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 The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  12:1) To present one’s body, one’s self, as “a living sacrifice” is an image of dying—of giving up one’s life as in a sacrifice, offering one’s life as a gift to God. The result is transformation and renewal: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12:2) “This world,” to which we are not to be conformed, is not the divinely created world of nature. That world is good. Rather, as in 1 Corinthians 1–2, “this world” is the world organized in accord with the “wisdom of this world”—the humanly created world of imperial normalcy with its conventions of domination, injustice, division, and violence. “Do not be conformed to ‘this world,’” is followed immediately by “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” “Mind” here refers to more than our thinking function, our intellect and rational faculties, though it includes them. It refers to how we “see” the world and our lives in a more comprehensive sense. Personal transformation includes a transformed way of seeing “this world.” The result of this transformation and renewal is the ability to “discern the will of God.” Obviously, the will of God is very different from conformity to “this world.” The personal transformation brought about by presenting oneself “as a living sacrifice” thus also had a political meaning. To refuse to be conformed to the wisdom of this world is to stand against it. Just as “Jesus is Lord” is both personal and political, so is dying and rising with Christ. To conclude, this understanding of “Christ crucified” reveals the way of becoming “in Christ.” The way, the path of transformation, is dying and rising with Christ. In this sense, Paul would agree with the affirmation in John’s gospel: Jesus is “the Way” (14:6). The way of at-one-ment is what we see in Jesus. And we participate in atonement by following “the Way” we see in Jesus: the path of dying and rising. AS REVELATION OF GOD’S CHARACTER Paul often speaks of Jesus dying “for others” and as a “sacrifice.” Our central claim is that this understanding of “Christ crucified” sees it as a revelation of the depth of God’s love and Christ’s love for us. The two—God’s love and Christ’s love—are integrally related for Paul. He saw Jesus as the decisive revelation of God, a conviction that he shared with early Christianity generally. Jesus reveals what God is like. In Jesus, we see what can be seen of God in a human life. The claim has been central to Christianity ever since—indeed, it defines Christianity. As the decisive revelation of God, Jesus reveals what has often been called the “nature” and “will” of God. We use instead the words the “character” and “passion” of God. We prefer their more dynamic resonance, even as we seek to name the same qualities. What is God’s character?

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  1:1–4) He then wished them: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 1:7) But even as Paul wrote to Christian Romans about that human and divine Jesus, another author wrote to non-Christian Romans about the human and divine Nero, the new, seventeen-year-old, fourth emperor since Augustus. In his Eclogues, Calpurnius Siculus rejoiced: Amid untroubled peace, the Golden Age springs to a second birth; at last kindly Themis [Greek goddess of Justice]…returns to earth; blissful ages attend the youthful prince…. While he, a very God (Latin ipse deus ), shall rule the nations, the unholy War-Goddess shall yield and have her vanquished hands bound behind her back…. Peace in her fullness shall come; knowing not the drawn sword…. Assuredly a very God (ipse deus ) shall take in his strong arms the burden of the massive Roman state. (1.42–47, 63, 84–85) How was it even possible—let alone credible—that the exact same terms and titles were taken by Christians from Caesar the Augustus on the Palatine Hill in Rome and given to Jesus the Christ on the Nazareth ridge in Galilee—or, even worse, to the “King of the Jews” on a Roman cross in Jerusalem? What did Paul and his communities mean when they denied those terms and titles to Caesar and transferred them to Christ? Was it low lampoon or high treason? If it was all a joke, why were the Roman imperial authorities not laughing? And, if it was not a joke, what was the fundamental difference between the incarnate program of a Caesar and that of a Christ? Think, for example, of those proclamations of imperial justice and peace that accompanied the accession of Nero as ipse deus —“a very God” or, better, “the God Himself”—after his accession in October of 54 CE. What is the essential difference between Roman peace and Christian peace? With the same transcendent status claimed for both, what was the difference in content between them? As mentioned in Chapter 2, each of Paul’s seven authentic letters begins with exactly the same official and formulaic greeting. The only slight exception is his earliest letter, and even there all the key elements of the formula are already present. Furthermore, in all of Paul’s letters except Philemon the final farewell always mentions “peace.” Here they all are: To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace…. May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely. (1 Thess. 1:1; 5:23) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…. Peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. (Gal. 1:3; 6:16) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…. The God of peace will be with you. (Phil. 1:2; 4:9) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Philem.