Jason Micheli's Blog, page 77
May 3, 2023
What is Said When Jesus is Said to be "Risen"
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Whatever else we may intend by the term, the gospel can only ultimately refer to the apostolic pronouncement, “Jesus is risen.”
The resurrection of Jesus the Israelite from the dead is the message that the apostles raced across the Mediterranean to proclaim. Contrary to the church’s subsequent emphasis on the cross, apostolic preaching presented the crucifixion of Jesus as salvific only to the extent that God overcame it, raising the crucified Jesus from the dead. Peter puts it just so in the first gospel sermon, “This Jesus, whom you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.” Meanwhile Paul, in his epistle to the church at Corinth, sets out the proclamation of resurrection as the claim without which the church is worse than a vain endeavor.
The church’s final, interpreting pronouncement is “Jesus, the Israelite, has risen from the dead.”
Gospeling occurs as this pronouncement interprets the hopes and fears not only of its hearers but of all created history.
If the church’s gospel has no other event to report but the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s surely crucial for believers to inquire what is said when Jesus is said to be risen. At its most essential, what are the “gospel-minimum” components of the faith’s resurrection claim?
What must we be saying when we say that Jesus is risen?1— That Jesus is risen means he must now be alive.Though a great deal of what passes today for Christianity would suggest otherwise, the most minimal claim of Easter faith is that Jesus, who once was dead, now lives with death behind him. To put the gospel-minimum plain, if Jesus is risen, he must now be alive.
But this is not as self-evident as we might assume, for what is said when someone is said to be alive? Robert Jenson suggests that the minimum difference between a live person and a dead person is that “the live person can surprise us.” That Jesus is alive, therefore, means that he is known by us yet not contained or constrained by our knowledge of him. The Gospel narratives are testimonies to him; they are not exhaustive biographies of him. The liveliness of Jesus, his ability to surprise us still, is a matter of time. That Jesus is alive, in other words, means that he comes to us from the future. Jesus is thus the first moment of the End, having been raised by the Father and ascended in the Spirit into the future— this is of course what Paul means by calling the Risen Jesus the first fruit of the new creation.
May 2, 2023
Can one be a Christian and believe that all will be saved?
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Some time ago, I received a question from a reader/listener about the boundary of the Christian hope; that is, is it somehow unfaithful to hope that God will, in the End, accomplish the salvation of all? Since we’re still in the season of Eastertide, his question strikes me as germane to the full scope of the Resurrection promise, about which the ancient church father, Maximus the Confessor, asserts:
“The Word of God and God wills eternally and wills in all things to accomplish the mystery of his Incarnation.”
In other words, as scripture itself says plainly, the resurrection of Christ is but the first fruit of a salvation that is cosmic in scope, extending not to certain individuals but to all of creation— all of creation, Maximus reminds us, will be as the child born to Mary, a creature yet charged with the glory of God.
Without further ado, here is Matthew’s thoughtful question followed by my response.
Hello Rev. Micheli,
My name is Matthew _______, I'm an enormous fan of your work. I was reading Rob Bell the other day and was a bit disturbed by this line: "It's been clearly communicated to many that this belief (in hell as eternal, conscious torment) is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus."Would you say it is a common view among evangelicals that the *belief itself* in universalism warrants Hell? That even if the person believes Jesus saves, the additional belief of universalism amounts to rejecting him? (This could just be Bell's hyperbole regarding the word "essentially".) Can one be a Christian and believe that all will be saved? I was wondering what your take on the matter might be.
Sincerest,
Matt
Hi Matt,
Quite obviously you’ve read a sufficient amount of my writing to guess that flattery was a good gamble to get a response from me. I thank you all the same, and I’m being truthful when I say that I’m humbled not only by your kind words but more so by your trust in me with such a significant question.
I think a word like “trust” is absolutely the right word to use in this matter for the stakes explicit in a doctrine like the— supposed— doctrine of eternal conscious torment are too high for the sort of callous, unthinking certitude with which many Christians comment on it. On the one hand, I know far too many liberals who attempt to posit universal salvation by resorting to sloppy analogies about spokes on a wheel.
