In contrariety to Greek thought, there stand the visions of man rooted in the spiritualities of Judaism and of Judaism as reinterpreted by Jesus. The quintessential elements of Judaism are embedded in a covenant between the people descended from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob/Israel and their God, Lord of the heavens and the earth. In the idiosyncratic ruminations of the late second millennium before Jesus, this comprehensive contract sets out the rules for the right approach to life not only in worship and prayer, but in dress, diet, hygiene, marriage, the treatment of strangers, the proper management finances, fields, cattle, and, in summation, of every other conceivable aspect of life social, familial, and private. This covenanted relationship with God is about man’s life in this world. By living in accord, by being a-toned, at-one, with the Law, the Torah, the heart and mind of God concerning life in the world, it confers true vitality of being, right dignity, “righteousness”. Its boon is the here and now blessing of the life well lived. The being-in-accord with the Law means something more than simply fulfilling the requirements of a command: it is about the quality of a life. It is about life lived in a living relationship with the living God. As vital and vitalizing, as referencing man’s ultimate well-being [salvation], it entails a formula, a format, a discipline supremely characterized by alacrity, that is, by agility, fervour and dedication of heart and mind, by, as says scripture, “delight” in the Law of the Lord. The commitment to God is communal; it is a shared honour and obligation. It is in attitude tribal, a state of all for one and one for all, and all under God. It is a socio-religious ideal that will face challenges.
The sundry Hebrew tribes were by this sacral communicity slowly melded together, and David stands forever in memory as the iconic apex of this theocentric assemblage. His demise also signals the decline of this bonding. Within a few centuries, Assyria puts an end to the northern reaches of the Davidic confederation. Shortly thereafter, Babylon decimates the remnant, and exiles a significant number from the land long understood as given in perpetuity by sacred promise. More so than all the ghettoes and pogroms raised up against the Jews, in alignment with the horrors of holocaust, the trauma of this conquest and exile cannot be overestimated. It is inscribed into the sacred texts, and thereby incised into the Jewish soul. Every hardship that follows is held up to it for scale.
The Hebrew people and their religion, while divinely appointed, were never made exempt from being human or historical, and thus, susceptible to the influences of other cults and cultures. In the Exile, living apart from their sacred land, possibly never again to have it as their own, living apart from the Temple of their God and its holy rites, possibly never again to have access to them, they needed to solidify around whatsoever of the glorious past and promise they could. The sacred writings become codified and fervently studied. Josiah had, in his Deuteronomic reformation, already begun this process, but here its congealing takes place, not in the courts of the Temple, but in the much wider agora of the Babylonian empire swirling with new ideas about personal accountability and culpability, Persian religiosity, Zoroastrianism, notions of angels, demons, and everlasting realms of personal reward and punishment. There arises pressure to adjust, contemporize, and contextualize for a landed people the ideas in the ancient sacred texts writ out for a nomadic people. Prophets had long roamed among the people sounding the voice of conscience twixt the eternal word of God and the contingent conditions amongst the people of God. Now arise scribes and scholars to work out the details of an extended application of the divine word. All religious scribes, lawyers of God, come to their profession because of a dimeric zeal for religion and for spelling out its applications to the minutia. Legal scholars may be the delight of the judiciary in their leaving no contingency unexamined. Such scribing, however, comes down to everyman as a casuistry, a legalizing obsessiveness deleting the joy of life by detailing the rule of its every situation. In trying to define a people, their relationships with their God and one another, in trying to make, in this particularly dire situation, the exiles into “the people [of God]” as opposed to “the peoples” [the, in Latin, gens, gentiles], the life of alacritous delight in the Law becomes something nearing the stoic, a burden to be borne, a sacrifice demanded of the newly discovered self as answerable, responsible, culpable. A dual dualism emerges: Gentile contra Jew, and world contra self or more immediately put, body contra soul. The “outside”, be it Gentile or body/world, becomes the source of danger and defilement for the integrity of “the people” and the soul. The exclusivity and world-wariness to which this gives rise to will be challenged by new prophets attuned to the intrinsically cosmic expanse of the embrace of the Lord of all, and the illuminative voice within the Law. The salvation which is the Law and which makes “the people” will be seen emanating outward to all peoples through a renewed-in-spirit Israel. God himself will break through the impasse of history and isolationism, will visit his people in mercy, restore them, renew them, and make them the seed to fertilize the entire world with the true worship of God and fellowship among men. In this world resounding with peace and brotherhood amongst all, even lion and lamb will embrace. It is a stirring ideal. Ideals, however, often await on the back pages of the realities of history. The psychic and sacral changes ingrained in the exile, and the hope-filled but tattered return to the land of promise too soon ended in subservience to Greek masters, then Roman. These forces cumulatively continued to absorb heart and mind and soul. God had delivered Israel from bondage many times over. Under the vicissitudes of Roman rule and the rigours of religious obligation the land was ripe for the saviour God to act again. There was a prevailing attitude about how the mighty God ought so to act, but God is ever more creative than the imaginations of men. [Enter Jesus.]