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  A few sentences later, he repeats the statement and makes it even stronger by adding “nothing” and “except”: “When I came to you, brothers and sisters,…I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified ” (2:1–2). In equally emphatic language, Paul underlines the centrality of the cross in his letter to the Galatians: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ ” (6:14). “Christ crucified” wasn’t simply information about how Jesus died. It had meaning. To use a theological term, for Paul the death of Jesus was salvific —it had “saving significance.” The cross saves us. Indeed, for Paul, it is our salvation. In Christian contexts today, the most common meaning of “salvation” is primarily about an afterlife—how one is saved in order to go heaven. But this is not what the term meant for Paul. Yes, Paul believed in an afterlife. But for Paul, salvation—being saved—was primarily about life before death. It was already happening in this life, this side of death. That the cross had salvific significance is implicit in Paul’s concise “Christ crucified.” It becomes explicit in passages in which he writes about Jesus’s death as “for all,” “for the ungodly,” for “sinners,” “for us”: Jesus died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. (2 Cor. 5:15) Christ died for the ungodly. (Rom. 5:6) While we still were sinners Christ died for us . (Rom. 5:8) Salvific significance is also signaled by Paul’s use of the word “sacrifice” to speak of Jesus’s death. We—everybody, as the context of the text makes clear— are justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. (Rom. 3:24–25) Because of the complexity of this passage and the varied use of the terms “justified,” “grace,” “redemption,” “sacrifice,” and “faith” in the history of Christianity, we will wait to treat it more fully later. For now Paul’s emphasis on the cross as having saving significance is the point: for Paul, the cross is our “redemption,” a “sacrifice” that brings about “atonement.” “Christ crucified”—the death of Jesus—mattered greatly to Paul, as it does for Christians to this day. Crowning church steeples, displayed above altars, worn around necks, the cross is the most omnipresent Christian symbol. The cross is utterly important and rightfully remains so. Christianity without the cross is not Christianity. TWO MISUNDERSTANDINGS We think that Paul’s proclamation of the cross has been misunderstood in two important ways. To proclaim “nothing except Christ crucified” has sometimes been understood to mean that only the death of Jesus matters. The second misunderstanding is even more widespread: for almost a thousand years Christians have most commonly understood the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin. Only the cross.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Most mystics have mystical experiences—by which we mean ecstatic experiences in which there is a vivid sense of the presence of God, or the Sacred, or the Real, terms that we use interchangeably here. An ecstatic experience, as the roots of the Greek word suggest, is a nonordinary state of consciousness. One is “out of” or “beyond” ordinary consciousness and in this state has an overwhelming sense of experiencing God. God becomes an experiential reality. In this sense, mystics know God. They do not simply believe in God, but have moved from believing to knowing. A century ago, William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience provided the classic broad definition of mystical experiences. Such experiences, he said, involve a vivid sense of union and illumination . Since we have just spoken about the former, we turn to the latter. “Illumination” has more than one connotation in the context of mystical experiences. The experiences often involve light. Sometimes they involve seeing light or a being of light—a photism, to use James’s word. They can also involve seeing the world as radiant, as full of light. The earth is “full of God’s glory” (Isa. 6:3), that is, full of the radiant luminosity of the sacred. Because the light sometimes becomes yellow or golden in these experiences, Mircea Eliade, the twentieth century’s best-known scholar of comparative religions, called them “experiences of the golden world.” “Illumination” has yet another connotation in the context of mystical experiences. They often include a sense of “enlightenment,” a vivid sense of seeing more clearly than one ever has before. And what one sees is “the way things are.” To use another word from William James, they are noetic —they involve a strong sense of knowing, and not simply ecstatic feeling. People who have such experiences experience a radical perceptual shift—they see differently. Enlightenment as a transformed way of seeing is not only part of mystical experience, but continues afterward. Common images speak of this as like moving from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from sleeping to being awake. Thus, for example, the Buddha after his mystical experience under the Bo tree, became the “enlightened one,” the “awakened one.” In the New Testament, the same effect is spoken of with the image of blindness and sight in a verse familiar from the hymn “Amazing Grace”: “I once was blind, but now I see” (see also John 9). Seeing is transformed; mystics see differently because of what they have seen. In this broad sense of the word, texts in both Acts and Paul’s letters show that Paul was a mystic. On this crucial foundational fact, Acts and Paul agree. (Later, in Chapter 3, we will also see certain differences between them.) According to Acts, Paul had a mystical experience of Jesus that was the transformative event of his life. It changed him from Saul the persecutor of Jesus to Paul the proclaimer of Jesus.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The result over time was a new religion, even though Paul (like Jesus) was a Jew who saw himself working within Judaism. Neither intended that a new religion would emerge in his wake. This does not mean that Christianity is a mistake. But it does mean that the two most important foundational figures of Christianity were Jews whose passion was the God and the people of Israel. When Paul spoke to non-Jews, it was to the God of Israel as disclosed in Jesus to whom he called them. Nevertheless, Paul more than any other figure in the New Testament was responsible for the emergence of Christianity as a new religion that, though it included Jews, became increasingly separated from Judaism. Paul’s importance extends beyond the New Testament into the history of Christianity. Many of its most important theologians and reformers were decisively shaped by Paul’s letters. St. Augustine (354–430) was converted to Christianity by a passage from Paul. Before his conversion he