Slain From the Foundation of the World

Slain from the Foundation of the World

Redemption through Grace as a Kenotic Act

This is my Master’s Thesis

CHAPTER 1.  INTRODUCTION

Abstract

This research will explore grace as a kenotic act. By contrasting grace, defined as divine benevolence and forgiveness, against grace as a kenotic death act, I will show that while divine benevolence and forgiveness are essential aspects of grace theology, reducing grace to those registers sells grace short and leads to problematic spirituality. I will examine grace theology, and how it is often built upon a framework of good and evil and thus narrowly understood within the confines of the concept of forgiveness. I will examine grace as described by early theologians, Christian mystics, reformationists, and modern theologians and philosophers to contrast grace in a framework of judgment to grace as kenosis. I will look at salvation through grace not as a phenomenon that lifts us out of sin but instead as a participation in the death of the framework of judgment based on “the knowledge of good and evil” and the birth of a way of redefining redemption altogether. 

Backdrop

The question of how humankind can access the love and benevolence of the gods has been a subject of study for theologians and philosophers throughout history. In the Christian tradition, grace has been the means by which this is done. From early Christianity to modern times, Christian thinkers[1]      have attempted to explain the theology of grace and to answer questions such as how grace saves, how grace is accessed and what – if any – are the conditions put on it? The question of how to access grace has been central to church formation and reformation for centuries. It has built churches and torn them down. It has fired the zeal of wars and crusades.[2],[3]  It has been at the heart of the execution of many a heretic.[4] Humankind has struggled with how grace might be free, infinite, and unbound and how it might at the same time maintain goodness and godliness in a world filled with evil. We may see glimpses of unbound, unconditional grace throughout the history of the Christian church, but we also see the persistent specter of quid-pro-quo. Theologians and non-theologians alike have wrestled with scriptures that point toward unconditional grace[5] against those that might be interpreted in such a way as to imply God’s forgiveness is a transaction that is conditional upon a particular action on our part.[6] This paper will look at attempts that theologians have been made to explain and resolve these seeming contradictions in scripture. It will examine how, because grace is still often narrowly understood within the framework of wrongdoing or fallenness, and subsequent forgiveness, the attempt to resolve these contradictions becomes impossible, layers of explanation become necessary, and grace loses its redemptive power. 

If we are to resolve these seeming contradictions, we must examine the framework upon which our understanding of grace is built. As a backdrop to my examination of these frameworks and the impact they have had on the theology of grace, I will use the Eden Story in Genesis 2 and 3 and the two trees in the garden as an allegorical representation of these two frameworks. In the Eden story, we see humankind living initially within a framework that included no knowledge of good and evil, and thus no judgement of any kind. In this state, humans could eat from any tree in the garden (Genesis 2: 16-17 NRSVUE), except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Thus, they could eat freely from the tree of life. We then see humans shift from this state of grace to a state that is built on judgement. Eve becomes convinced that her current state of being is lacking and it would be more desirable to be more “like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5 NRSVUE). Upon gaining this knowledge, she and Adam are able to assess what is good and what is not, and then attempt to redeem their situation, not through a gracious acceptance, but by taking whatever power is available to them to change things. When they perceive that being naked is less desirable, and in fact shameful, they use what power they have to act against their nakedness by sewing fig leaves together and hiding. Grace, built on this framework, is not an infinite acceptance of reality, but becomes transactional, built around wrongdoing, corrective action, and subsequent forgiveness. God becomes the punisher who causes the serpent to crawl, creates enmity between the serpent and humankind, gives pain in childbirth, sets humans against nature in their agricultural pursuits, and drives humankind out of paradise. God also becomes the forgiver of wrongdoing, and grace is portrayed as the covering of shame when God makes clothes to cover their nakedness. (Genesis 3: 8-24 NRSVUE).

In the tree-of-life framework, grace is a state of reality that is untethered to right or wrongdoing.  Thus, it is infinite, unbound and unconditional. It allows humankind to interact with the divine relationally without shame. In the knowledge of good and evil framework, humans move to judgement and grace becomes non-infinite as it is defined and confined by the definition of wrong acts that precedes it. Humankind’s relationship with the divine becomes transactional and the question of what one must do to access grace is enacted.

Although it may appear that one framework has the theme of life, and the other has the theme of death, a closer examination of these two ways of being will reveal that the theme of death runs through both frameworks in different ways. The obvious connection between eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and death[7] has led many to conclude that it was the sin of eating from the wrong tree that led to death. Subsequently, the path to life is to engage in sacrificial “death-acts” defined as turning away from wrong acts and thus obtain forgiveness (grace). In this framework, the death act is an act of power to move out of the wrong-state (repentance), and a receiving of God’s power to forgive sins (grace). The connection between the tree-of-life framework and death is less obvious. In this framework it would seem that because no good/evil dichotomy exists one would not have to enact death in any form. In fact, some put forth that prior to eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, death did not exist on earth and eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is a story about the birth of human conscience. However, if prior to eating it, humankind had no conscience, how then would Adam and Eve have understood ideas about forbiddenness where the tree was concerned? It is more likely that Adam and Eve, being human, had at least some idea that allowed them to understand the prohibition. With this in mind, it is more likely that the story is not about the beginning of conscience but is about the choice to participate in a framework, or way of being. In the tree of life framework, the death act is to relinquish the power to judge (know good and evil) and to allow grace to be truly infinite in our psyche. This includes not just giving up our power to declare that we know what is good and what is evil, but also our power to move from a “wrong” state to a “right” one. This kind of grace is a radical embrace of reality and the inherent lack that exists in ourselves and in all of reality. This kind of grace has no enemy that it fights against. Grace as a kenotic participation in death is no longer transactional but becomes disconnected from outcomes and agendas and thus becomes fully and completely grace. As kenosis, grace, like death is infinite, eternal and unconditional. In its infinitude, it reflects the infinitude of God and paradoxically, in death, grace becomes an engine for life.

Returning to the Eden story as our example, had humans remained in this kenotic, grace-state, they would have embraced their  lack of knowledge, and lack of feeling powerful and “god-like.” The temptation for them was to turn away from a lack of power and turn toward power - from a kenotic state to a non-kenotic state. In this framework, grace is a kenotic act and to fall from grace is to fall out of kenosis and to embrace power. We will look further at how the inability to enact death through kenosis in this way has impacted ideas about grace throughout history, how enacting death in this way leads to life and how God has been “slain” in the death act “from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8, KJV)

Motivation:

I was nourished on a gospel of control. My upbringing contained a multitude of positive messages handed down from my in-control father, my in-control mother, my society and my church. I was born into a time and place in which humankind had more control than ever before. I was born into a time that gave white, middle-class women more power than ever before (albeit much was an is still lacking). Surely the motto, “whatever you put your mind to, you can do,” seemed true. My religion reinforced this with messages of faith that affirmed I could have whatever I asked from God. And yet, adulthood confronted me, as it does so many of us, with the  harsh reality that life does not conform to our will, and like so many, my struggle against this reality was painful as I attempted to understand the intersection between expectant faith and surrender. The contemplative tradition had been lost to my denomination and my religion told me that letting go was a lack of faith and an admission of defeat. At the same time, best-selling authors were encouraging a radical letting go and acceptance of reality.[8] For me, the answer was a redefinition of grace. Not grace as forgiveness, but grace as a kind of open hospitality to all of reality. Letting go of control and diving into this kind of grace felt like a death, and at the same time has been the most life giving of all spiritual practices.

 Recognizing grace as a participation in death is not just life giving to the individual, it is especially relevant in our current cultural setting. We find ourselves in a time in history where technological and scientific advances have led to unprecedented power and at the same time a broad-scale breakdown of societal power structures (such as white patriarchy) is upon us. Because we have grown accustomed to the power, certainty and control that technology has given us, we are unable to hold in tension the release of power and the possession of it. We are unable to let go of what is passing away and embrace what is being born. Our relationship to life has become idolatrous and our relationship with death has become neurotic,[9] and death in all its forms has become our enemy.

This neurotic relationship to death applies not just to the physical death of the body, but to death in all forms, death of ideologies, death of relationships, death of ways of life, ego deaths[10] and the like. Survival has become the idolatry of the day, in all areas of life, corporations, political and economic systems, churches and academic institutions .

Paradoxically, the frantic pursuit of survival takes life rather than giving it, as freedom of thought, speech and action is shut down in service to survival of the status quo. Only grace that allows all things and embraces death can open up space for life.  Understanding that death is at the core of Christ’s liberation message, and at the core of grace, is what culture desperately needs. Redemption is not found in a message of dominance, certainty and control, but in a kenotic message of release and letting go. It is through this type of daily kenotic practice of letting go that we participate in the very nature of grace and become agents of grace to the world. This is the practice of death in every aspect of life. The giving up of our power over and control of our ideas about what is and is not, what should and should not be, our resistances against the uncomfortable and unfamiliar, our enemies and our agendas.  This is the daily enactment of death. It is an ongoing dying. This is the kenotic emptying of Christ that we align ourselves with as we give up the pursuit of god-like power and  empty ourselves as described in “The Christ Hymn”.[11]
Methodology

Grace has been one of the central topics of debate, and deliberation throughout the history of Christianity. From the beginning, the apostles wrestled with it. Can salvation be extended to those who are unclean?[12] Is circumcision required?[13] Can believers eat meat sacrificed to idols?[14]  The early church wrestled with who was saved and who was a heretic, and still today, churches divide over who is “in” with God and who is not. Many western fundamentalist churches supply their members with simple and formulaic doctrines of grace. The way to be forgiven (saved) is to believe, repent, be baptized and live a life in service to God.[15] Belief is defined as a conviction that God exists, Jesus is his Son who was sent to save us. Repentance is a turning away from evil and impure deeds and a commitment to keeping oneself pure and unstained by the world.[16] Baptism is included in many church traditions. In some it is seen as the act of participating in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ and from that act, the believer is raised to a new life which would be lived in service to God[17], to others it is the outward sign that this has already occurred. Either way, this recipe is provided to church members to save them from eternal damnation in hell after this life is over. It is also frequently touted as the way to save them from suffering in this life as well. With this formula, a believer can be saved from him or herself and the wretched thing that, if left to its own devices, would surely end up corrupt and miserable. It carries a promise of a life with good outcomes. The believer will sow good deeds and reap a good life (defined by a lasting marriage, well-adjusted and obedient children, good health, and wealth and abundance). If the believer slips up, and makes bad choices, acts selfishly, or even thinks bad thoughts, grace will be there to provide the forgiveness needed to maintain salvation from hell. For many Christians, this is the only definition of grace that their church tradition provides. 

There are variances on the theme. Some churches will say that once a person is saved from their sins, they will always be saved.[18] Some put forth that salvation is a predestined thing that does not depend on any action at all.[19] Some doctrines profess that without proof through certain gifts of the Holy Spirit, one cannot be certain of salvation.[20] There are many throughout history, and certainly today in a time where thousands are deconstructing what they were taught in church, who have wondered how grace can function in these ways. As far back as the writings of the apostle Paul, questions around grace and how it functions arise. The questions that come up related to irrevocable and unlimited grace also arose in Romans 6:1[21] as it seemed to give license to any number of bad deeds and did not seem to hold anyone accountable for anything. The idea of grace being conditioned on acts of faith or repentance lead to questions about whether grace is free, or if works are required. And some ideas put forth to resolve such a question, like the idea of predestination in which God decides ahead of time who is saved and who is damned can make God seem a monstrous thing and are thus rejected by many.  Many ask – could it be true that if I have not spoken in tongues I am not forgiven by God? Could God really send millions upon millions to hell who have never heard of Jesus and thus cannot place their faith in him? Grace, no matter how hard we try to make it simple and formulaic, is complicated and contestable.

I will review the historical progression of the understanding of grace as expressed by some of the great historical church theologians beginning with the apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and Wesley and contrasting them with mystics like Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart and Simone Weil.  I will examine how it is the very framework upon which theologies of grace are built that create an ongoing problem.

 Ideas of good and evil and the cultural frameworks they brought to their theology impacted these thinkers and their understanding of grace. I will look at how changes in societal and political structures have impacted our ability to rethink long held frameworks of meaning and will show how modern theologians and philosophers inform the topic of grace. I intend to weave together two ideas – grace and participating in the death of Christ – as one unified whole. It will become clear that the idea of infinite grace, while it may seem chaotic and uncontrolled in a way that seems counterintuitive to a God who underpins and holds all things together, is in fact not the thing to be feared. But instead, it is the frameworks of belief we are working with that limit grace and reduce its ability to free and redeem. We need not feel that letting go of the constructs that provide security, and certainty will leave us untethered, but rather that we are anchored in an entirely different paradigm.  A paradigm of death.   

Interlocutors:

Peter Rollins

In the study of grace, it is often difficult to reconcile ideas that seem at odds. Grace theology seems to be always trying to fit an infinitely loving God into a box that includes ideas about good and evil, heaven and hell, saved and lost. When I first encountered the work of Peter Rollins, I was introduced to a third way of thinking. A way that, rather than trying to solve the problem of sin and separation, suggested it might be incorporated into life as “constitutive of subjectivity itself.”[22]  Rollins’ ideas orient us to a different framework, a different pursuit. Rather than pursuing the answers, and resolution of contradiction, Rollins encourages sitting with the questions and the contradiction. To leave the question unresolved requires a practice of grace. Judgement gives us the power to resolve contradictions and questions and pursues the “right” answer. Grace leaves open space.

Peter Rollins states that “speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.”[23] Our self-denial must be absolute, including even our ideas of God and our grasp on God. “Religion claims that alienation is either a reality that can be overcome, or an illusion that can be dissipated”[24] This describes two approaches to grace.  Either we are separated from god by our sin and that separation can be overcome through grace in the form of forgiveness of sin that resolves lack and loss. In  a more expansive and perhaps “progressive” notion, we were never separated from god and the whole idea of sin is simply a lie into which we have bought. In this idea, grace is a freely given state of being that was and will always be there. We can access this awareness of oneness and “pierce the veil of illusion”  through meditation, prayer, or other spiritual practices. In both paradigms, grace  works by rescuing us from death, but Rollins goes on to describe a third way that affirms our suffering is due to a separation that is “fundamental to, and constitutive of, subjectivity itself.”[25] Thus, “I” am made of loss, separation and lack. I am made of a kind of death.  This is not a condition to be remedied through grace, nor a state to be denied, but is rather a reality to be embraced and that embrace is grace.

This is grace as kenosis – grace as the embrace of death itself. This grace is truly grace in that it seeks to change nothing, seeks to resolve nothing. It accepts the entire human experience with no need to reconcile anything.

Paul Hessert

In his out-of-print book, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, Paul Hessert argues that Christ did not come to provide us with a way to make meaning, but rather a way to exit the human project of meaning making altogether.[26] Ideas of good and evil, light and darkness are ways in which we attempt to make meaning of the world. The apostle Paul cautions us against this in 1 Corinthians 1:22-25.  To Jews, signs were a way of interpreting God’s favor and making meaning through power,[27] and to Greeks knowledge and understanding satisfied the human impulse to make meaning through making sense of things. Christ crucified is the breakdown of the use of power to move to a more ideal situation and a breakdown of what makes sense. “It is the absence of divine confirmation of human values.”[28] In this way it is not a way to make meaning but is an invitation into meaninglessness. Forgiveness can be nothing more than a continued acceptance of human values and the decision not to enact consequences, whereas grace may be the letting go of meaning making altogether and is thus a kind of ego death (kenosis).

Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart encourages us to find God in a space of silence and nothingness. He asserts that God speaks into a space called “the potential of receptivity”[29] This is created in silence and stillness and God must speak into that space .[30] This has nothing to do with good deeds, or religious purity. It occurs in both sinners and saints and even those in hell.[31] We must let go of images[32], understanding [33], intellect[34] memory, sense perceptions, imagination, and even ideas about God being good or compassionate[35]. To let go to this extent and create a void of this magnitude in our perception, requires a kind of ego death. It creates a space where our preconceived ideas and judgements no longer exist.  It is this void that is grace. Not the space where our ideas and judgements remain, but we “graciously” let the other person (or ourselves) off the hook through forgiveness. This kind of judgment and subsequent forgiveness involves knowing. Grace requires unknowing. God cannot be contained and thus our intuitions are tainted by human imagination and fantasy.[36]

Julian of Norwich

In her visions, Julian’s frameworks of meaning were taken down. Julian saw that God was in everything and her ideas about sin were revised. It is revealed to her that God is in even those things humans would reject. Even God holds within Gods-self the contradiction. Humans try to eradicate this contradiction in their experience and try to find heaven instead, but it is “sin” that allows us to see that contradiction within ourselves. In this way, sin is not a darkness that is an antithesis to the light that creates but is instead a type of creative force within us that opens our eyes and the light-as-good vs. darkness-as-evil duality is broken down. Julian concludes from her revelations that “sin is not shameful to man, but his glory”[37] This view of sin takes us away from shame and is the very definition of grace. Grace does not reject or erect walls through shame, it embraces and contains no judgment or condemnation. It is only through grace that we can hold our souls open to both good and error. Grace opens the soul to accept every aspect of our humanity and the humanity of others – even our enemies. In this way, light is not about  purity cultures or cancel-cultures that accept some things as good and reject others as evil, but light takes on a new meaning. Grace becomes the way in which we leave the purity of heaven and come down to earth just as Christ did. It is the way in which we descend into hell just as Christ did. 

Julie Reshe

Reshe argues that forgiveness is not simply the letting go of a judgment against another that exists within a framework of right and wrong. This kind of forgiveness is built on a constructive framework, and a fantasy that such forgiveness can right wrongs and bring harmony where there was none. Instead, she invites us to think about grace (forgiveness) and existing within the idea that the human being is made of an original loss. She states that “our identity and our life narrative are a substitute fantasy, an attempt to fill this original constitutive void, which however, can never be substantively filled”[38]  She argues that the idea of harmonious and non-traumatic relationships is a means of escaping suffering through fantasy. She advocates instead for forgiveness which requires a true acceptance of the unacceptability of persons (including – I would add – ourselves). [39] For Reshe, forgiveness

“comes from the clear recognition of the horror that the other and the relationships with them are. It does not serve as a shelter fantasy to hide from the other and their evil. It is a way to accept the other, to accept in her nullity, her rupture, her non-coincidence with herself, and not in a positive fantasy about her, which is really a way of not seeing her and by this tolerating her.”[40] 

To interpret Reshe’s ideas in light of grace, an idea of grace that requires change is a way of bringing a flawed person inside a safe place, a place where we can tolerate him or her. “Forgiveness does not destroy or banish the other by bringing in the defense fantasy that there are good people and bad people (which must be canceled), or that there are good qualities and bad ones (which must be corrected)…forgiveness disrupts the positive process”[41]  This disruption of the positive process is a kind of death, the death of fantasy. Reshe defines real forgiveness, not as an erasure of wrongs, but as type of destruction. It is “the art of enduring the devastating nothingness of the other and oneself. It is in that space – of mutual and self-destruction – where we genuinely meet the other.”[42]  “Forgiveness creates empty space that does not require justifications and conditions, a space for accepting oneself in one’s insignificance and non-coincidence with oneself.  “[43]  “Forgiveness does not improve …the one who is forgiven…It accepts the other ...in their tragic essence as the living dead” [44]

 Simone Weil

Simone Weil says that grace requires a void.  In this way grace is not a presence but is a kind of absence. “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity.  Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”[45] 

Simone Weil recognizes the kenotic definition of grace as she describes the perfection of the spiritual life as the consent to be nothing -  to recognize and accept the reality of the world, and to love it, “not wanting to tamper with it.” [46]

EXPECTED OUTCOMES

With the preparatory research I have done so far, I expect to see:

●      Grace that operates within a framework of meaning must include judgment, which operates under an assumption that one knows what needs to be forgiven or changed (i.e., what is right and what is wrong). When grace operates within such frameworks, it is limited by the bounds of the knowledge that makes up the framework of meaning, and is thus non-infinite

●      The creation of frameworks of judgment come from the human impulse to create meaning via the knowledge of good and evil. Grace theology is limited when the theologian tries to articulate grace inside a framework of judgment and meaning.

