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

  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.” 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.

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

  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. 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.

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

  This does not dismiss glossolalia; it is one of the gifts and, far from dismissing it, Paul says, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you” (14:18). 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.

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

  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 divine 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. 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.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Roxanne turned her head away. She was contemplating her own inner darkness, taking counsel from the shades that moved there. It took her some moments to speak. “Every time you give me an order, I’m afraid—afraid I won’t be able to do it, or afraid someday I won’t have anything left to give. You’re so hard on me, Daddy. Greedy. And mean. It was nice to make everybody come after me. Did it make you jealous?” “Yes. It also made me real hot.” Roxanne laughed softly. “I don’t have any rings in you,” she said. “So I have to have something else I can pull on. I don’t want to go home with anybody here but you, Alex, but I like to keep you guessing. Just so you don’t forget how hard you had to chase me before you finally caught me.” “You are such a flirt, I keep looking for ways to make sure I’ve finally got you. I don’t think I’ll ever be sure. But I guess it doesn’t matter that much any more. Because I think if I ever knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was going to have you forever and ever, maybe I wouldn’t want you any more.” “Oh, don’t worry, Daddy, you’ll never be able to trust me too much. But I love you enough to let you make me pay for it.” Alex laughed. “Be serious for a minute, Daddy. Will you do just one little thing for me? Please don’t tie me up. I promise I won’t spoil the work. I just don’t want any doubt to exist that I wanted you to do this.” Alex shook her head. “Pride,” she said. “Such pride.” “Aren’t you proud of me? Look at all these little old ladies stumbling around, yawning their asses off. Told you I’d wear them all out. How many flashy pieces of trash do you know with that much stamina? Only woman I never could wear out is you.” “Oh?” Alex said, disbelieving. “That’s just ’cause I’m in fear of my life.” She laughed at Roxanne’s pout. “Have to bring you down here and lock you up in a big steel cage if you couldn’t get what you wanted. Hey, quit makin’ that face. I won’t tie you up. I’ll never do anything to you that you don’t really want. You know that.” They stared at each other for a few long seconds. Than Alex said abruptly, “You don’t have to be brave yet. Tyre is going to shave you first.” She stood aside. For once, Roxanne did not ask questions or protest. She shifted her attention to Tyre and let her body follow her with small pleading gestures. She had learned how to be passed on without resistance or fear. In each new mistress’s eye, she was reborn and re-enslaved.

