Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  BEDE. (ubi sup.) And the reason that the Lord willed that he should at first be called otherwise, was that from the change itself of the name, a mystery might be conveyed to us. Peter then in Latin or in Greek means the same thing as Cephas in Hebrew, and in each language the name is drawn from a stone. Nor can it be doubted that is the rock of which Paul spoke, And this rock was Christ. (1 Cor. 10:4) For as Christ was the true light, and allowed also that the Apostles should be called the light of the world, (Matt. 5:14.) so also to Simon, who believed on the rock Christ, He gave the name of Rock. PSEUDO-JEROME. Thus from obedience, which Simon signifies, the ascent is made to knowledge, which is meant by Peter. It goes on: And James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother. BEDE. (ubi sup.) We must connect this with what went before, He goeth up into a mountain, and calleth. PSEUDO-JEROME. Namely, James who has supplanted all the desires of the flesh, and John, who received by grace what others held by labour. There follows: And he surnamed them, Boanerges. (Gen. 27:36. v. Aur. Cat. in Matt. 10:2) PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (Vict. Ant. e Cat. in Marc.) He calls the sons of Zebedee by this name, because they were to spread over the world the mighty and illustrious decrees of the Godhead. PSEUDO-JEROME. Or by this the lofty merit of the three mentioned above is shewn, who merited to hear in the mountain the thunders of the Father, when he proclaimed in thunder through a cloud concerning the Son, This is my beloved Son; that they also through the cloud of the flesh and the fire of the word1, (Matt. 17:1) might as it were scatter the thunderbolts in rain on the earth, since the Lord turned the thunderbolts into rain, so that mercy extinguishes what judgment sets on fire. It goes on: And Andrew, who manfully does violence to perdition, so that he had ever ready within him his own death, to give as an answer, and his soul was ever in his hands. (1 Pet. 3:15. Ps. 119:109. Bede ubi sup.) BEDE. For Andrew is a Greek name, which means ‘manly,’ from ἀνὴδ, that is, man, for he manfully adhered to the Lord. There follows, And Philip.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When the sixteenth-century Reformation took place, many branches of the new churches articulated their particular theories of atonement in official statements, but the great ecumenical creeds of the early centuries did not do so. They merely restated the early formula we find in 1 Corinthians 15, as, for instance, in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381): “For us humans and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and was incarnate . . . and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried.” The shorter Apostles’ Creed doesn’t even add “for us.” There is, in other words, no equivalent in atonement theology of the careful Christological formulations that emerged from the controversies over what could and couldn’t be said and what should and shouldn’t be said about the person of Jesus and the triune God. The rich imagery we find in, for instance, the exposition of the cross by the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, is striking. But it doesn’t get turned into official formulas. Many of the early church fathers seem to assume two things in particular about the meaning of the cross, holding these two points in a more fluid combination than later theorists sometimes imagine. On the one hand, many expound some version of the idea that on the cross God in Christ won a great victory, perhaps we should say the great victory, over the powers of evil. This is the theme many now refer to as Christus Victor, the conquering Messiah. On the other hand, many of the early theologians regularly spoke of Jesus’s death as somehow “in our place”: he died, therefore we do not. We, with hindsight, might want to describe this as a combination of two motifs, coupled also with a third, the regular use of sacrificial imagery; but the biblical view of atonement is more than the mere heaping up of motifs or even models. These are moments in a story; and it is the story itself—a real historical story both then and now—that matters. For this I think the church fathers provide much food for thought. But, as they themselves would insist, the Bible remains central and determinative.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  COMPANIONS Brajkishorebabu and Rajendrababu were a matchless pair. Their devotion made it impossible for me to take a single step without their help. Their disciples, or their companions Shambhaubabu, Anugrahababu, Dharanibabu, Ramnavmibabu and other vakils were always with us. Vindhyababu and Janakdharibabu also came and helped us now and then. All these were Biharis. Their principal work was to take down the ryots’ statements. Professor Kripalani could not but cast in his lot with us. Though a Sindhi he was more Bihari than a born Bihari. I have seen only a few workers capable of merging themselves in the province of their adoption. Kripalani is one of those few. He made it impossible for anyone to feel that he belonged to a different province. He was my gatekeper in chief. For the time being he made it the end and aim of his life to save me from darshan seekers. He warded off people, calling to his aid now his unfailing humour, now his non-violent threats. At nightfall he would take up his occupation of a teacher and regale his companions with his historical studies and observations, and quicken any timid visitor into bravery. Maulana Mazharul Haq had registered his name on the standing list of helpers whom I might count upon whenever necessary, and he made a point of looking in once or twice a month. The pomp and splendour in which he then lived was in sharp contrast to his simple life of today. The way in which he associated with us made us feel that he was one of us, though his fashionable habit gave a stranger a different impression. As I gained more experience of Bihar, I became convinced that work of a permanent nature was impossible without proper village education. The ryots’