was a gifted, brilliant, and troubled young man who fathered a child with a woman to whom he was not married. His spiritual journey led him through philosophy to Manicheanism, a religion that emphasized that the flesh was bad and spirit was good. Then one day, as Augustine tells the story, he heard a child singing, “Pick it up, read it.” He picked up a copy of the New Testament, and his eyes fell upon Romans 13:13–14: Let us live…not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ… In his Confessions, commonly seen as the world’s first spiritual autobiography, he reports: Instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all of the gloom of doubt vanished away. After this experience mediated by Paul, Augustine became the most influential theologian of the first millennium of Christianity. In the more than thousand years from Augustine to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, Paul continued to be revered because his writings were part of Christian sacred scripture. But during the Reformation, he became decisively important for Protestants. Martin Luther (1483–1546) had his transforming experience of radical grace while preparing lectures on Paul. Paul became the foundation of his theology, especially the Pauline contrasts between grace and law, and faith and works, language that has been paradigmatically important for Lutherans ever since. John Calvin (1509–64), the other most important Protestant Reformer, also made Paul central to his theology. Calvin’s theological descendants include millions of Protestants: Puritans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists (today’s United Church of Christ), and other Reformed denominations. Two centuries later, Paul played a central role in the birth of the Methodist church. Its founder, John Wesley (1703–91), was converted to his mission to reform the Church of England while listening to a reading of Luther’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  In Acts, it happened on the “road to Damascus,” a phrase that has entered popular language to describe a radical, life-changing experience. We refer to it in shorthand as Paul’s Damascus experience. The author of Acts tells the story three times, once as part of his narration (Acts 9) and twice in speeches attributed to Paul (Acts 22; 26). There are differences in details, such as what the men traveling with Paul experienced, which rules out taking the three accounts as exact factual reporting. Obviously the author of Acts was not concerned with factual inerrancy, or he would have harmonized the three stories. But on the main points the accounts agree: Paul saw a great light; he heard a voice and addressed it as “Lord”; the voice identified itself as Jesus; and the experience transformed him. We illustrate with the first and fullest story. Paul was on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus in Syria to find followers of Jesus and bring them bound to Jerusalem. Then: As Paul was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” (Acts 9:3–5) Paul experienced “a light from heaven,” a photism, to use William James’s term. He also heard a voice, what James calls an audition, sometimes but not always part of a mystical experience. Paul addressed the light and the voice as “Lord” and asked, “Who are you?” This suggests that Paul had not seen a visual figure, but a light, as the text itself says. Then the voice announced, “I am Jesus,” identifying the light as Jesus. Of course, this is the post-Easter Jesus, the risen Christ; the historical Jesus, the pre-Easter Jesus, had been dead for at least a few years. As the story continues, the theme of illumination appears again. The light was so brilliant that it blinded Paul (Acts 9:9). Then, three days later, he was led to a Christian Jew in Damascus named Ananias. Ananias laid his hands on Paul and said, “The Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored ” (Acts 9:17–18; all italics in biblical quotations have been added). Paul now saw differently—the light that was Jesus, and the Spirit with which he was now filled, had brought enlightenment: “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” The story in Acts 9 ends with Paul being baptized, the early Christian rite of incorporation. Paul had become “in Christ,” as he puts it in his letters. “In Christ” was for Paul a new identity that involved a new community and way of being.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Its metaphorical meaning, its more-than-literal meaning, is clear: Paul had experienced an internal crucifixion, an internal death. The old Paul had died, and a new Paul had been born: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Crucifixion and resurrection, dying and rising, are radical images of internal transformation. The difference is as great as the difference between life and death, and the path leads through death to life. Dying and rising with Christ is the means to life “in Christ,” a phrase Paul uses over a hundred times in his letters. He uses the synonymous phrase “in the Spirit” more than fifteen times. The phrases refer to an identity and way of life centered in Christ, in the Spirit. Paul’s transformation involved an “identity transplant”—his old identity was replaced by a new identity “in Christ.” We will quite often refer to this “identity transplant” as a “Spirit transplant.” We have in mind an analogy to modern medicine’s heart transplant, in which an old heart is replaced by a new heart. In Paul’s case, his spirit—the old Paul—had been replaced by the Spirit of Christ: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” This is central to what we meant in Chapter 1 when we spoke of Paul as a Jewish Christ mystic. He not only had ecstatic experiences of the risen Christ, but had become one with Christ by dying and rising with him. His identity was now a mystical identity “in Christ.” Paul had had a Spirit transplant. Paul uses the language of participatory at-one-ment not just about himself, but also for all who would live their lives “in Christ.” In his letter to Christians in Rome, he writes about dying and rising with Christ as the meaning of baptism, the ritual of initiation into the new life “in Christ”: All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (6:3–4) Being baptized symbolized joining Jesus in his death, being “buried with him by baptism into death.” It was followed by resurrection: “just as Christ was raised from the dead …so we too might walk in newness of life ”—the newness of life that results from a Spirit transplant through dying and rising with Christ. Paul also writes about internal transformation through participation in the death of Jesus using the language of sacrifice: I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Rom.