●      The grace-process of deconstructing the framework of meaning and judgment is a kenotic act. Thus, deconstructing such frameworks does not leave one entirely untethered, but rather anchors one in a perpetual act of death (kenosis).  It is the participation in the death of Christ, and this is how grace redeems.

●      Grace-as-death is redemptive not just to the inner self, the spiritual self or in some kind of religious way but is redemptive on a societal and political level as well . 

CHAPTER 2  FRAMEWORKS

Before we look at grace and what grace might look like both inside and outside a framework of meaning, we must define what we mean by frameworks themselves and talk about how they function and why they are important. For the purposes of this paper, I will define a framework as a system that allows us to interpret and make sense or meaning of the world around us. Charles Taylor[47], Hannah Arendt[48] and Paul Hessert[49] all agree that the quest for meaning making is central to the human condition, and give humankind a sense of permanence, stability and identity, but all three do not agree on whether this type of meaning-making is to be embraced or rejected.

Hessert describes something similar to Taylor’s moral frameworks as a “circle of reality.”[50] According to Hessert, a circle of reality includes not just the physical laws of the world around us, but also our narratives, myths and images. It expresses a culture’s grasp of meaning and sense of order. Hessert asserts that systems of meaning function based on power and control (whether real or perceived). The structure of meaning requires an initial judgement of a “should-be” condition in relation to the present, or “is” condition, and the possibility and power to move toward what is judged to be a more ideal condition. “If there cease to be possibilities or power, we describe the situation as hopeless or meaningless.”[51] This search for the “should be” is uniquely human, and it always occurs within a circle of meaning.[52] The circle of meaning necessarily requires judging what conditions are less desirable (or wrong) and what conditions are more desirable (or right).

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, meaning-making can be defined as communion with or reconciliation to God, and in this tradition, we see the story of meaning making from the beginning. As discussed in the Introduction, we see meaning making enacted in the Eden story. Eve attempts to find meaning through obtaining a new framework - the knowledge of good and evil. In this way, she believes she will gain power through knowledge and become more like God, the source of all meaning.

The apostle Paul critiques this pursuit of meaning through frameworks in his first book to the Corinthians.

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe.  For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (I Corinthians 1, 18-25, NRSVUE)

To Jews, signs were a way of interpreting God’s favor and making meaning through power,[53] and to Greeks knowledge and understanding satisfied the human impulse to make sense (meaning) of things. Christ crucified is the breakdown of the use of power and sense-making. Paul called it “foolishness,”[54] and affirms the move away from frameworks of meaning.

Because it is ubiquitous to human experience, meaning-making upon frameworks has continued throughout the history of Christianity, and the development of Christian theology. Moral frameworks, found through an interpretation of Scriptures, provide Christ-followers with a set of beliefs, or a set of rules upon which to judge good and evil. The closer we can come to aligning ourselves with this framework, the closer we feel we are to God and the more meaning life has. Volumes have been written to interpret and re-interpret scriptures, presumably so that we might have right belief, and to define and re-define Christian praxis based on these right interpretations – all in the pursuit of closeness to God (whether in this life, or the afterlife). As we’ve seen, Paul’s answer to this quest was to preach only Christ crucified – the revelatory kenotic act. Paul himself admits that this approach is “foolishness” to our way of thinking, implying that it goes against our natural ways of determining what is meaningful. In Paul’s re-direction away from meaning making, he affirms that the crucifixion does not make meaning by showing us God’s favor (as with a sign), nor by revealing a correct system of belief and praxis (as with wisdom), but it reveals something altogether different. It would seem that Paul might be suggesting that because the crucifixion is “foolishness” to our way of thinking, it does not provide a new framework of redemption. I will assert that what has been missed in the theological definitions and practices of grace is that the crucifixion was a revelation of the breakdown of meaning and the gospel is an invitation to enter this space where frameworks that create meaning (including the knowledge of good and evil) have been crucified.  

CHAPTER 3.  THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE

 It is in the crucifixion that we encounter the atoning work of Christ. The crucifixion is a central revelation of God in Christ. From Christianity’s earliest beginnings, even before the crucifixion, we see those who encountered Jesus wrestling with the revelation of Christ. One of the primary ideas they have wrestled with both before and after the crucifixion is the idea of grace. In this chapter we will explore how the evolution of theology around grace was informed by meaning-making frameworks that were products of the time and place in which they existed. We will discuss how kenotic grace is a relinquishment of power to force our will. It is hospitable to circumstances, people, and ourselves, despite the present conditions.

Jewish society in the first century was ruled internally by the Sanhedrin, an assembly of elders and priests who functioned as “the supreme council and court of the Jews, [they] wielded significant authority in matters both religious and secular.”  It was the Sanhedrin who interpreted the Torah, arbitrated religious disputes and ensured the continuity of Jewish laws.[55]   To the Jew of the ancient world, the law was paramount in their frameworks of meaning. They were a people-group with a history of trauma; from their enslavement in Egypt, to the captivity of the ten northern tribes in Assyria, to Babylonian captivity. Trauma specialists tell us that trauma is not what happens to you but is the story that develops in you as a result of what happened.[56]  The Israelites’ story told them that their law was the covenant that God had made with them to keep them from trauma, their suffering was a direct result of disobedience to God’s laws. God’s benevolence and protection depended upon keeping the law. They made meaning of the randomness of their suffering by narrating it within a system of order. Their scriptures promised them that obedience would protect them from disease (Exodus 15:26 NRSVUE), assured harvests and victory over their enemies (Leviticus 26:3-7 NRSVUE),and imparted to them the highest kind of meaning - they would be God’s people (Jeremiah 7:23 NRSVUE). To disobey the law would  result in terror, consumption, plagues, wild beasts devouring their children and starvation so severe they would devour their own children as well (Leviticus 26: 16-31 NRSVUE).  Consistent with these beliefs was the belief by the first-century Jewish people that “the reason they … had been made subjects of the [Roman] Empire was that people had not been sufficiently faithful.”[57] This interpretation gave them a way to make sense of their suffering. Acceptance of blame and keeping pure gave them a feeling they could control their outcomes and thus reduce trauma. Living in the Roman empire meant living under the thumb of a  patriarchal, dictatorial, and militaristic empire that, as it shifted from representative democracy to centralized imperial authority, subdued and maintained peace and authority through violence, power and intimidation. Emperors were worshiped and glorified as a religion of the Empire.[58] Society was full of exploitation, materialism and violence.[59] Bessel van der Kolk, one of today’s leading experts in trauma, tells us that the most common causes of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in men are combat and being a witness to death. In women, it is rape and sexual molestation.[60]  It is likely that any citizen in the Roman empire was a victim or witness to at least of one of these forms of trauma in a culture that “deified violence and exploitation.”[61] This was the backdrop that informed Jesus’ listeners and the writers of the New Testament. Authority was another of the primary frameworks upon which society in the first century Roman Empire was built. Authority takes on the right of law and judgment. It determines what is right and what is wrong, who is right and who is wrong. God, or the gods were absolute omnipotent, omniscient authorities and in the Roman Empire, the Emperor was on par with the gods. The trauma that the Jewish people were experiencing at the hands of Roman authority, made the higher authority and power of their God’s all the more important. Their God’s laws and the belief that he had the power to rescue them were key. Concepts around grace were built on this framework. The God of the Jews responded to repentance with forgiveness (2 Chronicles 7:14, 2 Chronicles 30:9, Proverbs 28:13, Isaiah 55:7, Jeremiah 3:12, NRSVUE), and required sacrifice to obtain forgiveness of sins (Leviticus 4 NRSVUE).

Jesus challenged the frameworks of the day in many ways. He challenged  ideas about authority that were at the base of religious culture when he re-claimed the sabbath (Matthew 12:8 NRSVUE), claimed to be one with God (John 10:30 NRSVUE), and re-interpreted scripture (Matthew 5:21-48 NRSVUE). And most certainly, when Jesus, a human, claimed divine authority to forgive sins prior to the requisite repentance or sacrifice (Mark 2:5; Matthew 9:1-8, Mark 14:62, NRSVUE) it challenged the very frameworks his audience held around grace.  How were those who encountered him to make meaning of this? He was introducing a kind of democracy into the kingdom of heaven that their authoritarian mindset had no framework for. So, when he made such democratic claims, the recognized religious authorities asked, 

“By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do them? Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin? Answer me.” They argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But shall we say, ‘Of human origin’?”—they were afraid of the crowd, for all regarded John as truly a prophet. So, they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.” (Matthew 21:23-27 NRSVUE)

In his response we see that Jesus refused to play the authority game of law that defined the political and religious culture of his time. Rather than upholding power based frameworks of dominance and authority, Jesus advocated equality in his prayer in John 17.

“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word,  that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.  Father, I desire that those also whom you have given me may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. (John 17:20-24, NRSVUE)

Jesus did not use power to compete in a contest of authority in the spiritual or the physical realm. Jesus revealed something entirely different; a God who rather than asserting ultimate authority and dominance, had a kenotic nature of emptying and serving.[62] We see this kenotic revelation at work in Jesus in the area of judgement as well as he defied the normative frameworks around good and evil by touching what was considered unclean (Matthew 8:1-3, NRSVUE), and eating with tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 9:10-11, NRSVUE).

This relationship with ideas of good vs. evil was certainly foreign and likely threatening to law-bound Jews and Gentiles living in authoritarian cultures. Because laws provided a framework of good and evil and a system of meaning through which they might expect some measure of control over the chaos of the world, shedding the idea that access to the grace of God comes through a knowledge of, and an adherence to these laws was difficult for those who came in contact with Jesus. We see this struggle to let go of control in the New Testament narratives. When the woman anointed Jesus, Judas could only see the act through a framework of right and wrong action. The money could have been used for the poor (John 12:4-6, NRSVUE). The religious leaders could not see love but only saw the laws Jesus broke when he touched the unclean or ate with sinners. The knowledge of good and evil their frameworks had provided them with caused the apostles to question if salvation could or should be extended to those who are unclean,[63] if circumcision was still required to be saved,[64] and should believers eat meat sacrificed to idols.[65] Grace had been defined as God choosing to forgive those who deviated from the law, they had not conceived of a grace that might redefine frameworks of good and evil.  

As Jesus’ followers strove to interpret the revelation they had been given through Christ and to explain it in their writings, we see their glimpses into infinite and unconditional grace[66]  peppered with conditional grace, that depends upon a particular action on our part.[67]

The apostle Paul knew that somehow his glimpses into grace were incomplete when he expressed that he only knew “in part” and saw “through a glass darkly”  (I Corinthians 13:9-12, KJV).  Although Paul articulated grace in groundbreaking ways, even still, his cultural frameworks limited his ability to take his understanding any further than he did.

The impact of culture can be seen throughout Christian history.  Beginning with the early Christians, who, like the Israelite people, encountered much trauma and held frameworks built to make sense of their suffering.. We can see evidence of this foundation of trauma when we look at the evolution of  many early Christian theological frameworks of grace.  Public and violent persecutions; crucifixions, beheadings, burnings, and feedings to wild animals in the coliseum, left a lasting imprint on how Christian thought and practice developed and has been lived out in the world, and how grace has been defined.

One such response to trauma was to fight. The fight response is a response to powerlessness that involves pushing back with power. It is understandable why Christians would be compelled to create a framework of meaning that included fighting. The early church had risked much for their faith. Many had given up families, social connections and had risked persecution to convert to Christianity. It would have been important to feel that the sacrifice had not been in vain and thus important to defend their conversion with perceived proof, whether intellectual or spiritual. Many had their very lives threatened and watched those they loved tortured and killed because of their beliefs. One can see how they would have wanted to make every effort to legitimize their faith in the hopes of ending such persecution. It is also easy to see how living surrounded by threats would result in orienting oneself to life as a battle against one enemy after another.

Defense of truth was one such fight. Rather than a kenotic response that relinquished power and released knowledge about right and wrong, early apologists fought to give credence to Christianity through debate. Gonzalez states that the “apologists witness to the tensions in which early Christians lived.”[68] One of the early apologists, Justin Martyr, attempted to build a bridge between faith and culture by defending Christianity on the prevailing framework of philosophical culture of the day. He called Christianity “the true philosophy”[69] arguing that whatever truth was found in philosophy, was given through Christ and it was through Christ we know truth fully.[70] Christian apologetics have continued as a fight response throughout the history of Christianity, as Christians, rather than accessing grace by abiding in the kenotic weakness and vulnerability of Christ crucified, attempt to prevail through a demonstration of superior strength of knowledge.

The early church also made much of the fight over who was saved and who was a heretic. In the second century, Polycarp directed no small amount of energy against those whom he considered to be heretics, even calling those who questioned the bodily resurrection of Christ, Antichrists.[71]      Ignatius in his letter to the Smyrnaeans spends a great deal of time fighting against what he believes is incorrect doctrine regarding the resurrected body of Christ, and the eucharist, and fighting for uniformity of belief. Differing views are seen as “factions [that] are the beginning of evils.”[72] Here again, we do not see a kenotic approach to the knowledge of good and evil, in which power through knowledge is relinquished but rather we see a reliance upon frameworks of knowledge and dogma to limit and define who might be in or out of God’s grace. We can contrast such fights over right doctrine to the apostle Paul’s admonition away from frameworks of knowledge and strength and toward the crucifixion alone when he taught the Corinthian church as follows:

 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. (I Corinthians 2:2-3. NRSVUE)

The fight response was not just directed outwardly toward heretics and persecutors, but also toward oneself. In the early church, Christian asceticism often manifested as a fight against one’s own humanity and the quest to gain power over the impulses of the body. Athanasius, when writing the Life of Antony describes Antony’s life in terms of warfare when he states, “Warfare with the demons is at the same time warfare with the self…it results in the attainment of divine empowerment and favor.”[73] Athanasius’ description of Antony’s warfare with the self to attain divine grace includes abstaining from sleep, bathing, sexuality, food and any other kind of human desire including grief, pleasure, and laughter.[74] Benedict’s rule is also full of battle imagery as monks wage “war under a rule and an Abbott,”[75] by abstaining from their humanity, even to include speaking, joking, and laughing, and thinking of themselves as wretches and worms who are on trial before God.[76]

These fights against the flesh contrast starkly with Christ who embraced human flesh both in the kenotic act of his incarnation, and throughout his ministry as he embraced flesh that was seen as “unclean” by the religious thought of his time.[77] Rather than fighting against his humanity, Christ entered into it with all its desire, and chaos. Christ ate, drank, laughed, and cried with heretics and sinners. They also contrast with Paul’s struggle against his thorn in the flesh. He begins with a mindset of power-over as he asks God to remove it and ends in a kenotic response as he accepts god’s answer that grace is sufficient “for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9 NRSVUE)  

Christ did not see the body and its desires as a battlefield to be fought against, but as something to be loved and embraced. The incarnation is a peacemaking act, first demonstrating God making peace with the human body by becoming a human body, at least in part because, “people at war with their own bodies, have little respect for the other,”[78] and then secondly by calling us to extend limitless grace to the other regardless of what offenses we endure or what judgements we may hold,[79] even from the cross itself.[80]

In defining the kenotic path, we might then ask if martyrdom  - a literal participation in the death of Christ, and a complete surrender of the fight response - is the ultimate kenotic act.  But even in martyrdom, we witness the hold that frameworks have on our narratives. Hessert states, “If there cease to be possibilities or power, we describe the situation as hopeless or meaningless.”[81] and surely the persecuted church must have felt powerless. Faced with their inability to fight persecution, early Christians may have spiritualized powerlessness by adopting a narrative around their martyrdom as a way of making meaning of such meaningless evil. Researchers  have proposed that religion may be used as just such a coping mechanism and have labeled this practice “spiritual bypassing,”[82] which can serve as a path for providing meaning to certain life events.[83] Rather than a kenotic surrender to death, martyrdom became glorified and even sought after in the early church. As this narrative caught hold in the Christian community, not only was martyrdom desired, but it was also seen as an ultimate path to God. Ignatius “speaks of his martyrdom with great enthusiasm and begs the Roman Christians to do nothing to prevent it.”[84]  He sees it, rather than grace alone, as a path to God when he says, “I shall never have a better chance than this of getting to God.”[85] Polycarp makes meaning of martyrdom when he claims the martyrs, “purchased for themselves life everlasting.”[86] With these claims, martyrdom makes oneness with God transactional – something to be purchased or achieved. It moves the victim from a powerless situation to one where the martyr has power. It moves the victim from an “is” condition to a more ideal “could be” or “should-be.”[87] This orientation toward martyrdom steps outside of kenotic grace. Inside the context of kenotic grace, martyrdom is a “cup” that we may hope will pass, but that we are willing to accept as Jesus did in a “not my will but thine” posture. (Luke 22:42, NRSVUE). It is not an act that moves the martyr from one state to another,  or something to be sought after in order to attain a standing with God that grace has already provided, but simply a surrender to the reality of the circumstance as it is. With this orientation, kenotic grace steers us away from the fight response.

We can also see meaning-making in the early church in response to trauma as some Christians, in a type of flight response, retreated  from society into the desert, into monasteries and isolated communities. For many, this retreat became a lifestyle. Although we see an example of retreating to the desert in both Jesus and John the Baptist, we also see a return to public life and ministry from both. Gonzalez states that the exodus of Christians into solitude began after the end of persecution and was motivated as a way to keeping oneself from being polluted by society’s temptations,[88] “Since martyrdom was no longer possible, these people must continue training, if no longer for martyrdom, then for monastic life.”[89] These ideas around training in purity and avoidance of pollution as the way to God create meaning by providing a narrative that we have  the power to move from a non-ideal condition to a more ideal condition. But sadly, the flight to deserts and monasteries made by Christians who were worn down from persecution provided scant respite since the monastic life often circled back to a fight response against the self as it went hand in hand with extreme forms of asceticism and self-torture as monastics fought against their sexuality, their appetites, their desires, and their humanity. We still see this flight response in Christianity today, not just in cloistered clergy, but also in more subtle forms such as Christian schools and communities that seek to remove believers from daily life with non-believers in the hopes they will not be polluted by the world. The very incarnation of Christ showed us that kenosis steers us away from flight and steers us toward entering into life. As we have observed, Jesus not only entered into a human body, but while in that body, ate with sinners and tax collectors, and did not concern himself with being touched by those that religious society considered unclean.[90] He prayed that we remain in the world (Luke 17:15-17, NRSVUE), and in doing so, imitate his kenotic act of  descending into the world and assuming human likeness. (Philippians 2:7, NRSVUE)

As Christianity became aligned with empire, we see meaning making in another trauma response, the fawn response.  “Christian worship [was] influenced by imperial protocol,”[91] including expensive churches, garments, pomp, and circumstance. Constantine gave the church, and particularly church leaders political and economic power. “Riches and pomp came to be seen as signs of divine favor.”[92] and a clerical aristocracy developed. Rather than a kenotic participation in vulnerability through the crucified life, the church began an embrace of power that has continued even to modern times. “Up until the seventeenth century, the denominational state possessed absolute dominance,”[93] and even after the separation of church and state, politicians and governments continue to co-opt religious beliefs to gain power, and believers trust in signs of God’s favor such as material wealth, power through miracles, or power over sin, rather than grace alone. Jesus, on the other hand, called us to resist the temptation of power. When tempted in the desert, he resisted political power when told he could have authority over all kingdoms of the world, and he resisted spiritual power when he refused to test God’s ability to perform a miracle through him (Luke 4:1-13, NRSVUE).  When Pilate offered Jesus the power of empire to avoid crucifixion, Jesus declined (John 19:8-11, NRSVUE).