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

  He openly adored and adorned her with kisses, gifts, and attention. But if I had asked him whether or not they had intimacy, he would have looked at me perplexed, not knowing what I was talking about. He knew love, and he knew partnership, and they implicitly included the vastness of intimacy. For my parents and others of their generation, the modern discourse on intimacy would have eluded them altogether. Their relationship was far from perfect—they might have come to therapy for any number of reasons—but the notion of “working on their intimacy” would have been alien to them. When Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, tells his wife, Golde, that he will allow his daughter to marry the man she loves (instead of the man he has chosen for her), he frames his decision with the understanding that “this is a new world.” It’s a world where people marry for love, far distant from the world in which he met Golde on their wedding day and was told by his father that he would learn to love her in time. Now, twenty-five years later, as he witnesses the burgeoning love of his daughter, he asks his wife if she does love him, after all these years. Golde answers with an amazing list of experiences they’ve shared in their life together, and she gives a beautiful and lyrical description of how the “old world” used to think of love and marriage. She washed his clothes, milked his cow, shared his bed, starved with him, fought with him, raised his children, cleaned his house, and cooked his meals. “If that’s not love, what is?” she asks. Knowing that Golde loves him doesn’t change anything, but Tevye ends the song by acknowledging that “after twenty-five years, it’s nice to know.” Golde’s picture of marriage doesn’t match what we today in the West commonly refer to as intimacy. We’d be more inclined to call it domesticity (at best) or age-old oppression (at worst). In the past, when marriage was a more pragmatic institution, love was optional. Respect was essential. Men and women found emotional connection elsewhere, primarily in same-sex relationships. Men bonded over work and recreation; women connected through child rearing and borrowing sugar. Love within a marriage might develop over time but was not indispensable to the success of the family. Marriage used to be primarily a matter of economic sustenance, and it was a partnership for life. Mating today is a free-choice enterprise, and commitments are built on love.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The point throughout is that the crucifixion of the Messiah is not just an event in the past that changed the world once and for all, though it certainly is that. It is not just the “mechanism” of salvation, though if we must use that language we can do so without inaccuracy. The Messiah’s crucifixion was not a strange, one-off deal through which God played a trick on sin and death, after which normal operations were resumed, power went back to being what it always was, and the normal human lifestyles of honor and shame, boasting and prestige, social climbing and pretension could be picked up again where they had left off. Precisely because the Messiah’s crucifixion unveiled the very nature of God himself at work in generous self-giving love to overthrow all power structures by dealing with the sin that had given them their power, that same divine nature would now be at work through the ministry of the gospel not only through what was said, but through the character and the circumstances of the people who were saying it. That is Paul’s central argument in 2 Corinthians. Though for the most part he is not talking about the effect of the cross with regard to its one-off dealing with sin and liberating the world from its grasp, he has discovered and discerned that the victory that was won through the cross has to be implemented through the cross—in particular, through the cruciform life and ministry of the apostles. Though Paul would no doubt say the same of all Christians in their varied callings, much of the letter is explicitly an explanation and defense of the nature of true apostleship, and it is in that light that I think we should read the central passage around which everything else revolves. Here we see, again and again, the specific application of the “covenant of vocation.” The purpose of the cross is not simply “so that we can go to heaven” (though the larger postmortem future is very present to Paul, especially at the beginning of chapter 5) or so that we can “be with God forever,” though no doubt Paul believes that as well. Rather, as in Revelation 1, 5, and 20, the result of the Messiah’s death is that humans, in this case those who exercise apostolic ministry, are called and equipped for that work. We glanced at this passage before, but it bears repeating here, so central is it to Paul’s understanding of both the cross and the vocation that results from it: The Messiah’s love makes us press on. We have come to the conviction that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all in order that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised on their behalf. . . .

