Are the Psalms Coherent?

Most of us have a favorite Psalm the way we have a favorite song. The psalms have been a great source of comfort, a balm to weary souls since the time of ancient Israel. But if you crack open the Psalms at random, chances are you will not open to a pleasant song of praise, but a harsh (even vindictive) song of imprecation. The Psalms of complaint make up a third of the entire psalter.

In other words, your chances of flipping to “The Lord is my shepherd” is much slimmer than finding lines like this: “Happy is the one who snatches up the babies of his enemies and dashes their heads against the rocks.”

The range of mood between the Psalms is vast. And this brings a question: If the Psalms are this varied how do they all hold together? Are the Psalms really one book or are they just a collection of many types of prayers and songs?

Is there any sense in which the book of Psalms works as a whole?

Orientation—Disorientation—New Orientation

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (RIP) argues that there is a spiritual coherence to the book of Psalms. He suggests that the Psalms can be understood as a movement through three stages:

* Psalms of Orientation: If you are oriented you have balance. These Psalms express a faith in God and creation. There is an obvious equilibrium to the world. God’s creation operates on clear-cut rules that yield clear-cut results. Most of us will have experienced seasons in our life that are like this. (See Psalms 1, 37, 104.)

* Psalms of Disorientation: But there are also seasons where things aren’t working. If you are disoriented you have lost your balance and your bearing. The Psalms of disorientation are songs of anguish, hurt, alienation, and suffering. And these songs are often marked by language that is exaggerated, harsh, accusatory, and even vindictive. (See Psalms 13, 22, 88, 109.)

* New Orientation: And then in the midst of that darkness,l many of us will have experienced the surprise of healing and other unexpected gifts. Joy breaks through the despair; new light breaks through the darkness. And this is a genuinely new orientation, not just a restoration of the old orientation. You see things differently than you did before the pain and suffering. (See Psalms 30, 34, 40, 150.)

We are really just talking about two movements here. The first is a move (downward) from orientation into disorientation. The old way of thinking about things isn’t working anymore. This is where we find ourselves in what the Psalms often call “the pit.”

The second movement is a move (upward) from disorientation into a new orientation. In the midst of the darkness we are surprised by a new gift from God and given a new way to make sense of the world on the other side of the pit.

Brueggemann points out that Christians should recognize the double movement of crucifixion and resurrection here. That is not by accident. The Psalms are a baptism.

Now, it has been hard for us to see this shape of the psalms in all their honesty because, as Brueggemann argues, we live in a culture of denial. We don’t want to deal with the darkness so we deny its existence or power. We numb ourselves in many different ways so that we don’t have to confront disorientation and the reality that we are in the pit.

The Pit

Chris Green, building on Brueggemann’s schema, says that the pit is a situation of alienation, isolation, suffering and grief. Green suggests that a movement down into the pit is always characterized by alienation and disempowerment.  The deeper you fall into the pit the deeper the experience of disempowerment becomes.

The primary problem Scripture identifies with being in the pit is a surprising one: people in the pit do not praise God. The pit is a place where you experience a loss of voice. Your voice is taken from you because of your pain, suffering, alienation. It’s like getting the wind perpetually knocked out of you.

Ps. 115:17 “The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence.”

Isa. 38:18 “For Sheol cannot thank you; death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.”

Ps. 88:3–6, 10–13 “For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? But I, O Lord, cry out to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you.”

To be in the pit is to be the walking dead. You are alive but you are deadened, cut off from your community, from yourself, and from God.

All of this is bound up with the central issue, though: a loss of voice. The deeper you fall into the pit the more difficult it becomes to pray, the more voiceless you become.

There might only be room enough for a cry or a complaint. But there is no praise or thanksgiving. This fall into the pit can happen very suddenly (a diagnosis from the doctor, the death of a loved one) or it can happen over time. You might not even realize how far down into the pit you’ve fallen because of how slow your fall has been. And because we are all unique there are many different reasons that we find ourselves in the pit. Just because what has affected you deeply would not affect others as deeply does not mean that they are not in the pit.

Green suggests that the reason a loss of voice is so dangerous is that when you lose your ability to speak up and give voice to your pain, you can get to a place where you cannot distinguish yourself from your pain anymore. You and your pain become identical. There is a collapse of your pain into yourself. The ability to distinguish yourself from your pain gets harder and harder the deeper into the pit you fall.

The antidote is precisely what the psalter give us in the Psalms of disorientation. The psalmists are people in the pit crying out to God. Sometimes they speak in very mean and angry ways. But they are still speaking! They haven’t completely lost their voice yet. Yes there is complaint, but a complaint is still speech of some sort.

Green puts it like this: “Before you completely collapse into your pain, the last coal that still has some fire in it is your ability to complain.” 

As long as you still have the ability to complain there is hope because you still have some part of your voice left. The most dangerous place to be is when you can no longer speak about your pain at all.

Green argues that the Psalms show us the way out of the pit and we can roughly categorize them in steps:

First, you have to find your voice again. If you can find your voice, you can begin to distinguish yourself from your pain. You can hold it at a distance, away from yourself. You are not your pain. Even a complaint is still a distinguishing of yourself from your suffering. The complaint is a coal that is about to be snuffed out, but if you bring it to God he can breath on it and restore the flame.

Second, we have to move from complaint to being able to name your pain correctly. What happened to you? Who caused this? Why are you here in the pit? The moment you can correctly name your pain you are already on your way out. This is intimately tied up with the human vocation God gives to Adam in the Garden of Eden. He gives him the power to name and distinguish things in the world around him. One way of describing the human vocation is becoming more and more precise with how we name things and distinguish this from that.

Third, once the naming has begun and it becomes more and more accurate, the naming turns to praise. The naming flowers into praise and thanksgiving because you start to recognize the truth of God in what has happened to you. You meet God in the pit. You realize he has been with you this whole time, sustaining you, promising to bring you through. Being able to more accurately tell the story is the beginning of praise. Gratitude grows.

And now the small ember of complaint has grown into a robust flame. You’ve gotten your voice back. Praise brings you into God’s truth about the world.

On the other side of the pit is the knowledge that even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are with me.

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Ends or Means?

Why did God become human? This is an old question and it is deceptively simple. The way we answer it will fill in answers to a lot of other questions that we aren’t directly considering.

It’s sort of like coming to a dirt road that has a bunch of ruts in it from other cars that have driven down it when the road was soft. Some of those ruts have been dug in so deep that you can easily get stuck. I once heard about a sign at the beginning of one of those old country roads that read: “Choose your rut carefully, you’ll be in it the next 4 miles.”

The same applies with this question. The way you answer it will lock you in to some things you didn’t necessarily intend when you began.

I think there are two broad categories of answers to the question: “Why did God become human?”

* Instrumentalizing

* Humanizing

The difference is simple. We’ve all had relationships that were instrumentalizing and hopefully we’ve all had relationships that were deeply humanizing. If someone is instrumentalizing their relationship with you they are using the relationship as a tool to get something else accomplished. The relationship becomes a means to some other end goal.

But in relationships that are humanizing the relationship itself is the end goal. There is no point to the relationship except the relationship itself.

These two categories can help us map the different answers that might be given to the question: “Why did God become human?”

Is the Incarnation a means to some other end (instrumentalizing)? Or is the Incarnation the end goal itself (humanizing)?

Instrumentalizing

Let’s take just one very common “instrumentalizing” answer: “God became human in order to die.”

This answer says that God became human because someone had to pay the price for sins. The cross does pay the price for sin. Scripture uses the language of a “ransom” (“The son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” Mk. 10:45). So, of course sin is addressed in the the life of Jesus, but forgiveness of sins is not the end goal of the Incarnation, rather it is a by-product of God becoming human.

If you make “paying the price for sin” the end goal of the Incarnation, you will end up with some distorted views about God, the world, and humanity. Here’s just one example in meme form:

The reason for the Incarnation here is something like this: We need Jesus to save us from what the Father is going to do to us.

Obviously the issues here are legion (in both senses). At bottom this would pit God against God. The Son is trying to save you from the Father. The Father turns his wrath on the Son instead of you in order to save you from what he was going to do to you. So there are deeply theological problems with this picture.

But this also instrumentalizes the Incarnation. It turns the Incarnation into a transaction between God and God as a means to accomplish salvation.

The Incarnation is the means to the end goal of balancing the Father’s scales of justice. His law has been broken and he demands a pound of flesh in return. So either Jesus gives it to him or we will.

This “instrumentalizing” view (and others like it, even the more sophisticated ones) ends up making the Incarnation an afterthought for God. God created the world, but when things went south he had to send his Son in order to pull things back on track. In this case, the Incarnation doesn’t reveal anything to us about who God actually is or who we actually are. It’s merely a means to an end.

Humanizing (the end goal itself)

The second answer to why God became human insists that the Incarnation is the end goal itself. The Incarnation is the point of all creation. All things were created by Jesus, through Jesus, and for Jesus. The incarnation is the beginning and the end of creation. It is the first and last thought of God about his creation (see Col. 1, Jn. 1, Heb. 1). 

In other words, God’s becoming human is not a tool that gets some other job done. It is the job done! 

Maximus the Confessor puts it like this:

“The one who knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb, knows the reason of [all] things. The one who is initiated into the infinite power of the Resurrection, knows the purpose for which God knowingly created all.”

According to Maximus the Incarnation was not a strategy to solve some other problem. The Incarnation is the purpose of the whole world. God created the world in order to becoming human.

This has a lot to say to us about how we relate to other. Our relationships with others are not tools for us to use to get something else accomplished. (Even if that something else is “getting them saved.”) Our relationships are never our means to some other end goal. Relationship is itself the end goal.

Theosis: Becoming God

In the 4th century Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “God became man so that man might become like God.”

That can be a very jarring statement to hear for the first time. There are many ways to mishear this. What Athanasius does not mean is some sort of crude polytheism in which we all become gods who rule over our own private worlds apart from God.

Athanasius is saying that what God is by nature, he is making us to be us by grace.

This is the wonderful promise of the gospel: God wants to share his very life with you. He wants you and me and all creation to participate in the life that only naturally belongs to Father, Son, and Spirit. The early church had a term for this: “Theosis.” God is bringing us into his own life.

2 Peter 1:4 says, “[God] has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature…”

If we use the language of “children of God” it might be a little more familiar. Who is God’s Son? He only has one by nature. His name is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. And yet we dare to say that we, too, are called children of God! But we are not children by nature, we are children by grace.

In the Incarnation God has become human–what we are by nature–so that he can include you by grace into what he is by nature. 

