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The God We Meet in Jesus - Dr. Paul Axton of Forging Ploughshares
71 Plays2 months ago
Is the Lord’s Supper an act of resistance against empire? What does Christ the logos mean for how we know God? Where has the church missed the mark? Dr. Paul Axton, Director of Ploughshares Bible Institute and host of the Forging Ploughshares Podcast, joins Matt and Nick in discussing psychology, atonement, and the church’s call to live as a peaceful kingdom community. He offers some harsh critiques for christian participation in the ways of the world rather than the way of the cross.
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:00
Speaker
We're sharing a conversation today that we were able to have with one of our heroes, Dr. Paul Axton, who is the president of Plowshares Bible Institute and the host of Forging Plowshares podcast, one of my favorites. Through his time in Japan as a missionary and through his psychoanalytical studies, I found him to be really insightful and challenging as he invites us into considering what the radically peaceful kingdom of God looks like and what a nonviolent God looks like.
00:00:26
Speaker
I hope the conversation's insightful and hope you listen to his podcast. Enjoy the conversation with Dr. Paul Axton.
Jesus' Apocalyptic Vision and Nonviolence
00:00:34
Speaker
In a recent sermon series, you talk about the interlocking of the apocalyptic vision, along with the nonviolent ethic of Jesus as demonstrated in his life and in his passion. um You talk about the apocalyptic beatitudes and how we need the eschatological vision and the model. They both depend on each other to work. So I'd be curious to let you talk us through that a little bit. Why do we need both the eschatological vision of the peaceful kingdom of God to come,
00:01:04
Speaker
and the means as seen in the Passion of Jesus. Yeah, I mean, at a basic level, it's just putting together faith and
Sermon on the Mount's Significance
00:01:13
Speaker
practice. That may be too simple, but, you know, in the Sermon on the Mount, I think that is the heart of Jesus' ethical teaching.
00:01:23
Speaker
And, of course, the way that that gets left out of Christian history is it said, well, that's not for Christians, or You know, in the Catholic Church, which is all of us, because in the history of the Church, well, monks and nuns and priests, they can do that Sermon on the Mount kind of stuff.
00:01:47
Speaker
But just ordinary people, you know, they can't do that. So that's the one way that just the practice of Christianity gets left out. We just ignore the very heart.
00:01:59
Speaker
of the ethics of jesus In my tradition, the way that it gets left out is, well, you know, the church doesn't start until the book of Acts. And so we don't really have ah the mandate from Christ in the Sermon on the Mount for the church.
00:02:18
Speaker
which, of course, is just another way of setting aside. You know, when we see the Sermon on the Mount, it's nothing there's nothing hard there to understand. the the The hard part of it is to imagine ourselves doing these things, and we immediately recognize that this is so difficult.
Forgiveness vs. Vengeance
00:02:40
Speaker
But its there's not a difficulty in understanding. you know Turning the other cheek is just the piece of the gospel. I recently did ah you know a comparison, the place that Jesus is specifically countering. you know When Peter comes and says, Lord, shall we forgive as many as seven times?
00:03:05
Speaker
And Jesus says, not seven times, but 70 times seven. seven you know And of course, it's not actually a numerical amount that Jesus is talking about, but he's talking about you know the perfect number, seven multiplied by 70.
00:03:25
Speaker
He's saying, this is how much you need to forgive. And of course, that is a direct counter to the story of Lamech, When Cain, you know, God says, well, I will avenge, you know, if anybody.
00:03:41
Speaker
And Lamech says, well, I'll do you even better, God. I'll avenge 70 times 7. And I think that we pass in the story of Lamech.
00:03:52
Speaker
You know, this this is a kind of bizarre story in and of itself. But I think in some way it actually resonates with we all understand Lamech. We understand the impetus to kill.
00:04:05
Speaker
and the impetus for revenge. And I think that we pass. Lamech is also talking about an infinite amount of revenge.
00:04:15
Speaker
Lamech is saying, I'm a killer. And you don't mess with Lamech. And of course, what is all tied up and what I'm trying to describe here, I think there's an alternative understanding of who and what we are.
00:04:32
Speaker
that is the impetus behind the Sermon on the Mount and this infinite forgiveness, ah that actually the person that can do these things is a different person.
00:04:48
Speaker
And that's the apocalyptic imagery. That's the faith imagery. You know, Kierkegaard says that we live our lives differently. ah forward, but we only understand backward.
Cultural Mirrors of Biblical Narratives
00:05:00
Speaker
But I think as Christians, we actually capture a vision of who and what we really are in Christ. And so we can spend so much of our time in a kind of Lamechian futility.
00:05:15
Speaker
And of course, what is what is it that Lamech is protecting? Well, we understand from the stories there, well, the shame that Adam and Eve experience.
00:05:27
Speaker
And this this simple idea, i you've probably heard me talk about, that it really took me going to Japan and recognizing that Japan is a kind of shame culture. And I began to read the Bible and recognize, well, the Bible is addressed precisely to a place like Japan and really all cultures.
00:05:53
Speaker
It's just that in our culture and in our Christianity, we've so focused on the judicial aspect, upon the guilt and the legal, that we've left out the personal and the emotional.
00:06:10
Speaker
And so we read this story and and we tend to just reduce it to the legal aspect. But you can't, in other words, by the time you get to Lamech, we understand what Lamech is devoting himself to is his pride. In other words, he's he is who he is, taking onto himself this kind of divine understanding.
00:06:35
Speaker
You know, really, he said, well, if God would do that, he's equating his own vengeance with something ah that is a multiple of the divine.
00:06:46
Speaker
We may not feel that consciously, but I think that that is at work in human personality. that The violence that we would do and the self-protection, you know, I think you can just call that self-salvation.
