I begin a series that will seek to shed some light on why I am Anglican.

Image used with permission.

More than twice a month I am asked “Why did you become Anglican?” The answer to the question is complex, and I want to answer that question in part by saying up front that I don’t believe in ecclesiastical superiority. I don’t think any single church or denomination is the one true church. I’ve heard more than a whiff of this from folks as varied as Plymouth Brethren, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic (in spades, frankly), Baptist, Evangelical Covenant, and United Methodists. So in this series I’m not saying that the Anglican Communion is the one-true-and-always-faithful church in the world.

I became Anglican because of the church calendar. (Not only because of the church calendar but it was part of the process.) Non-calendar Christians usually observe Christmas (not always Advent, though it is growing) and Good Friday and Easter. That’s about it. The rest of the year is up to the preacher, the pastor, the elders and deacons, and up to the congregation. Many pastors wisely organize their churches to be formed over time through a series of themes — or books of the Bible (Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Piper preached through Romans for almost two decades) — but none can improve on the centrality of Christ in the church calendar.

I begin with the church calendar, beautifully displayed in the graph at the top of this post. I love the church calendar, and here are my reasons:

1. God gave the children of Israel and calendar and a series of feasts that memorialized annually the story of God with Israel and the history of God’s redemptive work among Israel. Thus, read Leviticus 23.
2. A calendar like this served to divide the year into its parts on the basis of God’s redemption. Agriculture is folded into this redemptive calendar.
3. The calendar reminded Israel of what God had done and became the platform of hope for what God will do.
4. The spirituality of attentive Israelites was formed then on the basis of the major redemptive acts of God in Israel’s history.
5. Israelites knew their history and their story on the basis of this calendar

The church calendar is the Christianizing (to use a bad word) of Israel’s calendar. It reshaped that calendar around the central event of the Christian faith: the redemption in Christ.

From Robert Webber (see below).

Hence, the church calendar does what Israel’s calendar did for the Christians:

1. The church’s leaders provide a calendar commemorating the redemptive events in the life of Christ and these events memorialize what God has done in Christ.
2. A calendar like this serves to divide the year into its parts on the basis of God’s redemption in Christ.
3. The calendar reminds the church every year what God has done in Christ and becomes the platform of hope for what God will do in Christ.
4. The spirituality of attentive Christians is formed then on the basis of the major redemptive acts of God in the story of Jesus.
5. Christians can learn their history and their story on the basis of this calendar

Look at that calendar and you will notice how Christo-centric it is. The church’s calendar centers itself around Jesus himself and what God has done in Jesus. There is no better way to organize our life.

The church calendar itself does nothing for us apart from grace, apart from the work of the Spirit, and apart from our willing faithfulness to be open to what God does for us in Christ. But, with that work of grace and our openness the calendar can become a means of our formation.

The church calendar, especially in Ordinary Time, is the time where the most of adaptation occurs. Pastors may simply choose to preach through a book or a theme on the basis of discerning a church’s needs. Adaptation to the moment has always been a factor in church calendars, but over time the church calendar is a wise guide to the central themes of our faith and formation.

For a very good book on the church calendar, I recommend Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year.

The second edition of Scot’s book The Blue Parakeet is now available. The book is one of his best, a book that helps the reader think through the nature of the Bible as inspired and authoritative. From the back cover: “The second edition also includes new sections on race and slavery, the atonement, Genesis and science, and kingdom and justice issues.” While the first edition is outstanding, it did have some shortcomings. The most significant was the application of reading the Bible as story to only one issue – Women in Church Ministries Today. While this is a significant issue, and one that needs attention, it is far from the only issue raised by some approaches to Scripture. The revised version of The Blue Parakeet corrects this shortcoming by inserting a new section – Part 4 – with chapters Slaves/Atonement/Justice in the King and his Kingdom Redemption Story. Women in Church Ministries becomes Part 5. In addition there is an new appendix on Genesis and Science. This appendix is the subject of today’s post.

In some ways the appendix on Genesis and Science is a brief summary of Scot’s chapters in Adam and the Genome, but it makes an excellent addition to The Blue Parakeet. Many concerns that Christians have about evolution have nothing at all to do with scientific questions or evidence. The concerns are biblical and theological. The evidence for a long history and common descent appear to contradict the Bible and challenge our understanding of human vocation, human nature and original sin. Some will go so far as to claim that without a traditional understanding of original sin (i.e. Adam’s Fall in the garden) atonement is unnecessary and meaningless.  No Adam, no need for a savior.

Scot outlines what he calls the “historical Adam” view (p. 314): Two actual persons existed suddenly as the result of God’s creation. They have a biological and genetic relationship to all humans alive today. Adam and Eve sinned, died, and brought death into the world and passed on their newly acquired sin natures to all their descendants – i.e. all humans. It is this  string of connections that results in a universal need for salvation. No human being is exempt.

While this is a plausible reading of Scripture, many of the findings of modern science call into question the foundation of the scenario. There is ample evidence of evolution. Humans developed as a population. While we all share common ancestors, there is no evidence for a unique pair of individuals as the sole progenitors of the human race.  The genetic evidence suggests that the population was always in the thousands.

This challenge send us back to consider what the Bible teaches again. Is the historical Adam truly foundational? Probably not. Adam and Eve do not play a central role in the Old Testament, in fact, they are absent except for genealogies after the first chapters of Genesis, nor do they play such a role in Jewish tradition.  “Adam and Eve in the Jewish tradition were flexible human being, and each author used Adam and Eve in differing ways because each author saw the literary Adam and Eve as archetypal or representative humans.” (p. 316)

Paul uses Adam and Eve in ways that differ from the Jewish tradition that surrounded him, but his approach is the same. Adam is a literary archetype or representative. Paul is not making a scientific and genetic statement. The key point is the contrast between Adam and Christ (p. 317).

Adam: Sin -> Death -> Condemnation -> Union with others

Christ: Obedience -> Life -> Justification -> Union with others

Paul is clear that all die “because all sinned.” We are all individually responsible for our own death through sin. Life comes through Christ. Neither death through Adam nor life through Christ require biological or genetic descent.

