Awe

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 How God Became King (2012)

  In fact, all four evangelists make it abundantly clear that we are to understand both Jesus’s kingdom and his death in relation to the Temple—or rather, in relation to the fulfillment of the Temple’s role in Jesus himself (this is a major theme throughout John) and his upstaging of it in his last great symbolic actions. It is now becoming more widely recognized, I think, that the synoptic evangelists present the Last Supper as a “new Temple” moment. Jesus, having pronounced God’s judgment on the old Temple in his dramatic action and then his discourse on the Mount of Olives, now gathers his friends around him to celebrate a “Passover meal with a difference,” a meal that not only looked back, like all Passover meals, to the exodus itself, but forward to the new exodus that Jesus was about to accomplish. Like all Passover meals, it was not just a signpost, but a means, through the sharing of food and wine, of partaking in that event about to be accomplished. When Jesus wanted to explain to his followers the meaning of his death, he didn’t give them a theory; he gave them a meal. The synoptics draw this out in one way, John in another (with the foot washing, chap. 13). But if what we said before about the political significance of the Temple has any significance here, this means that Jesus’s Temple redefinition was also part of what the evangelists saw as his establishment of a kingdom vastly superior to those of both Herod and Caesar. For a new theocracy to be inaugurated, a new Temple is necessary, so that the living God may there receive the worship of the world and from there administer his wise rule over creation. This is the point above all, perhaps, that today’s attempts at political theology will find opaque. For a genuinely Jewish vision of theocracy, you need God in the midst of it. But what the gospels offer us—especially John, but actually all of them—is a God who is in the midst in and as Jesus the Messiah, and a God who is then committed to remaining in the midst, through Jesus, in the person of the Spirit.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  De Voragine tells how St. Lupe, as he was praying one night, felt great thirst. He knew it was due to the devil and asked for water. When it was brought, he clapped a lid on the vessel, "shutting the devil up quick." The prisoner howled all night, unable to get out.2131 Salimbene gives a droll case of a peasant into whom the devil entered, making him talk Latin. But the peasant tripped in his Latin so that "our Lector laughed at his mistakes." The demon spoke up, "I can speak Latin well enough, but the tongue of this boor is so thick that I make sorry work wielding it."2132 Luther’s easy explanation of mice, fleas, and other pests as the devil’s creations, is called up by the following statement: A certain Cistercian, Richalmus, of the thirteenth century, in a book on the devil’s wiles, said, "It seems incredible but it is true, it is not fleas and lice which bite us but what we think is their bites are the pricks of demons. For those little insects do not live off our blood, but from perspiration, and we often feel such pricks when there are no fleas."2133 These incidents may be brought to a close by the following interesting conversation reported by Caesar of Heisterbach as having been carried on by two evil spirits who had possessed two women who got into a quarrel. "Oh, if we had only not gone over to Lucifer," said one, "and been cast out of heaven!" The other replied, "Hold your peace, your repentance comes too late, you couldn’t get back if you would." "If there were only a column of iron," answered the first, "though it were furnished with the sharpest knives and saws, I would be willing to climb up and down it till the last judgment day, if I could only thereby make my way back to glory." These stories are records of what were believed to be real occurrences. The denizens of the lower world were everywhere present in visible and invisible form to vex and torment saint and sinner in body and soul. No voice is heard protesting against the belief. It is refreshing, however, to have at least one case of scepticism. Thus Vincent de Beauvais tells of a woman who assured her priest that she and other women were under the influence of witchcraft and had one night succeeded in getting into the priest’s bedchamber through the keyhole. After in vain trying to persuade her that she was laboring under a delusion, the priest locked the door and putting the key into his pocket, gave her a good drubbing with a stick, exclaiming, "Get out through the keyhole now, if you can."