God wants to have the same relationship with you that he shares with Jesus. And Jesus wants you to have the same relationship with the Father that he has.

You and I can be called children of God only because we are in Christ. This is the meaning of Athanasius’s famous line.

But even Athanasius’s dictum can be turned into an “instrumentalizing” of the Incarnation. You could mishear Athanasius as saying that the Incarnation is a means to some other end.

We will mishear him if we think he means something like: “God became what was opposite and contrary to himself in order to make human beings something that is opposite and contrary to what they are.” 

In other words, for God to make us “God” he would need to cancel out our human nature. The end goal would be to make us something non-human.

But that’s not what Athanasius means. We have to invoke Bonhoeffer one last time. In His Ethics he takes Athanasius’s famous line and tweaks it:

“Human beings become human because God became human.”

He is not disagreeing with Athanasius. He’s saying the same thing, but in a more precise way. He’s saying that because the God we meet in the life of Jesus is God as human, then to become God in the way that this God is God is to become truly human.

Or as Bonhoeffer will say elsewhere:

“God as human being, and human being as God, must be held together in our thinking…We believe that Jesus the human being is God, and that he is so as the human being, not in spite of his humanity or beyond his humanity…”

“It is finished”

So what does it mean to be truly human? 

Think back to Genesis and the account of creation. In Genesis 1 God sets out each new day to create and fill the creation by saying, “Let there be...” He says it, it is, and it is good. Everything God creates is done in this fashion, except one thing: humanity.

On the sixth day of the week we find a change in the pattern. Rather than saying, “Let there be human beings,” God says, “Let us make human beings…” All the other bits of creation made on days one through five were simply setting the scene—the backdrop—for the play. Now, with the creation of humanity, we’ve come to the main action. This will be center stage: God’s project of making human beings in his image. And a project implies that it is not completed yet.

Two questions arise: 1) Why doesn’t God say, “Let there be a human being,” and 2) Has he finished his project yet?

We find the answer in John’s Gospel. John famously begins with an obvious allusion to Genesis: “In the beginning...” John is claiming (at least in part) that the life of Jesus is what Genesis is about. As you read through John you find that he has slipped in a multitude of echoes and allusions to Genesis.

On the day of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion John stresses that it was the sixth day of the week (John 19:14 “the day of Preparation for the Passover,” or as we call it “Good Friday”). Jesus, now beaten and bloodied, has been arrested and Pilate brings him before the hostile crowd. But Pilate announces something odd. He says,  “Behold, the man,” “Ecce homo” (Latin) “ho anthropos” (Greek), or more accurately in English: “Behold, the human being.” 

In Genesis God began his project of creating human beings on the sixth day and in John’s Gospel he completes it on the sixth day. Behold the human being. And then we get Jesus’ last words from the cross: “It is finished!”

The project that God began in Genesis is now being accomplished in Jesus, the truly human one. “Behold, the human being!”

Jesus, the one who pours himself out, who empties himself for the sake of others, is the image of God. This is the image God is conforming us to.

So again, why doesn’t God create human beings by saying “Let there be human beings”? Because to be truly human is to voluntarily lay your life down, to pour yourself out for the sake of others.

In other words, in order for the completion of God’s project of creating a human being to take place in you and me, we have to say, “Let it be.” God is patiently waiting for us to respond with our own, “Not my will, but yours be done.”

These are truly human words precisely because they are truly divine words. The Spirit makes our words to be the words of Jesus. And oddly enough these human-divine words are words of prayer. As Robert Jenson says human beings are the “praying animal.” 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

A Hidden God?

In the early 2nd century a Greek opponent of Christianity named Celsus argued that Jesus could not be God because there was nothing visibly divine about him. Celsus writes:

“If there were a divine spirit in the body of Jesus, that body would of necessity vary in some respect from other bodies…in size, in beauty, in strength, in voice. It would have something attractive in its characteristics for it’s impossible that the body having something of the divine nature should in no way differ from other bodies. But Christians say that the body of Jesus was not at all different. Indeed, they so claim that it was small, ill-favored, and unsightly.”

Surely the divine cannot “fit” inside the human. Wouldn’t God have to become less than God to become human? Wouldn’t he have to undergo some sort of metaphysical surgery to “fit”?

In Celsus’s mind humanity and divinity are polar opposites. Time and eternity, finitude and infinitude, death and life—how could these opposites hold together in Jesus?

And yet this is the central claim of Christianity: God is the one who became human in Jesus Christ. Christians are those who look at the little baby in the manger and the bloodied man on the cross and say: “This is God.”

This bring us to a central theme within Christian theology that is usually referred to as “the hiddenness of God.” Christian theology throughout the church’s history has generally agreed that there is a hiddenness to God even in his revelation. When you look at the baby in the manger or the man on the cross you cannot simply see with your eyes that this is God. There is a hiddenness, an incognito.

But the real question is in what way is he hidden? There’s more than one way to be hidden.

A Kierkegaardian Parable

The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard told a story that cuts right to the heart of the way God is hidden in the incarnation of Jesus. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time there was a beautiful peasant maiden who worked in the fields gathering wheat. One day as the prince of the kingdom was walking on the parapet of the castle he noticed the young maiden. As he watched her work he was captured by her beauty. It was love at first sight. 

He decided in his heart that he would marry the young maiden. But he immediately recognized a problem. The prince knew that because he had power over all the land the maiden would marry him even if she didn’t love him. He knew that his power as the prince would coerce her into marriage. But he didn’t want that. He wanted her to genuinely love him in return.

So, he devised a plan. He would disguise himself as a peasant and hide his true identity. He put on the brown, tattered clothes of a peasant over the top of his royal purple garments; the purple hidden by the brown, the royalty hidden by the poverty.

Kierkegaard notes that this kind of a story grabs our attention. It’s a classic romantic drama. But, he says, what holds our attention in the story is not whether or not the beautiful peasant maiden will fall in love with the prince. That’s a foregone conclusion. He is noble, he is handsome, he is a prince, we know how these stories go.

What really holds our attention is not whether she will fall in love with him, but rather when he will reveal to her that he is actually the prince. When will he take off the brown peasants’ clothing and reveal the royal purple robes underneath? When will he come out of hiding? And how will she respond?

Perhaps he will tell her his true identity after they have worked together in the fields for several weeks and months. Maybe during a break in their work he will declare his love for her and reveal to her his true identity.

Or maybe he will wait until their wedding day, after she says “I do,” so that he knows she genuinely loves him. Maybe then he will rip back the brown clothes and reveal the purple. Perhaps he will even wait until after the wedding night. Maybe they will spend their first night together in a humble cottage and at breakfast the next morning he will turn to her and say, “You have not only become my wife, you have become the princess of the entire kingdom! Tonight we will sleep in the palace.”

Stanley Hauerwas says that Kierkegaard’s story reveals the way we think about Jesus and the hiddenness of God. Generally speaking, there are two ways Christians have thought about the way God is hidden: 1) “Concealing” and 2) “Revealing.”

1) Concealing. The first way would say: Before the Son of God became incarnate he was robed in royal purple. He was eternal, infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent. But when he became human, he laid aside some of these things in order to truly be a human being. In the incarnation he becomes finite, weak, limited in knowledge, etc. 

In other words, the prince has to stop being the prince (in some capacity) for a time in order to become a peasant. The resurrection, in this view, is the “rip” of the brown clothes to reveal the purple.

That is, obviously, a type of hiddenness. God hides himself by concealing his true identity.

2) Revealing. The second way to think about this, as Hauerwas says, is that in Jesus there is no purple underneath the brown clothes. The brown clothes of the servant are actually the true clothes of the prince. This is who he is. He is the prince not despite appearing as a servant—he is the prince as a servant.

In Jesus there is no other royal purple robes hiding elsewhere. His purple robes are his slave clothes. 

But this, too, is a type of hiddenness. God isn’t hidden because he conceals his true identity. Rather, God is hidden in that he actually reveals his true identity. God does not hide himself from us, he reveals himself to us. But it is precisely his revelation that hides him. 

Robert Jenson summarizes the two ways of conceiving of the hiddenness of God like this:

“In one way or another, western theology has tended to construe Christ’s human sufferings and death as clues to the character of his hidden divine presence. According to Luther, they are his divine presence among and for us. All orthodox theology is agreed that God remains hidden even when revealed; Luther goes beyond this to insist that it is precisely his revelation that hides him… Traditional theology has tended to say that God is hidden by his metaphysical distance from us, across which we must peer; Luther says that what hides him is that his revealed presence is so unavoidably in our face.”

The first way (concealing) can fall prey to the assumption that Jesus is really a king in the way the world knows kings. The only difference is that he hides it under his slave clothes for 33 years. With his understanding the incarnation is God acting out of character (and/or nature). For the duration of Jesus’ earthly life he conceals himself, but hiding under the brown clothes is really power as we all know it and want it. We can easily start to think that the purple Jesus really has is no different than the purple that Herod or Caesar wears.

I’m convinced the second way (revealing) is the faithful way to understand God’s hiddenness. God hides by revealing himself.

We actually don’t know what divinity is really like. We don’t know what real power is. We only know cheap, earthly imitations of both divinity and power. But in God’s revelation of himself Jesus shows us that the true God is a crucified God; that real power is the power of the cross.

To put it back in the terms from Kierkegaard’s story: True purple is not Caesar’s purple. True purple is the crimson of the cross. God is hidden in his revelation. But the way he is hidden is different than we would ever imagine. He does not hide himself, he reveals himself. But what he reveals turns out to hide him from us because it is not anything close to what we would expect. What he reveals is that he is essentially humble and lowly.

Kenosis, Humility, and Humiliation

Biblically, the rubber meets the road in how we read the Christ hymn in Philippians 2. 

“Although [or “Because”] being in the form of God, He did not consider his equality with God as something to be exploited for his own advantage, But emptied himself [kenosis], By taking the form of a slave, By being born in the likeness of human beings. And being found in human form, He humbled himself By becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and given to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:6—11).

The hiddenness of God is directly tied to what Paul here calls “emptying” (or in Greek “kenosis”). The question is who is being emptied of what and when?

The typical understanding of the sequence of events of the Incarnation would be something like this:

God → humiliation → Human

In this way of construing the matter, becoming human is a humiliation for God. God’s self is hidden in the act of becoming human because he has to lay aside his divinity in order to become human. He has to give up “the form of God.” He has to undergo metaphysical surgery—a “divinectomy” of sorts.

But then we are left with a major problem. If Jesus has to empty himself of the “form of God,” then his life isn’t really isn’t revealing to us who God actually is. He is hiding the purple divine garment underneath the brown human garment. We still don’t know what the purple garment looks like.