Jesus is a Jew. He is taught that to delight in the Law is a total devotion to God and his world, a devotion honed in the study of and meditation upon God’s will as enunciated in the sacred texts and their learned exposition. Luke tells us he excels in this (Luke 2). But Jesus finds his vocation in somewhat different understandings of God, being chosen, and Law. He goes into a desert, an alone-place. He comprehends his relationship with God not a matter of belonging to a people or learning in the law and order that define them, but in the intimacy and immediacy of a paternal love, a love that transcends law and order. The divine will is subsumed within a direct and personal relationship; there is a union of wills, a collision of identities. Tempted with power and prestige, the mortal Jesus counters the temptation with Deuteronomy’s “you shall not put the Lord, thy God, to the test”! This is not a matter of Matthew and Luke postulating a “high Christology”, a theory of Jesus appearing more divine than human. This is Jesus coming to know his demons, his dark desires. In the belaboured exorcising of the darkness within, he gives room to light, and so comes, in the images of his native cult, to the insight of his paternity, his heritage, his identity. This is Jesus comprehending the boundaries of his humanity, and embracing the bonds of his vocation. This is Jesus, having suffered and broken the bondage of his temptations, finding the freedom of his vicarious presence as son, not of Israel, but for Israel as son of El [the Lord].[i] This sense of unity with the Holy One will translate in the considerations of his followers as a unity of being which will claim “God was acting in Christ Jesus” and “Jesus is Lord [God]”-incarnate. His co-religionist would not pronounce the revealed Holy Name, the sacred tetragram, YHWH; he reverently and warmly addresses God as Papa [Abba]. Jesus reverses the idea that body and world have the power to defile either the chosen people or the soul. It is not what enters a man or a people that defines or defiles, it is what a man or a people transmit from within. Spirit defines. Spirit creates. Spirit gives value. Therefore, the greatest command stands: “Love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, all thy soul, all thy mind and all thy strength”. The subject of love becomes the objectivity of the lover. God becomes objective in Jesus. Spirit creates, and in ful-filling the spirit of God’s Law, God’s Spirit incarnates. The unfurling of that Power changes not one man, but through him, with him and in him, the cosmos.
The sense of freedom and creativity of Spirit transform Jesus. Imbued with Spirit, he defines and values creatively. His religion claimed divine love was the reward for keeping God’s dictated ways. The wicked were cut off from the Lord and condemned to perish. But in his desert retreat Jesus confronts the wickedness resident within and transforms the power of egocentric temptation into philanthropic and benevolent action. He walks out of those twinned solitudes of soul and desert to claim he has come in God’s name to pronounce God’s love for sinners, for God gives the “sun and rain”, his benefits and blessings, to all, to the just and sinner alike (Matthew 5). Thus, plainly he says “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Luke 5), and with them considered below and outside the law, he sits, he eats, he shares of himself. He has no concern for ideas of retributive justice, for the love of God, “my Father and yours”, is not bound to the present but is “of the Spirit”, a Power ever forward-giving. The redeeming and creative love of God is free from all human values, all human accomplishment, all human failure. Israel was not chosen for its size, its power, or its goodness, but because of God’s gracious love (Deuteronomy 7). The love of God is not a reward; it is a gift freely and equally given to each and all. It cannot be earned, gained, merited. God is the Father of the prodigal son (Luke 15), the owner of the vineyard who pays all the same amount without regard to the hours worked (Matthew 20). There is no ascent to God by obedience to law. God comes to man. God loves his creation, and as “in the beginning” his creative love gave it reality, so too does his providential love give it value, salvation, fulfillment, wholeness.