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  To Mary was given a place of dignity equal or superior to Christ as the friend of the sinful and unfortunate and the guide of souls to heaven. Damiani called her "the door of heaven," the window of paradise. Anselm spoke of her as "the vestibule of universal propitiation, the cause of universal reconciliation, the vase and temple of life and salvation for the world."2015 A favorite expression was "the tree of life"—lignum vitae — based upon Prov. iii:8. Albertus Magnus, in the large volume he devotes to Mary’s virtues, gives no less than forty reasons why she should be worshipped, authority being found for each one in a text of Scripture. The first reason was that the Son of God honors Mary. This accords with the fifth commandment, and Christ himself said of his mother, "I will glorify the house of my glory," Isa. lx:7; house, according to the Schoolman, being intended to mean Mary. The Bible teems with open and concealed references to her. Albertus ascribed to her thirty-five virtues, on all of which he elaborates at length, such as humility, sincerity, benignity, omnipotence, and modesty. He finds eighty-one biblical names indicative of her functions and graces. Twelve of these are taken from things in the heavens. She is a sun, a moon, a light, a cloud, a horizon, an aurora. Eight are taken from things terrestrial. Mary is a field, a mountain, a hill, a stone. Twenty-one are represented by things pertaining to water. She is a river, a fountain, a lake, a fish-pond, a cistern, a torrent, a shell. Thirty-one are taken from biblical figures. Mary is an ark, a chair, a house, a bed, a nest, a furnace, a library. Nine are taken from military and married life. Mary is a castle, a tower, a wall. It may be interesting to know how Mary fulfilled the office of a library. In her, said the ingenious Schoolman, were found all the books of the Old Testament, of all of which she had plenary knowledge as is shown in the words of her song which run, "as was spoken by our fathers." She also had plenary knowledge of the Gospels as is evident from Luke ii:19: "Mary kept all these sayings in her heart." But especially do Mary’s qualities lie concealed under the figure of the garden employed so frequently in the Song of Solomon. To the elaboration of this comparison Albertus devotes two hundred and forty pages, introducing it with the words, "a garden shut up is my sister, my bride " Cant. iv:12.2016

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  2Wanda’s chastened and temperate mood persisted for several weeks, and while it was on her she clung like a drowning man to Stephen, haunting the house from morning until night, dreading to be alone for a moment. It cannot be said that Stephen suffered her gladly, for now with the New Year she was working hard on a series of articles and short stories; unwilling to visualize defeat, she began once again to sharpen her weapon. But something in Wanda’s poor efforts to keep sober, in her very dependence, was deeply appealing, so that Stephen would put aside her work, feeling loath to desert the unfortunate creature. Several times they made a long pilgrimage on foot to the church of the Sacré Cœur; just they two, for Mary would never go with them; she was prejudiced against Wanda’s religion. They would climb the steep streets with their flights of steps, grey streets, grey steps leading up from the city. Wanda’s eyes would always be fixed on their goal—pilgrim eyes they would often seem to Stephen. Arrived at the church she and Wanda would stand looking down between the tall, massive columns of the porch, on a Paris of domes and mists, only half revealed by the fitful sunshine. The air would seem pure up there on the height, pure and tenuous as a thing of the spirit. And something in that mighty temple of faith, that amazing thrust towards the sublime, that silent yet articulate cry of a nation to its God, would awaken a response in Stephen, so that she would seem to be brushing the hem of an age-old and rather terrible mystery—the eternal mystery of good and evil. Inside the church would be brooding shadows, save where the wide lakes of amber fire spread out from the endless votive candles. Above the high altar the monstranced Host would gleam curiously white in the light of the candles. The sound of praying, monotonous, low, insistent, would come from those who prayed with extended arms, with crucified arms, all day and all night for the sins of Paris.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The most notable adept of this conventual flagellation was Dominicus Loricatus (d. 1060), who got his name from the iron coat he wore next to his skin. He accompanied the repetition of every psalm with a hundred strokes with a lash on his naked back. Three thousand strokes were equivalent to a year’s penance. But Loricatus beat all records and accomplished the exercise of the entire Psalter no less than twenty times in six days, the equivalent of a hundred years of penance. Peter Damiani, to whom we are indebted for our account, relates that the zealous ascetic, after saying nine Psalters in a single day, accompanying them with the required number of lashes, went to his cell to make sure the count was right. Then removing his iron jacket and taking a scourge in each hand, he kept on repeating the Psalter the whole night through till he had finished it the twelfth time and was well into the thirteenth when he stopped. What is your body, exclaimed Damiani, who contented himself with prescribing forty psalms a day for his monks,—"what is your body? Is it not carrion, a mass of corruption, dust, and ashes, and what thanks will the worms give for taking good care of it?"2117 Under the appeals of preachers like Fulke of Neuilly and Anthony of Padua, there were abnormal physical manifestations, and hearers set to work flagellating themselves. The flagellant outbreak of 1259 started at Perugia and spread like an epidemic. All classes, young and old, were seized. With bodies bared to the waist, carrying crosses and banners and singing hymns, newly composed and old, they marched to and fro in the streets, scourging themselves. Priests and monks joined the ranks of the penitents. Remarkable scenes of moral reform took place. Usurers gave up their ill-gotten gains; murderers confessed, and, with swords pointed to their throats, offered themselves up to justice; enemies were reconciled. And as the chatty chronicler, Salimbene, goes on to say, if any would not scourge himself, he was held to be a limb of Satan. And what is more, such persons were soon overtaken with sickness or premature death.2118 Twenty thousand marched from Modena to Bologna. At Reggio, Parma, and other cities, the chief officials joined them. But all were not so favorable, and the Cremona authorities and Manfred forbade their entering their territories. The ardor cooled off quickly in Italy, but it spread beyond the Alps. Twelve hundred Flagellants appeared in Strassburg and the impulse was felt as far as Poland and Bohemia. The German penitents continued their penance thirty-three days in memory of the number of the years of Christ’s life. They chastised themselves and also sang hymns. Here also the enthusiasm subsided as suddenly as it was enkindled. The repetitions of the movement belong to the next period. § 136. Demonology and the Dark Arts.