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Penetrating the Darkness (John 1:9-13)

The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world . . . yet the world knew him not. . . But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God [John 1:9-13].

In contrast to Matthew and Luke, who play the storytellers, charming us at Christmas with tales about angels and shepherds, a virgin birth in a stable, a villain named Herod and heroes like the Magi, John plays the theologian, starting off with a dazzling conundrum: the light by which everyone sees came into the world, yet the world didn’t see it.

We ought to be careful not to fall asleep on this text and piously nod our slumbering holiday approval, for John’s words bristle with oddities. After all, how could the very light that enlightens everyone, all men and all women, come into the world and not be recognized? Shouldn’t someone have noticed?

Today a growing number of people claim that there is no light -- not from within us and especially not from beyond us. For them, all "light-talk" is a delusion, exposed as such by the fact that the very light that is supposed to exist in us all has been seen by no one.

The more idealistic among us may also raise critical eyebrows over John’s claim. Many still cling to the belief that the light of a divinity is in us all -- a certain spark of God’s own life -- which, by means of direct introspection, one can detect. Indeed, the very order of nature, like the radiance of our souls, reveals the light of divine reason in us all.

So it would seem that if the light of the world became particularly intensified in a single human life, in the man Jesus, then many in the world surely would have recognized that light. The intensification of the same light that permeates all things might well leave us blinded by its brilliance, but it could hardly be said to have come into the world unperceived. Thus, once again, but on very opposite grounds, the Johannine claim that "the light that enlightens every man has come into the world" might be adjudged a delusion -- exposed as such by the myriad of spiritually enlightened observers who testify to having seen nothing in terms of light emanating from Christianity to warrant such a claim.

It is useless to defend the Johannine proclamation against such onslaughts by insisting that sin has so blinded the world that it cannot see the light. For if this were what John meant, surely he would have said so. Not that John was indifferent to or naïve about the reality of sin, nor that we would want to deny that human sin is a factor in the apparent paradox he presents. Nevertheless, it is clear from the whole Johannine context that the evangelist is not emphasizing that the light came into the world to demonstrate the world’s blindness. It is John who said that "God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him" (John 3: 17). And to force John’s Gospel into a reading whereby humanity is denigrated in order to build up God would merely add fuel to the protests of both our nihilistic and our idealistic fellow creatures. Would not such a reading confirm their suspicion that Christianity thrives on shame and guilt?

John does not let up in his penchant for paradox. After observing that not only his own world but "his own people" failed to receive the true light, he suddenly turns and salutes "all who receive [the light], who believed in his name," to whom "he gave power to become children of God." Is this turnabout not doubly baffling? For not only must we wrestle with the paradox of the world’s light shining unnoticed, but we are confronted by the seemingly contradictory assertion that though the "world" (presumably everybody) knew him not, nevertheless some received the light, some "believed in his name" and became "children of God" -- not of their own fleshly will but by the power of God. Are we therefore to conclude that although none of us can, naturally and spontaneously, see the light for what it is, God elects a few who are able to see? Such a predestinarian reading would ultimately violate John’s larger intention. But the fact that it even suggests itself underscores our central question as to how John can claim that the light of the world came into the world unperceived.

The difficulty of discerning a systematic consistency in John is less a function of some fundamental confusion in his thought than of his remarkable mirroring of the way in which we all must hold our faith. The poet Robert Frost once observed that "heaven gives its glimpses only to those not in position to look too close," as when one sees a flower from the window of a speeding train. One sees, responds and is profoundly affected. Nevertheless, one cannot answer questions as to the variety of the briefly seen flower; one only knows that one saw its beauty. Like such fleeting visions, God’s revelation cannot be inerrantly recorded, processed or made serviceable. Yet in faith we "see" that it is the most real and abiding thing we possess.

There is more to an infant’s pathetic cry in a cold, dark stable than meets the eye, and sometimes we are even privileged to see that something more. John, in his paradoxical insistence that the world cannot see the light which supposedly enlightens it, would not, I think, deny that even the unknowing, seemingly uncaring world sees glimpses of light -- as in the case of our annual philistine rush to the crèche of neon and plastic. Despite the self-indulgence and crassness of the season, are there not moments when even the worldliest of the world’s worldly show signs of having glimpsed a flickering of light that they perhaps can barely make out, but which they secretly hope reflects the reality of their own best selves?

The Christ child was born, came to maturity, was crucified, resurrected and ascended. He did not leave behind a solid body of certainties for us to base our lives on, but what he did give -- memories and promises and his spirit -- is enough. It would be truly horrendous to be in the hands of an all-intrusive God who never left us alone, and who, when it came time to send his messiah, sent one who ruled the earth like some heavenly Mussolini. In the very unobtrusiveness of the light of Christ, God honors our finite freedom.

As we in our various ways all know, the existential cost of such freedom is high. Certainly part of that cost is the frequent feeling that heaven has turned its back on us and that all our buoyant talk about our freedom is simply another way of admitting that we have been left orphaned in the world. Yet Christmas exposes the potential for self-pity in such feelings -- exposes it as the infantile regression it is. We are in fact no more orphaned in the world than was the son of God when he left heaven and came to earth. There is always light enough for both God’s will and human destiny to get themselves accomplished. The infant Christ was not blinded by his birth. He saw in the faces of his parents, the shepherds and the Magi -- and perhaps even the beasts of the stable -- the light of life and freedom that is God’s light. Indeed, he saw the image of himself in us. We take our darkness far too seriously, perhaps, when it is something an infant can see through.

Pagels’s Augustine: The Dark Prophet of Grace

Book Review: Adam, Even and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels. (Random House, 189 pp.)

Elaine Pagels has established her reputation by making the seemingly arcane topic of patristics, the theology of the early church, into a subject for celebrated and briskly selling books. As a follow-up to The Gnostic Gospel, which won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circles Award, the Princeton University professor has now published Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (Random House, 189 pp., $17.95)

With considerable simplicity and charm, Pagels begins her latest book assuming that the rise of Christianity is itself a very compelling business and that anyone willing to take a look will inevitably find themselves drawn to the topic. One of Pagels’s goals is to indicate how profoundly the Western world has been influenced by the patristic period, an acknowledgment resisted by many "secular humanist" historians. Pagels’s success will encourage greater recognition of the religious foundations of our civilization, and lead even secularists to face the religious dimensions of their own post-Christian commitments.

Reversing what she sees as a trend among historians, Pagels focuses not on the ways in which Christians were similar to their "pagan neighbors" (an emphasis useful in overcoming overstatements about the uniqueness of the early church) , but instead explores, in Tertullian’s phrase, the "peculiarities of the Christian society." However diluted and reinterpreted by Hellenistic culture it may have been, Christianity changed the evolution of the ancient world.

It would be too strong to say that the villain of her piece is St. Augustine; nevertheless, resistance to "Augustine’s singular dominance in much of Western Christian history" is central. Pagels acknowledges here an early admiration for Augustine’s "perceptive and candid" insights in the Confessions, and says she once took as a given the allegedly superficial rationalism of Augustine’s Pelagianist foes. Her Western Christian assumptions on these matters began to crumble, however, as she recognized the extent of Augustine’s departure from the mainstream of Catholic Christianity. As Pagels shows, from the second century to even the early Augustine himself, there was no real precedent for Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. She asks: Since the representatives of Christian orthodoxy, from Justin through Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, and Origen, had denounced gnostic interpretations of Genesis in the name of moral freedom, how could the majority of Christians in the fifth century be persuaded to give up this primary theme of Christian doctrine -- or, at least, to modify it radically -- following Augustine’s reinterpretation of Adam’s sin?

Also central to her book is the contention that in their opposition to the totalitarian Roman state, "Christians forged the basis for what would become, centuries later, the western ideas of freedom and of the infinite value of each human life." Pagels grants that many Christians were themselves slave owners, yet says others went among the Roman Empire’s wretched outcasts with the message of radical equality -- that class, education and gender "made no difference."

Pagels is a liberal democrat who stresses the liberty of the individual vis-à-vis the state. Thus the egalitarianism she "finds" in the early church does not lead her to pay even lip service to the fashionable Marxist, collectivist readings of the Christian ideal found in many seminaries. On the basis on her frankly Jeffersonian reading of the early church, she concludes, "Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society -- a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation, but by the voluntary choice of its members."

While Pagels argues that the phenomenon of pre-Augustinian Christian celibacy was an expression of this early Christian impulse toward freedom (rather than of a hatred of nature or the body) , she thinks Augustine’s defense of celibacy is the very antithesis of freedom. Pagels points out how promiscuity and immorality in the late Roman Empire resulted in widespread infanticide and abortion, as well as a slave trade in child prostitutes who were treated, in Justin’s phrase, "like herds of oxen, goats, or sheep." Sexual exploitation of the unborn, the new born and youth of both sexes, together with the fact that even free men and women were expected to marry (usually arranged) and bear and rear children as a duty to empire and family, meant for many Christians that the only route to personal liberty led through the "freedom" of celibacy. "Christian renunciation, of which celibacy is the paradigm, offered freedom -- freedom, in particular, from entanglement in Roman society."

But for Augustine celibacy was a different matter. Rather than viewing it as a decision made for the sake of living a life free from the world’s demands, Augustine agonized over the "evils" of sexuality in a doctrinal context that virtually denied the human capacity for free moral decision. Indeed, according to Pagels, Augustine viewed personal freedom "as total, obstinate perversity." She notes that Augustine accuses even those who are able to restrain "their passions through self control, leading temperate, just and holy lives," of neurosis, acting out of "illness" induced by "guilt." Augustine thought no one capable of righteous self-control, and thus, for him, "even the most advanced ascetic confronts the same continual insurrection within."

This "insurrection" stems from the initial sin of Adam and Eve, through which humanity not only lost the capacity to choose to live sinlessly, but which altered nature itself. For Augustine, there was literally no death prior to this fall, but as a divine punishment, nature itself now conspires against the fallen, morally enslaved children of the fallen first parents. Augustine claimed that "all nature was changed for the worse." Pagels comments: "Humankind, once harmonious, perfect and free, now, through Adam’s choice, is ravaged by mortality and desire, while all suffering, from crop failure, miscarriage, fever and insanity to paralysis and cancer, is evidence of the moral and spiritual deterioration that Eve and Adam introduced." Pagels finds Augustine’s pessimism inimical to democracy. Indeed, a humanity so utterly depraved must be strongly governed lest in its sin it destroy itself. Pagels concludes:

"Throughout western history this extreme version of the doctrine of original sin, when taken as the basis for political structures, has tended to appeal to those who, for whatever reason, suspect human motives and the capacity for self-government."

At one point, in what appears a clever lawyerlike play, Pagels discredits Augustine’s doctrine of the literal fall of Adam and Eve with the observation that it is hopelessly unscientific, and as a historian she feels compelled to add that Augustine’s great foe, Pelagius, would also have had no use for science. Nevertheless, Augustine’s insights are by modern standards more "scientific" than the Pelagian optimism regarding the possibility of moral freedom which Pagels appears to endorse.

Pelagians maintained that each individual is born into the world with the innocence of the first man and woman, and that each individual has the capacity to live a perfectly virtuous life. Indeed, the Pelagians claimed there were people who lived before Christ, or who lived after Christ but had never heard of him, who were nonetheless capable of earning their own salvation. Though they were without knowledge of Christ’s atoning work, their lives were blameless.

If Augustine’s modern, secular children Marx and Freud have taught us anything, it is that the idea that we are unaffected by the sins, economic interests and neuroses of our parents, class, nation, race and gender is absurd. In denying that our morality is affected by the actions (not to say sins) of others, Pelagianism represents moral individualism gone mad. And even if we do consider individuals as isalated entities, Augustine’s exposure of the moral ambiguity of every human initiative and intention -- indeed, the impossibility of even knowing for certain our real motives -- renders pure Pelagianism incomprehensible.

In another oversight, Pagels argues for the unprecedented character of Augustine’s doctrine, cutting Augustine off from the psychological and spiritual agonizing of the apostle Paul. Pagels is correct insofar as Augustine had a one-sided reading of Paul. However, Augustine had some extremely valid insights into the Pauline insistence on our radical dependence on grace, and unlike most of his Catholic predecessors Augustine caught something of the Pauline sense that everything is finally held in the electing hand of God: "For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all" (Rom. 11:32) Clearly, Augustine didn’t invent such themes. He believed that his doctrine of original sin was but a commentary on Paul’s thought, such as in Romans 1:24-25: "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator." Augustine set out to reassert Pauline Christianity, and he argued it with passion and comprehensiveness to an age rendered ready to hear it by the collapse of Rome. I find it less surprising than does Pagels that Augustinian views should have had such a powerful impact.