“Different religions are just different paths to the same destination,” is a mantra many are conditioned by the culture to repeat.
Seldom do such people realize the presumption behind what they surely take to be a humble position; after all, just as only God can reveal God, only God can know which paths might produce the destination that is God.
Likewise are those who want to iron over differences between the faiths of Abraham by dismissing them altogether with, “We all worship the same God, right?” We may indeed all worship the same God, but such a dismissal ignores that the central tension in scripture is not over having or not having a generalized belief in God but in whether or not God’s People worship God rightly.
Any account of universal salvation, therefore, must arise not from the secular impulse to undo what God does at Babel and eliminate difference.
The difference God does at Babel is the way God blesses the world.
The elimination of difference, Babel teaches us, comes from our sinful inclination to be gods in God’s stead. Often I think Christians of a certain vintage insist upon the notion of eternal hell because those Christians adovcating for universal salvation do so in a way that seems insufficiently Christian; that is, Christianity often seems incidental to the sentiments that prompt their universalism. Incidentally, I believe this is also why so many progressive Christians are unpersuasive to other Christians on LGBTQ issues. “Love and welcome for all,” for example, is a principle with which I concur, but it is a principle.
Principles, in principle, do not require a crucified Jew for you to discover them.
Any argument for universal salvation, then, must be one that emerges from the particular revelation given to us by God in Jesus Christ, and, frankly, the argument from those scriptures is much easier to execute than many brimstone-loving evangelicals seem to realize. Certainly there’s sufficient scriptural witness to disqualify any characterization of eternal conscious torment as an essential Christian belief. As Jesus tells Nicodemus, his coming comes from God’s love for the entire cosmos and what God desires is that all the world will be saved— the word there is healed— through him.
Question to Ponder:
Does God get what God wants in the End?
If not, wouldn’t what frustrates God’s eternal aim, by definition, be god?
In that Gospel, John makes explicit in his prologue and in his Easter account that the incarnation is God’s way of constituting a new creation not evacuating a faithful few from the old creation. The cosmic all-ness of Christ’s saving work is the thrust of Paul’s argument in Romans where even the unbelief of the Jews Paul attributes to God’s own doing:
“God has consigned some to unbelief so that God may be merciful to all.”
He puts it even plainer in Timothy:
“Our savior God . . . intends that all human beings shall be saved and come to a full knowledge of the truth.”
Where “the other place” is mentioned in the creeds, which, remember are the only means by which Christians evaluate who is and is not a legitimate believer, Christ’s descent to the dead is mentioned to reiterate the reality of his death and so his hallowing of death for all who enter it. Even in Christ’s own parables— and remember, they are parables— hell is never a realm that lies outside the realm of grace.
Whenever we separate the person and work of Christ, which an accomodated Church in Christendom is always tempted to do, we abstract discipleship (a life patterned after the person of Jesus) from faith (confession in the work of Christ), leaving “belief” to play an outsized role in how we conceive of what it means to be a Christian.
Faith then becomes a work we do, a work by which we merit salvation rather than a gift from God to sinners. Understand, this insistence on eternal conscious torment is ungracious all the way down. We’re the agents of it all.
It turns Christianity into a religion of law instead of grace.To answer your question, though, I’m not sure that I can answer your question. I don’t know how many evangelicals believe that belief in universalism itself warrants eternal conscious torment. If they do believe that believing all shall be saved is a surefire way not to be saved, I’m not sure what Bible they’re reading. Karl Barth, for instance, who was an evangelical in the original Reformational sense of the word, wrote that while the Bible does not permit us to conclude without qualification that all shall be saved, the Bible does exhort us to pray that all will be saved because the salvation of all is God’s revealed will.
The salvation of all is quite plainly God’s revealed will.
Just as I’m not sure what Bible such evangelicals could be reading, I’m also unclear about what God they could worshipping. Such dogmatic insistence behind belief in eternal conscious torment and the alleged justice that requires such a doctrine grates against the justice God reveals to us in crucifixion of God’s own self for the ungodly. When it comes to questions of eternal punishment, we mustn’t let the world’s sin obscure the fact that Jesus, crucified for the ungodly, is the form God’s justice takes in the sinful world.
