Disappointment

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 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  34 Later, my room had all the cheeriness of a dungeon and the appeal of a tomb. It was going to be impossible to stay there, but leaving held no attraction for me, either. Running away from home would be anticlimactic after Mexico, and a dull story after my month in the car lot. But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. I had it. The answer came to me with the suddenness of a collision. I would go to work. Mother wouldn't be difficult to convince; after all, in school I was a year ahead of my grade and Mother was a firm believer in self-sufficiency. In fact, she'd be pleased to think that I had that much gumption, that much of her in my character. (She liked to speak of herself as the original “do-it-yourself girl.”) Once I had settled on getting a job, all that remained was to decide which kind of job I was most fitted for. My intellectual pride had kept me from selecting typing, shorthand or filing as subjects in school, so office work was ruled out. War plants and shipyards demanded birth certificates, and mine would reveal me to be fifteen, and ineligible for work. So the well-paying defense jobs were also out. Women had replaced men on the streetcars as conductors and motor-men, and the thought of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark-blue uniform, with a money changer at my belt, caught my fancy. Mother was as easy as I had anticipated. The world was moving so fast, so much money was being made, so many people were dying in Guam, and Germany, that hordes of strangers became good friends overnight. Life was cheap and death entirely free. How could she have the time to think about my academic career? To her question of what I planned to do, I replied that I would get a job on the streetcars. She rejected the proposal with: “They don't accept colored people on the streetcars.” I would like to claim an immediate fury which was followed by the noble determination to break the restricting tradition. But the truth is, my first reaction was one of disappointment. I'd pictured myself, dressed in a neat blue serge suit, my money changer swinging jauntily at my waist, and a cheery smile for the passengers which would make their own work day brighter. From disappointment, I gradually ascended the emotional ladder to haughty indignation, and finally to that state of stubbornness where the mind is locked like the jaws of an enraged bulldog. I would go to work on the streetcars and wear a blue serge suit. Mother gave me her support with one of her usual terse asides, “That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Perhaps the only thing more ironic than the fact that the transgender movement’s “shatter the gender binary” slogan is now being used to enforce a new subversive/conservative gender binary is the fact that the queer/trans community’s growing sense of “oneness” evolved out of a well-meaning attempt to prevent exclusivity. From the outset, many early transgender activists feared that one particular transgender subgroup might come to dominate the transgender community, that they would begin to police the movement’s borders and enforce their own sense of “oneness.” Because the exclusivity of cultural feminism and the mainstream “gay rights” movement seemed to center on disputes over identity—who counts as a “woman” or who is legitimately “gay”—many activists advocated the idea that the transgender coalition should be borderless, one where there was no set criteria for an individual to join. Many also worked to play down or blur the distinctiveness of individual transgender subgroups in order to prevent any kind of hierarchy from developing. The transgender movement, in effect, became an anti-identity movement. In retrospect, I would say that the assumption that distinct identities would automatically lead to exclusivity was entirely misplaced. After all, an identity is merely a label, a descriptive noun to express one particular facet of a person’s experiences. And if we look beyond gender and sexual identity politics, we can find many examples of flexible and fluid identities. For example, if I were to identify myself as a “cat person,” nobody would be outraged or confused if I said I also loved dogs. Further, when I tell people that I’m a “musician,” no one makes unwarranted assumptions about what instruments I play or what styles of music I prefer. Nonpoliticized identities like “musician” and “cat person” allow us to see that the recurring problems in gender and sexual identity politics arise not from identity per se, but rather from opposite-think (e.g., that a cat person cannot be a dog person, and vice versa) and from a sense of “oneness” (e.g., the assumption that all musicians are or should be punk rock guitarists.)