Christian scriptures name this active and altruistic divine love agape [ἀγάπη]. It is freely creative. It creates new spaces, new values which are contra-individualistic settling neither upon the attainment of a personal, hedonistic happiness nor upon a stoic sense of adiaphoric release or indifference. Jesus’ revelation of God is still Judaic in nature, still worldly, still concerned with life on this earth. But for Jesus, the power of this love goes beyond the latter prophets. It is social and socializing, speaking to man uni-versally, dissolving the distinctions of gentile and Jew, male and female, free and slave. It makes, not a covenant, not a legal relationship, but a new creation, the family of our Father. The inter-relationships of this family must be a free and living transparency before and for the creativity that flows from and in the unrestricted love of God. “Freely have you received, freely give” (Matthew 10). “You have heard it said that you must love your neighbour, but I tell you love your enemies…that you may be [seen as] children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5). The Greek notions of love/desire leading man on to the highest good, truth and beauty become chaff in the wind. The Hebrew idea of obedience, of submission, likewise dissipates. Man stands in his fulfillment, his perfection, when he understands himself freely and deeply loved, and allows that freedom and depth of embrace to flow through himself into the world. This family of the Father, this Kingdom of God, is not made by men, by man’s moral endeavour. It comes by the act of God, the grace of God. [ii] Man can merely step away from self toward his truth, toward the other, and allow therein it be made manifest. The Christ-man simply remembers, and con-secrates his-self as the reality of presence: my body broken open, my life poured out—for you.
Greek inspired philosophy offered the cognoscenti an escape from the vicissitudes of life in intellectual contemplation. The mysteries of Dionysius and Demeter with their ascetics spoke to many. So also did Judaism with its unwavering monotheism and morals. Man, however, is never at ease when God and the world are not at-one, when this life is of its value cheapened or of its pleasures cheated. Jesus stood, or in the sacred symbolism of scripture, was both hanged upon and risen above this psychic plight. His first disciples presented his insight and the dynamic of his light, his illumination, to their fellow countrymen in their native religion’s tongue with all the force of its cultic symbols from Davidic descent to Pass-over’s sacrifice and liberation from servitude. A budding rabbi named Saul (in the Latin world, Paul) came to recognize the event of Jesus brought to fruition everything the latter prophets had espied: the rising up of God, the coming of God to all nations and the coming of all nations to the God of Israel resident in his Messiah, translated into the lingua franca, Greek, as Χριστός [Christ].
Paul is the first postulator of Christianity of whose actual words there is written record. Like Mark, Matthew, and Luke who follow him, he is a pastor. He is not an academic concerned to dissertate a systematic theology or expound an all-encompassing ethics. His concern is to preach to them gathered before him. Unlike Mark, Matthew and Luke, he is an itinerant preacher, his audience is not of one type or in one place.[iii] Unlike the evangelists, he is not setting out a singular story line, a gospel, from which to methodically preach to an established congregation. Seized by an insight, a transformative vision, he strives to work out its ramifications in his own life, and as inherently part of that, share its dynamic with all he encounters. He is a man converted, turned around. He is a man with a mission, an apostle, a “person sent”. He is academically imbued with the notions of law and merit. He is forever immersed in the religious iconography of his beloved Judaism. He is a mortal being, by choice or circumstance a bachelor, and by nature a fire-brand. Like the Apostle John, often when he speaks of love, it seems tinged with the notion of quantity, a thing given. Love, however, is manifest in relation-ship. It does not require an equals mark. It is a subtlety, a nuance, but one not easily marked, and a great deal of Christian theology and morality will read Paul through the lenses of Plato, and dance about the distinctions twixt the Greek notions of eros [ἔρως] and agape [ἀγάπη] as, respectively, love desiring and love freely given. Such is a spurious divide, for agape and eros form a circle, one ever arousing the other into itself toward a unity, an eternal act of creativity and freedom, a point needlessly made before anyone who has weathered the ages of marital love.[iv]
