While I had love for God and others and I had a concern for the way of life that Christ called us towards, I had over-focused on my intellectual capacities.

Edited to add after the fact: After posting this, I saw the a statement from Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, abouit Black Lives Matters which can be read here:

When we read their comments and official documents, when we survey the policies they propose and the worldview that guides their moral claims, it is clear that the Movement for Black Lives promotes a revolutionary and destructive agenda that is completely antithetical to a biblical worldview.

Mohler then goes on to say in the next paragraph:

While we affirm the sentence “black lives matter,” without hesitation and with full enthusiasm, we simply cannot use the sentence, because it will be heard, nearly universally, as a movement, not as a sentence. The sentence is no longer a sentence—it is a movement, a platform, an agenda of revolution at odds with the gospel, contrary to and destructive of God’s creational order.

I will simply put forward this as an example where the pursuit of a “purity of doctrine” has some damaging social implications. Critique Critical Race Theory fairly and not simply based upon its historical emergence from Marxist theory, critique individual elements of their platform and how they may be not sustainable or are not compatible with the Christian life, but to give a wide-spread sweeping critique of a phrase that seeks to correct racial injustice on the grounds an organization that bears the name being in opposition to “a biblical worldview” I would suggest is more grounded in a concern for a “purity of doctrine” that minimizes and diminishes the concerns for justice through overemphasis on a supposed orthodoxy.¹ May those who are seeking to be pure in heart see beyond the “purity of doctrine.”

Black Lives Matter and people with black skin deserve a Church that is seeking to be “pure of heart” and not simply aspiring to “purity of doctrine.”

I am presently considering taking a hiatus from blogging for an indefinite period of time (3 months? 1 year?), at least when it comes to Biblical studies and theological topics. I picked back up blogging as I transitioned into an academic environment, with one purpose to be to help me to work through various ideas and work through my language skills. However, as I am preparing to return back to the pulpit, I am wanting to give my focus to that. While I anticipate that I will return to blogging about theology and exegesis in the future, I want to take time to focus on the intersection of my learning these past three years into ministry. While I may decide to blog about the task of ministry (I am on the fence about that at the moment) and the life led by the Spirit, I feel it is good to give my mind a rest from the three years of relentless intellectual work. I will continue to do some work in exegesis and theology, but I will not be as focused on those tasks as I was the past three years.

With that said, there is one final idea I wanted to write about before I come to the hiatus: about the self. These past three years have been a Spirit-led journey where I have had to come to grips with my pain, my struggles, my fears, and my traumas in light of the God who had grasped me so many years ago in a way I never could fully wrapped my head around. While I still haven’t ‘mastered’ understanding God, and none of us ever will, I feel that I have come to a theological “framework” around the Trinity that has integrated the strengths of my Wesleyan theological background with the theology of Karl Barth, all while building the integration based upon exegetical work. What I always thought about extensively at the same time was about the self and identity.

All our worship, all our theology, all our studies of the Scripture inevitably are an engagement of the self and yet, paradoxically, we are invited and called into a way of life that goes beyond ourselves towards God and for others. The life lived faithfully by the Scriptures entails what seems like a paradox on the surface: we are called to be for others and yet we can only be ourselves. How can this be?

I hope the following provides a way forward for me (and others) to think on the topic: there is a difference between egotonicity and egocentricity that is important. Egotonicity is a fancy way of saying that we inherently interpret the world from our own biological, cultural, and individual givenness. All my past experiences, all my fears and my desires, all of it impinges on the way we understand and know about the world around us. We literally can not escape it, no matter how hard we try. We may say that egotonicity is the basic, epistemic base for all that we come to know.  

On the other hand, egocentricity is a hermenutical activity: it is to interpret the world around us with reference to the self. Whereas egotonicity is where we start, egocentricity is about where we end up in our understanding. I may unconsciously love a piece of art, but if in my analysis of it, I ask the question “What is it that makes me love this art?” and I find something within myself to answer the question, I am interpreting the art egocentrically.

Egocentricity isn’t inherently bad. It is only through moments of egocentricity that we can actually come to understand ourselves as human beings, what it is we want, don’t want, that we know, that we get wrong, etc. The problem, however, is when egocentricity gets entrenched, where the sole focus of our concern is unrelentingly about ourselves, that we do not stop to interpret the world around us with regards to other people’s lives or, even more importantly, with regard to God’s will. Egocentricity is necessary to understand ourselves but it isn’t the secret to happiness or living well, because our lives are wired to be for others. Sans some sort of neuroatypicality, we are wired to have a deep craving for relationships, which begins to be fulfilled to its best when our worship, faith, and love for God orders our loving relationships with others.