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Unless you say something along these lines, you are likely to be sneered at. You can’t be a serious thinker. The strength of this position is that it really does try, to some extent at least, to pay attention to the bits of the church’s own canon that the church’s own creeds had bypassed. At its best, it produces, as we shall see, a strong “social gospel” agenda in which many of the things the gospels emphasize about Jesus—his care for the poor, the sick, the weak, and so on—are given a new energy that official “orthodoxy” has often strangely failed to supply. Its weakness is that it has neither the will nor the means to integrate that central piece, the why-did-Jesus-live bit, with the outer, creedal questions, the puzzles of Jesus’s birth, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming. Many of us, I guess, have grown up with this liberal reductionism in the air. Books with titles like Jesus Who Became Christ abound. The “Jesus Seminar,” which trumpeted its own “findings” (“Scholars say that…”) while almost all New Testament scholars in America gave it a wide berth, went down very well with Time magazine and with liberal clergy who wanted to believe something like its reductionist teaching in the first place. The idea that Jesus came to teach a new, simple, clear ethic of being nice to people, without any “dogmatic” claims or “supernatural” elements, is so deeply embedded in Western culture that one sometimes despairs, like a gardener faced with ground ivy, of ever uprooting it. To this day there seems a ready market right across the Western world for books that say that Jesus was just a good Jewish boy who would have been horrified to see a “church” set up in his name, who didn’t think of himself as “God” or even the “Son of God,” and who had no intention of dying for anyone’s sins—the church has gotten it all wrong. The authors of such books routinely proclaim themselves “neutral,” “unbiased,” “impartial,” or “independent.” As if. This reductionist project suggests, in other words, that we try the picture the other way around. Instead of privileging the creeds and screening out the middle of the gospels, let’s privilege the middle material of the gospels and screen out all that odd supernatural stuff at either end, the ideas that found their way into the creeds. This position remains hugely popular. As with Richard Dawkins and his ilk, people clearly still want, in fact they rather badly want, to be told that Jesus was just a great teacher, not the divine Savior.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS, a major focus of my trans activism and writing has been the issue of transwoman-inclusion in lesbian and women-only spaces. I first heard of the issue back in 1999, around the time that I was beginning to call myself transgendered—about two years before I began my physical transition. At the time, I was voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on related to trans experiences and issues. As I read, I kept stumbling upon past instances of anti-trans-woman discrimination from within the lesbian and feminist communities. These included derogatory anti-trans-woman remarks by influential feminist thinkers such as Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, and of course Janice Raymond (who, in addition to writing the anti-trans screed The Transsexual Empire, tried to convince the National Center for Health Care Technology to deny transsexuals the right to hormones and surgery); stories about transsexual “witch hunts,” in which committed lesbian-feminists like Sandy Stone and Beth Elliott were publicly outed, debased, and exiled from the lesbian community solely for being transsexual; and of course, transwoman-exclusion policies, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s euphemistically named “womyn-born-womyn-only” policy, which was retroactively instated in the early 1990s after an incident in which a woman named Nancy Burkholder was expelled from the festival when it was discovered that she was trans.2 While I found it disappointing that people who identified as lesbians and as feminists would come down so harshly on another sexual minority, I cannot say that I was really surprised. After all, practically every facet of our society seemed to hate or fear trans people back then, and these incidents seemed more like a symptom of society-wide transphobia rather than something unique or specific to the lesbian community. And as I was giving thought to becoming involved in trans activism myself, there seemed to be plenty of other, more practical and relevant issues for me to take on. But in the years that followed, I experienced a number of changes in my life that would considerably reshape my views on this matter. For one thing, there was my physical transition and the countless social changes I experienced as a result of being perceived as female. But for me, being trans didn’t merely involve learning how to navigate my way through the world as a woman. I have the privilege of being appropriately gendered as female, so in my day-to-day life, when I am forced to come out to someone, nine times out of ten it is not as a transsexual, but as a lesbian. It happens every time somebody asks me if I am seeing someone and I reply, “Actually, I have a wife.” It happens every time Dani and I dare to hold hands or kiss in public. It happens when Dani is not around, but someone assumes that I am a dyke anyway because of the way that I dress, speak, or carry myself.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Of course, I didn’t say a word about Adam. I didn’t want them reprimanding me or giving me any healthy advice. I knew what they would say: I wasn’t supposed to be dating yet. And meeting up with strangers in alleys doesn’t constitute conscious dating. But maybe I didn’t want to be conscious. 