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Paul and all of his communities lived under Roman rule. This matters not simply as information about Paul’s time and place. Rather, it matters because Roman rule was legitimated by an imperial theology that proclaimed that the emperor was the Son of God, Lord, Savior of the World, and the one who had brought peace on earth. It also proclaimed, as we will see especially in Chapter 4, that peace and justice came through military victory and imperial order. For now, we simply note that Paul’s proclamation of Jesus as Son of God, Lord, and Savior directly countered Roman imperial theology. For Paul as a follower of Jesus, God as known in Jesus was Lord, and the emperor was not. In this context, Paul’s most concise affirmation about Jesus—“Jesus is Lord”—was high treason. It is not surprising that Paul, like Jesus, was eventually executed by Rome. In this fourfold context, much of what is in Paul’s letters becomes luminous. Though the meaning of some passages remains uncertain, either because we don’t know enough about the circumstances or because Paul was sometimes unclear, his genuine letters generate an understanding of Paul and his message that is remarkably consistent with the message of Jesus. Paul’s message challenged the normalcy of civilization, then and now, with an alternative vision of how life on earth can and should be. The radical Paul, we are convinced, was a faithful follower of the radical Jesus. A JEWISH CHRIST MYSTIC In the rest of this book we will be discussing Paul’s life and letters, mission and theology. But here, immediately, we emphasize the most important foundational fact about him: Paul was a Jewish Christ mystic. We begin with the word “mystic” and its cousins “mystical” and “mysticism.” Because of their diverse and ambiguous connotations in contemporary culture, they need explanation. The most common connotation of these words in popular usage is dismissive. To say something “sounds mystical” or “sounds like mysticism” means you don’t need to take it seriously. It is something vague, fuzzy, ungrounded, perhaps otherworldly, and irrelevant. In the academic world, the term is not dismissive, but ambiguous. It is used by some scholars in a very narrow and precise sense and by others in a much broader sense. Those who define it very narrowly see it as an unusual and very specific religious phenomenon. They see mysticism within Judaism and Christianity as a postbiblical development and would not use the terms “mystic” or “mysticism” for anything stemming from as early as the biblical period. We are among those who define it more broadly. In five words, which of course need to be expanded, mysticism is union with God. A mystic is one who lives in union or communion with God. The difference between union and communion is relatively minor: the first involves a sense of “one-ness” with God; the second, a sense of connection with the sacred that is deep, close, and intimate, even though a sense of “two-ness” remains.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Note the plural: we should not imagine that the Damascus experience was his only experience of the risen Christ. Then he speaks of “a person in Christ who…was caught up to the third heaven.” Though Paul uses third-person language here, he almost certainly refers to himself. “Such a person,” he continues, “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat” (12:1–4). The passage speaks of entering another level of reality (“the third heaven,” “Paradise”), in an ecstatic state (“whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know”), where he heard “things that are not to be told.” We do not think that the last phrase means secret information that could in principle be disclosed. Rather, it is best understood as something beyond words—“things unutterable,” as an earlier translation put it. Again to use William James’s language, this is mystical experience as ineffable—as impossible to put into words, as beyond words. Another passage in the same letter uses the language of mysticism: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:18) “Unveiled faces” is a mystical image—the veil has been removed. So also is “seeing the glory of the Lord,” the radiant luminosity of the Lord “as though reflected in a mirror” (see also 1 Cor. 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly”). The result is that we “are being transformed.” All of these passages—and more could be cited—indicate that Paul had mystical experiences of the risen Christ. He experienced the post-Easter Jesus as the light and glory of God, the one who enlightened and transformed him. Paul was not simply a mystic. More precisely, he was a Jewish Christ mystic . He was a Jewish Christ mystic because, as already mentioned, Paul was a Jew and in his own mind never ceased being one. He was a Jewish Christ mystic because the content of his mystical experiences was Jesus as risen Christ and Lord. Afterward, Paul’s identity became an identity “in Christ.” And as a Christ mystic, he saw his Judaism anew in the light of Jesus. We cannot claim this foundation as a consensus view. Scholars and theologians have often written about Paul without grounding his vocation and message as an apostle of Jesus in his mystical experience of the post-Easter Jesus. They have treated Paul’s letters as if they were primarily about a set of ideas that need to be systematized and explained.