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  There was once a coyote who felt overwhelmed by the pressures in his life. All he could see were too many hungry cubs, too many hunters, too many traps. So one day he ran off to be alone. Suddenly he heard the notes of a sweet melody, a melody of well-being and great peacefulness. Following the song to a clearing in the forest, he came upon a large locust sunning himself on a hollow log and singing. “Teach me your song,” the coyote asked the locust. No response. Again he demanded to be taught the song. But the locust remained silent. Finally, when the coyote threatened to gobble him up, the locust acquiesced and sang the sweet song over and over until the coyote had memorized it. Humming his new song, the coyote started back to his family. Suddenly a flock of wild geese flew up and distracted him. When he had recovered his wits he opened his mouth to sing again but found he had forgotten the song. So he turned back to the sunny clearing in the forest. But by this time the locust had molted, left his empty skin sunning on the same hollow log, and flown onto a tree branch. The coyote wasted no time making sure he had the song permanently inside him. In one gulp he swallowed the locust skin, thinking that the locust was still within. Starting home, again he discovered he did not know the song. He realized he could not learn it from ingesting the locust. He would have to let the locust out and force it to teach him. Taking a knife, he cut into his abdomen to release the locust. He cut so deep that he died. “And so, Irv,” Paula said, giving me her lovely, beatific smile, reaching out for my hand and then whispering into my ear, “you’ve got to find your own song to sing.” I was very moved: her smile, her mystery, her stretch for wisdom—that was the Paula I loved so much. I liked the parable. It was vintage Paula; it felt like old times. I took the meaning at face value—that I should sing my own song—and pushed away the story’s darker, more disturbing implications about my relationship with her. I have refused even to this day to examine it too deeply.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  This is why in Romans 5–8, drawing out the fuller meaning of what has been said in chapters 3–4, Paul can speak unambiguously of the divine love, agapē , and indeed of the Messiah’s love as well (8:31–39). Chapter 8 as a whole is the glorious heaven-and-earth celebration, itself replete with Temple language, that follows precisely from the “meeting” of heaven and earth in the covenant-fulfilling “putting forth” of Jesus in chapter 3. What then does this say as we look back to Romans 3:21–26? It insists that we read what Paul says here about the death of Jesus in the light of the larger covenantal narrative from Abraham through the Exodus story and on to the exile and the question of the ultimate “forgiveness” that would undo that exile and so fulfill the original covenant purposes. And at the heart of that we find not an arbitrary and abstract “punishment” meted out upon an innocent victim, but the living God himself coming incognito (“To whom has the arm of YHWH been revealed?”—in other words, “Who would have thought that he was YHWH in person, in power?”), coming to take upon himself the consequence of Israel’s idolatry, sin, and exile, which itself brought into focus the idolatry, sin, and exile of the whole human race. Expelled from Eden, the human race ended up with Babel. Expelled from Canaan, Israel ended up in Babylon. After Babel, God called Abraham and made covenant promises to him; after Babylon, those promises were made good. Here we see a clue to an important distinction. Exile was not an arbitrary punishment. If Israel worshipped gods other than YHWH, it was impossible to remain in the land—and it was impossible for the glorious Presence of YHWH to remain there either. By worshipping other gods, God’s people effectively sold themselves as slaves. The slavery of exile was thus the consequence of what Israel had done. It can of course be seen as “punishment,” and that is the image Isaiah 53 uses again and again (“He was wounded for our transgressions, . . . upon him was the punishment that made us whole, . . . YHWH has laid upon him the iniquity of us all,” 53:5–6). But Isaiah has framed this sharp-edged description of the “servant’s” death within the long poem about God’s faithfulness to the covenant, his victory over the idols, his dealing with exile, renewing the covenant (chap. 54), and so renewing creation itself (chap. 55). Our study of Romans indicates that Paul has exactly this larger narrative in mind as well rather than the truncated works contract in which “punishment” is the central theme. This means that the language of “punishment” must be used with great care .

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

  When Demetrius returned, he went straight to the prison, found Antiphilus, and at first was allowed to minister to his needs. He went to work as a porter in the harbor and gave half of his wages to bribe the guard and half to help his friend. But then the jailer forbade any more such visits for anyone, and Demetrius had to make a dangerous decision: Demetrius…could think of no other means of obtaining access to his friend than by going to the Prefect and professing complicity in the temple robbery. As the result of this declaration, he was immediately led off to prison, and with great difficulty prevailed upon the jailer after many entreaties to place him next to Antiphilus, and under the same collar. It was now that his devotion to his friend appeared in the strongest light. Ill though he was himself, he thought nothing of his own sufferings: his only care was to lighten the affliction of his friend, and to procure him as much rest as possible; and the companionship in misery certainly lightened his load. (32) That is no doubt the hyperbole of parable rather than the precision of history, but we have to imagine something similar—if less extreme—with Epaphras and Paul. Epaphras chose to live inside the prison alongside Paul as if he were his personal slave—not as a fellow criminal prisoner (sundesmios), but as a fellow prison inmate (sunaichmalōtos), accepting freely all the dangers to health and even life entailed in that decision. When you read the letter to Philemon, therefore, do not think only about Onesimus; think also of Epaphras (Epaphroditus). THE CONSERVATIVE PAUL ON SLAVERY Imagine, for a moment, the domestic situation when Onesimus arrived home with that letter for Philemon and announced that there was good news and bad news or, better, that the good news for him was bad news for his owner. (We do not, by the way, presume that their city was Colossae, despite the pseudo-Pauline letter to the Colossians, 4:9). Onesimus’s liberation could not have been kept a secret. What if Philemon had other slaves—would there have been an immediate mass conversion to Christianity? What rumors would have spread throughout the slave infrastructure of their village or city about Christians? Critics could easily have accused Christians—unfairly, but maybe inevitably—of advising slaves to flee their owners or even murder them in their beds. Still, even granted all of that, it is surely sad that the radical Paul of the letter to Philemon was so swiftly and thoroughly sanitized into the conservative Paul of Colossians and Ephesians. In both those books, pseudo-Paul addresses Christian slaves and Christian slave owners and thereby depicts those relationships as perfectly normal. Here are the texts, with Ephesians probably based on Colossians:

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But the way Jesus has done these two things, nesting inside one another as they do, is by coming as Israel’s Messiah, as the messianic “Son of God” (who wears that title for the double reason that he is both David’s rightful heir and the unique “only Son of the Father”), so that he could “love his own people in the world, and love them right through to the end” (John 13:1), demonstrating in action that “greater love” that would lay down its life for its friends. His loving identification with the idolaters, the unjust, the sinners, the weak, the foolish, seen in those endless parties in the gospels and then in his sharing of the fate of the brigands on Golgotha, is the context in which he can be their substitute, the one bearing the sins of the many. And that means what it means not because of a “works contract,” a celestial mechanism for transferring sins onto Jesus so that he can be punished and we can escape, but because of the “covenant of vocation”—Israel’s vocation, the human vocation, Jesus’s own vocation—in which the overflowing love, the love that made the sun and the stars, overflowed in love yet more in the coming to be of the truly human one, the Word made flesh, and then overflowed finally “to the uttermost” as he was lifted up on the cross to draw all people to himself. Though we can say and write words like that, words that obviously point beyond themselves into the bright shadow of reality, which, like the cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration, can sometimes enclose us as we contemplate their truth, we know that the reality itself goes far beyond even that.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We are always tempted to turn the kingdom of God into the instrument of our own worldly “success” or “comfort.” Some in our own day have forgotten the warnings of 1 Timothy 6:5–10, warnings against attempting to use the gospel as a way to get rich. Many have ignored the fact that for every word of Jesus against sins of the body there are a dozen against sins of the bankbook. Yes, there are also promises of great blessings. There will be seasons of apparent “success” and times of great “comfort.” But both those words get redefined by the gospel, redefined according to the revolutionary victory won on the cross. And this applies as much to ministry in the church as it does to individual lives. It is all too easy to equate “success” with increasing congregations and growing budgets. Church history teaches otherwise. The revolution, in fact, is going forward, and we with it. Statistics tell us that church attendance is in fact shrinking in the Western world; some of the countries where the early church was most securely established (Turkey, North Africa) now have hardly any Christian presence at all, though many devout believers in countries unimagined by Chrystostom or Tertullian still learn from those great early teachers. However, as the cynical Western world sneers, millions elsewhere and a great many in the West itself are discovering the joy of faith and hope and the love that will not let them go. The revolutionary victory on the cross is making its way in the revolution of communities, even whole countries, and not least of individual lives. I do not think that the individual message is any more important than the larger, worldwide or cosmic message. But nor is it any less important. The revolution has happened through Jesus and is now a fact about the world; but it is a fact that has to be implemented through his followers, and for that to be the case it must also be a truth that happens in them. The revolution is cross-shaped at every point. That is what baptism is all about; attempts are sometimes made to pervert it into the idea that “God accepts me as I am,” but baptism always meant dying, and still does. When Jesus “accepted” Zacchaeus “as he was” by going to lunch with him, Zacchaeus was utterly transformed by that encounter. The revolution is always shaped by the cross, which launched it in the first place. All this is summed up and brought into sharp biblical focus in John’s dramatic story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet (13:1–38). This is a vivid and moving scene that, like most biblical stories, has more dimensions than might appear at first glance. John places the scene at the start of the long buildup to the cross. Jesus has come to Jerusalem for the last time.