00:07:03
Speaker
ah that we're all about, that's what's being addressed in both the apocalyptic imagery, that is, there's new birth, there's an alternative world understanding.
00:07:16
Speaker
And once you get that in place, then you then something like the Sermon on the Mount, it falls into place. And of course, I still think we can only do this through participation in the Trinity. i You know, I'm not up to this. I'm not up to this.
00:07:35
Speaker
Because it's just what what is being described are depths of of humiliation. I mean, really, can you can you stand up to that?
00:07:47
Speaker
Well, not if we are in the Lamechian business, in the Adam and Eve business, if we are subject to shame. I don't think we any of us can endure prolonged shame.
00:08:02
Speaker
But in Christ, of course, what we have is the recognition, oh, that has nothing to do with the reality of who I am. And so the apocalyptic vision, you know, the vision and revelation, but just the alternative vision of the world and humanity.
00:08:20
Speaker
and And so what I'm doing, I'm shifting the focus. It certainly is inclusive of me as a person, but actually it's a corporate identity and it's a world identity because who and what we are and where the world is going is involved in our own capacities and recognition of what we are.
00:08:45
Speaker
And so that was the sense that I was bringing together this alternative imagination, the alternative apocalyptic vision, and then bringing that together with the outworking, you know, actually
Sermon on the Mount in Christian Ethics
00:09:00
Speaker
living this thing out.
00:09:02
Speaker
Well, I'm curious. that I don't know if you know the answer to this, but just from your observations, why do you think it is the case that so many traditions will kind of shelf the Sermon on the Mount? I mean, in the tradition I came from, it was it was actually a completely different reason than the one you offered.
00:09:20
Speaker
And it was that they saw the Sermon on the Mount as for the millennial kingdom. And until then, it's like, oh, great if you can live by it. But I mean, and you you probably can't live by it, so don't try.
00:09:31
Speaker
ah what what what is that? Why do we do that? Why do we seemingly displace the most central teachings of Jesus, teachings that according to Matthew, he's centering it in his book. He's presenting it as a new law, lawgiver given on the mountain.
00:09:46
Speaker
i Yeah, I think that, I mean, the simplistic answer is sin. And what i what I mean by that is that this vision of what a human being is that Jesus is presenting to us is just so over and against what the world would teach us that's so counterintuitive.
00:10:08
Speaker
And so, yeah, I think i think that that's your experience is just everybody's experience. But to just to do the Sermon on the Mount, to begin to live out this— and ah and of course, it's not simply ah passive resistance, but it's a nonviolent resistance.
00:10:31
Speaker
A nonviolent active resistance. Yeah, it's a—in other words, we don't do evil in resisting. But ah there is resistance in all the things that Jesus is describing.
00:10:47
Speaker
You know, this the the slap, I don't, you know, somebody slaps you on one cheek and turn to the the other also. It's so over and against what we would intuitively do.
00:10:59
Speaker
But I think that however you read that, one thing is that you're standing your ground. You're not moving. He doesn't say flee. Yeah. ah The other explanation I've heard is you know that in early society, they the the slap and you turn the other cheek, well, then that would require that you hit with the the right hand and it would be a punch and that that then would make you, in other words, now you've entered into a whole new level of violence that is in fact an an acknowledgement of the person.
00:11:35
Speaker
I don't know if even that is required you know to explain it, but I think what is there is that the translation that we have is not you know we We often have, do not resist.
00:11:50
Speaker
Well, no, do not commit violence in your resistance. And of course, you've heard all the other stories. you know the The Roman soldiers could say, well, go with me a mile.
00:12:03
Speaker
Well, actually, you're you're causing them to you know, if you go two miles, that's beyond what they could legally require. They're starting to get uncomfortable at that point. and they're getting They're getting uncomfortable and it is a resistance. and Kindness as an act of resistance. That's it.
00:12:22
Speaker
That's it. So this is just so overboard that to do these things, that people that have participated in You know, the Martin Luther King, you know, John Lewis, these guys all went through months of discipleship and training to put into practice nonviolent resistance.
00:12:46
Speaker
So i don't I think that that's why people set this aside. it's It's so overboard in nonviolent resistance.
00:12:57
Speaker
It's so counterintuitive to who and what we are. It's shameful for most people. to you know to turn the other cheek, to to submit. And that's it is a kind of—this was John Howard Yoder, or this is the Anabaptist understanding that I think gets it right, that it is a a revolutionary subordination.
00:13:27
Speaker
That is, that you're not— ah you're not rebelling You're not leading a rebellion from the top, but in a sense, you are leading a revolution from the bottom.
00:13:41
Speaker
You're undoing ah the the usual understanding. And so, yeah, I think this is a key question and a key focus. Why do we leave out the Sermon on the Mount?
00:13:53
Speaker
And I think, you know, people, the whole Millennial Kingdom thing, oh, that hasn't come yet. I think that's ah you know that's one of the ways, but I think that's so harmful, because what we're um ah reduced to in the church and as Christians is, well, we're just waiting for this thing to kick off.
00:14:15
Speaker
as if Jesus did ort not already inaugurate the kingdom. That's his prayer. That's his point. The kingdom is within you you. Pray that the kingdom may come.
00:14:27
Speaker
So we're supposed to be involved in kingdom activity. Most churches, for one reason or another, just picture the, the well, we'll do that later.
00:14:38
Speaker
You know, the the when we go to heaven and that's not for us now. Yeah, I mean, that leaves us sitting while we're sitting, twiddling our thumbs, waiting for Jesus to return. That leaves us with with what ethic?
00:14:51
Speaker
Well, the ethics of the world. We just do what the world tells us to do. And we do what humanity has always done. There's no redemptive quality
Salvation and Ethics
00:15:00
Speaker
to the salvation and Jesus that we preach about, that we sing about.
