Love

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 From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  If I hadn’t discovered by the time I was thirteen that I preferred to play hide-and-go-get-it with little girls over little boys, after taking one look at my sexy Samantha I would have definitely lost my appetite for dick and taken on a new craving for pussy. But lucky for me, I never had to even entertain the thought of fuckin’ around with a bunch of hood niggas only to discover that no-sized dick is worth putting up with them and their bullshit. All it took was growing up with Naomi Kensington—aka, my moms—and living the life she subjected me to, to know that I preferred pussy over dick any day. “Honey,” I heard Sam call from the shower. “Come join me. Wash my back.” I loved washing Sam’s back, from her shoulders to the small of her waist. I loved it. With me standing a little under a foot taller than her, towering over her made me feel so protective of her, like she was mine, really mine, unable to function without me. I know damn sure I’m unable to function without her. I love me some Sam, and not just because she was my first and only piece of ass, the woman I learned how to please a woman with, the woman I learned how it felt to be pleased with. It was because she was there when I was sixteen, out on the streets and needing that mother figure, any mother figure, to show me love. Being five years older than me, Sam was twenty-one when I was sixteen, and she was living with some thug-ass nigga named Detail who didn’t do nothing but beat her and fuck her, and usually in that order. He would clock on her over any little thing. If the toast was too brown, if the bed wasn’t made right or she missed a spot when she dusted, he’d get all up in that ass. He demanded perfection. That’s how he got the name Detail. He was meticulous about everything. His car had to be wiped down just right. The bed had to be made to his standard, tight like a hospital bed. Towels had to be hung in a tri-fold manner. I mean, nothing got past that fucker’s eyes. He was a real stickler for detail, to the point where, if you ask me, it was a sickness.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink—it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal)—and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer. Notes of a Native Son PART ONE Notes of a Native Son Everybody’s Protest Novel In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of American social protest fiction, St. Clare, the kindly master, remarks to his coldly disapproving Yankee cousin, Miss Ophelia, that, so far as he is able to tell, the blacks have been turned over to the devil for the benefit of the whites in this world—however, he adds thoughtfully, it may turn out in the next. Miss Ophelia’s reaction is, at least, vehemently right-minded: “This is perfectly horrible!” she exclaims. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” Miss Ophelia, as we may suppose, was speaking for the author; her exclamation is the moral, neatly framed, and incontestable like those improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of furnished rooms. And, like these mottoes, before which one invariably flinches, recognizing an insupportable, almost an indecent glibness, she and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil, the next world—posing its alternatives between heaven and the flames—were realities for them as, of course, they were for their creator. They spurned and were terrified of the darkness, striving mightily for the light; and considered from this aspect, Miss Ophelia’s exclamation, like Mrs.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I see the beauty of this man, the beauty of man. I never saw this before. #220 I fell madly, quickly, and completely, forever, the first time he fucked my ass. Now it’s #220 and my love has only deepened—220 times deeper. I adore him, for good and better (it’s never worse), and it is a kind of rapturous indulgence to so unconditionally adore the entire skin surface of another human being’s body. Before I liked men in parts—their lips or eyes, their hands or chest, only occasionally the cock itself. With him I love all those and every nook, cranny, and space in between—and his cock, balls, and asshole most of all. In worship lies freedom. The freedom of withholding nothing, which propels one into the elliptical realm of love. ANAL ORGASM As I learned how to stay in the bliss, I found something else. I have become pure vehicle for his cock, no resistance. I can relinquish all power. I feel such a gravitational pull to this man, who can, and will, disempower me, so willing to give everything away, to bestow it upon him. I never knew how much power I had until I gave it all to him through my ass. My ass is a pipeline for power. I am, I have come to realize, his runway, his launchpad. And after numerous runs to the edge of inevitability, the final one begins. I can tell it’s the one because it coincides, always, with my ability to commit to complete submission, to remain completely open without reserve, without limit. Once he feels this, he aims for the gold. If I show any sign on my face, or inside my ass, of reneging on my submission, he slows down and works me until my ass believes that there is only one choice, only one way. No choice but surrender is surrender. I am his entirely, body, soul, and asshole. I relish my freedom. Molded onto his cock, I feel its urgency. The road to orgasm is a straight line into my ass, into the center of my being, into the center of the world. I don’t know who starts the coming. I do, however, know that he is the only man whose orgasm interests me more than my own—no small feat. On one level, I feel like his cock sets off my contractions and my contractions then set off his . . . but then his set off mine . . . Contractions in my ass, involuntary contractions: anal orgasm. I ride his orgasm like a jockey on a wild stallion, never losing contact but never in control. He explodes. My ass has sucked us together into an airless vacuum and we are one thing. Fused in a timeless space, I experience my destiny directly as being that moment and no other.