These meaning-making narratives around moral and religious purity, doctrinal rightness, sacrifice and blessing as means to and signs of God’s grace have persisted throughout the evolution of Christianity and have influenced the understanding of grace. The persistent need for a framework of meaning has led to doctrines that, despite inconsistencies of logic, have persisted for centuries. Additionally, the inconsistencies of logic that were created by the need to remain inside the existing framework, have led to workings and re-workings of those doctrines.  We can examine this phenomenon by looking at some of the influential figures in the development of the Christian theology of grace. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all of the great Christian thinkers, but we will look at a few who have had lasting impacts on the theology of grace.  

Augustine

As  the era of broadscale persecution of Christians was coming to a close, and as the church was becoming legitimized by government in the fourth and fifth centuries, one of the  most influential leaders of Christian theology was St. Augustine (354-430 C.E.). Augustine’s framework is built on the notion that  sin is illicit behavior that separates us from God, and thus a mediator is required between God and humankind.[94] This is a classic example of an is condition needing some kind of power (mediator) to take it to a should be state. To Augustine, because mediation was needed between man and God, kenosis is the means to that end as it is the very act of Christ’s mediation. “He chose to be in the form of a servant, and lower than the angels, that he might be our mediator.”[95] This mediator (God) imparts the ability live a good life to humankind. Augustine defines grace as “the secret working of Divine benevolence upon the soul within.”[96] It is not simply a reward but is the cause of human excellence,[97] and it is superior morality and true doctrine that ensure the success of the community of God’s people.[98] Augustine’s framework is also built on the idea that grace is the aid we receive from God that allows us to love and thus not sin[99] and what makes one pleasing to God and “fit guides of men into purity of life” is a mind free of passions of fear, anger and lust.[100]  For Augustine, the work of God, through grace imparted by baptism, the eucharist, faith, works and penitence transform a sinner and lead to justification. In the framework he uses, the Eden story is interpreted to mean that humankind has an original predisposition to sin and an inherent inability to remain sinless; and the punishment for sin is death and separation from God that requires a mediator.  

This framework creates as many questions as it answers. If sin is a misdeed, and it separates us from God, did god create humankind knowing we would sin? And if so, why?  To preserve his framework, Augustine asserts that god created humankind, knowing they would sin, but that God also foreknew that “by his grace a people would be called to adoption, and that they, being justified by the remission of their sins, would be united by the Holy Ghost to the holy angels in eternal peace, the last enemy, death, being destroyed.” [101] So, humankind was destined by God for separation, and some were also destined to redemption. Augustine’s idea of physical death as an enemy and as a punishment for sin is also problematic. If death separates soul from body and it is the body that is unable to remain sinless, then death would be good to the man who is attempting to live for God.[102] Yet, how can death be good if it is the punishment for sin? Also, why is this punishment conferred upon all humankind when it was the sin of one man? Augustine makes a long and elaborate explanations that include whether or not death is good or evil,[103]  death/baptism of infants, martyrdom,[104] what if someone dies confessing, but unable to be baptized,[105] whether god intended death as physical or spiritual when he threatened Adam and Eve,[106] whether primitive man would have remained immortal if he had not sinned[107] and more. All to preserve the frameworks he has used to build his understanding of sin and grace. He asserts that in the “fall from grace” that Adam and Eve experienced, grace forsook them and now they were “deprived of the command the soul had formerly maintained over the body” [108] an explanation which again creates as many questions as it answers such as why, if Adam and Eve were under a type of grace that gave their souls command over the body, did that grace forsake them leading to sin in the first place? And why then can those who are under grace now, not remain sinless? Augustine goes on to answer these questions, but when we read his ideas with an eye to the frameworks he was working with, we see how one simple framework, if it must be upheld, can create a cascading effect whereby explanation after explanation must be made to uphold it and the meaning it provides. This can continue to such a degree, that no room remains for alternative viewpoints, as orthodoxies and heresies develop around the framework, with God consigning some to eternal punishment in response.[109]

In the years that followed Augustine, the church became more powerful and affluent. It became perhaps the most significant political power and wielded authority over what medieval people believed and practiced. In the Western world, it became one of the primary builders of frameworks,  culturally, politically and religiously, and often maintained these frameworks through force, executing those who challenged them.

Aquinas

Centuries after Augustine, Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274) also developed theologies of grace that have persisted for centuries.[110] Similar to Augustine, for Aquinas, it is grace that makes a person acceptable to God and eligible for eternal life. Aquinas begins with the pre-supposition that there is a place humankind finds itself in and a place humankind needs to move toward in order to be saved and grace is the action of God that works upon humankind to move it from one state to the other. He builds his theology of grace on a framework of justice that asserts that sin is an offense that incurs a debt that is owed to God, justice demands payment for this debt, and God is just. Justification cleanses the sinner and satisfies the “debt of punishment” for sin.[111]  This is problematic due to the fact that since payment is given that satisfies the debt of sin, grace is not a free gift of forgiveness of a debt but is rather God making payment of a debt on behalf of the sinner. Not a kenotic letting go of what is missing or owed, but a filling up through the life and death of Christ. In this sense, since justice is foundational truth for Aquinas, theological explanations that follow tend to uphold and reinforce the framework. For Aquinas, the question of why God, who presumably can do whatever God likes doesn’t just forgive without requiring payment is answered by circling back to the initial framework of justice. For God to forgive sin without payment would amount to God acting in an unjust way.[112]

In addition to satisfying the debt of sin, for Aquinas, grace also imparts the comprehension of the mysteries of the faith, [113] the will and the ability to do good, [114] to love God above all things,[115] to fulfill the precepts of the law,[116] to merit eternal life,[117] to resist and recover from sin,[118] and to persevere.[119]  For Aquinas, grace has limits and conditions. It may be dispensed differently to different people,[120] we may fall out of grace,[121] and outside of special revelation, one may never be certain she is in a state of grace.[122]

Augustine and Aquinas differ on aspects of their theologies of grace, but both are built on the framework that meaning is made through the use of some kind of power (either that of the individual or that of God) that moves the person from a less desirable state to a more desirable one. Theologies that originated with these two influential thinkers, have persisted for centuries and continue to inform Christian thought and practice. .

Reformation

The Protestant Reformation occurred during the Renaissance at a time in history that included a great deal of social and cultural upheaval.[123], [124]  It allowed for a break-away from the authority of the medieval church and resulted in new interpretations and practices in Christianity[125].  It began as protests against the corruption of the medieval church, but ultimately resulted in broader scale changes, not the least of which was the ability of the individual (through the invention of the printing press and the publication of the Bible in the vernacular) to interact personally with scripture to arrive upon his or her own ideas about God.[126]  This may seem natural to a modern way of thinking, but prior to that time, frameworks were not built by one’s own personal ideas but were built by authority figures. Literacy was not common and even among the literate, books were expensive, and Bibles were written in a languages that were inaccessible to many. Implications of the Reformation on frameworks were not limited to religious pursuits, but political and social frameworks changed drastically. Authority began to move from centralized authorities such as church and government toward the authority of the individual.  Kings broke away from the political authority of the church, claiming an authority of their own, and many and varied Protestant denominations were established as many religious leaders promoted their own interpretations of Christian practice. Two of the great theologians of the Reformation we will examine were Luther and Calvin. 

Luther

The Reformation can be seen as the early beginnings of the dismantling of some of the well-established religious frameworks. One of the fathers of the Reformation was Martin Luther. Luther wrestled with ideas of grace. According to Olson, as a young monk, Luther’s “whole life in the monastery was a ‘search for a gracious God.’ But instead of a loving God and finding him to be a gracious heavenly father, he feared God and came to hate him because he sensed only his wrath and not his love.” [127]  His study of the book of Romans led him to a new understanding of justification as he moved away from justification combined with merit to justification by grace through faith alone. For Luther, salvation was a free gift of grace, and persons could do nothing to obtain it.  He took down typical ideas about meaning making through the power to move from one state of being to another, by rejecting anything that was centered on human power and ability including free will and ideas of merit-based standing with God. This confronted many of the theological frameworks of his time. Oberman states:

“Luther’s discovery was not only new, it was unheard of; it rent the very fabric of Christian ethics.  Reward and merit, so long undisputed as the basic motivation for all human action, were robbed of their efficacy. Good works which church doctrine maintained as indispensable were deprived of their basis in Scripture.  This turnaround touched on more than individual faith and righteousness, the totality of life as affected and thus had to be reconsidered.” [128]

Luther wanted to take the authority of Vatican away and place all authority in God alone as revealed through scripture – Sola scriptura – and even in that, he maintained that the intellect could not comprehend God except through God’s grace through revelation.  

Despite the revolutionary nature of Luther’s theology, he was still bound to some kind of framework of meaning. He maintained that faith was needed to access grace. Although he was ready to reject that it was human power that led to faith and redemption, he did not include God in the abdication of power. He could not conceive of grace as the abdication of power (kenosis), even by God, and the acceptance of humanity in its current state. Rather, he placed the power to move from one state of being to another solely in the hands of God.  He held on to meaning in his efforts to move the church from a less-desirable wrong doctrine to a more desirable right doctrine. As the Reformation continued, the importance of this meaning-making framework was demonstrated by much time and energy spent on the promotion and defense of right doctrine as Luther opposed Zwingli and others over ideas about transubstantiation, free will and original sin.  

Calvin

John Calvin also moved doctrines of grace out of medieval frameworks.  In the medieval view, grace worked upon the person internally in order to justify and this justification resulted in a moral change that enabled the person to perform good deeds which were sanctifying. This internalist view of justification may have “helped to father the medieval abuses to which Calvin so vehemently objects and justification came to involve the need to continuously acquire merit by personal actions, even if those action included buying it.” [129] Calvin took it even further than Luther as he declared that acceptance by God requires no acceptance or moral change on the part of the person but is strictly an external act that declares the person pardoned. In Calvin’s view, the person remains a sinner, but it is the righteousness of Christ that appears “in court on our behalf” for “it alone is perfect and can bear the sight of God.”[130]   It is not through works that a person is saved, but rather a person, through the work of the Holy Spirit “grasps the righteousness of Christ through faith, and clothed in it, appears in God’s sight not as a sinner but as a righteous man.”[131]  Calvin, glimpses into the idea of dismantling the framework of meaning when he says that grace comes to us without any required action on our part, but he returns to it by saying that grace covers up the sinner’s undesirability with the more desirable righteousness of Christ. In his view, after grace is received, it transforms the soul, gives the person a “new heart” and makes one “fruitful to bring forth righteousness.” [132] He still believes righteousness is the more desirable goal and that “lusts of the flesh” must be “mortified.”[133] “Through continual and sometimes even slow advances God wipes out in his elect the corruptions of the flesh, cleanses them of guilt, consecrates them to himself as temples renewing all their minds to true purity that they may practice repentance throughout their lives and know that this warfare will end only at death.”[134] In other words, we must be changed from a less desirable state to a more desirable one.

During this period, we can see theological thought engaging in a kind of tug-of war with the question of power. Is it God alone that moves life the less desirable state (defined as lost-ness, separation from God, unrighteousness, etc.) to a more desirable one (defined as saved, righteous, etc.), or does  humankind play a role? If it is God alone, how can we live with the idea that some are not saved without making God a monster?

The Catholic Church, in response to the Reformation, in the council of Trent (1545 – 1562), defined its frameworks. It accepted the Nicene Creed, fixed both the Old and New Testament canons and set the number of sacraments to seven. It defined the nature and consequence of original sin and ruled against Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. It ruled that a person is justified by cooperating with divine grace that God bestows gratuitously.[135] In this cooperation, it was essentially confirming that persons have the power to cooperate and cooperation aids in moving from a less desirable position with God to a more desirable one.

Post Reformation

Much of the theological conversation following the Reformation centered around grace. The question of who had the power to move the individual into a state of grace persisted. Was the power in the hands of humankind  as those who espoused free-will theologies believed? Or was it solely in the hands of God? If in the hands of humankind, is it truly free and undeserved grace? If in the hands of God, how can a God that may arbitrarily choose to save some and not others be all-loving?

John Wesley

After the Reformation period, John Wesley’s (1703-1791) theology tried to hold the two ideas simultaneously -  both the doctrine of free will and at the same time keep power in the hands of God alone. He  believed humankind was initially created as bearers of the image of God, and it was and is free will that led to the fall in Eden and that leads to committing sin today. Wesley also held to the concept of total depravity – that humankind is incapable of pursuing godliness without some kind of intervention of grace from God.[136] “Good works are the result of salvation.”[137] In this way, Wesley was Augustinian in his approach, however in Wesley’s view, God’s grace works in a person even before justification (prevenient grace). It is this grace that is out of the will of the human as it “waiteth not for the call of man.”[138] After this , justifying grace moves on to justification and sanctification.  In Wesley, we can see the same framework underpinning his work – the idea that we must move from a less desirable state to a more desirable one.

What we see that all these thinkers have been wrestling with for centuries is how to take apart religious ideas around grace and still maintain coherence. Although much of their theology has persisted through to modernity, we can also see that much of what remains unresolved is due to the two-fold framework that has been established – the idea that we may know good from evil combined with the idea that what gives life (and perhaps even death) meaning is some kind of power to move from a less desirable state to a more desirable one.

The Mystical Insight

A counterpoint that has run alongside many of these thinkers in the work of theology is the mystical experience. It is problematic to differentiate mystics from non-mystics, because to be sure, many of the theologians we have already discussed had mystical experiences. And it may be that much of their work was an attempt to fit their mystical experiences (perhaps unsuccessfully) into the frameworks of their time and place. 

It is noteworthy that Aquinas, some three months prior to his death ceased his work on the Summar Theologiae after having what many traditionally believe was a mystical experience. 

“On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273], St. Thomas Aquinas was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work “Summa Theologiae” unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, ‘The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.’ When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, ‘I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.’”[139]

Perhaps his experience led him away from knowing and into the mysticism of unknowing. Even so, we also see many of the great mystics spending time trying to make sense of their experiences. For the purposes of this discussion, we will claim that the mystical response leans toward a willingness to stay in the realm of unknowing and is reluctant to adopt a stance of knowledge or judgement.

From ancient to modern times, the mystical experience introduces a rupture in common frameworks of thought. It collapses dualities of beauty and ugliness, life and death, good and evil.  It contains within it a longstanding contemplative tradition that includes a quiet and non-judgmental observation and acceptance of reality. It holds unknowing, mystery and paradox sacred and ventures into unchartered and what some have labeled as heretical territory. There have been countless mystical teachers in both religious and more secular traditions. I will look at a small sample of some influential mystics: Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Simone Weil and the Anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing.

Meister Eckhart:

 The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart may have been one of the most emphatic in encouraging unknowing. He puts forth that the place where God speaks, and works has less to do with right action, right emotion or right mindset and more to do with space. Eckhart calls this open space the “potential of receptivity.”[140] He says that we create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us. “There must be a silence and a stillness, and the Father must speak in that.”[141] Eckhart abdicates the knowledge of good and evil when he affirms that this birth has nothing to do with good deeds or religious purity as we think of it but rather, it occurs in both sinners and saints – even those in hell.[142] Eckhart speaks of creating a space through the practice of silence and stillness that is absolute and is far more extreme than most Christian practices. It describes taking down some of  the most basic human frameworks such as images,[143] understanding,[144] intellect,[145] memory, sense perceptions, imagination and even ideas about God being good or compassionate.[146] This kind of extreme emptying of the self is a radically different approach from what is typically seen in religious pursuits, or for that matter any human pursuit. We know from Narrative Theory that our sense of reality is based on narratives, and these are largely given to us through our cultural setting,[147] but when we imagine taking down a framework as  fundamental as sense perception, we must inquire as to what is left to keep us tethered.

Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich’s mystical visions also collapsed some basic frameworks of her time such as ideas of light and darkness, sin and righteousness, good and evil.  She saw that God was in everything and for this reason, sin cannot be a thing.[148] This revelation that sin is no-thing was new to Julian. When she asked Jesus about it, he revealed to her that “sin is necessary,”[149] because it “purges us and makes us know ourselves.”[150] In this way, sin is not a darkness that destroys and is an antithesis to the light that creates but is instead a creative force within us and the light-as-good vs. darkness-as-evil duality is broken down. Julian concludes from her revelations that “sin is not shameful to man, but his glory”[151]

The Cloud of Unknowing

The author of the Cloud of Unknowing encourages us to detach from frameworks of answers and knowing and “remain in this darkness as long as you can… if you are ever to feel or see [God]...it must always be in this cloud and this darkness."[152] To this author, an abdication of power to make meaning even includes thought. God can be loved but not thought,[153] and one must trample thoughts "and tread them down beneath your feet. And try to cover them with a thick cloud of forgetting…Push them down as often as they rise."[154]

Although we see that all three of these mystics attempt to redefine the frameworks of their times, and each in his or her own way is attempting to describe breaking down dualisms of light as good and darkness as evil, and moving away from power and meaning via thought, memory, and answers, they retain aspects such as  the pursuit of closeness to God, and the value in drawing near to God. In this way, they reinforce Charles Taylor’s ideas of hypergood and moral sources[155] as part of their frameworks.

Simone Weil

Much like Eckhart, the 20th century philosopher and mystic Simone Weil described the perfection of the spiritual life as kenotic - a consent to be nothing. Weil asserts that we must  recognize and accept the reality of the world, and to love it, “not wanting to tamper with it.”[156]  Not only does Weil tell us to accept and love the reality of the world without wanting to change it, but she carries the idea of emptying into her contemplation of God.  For Weil, attention was the suspension of thought:

 ““Attention consists in suspending thought, leaving it available, empty and ready to be entered by its object … thought must be empty, waiting, seeking nothing, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is about to penetrate it.”[157]

Weil advocated stillness, and waiting in emptiness, forming no attachment to outcomes. Weil goes a step further than some of the earlier mystics and even takes down the framework of the tangible existence of God and even the self. For Weil, in this suspension of thought, even God - the object of attention - must be nonexistent for two reasons; God is necessarily not an object, and God cannot be contained and thus our intuitions are tainted by human imagination and fantasy.[158]  Weil’s kenotic waiting is a waiting upon God, who “ has withdrawn, having created the void, leaves humanity with its freedom, and the need, according to Weil, to shed the ―”I” in order to connect with God again.”[159] “This self-emptying kind of grace and resistance to self-will is what Weil called 'decreation,' equivalent to the 'death to self' language of Jesus or Paul. In her discussions on 'void', this is her understanding of the first beatitude, "Blessed are the void in spirit" and of Philippians 2, in which she interpreted kenosis as "Jesus voided himself."”[160] But again we see remnants of frameworks around the need to connect to God and to find a superior way of life, even if that way is simply radical acceptance of what is.

The High cost/risk of mysticism:

Breaking down frameworks is never easy and often comes at a high cost. The ancient Hebrew prophets were often killed for challenging the status quo. Christ was executed, as were many of his followers. Meister Eckhart was tried and accused as a heretic. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing remained anonymous and cautioned his reader, "do not willingly and deliberately read it, copy it, speak of it, or allow it to be read, copied, or spoken of, by anyone or to anyone, except by or to a person who, in your opinion, has undertaken truly and without reservation to be a perfect follower of Christ."[161] Julian of Norwich kept her revelations secret. Theresa of Avila’s writings are filled with fear that the religious community would think she was possessed of the devil.  