In his Christology lectures, Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests that we understand the sequence of events differently:

God → Human → humiliation

Jesus’ divinity is seen in his humanity, not despite it. For God to become human is not a humiliation for God, it is a revelation of God. God’s becoming human is the most fitting thing for him because he is the God-human.

Chris Green summarizes Bonhoeffer’s point:

“As Bonhoeffer reminds us in his christology lectures, the incarnation is not a humiliation for God—it is not as if God finds it unbecoming to take humanity as his own! The incarnation is a humiliation for us, because God comes among us as one without beauty, without desirability or comeliness, making nonsense of every frame of reference, every standard of judgment, every order and scheme we have devised for ourselves as a means of giving our lives significance and stability.”

God does not have to become less God in order to become fully human. Jesus is not emptying himself of divinity, rather he is revealing to us that it is the nature of the true God to empty himself. This God is God as human. Or as Luther often said: “I point to this human being [on the cross] and say, this is God!”

This is the mystery of the Triune life. In Jesus’ humiliation we are seeing God’s exaltation. Jesus isn’t humiliated in order that he can then be exalted. His humiliation on the cross is his exaltation.

Put differently, the throne of God and the cross of Jesus are not two separate things, but one single reality. Jesus tells us this in John’s Gospel: “‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die” (12:32–33).

There is a humiliation in the incarnation, but it is not that God would become human. Rather the humiliation, the scandal, is that God would be human in this way: lowly, humble, suffering, shameful, dishonored, and defiled.

Unveiled Faces

Scripture is full of instances in which creatures come in contact with the face of God and they have to hide their own faces. It is too much for them to take in.

In the visions of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and John we see the cherubim/seraphim (those closest to the throne of God) continually hide their faces with their wings. They veil themselves from the glory of the face of God. 

But why? 

In Ezekiel’s vision as he looks upon the throne of God he sees something odd: the one seated on the throne has the appearance of one a son of man—a human being. But why does the one on the throne look like a man? Christian theology must answer: because the second person of the Trinity is a man–Jesus of Nazareth.

Gregory the Great (6th century) describes Ezekiel’s vision like this:

“We should observe how the order is maintained… For above holy men still living in the body are the angels, and above the angels are superior angelic powers closer to God, and above the powers is…the man Christ Jesus.”

That which is most exalted, even above all the angels, rulers, and thrones is the humiliated, crucified man of Golgotha. That is the stumbling block. The Exalted One is the Crucified One.

The the highest is also the lowest. And it is highest by being the lowest.

This is why the angels hide their faces. It’s not simply because God’s glory is so much higher than the glory of the angels (though it is). It’s that the way it is higher is precisely in that it is lower. As Bonhoeffer says, “God glorifies himself in the human being.”

But angels aren’t the only ones to encounter God’s immediate presence. Elijah and Moses also see God in his glory, and they both do so on the top of mountains.

Moses is on the mountain of the Lord and he asks to see God’s glory. God tells him that he cannot look on his face and live, but that he will pass before Moses while Moses is in the cleft of the rock. God covers the cleft with his hand so that Moses can only see his backside.

Moses sees not the face, but the backside of God. Martin Luther notes that “the backside” (or “posterioria” in Latin) is the shameful side of God. Luther then suggests something provocative. What is the shameful “backside” of God except the cross of Jesus? Moses sees the lowliness of God, but in that lowliness he sees God as he truly is. Moses sees Jesus: He sees God in shame, dishonor, and suffering. He sees the Crucified God.

But Elijah also encounters God on a mountain (perhaps the same one):

“A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kgs 19:11–13).

God comes in a still small voice. Not in the thundering power of the earthquake or the wind, and not in the glory of the fire. God comes in weakness because this is how God always comes to us.

But there is a difference between the stories of Moses and Elijah.

Elijah veils his face just like the angels do. He cannot bear to look on the one who comes in the weakness of the still small voice. But Moses does not. Moses speaks to God face to face as a man speak to his friend. Moses only veils his face with the Israelites, but with God he takes the veil off. 

Moses knows that the truth of God’s glory is that he is humble. Moses knows (somehow, someway) that God is the God-human. Moses unveils his own face and the face he sees looking back at him is the face of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s God’s glory.

The question posed to us is whether or not we will veil our face when we are confronted by the cross. The cross is too much for us to take in because we expect God’s “purple” to be higher than us. But God’s royal purple robes are lower than us, and that’s the block we stumble over. This stumbling stone is precisely what creates faith in us.

Will we veil our faces in his presence or will we take our veils off?

In 2 Corinthians Paul tells us what we are called to do: “And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another…” (2 Cor. 3:18).

But here is the the good news of the gospel: Even if we veil our faces in the presence of this lowly king, he still meets with us. He will continue to meet with us until the veil is removed from our face. He did it for Elijah, and he will do it for you.

The gospel of Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah both met Jesus on a mountain, the mount of transfiguration. Jesus appears in his glory before Peter, James, and John and there he is with both Moses and Elijah. Jesus speaks with the two prophets about his departure, his exodus, his crucifixion. His lowliness.

This is his “backside.” This is the “still small voice.” And on the mount of transfiguration both Moses and Elijah turn to the Lord with unveiled faces because God has turned toward them in his meekness.

The veil that covers our face is our own embarrassment over the fact that God is this humble, this lowly.

Take off the veil like Moses did. Turn to the Lord today. But even if you delay taking off your veil like Elijah, the promise we are given is that one day it will be removed and you will see the Lord high and exalted and your knees will bow.

But your knees will not bow in terror or fear, they will not bow merely because he is so much higher than you are, but because he is so much lower. Your knees will bow because the God you will see is that God whose knees are already bowed down in order to wash your feet. 

And when you bend down to meet him there, the veil will finally be removed. But not until you meet him down low.

Or as Maggie Ross writes, “Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring…The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Scripture uses a variety of terms to describe the human self (e.g. body, soul, spirit, mind, and heart). Last week we discussed the human self in its integrity. We are both embodied souls and ensouled bodies.

This week we take a look at the human heart with its shallows and its depths. Fortunately, last October we had Dr. Chris E.W. Green with us for our theology conference and he lectured on a theology of the human heart. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for us to revisit a bit of his excellent teaching within the context of our wider study of what it means to be truly human.

In class we watched a shortened version of one his lectures. (The podcast I’ve attached is the audio from the lecture we watched Wednesday night).

You can watch the full lecture here:

You can also find the first lecture here and the Q&A session here.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Deep Unity of the Self

What does it mean to be a human self? What constitutes it? We will all be familiar with a similar vocab bank: body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, etc. It’s also probably not much of a stretch to assume that most of us have been taught that human beings are composed of two (or three) parts: body and soul (and spirit).

It’s often of assumed that these composite parts of the human self are separate and discrete things that we can treat in isolation. But in Scripture there is a lot of overlap between these terms. Different biblical authors (and writers throughout the church’s history) use these words differently. Sometimes they use them with a lot of precision in order to make important distinctions, but sometimes precision isn’t the goal. 

For instance, words like spirit/soul can be completely interchangeable in some biblical texts. Think of Mary’s song in Luke 1:47, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Is Luke using this language to make a distinction between the soul and the spirit? Is he trying to be precise? Do souls have the specific job of magnifying and spirits handle the rejoicing? Some might want to make that case, but in my reading this is sort of a poetic doubling, a literary device.

I think what’s being communicated is that Mary–as one whole person–is magnifying and rejoicing. It’s not so much that there are two regions inside her—one called “soul” and the other called “spirit”—Mary is the single subject here. The act of magnifying and rejoicing is something that involves Mary’s whole person. Not simply her soul and spirit but also her body (lungs, vocal cords, and lips as she sings)!

Biblical authors and theologians might intend to be precise and make distinctions at times, but very often there is a lot of overlap in the way these terms get used. It all depends on the writer and the context.

But I do think this is key: there is no hard and fast way of using the language of soul, spirit, mind, heart. Our problems come when we decide in advance exactly what these terms have to mean and then read our own arbitrary definitions into the biblical texts. You have to read a biblical author/theologian on their own terms and try to figure out what’s important to them and see the distinctions they want to make. 

There isn’t one easy schema that the Bible always uses. But that’s what many of us will have learned. Think of the common saying: “You are a soul but you have a body.” Or: “You are a spirit, who has a soul, that lives in a body.” The problem with systems like this is not that they claim humans have spirits and souls and bodies. The problem is that these words are not always used in technically precise ways that are uniform across Scripture. 

Something in us craves for these neat and tidy definitions and distinctions, though. I think it is a uniquely modern craving. We view ourselves as machines or computers and those have separable parts. And the key to scientific knowledge—or so we think—is to break everything down to its smallest components. The smaller the better.

Breaking things down and taking them apart allows us to analyze them. And we think that what something is in its smallest parts reveals the deepest truth of it. Knowledge comes by dissection.

But say you are in a biology class that is dissecting a cat. The professor says, “We are going to split up into groups and this group will study the heart, this group the brain, this group the stomach, etc… and when we come back together we will share what we’ve found.” You will definitely gain plenty of information about the anatomy of the cat. But there is one thing you won’t have access to: the cat! Because in order to dissect it, you had to kill it.

I think the truth of what it means to be human is found not in dissecting us down to our parts and studying them in isolation from one another, but rather the deepest truth is found in the whole. Being analytical and breaking things down to their smallest bits is a really helpful thing, but true knowledge comes on the other side of analysis. It comes in encountering.

This doesn’t mean we can’t distinguish between the parts of the human self. We can. But those parts aren’t what they are in isolation from the other parts.

Our thinking needs to be more christological. Jesus Christ has two natures. He is fully divine and fully human. But the truth of who he is can never be found by breaking him down into his natures, but only in the wholeness of his person. Does Jesus ever say or do anything without being simultaneously fully divine and fully human? No. To truly know Jesus we encounter the him in his personhood.

Put otherwise, full knowledge comes not in mere analysis (breaking things down into parts), but in synthesis (unity of the whole).

Neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that because our brains have two hemispheres we have two ways of attending to the world: analysis and synthesis. Breaking things down to grasp the bits and the parts on the one hand, and seeing the whole picture on the other. Obviously you need both, but the end goal should be synthesis.

One of the most fascinating examples McGilchrist gives to show the difference is a semi-rare condition called “face-blindness.” People with face-blindness (prosopagnosia) have a harder time recognizing faces. This is usually due to a traumatic injury or developmental issues in the right hemisphere of the brain.