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Michael’s in Normandy and in 1475 to Wilsnack, where, in spite of the exposure by Nicolas of Cusa, the blood was still reputed holy.1270 The most noted places of pilgrimage in Germany were Cologne with the bodies of the three Magi-kings and Aachen, where Mary’s undergarment, Jesus’ swaddling-cloth and the loin-cloth he wore on the cross and other priceless relics are kept. Some idea of the popularity of pilgrimages may be had from the numbers that are given, though it is possible they are exaggerated. In 1466, 130,000 attended the festival of the angels at Einsiedeln, Switzerland, and in 1496 the porter at the gate of Aachen counted 146,000.1271 In the 14 days, when the relics were displayed, 85,000 gulden were left in the money-boxes of St. Mary’s, Aachen. Imposing religious processions were also popular, such as the procession at Erfurt,1483, in a time of drought. It lasted from 5 in the morning till noon, the ranks passing from church to church. Among those who took part were 948 children from the schools, the entire university-body comprising 2,141 persons, 812 secular priests, the monks of 5 convents and a company of 2,316 maidens with their hair hanging loosely down their backs and carrying tapers in their hands. German synods called attention to the abuses of the pilgrimage-habit and sought to check it.1272 English pilgrims, not satisfied with going to Rome, Jerusalem and the sacred places on their own island, also turned their footsteps to the tomb of St. James of Compostella, Spain. In 1456, Wey conducted 7 ship-loads of pilgrims to this Spanish locality. Among the popular English shrines were St. Edmund of Bury, St. Ethelred of Ely, the holy hood of Boxley, the holy blood of Hailes and, more popular than all, Thomas à Becket’s tomb at Canterbury and our Blessed Lady of Walsingham. So much frequented was the road to Walsingham that it was said, Providence set the milky way in the place it occupies in the heavens that it might shine directly upon it and direct the devout to the sacred spot. These two shrines were visited by unbroken processions of religious itinerants, including kings and queens as well as people less distinguished. Reference has already been made to Erasmus’ description, which he gives in his Colloquies. At Walsingham, he was shown the Virgin’s shrine rich with jewels and ornaments of silver and gold and lit up by burning candles. There, was the wicket at which the pilgrim had to stoop to pass but through which, with the Virgin’s aid, an armed knight on horseback had escaped from his pursuer. The Virgin’s congealed milk, the cool scholar has described with particular precision. Asking what good reason there was for believing it was genuine, the verger replied by pointing him to an authentic record hung high up on the wall. Walsingham was also fortunate enough to possess the middle joint of one of Peter’s fingers.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The third speaker, the gospel story as the story of the renewed people of God, reminds us of two other elements of the exodus story: Israel’s vocation to be the royal priesthood (Exod. 19:5–6) and the gift of the Torah, through which that vocation might become a reality. When we listen to the story with the speaker properly adjusted, we hear at last the gospels describing Jesus as not only a great moral teacher, but as the one who gives to God’s people their new vocation and way of life. The gospel story, and the teaching of Jesus within it, is not simply a new “Torah,” as though replacing the old one with a new one. The whole situation is now different. Jesus’s way of life, and the renewed heart that he promises goes with it, partake already of the new creation, which enables this people to be God’s people indeed. When, thinking of the exodus, we read the gospels with the fourth speaker adjusted properly, we are reminded of God’s dark and solemn victory over Pharaoh, first in the plagues and then in the Red Sea. The story of the exodus is of course an exciting, dramatic rescue operation. When you relive it at a Passover celebration, you tend to identify with the people as they dream of freedom while living under a cruel regime, as they begin to dare to hope for it when Moses confronts Pharaoh, as they start to taste it when the plagues fall on Egypt and they are allowed to leave, as they experience it vividly in the crossing of the Red Sea—and then as they find that freedom poses its own new challenges in the wilderness. But with all this we are still focusing, naturally enough, on the experience of the people. Behind this, underneath this, is the deeper and darker story that makes sense of it all. The powers of this world exalt themselves against the creator God, the God of Israel, and God will not be mocked forever. The kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdom of our God, and he will reign forever and ever. The story of the exodus is the story of “how God became king.” That is what Moses and the Israelites sang about after the Red Sea had returned to drown the pursuing imperial army: I will sing to YHWH, for he has triumphed gloriously; Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. YHWH is my strength and my might, And he has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise him, My father’s God, and I will exalt him. YHWH is a warrior; YHWH is his name.... YHWH will reign for ever and ever. (Exod.