That Augustine’s is an overly dark reading of Paul is obvious. But it would be a mistake to suppose that an Augustinian emphasis on original sin or predestination (which, oddly, Pagels does not discuss) leads inevitably to a denial of the right of civil protest or to passive submission to authority. It is worth recalling that the Reformation was born of a Pauline and Augustinian revival, and that Calvinism remained the most revolutionary force in Europe for over a century. It’s true that the Jeffersonian contribution to our nation’s independence and its democratic structures has kinship with Pelagianism. But the Calvinist contribution to American political thinking must be noted with at least equal emphasis.

Pagels ignores altogether the fact that it was in the Byzantine Empire, where Augustinianism never had any appeal and where the old Pelagian understanding of free will prevailed, that the church was most radically and stubbornly subservient to imperial claims. One might well ask why and how it was that the bishops gathered by Constantine in Nicaea in 325, some three-quarters of a century before Augustine’s Confessions, accepted imperial patronage and privilege as if it were the church’s long-overdue right. Why was there so little protest in the name of religious liberty when Constantine deposed the Arian bishops?

Pagels fails to acknowledge that the roots of Christianity’s ready acceptance of a Christianized Roman imperialism and all the religious repression necessary to maintain it had nothing to do with Augustine. That move began much earlier, with the same second-century apologists whom she extols as champions of liberty. True, as a persecuted minority, they wanted religious freedom and called for a new society. But what was the alternative they sought to the rule of Rome with its evil pluralism and permissiveness? Clearly, they did not envision a society dedicated to the principle of pagan free speech.

The apologists saw Christianity as the fulfillment of the best of Hellenistic monotheistic philosophy, and not infrequently boasted about the superiority of Christianity as a religion and an ethic. In wondering at the injustice of so excellent a people as Christians being persecuted, the apologists offered a hint of how useful such a movement as Christianity could be in cementing the Pax Romana. In the light of the fact that Jesus (or the apologist Justin, for that matter) was killed by Rome, we must ask, Who made the greatest compromise, the church or its new Roman patron? Did Rome become less authoritarian, or had the preAugustinian church begun a sell-out to Roman authority and in so doing lost the distinction between Christ’s kingdom and the kingdoms of this world?

Whereas Pagels discusses second-century theologians who offer alternatives to Augustine’s problematic freedom, she ignores the great "heretic" Marcion, who finally concluded that the creator of a world in which there is so much evil is a deeply flawed deity, the very God from whom we must be redeemed. Far more than the wildly speculative gnostic Christians to whom Pagels devotes a chapter, Marcion, standing squarely in the Old Testament, was able to hit orthodox Christianity where it lived -- at the link between the Father and the Son, and its contention that the creator of the world was also its redeemer.

The only theologian of the era who came to grips with Marcion’s pessimism about creation was Irenacus, whose genius Pagels underestimates. Irenacus did not blunt the hard texts of Scripture by moralisms and allegory, nor did he resort to the naivet6 of Pelagianism, imagining that the problems of sin and death can be overcome by good works. Irenaeus taught that God created Adam and Eve as innocent but immature beings. Thus, God created humanity so that in the process of our coming to maturity we might contribute to the completion of our own created nature. Adam’s sin was deeply lamentable, but it is not bound up in the cosmic catastrophe that either Marcion or the later Augustine envisioned. Given Adam’s immaturity, sin might have been almost expected.

In answer to Marcion’s challenge as to how a supposedly loving God dared create a universe in which evil was all but inevitable, Irenaeus maintained that God’s justification lay in the deifying work of Jesus Christ and God’s power to redeem the creation he has placed at so great a risk. Irenaeus did, as Pagels claims, sometimes reflect a naively "Pelagian" view of freedom. For Irenaeus, however, our freedom was the fruit not of our own wills but of the liberating, ransoming work of Jesus Christ, who came both to free us from death’s stronghold and to complete our created natures by binding us to his deifying incarnation. Christ’s incarnation and cross not only set us free, but they rescued God’s honor from the charge that he has led us out into the desert of this world to die. Surely Irenaeus had the more biblical view of Christian liberty.

In comparing the great theologians of the patristic period, both Augustine and Irenaeus, despite their vast differences, are theologians of grace -- they operate within the same circle of faith. For Pelagius, however, human freedom had nothing to do with the work of Christ. Despite his problematic nature described by Pagels, Augustine, the dark prophet of Christ’s grace, can be adequately corrected only by theologians equally committed to Christ’s grace.

Anselm Kiefer: Art as Atonement

Born March 8, 1945, less than two months before the suicide of Adolf Hitler, German artist Anselm Kiefer is far too young to remember firsthand the Führer and his "1,000-year Reich.’’ Nonetheless, the Nazi catastrophe is Kiefer’s all-consuming subject. Hitler’s perversion of the German nation and culture is the deep shadow that sometimes merely lurks in the background of Kiefer’s art, but more often darkens the entire foreground. Somber, guilt-ridden, accusing, mocking, enigmatic -- Kiefer’s vision of life, religion, ideology, national identity and history has been charred by the flames of the Holocaust. Many of his later canvases look like they have been worked over with a blow torch in order to bring them to completion. One of his favorite techniques is to pour a blob of melted lead onto his already ashen canvas. which serves to heighten the suggestion of incineration. One cannot help but ask. Are we looking inside the oven chambers of the crematoria?

Kiefer is a self-conscious, deliberately "German’’ artist. As such, he is engaged in profound dialogue with his heritage. Many allusions to German culture and history in his work are likely to go unrecognized by the first-time American viewer, especially anyone who has not read some of the growing critical literature on Kiefer or the excellent guide by Mark Rosenthal to the Kiefer exhibition now touring the United States. For example, frequently appearing in his works are zinc bathtubs which function variously -- sometimes as a crucible of blood, sometimes as a representation of the English Channel (and Germany’s failure to cross it in World War II) In another instance Kiefer utilizes a photograph of a bathtub apparently filled with glassy smooth water on whose surface the artist himself stands while giving the Nazi salute. The irony of this allusion is compounded if one knows that in the 1930s and ‘40s the Nazi Party allocated such tubs for every German home to ‘‘insure a minimum standard of hygiene." Or that a joke current during the Nazi period was that Hitler walked on water because he could not swim. But such knowledge is not essential for the viewer to be seized by the biting force of Kiefer’s use of the bathtub image.

Two of Kiefer’s works that bear the same title -- ‘‘Ways of Worldly Wisdom" -- gain impact if one realizes that he borrowed the title from Bernhard Jansen, a sanguine Jesuit theologian who in the 1920s, in his apologetic efforts to give rational justification for Catholicism, drew on the writings of a number of German philosophers who, ironically, also proved to be useful foils in the apologetics of Nazi ideologues. Yet one does not need to know such facts in order to be directly affected by Kiefer’s paintings. The intent of both versions of ‘‘Ways of Worldly Wisdom’’ is evident. as the artist superimposes the faces and/or the names of various German thinkers against the background of a brooding dark forest, with lines of connection drawn in a random, snaky and seemingly mindless manner from individual to individual like a psychotic flow chart. It matters little that the viewer may not be familiar with all the thinkers’ names or their specific ideas: the larger point is powerfully made: Germany’s present moral and spiritual crisis -- and the residue of guilt that Kiefer contends still haunts its people -- is a continuing development of the very Germanic mind-set which Nazism was able to draw upon. albeit in its own uniquely perverse way.

To what extent Germany is fairly represented in Kiefer’s ideological campaign, the Germans themselves are in a far better position than I to decide. The value of Kiefer’s work for Americans, however, lies in his ability to stand on his self-chosen Teutonic foundations and yet give universal significance to symbols which in the hands of a lesser artist would yield only a parochial, nation-bound statement (many lesser German artists are trying to plow the same ground as Kiefer. but by and large they are producing works marked by shrill sensationalism) Kiefer’s work asks us all such questions as. Is the German war guilt merely a peculiarly intense manifestation of the universal blood guilt of the human race? Are Nazi atrocities simply extreme examples of the atrocities required of all nations and classes if they arc to survive? One need not even agree with the premise of such a question to grant the importance of its being raised. (One wonders what the Reinhold Niebuhr of Moral Man and Immoral Society would have thought about the working premises of Kiefer’s art.)

Kiefer is a deliberately, if idiosyncratically, religious painter. Allusions to his own strangely skewed versions of Christianity, Judaism, gnosticism and alchemy abound, and he has acknowledged that he thinks a great deal about religion ‘‘because science provides no answers." Consider. for example. his powerful two-paneled work titled ‘‘Father, Son. Holy Ghost.’’ On the upper panel is painted and drawn an architectural interior. Interior scenes of neoclassic National Socialist architecture arc a frequent subject for Kiefer, but in this work he depicts the crudely built interior of an attic that looks much like the barracks of a concentration camp. With its three steamy windows, the interior is empty except for three faintly drawn burning chairs suggesting the Trinity as it is being consumed in the fires of the Holocaust. The lower panel pictures the floor of a dense pine forest -- romantically mysterious, confining and bleak. From the living timber of stark, impenetrable nature comes the raw wood of human cruelty and the burning seats of our religious hopes. The ‘‘God is dead’’ theologians and our current theological deconstructionists can claim a profound ally in Kiefer.

In ‘‘The Order of the Angels.’’ one of his later paintings using the ideas of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Kiefer paints a singed, forlorn landscape. Out of the cramped sky of the upper-right-hand corner, irregular and broken lead strips serve to symbolize a halting emanation of angels (each with its name painted on celestial placards) , down from the sky to the earth’s surface. Thus grounded, each angel’s name is replaced by a number, and the emanated angels themselves are portrayed as snakes, wriggling on the scorched earth. Good and evil, God and death are intimately juxtaposed, like yin and yang. It has been suggested by some that Kiefer intends to leave the viewer bewildered by such pictures. But I find them about as bewildering as a roundhouse punch aimed at the nose.

A very recent work, "Iron Path" (1986) , shows a bleak, gray, incinerated landscape in which a railway track leads from the foreground to a junction at which the track splits and goes off in two directions to nowhere. "Iron Path" evokes the photographs of the railyards at Auschwitz, and like most of Kiefer’s recent paintings, it is very large.

His work "Osiris and Isis" (1985-1987) , however, is downright huge (150" by 220 1/2’’) It pictures a massive copper-toned pyramid. Copper wires lead from the top down to the base, where the wires terminate in bits of ceramic fragments. Combining in Kiefer’s own personalized and enigmatic way elements from ancient Egyptian religion and modern electrical power, the work’s specific message is imprecise. but its mood is oppressive and pessimistic. Is atomic power the new means by which the gods of Egypt and all other gods are to die again’? Are the wires the tentacles through which is transmitted the hellish energy of the modern world -- energy that makes our present environment as inhospitable in its own way as was that of National Socialist Germany in its?

The current exhibition of Kiefer’s work is too vast to allow descriptions of each painting. The very cost of mounting and moving so comprehensive a show (having closed in Chicago, it is now in Philadelphia and from there goes to Los Angeles and New York) makes it all the more remarkable that an artist who had generated so much hostility among so many critics at the beginning of the decade in both the United States and Germany would have survived the firestorm of criticism and receive solid support from such establishment stalwarts as the Lannan Foundation and the Ford Motor Company. It is a manifest indication of the extent to which, in our so-called postmodern context, alienation is still "in." In our age. the right talent at the right time can become prominent by raking over the ashes of Auschwitz. Certainly Kiefer’s success with the American art establishment is not unrelated to the fact that his art allows us to deflect our nagging awareness of our own national guilt (Hiroshima, Vietnam, racism, Imperialism) -- to the real beast, Adolf Hitler. There is a certain perverse comfort in assuring ourselves that while national crimes may be inevitable, nonetheless we are not in the same class as the Nazis.