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But he continued to write and I had not yet learned that businessmen dream up a personality for themselves which they forget to set aside, even when such histrionics are unnecessary. Impressed by the silence, I was embarrassed in this unaccustomed atmosphere of concentration and luxury, and continued to await some further invitation. At long last, Monsieur Bismuth set down his fountain pen, put his papers methodically in order, and asked me to be seated. He called his trembling hands to order by clasping the fingers together very tight. Then he launched forth on a long speech that had perhaps been prepared, all about the need to work uninterruptedly if one wants to succeed in life. He spoke slowly, his voice evenly poised, his words well chosen, with the diction of an intelligent and learned foreigner who has mastered the language through sheer will power. I think he made a great impression on me. He had reverted to the same themes as the school principal, though he avoided the theme of his own life while constantly referring to it indirectly. I had meanwhile had time to inform myself about him; everything that he now said to me was clear and I was able to refer each detail back to his own life story. Though the speech was intended as an exhortation referring to my future, it was actually a summary of his past, too. At least, that is how I understood it, approving and admiring his manner. A man’s worth may be weighed according to his degree of success, and he had succeeded. One’s background is of little importance: he was the son of a well-known rabbi who had been very poor and who died shortly after begetting him at the age of seventy, leaving a young wife in great indigence. Hard work will overcome, in the long run, all obstacles: as a brilliant student, I too had discovered this truism. Finally, he concluded by affirming outright: “If you study hard, we’ll make a druggist of you.” I revealed no surprise at all, though some muscular contraction of face or of body nearly always betrayed my feelings. Besides, he was not watching me. In the course of his long monologue, he never once tried with his eyes to catch mine. Instead, he seemed to be speaking only for himself. In the seven years of my life when I saw him regularly once a month, we never established any real contact. Never once did I feel current pass between us. His eyes always avoided mine, and I understood later what I had always suggested to him: in me, he recognized his own personal battle, his difficult past, his insecurity. I lacked the courage to answer that I preferred to study medicine. After all, he was the one who paid, and he added now, with some disdain and the only sign of any real emotion in all our conversation, as if he had already guessed some objection on my part:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But this overall argument (that all human beings are sinful, and that Jews are no exception) cannot be allowed to nullify the specific and different point that 2:17–3:9 is actually making. This too is vital if we are to understand the inner dynamic of 3:21–26. Here, once again, we see the difference between the “works contract” and the “covenant of vocation.” It has been assumed that Paul, addressing “the Jew” in 2:17, is talking about a works contract; but in fact he is clearly speaking of Israel’s vocational covenant. The Jew against whom Paul is arguing—his own former self, we may suppose—is not saying, “I am an exception to the rule of universal sin.” The Jew against whom he is arguing is saying, “Yes, the world is indeed in a mess; but we Jewish people, armed with the Torah, are God’s chosen solution to this problem. We have been given the divine vocation of sorting out this mess, of putting the world right.” And Paul basically agrees with this. This has been so unexpected in many traditions of reading that Paul’s plain words have been overlooked. He does not dispute that “the Jew” really does have a particular status and equipment: But supposing you call yourself a “Jew.” Supposing you rest your hope in the law. Supposing you celebrate the fact that God is your God, and that you know what he wants, and that by the law’s instruction you can make appropriate moral distinctions. (2:17–18) He agrees—indeed, he would insist on the point—that these privileges are given so that Israel may be the light to the nations: Supposing you believe yourself to be a guide to the blind, a light to people in darkness, a teacher of the foolish, an instructor for children—all because, in the law, you possess the outline of knowledge and truth. (2:19–20) This is a classic statement of the well-known Jewish belief—variously expressed, but common across many traditions—that God’s call of Abraham and his family was designed to put right what was wrong with the world . Paul is not saying, as some commentators have imagined, “You are a bigot, imagining yourself to be morally superior.” He is saying, “You believe that God has called you—has called Israel as a whole—to be the light of the world.” And Paul affirms that belief. “The Jew” whom he is addressing is quite correct. This is indeed what the scriptures say. This is the vocation of Israel. The problem, however, was pointed out long before by Israel’s own scriptures, on page after page. The prophets said it repeatedly: Israel’s vocation didn’t work out the way it might have, because Israel went wrong. This is not a new charge. Paul is not making it all up on the basis of his newfound belief in Jesus. He is not “rejecting Judaism” because he has found something different, something he considers “better.