13.Later, as I waited for Adam on Ocean Front Walk, near Marina del Rey, where the homeless cleared and the vibration of the boardwalk became more desolate, I was so excited that I was nauseated. The Santa Monica Mountains were covered in fog, so the pink and palm-tree silhouettes of Venice looked like their own island—an old beach scene frozen in time. It was windy out and I was cold, but I felt important—momentous—like I was on a timeless mission. I could be anyone standing by any beach in history, waiting for a lover. I could be Sappho, unafraid of Eros, calling Aphrodite to her shrine. But as soon as I saw him coming, I thought, Oh God no. He sort of looked like his picture, but more the monkey aesthetic than the hot one. Also, he had an additional werewolf essence that the photo had not captured. It wasn’t just his jagged teeth, the scruffy goatee, but something else that was distinctly werewolf. He waved to me, and I waved back, cursing through my teeth, already disappointed. When he crossed the street I tried not to let it show, to be warm, though I wasn’t sure why I cared what he thought. I guess I felt bad about rejecting someone without even knowing him. I felt sort of ashamed that I was judging him for his looks, but with an alley make-out what other attributes could there be? It figured. Of course this werewolf-monkey creature was the best that I could do. He might have been disappointed in what I looked like too, but he didn’t show it. “You’re really cute,” he said, as though assuring both me and himself. “You look a lot younger than forty. A lot younger.” “I’m thirty-eight,” I said. “Not that I don’t like older women. I love older women. You’ve got seasoning. But you look like a young older woman. Or an old younger woman—” “Okay,” I said, relieving him of having to speak. “I got it.” “So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Do you want to stay here and have a drink or do you want to go for a walk?” “Let’s have a drink first,” I said. “God, you’re really cute,” he said. We turned in to a little dive. I ordered myself a vodka tonic. Rarely did I drink liquor anymore but I felt that the situation called for it. I needed to be less lucid than I was. He didn’t offer to pay for my drink. But he got two tequila shots, offering me one, and a Jack and Coke. I declined, laughing.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Another similar use of an ungendered character can be found in Diane DiMassa’s comic strip Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. With its dyke protagonist who confronts expressions of sexism and homophobia with a lethal combination of violence and humor, Hothead became a popular vehicle in the ’90s for expressing the frustration and anger many queer women felt. At one point in the series, Hothead meets her eventual love interest, Daphne. When they are first dating, Daphne mentions, “I’m just low on friends! Mine took off ’cause they couldn’t handle it.” After Hothead asks why, Daphne explains, “I’m in the middle of a large-scale transition. Look at me. ... Do you see? ”12 The fact that this “large-scale transition” is a physical one, and that Daphne follows with, “I’m telling you now so you can do what you gotta do. If you’re gonna fly away I’d rather just get it over with,” DiMassa is clearly leading the audience to believe that Daphne is transsexual. This is further evident in a later episode when Hothead imagines asking, “So Daphne, what’s the story? You gotta dick or pussy or what?”13 While the fact that Daphne has a feminine name, longish hair, breasts, and identifies as a dyke suggests that she is a trans woman, DiMassa never clearly spells it out, opting instead to tease the audience by relegating Daphne to a permanently ungendered state. In 2004, Daphne’s ungendered status slammed up against the political reality of actual trans people when a musical based on Hothead Paisan was to be performed at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Because many people were led to believe that Daphne was transgender—and more specifically, a trans woman—DiMassa received pressure to denounce the festival’s transwoman-exclusion policy. In response, DiMassa published an open letter on her website in July 2004 stating that she supported the transwoman-exclusion policy. In an interview with Bitch magazine around the same time, she said, “Daphne has become sort of a transgender hero character. But I never used that word. I never said which way she was going. I never said if she was MTF or FTM.”14

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

  fall. On a single day, he was subjected to 14 turnings of the rope. There were two separate trials conducted by the municipality, April 17 and April 21–23. In the delirious condition, to which his pains reduced him, the unfortunate man made confessions which, later in his sane moments, he recalled as untrue.1205 He even denied that he was a prophet. The impression which this denial made upon such ardent admirers as Landucci, the apothecary, was distressing. Writing April 19,1498, he says:— I was present at the reading of the proceedings against Savonarola, whom we all held to be a prophet. But he said he is no prophet and that his prophecies were not from God. When I heard that, I was seized with wonder and amazement. A deep pain took hold of my soul, when I saw such a splendid edifice fall to the ground, because it was built upon the sorry foundation of a falsehood. I looked for Florence to become a new Jerusalem whose laws and example of a good life—buona vita — would go out for the renovation of the Church, the conversion of infidels and the comfort of the good and I felt the contrary and took for medicine the words, "in thy will, O Lord, are all things placed"—in voluntate tua, Domine, omnia sunt posita. Diary, p. 173. Alexander despatched a commission of his own to conduct the trial anew, Turriano, the Venetian general of the Dominicans and Francesco Romolino, the bishop of Ilerda, afterwards cardinal. Letters from Rome stated that the commission had instructions "to put Savonarola to death, even if he were another John the Baptist." Alexander was quite equal to such a statement. Soon after his arrival in Florence, Romolino announced that a bonfire was impending and that he carried the sentence with him ready, prepared in advance. Fra Domenico bore himself most admirably and persisted in speaking naught but praise of his friend and ecclesiastical superior. Fra Silvestro, yielding to the agonies of the rack, charged his master with all sorts of guilt. Other monks of St. Mark’s wrote to Alexander, making charges against their prior as an impostor. So it often is with those who praise in times of prosperity. To save themselves, they deny and calumniate their benefactors. They received their reward, the papal absolution. The exact charges, upon which Savonarola was condemned to death, are matter of some uncertainty and also matter of indifference, for they were partly trumped up for the occasion. Though no offender against the law of God, he had given offence enough to man. He was accused by the papal commissioners with being a heretic and schismatic. He was no heretic.