00:15:04
Speaker
That doesn't really impact our communities in the here and now. We just celebrate that which will be while we continue to kill and destroy and live the ways of the world in the here and now.
00:15:14
Speaker
That's why it's so damaging, I think. And you said a ah key thing here. And that is usually when we start talking theology, we divide out salvation from ethics.
00:15:28
Speaker
And what we mean by salvation is, well, i'm going I know that I'm missing hell and going to heaven. But of course, what the New Testament means by salvation is a practical salvation. We practice salvation.
00:15:44
Speaker
We're in the—that the salvation is enacted in our lives. So, you know, part of the Sermon on the Mount and the be know the Beatitudes are connected there right with it.
00:15:56
Speaker
And, of course, what is being described is this alternative way of being human ah that is salvific. It is, you know, ah Paul does say, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
00:16:11
Speaker
And of course, well, as good Lutherans, or we want to say, well, we don't we don't do works. Well, there's ah that Paul's point is not that we have to work to to earn salvation. Right.
00:16:25
Speaker
But the point is that by enacting the life of Christ, participating, it certainly involves us in doing stuff.
00:16:36
Speaker
It's not a passive thing. And so we, you know, it doesn't really matter, know, where you've heard the the, there's this profound misunderstanding that of what Paul means by works or works righteousness.
00:16:54
Speaker
And of course, he is aiming at the idea of a departure from the Jewish identity as the mode of salvation. Mm-hmm.
00:17:04
Speaker
Being Jewish is not the salvation of Christ. That's what Paul is talking about. And the works of the law, circumcision, food Right, the identity markers, yeah. Right. And so, yeah, that and and you can take that idea and spread it out, because we're all really into identity, you know, ah that identifying as American or Jewish or Minnesotan or...
00:17:33
Speaker
So I think that's the new perspective on Paul. it it doesn't It's not adequate in and of itself. but it is ah an aid. It's sometimes overbilled as a revolutionary thought. It's not that revolutionary, because you still, it it doesn't really get you ah to to what I'm describing. But I do think that's a point that needs to be made.
00:17:58
Speaker
Once you get there, then you can talk about a practical salvation. And so a Christian that is not willing to follow Jesus— that's what That's actually what we're describing when we separate out salvation from ethics, that most Christians don't need to act like Jesus to imagine that they're being saved.
00:18:24
Speaker
But what the New Testament is saying, no, the way that you're saved, that salvation is this alternative way of being, this be attitude, this alternative practice, that in the practice is salvific.
00:18:43
Speaker
We can't just shrink salvation down to a forensic yes-no checkbox kind of thing. That's it. and And what gets left out are people. is the personal.
00:18:54
Speaker
So what we've entered into in this way of describing it, you know, I think that in in typical notions of salvation, the fullness of human emotions, human personhood, the justar that that is ah left out. And so most of what happens in church, it can actually be quite damaging to us if we just try to tamp down issues of shame.
00:19:25
Speaker
You know, I think many of us, these are jealousy, envy, pride, you know, things that are just part of normal human experience of growing up.
00:19:38
Speaker
Well, as Christians, we don't want to be talking that way, you know. But of course, the New Testament is addressing directly the passage from the the sense in which those sorts of rivalries, jealousies, you know, ah pursuit of some sort of ah being, you know, that is just elusive.
00:20:03
Speaker
so So we do a great deal of damage in telling people, I'm okay, you're okay, You know, don't don't tell me about your problems. And I think the New Testament is saying, well, no, people people pass through these jealousies, envy, rivalry.
00:20:22
Speaker
We all understand the story of Lamech, but isn't it ironic that the story... that Jesus tells, you know, or the Sermon on the Mount, in some way our are incomprehensible to us how we would do that.
00:20:38
Speaker
And of course, I think the point is, yeah, these things are incomprehensible because we need to comprehend them from an alternative perspective. like kind of getting at this understanding from an alternative perspective.
00:20:52
Speaker
Looking back through church history, Christians have often sought to understand or access God through means of philosophy or through lenses
Philosophical Critiques
00:21:00
Speaker
like nominalism. And then they go and they take Jesus and they try to understand Jesus kind of within those existing frameworks they have of God.
00:21:08
Speaker
What's wrong with that approach? And what does it miss about Jesus? Yeah, well and so this is the whole point of, you know, I think that postmodernism actually has a point in its foundationalism.
00:21:23
Speaker
But what has happened in nominalism, voluntarism, in theology, you know, what we're talking about, the crashing and burning philosophically included theology because theology was also engaged in this sort of irrational approach in which we understand who Christ is on the basis of an understanding that we already have.
00:21:51
Speaker
that doesn't get at the revolution that is occurring in Christianity. And so Paul talks about, you know, we have no foundation other than Christ Jesus.
00:22:02
Speaker
I just take that literally, I take that in ah a philosophical sense, I think we need to take it in a personal sense, that I don't think that philosophically,
00:22:14
Speaker
that we can ah that that there is a foundation that we can presume to build. Now, this may sound begin to sound arcane to people. Oh, now he's drifting off.
00:22:26
Speaker
but But actually, the philosophy stuff applies directly to the psychology. Because what happens you know in a Descartesian, you know this is the Descartes is supposedly the father of modernity, and Descartes is describing a move that I think we all are familiar with psychologically.
00:22:50
Speaker
I think, you know, therefore I am. That is, he's imagining that he can build a foundation on an already existing thought.
00:23:01
Speaker
That is a literal... philosophical foundation that is going to lead to all kinds of problems, but it's also descriptive of a psychology, of the way in which we we may be functioning psychologically.