This distinction between egotonicity and egocentricity is helpful, I believe, because most of us are trained to think about our selves with one idea in mean “being selfish.” We treat the relationship of ourselves to others in terms of this single moral idea by which some of us come to feel guilty if we ever do something for ourselves, because we think of it as “selfish.” Or, if we don’t understanding something about someone and we may feeling guilted for being “self-centered,” even if we were never told anything about it.

However, the distinction between egotonicity and egocentricity allows a little more nuance to recognize that our own selves are a necessary given, but that we don’t have to always be about ourselves. Egotonicity does not automatically lead to persistent egocentricity. But, egotonicity does not mean that we are not selfish simply for not knowing how other people feel, but that we are being entrenchingly egocentric only if we are unwilling to hear and respond to another and interpret their words with reference to their own thoughts and feelings.

I would say that privilege can make us entrenchingly egocentric, where everything is about our rights, our wants, our dreams, etc. Privilege allows us to make it about ourselves and not consider what happens to others. It is those who are disprivileged, those who are on the outside, who tend to be less entrenched in their egocentricism. This doens’t make them automatically more virtuous or moral, as sin is universal and not simply the monopoly of the privileged, but only that by virtue of their being on the ‘outside’ are they more apt to be focused outwardly, to understand others, to even seek and pursue after God with their whole heart. No wonder Jesus’ Beatitudes starts off with “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” They can receive from God in Jesus Christ the way of the kingdom of heaven that others may not be so readily open to hearing and receiving.

To be clear, privilege doesn’t automatically make us purely and unescapably selfish. If one has learned to love others in a way that it has become an engrained habit, privilege will not tear away what has been sown deep in a person’s heart. In fact, ‘privilege’ may even become something people use to help others; not as a upper class hero who pours down “blessings” on those below them,¹ but as a servant who seeks to raises others up to be able to receive what they themselves have received. It is the servant who has learned the secret between when to be ‘egocentric’ so as to interpret and understand oneself and when not to be so as to understand and raise others up. Even the Servant of servants Jesus was ‘egocentric’ in that he would take time alone for prayer to be in communion with the Heavenly Father, even when he could have been ‘less selfish’ and healing more people.

Maybe with this in mind, I will be able to understand what self-care is. It has always felt like such a “selfish” thing, and it can certainly turn that way when self-care is used in a privileged way, but self-care is to make good use of the thing God has given to us, our bodies with its (affective) heart and mind.

We will see what the next few months have in store for me. But with that, I am letting work of the the past three years go to rest for a little while,² with the hopes of dreaming sweet dreams and to wake up refreshed and ready to get back to task when the opportunity for academics rises up again, God willing.

Over the course of the past three years, I have dedicated a lot of my intellectual energy and effort over questions related to theological epistemology, especially through my research on 1 Corinthians 2 and my education under the professors as the Logos Institute at the University of St. Andrews. As a result, I have a lot of ideas that have come up over the years that I think are really helpful, but I don’t know how to systematically and coherently relate all of them together. So, instead of trying to write an intellectual narrative that tries to weave them altogether, here are a few of the ideas that have come up to me recently in light of my reflections on theological epistemology, some of which I have partially addressed in the past. Not all of these ideas have been thoroughly tried and tested equally, so some may be more needing of refinement, if not throwing away, even as others may have theological and spiritual value.

1) Revelation does not provide truth, but refers to events, speech, and the person of Christ from whom/which we are able to draw analogical inferences about God.

2) Analogy is cognitive, not ontological. As such, analogy only transfers our understanding from one domain of knowledge to another, but it is not a linguistic tool by which we cross the threshold of the Creator-creation boundary. The reliability of analogy to understand God is contingent upon God’s agency to make analogy reliable.

3) The recognition of revelation doesn’t tell us what the specific analogy there is between the content of revelation and God, but only that an analogy for understanding God can be found in the person Jesus and in the events and speech of revelation. Instead, revelation provides the content that both (a) allows for a person to recognize revelation as revelation (self-authentication) and (b) provides instruction which, if rightly understood, leads to truth ().

4) The self-authentication of revelation is conditioned to God’s agency to accommodate Himself to human understanding and not to some specific type of cognitive or epistemic state in the recipient of revelation. Consequently, from the human side, a person may come to recognize God’s revelation based upon prior epistemic foundations. However, the success of revelation disconnects the epistemic foundations for recognizing God’s revelation from the comprehension of the content of revelation.

5) The degree to which the content of revelation is understood is the degree to which the criteria by which a believer recognizes God’s revelation and activity in the future are transformed. As such, the way people come to know God is transformed over time based upon mutual love, where God in love accommodates to us and we in faith come to love and accommodate to God.