But here’s the weird thing. People with face-blindness are not blind. It’s not that they can’t see faces. They can. They can see facial features like noses, eyes, ears, and mouths. But what they are unable to do is recognize whose face it is. They can see the parts of the face, but they can’t see the whole thing at once and identify it.

For most of us, it’s the opposite. We see faces as wholes, as singular things, and we might even struggle to describe the parts of a person’s face that we know very well. 

(I could talk about face-blindness for hours. Malcolm Gladwell recently had an episode on his podcast Revisionist History on face-blindness that was really great. One man they interviewed said that he will regularly have to pause a movie to ask his wife who a character is. She usually says something like: “Honey that is still Robert De Niro, he just has a hat on now.”)

Of Earth and Spirit

The truth is that the typical hard and fast distinction and separation of soul from body (“You are a soul and you have a body”) is not quite right. In Genesis 2:7 we read: “...then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

The human being that God creates in his image is taken from the earth. Humanity is derived from a piece of earth. That’s who it is. The church’s temptation from the beginning was to see the body as dirty, defiling, and evil. The body is bad so it needs to be shed.

But in Genesis we get a completely different picture. Human beings are taken from the dust of the ground but that ground is not the cursed ground of Genesis 3, it is the blessed ground. We are taken from the earth that God called “good!” Your body is a good gift from God. Without it you wouldn’t be you.

The christianities that have shaped many of us have often undercut the importance and the goodness of the body (“You only have a body.”) But the truth is that a person’s body belongs intimately to who they are. Our bodies aren’t prisons, or shells, some exterior thing that can just be cast off.

I think we can put it this strongly: Human beings do not ‘have’ bodies. We are bodies.

But we are not only bodies. God doesn’t just mold us from the dust of the ground. He breathes the breath of life into the body. This breath/soul is life, it animates the human being. The soul is not an abstract gas that floats around until it is pumped into human lungs. The soul (nephesh in Hebrew and psyche in Greek) is the concrete bodily life of a creature. The soul is the whole person.

We have to hold both things simultaneously: We are embodied souls and we are ensouled bodies. 

Without either one we are not in the image of God. And neither one is what it is made to be without the other.

Oftentimes people will point to 2 Corinthians 5:8 to prove that we are souls who only have bodies. Paul writes, “We would rather be absent from the body and to be present form the Lord.” On the first reading it does sound like it is our body that needs to be shed in order to be present with the Lord.

But if you read the whole passage you will find that Paul is actually making the exact opposite point.

“For we know that, if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be further clothed with our heavenly dwelling, for surely when we have been clothed in it we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan under our burden because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” (2 Cor. 5:1-5).

Paul seems to think that a disembodied existence would be a dreadful thing. It would be sub-human. We do not want to “shed this mortal coil” and be a “naked” soul. That wouldn’t be comfortable or fitting for us.

The goal is not to take off this body and become a naked soul, but rather to be “further clothed” with a resurrected body, a body that is incorruptible.

To be disembodied is to be less than human.

Being Re-Membered at The Lord’s Supper

This separation and dismembering of the human person can lead to misunderstanding what salvation actually is. God intends to redeem us as whole persons: body and soul.

Think of another popular passage we regularly misread. In Revelation 3:20 Jesus is speaking to the church in Sardis: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.”

We usually hear this verse and think that it is talking about “asking Jesus into your heart.” But the passage says nothing about that. (We easily forget he is talking to people who are already in the church.)

So, what is it about? It’s about eating with Jesus. And not a spiritualized eating. Really eating—bodily. Jesus calls his church to gather at his table and eat a meal of bread and wine. It would be hard to do that without your body.

But eating with Jesus does not only involve your body. It involves the whole of who you are. The communion meal is bread and wine, but it is not merely bread and wine. In eating this meal we are participating in the very life of Jesus (1 Cor. 10:16).

The earliest Pentecostals were adamant about this. The communion meal is not merely a meal of bread and wine that brings Jesus to our memory. They insisted that Jesus is actually present in the meal. We feast with him as we feast on him.

When we eat the bread and drink the cup we are communing with Jesus as whole persons. Our bodies are engaged along with our souls (and our spirits, hearts, and minds). The supper is an all-embracing reality.

God created human beings as body and soul, and that’s how he is saving us. In the incarnation Jesus has taken to himself the totality of what it means to be human. He has a human heart, a human mind, a human soul, a human spirit, and a human body. If he didn’t take all of these things to himself, then we would not be completely saved.

Our tendency is to denigrate the body and exalt the soul, as if that’s what’s really important. The truth is that most of us would rather not be human. We would prefer to be something more, something more lofty. That was Adam and Eve’s sin. In wanting to become more than human they tried to become like God. But they didn’t realize that God is God precisely as a human.

C.S. Lewis says that the perennial human temptation is to be more spiritual than God. But:

“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life in us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”

Jesus has ordained that our fellowship with him take place at a meal.

The Lord’s Supper is a remembering. But it is also a re-membering. It takes the broken and disconnected pieces of our lives and re-members them, makes us whole.

This is the work of Jesus. Jesus is out to re-member you. And he does this by calling us to eat this meal “in remembrance” of him. As often as we eat the bread and drink the cup we re-member Christ. He makes us members of his own body in our eating. The Spirit gathers us up—body, soul, heart, mind, spirit—and brings us into the wholeness that is Christ.

And all this happens over a shared meal.

As Rowan Williams memorably put it, “It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that he wants our company.”

He wants your company. Not just a piece of you. Not just your soul or your mind or your heart. He wants to eat with the entirety of you in order to make you entirely you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Being Human as Vocation

Becoming truly human is not just a matter of being, but of doing (hence the “becoming truly human”). In truth, being and doing are not separable, but are always one—our being is always a doing. Put otherwise, when the Spirit unites us to Christ we are not only given Christ’s identity (being), but Christ’s vocation (doing).

Psalm 8:6–8, riffing on Genesis 1-2, describes the human vocation: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, a son of man that you care for him? You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.”

The author of Hebrews quotes Ps. 8 but riffs on it: “As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus…” (Heb. 2:8). Yes, we were created to have dominion over creation, but we do not yet have the dominion God means for us to have.

The human vocation is only fulfilled, for now, in Jesus—the pioneer of our faith. What is true of him, will be true of us. As Chris Green says, the human vocation is nothing less than a share in Jesus’ lordship, Jesus’ dominion over all creation. But we know that his “lordship” is not a “lording it over” creation, but rather a serving of creation. 

Put another way, becoming truly human is a calling to become priests. Priestly work is mediating work. It is about reconciling two parties, it is about peacemaking, building bridges, and making connections.

But this is a calling for all humanity. It is a calling to a responsibility, a burden for others before God.

The Image of God: Relationality

Genesis 1 says that God created human beings in his image and after his likeness. But what is that image and likeness? The text is sparse and ambiguous. It leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Scripture invites us to fill in the spaces it leaves.

The most common answers that have been given to the question of what makes us in the image of God are either 1) faculties or 2) capacities we possess. Is it our faculty of reason and knowledge that makes us in the image of God? Is it our capacity to be virtuous and holy?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that it is neither our won faculties or our capacities that make us image bearers. Rather, he suggests, is it is that we are created free.

“To say that in humankind God creates God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free. To be sure, it is free only through God’s creation, through the word of God; it is free for the worship of the Creator. For in the language of the Bible freedom is not something that people have for themselves but something they have for others. No one is free ‘in herself’ or ‘in himself’--free as it were in a vacuum or free in the same way that a person may be musical, intelligent, or blind in herself or in himself. Freedom is not a quality a human being has; it is not an ability, a capacity, an attribute of being that may be deeply hidden in a person but can somehow be uncovered…”

Bonhoeffer is saying the image of God in human beings is found in our freedom. But our freedom is not a faculty/capacity or a quality that we possess in and of ourselves. Our freedom is found in the face of our neighbor, not inside ourselves. Our freedom is not a freedom from our neighbors, but our freedom for them.

Freedom is not something you own. Freedom is a calling. It’s an event, a doing. It is a responsibility. Freedom can only arise in our relationship to the other.

“Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other’, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.”

This is a very different definition of freedom than the one we typically conceive. Freedom for Bonhoeffer is something that happens between me and you, not something I possess all by myself. It happens to me through you. This is a definition of freedom rooted in our relationality rather than our individuality. 

In other words, the image of God is fundamentally relational. Being the image of God is not something that I have all by myself without you. It is something we have only together—through our relationship to one another.

But where is he getting this from? Notice the text of Genesis 1 actually says.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

The image of God is found in our relationship to what is other than ourselves. He creates humanity male and female. This is unity in differentiation. Humans are different from one another, and in that difference they are one.

Bonhoeffer puts it like this:

“The creature is free in that one creature exists in relation to another creature, in that one human being is free for another human being. And God created them [male and female]. The human being is not alone. Human beings exist in duality, and it is in this dependence on the other that their creatureliness consists.”

But how is this difference from one another what makes us in the image of God? Because God is not God alone. God is Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. In God there is relationality. God just is the relationships between the Three Persons. What makes God God is the relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit. He is one precisely in that he is three.

Humanity is made in the image of God in that we are constituted in relationship to one another. The image of God is in our inherent relationality.

What makes us human is that we are turned outward from ourselves to others. Our lives are created for the sake of others, not to be closed in on ourselves.

This is what makes the calling of becoming human a priestly calling. A priest’s work is about relationships.

Intercession: “Bone of my bone”

We can see that the human calling is a priestly calling most clearly in Genesis 2:15,“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work and to keep it.”

The phrase “work and keep” is carefully chosen. These words almost always appear in the Old Testament in reference to the job of the priests. Priests are to “work and keep” the temple (Numbers 3:7).

Genesis is picturing the Garden of Eden as a temple, as a Holy of Holies, with Adam and Eve as the High Priests of all creation. Eden is the temple for the sake of the world.

And this is precisely what priests do: they are not called to work in the temple instead of the world, but for the sake of the world. Or to put it another way: Adam and Eve are intercessors!

What does it mean to be an intercessor? Symeon the New Theologian says that an intercessor one who refuses to be saved apart from their neighbors. Paul in Romans 9 gives us an example: “I wish I were accursed and cut off for the sake of my kinsmen according to the flesh.” Paul wishes that he would not be saved at all if his kinsmen are not saved. Intercession is quintessentially priestly work.

Intercessors stand in for the sake of their neighbors and for the sake of the world.

Jesus, the great High Priest, is the true human not instead of all humanity, but for the sake of all humanity. He does what he does for the sake of the world! As Bonhoeffer never tires of saying, “Jesus is the man for others.”