Paul accepts that God has acted in and through the person of Jesus. This rabbi, like most of the early converts of the first two generations after Jesus, cannot, however, equate God and Jesus. Jesus can be hailed God, God’s son, God’s ambassador, his Christ, but God is somehow something more than Jesus. He is Father. He acts in, with, and through Jesus. Jesus is understood in Jewish terms as the Shekinah (the merciful presence and active wisdom of God amongst his people). Jesus remains the “son”, the “image” of God.[v] Thus, Paul cannot say God gives his life for man, but God gives himself in his son for man. Nevertheless, the crucifixion is the real and revelatory self-sacrifice of God. Jesus is the victim-vicarious, not of man, but for God. The cross stands the great emblem of the reversal of the idea that man can merit anything by keeping the Law. The cross is the place God makes explicate his freely given love, where he dies with man, dies as man, dies for man, where he begins the resurrection of man into a new heaven and earth. It is God bound to the perfection of his creation, bound to Israel, to humankind, even in death, and creating out of his own death a new reality. Because creation is not an item divisible except in the pragmatic conceptualizations of man, sin, although it be of one, touches all. The salvation that dawns is not, therefore, of an individual, not even of a community; it is of the cosmos. In this new world-order man resides not under the Law of God but in a familial relationship with God as Father, and in that, in a brotherhood, a blood-bond with all creation. Man must be totally open to his world and himself, must exist as a channel for divine love, a love that comes with no strings, no expectations attached. Jesus-Christ is the standard. “He took not concern for himself, but gave himself away” (Philippians 2). The celebration of the Lord’s supper becomes the place wherein this is ever in the church rehearsed. “This is my body (my life) given, my blood (my soul) poured out. Remember this.”
Paul astutely observes that man, beloved of God, is still man the sinner, the egoist.[vi] Desire and want are parcel of his structure. The sheer love of God makes him, holds him, values him, but he cannot duplicate it. That is definitive. It is God who is Love; it is God who saves. God is the supreme and only free actor in the universe. Freedom is his truth. The Greek ideals of acting out of duty, out of desire for or the love of some good, be that the vision of God or something lesser, are pointless. Man’s only valid response can be to trust that God holds him in love, forgives him, and leads him forward in a newness of existence wherein man is broken open to exist as God does, freely pouring himself out for the other, for all. Man can wallow in himself, in hubris or pity, or man can believe there is a deeper, a richer force at play. He can have faith. He can rely upon God and be open to being the pre-sent of God’s redemptive action in the world. Egocentric concern and rebelliousness characterized as “flesh”, “body” and “world” do not miraculously vanish, but in the power of Spirit, at once of God and of his Christ, the fruits, the virtues, the spiritual strengths of this Spirit become manifest in the believer by being a believer, by the grace of living in the rich poverty, the humility of “faith alone”. Faith in the love of God is the foundation of Pauline morality. The Christ-man, with his Lord, daily prays: “Our Father, Thy reign come… [Thou] this day give us…forgive us…lead us…for Thine is the power, the kingdom and the glory”.
Paul knows the Christian cannot simply sit in confidence of God and allow the world and himself in it go by in blithe disinterest. He needs, however, to counter his own past of obedience under Law and underscore that faith, or the grace of God that opens man to faith, stands above good works as meritorious actions before God. Faith is not a “doing”; it is a state of “being”–being held, being accepted–and responsively being ever thankful and allowing those twinned certainties emanate through the “new self” into the quotidian realties. Just as Luther, whose world was deluged with distortions about the nature, compass, and value of good works, will want deleted from the sacred texts the Epistle of James for its insistence upon good works to exemplify faith, Paul is fighting his own reformation and setting an invariable standard. He understood human nature well enough to know how easily liberty can morph into licentiousness, godliness into godlessness. Plainly, he encountered it among the churches to whom he preached. Certainly, his insistence on chastity and charity, on setting a good example in every conceivable way exemplifies the pragmatics of his understanding—but he ever will insist such activity is merely and humbly the manifest of faith-ful brotherliness in the universe of our one Father, one Lord, one Spirit.