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  He presumes his audience knows that the story started in Damascus, so that “returned to” makes sense to them. In other words, he was living in Damascus and persecuting Jewish Christians there—most likely within its synagogue. There is nothing, of course, about high-priestly authorized travels to Damascus with the right of rendition back to Jerusalem. But this next difference is much more important. Luke says Paul only heard Christ, but Paul insists he saw Christ. Indeed, it is the sight of Christ that makes him an apostle, as he says in 1 Corinthians: “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (9:1). It is that sight that puts him on a par with the Twelve and all the other earlier apostles: “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared [Greek ophthē, ‘was seen’] also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (15:8–9). Paul already knew enough about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to persecute his followers for proclaiming their faith to fellow Jews at Damascus. In Christian gospel, art, and mysticism, the risen Christ retains the wounds of historical crucifixion even on his glorified and transcendental body. Those wounds do not heal or fade. They are forever there. To take seriously Paul’s claim to have seen the risen Jesus, we suggest that his inaugural vision was of Jesus’s body simultaneously crucified (by Rome) and glorified (by God). Such a stunning vocational vision would already contain foundationally the full message of Paul’s faith and theology, the full meaning of Paul’s life and death. An apostle of Christ. That preceding divergence between Paul and Luke leads directly into a second major disagreement between them, and it too concerns much more than autobiographical details and résumé upgrades. It involves Paul’s very identity, integrity, and authority as a Christian apostle. An “apostle” is a person “sent” somewhere (from Greek apostellein, “to send”) in order to found new Christian communities. But by whom is an apostle “sent”? According to Paul, he is an apostle called and sent directly by Christ—just as were the Twelve—but according to Luke Paul has no such status or authority. He is only an apostle sent by the community at Antioch and is therefore subordinate to Antioch, and through Antioch to Jerusalem and the Twelve. As you can understand, there are profound theological implications to that difference. Do God and Christ call an apostle by revelatory vocation (from Latin vocare, “to call”) directly from heaven even after the resurrection and ascension, or only indirectly through the Christian community here below? So for Luke in Acts, Paul is an apostle sent by Jerusalem and Antioch. Here is how Paul becomes an “apostle” according to Luke in Acts 13:1–3, but notice that Barnabas is mentioned first and seems much more important than Saul/Paul in this account:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Though we can say and write words like that, words that obviously point beyond themselves into the bright shadow of reality, which, like the cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration, can sometimes enclose us as we contemplate their truth, we know that the reality itself goes far beyond even that. As we tell the story again, as we listen to the musical settings, as we contemplate some of the great works of art that help us to glimpse the way in which the horror and pain of the world and the powerful love of the creator God came rushing together on to one place; as we find ourselves battling an intransigent magistrate on behalf of someone suffering injustice or praying at a deathbed and feeling a soft hand squeeze at the name of Jesus; as we find ourselves singing “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”; as we find ourselves stopped in our tracks once more by the forgiving love that won’t let us go sneaking back to the place of slavery—on these occasions and on thousands more we know that we are in the presence of the Lover himself. Christian devotion today has everything to gain and nothing to lose by exploring what the early Christians meant when they said that the Messiah died for their sins “in accordance with the Bible,” by understanding better how the great story fits together and how it all makes sense. Christian theology, undergirding that devotion, has everything to gain and nothing to lose by abandoning its Platonized eschatology, its moralized anthropology, and its paganized soteriology and embracing instead the vision of new heavens and new earth with renewed humans rescued from the power of sin and death to take their proper and responsible place, here and now and in the age to come, within that new world. Yes, it will mean taking up our own cross. Jesus warned us of exactly that (Mark 8:34–38). It will mean denying ourselves—a phrase we used to hear in hymns and sermons, but for some reason don’t hear quite so much today. How remarkable it is that the Western church so easily embraces self-discovery, self-fulfillment, and self-realization as though they were the heart of the “gospel”—as though Mark 8 didn’t exist! Yes, following Jesus will mean disappointment, failure, frustration, muddle, misunderstanding, pain, and sorrow—and those are just the “first-world problems.” As I have already said, some Christians, even while I have been working on this book, have been beheaded for their faith; others have seen their homes bombed, their livelihoods taken away, their health ruined. Their witness is extraordinary, and we in the comfortable West can only ponder the ways in which our own unseen compromises—perhaps because of our platonic eschatology—have shielded us from the worst things that are happening to our true family only a short plane ride away.