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This is the point that the four gospels are making, but that the creeds appear completely to ignore and that the Reformers and subsequent “evangelical” movements have likewise normally ignored in their eagerness for “the gospel” of personal salvation. The church has gone on reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but without any clue from those great creedal and Reformed traditions as to what they are actually saying. My case throughout this book, then, is that all four canonical gospels suppose themselves to be telling the story that Paul, in some of his most central and characteristic passages, tells as well: that the story of Jesus is the story of how Israel’s God became king . This is how, in the events concerning Jesus of Nazareth, the God of Israel has become king of the whole world. This is the forgotten story of the gospels. We have not even noticed that this was what they were trying to tell us. As a result, we have all misread them. A sign of how far off-track we are at this point is the natural reaction that many will already have had to the very word “theocracy.” Some readers may, metaphorically or even literally, have put their hands to their mouths in dismay. “We never wanted to hear that ! If it were true that God had become king, what on earth would it mean? The rule of the crazy and corrupt clergy? And surely it isn’t true, anyway—since the world is still in a horrible mess and since indeed Jesus’s followers have contributed to that mess? Wasn’t the kingdom of God something having to do with the end of the world, and since that didn’t happen, aren’t we justified in looking at things very differently? And if in some way we believe that Jesus is exalted or enthroned, surely that is a purely spiritual reality we’re talking about? Doesn’t the Easter hymn say, ‘Now above the sky he’s king / where the angels ever sing / Alleluia’” ? Well, yes, it does. More’s the pity. Actually, when I was Bishop of Durham I used to insist that we change that line to, “Now o’er all the world he’s king / while the angels ever sing / Alleluia.” That’s what the ascension is about. But before we can get to that, we need to take several steps back and look more widely at what people have done with the “middle bits” of the gospels once they have forgotten the story that the evangelists were really trying to tell us.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  (Such people are the target of the warnings in 1 John 4:2–3.) Since for many centuries the main thing people wanted to say about Jesus was that he was fully divine and fully human, it has once more been assumed that this “must have been” what the gospels were “really” trying to say about him. This way of reading the gospels was presented to me in one of the very first tutorials I attended as an Oxford undergraduate. On the reading list there was a book explaining that one could trace, in the gospels, the things Jesus did that demonstrated his divinity and the things he did that demonstrated his humanity. The miracles—especially walking on water, raising the dead, and then being raised himself—showed that “he was God.” But also he was hungry, he wept, and he confessed his own ignorance (in Mark 13:32, which the early church certainly didn’t make up, Jesus declares that he doesn’t know the day or the hour of the cataclysmic events he is predicting). All this, I read, showed that “he was human.” His death, of course, made the latter point all the more starkly. When did people start to talk about Jesus’s “humanity” and “divinity” in this way? Not, I think, in the first century. Don’t misunderstand me. As we shall see, if the question were raised, the New Testament writers would be quite clear that Jesus was indeed fully human and—somehow, strangely, but definitely—truly divine. But that does not seem to be their main point. Even John, who brings his stage-setting prologue to its climax by speaking of the Word becoming flesh, does not make this the main strand in the story he is telling. It is only later, when the church moves out into the wider world of Greek philosophy, that the question gets raised like that, in the abstract. In the middle of the fifth century Chalcedonian Christology declared, in ringing, round, and frankly very paradoxical tones, that Jesus was indeed fully divine and fully human. These abstract categories were in the center of the discussion then, and no mistake. But if you compare Chalcedon with the four gospels, you’ll find that they are very different sorts of documents and that the gospels, though they do indeed have Jesus doing remarkable things, on the one hand, and behaving like an ordinary human being, on the other, do not appear to be written in order to prove that point. Sometimes people will say, making a more personal or pastoral point, that the gospels, in telling the story of Jesus, show us who God really is. That’s a bit more like it. That, in fact, is precisely what John says at the end of his prologue: nobody has ever seen God, but the only son, who is intimately close to the Father, has brought him to light.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Conclusion We should note at this point that the so-called Gnostic gospels, books like the Gospel of Thomas and the rest, are simply in another world. They reject the story of Israel—indeed the idea that there is a “story” within which Jesus’s words and deeds make sense— and avoid any mention of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. This does not mean, as some have suggested, that they are earlier versions, prereflective first attempts at remembering Jesus. It means that they are later, de-Judaized, dehistoricized distortions, offering salvation not for the world, but from the world. They want nothing to do with Jewish-style creational monotheism, in which the world is God’s good creation, needing to be judged and set right. They want nothing to do with Israel as the people who carry God’s rescuing purposes for the world. They want a dehistoricized world, a de-Judaized world, a “spiritual” world rather than the matter-and-spirit world, the heaven-and-earth world, which Israel’s God has made. They are deconstructing Genesis itself. They have no time for the God of the exodus, the God who sets the slaves free and comes to dwell in their midst. Unless we are constantly aware, in reading the gospels, that they are telling the Jesus story in such a way as to bring out the Israel story, we will never hear their proper harmony. This is the first of the speakers in our sound