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

  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. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed because of his love for his people and his passion for a different kind of world. In these examples, dying for others does not mean dying in their place. Rather, these martyrs died because of their love for their people and their passion for a different kind of life for their people. Love and passion led them to their deaths. Their deaths were an epiphany of the depth of their love and passion. In ordinary language, the word “sacrifice” is often used in the same way. In the examples above, the mother sacrificed her life to rescue her child, the soldier sacrificed his life to save his friends, Romero sacrificed his life for the Salvadoran people, and so on.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  First Peter explains this in considerable detail, perhaps because the audience of that sparkling little letter had somehow imagined that the Messiah had done all the suffering, so that there was no more for them to face. The book of Revelation emphasizes the same point in its own ways. At one level all this continues to be perplexing, especially when we ourselves are facing that suffering (in other words, when the problem ceases to be merely theoretical and becomes urgent and personal). But when we pause for a moment we can, I think, glimpse something of why all this should be necessary. It has to do with Jesus’s own sense of vocation and with the redefinition of power itself which he modeled, embodied, and exemplified. Jesus was not the kind of revolutionary who would call for twelve legions of angels, sweep all his enemies away in a moment, and leave nothing to do thereafter. As we have seen throughout this book, the revolution he accomplished was the victory of a strange new power, the power of covenant love, a covenant love winning its victory not over suffering, but through suffering. This meant, inevitably, that the victory would have to be implemented in the same way, proceeding by the slow road of love rather than the quick road of sudden conquest. That is part of what the Sermon on the Mount was all about. Did we really imagine that, while Jesus would win his victory by suffering, self-giving love, we would implement that same victory by arrogant, self-aggrandizing force of arms? (Perhaps we did. After all, James and John, as close to Jesus as anyone, made exactly this mistake in Luke 9:54 and again in Mark 10:35–40. Perhaps even Jesus’s mother thought the same way; her great Magnificat, in Luke 1:46–55, sounds quite like a battle hymn.) Once you understand the kind of revolution Jesus was accomplishing, you understand why it would then go on being necessary for it to be implemented step by step, not all at one single sweep, and why those steps have to be, every one of them, steps of the same generous love that took Jesus to the cross. Love will always suffer. If the church tries to win victories either all in a rush or by steps taken in some other spirit, it may appear to succeed for a while. Think of the pomp and “glory” of the late medieval church. But the “victory” will be hollow and will leave all kinds of problems in its wake. I think many, if not most, Christians understand this instinctively, without needing to see the theological or biblical underpinnings. Such people do not need a book like this to explain it all to them. One might as well give someone a flashlight to go and see if the sun had risen.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Jesus’s death is regularly appealed to as the gold standard of “love.” In John’s gospel, Jesus commands his followers to love one another and declares, “No one has a love greater than this, to lay down your life for your friends” (15:13). The First Letter of John insists on the same point, as do Paul and many other early writers. But this too runs into problems. Unless there was a reason for Jesus to die, and perhaps even a reason for him to die that particular and horrible kind of death, it is hard to see how this death could actually be an example of love. If Bill’s dearest friend falls into a fast-flowing river and Bill leaps in to try to save him, risking his own life in the process, that would indeed provide an example of love (as well as heroic courage) for anyone who witnesses the event or hears about it. But if Fred, wishing to show his dearest friend how much he loves him, leaps into a fast-flowing river when the friend is standing safely beside him on the bank, that would demonstrate neither love nor courage, but meaningless folly. My point is this: unless Jesus’s death achieved something—something that urgently needed to be done and that couldn’t be done in any other way— then it cannot serve as a moral example. The “exemplary” meaning must always depend on something prior. As John puts it: “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the sacrifice that would atone for our sins. Beloved, if that’s how God loved us, we ought to love one another in the same way” (1 John 4:10–11). John does not expect his readers to offer themselves as the sacrifice to atone for one another’s sins. That has already been done. They are expected to copy the self-sacrificial love through which Jesus did something unique, something that urgently needed doing. So our question presses: What was that “something”? At this point other questions have come into the contemporary discussion. First, as we have seen, the wars and genocides of the last century have generated a new kind of Christian pacifism in which all violence is to be rejected outright, including the apparent violence of some traditional atonement theories (God using violence against Jesus, and so on). Second, at the same time and perhaps with similar motivation, many have embraced the previously unthinkable idea that the suffering of the cross is the suffering not only of the Son, but also of the Father. Others, again, have reacted by proposing new versions of the old idea that though the “human” Jesus suffered on the cross, the “divine” Jesus did not. Whether that makes any sense is difficult to say.