6) Love is not the beginning of knowing God, but it is the culmination of the mind and heart prepared to understand the fullness of God’s purposes by the fullness of Christ through the fullness of the Spirit’s inspiration of the Church.

7) The way we learn to draw the right analogy from  the content of God’s revelation so as to understand truth is through the direction and leading of the Spirit, both mediated through another, inspired person and through the direct instruction, leading, and guidance.

8) The leading of the Spirit is not intellectual before it is pre-symbolic and volitive. Also, the lead of the Spirit occurs over time, such that Spiritual formation, alternatively referred to as discipleship, pedagogy, etc., is necessary for a person to be able to understand in such a way as to draw true analogies from God’s revelation.

9) To the degree that the object of theology is not focused on God and His purposes but on the products of God’s agency within creation, theology can safely allow for analogies within creation to understand the creation, while still needed to be critically engaged. For instance, one may draw from an analogy of romantic love to understand the human love for God, while recognizing that the analogy may need careful qualification. This is not inherently unreliable to the degree which the objects of our analogical inferences are known asides from analogy, allowing for the possibility of self-correcting feedback for specific analogies.

10) There are two, interrelated reasons the analogia entis is inherently unreliable to understand an utterly holy God. Firstly, apart from revelation, there is not way to “test” the analogies that are being drawn to determine their truthfulness about God. In other words, the analogia entis is not self-correcting. Secondly, to the degree that the analogia entis does not provide self-correcting feedback, it risks created an entrenched confidence in the methodology that falls far off track from its lack of reliability in knowing God.

11) There is no redeeming the analogia entis for any sort of theological knowledge about God. At best, it may provide a grounds for deriving possibilities about God that may be beneficial in pre-evangelism and apologetics for breaking loose ideological strangleholds that preclude understanding God, but the risk is that through such analogies a person may come to believe the analogia entis is a reliable theological methodology.

12) The analogies of revelation are ultimately directed towards God’s purpose in new creation and, as such, analogies are not primarily intended to tell us about God’s nature abstracted from creation, but rather God’s activity and purposes in creation.

13) As such, the doctrine of the Trinity is to be ultimately understood as the description of how God has, is, and continues to be engaged in His creation and, consequently, how we come to understand God’s purposes through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In other words, the ultimate analogical target of new creation means that the Trinity is to be understood economically and not immanently, except insofar as the immanence of the Triune relations are exhibited in God’s activity in creation.

14) The distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity as a product of human thinking may be considered analogous to a modification of Kant’s phenomena and noumena distinction, where the noumena refers to the range of potential of which the phenomena is one instantiation. To that end, discussions on the immanent Trinity may be considered to be a reflection of the range of possibilities that have been exhibited of God as Father, Son, and Spirit throughout salvation history.

15) Worship that is shaped in relation to the Triune God, and not simply the recognition of Trinitarian doctrine, is the necessary condition for being capable of being able to comprehend God’s revelation to the fullest.

I am going to make a strong call that I am make little hesitation: we need a moratorium on using the word “idolatry.” At the core of my criticism is this: we don’t use typically use idolatry to refer to specific practices directed towards some ‘figure’ of power, but we use it to refer to what we deem to be the cause of injustice. While I support many of the motivations that people have when addressing “idols,” such language smells of sloppy ethical critique cloaked in Biblical language to give its legitimacy. Instead, I would propose that we find alternative terms that are more descriptive of the causes of injustice, such as ideology, sins, ignorance, etc., than use such a sloppy form of thinking where the referents of “idolatry” only resemble the historical practice of idolatry in terms of being “wrong.”

The reason for this criticism is two-fold. Firstly, in the Biblical world, to speak of idolatry immediately conveyed the solution to the problem: stop doing the things that venerate the idol. Today, however, the reference of “idolatry” have shift away from action in the world to a cognitive-affective internalism that is used to describe values, worldviews, cultural beliefs, ratonality, etc. When we use idolatry to refer to the way people think, rather than what people do, we unwittingly engage the internalist way of thinking ushered in by Rene Descartes and the Enlightenment, although Francis Bacon was one of the first philosophers to refer to mental processes as idols. The damage of this is that this is, essentially, a veiled form of mind-control in which one tries to control the content of persons thinking through, essentially treated them as equivalent of ‘infidels’ for getting it wrong. While most people do not actually use it to such language to its worst effects, the more people give in wholeheartedly to such a sloppy use of “idolatry” to refer to internal realities rather than specific classes of well-demarcated behaviors, the more potentially abusive it can become.