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Like The First Christian and The Gospel According to Woman, Muhammad began as a polemic. I wanted to refute the accusations of Rushdie’s partisans and set the record straight. But during the research and writing, something else happened. Rather to my surprise, I found myself as strongly drawn to Muhammad as I had been to Saint Paul. “Your book is a love story,” the Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed told me years later. “If you had met the Prophet, you would have consented to be his fifteenth wife!” I am not sure about that, but I did find real pathos in his story. Muhammad lived in a dark and violent time, not dissimilar to our own. Because we know more about him than about the founder of almost any other major tradition, he emerges from the sources as far more human than either Jesus or the Buddha. We see him laughing, carrying his grandchildren on his shoulders, and weeping over the death of his friends. Above all, we see him struggling, sometimes literally sweating with the effort of bringing his people out of an apparently hopeless situation. We see his doubts, his grief, his moments of despair and terror. All this reminded me that religion is born of desperation, horror, and vulnerability as well as from moments of sublime insight. Even though I did not realize it fully at the time, my research was taking on a more “religious” character. I was working at top speed, with one eye on the clock, yet I was approaching my subject in an entirely different spirit. This time, there were no witty, sophisticated friends around telling me that it was all bonkers. I was working entirely on my own. With the plight of poor Rushdie constantly before us, Liz and I were acutely aware that the subject was highly sensitive, even explosive, and must not be approached with anything that could be construed as levity. There must be no slick remarks this time, no witty, biting polemic—as in The First Christian. When I was writing television tie-ins, it had always been essentially “my” show. I was not an established scholar, after all, so my books and programs were always presented as a highly personalized view. “I”—a contentious and hopefully entertaining personality—was very much to the fore. That would not work for Muhammad. In this dangerous climate, “I” had to stay in the background. This was not a policy adopted for idealistic reasons but was an editorial necessity. Yet editing out ego is—I now realize—an essential prerequisite for religious experience. Again, I had unwittingly started to practice one of the most universal religious principles, one that is central to all the world faiths.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Muhammad introduced me to a different world. I began to be invited to interfaith gatherings, and gained a new circle of friends. I was surprised and moved that I—a woman and a kafir—should be invited to speak to Muslims on the occasion of their Prophet’s birthday, and wondered if Christians would be prepared to invite a Muslim to address their congregation on Christmas Day—the birthday of the prophet Jesus, who is, of course, greatly revered in Islam. These gatherings were not entirely an unmixed delight, however. I had no problem accommodating Muslim faith, but as an uptight Westerner who hates to be late, I sometimes had difficulty coming to terms with the relaxed Oriental attitude to punctuality. I once got up to speak at the time when my host had suggested that I order the taxi to take me home. And what was a wine-loving lady like me doing at a dinner where you could hope only for a stiff mineral water on the rocks? On one occasion, I sat on the high table next to an eminent Sufi sheikh who, to the dismay of his followers in the hall, refused to address a single word to me. Eventually I gave up and turned to my other neighbor, an ambassador from one of the Muslim countries, who was a delight. As the evening ground on, lecture following lecture, he leaned toward me confidentially. “Tell me, what is your advice?” he muttered. “Should I speak for a long, or short, time?” “Oh—as short as you possibly can!” I whispered back. “Look at them!” Hundreds of people on the floor below were gazing in our direction with the glazed, punch-drunk expression of those who have listened to too many speeches. The ambassador, who was to sum up the proceedings, was introduced with a long, elaborate encomium. He approached the mike, and glanced back at me. “Short!” I mouthed back. He certainly took me at my word. “Thank you very much and all the best!” he cried, and sat down, to the consternation of our hosts but to thunderous applause from the floor. On one such occasion I met Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Magonet, principal of the Leo Baeck College, the chief academy for Reform Judaism in Europe, which happened to be near my house in Finchley. He later asked me if I would like to teach Christianity to his fourth-year rabbinical students. I agreed, and found that I looked forward to the classes. It was fun to teach future rabbis about the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the students were wonderful: open and enthusiastic, welcoming me for the most part with genuine affection. And I noticed that during these classes, feeling loved and appreciated, I became a more lovable person and that my ideas flowed more freely. It was an important lesson.