In addition to the risk of rejection and persecution, taking down frameworks feels risky to the individual and may feel threatening to the sense of self. What will give life its structure and meaning? How do we go about making sense of the world around us? To what are we tethered and how do we understand ourselves if not through ideas of right and wrong, our thoughts and our sense perceptions? Baked into the very development of the human psyche is identity formation that requires us to understand the difference between self and other, and to separate things into categories. Religion has offered up categories that provide certainty to the human psyche such as saved and lost, good and evil, light and darkness.

Charles Taylor argues that the frameworks upon which meaning is made are inescapable and to step outside them would be to step outside of undamaged human personhood.[162] He equates frameworks to the same kind of orienting the human organism does in physical space (up vs. down, right vs. left). [163]  And a case may be made in this regard as in some ways, the mystics often exhibited characteristics that could be described as damaged personhood.  Julian of Norwich asked to:

 “have by God’s gift a bodily sickness, so that I should in that sickness receive all the rites which Holy Church had to give me, whilst I myself should believe that I was dying and everyone who saw me would think the same, for I wanted no comfort any human, earthly life. In this sickness I wanted to have every kind of pain, bodily and spiritual which I should have if I were dying, every fear and assault from devils, and every other kind of pain except the departure of the spirit… I prayed our Lord God that he would grant me in the  in the course of my life three wounds, that is, the wound of contrition, the wound of compassion and the wound of longing with my will for God.”[164]

Similarly, Simone Weil wrote prayer in which, according to Tastard, she asked that she

“become totally paralyzed, lose all sensation and all rationality. Then she asks that all these powers and faculties may be remade until they respond perfectly to God’s will and God’s truth. She concludes, “May all this be stripped away from me, devoured by God, transformed into Christ’s substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body and soul lack every kind of nourishment. And let me be a paralytic blind, deaf, witless and utterly decrepit. She is asking to be broken, remade and finally devoured by a needy world.”[165] 

One might wonder if disconnecting from frameworks ultimately disconnected her from the will to live leading to her death from heart failure brought about by tuberculosis and self-starvation.

Additionally, many have experienced a dissolution of frameworks that has felt akin to the dissolution of the self through mystical experiences that are not only religious but also non-religious. In addition to spontaneous mystical experiences, the use of psychedelics, or in the practice of altered states through meditation, breathwork or other means, often describe the experience as a type of death of the self.  For some these experiences are deeply unsettling and even traumatic, while for others, rather than a self-destructive outcome, a sense of improved well-being is reported.[166]

These kinds of ego-death experiences can provide insight into the death that Christ invites us into. In the next chapter we will look at the deconstruction of frameworks, then we will move on in future chapters to look at how, when traditional frameworks of meaning are abandoned, we, as Christ’s followers need not feel untethered, but rather tether ourselves to death itself.

CHAPTER 4 – DECONSTRUCTING THE FRAMEWORKS.

Shifts in modern societal and cultural structures have made it more possible for the individual to find validity and authority within the self. This has had a profound impact on the individual and Christianity as a whole. In this chapter, we will look at how some modern theologians and philosophers are taking apart frameworks, specifically the framework of the knowledge of good and evil. We will also look at the effect the destruction of frameworks has had on modern Western Christianity and the current wave of “deconstruction” we are seeing in Western Christendom.

Although there have always been individual thinkers who have challenged the status quo, it is also true that historically, such figures are usually seen as threatening by the established system and have often been killed or persecuted. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the prophets, the apostles, the mystics and the reformers all faced persecution for challenging the status quo.  Entrenched frameworks maintain power structures and it is often those with an interest in power that perpetuate the persecution. However, persecution  can also come from less powerful aspects of society, since conventions maintain systems of meaning and create cohesiveness.  In the past, a person might have participated in a search for meaning in the sense that they might wonder if the conventions and frameworks of their culture (societal or religious) lived up to the promise they upheld, but it is likely they wondered less about the rightness of those conventions than in modern times. This may have arisen from a fear of condemnation or persecution, but also from the fact that historically, interdependence has equaled survival.

Survival in the most literal, physical sense has become less central to humanity. In his book “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” Yuval Noah Harari asserts that until recently, the physical survival problems of famine, plague and war preoccupied humanity.  But in recent decades, this has changed:

“In the last few decades, we have managed to reign in famine, plague and war. Of course, these problems have not been completely solved, but they have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature to manageable challenges.  We don’t need to pray to any god or saint to rescue us from them.  We know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war and we usually succeed in doing it.  True, there are still notable failures, but when faced with such failures, we no longer shrug our shoulders and say, ‘well that’s  the way things work in our imperfect world,’ or ‘God’s will be done.”  Rather, when famine, plague or war break out of our control, we feel that somebody must have screwed up.  We set up a commission of inquiry and promise ourselves that next time we’ll do better.  And it actually works.  Such calamities happen less and less often.  For the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little.  More people die of old age than from infectious disease, and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.  In the early twenty-first century, the average human is more likely to die from eating at McDonalds, than from drought, Ebola or an Al Quada attack.” [167]

This freedom from the urgent pursuit of survival has allowed the individual to become less interdependent and more independent.  Societies have progressed away from authoritarian structures toward more free and democratic ones, and the freedom of the individual to create ideas and systems of thought that are unique has increased.  Charles Taylor asserts that for the modern, western individual, identity has shifted toward autonomy.  People are free to pursue their own personality in their own way, even if it is repugnant to others.[168] This has created  more diverse societies and what is considered ethical becomes less authority driven. Traditional frameworks have been downgraded to personal opinions or preferences or rejected as non-credible altogether and this lack of universally (or at least culturally) agreed upon frameworks leads persons to feel they are finding meaning in their own unique way that is just one of many, or in ways that are tentative and uncertain and leave room for being wrong.  We certainly see this phenomenon in what many are calling the “great deconstruction” that is sweeping the Western church.  Taylor would assert that it is this very  uncertainty that has led the modern individual to be, more than ever before, on a “quest” for meaning,[169] even the individual who is actively seeking to deconstruct long held beliefs and conventions.[170] Thus, according to Taylor the fear of meaninglessness and the quest for meaning defines our age. The human quest is defined by finding a believable framework for meaning. We see this driving need for meaning in modern culture as individuals polarize themselves more and more firmly into ideological groups. It is difficult to escape this all too human tendency.

We will look at the work of some modern theologians and will see that they, similar to their predecessors, attempt to steer away from or take down long-held frameworks of meaning, but also ways in which some of them fall into the impulse to circle back to ways of making meaning. 

Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich takes down the framework of sin as wrongdoing in his Sermon” You are Accepted.” He takes concepts like grace and sin out of the framework of morality (good and evil) and redefines them as something more fundamental. He asserts that sin does not mean an immoral act but is rather separation – of a man from himself and of all men from the Ground of Being. This separation, according to Tillich, is not unique to an individual and is not a problem to be overcome but is rather our very existence itself. It is a state, just as grace is a state. In stating it is not a problem to overcome, Tillich seems to be making a radical move away from meaning- making through judgement and also from the idea that meaning is made via the power to move from a less-ideal state to more-ideal state (i.e. overcome the problem). He acknowledges the urge to move out of estrangement but asserts there is no move to be made to escape from this existence. He points out the contradiction of existence when he states: 

We feel that something radical, total, and unconditioned is demanded of us; but we rebel against it, try to escape its urgency, and will not accept its promise.

We cannot escape, however. If that something is the Ground of our being, we are bound to it for all eternity, just as we are bound to ourselves and to all other life. We always remain in the power of that from which we are estranged. That fact brings us to the ultimate depth of sin: separated and yet bound, estranged and yet belonging, destroyed and yet preserved[171]

Tillich does not go all the way and encourage us to give up meaning making entirely in this state of contradiction. He says that to give this up would be intolerable and calls it “despair." Tillich’s suggestion is to accept grace. Not grace as the forgiveness of moral failings or a divine benevolence – these concepts of grace should be rejected according to Tillich since they are built on the framework of morality rather than separation – but for Tillich there is still a move to be made out of despair and toward meaning – the move of accepting grace.  He says: 

“Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”[172]

So, Tillich states that in grace nothing is required of us, “We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace. It happens; or it does not happen. And certainly, it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves.” [173] This is a big move theologically; however, we still see that in this view, meaning making occurs through power. The power to create meaning is located outside the individual, in grace or in Christ. Thus, Tillich does not relinquish all power to make meaning but transfers power from the self to grace. It echoes Augustinian theology that gave all redemptive power to God but substitutes grace instead. In his inability to give up all meaning-making, Tillich affirms Taylor’s assertion that the need to make meaning is powerful and persistent, even in modernity. 

While it may seem that any and all efforts to describe redemption circle back to a system of meaning making in which some kind of power moves the individual or a situation from a less desirable state to a more desirable one, we must ask how, if we give up our enslavement to the endless project of meaning making, we might avoid the despair of nihilism.

John  Caputo

In The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, John Caputo takes on this question when he takes apart the idea that meaning making is unavoidable and nihilism is to be fought against and instead suggests nihilism should be “celebrated as a grace.”[174] Caputo describes grace as blind forces that exist in the space that gives a place for being to exist. Caputo’s grace is not beneficent, in fact grace does not even know we are here. It is the grace of “perhaps.”[175]  He calls for an embrace of “being-for-nothing,” which accepts even nihilism as a gift. Life is pure gift, pure grace, pure contingency, without a “why.”[176] Caputo writes, “We answer a call we never heard. It’s just a pure gift  in which what is given is given without good intentions, without any intentions at all”[177]

But without good intentions, we find ourselves faced with the question of evil and it is often that question that prevents us from letting go of meaning making altogether. What are we to do about evil? We feel a pressure to both eradicate evil and to make sense (meaning) of it.

Peter Rollins

Peter Rollins suggest that rather than trying to solve the problem, it might be incorporated into life as “constitutive of subjectivity itself.”[178]  Rollins’ ideas orient us to a different framework, a different pursuit. Rather than pursuing answers and resolutions, Rollins encourages an embrace of questions and contradictions of life. To leave the question unresolved requires a letting go, an abdication of power, a kenotic practice of grace. Judgement resolves contradictions and questions and pursues the right answer. Radical, kenotic grace is nothing but space in which any and everything may exist, even those things that are unresolvable.

Rollins echoes Eckhart when he states that “speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.”[179] Our ideas and understandings become a way of making meaning. But our self-denial must be absolute, including even our ideas of God and our grasp on God. “Religion claims that alienation is either a reality that can be overcome, or an illusion that can be dissipated”[180] He critiques the two common approaches to grace.  The first approach being the notion that we are separated from God by our sin and this separation can be overcome through grace in the form of forgiveness of sin. The second more “progressive” notion being the idea that we were never separated from God and the whole idea of sin is simply a lie into which we have bought. In this idea, grace is, was, and will always be there, and is freely given. We can access this awareness of oneness and “pierce the veil of illusion”  through meditation, prayer or other enlightenment methods. Rollins goes on to describe a third way.  He concedes that our suffering is due to a separation but that it is “fundamental to, and constitutive of, subjectivity itself.”[181] In this way, we are a type of living death. We would not be individual subjects without the separation that allows us to exist psychologically. Even biologically, the very thing that allows us to exist – both in the mechanism of evolution on the DNA level, and in regeneration on the cellular level -  is death.

Julie Reshe

Julie Reshe speaks of grace in the context of living death as well.  She argues that traditional forgiveness is built on a constructive framework, and a fantasy that such forgiveness can right wrongs and bring harmony where there was none. Meaning making in Reshe’s view is a positive fantasy to defend against the horror of reality. Similar to Rollins, she invites us to think about grace (forgiveness) as existing within the idea that the human being is made of an original loss (or as Rollins might put it – lack). She states that “our identity and our life narrative are a substitute fantasy, an attempt to fill this original constitutive void, which however, can never be substantively filled”[182]  Much like Weil who encourages us to recognize and accept the reality of the world and to love it “not wanting to tamper with it”[183], Reshe says that forgiveness (grace), rather than being a way of creating an ideal, is an acceptance of the horror of life as it is. She states that forgiveness in this definition is an alternative to positive fantasy. “Fantasy presupposes belief in the possibility of harmonious and non-traumatic relationships…Forgiveness on the other hand, is the opposite of fantasy….It presupposes a sincere acceptance of what is unacceptable…It comes from the clear recognition of the horror that the other and the relationships with them are. It does not serve as a shelter fantasy to hide from the other and their evil. It is a way to accept the other, to accept her nullity, her rupture, her non-coincidence with herself, and not in a positive fantasy about her, which is really a way of not seeing her and by this tolerating her.”[184] An idea of grace that requires change, is a way of bringing  flawed persons or a flawed self into a safe place, a place where we can tolerate them. “Forgiveness does not destroy or banish the other by bringing in the defense fantasy that there are good people and bad people (which must be canceled), or that there are good qualities and bad ones (which must be corrected)…forgiveness disrupts the positive process”[185] This disruption of the positive process is a kind of death. Reshe defines real forgiveness, not as an erasure of wrongs, but “forgiveness involves destruction” it is “the art of enduring the devastating nothingness of the other and oneself. It is in that space – of mutual and self-destruction – where we genuinely meet the other.”[186] Reshe talks about this as creation of an empty space – paralleling kenosis: “Forgiveness creates empty space that does not require justifications and conditions, a space for accepting oneself in one’s insignificance and non-coincidence with oneself.  “[187]  “Forgiveness does not improve …the one who is forgiven”  “It accepts the other ...in their tragic essence as the living dead” [188]

Caputo, Reshe and Rollins point to the problem we, as humans encounter with meaning-making.  The problem of evil. There is an impulse to right the wrong on this world either by making meaning of evil, or by forgiving or overcoming it. In this way, kenotic, radical grace can deal with the horror of life in a way that meaning-making cannot, because try as we might, there is always evil of such monumental proportions, that we find we cannot make sense of it, nor overcome it. Paul Hessert uses the holocaust as an example of why we must move away from meaning making. In the holocaust, God cannot be found through power or meaning but must be found in their absence.[189] Meaning can no longer be the act of power that moves humankind from a less desirable state to a more desirable one, but must be something else altogether, if it exists at all. Also, in response to the holocaust, Arendt suggests that releasing power through grace is the only way to address radical evil since such offenses cannot be punished in any real way.[190] In the face of such great evil, truths are so traumatic, they resist being integrated into the universe of meaning. Žižek addresses this breakdown of meaning in the face of radical evil when he points out that God must either be given full responsibility (and thus blamed), must hand out some kind of infinite and ultimate punishment, or:

“ the third position above and beyond the first two (the sovereign God, the finite God), that of a suffering God: not a triumphalist God who always wins at the end, although "his ways are mysterious," since he secretly pulls all the strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right; but a God who – like the suffering Christ on the Cross - is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery.  It was already Schelling who wrote: ‘Without the concept of a humanly suffering God /.../ all of history remains incomprehensible’[191] Why? Because God’s suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God’s suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved, and its fate is decided. One should therefore take the statement that "the unspeakable suffering of the six millions is also the voice of the suffering of God"[192] quite literally: the very excess of this suffering over any "normal" human measure makes it divine.” [193]

The suffering God is the kenotic God. The God who has left triumphalist power (either metaphysically or in our imagination of what God is) and entered into the creation in a participatory way. The crucifixion is the ultimate revelation of this God. If we as participants in kenosis allow ourselves to forsake making meaning of the crucifixion and allow it to be the destruction of God (ultimate meaning itself), it is also a death act on our part and becomes a double kenosis.[194]

Žižek claims we should reject meaning making. He asserts that Christianity is the acceptance of this meaninglessness, because “the pressure of meaning” is the place “the devil waits upon you.”[195] Likewise, Hessert asserts that the embrace of meaninglessness is the essential heart of the Christian message. 

“Christ crucified is the end of the expectation that power will bring life to its fulfillment in the sense of actualizing its present potential. Faith in Christ crucified means giving up the kind of justification of life that realizing one’s potential would offer. There is thus a direct correlation between faith as the surrender of the claim to divine power and “Christ crucified” which is the absence of such divine power.”[196]

Radical grace is more than  Tillich’s notion that we are radically accepted through Grace[197], it is a radical acceptance of the divided, imperfect, contradictory and sometimes horrifying nature of all of reality. It is the acceptance that Gods-self has been “slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8 NKJV) and that as the body of Christ, we too are the living dead.

What  thinkers like Arendt, Rollins, Reshe, Hessert, Caputo and Žižek have in common is the viewpoint that structures can and must be taken apart. Rather than redeeming the empty space of life with meaning making, the kenotic act, empties, creates space, and gives up power.

As we have seen, throughout the history of Christianity, it has proved difficult to disconnect grace from a framework of meaning making. In fact, accessing grace in the pursuit of redemption has been central to the meaning-making of the Christian life. The search for the “should be” is uniquely human, and it can be said that religion consists of uniquely human practices that give meaning and make meaning of life.[198] Throughout history, followers of the Christian faith have attempted to understand and control connection to the divine not by letting go of frameworks of understanding, but by pursuing, defining, and refining them. Asceticism, holiness, purity, good works, right theology, liturgy and iconography have all served as means by which the religious observer might access grace (and thus God). Beliefs that it is the holy person who will be capable of miracles and who will receive good things from God, or that it is the one who believes rightly who will be saved, or that sin and error will separate us from God are central to much of Christian doctrine and practice. Thus, a state of grace that is disconnected from frameworks of meaning is an anti-religious concept.  It is threatening. Not only do we resist letting go of meaning-making for fear of falling into despair, but we also resist it out of fear of chaos and loss of control.  Grace takes all control out of our hands. It forces us to confront evil and chaos with acceptance. If life is without meaning, what do we have to live for? If life is without control through power, what ground do we stand on?  How can this be redemptive? Like Peter when he stepped out of the boat and onto the water (Matthew 14:28-31, NRSVUE), when we step off of familiar frameworks of meaning, we fear we may sink.

We see this phenomenon in the modern wave of “deconstruction” that is occurring in Western Christianity.  Large numbers of Christians are questioning and taking apart long-held beliefs that have provided them with certainty and meaning. If the expectation that meaning-making is central to life is not deconstructed, the loss of certainty and meaning, can lead to depression and anxiety. In an effort to combat these feelings, some climb back into the boat of certainty through various means. Atheism provides a certainty that God does not exist, others reconstruct a new and improved religious framework that provides a revised version of religious certainty, still others turn to social or political activism. Brad Jersak cautions us that this impulse may just lead us to “reconstruct based on the sinking sand of the shifting culture”[199]  The pitfalls of deconstructing frameworks requires us to ask if it is possible to disconnect from the frameworks that give meaning to life and yet still live it redemptively and  abundantly as Christ hoped.  

Chapter 5 – Why Death Redeems

Traditional ideas of grace as forgiveness or grace as a state of being both work by resolving lack and loss. Both work by rescuing us from death – whether future death, our belief death, or our fear of death, whereas grace as kenosis takes us into death. Grace is the death itself. It is the acceptance that we are made of loss, separation and lack. We are made of death. Not only we, but all of reality is riven with death at its core. This is not a condition to be remedied, nor a state to be denied, but is rather a reality to be embraced. In this way, grace is the embrace of our living death. 

In this way, grace is truly kenotic in that it uses no power to remedy the situation. It is truly grace in that it seeks to change nothing, seeks to resolve nothing.  It accepts the entire human experience with no need to reconcile anything.