system that we must turn up to its proper volume. The events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, to be sure, burst upon an unready first-century Jewish world, as the evangelists make clear on every page. They are the real fulfillment, even though the people weren’t expecting it. All those parables about the returning master or lord come into their own. There wasn’t a smooth “salvation history” in the sense of a steady crescendo, things getting better and better until the moment arrived. Rather, it was the reverse. Israel was in a mess, and God had to do something radically new. But the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he’d always promised, the thing for which they’d always most deeply hoped and prayed. This is the paradox. It runs right through the New Testament, and especially through the gospels. The story reached its goal, but the story itself was looking in the wrong direction. “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” Instead of declaring that they wanted “no king except God,” as their scriptures might have suggested, the chief priests, Israel’s official representatives, declared that they had “no king except Caesar.” But, as John makes clear, Jesus was indeed their true king, and his crucifixion was the full revelation of what that meant. Paradox upon paradox.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  As I read the gospels and think what the church has done (and hasn’t done) with them, I am reminded of a wonderful scene in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. There, the cynical old court composer Salieri contrasts his own operas, telling and retelling great tales of legendary heroes but through stale and tedious music, with Mozart’s astonishing ability to take characters off the street and create something truly magical. “He has taken ordinary people,” says Salieri, “ordinary people—barbers and chambermaids—and he has made them gods and heroes. I have taken gods and heroes...and made them ordinary.” Making the Gospels Ordinary Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation. It is not easy to escape the trap of “making the gospels ordinary.” There are habits of thought and of the practice of the church (some lectionaries, for instance) that are so ingrained that we don’t realize they’re there. But habits of thought, especially when we are not aware of them, have the capacity to keep us imprisoned in small-minded readings unless we name them, smoke them out of their hiding places, set them aside, and take steps to prevent their return. This chapter is, in one sense, a digression, because in it we turn aside to examine these habits, these patterns of thought and imagination, so that we can at least reduce their powerful influence. Only then can we return to the gospels themselves with some hope of seeing more clearly what they are actually saying. The gospels are telling us that the whole story belongs together: the kingdom and the cross are part of one another (and both, together, are part of the larger whole that includes incarnation, on the one hand, and resurrection, on the other). We have become stuck in habits of thought that pull these apart. Once you lose the kingdom theme, which is central to the gospels, everything else becomes reinterpreted in ways that radically distort, that substitute a subtly different “gospel” message for the one Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are eager to convey.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Let’s sharpen this up by observing an irony that follows directly from this. To this day, whenever people take it upon themselves to explore the divinity of Jesus, there is at the very least a tendency for the theme of God’s kingdom, coming on earth as in heaven, to be quietly lost from view. It is as though a young man spent all his time proving that he really was his father’s son and left no time or energy for working with his father in the family business—which would, actually, be one of the better ways of demonstrating the family likeness. The gospels don’t make that mistake. It is by his inaugurating of God’s kingdom, in his public career and on the cross, that Jesus reveals the father’s glory. More of that anon. But this is a startling preliminary conclusion. It poses several additional questions for us today: about our discipleship, our preaching, our hermeneutics, and even our praying. The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. It would be truly remarkable if one great truth of early Christian faith and life were actually to displace another, to displace it indeed so thoroughly that people forgot it even existed. But that’s what I think has happened. This book is written in the hope of correcting that distortion. The Plot Thickens: Twentieth-Century Scholarly Trends So far I have confined myself to personal observations. But I believe the problem I have highlighted resonates across the whole field of Bible reading, scholarly and popular, in all the different traditions. As an American friend of mine put it, most Western churchgoers treat the gospels as the optional chips and dip at the start of the evening. They are the cocktail nibbles. Only after that do we sit down at table for the red meat of Pauline theology. I suspect—though this would take us too far afield—that this has been the case for much of the past millennium in the West, during the Middle Ages and then during and after the Reformation. That historical story, as I said in the Preface, must wait for another occasion, and probably another writer. I want, for the moment, to concentrate on one enormously influential strand of twentieth-century scholarship that both reflects the problem I am outlining and then solidifies it in the imagination and implicit understanding of the Western church at least. The German Lutheran scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential New Testament scholars. For Bultmann and the generations of scholars and students who have been influenced directly or indirectly by his work, the story of Jesus himself formed no part of “New Testament theology”—it was merely the presupposition for such a thing. All that was needed was the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion; that was enough. Everything else one needed to know was contained not in his teaching or public career, but in the early church’s reflection on the meaning of the cross.