This is not said from a note of superiority on this matter, but it is something that I have felt a strong conviction about myself as I have used “idolatry” to refer to various sorts of thoughts and feelings. However, in the end, I realize such language was partly due to my inability to describe what it was I was observed and that it is language that does not provide a clear solution towards those “guilty” of idolatry. Rather, the fear of such language is that those who wield such language will determine what does or does not constitute, without clear, reasonable guidance as to how to avoid “idolatry.” It is convenient appeal to people’s moral pathos to try to persuade, but it isn’t really effective at bring long term comprehension and understanding towards transformation if the specific actions to take to remedy it are not clear.

Building off of that, secondly, by putting a “moratorium” on usage of the language of “idolatry,” we will be forced to dedicate our thinking to clear descriptions of what the concerns and causes of sin are and, with that, the potential for developing a clearer plan for action. We can’t just point to the Biblical texts as some authority without making sure that what we are describing is strongly analogous to idolatry as describing in the Scriptures, but we are called to engage in a social form of thinking and analysis that calls us to understand the people who are committing the errors. Furthermore, by not flippantly referring to something as “idolatry,” which puts the burden on the “idolater” to get it right, we are more open to recognize our own role in bringing the redemptive message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to redirect people’s lives away from the sins and injustices that have bound us, both in the doing of them and being the recipient of them.

Certainly, there are still some things that can be deservingly called idolatry that have come clear prescriptions, such as the idol of money which calls for a distinct distancing of oneself from the purposeful activities of needlessly acquiring and increasing one’s wealth. But this is the sort of things where a prescription for the problem can be given, even if the prescription is not an easy one for people to grasp (as Jesus said, it is easier for a camel….). But much of what we criticize as idolatries are very different things than idolatry in the Biblical sense.

Undergirding the spirit of calling things “idolatry” is an iconoclastic spirit that seeks to tear down and dismantle the “errors” of those we oppose. While their are times to do such, such as Barth’s bomb in the playground of theologians, iconoclastic action do not build peace and shalom, but they simply take power away. To that end, lets unveil what is really happening under much of the “idolatry” rhetoric: post-modern deconstructionism. I don’t use this as an evil phrase, but rather to point out that people are more focused on deconstructing the worldviews and values of other people, cultures, etc. Maybe they are willing to reconstruct a new worldview, which they may use Christ to justify, but how many are truly willing to allow the freedom and the space to allow people to grow to reconstruct a new worldview by their worship of God in Christ through the Spirit? Deconstructionism is not the Gospel, even as sometimes our worldviews must be deconstructing to come to and grow in Christ, and deconstructionism does not bring God’s shalom.

The way that Paul worked in his evangelistic ministry, at least in Corinth, was through Gospel narrative and demonstration of the Spirit. The work of the Spirit was the witnessed breaking down of the worldviews and ideologies that influenced Paul’s audience that also simultaneously testified to the power of God in the cross of Christ told in the Gospel narrative. As such, Paul’s evangelism became an invitation to a community gathered together in a Triune worship, which when faithfully lived out would lead believers away from the idolatries, ideologies, and worldviews taught and propagated by the various exalted figures of wisdom, power, and honor n that day.

To that end, rather than focusing on “idolatries,” it may be more pertinent for Christians to focus on the right and wholesome worship of the Triune God and to bring to light how our values, ideologies, and worldviews may be cutting off and limited this worship. However, the purpose here is not to direct control the worldviews, values, and ideologies that people should then hold to, but rather to bring people to live more faithfully before the One who gives His wisdom to those who have grown to love Him. If there is some clear and abiding action, such as the overvaluation of money, that works against the redemption had in Christ. then we can provide a clear account of this with a clear prescription. But if there isn’t a clear prescription to address the problem, using “idolatry” is not helpful, even if it may feel very emotionally satisfying to explain social and political problems as “idolatry” and create a feeling of “rightness” in one’s argument.

For those familiar with the work of Douglas Campbell, you would be familiar with his Barth-inspired criticism of epistemic foundationalism. Having written extensively about in The Deliverance of God and also in “Apocalyptic Epistemology” in Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination, Campbell provides another strong indictment against foundationalism in Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love:

A more technical name for the procedure whereby we elevate our own truth criteria over the truth that is God, ultimately to judge God’s truth or falsity, is “foundationalism,” which denotes here our provision of a different foundation for truth from the one that God has laid for us in Jesus, and hence a structure that we ultimately build for ourselves. Foundationalism has a more technical, although related, meaning in modern philosophical discussion, referring primarily to the desire of many thinkers post-Descartes to construct an indubitable basis for knowledge—a foundation in this specific sense. So clearly there is some overlap here. Any such philosophical attempt to construct a perfect foundation for all thought and knowledge is indeed a form of foundationalism. In the light of the revelation of the Trinity, however, we can see that this exercise in human hubris exists in many more forms than philosophical foundationalism alone, and each of these needs to be identified and resisted. Especially since the Enlightenment, Christians have often themselves employed this way of reasoning—for example, by trying to prove the truthfulness of the Bible on the basis of historical records, reason, appeal to universal moral intuitions, or the like, before explaining what the Bible teaches (an effort labeled “evidentialist apologetics”). Yet, every such effort is also, at bottom, an exercise in idolatry. To build a foundation for the truth ourselves is to reject the truth and to build our own version of the truth, which we then make the judge of all truth, and so the lord of truth, at which moment in effect we bow down before it and proclaim it as our new lord. So epistemological foundationalism, however sophisticated, is, at bottom, nothing more than another golden calf.¹

Admitting that there is a bit of a differnece between his definition of “foundationalism” and philosphical definition of “foundationalism,” Campbell nevertheless sees fits to include any effort to arrive at truth about God independent of God himself as a form of epistemic idolatry, that substitutes God for something else.

I share some sympathies with what Campbell is describing as I do think there are problem with many forms of “foundationalisms,” but yet I find targeting foundationalism as a class to be a bit of a misfire. Firstly, as Campbell’s arguments against foundationalism has been ostensibly a part of his reading of the apostle Paul, I think such an interpretive move is fundamentally etic. It appropriates Paul to address modern intellectual issues but does not adequately demonstrate the why “foundationalism” is a direct, or even an indirect, target of Paul. To that end, Campbell’s interpretation of Paul is more of a theological exegesis, a quite profound one, but one that lacks the socio-historical plausibility. While most philosophers might agree that ancient Greek philosophy was foundationalist, would this pattern of reasoning have been recognized by Paul, either directly or indirectly, so as to respond to it? While ancient philosophers were sufficiently focused on internal cognition to be able to attempt to give an account of rationality, the ancient Meditteranean world was not focused on the internal contents of thinking and reasoning to even be able to give an account of foundationalism. While Paul is clearly an intelligent figure and in my opinion is aware of many aspects of ancient philosophy, nothing in his letters suggests he has enough awareness about the internal processes of reasoning to be able to identify, much less even recognize, foundationalism.

To that end, I think Campbell’s reading of Paul owes too much to Barth. Barth is a powerful theologian who attempts to take the Scriptures seriously, but his reading of Paul is largely owing to the social, political, and intellectual challenges of his day. Barth’s reading of Romans was “like a bombshell in the theologian’s playground.” The problem with bombs is that they are rather indiscriminate in what they destroy. This is fine and well when one is dealing with a thorough-going evil: one needs to put an end to it without concern for subtly or precision in one’s criticisms. It is quite another thing, however, to build a reading of Paul or generate a widescale critique of epistemology based upon Barth.

To that end, I think a more appropriate criticism is not “foundationalism” writ large, but rather the analogia entis. More particularly, a problem of theological epistemology arises when there is an actionable belief that there are some reliable grounds within creation for knowing God (or about God) via analogy that are not authenticated as being from God. Whether it be natural theology, personal experience, etc., on what grounds do we trust that the object of our understanding can be used to then generate confident beliefs about God?

By contrast, revelation is a divine self-disclosure that makes evident that a specific event (the burning bush), speech (inspired speech) or person (Jesus) can be a reliable source of understanding about God. In the cases of revelation, reliable analogies may be drawn between our understanding of an event, speech, or Jesus and our knowledge of God.² We can think of revelation as an event that provides the necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition for reliably drawing an inference about God via analogy.

I think this account can explain Paul’s discourse in 1 Corinthians 2.9. The content of God’s wisdom is not something that can be understood by human reasoning from what is readily knowable in creation. Whereas the Stoic pantheism suggests that ‘God’ was fundamentally like the observable cosmos, Paul rejects such an analogy between God’s wisdom and creation. While certain properties about God may be knowable from within creation (Romans 1.19-20), God’s eschatological purposes that are made known in Christ crucified are not knowable from within the present order of creation. It is the resurrection of Christ that provides THE analogy of God’s redemption of humanity.