The longstanding traditions in Christianity that hold that it is death that saves us, usually put forth that this is via the death of Christ, which gives us access to grace, [200] rather than our participation in death as an act of grace. We must  ask why radical acceptance and the abdication of the need to save would be redemptive. In this chapter, I will explore how and why it is the death process itself – and not just the death of Christ – that is redemptive and how the two are at  inextricably linked.

Our earliest story in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures is the Eden story. As we stated in the Introduction, this story has been interpreted many ways: as the birth of human consciousness, as a story about the move from sinless to sinful, or from immortal to mortal. But another possible interpretation is that it is a cautionary tale that addresses one of the most fundamental human impulses – the impulse to make meaning through power. In this tale we encounter humans who have a choice between two trees. The forbidden tree represents the world of meaning-making in which frameworks of judgement and qualitative distinctions are obtained in order to gain power, and in so doing, humans sought to, “become like God, knowing good from evil” (Genesis 3:4, NRSVUE). The second tree is characterized as a tree of life, and we can imagine that the fruit of this tree was in some way opposite the forbidden tree. This fruit represented a kenotic way of living that made no attempt to power through judgements of good and evil. Because it was not forbidden, we can also imagine that humanity was eating freely of it, thus in this interpretation, grace was the state of being prior to eating the fruit in which humans were free from the pursuit of meaning. When humans participated in the pursuit of meaning through judgement and power, they were no longer free but burdened by pain (cast out of paradise). From this tree, death is enacted upon humankind. The tree of life on the other hand is humankind participating willingly in death (acting kenotically) by abdicating power.  In this view, we might conclude that the act that redeems us by reuniting us with grace is the act of stepping out of meaning-making frameworks, refusing to eat that kind of fruit. In this view, the crucifixion becomes something entirely different. Rather than being an act in which sin is atoned for via blood sacrifice, it becomes a revelation of the death and abdication of meaning by God (who is ultimate meaning). Not God’s representative, or alter-ego, but Gods-self in flesh. Žižek calls the crucifixion the “destruction of God (ultimate meaning),” [201] Christ crucified is the very literal enactment of entering into death that reveals grace as an abdication of power. And our participation in that death is to abdicate systems of meaning and to cease eating of the “forbidden fruit” of judgement and power and eat of the fruit of kenosis.[202]

Not only does releasing frameworks of judgement and power set us free from the pursuit of meaning, but it also answers many of the problems that grace theologies have attempted to solve. When grace is acting on the premise of judgement either through forgiveness of a misdeed, or through undeserved blessing bestowed, we can see that it is non-infinite. It is limited by what has been judged as evil or undeserving and in need of grace. We can see over the arc of  history how such moral and ethical judgements have been influenced by and change as a result of culture. Much of what has been deemed sinful in history is no longer seen as such and many cultural norms of the past are now abhorrent to our way of thinking. In this confine, grace is incompatible with ideas of an infinite God.

It is only when the framework of judgment (and the control this imparts) is removed that grace becomes infinite, timeless and disconnected from culture and politics. When grace is defined as the removal or death of the framework, grace becomes kenotic in that it empties itself of all preconceptions that underpin ideas of who needs or merits forgiveness. Grace of this type is itself an enactment of death; death of ideals, judgements, norms, and death of the need for power to overcome evil or to achieve such ideals. It is death of the entire framework. In this interpretation, the death we are participating in when we are united with Christ in death (as in Romans 6:4 NRSVUE) is the death of the frameworks of meaning. We abdicate power in the form of knowledge of good and evil and admit that “we know not what we do”(Luke 23:34 NIV). In this way, death and grace are brought together as one unified whole and we are freed from the need to define evil, make sense of evil or conquer evil.

Paradoxically, it is not the death of evil (either in ourselves, or in the world) that unites us with God, it is the death of meaning. The death of God (ultimate meaning), and the separation of god within gods-self[203] is, according to Žižek the “point at which Christ becomes fully human,”[204] and also when we become one with God. Žižek states, “when I, a human being, experience …. that very moment of the utmost objection, I am absolutely close to God, since I find myself in the position of the abandoned Christ.”[205] When we unite with Christ in that most meaningless of moments we abdicate the pursuit of meaning, judgement and power. This is the kenotic death-act whereby we enter into grace. In this place, the individual gives up frameworks altogether and moves into a space where meaning is not created by frameworks, nor in crisis without them. 

This release of the power that moves life from one condition to a condition that is perceived as more ideal is the kenotic act. Although we may be able to see how it is freeing to individual, how can this kind of a death via grace redeem the world?  Would not radical acceptance and the death of all frameworks of judgment result in the death of all change?

Chapter 6: THE REDEMPTION OF THE WORLD

Recognizing grace as the vehicle by which the world will be redeemed is not a new idea. We see it in the scriptures as the central tenet of the work of Christ.[206]  Certainly, the idea of accessing grace by participating in the death of Christ is also not new. We have seen this in writings from the New Testament scriptures to modern times.[207]  We have seen this enacted concretely in the acts of the martyrs and the ascetics, and symbolically in sacraments such as baptism and the eucharist.[208] But we also see how the need for frameworks of meaning have kept redemption via grace-through-death tethered to the various structures of meaning that have existed in cultures throughout history. It would appear that frameworks of meaning and their requisite assessments of “good” and “evil” would result in a better world or a better individual since they pursue goodness, justice, and benevolence. But instead, we observe that theologies are built, and religions are created by and around such frameworks, political structures speak to it and co-opt it, economics are driven by it and all kinds of violence is enacted as a result of it. Instead of being redemptive, these pursuits place humankind on a never ending treadmill. Meaning making results in polarization between people-groups, ideological defenses, and in the face of radical evil, can create theologies that make a monster of God and shipwreck the faith of many.

We have observed that humankind has never in history been more death-averse than in modernity. Never before has humankind had as much power to better their state of being than in modernity. Technologies have enabled us to produce food and goods, combat disease, communicate, conduct trade, access information, and wage war in ways that are unprecedented. Medical technology has given us more control over physical death than ever before. This perceived power over death has allowed the pursuit and preservation of life to become, for many, a central way of making meaning. Modernity: medicine, nursing homes, the funeral industry have moved death from “the center of life to the periphery – physically, culturally and psychologically,”[209] Death is not experienced as a normal part of daily life anymore. “It comes as a shock to us, whereas it rarely, if ever, shocked our forebears. And this shock is a symptom of our neurotic relationship with death.”[210]  Our anxiety around and fear of death has increased while our encounter with death has decreased. We feel that death is somehow abnormal, unnatural, accidental - a destroyer and enemy to be feared and conquered; rather than an integral, normal part of life, or even more – a deep and profound part of redemption. This applies not just to the physical death of the body, but to death in all forms. The worship of survival makes:

“claims upon us for idolatrous commitment in that the moral principle which governs... a great corporation, a government agency, an ecclesiastical organization, a union, utility, or university – is its own survival.  Everything else must finally be sacrificed to the cause of preserving [it] and it is demanded of everyone who lives within its sphere of influence – officers, executives, employees, members, customer and students that they commit themselves to [its] survival.”[211]

An ethic centered in life seems like a good thing but can lead us further into the idolatry of survival at all costs. Survival is king and the power over death becomes a way of making meaning. This is not only true of physical death but applies to death in any form as we can observe in relationships, organizations, societies and communications.

In interpersonal relationships, when survival of the relationship is the foundational premise, persons use whatever powers are available to them to preserve the relationship. Persons may act inauthentically, sublimate themselves, or control the other to preserve the relationship and prevent loss. Love is no longer lived out in freedom and honesty but is co-opted in service to the life of the relationship instead.  When death is risked and the power to preserve the relationship is relinquished, the relationship exists based on grace and authenticity and the loved one has the opportunity to be loved for his or her true self rather than a false self they have presented in service to the relationship.  In the story of the prodigal son the father gives the son the power (money) and freedom to leave the relationship. He risks the death of the relationship, understanding that only through the relinquishment of power can his son return to him in authentic relationship (Luke 15:11-32, NRSVUE).

Businesses, churches, political, economic systems, and other corporate endeavors are based on a premise of survival. The mission of the group is survival, and power is leveraged to prevail against death. This may be death of the entity itself, or perhaps death of its identified mission.  Thus, they are held in bondage to the fear of death. Persons become secondary and disposable.   Leaders and members of the organization are required to conform to ensure survival of the entity, its profits or its mission, and are sacrificed in the service of that survival. Those that question the tenets of the organization are ostracized. What may have begun as a life-giving endeavor, in its avoidance of death, becomes just the opposite.  

During the COVID 19 pandemic, humanity came face to face with not just an ideological death, but with physical death at a scale that we have not seen in generations. Medical technology did not provide us with the power and certainty we had come to expect, and our inability to come to terms with powerlessness was revealed. This was apparent in a profound way in the United States, where persons pushed against any kind of restriction or any loss of the way of life they were accustomed to. A broad-scale debate over the knowledge of good and evil as it related to the virus occurred.  These debates included the good or evil of the vaccine, mask-wearing, treatment options, quarantines and the like. Political leaders, rather than admitting uncertainty and unknowing held out false certainties to the public.[212] Conspiracy theories abounded and the loss of trust in political leaders rose to a fever pitch . Was the vaccine safe? Were the treatments that were being offered safe? How long would it go on? A great deal of religious and political rhetoric pushed against any kind of restriction or loss and pitted groups against each other. Millions in the United States chose, rather than a relinquishment of power or an embrace of the death of a way of life and an acceptance of something new, to resist any kind of change and strive to return to their previous “normal.”

In the United States shifts in power structures as patriarchal systems of meaning built around the power of white male dominance are being overturned and the inability to embrace the death of that power structure has corresponded with unprecedented numbers of mass shooting in the US, primarily perpetrated by white males,[213] and a recent political shift back to white, patriarchal dominance.

Cancel culture uses power through social shaming and shunning to control the actions and words of others. According to the United Nations more nations are experiencing more violent conflict worldwide than at any point in almost 30 years, the homicide and gender-based violence rates are climbing.[214]

The consumption of the earth’s resources and the inability of the powerful and privileged to deny themselves is leading to the possible collapse of our climate.  We find ourselves “in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction crisis. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimated that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history.”[215]

As we have noted, despite the unprecedented power available in modernity, modern democratic societies lack the kind of political authoritarianism that gave structure and meaning to earlier cultures. In an effort to make meaning outside of external structures, people are polarizing into camps in which they can feel safe and surrounded by those that are most like themselves in ideology and practice. Thus, paradoxically, greater personal freedom and a time of unprecedented power to affect change has not seemed to lead to an improved outlook either within the individual or within society. Instead, increased power and the freedom to use it has increased anxiety and in-authenticity.[216] Rather than increased peace and harmony, we are seeing increasing division and polarization among people groups. Given the state of the world today, it is difficult at best to imagine that an abdication of power that might move the world from its present state to a better one is the way forward.

Regardless, we might expect that among Christians, we would see individuals who have embraced death and eschewed power as Jesus admonished.[217] What we see instead is that the democratization of religion, has led to a similar phenomenon as in culture. Rather than opening up space for new creation, the practice of Christianity in the western world has given way to commercialization and corporatization of religion. As a result, the same kind of polarization we see politically and societally has occurred in the Western church and has become entwined with political polarization as people seek to regain frameworks in any way possible. We can observe a rejection of death and an embrace and even glorification of power in religious practice. The language of much of modern, western Christianity, and in particular varieties that promote triumph and prosperity as signs of God’s favor, reflects an ethic that holds on to life at all costs and rejects death in all its forms. Prosperity gospels hold out the promise of power, wealth, control, and consumption and interpret them all as a sign of God’s blessing. Meaning is defined by power and success and in this view, it is common to see failure of a desired outcome rejected in the name of Jesus. Churches and church leaders encourage the preservation of working and personal relationships even if they are abusive. Pro-life politics and power based politics become a primary means of selecting church and political leaders. Political power is co-opted in the name of Christianity and Christian Nationalism is on the rise.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many Christian leaders, rather than serving as guides to assist their followers in the death and rebirth process that the pandemic might have been, allied themselves with political ideologies and encouraged their flocks to do the same. Churches protested bans on assembling, calling it religious persecution.[218]  Four years past the beginning of the pandemic and many churches are simply striving to return to pre-pandemic models of Christian community and worship, even though mass numbers of members no longer find their previous form of church attendance relevant to their lives.  Churches are trying to resurrect the old forms and keep them alive rather than allowing the pandemic to be a death and rebirth of something entirely new. 

Much of modern, western Christianity has held aloft knowledge over unknowing, answers over questions, power over kenosis, life over death. As in culture, the pursuit of life at all costs is not just about the lives of the unborn, but the life of the corporate church and its structures, the life of belief systems and doctrines, the life of ideologies and frameworks built on a perceived knowledge of good and evil, and the life and preservation of power.

This disconnect from the kenotic center of Christ has rendered many forms of modern Christianity irrelevant to today’s problems. In the United States, church affiliation has remained relatively constant at around 70% since Gallup first measured it in 1937. In the last twenty years, it has seen a steady decline with the sharpest drop being observed since 2018.[219] Deconstruction is much discussed as Christians question long held beliefs and structures and leave churches in unprecedented numbers. Disaffiliation and deconstruction are not seen by the institution as a kind of death that might usher in transformation and reveal a new path forward, but as an enemy to be resisted or defeated. Rather than celebrating the kenotic nature of deconstruction, religious denominations that strictly control the behaviors and beliefs of their members may use power in the form of shunning or shaming those who question their doctrines, or who disaffiliate.[220] Those who question are frequently scapegoated, villainized, and shamed, rather than given grace – even those who have endured abuses in church settings.

It seems that power is entrenched in our meaning making systems. We believe that meaning (the ability to move from a less desirable state to a more desirable one) can be  made of any situation. And thus, the problem around the making of meaning is a critical question perhaps more at this time in history than ever before.

We must define grace not merely as forgiveness, mercy or even a symbolic participation in death, but as a lived participation in the death of meaning-making frameworks that enact power. How is this accomplished? 

To begin with, grace must be emptied of power. To be emptied of power, grace must first be entirely unconditional. Conditions to grace are means by which we “make sense” of something that offends our sensibilities of justice and fair play. Grace that requires action or change on the part of the individual is no grace at all. If we are to love and live in peace with our fellow human, we cannot as Reshe says live in a fantasy that strives toward harmonious and non-traumatic relationships Instead, we must create kenotic space that accepts the tragedy of humanity,[221] and choses to live with it as Christ did. It is only through this kind of gracious acceptance that political engagement and freedom speech can exist without the constant need to convert the viewpoints of the other to our own.

Unconditional grace must also be unrelated to ideas of judgement of good and evil. As we’ve discussed, the perceived knowledge of good and evil is a means by which humankind gains power over unknowing. It is the means by which we make meaning by assigning values to all things. One thing is better than another, more beautiful, more desirable. Unconditional grace allows us to practice consent to reality without wanting to make it better, purer, holier, or safer. It is grace that allows us to see beauty in ugliness and God in all things and enables us to stop rejecting one thing over another.  This is the only path to peace.

The pursuit of peace and justice is often seated squarely within frameworks of good and evil. We feel we must come to common understandings of justice and goodness to create a better, more Eden-like society. Throughout history, much violence has been enacted in the name of eradicating evil or disharmony. The evil of infidels and heretics, the evil of fascists and dictators. Some of these efforts, to our modern thinking, seem outdated and absurd, some retain validity. Charles Taylor states that modern Western thinking is, more than ever in history, largely founded on ideas of justice and human rights since we live in a time where certain types of human rights have come to be seen as inalienable. So perhaps now more than ever, grace and the notion that something is given randomly, freely and without justification offends human ideas around justice, and as such, now more than ever it should be Christians who are leading the way in grace. The Christian scriptures are full of stories that offend ideas of justice in that they de-couple the relationship between good deeds and good outcomes and describe good coming to those who are unworthy and undeserving. The Scriptures tell us that “the Spirit blows where it wishes,” (John 3:8, NRSV),God blesses both the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45, NRSV). In Matthew 20, we read a parable told by Jesus about laborers who worked unequal time and got paid equally. In Luke 15, we read a parable told by Jesus about a son who sins and is still welcomed and celebrated by his father. We recognize these parables to be about grace and can see how they were meant to confront ideas of God demanding quid-pro-quo, and yet strangely, Christian doctrine and practice continues to be shot through with shame and punishment for sin and reward for goodness, and many Christians take a quid-pro-quo stance on political and societal issues. Grace is as controversial and unacceptable inside Christendom as it is outside it.

“See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
    a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

This honor, then, is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe,

“The stone that the builders rejected
    has become the very head of the corner,”

and

“A stone that makes them stumble
    and a rock that makes them fall.”

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.” (1 Peter 2:2-8, NRSVUE)

Peter points out this very phenomenon when he says the very goodness (grace) that undoes shame is also the stone that makes men stumble and the rock that makes them fall. Thus, we stumble, not due to wrong deeds or beliefs, we stumble over  the word of grace.

We stumble over grace because letting go of the control that meaning-making frameworks provide, feels like a type of death, which in fact it is. The knowledge of good and evil gives us the power to judge. Grace is the abdication of that power. When we abdicate that power, we encounter the chaos of the world, our own chaos and the chaos of others. It is that chaos that threatens us with annihilation. This is a death we are loathe to face, but entering into this type of grace is the kenotic participation in death that Christ calls us to.

As we’ve noted previously, this is evident in the incarnation. Christ incarnated is just such a demonstration of abdication of power. We read in Philippians 2 that in the incarnation God:

“emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross. (Philippians 2: 7-8, NRSVUE)

Christ incarnated is the breakdown of the use of power to move to a more ideal situation. In the incarnation, Christ gave up power and moved into a less ideal situation. One that was more chaotic, more filled with what we would deem evil and unjust. In this way, it is the enactment of grace and a movement away from meaning-making through power. In kenosis, grace chooses powerlessness. Grace is an act of death.

If the church understood this kind of kenosis to be at the core of Christ’s message, and at the core of grace, the church might once again hold out a countercultural (and offensive to some) message that is desperately needed. A message of love and acceptance rather than war and division. A love so radical it consents to recognize and accept the reality and  brokenness of the world.[222] Grace cannot be a project that seeks to resolve the contradictions and alienations that exist in reality. Todd McGowan addresses the dangers of this kind of reconciliation project in his book Embracing Alienation:

“People don’t become dangerous because of their alienation but because of their belief that they should be self-identical and are failing to achieve this aim. The danger consists in try to overcome alienation, not in alienation itself. This attitude creates bullies and oppressive regimes along with killers and murderous societies. If people nourish the hope of getting out of their alienated subjectivity, if they believe this is a real possibility, they will often do whatever it takes to achieve it.  The image of a life free from alienation authorizes the violence that would bring this possibility into existence.  Accepting the fact that alienation is constitutive of one’s subjectivity is a way of struggling against this violence.”[223]

Peace can only be achieved when this kind of radical acceptance is enacted and if followers of Christ  were to lead the way, we might become the “site of the Spirit, the site where Spirit achieves its actuality.” This – Žižek asserts - is the ultimate lesson to be gained from the incarnation and death of Christ.[224]

Christ takes the acceptance of reality seriously. When Peter rejected the reality of Christ’s impending death and crucifixion in his cry, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:22, NRSVUE), Jesus rebuked his impulse as Satanic.[225] Immediately following Peter’s rejection of reality, Jesus speaks to his disciples about death, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  (Matthew 16:24-25, NRSVUE). The self-denial that he spoke of was not fasting, or sexual abstinence, it was not giving up sleep or laughter as many of the church fathers presumed, but was the emptying Eckhart described - an emptying of self, a kenosis that consents to be nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing. Jesus was inviting them to let go of everything – even himself (God). It is from this kenotic emptying that the creation of all things arises.

