Extra Credit Podcast

From 1 Corinthians 11 onwards Paul turns to deal with issues in the Corinthians’ public worship gatherings. In chapters 12 to 14 Paul takes up the issue of orderliness and love of neighbor in public worship. His goal throughout is pastoral. He is trying to show the Corinthians that true worship cannot be disorderly and self-centered. Worship—and use of the gifts in worship—must always be for the sake of your neighbor.

Paul frames the conversation around the variety of spiritual gifts freely given to the every member of the church, but all by the one Spirit. The gifts are various and unique from person to person, but it is the same Spirit who energizes/activates them all.

Later, in chapter 15, Paul will say that the end goal of all things is that God will be all in all. This doesn’t mean that we will all become the exact same thing, with no differences between us. Rather, for God to truly be all in all there must be diversity. Why? Because God is infinite. As God’s life comes alive in you it takes a unique shape in you that it couldn’t take in me. And vice-versa. He is infinitely creative.

The variety of gifts given to the church are all for the “common good” of the whole church. The Greek word here is “sympheron” from which we get our word “symphony.” A symphony is not uniform, it is a variety of instruments coming together for the sake of one song. The spiritual gifts are always given for the sake of the one song: building up the church-community. They are not given for merely individual/private edification.

All this talk of unity in diversity leads Paul to one of his favorite ways of speaking of the church: the body of Christ. Every member of a human body is important. And it is the members that “seem to be weaker” to us that are actually to be clothed with dignity and honor.

Paul makes the turn in verse 27 “Now [y’all] are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”

St. Augustine (4th century) building on Paul’s theology of the church as the body of Christ called the unity between Christ and his body the “total Christ.” To speak of Christ as the head is always to include his body. Christ is never separate from his body, just as the body is never separate from the head. His body makes him who he is.

Augustine makes the point like this: Say you are in a crowded area where people are jostling around each other trying to make their way out. If someone steps on your foot, isn’t it the head that says, “You are treading on me!” But no one has stepped on your head or on your tongue. Both are safely high up off the ground. And yet, he says, because of the bond of love that exists between your head and even your feet, there is a deep unity. This is why you say, “You’ve stepped on me.”

How much more deeply related is Christ (the head) to us (his body)? When someone abuses another person who seems unimportant to us, they’ve stomped on Christ’s feet. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

But this reveals something even deeper. Something too marvelous to comprehend. It reveals something about the unchanging identity of God: Jesus is not Jesus without us. It almost sounds blasphemous to say, if it weren’t for God saying it. Jesus made us the whole intent and purpose of his life. He lived his entire life, all the way to death, for us.

Jesus refuses to be God without us.

Could God have been God without us? Of course! He lacks nothing and has no need of anything. He doesn’t need us to be God, but he refuses to be the God he is without us. 

There is no Jesus except the one who prayed, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” This is his dying prayer. If the Father is going to raise his Son from the dead, it will have to be the Son who prayed this prayer that he raises. It will have to be the Jesus who has united himself to us in extreme solidarity that he resurrects.

Robert Jenson puts it like this: It’s as if on the cross Jesus poses this question to his Father: “Will you still be my Father, even though I am now tied up with these despicable brothers?”

The resurrection is the Father’s resounding “Yes” to Jesus’ question. And because it is a “Yes” to Jesus, it is a “Yes” from God to you and to me. 

Jesus refuses to be God without us. It sounds too marvelous to say. But in fact we confess it all the time. He is Emmanuel: God with us.

Does God see gender as a barrier to women taking certain positions of leadership in the church or in the world?

It’s a nagging question for many believers today. Some think that God does see gender as a barrier; others think that he doesn’t. But many are still a little nervous that he might.

1 Corinthians 11:2-16 brings all this to the surface in one of the most controversial and difficult passages in the New Testament. Paul seems to say that women must pray/prophesy with their heads covered because if their heads were uncovered it would bring shame on their head. He also seems to imply that only men are created in the image and glory of God, while women are only the glory of man. Man isn’t made for woman, but woman for man because woman was made from man.

Needless to say this passage has caused many interpreters to blush, while causing others to institute oppressive practices on women in worship.

The typical way of handling the passage is to slough it off as a “cultural” issue. But on a closer reading we find that the text grounds it all in a theological rational.