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

  What happened in Jesus discloses God’s purpose and passion, which is reconciling the world to God. The world matters to God. So also, in a lyrical, rhapsodic, and profound passage Paul writes about the love of God as revealed in the death of Jesus. Familiar to millions of Christians, Romans 8:31–39 begins with a question: “If God is for us, who is against us?” A series of parallel questions punctuate the passage: “Who will bring any charge against God’s elect?” “Who is to condemn?” “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” “No one and nothing” is Paul’s answer. What is the reason for Paul’s confidence? The evidence that “God is for us” is the cross: God “did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us.” The meaning is clear: the cross seen as the death of God’s Son reveals the love of God for us. And thus the passage concludes that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” A caution: this passage uses the language of God’s “agency” in the death of Jesus—God “gave him up.” The language should not be literalized. When it is, it suggests that the cross was part of God’s “plan”—that it was God’s will that Jesus be crucified. To think this is strange and leads to a strange theology. What kind of God would require the death of this extraordinary human? The passage is not about divine causation, as if God willed the death of Jesus. Rather, like all interpretations of Jesus’s death, it reflects a post-Easter retrospective vantage point that sees a providential and revelatory purpose in it. Moreover, the power of the passage depends upon the post-Easter perception of Jesus as God’s Son. The use of a parent-child metaphor emphasizes the depth of God’s love: God was willing to give up “his own Son” for our benefit. That is how much God loves us. The death of Jesus as God’s Son is a parable of God’s love for us. And a parable should never be literalized—to do so would be to miss the point. Parables are about meaning. We turn now to a passage that uses both “sacrifice” and “atonement.” A summary and climax of the first three chapters of Romans, it is dense, packed with a load of freight. 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) One of the foundational texts of the Protestant Reformation, it is about justification by grace through faith, which we explore more fully in Chapter 6. Here we begin by noting that grace means “a gift,” as the text itself says.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I fell in love for two years although the affair lasted less than three months. Looking back, I now realize that his first sexual comment to me was, “You have a great ass.” Must have been my fate, even then. But I didn’t know it for many years. I look good, from the back. After I lost my virginity, my pussy became a place of great interest to me. I had not realized until then that that hidden hole below my waist was the entrance to my heart. Others came to the now-opened gate, and I proceeded to have what everyone else seemed to be having: consecutive monogamous relationships of varying lengths. It never occurred to me that you didn’t have to become monogamous the moment a guy put his tongue in your mouth. That’s just the way it was—sealed with saliva—and I didn’t have enough experience to think that I might have a choice in the matter. The second and third boyfriends—both “nice” and “appropriate” young men—introduced me to orgasms through oral sex and I became hooked on that, on their tongues, but not so much on them. The intercourse that followed just seemed like their part of the deal. And there were a few more boyfriends after them. Same thing. The only time I had sex that was not defined by monogamy was with a stagehand I met in a bar. Long blond hair, gruff language, tattoos. I was having a drink with friends one night when he turned to me and whispered, “I want you to sit on my face.” “Excuse me?” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. He thought I must be joking, but I wasn’t. So he explained. I had another vodka, left the bar with him, and sat on his face. I’d never done that before. He had big hands that handled me like meat, prime. It was my second taste of being with a man who was “wrong” for me, a man with whom I knew there would be no “relationship.” Fucking him, I felt the fantastic power of a completely other being crashing into mine. I could not lose myself with a peer, only with a man who was impossible. But then I fell deeply, suddenly, and totally in love with the man who became my husband—it was like being hit with a cement block on the head, crash, and there I was at the altar—and bad boys were banished. It never even occurred to me to have an affair while I was married. I loved him too much, it was unthinkable. He was my fate, my husband. But I had thought that meant my ending, my final destination, when, in fact, he was my beginning, my wretched beginning. God, that hurt. The profound disillusionment of having the great love of my life founder on the rocky road of reality was a blow too great for my own consciousness to bear, much less comprehend.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Soon after, the redhead announced that she was tired and was going to bed. She showed us a futon that rolled out over the Persian carpet, kissed us both on the forehead, placed two condoms and a bottle of water beside the futon, and disappeared to her own bedroom. She was our fairy godmother, she had felt it between us, she had seen it, and she sanctioned it, even engineered it—despite the fact that she had wanted him. I’d never had a woman do that for me before. I loved the redhead and her house of Freudian mirrors. And then the blessings really began. Thus far, there had been no fucking that night. Now love poured out of this guy’s body like oil. When he entered me, I knew. I just knew. He fucked in love, not frenzy; in tenderness, not anger; in ease, not desperation. What his cock could do for me seemed to be the question he was answering. It did plenty for both of us. Finally, a fuck I liked. A new year, a new world. I saw him once more, alone, before he went to Europe for two weeks, but I simply didn’t have the courage to love him, so I got myself one of those temporary boyfriends—monogamy, weekends away, dinner parties, friends, plans. When the Young Man returned, he called, and I told him I had a boyfriend, I couldn’t see him. He was too good to be real, I told myself, so I chose instead a small, jealous man who didn’t even like to eat pussy. Why? Self-hatred, lack of faith, and a fear of what is beautiful: divorce can make you nuts. But after the boyfriend snooped in my diary one morning six weeks later and confronted me with questionable evidence—I had kissed the Young Man at the gym and had written it down—I fired him on the spot, my outrage being greater than his. I never saw him again. So I continued to date some men (dinner) while fucking others (no dinner). I was learning a lot—well, two things anyway. I preferred sex on an empty stomach, and to eat alone with a good book. MEN