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Poor old Alexandre! They’re all like that, even Ginou! You’re in love with her, and you must be ready to pay the price!” Slowly, I made my way home to our Passage. To reach our hallway door, I had to chase away the flock of night-prowling cats that fed out of our ashcans. Not in the least scared, they waited a few feet away, their eyes bright in the darkness. Late though it was, I couldn’t sleep. One more road that I was closing, that closed itself ahead of me. Had I really wanted very deep in me to become a middle-class bourgeois? I wasn’t one and no longer wanted to be one. How could I ever be like Jean-Jean, like the Gazelle, like Michel, like the Commissioner? Polished as pebbles picked up on the seashore, they had no memory. Would I ever be able to forget Pinhas and the others who are like him, merely to save myself? How had I ever been able to believe that I would be able to lead a futile and self-satisfied existence? That evening, perhaps, I caught a glimpse of what their life really is. But that was also the time when I thought I had discovered in myself the signs of a calling, to teach philosophy. The bohemian manner of Poinsot, my admiration for him, the satisfactions that my successes in philosophy classes assured me, all this made me feel that teaching was an intellectual profession that was not committed to middle-class values and that maintained its independence as far as prejudices and earnings are concerned. It was also about that time that I began to develop the habit of going on long walks, all by myself, in the poorer districts of the city. ~ 10. COMMENCEMENT DAY ~

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It means that a great reward is stored up safely in God’s Presence until the time of its unveiling on earth. In any case, the key thing about so many of these “blessings” is that they demonstrate the way in which God’s kingdom will actually be put into operation: through the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the justice-hungry people, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the people who are prepared to face persecution and slander because of their commitment to the way Jesus is pioneering. Some of these characteristics are more obviously “active”—the justice-hungry people, the merciful, the peacemakers—but the entire package is what matters. God’s sovereign rule will come to birth through people like this. They will learn to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world (5:13–16). They will learn the way of forgiveness and reconciliation (5:21–26), the way of purity (5:27–32), the way of truthfulness (5:33–27). And, in particular, as chapter 5 comes to its climax, they will learn the way of nonviolence, the way of love for enemies and prayer for persecutors (5:38–48). They will turn the other cheek; they will go the second mile; they will allow someone to strip them of both shirt and cloak. And they will thereby demonstrate that they truly are children of their Father in heaven (5:39, 41, 40, 45). Among the dozens of other things that Matthew is saying in his gospel, it seems beyond doubt that he is highlighting the point that the kingdom agenda set out in chapter 5 is not simply an outline for a bracing ethic for Jesus’s followers to attempt; it is the dramatic outline of Jesus’s own vocation. He would stand there unresisting as people slapped him and mocked him. He would be compelled by the Roman soldiers to carry his burden all the way to Golgotha. He would find his clothes stripped off him and divided up. And, as he died, one of those very soldiers would declare that he really was the son of God (26:67; 27:30–32, 35, 54). These echoes cannot be accidental. They express part at least of what Matthew wants to say about both the kingdom and the cross. Jesus’s suffering and death are indeed, for Matthew, the means through which God is becoming king, through which “all authority” is being given to Jesus himself. This will set the pattern not just for a “new ethic,” though it will be that, but for a new kind of behavior, a new lifestyle, through which the saving rule of God will be brought to bear upon the world. And it will come about through Jesus’s unique kingdom vocation, through his taking upon himself the scorn, malevolence, and hatred of the world, in order to do what, in the last analysis, only Emmanuel himself can do. The long story of Israel, sketched by Matthew in terms of the genealogy from Abraham to David, through the exile, to the Messiah, has come to its fulfillment.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Praise for The Prophetic Imagination , 40th Anniversary Edition “Years ago, as I struggled to envision a ministry that would engage both the prophetic and the pastoral, Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination gave the world a fresh vision of the role of imagination in the inevitable confrontation between what Howard Thurman terms ‘the religion of Jesus’ and what Brueggemann calls ‘the royal consciousness.’ In the years since that revelation, yesterday’s dilemmas birthed today’s crises, which now loom as tomorrow’s catastrophes. Even amid these shadows, Brueggemann still emboldens us to endure and even to overcome these troubles, not merely by the tenacity of blues lamentation and the transcendence of gospel communion, but also by prophetic improvisations that jazz the song of Joshua and crumble the walls thrown up by the politics of domination.” — William J. Barber II, author of The Third Reconstruction “Few authors have influenced my spiritual formation more than Walter Brueggemann, and few books more than The Prophetic Imagination . Brueggemann is one of the greatest theologians we have alive today. If you have not read this book, please do. If you have read it before, read it again. The Prophetic Imagination is precisely what the church needs right now.” — Shane Claiborne, activist and author of Executing Grace and Red Letter Revolution “When I first read The Prophetic Imagination in college, it changed my life. Now, forty years after its initial publication, Brueggemann’s