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And yet. As we observed in the first part of this book, it simply won’t do to say that the Bible and the creeds can come together in that ultimate, intimate way. The creeds simply do not “let Scripture come to its natural, two-testament expression.” Indeed, for many who have said the creeds down the years, the Old Testament has remained a largely closed book. There are many who would be horrified to have their status as catholic, creedal Christians questioned, but in whose life, worship, teaching, prayer, and Christian thinking the scriptures of Israel play no visible part. The creeds do virtually nothing to challenge this form of truncated, quasi-Marcionite Christianity. (When I say “virtually nothing,” I allow the two exceptions: that calling God the “maker of heaven and earth” at once invokes Genesis 1, for those who have ears to hear; and saying, in the Nicene Creed, that the Holy Spirit “spoke by the prophets” acknowledges—assuming with most that the reference is to the “prophets” of the Old Testament, not the New—that the gift of Pentecost was simply the universalizing of the special inspiration of the ancient biblical writers.) But that is only the start of it. As we saw, directly following from the creeds’ nonmention of the whole story of Israel is the complete absence of anything to do with God’s kingdom. This is fine so long as the creeds are regarded as the key markers in areas where there had been serious controversy. But as soon as they are made the syllabus, the master list of vital topics, there is a major gap. Again, it would, I think, be uncontroversial to propose that the great majority of people in today’s church who consider themselves to be firmly “creedal” Christians, affirming the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the second coming, have never imagined for one moment that the gospels are telling the story of how God became king or that the rescuing sovereignty of God is already a reality in the world through the public career, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There is a kingdom-shaped gap at the heart of their implicit story. And the problem with leaving that gap unfilled is that everything else in the story changes its meaning, ever so slightly but significantly. Like somebody who has lost a central piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but is determined to finish the puzzle anyway, other pieces have to be pulled a little out of shape if they are to be made to fit. By themselves, the creeds are fine—excellent, solid, evocative, upbuilding. But if their enthusiasts claim that they teach exactly the same thing as the canon, they have deceived themselves, and the truth is not in them.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And at this point we have crossed a line. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John say, “These are the things you need to know about Jesus.” The creeds, when taken out of their liturgical context where they belong with the gospels and the Lord’s Prayer and used instead as the basis for a teaching program, say: “No, these are the things you need to know.” And when push comes to shove the one thing you miss, when you use the creeds in that way, is the central point that Matthew, Mark, and Luke in their way and John in his own different way all say was central to the work of Jesus himself. This, they would say, is the story of how God became king of the world. The great creeds, then, which have shaped and expressed the faith of millions of Christians in both Eastern and Western Christianity, simply omit the middle section, the story of Jesus’s actual life and the meaning this story conveys. One could make a similar point the other way around too. All these high- flown statements about Jesus in the great creeds—all of which I endorse and say or sing ex animo in church (this argument is not building up to some kind of neoliberal reductionism!)—go way beyond anything even in John’s gospel. The four evangelists say nothing whatever about Jesus being “begotten... before all worlds” or being begotten as opposed to being made. They may hint, John more openly than the others, that he is “of one substance with the Father,” but they don’t put it exactly like that, and for most of the time that doesn’t seem to be the main thing they are talking about. Nor, at the latter end of Jesus’s life, do they mention his “descent into hell.” That is hinted at in 1 Peter (3:19), but you wouldn’t know it from the four gospels. Again, I am not saying that any of these ideas are wrong, or inappropriate, or unhelpful. Nor am I saying that the church was wrong to develop its teaching in different, postbiblical language to meet new challenges and settle new difficulties. That had to be done, and it created the context for further faithful and fruitful Christian living. I am simply noting that these great statements of faith, which the church has treated as foundational for its life ever since, manage not to talk about what the gospels primarily talk about and to talk about something else instead. What I see, in other words, is a great gulf opening up between the canon and the creeds. The canonical gospels give us a Jesus whose public career radically mattered as part of his overall accomplishment, which had to do with the kingdom of God. The creeds give us a Jesus whose miraculous birth and saving death, resurrection, and ascension are all we need to know. It is not only in a historical sense that the title “Apostles’ Creed” is a serious misnomer.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  “And another thing,” continues the mechanic, undaunted. “The tires are the wrong sort for those wheels. They are already quite worn and could get worse. And the cylinders—well, they’re a mess. We’ve been having quite a debate in the garage about whether they will really do the job.” “But where is the car?” asks the owner, getting agitated. “Have you got it going? Can I still drive it?” The mechanic shrugs his shoulders. “Come and see,” he says. They go through to the garage in the back. There is the car, dismantled into a thousand parts, each one carefully labeled and laid out beautifully, artistically even, all over the workroom floor. The owner stares in dismay. “My car!” he shouts. “What have you done to my car?” “Hey, take it easy, man,” replies the head mechanic. “Just look at this. What a great machine. People must have enjoyed this old thing all those years ago. These parts—we’ve all been admiring them. Sure, we’ve cleaned up some of them, and we’ll probably replace some of the others. Enjoy the view! You should be proud.” And the owner, lost for