The Christian Mystery of Being: For a Philosophical Audience

Andrei Rublev's Trinity Icon

"ἐν αὐτῷ γὰρ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν…" (In God we live and move and are… Acts 17:28).

Perhaps what is going to be central in my thought here is the topic of the God who is love and who is three and yet cannot be contained by the “isness” of existence. Moreover, it is this communion of God’s strange transcendent nearness that is the basis for all that is. We are an age twisted by the work of self-mastery and the need to purge ourselves of mystery by naming, explaining and containing all that can be quantified and worse yet all that cannot. But this would be a mistake and will put us at odds with all that we are to be in relation with, not least our Source of being.

I must begin with a metaphysical look at God. I honestly never gave this much thought until I read D. B. Hart’s essay, The Destiny of Christian Metaphysics, which itself is a defense of Erich Przywara’s, Analogia Entis. In this essay Hart makes the point that God cannot be enumerated as a “divine” or “supreme” being. It is a categorical error of sorts. We Christians affirm that creation comes into existence ex nihilo, so a being which comes from nothing is by its nature coming from a source. So if God is a being, that would mean God has a source from which God came and that source must then contain both God and God’s creation.[1]

But, if we affirm that God is all goodness and truth from which knowledge and being comes from, then God transcends being. Thus we stumble upon the thing, as Hart says, that “no self-sufficient and perfectly systematic metaphysics could ever properly admit into its speculations: the radical contingency and nonnecessity of the created order.[2] In other words, all that “is” is an unnecessary excessive expression of God’s glory.  This is “…the delightful and terrible principle of the creature’s utter groundlessness; it is the realization that we possess no essence, no being, no foundation that is not always, in every moment, imparted to us from beyond ourselves, and that does not therefore always exceed everything that we are in any moment of our existence.”[3]

Stating it this way makes the whole scope of existence a sacred act of God’s incarnation. We are all the word of God being echoed and manifested. The unspeakable present secret is that Paradise, Heaven, the Kingdom of God is all around us and in us and we do not comprehend it. Now I am not attempting to define anything beyond this, but rather it is illuminating our present enigma of “isness” and being within God’s hiddeness that we should never be ready to solve but always in the midst of perceiving, grappling with and even celebrating.

In Andrei Rublev’s Trinity icon (as seen above) we are offered an interesting story of the Trinity in the desert at Abraham's table, but what is most unique to its theology is that there is a fourth place set at the communion table with a rectangular imprint that is believed to be the place where a mirror once set. The point being that the one who saw themselves in its reflection is invited into the infinite communion table of the Trinity. We are not separate from what awakens us and tells us to “be”. God awakens finite being into fellowship of essence and existence that overlaps within the transcendent immediacy of God's eternal Being; that is not to speak of God as a divine being but Being itself. This is where our residence in Life ultimately subsists.  

 [1] David Bentley Hart. The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 20017), 100.

[2] Ibid.99.

[3] Ibid.

A Miracle in Death

Author leaves trail in truth unexplained for those who will catch on not so soon

For the last, the lost, the least, the little, the dying and fishers of no fish

Tells a story of having left virgin womb only to enter virgin tomb

Says to all, this will be the womb you must enter in if 

You are to be born again; enwombed we saturate

In long wait, but when death ate God hell was

Overflowing with heaven; and death

Was made available for

None not

One

Good Friday: Sacrifice Unmasked

San Damiano

Well after unintentionally being a few months out from my last post, here we go!  I have just finished reading Mark Heim’s, Saved from Sacrifice, which works out well as Holy Week is here and I want to discuss some of his relevant ideas. While I will not go into it specifically, Heim spends a decent amount of time setting up, and writing in dialogue with, Rene Girard’s work on the scapegoat for understanding the crucifixion which could be helpful background knowledge for this, but not entirely necessary. 

Recapping Some Things

A few years ago I wrote a post against the Penal Substitution Atonement theory (PSA) and I stood in favor of the Christus Victor (CV) theory (See Here).  If you are not familiar with PSA it is, in short, the idea that Jesus died as the only acceptable sacrifice that would divert God’s angry retributive wrath away from human failure.