What does this mean for the historical Adam as outlined above? Scot emphasizes: “no one in the Bible or in the Jewish tradition taught this historical Adam theory as the church tradition teaches it.” (p. 317) The church tradition builds on Paul’s writing – but it is not simply a recap of his teaching. It elaborates his teaching. We can discard the elaboration without abandoning Paul’s teaching.

Both the Bible’s General Plot – the King and His Kingdom – and the Bible’s redemptive benefits story fit into other approaches to understanding what the Bible actually says about Adam and Eve. Jesus is King and he summons all humans into his Kingdom whether or not this historical Adam theory is accurate. But more importantly, the approach to Adam and Eve detailed above – as personally responsible for their sin  and we are responsible for our sin )”because all sinned”) – is all we need for us to believe the gospel’s saving benefits: that Jesus dies for our sins and was raised for our justification (Romans 4:25) (pp. 317-318)

All this means is that no significant Christian doctrine rests on the historical Adam.

Focus on the General Plot and let the rest stand or fall on its merits.

What do you think?

If you wish to contact me directly, you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

By David Fitch, Professor at Northern Seminary

One approaches the concluding chapter of The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone, the architect of the Black theology Movement, with great anticipation. We come with deep longings to see change. We come asking, “what shall we do in the face of the horrific racism that rules our society? What is the good news in all of this?”

The gospel for James Cone is:

…more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die.” (It is) an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst.

The Christian gospel is “God’s message of liberation in an unredeemed and tortured world.”

Cone does not dismiss the transcendent reality of the gospel “that lifts our spirits to a world far removed from the suffering of this one” (155). Indeed, Malcolm X and MLK Jr. both had revelatory moments of the transcendent that sustained them in the midst of crisis (this gives us a good clue as to how Cone views the transcendent). But Cone is adamant that the gospel is more than this.

The gospel is that God is actually at work in the suffering of His people.

The Gospel for James Cone

Central to Cone’s gospel is that God has turned the cross, a symbol of death and defeat, into “a sign of liberation and new life” (156).

In Niebuhr’s words, the cross of Christ worked a “transvaluation of values.” In other words, God reveals evil for what it is in the cross, and exalts the suffering of people. Cone says: Let us likewise see the lynching tree as a “transvaluation of values” (157).

Cone asks us to resist “spiritualizing” the cross via a substitutionary atonement that creates a withdrawn piety, making the cross irrelevant to injustice in the world. This is the white man’s atonement.

Cone argues that “Jesus was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America.” And because “God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word…God was also present in every lynching…God transformed lynched black bodies into the re-crucified body of Christ” (158).

There is an “opening to the transcendent” here in the crosses of the suffering. Here we see God is at work redemptively through the suffering (Cone plays homage to MLK’s theology of redemptive suffering, 83-92).

The gospel for James Cone is that God is at work in the suffering of the lynching tree, working to overcome the injustice. In my preferred language, Cone is recognizing God’s presence at work in the suffering that is profoundly evident in the cross of Christ at Calvary. (This counters the atonement theology that sees God the Father as separated from/turning his back on the Son at the cross. Following Greg Boyd et. al. I believe God withdrew his presence from holding back the evil, thereby allowing Jesus to take on the consequences of the world’s sin/violence).

Notice again he says “God was present with Jesus on the cross,” refusing to let Satan and death have the last word. In the same way “God was also present in every lynching.” He talks of the “concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor.” I believe when he talks about the “the liberating power of black experience” (154), he is talking about the power of presence, the relational power of God’s presence at work in the world drawing people to reconciliation and renewal. Cone lacks of an account of atonement here. This is problematic because it leaves missing an account of how God works—not through violence—but by overcoming the violence.

Nonetheless, this all still resonates powerfully for me and with my own work on Faithful Presence.

But Now What?

But what does this mean in practice? How are we Christians (especially white Christians) to respond to this?

Cone points us in two directions.

1) Let us remember. By “remember,” I mean “be present.” Let us be present to the suffering of the lynching tree. Cone suggests that just as the Germans should never forget the Holocaust, Americans should never forget slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree. By remembering, Cone says, we are recognizing “blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land…What happened to blacks happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves” (165). Cone believes if America has the courage to face “the great sin” of lynching and the legacy of white supremacy, this can lead to change and transformation.

2) Let us act. For Cone, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well meaning Christians. We are called to do more than mere contemplation and adoration. In the words of Cone, “we are faced with the challenge to take the crucified down from the cross” (161). The cross offers us courage that there is more than just contemplation. God is present in the cross. And so we encounter God’s solidarity with the suffering in the cross and discover the beauty therein (162). Cone is not explicit as to what this action will look like, but his assumption is this encounter with the cross and the lynching tree will change the way we live. Cone is confident:

If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope “beyond tragedy.” (Cone’s concluding words on p. 166).

The Temptation of Niebuhr?

And so Cone leaves us with a call to remember and a call to action. Let us be present and let us engage.

But how to engage? After the compelling, so important, and so biblical call to be with the suffering, know the suffering, see the injustice, and that God is on the side of the suffering—what Gutierrez called the “Preferential Option of the Poor”—we are called to go do something about it.

But how? Do we engage in activism? Do we engage in trying to change the legal and or economic system through systemic change? Do we engage in coercive engagement, all out “war” against the evils we plainly see? Do we seek to impose our systems, implement retributive actions to remedy, and make “even” the injustices done against the victims?

After reading Cone, the temptation is to follow the realism of Niebuhr and take the justice of the world into our own hands.

More blatantly, the temptation is to change the world through various coercive means. This, to me, is the temptation of Cone—indeed the temptation of liberation theology.

Like Latin American liberation theology, where we are tempted to rely on Marxian social analysis and enter into working for social change through the machinery of antagonism and provoking dialectical revolution, with Cone we are tempted to revert to Niebuhrian realism, to engage in the battles of pitting one side of coercive power over another after the injustice has been revealed.

Cone’s critique of Niebuhr (in Lynching Tree) seems at once to condemn the inadequacy of his approach to “proximate justice” while at the same time giving a nod to the realism of his assessment: that indeed we must engage the world on the world’s terms, engage its violence with a pushback against it, if indeed we are to accomplish anything.

It is easy to remember how at the end of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ministry, he himself lost patience with the practice of nonviolence. It’s easy to remember Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and others who viewed non-violence as a losing strategy. We must meet power with power. We must share in the same power that does these wrongs to us. Violence with violence.