To say that Kiefer is a modern German artist is tantamount to saying that he is an expressionist, for German art in the 20th century has been overwhelmingly expressionistic and existentialistic, There is a distinct line from such early 20th-century expressionists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Max Beckmann. Lovis Corinth, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde and the Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky to late 20th-century German art in general and to Kiefer in particular. Expressionism is an art which seeks, as critic Wieland Schonied puts it, "to fuse feeling and the object of feeling." The real subject of expressionist art is not the object itself but the artist’s feeling about the object. It is above all an art of "passion, the ecstatic assimilation and appropriation of the world.’’ Critic Christos M. Joachimides is also correct in asserting that "judged according to the aesthetic canon which developed from Post Impressionism, art as an existential assertion of the self is ugly art." (Both Schonied and Joachimides are quoted in German Art in the Twentieth Century. edited by Joachimides et al. [Prestel-Verlag, 1985],)

Even before World War I, German art had taken an expressionist turn. Often savage and always tinged with a sense of the tragic, it was an art deeply influenced by the existentialism and irrationalism of Friedrich Nietzsche. In many ways, the reason that the expressionistic, existentialistic, dialectical theology of Karl Barth’s Letter to the Romans, in all its drastic negation, caused such a sensation in Germany in 1922 just after the war was that the expressionist and existentialist mood was culturally far advanced there before the war. For many, the war simply confirmed the prophesies of the great German expressionists, What is true of post-World War I theology is also true of German philosophy. The most influential German philosopher between the wars was Martin Heideggear, whose indebtedness to Nietzsche and his spiritual kinship with the expressionists were obvious.

Because Nietzsche’s thought was appropriated by Hitler and Nazism (however legitimately or illegitimately the Nazis understood that self-contradictory philosopher -- and the jury is forever out on that question) , Nietzsche came under a cloud in Germany immediately after World War II. But such an eclipse could not be expected to last, and at present Germany is experiencing a Nietzschian revival, Kiefer is plainly indebted, as were his early 20-century German expressionist predecessors, to elements within the Nietzschian mind-set,

To be sure, Kiefer’s art does not simply repeat that of earlier expressionists. Nor was his appropriation of Nietzsche as enthusiastically apocalyptic as theirs, His art is post-Holocaust, post-Hitler. With benefit of hindsight, Kiefer can see more clearly than they the dark side of Nietzsche’s nihilistic exposd of the shallowness of hypocrisy, of 19th-century bourgeois culture -- an exposed that seemed liberating indeed to the early expressionists. Furthermore, partly under the influence of his great teacher, Joseph Beuys, Kiefer’s art is more historical and more self-consciously ideological than that of most of his expressionist forebears, whose orientation was generally more personal, psychological and sensual and far more coloristically vital. Nevertheless, like theirs, his art depends on passionate internalization of his subject -- even if it is a subject he does not personally admire.

In explaining his early books of artistic photography -- particularly Occupations, which contains many photos of him giving the Nazi salute against a variety of backgrounds -- Kiefer offers a comment that is consistent with his expressionistic need to "fuse" himself with his subject: "I do not identify with Nero or Hitler, but I have to re-enact what they did just a little bit in order to understand the madness. That is why I make these attempts to be a fascist."

With an almost messianic sense of mission, from the outset Kiefer took it upon himself to thrust the faces of his fellow Germans into the abrasive realities of their country’s Nazi past. Clearly he believes that a sizable residue of Hitler’s spirit still resides in the German soul. Is he also aware that if this is true, then the Nazi residue must reside in his own soul as well, and not simply as a matter of his romantically extravagant but deliberately self-controlled program to "be a fascist’’ (a decision he can turn on and off at will) ? I cannot say. However, Kiefer’s art raises serious questions in my own mind as to whether it may unwittingly help to nurture some of the very beliefs and attitudes he hates,

Kiefer does not, in my opinion, consciously intend finally to end in nihilism, Yet his determination never for one moment to permit the horror of the Nazi regime to leave the foreground, leads him to create a pictorial world which is fundamentally without faith, hope or love. Even where these virtues of the One who alone is the only perfect atonement are wistfully alluded to in Kiefer’s work, his constantly interjected reminder that all things are completely subject to the same corruption that Hitler brought upon German culture so overwhelms his visual field that nothing remains except scorched-earth, dead gods and the shattered ruins of the Third Reich. How can there be healing when Kiefer is driven by a need to open and ever reopen old sores?

In this decade Kiefer began a series of so-called "straw paintings" on which he glued stalks of straw, sometimes in patterns. sometimes randomly. As Mark Rosenthal observes, Kiefer "thinks of straw as a kind of manure that is a form of energy that provides warmth in the winter." Straw a symbol of hope? Perhaps, but it is also a symbol of fragility, impermanence and combustibility. As Rosenthal goes on to say," Kiefer is uncomfortable when his art is positive or perceived to be so," Thus, the use of straw, hinting as it does of a certain "manure of hope," is overwhelmed in the burned-out context of the artist’s larger vision, That which might have opened the door to hope is explored for its potential to symbolize despair.

Moreover, Kiefer’s bleak perspective is rendered in such massive, extremely well-crafted, grandiloquent dimensions! In their immensity, many .of his works are vaguely suggestive of Wagnerian opera sets or perhaps the huge wall-sized Baroque paintings of Peter Paul Rubens -- that is, if Rubens’s paintings had been reworked with a flamethrower. To give such monumentality to such unyielding hopelessness is to suggest -- perhaps even to demand -- that nihilism is the way and the truth and the life. Ironically, Hitler’s nihilistic starting point has been curiously surrendered to him by Kiefer, his sworn enemy.

In Kiefer’s art, God, if not dead, is a serpent. A god symbolized by a serpent is a god in whom good and evil are equal principles. Many moderns have argued that this is what history reveals ultimate reality to be -- sometimes benign and rich with the bounty of life, and other times cruel and unjust in its utter arbitrariness, Since life in this world is contradictory and brutally unfair, so too, such thinking concludes, must be the only God who is realistically conceivable. But is not such a schizoid god perfectly served by the schizoid ethics of those guards who could torture Jewish children in the death camps. then go home at night and gently bounce their own children on their knees? Did not the SS guards claim for themselves the status of heroes -- men (and in some cases women) who had the courage to keep in balance the appropriate brutality and the appropriate gentleness that a nihilistic view of ultimate reality requires of the "superman"?

From the beginning the relationship between Nazism and expressionism produced bitter ironies. Hitler’s repression of modern art is instructive in this regard. In 1937 in Munich, the Führer began a bizarre campaign against "degenerate art." The works of 112 modern artists. most of them German expressionists, were gathered in a large-scale traveling exhibition designed to illustrate what he termed the "degenerate Jew-boy" tendencies of those so-called "artists’’ who wished to inflict their "humbug" on the German people. Modern artists, Hitler argued. are either the victims of appalling defects of vision, or they are genetic mutants, or perhaps simply criminal frauds, Eyewitnesses claimed that in at least one of his harangues against modern art, he actually frothed at the mouth.

Hitler’s maniacal hatred of German expressionism stemmed, I think, from the fact that he had enough of an artist’s eye to discern something of what was going on. Expressionism opened the window to the madness (Augustine might have called it original sin) that is in us all. But Hitler, who supremely exemplified the kind of disorder that the expressionists gazed at in rapt fascination, could not face the self that their art exposed. Thus the inflated rhetoric of his speeches, so perversely expressionistic, was his own artistic self s outlet, although visually he could abide only the dull, oppressive grandiosity of National Socialist neoclassicism. Since Hitler could not face the searchlight that modern art turned on his personal madness, he was totally incapable of recognizing that in expressionism there was also a great deal of health -- above all, the health of its extravagant affirmation of life despite life’s ambiguity and tragedy.

Of course, not all the artists pilloried by Hitler would have seen themselves as his natural enemies. Indeed, Emil Nolde, whose subject matter was frequently the most specifically Christian of all the major expressionists. was himself a Nazi -- even though his work was singled out for particular abuse by the Nazi regime. As scholar Georg Bassmann (in German Art of the Twentieth Century) persuasively contends, had Hitler and Goebbels looked favorably on modern art, their support of it could have provided Nazism a bridge to the "liberal educated middle class." The German Art Society’s Management Committee saw this possibility when it informed the Nazi government, "We beg to be of service." Granting that modern art contained too many contradictions to have provided Germany with a "state art," Bassmann is no doubt correct in claiming that many artists could have been co-opted by the regime -- as were. I would add, many intellectuals, including Heidegger. Those artists who would have been willing to go along might have added powerful visual propaganda to Hitler’s own violent verbal expressionism.

For all his power and talent, Kiefer has not, I would argue, found the real truth of the human situation, and so there is a basic contradiction running through all his work. If it were actually true that everything we are and do is inevitably corruptible (including art and the artist) , and that all the fruit of human labor is but the meat and drink of corruption, why would Kiefer continue to create monuments to despair’? It is evident that despair and nihilism feed upon themselves. A supposedly meaningless world is an invitation to the next "superman" to arise and impose his own version of order upon it. Granted, Kiefer expresses loathing for Hitler. but since that very loathing is itself corruptible, why doesn’t Kiefer sink into quietism and create nothing, thus giving the inevitable corruptive process nothing with which to work?

The answer is, in part at least, that Kiefer is driven by a kind of truncated, forlorn sense of hope, which nonetheless he cannot permit to surface because of his programmatic need to resurrect the horror of the Holocaust as if it were the first thing to be said about everything. If only he could let go of his self-acknowledged (and self-induced) pessimism and embrace the truth about human sin.

Kiefer is a salient example of the way in which modern culture has generally lost its sense of sin and thus has fallen prey either to a Kieferesque self-consuming sense of irony and pessimism, on the one hand, or, on the other, to the shallow bourgeois denial of tragedy which Kiefer set himself to puncture. Without a faith in the living God, there can be no sense of sin. For sin is the radical acknowledgment that indeed something is wrong in the world, but it is also the recognition that at root what is wrong is our warped relationship to God. Therefore, since the living God is eternally in the right, we as God’s creatures can, by the righteous grace of the very One from whom we stand alienated, in fact be set right. The saying is true: a radical doctrine of sin is the most optimistic appraisal of the human condition possible -- consistent with realism. Realism, however frank, however uncompromisingly critical, ought never to be the occasion for black despair. While it is the hard reality that the Lord of life came into this world only to be brutally tortured and slain, it is equally the hard reality that he rose again and lives. As the ancients knew, "Christ became what we are that he might make us what he himself is," Thus the final reality is not that all works of human creativity are pervertible, but that they are redeemable.

Jeremiah’s Barbs (Jer. 31:31-34)

‘Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts: and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more" [Jer. 31:31-34].

Readers will decide for themselves about the usefulness of such self-pity. My point in bringing up this side of Jeremiah’s relationship to God in the context of our exultantly hopeful text is that it helps us see that even in his most reconciled and pious moments, Jeremiah still was not able to speak of God’s doings without sounding a note of chastisement.

Clearly, our text about the coming of a glorious new covenant contains one of Jeremiah’s not-so-hidden barbs. To be sure, Israel was guilty of having broken the covenant that God gave Moses, even though "I was their husband, says the Lord." On the other hand, that covenant was imperfect -- for it was breakable, and it was breakable precisely because God did not put his "law within them." God did not "write it upon their hearts" and in such an immediate way become "their God" and thus truly enable them, from their side, to be God’s "people."

If Jeremiah’s barbs are any indication, things haven’t changed much. For our part, we do not usually consult with God when we are confronted with life’s decisions. We do not wish to -- if only because we already have to contend with the opinions of wives or husbands, friends and enemies, relatives and employers. Also, God’s opinions would hopelessly complicate our essentially practical, pragmatic choices. We wouldn’t even know how to drag in the eternal in deciding, say, whether to buy an American or a Japanese car. Most of our decisions are strictly ours to make. Moreover, God is generally silent anyway. Even if I wanted God’s opinion on this, that or the other thing, I an unlikely to receive it. On the really weighty matters -- whether to murder or embezzle or slander or to entertain envy or lust -- I know what the answer is; even to ask would be an impertinence.

Most believers do a fairly good job where the self-evidently hideous, personal sins are concerned. Generally we are not murdering, stealing, lying, jealous wantons. When we read in the newspaper about some ax-wielding murderer we can barely comprehend such malevolence. While we ourselves feel guilty because we might have behaved brusquely toward a colleague, we read of others who brazenly declare that they don’t care to whom they transmit the AIDS virus. Examples of such unspeakable selfishness, though they abound in the newspapers, still boggle our radically more "righteous" minds.