CHAPTER 7 - SLAIN FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD

We can see the principle of the creation of a new world through death throughout the scriptures. Long before the incarnation of Christ or the crucifixion of Jesus, the death of Christ was at work.  In the book of Revelation, the author in his vision says that life is given by the “Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8, NKJV) This suggests   that the act of death is foundational to creation. God’s first creative act was to empty God’s-self of infinitude - in which God occupied all space and time - to make space for something else to exist. It is this foundational death act, this utterly incomprehensible foolishness – that an infinite God should die -  that creates and gives life. Lissa McCullough quotes Simone Weil as saying, “It is contradictory that God, who is infinite, who is all, to whom nothing is lacking should do something that is outside himself, that is not himself, while at the same time proceeding from himself.” [226]

God must continue to be kenotic for anything other than God to exist. In the sustenance of life, God in the incarnated form of creation must give itself over to death in order to sustain life. Plants and animals must die so that others can eat, cells must die so that bodies can be renewed, DNA must contain death-producing mutations so that organisms can evolve to adapt to changing environments. In the incarnation of Christ, God becomes alienated from position and power in heaven and takes on human form. In the crucifixion God is alienated from power and becomes powerless. Over and over, we see that god is “slain - from the “foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8 NKJV)  to the present day, it is this kenosis that is required to create life. In this way, kenosis is the “primordial contradiction that originates in the will of God as creator, for creation itself is a contradiction of the infinite being of God.”[227]

In this foundational paradox, the death demonstrated in the abdication of power through kenosis creates life, revealing the cyclical pattern of death through life and life through death.

It is essential to remember that death, by definition is absolute and irrevocable. For grace to redeem, death must be absolute so that grace can be absolute as well. Absolute death must extend even to our  ideas about good and evil, and our ideas about God. Absolute grace must in some way make space for all things, even evil, just as, in some way, the kenotic nature of God has made space for evil and has extended infinite grace to it.[228]

Simone Weil says that to let go to this extent and create a void of this magnitude in our perception, requires a kind of ego death. It creates a space where our preconceived ideas and judgements no longer exist. Not the space where our ideas and judgements remain, and we “graciously” let the other person (or ourselves) off the hook. This kind of judgment and subsequent forgiveness involves knowing, which as we have said, are frameworks. Grace requires unknowing. God cannot be contained and thus our intuitions are tainted by human imagination and fantasy.[229] Grace requires a void, or perhaps it is better articulated that grace is this void. In this way grace is not a presence but is a kind of absence. “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.[230]

CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSIONS AND INSIGHTS

Is this kind of ego death possible for us? Can we let go of our frameworks of meaning without losing hope? After all, the human “imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”[231]  The psyche is continually filling the void. To enter into that void and participate in that death, we must be converted to anchoring ourselves not in certainty, but in a perpetual act of kenosis. We must take seriously the call to step out of the boat and into a way of life that feels as though there is nothing solid beneath our feet. This kind of faith is anchored in the very source of life and creation - death.

Redemption of the world is not found in a message of dominance, certainty and control nor is it found in winning others to the “right” side of thought or action, or in common ground. It cannot be for we know that whatever right and correct framework we strive to enact in the world will be redefined with each new era of thought and whatever we may have in common changes as we change and the world around us changes. What is thought to be paradise today will be tomorrow’s hell. Redemption can only be found in a kenotic message of release and letting go. Death is our true common ground. Not just death in a physical sense, but the death involved in continual change and loss. It is through this type of daily kenotic practice of letting go that we participate in the very nature of grace and become agents of grace to the world. This is the practice of death in every aspect of life. The giving up of our power over and control of our ideas about what should and should not be, our resistances against the uncomfortable and unfamiliar, our enemies and our agendas. This is an ongoing dying. This is the kenotic emptying with which we align ourselves with Christ and no longer pursue god-like power but become obedient to death (Philippians 2:6-8, NRSVUE). Through the absolute emptying of self and trust in grace, the human is freed from the need to make meaning and is able to live in a space where we are “not glad because of any special thing or…distressed by anything at all, for all will be well.”[232]

Thus, paradoxically, it is not knowledge that enlightens, but unknowing. It is not the lack of doing or the acts of wrongdoing that are darkness but is instead the pursuit of meaning through power. It is in the open space of unknowing and un-judging – the void that is grace – that peace and love are born. Without this self-emptying, we will naturally divide good from bad and restrict what we will accept. We cannot love our enemy because there will be things in the enemy that we reject, we cannot love the enemy in ourselves because there are things in ourselves we have rejected, we cannot love the world, because there will be things in reality we reject. Thus, love can only exist when frameworks of meaning are taken down. In taking down our meaning-making frameworks, we are imitators of God, who was slain at the world’s foundation to make a void into which creation could occur. For us, this void makes evil a “no-thing,”[233] and as a no-thing we have nothing to fear from it; from ourselves, from others or from the chaotic reality of life. In the open space of unknowing created by grace, we create “fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:5-7, NRSVUE), with ourselves, and with the world. 

Research and Further Questions

The impact of a kenotic practice of grace has the potential to impact both the individual and society in meaningful ways that may be difficult to quantify and measure, however some scientific applications seem to be exploring the spiritual principle and redemptive abilities of kenotic grace without naming it as such.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in studies done using psychedelics, with the number of new clinical trials in psychedelic research more than doubling each year since 2017.[234] These study the effects on a wide range of health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, Parkinsons disease, headache disorders, multiple sclerosis and more. Although results are mixed and the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has asked for more research before considering recent applications for approval, results are promising. Barrett et.al. conclude that psilocybin alters brain default mode networks in ways that correlate with subjective effects such as “mystical or ego-dissolutive” experiences,[235] citing a study by Smigielski that found the “extent of ego dissolution and brain connectivity predicted positive changes in psycho-social functioning of participants 4 months later.[236]

Additionally, a relatively new form of therapy called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) echoes ideas of kenotic grace in that utilizes radical acceptance of reality and emotions without judgement or avoidance. Although data is mixed and further research is needed, some trials have shown that DBT is beneficial for downregulating negative emotions and facilitating cognitive change.[237]   

The impact of meaning-making in peacekeeping is well studied, however further research might explore how, if any, a kenotic practice that releases meaning-making might influence peace keeping efforts and assist in de-polarization of ideological groups. Finally, research to explore how a practice of kenotic grace might inform pastors and spiritual directors who seek to shepherd those who are deconstructing their faith or disaffiliating from religion.

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[1] Among these, I will be focusing on the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil, Paul Tillich, John Caputo, Peter Rollins, Paul Hessert Julie Reshe, and Slavoj Žižek.

[2] Ane Bysted, The Crusade Indulgence; Spiritual Rewards and the Theology of the Crusades, c. 1095-1216 (Boston: Brill, 2014), 6

[3] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1984), 293-297.

[4] Robert Thurston, “Violence towards Heretics and Witches in Europe, 1022-1800,” chapter in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, and Caroline Dodds Pennock, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 513-530.

[5] Examples of these types of scriptures are:  “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace would no longer be grace”  (Romans 11:6, NRSVUE)

“ For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NRSVUE)

[6] Some examples are:  “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matthew 6:14-15 NRSVUE)  

“ If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1John 1:9 NRSVUE)

[7] “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Genesis 2:17 (NRSVUE)

[8] Among those who influenced me were Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and Byron Katie.

[9] Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death, (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 31.

[10] The word ego is used in various ways, depending on the psychological model in which it’s used. Although in general, it may refer simply to an individual’s way of viewing and regulating themselves in relationship to their environment, for the purposes of this thesis, ego is used to describe the aspect of the ego that uses judgement and power as a form of defensive functioning. In this sense, it is not the ego itself that dies in “ego-death,” but is its defense through judgement and power. 

[11] “Let the same mind be in you that was[a] in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.” Philippians 2:6-8 (NRVUE)

[12] “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So, when I was sent for, I came without objection.” (Acts 10:28-29 NRSVUE)

[13]“Then there rose up certain men of the sect of the Pharisees who believed, saying that it was necessary to circumcise the Gentiles, and to enjoin them to keep the law of Moses. And the apostles and elders came together to consider this matter.” (Acts 15:5-6 NRSVUE)

[14] “Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “no idol in the world really exists” and that “there is no God but one…Food will not bring us close to God.” We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do.” (I Corinthians 8:4, 8 NRSVUE)

[15]  Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:38, NRSVUE)

[16] “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (James 1:27 NRSVUE)

[17] “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4 NRSVUE)

[18]“The Canons of Dort 1619 -Article 11,” Christian Reformed Church, accessed February 26, 2024,  https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/canons-dort

[19] Christian Reformed Church “Canons of Dort 1619 -Article 7”

[20] H. Vinson Synan, The Century of the Holy Spirit. 100 years of Pentecostal and Charismatic renewal. (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2001), 335.

[21] “Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase?” Romans 6:1 NRSVUE

[22] Peter Rollins, “Church of the Contradiction, proclaiming the Unknowing God,” in Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism (Everyday Analysis: 2023), 33.

[23] Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 34.

[24] Peter Rollins, “Church of the Contradiction,” 32.

[25] Rollins,  “Church of the Contradiction,” 33.

[26] Paul Hessert. Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion. (Rockport MA: Element Inc., 1993. Out of Print).

[27] Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning, 19.

[28] Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning, 26.

[29] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe, (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), 56.

[30] Eckhart, Mystical Works, 32, 33.

[31] Eckhart, Mystical Works 40.

[32] Eckhart, Mystical Work,  34.

[33] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe, (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), 36.

[34] Eckhart, Mystical Works, 49.

[35] Eckhart, Mystical Works, 55.

[36] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 147-149.

[37] Amy Laura Hall. Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 85.

[38] Julie Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, (Everyday Analysis, 2023), 10.

[39] Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” 12.

[40] Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” 12.

[41] Julie Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, (Everyday Analysis, 2023), 12.

[42] Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” 12.

[43] Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” 13.

[44] Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” 13.

[45] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 147-149.

[46] Simone Weil,  The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Trans. A Wills. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 542. Referenced in Scott McLaughlin Marratto and Lawrence E. Schmidt “The Measure of Justice: The Language of Limit as Key to Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy.” The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, 28, 2000, 57.

[47] Taylor asserts that finding meaning depends on deriving adequate moral frameworks with which we can judge our lives and measure their fullness or emptiness, and that above all, we fear meaninglessness. It is perhaps this fear that defines our age. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 16, 18.

[48]  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (1998): 154.

[49] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, ( Rockport MA: Element Inc., Out of Print, 1993), 7.

[50] Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning, 4.

[51] Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning, 8.

[52] Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning, 10.

[53] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, ( Rockport MA: Element Inc., Out of Print, 1993), 19.

[54] Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning, 26.

[55] Douglas Youvan, Reconciling Eras: The Sanhedrin, Hitler, and the Threads of Jewish History, (2023), 2, 3, DOI:

          10.13140/RG.2.2.25761.99683

[56] Ellie Violet Bramley, “The trauma doctor: Gabor Mate on happiness, hope and how to heal our deepest wounds,” The Guardian, April 12, 2023,  https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/12/the-trauma-doctor-gabor-mate-on-happiness-hope-and-how-to-heal-our-deepest-wounds.

[57] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1984), 32.

[58] La Vu Truong Giang, “The Spiritual Values of Roman Culture in Two Centuries of the Pax Romana Period (27BC – 180),” Journal of Science Social Sciences and Humanities 128, no. 6B (2019): 174.

[59] Sarah Ruden. Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time. (New York: Image Books, 2010). 11.

[60] Bessel van der Kolk. “Posttraumatic stress disorder and the nature of trauma.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience. 2:1 (2000): 8.

[61]  Ruden, Paul Among the People, xvii.

[62] Philippians 2:7

[63] “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So, when I was sent for, I came without objection.” (Acts 10:28-29 NRSVUE)

[64]“Then there rose up certain men of the sect of the Pharisees who believed, saying that it was necessary to circumcise the Gentiles, and to enjoin them to keep the law of Moses. And the apostles and elders came together to consider this matter.” (Acts 15:5-6 NRSVUE)

[65] “Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “no idol in the world really exists” and that “there is no God but one…Food will not bring us close to God.” We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do.” (I Corinthians 8:4, 8 NRSVUE)

[66] Romans 3:23-24 ; 5:20; 11:6 NRSVUE) all articulate Paul’s insight that grace is an unconditional “gift” that is received before any change on our part – “while we were still sinners” and not on the basis of works.

[67] Matthew 6:14-15 and 1John 1:9 (NRSVUE) read as conditional if-then statements when talking about grace, stating that we will be forgiven if we forgive others and if we confess sins.  “

[68] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1984), 57.

[69] Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, 46.

[70] Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, 56.

[71] Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians. 7. Louth, Andrew, ed. Early Christian Writings:  The Apostolic Fathers.  trans. Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth,  (London: Penguin Books, (1987), 12.

[72] Ignatius, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8.8., Louth, Andrew, ed. Early Christian Writings:  The Apostolic Fathers,  trans. Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth, (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 103.

[73]Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, Trans. Robert C. Gregg, (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1980), 4.

[74] Athanasius, The Life of Antony, 645, 36, 98, 45.

[75] Benedictus, Saint, The rule of St. Benedict, trans. Anthony C. Meisel and M.L. del Mastro, (New York: Doubleday, 1943), 48.

[76] Benedictus, The rule of St. Benedict,60, 61.

[77] Jesus interacted with bodies in ways that were considered unclean. In Luke 5, we see him touching a leper and being condemned for eating with tax collectors and sinners; in Luke 7, he rewards the faith of a Roman Centurion and allows himself to be anointed by a sinful woman; in Luke 8 he interacts with the demon possessed and touches the dead. In Mark 7 he and his disciples eat with unwashed hands. 

[78] Sarah Ruden. Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time. (New York: Image Books, 2010). 27.

[79] Jesus spoke of grace as limitless when he answered Peter that he should forgive seventy times seven (Matthew 18:21-22 NRSVUE), when he told those would have stoned the woman caught in adultery that those without sin should cast the first stone and that he did not condemn her (John 8:7-11 NRSVUE)..  

[80]Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. ( Luke 23:34 NRSVUE)

[81] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, ( Rockport MA: Element Inc., Out of Print, 1993), 8.

[82] Alejandra Motiño, et al. “Cross-Cultural Analysis of Spiritual Bypass: A Comparison Between Spain and Honduras.” Frontiers in Psychology 12:658739 (May 2021): 2, https://  doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.658729.

[83] Kenneth Pargament, Margaret Feuille, and Donna Burdzy, “The Brief RCOPE: Current psychometric status of a short measure of Religious Coping.” Religions 2 no.1 (February 2011): 53-54. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:12436514.

[84] Andrew Louth, ed. Early Christian Writings:  The Apostolic Fathers,  Translated by Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 56.

[85] Ignatius, “Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8.8,” in Early Christian Writings:  The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth, (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 85.

[86]  Polycarp, “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in Early Christian Writings:  The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth, (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 125.

[87] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, ( Rockport MA: Element Inc., Out of Print, 1993), 8

[88] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1984), 137.

[89] Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, 124.

[90] Jesus touched a leper in Luke 5:13-14 and a woman who was bleeding in Luke 8:44

[91] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1984),125.

[92] Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, 134

[93] A.E. Sebentsov, “Religion in the System of State Power.” Russian Social Science Review 53, no.1 (February 2012): 34. https://doi.org/10.1080/10611428.2012.11065462

[94] St. Augustine, The City of God, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2022, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120101.html), 370.

[95] Augustine, City of God, 360.

[96] St. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, trans. W.J. Sparrow Simpson, D.D., London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, (New York and Toronto: The MacMillan Co., 1925), 12. (https://www.google.com/books/edition/St_Augustine/O78rAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA2&printsec=frontcover)

[97] Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, 18.

[98] Augustine, City of God, xi.

[99] Augustine, City of God, 526.

[100] Augustine, City of God, 360.

[101] St. Augustine, The City of God, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2022, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120101.html). 515

[102] Augustine, City of God, 522.

[103] Augustine, City of God, 523,528.

[104] Augustine, City of God, 523-525.

[105] Augustine, City of God, 527.

[106] Augustine, City of God, 522, 534.

[107] Augustine, City of God, 542.

[108] Augustine, City of God, 534.

[109] St. Augustine, The City of God, New Advent, accessed April 13, 2022, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120101.html, 360.

[110] Aquinas, T. Summa Theologiae: Latin text and English translation, trans. Gilby, T.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ST IaIIae q110 a1.

[111] Luke S. Martin. “The Principles of Grace According to Thomas Aquinas.” (PhD diss., University of Oxford. 2018), 40.

[112] Aquinas, T. Summa Theologiae: Latin text and English translation, trans. Thomas Gilby.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). III q46 a2.

[113] Aquinas, Summa,  109.1.

[114] Aquinas, Summa, 109.2.

[115] Aquinas, Summa, 109.3.

[116] Aquinas, Summa, 109.4.

[117] Aquinas, Summa,109.5, 114.

[118] Aquinas, Summa, 109.7, 109.8, 109.9.

[119] Aquinas, Summa, 109.10.

[120] Aquinas, Summa, 112.4.

[121] Aquinas, Summa, 113.2.

[122] Aquinas, Summa, 112.5.

[123] Sascha Becker, Steven Pfaff, and Jared Rubin, “Causes and consequences of the Protestant Reformation,” ESI Working Paper, Chapmen University Digital Commons, (2016),16-13. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/178.

[124] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Present Day. (Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 1984), 363-370.

[125] Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, 364.

[126] Jared Rubin, “Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 96, no. 2 (2014): 270–86.

[127] Roger Olson, The Story of Christian Theology. Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform. (Illinois: Intervarsity Press. 1999), 376.

[128] Heiko Oberman. Luther, Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Scharzbart. (New York: Doubleday Press, 1992), 154.

[129] Paul Helm, Calvin at the Centre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 196.

[130] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume 1, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 726.

[131] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion,  727.

[132] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume 1, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 598, 540.

[133] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 776.

[134] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 601.

[135] "Council of Trent." Encyclopedia Britannica accessed April 3, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Council-of-Trent.

[136] Isaac Boaheng, “The Socio-Political Function of Grace in Wesleyan Theology and Praxis,”  International Journal of Social Science Research and Review. 6, no. 3, (March 2023): 303.

[137]  Boaheng, “Socio-Political Function,” 301.

[138] Kenneth Collins, The Theology of John Wesley. Holy love and the Shape of Grace, (Abingdon Press, 2007), 82.

[139] David Cooley, “Thomas Aquinas’ Mystical Experience” Diocese of Covington, December 3, 2020, Quoting Thurston and Attwater revision of Alban Butler’s “Lives of the Saints,” accessed January 14, 2025.  https://covdio.org/thomas-aquinas-mystical-experience/

[140] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe, (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), 56.

[141] Eckhart, Mystical Works, 32, 33.

[142] Eckhart, Mystical Works, 40.

[143] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe, (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), 34.

[144] Eckhart, Mystical Works, 36.

[145] Eckhart Mystical Works, 49.

[146] Eckhart Mystical Works, 55.

[147] Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality” Critical Inquiry, 18, (August 1991): 20.

[148] Julian of Norwich. Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 136, 166.

[149] Norwich, Showings, 148.

[150] Norwich, Showings, 149.

[151] Amy Laura Hall. Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 85.

[152] Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. A. C. Spearing. (London: Penguin. 2001), 22. 

[153] Anonymous. The Cloud, 44. 

[154] Anonymous. The Cloud, 54.