While I’m not sure how many evangelicals believe believing in universal salvation yields damnation, I do believe many evangelicals lack an helpful awareness that belief in universal salvation is more than a meager minority voice in the history of the Christian Church. There have been universalists as long as there have been Christians. In the first half the Church’s history, they were so numerous that Augustine had a sarcastic epithet for them (“the merciful-hearted”). The church father, Gregory of Nyssa, whom Rob Bell basically ripped off, was one. He argued that since Adam and Eve were types who represented the entire human community whatever salvation meant it meant the redemption of all of humanity. You need not agree with Gregory but to suggest Gregory is not a Christian seems to indicate the plot has gotten lost.
As David Bentely Hart notes:
“[Universalists] cherished the same scriptures as other Christians, worshipped in the same basilicas, lived the same sacramental lives. They even believed in hell, though not in its eternity; to them, hell was the fire of purification described by the Apostle Paul in the third chap- ter of 1 Corinthians, the healing assault of unyielding divine love upon obdurate souls, one that will save even those who in this life prove unworthy of heaven by burning away every last vestige of their wicked deeds.”
Back to your question— Would you say it is a common view among evangelicals... that even if the person believes Jesus saves, the additional belief of universalism amounts to rejecting him?
Again, I’m not sure what evangelicals believe about the dangers of believing in universalism, but if any do, then we should pray for them. How sad to think that it’s possible for Christians in America to have turned the wine of the Gospel into water.
A Gospel where, in the End, sinners get what they deserve— that’s water not wine.It’s religion; it’s not the justification of the ungodly.A Gospel where those who err by believing too much in the triumphant mercy of God will be banished to eternal outer darkness— that’s worse than the plain old water of religion. What’s more, it puts the right-believers outside the party standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the older brother pissed off at the prodigality of the Father’s grace. Recall Good Friday, it was such begrudgers who pushed God out of the world on a cross.
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May 1, 2023
Baptism Saves
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The lectionary Gospel text for the Fifth Sunday of Eastertide is a passage made familiar by its ubiquity at services of death and resurrection. Just after Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, he begins to say farewell to them. The God who wept for Lazarus speaks to his fearful followers, already grieving his absence, of the place he goes to prepare for them:
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you there myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
When Jesus got up from the table in the Upper Room, removed his outer robe, and stooped down on his knees before them like a slave, Peter had protested. “You’ll never wash my feet,” “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me,” Jesus had replied. “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet,” Jesus elaborates, but one who has been bathed is entirely clean.”
Jesus wasn’t talking about feet.
He was talking about baptism.
He was talking about the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection.
If you’ve been baptized by me, baptized into me, you are entirely clean, Jesus promises.
It’s the same promise with which God meets us in the water:
Wash away sin and clothe him/her in Christ’s righteousness— that’s everything.That’s all any of us will ever need before a Holy God.That’s enough.That’s your enoughness.Baptism saves.“Pour out your Holy Spirit, Lord, to bless this gift of water and ____ who receives it, to wash away his/her sin and clothe him/her in Christ’s righteousness; so that, dying and rising in the waters of baptism, ______ may share in Christ’s final victory.”
Or rather, through baptism into Christ, God saves you.
Faith clings to baptism, Martin Luther taught. Whenever doubt or despair attacked him, Luther said he could always return to the fact of his baptism and take comfort. No matter what’s going on inside you, Luther taught that you can always point outside of you to your baptism and know that, by virtue of your baptism, you are in Jesus Christ.
Whenever the valley of the shadow of death casts its pall over you, you can cling to your baptism and know that everything you need to enter the Father’s house was already gifted to you by Christ through water and the Word. Speaking of the Father’s house, after making this promise about the power of baptism not simply to cover all our sins, but to clothe us in Christ’s own perfect righteousness, Jesus makes this other promise about going to prepare a place for us in his father’s house.
Jesus isn’t giving blueprints of heaven.
Jesus is talking about a wedding.
In first century Jewish weddings, when a bridegroom betrothed himself to a bride, before the wedding ceremony, he would first go to his father’s house and build an addition onto the family home.