Now I still abhor PSA and believe that to say that humanity was both forgiven for our sins and that someone “paid” the debt in full cannot simultaneously be true. However, I do not totally agree with CV anymore either, though it was a necessary progression to get to something more Biblical. PSA is an idea that began with Anselm and found new life with Luther. But, for the first thousand years the church did not have this view of the crucifixion and the Orthodox Church has never claimed this view, so it should raise red flags.

As Tom Wright iterates throughout his recent book, The Day the Revolution Began, PSA falls in line with the pagan religious beliefs in which the community sacrificed human life to appease a retributive deity (like Molech). Now it is not out of line to say that prior to Abraham’s call from YHWH he was part of one of the many cultures that did practice human sacrifice. Yet, God’s cease and desist on taking Isaac’s life (Gen 22:12) reveals that He is different on what faithfulness to Him was going to be.

I believe the church arrived here due to having misunderstood this Abrahamic scene along with a couple of other factors such as: The influence of their own cultural norms and early philosophies of jurisprudence; getting their anthropology of the ancient Jews wrong and thus misinterpreting the Torah, the prophets, the book of Hebrews, Paul’s letters and so on. The bigger problem, however, is that we can never arrive at this view when stories with innocent victims like Abel, Joseph, Job, Daniel and the Gospels are taken seriously. 

Sacrificial Myth

Heim points out that there are many historical myths and symbols in which a demigod of sorts dies and rises for the people. Those myths, however, can neither be read as purely literal or purely fake. This is because people were blind to their sacrificial mechanisms and so create a palatable shrouding from which behind stands a genuine human victim.[1]  Heim says, “In myth no victims are visible as victim, and therefore neither are any persecutors. But with Jesus the victim is unmistakably visible and the collective persecutors (including in the end virtually everyone) and their procedures are illustrated in sharp clarity.”[2] 

            Moreover, in “the Christian account, nowhere more evidently than in the passion, says it took divine intervention, a revelatory act, for us to translate supernatural myths into the actual historical realities behind them. For once God actually was the victim, with the reverse effect of unveiling the humans beneath the symbols.”[3] This completely reframes how we should be viewing the cross but instead we have managed to restructure our theology around the very idea it aims to disarm (i.e. temple theologies of sacrifice).

Heim draws this from the Biblical text. Each of the Gospels offers its own theologies of the crucifixion that are anti-penal. It begins with Jesus forgiving sin without ever offering a sacrifice or becoming a sacrifice first. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (Jn. 1:29).

Jesus putting God’s flagrant forgiveness on display is kind of a regular occurrence (Mt. 6:12; Lk. 7:47-49; Jn. 8:11) but the case of Jesus forgiving the paralytic man gets attention in all of the Synoptics (Mt. 9:19; Mk.2:1-9; Lk. 5:20-23). In this particular scene we have Jesus’ forgiveness being challenged by the scribes: “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”(Mk.2:7). It is not that God cannot entrust reconciliation for someone via another person, but when there is absence of a presiding priest, temple ceremony and sacrifice, Jesus is thus assuming God’s place, or at least claiming to know God’s position on the matter, namely in regards to what God’s necessary requirements for reconciliation are. In this case Jesus seems to be saying, short of facing our failure there are no requirements because grace was always central to God’s dealing with us and healing in us.

If you forgive anyone their sins they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness it is withheld (Jn. 20:23). Forgiveness then is quintessentially a display of God’s character. “Go learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9:13).  Here Jesus is referencing Hosea 6:6, (and possibly Psalms 50:8-14, 51:16-17, Micah 6:7-8) and setting the stage for followers of God to move forward with life and bring peace and reconciliation in a way that does not come at the cost of another. Yet, it simultaneously is calling out the sacrificial system. As Heim says, “In the Bible when the story of redemptive violence is finally told from the viewpoint of the victim it is told as a sinful human construct for peacemaking, not a divine institution. Jesus reveals that God is not the author of the process, but the one crushed by it.”[4]

Who Asks For Blood?