00:23:18
Speaker
And that is that when we come into Christianity, the eye, you know, this is Paul in Romans 7, maybe the eye that we're thinking needs to be saved.
00:23:31
Speaker
And of course, and and ah there's i don't that this can be misunderstood, but I think that our impetus, even as children, in our understanding of who and what we are, is mistaken.
00:23:44
Speaker
You know, a little child sees its image in the mirror and says, that's me. Well, first of all, that's a static image. It's an objective image. It's outside of who you really are.
00:23:58
Speaker
Who we really are is interpersonal, we're persons. And who we ah you know this is the whole point of the image of God in Genesis, that there is this interpersonal plurality.
00:24:13
Speaker
And I assume it's not just the plurality of male and female, a multiplicity of persons, but the original idea is that the image of God is inclusive of who God is. That is, that it's God's participation with the original pair.
00:24:32
Speaker
And that's what I you know understand, that the image is restored to us, not in some magical sense that, oh, now we can keep the law, but know that we were made for relationship with God and other people, and this is how we become fully what we are.
00:24:54
Speaker
yeah know this is We're made for this kind of ah relationship. And in a philosophical foundationalism, it has turned to a radical individualism.
00:25:06
Speaker
ah You know, the logic or just working from ah the the logos, the huge the small L logos, is intimately individualistic.
00:25:21
Speaker
and And I think we can mistake and imagine that that is, you know who I am is some way ah inside me. You know, Descartes thought it was near the pineal gland, you know. Literally, he just thought that the body...
00:25:40
Speaker
was not a part of the reality of who he is. one was go ahead. he was He was a good disciple of Plato, I think. I think he was, and and this is my reading of Plato.
00:25:52
Speaker
that he is a dualist, that he's picturing the true self as a disembodied self, the soul or
Impact of Cartesian Dualism
00:26:00
Speaker
the spirit, which is, of course, the wrong meaning of the word soul. Soul in Scripture references an embodied person.
00:26:08
Speaker
Right, yeah. And so once we once we began talking about human embodiment, we're talking about a corporate identity. Because what bodies are, you know, this is the way Jesus talks.
00:26:22
Speaker
that you know that you are my body. you are There's an extension of the incarnate Christ in the body of Christ. This is the great shame, again, of a Christianity that doesn't recognize that we've entered into the the kingdom of God, the body of Christ.
00:26:43
Speaker
No, quite literally, we are co-participants in the body of Christ. That's not strange language, but once we understand the language itself is embodied, know, this is the significance of the though Ludwig Wittgenstein. is It's a very simple idea.
00:27:06
Speaker
People learn to talk because they're parts of communities of people that talk. This is Noam Chomsky. So there's been a, at the same time, there's been an undoing of, you know, the ah mo modernity and the individualism in modernity.
00:27:25
Speaker
Not that that's been done theologically undone theologically or culturally, but in ah but postmodern modernism,
00:27:35
Speaker
turns to Christ as the foundation, then there is this reconceptualization of what it means to be human, that we're human corporately.
00:27:48
Speaker
There's no such thing as an isolated individualistic human And that's exactly what foundationalism, Cartesianism, modernity, they've been built upon this lie that is in fact simply not true about what people are.
00:28:08
Speaker
This isn't ah the main point of this conversation, but I have found it curious. I've observed like the culture war issues in our context today. You have like conservative evangelical churches that will critique identity politics and different things going on. And usually on the left that they, you know, the evangelicals really don't like.
00:28:28
Speaker
um But then the evangelicals are teaching all about how we are souls and our bodies really aren't our true selves. And I'm just thinking you you both share the same basic philosophy that you're not, you know, your true self is something not embodied. It's something else. I don't know where it's to be located.
00:28:45
Speaker
it's It's a little puzzling to me. And I think it's an interesting observation that we we often share the same philosophies of the world if we're not grounding our reality in the incarnation of Jesus and what that means to be human.
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a mistaken—you know, I think that all of our instincts about who and what we are, I just think that there is a ah basic deception. ah This may sound a little simplistic, but I do think that's what the but Scripture is teaching us. You know, we often picture that our problem is— I just did this on miss the mark. I think I you know i dismissed that definition of sin, but actually it's a pretty good definition.
00:29:30
Speaker
If you understand the mark is God and we've missed it, not because we're inaccurate in our aim, but because the target is completely obscured to us. And this is the the understanding you know that we put all of Christianity together in a legal context.
00:29:49
Speaker
We've understood it judicially, and we've understood missed the mark in a judicial context. And I think that's exactly wrong.
00:30:00
Speaker
but No, it's more serious than our aim is slightly off. It's that we don't even have the target in view. We don't have God in view.
00:30:13
Speaker
Who we call God is not God so you know so often. The molek that most people are reduced to worshiping in a violent Christianity, this angry, you know vengeful God who, you know I learned this in seminary, that all God is split against himself and he's, well, it's such a crude conceptualization that is simply not true of God who is defined as love.
00:30:49
Speaker
And so, yeah, I think that people are caught up. i the The thing I always think about evangelicals being so down on critical race theory.
00:31:01
Speaker
Well, actually, critical race theory is just saying what Christians should always be saying. And that is that inherent in the law is this basic deception.
00:31:12
Speaker
that is going to, in some way, oppress some people, oppress all of us ultimately. This is Paul's point in the New Testament about the law.
00:31:25
Speaker
The law does not contain God. The law does not contain life. The law does not even reveal God. It's an obstacle. You know, this is the, not that Paul is anti-nomistic or anti-law.
00:31:42
Speaker
It's just that he's saying the law does not do what Jesus Christ has done. What the law does, and by the law, I think, you know, we can spread that out.
00:31:55
Speaker
The law of culture, the law of culture. politics, the law of identity. In other words, these these understandings of who we are in and through the law of sin and death, they all share the same quality.