Paul’s life was defined by the Law. He studied to be of it a master, academically and spiritually. He was zealous for it. When Stephen, disciple of Jesus, was stoned for apostasy, he stood in witness. In the local synagogues, he sought out the adherents of Jesus as heretics, and when he heard of an outcrop of this heterodoxy in Damascus, he scurried off with letters authorizing him to exterminate it. It was on that venture that he fell off his high horse and got turned around. His conversion was not from a life of sin. He had lived as a righteous man under the Law. His conversion is from being a being under the Law to being a being held in the love of God. Yet, the Law would always be part of him, the once delight become a thorn in his side. He knew only God could traverse the chasm twixt himself and man. He had received the Law as the solitary image of the Holy One before which man might bow. Before the gates of Damascus, that position was circumvallated in blinding revelation. The Law of the Holy One was an accusation against man, exposing his anility to abide by and in its Spirit. Its was a proclamation of God’s holiness and man’s spiritual destitution. Jesus, in word and deed, abolished that attainture: “I have come to save sinners”. This is a gift, a fore-gifted-ness. This is God’s delight in his work, not man’s delight in God’s law. This is a love that frees man from a world of right and wrong, clean and unclean, chosen and gentile. This is love that allows man to shed all pretense of striving after holiness, and frees him to simply be a vista into God’s creativity in the world before him. The neighbour and the enemy are not loved for “God’s sake”. They are loved and cared for because between the believer and God there is no practical, no in-practice, distinction. The Christ-ian is he, by grace, released, sent to be the incarnate transparency of divine presence. Not by genetics, circumcision, historical or physical marking, but by faith alone does one live this newness of life. All man need do is with all of heart, mind, soul, and strength embrace, not the law, but being accepted and loved. “As beloved children, be imitators of God and walk in love even as Christ [Jesus] loved you, giving himself away for you” (Ephesians 5). This fore-giving, this giving-way-to-a-new-place love of God was made tactically real in Jesus. Thus, faith in God’s love is simultaneously, is iconographically, a faith in Jesus, in God’s having acted redemptively in Jesus. This faith made concrete in Christ-ian action ceases to be faith; it focuses and coheres in the believer as experiential reality and becomes knowledge, and thus Paul can make bold and say “this I know”.
Paul conjoins the God of forgiving love and Jesus as his re-present-ative, his Christ, such that Jesus is always for Paul Christ-Jesus. Paul also bonds the faith of the believer and the faithful love of God. Faith is love being embraced. Faith is man loving God. The faithful in God’s love form the sustained present of God’s forward-giving love, revealing them the children of God, the church, the body of Christ, a communion of the “saints”, the “holy and beloved” ever united with Jesus and reaching out to encompass the whole of creation re-newed in the liberty of divine grace. He sets the groundwork for both baptismal theology and ritual in depicting the embrace of the Christ-mission as an enrobing, a vesting in Christ-Jesus, and in this sacral robe, this enveloping new identity, terminating, “dying to”, the old self and its ways of being and doing and having. Having risen into a new life, a new identity, into Christ-hood, one lives in chastity of self, in charity to all, avoiding all that is false in teachings, scandalous in actions. And all this but ancillary to the ever-present propriety of thankfulness to God for his great mercy made manifest in Christ-Jesus, our Lord, God-for-us.
The divide twixt the Judaic idea of justification under the Law and the Christian notion of justification (being set aright) by faith in the freedom of God’s Spirit sits precariously within Paul. He carries this discomfiture into his pastoral decisions. He rails against the “Judaizers”, them that were insistent that gentile converts to the Jesus-way undergo circumcision and observe the rules and regulations of Judaism. To Paul, by faith or by the grace of God that opens the path to faith, all these externalities of religion are obsolete. The freedom of the Spirit of God is given the children of God. He reprimands Peter for hypocrisy when, after having been by some criticized for so doing, he declines to eat with gentiles. He tells Christians they have undergone a circumcision of the heart and need not one of the flesh, but proceeds to circumcise his assistant, Timothy. He treads a fine line in trying to uphold the freedom of the children of God, and not causing a scandal within the given situation. He is ever seeking a diplomatic, kind, or, considerate course, advising the virtually impossible: “be all things to all men to better win over more” (1 Corinthians 9), and “let no one despise you, but set a good example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1Timothy 4).