book remains as timely as ever, retaining all of its power, insight, and daring. This anniversary edition—beautifully introduced by Davis Hankins—ensures that this classic work is available to inspire another generation to resist the static triumphalism of Pharaoh (in countless contemporary incarnations), to criticize the dominant totalizing consciousness, and to energize the people of God in the face of profound grief.” — Brent A. Strawn, Emory University “Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination has drawn many a student, seminarian, preacher, and more than a few laypeople on the strength of the title alone, resonant with much of black preaching where the ‘sanctified imagination’ is regularly engaged. This text has guided generations of biblical interpreters to take the prophetic encounter and vocation as more than protest or religiopolitical disagreement in and beyond the text. The book remains relevant—eminently readable and teachable.” — Wil Gafney, Brite Divinity School “At a time when tradition seems to have become the property of the status quo, this book is more relevant than ever. As tradition shifts sides, it becomes subversive of the dominant religious, political, and economic developments, and so new energies are set free that push toward liberation. While this has been going on for thousands of years, the increasing challenges of the past forty years since this book was written—threatening to destroy both humanity and the planet—underscore its ongoing importance.” — Joerg Rieger, Vanderbilt University

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The boys pretended to be enraptured by the contents of these sumptuous packages and uttered cries of affected admiration. The scout movement didn’t encourage flirting and courtship, so that it was not permitted to make gallant remarks about the appearance of the girls, though most of them were exquisite, and exquisitely dressed. The living-room where we happened to be meeting struck me as unusually big, with space enough for a public gathering. I made a round of the other rooms in the apartment for all the doors were open. I counted nine rooms, or perhaps ten, all of them very spacious and some of them larger by themselves than our whole flat. I was unable to understand how one could need so much space. Besides, these rooms were sparsely furnished and I felt, on the whole, that they did not give one an impression of intimacy at all. Suddenly, all the gossiping stopped and the crowd gathered together according to a preconceived plan and began to sing in chorus. The National Commissioner had just arrived, accompanied by our local Commissioner. Standing to attention in the doorway, they joined in our song. I think the song was about our chief being like the Iroquois who is noble and virtuous, with a piercing gaze, a fleet foot, a lion’s heart, the faithfulness of the dove, and the wisdom of the Almighty. I have always, I admit, admired them for this: they could sing perfectly, these scouts, without a false note, but each one of them according to his own voice and in his own tone. The National Commissioner was singing with a convinced expression, his face lowered and thrust forward by his effort, his mouth open, as if he were drinking, whenever he reached the deep and graver notes. He was very thin and tall, his shoulders hunched beneath the weight of his bony build, his heavy and angular head somehow, so it seemed to me, like that of a prehistoric animal. Furtively, I glanced at Ginou, who was singing too and gazing earnestly at our chief. The song stopped dead, on a single collective cry, so perfectly timed and attuned that it sounded like a single voice.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Finally, in this quite personal and subjective list to which many other items, names, and efforts should be added, I want to report a most fortuitous happening. On the very day that I was writing this paragraph (September 26, 2000), it happened that Andrew McAuley Smith, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, shared with me a copy of his 1999 D.Min. thesis from Princeton Seminary. He was generous to give me a copy that of course caught my attention because it is titled, Prophets in the Pews: Testing Walter Brueggemann’s Thesis in The Prophetic Imagination in the Practice of Ministry. [1] Smith has taken my book and has understood that the test of its exposition is actual, concrete practice of the faithful in the life of the world, which for his particular study focuses upon the social crisis evoked by racism. After an alert summary of my argument, Smith organizes his response in two ways. First, he offers a working definition of white racism and considers the perception of racism as offered by three towering prophetic figures: 1 . Bartolome de Las Casas (1474–1566), a Spaniard who came to the “new world” along with the first colonialists after Christopher Columbus, in the midst of the Spanish genocide against the native population of Haiti and Cuba. He came on an evangelizing mission of the church but became single-handedly a vigorous, noticeable force in defense of the “Indians” against European rapaciousness. 2 . Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), a better-known German theologian who took his bold stand early against the “Aryan clause” of German National Socialism, and almost single-handedly summoned the Confessing Church in German to see what was at stake in the racism of National Socialism against Jews—for which he risked and eventually sacrificed his life. 3 . Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1969), best known among us as a prophet for