And to be truly human in this way is to take up Jesus’ vocation. To live your life for the sake of your neighbor, for the sake of the world.

Think of Genesis again. In Genesis 2 God creates Eve from the side/rib of Adam and when Adam wakes up to see Eve, he has poetry on his lips: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” 

This isn’t a merely a romantic poem. He is saying, “I can’t be myself without you, Eve. Now you make me who I am! Before you were here I wasn’t even myself. You are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”

We all know this at a biological level. Who am I without my parents? Who am I without my children? Who am I without my friends? At a fundamental level these people make me who I am.

But while biology and natural friendship shows us something of the truth of what it means to be human, Jesus calls us to something higher. He says, “Even the tax collectors love those who love them back. I’m calling you to love your enemies.”

In calling us to love our enemies Jesus is calling us to a deeper intercession, a deeper humanity. When Paul says that he wishes he would be accursed and cut off for the sake of his kinsmen, he is speaking not only of his friends but even his enemies. Many of his kinsmen wanted to kill him, and yet he is saying: “I am not myself without them. I refuse to be saved without them. God, if you are going to have me, you have to take these people, too!”

That’s the work of an intercessor: to look at your neighbors, including your enemies, and say: “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”

When Jesus was hanging on the cross he looked at the soldiers who were crucifying him and cried, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do!”

This is the deep intercession we are called to. Jesus looks into the faces of his greatest enemies and all that he can think is: “These people are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I cannot be who I am without them!”

This is the deep truth of the gospel: Jesus cannot be himself without you or me. But he also cannot be himself without our greatest enemies. This is the calling to priestly intercession.

When you and I gather to worship each Sunday morning, we are called to bring the bones of others with us. When we eat of the bread and drink from the cup, we carry the bones of our neighbors with us. We bring the bones of those who cannot be there with us and even those who, for the time being, refuse to be there with us. We worship for the sake of the world.

Why? Because we are called to be priests. This is what it means to be human.

The call to be human is a call to recognize that your neighbors (including your enemies) are “bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh.” We are called to carry the bones of the world before God for the sake of the world.

Chris Green sums it up perfectly:

“The church exists only to remind the world of its true nature and its true destiny in the kingdom of God… For now, however, we find ourselves called out from [the world], but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for [the world]. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others—never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or to submit to the call. The elect are elected always for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Sin: Blocking the Flow of God’s Love

The way we speak about sin is key. The metaphors we use to speak about reality always end up “using” us. Our language isn’t merely a tool we use, it shapes the way we see reality. I want to juxtapose two metaphors for speaking about sin: breaking God’s laws vs. blocking the flow of God’s life/love. It’s not that one is wrong and the other is right. It’s that the overuse of the one has misshaped and malformed us, and we need a correction.

Most of us will have been taught to speak about sin as “breaking God’s laws.” That’s right, insofar as it goes, but it remains too impersonal and abstract. The human conscience loves the idea of a law that it can manipulate, weaponize, and control.

I think it could be more helpful for us to speak about sin as “blocking the flow” of God’s love and life for our neighbors. The legal metaphors for sin are too impersonal. The metaphor of “blocking the flow” keeps us anchored in the personal. It keeps our eyes focused on our neighbors.

Theologian Kathryn Tanner is puts it like this:

“God’s gifts can be blocked by our sins and the sins of others against us; but God does not stop giving to us because we have misused and squandered the gifts that God has given.”

Think of the “blocking” here as a garden hose. You can step on the hose and make the flow a little weaker. You can put a kink in the hose to temporarily cut off the flow. But you can store the hose in a kinked position for long enough that you create a break in the hose.

Think of sin as the ways we block the flow of God’s life and love to our neighbors and ourselves—kinking the hose in some way.

It is key to notice here that the water continues to run even if we clog the flow. God is always fully God to every human being. His love and life is always flowing to them. Our sins make it harder for them to receive that flow of life and love. Our sins are what make it harder for our neighbors to receive the good gifts God has for them. But the flow does not and cannot stop.

Sin is the harm we do to our neighbors (including ourselves). Anything that we do or fail to do that makes it harder for our neighbors to believe God, trust God, know God, and receive his love—that’s sin.

“A Sick Holiness”

The legal metaphors for sin, when they are used in isolation from other metaphors, almost always lead us to moralism. And moralism is, perhaps, the greatest enemy of the truth of the gospel.

Moralism is “preaching” that aims to get people to behave a certain way. It is an attempt to conform others to some system of morality. But the gospel conforms people to the Christ. The difference is easy to see: systems of morality are always dead ideas, Jesus Christ is a living person.

This is why when we define sin as missing the mark we should immediately think: Whose mark? Societies’ mark? My family’s mark? The democratic/republican party’s mark? My own personal mark? Some might say, “No! Sin is missing the Bible’s mark!”

But whose reading of the Bible? Saul’s? The Pharisees’?

Jesus challenges every system of morality precisely because he is alive. No moral order can capture him. No ideology can cage him in.

So it is key for us to see that holiness and morality are not the same thing.

Chris Green puts it like this:

“We often, always at terrible cost to ourselves and to others, confuse the sanctified life for a moral life. But the truth is, holiness is beyond morality and immorality.”

The gospel is not about making us more moral. In fact, the holiness that the gospel intends for us has very little to do with what consider to be morality and immorality.

Bonhoeffer makes just this point. In the Gospel accounts Jesus makes some very high moral demands on people: You have heard it said, “Do not commit adultery,” but I say to you if you so much as look on a woman with lust you have already committed adultery in your heart. With these high moral demands we would expect that he would hang out with the moral heroes of his world. That’s what Plato and Buddha did.

But when we read the Gospels we find Jesus among the morally weak and the outright immoral: Children, prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. (He even tells the moral heroes of his day that the immoral ones will enter the kingdom ahead of them.)

Why? Because God chose what is foolish and weak in the world to shame the wise and the strong. So, Bonhoeffer says: 

“Religion and morality contain the germ of hubris… In this sense, religion and morality can become the most dangerous enemy of God’s coming to human beings, the most dangerous enemy of the Christian message of good news. Thus the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound…”

We need to reckon with Bonhoeffer’s stark warning. Morality is one of the greatest dangers to the gospel. Do we believe that?

We often think of becoming “holy” as becoming sinless. But God wants more for us than to become blandly sinless. He wants us to be conformed to Christ, to be one with the Father as Jesus is. In Christ we see that holiness is never identical to being moral.

Think of Jesus’ life as the gospels tell it. Jesus is called “the holy one of God,” he is holiness incarnate, but he was repeatedly accused of being immoral by the moral heroes of his day. It was this charge of “immorality” that led to his crucifixion. Why? Because his way of life did not (and does not) fit within the moral standards of his day (or of any day). 

Jesus reveals to us how bankrupt all of our moral systems are. Our concepts of “goodness” have to broken open by the Spirit. To follow Jesus requires that we leave behind our own moralisms. Jesus and our morality cannot coexist.

Peter is a perfect example. Peter famously makes the true confession of Jesus’s identity. Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter responds, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus tells Peter that the Father has revealed this to him. He has made a true confession. God has spoken to Peter. But Peter’s true confession still ends up distorted by his own understanding of morality. Jesus responds to Peter’s true confession by saying, “And the son of man must go to Jerusalem and suffer.” “No!” Peter says. He won’t allow it! He’s still operating within his own understanding of morality. He hasn’t let Jesus show him what true holiness is.

Peter, like all of us, takes what God has said to him and squeezes it inside his own understanding of what is good and right. The words of Peter’s confession are true, but the sense he makes of them is wrong. He’s got the right words—“You are the Christ”—words that are truly from God, but he’s interpreting them within wrongly.

We have to “unlearn” our systems of morality in order to truly follow Jesus. We must allow the Spirit to tear down our conceptions of morality and replace them with genuine holiness—Jesus.

Chris Green concludes:

“We learn holiness only by unlearning ‘goodness.’ The call to holiness is a call to break free from morality, which, at its heart, is always about power and control.”

Holiness has as little to do with morality as it has to do with immorality. Very often in our circles, holiness is defined as a move away from the world. “The world does x, y, and z, so we DO NOT do x, y, and z. That’s what makes us holy/moral.”

But we have to ask: Who is defining the “mark” that must be hit here? Is it Jesus?

Just because you are moving away from the world does not mean you are moving towards Jesus. In fact, to move away from the world almost always means you are moving further away from Jesus. In the Gospels Jesus is most often found in worldly, immoral places—with the sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. 

This is the problem with moralistic thinking: it confuses morality with true holiness. True holiness is always a move towards Jesus, not merely a move away from the world. 

Moralism attracts our attention to what it deems to be immorality (for many of us we have heard things like: smoking, drinking, dancing, the clothes you wear, going to the movie theater, etc.) But precisely by focusing our attention on these things, it hides the deeper sins of pride, greed, and self-righteousness.

Bonhoeffer calls this a “sick holiness.” “Sick holiness” is holiness defined by our own moral standards. We need to be cured from that deadly disease. Sick holiness might follow every letter of the law of God, but it ends up blocking the flow of God’s life and love to ourselves and our neighbors.

“All Sins Are Equal”

Right at the heart of “sick holiness” is something most of us have been taught about sin: “All sins are the equal before God.”

Intuitively we all know this isn’t true, but it takes some work to unpack. We’ve often made things that are not sinful out to be terribly sinful because of our moral systems (think of the catalogue of vices you’ve heard). But because we’ve said that all sins are equal we’ve made “minor sins” out to be “major sins,” which end up ignoring our deeper problems.

Not all sins are equal. They don’t all have the same consequences in our lives or in the lives of others. Some things we have done are deeply wounding and have caused tremendous havoc in the lives of our neighbors. But there are also things we have done that were wrong, but did not have the same catastrophic effects.

Scripture often talks about “sinning against God.” And we are called to confess our sins “against God and our neighbor.” But if sin is the harm we do to our neighbors, what does it actually mean to “sin against God”?

Is it that we can divide our sins up into two categories? Some of our sins are against God and others are against our neighbors? I don’t think so.

Theologically I think we have to say that our sins are never violating or harming God. God cannot be harmed by what we do. Our sins do not block the flow of God’s love and life that he has in himself. We actually cannot trespass against God directly. But we can violate his will by violating our neighbors.

The damage our sins do is not to God, but to ourselves and to our neighbors. All of our sins are against our neighbors and in that way they are ultimately against God.

But it also isn’t true that our sins are only against our neighbors. To sin against our neighbor is to sin against God. Why? Because of Jesus. Jesus is God who has become your neighbor. God and neighbor are held together in him—in one person!