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I fell madly, quickly, and completely, forever, the first time he fucked my ass. Now it’s #220 and my love has only deepened—220 times deeper. I adore him, for good and better (it’s never worse), and it is a kind of rapturous indulgence to so unconditionally adore the entire skin surface of another human being’s body. Before I liked men in parts—their lips or eyes, their hands or chest, only occasionally the cock itself. With him I love all those and every nook, cranny, and space in between—and his cock, balls, and asshole most of all. In worship lies freedom. The freedom of withholding nothing, which propels one into the elliptical realm of love. ANAL ORGASM As I learned how to stay in the bliss, I found something else. I have become pure vehicle for his cock, no resistance. I can relinquish all power. I feel such a gravitational pull to this man, who can, and will, disempower me, so willing to give everything away, to bestow it upon him. I never knew how much power I had until I gave it all to him through my ass. My ass is a pipeline for power. I am, I have come to realize, his runway, his launchpad. And after numerous runs to the edge of inevitability, the final one begins. I can tell it’s the one because it coincides, always, with my ability to commit to complete submission, to remain completely open without reserve, without limit. Once he feels this, he aims for the gold. If I show any sign on my face, or inside my ass, of reneging on my submission, he slows down and works me until my ass believes that there is only one choice, only one way. No choice but surrender is surrender. I am his entirely, body, soul, and asshole. I relish my freedom. Molded onto his cock, I feel its urgency. The road to orgasm is a straight line into my ass, into the center of my being, into the center of the world. I don’t know who starts the coming. I do, however, know that he is the only man whose orgasm interests me more than my own—no small feat. On one level, I feel like his cock sets off my contractions and my contractions then set off his . . . but then his set off mine . . . Contractions in my ass, involuntary contractions: anal orgasm. I ride his orgasm like a jockey on a wild stallion, never losing contact but never in control. He explodes. My ass has sucked us together into an airless vacuum and we are one thing. Fused in a timeless space, I experience my destiny directly as being that moment and no other.

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

  God’s grace, God’s gift, comes through “the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Like the words “sacrifice” and “atonement,” the word “redemption” needs redeeming. Centuries of Christian usage associate it with sin: redemption is about being redeemed from our sins. But “redemption” in the Bible and in Paul is not about the forgiveness of sins. Rather, it is a metaphor of liberation from bondage—from life in Egypt, from a life of slavery. “The redemption that is in Christ Jesus” would be better translated “the liberation that is in Christ Jesus.” We are liberated through him. Then, like the previous passage, it speaks of God’s “agency” in the death of Jesus: “ God put [Jesus] forward as a sacrifice of atonement.” Again, the language should not be literalized, as if God willed the death of Jesus. Rather, the language of divine agency here emphasizes the theme of God’s grace: God provided the sacrifice . That is how much God loves us. As in the previous passage, the death of Jesus is a parable of God’s grace, a revelation of God’s character as love. Finally, we come to the phrase “a sacrifice of atonement by his blood.” If it does not mean substitutionary atonement, what does it mean? Did Jesus sacrifice his life? Yes. He was willing to be crucified (the words “by his blood” point to execution) because of his passion—his passion for God and for a different kind of world, the world referred to in the gospels as the kingdom of God. Did Paul think he died as a substitute? No. Did Paul think his death on a cross had atoning significance? Yes. It was about at-one-ment in the ways described in this chapter. In short, Paul’s language of Jesus dying for others and as a sacrifice reveals both the love of Christ and the love of God—the character and passion of both. Christ’s love and passion led to the cross—and in that we see both his love and the love of God. So also the cross, understood as God sacrificing “his own Son” for the sake of the world, is a revelation of God’s love, a parable of God’s character and passion. Within this framework, the cross is a revelation of di vine generosity—of God’s grace and what we will call in Chapter 6 God’s distributive justice, God’s grace freely available to all. We are now in a position to see why substitutionary sacrifice is not only bad history and bad anthropology, but also bad theology. What does it say about God’s nature or character—about what God is like? At its heart is the notion that God is a lawgiver and judge who demands payment for sin.