But what else is there? Where else is there to go after being faced with the compelling reality of suffering and injustice as unveiled in The Lynching Tree (and, for that matter, in all theologies of liberation?)

The Missing Pieces of a Theology of Liberation

Here’s where I propose an Anabaptist alternative to the Niebuhrian option—where we take the best of Cone, and supplement him with Anabaptist practice to build a contextual theology.

The sixth (and final) chapter of Cone’s Lynching Tree leads most readers to default to the Niebuhr option. Even though Cone criticizes Niebuhr for the lack of presence proffered by his theology (that I contend is inherent to Niebuhr’s theology), Cone leaves us with no alternative to Niebuhr.

To offer such an alternative, I suggest Cone’s book needs three things:

1) An Alternative Account of Power: There is lacking in Cone’s book an alternative account of power. As I have argued elsewhere, God in Christ enters the world through his people with an alternative way of power. In the words of Jesus:

You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant (Mark 10:42-43).

God comes, he convicts, he centers, and realigns all forms of relationship—including interpersonal and systemic ones—through His presence. By “presence,” I do not mean here a psychologized or spiritualized dynamic at play when people become present to each other, although that may be a part of it. I mean that God’s presence that moves people and systems towards redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, healing, cooperation, and transformation, that is, in essence, supernatural.

This presence of God is more than personal. It is always social. It works for social transformation. And when Christians become present in a space, engage, listen, and speak truth in love, entering the space of violence, injustice, suffering, and opening space for discerning new ways forward, God works. This is presence.

His presence is the opposite of violence and coercion. God’s presence of course can be rejected because God does not coerce. So to the human, God’s presence is inefficient.

But when God’s presence is received and responded to, true transformation breaks out.

This is a different kind of power. But it is power nonetheless, and it is mightily at work. In the words of the great John Perkins:

Racism is satanic. It will therefore take a supernatural force to defeat it.

There is judgement against injustice in this power, for in the very rejection of God’s presence, God hands people over to the consequences of their sin for all to see (remember Selma). And change comes again— either in repentance or the destruction of evil as its own end.

Niebuhr could never fathom that anything political (or social) could be accomplished via God’s presence. For him, spirituality was always individual. Like Martin Luther (he was Lutheran enough in this regard), Niebuhr kept the right hand of Spirit separate from the left hand of the Sword. The political needed the right hand, the left hand could only be individual.

But the Anabaptist in me shouts out: Only so much can be accomplished via the left hand of coercion  Yes we need preservatory protections. But it is through the Spirit, God’s presence, that He shall work in the world for healing, reconciliation, and restoration. And this is much more than individual. This is intensely social, political. Though Cone gives overture again and again to presence at work in the suffering of his people, he does not develop how a people—the church—makes space for His presence…what I have called “Faithful Presence.”

Without faithful presence, the church will always be tempted by Niebuhr. We always default to the Niebuhrian temptation.

2) A Role for The Church: To engage the world’s injustice this way, Cone’s book needs a prominent role for the church. But this goes missing in Cone’s Lynching Tree. Indeed the most prominent treatment of the church in The LynchingTree is of the white church’s failure in America during the pre- and post-WWII Civil Rights movement. As such, it’s easy to understand why Cone has little imagination for the church to play a role in challenging and transforming the culture of white supremacy so ensconced in the American culture.

And yet, with no account for the church, what we get is a default church. The church in effect becomes a training organization for volunteers to be sent into the world to do the work of justice.

The problem with this option is it always sends Christians into the world with the posture “we know what is right” and we are here to do battle against this injustice on the world’s terms of violence and antagonism.

It is inevitable, then, that God’s people get absorbed into the world’s violence. And I contend that all we end up accomplishing is some mediating steps towards holding back injustice (which is worthy nonetheless) but never get to opening space for the renewal of all things in Christ. We settle for less. And often, because we engage the world’s violence with more violence, we make it worse. I call it the Donald Trump effect. And in the end, we are exhausted, depleted justice warriors.

This is not the way God shall change the world.

Instead, it is the church’s task in the world is to be His Faithful Presence. It is by His work in the world, and by participating in it, that God shall bring His justice into the world. The church’s task is to be present to the racism of our culture, speak into it when the space is opened, and make space for the new world coming through reconciliation and table fellowship.

3) Jesus as Risen King: All of the above assumes that God has come in the Son. He has died, taken on the sin and violence of the world, and won a victory in the resurrection. He ascended and now sits at the right hand, the risen King, the ruling Lord.

Of course, Cone is focused on the cross. But much like evangelicals, Cone’s book offers no account of the resurrection and its role in overcoming racism (for too many evangelicals, the resurrection is merely the vindication of Christ in overcoming death).

But apart from the resurrection and ascension, there is no power of God’s presence at work in the world. Neither is there a church that lives under a different politic. And so power will be flattened (à la Niebuhr), and the church will be merely a volunteer training organization for the world’s violence. Jesus becomes merely our example, the exemplar who shows us how it is done. For sure, that is true. But in Christ, God has initiated a new Kingdom, a regime of presence, love, forgiveness, reconciliation, healing, renewal, and transformation. None of what I have said above is possible unless God has conquered evil in the world, triumphed over principalities and systems, defeated the chains of sin and antagonism, through the death, resurrection, and exaltation of Christ as Risen Lord.

Will This Work?

Will this work?

It depends upon what you mean by “work.”

But let me remind you of the stories of the early Civil Rights movement in the southern United States. It was Charles Sherrod and those early Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meetings that had multi-racial prayer meetings and sit-ins of presence on southern campuses and town centers that disrupted the ensconced Jim Crow society of the south.

Sherrod said that it was the “reconciliation that occurs within the Christian community (that) is the deepest and most permanent of reconciliations.”

As I make the case in Faithful Presence, reconciliation is a deep practice of God’s victorious presence in the world. It was Diane Nash of SNCC who said:

Our goal was to reconcile, to create a community recovered or fulfilled, rather than simply gain power over the opposition.

Here we see communities of presence at the core of what started the disruption of Jim Crow of the 50’s and 60’s.