Only after the bridegroom had prepared a place for his bride at his father’s house would the bridegroom return, make his promise of forever to his bride, and then take her to the place he had prepared for them.
This promise at the Last Supper— it’s not about a place.It’s about a person.April 29, 2023
Hitmen and Midwives
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Hi Friends,
Thanks to all of you who have subscribed and supported this little theo-venture. Your questions and feedback have been very helpful, and I appreciate you taking the time to make this as much of a community as the inter-webs will allow.
One of the offerings I’ve started here on the Substack is a series on preaching, Hitmen and Midwives. I took the title from a series of talks I did for the clergy of the Anglican Church of Canada, and I got the title for it from God’s self-description in Deuteronomy, “I kill (with the Law) and I make alive (with the Gospel).”
As part of this series, I’ve been talking with my friend Ken Jones about our 9.5 Theses on Preaching. The wink to Luther’s 95 Theses is appropriate for the Protestant Reformation, really, is best understood as a preaching movement.
Here is Thesis #5:
Preachers who assume a free will on the part of their hearers will always confuse law for gospel and will instead deliver advice, wisdom, or exhortation while also making the cross a mere adjunct to personal improvement or an exemplar of purposeful living.
If you like what we’re doing, consider pledging your support.
If you have questions or ideas for future conversations, leave it in the comments or shoot me an email.
Grace and Peace,
J
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April 28, 2023
Is this how to be an antiracist?
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Here is my latest piece for The Christian Century, a review of Jonathan Tran’s new book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism:
Every system gets the results its structure is designed to produce. Some pastors learn this lesson explicitly in pastoral care courses, and others learn it on the ground in congregational ministry. It wasn’t until I heard my most blatantly racist parishioner describe his difficulties paying the bills and his frustrations over being at the mercy of the Veterans Health Administration for health care that I even thought to ask the question:
What purpose does racism serve?In this necessary and challenging book, Jonathan Tran employs a relational ethnography to critique what he deems the reigning orthodoxy on antiracism and to provide a contrary framework for destabilizing the status quo that Whiteness protects. He documents the histories of two communities, Redeemer Community Church in San Francisco and the Mississippi Delta Chinese, to show how anti-Asian racism in America belies the simplicity of the Black/White binary. By moving from the now normative framework of “identitarian antiracism” to one of “political economy,” Tran attempts a counterintuitive analysis that, he argues, can lead to imaginative alternatives when it comes to our practices and our politics, especially for Christians.
Tran’s thesis is as simple as it is contrary.
He asserts that orthodox antiracism’s intense focus on racialized identity is “serious impediment to the work of democratic life on the one hand and political liberation on the other.”
Alternatively, he foregrounds the political economy (or what scripture calls the principalities and powers), which originally created the concept of race and racial categories as a means to justify domination and exploitation. In widening the frame of the discussion to better understand the historic purpose racism serves, Tran is returning to the kind of argument mounted long ago by Black thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois.
The first half of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism relies upon an ethnography of the Delta Chinese to critique the identitarian antiracism that presently holds sway across the public square. As Tran understands it, this is “an approach to racism that begins and ends with racial identity, prioritizing (white) racial identity as racism’s starting point and championing (non-white) racial identity as antiracism’s end game.” Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller White Fragility is the popular pinnacle of this view, and Tran finds a number of faults with its analysis and solutions.
For one, racial identity as an explanatory concept “has very little to say about Asian-Americans.”The arbitrary term Asian American names too many disparate cultural and linguistic groups to be useful and, presumably, so do other racial identities. “Nobody grows up speaking Asian-American,” Tran remarks, quoting Jay Caspian Kang. “Nobody sits down to eat Asian-American food . . . and nobody goes on pilgrimages to their motherland of Asian-America.” Identitarian antiracism is structured by a Black/White binary that forces others into its explanatory concept, Tran argues. This leads to corrosive mythologies such as the “model minority myth,” which allows Asian Americans to gain relative access to Whiteness.