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

  About himself, he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (2:19–20). Paul’s “crucifixion” is metaphorical; though Jesus was literally crucified, Paul had not been. 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.

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

  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? What is God like? And what is God’s passion? What is God passionate about? Paul’s answer is that the death of Jesus—Christ crucified—reveals God’s character as love and God’s passion as the world. Before we turn to the positive meanings of the language of this, our central claim, we revisit an important misunderstanding announced earlier in this chapter. We do not think that Paul’s language about Jesus dying “for others” and as a “sacrifice” means his death is a substitutionary sacrifice—payment for human sin. When language such as Christ dying “for the ungodly,” “for us,” “for all,” and as “a sacrifice of atonement” is heard within the framework of substitutionary atonement theology, it means Jesus died for our sins—he took upon himself the punishment we all deserve. He satisfied the debt we owe to God. He was punished in our place. It is this almost automatic set of associations that we invite you to set aside in order to create the possibility of hearing this language anew. Dying “for” someone and “sacrifice” do not in themselves imply substitution. This is true in ordinary language and also in the Bible. In ordinary language, when people talk about somebody dying “for” somebody, they seldom if ever mean in that person’s place . Rather, they mean for that person’s sake or benefit . A parent risks her life and dies in order to save her child from a burning house. A soldier leaps on a grenade in order to save the lives of his buddies. One might say that the mother and the soldier died instead of the child and the buddies, but one wouldn’t mean as a “substitute.” Rather, they gave up their lives for the sake of others. They died that others might live. Thinking about three twentieth-century martyrs makes the same point. Archbishop Oscar Romero—advocate of the poor and critic of the ruling class in El Salvador, killed by an assassin sent by the powerful—died because of his love for the Salvadoran people. In this sense, he died for them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed because of his involvement in a plot to overthrow Hitler, died because of his love for the German people and those they victimized.

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

  When an animal was sacrificed, the notion was not that God was punishing an animal instead of a person; it was not about an animal suffering and dying instead of a human being. The point is that Paul’s language about Jesus’s death as a dying “for us,” as a “sacrifice,” does not in itself mean that Jesus was being substituted for us. Indeed, we need to make the statement stronger. To see Paul’s understanding of the death of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin is to import into the notion of sacrifice a meaning that it did not have in the ancient world, including the world of Paul. Indeed, substitutionary atonement theology is completely counter to the thought of the radical Paul. So we return to our central claim. When Paul speaks of Jesus dying for others and as a sacrifice, he uses this language to refer to the depth of God’s love and Christ’s love for us. Paul’s claim is that God’s character and passion are revealed in Jesus. What we see in Jesus reveals what God is like. Hence Paul can speak of Christ’s love for us and God’s love for us interchangeably. And he often does so in passages about the meaning of the cross. The three—God’s love, Christ’s love, and the cross—are combined in Romans 5:6–8, one of the more important texts in Paul about Jesus dying for others, named as “the ungodly,” “sinners,” and “us.” He says, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Reflecting about how remarkable this is, Paul continues: “Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.” But to die for “the ungodly” is extraordinary. His point is that this is how much Christ loved us. Then he connects the love we see in Christ’s dying for us to the love of God for us: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” That “Christ died for us” reveals the depth of God’s love for us, disclosing God’s character as love. We see the love of God in Christ. In different language, the same claim—that Jesus and the cross reveal God’s character—is made in 2 Corinthians 5:14–21, another passage that refers to Jesus dying “for all”: “He died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.” The purpose of his death is that people “might live no longer for themselves, but for him” by becoming “in Christ.” The result is new life: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!” Then Paul speaks of God’s role in all of this: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…. In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.”