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

  “IN CHRIST,” “SPIRIT OF CHRIST,” “BODY OF CHRIST” In this chapter, we focus on the communal meaning of life “in Christ.” Our purpose is to see what Paul’s communities looked like “on the ground.” We begin with Paul’s ways of speaking of the new community. “In Christ,” the title of this chapter, is shorthand for Paul’s vision of Christian community. The phrase, one of his favorites, appears over a hundred times in the letters of the radical Paul, often with a communal meaning. Paul had other favorite phrases for Christian life together. To be “in Christ” was also to be “in the Spirit.” He uses these phrases interchangeably. In a single chapter in Romans, he writes, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1). In the very next verse, he refers to “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (8:2). A few verses later: “You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (8:9). After a few more verses, he speaks of “the Spirit of God” (8:14). Paul’s communities “in Christ” were communities “in the Spirit,” grounded in the Spirit of God as known in Jesus. Paul speaks not only of the “Spirit of Christ,” but also the “body of Christ.” This metaphor dominates most of 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul combines Spirit language with body language: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (12:13). Near the end of the chapter, Paul puts it in a sentence: “You are the body of Christ” (12:27). Christian communities were the “body of Christ” animated by the “Spirit of Christ.” Their identity and their life together “in the body” were grounded in Christ, in the Spirit, in the Spirit of God as known in Christ, and not in “this world.” We add one more image—implicit this time in a single word, not a phrase. Paul regularly addressed his communities as “brothers” (“brothers and sisters,” in the inclusive language of recent translations of the New Testament). The term appears more than fifty times in his genuine letters. To address people as brothers (and sisters) was not just social convention. Nor was it just about affection, though affection was of course involved.