words, shakes his head sorrowfully and walks away. The Whole and the Parts The car is the New Testament. The owner is the “ordinary Christian,” whether in the pulpit or the pew. The mechanics are a certain breed of New Testament scholar. And the sad little story represents the perception of many “ordinary Christians” about the effect of scholarship on their wonderful old text. Some scholars have said it’s unreliable. Some have said people have added bits that shouldn’t be there. Some have said you won’t be able to drive it much longer. But many others have just taken it apart, analyzed it word by word, drawn cunning parallels with other ancient literature, demonstrated its rhetorical skill—and left it in bits all over the floor. To be admired, no doubt. But not to be driven. I and many others have done our best to study the New Testament with a different aim. Without skimping on historical and verbal analysis, we have done our best to put the whole thing back together again, even though the owners may have to get used to driving slightly differently in the future. But I can understand why many “ordinary Christians,” and many systematic theologians too, have become fed up with a “biblical scholarship” that seems to leave the text all over the floor. However “true” such scholarship may be on one level, it is deeply untrue on another. The text was, after all, written to be part of the lifeblood of a community.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Here we have the central pair of statements, as we saw near the start of this book. The virgin birth and the crucifixion, with nothing but a comma in between. Sadly, here most modern Christians who say the creed from the heart barely even notice the comma, let alone think about the wealth of biblical emphasis that is thereby dwindled down to nothing. Jesus, for such people, is the miracle man, the supernatural being who came miraculously into the world to save us from our sins. For them, it really would be true that Jesus could have been born of a virgin and died on a cross and done and said nothing whatever in between. The miracle of the birth and the death for sinners—that’s the heart of it, think “orthodox” Christians. (The Apostles’ Creed does not mention the purpose of the death, as does the Nicene Creed—“who for us men, and for our salvation”—but most modern creedal Christians will think of it at this point, and be rightly grateful.) But will they understand the incarnation as God becoming human in order to become king? Will they understand the cross as the means by which God completed his incarnate kingdom work? Pretty certainly not. As I have repeatedly said, it is possible to check all the “orthodox” boxes and still miss the point. Indeed, I sometimes fear that people have been all the more eager to affirm the official doctrines in this truncated sense as a way of carefully avoiding the implications of God’s actually being king on earth as in heaven. Far safer to have a superman Jesus who zooms down into the world to snatch us away from it. He descended into hell. I doubt if most modern Christians give too much thought to this. Those who have known hell in their own lives may sense with gratitude that Jesus came into the worst place imaginable, the place where we sometimes are, to rescue us. The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Traditionally minded Christians will celebrate this gladly. Here’s the great miracle, the supernatural intervention! The tomb was empty, and Jesus, having risen, was taken up into heaven. I suspect that most won’t bother too much about Jesus’s precise location now, “sitting at God’s right hand”; we sense that the idea of God having two hands and Jesus being at one of them is at most a metaphor. For many, though, the ascension itself basically means that Jesus has gone away, leaving us to get on with the task (in the power of the Spirit, of course). It won’t, of itself, conjure up any idea of his present sovereignty over the world. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This, they would say, is the story of how God became king of the world. The great creeds, then, which have shaped and expressed the faith of millions of Christians in both Eastern and Western Christianity, simply omit the middle section, the story of Jesus’s actual life and the meaning this story conveys. One could make a similar point the other way around too. All these high-flown statements about Jesus in the great creeds—all of which I endorse and say or sing ex animo in church (this argument is not building up to some kind of neoliberal reductionism!)—go way beyond anything even in John’s gospel. The four evangelists say nothing whatever about Jesus being “begotten…before all worlds” or being begotten as opposed to being made. They may hint, John more openly than the others, that he is “of one substance with the Father,” but they don’t put it exactly like that, and for most of the time that doesn’t seem to be the main thing they are talking about. Nor, at the latter end of Jesus’s life, do they mention his “descent into hell.” That is hinted at in 1 Peter (3:19), but you wouldn’t know it from the four gospels. Again, I am not saying that any of these ideas are wrong, or inappropriate, or unhelpful. Nor am I saying that the church was wrong to develop its teaching in different, postbiblical language to meet new challenges and settle new difficulties. That had to be done, and it created the context for further faithful and fruitful Christian living. I am simply noting that these great statements of faith, which the church has treated as foundational for its life ever since, manage not to talk about what the gospels primarily talk about and to talk about something else instead. What I see, in other words, is a great gulf opening up between the canon and the creeds. The canonical gospels give us a Jesus whose public career radically mattered as part of his overall accomplishment, which had to do with the kingdom of God. The creeds give us a Jesus whose miraculous birth and saving death, resurrection, and ascension are all we need to know. It is not only in a historical sense that the title “Apostles’ Creed” is a serious misnomer. My experience as a teenager and the one I had in my twenties were indications of something profoundly puzzling in the way we have all read the gospels. We have assumed some kind of creedal framework, and the gospels don’t fit it. Have we, then, all misunderstood the gospels? Is there an emptiness at the heart of the great cloak of the creedal gospel?