The problem here for Paul is not relying upon some other grounds to secure one’s faith in Jesus. The problem is that, fundamentally, the ontic nature of God’s holiness is not understood within the assumed Stoic epistemology. God’s thoughts are not humanity’s thoughts (Isa 55.8-9). The expectation that God’s purposes in Christ must correspond to some set of expectations, such as the received wisdom based upon the the understanding of the present order of things or the expectation of specific types of signs that God’s power is politically active for the Jewish kingdom analogically similar to past events of Jewish glory in the Maccabean revolt (cf. 1 Cor 1.22-23) is to overlook and ignore the way that God makes Himself and His purposes known. Analogy from past uprising or the present order does not provide a knowledge of God’s purposes, but in fact inhibits the reception of them in the cross.

That Paul understands analogy to be at work can be demonstrated in 1 Corinthians 15.12-19, where he conceptually distinguishes between the resurrection of Jesus and the general resurrection. While distinguished, his argument is that the two must hold together. One can not accept the resurrection of Jesus while, simultaneously, denying the general resurrection of the dead. There is a necessary analogy between the event of Jesus’ resurrection and the eschatological hope of the future resurrection.

A similar point can be made about Paul’s comments on the Torah in Romans 3.20. The Torah can not justify because the Torah can not serve as an analogical source for understanding God’s righteousness, as the Torah is about sin not righteousness. This does not mean that the Torah can not be used as a witness to God’s righteousness in Jesus Christ, but only that one doesn’t know about God’s righteousness via an inferential analogy from one’s knowledge of Torah.

The concern, here, then is not some sort of foundationalism or progressive, prospective movement of knowledge from one body of beliefs being used to infer or justify other body of beliefs about God, Jesus, etc. Rather, the problem is to draw an analogical inference from one body of knowledge to theological knowledge without revelation. The outright holiness of God entails that God is discontinuous with creation in such a way that one can not simply look at creation and reliably know God in His fullness. It isn’t per se impossible to come to some specific, true beliefs about God’s power and what not, but reasoning from creation to God is an utterly unreliable way to try to know God. It is like try to shoot a 200 targets while blindfolded with only 200 bullets. You may hit a target once here or there, there is no way you can direct yourself to hit all 200 targets. The fullness of God and His purposes is only knowable in Christ and through the Spirit and not through anyone or anything else.

While God as creator certainly implies that there is some sort of continuity between creation and the mind and intentions of the Creator, God’s holiness makes discovering the analogy between creation and Creator an unverifiable enterprise that would draw people off course again and again and again. Whatever specific true beliefs they might come upon, those who indiscriminately try to know God via analogy are fundamentally lead astray by all the rest that they confidently believe to be from God but is not true. 

To that end, foundationalism is a problem to the extent that it expects the beliefs about God to be analogically similar to the prior, given foundations for knowledge. For instance, epistemic foundationalism combined with a fervent socio-political nationalism among Christians may lead to the conclusion that God’s purposes in the present age can only be the case in so far as God’s activity today resemble the way the nations prospered in the past. In this case, nationalism has colonized the foundations of theological knowledge, thereby suggest an analogy between national history and power and what God’s activity will look like. However, the fundamental problem is not foundationalism per se, but the way that foundationalism then provides legitimation for this socio-political analogy once the foundations of ‘truth’ has been colonized by a zealous, nationalist spirit. So, for instance, it is assumed by some white evangelical Christians that God’s work on behalf of the United States will look fundamentally like the past prosperity of white people. Even as this is not explicit to the degree of an ideological white supremacy, the fundamental assumption that God’s blessing of the United States would like like the past prospering of the white majority controls the way they understand and think about God in this present age and time.

Foundationalism, in other words, may provide legitimation of religious syncretism with socio-political values. The problem of syncretism isn’t of messing with the “purity” of religion’s foudations and backgrounds, however, but the way in which the way one knows and understands God’s has been colonized in such a way as to effectively subverts the real recognition of God’s holiness and relies in implicit analogies from the past and present socio-political order to God’s ongoing, redemptive purposes to bring about the blessing of Abraham. Foundationalism is ripe for legitimating analogical ‘heresy,’ but I would not say foundationalism itself is idolatry. To suggest a meta-anaology (an analogy about analogy): foundationalism is to analogical ‘heresy’ what Aaron is to the golden calf: complicit in the problem but is not necessarily to be reject with repentance.

Given my fascination with epistemology, one of the things that intrigue me about the Old Testament is the way the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly the Pentateuch, uses one of its primary epistemic terms, ידע (knowing), with a range of semantic senses that does not neatly overlap with our primary epistemic term of knowledge. It describes the serpents portrayal of God’s knowledge about Adam and Even if they were to eat of the tree of knowledge of good of evil. In Genesis 3.7, it is used to describe Adam and Eve’s knowledge about their own nakedness. It is then used to describe sexual relations between Adam and Even in Genesis 4.1 and 4.17. It is used to refer to (lack of) knowledge of the whereabouts of Abel in Genesis 4.9. It is attributed to Abraham in Genesis 12.11 describing the beauty of his wife Sarah. Perhaps one of the most significant uses in the Old Testament is in Exodus 2.25, where it refers to God’s ‘response’ to the Israelites’ groaning.