As Jesus says to Paul on the road to Damascus, “Why are you persecuting me?” What we do to anyone we do to him. Jesus takes our sins against our neighbors personally. Every sin—no matter who it is against—is a sin against Jesus. If I sin against you, I am not merely breaking God’s laws, I am wronging you “in Christ.”

Thinking of sin as merely breaking God’s laws can hide this deep truth from us. The question always has to be: What wrong have I done to my neighbor?  How have I blocked the flow of God’s life to them? How have I made it harder for them to trust in the goodness of God and to believe in God?

When we think of all sins as being equal, we can easily become blind to the harm we’ve done to others because our attention is in the wrong place.

Here’s an example. Why is harmful and abusive speech sinful? Because it transgresses God’s law? Yes, but the reason runs deeper. The reason abusive speech is sinful is not that it breaks God’s law (as if there were a list of words you cannot say because God has forbidden them), but that it makes it harder for our neighbors to receive the love God has for them.

There is a sense in which it is true that all sins are breaking God’s laws. But even Scripture witnesses to the fact that not all sins are equal. In the Old Testament there are some sins that require stoning, but others don’t. The severity is different. In the New Testament Paul says that a man’s sins requires him to be excluded from the community of believers, but not all sins require this. 

When we say that “all sins are equal” what we are really doing is individualizing sin and reducing it to be only about me and God, all the while ignoring the harm we’ve done to others, which is the actual problem. And there are different degrees of harm we can cause to other people.

Think of a sliding scale, a spectrum running from “bumping into our neighbors” to “wounding our neighbors” all the way to “violating our neighbors.

Bumping into our neighbors just happens sometimes. And it isn’t always sinful. These are the ways in which we have been impolite or inconsiderate in a moment. Perhaps we have spoken to someone in the wrong tone of voice or not given someone our full attention. Or maybe we’ve offended someone because something we’ve done doesn’t fit within their understanding of morality. These things are not inherently sinful. I think we can place “vices” here, as well. It isn’t that these things are insignificant. They often can reveal a deeper problem within us. But moralism wants to focus our attention only here, on how we “bump” into others and inconvenience them.

Think of the garden hose analogy again. More often than not, “bumping” into others does not block the flow of God’s life and love to them. It’s more of an annoyance.

“Wounding” others is a different story. We wound others when we fail to show the love of Christ to the people around us. Usually we “wound” others by the things we have left “undone.” Wounds are not annoyances. They take special care and attention to be healed.

But then there is “violating” our neighbors. These are the ways we’ve sinned against others in high-handed ways. We’ve traumatized them. We’ve completely kinked the hose. We’ve made it almost impossible for them to receive God’s love. These are the ways we’ve marred their understanding of who God is. When we “violate” others we put them in critical condition. What they need is an E.R. in order to be healed.

But question always has to be this: Am I blocking the flow of God’s love and life to them? Am I making it harder for them to believe in God, to trust that he is good, to truly know who he is?

Moralism wants to keep us blind to the ways we’ve “wounded” and “violated” others. It keeps our attention firmly focused on our implolite behaviors, our vices, things that we can manage, so that we become self-righteous.

This is where the deepest danger of sin lurks. Pastors and teachers the most susceptible to wounding/violating others because of how we’ve spoken of God, the ways we’ve imaged him for others can be deeply traumatizing.

Parents are also very susceptible to this in their relationship with their children. We can become so concerned with how well-behaved our children are, that we deal with them in ways that mars their view of who God actually is. In our efforts to “fix” their behavior, we may be sinning against them in far deeper ways.

Obviously it isn’t only true of pastors and parents. We all become susceptible to this in the ways we talk to our neighbors—our coworkers and family members. 

We can be so concerned with moralism, with “fixing” moral behavior, that we make it harder for them to truly know God.

But at its heart sin is anything I do or fail to do to love others with the love of Jesus. Every person I meet, everyone I think about, I am called to love them with the full love of Christ. To unclog the flow.

When we start to understand sin in this way most of us will see that we hardly take a breath without sinning. And all we can do is throw ourselves on the love and mercy of Christ.

But the promise of the gospel is that his love never stops flowing—even to us moralists trapped in our moralisms.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Curved In On Ourselves

Last week I tried to argue that, contrary to much of what we’ve been taught, sin does not separate us from God. Many of us have heard that God cannot even look on it. But if the Gospel records are true we have to say, “Of course he can! If he couldn’t, how would he save us from it?”

In Christ we meet a God who loves sinners so much that, not only does he look on their sin, but he becomes their sin in order to free them from it. Sin doesn’t have the power to separate you from God.

For many of us, that’s tough to come to terms with. And it’s especially tough because there are texts in Scripture that speak of sin causing a separation, a break, or a fracture. 

If we start with Jesus, though, we can see that the separation that sin causes is not between us and God, but within ourselves. Sin separates us from ourselves. It separates us from our awareness of and sensitivity to God, our neighbors, and ourselves. Sin causes a lack of self-awareness.

In his lectures on the book of Romans Martin Luther famously defines sin as being “incurvatus in se,” or “curved in on the self.” Sin turns us in on ourselves and makes us self-absorbed.

I’m going to keep reiterating this because I think it is important for us to wrestle with: Many of us have been given doctrines of sin that are sinful. Or to put it in Luther’s language, those problematic doctrines of sin actually lead to a deeper “curving in” on our own selves. As Chris Green reminds us, “Nothing is so sinful as what we’ve said about sin.”

Sin Separates You From Yourself

The separation that sin causes can first be seen in Genesis 2 and 3.

In his lectures on Genesis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are at the center of the garden. The trees are the center of Eden, and so they are the center of Adam and Eve’s life. It is significant that in a story in which Adam and Eve are the main characters, they are not at the center.

Bonhoeffer takes this to mean that it is God who is the center of Adam and Eve’s life. The tree of life is an image representing God. God is life. He is my life and your life. You and I do not have life in and of ourselves. Apart from God no one has life. In him we live and move and have our being. Adam and Eve are not their own center. God is their center.

So, in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve enter the center of the garden to take from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they are attempting to make themselves the center of their own lives. They are becoming “gods against God.” They desire to know good and evil from themselves—with themselves as the center.

In this act of attempting to find their origin in themselves, they are becoming “curved in on themselves” as Luther says. Not curved toward God and neighbor, but self-absorbed. This is surely what God means when he says, “If you eat of the tree you shall surely die.” To live with yourself at the center of your life is to become deadened to your true life which is only in God. It is to create a false life on a false center.

Here’s Bonhoeffer expounding on this in Ethics:

“Man at his origin knows only one thing: God…He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with his origin…The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God.”

Bonhoeffer speaks of separation here. But it is about Adam and Eve’s knowledge. It’s not that Adam and Eve have successfully cut themselves off from God. They don’t have the ability to do that. They can’t dictate who God is to them and who they are to God. But they can cut themselves off from their awareness and knowledge of their true center.

Bonhoeffer continues:

“But man cannot be rid of his origins…Man’s life is now in disunion with God, with men, with things, and with himself.”

To have yourself as your own center and origin, to live from yourself, to know good and evil from yourself, is another word for the conscience. The conscience is that faculty that adjudicates the rightness and wrongness of what you do. But based on what? Your own perception of good and evil. You are the center and the origin.

The reason Adam and Eve are in disunion with God is because they are in disunion with themselves! They’ve “created” false selves. They’ve alienated themselves not from God, but from their true selves. Their false selves are alienated from God. But why? Because they are an unreality. Those lives are lies.

Bonhoeffer’s argues that when Adam and Eve take of the fruit, the conscience is born. Before the fall Adam and Eve have no conscience. They know only God as their center and so they don’t have to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. But when they make themselves their own origin, they make their own knowledge of good and evil their center. Their conscience becomes their new God (Sicut deus—Like God, gods against God). The good and evil that Adam and Eve now know are not the good and evil God knows, but the good and evil of their own choosing. Conscience is the problem the fall creates. And it’s a fracture within Adam and Eve.

Bonhoeffer is strong on this point:

“Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other men. It is therefore from his right relation to himself that man is to recover the right relation to God and to other men.”

This is why the letter to the Hebrews says Jesus’s sacrifice is different than all the other sacrifices that have come before: Jesus’s sacrifice cleanses the conscience of the worshiper (Hebrews 9:9, 14). 

Think of how different that sounds from what we’ve often been taught. Many of us will have learned that Jesus has to die in order to set things right between us and the Father. We’ve been taught that the problem is between us and God, and Jesus’s death puts that right. But that’s not what Scripture says. Hebrews says that Jesus’s sacrifice changes us, not God. He cleanses our conscience, our perception, our awareness.

The separation that sin causes is a break within ourselves. We don’t perceive the world (and God) rightly precisely because we do not see ourselves rightly.

In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus talks about the eye being the lamp of the body. He’s talking about our perception. He says the light that is in you is darkness. Your perception is off. You and I think we know what good and evil are, but we are living by our own light—which is darkness.

(Don’t forget that John 1 tells us that Jesus is the light of every human. He is our light. He doesn’t become our light when we decide to let him be out light. That’s who he is. When we come to see him as our true light we are recognizing the truth about ourselves. In that process, we are becoming true, not making Jesus true. We live in a delusion (sin) that makes us think we have our own light, but it is darkness.)

This is the hope of the gospel: Christ has come to cleanse the conscience! Or to put it another way, Christ comes to reveal to us that our own conscience is not our true center—he is, and always has been! But we need that to be revealed to us. We need to be changed.

The work of Christ is overcoming the separation that is in us. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection do not change God—it changes us!

To say sin separates us from God is to say that God changes in his relation to us. But we know that can’t be the case. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever! We are the ones who change and need changing. God never once leaves us. As St. Irenaeus says, Adam never once escapes the hand of God throughout his life, especially when he is in sin.

To sum up: the conscience—according to Bonhoeffer riffing on Luther—is what curves us in on ourselves. It is the seat of sin. The conscience is what needs to be overcome.

In one of his lecture notes to the underground seminary at Finkenwalde Bonhoeffer puts it like this:

“Whoever is one, whole, unbroken, has no conscience. Those in the middle, between good and evil, have a conscience...Having a conscience means that a person is between good and evil. To every person conscience says: you did something bad, only because I know about good... As long as we have conscience, we cannot be as good as Jesus wants us to be. The goodness of conscience is something different from the goodness of Christ...Ultimately our conscience must die so that Christ alone may live within us. Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer."