This brings us again to the point that the Gospels are anti-penal. If Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice to appease a wrathful deity, then why is everyone involved in his demise seen as the evil doers and betrayers? Are they not doing a needed sacrificial act? Like Caiaphas says, better for one man to die than to let an entire nation perish (Jn.11:50), right? Except the accusers in Jesus’ parable of the “evil tenants” are unmasked. The story is centered on those symbolic tenants (scribes, Pharisees and previous royal orders) who torture and/or kill all the workers (prophets) that the king (God) had sent, but at last he sends his beloved son who they think just needs to be bumped off in order for them to steal the very inheritance that they have been unfaithful tenants of (Mark 12:1-12). Sequentially, they make plans with Judas by buying him off to find a moment for them to secretly arrest Jesus, but in Luke it goes further to say that Judas is doing the work of Satan (Lk.22:1-6). I do not need to explain the critical light this is casting.

But, from the cross the words of forgiveness, not vengeance, ring out (Lk.23:34). Make no mistake; the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world and breaks the sting of death in the process, but it has nothing to do with taking God’s wrath off of us. Rather it has everything to do with the coalescing of all the sin that led to “sacred violence” past, present and future and broke it. As Heim says better than I can:

The sacrificing of Jesus was the work of sin, but the overcoming of that scapegoat death is the work of God. Sacrifice is the game the powers of this world were playing with Jesus, and apparently winning according to the old rules. God’s victory broke the hold of this game itself, ‘made captivity itself a captive’ (Eph. 4:8). Such images dramatically affirm that God has defeated scapegoating death and returned to claim that site of violence, the cross, as a throne. It is out of commission for the execution business and ruled by another power.[5]

In this we ourselves become forgiven not bought, rescued not legally defended, loved not proven worthy because life is not a worthiness contest, but it is a gift that any good Creator would want Her/His creation to thrive in. The Gospel is the good news that God will forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors so we can learn to reconcile without killing something, Tikkun Olam! 

[1] S. Mark Heim. Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), 111.

[2] Ibid, 114.

[3] Ibid, 122.

[4] Ibid, 17.

[5] Ibid, 310.

Seven Stories Review

Mike Morrell’s Speakeasy has supplied me with another free book this month in exchange for an honest review no matter how critical (i.e. I have no obligation to be nice). The title of this book is Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach a Nonviolent Bible, written by Anthony Bartlett.

This is the first book I have read by Bartlett, but he proves himself to be a brilliant thinker. He is well read in theology, philosophy and more specifically Girardian philosophy which emerges often in this book. Seven Stories is set up in a textbook fashion that is ideal for, but not limited to, teachers, small groups, pastors and their staff. I, however, found it also to be an enjoyable solo read.  At the end of each section he offers lesson questions, reflective questions, a glossary of terms used, literary resources for more on the subjects he is discussing and cultural references that have touched on these topics (e.g. movies and books). While I initially felt it was written for more of an academic audience, this did help toward making it accessible for others.

Bartlett employs solid interpretative tools for looking at scripture in that he constantly minds historical-criticism, literary-criticism and further employs Girard’s anthropological considerations. He takes his readers through seven stories, but they are “stories” in the sense that each chapter/story is broken up into three lessons which begins by picking up on a theme and theological issue that occurs early in the Bible (often within the Pentateuch) and shows how it travels and evolves throughout the rest of scripture for how people think about and relate to God in their experience and communal life. Bartlett reveals by “lesson three” of the story how each one finds fresh revelation that reshapes their understanding and sores to new heights in Jesus.

This is not in the sense that there is a univocal voice tidily linking the canonical books together but rather he makes full use of the view that the text (as Rene Girard says) is “in travail” and wrestling with itself. His storied themes show how in the messiness of it all that God is always progressing his people to somewhere new and striving toward new meanings especially in terms of what justice, vindication and redeemers look like.

While reading it I was reminded of a quote attributed to Novatian (though I cannot corroborate that, but it’s germane to the topic) in which he said, “The Israelites viewed God not as God was, but as the people were able to understand. God, therefore, is not mediocre, but the people’s understanding is mediocre; God is not limited, but the intellectual capacity of the people’s mind is limited.”  In a sense this book meets a need in the church right now that struggles to remember how God’s self-revelation in the midst of this is constantly moving humanity in life affirming directions and thus causing (as Bartlett terms it) a “semiotic shift” in the later authors’ view of everything.

 I really don’t have many gripes about this book other than wishing he would have expounded a little more on “Story 1” about the Hapiru as I think that will be a bombshell to many coming from evangelical streams and could be easily misused by those prone to anti-Semitism, but it is very important topic for us to be discussing.