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  If God is doing all the willing and the working, why are we doing all the fearing and the trembling? If it all depends on us, we can see how we might be punished for our failure, but if God is doing everything in us and for us, why should there be any need for trembling fear? To begin with, Paul mentions “work” three times in that single sentence, once at the start, once in the middle, and once at the end. This seems to put an end once and for all to any discussion of whether there can be faith-without-works, the internal commitment without the external manifestation. There cannot be. The problem, as seen already, is not that there can be faith-without-works, but that there can be works-without-faith. You cannot have love without show, but you can always have show without love. In an effort to understand how God actually works within us to empower both intention and operation, we return to that earlier example from medical technology. In a heart transplant, a person’s old and damaged heart is totally removed and replaced by a new and undamaged one. It is possible that the new organ may be rejected by the body, but there are medications to help prevent this. What God did in Christ and what God thereby offers to everyone is an identity change, a character replacement, a Spirit transplant. God’s own holy Spirit, the Spirit of nonviolent distributive justice that is God’s own self, nature, and character, is offered freely and gratuitously to all people. It is what Paul calls a charis and we translate as a “grace.” It is a free gift offered without any prior conditions demanded by God or prior merits expected of us. Indeed, how could either of those even be imagined? Also, to continue the analogy, the medications against the rejection of God’s Spirit transplant are called prayer and meditation, worship and liturgy. Paul calls that process of Spirit transplant “God’s just-making” or “God’s just-ification” of the world. But what is truly extraordinary is not so much that the divine Spirit transplant is freely offered by God, but that it is freely offered to friends and enemies alike—yes, even to God’s enemies—according to Jesus: “For God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45). That absolute grace—offered even to God’s enemies—is what Paul could never forget, because he experienced it personally at Damascus. It was precisely when he was, as he told the Philippians, a “persecutor of the church” that God empowered him to live in Christ (3:6). It was precisely when he was, as he told the Galatians, “violently persecuting the church of God and…trying to destroy it” that God’s Spirit transplant took place within him (1:13). It was precisely “while we were God’s enemies,” as he told the Romans, that “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (5:10).

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We reach a unique intimacy in the erotic encounter. It transcends the civility of the emotional connection and accommodates our unruly impulses and primal appetites. The flint of rubbing bodies gives off a heat not easily achieved through tamer expressions of love. Paradoxically, ruthlessness is a way to achieve closeness. Erotic intimacy invites us into a state of unboundedness where we experience a sweet freedom. We get a temporary break from ourselves—the legacies of our childhood, the habits of our relationship, and the constraints of our respective cultures. Loving another without losing ourselves is the central dilemma of intimacy. Our ability to negotiate the dual needs for connection and autonomy stems from what we learned as children, and often takes a lifetime of practice. It affects not only how we love but also how we make love. Erotic intimacy holds the double promise of finding oneself and losing oneself. It is an experience of merging and of total self-absorption, of mutuality and selfishness. To be inside another and inside ourselves at the same time is a double stance that borders on the mystical. The momentary oneness we feel with our beloved grows out of our ability to acknowledge our indissoluble separateness. In order to be one, you must first be two . 9 Of Flesh and Fantasy In the Sanctuary of the Erotic Mind We Find a Direct Route to Pleasure The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man’s thoughts. —Louis Aragon W HEN C ATHERINE HIT PUBERTY SHE was fifty pounds overweight. Sexually invisible, repeatedly rejected, she was the “ugly sidekick” left guarding the door while her girlfriends made out on the other side of it. Today she is a beautiful woman, married for almost fifteen years. She and her husband play out a fantasy in which she is a high-priced prostitute. Men pay top dollar for the pleasure of her company—they want her so much they’re willing to spend a small fortune and risk their jobs and marriages for a little bit of her time. The more outrageous their transgressions, the greater her value. Catherine’s past humiliations are vindicated by the men who now can’t walk past her without marveling. In her theater of the surreal she triumphantly exacts revenge for the pains and frustrations of her adolescence. Daryl’s wife complains, “He can’t even decide on a restaurant, and he wants to tie me up? What’s that about?” The difficulty Daryl feels about asserting himself in his daily life is spectacularly remediated in his domination fantasies.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Sometimes they involve seeing light or a being of light—a photism, to use James’s word. They can also involve seeing the world as radiant, as full of light. The earth is “full of God’s glory” (Isa. 6:3), that is, full of the radiant luminosity of the sacred. Because the light sometimes becomes yellow or golden in these experiences, Mircea Eliade, the twentieth century’s best-known scholar of comparative religions, called them “experiences of the golden world.” “Illumination” has yet another connotation in the context of mystical experiences. They often include a sense of “enlightenment,” a vivid sense of seeing more clearly than one ever has before. And what one sees is “the way things are.” To use another word from William James, they are noetic —they involve a strong sense of knowing, and not simply ecstatic feeling. People who have such experiences experience a radical perceptual shift—they see differently. Enlightenment as a transformed way of seeing is not only part of mystical experience, but continues afterward. Common images speak of this as like moving from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from sleeping to being awake. Thus, for example, the Buddha after his mystical experience under the Bo tree, became the “enlightened one,” the “awakened one.” In the New Testament, the same effect is spoken of with the image of blindness and sight in a verse familiar from the hymn “Amazing Grace”: “I once was blind, but now I see” (see also John 9). Seeing is transformed; mystics see differently because of what they have seen. In this broad sense of the word, texts in both Acts and Paul’s letters show that Paul was a mystic. On this crucial foundational fact, Acts and Paul agree. (Later, in Chapter 3, we will also see certain differences between them.) According to Acts, Paul had a mystical experience of Jesus that was the transformative event of his life. It changed him from Saul the persecutor of Jesus to Paul the proclaimer of Jesus. In Acts, it happened on the “road to Damascus,” a phrase that has entered popular language to describe a radical, life-changing experience. We refer to it in shorthand as Paul’s Damascus experience. The author of Acts tells the story three times, once as part of his narration (Acts 9) and twice in speeches attributed to Paul (Acts 22; 26). There are differences in details, such as what the men traveling with Paul experienced, which rules out taking the three accounts as exact factual reporting. Obviously the author of Acts was not concerned with factual inerrancy, or he would have harmonized the three stories. But on the main points the accounts agree: Paul saw a great light; he heard a voice and addressed it as “Lord”; the voice identified itself as Jesus; and the experience transformed him.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  A few cases away from the Rabbit sat Osé, a large, chunky silicone sex device shaped like a flattened C, debuted to the public by sex tech company Lora DiCarlo in 2020. I stood stunned in front of it, mouth agape, and read the little placard. Developed in partnership with the androbotics program at Oregon State University, Osé employs “biomimicry” to imitate “the human motions of the mouth, tongue, and finger by translating them into microrobotic motions.” I learned that in 2018, Osé was the first piece of consumer sex tech to be recognized at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with an Innovation Honoree Award. A month later, CES’s parent company retracted the award, calling the product “immoral, obscene, and profane.” To reiterate, the year was 2018—two decades after Charlotte bought the Rabbit, and eleven decades after Pulsocon’s “blood circulator” gained popularity as an orgasm machine. After a public backlash against the decision, the award was eventually reinstated, and sex toys became permanently allowed at the show. The controversy revealed our enduring discomfort with something as fundamental as sexual pleasure (“immoral, obscene, and profane”!) and, more specifically, the items that help us feel it, typically far more easily than another person could. My field trip to the museum sparked a deep curiosity in what might come next in the field of sex tech. When I was writing my Sex Machina column, just five years prior, the landscape still felt niche—you found it only if you went looking. (There certainly weren’t any celebrities or micro-influencers hawking products.) Nevertheless, I persisted. I tried vibrating vagina Kegel balls, weed-infused lube, ejaculating dildos, vibrating underwear, and an alarm clock–vibrator hybrid that you put in your underpants before going to sleep so you can wake up to an orgasm. A few days after my visit to the Museum of Sex, on Instagram, the algorithm shepherded me to Cute Little Fuckers, an independent brand that makes gender-inclusive vibrating toys in playful shapes inspired by octopuses, aliens, and starfish, a far cry from the minimalist or explicitly genital-inspired toys you typically find. Founder Step Tranovich, who designs the toys to feel excellent on a wide range of body parts, says the starfish-like toy, called Starsi, has been especially popular with trans-femme people experiencing gender dysphoria—when nestled in the hand, the gently curved toy easily covers genitalia, “allowing us to map new genitalia and euphoria in our own mind.” Tranovich, who is disabled, engineers their toys to be held and arranged in numerous ways, so people with limited or no hand use can find pleasure, too. Their whimsical designs also increase what they call “emotional access” to sexual pleasure. “I had this vision in my mind of someone going to a sex toy store for the first time and going, ‘Oh, I don’t know. That’s too intense,’ and then they see my toys,” Tranovich said. “It’s amazing. I’ve had lots of people say that [Cute Little Fuckers] was their first sex toy experience.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  First, it really does look as though the sequence of Servant Songs (42:1–9; 49:1–7 [or possibly 1–12]; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12) carries at the least overtones of the “royal” passages in the first part of the book (9:2–7; 11:1–10) and the similar, presumably messianic, passages in the later parts (61:1–4; 63:1–6). There is a well-known fluidity between the nation and its royal representative: the king holds the key to the destiny of the people. (That too is an old and difficult question, but some sort of “royal representation” makes a great deal of sense in the texts and the world of the time.) The “servant,” then, is some kind of “anointed” figure through whose work YHWH will bring justice to Israel and the nations, reminding us of Psalms such as 2 and 72. The shock of discovering that this royal “servant” was called, as part of his obedient vocation, to die an unjust and shameful death is almost too much, and perhaps it was for the prophet as well, or at least for his anticipated readers. But this is where the poem seems to point. The themes of the divine kingdom, the divine victory, and the divine forgiveness of sins all converge on this point. Thus, if the “servant” is the coming king through whom God’s redemptive purposes will be accomplished, one can at least imagine the possibility that his horrible death might be seen—with help, perhaps, from some of the Psalms—as a vocational necessity. David, already anointed but not yet recognized as the coming king, had to go to battle against Goliath; he was one man representing the whole people. Similarly, this “servant” has to take upon himself the consequences of the people’s age-old sins. But at least David defeated Goliath and killed him! How can the death of a hypothetically royal servant be part of the overwhelming loving purposes of Israel’s God? Here the second point comes in. The powerful action of YHWH is spoken of in this poem as the divine “arm”: See, the sovereign YHWH comes with might, and his arm rules for him. (40:10) Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of YHWH: Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago! Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? 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? (51:9–10) 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. (52:10) Finally, it seems, the “arm” of YHWH is revealed—in the person and in the fate of the “servant” himself: 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)