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

  It emphasizes God’s wrath. God’s wrath needs to be appeased, placated, satisfied—choose another verb if you wish, but the need is the same. It suggests that God required the death of Jesus, that it was God’s will, God’s plan, that Jesus be killed. Ponder what all of this suggests about the character of God, what God is like. Strict parent? Exacting judge? Demanding monarch? It turns the message of divine generosity, of grace, of God’s character as love, on its head. It is difficult—we would say impossible—to reconcile substitutionary atonement with the radical Paul’s ways of speaking about God as known to him in Jesus, his crucified and risen Lord. For Paul, the cross revealed God’s passion, God’s will, for the world—a world different from the normalcy of “this world” of domination, injustice, and violence, all legitimated by the “wisdom of the world.” It also revealed the path of internal transformation, the path of becoming “in Christ” by dying and rising with Christ. And it revealed God’s character, God’s nature, as divine generosity, as love for all—the ungodly, sinners, us. In all of these ways, Paul saw salvific meanings, atoning significance, in Christ crucified and risen. RESURRECTION: GOD HAS RAISED JESUS We have already mentioned some of the meanings Paul saw in the resurrection of Jesus as we explored the word pairs “death and resurrection,” “dying and rising,” “crucified and risen.” Now we focus more specifically on the second word in that pair, the resurrection itself, Paul’s conviction that God had raised Jesus. What did he mean when he said this? What meaning did he see in it? Like “sacrifice,” “atonement,” and “redemption,” “resurrection” has a common meaning held by many Christians. For them, God raised Jesus from the dead by reanimating and transforming his corpse, leaving his tomb empty, and for a limited period of time he appeared to his followers in a way that he hasn’t since. The story of Jesus ascending into heaven, said by Acts to have occurred forty days after the resurrection, brought that special time to a close. Moreover, many believe (or think they are supposed to believe) that all of this was quite “physical”—by which we mean that the tomb really was empty, that Jesus appeared to his followers in a body that could be seen and touched, that he ate with them and even cooked breakfast for them. This, or something like this, is what most people think the resurrection of Jesus means. Some believe it, some don’t, and others puzzle about it. The scenario above is based on the gospels.

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

  But it is neither evidence of spiritual superiority nor the greatest gift. Rather, the greatest spiritual gift is love. In the middle of this three-chapter treatment of the gifts of the Spirit is the best-known text from Paul, 1 Corinthians 13. Often read at weddings and funerals, it may even be the most famous chapter in the New Testament as a whole. Its fame is deserved, for it is gorgeous, lyrical, and luminous. The last verse of chapter 12 sets it up: “Strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way” (12:31). Chapter 13 begins with a series of contrasts as Paul extols the supreme importance of love: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. (13:1–3) Then he lists the qualities of love: Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (13:4–7) He again proclaims the priority of love as a spiritual gift over the gifts of prophecy, tongues, and knowledge: Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. (13:8–10) Then he contrasts childish and adult ways of knowing: When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (13:11) Yet there are limits to our knowing. We know only in part, even though we are already fully known by God: For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (13:12) This famous chapter then climaxes with its most famous verse: And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (13:13) There is a hierarchy of spiritual gifts, and the most important gift is love. The context of 1 Corinthians 12–14 gives this text an even richer meaning than when it is heard, as it most often is, apart from that context.