Paul is also less than liberated from his cultic idioms and cultural prejudices. He speaks of the cross in terms of temple ritual, as a sacrifice for sin, as the final and great propitiation. He sets the risen Jesus in a celestial orb enthroned in honours at God’s side. He portrays Jesus as priest ever making intercession for the world before the throne of Mercy. In the religious idioms of the day, he contrasts self-concern and selflessness: the children of light are called out of the world and away from the children of darkness, the world/body/flesh surge to stagnate the purity and honour of soul/spirit. He imbues Christianity with notions of war, athleticism, and the need to do something more than live by faith alone in his similes of soldering on for God’s cause, donning the marks of military service, running well the course, etc. Aided and assisted so often by women, preaching a new way wherein the cultural dichotomies twixt male and female are dissolved, he admonishes women to keep to their accustomed places and roles. He does likewise with slaves. He has in his hand and at the end of his mighty pen a revolutionary, democratic, egalitarian insight into the propriety of world function, but he wields that sword with enormous caution. Perhaps there is in this more than a tincture of wisdom, for Christianity may never have had berth to live and grow had it entered the Roman world any more forcefully than it did. It needed, as still it does, the sanctuary of cult to affect the total regeneration of the world into something more akin to a “new creation”, for cults, being iconic, are better situated to both endurance and efficaciousness than the time-tempered pragmatics of the socio-political theories they inevitably excite.
The viability of this “new creation” according to Paul has often been debated. Some opine that Paul, like Jesus before him, was expecting the end of this world to soon occur, that the “kingdom of God” would suddenly in real and concrete time and space appear and melt away the existing structures of heaven and earth, and that a spirituality of rigourous morals and communal life would be practically and briefly sustainable. Of Paul, and of many of his contemporaries, this is probable, but of Jesus, merely possible. Jesus certainly speaks of the eminent coming of God’s full reign, but Jesus presents himself in prophetic colours,[vii] and time in prophetic parlance lacks a specific frame of past-present-future. It is an idealized time, a compressed time wherein futurity is condensed and made to drip out of the present. It is time transforming out of synchronization, and viewed from a perspective in eternity. The point is not the end of time-space as it now exists, but the coming of God’s dominion,[viii] his gracious presence in his Christ, his emissary, who concretely reveals the healing, vivifying, and sanctifying immediacy of the Creator to and for the created, opening a new way, a way not of law but spirit, not of desire, but com-union by grace, by free gift. Jesus’ talk of the kingdom coming is temporally amorphous because it is about spirituality, not time-space. More than one of his early disciples would seemingly had preferred God descend as Deus ex machina and wipe away everything seen as wanting about this world, but God descends as Emmanuel, as “God-with-us”, a God who labours with us even unto death.
By the turn of the first century (approximately 90-110 AD) when the last works to be admitted into Christian scripture are receiving their final forms, Christianity and the world have changed. Between the preaching of Paul and the proclaiming of Christ by the Johannine communities, the churches founded by John in and around present day Turkey and Greece, Christianity has been expelled from Judaism, stands as a religion in its own right, is persecuted, and showing signs of hostile divisions within.[ix] God is unbounded love, Christ is God, but freely given love one to another is restricted to them of like mind, “the brethren”. Likewise, the “world” has lost the ideational potential to be the cosmos renewed in love, forgiveness and healing; it is simply the antithesis to God and godly life. There are things to be desired and things to be despised. Christ appears to be Plato’s idea of beauty, truth and good, and the world Plotinus’ idea of a power distorting and destructive of man. The optimism, the faith, that Paul tries to place between the reality of the human situation and the ideal of freely given love is turned into a negation, a flight from the reality of the world to a better world, a rising above the world, and it is, as many early churchman thought it, dualistic, gnostic (to some degree), and as is every mystically inclined vision, sufficiently amorphous to be plied into dangerous, unorthodox ideas. Matthew, Mark, and Luke in their gospels each have Jesus risen in this world. Jesus’ ascent to the Father that the Spirit might come into the world is not immediate. In John’s gospel that is compressed. Jesus comes to the disciples on Easter evening already the ascended. Resurrection and ascension are united, for the world, its time and its value are ended, past. God is not in the world; God is in the church.[x] Jesus saves, and he saves not merely from sin but from the world. Man is in the world, but must shelter from it in church, in faith, in renunciation of the world and its relentless temptations and evil ways. Man must desire God, not the world. The prayer here is not to be a channel of divine love, but to make the will, the deepest wells of want and desire, at-one with God. John could sing “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring”, while Paul would think Jesus is the joy of man’s being. It is a nuance, but so is every modification in the genetic code.