It was Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm communities of Georgia that gathered people, black and white, cooperating together to share economics and farming, that disrupted the white supremacist Jim Crow culture of Georgia.

It was John Perkins’ practices of the three “R’s”—Relocation, Reconciliation, Redistribution—grounded in the church, which added up to a social agenda more radical than any other advanced by the Civil Rights Movement.

These grassroots efforts—spreading across the south, grounded in the churches practicing presence— became the ferment from which the Civil Rights Movement grew, and which later the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became its public leader (read Charles Marsh’s Beloved Community for this history).

Ironically, one wonders: After the death of Martin Luther King Jr., after the accomplishments of several landmark pieces of legislation, whether the Civil Rights Movement was not in fact given over to the government (and para-church organizations) too soon, and in so doing, lost its ferment to go further into revealing racial injustice and healing the divisions and antagonisms. Surely legislation must come, but we need not lose the church’s witness to keep the work of justice flowing against ‘the powers.’

In the words of John Perkins:

The civil rights movement was an overwhelming success. But it failed to inspire our nation to move beyond integration to reconciliation (as quoted in More Than Equals, Spencer Perkins and Rice 1993, 17).

So instead, decades later, what we are left with is a society regressed to a second, more hideous, New Jim Crow as well as other variations of white oppression (read these writers.)

Conclusion

In conclusion, Cone’s work The Cross and the Lynching Tree is a brilliant book that pushes the church towards a theology and practice that is intensely contextual. It gives us a superior example of how we must first go be among our context, listen, observe, know the narratives, chart the pain, suffering, economics, to then begin to understand how Gods is at work here for redemption.

But we need more.

We need an ecclesiology (an understanding of the church’s role in the world). We need a way of practicing church as faithful presence to take the next step beyond awareness of injustice to actually allowing God to work for His healing, and for us to be his instruments.

For those interested in more study and development of Contextual Theology, check out our Doctoral program at Northern Seminary.

It’s always a danger for a white man to critique the ground breaking work of a black theologian of the stature of James Cone. So I humbly submit: Where have I seen things well? And what did I completely miss on? Does this review advance the work of liberation theology (my hope in writing it)? Let’s have a conversation.

Perhaps the most neglected and disputed aspect of Christian faith is the person and role of the Holy Spirit. We (most of us anyway) will recite the Apostle’s Creed with sincerity and affirm a Trinitarian doctrine of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit;

the holy catholic Church;

the communion of saints;

the forgiveness of sins;

the resurrection of the body;

and the life everlasting. AMEN.

God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth is rather clear. Jesus Christ is the center of Christian faith. Yet the nature of the Holy Spirit, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit remain somewhat enigmatic, poorly understood, and controversial. This is almost an after thought in some areas of Protestantism. Of course charismatic Christianity is growing, both here and in the broader world, yet some see this as a problem rather than a cause for rejoicing.  The emphasis on the Spirit is misplaced. The gifts of the Spirit served a specific and limited role in the early church but have ceased. Now we have Scripture as our guide. Perhaps the primary (although not sole) role of the Holy Spirit in the early church was to inspire Scripture. The gifts of the Spirit served to authenticated apostleship.

Science and the Spirit. The Holy Spirit and gifts of the Holy Spirit may seem distinct from my more typical discussions of science and Christian faith, however, I think they are deeply intertwined. The experienced reality of the supernatural lies at the very heart of many of our debates and disagreements.

Many in our Western culture view the reality of the supernatural as simply wrong, a myth we’ve outgrown. There is an attitude that rational people realize this. Discussions of the virginal conception (or virgin birth), incarnation, and resurrection generally reflect this naturalism.

Ironically, many Christians implicitly reinforce this idea. The reality of the supernatural is defended as a rational argument required by Scripture, and as a litmus test for true faith, rather than as an experienced reality. Arguments that connect young earth creation and a global flood with belief in the resurrection fall into this category. We believe in both, so we are told, because the Bible tells us so. If one is rejected, there is no foundation for the other. (… ridiculous!)

Most protestants will not deny the Holy Spirit or the work of the Holy Spirit (albeit carefully constrained), yet many view the work of the Spirit with a touch of skepticism. In large part this skepticism arises from the inherently personal and subjective experience of the Spirit. It seems far safer (and more rational) to trust in the Holy Authoritative Written Word of God as final authority than to trust in the ongoing work of the Spirit. This strikes me, in some respects, as a sterilized, enlightenment, rationalist view of God. Wilson emphasizes toward the end of the discussion that he doesn’t take a deist view, although he believes the gifts of the Spirit are no longer necessary and have ceased. This is a fairly common response. Stopping short of the complete disavowal of the supernatural, or relegating God to a deist first cause, we really don’t trust the supernatural or the Spirit as experiential. We intellectually affirm the supernatural but distrust experience.

Perhaps we struggle as Western Christians with the nature and power of the Spirit because of a quest for absolute certainty and authority. We created artificial divisions of agency – nature, Spirit, human – and find authority in none of these. Within Protestantism authority has been invested in a book – sola scriptura – as (perhaps) the only “sure” thing. But this is not the practical reality of the church  or of the first three quarters plus of church history from AD 50 to 1600 give or take a hundred years or so (the flexibility is intentional, no change is abrupt).

Let me put up a suggestion for discussion. The canon of Scripture, has been given not to replace the Spirit or to provide absolute authority, but to allow the community of the Church to have record of the work of God in Israel and of the experience and growing understanding of those who saw the Messiah in life, death, and resurrection. It is not a law book of propositions and facts, but the story of God’s interaction with His creation. This means that we must be immersed in the entire sweep of Scripture from Genesis through Revelation, including the boring parts. Short little excerpts won’t do. We must also come together as a community to listen to those among us who have insights into the culture and times recorded in Scripture (linguists, anthropologists, and historians).

Scripture doesn’t replace the Spirit, but immersion in the story of Scripture in the community of the church provides the foundation for discernment. It lights the way, but doesn’t provide the foundation or the experience.

The gifts of the Spirit are real even today … wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues, teaching, helping, guidance, … and given for the common good, practiced in and for community. (e.g. 1 Cor 12)

What do you think?

Is the importance of the Spirit underestimated in much of evangelicalism? Western Christianity?

What is the role of the Spirit today?

If you wish to contact me directly, you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

This is a lightly edited repost from several years back.