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  From all that we examined in Chapter 7, it is clear that all four gospels regard the story of Jesus not only as the confrontation between God’s kingdom and Caesar’s kingdom, but as the victory of the former over the latter. This theme is continued throughout the New Testament. Toward the end of the previous section we glanced at some passages in the book of Revelation that make this point graphically. The violent death of the Lamb has won the decisive victory over the monsters and their horrid kingdoms and over the old dragon, the satan itself. But there are many other passages too that do not mince their words. It may have looked as if the powers of the world were winning a victory over Jesus (certainly that was how everyone in Jerusalem, both those who followed Jesus and those who hated him, saw things at the time). But in fact the boot was on the other foot. Think of Caesar in his title of “son of God”; think of his (claimed) royal descent, his power, and his claim to worldwide allegiance; and then hear the overtones of Paul’s stunning opening for his greatest letter: …the good news about God’s son, who was descended from David’s seed in terms of flesh, and who was marked out powerfully as God’s son in terms of the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus, the king, our Lord! Through him we have received grace and apostleship to bring about believing obedience among all the nations for the sake of his name. (Rom. 1:3–5) Or think of Paul speaking of “the wisdom God prepared ahead of time…for our glory” (1 Cor. 2:7) and then explaining: None of the rulers of this present age knew about this wisdom. If they had, you see, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. (2:8) In other words, the powers that put Jesus on the cross didn’t realize that by doing so they were in fact serving God’s purposes, unveiling the “wisdom” that lies at the heart of the universe. Paul puts it even more positively, seeing the cross as the weapon with which God stripped the armor from the rulers and authorities, as soldiers would do with beaten enemies: He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor, and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him. (Col. 2:15). That is to say, when Jesus died on the cross he was winning the victory over “the rulers and authorities” who have carved up this world in their own violent and destructive way. The establishment of God’s kingdom means the dethroning of the world’s kingdoms, not in order to replace them with another one of basically the same sort (one that makes its way through superior force of arms), but in order to replace it with one whose power is the power of the servant and whose strength is the strength of love.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The views of Thomas Aquinas have already received notice (p. 673). His statements are so positive as to admit of no doubt as to their meaning. In the pope resides the plenitude of power. To the Roman Church obedience is due as to Christ.1874 These are assertions made in his treatise against the errors of the Greeks written at a time when the second council of Lyons was impending and measures were being taken to heal the schism between the East and the West. The pope is both king and priest, and the temporal realm gets its authority from Peter and his successors.1875 Thomas went further still. He declared for the infallibility of the pope. In confirmation of this view he quoted spurious writings of Cyril, but also genuine passages from the Fathers.1876 The popular opinion current among priests and monks was no doubt accurately expressed by Caesar of Heisterbach at the beginning of the thirteenth century when he compared the Church to the firmament, the pope to the sun, the emperor to the moon, the bishops to the stars, the clergy to the day, and the laity to the night. We stand amazed at the vastness of such claims, but there can be no doubt that they were sincerely believed by popes who asserted them and by theologians and people. The supremacy of the Roman pontiff in the Church and over the State was a fixed conviction. The passage, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s, quoted to-day for the separation of the two realms, was quoted then but with another interpretation. The Church was defined, as it had been defined by Augustine, as the university of believers by Hugo of St. Victor,1877 — universitas fidelium, — or as the congregation of the faithful confessing Christ and the arsenal of the sacraments by Alanus de Insulis.1878 But the idea of the individual liberty of the Christian and his immediate responsibility to Christ, as revealed through the New Testament, had no hold. As a temporary expedient, the fiction of papal sovereignty had some advantage in binding together the disturbed and warring parts of European society. The dread of the decisions of the supreme pontiff held wild and lawless temporal rulers in check. But the theory, as a principle of divine appointment and permanent application, is untenable and pernicious. The states of Europe have long since outgrown it and the Protestant communions of Christendom can never be expected to yield obedience to one who claims to be the vicar of Christ, however willing they may be to show respect to any Roman bishop who exhibits the spirit of Christ as they did to Leo XIII. § 124. The Pope and the Curia.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The title, doctor ecstaticus, which at an early period was associated with Ruysbroeck, well names his characteristic trait. He did not speculate upon the remote theological themes of God’s being as did Eckart, nor was he a popular preacher of every-day Christian living, like Tauler. He was a master of the contemplative habit, and mused upon the soul’s experiences in its states of partial or complete union with God. His writings, composed in his mother-tongue, were translated into Latin by his pupils, Groote and William Jordaens. The chief products of his pen are the Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, the Mirror of Blessedness and Samuel, which is a defence of the habit of contemplation, and the Glistening Stone, an allegorical meditation on the white stone of Rev. 2:17, which is interpreted to mean Christ. Ruysbroeck laid stress upon ascetic exercises, but more upon love. In its highest stages of spiritual life, the soul comes to God "without an intermediary." The name and work of Christ are dwelt upon on every page. He is our canon, our breviary, our every-day book, and belongs to Laity and clergy alike. He was concerned to have it understood that he has no sympathy