There is one common factor in these few uses of ידע that importantly differs from the way we understand “knowledge” today. In the Old Testament, knowledge tends to be social, describing ‘knowledge’ of persons.

Our usual usage of “knowledge” in our modern world tends to be ‘facts’ driven, where we know things about about something. It can be about people, such as I know the facts of my parents birthday, but the emphasis upon knowledge in the modern world is upon a representation that I have inside my mind of the world around me. To know the truth is to know the true facts, theories, propositions, etc. about specific states of affairs. This knowledge then can be used in various ways. For instance, knowledge about Einsteins’ general theory of relativity can be used to help provide understanding about the cosmos, help adjust satelites for the relativistic time effects, and used as a basic axiom to further develop more scientific hypotheses and theories. Knowledge is the modern world is “multifunctional,” in that specific forms of knowledge can be used to accomplish various, which is owing to how knowledge, particualry scientific knowledge, functions as paradigms that we extend to various situations, circumstances, questions, and topics. Put simply, knowledge in our modern world is reliable information that will help us to accomplish other tasks. 

That is not how ידע words in the Old Testament. It is not focused on simply a description of a state of affairs that can be used, but it refers to some type of knowledge that directly or indirectly relates to actions and outcomes. You can not look at ידע as a knowledge of information that can be used in many repreated scenaros. Rather, ידע typically compels to a certain form of action. To know is to be compelled to action.

Let’s take the somewnat complicated usage of ידע to refer to sexual intercourse in Genesis 4.1. Often refered to as a euphemism or as description of intimacy, I have come to the opinion that neither of these accounts are getting at the heart of the what the Hebrew is conveying. Rather, I have come to take ידע along the lines of an understand-action script, where the full exposure of Eve to Adam is what Adam ‘knows’ and then implicit is conjugal relations. Adam knows Even in here nakedness, echoing back to what we have in Genesis 3.7. As such, the language is essentially synonymous with the other common language for sexual intercourse in the Pentaeuch, uncovering nakedness, with one bit significant difference: to ‘know’ someone is an appropriate type of exposure, whereaas to ‘uncover nakedness’ is an inapprorpiate type of expsoure.

The point being is that ידע of sexual relations in Genesis 4 is not so much a euphemism for sex, but rather a word with the implied undersatnd-action script that harkens back to the reality after Adam and Eve at of the tree of knowledge. A distance was created due to shame that made them hide their bodies from each other. The knowledge (דַּ֫עַת) of good and evil had created a distancing of Adam and Eve from each other. With that background, the ידע of Genesis 4 may be understood as the reestablishing of the pre-disobedience relations, back to closer to the way God intended things. To that end, ידע certainly may imply a sense of intimacy and trust that would cast away the feelings of vulnerability that Adam and Even may have in each other’s presence, but there is not a particuarly profound meaning to the word ידע. The profound theological meaning is to rather be had in interplay of the various events ‘knowing’ of the narrative in Genesis 2-4, as if there is a tension or contrast between different ‘knowledge’ events.

We can certainly suggest a similar narrative interplay happening in Exodus. In Exodus 2.25, God is say to know Israel in response to their cries. How exactly to take ידע has various possibilities, but I want to suggest that we can understand Exodus 2.25 is similar to Genesis 4.1 in terms of (a) the understanding-action script and (b) the dependence of various uses of ידע in the narrative upon each other. We see a new king arises in Egypt in Exodus 1.8 who is said not to know Pharoah, which culiminate in the enslavement and oppression of the Israelites. We may then consider God’s knowing of Israel to be a contrast to Pharoah’s ignornace of Joseph, with the implied sense in that God will act on behalf of Israel because this new Pharoah will not act to protect them. Both uses in 1.8 and 2.25 may be understood to point towards the expectation of some sort of action that corresponds to the understanding.

However, the significance of this is not just in the tension between Pharoah’s ‘ignorance’ and God’s ‘knowing.’ Read in the context of the patriarchal narrative, God’s ‘knowing’ is a response to the lack of influence of Joseph. One reading of Genesis may understand Joseph to be the first realization of God’s blessings to the families of the earth, the promise made to Abraham. With the lack of influence by Joseph with the new Pharoah, however, the blessing of those who bless Abraham (and his descendants) is now going to turn into a curse for those who curse Abraham in the form of the plauges. Hence, God is said to remember the covenant he made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which may be understood as a single convenant that is the expression and outworking of God’s promise to Abraham. Because the blessing of Abraham is no longer going to be in force, God is now going to act on behalf of Israel to release them from their Egyptian oppressor.