Not long ago I posted this:

It’s time to bury the word “evangelical.” It’s both past time to bury it but it’s also time yet again to bury it.

I stand by that more today than even when I posted it. The term is now useless. Roy Moore lost but the vote in Alabama proved that evangelicalism as a movement has lost its moorings.

The Political Turn of Evangelicalism is undeniable, and I spoke about and against this in both The King Jesus Gospel and Kingdom Conspiracy.

George Marsden wants to hang on to the term and so concludes in his essay on the diversity of evangelicalism, including the usefulness of the term outside North America, and he notes well the intellectual resources now available among evangelicals. But he wants to hang on to the term:

It may well be prudent for the time being for non-Trump American Christians, including most Christian scholars, to distance themselves from any identification as “evangelical” in public. The term has never been that widely used as a primary self-identification. Yet the term may still be useful intra nos, as in “the Evangelical Theological Society or for Americans who are relating to their British “evangelical” counterparts or in connecting with those involved with the Lausanne Conferences on World Evangelization.

Certainly the word “evangelical” is still useful historically to help describe a huge set of historical phenomena and the remarkable fact that they can be so diverse yet hold certain features in common. At least it seems safe to predict that long after Trump is gone, if the human species survives, many varieties of what are now called “evangelical” Christians will still be flourishing. And some of these will be flourishing even more–especially I would hope by being kept closer to the mainstreams of the Christian heritage and all that implies in practice–if the faithful scholars among them do not lose heart.

And Ken Stewart’s attempt to contend that evangelicalism’s history has been one that has embraced both Bible and the deep traditions of church history. That’s not the problem.

The problem is now. [The image is from Tom Oord and it illustrates The Political Turn.]

The problem is that in the 1980s evangelicalism’s leaders — James Kennedy, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell — aligned evangelicals with the Republican Party and we have people today like Franklin Graham uttering asinine and inane defenses of President Donald Trump, we have pastors standing behind the President in the posture of blessing, and far too many evangelical leaders who are afraid to speak against the political posturing of evangelicalism.

Don’t blame the meaning of the term “evangelical” simply on the media’s use of the term. 24-7 news — TV or social media — has simply turned the Political Turn of Evangelicalism in the 80s into a harder firmer turn.

The problem is that America’s evangelicalism doesn’t know the difference between America and Jesus.

Progressive evangelicals are no different. All they want to talk about is Trump.

We live today in the wake of politicization of evangelicalism and that’s how the term is understood today.

My review of a fantastic new book: Matthew Croasmun, The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Sin in the Pauline letters seems to be more than the violation of a command and seems to take on systemic force. Christian theology’s doctrines of original sin and guilt are but one example of theological attempts to come to terms with lower case sins and upper case Sin as a tyrant. In Matthew Croasmun’s recently published dissertation, The Emergence of Sin, a series of proposals are made that provide innovative solutions to all the above and more.

Croasmun establishes both the contours and parameters of the discussion in chapter one, which sorts out scholarship more or less into the individual or psychological (R. Bultmann), cosmic or mythological (E. Käsemann), and the systemic view of liberation theologians (E. Tamez). His terms are “sin came through sinning” (4), standing under definite dualism’s lordships (11), and sinful institutions (15). Croasmun’s contention is not that these elements are not each present, for they are, but that they can’t explain enough. Sin, what is it? Personification or a hyper reality? Is the individual sinning paradigm sufficient for the cosmology and anthropology at work? Is not Sin experienced as something outside and inside, as some kind of cosmic tyrant? What happens then to cosmology and anthropology? “We would prefer a reading that can hold together both sides of the contradiction, about which Bultmann and Käsemann more or less choose sides: that is, that human agents are subject to a power, Sin, that constrains their freedom to act; and that they are nevertheless responsible for their sin. Liberationist readers move us in the direction of being able to hold these two “sides” of the debate in tension, though not without introducing their own difficulties and limitations” (15). Whether it is social or cosmic forces, the systemic theory of Sin acting upon humans offers promise in coming to terms with the Pauline presentations in Romans. How then can Sin be explained as an enslaving force or power? Are the structures simply consequences of individual sins or do they take on a power of their own? What happens then to cosmology and anthropology? What is a person, or what is an agent? Is Sin a person or agent? Sin, Romans 7:8, makes clear is some kind of agent acting upon the person in his or her attempt to observe Torah.

The singular contribution of The Emergence of Sin is Croasmun’s lengthy, accessible and paradigm-altering proposal that sin by the individual, Sin as a cosmological presence and Sin as a systemic can be explained best by emergence theory. In chapters two and three the author examines emergence theory and personhood by appealing to the physical and social sciences as well as philosophy, sociology and psychology. His concern is “trans-ordinal theory,” or the relationship of various levels and how one is caused or correlated with another. Emergence is “concerned with the appearance of higher-order properties at coordinating higher levels of complexity” (23). The “wetness” of water, beehives, memory and money each briefly illustrate emergence that appears to be both caused by lower order elements yet taking on something of a life of its own. Dualistic theories are on their way out as some kind of ontological monism becomes more and more the scientific orthodoxy. Reductionisms are emergentism’s primary challenge: that is, the thought that lower levels always explain higher levels. However, “explain” and “explain away” are not the same thing. The mind does not exist apart from the chemicals at work in the brain, yet the mind and its intentions do real work in the world (hence, something like emergence is better than dualism or reductionism).

The core to Croasmun’s explanation of emergence theory itself is the dialectical relationship of supervenience and downward causation. Supervenience is not as intuitively clear as downward causation: the former refers to a causal basis of higher properties from which they emerge while the latter contends that what emerges works back almost in cyclical fashion upon the supervenience base making it more of what it is. They feed on one another and form one another. I shall enter our topic now into the discussion: human agents sin and from these sins, Sin emerges and Sin as an Agent works back on humans to precipitate more sin and sinning. Sin is ontologically dependent for its existence on human sinning. Croasmun’s ability to think through various systems of thought comes into play in these two chapters, each of which both demonstrates and illustrates this interplay of supervenience and downward causation. For example, the mind supervenes on the brain but the mind is not reducible to brain. Mind, thus, is more than brain.