Of course, on some extremely grave matters -- such as abortion -- we as a society are never fully certain whether we are engaged in a heroically virtuous act of women’s liberation or in the heartless extermination of the weakest members of the human community for the purposes of the stronger. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as members of a society that countenances the murder of the very young. Yet our consciences are not totally clear, either. The churches aren’t quite ready to devise an abortion ritual, to be enacted in clinics and hospitals, that would call on God to bless this "holy" alternative to birth and baptism. If only God would write on the human heart his law in these matters. But God is silent, or -- as judged by our uncertain hearts -- is giving contradictory messages. On this issue it is possible to experience such contradictory jolts of conscience that one finally doesn’t know whether to list oneself as a member of a society of the courageously righteous who are mature enough to face up to life’s ambiguity and do the difficult things that freedom requires -- or simply a society of moral failures. One even has nightmares intimating that perhaps there is no difference.

Left on our own, we are, in most ordinary matters, neither heroically righteous nor heroically evil nor even heroically ambiguous; we simply drift -- from at least a theoretical belief in God’s overriding sovereignty in our lives, to a working pragmatism which simply assumes that the little decisions are ours to make. Curiously, no one little decision is very important, but after thousands of decisions a life has been lived. Thus, though we are not wantonly godless, we are godless nevertheless -- not deliberately godless, but godless by default.

It is ironic that while we believers are not blatant violators of the Ten Commandments at a personal level, we live in a world whose values are grounded in a materialistic hedonism that is alien to the spirit of God’s law. Our day-to-day pragmatic so-called "value-neutral" decisions are ranked in importance by the practical needs of such a world. After all, it’s in our world that our day-to-day decisions must be made; it’s not the Garden of Eden we face each day. Indeed, we cannot but be, extensions of our world, especially since God’s law is not written on our hearts.

Jeremiah likened God to Israel’s "husband." But what kind of marriage is possible if it is necessary for the marriage counselor to sleep between husband and wife? Jeremiah lived during the period in which the written Deuteronomic law first appeared -- shortly before the exile -- and he opposed that law precisely because he believed it was such an obtrusive "counselor." If marriage provides the most adequate analogy for God’s intentions, then God must finally cease acting through intermediaries. The written law was but the last of a series of futile efforts to bring Israel to God’s marriage bed by means of intermediaries. Priests, even prophets, had finally been only "middle men," seeking to bring God to people. It is a hopeless task. As Jeremiah realized, only God can bring God.

Caught in the throes of such a Jeremianic impasse, the righteous are desperate for the fire of God’s law to be emblazoned on their hearts and in their minds, bowels and glands. But in response to their crying need, what does God do? God sends an infant -- an infant to do God’s work! We get nothing like the empowering covenant we longed for and hoped for. We get another mouth to feed, another bottom to diaper, and finally another body to bury.

God apparently has no immediate desire miraculously to soothe the existential anguish of the righteous. Jeremiah’s vision of a new covenant appears still to be "on hold." God’s law is far from being planted firmly within us. However, as a down payment on the promise Jeremiah discerned, God was determined to share with his creatures the burdens of the old covenant. God’s only answer to the dilemmas of our existence is his concrete commitment to our plight in the plight of his son. God is no distant empathetic fellow sufferer. God has become an infant. The righteousness of God hangs by Jesus’ umbilical cord. It may indeed be a rope of fragile, withering flesh, but it is strong enough to hold God’s moral claim on the universe.

This is hardly the time for self-pity. There is work to be done, an infant to be cared for, and incredible joy over the new birth to contend with. Think of it! To such as we, God has entrusted the burden of his own righteousness. The very wisdom of the universe slipped from Mary’s womb and, suckling at her breast, is ours to protect and nurture.

God’s great vulnerability and need have become more important than our blindness and sin. The God child’s need forces us to grow up fast. Chastise God though we may for thrusting on us the burdens of parenthood before we are ready, the situation does not change. We still have the baby Jesus on our hands -- to tend to, to love and, in time, as proud parents will, to boast about. It’s a sobering thought -- as surrogate parents, you and I are about as good as Jesus, on balance, is likely to find. If the love of God cannot be advanced through such as we, it is not likely ever to be advanced. It is time for us to grow out of our juvenile, neurotic absorption with our frailties and begin assuming our roles as God’s earthly parents.

The Mary in Us All (Luke 1:4b-42)

"...and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!" [Luke 1:41b-42].

It should not be altogether surprising that someone whose grasp of Christianity was destined to take a Protestant form would never have been able to internalize such a prayer. The request that Mary "pray for us sinners" presupposes a view of redemption quite alien to the Protestant perspective. Yet does this soteriological difference -- significant though it is – justify our general Protestant apathy to the witness and person of the mother of Christ? Does not the Scripture, which is supposed to be the Protestants’ sole authority for faith, have something quite singular to say of Mary – "blessed are you among women"? In the New Testament, besides Jesus, only John the Baptist is praised as much as Mary, yet in spite of her scriptural credentials she has functioned less in my Protestant theology than has John -- and certainly less than the Old Testament prophets and such remarkable Old Testament women as Miriam and Deborah.

The Reformation, driven by its radical monotheism, rejected as idolatrous and even polytheistic the medieval veneration of saints and relics. Although Luther said some beautiful things about Mary, the general Protestant tide swept away Marian devotion. I do not dispute that the church needed a purge so that Christians could hear the Bible afresh. However, as Protestantism’s puritan impulse became secularized in subsequent centuries, it took the form of rationalistic cynicism and skepticism -- a mind-set now shared by believers and unbelievers alike. For example, the Protestant doctrine that we are all sinners is reflected in the Freudian-Marxist behaviorist-positivist claptrap claiming that there is no virtue, that all our actions arise from dark psychic urges, exploitative class greed or biological impulses -- which supposedly proves that talk about good and evil, right and wrong, and certainly saintliness is illusory. We are easily persuaded that those who might appear to be saints or great people actually have feet of clay. Consider how modern biographies so frequently elaborate upon their subjects’ warts and pimples.

However, leftist rationalistic skepticism is not the only secular mind-set that has evolved out of the Reformation. We Americans are not a left-wing people. We are above all a capitalist, individualist, pragmatic people. Consistent with that attitude’s deepest wisdom, our intellectuals, even of the left-wing, are often employed in ‘our institutions of higher learning and are permitted relatively free expression because we know that they are really no threat to us. Since the left is so easily co-opted, it can be tolerated and accommodated. The left’s lunatic fringe even provides us a certain comic relief. However, the fact that we are securely conservative in our American secularity doesn’t enable us to hear Mary’s witness, for it is just in being good, sound, red, white-and-blue Americans that we are most fundamentally unable to embrace the Mary portrayed in the Scriptures.

The great Reformers didn’t give much theological attention to Mary. Yet, because God’s sovereign predestining grace was central to their faith, their attention to Mary should have been central and not peripheral. For who better than she illustrated the fact that every one of us is a passive and indeed virgin recipient of God’s purpose and calling? Christianity is the religion of what God has done for us and to us.

Certainly we are not to remain passive recipients. We are engraced so as to be active and creative. But at the root of everything is God’s initiative and grace. We cannot create ourselves, we cannot redeem ourselves, we cannot "ascend into heaven. . . to bring Christ down" and we cannot "descend into the abyss, to bring Christ up from the dead." Everything that is comes from God. Every hope we have for the redemption of all things comes from God. If we think seriously in these terms -- upon which the Reformation was itself grounded -- how can we fail to realize that we have all been made pregnant by God’s grace? We are all Mary.

It is difficult to acknowledge that the origin of our creaturely creativity is the living God. In our dynamic activism it seems an intolerable weakness to have to acknowledge that God’s grace is absolutely prior to all we do and are. America, a nation religious to the core, is motivated by the conviction that God helps those who help themselves. Given our unprecedented power over nature and nations, the implications of so arrogantly supposing that God’s grace is ours as a reward for our cultural virility are frightening. Without acknowledging that we are, in our virgin beginnings, the humble, barefooted recipients of a grace and a call that are the foundation of all we can ever hope to accomplish, our civilization loses all perspective and our power inevitably corrupts us. We could do worse than to claim Mary as our patron saint, she who was the simple and pure recipient of the grace of the Holy Spirit

Lord, Teach Us to Pray (Luke 11:1-4)

He was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." And he said to them, "When you pray, say:

‘Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread; and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation"’ [Luke 11:1-4].

Can a spirit longing to fly to God on the wings of prayer possibly hope to take off when those wings are so severely clipped? Could it be that by this very severity Jesus intended to throw cold water on our human desire for religious flights to God? Could it be that Jesus means to say that these few words are the full content of both what we need to say and what God wishes to hear from us? In any case, when Jesus prays he is all business.

"Father, hallowed be thy name." God, you are the personal, beloved parent of our being. Therefore, we acknowledge in gratitude and awe your holiness, your lordship, your sovereignty. Your very name is sacred. Never should your intimate parental love tempt us to the contempt of familiarity.

"Thy kingdom come." Our deepest longing is to see the day when the triumphant, sovereign lordship of you our loving God will no longer be a mere hope clung to desperately by faith, but a manifest reality in all human affairs. Our souls can never be entirely content until your honor is fully vindicated in all creation. When will the reign of evil and death end?

But life is not all unfulfilled possibility. Life is good, yet our physical needs must be met. The request "Give us each day our daily bread" is a plea for more than food; it implies all the necessities of life. God, give us what we need in order to enjoy the gift of life.

". . . and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us." Jesus does not suppose that God’s forgiveness is contingent on our forgiving. Rather, he simply assumes that those who seek to learn to pray from him will indeed forgive their enemies. Quite an assumption!

Finally, there is the recognition that our forgiveness of the sins of others is not the basis of our righteousness. By treating the forgiveness of sin and thus all Christian living as a simple given, Jesus’ prayer precludes all boasting. Indeed, our pride ought to be shattered when we pray, "and lead us not into temptation," for by these words we recognize that we can never be self-sufficient in holiness and virtue. Were God to "lead us into temptation," were we required to play the role of Pharaoh or Jezebel or Judas in the divine drama, we would be as consumed by evil as a snowflake in a furnace is consumed by fire. Jesus, the friend of tax collectors and sinners, knew well that temptation can simply overcome people. Victims of poverty, ignorance, prejudice, oppression, parental abuse, gang life and drugs reveal to us how easily, indeed automatically, people can be driven beyond endurance. Those who pray with Jesus share his abject sense of ultimate human helplessness and dependence.

Apart from the Lord’s Prayer, what few practical "rules" for praying that Jesus did offer can be reduced to three slogans: keep it secret (Matt. 6:5-6) , keep it uninflated (Mart. 6:7-8) and, with dogged confidence, keep it up (Luke 11:5-13; Luke 18:1-5; Matt. 7:7-11; Mark 11:23-24). It would be easy enough to act on the first two slogans if we had the faith to carry out the third. If we really could believe that "God will vindicate his elect, who cry unto him day and night" (Luke 18:7), then our secret prayer would not constitute a dark night of the soul, just as our inspired confidence in God’s deliverance would render moot any temptation to merely human eloquence. As for Jesus’ statement that "whoever says to this mountain ‘be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him" (Mark 11:23) , down deep we believe it to be mere hyperbole. Thus, we resort to eloquent verbal bouquets -- to cover our naked unbelief. Behind the request "Teach me how to pray" lies the more fundamental plea, "Teach me how to believe so that I can pray." The real question has little to do with technique. The real question is: Do we believe in Jesus’ God?

"Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God,"’ said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Such a remark intends no impiety. Certainly, Bonhoeffer was no atheist. It is often difficult to believe that anyone could really be an atheist at heart. What is called atheism is generally a sadly disappointed or militantly outraged reaction to the fact that we can and must "deal with . . . all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God."’ It is less a rejection of the existence of the holy than a profound disappointment that God is so distant just when we need him the most.

It is difficult for modern Christians to pray precisely because we carry within ourselves the very questions about how God works in the world -- or makes any difference in the world -- that cause the so-called atheists among us to turn their backs on God in melancholy outrage. Further, we wonder, are we constantly to go through the motions of asking -- when we know we can do for ourselves? Weren’t we created to be creative, hardworking beings? Aren’t our talents given to us precisely so that we can produce? And is it not an embarrassing fact that because we generally don’t need God to bail us out, when we do become desperate and could indeed use help we are almost ashamed to ask? We don’t want to be like the shameless son who never visits his parents except to hit them for a loan.

Clearly, our uncertainty about petitionary prayer reflects our uncertainty about how God governs the world. Christians often hold contradictory views about God’s providence. There are those on the fundamentalist side who speak about the direct intervention of God as if they attribute even the most mundane functions of daily life to his direct agency. Many liberal Christians, on the other hand, are essentially deists; it is their view that after having created the world and revealed the divine will in its structure and the laws of nature, God cannot be looked to for further intervention.