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Beyond Atlanta, the following have come to my attention: Jimmy Carter, in his stunning post-presidential vocation, works on a large international scale at political reconciliation, all the while keeping his hand concretely in on-site hammer-and-nails work with Habitat for Humanity. The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is a community organizing effort derived from the passion and strategies of Saul Alinsky. My contact has been with Ernesto Cortez, officed in Austin, Texas, a regional office for the Southwest. This remarkable effort at mobilizing communities for the sake of shared well-being includes passionate staff people, spirited volunteers, and institutional, congregational support that takes on large urban issues concerned with social justice in the face of fearful privatization. Watts Street Baptist Church (Durham, North Carolina), where T. Melvin Williams Jr. is the pastor, characteristically begins its worship services not with conventional praise but with lament Psalms, with the “public processing of pain.” That congregation, moreover, is part of a Durham church coalition that “regularly holds prayer vigils at the site of each violent death” in Durham. The ritual marks the accession and the loss liturgically and thereby creates a place for protest and grief in response to the violence that destroys life. Church Health Center, sponsored by a church coalition of hundreds of congregations in Memphis, has established an extensive, first-rate health care system for the poor in that city where poverty savages too many. Alongside deep and crucial church support and participation, the center mobilizes the active support of hundreds of dentists and doctors plus the resources of a large hospital that has made building space available. The moving force for this immense project is Scott Morris. Morris combines medical expertise and theological sensitivity, a capacity for organizational effectiveness and abundant people skills. Around his passion and vision have gathered a large prophetic populace that is resolved to connect the healing capacity of God to the poor who are deprived of normal health care delivery.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  A famous cartoon from the Palatine in Rome, dated to some point during the first three centuries of the common era, makes the point. It reads, “Alexamenos worships his god,” and features a crucified figure with a donkey’s head (below). How easy it would have been for the early Christians to tone down the fact of the cross, to highlight instead the life-giving force of the resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit. How “sensible” it might have been to draw a discreet veil over the manner of Jesus’s death that had preceded this sudden new life. Some people, including some who wanted to think of themselves as followers of Jesus, took exactly that line. We can watch the process taking place in the so-called Gnostic gospels (books like the Gospel of Thomas). They airbrushed the cross out of the picture, redefined the resurrection as a nonbodily transformation, and reduced Jesus to being a teacher of quizzical wisdom. This has attracted enthusiastic attention from some in our own day for whom, for whatever reasons, certain presentations of the cross have become a scandal. But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny. One of the great Christian writers of the mid-second century, Justin Martyr, wrote glowingly about the way in which the cross is the key to everything. It is the central feature of the world, he said: if you want to sail a ship, the mast will be in the shape of a cross; if you want to dig a ditch, your spade will need a cross-shaped handle. That gives us a fair indication of the way in which even those who were trying to explain the Christian faith attractively to outsiders didn’t shy away from the cross, but rather celebrated it. They wallowed in it, we might say, even though they knew what the reaction would be. 1 They did not, however, define it. Nor has the worldwide church done so at any time since—though some groups and movements have insisted on various formulations. There is wisdom in that: doctrinal definition can only go so far.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Anyone who wants to be first must be everyone’s slave. Don’t you see? The son of man didn’t come to be waited on. He came to be the servant, to give his life “as a ransom for many.” (10:42–45) Here we see the full integration of what have seemed to subsequent generations to be two key elements of the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion. A new sort of power will be let loose upon the world, and it will be the power of self-giving love. This is the heart of the revolution that was launched on Good Friday. You cannot defeat the usual sort of power by the usual sort of means. If one force overcomes another, it is still “force” that wins. Rather, at the heart of the victory of God over all the powers of the world there lies self-giving love, which, in obedience to the ancient prophetic vocation, will give its life “as a ransom for many.” Exactly as in Isaiah 53, to which that phrase alludes, the death of the one on behalf of the many will be the key by which the powers are overthrown, the kingdom of God ushered in (with the glorious divine Presence seen in plain sight by the watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls), the covenant renewed, and creation itself restored to its original purpose. Mark 10:35–45 contains within itself more or less the whole of the New Testament’s complex but coherent vision of how Jesus’s death, completing his vocation as Israel’s Messiah, overthrew the dark powers that had enslaved the world by coming to take the place of sinners. The new Passover was accomplished by the new exile-ending “forgiveness of sins,” and the latter was accomplished through the one taking the place of the many. If we were to summarize what Mark has now told us, in both this passage (though we have not had time to follow it through) and his gospel as a whole, we might just as well say that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” This, of course, points us to Paul, where we find that summary both stated and expounded. But, before we get there, some final reflections are in order on the death of Jesus in the gospels. First, it is vital to see that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not simply telling us in descriptive language something that “really” belongs as a dogmatic formula. It is the other way around. The formula is a portable narrative, a folded-up story. The story is the reality—because it is the story of reality, historical reality, flesh-and-blood reality, Israel’s reality, life-and-death reality.