John takes the practical, the active identification of Jesus with the heart of mind of God for the situation at hand to its ultimate height. Paul’s solitary path of by faith alone becomes for John Jesus as the solitary Way, Truth, Life. As in Paul, Jesus is the living Shekinah, the merciful presence of God descended to earth, and thus Jesus can claim power over the temple, and be made to supersede every feast and rite of Judaism.[xi] In the temple the divine rested, in Jesus the divine acts. In the mind and heart of the Johannine gospel, Jesus is not a man divinized, a man infused with the Spirit of God; Jesus is the earth-shattering splendour of God come down into human form, and Jesus fails at no turn to exemplify or enunciate this. This attitude will, however, open Christianity to the heresy of Docetism which claims God merely takes on the appearance of the created and is not really in-carnate. The “high Christology” of the Johannine community that elevates and virtually eliminates the humanity of Jesus will, in the Apocalypse, eclipse Jesus behind the Terror of God spilling out from above to incinerate all evil and the world which is its incarnation. Where, in the course of the thirty to fifty years of reflection and re-editing that give us the completed Johannine corpus, has gone the God who so loves this world and wills its salvation? In the Johannine writings, despite all the ranting against Judaism and the demoting of its cult, despite the rising distrust of the world and its ways, there abides a profoundly deep love of Judaism and its exulted Lord, and so we are turned from the portraits of Jesus in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, back to the God of the ancient prophets, to the vision of the God enthroned in glory behind seraphs of fire shouting out to all corners of the cosmos: “Holy, Holy, Holy!” The universality of “I have come to save sinners” becomes something insular, referencing only them sequestered in the ark of the church.
It needs be noted that both Paul and John have God coming to man. There is in this an affinity with Plotinus and his vision of a divine descent. This, and the tension introduced by God’s freely given and unmerited love, and man’s natural inability to act without some root in desire, some trigger of will, will play out throughout Christian spirituality, and its philosophical ideas about God and human nature. Salvation, ultimate well-being, transcendence, wholeness, become rarely gift from God, something handed man by the grace of God, but something to be fought for and merited as the just reward. In brief, despite the modern glorification of the adolescent cry “don’t tell me what to do”, man thirsts for someone to tell him exactly what to do. If man is given a choice between investigating and deliberating toward a solution or simply being told “do this”, most will comfortably slip into the herd mentality and follow any leader with sufficiently commanding voice.
The earliest non-scriptural texts introduce both the value, and the necessity of human merit. The Didache (circa 85AD) calls charity a “compensation” for sin and the deliverance from death’s finality. By the mid-second century (circa 140AD) there appears the very popular spiritual work, The Shepherd of Hermas. It is an enchidrion on sin, repentance, and self-mastery. The Greek mind observed a divide twixt good and evil, but it is a metaphysical opposition within the unity of being; they are principles of the internal dynamic of being and non-being, being and becoming. In The Shepherd, good and evil are individuated entities in opposition. In contrast to Job, with its rather philosophical “wisdom literature” attitude, wherein Satan plays the role of chief-prosecutor before the Supreme Judge, in The Shepherd he becomes the condemned criminal escaped and ravaging the world. In an ideology that will materialize in the treatment of sin and heresy for centuries to come, the body is not the temple of the Spirit, but an entity at war with the Spirit, an entity to be fought, suppressed, and held in check with the threat of hell-fire. On this battlefield where rage the forces of heaven against the earth, those comfortable words from Matthew 11: “Come to me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you” become not the invitation to a spirituality of sanctification in trust, but a populist theme at the burial of the dead.
[i] Cf: The conclusion of Occidental Ideas, Part 8, February 2014.