with pantheism, and opposed the heretical views of the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Beghards. He speaks of four sorts of heretics, the marks of one of them being that they despise the ordinances and sacraments of the Catholic Church, the Scriptures and the sufferings of Christ, and set themselves above God himself. He, however, did not escape the charge of heresy. Gerson, who received a copy of the Spiritual Marriage from a Carthusian monk of Bruges, found the third book teaching pantheism, and wrote a tract in which he complained that the author, whom he pronounced an unlearned man, followed his feelings in setting forth the secrets of the religious life. Gerson was, however, persuaded that he had made a mistake by the defence written by John of Schoenhofen, one of the brethren of Groenendal. However, in his reply written 1408, he again emphasized that Ruysbroeck was a man without learning, and complained that he had not made his meaning sufficiently clear.496

• From How God Became King (2012)

  He is the bearer of Israel’s vocation, of Israel’s destiny, and in his suffering and vindication that destiny will be fulfilled. The phrase “son of man” does not, by itself, mean “messiah” in pre-Christian Judaism, but the narrative, even in visionary symbol, of an individual who represents God’s holy people lent itself easily and naturally to the “messianic” meaning. c. This links the suffering of Jesus (when the “monsters,” i.e., the Judaean rulers, on the one hand, and Rome, on the other, appear to have triumphed over him) very closely to his coming exaltation as the world’s true king, exactly as we find, for instance, at the end of Matthew’s gospel. d. But the one who is thus exalted to worldwide sovereignty after his suffering is the one who then sits on the second throne in heaven . This is a huge claim, but it is exactly cognate with the implicit claim we saw in all four gospels in Chapter 5. The messianic vocation of suffering and kingship appears to be a vocation marked out in scripture for God’s own use. When we understand the ancient Jewish roots of the gospels’ “incarnational” vision of Jesus, we understand more fully that this vision belongs intimately and inextricably with the establishment of God’s kingdom, through the figure who now shares his throne, across the whole world. We understand, in other words, that the “gap” in the classic creeds—the gap between incarnation and atonement—is filled by the evangelists with their claim that in Jesus, and particularly through his suffering, Israel’s God was becoming king of the whole world. Daniel 7 is about the establishment not just of a radical and total theocracy, but of the rule (“-cracy”) of the God (“theo-”) who calls the cruel powers of the world to account and exalts those who have been crushed under their arrogance. That theme, of course, resonates with every corner of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It chimes with the song of Jesus’s mother: “Down from their thrones he hurled the rulers, up from the earth he raised the humble” (Luke 1:52). It fits exactly with the Beatitudes: “Blessings on people who hunger and thirst for God’s justice! You’re going to be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6). It dovetails precisely with Jesus’s own great redefinition of power and kingdom; the rulers of the earth behave in one way, but we’re going to do it the other way: “Anyone who wants to be first must be everyone’s slave…. 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’” (Mark 10:42–45). Kingdom and cross belong exactly and profoundly together. And both gain their astonishing depth of meaning from the music we hear in the second of our speakers. The one who goes to the cross to establish God’s kingdom is none other than “the arm of YHWH ,” Israel’s God in human form, the one who shares the throne of the “Ancient One.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  With this as our framework, we should be able to read right through John and discern what he is actually doing. His Jesus is a combination of the living Word of the Old Testament, the Shekinah of Jewish hope (God’s tabernacling presence in the Temple), and “wisdom,” which in some key Jewish writings was the personal self-expression of the creator God, coming to dwell with humans and particularly with Israel (see Wis. 7; Sir. 24). But this Jesus is no mere ideal, a fictional figure cunningly combining ancient theological motifs. John’s Jesus is alive; he moves from one vivid scene to another, in far more realistic dialogue with far more realistic secondary characters than in most of the synoptic gospels. In particular, he goes again and again to Jerusalem, not least for various festivals—but in each case he appears to trump the festival itself, declaring at the Festival of Tabernacles that he is the one who provides the real living water (John 7), at Hanukkah that he is the true (royal) shepherd, and ultimately at the final Passover that he has overcome the world and its ruler, like YHWH himself overthrowing Pharaoh in Egypt, in order to liberate his people once and for all. John describes Jesus not only as the Temple in person, but as the one in whom everything that would normally happen in the Temple is fulfilled, completed, accomplished. That is why, in the incomparable final discourses of chapters 13–17, generations of readers have had a sense of entering the real Temple, the place where Jesus promises, as God promised in the ancient scriptures, to be with his people and they with him, climaxing in the prayer of chapter 17, which has often, with good reason, been called the High-Priestly Prayer. All the functions of the Temple—festival, presence, priesthood, and now sacrifice—have devolved onto Jesus. This is the heart of John’s “high Christology.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus’s “divine” status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here. A Different Way of Reading the Creed So what’s the alternative? What ideas might we “festoon” around this magnificent document, doing justice to the fact that those who framed it undoubtedly intended it to illuminate and to be illuminated by the scriptural witness, rather than closing it down? One could at this point write an entire systematic theology, and this is obviously not the place for that. Let me simply suggest a few pointers in what seems to me the biblical, canonical direction. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Here the wise worshipper will celebrate the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, knowing that this confession of him as “father” resonates back to the Jewish scriptures and that the delight in him as maker of all, heaven and earth, puts us on a level not only with the author of Genesis 1, but also with such majestic writings as Psalm 19 (“The heavens are telling the glory of God,” v. 1) and Isaiah 40 (“Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?” v. 26). This is, in particular, the Israelite and Jewish confession of faith, which carried with it an implicit social, cultural, and political edge: the gods of the nations are mere idols, but our God made the heavens (Ps. 96:5; Ps. 96 is one of the great psalms of creation and its renewal). Again and again the plight of Israel, threatened and oppressed by the nations, causes the psalmists to invoke God precisely as creator, as the one who, having made the whole world, is responsible for bringing it back to order when chaos threatens: O God, why do you cast us off forever? Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture?… How long, O God, is the foe to scoff? Is the enemy to revile your name forever?… Yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the earth. You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters…. Yours is the day, yours also the night; you established the luminaries and the sun. You have fixed all the bounds of the earth; you made summer and winter. Remember this, YHWH, how the enemy scoffs, and an impious people reviles your name. (Ps. 74:1, 10, 12–13, 16–18) That is a classic statement in which the pagan nations rage against Israel, but Israel appeals to God precisely as creator and, we note from verse 12, as king.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  All this is bringing us nearer, I think, to understanding the evangelists’ atonement theology. It highlights too the distortions that result when people construct an “atonement theology” that bypasses the gospels. God himself will come to the place of pain and horror, of suffering and even of death, so that somehow he can take it upon himself and thereby set up his new style theocracy at last . The evangelists tell the story of Jesus in such a way that this combination of Israel’s vocation and the divine purpose come together perfectly into one. This, I suggest, is the reality behind the later abstractions of “humanity” and “divinity.” The humanity is the humanity of Israel, the divinity is the divinity of Israel’s God. Kingdom, Cross, and Church The third speaker invites us to listen to one particular dimension of the music of the gospels. This dimension, we recall, highlights the story of Jesus heard as the story of the launching of God’s renewed people. The gospels, in telling the story of Jesus (including the fulfillment of Israel’s long narrative and the remarkable claim that this is also the story of God in person), declare in a thousand ways that Israel is hereby transformed, through its Messiah, Jesus, into a new community, based on him but shaped by the Twelve, whom he called as one of his initial great symbolic actions. Many in Jesus’s day were seeking to renew God’s people this way and that. The gospels present Jesus as fitting exactly into that context and culture, with his prophetic ministry aimed, like all prophetic ministries over the previous centuries, at challenging Israel to turn from its wayward folly and to embrace once more its true vocation. The gospels themselves were written from and to communities of Jesus’s followers, who believed that in Jesus as Israel’s Messiah this renewal had become actual. Israel had not been abandoned. It had not been “replaced.” It had been transformed. That, indeed, was the source of many of the early Christians’ problems (should pagan converts get circumcised and keep the food laws?) as well as the root of their self-understanding. Of course, this transformation was anything but a smooth progression, a steady “development” from one phase to another. The story retains its thoroughgoing “apocalyptic” overtones all the way through: a veil is ripped back; things previously hidden are now unveiled, making the world a radically different place; events occur that change Israel and the world for ever. All of this, in its meaning for the early Christian community, is right there in the way the evangelists tell the story. At the center of it all, we find once more the themes of kingdom and cross.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  In fact, all four evangelists make it abundantly clear that we are to understand both Jesus’s kingdom and his death in relation to the Temple—or rather, in relation to the fulfillment of the Temple’s role in Jesus himself (this is a major theme throughout John) and his upstaging of it in his last great symbolic actions. It is now becoming more widely recognized, I think, that the synoptic evangelists present the Last Supper as a “new Temple” moment. Jesus, having pronounced God’s judgment on the old Temple in his dramatic action and then his discourse on the Mount of Olives, now gathers his friends around him to celebrate a “Passover meal with a difference,” a meal that not only looked back, like all Passover meals, to the exodus itself, but forward to the new exodus that Jesus was about to accomplish. Like all Passover meals, it was not just a signpost, but a means, through the sharing of food and wine, of partaking in that event about to be accomplished. When Jesus wanted to explain to his followers the meaning of his death, he didn’t give them a theory; he gave them a meal. The synoptics draw this out in one way, John in another (with the foot washing, chap. 13). But if what we said before about the political significance of the Temple has any significance here, this means that Jesus’s Temple redefinition was also part of what the evangelists saw as his establishment of a kingdom vastly superior to those of both Herod and Caesar. For a new theocracy to be inaugurated, a new Temple is necessary, so that the living God may there receive the worship of the world and from there administer his wise rule over creation. This is the point above all, perhaps, that today’s attempts at political theology will find opaque. For a genuinely Jewish vision of theocracy, you need God in the midst of it. But what the gospels offer us—especially John, but actually all of them—is a God who is in the midst in and as Jesus the Messiah, and a God who is then committed to remaining in the midst, through Jesus, in the person of the Spirit. Jesus himself is the new Temple at the heart of the new creation, against that day when the whole earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. And so this Temple, like the wilderness tabernacle, is a temple on the move, as Jesus’s people go out, in the energy of the Spirit, to be the dwelling of God in each place, to anticipate that eventual promise by their common and cross-shaped life and work.