For my own part, I suppose I am -- to use a term originally intended as a putdown -- an occasionist. I believe in the "times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority" (Acts 1:7) I believe that in fact God does act in the world, that he raises up prophets, that he answered Israel’s deepest prayer for deliverance and sent his son. I believe that the disciples of John did indeed "hear and see" what Jesus told them to report: "The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them" (Matt. 11:4-5). I believe in the resurrection, in Pentecost -- I sometimes find myself surprised at just how much of the Bible I do believe.

In my own life I have felt the guidance and protection of God. But I have also know what it is to be alone, with dead, flat prayers finally sinking into prolonged silences. God can in the economy of his providence directly affect our lives and yet at other times effectually leave us quite alone. My parents loved me, but neither of them was above saying, "Don’t bother me; go out and play." Certainly no amount of prayer can alter the mortality of our flesh. Even when Jesus raised up the dead, he simply delayed the consequences of the iron law of existence. To be born is to die. If our prayer is that we be spared the ultimate human catastrophe, the answer is No. God’s eternal mercy is wrought out in the context of our finite dying.

Once we have a chance to reflect upon Jesus’ prayer, it all seems so obvious. Of course we should ask only for that which God already knows we need, and beyond that we should ask only for that which we need absolutely. True prayer is a statement of the obvious. Jesus’ prayer is basically a rehearsal of the terms of our existence as we stand under God. Petitionary prayer reflects our awe and gratitude before the fact that God continues with us in spite of the breach between him and ourselves. At root, what every Christian prayer is asking for is God’s presence. To pray for a Cadillac or for a football victory would be a blasphemy were it not so comic.

The fact that the ultimate request of our petitions is for God himself is borne out by Jesus in the high drama of Gethsemane when he says, "Not my will, but thine, be done," or in his various prayers and cries from the cross. But beyond the drama of these moments that put Jesus’ "instructions" to the test, there are his words uttered in the relative calm of the teaching situation. After giving us his illustration of prayer, Jesus concludes his general advice to persevere in prayer with this promise (cited above in part) : "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:13)

Perhaps the reason that God makes prayer so hard for us and so often withholds his Spirit from us is precisely because true prayer entails the fire of the Holy Spirit, a fire that consumes great masses of dross in its purifying flame. God’s silence is a way of identifying the dross that needs to be burned away.

Were we to cry to God night and day and were the Holy Spirit given to us, what the Spirit would teach us would inevitably come to us as a surprise. Yet it ought not be a surprise, for in fact what we would hear from the Spirit we have known in our guts all along. Ironically, what the Spirit would grant us is the very thing which in petitioning God in the first place we had secret hopes of avoiding. As the Spirit is God’s complete answer to prayer, the Spirit is also the content of prayer. The Spirit’s perfect gift is the capacity to say with Jesus, "Not my will, but thine, be done." In the final analysis -- with Jesus’ completed ministry as the basis of that analysis -- if Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is to be faulted, it is plainly not to be faulted for its brevity. A more apt charge might be that it is verbose, for Jesus was able to say precisely the same thing in fewer words -- seven, to be exact: "Not my will, but thine, be done."

If we were in the spirit of God, then we would take both God’s Yes and his No with the same complete confidence and ultimate joy, knowing "that in everything God works for good with those who love him" (Rom. 8:28) The heart of true prayer is surrender to God’s redeeming will. Could it be that it is precisely at this point that we come face to face with the reason we so often do not pray? Perhaps the obstacle is not so much God’s silence as our own fear that God might in fact respond. What if God answered that he wills to bless us by revealing to us a cross to bear? Perhaps our problem is not that we don’t know what to pray, but that we don’t want to know what to pray. Even though we don’t need God’s help with the mundane needs of life in our fleshly "pursuit of happiness," God needs our help to bear Christ’s cross in the world. We don’t want to be told that God can bless us as much through his No as through his Yes. We don’t want everything to work for good; we want only good things to work for good, at least in our own lives.

Our civilization has managed to keep God at arm’s length. We generally don’t need God, and we clearly find his ways strange. Then why worry about it? Why pray at all? The answer is, of course, that our souls cannot be content with our situation. We’ve never had it so good. We are addicted to the good life, yet we can’t get Christ out of our craws. We fear we have sold our birthrights. We know that there is no way out of our dilemma that does not begin in prayer, yet we are afraid, without faith and preoccupied.

Sweet Jesus! Teach us to pray. We cannot be silent and we cannot speak.

The Karl Barth Centennial: An Appreciative Critique

Karl Barth was born 100 years ago on May 10 in Basel, Switzerland. For better or for worse, his influence on this century’s theology has been incalculable. Many have certainly found that they have had to seek routes different from Barth’s; nevertheless, he is virtually impossible to ignore, for he provided a theological beacon from whose light both friends and enemies took their respective bearings.

It is part of the folklore of 20th-century theology that, with the outbreak of World War I, Barth became disillusioned with his own theological liberalism. If liberalism, he reasoned, could serve as a theological platform for the militarism and chauvinism of his until-then-esteemed German teachers, then it was a terminally defective theology.

Convinced that the chief error of liberalism was its reduction of theology to anthropology, Barth radically insisted upon the utterly transcendent sovereignty of God In his famous 1922 Letter to the Romans, he wrote of God as the "wholly other" of whom we can have absolutely no natural knowledge. God is the unknown who is disclosed to us exclusively in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even with the incarnation, all language about God entails an unresolvable dialectic, and thus remains perpetually flawed. Faith always creates a totally disruptive crisis for all human thought, enterprise and values.

This negative tone dominated Barth’s theology for the rest of the ‘20s and ‘30s. The emergence of Nazism gave a new urgency to Barth’s attack on all philosophical and anthropological starting points for theology. Having baptized each new wave of the human spirit for two centuries, Barth asked, how could liberalism withhold its baptism to Hitler? Barth was convinced that the church would never be able to say No to Hitler so long as it offered allegiance to any voice save that of Jesus Christ. An early leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church and the principal author of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, Barth was expelled from Germany to his native Switzerland in 1935.

In 1932 Barth published the first volume of his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics. By 1942, with the publication of the Church Dogmatics, II, 2, Barth’s negative phase was largely past. Coming very close to affirming universal salvation, his later theology has been characterized as a theology of the "triumph of grace." By 1956, in an extremely influential lecture that popularized themes already developed in the Dogmatics, Barth spoke of the "Humanity of God." "God is human" in "His free affirmation of man, His free concern for him, His free substitution for him."

The only aspect of Barth’s thinking that changed little during his lifetime was his politics. Despite the often-repeated charge that his theology led to political quietism, Barth himself was not quiet. He always insisted that theology had to be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. He was a lifelong socialist and political maverick whose political views elicited much hostility -- first in Nazi Germany, later in anticommunist America, and chronically in his own neutral Switzerland. As he once observed, in politics the radical is probably wrong but has a chance of being right; the conservative is always wrong.

The Barth corpus is vast. The never-completed Dogmatics alone ran to 12 volumes that average more than 600 densely printed pages each. Beyond this work, he produced a staggering number of books, lectures, articles and letters -- most of which were of the very highest order. Quite apart from the creativity and scope of his constructive theology, Barth was an imaginative (sometimes perhaps too imaginative) biblical exegete and an extraordinary intellectual historian. He had both the intellect and the energy to engage in theological conversation -- albeit often polemical conversation -- with most of the leading Protestant theologians of his time. And he contributed more than any other 20th-century Protestant theologian to opening serious dialogue with Roman Catholicism. (His influence, direct or indirect, on Catholic theology may be as great as it is on Protestant.) All this -- together with his various political involvements, both ecclesiastical and secular -- may explain why he regarded sloth as much as pride to be at the root of human sin. His was the Protestant work ethic gone mad.

Barth had many friends, but he also made many enemies (not a few of whom were former friends) The number of enemies can be attributed in part to the fact that he was probably more successful in overcoming sloth than pride. In discussing this matter, Hans Frei observes that Barth tried to overcome his own "pretensions," his own self-assertiveness and incredible self-confidence by "constant self-ironization and self-needling" (review of Eberhard Busch’s Karl Barth, reprinted in Gospel Narrative, Dikran Hadidian, ed. [Pickwick, 1981]) But as Frei insightfully comments, "All too often ritual exorcism by humor actually reaffirms the tenant rights of the very demons seemingly expelled!"

Part of the reason that Barth tended to antagonize and drive people away was a function of his powerful mind and personality. Not only did he delight in theological combat, but he could, even without intending it, intimidate people. Yet beyond his personality was what Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- who by virtue of his radical christological emphasis remained very close to Barth -- called a "positivism of revelation." Barth reflected a radical confidence that he could find in the Bible the unvarnished truth about the nature of God and any other truth worth knowing. Bonhoeffer claimed that this led Barth to say "in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, the trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all." Barth’s defensiveness in response to this charge reflects the fact that Bonhoeffer, attacking from within the Barthian circle, could do more damage than any of Barth’s outside critics. Bonhoeffer didn’t accuse Barth of personal arrogance, but he pointed sharply to the uncompromising tone of Barth’s theological enterprise.

The beauty of Barth’s theological style is also its chief limitation. His whole theology is mirrored in every doctrine. He constantly tried to restate the whole of the preceding Dogmatics at each unfolding juncture of his thought (sometimes seemingly in every paragraph). This restatement was intended to shed light on his new point while also showing how the new doctrine would in turn enlighten everything that preceded it. For Barth, there is a total, logical connection between all doctrines so that every doctrine mirrors every other. Perhaps Barth is wordy, but the sheer cumulative power of his thought is magnificent.

However, this very cumulative power has the unfortunate secondary effect of presenting everything Barth said as if it were an equally significant and necessary part of the whole. This cumulative impact not only creates a certain "like it or lump it" impression, but it virtually invites the undecided critic to dismiss Barth for being hopelessly unyielding and for claiming to know more than any creature can about the nature and purpose of the one God. Then when Barth himself changed his mind -- as he so often and so publicly did, as if it were merely a matter of an excusable error after he had formerly fired so all-inclusive a barrage in support of his now-discarded view -- it is small wonder that many people became exasperated and, though they might themselves be deeply influenced by him, preferred not to admit it.

To be sure, Barth has a number of unabashed supporters who find themselves fundamentally in phase with his basic enterprise. For such, Barth’s polytechnical forays and expositions, far from offensive, were things of beauty. When Barth was on the attack, his anger was prophetic. He had the courage to speak out where others were timid. He articulated far better than one could oneself what one had always deep down believed. If Barth changed his mind, it was a healthy sign that he recognized how far short we all fall from the truth of God.

I never met Karl Barth, though I did see him when I was a graduate student in Chicago in 1962 during his only trip to the United States. He gave several lectures and participated in a panel discussion with a number of American theologians. I was deeply impressed, even more than I expected to be. Yet somehow I felt relieved that I hadn’t studied with him. I felt that I had all the Karl Barth I needed, or could take, from his books. In order to breathe theologically, I needed distance from the one I regarded as my mentor.

Even though I didn’t know Barth personally, I used to experience intellectual pangs of disquiet, if not guilt, when I knew down deep that I would have serious disagreements with him. Were he alive and had he taken any notice of my theological work, I am still sure that he would tear the hide off me. I don’t think I’m alone among "Barthians" in such a feeling. If Barth lovers can feel the need to put this colossus at a distance, it is easy to understand how Barth’s theology could be anathema to those who could not even begin where he began -- i.e., in a trinitarian adherence to the authority of the Scriptures.

It is precisely this question of freedom that I would most want to press on Barth himself. More specifically the question is: Given the absolute freedom of God in Barth’s thought, is there any room left for the significant freedom of the creature? Surely the all-inclusive, unyielding, self-confident style of Barth’s theology is not altogether unrelated to his belief that the free love of God is invincible. But can an invincible love, however loving, still be capable of liberating its object?

The "early" Barth affirmed a version of the sovereignty of God that came close to precluding human freedom from the start. God’s lordship was absolute. In 1920, Barth declared that God

must be true to himself; he must be and remain holy. He cannot be grasped, brought under management, and put to use; he cannot serve. He must rule. He must himself grasp, seize, manage, use. He can satisfy no other needs than his own line Word of God and the Word of Man (Harper, 1957) , p. 74].

Such a doctrine of a divine management that cannot serve but can only rule effectively precludes any serious talk about human freedom. Having seen where the vaunted liberal pride in human independence and self-salvation had led theology, Barth was convinced that only by absolutizing the grasping, seizing management of God could human presumption and pride be curbed. But if Barth meant what he said about God’s rule, it would seem that only with automatons could such a God ever be reconciled.