To make matters worse, Paul seems to be of two minds in the passage. In fact, he seems to outright contradict himself; saying one thing, but then taking it all away in the next breath. Verses 4-10 offer a sort of (odd) creational theology for why there is a hierarchical relationship between men and women, but verses 11-16 seem to disagree completely, offering a vision of mutuality and reciprocity between men and women “in the Lord.”

All this and more make the passage one of the most difficult in the entire New Testament.

Here are few NT scholars on the difficulty of the passage:

* C.F.D. Moule: “[The problems raised by 1 Corinthians 11] still await a really convincing explanation.”

* George Caird: “It can hardly be said that the passage has yet surrendered its secret.”

* Craig Blomberg: “This passage is probably the most complex, controversial, and opaque of any text of comparable length in the New Testament.”

* Gordon Fee: “This passage is full of notorious exegetical difficulties including the ‘logic’ of the argument as a whole… [along with] uncertainty about the meaning of some absolutely crucial terms…”

Lucy Peppiatt, lecturer and Principal of Westminster Theological Centre, offers a possible alternative reading of the passage in her book Women and Worship at Corinth.

It is a well-established fact among scholars that Paul regularly quotes the Corinthians and their slogans throughout his letter—usually to disagree with them or to tweak their theology.

The Greek text of 1 Corinthians doesn’t have any quotation marks in it, but almost every modern English translation adds them because it makes sense of what would otherwise be contradictory passages. There seem to be two voices all throughout 1 Corinthians: Paul’s voice and the “Corinthians’” voice.

Her thesis (and it is only a thesis!) is that perhaps there are two voices speaking again in chapter 11. Maybe Paul is quoting from the Corinthians again and using a rhetorical method to show the inconsistencies and problems within the Corinthians’ theology of men and women at worship.

Here is Peppiatt’s reading of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 (the bolded and italicized sections indicate Corinthian thinking or phraseology that Paul is disagreeing with):

1 Cor. 11:2-16

I think she’s on to something! But either way, as Peppiatt points out, all readings of 1 Cor. 11 must be held with humility because of the absolutely opaque nature of the entire passage.

In the class I replicated as closely as possible the way Peppiatt teaches the passage. If any are interested in hearing more from her, you can watch this interview and this lecture:

1 Corinthians 10 is the apex of Paul’s long and complex argument for why certain members of the Corinthian congregation should not eat meat sacrificed to idols in the pagan temples.

Unsurprisingly, at the heart of his argument about eating in temples is the Lord’s Supper. To feast at the Lord’s table is to commune with him and with your Christian neighbor. The communion between me and you and Jesus happens as we all partake of the one loaf. Because we all eat of the one loaf there is only one body. As I am drawn into communion with Jesus, he draws me into communion with you.

1 Corinthians 10 is filled with fascinating examples of how Paul reads Scripture (the Law and the Prophets). Paul reads Scripture with the conviction that it is all written down for us, on whom the ends of the ages has come. That is, the resurrection of Christ has unveiled the Law and the Prophets so that we can see what the Old Testament Scriptures have always been about.

The Exodus, Noah’s ark, manna falling from heaven, the water from the rock, all of it has always been about Jesus Christ who “died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and was buried and was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4).

This forces us to reexamine the way we read the Old Testament. Is the truth of the Old Testament founded on its historical and scientific accuracy (as we modern people conceive of it), or is it founded on the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth who is the Truth itself?

Paul brings together the opening of the Scriptures and the breaking of the bread (communion) in 1 Corinthians. Luke, Paul’s disciple, puts these same two convictions together in Luke 24 with the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Their hearts burned within them as the resurrected Christ opened the Scriptures to show that they have always been about him. But the disciples still did not recognize him. It wasn’t until he took the bread, broke it, gave thanks and gave it to them that their eyes were opened.

Scripture and communion are tied together at the deepest level: the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

In communing together at the Lord’s table we are taught to see Jesus in Scripture and in the faces of our neighbors. Why else would Jesus disappear from the disciples sight when they finally recognized him in Luke 24? They had eaten of the one loaf and so they were now his body. To see Jesus rightly is to see you rightly.

Diagram: This diagram is from Fr. John Behr on the relationship between the Old and New Testament. The cross has always been the center—the true meaning—of the Old Testament. The New Testament does not “add” anything “new” to the Law and the Prophets. Rather it provides a clarifying “image.” It focuses our attention on the cross.

Maximus the Confessor (6th century) explains the relationship between the Old and New Testament by using the language of Hebrews 10:1: “For ‘shadow’ refers to the things of the Old Testament, ‘image’ to things of the New Testament, and ‘truth/reality’ to the future state.”