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It means that a great reward is stored up safely in God’s Presence until the time of its unveiling on earth. In any case, the key thing about so many of these “blessings” is that they demonstrate the way in which God’s kingdom will actually be put into operation: through the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the justice-hungry people, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the people who are prepared to face persecution and slander because of their commitment to the way Jesus is pioneering. Some of these characteristics are more obviously “active”—the justice-hungry people, the merciful, the peacemakers—but the entire package is what matters. God’s sovereign rule will come to birth through people like this. They will learn to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world (5:13–16). They will learn the way of forgiveness and reconciliation (5:21–26), the way of purity (5:27–32), the way of truthfulness (5:33–27). And, in particular, as chapter 5 comes to its climax, they will learn the way of nonviolence, the way of love for enemies and prayer for persecutors (5:38–48). They will turn the other cheek; they will go the second mile; they will allow someone to strip them of both shirt and cloak. And they will thereby demonstrate that they truly are children of their Father in heaven (5:39, 41, 40, 45). Among the dozens of other things that Matthew is saying in his gospel, it seems beyond doubt that he is highlighting the point that the kingdom agenda set out in chapter 5 is not simply an outline for a bracing ethic for Jesus’s followers to attempt; it is the dramatic outline of Jesus’s own vocation. He would stand there unresisting as people slapped him and mocked him. He would be compelled by the Roman soldiers to carry his burden all the way to Golgotha. He would find his clothes stripped off him and divided up. And, as he died, one of those very soldiers would declare that he really was the son of God (26:67; 27:30–32, 35, 54). These echoes cannot be accidental. They express part at least of what Matthew wants to say about both the kingdom and the cross.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  At least, that is how I understood it, approving and admiring his manner. A man’s worth may be weighed according to his degree of success, and he had succeeded. One’s background is of little importance: he was the son of a well-known rabbi who had been very poor and who died shortly after begetting him at the age of seventy, leaving a young wife in great indigence. Hard work will overcome, in the long run, all obstacles: as a brilliant student, I too had discovered this truism. Finally, he concluded by affirming outright: “If you study hard, we’ll make a druggist of you.” I revealed no surprise at all, though some muscular contraction of face or of body nearly always betrayed my feelings. Besides, he was not watching me. In the course of his long monologue, he never once tried with his eyes to catch mine. Instead, he seemed to be speaking only for himself. In the seven years of my life when I saw him regularly once a month, we never established any real contact. Never once did I feel current pass between us. His eyes always avoided mine, and I understood later what I had always suggested to him: in me, he recognized his own personal battle, his difficult past, his insecurity. I lacked the courage to answer that I preferred to study medicine. After all, he was the one who paid, and he added now, with some disdain and the only sign of any real emotion in all our conversation, as if he had already guessed some objection on my part: “It is absolutely necessary to live on Easy Street. It’s very important, and you’ll realize it, too.” But for whom this contempt? For those who failed to earn an easy living, or for his own philosophy of profit and earnings? At the time, I seemed to understand that he despised those whose earnings were small; on the whole, I agreed with him. Money was only one aspect of the glory that I hoped to win. In town, people were already complaining that the medical profession was overcrowded and that young doctors found it increasingly difficult to build up a practice. Pharmacies remained, however, an excellent business. Our middle class is too recent to have much respect for professional scales of values or for a disinterested vocation. It still understands only commercial success and, of course, this opinion of our middle class imposes itself on our other classes too. But even if Monsieur Bismuth was right, he now separated quite brutally two images that I had kept closely connected: the one, of my material success, of my studies, and the other, of myself in a white smock, the lancet in my hand as I accomplished a task that brought health to mankind and earned me its gratitude.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  But for me the real hero of this story is Pierre Janet, who helped Charcot establish a research laboratory devoted to the study of hysteria at the Salpêtrière. In 1889, the same year that the Eiffel Tower was built, Janet published the first book-length scientific account of traumatic stress: L’automatisme psychologique.