Barth would never mitigate his affirmation of the utter majesty of God, but he came to see that there is a greater lordship than that of an imperious potentate -- i.e., the sovereignty of a God who can even risk suffering at the hands of his creatures. Thus, in this later theology he will completely reverse himself on the question, Does God serve? Barth argues that the predicates of the eternal, almighty God can be known only as God relates to humanity as a suffering servant:

It is in the light of the fact of His humiliation that on this first aspect all the predicates of His Godhead must be filled out and interpreted. Their positive meaning is lit up only by the fact that in this act He is this God and therefore the true God, distinguished from all false gods by the fact that they are not capable of this act, that they have not in fact accomplished it, that their supposed glory and honour and eternity and omnipotence not only do not include but exclude their self-humiliation. False gods are all reflections of a false and all too human self-exaltation. They are all lords who cannot and will not be servants, who are therefore no true lords, whose being is not a truly divine being [Dogmatics IV, 1, p. 130].

We human beings generally comprehend power as a reality that is on a continuum between abject weakness and invincibility. Thus, politically we measure sovereignty in terms of invincibility. We Americans celebrate victories over anyone whom we can vanquish, even if it is only tiny Grenada or the tin-pot Qaddafi. We even accuse ourselves of weakness when we confront areas of the world where our power is of no avail.

God the suffering servant, on the other hand, never clearly wins. Within the creation, God’s reality is so unobtrusive that it is possible to fail to see that a God even exists. God’s power is of an altogether different order than the power structures of this world. God conquers through suffering love. Further, in this world the evidences of the suffering conquests of God are present exclusively in events that faith alone can perceive. Such talk is obviously only vacuous, wishful thinking apart from its eschatological validation. In the Kingdom of God, where the Sermon on the Mount will be the law, the proof that love is the only source of lasting power will be manifest to all. Until then, we hope in things unseen.

If, as I recently argued in the Century ("The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy," April 16) , belief in the suffering of God is the most basic revolutionary development of 20th-century theology, then Paul Tillich and others were wrong in contending that, in his movement from Romans to the Dogmatics, Barth went from a revolutionary to a conservative stance. In fact, the Dogmatics constitutes a genuinely revolutionary work, while Romans reflects an older, indeed philosophical, concept of God’s sovereignty, as Barth himself admitted.

Granted, the "catholic" Barth reappropriates the whole tradition of orthodox Christian theology. However, this reappropriation virtually turned the orthodox tradition on its head at many key points. Barth reasserted "orthodoxy," but with the proviso that God’s capacity to suffer was the proof of his true lordship. Thus Barth’s "neo-orthodoxy" stood in remarkable tension with 18 centuries of orthodoxy and, for that matter, with mainstream liberalism as well, for both, in their own ways, denied God’s suffering.

The doctrine of predestination is pivotal to Barth’s thought. Yet the Protestant partisan and self-styled Calvinist interprets the atoning death of Christ and God’s eternal predestining decree in the very teeth of Luther and Calvin: election is the "sum of the Gospel," for God’s election of humanity is a predestination not merely of humanity but of God himself. "Man is not rejected. In God’s eternal purpose it is God himself who is rejected in his son. . . Predestination means that from all eternity God has determined upon man’s acquittal at his own cost" (Dogmatics II, 2, p. 167). Therefore, "there is no such thing as a created nature which has its purpose, being or continuance apart from Grace" (p. 92). Such a universalistic understanding of God’s suffering love constitutes a drastic reversal of the terrible inscrutable darkness of the secret will of the God of Luther and Calvin.

Barth sought to break the impasse that Western Christianity faced from the Pelagian controversy on. Both Pelagius and Augustine had agreed that the great majority of the human race were damned; they differed only on the question of the basis of that damnation. For Augustine it was finally the predetermining will of God. Thus, significant human freedom is precluded in the matter of salvation. For Pelagius, on the other hand, one merits damnation by one’s evil deeds. But this presupposes that we have all been born with the perfect and complete freedom necessary to fulfill God’s law, indeed, that human beings could live morally perfect lives unaided by grace.

Barth, whose God is the one who "loves in freedom," realized that the grace of the free God must be consistent with significant human freedom contra the Augustinian-tradition. On the other hand, salvation is by grace alone, contra Pelagius. Universalism seems to answer many of these dilemmas. It is God’s predestined will that all persons on earth -- or in hell, for that matter (for Christ descended into hell to preach his kerygma) -- freely accept their divinely preordained salvation. The atonement is unlimited. Christ died for everyone. The only difference between Christians and non-Christians is that Christians have accepted and are called to testify to what God has done for all humanity, and non-Christians have not yet accepted.

Barth realized that he was walking a tightrope, for a totally consistent universalism inevitably precludes freedom. If we are all to be dragged -- in some cases kicking and screaming -- into the kingdom, nothing we are or do matters. We are in the thrall of the divine will to save us. Even God’s freedom is curtailed, for not even God is free from his own deterministic schema. Barth never quite closes the door on the possibility of rejection, and he even had dreams that he might himself be rejected. Universalism -- which might have seemed to be the logical outcome of the decree of God and the atonement of Christ -- is finally only a devoutly-to-be-wished possibility; it is not inevitable.

Though the crux of the problem has been shifted in a salutary manner away from predestination as a mystery of almost fatalistic darkness, the tension between God’s love and God’s sovereign freedom remains. For if it is God’s will that all are saved, but some individuals forever refuse God’s love, then their rejection would frustrate God’s loving intention. Thus if anyone is ultimately damned, both God’s sovereignty and his universal love are compromised. Yet if God were to compel us to be saved, our salvation would contradict our created natures, for we were created in the image of the free, self-determining God.

Barth faces the logic of this seemingly intractable impasse between God’s sovereignty, God’s love and human freedom by acknowledging that God took an astonishing "risk" when he constituted himself as the God of a creature who not only can fall, but who has fallen (pp. 163-166) God so radically committed himself as humanity’s "friend and partner" that he "ordained the surrender of His own impassibility."

Here, I think, we find the crux of the whole question of human freedom in Barth’s theology. How far will Barth really push his radical insistence that God actually risks the divine honor, aseity and impassibility in this utter commitment to humanity?

For Barth, freedom is the creature’s capacity gladly to accord itself with the freedom of God. Barth does not fall into the trap of the so-called "free-will defense" of God, that theodicy which allegedly explains evil by rooting it in human freedom. Supposedly our freedom entails the capacity to choose for or against God. Thus, we created evil by misusing our freedom. "It would be a strange freedom that would leave man neutral, able equally to choose, decide, and act rightly or wrongly" (The Humanity of God, p. 76) The sinner is not free; the sinner is a slave of death, and death is the termination of all decisions, be they free or enslaved. As God’s gift, human freedom cannot contradict God’s freedom. No other understanding of freedom makes any theological sense. Freedom is a prime attribute of God. To say that freedom is compatible with sin -- indeed, that freedom requires the possibility of sin -- would be to imply that God cannot be God unless God could sin. Such is absurd. Yet there is a potential totalitarianism in equating all true freedom with God’s will. Everything depends on the degree to which God’s love is genuinely reflected in the kenosis, the self-humbling of Christ (Phil. 2:7)

Has God so humbled himself that he wills our freedom to be truly a mirror of his own freedom? Or are we created and redeemed merely to exercise our "freedom" in abject gratitude to God who alone is capable of eternally significant action? Any true affirmation of human freedom must celebrate the fact that God has set us free to contribute creatively to the creation through that which God did not create: human culture. Therefore, we must be so bold as to say that God has set us free so that we might creatively contribute to our own being. In our God-ordained freedom, we are to be more than God’s passive partners.

The true test of agape lies in the answer to the question: Does the love that begins in the free nature of God create in the object of the love the very freedom of its source? In the last analysis, in certain critical doctrines Barth does not adequately pass this test. A crucial, though by no means isolated, example of this inadequacy clusters around his understandings of evil, history and eschatology.

If, for example, evil has been defeated from the very outset, and human history has already been secured by God in election, does this not render history a mere process by which God can effect the inevitable triumph of his grace, with human beings little more than the passive beneficiaries of his boundless and irresistible good will and grace?

Barth’s historical theomonism inevitably leads to his eschatological theomonism. Barth interprets the scriptural promise that, in the end, God will be "everything to everyone" to indicate that our finite life will be finished -- that time will have ended, and humanity will forever stand completed in the eternal impassibility of God. There can be no question of our developing new enterprises in an ongoing redeemed life -- in any "beyond." "Man as such, therefore, has no beyond. Nor does he need one, for God is our beyond" (Dogmatics, III, 2, p. 632). Thus Barth develops an eschatology that seems to render redeemed humanity frozen in eternity, undercutting the very agape that he elsewhere so eloquently defends.

God, in the freedom of his love, has determined that his own life will be affected by the creature. Indeed, he has tied his own destiny to human destiny so tightly that our suffering is his suffering, and our growth in freedom is his growth in freedom. Luke tells us that, under the care of Mary and Joseph, "Jesus increased in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52). If God was truly incarnate in Jesus, then it was not God’s humanity abstracted from God’s divinity that was subject to development in fellowship with human beings. It was both natures of the inseparably united God/human that "increased."

The paradox of God’s love is that the all-great God wills to achieve even greater richness and glory by means of his humble dependence upon his creatures. A theology of divine kenosis must celebrate, not minimize, God’s willingness to evolve his ever-increasing glory by irreversibly binding himself to his creatures in an eternal and reciprocal relationship.

Despite Barth’s refusal fully to follow out his theology of the divine self-giving, I must confess an ongoing allegiance to his thought. Though Barth failed to see how completely God’s free love entailed human freedom, he did powerfully realize that human liberation is possible only if the God who creates and sustains this universe has the all-sufficient freedom and love to sustain that Liberation.

Barth’s testimony to the reality and sovereignty of God is a vital foundation if we are to hold out for anything more than the fleeting, tragic significance of human liberation. If God cannot or will not sustain us unto eternity, then God is finally, in Jesus’ phrase, a "God of the dead." And all our hopes and aspirations for human existence are mocked by our inevitable extermination.

The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy

Twentieth-Century theology has been extremely diverse. Schools and fads have abounded, from neo-orthodoxy to neo-liberalism, from demythologization to the "God is dead" movement, from Christian realism to secular Christianity, from process thought to the various liberation movements. Twentieth-century theology might appear to be so completely at sixes and sevens that it has no distinguishing characteristics save an utterly discordant pluralism.

However, as we near the end of the century, we can begin to make out some of the larger features of the theological landscape. Indeed, despite all the real and intractable differences among theologians, a curious new consensus has arisen. The age-old dogma that God is impassible and immutable, incapable of suffering, is for many no longer tenable. The ancient theopaschite heresy that God suffers has, in fact, become the new orthodoxy.

A list of modern theopaschite thinkers would include Barth, Berdyaev, Bonhoeffer, Brunner, Cobb, Cone and liberation theologians generally, Küng, Moltmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Pannenberg, Ruether and feminist theologians generally, Temple, Teilhard and Unamuno. Just as significant, perhaps, is the fact that even those theologians who have not embraced modern theopaschism have failed to develop a creative restatement of the older dogma (von Hilgel being, perhaps, the lone significant exception)

What is particularly remarkable about the theopaschite mind-set has been its development as a kind of open secret. The doctrine of the suffering of God is so fundamental to the very soul of modern Christianity that it has emerged with very few theological shots ever needing to be fired. Indeed, this doctrinal revolution occurred without a widespread awareness that it was happening.

There is, to be sure, a minor literature on the topic. As early as 1959 Daniel Day Williams saw that something of epic importance was taking place. He described the growing belief that God suffers as a "structural shift in the Christian mind" (What Present-Day Theologians Are Thinking (Harper & Row, 1959], p. 138) Articles and a few books have been published pointing to the theopaschitism of this theologian or that group of theologians. English theologians especially took an early interest in the topic, and theopaschitism is not infrequently examined in British journals. Nevertheless, no one of whom I am aware has quite said that the rejection of the ancient doctrine of divine impassibility has become a theological commonplace. (Yet when one ventures to make this claim in the presence of theologians, one is invariably met with a slightly surprised expression, followed by an assenting, "Of course.")