Or more simply, as he says in elsewhere, “Christ must become our conscience.” Christ is our true center and we must come to recognize it.

The truth of the entire world is that it has been reconciled to Christ—whether it recognizes it or not. He is the true center of all things. Any “world” that is not centered on Christ is not the true world. Any person who is not centered on Christ is living in their own false reality—their own delusion. But this is the point: it isn’t reality! Human beings in their true reality are those who are “accepted in the incarnation of Christ… loved, condemned and reconciled in Christ.”

Or as another Lutheran theologian, Robert Jenson, provocatively puts it: “Sin is simply man’s attempt to behave as if he were not reconciled to God through Christ.”

Anyone who lives in sin is not living into the truth of who they have been made to be in Christ. They are living in a delusion.

But that delusion is not a separation from God. It is a self-delusion. God is right there with every person in their delusion. The incarnation reveals to us just how far God is willing to descend: God even comes inside our own delusions. There is nowhere that we can escape from him.

Sin does have a “disorienting and deadening effect” on us. And, “as that damage is done, we begin to lose touch with ourselves… We are less and less capable of being straight and open with God.”

But God is never incapable of being straight and open with us. He is waiting for us where he always has been—in his Son Jesus Christ. He has never separated himself from us, but has always been present to us in our own separation from ourselves. Where is God? God is in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the place in which the world has been made one with God. And that is the truth about you and me and everyone we have ever met.

Self-Absorption vs. Self-Awareness

Sin curves us in on ourselves, but most of what we’ve heard about sin makes us more curved in on ourselves. As Chris Green points out, we are typically more concerned with managing our feelings of guilt than with the harm we’ve actually done to our neighbors. That’s the work of the conscience. As Bonhoeffer insists, the conscience keeps us from knowing God and our neighbors rightly because it keeps us from knowing ourselves rightly. (see 1 Cor. 4:4 and 1 John 3:20). The conscience keeps us self-absorbed, but Jesus brings us into self-awareness. The difference is crucial.

So much of the preaching and teaching that we’ve received aims at our conscience, our feelings of guilt, and motivates us to do whatever is necessary to alleviate our feelings of guilt, rather than making right the wrong we’ve done to our neighbors.

Focusing on our own feelings of guilt is not a move towards self-awareness but being driven further into self-absorption. Self-awareness is the ability to step into a room and know where you are and how you fit in that particular place. It’s knowing where you end and others begin. Self-absorption has no grasp of this. Someone who is self-absorbed can’t see their own edges, their own limits and boundaries. They are curved in on themselves.

We’ve all met people who are caricatures of self-absorption (remember, this is a problem of degree not kind). These people think they are the main character in every room they walk into. As self-absorption increases, self-awareness decreases.

Self-awareness can only happen as your conscience dies and Christ comes alive in you. “Where Christ alone is, conscience is no longer.”

Coming to see Christ as your true center overcomes the separation that sin causes within us. We don’t know ourselves truly until we know ourselves “in Christ.” True self-awareness can never happen apart from the presence of Jesus.

What grieves me is that so much of our preaching and teaching about sin usually throws people back on themselves and creates even more separation within them. It plays to their conscience and increases self-absorption. What our souls desperately need is preaching and teaching that direct us outside of ourselves to Christ.

This was right at the heart of the theology of Martin Luther. The gospel is a word that comes to us from outside of ourselves, not from within. Philip Cary summarizes Luther like this:

“Luther never looks inside himself to find Christ. It is precisely by taking hold of Christ outside us, in the external word of the Gospel, that faith brings Christ into our heart… If you want to learn a song by heart, you don’t listen to your heart but to the song, as the sound of it reverberates in the air and in your ears… Likewise, if you want to be united with Christ, Luther thinks, you must listen to the Gospel as it comes to you from outside, through your ears and into your heart. When you receive this word by faith, the form of Christ becomes your own, like the music of your heart.”

All of this is right. The gospel is an external word, not an internal word. But we need to say more. Although it is true that the gospel is a word that is external to us, we actually find our true center there. It turns out to be the very center of our being. It comes to us on the periphery of the false selves we’ve created, but it invites us to abandon those false selves with their false realities, and to find our center at the cross of Christ.

When the gospel comes to us, it does draw us out of our delusions, but it does not annihilate us. It makes us who we have always been called to be. It makes us true by giving us our true center—Jesus Christ.

Or to put it in the language we’ve been using: the word of the gospel calls us out from the separation sin has caused within us. It calls us out of our self-delusions, out of our false selves, and back home to our truth.

The voice that speaks the truth to us is not our own conscience, but the voice of that strange Galilean man who claimed to be the truth. That voice is the voice that called you into being, after all. And it still is.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

It Takes Training To Be a Sinner

The movement from Adam to Christ is the movement from being born from below to being born from above. It’s the movement into becoming truly human as God is human.

But that movement involves a death. Paul puts it succinctly in Colossians 3:1—11. We have already died and our lives are hidden in Christ, but we must continue to take off the “old human” (Adam) and put on the “new human” which is being renewed in the image of the creator. Becoming truly human begins in a death (“you have died” Col. 3:3), but that death is an ongoing process (“Put to death, therefore…” Col. 3:5). That process is what the old Puritans called “the mortification of sin.”

The problem is sin. But what is it? How do we come to know what it is?

In talking about sin we have to be incredibly careful. But this is an area in which many of the teachers we’ve learned from have not been careful. Many of us have not been careful or prayerful in the way we’ve taught others about sin. Or as Chris Green memorably puts it, “Nothing is more sinful than what we’ve said about sin.”

To say the same thing another way, most of us have been given a doctrine of sin that is sinful.

The problem—as usual—is that we do not start with Jesus in our understanding of sin. Most of our doctrines of sin begin from our own abstract ideas of what sin must be and then we try to squeeze Jesus into those already-fully-formed ideas. But a doctrine of sin constructed this way makes it so that our ideas of sin are setting the terms for Jesus to fulfill, rather than letting Jesus show us the truth. The result is that we’ve cut Jesus down to the size of our own ideas of sin.

Stanley Hauerwas says that becoming a Christian is being “trained to be a sinner.”

“To be able to confess our sins is a theological achievement that our baptisms have made possible. For sin, as Karl Barth maintained, is only known in the light of Christ. Thus from Barth’s perspective, our fundamental sin consists in the presumption that we can know our sin without having become a disciple of Christ. In short, to be a Christian means we must be trained to be a sinner.”

We assume that because we are sinners we must know what sin is. But do we? Does an addict caught in the throes of their addiction really know the extent of their situation? Can they see their addiction and its dangers with any clarity? No! Only in the light of sobriety can an addict fully know the danger they were in.

Misdiagnosing Sin

Misconceptions about sin abound (but grace does much more abound!). Many of us will have been taught that sin separates us from God, or excludes us from the presence of God, or that God cannot even look on sin.

If we begin with Jesus we can see that none of these definitions of sin can be right. In fact, the gospel itself would make no sense if it were true that God cannot be near sin. Jesus—the one who is both truly human and truly God—is called “a friend of sinners.” When you read through the gospels not only do you find God constantly hanging around sinners, but it seems like that’s where he prefers to be.

This makes it all the more puzzling that so many theologians, pastors, and teachers continue to define sin as separation from God. If you read through a theology textbook (like Wayne Grudem’s systematic theology), you will find statements like “sin separates us from God” or “God cannot look on sin” and those assertions are typically followed by parentheses containing a Bible verse. (This is what people in the business call a biblical prooftext.)

It is true that there are many texts in Scripture that are difficult and require us to wrestle with them. But when you look up these texts that are often cited to prove sin separates us from God, what you typically find is that they aren’t difficult at all. In fact, they are usually making the exact opposite point.

Myth #1: “God cannot look on sin”

Habakkuk 1:13 is almost always cited in definitions of sin. “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.”

But when you read the book you realize that Habakkuk is complaining to God because of sin and injustice. He begins the first chapter saying, “‘How long O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?' Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!; but you do not save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?” (Hab. 1:2).

Habbakuk feels like God is making him look at and tolerate injustice. He knows God doesn’t like it, and he thinks God shouldn’t look on it either. But God tells him to watch. When we come to the infamous verse 13 that seems to say God cannot look on evil we find there is more to the story. “Lord, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, you will never die. You, Lord, have appointed them to execute judgment; you, my Rock, have ordained them to punish. Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?” (Hab. 1:12-13).

Habakkuk is crying out to God, knowing he is a God of justice. He says, “I know you are the Holy One and that your eyes are too pure to look on evil and you cannot tolerate it. So, why do you tolerate it?”

In other words, Habakkuk is saying, “God, you can’t look on/tolerate evil, so why do you?” The text is actually bearing witness to the exact opposite point.

What Habakkuk has to learn is that God’s holiness is not what keeps God from coming in contact with sin, but actually it is what makes it possible for God to be with sinners, cleanse them, and make them whole. That’s what makes him holy.

The point is not that God cannot look at sin, but that it is the “looking” of God that frees sinners from their sin.

In his lecture on Genesis 1:3—5, Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes that God creates by his word and then “looks” at what he has created and calls it good. Bonhoeffer argues that God’s “looking” at creation is what upholds it and preserves it in its goodness. God’s looking at his creation is what keeps his creation from falling back into nothingness. If God turns his gaze away from something he has made, it ceases to exist. 

God’s “seeing” is never a passive act. He is never a voyeur. He is not surveilling us. God’s “seeing” is active. It is a grace. When God sees his creation what he sees is the truth of what he has made: that it is good. Bonhoeffer’s point helps us to see that God never looks away from us, even in our sin. He continues to uphold and preserve us in the truth and goodness in which he made us.

Myth #2: “Sin is exclusion from God’s presence”

Genesis 3-4 are often cited to show that sin causes us to be excluded from God’s presence. Adam and Eve sin in the garden and are exiled from Eden. But as you read the text you find that God has gone into exile with them. The same holds true for Cain in Genesis 4.

Later in the story, when many of the Israelites are taken into exile in Babylon, it is again assumed that those in exile have been excluded from God’s presence. Those who are left in the promised land declare that wicked have been removed from God’s presence into exile because of their sin. But the prophet Ezekiel disagrees.

“Ezekiel responds by declaring exactly the opposite, namely that those in exile—though neither obedient nor virtuous—are in fact the preserved remnant (11:16–20), even going so far as to depict the presence of YHWH leaving the temple and Jerusalem and heading east, as though YHWH was joining his people in exile (11:22–24), where YHWH will himself be ‘a little sanctuary’ (11:16) for the exiles… YHWH remains present among the exiles. On this point, Dalit Rom-Shiloni observes, ‘exile does not [for Ezekiel] bring separation from God.’”