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

  First, the love of which Paul speaks is a spiritual gift, not simply an act of will, not something we decide to do, not simply good advice for couples and others. Rather, as a spiritual gift, love is the most important result (and evidence) of a Spirit transplant. As the primary fruit of the Spirit, it is also the criterion by which the other gifts are evaluated. Second, when this text is heard apart from its context, it often sentimentalizes, trivializes, and individualizes what Paul meant by love. It should not be reduced to a tribute in praise of love. Nor should its meaning be reduced to being nice, sensitive, thoughtful, faithful, and kind, even though those are fine qualities. And it should not be reduced to behavior in individual relationships, important as that is. Rather, for Paul, love in this text is radical shorthand for what life “in Christ” is like—life in the “new creation,” life “in the Spirit,” life animated by a Spirit transplant. As the primary fruit of a Spirit-filled life, love is about more than our relationships with individuals. For Paul, it had (for want of a better word) a social meaning as well. The social form of love for Paul was distributive justice and nonviolence, bread and peace. Paul’s vision of life “in Christ,” life in the “new creation,” did not mean, “Accept the imperial way of life with its oppression and violence, but practice love in your personal relationships.” To make the same point differently, people like Jesus and Paul were not executed for saying, “Love one another.” They were killed because their understanding of love meant more than being compassionate toward individuals, although it did include that. It also meant standing against the domination systems that ruled their world, and collaborating with the Spirit in the creation of a new way of life that stood in contrast to the normalcy of the wisdom of this world. Love and justice go together. Justice without love can be brutal, and love without justice can be banal. Love is the heart of justice, and justice is the social form of love. TWO WAYS OF LIFE: FLESH AND SPIRIT Paul’s letter to his conflicted community in Galatia provides another description of life “in Christ.” As in 1 Corinthians 13, the text emphasizes love as the primary quality of living by the Spirit: For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  A final example: My current lover of eight years and I first met when he was homeless and selling books from a blanket spread out on Seventy-second Street. Our two best friends for many years now are a male couple, one of whom I first met in an encounter, perhaps a decade ago, at the back of the now closed-down Variety Photoplays Movie Theater on Third Avenue just below Fourteenth Street. Outside my family, these are among the two most rewarding relationships I have: both began as cross-class contacts in a public space. Visitors to New York might be surprised that such occurrences are central to my vision of the city at its healthiest. Lifetime residents won’t be. Watching the metamorphosis of such vigil and concern into considered and helpful action is what gives one a faithful and loving attitude toward one’s neighborhood, one’s city, one’s nation, the world. I have taken “contact,” both term and concept, from Jane Jacobs’s instructive 1961 study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs describes contact as a fundamentally urban phenomenon and finds it necessary for everything from neighborhood safety to a general sense of social well-being. She sees it supported by a strong sense of private and public in a field of socioeconomic diversity that mixes living spaces with a variety of commercial spaces, which in turn must provide a variety of human services if contact is to function in a pleasant and rewarding manner. Jacobs mentions neither casual sex nor public sexual relations as part of contact—presumably because she was writing at a time when such things were not talked of or analyzed as elements contributing to an overall pleasurable social fabric. Today we can. When social forces menace the distinction between private and public, people are most likely to start distrusting contact relations. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (98–111), Jacobs analyzes how limited socioeconomic resources in the area around a public park (lack of restaurants, bathrooms, drugstores, and small shops) can make the mothers who use the playground and live near it feel that their privacy within their home is threatened—thus markedly changing their public attitude to interclass contact. Briefly, a park with no public eating spaces, restaurants, or small item shopping on its borders forces mothers who live adjacent to it and who thus use it the most to “share everything or nothing” in terms of offering facilities of bathroom use and the occasional cup of coffee to other mothers and their children who use the park but do not live so near. Because the local mothers feel they must offer these favors to whomever they are even civil with (since such services are not publicly available), they soon become extremely choosy and cliquish about whom they will even speak to. The feel of the park becomes exclusive and snobbish—and uncomfortable (and inconvenient) for mothers who, in carriage, dress, race, or class, do not fit a rigid social pattern.

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

  With this conception of the church is closely connected Paul’s profound and most fruitful idea of the family. He calls the relation of Christ to his church a great mystery (Eph. 5:32), and represents it as the archetype of the marriage relation, whereby one man and one woman become one flesh. He therefore bases the family on new and holy ground, and makes it a miniature of the church, or the household of God. Accordingly, husbands are to love their wives even as Christ loved the church, his bride, and gave himself up for her; wives are to obey their husbands as the church is subject to Christ, the head; parents are to love their children as Christ and the church love the individual Christians; children are to love their parents as individual Christians are to love Christ and the church. The full and general realization of this domestic ideal would be heaven on earth. But how few families come up to this standard.1161 Ephesians and the Writings of John. Paul emphasizes the person of Christ in Colossians, the person and agency of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians. For the Holy Spirit carries on the work of Christ in the church. Christians are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise unto the day of redemption (Eph. 1:13; 4:30). The spirit of wisdom and revelation imparts the knowledge of Christ (1:17; 3:16). Christians should be filled with the Spirit (5:18), take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and pray in the Spirit at all seasons (6:17, 18). The pneumatology of Ephesians resembles that of John, as the christology of Colossians resembles the christology of John. It is the Spirit who takes out of the "fulness" of Christ, and shows it to the believer, who glorifies the Son and guides into the truth (John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13–15, etc.). Great prominence is given to the Spirit also in Romans, Galatians, Corinthians, and the Acts of the Apostles. John does not speak of the church and its outward organization (except in the Apocalypse), but he brings Christ in as close and vital a contact with the individual disciples as Paul with the whole body. Both teach the unity of the church as a fact, and as an aim to be realized more and more by the effort of Christians, and both put the centre of unity in the Holy Spirit. Encyclical Intent Ephesians was intended not only for the church at Ephesus, the metropolis of Asia Minor, but for all the leading churches of that district. Hence the omission of the words "in Ephesus" (Eph. 1:1) in some of the oldest and best MSS.1162 Hence, also, the absence of personal and local intelligence. The encyclical destination may be inferred also from the reference in Col. 4:16 to the Epistle to the church of Laodicea, which the Colossians were to procure and to read, and which is probably identical with our canonical Epistle to the Ephesians."1163