[15] Janet proposed that at the root of what we now call PTSD was the experience of “vehement emotions,” or intense emotional arousal. This treatise explained that, after having been traumatized, people automatically keep repeating certain actions, emotions, and sensations related to the trauma. And unlike Charcot, who was primarily interested in measuring and documenting patients’ physical symptoms, Janet spent untold hours talking with them, trying to discover what was going on in their minds. Also in contrast to Charcot, whose research focused on understanding the phenomenon of hysteria, Janet was first and foremost a clinician whose goal was to treat his patients. That is why I studied his case reports in detail and why he became one of my most important teachers.[16] Amnesia, Dissociation, and ReenactmentJanet was the first to point out the difference between “narrative memory”—the stories people tell about trauma—and traumatic memory itself. One of his case histories was the story of Irène, a young woman who was hospitalized following her mother’s death from tuberculosis.[17] Irène had nursed her mother for many months while continuing to work outside the home to support her alcoholic father and pay for her mother’s medical care. When her mother finally died, Irène—exhausted from stress and lack of sleep—tried for several hours to revive the corpse, calling out to her mother and trying to force medicine down her throat. At one point the lifeless body dropped off the bed while Irène’s drunken father lay passed out nearby. Even after an aunt arrived and started preparing for the burial, Irène’s denial persisted. She had to be persuaded to attend the funeral, and she laughed throughout the service. A few weeks later she was brought to the Salpêtrière, where Janet took over her case. In addition to amnesia for her mother’s death, Irène suffered from another symptom: Several times a week she would stare, trancelike, at an empty bed, ignore whatever was going on around her, and begin to care for an imaginary person. She meticulously reproduced, rather than remembered, the details of her mother’s death. Traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much. On the one hand, Irène had no conscious memory of her mother’s death—she could not tell the story of what had happened. On the other she was compelled to physically act out the events of her mother’s death. Janet’s term “automatism” conveys the involuntary, unconscious nature of her actions.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  One can only stand in awe at the combination of insight and expression that could encapsulate so much in a mere seventy-six Greek words. What this tells me is that already in the very early church it was common coin, first, that Jesus’s death established God’s kingdom; second, that this came about because of his servant-shaped identification with sinful humanity, sharing their death and so bearing their sin; and third, that this action was not something Jesus did despite the fact that he was “in God’s form” and “equal with God,” but rather something that he did because he was those things. In whatever way the New Testament tells the story of the cross, it is always the story of self-giving divine love. This is why I have said that the real danger in expounding the meaning of Jesus’s death is to collapse it into a kind of pagan scenario in which an angry God is pacified by taking out his wrath on Jesus. The first Christians did not use the language of “Trinity,” but at the heart of what they believed about Jesus and his death, they affirmed, explained, insisted on, and turned into brilliant poetry the insight that what happened on the cross was the self-expression of the love that made the world. Colossians A passage from another “prison letter” that is vital for our purposes is Colossians 2:13–15: In the same way, though you were dead in legal offenses, and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with Jesus, forgiving us all our offenses. He blotted out the handwriting that was against us, opposing us with its legal demands. He took it right out of the way, by nailing it to the cross. He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor, and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him. This is of course deliberately ironic. What seemed to be happening as Jesus of Nazareth hung in agony on the cross was that the “rulers and authorities” were celebrating their triumph over him , having stripped him of his clothes and held him up to public contempt. No, insists Paul, once you learn the meaning of the gospel, you have to see everything inside out.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. Oprah Winfrey comes to mind, as do Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. Read the life history of any visionary, and you will find insights and passions that came from having dealt with devastation. The same is true of societies. Many of our most profound advances grew out of experiencing trauma: the abolition of slavery from the Civil War, Social Security in response to the Great Depression, and the GI Bill, which produced our once vast and prosperous middle class, from World War II. Trauma is now our most urgent public health issue, and we have the knowledge necessary to respond effectively. The choice is ours to act on what we know. AcknowledgmentsThis book is the fruit of thirty years of trying to understand how people deal with, survive, and heal from traumatic experiences. Thirty years of clinical work with traumatized men, women and children; innumerable discussions with colleagues and students, and participation in the evolving science about how mind, brain, and body deal with, and recover from, overwhelming experiences. Let me start with the people who helped me organize, and eventually publish, this book. Toni Burbank, my editor, with whom I communicated many times each week over a two-year period about the scope, organization, and specific contents of the book. Toni truly understood what this book is about, and that understanding has been critical in defining its form and substance. My agent, Brettne Bloom, understood the importance of this work, found a home for it with Viking, and provided critical support at critical moments. Rick