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

  “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. 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.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  How then will he not, with him, freely give all things to us? . . . I am persuaded . . . that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor the present, nor the future, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord. (8:31–32, 38–39) There is of course another passage that has been cited thousands, probably millions, of times as Paul’s central statement about Jesus’s death, but it is more complex again, and the setting is often misunderstood. In chapter 3 Paul describes the “redemption which is found in the Messiah, Jesus” by saying: God put Jesus forth as the place of mercy, through faithfulness, by means of his blood. He did this to demonstrate his covenant justice, because of the passing over (in divine forbearance) of sins committed beforehand. This was to demonstrate his covenant justice in the present time; that is, that he himself is in the right, and that he declares to be in the right everyone who trusts in the faithfulness of Jesus. (3:25–26) Almost every word in this dense statement has been given different interpretations at different times in the history of the church, not least in the last two or three generations. There is a particular reason for this, which we must face right away, because it relates to the central concern of this book. The first four chapters of Romans have for many years been read as though they were a statement of our old friend the “works contract.” Humans were supposed to behave themselves; they didn’t. God had to punish them, but Jesus stood in the way, so God forgave them after all (provided they believed in Jesus). Rather than going to hell, they can now go to heaven instead. That, with small variations, is how Romans 1–4 has been read. It is frequently referred to as the “Romans road.” When people in churches preach and teach the kind of view that I have been warning against throughout this book, it is to Romans that they go to “prove” what they are saying. And I am convinced that this is mistaken. That is why we need, in this chapter and the following one, to look at Romans in much more detail. At this point we cannot avoid getting our hands dirty with some detailed reading of the text. I have suggested in the previous chapters that the four gospels are far more important than has usually been supposed for understanding the early Christian view of what Jesus’s death achieved. But sooner or later we must come back to Romans.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  My point is this: unless Jesus’s death achieved something—something that urgently needed to be done and that couldn’t be done in any other way—then it cannot serve as a moral example. The “exemplary” meaning must always depend on something prior. As John puts it: “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the sacrifice that would atone for our sins. Beloved, if that’s how God loved us, we ought to love one another in the same way” (1 John 4:10–11). John does not expect his readers to offer themselves as the sacrifice to atone for one another’s sins. That has already been done. They are expected to copy the self-sacrificial love through which Jesus did something unique, something that urgently needed doing. So our question presses: What was that “something”? At this point other questions have come into the contemporary discussion. First, as we have seen, the wars and genocides of the last century have generated a new kind of Christian pacifism in which all violence is to be rejected outright, including the apparent violence of some traditional atonement theories (God using violence against Jesus, and so on). Second, at the same time and perhaps with similar motivation, many have embraced the previously unthinkable idea that the suffering of the cross is the suffering not only of the Son, but also of the Father. Others, again, have reacted by proposing new versions of the old idea that though the “human” Jesus suffered on the cross, the “divine” Jesus did not. Whether that makes any sense is difficult to say. These questions demonstrate rather sharply something that is always going to be true: whatever we say about the cross will sooner or later involve us in discussions of the Trinity and the incarnation in the questions of who God really is and who Jesus really was and is. Having mentioned earlier the ways in which Western hymnody has struggled to articulate the meaning of the cross, I note that at least one recent writer has expressed this new emphasis memorably: And when human hearts are breaking Under sorrow’s iron rod, Then they find that self-same aching Deep within the heart of God.2

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The myrtle will at last replace the brier, and the cypress the thorn. Nothing vital in traditional Western understandings has been lost through this approach. What has been lost is the paganized vision of an angry God looming over the world and bent upon blood. What Paul gives us instead, here and throughout his writings, is the Jewish vision of the loving, generous creator God, who gives his own very self for the life of the world. Much traditional theology has of course insisted on this very point. But the frameworks within which this central truth has been set have often allowed a very different underlying meaning to be “heard.” No doubt this is partly because of the hard hearts of the hearers. But I think it is also because the full biblical story has been set aside in favor of a truncated narrative. “The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible” and its own great narrative. We are not at liberty to replace this with narratives of our own. We must, as always, remind ourselves that Romans is not a “systematic theology” in which all the basic theological topics are laid out in summary form. Nor is Romans 3:24–26 an attempt to say everything one might want to say—even everything Paul might want to say—about the “atonement.” As with every other time when Paul mentions Jesus’s death, these verses do the job he wants them to do within their larger context. The larger context here is the faithfulness of God to his covenant with Abraham and Israel. That faithfulness, through which the Israel purpose is fulfilled and the world-saving purpose accomplished, has now been unveiled in action. Once we liberate Romans 3:21–26 from the burden of trying to say “everything about the cross,” it too experiences its Exodus. It is free to make its own point in its own way and thereby to contribute vitally to the larger argument of the letter as a whole. Beyond the Gospels and Paul I have not tried, in this book, to provide a complete account of what the New Testament says about the death of Jesus. I have looked mainly at the four gospels, Acts, and Paul with a glance or two at the book of Revelation. For a full account I would naturally want to add the relevant material from two other early Christian letters, the Letter to the Hebrews and the First Letter of Peter. They offer other angles of vision, though for what it’s worth I think they complement the picture I’ve been sketching.