The point: knowledge is intimately connected to action with and on behalf of others in the Old Testament. Hence, we may be able to see a similar pattern in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 8, where Paul contrasts “knowledge,” in the Stoic sense of the term, that leads to justification of eating foot at temples with a concern for the effect one’s actions have on another. To that end, Paul could be understood as working with a different account of “knowledge” from the Old Testament that the Stoic/philosophical account of knowledge does not readily make sense of. That can then make sense of 1 Corinthians 8.3, with the sense that the knowledge of God is the understanding of those who love Him that leads to God’s redemptive agency, prototypically shown in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I have to give thanks to my friend Laura, whose sermon on Exodus a couple months back put me down the line of investigating and noticing the Hebrew significance of knowing in Exodus 2.25.

Almost anytime we get into a discussion about matters of injustice that calls for political reforms, there is a response from primarily evangelical Christians that say that racism can only be eradicate from the heart. While this is a true sentiment on the surface, there is often an underlying sentiment this idea is used to justify: “therefore, we shouldn’t try to change the problems in society.” It is often used as a repudiation of social justice.  Modern advocates for justice, on the other hand, imagine trying to eradicate racism, or any other various forms of socials ills, frequently by reimagining society. In this worldview, if you construct society well, you can eradicate social evils.

These two worldviews have different implicit “logics” that undergird what they say. For the evangelical, their logic works under the assumption that society is determining by the aggregate of individual people and their contributions to that society. By contrast, the social justice advocate works by the reverse logic, where the way society is ordered and structured determines the nature of individual people.

What I want to suggest is that there is a validity to both forms of “logic” about injustices, such as racism, but they fail to really understand the degree to which their perspectives are reliable to eradicating social problems.

On the one hand, personal transformation is necessary to eradicating racism within a society, as prejudice ultimately stems from the behaviors of people. Even as not all injustice can be explained to the aggregate of individual intentions, preferences, and behaviors, the existence of prejudice must be eradicated by transform people’s hearts. However, the existence of societal ideologies can create a stranglehold that make personal transformation nigh impossible across the whole of society, as ideologies have a way of forcing how people perceive themselves and others, including both the ideological centers of power and those who are resisting those centers of power. When such ideologies have power, such as the ideology of white supremacy in the 20th century, personal transformation is actively hindered. It requires wide-spread demonstrations of a different way of life to break open the worldviews and begin to cast down the ideology. When people try to minimize and silence such demonstrations through appeals to the “heart,” they are buttressing the very ways of life that keep personal transformations from happening on a wide scale.

Consequently, societal transformation can be instrumental in personal transformation when the source of power for controlling ideologies of the past have been torn down, taking away the source of control of thinking that will open people up to a new way of thinking and living with a great concerns for justice. Furthermore, the changes that societal transformations make can lead to the minimization of harm from personal prejudices through various mechanisms.

However, there is also the risk of social transformations when the historically oppressed and those who identify with the oppressed become societal victors, the moral zeal and passion for one’s cause may then lead to temptations to the wide scale punishment and shaming of the perceived oppressors in an attempt to eradicate the source of injustice. There shall be no quarter for the “enemy.” This form form of no tolerance for anything that smells of deviance leads to resistance, thereby increasing rather than decreasing instability and conflict.

This is why the bifurcation of the Gospel of Jesus into individualistic evangelism and social justice has severe societal consequences. A wide-scale transformation towards justice needs both personal and societal transformations to lead to a long-lasting peace and shalom. Societal transformations can break down the strongholds that actively keeps people’s eyes from seeing and ears from hearing and it is there that awakenings on a personal level can begin to really take root.

As I wrote in a previous post “A hypothesis about spiritual awakenings,”  I put forward that “Christian spiritual awakenings (1) occur during periods of a wide-spread social disequilibrium that (2) erode people’s confidence in prevailing cultural and social beliefs, (3) resulting in people’s greater openness to spiritual awareness.” Social transformations create a wide-spread disequilibrium, particularly when they disarm the previous centers of ideological power and influence, that can then make people open to personal awakening and transformation.

To that end, I would put forward that any Christian who wants to see an awakening and revival where Jesus is followed in our relationships with each other and is glorified in our worship will be actively supporting African-Americans in their pursuit of societal transformation for justice. If you want personal transformation, use your voice to support a societal transformation for racial justice. Be a witness that embraces both, letting the wisdom of God in Jesus Christ form the way we advocate for a better society.