St. Augustine (4th century) writes: “For only in Christ is there removed not the reading of the Old Testament, which keeps hidden the strength of grace, but the veil by which it is hidden.”

In 1 Corinthians 9 Paul continues his extended argument about eating meat sacrificed to idols. Paul holds up his own practices as an apostle as an example for the Corinthians to follow. He has certain rights that are his as an apostle. According to the Law and Jesus’ teachings, ministers should be financially supported in the work of ministry. But Paul renounces his right to financial support from the Corinthians.

In this way he not only preaches the gospel, but embodies it. Gordon Fee explains Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 9 like this:

In offering the “free” gospel “free of charge,” his own ministry becomes a living paradigm of the gospel itself.

Fee is right, I think, but doesn’t put it strongly enough. Paul’s life is not just a paradigm—or an example—of the gospel, the very life of Christ is happening in Paul’s life. Paul’s life is mysteriously participating in the life of Jesus.

The life of Jesus takes the shape of humility and self-emptying. In Philippians 2:5—11 Paul quotes a hymn that early believers were already singing to the resurrected Christ:

Although being in the form of God,

New Testament scholar Michael Gorman finds a basic pattern in this hymn that Paul utilizes all throughout his letters:

“Although [x], not [y] but [z].”

“Although [status/rights], not [selfishness] but [humility/self-emptying].”

Paul uses the same pattern in 2 Corinthians 8:9:

For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ,

You can see the pattern clearly here: “Although [Christ was rich], he did not [hold on to his wealth] but [he became poor for us].”

In 1 Corinthians 9 we see that Paul’s life is taking on this same pattern of the Christ hymn from Philippians 2: “Although [he is an apostle], he does not [exercise his rights as an apostle] but rather [becomes a slave to all].”

And Paul is inviting the Corinthians who feel they are free to eat meat (their right!) to have this same song of Christ sung in and through them.

But this is key: Michael Gorman points out, the word “although” is not in the Greek text of Philippians. He argues it would be better translated “because.” It is precisely because Jesus is God that he empties himself for the sake of others. Jesus isn’t acting differently than God in his humility and self-emptying; he is acting in accordance with who God is! Because Jesus is God he empties himself.

This hymn is the very shape of God’s being. And the work of the Spirit is to hymn us into Christ—to make us precisely who we were created to be. It is precisely because we are hymned into Christ by the Spirit that our lives take on the same character of humility and self-emptying. This is who God is and we have been brought into him and made to sing his song along with him.

Diagram: This diagram is from Fr. John Behr on the relationship between the Old and New Testament. The cross has always been the center—the true meaning—of the Old Testament. The New Testament does not “add” anything “new” to the Law and the Prophets. Rather it provides a clarifying “image.” It focuses our attention on the cross.

Maximus the Confessor (6th century) explains the relationship between the Old and New Testament by using the language of Hebrews 10:1: “For ‘shadow’ refers to the things of the Old Testament, ‘image’ to things of the New Testament, and ‘truth/reality’ to the future state.”

Gregory the Great (4th century) strikingly puts the matter like this in a homily on Ezekiel: “See how when we want to clarify the meaning of a passage in Ezekiel, we settle the matter at issue from one of the Gospels.”

After taking some time on the complicated issue of how Christianity relates to Judaism (or how the gospel relates to the Torah), we launched into 1 Corinthians 8. The new issue Paul is addressing is whether or not the Corinthian Christians are free to eat meat sacrificed to idols in the pagan temples.

Surprisingly, Paul does not give a straightforward answer. Elsewhere in the New Testament the Apostles are clear that gentiles are forbidden to eat meat sacrificed to pagan gods (Jerusalem Council in Acts 15:28-29).

Paul comes at the issue from a different angle. There are those in the Corinthian congregation that see themselves as “spiritually elite” because they “possess knowledge.” They think that eating meat sacrificed to idols is not a huge deal because there is only one God and the idols are merely lifeless statues that can neither help or harm them. They also know that eating food cannot bring you closer to or further away from God.

Paul doesn’t fully disagree, but he challenges them on other grounds. He writes, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). There are others in the congregation who have weaker consciences who could be “destroyed” by those with “knowledge” eating meat sacrificed to idols in the pagan temples.

Paul argues that those with knowledge “do not yet know as they ought to know.” Their knowledge that there is only one true God is right. Their knowledge that food cannot draw them away from the one God is right. But they’ve forgotten the identity of this one true God.