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  It is based on the very character of God as Father or Householder who loves all those in the world house and therefore supplies sunshine for the good and the bad and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. Granted that vision of God as Father/Householder who creates, protects, provides for, and models for all in God’s household, how does the opening invocation, “Our Father in heaven,” relate to the rest of the Lord’s Prayer? I answer, for here and now, only in a preliminary way by seeing how the prayer’s balanced structure flows from its initial address. Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is a well-crafted, carefully organized, and poetically structured hymn. That means we must pay attention to both form and content. I begin here with a diagram of its skeletal structure, but before looking at it, here are some aspects to focus our understanding. First, the prayer begins with “Our Father,” that is, with a communal “our” rather than just an individual “my.” The prayer is certainly “personal,” but personal-in-community rather than personal-in-privacy. You may certainly pray it alone, but you are never alone when you pray it. Second, in the Greek of Matthew, “Our Father” is literally “Father of us.” There is no difference in meaning, but “Father / of us” helps us to see immediately the formal division of the prayer into two halves. The former half focuses on the divinity of God; the latter half focuses on our humanity. When you look at the diagram, you will immediately see that pronoun “your”—God’s—predominates in the first half, and the pronoun “our” predominates in the second. Third, as you examine the outline, you will immediately see that there are three units on either side. In the Divinity half are God’s name, kingdom, and will. In the Humanity half are our bread, debt, and temptation. Since I have spoken so much about various types of poetic parallelism, what is the point of that threefold balance? Is it just random or accidental? My question is not about the number of units per side, but about the fact that both halves of the prayer have the same number. Fourth, in the outline I translate phrases from the Lord’s Prayer somewhat literally or even woodenly to respect Matthew’s intentional emphases and connections. Watch the key words in upper case, whether italicized or not. Notice also how the two halves, Divinity and Humanity, pick up the two parts, “Father / of us,” in the Greek of the opening address: DIVINITY in the heavens : (1) Be hallowed YOUR NAME. HUMANITY so on earth : (1) Give us this day OUR daily BREAD. DIVINITY in the heavens : (2) Be come YOUR KINGDOM. HUMANITY so on earth : (2) And forgive us OUR DEBTS, as we also have forgiven OUR debtors.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  24:28), it was from her mother’s household that she had learned and prepared to have one of her own. “Be like me” was the mantra of that process. In addition to Creator, Protector, and Provider in the metaphor of God as Father/Householder, Jesus adds another emphasis, namely, the Householder as model. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus gives the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount in 6:9–13, that is, almost immediately after his negative admonition about violence and positive one about love in 5:38–48. First, that section begins with this negative command: “I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer” (5:39). That sounds—in English—like total nonresistance or even indifference to evil. But not so in Matthew’s Greek. There the verb “resist” is composed of two parts: anti and hist [image "image" file=Image00051.jpg] mi . The major Greek lexicon, Liddell and Scott, explains that verb as meaning: “to stand against, especially in battle, to withstand, oppose .” It is accurate, I think, to translate Jesus’s use in Matthew 5:39 as: “Do not withstand evil violently .” Next, comes the corresponding positive command. Jesus presumes that, as in Leviticus, we must “love our neighbor as ourselves” (19:18) and even “love the resident alien as ourselves” (19:34). But this is his striking extension of those passages: “I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44). Finally, what is even more striking is why we are supposed to act without violence and with love: So that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous…. Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (5:45–46, 48) God the Father is our model for how to respond to evil against us. That English word “perfect” may also tend to mislead us. Who, we ask, could be “perfect” as God “is perfect”? The Greek word there is teleios, which can certainly be translated “perfect.” For example, Jesus tells the rich young man to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and follow him, if he “wishes to be perfect” (Matt. 19:21). But there are several different translations of teleios elsewhere in the New Testament. It appears as “complete” (1 Cor. 13:10) or “adult” (1 Cor. 14:20) and especially as “mature” (Phil. 3:15; Col. 1:28; 4:12; Eph. 4:13). The letter of James advises: “Let endurance have its full (teleion ) effect, so that you may be mature (teleioi ) and complete, lacking in nothing” (1:4). To be perfect is to be full, complete, mature—qualities the parent models for the child, the householder for the household, and God for all of us. That is a magnificent vision of loving even one’s “enemies,” loving even those who hate or persecute, curse or abuse us.