Importantly, the question becomes Is the Mind then something other than brain? Croasmun examines this dialectic with amazing dexterity in chemistry, biology, sociology, and then focuses on racism. Back to sins and Sin: “In this light, the conflict between Käsemann and more radical liberationists, on the one hand, and Bultmann and the Vatican, on the other, is entirely predictable: it is the conflict between dualists and reductionists. Those more committed to modernist frameworks (Bultmann and the Vatican in this case) adopt the reductionist view. Those more committed, largely for theological reasons, to the recovery or preservation of premodern frameworks (Käsemann, Gaventa, etc.) adopt a dualist view. Those less committed to modern or premodern Western frameworks (non-Western liberationists and postmodern Westerners) are inclined toward something that looks more emergent” (55).

What then of the person? Croasmun’s examination leads him to conclude that the separation of persons from other persons and the person from the organic cells of the body are not as tidy as often argued and that we are together enmeshed in a system. Furthermore, both “self” and “person” begin to take on new properties leading him to contend that an agent or person or self called Sin can emerge from its supervenience base and become an agent of downward causation on the sinner. The older terms like personification or mythology are now found to be inadequate categories once emergence theory and personhood are reformulated. “Both body and mind are internally composite and integrated externally with their environments, to the extent that the very use of the categories ‘internal’ and ‘external,’ and ‘individual’ and ‘environment,’ become problematic” (59). The reductionism of Bultmann then comes to an end. Nor do we need figurative language for Sin: it becomes a reality, not simply a way of speaking. It is, in other terms, a Self that exercises constraints on its supervenience base. Sin, the apostle Paul said, influences the human to sin. On emergent account, Sin is comprehensible as a genuine Self. Croasmun then turns this into a discussion of the organismic self (the body) and the subjective self (mind) and this turns into superorganisms (e.g., a bee hive), the larger emergent organism encompassing the others. When the system, the superorganism has a life of its own, for the sake of survival, the individual cooperates and preserves the superorganism. The human person then is not an isolated individual but a cog in a wheel, an organism in a superorganism. The individual cannot opt out of the system. A human is a “node in a network of multiple scales” (94). Perhaps the most stunning conclusion is this: “Either the social is real or the individual is not. Ontological individualism is incoherent” (96). Emergence theory best explains the Pauline language of humans as sinful agents and Sin as a cosmic tyrant. Thus, hamartia in Romans 5–8 is a “mythological person: that is, a superorganism with a group mind emergent from a complex network of individual human persons” (99).

Only at this point does Croasmun turn to Romans but he has given his secrets away: Sin exercises downward causation – encouragement to sin – upon human sinning selves, and sinning selves are the supervenient base for Sin as a superorganism. With aplomb Croasmun sorts out Greco-Roman contexts for understanding Pauline anthropology and hamartiology. The Body of Sin stands over against the Body of Christ, each a system unto itself, one for Death and one for Life. How then does emergence theory deal with Torah/law/Law? Law is the means by which Sin connects to the human, the supervenience base (128).

The fifth chapter (142-174) on “Sin, Gender, and Empire” took a surprising and (to me) unconvincing turn to explain sin as a mythological figure, Hamartia, in the context of Greco-Roman concerns with self-mastery, the latter theory in interaction with Stanley Stowers’ A Rereading of Romans. Sin, then, has a body sexed female and gendered feminine. If the overall theory at work was less than compelling, the details will continue to fascinate Romans scholars. If masculinity was control, femininity was lack of control; if the audience of Romans is out of control, and if that audience is under the control of Harmatia, then the behavior is feminine and Paul proposes a new kind of ironic if not deconstructive masculinity of slavery to God! Hamartia then acts as a hypermaculine controlling agent for evil. She may be an impossibility but she is also, for Croasmun, the goddess Roma herself. Filter her through emergence theory and you have a collective Self in her too. Add to Roma now the ancient women called tribas who have masculine passions for women … and it all gets tied together in this fascinating romp through ancient sexuality, gender, empire and theology. Hamartia then is a woman ruling over the passions of the Roman males who are then challenged by the Pauline insult. This may well, he suggests, be a kind of anti-empire criticism by way of insult. Thus, it’s a parody: “the tribadic dominion of Hamartia sounds not unlike the effeminate dominion of the Caesars”(166)! The effeminate Body of Christ then resolves the battle and leads to a new kind of mastery of the passions.

In what will be a favorite for those teaching this book as an effort to show that emergence theory really matters for modern realities, Croasmun suggests his account of an emergence theory of sins and Sin speaks into racism today, into capitalism, into The Network and The Market, but also into a fresh account of original sin and guilt as well as into youth violence. Croasmun’s book has more than enough contribution in his theory of emergence and sin as supervenient base with Sin’s downward causation. The adventure into the gendered body of Hamartia, Roma and tribas may well find a number of responses as well. I find his theory of Sin and emergence to be compelling as a way of putting together individual sins, Sin as a powerful force and Self, as well as Sin/sin as a collective systemic set of institutions. While he states that his method is not a typical historical critical examination, his practice approaches the typical explanation of Paul in his historically reconstructed context.

By Tim Krueger

Tim Krueger is the editor of Mutuality magazine
and is publications coordinator at CBE International.
He was raised in the Philippines and studied history
and Bible at Bethel University (MN).
He and his wife, Naomi, have a son and live in Saint Paul, MN.

In April of 2017, the hashtag #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear went viral on Twitter.

Thousands of women took to social media to share painful things they’d been told by other Christians. One woman shared this:

“Sure, women are equal to men, but I still believe they’re different.”

Most, if not all, egalitarians have heard this before. Critics consistently accuse us of trying to erase gender differences. I’m almost surprised when someone doesn’t assume that because I’m egalitarian I think men and women are exactly the same.

If you’ve never read this book, it’s time.
Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy
ed. by Pierce, Groothuis, Fee

You don’t have to look farther than the Christian blogosphere for the logic behind this myth. At least among American Christians, the same argument appears over and over: Feminism pulled the thread that is unraveling the moral fabric of society. Power-hungry women wanted what men had, so they stepped into men’s spheres. The culture jumped on board, and now our society sees men as worthless, so much that men are trying to become women. Because of feminism, our God-given gender has become meaningless, expendable. Feminism is ultimately a rebellion against God’s created order, which is for our flourishing. Egalitarians are just Christians who have fallen into the feminist trap. They are complicit in erasing gender and undermining a biblical worldview.