For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. (1 Cor. 8:6)

Effectively, Paul begins to answer their question of whether or not they are free to eat meat by identifying the one true God. Put differently, he discussing the doctrine of the Trinity. He is saying, “Don’t forget who the one true God is! Jesus of Nazareth—the one who is fully God and fully human, the one who ate with tax collectors and sinners, the one who lived his whole life for the sake of others, the one who identifies with the poor and the weak—is God.”

The Corinthians with “knowledge” have started from an abstract idea of who God is. Their information about this God is accurate, but they’ve failed to specifically identify him. Who is Jesus? He is God become human. He is God become your neighbor. And if you are to love this particular God with all you heart, soul, mind, and strength, then you will love your neighbor as yourself!

Loving your “weaker” neighbor is how you love this particular God!

The saying goes: “To know her is to love her.” Paul is saying, “To know this God is to love your neighbor.”

For Paul knowledge/truth are not at odds with love. Real knowledge is always the truth in love because the truth is a person (Jesus), not some abstract bit of data.

This is why the Corinthians who have knowledge “do not yet know how they ought to know.” To know the truth of anything is to know it in and through Jesus—in love. Any way of speaking or acting that keeps us from loving our neighbors, no matter how factually accurate it is, cannot be true. It is sinning against Christ (1 Cor. 8:12). There is no love and so there is no truth.

The Corinthians with “knowledge” may well be right that there are no other gods to worry about and that food doesn’t harm them because it cannot keep them from God. But eating this food in the pagan temples does keep them from their neighbors. When you identify the true God, you find that he cannot be known truly without loving and caring for your neighbors.

To know Him is to love you.

Here is the quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermon on 1 Corinthians 13 given in London in 1934:

Perfect understanding is perfect love…In order even to be able to see something, we need to love it. If we are indifferent toward a person or a thing, we will never understand it. We will always misunderstand a thing or a person we hate. Only a person whom we love can we fully know. We will know only as much about a person as we love in him or her.

1 Corinthians 7 presents some interesting challenges. It has been widely misunderstood throughout church history, often with terrible consequences. If not read carefully it can sound like Paul is against marriage, despises women, and sees sex as dirty and defiling.

But a closer reading reveals that, far from being bossy and close-minded about sex and marriage, Paul is actually quite flexible and humble regarding these matters. And this brings us to the odd dimension of this chapter: Paul is very careful to distinguish when he is delivering commands from the Lord and when he is delivering his own convictions and opinions.

In other words, Paul holds space open for the Corinthians to exercise discernment in the Spirit over these matters for themselves.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays describes 1 Corinthians 7 like this:

This chapter, perhaps more than any other in the New Testament, actively invites us into he process of moral deliberation.

Part of the key to a close reading of this chapter is realizing who Paul is addressing throughout:

1 Cor. 7:1-7: Paul’s advice to married couples

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the chapter is Paul’s conviction that, for Christians, the single life is not only capable of being a fulfilled life, but that it is actually the preferred way of life for Christians.

This is a challenge to our romanticized idealizations of marriage and the family. For Paul, marriage and the family are not the end-all, be-all of life. Paul’s argument challenges our idolizations of the biological family. Christianity has been (and still is) a challenge to the family and to family loyalties.

Stanley Hauerwas puts it like this:

When the church loses the significance of singleness, I suspect it does so because Christians no longer have confidence that the Gospel can be received by those who have not been, so to speak, “raised in it.” Put differently: Christian justifications of the family may often be the result that Christians no longer believe the Gospel is true.

In other words, our biological families are not the hope for our future. Jesus is.

We finished the class discussing the difficult issue of divorce and remarriage. What has to be remembered in these discussions is that the acts of Jesus are how we interpret the words of Jesus. Jesus’ words can be easily abstracted from his actions and turned into heavy laws that we have control over and then drape around the necks of other people.

As Ray Anderson puts it:

Jesus said that if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. But he never mutilated anyone. He healed broken hands. Jesus said that if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. But he never plucked any eyes out. He healed blinded eyes.

The actions of Jesus show us that all his words and teachings must be understood as bringing wholeness, healing, and liberation. And Jesus is alive today! Jesus is still ministering among us, still bringing healing and restoration, still making all things new. We have to interpret Jesus’ teachings through his actions of ministry and healing.

Ray Anderson gives us a strong warning:

We dare not use the word of God to nullify the works of God.