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But they do not suppose that the divine Glory, which the later rabbis referred to as the Shekinah , the “tabernacling Presence” of God, is there in the same way as in Exodus 40, 1 Kings 8, Isaiah’s vision, or the promises of Ezekiel 43 or Isaiah 40 and 52. Isaiah spoke, after all, of the sentinels on Jerusalem’s walls lifting up their voices and singing for joy, because “in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). That never happened. The postexilic prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—insisted that it would happen, but it hadn’t yet. Centuries later, the rabbis looked back on this period and produced a list, with a sense of gloomy resignation, of all the ways in which the Second Temple was deficient in comparison with the First Temple. Notable on the list of what was missing in the Second Temple was the Shekinah itself, the glorious divine Presence. In Jesus’s day, the hope was alive that the Glory would return at last. But nobody knew exactly what that would mean, how it would happen, or what it would look like. To these questions the New Testament writers offer an answer that is so explosive, so unexpected, so revolutionary, that it has remained entirely off the radar for most modern readers, including modern Christian readers. To take the most obvious example, the Gospel of John says: “The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14). The word for “lived” here is eskēnosen , “tabernacled,” “pitched his tent.” John is saying that in Jesus the new tabernacle, the new Temple, has been built, and the divine Glory has returned at last. The “Word” who was and is God has become flesh. The vehicle of this glory is the “father’s only son”: picking up 2 Samuel 7 and the related psalms, the evangelist is declaring that the ancient promises and the long-awaited hopes have been fulfilled in this Messiah, this Jesus, this Davidic son of God. Through this Jesus we glimpse that the very phrase “son of God,” like the tabernacle itself, was a building designed for God himself to dwell in. Readers are invited to see the creative Word through whom all things were made coming as a human being and, as Isaiah had promised, unveiling the divine Glory before all the nations. Once we understand the image-bearing purpose of human beings, this is perhaps not so hard to imagine as some have supposed. As John’s gospel progresses, we come to realize that the moment when that Glory is fully unveiled is the moment when Jesus is crucified. This is part of John’s dramatic and revolutionary theology of the cross.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  (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)

  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. 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.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But what exactly does it mean? How does it make sense? Ought we even to try to fathom it out? Can we not rest in awe and wonder, as in the third verse of another classic hymn, “How Great Thou Art”: And when I think that God, his Son not sparing, Sent him to die, I scarce can take it in; That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away my sin. 8 It may indeed be true that we can scarcely “take it in.” It may even be ultimately true, as one popular contemporary jingle has it, that “I’ll never know how much it cost to see my sins upon that cross.” Though since the New Testament does tell us precisely what it cost (the blood of God’s own son), and since the jingle in question is as confused in theology as it is deficient in rhyme, we are not much farther ahead. But—and this is the point of writing this book—I believe it is vital that we try. All this brings us back where we began. Granted that the story of Jesus’s crucifixion as it is portrayed in the gospels and in art, music, and literature seems to have a power to move, console, and challenge people across widely different times, places, and cultures, what is it about this story, and particularly about the event itself, that carries this power? When the early Christians summarized their “good news” by saying that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible,” what precisely did they mean? Why, in short, did Jesus die? Why would anyone suppose that his death possessed revolutionary power? And why do so many people, without holding any particular theoretical answer to those questions, find nevertheless that the cross, in story, image and song, has a power to move us at such a deep level? The question, “Why did Jesus die?” in fact, subdivides. There is the “historical” question: Why did Pontius Pilate, egged on by the chief priests, decide to send Jesus to his death? Then there is the “theological” question: What was God hoping to achieve by Jesus’s death, and why was that the appropriate method of achieving it? Underneath these there is another, even more difficult one: What did Jesus himself think was going on? That one is both historical (giving an account of the mind and motivation of one historical person) and theological (even if you don’t believe that Jesus was the incarnate son of God, he was certainly very much in tune with Israel’s scriptures and the question of their fulfillment). Or to go on walking cautiously around these questions: What deep layers of meaning are hidden in the deceptively simple phrase “for our sins”?