00:32:13
Speaker
They would take some form of the symbolic order or the law or language and imagine, like Descartes, that this thing gives us the truth about reality.
00:32:26
Speaker
Yeah. So ah have we made the mistake then of trying to understand
Critique of Atonement Theories
00:32:30
Speaker
Jesus and his work within this kind of legal context rather than seeing Jesus as the reason we should call into question the the context we understood originally? That's it.
00:32:40
Speaker
That's it. That Jesus doesn't leave us with the law. The law is ah deadly. The letter kills. if you're and And I would even say this about Scripture.
00:32:52
Speaker
You know, that's actually Paul's word there, that he says the Scriptures kill. What he means by that is that if you focus on Scripture apart from Christ, ah the letter is deadly.
00:33:10
Speaker
And I think you could spread that out. Human language, if you're just focused on the full philosophically, you can do this.
00:33:21
Speaker
ah Psychologically, you can just imagine that if I could attach you know ah myself to to a word or an identity...
00:33:33
Speaker
ah That it's all the same thing. It's taking what is essentially a non-entity, nothing, and reifying it and making it an absolute. So that's the that is religion and culture and politics as we have it.
00:33:51
Speaker
ah Christians often, I think, kind of starting with this legal framework they understand Jesus in. They've developed the satisfaction theories of atonement, where we understand Christ's suffering is fulfilling God's requirements for honor or for justice um through this propitiation of his wrath.
00:34:06
Speaker
Is this consistent with the God as revealed in Christ? This is the Antichrist. I think this is the this is the abhorrent thing that has taken place. Now, this develops, you know, the the development in Anselm of Canterbury is actually following exactly the logic that I'm describing. Anselm is a good monk, and they're no longer doing Christus Victor. They're no longer picturing that Christ has defeated evil.
00:34:37
Speaker
And I'm not saying that all of the pictures of Christus Victor in the early church, there was some crude explanations of that. But, you know, one of the ideas in Christus Victor was in the early church when you talked about evil or Satan, you know, they they weren't really picturing a diabolical spirit. it They meant, and oh, we see the Satan, and I think the Satan, this diabolical force in the emperor.
00:35:11
Speaker
There's the Satan, the Roman Empire that's killing us. And then, of course, we have the Constantinian shift, and and actually then Christus Victor, in which we picture Christians over and against the Roman Empire or you know the theyre principalities and powers of this world.
00:35:35
Speaker
and we' big That became a difficult way ah for Christians talk. And so Anselm is part of a tradition developing an alternative understanding.
00:35:48
Speaker
And he does the same thing. other words, Rene Descartes is actually a great fan of Anselm of Canterbury. Anselm talks about, he goes through, he does a cosmological argument.
00:36:03
Speaker
He talks about the human logos is on a continuum with the divine logos. Now what he's saying is the human word takes us to the divine word.
00:36:16
Speaker
But what is the human word? Well, it's a word that arises from within me. Notice the radical individualism here. Go into the door of, you know, your room, go into your room, the your cell, he's talking to monks, close the door, close the door of your mind, isolate yourself completely,
00:36:38
Speaker
And there from that place from which the word arises in you is the truth. And so it's a place prior to language, prior to embodiment, prior to, you know.
00:36:54
Speaker
So he there is this privatization. There is this individualization. I don't know that all of that was there in Anselm, but by the time we get to Rene Descartes,
00:37:08
Speaker
It's all, that's what he's doing with the same meditation that he finds in Anselm. And so out of Anselm, we have this shift in what a person is, and then we have the alternative doctrine of atonement in divine satisfaction.
00:37:25
Speaker
And so Anselm gives us, you know, Curtis, why a God-man? And he gives us the logic of Lamech in why Christ died. And that is, well, God needs to you know restore his honor that we've taken away from his honor.
00:37:45
Speaker
And he's thinking of a society very much like a Lamechian society, you know, in which you step on my toe and I may get out my sword, you know? Yeah, God needs to save face. He needs to save face.
00:38:00
Speaker
ah And so he's got an economy, and it makes wonderful sense in that economy, in a zero-sum game.
00:38:12
Speaker
And that's the the thing that many people don't see in Anselm. There's only so much room in heaven. We don't know how much room, but it's a zero-sum game.
00:38:22
Speaker
Just as much room as the angels cleared out to leave behind. That's it. And so what he's created is a closed economy. And of course, Calvin is going to take that and build upon it and give us penal substitution.
00:38:35
Speaker
And so this thing becomes an abhorrent view of who God is. It gives us a God who is violent. It gives us an originary violence.
00:38:47
Speaker
And by this point, stuff like the Sermon on the Mount, that makes no sense whatsoever. So if we don't have ah God you know who is love, that's the definition. If we don't have a God who is a peace, then we've really lost the meaning, I think. of I don't know that you can restore the Father of Jesus Christ.
00:39:15
Speaker
And that's what that's what we've done. you know We've created this image of God that has nothing to do to do with Jesus Christ. We've it created an atonement theory that is legal or judicial, ah worked out in the realm of honor and pride, that again has nothing to do with who God is.
00:39:36
Speaker
it It is numerical. You know, yeah we can you can weigh it in the scales. It's legalistic. And it is anti-Christian. And, well, on that theory, I mean, Jesus can still be a full revelation of what humans are to be, but he can no longer be a revelation of who God is.
00:39:58
Speaker
that's That's it. And that's what we have, that we've we've made Jesus a kind of avatar. You know, ah he put on the skin.
00:40:10
Speaker
ah And of course, what we're taught in the New Testament is he's God. That here is the final and full revelation of who God is.