Nevertheless, Anthony Bartlett sets out to offer a new lens to interpret the Bible through and he does it very well and will certainly challenge our thinking and assumptions. To me, that alone makes it a quality book to grapple with whether anyone walks away agreeing with him or not.

Christmas Confronts Capital

Everett Patterson's "Jose y Maria" 

From Advent through Christmas this season (that’s right there’s 12 days of Christmas so I am not late) I have been reflecting on the nativity in contrast with the idea of structural sin. Specifically how the structural sin Jesus was born into (which unsurprisingly looks a lot like our structures) created the culture that would later crucify him. This culture seems to be the very thing God asks Israel in Torah and the prophets to push back against. In considering this I am also noticing that personal sin is almost always a reflection of the systems of sin one lives in, which is not a new idea but one I am beginning to grasp. This is not to say that we do not have personal responsibility in the matter but quite the opposite as we are contributing to the larger problem when we engage in it. So let’s explore how.

I believe we see hints of Israel’s structural sin in all of Advent especially as we follow John the Baptist into the desert.  In this reminiscent scene of exodus and exile John draws Israel’s old night to a close and prepares everyone to ring in the new dawn. He takes up the prophet’s role of calling for the people to turn away from all that desecrates/enslaves them.  It is here that the culture’s entanglement is revealed when they ask, “What must we do?”  John tells the crowd to stop living in excess: If you have two coats give one to someone with none and the same goes for food; to the tax collectors he said stop taking more than you need from people; to the soldiers he said stop extorting and be content with your pay. Then King Herod arrests John for calling him out on taking his brother’s wife (Lk. 3:1-20).  All of these issues seem to be rooted in greed, violence and even fear-driven desire of their predatory economy. They lived in an unwillingness to trust each other or YHWH as provider and instead took for itself what it wanted.

Moreover, it reflects how Roman culture behaved from the top down and how much that had permeated Jewish culture.  Rome’s imperial control created severe inequality through its extraction-economy.  As Walter Brueggemann says about the period:

That is why so much attention is given in the Gospels to the tax collectors who were agents who helped transfer money and possessions from those who produced wealth to those who enjoyed wealth. That economy featured an urban center (Jerusalem) that was organized and ordered by the urban elite who enjoyed surplus wealth. It was evident that in Jerusalem many were not among the elite and lived subsistence existence. The elite who dominated the city depended, of course, on the labor of such subsistence workers… Douglas Oakman (in Jesus and the Peasants) has made a compelling case that the defining reality of this economy was debt, whereby subsistence peasants were kept endlessly and hopelessly in debt to predatory interests. ”[1]

It is not hard to extract from this scenario that it would have created fears over scarcity and vulnerability which has always been power’s greatest tool for control. Fear-based relationships never work well. Moreover, while the majority suffers, those at the top never go without and ironically they need the indebted majority to continue being consumers with innumerable payment plans.  This is why the tune that retailers sing the most is that we consumers do not have enough or that we are not enough without their product.  But that is not the truth, though it is the anxiety we enter into and it creates a people who will live beyond their means and implement such strategies over others. Thus the structure has formed the individual.

Contrastingly the message of Christmas is the great alternative message of hope. Not a message with words but a message of presence and a presence that threw shade on all their present arrangements. The nativity scene says that there is only one place even for the Creator who chooses to enter His creation through parents of poverty and that is to stay on the outside of its settled imperial order with the rest of the night’s displaced animals.  In this picture lay the hope of all who are displaced, disinherited, and disheartened because that is exactly where God prefers to make covenant, tabernacle, break bread, breathe life and redefine beauty. Why? Because God always had a life-thriving vision for creation and those set on the outside have no loyalty to the structures that never included them.  God opposes it by continuing creation through a people who will enter into trust and neighborly economies in the now. For those who insist on protecting the top of the economic and power food-chains this will NOT be good news! At least, not until they can see it for the life in captivity and anti-creation it is.

This foundational silent night sets the stage for the One who will later break traditional economic patterns and ask His followers to forsake possessions to follow Him (Lk. 5:11, 28; 18:22). It is because God’s remedy to our structural predation is selfless giving in remembrance that we are enough as is and YHWH decisively insists on being our provider (Exod. 16; Matt. 6:25-34; Mk. 6:30-44). The formation of trust and neighborliness is the culture of hope that should shape our collective lives on this creative journey. But it requires practicing this alternative way with fidelity in all of our relationships as our lives share a deep connection with the whole of the cosmic story.  