[ii] Kant and the brace of theologians he has influenced are at odds with this foundational, scriptural position. There is a near universal impression that man must work to make the kingdom of God appear, work to be saved, to be loved of God. When, however, one accepts being loved, accepts God comes, makes “himself” present and manifest in love, then salvation, well-being, fulfillment “appear”, “arise” as free creation, as gift, as new life. Such is the truth of spirituality. We do not make it, or accomplish it. It comes from beyond us, from “the other”, and it makes us and makes us whole. With no intention of being glib, simply put, man’s part is to relax, accept, stay faithful. There is a reason spiritual exercise begins in learning how to breathe in, breathe out.
[iii] Cf: A Great Divorce, Part 7, July 2013.
[iv] For Plato, the memory of beauty rouses man to the return to his true being. Put otherwise, memory is the occasion of the fateful turn, of con-version. Memory is likewise the fulcrum of conversion in both Hebrew and Christian sacred writ. Both the Passover meal and the Eucharist are thank-ful acts of remembering. It may also be noted that before both Jesus and Paul, Aristotle had the world moved by love. In Meta-physics he postulates that that which moves the unmoved mover is being loved [ερωμενον]. Aristotle’s desiring love as the animation of cosmos will be revisited throughout occidental philosophy as the Will to be, the Will to power, the Will to self-hood, to ego, to ego-satisfaction. As marked in an earlier article, the freedom of love seeks out the desire of the other, and, without intending to amend ideas of an eternal dialectic in either Hegelian thought or Process theological systems, eros and agape endlessly melt one into the other, creating a dynamic of being and having, giving and receiving, subjectivity and objectivity that in each moment of satiation is Spirit. CF: Spirituality, Part 2, subsection IX.
[v] Paul comes from a heritage that despises any image of the divine. To hail Jesus as the “Image of the Father” is, thus, a moment brimming with often unappreciated cachectic weight.
[vi] Cf: on Sin, March 2013.
[vii] The rabbinical Matthew presents Jesus as the new Moses, greatest of the prophets. In his gospel account, especially the latter chapters, Jesus exhibits an inclination to wield words of hell-fire and damnation. This prophetic storming is, however, always directed at them who claim devotion but are in fact hypocrites. Jesus’ stern warnings are always about making an authentic choice: life in [trusting] God, or life on one’s own powers, life alone. The Johannine writings, while usually open to raining down terror from above, locate the source not, to borrow from Matthew, in “a prophet” but “something more”, Revelation’s Lord of Judgment with his double-edged sword. For the Johannine communities, the time for the authentic choice is now, and, in the prophetic gale there is always a sense that that now has just this moment been lost to an irretrievable past.
[viii] Cf: Kenosis and Eschaton, April 2013.
[ix] Cf: A Great Divorce, Part 6, June 2013.
[x] Taken superficially, it is astonishing that the works of the Johannine community are set beside those of Paul. Yet, they both have a truth to disclose. The reality of man, of hope and its compatriots of trust and love, of our ideals and our living relationship with them are far too complex to reduce to having only one perspective. The task of faith, both as a general positivity toward life and as the embrace of a complex of religious ideas and ideals, is to be ever vigilant that balance and respect characterize our approach. The title “saint” is applied to both John and Paul. It is an honorarium denoting not perfection but dedication.
This said, the reader ought not mistake the writer as a despiser of the Johannine corpus. Quite the contrary! The Johannine visions constitute the superlatives of the Christian canon. My reservations reside in their mystical proclivities having been wrongly plied and having lead both dogmatic theology and spirituality into anfractuous complications, devaluing both the mission of the church to the world and the worldliness of God and soul. The Johannine works present the church mature meditations upon holiness. They are prayers suitable for the “dark night”. They are moments of Majesty appeared, not to stir to action in and for the world, but to reassure the soul confronted with its wounds in its sacred office of abidance. In the pain of conscience and the adversities of life, the orderly series of Johannine visions form a bulwark depicting the indefectible glory and grace of God. They stand the cynosure that truth, goodness, beauty, love not only endure but triumph—in faithfulness. Their inherent Hebraic prayerfulness cannot be made into a vocabulary for Greek-inspired metaphysical speculations about the nature of God and man.
[xi] CF: on John, Reflections on a Vision, February 2016, and on The Apocalyptic Book of Revelation, January 2013.
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