[155] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

[156] Simone Weil,  The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Trans. A Wills. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 542. Referenced in Scott McLaughlin Marratto and Lawrence E. Schmidt “The Measure of Justice: The Language of Limit as Key to Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy.” The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, 28, 2000, 57.

[157] Simone Weil. Attente de Dieu (Paris: La Colombe, 1950) pp. 76-77, trans. J.P. Little in “The Symbolism of the Cross in the Writings of Simone Weil.” Religious Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 1970), 130, Cited in ‘As an Emerald is Green.’ Waiting, Poetry and Affliction: Simone Weil’s Concept of Attention Mary Campbell Doctoral Thesis.  Dublin City University School of Theology. January 20231987), 91.

[158] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 147-149.

[159] Mary Campbell, “As an Emerald is Green. Waiting, Poetry and Affliction: Simone Weil’s Concept of Attention” (PhD diss.,  Dublin City University School of Theology. 2023), 91.

[160] Bradley Jersak, personal correspondence, Feb. 18, 2025, Cf. Bradley Jersak, From the Cave to the Cross: The Cruciform Theology of George P. Grant and Simone Weil.” (Abbotsford: St. Macrina Press. 2015).

[161]  Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. A. C. Spearing. (London: Penguin. 2001), 44-45. 

[162] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27.

[163] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27.

[164] Julian of Norwich. Showings. trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh. (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978), 126-127.

[165] Tarry Tastard. “Simone Weil’s Last Journey.” America Magazine – the Jesuit Review. April 9, 2001.

[166] Sam Moreton et. al. “Reduced death anxiety as a mediator of the relationship between acute subjective effects of psychedelics and improved subjective well-being.” Death Studies, 47, no.10 (2023): 1120, https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2023.2169848

[167] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. (New York: Harper Collins, 2017): 1-2.

[168] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12.

[169] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17.

[170] Taylor, Sources of the Self. 12.

[171] Paul Tillich “You Are Accepted” Sermon, accessed May 5, 2024, https://wedgeblade.net/files/archives_assets/20810.pdf

[172] Tillich “You Are Accepted”

[173] Paul Tillich “You Are Accepted” Sermon, accessed May 5, 2024, https://wedgeblade.net/files/archives_assets/20810.pdf

[174] John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 244.

[174] Caputo, The Insistence of God,  251.

[175] Caputo, The Insistence of God, 205-206.

[176] John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 244.

[177] Caputo, The Insistence of God,   230.

[178] Peter Rollins,  “Church of the Contradiction, proclaiming the Unknowing God,” in Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, (Everyday Analysis, 2023), 33.

[179] Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 34.

[180] Rollins, “Church of the Contradiction”, 32.

[181] Peter Rollins,  “Church of the Contradiction, proclaiming the Unknowing God,” in Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, (Everyday Analysis, 2023), 33.

[182] Julie Reshe “Forgive and Die,” in Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, (Everyday Analysis, 2023), 10.

[183] Simone Weil,  The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Trans. A Wills. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 542. Referenced in Scott McLaughlin Marratto and Lawrence E. Schmidt “The Measure of Justice: The Language of Limit as Key to Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy.” The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, 28, 2000, 57.

[184] Julie Reshe “Forgive and Die,” in Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, (Everyday Analysis, 2023), 12.

[185] Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” 12.

[186] Reshe “Forgive and Die,”), 12.

[187] Reshe “Forgive and Die,” 13.

[188] Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” 13.

[189] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, ( Rockport MA: Element Inc., Out of Print, 1993), 29.

[190] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 240-241.

[191] F.W.J. Schelling, "Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom," in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler, (New York: Continuum, 1987), 274.

[192] David Tracy, "Religious Values after the Holocaust," in A Holocaust Reader, ed. Michael L. Morgan (New York, Oxford University Press, 2001), 237.

[193] Slavoj Žižek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, Section 2 Kierkegaard, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html 

[194] Slavoj Žižek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, Section 2 Kierkegaard, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html  Section 2.

[195] Slavoj Žižek, “The Pressure of Meaning” Electron Media Group, Inc. December 19, 2014, audio, 25:08-25:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qVAxuHRKOw.

[196] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, ( Rockport MA: Element Inc., Out of Print, 1993), 31.

[197] Paul Tillich “You Are Accepted” Sermon, accessed May 5, 2024, https://wedgeblade.net/files/archives_assets/20810.pdf

[198] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion, ( Rockport MA: Element Inc., Out of Print, 1993), 10.

[199] Brad Jersak, “The Great Deconstruction” accessed February 12, 2025. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7WApYLhLvg.

[200] Often this is explained by substitutionary atonement theology that states that Christ’s death served as substitute for the blood sacrifice God needed to be able to forgive sins and, in this way, it redeems us.

[201] Slavoj Žižek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, Section 2 Kierkegaard, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html.

[202] This echoes Jesus’ words in Matthew 7 where he admonishes his followers to abdicate judgement, then contrasts good trees and good fruit with bad trees and bad fruit. (Matthew 7:1-5; 15-20, NRSVUE)

[203] When Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46 NRSVUE).

[204] Slavoj Žižek, On Belief, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 145.

[205] Žižek, On Belief,  145.

[206] “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17 NRSVUE).

[207]

“If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” (Romans 6:8 NRSVUE).

“If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24 NRSVUE).

“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1 NRSVUE).

[208]

“Therefore, we were buried with him by baptism into death.” (Romans 6:4 NRSVUE).

“He took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it.  He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” (Mark 14:22-23 NRSVUE).

[209] Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death, (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 31.

[210] Beck, The Slavery of Death, 31. 

[211] William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience, (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2006 reprint), 55-57.

[212] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-president-donald-trump-changing-statements-on-coronavirus/

[213] William Mingus, and Bradley Zopf, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry: The Racial Project in Explaining Mass Shootings.” Social Thought & Research, 31 (2010): 73.

[214] Although more countries are experiencing violent conflict, the absolute number of war deaths in 2016 declined since 1946. “A New Era of Conflict and Violence” United Nations, accessed July 9, 2024, https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence

[215] “Human Population Growth and Extinction,” Center for Biological Diversity, accessed September 1, 2024, https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/

[216] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, (London: Methuen, 2007).

[217] “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23 (NRSVUE).

[218] “Coronavirus Church Closures are Not Persecution,” Christianity Today, accessed September 1, 2024, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2020/10/persecution-coronavirus-churches-closed-religious-freedom/

[219] Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time,” Gallup, accessed September 1, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx

[220] Andrew Fenelon and Sabrina Danielsen, “Leaving my Religion: Understanding the Relationship Between Religious Disaffiliation, Health, and Well-Being.” Social Science Research, 57, (2016):49-62.

[221] Julie Reshe, “Forgive and Die,” Religion, Psychoanalysis and Marxism, (Everyday Analysis, 2023), 12.

 [222] Simone Weil,  The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Trans. A Wills. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 542. Referenced in Scott McLaughlin Marratto and Lawrence E. Schmidt “The Measure of Justice: The Language of Limit as Key to Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy.” The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, 28, 2000, 57.

[223] Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation, (London: Repeater Books, 2024), 148.

[224] Slavoj Žižek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, Section 2 Kierkegaard, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html. 

[225] [Jesus] “turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Matthew 16:23, NRSVUE).

[226] Simone Weil,  The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Trans. A Wills. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 386. Referenced in Lissa McCullough, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction, (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd., 2014), 15.

[227] Lissa McCullough, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction, (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd., 2014), 15.

[228] Thomas J.J. Altizer, asserts that the withdrawal of god from power and infinitude is where evil has its origin.  Godhead and the Nothing, (Albany New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 37.

[229] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 147-149.

[230] Weil. Gravity and Grace, 147-149.

[231] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 147-149.

[232] Julian of Norwich. Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 153.

[233] Norwich. Showings, 148.

[234] Joshua Kurtz, et.al., “The Use of Psychedelics in the Treatment of Medical Conditions: An Analysis of Currently Registered Psychedelics Studies in the American Drug Trial Registry,” Cureus, 14, no. 9 (2022): 6, doi: 10.7759/cureus.29167.

[235] Frederick Barrett, et.al., “Psilocybin acutely alters functional connectivity of the claustrum with brain networks that support perception, memory, and attention,” NeuroImage, 218, (2020): 8. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116980

[236] Lukasz Smigielski, et.al., “Psilocybin-assisted mindfulness training modulates self-consciousness and brain default mode network connectivity with lasting effects,” NeuroImage, 196, (2019): 207.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.04.009.

[237] Or Segal, Karin Bronshtein and Noam Weinbach, “The benefits of radical acceptance of reality as a standalone strategy for emotional regulation,” Current Psychology, (2025), doi.org/10.1007/s12144-025-07286-0

Where can I find her?

From the beginning, she was bone of our bones,

We were flesh of her flesh.

She pulsed in our veins.

Her eyes looked into our souls.

She was a word of wisdom and a peaceful silence that cradled our questions in her hands ….and told us our truth. 

She was the keeper of our secrets and our stories.

She was cool, silk hands on our foreheads, that brushed the hair from our eyes. 

She was the rock beneath our feet and the soft landing place for our hearts.

She was a resting place and a pillow for our heads.

She was home.

Where will we find her now that she is gone?

We will find her in a sigh, in a soft breeze, a blue sky.

We will find her in the warmth of the kitten, and in the soft head of every dog.   

She sparkles in every painted nail and will join in on every joke.

She will be there for every grand adventure, and every hand of cards.

We will find her in the morning fragrance on a spring day, and the song that will rock us to sleep at night.

She will be in every cool soft hand.

We will hear her in every note when a piano is played.

We will see her on every stage and in every song.

The songs!!  K-K-K-Katie will always be waiting at the K-K-K-Kitchen door, no one will dump their junk in my backyard, and lots of chocolate for me to eat will always be loverly.

She will be in every red rose, every orange shirt in the stadium, in purple and in every snickers bar, and every bite of an oatmeal cookie.

She will be in every double rainbow in the sky and the wind that comes sweeping down the plain.

She is in my brown eye and the blue vein on the back of my hand.  

She is in the voice of my brother, and the paintbrush of the other.

She is in the songs my sister sings.

She sparkles from the eyes of one daughter, and the smiles of the others. She rings in the laugh of our sons.

And when we rock  our grandchildren and sing them to sleep, she will be there.

She is bone of our bones, flesh of our flesh.

We hid within her, and she will hide within us all.

This is my body

We broke off pieces of our souls and elevated those hosts.

The bread of the song and the story,

the wine of the poem.

A cloud of witnesses.

This is my body - given for you

So that you may laugh or weep or sing

Broken

So that you may live

PB & J Communion

Dad is slipping

Away

Bit by Bit

One excruciating piece at a time

The obsessively neat and tidy one

Whose sock drawer was the impossible gradient of rolls from white

to black

doesn’t shower

And leaves his pants on the floor … when he wears them

And his shit in the toilet … when he uses is.

He lays in a bed trying to remember his words

and names

As he slips away, I slip with him

Bit by Bit

His sentences are lost, his words, his “I love yous”

I slip and slide as the man who held me on his wide shoulders slips away

I grieve the man who brought my mom flowers and diamonds

Who danced and twirled

Who whistled and cheered and called the plays

Who opened doors and fought off monsters. Mine and his.

And yet…

Each day

He orders a sandwich from the nursing home kitchen

And waits with his peanut butter and jelly for his love.

She arrives and sits

She holds his hand - more skeleton than flesh

And he takes the bread, and breaks it

And gives her half

And there together as their 61 year old love affair slips away in shit and antiseptic

They eat

This is his body - broken - given for her

This is their eucharist

Their holy communion

Let us be Lost

Let us be lost always

You know me…

Sometimes the desire to be lost comes over me like a vapor

I am 

Such a stranger to myself

I go up…

to heaven

I make my bed…

in hell

I hardly exist

I wear so many heavy coats

And Darkness far more wonderful than any words 

You are there

Inescapable

This darkness is a blind man’s beginning

Creating all of creation and breaking it down

Seeing everything and nothing

Possibilities and horrors

Do you think there is anything in darkness that is not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else? 

Darkness and light are the same. 

If this is lost… let us be lost always.

When COVID happens in Vegas, it doesn’t stay in Vegas.

I’m COVID positive in Vegas and what a strange trip it has been.

I was in Vegas to attend a work conference and arrived four days early to visit my brother and my mother who is in a nursing home there. 

I came to Vegas right after a girl’s weekend with three vaccinated friends.  One of the friends had an upper respiratory infection during our trip, but was tested before and after the trip and tested COVID negative both times.   So, when on day two of my Vegas visit, I got a little scratchy throat I chalked it up to the dry air.  And on day three, when I got the sniffles, I assumed I had caught my friend’s respiratory thing. 

I went to check into the Mandalay Bay for my conference on a Thursday.  Our conference materials said that the hotel had on-site COVID testing and I thought my co-workers at the conference would want to be reassured that my sniffles were not COVID, so I called for the test.   They couldn’t test me until Saturday.  I wanted the test before attending any conference activities, so I set out to find a test elsewhere.  Not an easy task in Vegas. 

I signed up online for a test at a testing center nearby and masked up and Ubered on over.  Despite the fact I could sign up online, the center was closed.  CVS couldn’t see me same-day.  Neither could Walgreens.   Where exactly was one supposed to get tested in Vegas?

Care Now Urgent Care could see me, so back into an Uber and across town to Care Now. 

A couple of hours later and after the requisite swab-up-the-nose I was told I was COVID positive.  I was sure I had heard her wrong, insisting I am vaccinated.   A silly response to be sure, I’m smart enough to know that there are breakthrough cases.  But still, surely that happened to other people, not to me.  Not right before a conference I was looking forward to.  Not in Vegas. 

I took the paperwork and prescriptions from the Care Now doctor and walked across the street to the CVS.  The store was open but the pharmacy was closed.  So, I set about finding a 24 hour pharmacy in Vegas.  Despite the fact that several were listed online as 24-hour, when I called to confirm, they were, in fact closed. 

With my phone at 4% charge, I was able to find a 24 hour Walgreens halfway across town and masked up and Ubered on over.  I was feeling guilty at this point for getting in an Uber, but what choice did I have?  I had sanitizing wipes with me and wiped off every handle I touched.  My mask was an N-95.  But still…..

I got the prescriptions filled and had just enough charge on my phone to get an Uber back to Mandalay Bay.  Whew. 

I notified my co-workers and Human Resources department who advised me to notify the Mandalay Bay.  The Mandalay Bay told me they did not know what the current protocol was for COVID positive guests.  They said they’d never had a COVID positive guest before.  Hard to believe.  Maybe no one had ever admitted it to them before. 

Mandalay Bay passed it up the chain and a director, who was fantastic contacted me and said she was checking on the policy.   She got back with me and told me that Clarke County requires them to move COVID positive guests off the strip to a special COVID hotel that is paid for by the state.  She assured me it a nice hotel and they will provide me with meals, laundry service and transportation to the hotel, all paid for by the state of Nevada.   Sounds like a pretty good deal.  The COVID hotel was full, so I would quarantine at the Mandalay Bay for one more night.   Contactless room service.  No problem.

The next day, a non-emergency ambulance transport picked me up to take me to the COVID hotel. 

When I arrived at the COVID hotel, it was not as expected.  It was a run-down Super 8 motel in a marginal part of town.   All the residents that were visible and hanging out, were unmasked.  Clearly not COVID positive folks.  I was handed a sheaf of papers asking for various personal information (Social Security number, etc.), medical information, medical releases, drug rehab agreements, rules about leaving the property, rules about outside people coming onto the property, etc.   

Drug rehab agreements?

It became obvious to me that I was at a facility that at some point during COVID had been converted to help get the homeless off the street.  A great thing to be sure, but not what I was expecting to be housed in.  Not what Mandalay Bay had led me to expect.  Not what Vegas needs to be doing if they want people to be truthful, to get off the strip and to stay off the airplanes going home.

The staff at the COVID hotel was lovely, helpful, accommodating.   I was not comfortable with the paperwork, so I called my HR department to tell them I would be looking for different options.  But what were my options?  The non-emergency transport was gone and I was told that Uber and Taxis would not pick up at that location due to the nature of what the facility was. 

Was a trapped?   Thank goodness my brother lived in Vegas, otherwise it would have felt that way.   My brother and his husband had told me I could quarantine at their house, but I didn’t want to expose them any more than I already had – if I could find another option. 

I called rental car companies to rent a one-way rental and just get out of Vegas and get home.  There were no one-way rentals to be had. 

Meanwhile, the temperature had climbed to 106 degrees while I sat outside with all my luggage trying to find options.  The lovely staff at the COVID hotel told me to go ahead and get into the air conditioned room at least temporarily.  No paperwork required. 

So I did. 

The room wasn’t good, but I’ve seen worse.  It was obvious the bathroom had not been cleaned since the last resident stayed there.  The toilet, sink and shower were dirty.  There were no blankets on the bed.  I called the staff and they brought me a whole tub of Lysol wipes, a case of water, blankets, extra toilet paper.  They were very nice. 

I wiped down the bathroom, and every other surface in the place. 

The internet was good.

I thought I’d stay a bit and get a feel about it. 

Maybe I could make it work.  I wasn’t that delicate was I?   I would be locked in after all.  So, what difference did it make what was outside the door? 

Then, a couple of hours later there was a knock on the door.  No one in the peephole.  I looked out the window, no one there.  I opened the door with the security bar in place.  A guy was standing in front of the next room.  He told me that there was a guy walking up and down randomly knocking on doors.  Hm.

I went back into my room and considered how truthful this was likely to be.  I hadn’t seen anyone but him.  I wondered if he were just scoping out the room to see who was inside.  Now he knew. 

About twenty minutes later, another knock.  No one at the peephole.  But same guy standing there when I peeked out the window.  Seemed I was being pestered. 

I called the front desk and told them what was going on and let them know I’d be finding another option.  Time to call my brother for a rescue. 

I found a hotel in town and decided I would just quarantine elsewhere.  Oh, I know, it wasn’t ethical to go into a hotel knowing I had COVID.  I get it.  But my ethics had landed me at the COVID hotel and it was time to go. 

My brother and his husband masked up and picked me up.  As I lugged my suitcases down the stairs, an elderly African American man offered to help me with them.  I told him I was contagious and he shouldn’t touch my luggage.  He thought I was being racist and said so.  I tried to re-explain that I was contagious, but he was merely offended. 

We drove with the windows down to my chosen hotel.  I wiped down every surface in their car as I exited. 

I checked in with the N-95 mask, handling my credit cards with a Lysol wipe.  I hoped the guy at the desk didn’t suspect.  Hopefully he just thought I was a germophobe.

No maid service. I’ve been working from the room, eating peanut butter M&M’s, chips and guacamole (courtesy of my co-workers who ubered over with an enormous bag of goodies) and contactless door dash for dinner.

 I admit I’ve been going to the ice machine to get ice in my N-95 mask.  But I touch the ice maker with a Lysol wipe and haven’t seen or had contact with anyone. 

Yesterday, I got a message from the convention letting convention attendees know that another convention attendee had tested COVID positive, and letting them know they’d all been exposed.  I wondered what had happened to that COVID positive attendee.  I bet he didn’t end up at the COVID hotel. 

I heard today that a doctor at the convention had rented a round-trip rental car and just drove it one way to Louisiana regardless of how his rental was set up.  Was he the COVID positive guy?  At least he found a way out of Vegas. 

But I’ve never been a rule breaker and wouldn’t have thought of just breaking the car rental rules.

So I’m still in Vegas and have four days more to quarantine in Vegas.  And it’s fine.  I’ve thought about my in-laws who are in a nursing home and could not leave their room for an entire year during COVID last year.  They ate in their room, they stayed in their room.  For a year. 