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This contrast is simply wrong—on both sides. John has been made the spokesman for the kind of “high Christology” with which devout Christians in recent centuries have been trying to oppose post-Enlightenment skepticism; and the skeptics have replied by declaring that John is late, nonhistorical, and therefore irrelevant. The skeptics, in turn, have made the synoptics their spokesmen; in them they see the human Jesus, admittedly already distorted, but still visible. But none of this dialogue of the deaf has paid attention to the biblical story of God as we have just briefly sketched it. Both sides were, it seems, looking for the wrong kind of things. To get a genuinely biblical “high Christology”—a strong identification between Jesus himself and the God of Israel—you don’t need the kind of explicit statements you find in John (“I and the Father are one,” 10:30). What you need is, for instance, what Mark gives you in his opening chapter, where prophecies about the coming of God are applied directly to the coming of Jesus: This is where the good news starts—the good news of Jesus the Messiah, God’s son. Isaiah the prophet put it like this (“Look! I am sending my messenger ahead of me; he will clear the way for you!”): “A shout goes up in the desert: Make way for the Lord! Clear a straight path for him!” John the Baptizer appeared in the desert. He was announcing a baptism of repentance, to forgive sins. The whole of Judaea, and everyone who lived in Jerusalem, went out to him; they confessed their sins and were baptized by him in the river Jordan. John wore camel- hair clothes, with a leather belt around his waist. He used to eat locusts and wild honey. “Someone a lot stronger than me is coming close behind,” John used to tell them. “I don’t deserve to squat down and undo his sandals. I’ve plunged you in the water; he’s going to plunge you in the holy spirit.” This is how it happened. Around that time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and was baptized by John in the river Jordan. That very moment, as he was getting out of the water, he saw the heavens open, and the spirit coming down like a dove onto him. Then there came a voice, out of the heavens: “You are my son! You are the one I love! You make me very glad.” (1:1–11) Mark quotes that passage in Malachi about Israel’s God returning at last (3:1) and couples it with Isaiah’s promise about the prophet shouting to Zion that its God is coming back at last, coming back in glory (40:3–11). Mark then emphasizes John the Baptist’s saying about “someone a lot stronger than me” who is “coming close behind,” someone who will plunge the people in the Holy Spirit.

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

  They feared God, and nothing else. Their very fear of God made them fearless of men. The same may be said of the French Huguenots and the English Puritans. Luther stated this theory in stronger terms than Augustin or even Calvin; and he never retracted it,—as is often asserted,—but even twelve years later he pronounced his book against Erasmus one of his very best.547 Melanchthon, no doubt in part under the influence of this controversy, abandoned his early predestinarianism as a Stoic error (1535), and adopted the synergistic theory. Luther allowed this change without adopting it himself, and abstained from further discussion of these mysteries. The Formula of Concord re-asserted in the strongest terms Luther’s doctrine of the slavery of the human will, but weakened his doctrine of predestination, and assumed a middle ground between Augustinianism and semi-Pelagianism or synergism.548 In like manner the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining the greatest reverence for St. Augustin and indorsing his anthropology, never sanctioned his views on total depravity and unconditional predestination, but condemned them, indirectly, in the Jansenists.549 Final Alienation. The Erasmus-Luther controversy led to some further personalities in which both parties forgot what they owed to their cause and their own dignity. Erasmus wrote a bitter retort, entitled "Hyperaspistes," and drove Luther’s predestinarian views to fatalistic and immoral consequences. He also addressed a letter of complaint to Elector John. The outrages of the Peasants’ War confirmed him in his apprehensions. He was alienated from Melanchthon and Justus Jonas. He gave up correspondence with Zwingli, and rather rejoiced in his death.550 He spoke of the Reformation as a tragedy, or rather a comedy which always ended in a marriage. He regarded it as a public calamity which brought ruin to arts and letters, and anarchy to the Church.551 He was summoned to the Diet of Augsburg, 1530, as a counsellor of the Emperor, but declined because he was sick and conscious of his inability to please either party. He wrote, however, to Cardinal Campeggio, to the bishop of Augsburg, and other friends, to protest against settling questions of doctrine by the sword. His remedy for the evils of the Church was mutual forbearance and the correction of abuses. But his voice was not heeded; the time for compromises and half measures had passed, and the controversy took its course. He devoted his later years chiefly to the editing of new editions of his Greek Testament, and the writings of the church fathers.

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

  Albrecht Bengel (in his Gnomon, his Ordo Temporum, 1741, and especially his Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 1740, new ed. 1834). This truly great and good man elaborated a learned scheme of chronological interpretation, and fixed the end of the anti-Christian (papal) reign at the year 1836, and many pious people among his admirers in Würtemburg were in anxious expectation of the millennium during that year. But it passed away without any serious change, and this failure, according to Bengel’s own correct prediction, indicates a serious error in his scheme. Later writers have again and again predicted the fall of the papacy and the beginning of the millennium, advancing the date as times progress; but the years 1848 and 1870 have passed away, and the Pope still lives, enjoying a green old age, with the additional honor of infallibility, which the Fathers never heard of, which even St. Peter never claimed, and St. Paul effectually disputed at Antioch. All mathematical calculations about the second advent are doomed to disappointment, and those who want to know more than our blessed Lord knew in the days of his flesh deserve to be disappointed. "It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within his own authority" (Acts 1:7). This settles the question.