The theological implications of the theopaschite revolution are enormous. Every classical Christian doctrine -- the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, creation ex nihilo, the atonement theories, sin (original or otherwise) , predestination, etc. -- was originally formulated by theologians who took divine impassibility to be axiomatic. Mainstream Protestantism inherited the presupposition of God’s impassible sovereignty. Even Luther, who in his theology of the cross affirmed the suffering of God even unto death, seemed to take back much of what he said in his equally foundational doctrines of predestination and the Deus Absconditus. When contemplating the purposes of the hidden God, Luther portrayed an inscrutably impassible, divine sovereignty -- a portrayal which was even more severe than Calvin’s.

Eighteenth- and 19th-century liberalism, which generally rejected or radically reinterpreted the orthodox tradition, also adhered, with a few exceptions (Hegel chief among them) , to the dogma of divine impassibility. As Karl Barth observed, "The God of Schleiermacher cannot show mercy." And there can be no suffering love where there can be no mercy.

One would think that every Christian doctrine must be recast in the light of the modern assumption that God’s being is a suffering being; yet it is curious that this revolution in our understanding of God’s very nature has not caused a general refocusing of every theological utterance. Nevertheless, to date theologians have faced up to the implications of the new situation only on a piecemeal. ad hoc basis. The two most conspicuous exceptions to this charge are to be found in the otherwise radically incompatible theologies of Karl Barth and the process school. Thus, we have only begun to see where systematic theologies grounded in the suffering God might lead.

The decline of Christendom. The most drastic form of theopaschitism in modern theology is Christian atheism. Not only can God suffer, but God has suffered -- terminally. The "God is dead" movement, though no longer in the headlines, is itself far from dead; it reflects a profoundly felt consciousness among many honest and sensitive Christians that the sovereign God honored through many centuries of Western history has been deflated like a punctured beach ball. God no longer manifests a rule that claims the holy fear of modern men and women.

Though Christian atheism may seem to most theologians an abandonment of the vital center of the faith, the fact remains that belief in the "mighty acts of God" is increasingly difficult to relate to modern experience. The Exodus has often been offered as a paradigm of the acts of God in history. Yet where do we find contemporary paradigms of God’s sovereign acts? Even many biblical critics who believe in the "acts of God" explain the Exodus event in such a way as to show its compatibility with natural events. If God were to re-create the miracle of the crossing of the Yam Suph (the sea of reeds) , we would in all probability be too skeptical and too critical to recognize it as much more than a freak event.

Since Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, Christian triumphalism has taken many forms. From Augustine’s theocratic hope that the church as the earthly City of God would gradually come to rule the world to the liberal dream that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth through the liberal’s persuasive evangelism, Christians have been united in the conviction that God’s eternal rule is confirmed by world events. In short, Christians have believed that the eventual triumph of God’s earthly purpose is discernible in the facts and trends of history.

To be sure, anti-Constantinian voices were raised from time to time. Both monasticism and the thought of the pacifistic Anabaptists had a strong nontriumphalist component; paradoxically, so too did Luther’s thought, though Luther despised both monasticism and Anabaptism. Nonetheless, until the modern period, those who called into question a genuine progress of the church toward the City of God did not have to witness a manifestly contrary situation -- one wherein the City of God seems to be in abject retreat. Thus it once seemed possible to talk simultaneously of the sinfulness and worldliness of the world and the impassible, immutable sovereignty of God. With the collapse of the earthly City of God, such a balancing act becomes more difficult.

Today, Christian triumphalism has become a rare commodity. The language of Heilsgeschichte (history of salvation) theology is still heard, and people still express the conviction that, in Otto Piper’s terms, "purely human history" will be "gradually transformed into a history with God." But what evidence convincing to Christians in general can be adduced that demonstrates that the transformation of history, however gradual, is in fact occurring? Could it be that belief in the victory of God’s history on earth is but a pious hope based not on perceived events but on a historic reverie? In any case, what many Christians perceive as actually having occurred in our century is forcefully summarized in Bonhoeffer’s theopaschite observation, "God is allowing himself to be edged out of the world and onto the cross.

The great majority of Christians continue to affirm the reality of God. But God so rarely seems to accomplish his will in the world. So often God’s purpose, if it can be discerned, seems to be defeated. The actual redemptive presence of God in the world is discerned less in God’s taking the sovereign lead in events and more in God’s picking up the pieces after history has misfired. In any case, without being able to point to clear evidence of the progress of God’s holy purpose in human history, the notion that God rules the world through his mighty acts becomes somewhat vacuous.

In the Bible, however, there is no talk of the uniform progress of world history toward God’s Kingdom. The God of the Bible does indeed, from time to time, act with free and surprising power. But the direct hand of God in events, if there at all, is often simply lost on people. God does not always raise up prophets to interpret his acts. Even Jesus found himself at a loss as to when God would act. "But of that day or that hour no one knows (Mark 13:32). In God’s occasional acts, no law of historical progress can be discerned. Redemptive history obeys no law; it is in the free hand of God.

Thus, belief in the ultimate victory of the biblical God may indeed be grounded in events in history, but not as part of self-evident progress; they are parabolic moments which point to the eschatological potential of God’s power. But these glimpses are as occasional as they are debatable. Jesus’ career, which Christians believe to be a supreme movement of God’s occasional in-break, has been read by some apparently honest critics as a demonic ministry.

The rise of democratic aspirations. Despite cataclysmic assaults upon democratic ideals from both the right and the left, the ideal of democracy persists, indeed flourishes, not only in Western Europe and North America but -- even if only as an ideal -- throughout much of the less-developed world. Even communist states claim to stand for democracy.

These democratic aspirations have contributed to the problem of belief in an impassible, immutable God. For if God is conceived of as an unmoved mover -- the unaffected source of the world -- he is irrelevant to what free men and women do in the world. And if God’s impassibility is interpreted as being emblematic of an imperious rule that is finally indifferent to the effect it has on the opinion of the governed -- as in, for example, the classical doctrine of predestination -- God appears as a tyrant who must be resisted in the name of human freedom.

No concept of divine sovereignty can be divorced from a concept of political sovereignty; thus it is understandable, and probably inevitable, that theology should engage in the apologetic task of tailoring its concepts to popular tastes. But unless it can be shown that the theopaschite understanding corresponds to the eternal truth about God, then adroit theological shifts to meet the needs of the moment simply validate the atheist’s charge that theology is nothing but an endless series of ad hoc rationalizations. And God dies the death of a thousand refashionings.

The problem of suffering and evil. One of Charles Darwin’s reasons for his agnosticism-bordering-on-atheism was the problem of suffering. Darwin’s theory of evolution was predicated not only on the law of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, but on the assumption that this law had operated over an enormous period of time. The evolution of humanity had occurred only after eons and eons of "nature red in tooth and claw."

The traditional calculation of the age of the universe in terms of thousands, not billions, of years -- popularized by Bishop James Ussher -- had hitherto obscured the sheer immensity of sensate anguish that had been a part of the world -- and on which evolution depended. To a circle of early 20th-century English theologians, the thought of God’s ruling over a universe of pain and yet being untouched by it was unbearable. The English move toward theopaschitism was grounded in such considerations of natural history.

The brutalities of World War I gave further cause for rethinking the doctrine of God. It appeared that humanity could be more brutal than the beasts, that human moral progress was a charade, and that evil and suffering were a fundamental part of human existence. Talk about an impassible, immutable God was for many simply inconceivable. How could God be love and not lay wounded on the battlefields of France? Only a God who suffered with the victims of the war could speak to the disillusionments created by the war.

The scholarly reappraisal of the Bible. The higher critical approach to the Bible was an early harbinger of the theopaschite revolution. Indeed, an immutable, impassible God requires an immutable, infallible scriptural witness.

Biblical interpretation is no longer bound by patristic and scholastic presuppositions about the divine aseity, nor is it bound by the deistic assumptions of liberal scholars. Some find the God of the Bible not to their taste, but today few scholars would disagree that the God of the Bible is a personal, passionate, jealous, concerned and suffering God. Increasingly one sees books and articles by biblical critics about the suffering of the God of the Bible. The work of historians inevitably reflects the Weltgeist of their time.

If God is conceived as being limited in power, though perhaps unlimited in love, then the defense of God in the light of evil and suffering boils down to the contention that God has created the greatest amount of good that he can, and the evil that remains is beyond his capacity to eliminate. A limited deity of this kind is portrayed in contemporary Whiteheadian-process theology, but the doctrine has a distinguished pedigree going back at least as far as Stoicism. A fundamental assumption in this approach is that an imperfect world is better than no world at all. What is unique to the Whiteheadian version of the limited deity is its departure from the classical Western view that God cannot be affected by the pain of an imperfect world. Indeed, as a seal of God’s goodness and love, God is, in Whitehead’s lovely phrase, "the fellow-sufferer who understands."

The problem of evil has traditionally been formulated this way: How can it be that God is all powerful and all good and yet there still is evil? The doctrine that God is limited in power solves the problem by sacrificing God’s omnipotence. However, to my mind, any concept of a limited deity finally entails a denial of the capacity of God to redeem the world and thus, ironically, raises the question of whether God is in the last analysis even love, at least love in the Christian sense of the term.

All assertions of a limited deity must confront the fact that, if the world’s imperfections are the inevitable consequences of the limited capacity of God to create a world that is both perfect and free, then inescapably any other realm of being, any eschatological reality, would be similarly flawed. The blessing of eternal life would thus be impossible, for an eternal life flawed by imperfection and suffering would not be redemption, it would be hell. Hell is the prospect of wallowing forever in one’s weakness and finitude.

In Whitehead’s philosophy, the creation of the world is the result of God’s primordial yearning for a concretization of merely abstract possibilities (reminiscent of Plato’s "Ideas") , which Whitehead calls "eternal objects." Until they are arranged and concretized in the world, these eternal objects are merely abstractions. God’s primordial nature is governed by a "yearning after concrete fact -- no particular facts, but after some actuality."

The other pole of God’s bipolar being, his "consequent nature, "is characterized by a dependence on the continual emergence of concrete reality or "actual entities" in the world. Actual entities are perpetually perishing and arising. Each successive actual entity is capable of using in its own development the entities that have preceded it. God alone is everlasting. And his being is constituted in the process of his taking into himself all that he is able to save of all actual entities. They thus have a kind of immortality in the memory and in the ongoing self-enrichment of God. But the personal existence of all actual entities perishes. God wills the best for us and is a sympathetic sufferer with us when, in the course of the enrichment of his being, we suffer tragedy; but God alone is the everlasting beneficiary of the creative process.

To modern "protest atheism," the fact that God, though sympathetic with the suffering of humanity, is nonetheless enriched by it, would seem little more impassive than the bathos of the sentimental butcher who weeps after each slaughter. If the purpose of our life and death is finally that we contribute to "the self-creation of God," how, an outraged critic of God might demand, does God’s love differ from the love of a famished diner for his meat course?

To my mind, the insistence on the almightiness of God and creation ex nihilo are indispensable for an adequate understanding of the Bible’s witness, both to God’s lordship and to his capacity to save what he has created. Without the Bible’s eschatology, the God of the Bible cannot be understood in terms of agape, the radical self-giving love of one who holds nothing back -- not the life of his son, not the sharing of his own being.

But this understanding puts us back on the horns of the dilemma: If God is so powerful in creation and so willing ultimately to deify the creation, why is there now evil?

Two lines of defense have become popular among theologians who find themselves, for whatever reasons, unable to speak of God as ontologically limited and yet unable to affirm the predestinarian highhandedness of an impassible, immutable God.

The first is the so-called Irenaeian theodicy (after the second-century theologian Irenaeus) : God permits suffering and evil in order that by them we might come to sufficient maturity so as to be able to inherit eternal life. The problem with such an argument is that while it offers a very helpful insight into the question of why we suffer and endure hardship, it says nothing about real evil. For real evil, as we experience it, does not build up and develop its victims; it corrupts, corrodes and destroys them.

The other line of defense can easily incorporate the Irenaeian theodicy, and indeed, might even seem to strengthen it. In this view, the statement "God is love" is virtually synonymous with a kenotic (self-emptying) (Phil. 2:7) view of the incarnation. God’s love is supremely revealed in his self-humbling. God is a fellow sufferer who understands not because God cannot be otherwise, but because God wills to share our lot.

Here, as in the case of a limited doctrine of God’s being there is a certain immediate psychological comfort in the notion that God does not require of us a suffering that he himself will not endure. However, if this comfort is to be any more than a psychological prop, it must show how God’s suffering mitigates evil. This explanation has been, to date, curiously lacking in the theodicy of divine self-limitation.