00:40:20
Speaker
What is God like? He's like Jesus. exit I was going to say the same thing. If you want to know what God is like, look at that man carry his cross up the hill. And anything
Christ as Theological Foundation
00:40:30
Speaker
else, we don't really, in words, the what we've been working from.
00:40:35
Speaker
is just the opposite. We get God up and running. I don't know you if you guys experienced this in seminary, but this is literally the way my theology class worked. First you know couple weeks in theology, we did the philosophical arguments for God, including Anselm's ontological argument.
00:40:56
Speaker
So you've got to prove God on the basis of reason, and then you've got get God up and running And then you can plug the Bible into that. Well, no, that's the whole, that's it's the wrong God.
00:41:10
Speaker
And you've already determined the parameters in which that God is going to work. And you're never going to, you can't escape it. So you've got to start with Jesus Christ.
00:41:23
Speaker
It's equally a problem to get the Bible up and running and some conception of like a Biblicism that seeks to answer all questions and thinks that the Bible is very univocal and says all the same things about God. And we can start there, then prove God and Jesus.
00:41:38
Speaker
That's also not the starting point. The starting point is like the New Testament says to give Christ preeminence. I've desired to know nothing among you except Christ preeminence.
00:41:51
Speaker
crucified. That's the starting point as revelation of who God is. Jesus Christ is a person. He's not a book. We know this person. you know this is i like In this sense, I kind of like the you know the quadrilateral. that that yeah we There's many ways in which we know Christ, ah you know certainly that the the through Scripture, but Scripture alone, if if that's the singular thing we're working with,
00:42:20
Speaker
Well, you're leaving out the Holy Spirit. You're leaving out the church. You're leaving out the personal. and So when we, I think there is, there that that we know Christ the way in which we know a person, and a person is many faceted, and, you know, just any person.
00:42:39
Speaker
There is an infinite depth to any of us. And so there, it is ah an unfolding revelation. This is, this, This is just the way the early church understood it.
00:42:53
Speaker
you know and I think this is what Paul is talking about, but somebody, the earliest theologian, somebody like Origen or Irenaeus, that you go back and look at their hermeneutics. Origen really gives us the first book on hermeneutics.
00:43:08
Speaker
And this is what he's talking about in his own Christocentrism. The Bible that they're working with is really the Old Testament. Right. The New Testament, as one of my professors that I that i loved said, the New Testament was written to Christians.
00:43:24
Speaker
Therefore, there were Christians before the New Testament. So you can't start with the New Testament as your starting point for becoming a Christian or believing in God and or something. I thought that was kind of clever. Yeah. And so, you know, when Paul talks about Scripture, well, we all know he's not talking about the New Testament. He's talking about the Hebrew Scriptures.
00:43:43
Speaker
And they're finding Christ in the Scriptures. Yeah. because of the person that has been revealed to them, and they're reading them through that lens. and that's ah there's a dynamism there. And I i went through this, i you know, that I grew up in this period in which, you know, from liberalism, it seemed like that they were attacking the Bible. and And then the fundamentalist response is, well, no, the Bible is inerrant.
00:44:17
Speaker
Well, of course, both groups are wrong in the the way in which they're focused on the book. it's not It's not about a book. It's about the person, and we claim to know this person.
00:44:29
Speaker
And that's our hermeneutical key. Let's get a little bit practical, if not political, by introducing Girard a little bit here. ah You described the Descartesian, Cartesian maybe understanding of human selves as maybe unembodied souls lodged in bodies. Like the the true self is that which is not physical or something like that.
00:44:54
Speaker
um And you described a little bit the societal ramifications of that. I want you to introduce our listeners a little bit to Gerard's insight into human violence, the separation of humans into aliens and enemies, um fear of violent death as central to human ah community formation and politics, basically.
00:45:17
Speaker
Yeah, so Gerard, he comes at this in a very, you know, he wasn't at first a Christian. He was actually, well, actually he was a language teacher. He came to the United States. he was a they He spoke French, and they
René Girard's Mimetic Theory
00:45:30
Speaker
said, well, here, are you you teach us French literature, you know.
00:45:33
Speaker
He didn't know anything. So he he got real serious about French literature. And what he noticed ah in the literature, in the great literature of the world, that is just psychologically true about all of us, is what he calls mimesis or imitation.
00:45:53
Speaker
That is that we imitate one another. This this is true you know in child development. Yeah, we we have children. we we see this all the time. And so it's not...
00:46:04
Speaker
There's nothing sinful inherently. that's just the way that we learn to talk. That's the way that we learn to be human. But of course, in imitation,
00:46:15
Speaker
there's bound to be rivalry. you know this is And this is what shocked Girard. He found in Shakespeare, in Dostoevsky, in the great literature of the world, well, there's this mimetic desire and then mimetic rivalry, and that then explains violence, right?
00:46:41
Speaker
In a sense, Gerard is just reading Freud here, but he's flipping Freud a little bit. You know, Freud saw this in the Oedipus complex, that the child would like to be his father.
00:46:56
Speaker
Well, no, the child wants to be his father. ah We do this. you know we We take ah the image that we're imitating, and the word that Freud uses is that he we confect, that is, that literally the voice of the Father, you oh God.
00:47:17
Speaker
Now, Freud set this in a sexual realm, and Gerard says, well... I don't think, you know, children really don't, they're not aware sexually, but there's something even deeper there.
00:47:29
Speaker
And so Gerard reads this rivalry as just part of development. And then, you know, once you have the rivalry,
00:47:41
Speaker
and there is this mimetic desire, well, that unleashes cycles of violence. you know and And so this is what his great discovery about the Bible is.