In 1 Corinthians 6 Paul continues to address the specific problems within the Corinthian community (lawsuits and sexual immorality), but with an interesting twist. He frames their disunity in terms of eschatology. For Paul the future of the whole world (which just is the risen Christ) has already arrived ahead of time in the middle of time. Paul encourages the Corinthians to live into that future now in the midst of the present.

For Paul the Corinthians’ issues all boil down to disunity within the church-community. Whether it is sexual immorality, members taking other members to court, etc., the issue is that individuals are putting themselves before the community.

In 1 Cor. 15 Paul uses the image of the first and second Adam. The first Adam was an “animated being” with breath in his lungs. The second Adam (Christ) became a “life-giving spirit.” The first Adam breathes only for himself. His whole life is about preserving his own breath by whatever means necessary. The second Adam does not try to preserve his own breath, but hands his breath over (John 19:30) for the sake of others. His breathing (the Spirit!) gives life rather than taking it.

Those who have been “washed, sanctified, and justified” in Christ, the second Adam, are called to live into the future that Jesus has made a reality right now.

The church-community is to be a congregation, an embassy, and outpost that is from the future God intends for all things. That is our reality whether we realize it or not. Our calling is to live in the world and with one another bearing witness to God’s ultimate future. By the power of the Spirit that Christ has given to us we are called to live in such a way that we “bear more pain than we inflict on the world” (Tim Keller).

1 Cor. 6:12—14 is almost universally acknowledge by scholars to be a dialogical argument between Paul and the Corinthians. Paul quotes popular slogans from the Corinthians and then provides his rejoinder. Here’s how I think that works in this passage:

Before jumping into 1 Corinthians 5, this week we took some time to unpack the distinction between the heart and the conscience. The distinction is key, I think, to understanding how Paul is continuing to make judgments of the Corinthian congregation (1 Cor. 5) even after he has made the point in 1 Cor. 4 that only Christ is the final judge with the last word.

(My thanks to Chris Green for helping me think through the distinction between the heart and the conscience. He wrote up his response to my question on his substack, which you can find here.)

Making a distinction between the heart and the conscience is not a necessary way of speaking. Depending on what people mean by the terms, they may be completely interchangeable and that can be a perfectly fine way of speaking. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, however, critiques the conscience as something that is a result of the fall. Conscience is at the root of sin. For Bonhoeffer, the conscience is “in no way the voice of Christ” (Clifford Green). In this way of speaking, the conscience is always opposed to true faith because it is concerned only with self-justification. And I think Bonhoeffer’s critique is worth preserving.

Bonhoeffer puts it this way in his lecture notes for the underground seminary in Finkenwalde:

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 [vs. evil]...This is why there is no completely good or completely bad human being, as long as conscience [exists]. 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, as Bonhoeffer says it in Ethics: “Christ becomes our conscience.”

Chris Green put it to me like this:

Another way of getting at all this is to say that the heart is there first. We see it in the childlike response to injustice. The conscience develops, forms, over time. And often ends up stifling the childlikeness.

There is a type of judgment that comes from being united to Christ, which Paul displays in 1 Cor. 5. Paul is able to make a true judgment on the man who is sleeping with his father’s wife because Paul’s heart is rightly oriented to Christ. His judgment (“hand this man over to Satan”) is true only because it is for the man’s good (“so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord”).

We are called by Paul to make judgments in church (not outside, though!). But this is a whole new sort of judgment. It is patterned after the judgment of Jesus. Jesus’s judgment is always for others, not against them.

Our own faulty judgments that spring from our conscience are usually violating to our neighbors. They are attempts to exclude them for the sake of exclusion. This is the problematic judgment of the conscience. But Paul’s judgment on this man is a judgment to exclude him for the sake of including him.

If we are ever going to make truthful judgments of others and of ourselves, Christ must become our conscience. His love for others has to become our love for them.

The judgment of God is always for us and our neighbors. It has as its aim reconciliation, not division. The gospel reveals that God is not against us. He is for us. But as Paul is showing us here God will be against us if he has to be, but only ever for us. It’s like the judgment of a surgeon. A surgeon only ever applies the knife against the patient to remove what is killing him.

George Macdonald explains the “fire” of God’s judgment this way:

It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship; but that the fire will burn us until we worship; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force.