I won’t dive into the faults in this reasoning (and there are many) here. Instead, I will try to offer a straight answer to the question, what do egalitarians think about gender differences?

We egalitarians are a critical and free-thinking lot, and we have our differences. I can only honestly say what this egalitarian believes, but I do think most would agree with these five points.

1. Equality is not sameness

First, let’s define “equality.” Where better to start than the dictionary? Merriam-Webster lists several definitions of “equal.” If, like most people, you read “Merriam-Webster defines…” and tune out, stay with me. Definitions matter. How we understand “equality” relates to how we understand gender differences. The primary definition has three parts:

a (1): of the same measure, quantity, amount, or number as another (2): identical in mathematical value or logical denotation: equivalent

b: like in quality, nature, or status

c: like for each member of a group, class, or society

Can equal mean identical? Yes, if we’re talking about math, but we’re not. What if we’re talking about the way God created women and men to coexist?

Let’s try definition b: like in quality, nature, or status. That sounds more like it. Women and men are alike in their quality and their nature. Both bear the image of God. Both are fully human. Both have the same status before God. On this, complementarians and egalitarians agree! (In this, we both break with church tradition.)

We disagree on the implications. Complementarians believe the Bible outlines a gender-based hierarchy that forbids a woman holding authority over a man. Egalitarians believe the Bible demands equal treatment of women and men in relationships and institutions. That is, in the sense of definition c: like for each member of a group, class, or society.

So, egalitarians believe the Bible promotes two senses of equality: equality of nature and equality of opportunity. Neither requires or even hints that women and men are or should be identical.

Egalitarians don’t deny difference, we deny that difference is destiny.

2. There are differences, on average

There are clear differences between male and female. Different DNA. Different genitalia and reproductive systems. Other differences are obvious but less universal. Males are generally taller with more muscle strength. Females are generally shorter with less muscle strength. But, these are only averages. Not in a million tries would I defeat a female athlete—professional, collegiate, or probably high school—in any feat of strength or athleticism.

When it comes to how women and men think and behave, things get fuzzier. Popular wisdom dictates such things as:

Men are more competitive and rational, and less emotional, than women.

Women are more cooperative, nurturing, and emotional than men.

Researchers do observe differences between men and women. However, it’s impossible to know whether they are innate or simply learned. Importantly, there’s more variability within sexes than between them.¹ Differences exist on average, but any one person is unlikely to mirror the average. That matters.

I live in Minnesota, where the weather is erratic. “Today, we’re twenty degrees above/below average!” our meteorologists declare self-importantly. “So what?” I complain to my TV. Here, it can be forty degrees one day and eighty the next. Average them, and you get sixty, but that doesn’t help me. If I dressed for sixty degrees both days, I’d be too cold one day, too hot the next. The average does nothing to help me wear the right clothes.

Fixating on average gender differences is similarly unhelpful. It tells us nothing about the actual people in our lives. When we idealize the average, it goes from unhelpful to harmful. We dress the body of Christ for average, not actual, weather. We stifle each other’s unique gifts. We elevate a statistical, composite average “person” over the actual people that God created, gifted, and called.

Jesus ignored what tax collectors, zealots, prostitutes, Samaritans, centurions, the rich, the poor, men, and women were “supposed” to be. Instead he invited them to something greater. We obey God when we do the same.

3. Gender difference does not require gender roles

The truth is, this isn’t a question of sex or gender differences at all. Complementarians know that even the secular community recognizes differences. One complementarian leader writes:

Non-Christian scientists have recognized the bodily differences of the sexes. Anne and Bill Moir, for example, note that men have on average ten times more testosterone than women. Studies show that women use a vocabulary that is different enough from men’s to be “statistically significant.” We are distinct emotionally, too. The Scripture gives voice to this reality when it calls godly husbands to treat their wives as the “weaker vessel” and challenges fathers to not “provoke” their children (1 Peter 3:7; Colossians 3:19). These and other patterns constitute the markers of our manhood and womanhood. Our differences, as is clear, are considerable. They are also God given.²

Did you catch the last part? Observable differences are only symptoms of what really matters: manhood and womanhood. These are defined by so-called “roles” (men lead and provide; women submit and nurture). The symptom (differences) and condition (roles) are inextricably linked. To unlink them is to rebel against God’s design. This explains the alarm when egalitarians say gender roles are invalid.

But there is no cause for alarm. We acknowledge that differences exist, but we don’t believe they’re linked to God-ordained “roles.” This isn’t because we want to undermine God’s way. We honestly don’t believe “roles” are God’s design, and we want to be faithful to God and the Bible.

4. Gender roles aren’t the Bible’s (or God’s) way

If you’re an American evangelical, you’ve probably heard about biblical manhood and womanhood. It’s in sermons, blog posts, articles, podcasts, books, Bible studies, curricula, movies, music. Just about everywhere. Everywhere except the Bible, that is.

Sure, there are the favorite passages that supposedly teach God-ordained gender roles. Ephesians 5, 1 Timothy 2, Genesis 1–3, 1 Peter 2:1. The list goes on. We’re told that gender equality is a secular idea. Complementarianism is the Bible’s clear stance. Case closed.

Not so fast.

First, the passages in question are not simple. There’s no need for me to break down all the controversial passages here. Plenty of others have done it far better than I could. I will only say that when we consider literary and cultural context of the passages, translation issues, and the work of Jesus, a different picture emerges. A lot of these passages actually make a strong case for the full inclusion of women. The few restrictions are revealed as conditional, never meant for all churches or Christians for all time.

Second, it’s absurd to suggest that egalitarianism is tainted by culture, while complementarianism is straight from the Bible. Both are influenced by culture. Culture always interacts with the Bible and vice versa. No one views the Bible without a cultural lens.

The defining belief of complementarianism is that women and men are equal in worth but different in role. Despite what we’re told, this is not traditional at all. The “equal in worth” part is a flashy new idea like human rights and democracy. Until recently, the church taught that women were innately inferior to men. Even today, many people around the world believe the Bible clearly says that only men are created in God’s image, while women are created in man’s image. To most people in the world and in history, complementarianism would be a concession to Western, post-Enlightenment culture.