[1] Walter Brueggemann. Money and Possessions (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 187-188. 

            

A Song For Our Time

Photographer Mark Lennihan's picture of "Charging Bull" & "Fearless Girl"

Illusions of paradise; we hoard them all, those graven images of liberty;

and Wall-street’s silos storing needs

sing well an indivisible nation’s liturgies;

doctrine of trading farmers for industry,

flow of life follows the Nile’s fertility

right through the ghettoes of prosperity,

“in God we trust” in Caesar’s currency

buying up Victoria’s secret iconography,

found tranquility in mindful mass captivity,

ordaining the weak, the prop for our longevity,

gun proliferation blessed my weaponized-economy,

quick sanitize their bodies under gravestones of sanity,

honored for sacrificing the children to the Flag; finally

we are free from the need to need, feel, receive, fail, forgive and grieve.

Growing as a Culture of Peace (Prt 3 & Final)

To continue building on the last section, when it comes to being a people of peace, knowing and explaining what is right is far easier than putting it into practice.  I insist that it begins with a heart that has been transformed by God’s grace, but there is a progression in living a life found in grace. But it must be further learned and shaped within the domestic life of the church community.

I find it best to look at the guidance from the early church. The very early church was good about forming a people that would act more in the way of peace as appose to a people who just try to convince others that it was the right way to be while showing no sign of it themselves.  This was not, and should not be, viewed as a behavioral modification emphasis, but rather it was unique transformation.  In fact these Christians drew lots of people because they were known for being radically peaceable and patient and it was for that reason that the early church improbably flourished amid the violent Roman Empire. That is of course before Constantine and others drove Christian growth via violence and force thus making our story a cautionary tale, but let that mark the way not to go.

            To get back on topic, in Alan Kreider’s book on the early church he shows that some of the practices that initiated their habitus was memorizing scriptures that they felt embodied the Gospel and God’s Kingdom being present.[1] Yes, this looks like one of the spiritual disciplines discussed in the last post because it is, but I’m moving to somewhere new I promise.  The Sermon on the Mount was among the obvious that Christians focused on, but Kreider highlights another one that was cited most by early writers. It was Isaiah 2:2-4,[2]

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

This poem in Isaiah comes right after chapter one’s judgment on Israel, but it strangely looks beyond judgment to a vision of hope and a day when YHWH is tabernacled with the world again. He will be the life giving presence in Jerusalem which makes it the central place of peace that draws all nations. Walter Brueggemann also adds that Jerusalem is the torah of YHWH in which the torah will be the clue for peace and points to the way of justice for everyone.[3]  Perhaps a justice that only acts restoratively.  

            Fast-forward to the Christian writer Justin Martyr who said that while Isaiah’s words were not seen as fulfilled on the grand scale of a still violent and war stricken world, they were already being formed and fulfilled within the culture of church communities.[4] “We who were filled with war, and mutual slaughter, and every wickedness, have changed our warlike weapons (our swords into ploughshares and our spears into implements of tillage) and we cultivate piety, righteousness, philanthropy, faith and hope, which we have from the Father Himself through Him who was crucified.”[5]  Jesus’ life and teaching offered creative expression for the church community to live this out because it had a new way in which new possibilities were emerging.  But we can only get to the new way if we are willing let grace and spiritual humility lead us into rethinking everything.

As I said in part 1, conflict is not a bad thing, but our perspectives and responses to it tend to be quite terrible. Look at race in the U.S. right now. The black population clearly sees inherent racism in many areas but particularly in our justice system.  It seems that very few whites (especially those in power) are taking them seriously and many white people say awful things like slavery was in the past and “they just need to get over it” because it was their great-grandparents and grandparents enslaved and not them.

The black majority realize they are not being heard or taken seriously and they protest and form movements that attempt to highlight that they are witnessing police brutality and mass incarceration rates higher among them than anyone else and they are right. Yet nobody wants to step up for them and say “black lives matter” so they have had to do it themselves. The response to that from many has been to say well “all lives matter” even when they clearly don’t believe that and it only became another division for the political right and left to take sides on which itself seems to be a new turf for racial division.  Still not being heard though, many protests have turned violent which brought new condemnation and equally violent responses. 