00:47:54
Speaker
he just i don't you know He had been raised Catholic. I don't think he was he was in in no way convinced of it. But then he picked up the the Old Testament and realized, oh, the Old Testament is doing something very different Usually what happens in a society, you know, if we had a story of, I don't know if you guys have gotten into myth or mythology. I was in Japan.
00:48:23
Speaker
This stuff is strange, you know, yeah the the mythology. But what Gerard gives us a key to myth is recognizing, well, the way that these this mimetic rivalry and unleashing of violence, and and then there's just these cycles of violence, the way that it forecloses itself is in and through latching onto scapegoat.
00:48:45
Speaker
right And everybody then begins to focus, it's that guy, or it's that, you know, and It doesn't really matter. you know ah it It could be of a foreigner. It could be a stranger. It could be somebody that's handicapped.
00:49:03
Speaker
yeah It really doesn't matter. But somebody that's different, yeah they will focus on that, and there will be a murder. Yeah, the expelling of that scapegoat actually has a cathartic effect on the group that expelled them.
00:49:19
Speaker
And I think if I'm reading Girard correctly, he says that's the foundation of culture. That's the that's sacrifice, that's culture. And the this you know ah what you encounter in every religion is that every religion is a sacrificial religion.
00:49:34
Speaker
And so when he picks up scripture, you know, what happens in mythology and religion is the murder gets covered over. other words, in reading about Izanami and Izanagi, it's clear there was somebody that kind of behind the myth, you can see, know, we didn't used to imagine we could read religious myth historically.
00:49:59
Speaker
Gerard says, well, no, something happened. Somebody got killed, and the myth was the myth covers up the reality. yeah Of course, you pick up the New Testament. It just says point blank, Cain killed Abel.
00:50:10
Speaker
Or the the Old Testament. But yeah, and then the ultimate revelation of the innocent scapegoat is obviously Jesus of Nazareth. So Gerard, I think, gives us a great aid in doing this. And I really like what Gerard has done.
00:50:25
Speaker
ah um Gerard is not omnicompetent, and I don't think he ever thought he was. In other words, I think that we we should have have have come you know, to these same conclusions, it's just that Gerard has filled this out for us, and we recognize this is just universal in human religion, human psychology, this is, we're all mimetic, and what's involved in mimesis is jealousy, envy, rivalry, and murder.
00:50:56
Speaker
You're going to kill, you know, and so psychologically, if you think of the story of Cain and Abel, Abel had the you know favor that Cain wanted.
00:51:11
Speaker
And of course, when Cain turns to Abel, Abel is an obstacle to him. And this is there in Girard, that the obstacle cause of desire, this is there in Lacan and Zizek, that we get focused, you know they we actually lose sight of God, or of the goal, or in, if you're thinking of Hamartia,
Modern Politics and Identity
00:51:40
Speaker
the target, and you get focused on the obstacle.
00:51:45
Speaker
And so Cain is focused on Abel. Lomech is focused on this young man that apparently has slapped him. and he's going to kill him, and he's going to kill anybody, 70 times 7, that messes with him.
00:52:03
Speaker
We've entered into the realm of pure drive. In other words, we're no longer talking... anything reasonable here. And that's the the the human jealousy, envy.
00:52:17
Speaker
Try to run that down, yeah even in your own mind. Why would I be jealous? We all are. I mean, we all experience it. And of course, what we see is exactly what Anselm of Canterbury is saying. other words, he's incorporated things human sinfulness into his image of God.
00:52:41
Speaker
This zero-sum game. If you got it, that means I don't have it. And the only way I can get it is ah if I extract it from you.
00:52:52
Speaker
yeah that's That doesn't make sense. But that's the level that we operate at in jealousy and envy. The only reason you would envy anybody else is that their capacities, their abilities, their fullness emphasizes your um our you know our emptiness.
00:53:17
Speaker
Right. And it's so damaging. And this is where it gets political. It's so damaging on a societal level. When you realize that our tribal affiliations, whatever they are, let's even let's let's zoom out to the realm of nationhood.
00:53:32
Speaker
It's all preposterous. It's all idiotic to think that we need to protect our Me and mine and people like me and the lines around that are so arbitrary to over against them, the enemy, the scapegoat, because otherwise they might have something, you know, they they might have something that I want. i Like, I must expunge them. I must expel them. I must murder them.
00:53:58
Speaker
In order to keep my group, however arbitrarily defined, safe, comfortable with the good life or whatever. and um So damaging. i think it's wonderful. The person of Jesus frees us from thinking that that has any validity. it actually makes us laugh at that a little bit.
00:54:17
Speaker
And so then it's concerning when we see Christians who supposedly have been enlightened by Jesus of Nazareth, by the sermon, by the passion of Jesus, and then continue to live as if life is a zero-sum game, embrace patriotism, embrace other type of tribal identities.
00:54:38
Speaker
It's a bit of a shock, actually. Christian nationalism. what What an and ah abhorrent, you know, anti-Christ understanding. that to And of course, that's what's happened to to all of us in some way. We've been subsumed into this Christian nationalism.
00:54:56
Speaker
And maybe it's hard to see, you know, because our identities are so caught up in being, you know, American or being missourian or Texan.
00:55:08
Speaker
I saw this in Japan, you know, Japanese nationalism. Of course, I can't be Japanese, but they're the same notion of identity. Well, then the problem arises in Japan because it is not a Christian nationalism.
00:55:25
Speaker
How can a Japanese person be Japanese and become a Christian?
00:55:32
Speaker
Well, actually, the same problem it doesn't occur in this country, but it actually should occur. Right. That how can I do both? yeah i we Yeah, exactly. We think you can be a good American and a Christian. I mean, that's what we've always been told, right? The founding fathers were Christians, right?