To anyone who feels compelled to affirm divine suffering, the fact that God is deeply involved in the anguish and the blood of humanity forces a drastic theological crisis of thought vis-à-vis the question of evil. The mere fact of God’s suffering doesn’t solve the question; it exacerbates it. For there can no longer be a retreat into the hidden decrees of the eternal, all-wise, changeless and unaffected God. The suffering God is with us in the here and now. God must answer in the here and now before one can make any sense of the by and by. God, the fellow sufferer, is inexcusable if all that he can do is suffer. But if God is ultimately redeemer, how dare he hold out on redemption here and now in the face of real evil?

My own view is that the death of God’s Christ is in part God’s atonement to his creatures for evil. Only on the basis of God’s terrible willingness to accept responsibility for evil do we have grounds to trust God’s promise to redeem evil. Only in God’s daring willingness to risk all in the death of his own son can we have confidence that God finally has the power to redeem his promise. Others may not agree with this radical rethinking of the atonement, but it seems apparent that comprehensively to affirm the almighty sovereignty of the self-humbled God requires a drastic rethinking of traditional doctrine.

It appears that 20th-century theology will leave the 21st century with a completed revolution, but with the doctrinal consolidation of that revolution far from complete. One can only wonder how the next century will deal with what we have left it.

Judas as Patron Saint (Mark 14:21)

For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born [Mark 14:21].

The specific reasons may differ from age to age, from nation to nation. We Americans want God dead because we do so very well without him. The memory of our former dependence on God simply encumbers our modern worldliness. We don’t need God for flood control; we have dams. We don’t need God to heal; we have the pharmacy. We don’t need God for comfort; we have psychiatry. God has never successfully brought peace. Peace we have achieved by our policy of mutually assured destruction and shrewd international orchestrations assuring that, in most cases at least, the wretched of the earth dissipate their rage by killing each other.

In Jesus’ time, people’s reasons for deicide were almost totally opposite to our own. While we don’t need God, they needed God too much. They had no pharmacies, no psychiatrists and no technocracy. Their peace, the peace of Rome, seemed, like our own world’s pax Americana, perfectly rational and just to those after whom it was named. But to the objects of its pacification it seemed like slavery. The technically primitive, destitute and enslaved people did not long for a "deliverer" whose ministry was one of suffering; a messiah whose version of the messianic age was the cross seemed to be no messiah at all. And if the impoverished Jesus were God’s answer to Israel’s desperate cry, this seemed like a cruel joke. The Son of such a God must pay a price for his Father’s macabre sense of humor.

We don’t know what motivated Judas, but his pathetic attempts to return the money and his suicide indicate it probably wasn’t greed. I think Judas was brokenhearted that Jesus would do no more than suffer. Watching Jesus’ ministry go down the drain, Judas struck at him with the feelings of a betrayed spouse -- rage, disappointment, injured love and humiliation. A marriage born in high hopes is shattered by weakness. How could I have been so blind? Judas may have asked himself.

Which of us has not wondered with Judas whether God does anything besides hinder those who are left to get on with life in the face of the void? Which of us has not experienced Judas’s remorse as we realize that our lives often lack any passionate, ethical involvement with the transcendent? Are our brave new world’s achievements worth the emptiness we feel when we contemplate the void? When we hear tales of modern saints such as Mother Teresa or of the suffering and martyrdom of those behind the iron curtain,, we look at the trinkets we have gathered to measure our success and in wistful remorse almost wish that we could relinquish them all and recover our innocence. But innocence lost seems lost forever.

It isn’t even a matter of obeying or disobeying. Jesus’ vision of reality simply doesn’t compute. What Jesus calls blessedness we call failure. Blessed are you poor, he said. We don’t understand how poverty could be a blessing. He also said that blessed are the pure in heart. If society could somehow become pure in heart -- that is, if it could be characterized by the "willing of one thing" (the good) , as Kierkegaard put it -- it would fall in economic collapse. The salvation we desire is deliverance from poverty so that we might be possessed by many things.

In light of Jesus’ incredible "otherworldliness" and the fact that his radicalism seems inappropriate to every conceivable historical and social situation, why should anyone even bother to take him seriously? Why didn’t Judas simply return to Galilee a bit sadder but a whole lot wiser? He must have known that he wouldn’t have been able to bring himself to spend the 30 silver pieces. The money was a pretext for Judas’s acting on the challenge of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus was too compelling for Judas simply to reject benignly. Jesus’ very being demanded a Yes or No to God. Judas said No with a receipt of cash and a kiss.

Jesus and his God receive many kisses from us today. We praise. We theologize. We join churches. We adopt "responsible" positions on national and international political issues. But we are so caught within the iron vise of our secular, materialistic, hedonistic perspectives that the God of Jesus is like an illicit mistress or lover whom we, like Judas, kiss in the dark. However, the presence of such a God in the daylight working hours would only disrupt our labor and embarrass our fellow workers.

Sometimes I think that my patron saint is not Peter or Paul or Francis or Calvin or King, but Judas. Caught in the collision between God and humanity, Judas followed Jesus as far as his strength and insight would take him, and at the end fell short. He was not alone; even Peter, the "rock," had failed Jesus. But Judas’s treachery was deliberate, while Peter’s denial was merely a spontaneous act of cowardice. Somehow, Peter’s weakness is forgivable, but Judas’s cold-blooded act could end only in death.

Of course, my failure to take up my cross and follow Jesus is in one sense more like Peter’s denial. I am simply overwhelmed by the thought of the cross, and I instinctively recoil. But when I "instinctively" recoil day after day, year after year, the natural aversion finally becomes a deliberate policy to grab the world’s wealth and betray Jesus with the kiss of the Christian religion.

We can derive some comfort from George Bernard Shaw’s bon mot, "The last Christian died on the cross," for there is a certain absolution in realizing that we all fall pitifully short. If all others fail, why shouldn’t I? Yet, this cop-out slanders the great "cloud of witnesses" who did not betray, deny or run away, but having been crushed in the collision between God and the world were blessed by Jesus. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

Had Judas been confronted with the challenge "Deny the Messiah or die" only a few weeks earlier, while still hoping Jesus was the real messiah, he would probably have been the first Christian martyr. Or what if he had succumbed to pneumonia on the day he was to betray Jesus, and the chief priests went ahead without Judas’s testimony, which obviously they didn’t need? What if Judas recovered from his delirium only to hear that while he was desperately ill Jesus had been crucified and was resurrected? Perhaps after shuddering with relief upon remembering what he almost did, Judas might have gone on to become one who, like Paul, was "unworthy to be called an apostle" but nonetheless proved to be a great apostle. There is a sense in which poor Judas was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. How often we are saved from saying or doing something we would profoundly regret simply because we reconsider before we get the chance to act.

We, of all people, should find it difficult to condemn Judas. He never did anything to us, except to be the agent whose dark work was a necessary part of our salvation. In many ways, we are as guilty as Judas in the death of God; yet from this death we hope for infinite benefit. Why should Judas be judged more harshly than we are? The best hope most of us have in facing the final judgment will be to stand in solidarity with Judas. For in pleading his case we will be pleading our own.

The Costliness of Grace (Mark 9:43-48)

And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched [Mark 9:43-48].

‘‘It is better for you to enter life maimed . . ." Jesus was possessed of a ferocious righteousness that, frankly, leaves us appalled. Confronted by such a text, we are immediately impelled to find some way out from under its judgment. Clearly, we insist, Jesus was speaking hyperbolically. Did he not frequently overstate the case in order to drive home his point? Surely Jesus was not literally calling for a pack of limping, blind and handless disciples to follow stumbling after him into the Kingdom of God.

Our recognition of a certain exaggeration in our text is some consolation, but not much. For who ever supposed otherwise? Hardly anyone in the history of the church, with the notorious exception of the self-emasculated Origen, ever really supposed that self-mutilation was a remedy for sin. It is almost universally recognized that Jesus’ drastic language was his metaphorical way of expressing his hatred of sin. Yet it is precisely the intention that lies behind his metaphor that gives us our problem. For Jesus’ language in all its vigorous overstatement still reflects a sense of divine fury over the failure of the divine purpose to work itself out in the actions of human beings that does not compute with our urbane, 20th-century middle-class liberal Christianity.

Bonhoeffer’s accusation that the modern church seeks "cheap grace" has become a commonplace. It is all but impossible not to agree with his critique. We do indeed want our salvation free and easy. We don’t want our secular lifestyles unsettled by our religion. We sincerely hope that grace is cheap. It’s the only way we would be willing to afford it. If we believe in salvation at all, we tend to believe in universal salvation, for it is the only basis on which most of us could remotely hope to be saved. All the time we’re still Christian enough to call to God in the name of Jesus -- the very Jesus who warned of hell where the "worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."

Of course, the hell talk can be gotten ‘round. Jesus was a first-century apocalyptically oriented Jew. Hell was a part of an apocalyptic schema that also included language about literal demons, an imminent supernatural end to the cosmos, etc.; modern scientifically oriented individuals cannot be expected to interpret Jewish apocalypticism by reviving medieval pictures of hell. In fact, we see things very differently.

Both in the secular world and in the church, our characteristic approach to human frailty is not chastisement and dire threats, but understanding; not calling people to repent their sins, but teaching people the gentle arts of self-acceptance; not an ethic of cross-bearing, but an ethic based on the value of self-actualization. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we render this in terms of the cliches of pop psychology. "In order to love one’s neighbor, one first must love oneself." The terrible truth is that Jesus would have made a miserable shrink. For Jesus, human frailty and weakness must be excised, not adjusted to. Jesus stands outside our characteristic approach to psychology and ethics, and he refuses to come in. And our problem is that we can neither agree with Jesus nor let go of him.

To be sure, the hand-chopping, eye-plucking remedy for sin could never work, if for no other reason than the fact that we have more sins than we have bodily parts. If all offending parts were removed, in the end we would simply be torsos supporting heads. And there’s the rub. Our hearts and minds are still intact. Yet from our hearts and minds come forth all our sins. Our other organs would have been made scapegoats for the real culprits. "For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth" (Gen. 8:21). Yet Jesus spoke in such desperate terms in order to underscore his sense of outrage over a situation that is made worse by the very impossibility of it all.

Certainly, it is helpful to realize that Jesus did not intend his words to be taken literally, and the demythologizing insights of biblical criticism save us from an attempt to repristenate the apocalypticism of the first century in a forlorn attempt to be faithful to Jesus’ words. Nevertheless, the power of Jesus’ words cuts through our attempts, however legitimate, to mitigate them. The fact remains that we are sinners. Individually, we are all that our weekly ritualistic, liturgical confessions of sin make us out to be.

We are indeed prideful, selfish, lustful, slothful, cold of heart, deceitful both to ourselves and others -- the melancholy list goes on. And collectively we Americans are on top of the radically unbalanced eco-political structure of the world, getting ours first. Most of the time we successfully erect self-justifying rationales that protect our sin against the lash of Jesus, but we all, on occasion, let our guards down, and the anger of Jesus exposes us in all our godlessness.

Yet even in these moments of exposure, our self-justifications are still close at hand. How easily we cover our nakedness once again with rationalizations and, in a single movement of our soul, quickly come to resent the embarrassment that the revelation of our actual condition caused us. Having regained our composure, we despise the disturber of our self-respect. Quite apart from the fact that talk of eternal hell insults our modernity, we reject the hell talk of Jesus because we reject the right of anyone -- son of man or son of God -- to speak to us in such terms. We grant that we are not perfect, but we refuse to grant that our imperfections, such as they are, justify God’s eternal rejection of us. How dare Jesus, or anyone, speak to us in terms of amputations, gnashing worms and unquenchable tires! Metaphors and myths notwithstanding, who does he think he is?

It is ironic that the one who ended up mutilated for sin was Jesus himself. He who said cut off your hand and foot was hanged hand and foot from the cross. He who advised plucking out your eye shut both his eyes unto death. Perhaps Jesus has earned the right to discuss with us the gravity of our sin, having forgiven us our sin in such mutilating agony. Perhaps his forgiveness of us might evoke in us, if only for a moment, a willingness to wonder about the pride we take in our modernity, our self-sufficiency, our self-justification. Perhaps we do stand in need of grace. Could it be that if Jesus’ cross is any indication, the only real grace is costly, hard-earned grace? Maybe we, even we, need as a mercy to hear of the awe-ful judgment of God for a time. And thereby to be brought to our senses about the significance of our lives and deaths.