Mark my words, this intractable polarization will continue so long as the adversarial thinking continues. Those with the dispute will continue to be ignored and downplayed by those who do not experience it firsthand and by those who want to make sure they stay suppressed.  Now I am sure there are arguments against me from other sides of the conflict, but it will not negate that somebody was first not being heard and the same old cycle of conflict with anger, violence, depression, broken relationships and so on is just being carried forward.

The counter-cultural witness that was in Isaiah’s vision, Jesus’ embodiment and the church’s continuation was that conflict was the uncomfortable failure that brought opportunity for change. But the hurt ones were heard by the other side who would confront the issues by taking it seriously and empowering all parties to work for change as one people, not “colorblind” as they say, but color-bound. 

To borrow Kreider’s illustration, in Acts the Hellenists within the church community were upset with the Hebrews because they were neglecting to feed their widows in the daily distribution of food (6:1-6).  Now note that the response was not to ignore them, or downplay their issue, but rather they assembled as a community and decided to appoint seven notably responsible people who would shoulder the task of distributing food just to them. The whole community liked the idea and it worked well.

So what I am trying to get at is that along with God’s grace and spiritual formation is the need to develop practices and skills that say we to belong to each other.  There are three main skills I will throw out there to consider (Kreider and Augsburger both tout these).  The first two are interlinked, “attentive listening” and “truth speaking”. Each highlight that communication is the key to a strong relationship, yet always has to be centered on some idea of love for the other. As David Augsburger says, “To love another is to invite, support and protect that person’s equal right to hear and be heard. To love is to listen; to be loved is to be fully heard. Love is first the action of the eyes attending, the ears attuning and then the soul connecting.”[6]  And if you follow the God who is love then there should be no reservations about wanting to follow this.

Subsequently, “attentive listening” is to suspend judgment and receive the criticism not in a way that reads something else into it or using what is being said to create ammo for a counter argument, but by truthfully attending to what is said and meant and uninterruptedly identify with what they are feeling. Another way to think about it is as a matter of being open to a different perspective and goals and taking it seriously.  "Truth speaking" correspondingly works to mutually use the simplest and clearest words one can come up with to convey and clarify their meaning and experience.  Then, as Miroslav Volf says, “…we enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves…”[7] This helps us to see and hear each other.

          The third skill is alertness to community wisdom. Community is always a complex intertwining of lives and experience that is part of something larger especially in the church sense. Churches are usually a close knit people who have entered the story of the Prince of Peace and we can often recognize those among us who genuinely embody that (usually the older generation). We then learn that way of peace best when those who have been well formed by it consistently model it, teach it and empower others to do it better.  We are creatures of mimetic behavior (see Rene Girard for more on that) and so it must first be learned by observing others doing it well and then become a padawan of sorts to follow "the way". Thus the way justice and peace is learned and practiced inside the church will become the way justice and peace is practice outside of the church and if it does not embody Christ’s peace we might need to raise some questions to our church leaders.  

 Now, I believe this can only lead to conversations about mutual accountability and how to discern as a community. Yet what this is about is that we are to be a people so committed to the practices and values of peace (as-well-as belonging to each other) that good outcomes will be subsequent but not central to our task.  Peace is the way, not the end goal. 

So to tie this back together we live lives in flux. What began with encountering God’s transformative grace and work should continue with our connecting with God in spiritual disciplines of fasting, prayer, worship, silence and so forth to internalize Jesus’ way of peace, and then this should lead us to outwardly rethink how we relate to everyone else and become better at making room and tending to each other.  If we do this regularly together, we will be a community that no longer needs to fear conflict because with God we know how to care for it, transform it and even welcome it into our lives growing together.   

[1] Alan Kreider. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic 2016), 91.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Walter Brueggemann. Isaiah 1-39: Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 1998), 24.

[4] A. Kreider, 92.

[5] As quoted by Kreider from Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho 110.3.

[6] David Augsburger. Caring Enough to Confront: How to Undersand and Express Your Deepest Feelings Toward Others (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Publishing 3^rd Ed. 2009), 29.

[7] Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press 1996), 213.