Are egalitarians influenced by our culture? Yes. Are complementarians? Yes. Culture always impacts how we read the Bible. We both take the Bible very seriously. We both work to make sure our cultures sharpen, rather than dull, our understanding. From creation through Jesus’ ministry and beyond, the biblical account is of a God who always calls his people to give up privilege and authority over others. The Bible undermines patriarchy and calls us to a better way.

5. Humanity before gender

When I’m asked to share marriage advice, I always make sure to say this: remember that your spouse is human before he/she is a man/woman.

Too many men dismiss the ideas, wisdom, needs, experiences, and feelings of women because they see gender before humanity. I have done it myself. When I write off my wife’s sadness or joy as her just “being a woman,” I don’t see the full humanity of the person I married. I prevent myself from learning from her, being inspired by her, loving God more because of her.

Awhile back I cracked open a Christian book on gender. It said:

At the core of who we are, we are gendered. Femininity or masculinity is so irrevocably and irreversibly embedded in our being that no one can accurately say “I am first a person and then male or female.” With the privileged excitement of destiny, we must rather say, “I am a male person, a man,” or “I am a female person, a woman.” Our soul’s center is alive with either masculinity or femininity.³

Yes, sex and gender are important. But first, we are human. Yes, there are differences between men and women, but first, we are human. Let’s stop idealizing differences and remember our shared humanity.

We are all tainted by sin and redeemed by grace. We serve the God whose Word celebrates women who broke all the rules—judges, prophets, warriors, queens. We follow the same Jesus who welcomed female disciples and praised women’s understanding and faith. We are empowered by the same Spirit that descended on women and men alike. The same Spirit that inspired the leadership of women like Lydia, Priscilla, Junia, and Phoebe. Who are we to stand in the way?

Notes

1. For an in-depth discussion on male-female differences, see Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, “Social Sciences Cannot Define Gender Differences,” Priscilla Papers 27, no. 2 (Spring 2013), online at https://www.cbeinternational.org/resources/article/priscilla-papers/soci….
2. Owen Strachan, “Transgender Identity—Wishing Away God’s Design,” Answers in Genesis, March 15, 2015, https://answersingenesis.org/family/gender/transgender-identity-wishing-…
3. Larry Crabb, Fully Alive: A Biblical Vision of Gender That Frees Men and Women to Live Beyond Stereotypes (Baker, 2013), 21–22. Emphasis added.

This article originally appeared in the print version of Mutuality as “Difference Is Not Destiny: 5 Things Egalitarians Believe about Gender Differences.”

In Andrew Root’s  Faith Formation in a Secular Age, he sketches three kinds of Secular:

Secular 1: Sacred versus Secular Planes
Secular 2: Religious versus A-religious Spaces
Secular 3: The Negating of Transcendence

What happens to justification by faith in Secular 3? If Secular 2 is more negotiated space, what about Secular 3? Bigger one: if justification tends to be expressed at times as a legal fiction (only a standing, only a declaration, only judicial), can justification be valued in Secular 3 when experience matters deeply? Can justification be connected to the experience of transformation?

Here we go.

Root’s opening contextual description as well as the summary claims of the chapter: the age of authenticity values experience; justification by faith alone is a disposition open to God’s ministering to us in Christ through the Spirit; faith then is openness to God’s person indwelling our person; ministry then is about this kind of faith-alone-justification-experiencing of God. It is transformative.

Now Root:

The age of authenticity allows us all to continue to seek a sense of “fullness”—for experiences that feel like transformation, giving us meaning and purpose. There becomes a nova effect—all sorts of new ways to seek this transformation, like new therapies, spiritualities, sexual expressions, fashions, and more. Oddly, while Secular 3 claims that existence is only material and natural, we cannot live with this, and the age of authenticity cannot stand for it, pushing us into seeking all sorts of transformations that might give us a sense of fullness.

This propensity in the age of authenticity gives us again the opening to make a case for divine action that is bound to justification. This makes “faith alone” not solely the epistemological submission to the rule of a sovereign but an encounter with the real presence of Christ, who transforms us (theosis) through a (hypostatic) union bound in our death experience (kenosis). Justification, then, must also be imagined as the very act of ministry.

To be justified by faith alone is to see faith alone as the human disposition that opens itself to the ministerial being of God, who through the personhood of the Son joins our persons by overcoming our deaths through the transformational power of the Spirit. We are made into Christ (theosis) by experiencing the ministry of Christ, who gives us his life out of our deaths. Justification is not simply a picture of a sovereign, ruling God but the articulation of the depth of God’s own ministry. Justification begins with the divine proclamation that we are lost in sin and death and therefore always need the ministry of the Father to the Son (through the Spirit) to transform our very being from death to life. It is ministry itself, I contend, that is the power of transformation in the world. All forms of transformation that bring life, wholeness, and healing take the shape of ministry. Even articulations of such transformation outside the church often claim ministry (without using the word) as the catalyst of transformation (e.g., “If it wasn’t for Laura, I’d still be drunk, killing myself with every shot,” someone might say). To see how justification is the ministry of transformation, we must return to Paul and righteousness.

For Root, God is not a scorekeeper as God is for so many today; rather, God is a minister.

Then who this God is, revealed in justification, is not an accountant or a scorekeeper but a minister who comes to your dying person with a personhood (hypostasis) that enters your death experiences as an act of ministry (kenosis) so that you might be free from serving death and be (not a clairvoyant shaman but) a minister to your neighbor (theosis). You need not the idea of a foreign righteousness that changes your attitude but the personhood of a minister who can transform your very being, leading you through death into union with a new being who has overcome death so fully that you are now free to reenter death as a minister who loves persons. “Justification, then,” as Gorman says, “is about reconciliation, covenant, community, resurrection, and life. And this reality is brought about by death—Christ’s death for us in the past and our death with Him in the present.”

Too often sin and justification and faith are shaped entirely into a negative; Root reframes:

It’s not that you suck or that when God looks at you, God only sees Jesus. Rather, you are invited to recognize and admit your places of isolation, rejection, loneliness, and fear and to find that Jesus is there with you—through your brokenness you find yourself loved by a minister and sent into the world to minister to your neighbor.