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago!... Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to cross over?... YHWH has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. (51:9–10; 52:10; cf. 40:10) This means that when we arrive at 53:1, there is only one possible interpretation: Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of YHWH been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. (53:1–2) The prophet looks on in horror at the “servant,” battered and bruised beyond recognition, and says in wondering tones, “Who would have thought that he was ‘the arm of YHWH’?” Looking at him, at this “servant,” you’d never have guessed it. But the point of the larger poem, of Isaiah 40–55 as a whole, is that the servant is the one through whose representative work Israel’s God will accomplish his purposes for Israel and the whole world. The “servant” is a role made for YHWH’s own use. The purpose is to establish the kingdom; the means is the obedient suffering of Israel’s representative. This role and the accomplishment of this purpose are tasks that only YHWH himself can undertake. Here is the mystery at the heart not only of the New Testament (which went back again and again to these texts in the quest for understanding what had just happened), but of the Old as well. What we call “incarnation” thus lies at the heart of, and gives depth and meaning to, the kingdom-and-cross combination that, in turn, lies at the heart of all four gospels. And—to develop a point we hinted at a moment ago—this means that one “normal” reading of the creeds and of the whole Christian tradition at this point has to be challenged. The “divinity” of Jesus is not to be separated from his kingdom work, his cross-accomplished kingdom work. It does not, as a dogma, “come away clean.” So too with the “one like a son of man” in Daniel 7. To be sure, this strange visionary figure represents “the people of the holy ones of the Most High” (7:27). There seems no reasonable doubt that the one who is brought before the “Ancient of Days” in that great judgment scene is to be understood in this way. The passage offers two “interpretations,” one shorter and one longer, but in both this point is clear. (Some have speculated that an earlier form of the vision in 7:1–16 had a different meaning, but the text that was being read in the first century was the one we now have.) This is how it works. First, the vision.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This is the message of God’s kingdom, all right, but it doesn’t play out in either of the obvious, simplistic ways, either as an “otherworldly” kingdom completely separate from that of Caesar or as a straightforward, old-fashioned violent revolution. For Matthew, Mark, and Luke the story is one of the key pointers, following Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and prior to his arrest and death, to what is “going on” throughout: this is the story of how God truly became king, as Jesus offered back to God what was his own, in his obedient suffering and death. And within the new world that was thereby created, the question of Caesar, his power, and his coins looks completely different. There may be a time for confrontation; there may be a time for appropriate collaboration. But all is to be done within the bounds of God’s kingdom. It cannot be otherwise. That kingdom is universal, all-present, and all-powerful. That is, after all, the message of all four gospels, and once we have turned all four speakers to their proper volume, we will not be able to miss the challenge they presented in the first century and could perhaps present again in the twenty-first. The Four Speakers Together What can we say, at the conclusion of this second part of the book, about these four speakers and about the music that the gospels want us to hear when all four speakers are properly adjusted? Let me point out one feature of what we have seen in this second part. Think back to the story of the exodus in its many elements. All first-century Jews knew this story well, just as most twenty-first century Jews do, because it was and is celebrated in song and symbol every Passover. The New Testament is full of echoes of the exodus, either as a whole or in this or that feature. Listen to the way this emerges when we adjust the volume on the speakers and pay attention to the full music of the four gospels. From the first speaker, the long narrative of Israel, we hear of the exodus in terms of rescue and journeying. The people celebrate God’s liberation, but they then wander for forty years through the wilderness before reaching their promised land. The long narrative, say the evangelists, has come to an end, a goal. Here, with John the Baptist down by the Jordan, we discover that this is where it was all going all along. It is time for the promises to be fulfilled. In the original exodus, they were fulfilled by Joshua (Yeshua in Hebrew) leading the people across the river and into their new territory. Now here is Jesus (Yeshua) doing the same.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth—then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the “you” you are at the moment into a being—a full, glorious, physical being—who will be much more truly “you” than you’ve ever been before. Sin, by distorting and downgrading our specific God-given capacities and vocations, makes us more and more alike in our degradation. Jesus makes us more and more alive in our uniqueness, and the resurrection will complete that in a great act of new creation. Thomas à Kempis put it like this in his great hymn “Light’s Abode, Celestial Salem” (translated here by J. M. Neale): O how glorious and resplendent, Fragile body, shalt thou be; When endued with so much beauty , Full of health, and strong, and free; Full of vigor, full of pleasure That shall last eternally. And Jesus will do this, declares Paul (Phil. 3:20–21), by the power that enables him to submit everything to himself . Our resurrection, in other words, like the whole new creation, will