Diagram: The heart is the deep center of us, the place where God speaks to us. The conscience (our faculty of judgment which is formed by the way we were raised, by the time in which we were born, and the communities we belong to) develops over time and ends up imprisoning the heart (creating what Scripture calls a “hard heart”). Our hearts cannot lie to us, but they can be deceived. The conscience can pull the heart in all sorts or directions because it “pretends to be the voice of God.” True faith—the process of discipleship—is about having our hearts rightly oriented to Christ as our conscience. Discipleship is about Christ becoming our true center, giving us a clean heart (not a clean conscience!), teaching us his truth in our inward being, and making known to us his wisdom in our secret heart (Ps. 51). The conscience deals in abstractions, ideas, rules, and laws. Discipleship (or, the process of sanctification) is about coming into alignment not with our ideas of Jesus, but with the person of Jesus. Christ must becomes our conscience.

Last week we discussed the “secret” to getting along with one another in church: holding all our opinions and judgments with open hands and with a kind of levity and lightness; recognizing the Lord has the Last Word on all things.

This week is a kind of part two to last week. In 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 Paul teaches us the key to taking our judgmental hands off of our neighbors and ourselves. It’s a liberating message; truly good news! You don’t have to carry the burden of being the final judge and arbiter of others or even yourself. In Jesus we find that freedom.

The key, as Paul outlines it, is to recognize that your conscience (that part of you that acts as the judge of all things, adjudicating between good and evil) is not God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it, our consciences bring about disunity with God, our neighbors, and ourselves. It attempts to make us “gods against God.”

Bonhoeffer says:

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.

We have to have the ability to make a distinction between our conscience and the final judgment of the Lord Jesus. Paul is clear that the conscience is involved in “pre-judice” (literally, judgment “before the time, before the Lord comes”). Judgment of others and ourselves “before the time” is prejudice, and we must recognize the provisional and secondary nature of those judgments. They are not the Last Word on anything.

But there is another key distinction we have to make between the conscience and the heart. The heart is the very center of who you are which is made by God, and is a good thing. The heart is the place where God speaks to you. (See this insightful lecture from Chris Green for more on the heart.)

The problem we come up against is that we have hard hearts—hearts of stone—which are insensitive. Having a heart of stone makes it so that there is no space between your conscience (the judgmental faculty in you) and your heart. You become your judgments and your judgments are final. They are God’s judgments.

The promise, as Ezekiel puts it, is that God will give us a new heart to replace the heart of stone. By his Spirit God gives us fleshy, tender hearts that are sensitive to his speaking.

A tender, fleshy heart provides space between you and the thoughts that occur to you from the periphery of your awareness, between you and the emotions that bubble up from within, and between you and your conscience, your prejudices (pre-judgments) that come to you without reflection. The tender heart God gives allows for a deeper self-awareness, which is intimately connected and intertwined with God-awareness.

John Calvin explains this intertwining of self-awareness and God-awareness like this:

Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.

The key is to have a heart that can pay attention and name the thoughts, emotions, and prejudices that come to you.

Diagram 1: In the “I-It” way of relating to others the “I” is in total control. Everyone else is made into an “It,” an object or a tool for the “I” to use. There is no genuine personhood granted to the “It.” It is the relationship of a master to a slave. It is possession. The “It” has no agency. The “It” has no voice; no ability to say “No” to the other.

Diagram 2: In the “I-You” way of relating we have genuine personhood on both sides. I am an “I” and you are an “I.” This begins in the ability to say “No” to another person. The “No” provides the other with a limit or boundary that they bump up against which lets them know they are dealing with another person, not an “It.” That limit teaches us that we are not God. We are limited. Our judgments are not God’s judgments. And it is Christ who makes possible the genuine relationship between “I” and “You.” He is the space between us that we must leave to others if we are to have a true relationship with them because his word is the Final Word.

Good Friday 2024

“Christians and Heathens” Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1944 from Tegel Prison)

I.

If any character in the Gospels embodies Bonhoeffer’s poem it is Simon of Cyrene. He goes to God in God’s own need, finds him poor and reviled, devoured by sin, weakness, and death, and stands by God in God’s own pain.

All three synoptic Gospels attest to Simon carrying Jesus’ cross for him. Curiously, though, the Gospel of John does not. In fact, it’s almost as if John goes out of his way to disagree.

John 19:17 “So they took Jesus, and carrying the cross by himself he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.”

Who carries Jesus’ cross? Does Simon help him shoulder his burden, or does Jesus carry it “by himself”? Or (as usual) does John have a theological point up his sleeve?