Myth #3: “Sin separates you from God”

We read in Isaiah 59:2 “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”

But, again, when you read the whole chapter you find that Isaiah is making the exact opposite point. Isaiah 59:1 says, “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,  nor his ear too dull to hear.”

Isaiah is not saying that God is cut off from sinners and can’t reach them because of their sin. He is saying that God can get to sinners even though their sins cut them off from their awareness of him.

The passage goes on to say that we are blind and cannot see justice, we look for justice but find none, our deliverance is far away. We have turned our backs on our God.

Isaiah 59:15–17 “15 Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. 16 He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him. 17 He put on righteousness as his breastplate, and the helmet of salvation on his head; he put on the garments of vengeance and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.”

The separation from God is in our perception, our awareness, of God. It is true that our awareness is fractured, but Isaiah is saying that even when we are in this kind of sin and injustice, we are never outside of the reach of the hands of God. Because his arm is not too short (Isa. 59:1). What else can “his own arm achieved salvation for him” be referring to other than the cross of Jesus Christ? Jesus is the arm of the Lord that is “not too short.”

This, then, is the point of Isaiah 59: even if it feels like you are outside the reach of righteousness, you are never outside of his reach of his right arm.

Myth #4: “Hell is separation from God”

There is one text in the New Testament that seems to explicitly say that hell excludes us from God’s presence.

2 Thessalonians 1:9 “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…”

But things are never that simple. The book of Revelation seems to say the opposite. Revelation 14:10 “They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb.”

The text forces you to make a decision. Either we have to read 2 Thessalonians in light of Revelation or we must read Revelation in light of 2 Thessalonians. Are sinners shut out from the presence of the Lord in hell or are they in the presence of the Lamb?

If we start our understanding of who God is and what sin is with Jesus the answer is clear. Is Jesus God or isn’t he? This brings us directly to the heart of the idea that sin separates us from God. At the end of the day what this suggests is that Jesus is not fully God.

But the church teaches us to confess that Jesus is everything that God is and everything that we are—in one person. If we hold to that confession then we can see that the gospels witness to the fact that God himself has gone into God-abandonment (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). But he has done this so that we can know that he is present especially where he seems to be absent.

If God has gone into God-abandonment, then there has never been anywhere to hide from him.

As the psalmist says, “Where should I go to flee from your presence? If I go to the highest mountain you are there and if I make my bed in hell you are there!”

This is the promise of the beautiful gospel. In Christ we can hear God saying, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here. I gave you my one and only Son and you murdered him, but I transfigured that evil act into resurrection and the salvation of the whole world. I refuse to separate myself from you, and I refuse to allow you to separate yourself from me.”

Or as Lincoln Harvey has it:

“The only way the creature could separate itself from God is to take him in our hands and kill him. But God has always already chosen the event of separation as his life in Jesus Christ… And this means that nothing can separate us from the love that God is, because the event of the creature’s attempt to separate is the definition of his life.”

This is the true meaning of grace. No matter what you’ve done or will do, God will never leave you or forsake you. The truth is that you cannot separate yourself from him. That’s good news.

But the beauty of the mystery deepens: if God is to be true to himself, he cannot separate himself from you. In Jesus Christ, God has so tightly bound himself to you that to deny you would be to deny himself.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Not “How” but “Who”

Last week we began a study of what it means to be “truly human.” And we began with the truly human one: Jesus of Nazareth. It is not the case that Adam came first and then, when things went wrong, God sent his Son to be born of a virgin as a reaction to Adam’s sin. This typical way of thinking makes it so that Jesus is made in Adam’s image and—to caricature a bit—turns Jesus into Plan B.

Paul insists in Romans 5 that Adam is made in the image of Christ. In other words, Jesus comes first. This is hard for us to think. We know that Jesus is both truly God and truly human, but in order to make this all “fit” we split him in two (sometimes suggesting he is two persons: the eternal Son of God and then Jesus of Nazareth).

The problem with this way of thinking is that it begins with the two natures of Christ (human and divine), seeing them in some sort of competition and tension, and then tries to resolve the tension by some sort of math equation.

Hopefully you can already see the issue with doing theology this way around. This is to start with our own abstract concepts (humanity and divinity), rather than with the concrete person of Jesus.

In other words, we think we know what it means to be God and we think we know what it means to be human and then we try to say Jesus is both those things. This then creates problems for us to solve: How can the uncreated one be created? How can the infinite one be in time? How can the first one come in the middle? How can God die on the cross?

But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out in his Christology lectures, the first question of theology has to be “Who” not “How?”

Rather than starting with the seemingly incommensurable natures of Christ (human and divine) and then asking the question, “How do these fit together?” We must start with the concrete person of Jesus Christ. We must ask, “Who?”

We need to start with Jesus to know God and to know ourselves. This one—this person—is simultaneously God and Us.

Truly Human Being

To be truly human—to be human in the way that God is human—we must be fashioned into the image of Jesus, who comes before Adam. To become truly human is to move from Adam to Christ. We’ve got the “who” questioned straightened away. Now we can ask the “how” question. How do we move from Adam to Christ?

Ignatius of Antioch, a first century bishop who died around AD 108, wrote a letter to the Roman Christians while he was under arrest and on his way to being martyred. What he says is striking. His primary plea to the Christians in Rome is that they will not try to keep him from being martyred.

St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans:

“It is better for me to die in Christ Jesus than to be king over the ends of the earth. I seek him who died for our sake. I desire him who rose for us. Birth-pangs are upon me. Suffer me, my brethren; hinder me not from living, do not wish me to die…Suffer me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being [anthropos], suffer me to follow the example of the passion of my God.”

“Birth-pangs” are upon him as he is coming to his death. His death is actually his birth. “Hinder me not from living” is Ignatius’s way of saying “Don’t stop me from dying.” Only in his death will he truly come alive. Life and death have been completely reversed here. “When I shall have arrived there, I will be a human being.” He’s not yet truly human. He is “in Adam” now, but he longs to be made into the image of Christ through his death. Only then will he be “a human being.”

In other words, for Ignatius, to be put to death in the way Jesus was is to become a true human being.

Two Births

The movement Ignatius shows us is a movement from Adam to Christ through death and this is what it means to become truly human. But he isn’t making this up for himself. This is what Scripture explicitly tells us.

In John 3, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. Jesus tells him that he will only be able to see the kingdom if he is “born from above.” Nicodemus asks how someone can be born again once they are old. Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:5—8).

Jesus is talking about two different births: one from above and one from below. Yes, Nicodemus, you are born from Adam—from below—but to truly live, to truly be made into the image of God, you must be born from above—born of the Spirit.

Paul picks up this same theme in 1 Corinthians 15:35—49:

35 But some one will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" 36 You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies…42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44 It is sown an animated body [soma psychikon], it is raised a spiritual body [soma pneumatikon]. If there is an animated body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual which is first but the animated, and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”

The movement here, as John Behr points out, is from Adam to Christ, from being an a body animated by breath (psyche) to a body made alive by the Spirit (pneuma). Adam has breath in his lungs, but that breath expires. Jesus is the Second Adam who—precisely by letting his breath expire—is raised a life-giving Spirit.

These are the two births Jesus spoke of to Nicodemus. The first one is a false beginning—in Adam. But the second is the true beginning of all that is created—in Christ.

Adam—Christ.

Breath—Spirit.

Psyche—Pneuma.

The Lord Kills and Makes Alive

Scripture everywhere bears witness to this movement from breath to Spirit.

Psalm 104:29–30 “When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust; when you send forth your Spirit and they will be created.”

We have to notice the order. We often read a text like this and think: “Yes, of course. God is the creator so he gives us our breath and then he takes it away whenever he sees fit.” But the text doesn’t say that. It says that he takes away their breath first and then sends forth his Spirit and they will be created.

Many have noticed that Scripture speaks this way. Especially in a text like Deuteronomy 32:39, “I kill and make alive.” Once again the order is key. It is the killing that leads to the living. It is crucifixion and resurrection.

Origen: “In Scripture we always note that those acts which are ‘unpleasant-seeming,’ as I will name them, are listed first, then those acts which seem gladdening are mentioned second.' I will kill and I will make alive' [Deut 32.39]. He did not say, 'I will make alive' and then 'I will kill.' For it is impossible that what God has made to live would be taken away by himself or by anyone else. But, 'I will kill and I will make alive.' Whom will I kill? Paul the traitor, Paul the persecutor. 'And I will make alive' so that he becomes 'Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ.’"

Maximus the Confessor (on God telling Jonah that he will destroy the city of Nineveh): “God in truth both destroys and saves the same city…”

Martin Luther: “Thus when God makes alive he does it by killing…when he takes into heaven he does it by sending to hell.”

Karl Barth: “In Scripture we do not find the Law alongside the Gospel but in the Gospel, and therefore the holiness of God is not side by side with but in His grace, and His wrath is not separate from but in His love.”

This is the secret of God’s wrath: it is not something separate from his love, but is always found in his love. As George Macdonald memorably put it, God’s wrath is nothing but the furthest reaches of God’s love as we resist it.

God’s wrath is not like our wrath. Our wrath aims to kill and destroy, but God’s wrath aims to make alive.

Origen points out that in Galatians 5 “wrath” is not a fruit of the Spirit, but a work of the flesh! But God is Spirit and not flesh. So, when Scripture talks about God’s “wrath” it cannot mean what it means as a work of the flesh.

The wrath of God makes alive. Or, put otherwise, the wrath of God are “the hands of God” that Adam never escapes at any time in his life. The molding and and the shaping are the wrath, which lead us to being born “from above.” It is the wrath of God that takes away our breath in order that he might fill our lungs with his own Spirit so that we might become “life-giving spirits” just as he is.

The Gospel of John tells us that when Jesus breathed his last from the cross he handed over his spirit. But the Greek is really specific: “He handed over the Spirit.”

Jesus breathing his last from the cross is his breathing the breath of life into all things. He is the Life-Giving Spirit.

But he has to breathe his last. He must let go of his breath, and let the old Adam die. Adam must have his breath taken away—crucifixion. But in letting go of his breath he sends forth the Spirit—resurrection.

This is not so much “new” creation or “re-creation” as it is true creation. This was always what Genesis meant when it said that God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into him. At the cross we are witnessing God’s act of true creation.

Martin Luther said that God created us in order to redeem us. That’s true. But we can be even more precise. God creates us by redeeming us.

But it is only in death that we find life. It is only when you let him take away your breath that you can become clay in his hands and be truly created.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com