come about because Jesus is king and Lord. Once you get the kingdom back in its place, everything else—Trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection itself—all gain in meaning. They stop trying to do jobs they were not supposed to do and can play the parts they were originally given. Conclusion: How to Read the Gospels My case throughout this book, then, is that we have all misunderstood the gospels. We have either followed the apparent implication of the great creeds and allowed ourselves to tell a pseudo-Christian story from which the story of Israel, on the one hand, and the story of God’s kingdom, on the other, have been quietly removed. Or we have formulated a concept of the kingdom that did in fact grasp God’s passion to put the world to rights, but we were then unable to integrate that with the incarnation and death of God’s own son. And to correct this misunderstanding it is not enough, not nearly enough, to affirm airily that we believe in the “canon” (many say that who, alas, continue to assume that the canon merely supports the “orthodoxy” they already know), still less that we are supporting something called “Nicene Christianity” and determining to read the Bible in that light.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  That message is written right across the New Testament (though the habit of having the first speaker turned way down means that many readers miss it entirely, in the letters and Revelation as much as in the gospels). But it makes enormous sense of the gospels themselves. The way they tell the story of Jesus going to the cross makes this abundantly clear. The greatest religion the world had ever known and the finest system of justice the world had ever known came together to put Jesus on the cross. The misunderstanding, betrayal, and denial of close friends adds another dimension. The mocking of the soldiers and the crowds deepens both the agony and the irony. Finally, the nations rage, as Psalm 2 said they would, rising up against the Lord and against his anointed, and God’s response is, “Yet I have set my king, my son, upon my holy hill”—no longer Zion, the ancient Temple mountain, but Golgotha, the ugly little hill a bit to the west. The cross constitutes Golgotha as the new holy mountain. This is where the nations will now come to pay homage to the world’s true Lord. The one enthroned there, with “King of the Jews” above his head, is to have the nations as his inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth as his possession. His victory over them will not be the victory of swords and guns and bombs, but the victory of his people and of their derivative suffering and testimony. That is how, for the four evangelists, the kingdom and the cross come together at last. That is how the darkest of the “powers” are to be overthrown. For God to become king, the usurping rulers must be ousted. Throughout his public career, Jesus was engaged in launching that project. But it was on the cross that it came to its triumphant conclusion. That is why, when Peter tried to turn Jesus away from his vocation to suffer, Jesus called him “satan.” That is why the mocking voices urging Jesus to come down from the cross echo so disconcertingly the mocking voices in the temptation narratives (cf. Matt. 27:39–43; 4:1–10). Without the cross, the satanic rule remains in place. That is why the cross is, for all four gospels (and, as I have argued elsewhere, for Jesus himself) the ultimate messianic task, the last battle. The evangelists do not suppose that the cross is a defeat, with the resurrection as the surprising overtime victory. The point of the resurrection is that it is the immediate result of the fact that the victory has already been won. Sin has been dealt with. The “accuser” has nothing more to say. The creator can now launch his new creation.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Yes, we think, because that is how the great scene in John 18–19 comes to its close, with Jesus speaking of kingdom, truth, and power and going to the cross to make them all happen! He descended into hell. And to his death and burial we then join “descended into hell”; those who know the single biblical reference to this (1 Pet. 3:19) know that it is not simply (though it may be this too) a statement of Jesus’s sharing in our worst nightmares. It is principally a statement of Jesus announcing to the “spirits in prison” that through his death God has won the ultimate victory. Peter goes on to speak of the immediate sequel, in which Jesus is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him. That makes the point exactly . The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Now at last Jesus’s resurrection can mean what it meant to the gospel writers. It isn’t (as some, remarkably, still imagine) simply an “intervention” by God to rescue Jesus as a kind of special favor while leaving everyone else still in the grave. If Jesus is the one who is carrying the destiny of Israel, and if Israel is the people who are carrying the ultimate purposes of God to bring his justice and new creation to birth, then the resurrection of Jesus is the launching of the new world in which that justice and new creation have arrived at last, on earth as in heaven. “Some people standing here,” said Jesus, “won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power.” Yes, and now they have. And the ascension is then, as Luke certainly intends and John and Matthew hint, not Jesus “going away” in the sense of being out of sight and out of mind. Heaven, in biblical thought, is after all the “control room” for earth. For Jesus to be now “at God’s right hand” is for him to be given full authority over heaven and earth, as Matthew’s Jesus says explicitly. Every line of this section of the creed thus speaks powerfully about the kingdom of God. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. To the objection that the kingdom seems not to have gotten very far just yet—an objection that actually ignores the massive positive changes in the world and in our own society brought about by faithful and usually unknown Christians—this clause gives the answer: “From thence”! This is a direct allusion to Philippians 3:20–21, in which Jesus comes “from heaven,” from his place of utter sovereignty, to complete the work of establishing that sovereignty on earth. The scene here is not so much that of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, though it may include elements of that as well.