00:55:50
Speaker
But it's the Constantinian Christianity. It's not a Sermon on the Mount focused Christianity. And so the good the good Christian young people, they're prime candidates to go fight in the military. you know that that we've that this In this Christian nationalism, this evangelicalism, that we've promoted a kind of warrior mentality.
00:56:17
Speaker
you know picturing even Jesus as you know having, he's a man's man, you know that he's a kind of a warrior. And we picture a ah kind of cultural warfare with Islam or other, just this this abhorrent you know stuff.
00:56:36
Speaker
I think you know that we've been there for about 1700 years with the Constantinian shift. ah That just simply is a a degradation of of the gospel. So yeah, yeah in Girardian understanding, but I think just the New Testament or the biblical understanding, you've got to have your enemies.
00:56:58
Speaker
You've talked about the way the church has
Church as Counter-Cultural Entity
00:57:00
Speaker
kind of given up a lot of the things it should be doing to the state as we've kind of shifted our understanding of how those two entities interact. You actually had a really interesting sermon recently where you described the taking of the Lord's Supper together as a form of practiced resistance to the state.
00:57:16
Speaker
Can you describe what that is and what kind of posture you're describing that the church should be taking towards the state in general? Yeah, so that, you know, that this, actually, I just did a ah conversation with ah the activist John Deere.
00:57:31
Speaker
I don't know if you're all familiar with Yeah, loved it. I listened to it, yeah. yeah the Yeah, the podcast that I haven't put out yet, he describes at Loyola University that the ROTC candidates, you know, they come out and they give their oath that they will you know be loyal to the United States, then you know the enemies... Whatever.
00:57:58
Speaker
the for you know They swear loyalty, then they all partake of the Eucharist. Did they erect a 90-foot gold statue that they're supposed to you know prostrate themselves to as well? or It's the same. In other words...
00:58:10
Speaker
that the body of Christ that is being celebrated in the Lord's Supper is really an alternative to the body of state.
00:58:23
Speaker
What has happened in the formation of the modern nation-state is partly this division that we're talking about. Oh, you know, you Christians, you can do that private disembodied stuff.
00:58:38
Speaker
But it's real hard when you take the communion, you know, whatever your tradition says about it, that's the body of Christ. We are the body of Christ.
00:58:49
Speaker
And this embodiment bodies itself forth over and against the, you know, body of state. And I think that historically, this is literally the the the notion of the modern nation state.
00:59:06
Speaker
It is that a pure ideology. yeah In Japan, actually, this this may be easier to understand. you know In Japan, you have the emperor.
00:59:18
Speaker
And ah the emperor is the superego. They actually use this in in Japan. They picked up Freudian psychoanalysis, and they began to picture the nation state in terms of Freudian psychology.
00:59:35
Speaker
And they said, well, the the emperor is the superego, and all of the people are the little egos revolving around the superego. This Meiji Restoration, in which they're making the modern nation-state in Japan, is there in a kind of compact form of what happened in the formation of the modern nation-state.
01:00:02
Speaker
In other words, it is a kind of ah ah co-opting of a Eucharistic understanding of Christ that has been taken over by the state, the body of state, that we're all, you know, that that we have this thing tattooed on our forehead, practically, that we're American or we're with this state.
01:00:25
Speaker
And I think that if we understand the body of Christ is an alternative politic, an alternative body, an alternative culture if we understand that we transform the cultures of which we are a part.
01:00:42
Speaker
I don't think that you can do both. In other words, I don't think that you can acknowledge the power of state in the way that it wants to be acknowledged, really back to the way that the Roman emperors wanted it to demand, you know, I always think of this in terms of when Moses came to, you know, say, let my people go.
01:01:12
Speaker
And, you know, if if the the Pharaoh, you know, he said, well, now Moses, let's discuss this. Do you mean that you want them to be ah free physically?
01:01:28
Speaker
Or do you mean that you want them to be free spiritually, mentally? I think if Moses had just been up to a little Christian compromise and said, well, yeah, Pharaoh, I just i just mean, you know, that if they could be free mentally, I think Pharaoh would have immediately agreed to what modern Christians would in their dualism, imagine Christianity as this disembodied religion.
01:02:00
Speaker
I think the Jews would still be slaves in Egypt and still worshiping the Pharaoh if Moses had been not been so hard-nosed about this embodied religion.
01:02:15
Speaker
nature of Israel. And of course, that's what we're doing, I think, that in relinquishing the fullness, the political, the cultural, you know the full embodiment of Christ, where if by just saying this is a privatized religion, well, you might as well give up practicing communion.
01:02:36
Speaker
Last question for you. As an alternative political
Church's Role in Political Reality
01:02:40
Speaker
reality, what is the purpose for the church in the world? I think it is salvific.
01:02:48
Speaker
and And what I mean by that is that, you know, how do you get saved? The good question here. right It's not by praying the prayer.
01:03:00
Speaker
It's not by accepting Jesus in your heart. It's by putting on the fullness of who Christ is. We can only do that in community.
01:03:11
Speaker
We can only do that in a fellowship. We can only put on the fullness of the practices of Christ corporately. We can only follow the Sermon on the Mount if we're all in this together.
01:03:24
Speaker
I don't think that any of us are up to striking out and doing this on our own. And so, yeah, the church is for the salvation of the world, though. It's not just my salvation, but it's salvific for everyone because this is the only reality we have.
01:03:43
Speaker
As long as we're dealing in the realms of state, as long as we're dealing in the realms of the principalities and powers, we're not really dealing in reality. We're dealing in ideology.
01:03:56
Speaker
We're dealing in mythology. None of it's real. And so the the thing that we have in Christ is nothing short of ultimate reality.
01:04:07
Speaker
Yeah. It's great. It was a pleasure get to speak with you. Thank you very much. Good talking to you guys. Glad connected.