A week is a short time. 

COVID in Vegas, does not stay in Vegas.  COVID anywhere doesn’t stay contained, even by vaccinations.

Don’t’ get me wrong, I support vaccinations.  But, all those folks at the convention who were exposed by the COVID positive guy, are flying home to places all over the country.  Most of them are vaccinated -- it was a doctor’s convention.  But nonetheless, some of them, like me, may be infected breakthrough cases, infecting other people.  I walked around Vegas infected for several days before I got tested.  Thank god I only saw my mom through the window of her nursing home.  Thank goodness I tested before the convention and didn’t go to any of the convention events.  But still, who knows who I infected?  Was it someone with vulnerable health?  Someone’s baby?  Someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, grandmother, grandfather?

Because I was vaccinated, I saw myself as one of the ones who was NOT the problem.  It was the unvaccinated who were the problem, who needed to still mask-up, who needed to be concerned about themselves and their impact on others. 

But it’s not true.  We are all still a part of this, vaccine or not.  We all still have the potential to become infected, to pass it to others.  

It’s too easy to point the finger.  It’s too easy to live in a headspace of what the other guy needs to do to make this problem go away, what needs to happen to make the world as it “should” be.  Regardless of what side of the issue you are on. 

But the world is not what it should be.  It never was.  It never will be. 

And COVID has shown us that we have to figure out how to live with that reality without destroying each other.  Literally. 

Pointing the finger is not the way to make the world as it should be.  Scapegoating others won’t do it.  Somehow we need to figure out how to be united in this rather than divided.  Because the reality is – we are united in this.  Way more than any of us want to be and it’s that reality that we are pushing against.  It’s hard to be that connected to others because we can’t control them. 

I can’t control if my neighbor gets the vaccine.  I can only control my choices in this.  Whether or not I get the vaccine, whether or not I continue to wear a mask so that if I get a breakthrough infection I don’t infect others.  Whether or not I can respect my neighbor’s decisions and forgive them.  And if I infected my neighbor this week, can he forgive mine? 

Short Stories, essays, poetry, dreams and whatever RSS

Dreams of you

I dreamed of you last night. 

Growing inside me.

I didn’t know whether to be scared because

Sometimes

Dreams come true

I didn’t know whether to be excited because you haven’t told me who you are

What you are,

and

Sometimes

Dreams come true

A dream of patriarchy

When I was 29 I had a dream

I will never forget

The scene was dark.

Pitch black and the blackest red.

In the black was a cold, stone slab.

On it

was me.

Stripped and naked and surrounded by them all.

All of them.

No faces, just bodies. Except my dad and my beloved.

They cut me at the wrists and the ankles to see if I would live.

The blood drained out of me and I grew tired

So tired.

When they saw that I would live, my beloved made me pregnant.

I was strong enough to create life.

Artwork taken from: https://soundcloud.com/couchboysnl/couch-human-sacrifice

We're close

We’re close they said

Close

One day?

One week?

One hour?

Breath in, breath out.

I went home and planted my flowers. 

It was something I could do.

Breath in, breath out.

I went home and cleaned my house.

It was something I could control.

Like my breath. 

Bearing Witness

The last time I saw you, you were lying in the bed, t-shirt around your chest.

Your white chest was peppered with purple bruises where they had stuck you time and time again, it labored with its rising and falling as you struggled to stay in your body.

Your hand was blackened and bruised and twitched as you dreamed a dream that lacked peace; the flesh had sunken between the frail bones

Your eyes were closed and crusted over. 

I wanted to take a warm sweet cloth and wipe them clean.

I wanted to wipe down your ravaged body and make it young and vigorous again.

I wanted you to be strong and steady to take care of me again as you had all those years.   

But instead, I sat beside you bearing witness to your humanity, hoping I was taking care of you at least half as good as you had taken care of me. 

Probably not.

I was just bearing witness. 

Faith

Cleaning the shit is faith

he becomes

a shell, a husk, a child

The tears are damned and create a dry and lifeless soul.   

Spent

Who can be bothered with the shit

We spoke of dust

We spoke of dust, of scattering, of burial.

We spoke of guns and the end.

It's the first time we've spoken of it, beautiful and horrible, even as he disappears before my eyes. 

Withering and wilting,

tripping and falling. 

Breaking down into dust. 

Grace is evolution - essay

This essay comes out of dream.

I’m a scientist so it’s a little weird that I believe in dreams.  But I do.

Last year I had a dream.  It had the strange and distinct quality of dreams I have that are different than other dreams.  Dreams that I feel are calling to me or telling me something.  Dreams that are sometimes prophetic. 

In the dream a rush of something I can only describe as "gray-ness" came toward me.  It looked kind of like a huge whirlpool and rushed hard and powerful toward my face.   It was a little terrifying like it might sweep me into it.

Then I awoke to a loud, booming voice that said:  

“Grace is evolution.”

Grace is an infinite number. 

Grace is evolution. 

Evolution is grace.

The story of the moths

The moth was an ordinary grey moth in every way, except for the fact that she felt as humans feel and thought as humans think.  She had a good life and was thankful to god for her life.  She lived on a tree with a grey trunk and her soft peppered grey color hid her from the monstrous moth-eating bird monsters.  

She had heard that there was a strange thing happening in the moth community.  Some moth mothers were having black babies.  This was a terrible evil because the black moth babies were easy prey for the bird monsters and the mothers had to endure the horror of seeing their beautiful babies eaten right before their very eyes. She thanked god every night that she was a grey moth and her babies had all been born grey. 

One day the unthinkable happened and the soft grey moth had a black baby.  She did everything she could think of to hide the baby.  She positioned it in the deepest crevices she knew of behind a branch in the tree. She prayed to god to protect her baby.  But despite all her best efforts, it didn’t work.  The bird monster saw her lovely black baby almost immediately and ate the baby whole right in front of her eyes. 

The moth became deeply depressed.  She grieved for her baby.  The world was a dark and evil place to her.  What kind of a world was it where babies could be born with such a terrible disability?   She didn’t want to bring any babies into such a terrifying and evil world. 

But because she was a moth, birth control was not an option.  She kept having babies.  She used to love being a mother, but now the prospect of motherhood was an awful one.  She still loved her babies, but she lived in fear and anxiety.  Some of her babies were born soft grey like her and she felt a wave of relief and gratitude to God.  But some were black.  As the months of her life went by, she grew more and more deeply depressed as she saw one black baby after another die a cruel and horrifying death in the beak of bird after bird.  She began to curse God and eventually came to believe there was no God at all.  How could a loving God create black moths? 

After a time, the mother moth died, but within her moth community, black babies continued to be born.  .

The moth community discussed this awful evil at length.  The world was a dark and terrible place.  They discussed what measures they could take to eradicate the great evil of this black coloring mutation.  They discussed what types of protective measures they could put into place against the birds.   But they were just moths and were helpless in the face of it. 

Moth theologians and philosophers debated on the question of suffering.  How could a loving God create such suffering?  Did the black moths come from God or Satan?  Was there even a god? 

But a strange thing was happening in the city that the moths were unaware of. 

A factory had been built that was pumping gallons of black smoke into the air.  Little by little the soot coated the trees and the bark became darker and darker. 

Pretty soon the soft grey moths were being eaten in great numbers and all that was left alive were the black moths.  Sad and orphaned as they watched their lovely grey mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters eaten one after the other right before their very eyes. 

What kind of an evil God would allow for such death and destruction?  How could a loving God allow the trees to become black?  Was there even a God?

Eventually only black moths were left - a shockingly low number of moths.  But there were enough to have babies.  The black moths were having mostly black babies.  The black moths thanked god for being black.  But still, evil persisted and every so often a grey baby moth was born and was promptly eaten by the birds.  

As the years went by the moth elders told stories to the younger moths about how their entire species used to be grey and the trees used to be grey.  They told the story about how in those times, it was a great evil was to be born black.  None of them could remember this way of thinking about evil.  It was good to be black and terrible to be born grey.  

But a strange thing was happening in the city that the moths were unaware of. 

The soot in the air was making people sick.  Governments were passing laws that factories couldn’t billow huge clouds of black smoke into the air.  And little by little the trees were becoming grey again. 

Pretty soon the black moths were being eaten in great numbers and all that was left alive were the few grey moth babies, sad and orphaned as they watched their beautiful black mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters eaten one after the other right before their very eyes. 

What kind of an evil God would allow for such death and destruction? How could a loving God allow the air to become clean and the trees to become grey?  Was there even a God?

Eventually only grey moths were left - a shockingly low number of moths.  But there were enough to have babies.  The grey moths were having mostly grey babies.  Every so often a black baby moth was born, but it was promptly eaten by the birds.  

As the years went by the elder moths told the young moths stories about how their entire species used to be black and the trees used to be black.  They told the story about how in those times, the great evil was to be born grey.  But none of them could remember this way of thinking about evil.

It was good to be born grey and terrible to be born black.

(This story is a fictional adaptation based on a phenomenon during the industrial revolution in England in peppered moths  Biston betularia f. typical)

Science and Religion

I'm a biologist and I like to think about spiritual things in light of biology.  Science has always been a religious experience for me.  That is why I love science and the study of biology.   It is my church.

“Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Romans 1:20)

I have always felt that in studying biology, I am studying God himself.  Creation is God’s revelation of himself.  Before the incarnation of Jesus was the creation.   It was god’s first incarnation.  In studying biology, I am studying what has come forth from God.  Creation reveals the creative force behind it.  I use the word "god" for that force, but you might dislike that word and prefer another one - or none at all.  That's fine.  I find the principles are the important thing, not the metaphors and words we use to try to describe them.  A rose by any other name......

Scientific pursuit feels like spiritual pursuit. Not just in the way that it is the study of God’s creation, but also in the nature of the pursuit itself.  In science, discoveries are made and disproven and made and disproven over and over again as one revelation builds upon another time and time again.  Scientists live with the knowledge that there is no holy grail.  Nature is at once revealing itself and concealing itself.  As soon as they discover something, it will become immediately obsolete.  The universe and its secrets are infinite.  And they love it. 

So it is with God. 

There is no holy grail in the pursuit of God.  God is unknowable.  Whatever we make of god today, if we are seeking, we will unmake of god tomorrow.  God is always revealing and ever concealing himself.   As soon as we discover some truth, it will immediately become obsolete.  God and her secrets are infinite.   And we love that.  

So it’s always been puzzling to me that science and religion have ended up enemies so many times.  I never had a problem with the Genesis story.  It said seven days, but I always felt it was poetry.

“And there was evening and there was morning the first day”

The sun and moon hadn’t even been created yet, it seemed quite obvious to me it wasn’t a literal 24 hour day.  It wasn’t morning and evening as we know it.  It was a figurative “day”.  Like, “in the day of King Nebuchadnezzar”  

A time period.

An Eon. 

An Age.

Evolution

Even in my most fundamentalist religious days, I never felt that there was a conflict between evolution and religion.  It seemed to me that a God who created things that evolved was far more miraculous and powerful and interesting than a God who could only create non-changeable things.  

Evolution is fascinating and miraculous.  It makes sense to me.  Much of the religious objection I hear about evolution is based in incorrect fact and misinformation. 

Let’s do a little basic evolutionary review.

DNA replicates.   This happens all the time, over and over in order to keep any organism alive. When DNA replicates, often errors or mutations occur. Most mutations on the DNA are harmless and nothing comes of them. Some mutations on the DNA are lethal and the cell or even the entire organism dies. Some are harmful and can lead to disability or disease of the organism. 

Like the moth in the story, if you are the owner of the disability or disease, or the parent of the disabled or diseased, to you this is painful, tragic,

….evil.

If you are the offspring of that mutated organism and generations later,  the mutation has given you a survival advantage – to you it is good. 

Good and Evil

Good and evil

Evil and good.

Many times it’s our vantage point that determine which is which. 

If you were watching woman giving birth, but you didn’t have any idea that a child was on its way, all you would see is a great deal of suffering.  You would see hours of pain, blood and gore.  You would hear screams of agony.  If no baby comes forth, you might see the woman die. 

You would think, “What a terrible evil – this suffering she endured!!”  And you would be right.

But if a baby is born you would see the woman’s suffering turn to joy and you would change your judgement.  You would think that you had just witnessed a great good.  And you would be right.

If you standing at the crucifixion of Jesus, and you believed him to be a good man, or the son of God even, you would think you were witnessing a terrible evil. And you would be right.

If you thought him to be an enemy of God or an enemy of the state, you would think you were witnessing an act of good and of justice.  If you knew his death was a redemptive act, you would think you were witnessing good.     And you would be right.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if a thing is good or evil.

Even in your own life, you can probably look back on many events that at the time were tragedies.  You may have raged at God, or at the fates, or at the world.  You may have despaired of life itself, or tried to kill yourself.  I’ve been there.

But sometimes, after you make it through to the other side, you look back on those times and see that you were transformed.  The great evil became an agent for great good in your life.  I’ve been there too.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if a thing is good or evil. It’s caught up in vantage point and timing.

In the present tense, in “quick time”, a thing may be evil.

In the  future tense, in “deep time”, that same thing may be good. 

Or not.

It can’t be reduced to a simple equation or to a platitude that says that everything works together for the greater good.  Not all error in life or in biology leads to good.  Sometimes it can lead to death and destruction. 

That’s why it’s tricky when human beings, who live in quick time get into the business of discerning good from evil.

There was a story about that:

The story went that the man and the woman lived in deep time where everything was good.  But they thought they needed to improve upon things and become more like god, so they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  But instead of becoming more like god, they began to determine what’s good and what’s bad.  They thought their nakedness was bad.

The story has lots of twists and turns.  Lots of chapters and characters that talk about how mankind over and over keeps trying to be godly, but they keep misunderstanding God and godliness.  How they continue to use their knowledge of good and evil and create death time and time again.

The finale of the story takes place centuries later.  God comes to earth and goes around telling people, “Hey, all these things you’ve judged as bad?  Those prostitutes?  Those tax collectors?  Those Samaritans?  Those lepers?  Those laws?  You got the whole good/bad thing wrong.  You suck at figuring out what is good and what is bad.  You should have never gotten into that knowledge of good and evil game to begin with.

It was curse.

Let me reverse it

It started with a tree.

I’ll end it with a tree.

That would be poetic.

Grace and the Law

My religious upbringing taught me that Grace was pretty much the same as forgiveness.  Some would go so far as to say it was “unmerited favor” with God.  It left me with the perspective that Grace was the aspect of God that looked turned a blind eye to my imperfections.   In my earlier fundamentalist days, grace was tenuous.  You had to do just the right things; believe, repent, confess, be baptized to be a recipient of this grace.  You had to continue to live the right kind of life to remain in this state of forgiveness and grace.   Later on it opened up and I came to believe that once I received this grace and forgiveness, there was nothing I could do to lose it.   And even later on I moved to a belief that the Grace was given freely and no spiritual act I had performed had put me in a “right relationship” or a place of Grace with God.  Not even faith.   This evolution of belief is still a work in progress. 

It seems to me now that grace, rather than being a “state” I am in with God is in fact an aspect of being that we can either sit in and enjoy, or take ourselves out of.   It’s always just there as an underlying fact or principle.  We cannot search for it or enter into it, or take hold of it.  How can we enter into something we already have hard wired not only into ourselves, but into all of creation?  We can only acknowledge it and enjoy it. 

Grace says:  God created goodness.  You cannot.   

Grace says:  there is nothing you need to change to be more “good” or more “like God”. 

Grace says:  Everything is permissible

So anything can happen. 

Anything, so….

Grace is infinity. 

Grace says there are endless possibilities and outcomes.  

Grace is the full openness to an infinite number of options. 

With Grace we are out of control. 

Grace allows for error

Grace opens things up for error

With Grace error CAN occur

With Grace error DOES occur. 

With error comes suffering. 

Wait a minute – with grace comes suffering?   Aren’t we taught that grace alleviates suffering? 

But we know just by observing the world around us that not all error ends in good, not in life, not in biology.   Not all mutations lead to life.  Some just end in death. But the same mechanism that opens up error also allows for life.  Grace is that mechanism.  It is that permission for endless possibilities.  It is that infinity. 

Let's just stop there and be honest - we hate this. This is our fundamental problem with grace.  It’s why we resist it on so many levels.  You see grace cannot be infinite if options are limited only to those options we call good. Even so, we like to limit the options.  We like to control things.  We like predictability, security and knowledge of what the future holds -- at least to some degree.  

We like that tree of knowledge of good and evil. We like law. 

We don't want the people we love to change too much, we don't want our bodies or our health to change too much, we want secure jobs, secure homes, secure incomes, secure economies, secure stock markets, secure political systems.  We like to analyze things and put them into neat little categories so that we can feel like we understand them.  So that we feel some measure of control.

Right/wrong. 

Good/bad. 

Dualisms. 

Laws.

With law we can create good. Good laws, good policies, good societies, good deeds in people. 

With law:  We are always trying to be more “good” and more “like God”. 

With law:  we define what is and is not permissible

So we can control outcomes and limit unpredictability

Law is a finite number.   

With law we are in control, trying to control. 

Law limits error and that’s a good thing right?

Because with error comes suffering. 

Grace is evolution

In the very essence and basic building block of life – the DNA – we find laws at work.  These laws of nature tell the DNA how it will replicate and how that will lead to life.  Built into these laws we find another law of nature.  This is the law of error.  

The law of error says that error can occur, error will occur, error must occur.  Error will lead to variance, and that variance can be harmless, or it can lead to terrible mutations, or it can lead to death, or it can provide the very material for life in situations where the environment is changing.

The capacity for error is infinite. 

With Grace the capacity for error is infinite.  Grace is door that opens everything up to  error. 

In spiritual terms, sin is often another word used for error.  Sin is the spiritual equivalent of the error in DNA replication.  Many times, very little comes of it.  Sometimes it has terrible, destructive consequences.  Sometimes it leads to death. 

But without it, we lose our capacity to grow and change.  We lose our capacity to evolve.

So, maybe it’s built into the whole system.

It’s an integral part of life.   

People debate the question of god and suffering, of god and the existence of evil.   Some will say that sin, error or evil only occur by chance and they have nothing to do with God, others will say it is God's plan, and still others will say it is NOT God’s plan, but rather a part of the "fallen-ness" of creation, or the work of Satan. 

If God is good, can he create evil?  If God is love, why is there evil? 

We tend to think that an all-loving god would not create a system that contained evil.  We tend to think if we could live perfectly under a set of rules of good and evil, and no error were to occur, this would be a utopia, paradise, Eden, heaven. 

In the story of the Garden of Eden then the question is often asked, "why did God even put the tree there?  Why would he tempt people with evil?"     And whether you read the story as allegorical, mythological or literal, the answer to that question may be the same.   The very fact that God (or creation, or biology, or the ground of all being), allows for freedom for error -- is not a temptation to evil, or evil itself.  It is the creation of the opportunity for error.  It is Grace.

Regardless of where you come down on this, it seems obvious to me that in some way the error, that we call evil or sin is hard wired into the very system and is necessary for growth and change to occur. 

The very error that brings suffering and death, the very EVIL – IS also the very thing that also contains the capacity for change, growth, survival, 

Grace makes space for error.  Law does not.  Life cannot occur without error.  Grace makes life out of error. 

LIFE

From the place that brings death, life is possible.  .  

Biological life, emotional life, spiritual life. 

So, good and evil are bound up in the same thing. The debate of can love create evil, can good create evil does not need to arrive at an either/or conclusion. 

It could be both/and.  

Both are God’s grace. 

“first there is the fall, then there is the recovery from the fall.  Both are the Grace of God”   Julian of Norwich