Kot, my editor at Viking, supplied invaluable feedback and editorial guidance. My colleagues and students at the Trauma Center have provided the feeding ground, laboratory, and support system for this work. They also have been constant reminders of the sober reality of our work for these three decades. I cannot name them all, but Joseph Spinazzola, Margaret Blaustein, Roslin Moore, Richard Jacobs, Liz Warner, Wendy D’Andrea, Jim Hopper, Fran Grossman, Alex Cook, Marla Zucker, Kevin Becker, David Emerson, Steve Gross, Dana Moore, Robert Macy, Liz Rice-Smith, Patty Levin, Nina Murray, Mark Gapen, Carrie Pekor, Debbie Korn, and Betta de Boer van der Kolk all have been critical collaborators. And of course Andy Pond and Susan Wayne of the Justice Resource Institute. My most important companions and guides in understanding and researching traumatic stress have been Alexander McFarlane, Onno van der Hart, Ruth Lanius and Paul Frewen, Rachel Yehuda, Stephen Porges, Glenn Saxe, Jaak Panksepp, Janet Osterman, Julian Ford, Brad Stolback, Frank Putnam, Bruce Perry, Judith Herman, Robert Pynoos, Berthold Gersons, Ellert Nijenhuis, Annette Streeck-Fisher, Marylene Cloitre, Dan Siegel, Eli Newberger, Vincent Felitti, Robert Anda, and Martin Teicher; as well as my colleagues who taught me about attachment: Edward Tronick, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, and Beatrice Beebe.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is one place where the long traditions of displaying a romantic or sentimental Jesus figure have let us down. We are so used to the soppy picture of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” and to the reaction that such a picture provokes, stressing Jesus’s occasional sternness and warnings against the Pharisees and others, that we have perhaps failed to notice how strange it is to have a major public figure who is treading a dangerous line between affirming ancient traditions and criticizing current abuses and who is known at the same time for a deeply caring approach to people of all sorts, especially those in distress. The reason for highlighting this here is not simply that it is an important and easily overlooked feature of the gospels, but that for all four evangelists this deliberately and explicitly constructs a picture of Jesus’s death not in terms of an angry father lashing out at an innocent and defenseless son, but in terms of someone embodying the love of God himself, acting as the personal expression of that love all the way to his death. If more attention had been paid to this feature, which is built into the narrative rather than being stuck in from the side by means of one or two scriptural quotations or allusions or the odd authorial “aside,” some of the more disturbing and unbiblical features of would-be “atonement” theology—and the social and cultural spinoffs that have sometimes accompanied them—could have been avoided. John, as we saw, opens his account of the events leading up to Jesus’s death by stressing that this was the completion of Jesus’s constant love (13:1). But this does not stand alone. For John, it draws out and makes explicit what has been implicit in passage after passage as Jesus transforms the lives of people of all sorts; biblical imagery, such as that of the “good shepherd,” also makes the same point.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The result is that the cross establishes the kingdom of God through the agency of Jesus . That is what the last three stanzas of the poem are celebrating. We are here exactly on the same page as the four gospels. Third, the poem in its present context is setting out the pattern of life that is both the foundation and the model for the way Jesus’s followers ought to behave in relation to one another. The first four verses of the chapter stress the shared life of the community, mutual love and partnership in the spirit, heartfelt affection, and sympathy. On this basis Paul instructs the church: Hold on to the same love; bring your innermost lives into harmony; fix your minds on the same object. Never act out of selfish ambition or vanity; instead, regard everybody else as your superior. Look after each other’s best interests, not your own. (2:2–4) The poem then sets out the story of Jesus himself not only as the example of how to do this but as, so to speak, the place where this kind of life is to be found. The “place” is the Messiah himself, “in whom” his people find their identity: “This is how you should think among yourselves—with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus” (2:5). They already belong to him and this is how his “mind” worked, so theirs should work in the same way not only because they are copying him, but because his “mind” is at work in theirs. But this provides a clue to how Paul at least sees the logic of the cross underneath the surface of the poem. The Messiah was lord of all, yet became a slave. He was all-powerful, but became weak. He was equal with the Father, yet refused to take advantage of this status. Add to this the echoes throughout this passage from Isaiah 40–55, particularly the “servant” poems, and we can go one step farther: he was innocent, yet he died the death of the guilty. This is how the cross establishes God’s kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death . The kingdom of God is established by destroying the power of idolatry, and idols get their power because humans, in sinning, give it to them. Deal with sin, and the idols are reduced to a tawdry heap of rubble. Deal with sin, and the world will glorify God. There are many remarkable things about this poem, but we should note one in particular. Paul wrote this letter in the mid-50s of the first century, that is, less than thirty years after Jesus’s execution. Either he wrote this poem for use in this letter, which is quite possible, or he was quoting a poem that either he or somebody else had already written. The poem is a masterpiece of compressed biblical theology.