The normative discourse on racism operates “as if Asian-Americans quietly waiting their turn is the public face of racial solidarity.”Another fault of identitarian antiracism, Tran writes, is that it’s overly individualistic. It presupposes that individuals, out of prejudice, act in racist ways that can manifest systemically. It aims to change mindsets through antiracism training, rooted in the assumption that better ideas lead to better representation, which will lead to better conditions for the oppressed and exploited. This assumption, however, doesn’t sit well with the evidence. Since the 1960s, when diversity, equity, and inclusion training was first normalized in the United States, both the racial wealth gap and racial health-care disparities have gotten worse rather than better. Ideas are not all that have hold of us.
And whence do those racist ideas in individuals come?
While in no way denying the totalizing reality of racism, Tran contends that identitarian antiracism speaks of Whiteness in ontological terms it is reticent to claim; that is, it holds that racism is an ailment innate and indelible to being White.
For Tran, this is problematic on two fronts. The first is that it depends upon a racial essentialism (the idea that a White person’s identity is determinatively bound up with the fact of their Whiteness) that originated with White racists.
We ought not to be fighting racism using the conceptual terms bequeathed to us by the KKK.The second problem Tran identifies with the unstated metaphysics of identitarian antiracism is that it would have us believe that White racists act out of no other motivation or context than prejudice and resentment. Tran believes this is an oversight of convenience. It’s far easier to induce White guilt than to examine what is required to upend the structures that make possible that guilty White person’s way of life.
Centering the problem on Whiteness, Tran argues, only ensconces both sides in the status quo.Tran believes we must destabilize the categories of identitarian antiracism if we hope to destabilize White people’s attachments to the systems that oppress and exploit others. “It is surprising how rarely antiracists acknowledge the commanding role racial capitalism has played throughout American history,” he writes, and “the omission suggests that identitarian antiracism does not fully appreciate the stakes of the matter, nor the possibilities that remain.” He cites sources, such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, to argue that race is a construct created to justify capitalist exploitation. What color you are is determined by the same social architecture that ensures your first question to any stranger is, “What do you do for a living?”
In the second half of the book, Tran turns his analysis to the systems that racial capital protects and maintains. If, in fact, racism serves a purpose—to justify dominative exploitation—Tran believes antiracism should undertake two concrete and manageable tasks.
First, it should reduce racialization’s power to aid and abet domination. This task involves relinquishing racist identitarian modes of thought, including the concept of Whiteness. Second, antiracism should work to upend exploitation as the basis of political economy. Such work requires the searching for and lifting up of “alternative idioms by which political economy is imagined” and practiced.
The reigning antiracist orthodoxy is incapable, Tran argues, of attempting this imaginative political economy because “it separates questions of representation (specifically the representation of constituent identities) from questions of justice.
Questions of justice are then hollowed out into questions about who is and who is not represented, where just representation involves mere presence in what amounts to a numbers game.”
In conversation with theologians such as Willie James Jennings, Tran provides a relational ethnography of Redeemer Community Church to illustrate how identitarian modes of antiracism are impotent to undo the complexities of a political economy based on racial capital and to show how a Christian moral vision can create communities oriented around alternative micro economies. Redeemer is located in the most marginalized area of San Francisco, Bayview–Hunters Point, one of the last remaining Black communities in the gentrified city. The church operates its own software company, which funds its ministry to the community. It has also established a school, Rise University Preparatory, which seeks to address the city’s educational inequality.
Education is a particularly salient instantiation of the limits of identitarian antiracism, Tran believes. Echoing Martin Luther King Jr.’s lament about the dangers of the White moderate, he writes:
“The fact that it is more often than not liberal progressives who hoard [educational] opportunities to facilitate advantage over African Americans suggests that progressive sympathies arrive as wolves in sheep’s clothing. Indeed, the inability of the most committed progressives to carry through on the promises of liberal modernity suggests that it is nonblack antiracists that should worry us the most. It is their missional posture and baked-in justifications that are likely to enact the greatest damage. . . . If those most committed to liberation only further harm black life, then perhaps the persistence of antiblackness reveals a reality we not only have failed to come to terms with, but perhaps constitutionally cannot bring into focus.”
In other words, DiAngelo is not nearly radical enough.
White people threatened by antiracist training do not have fragile psyches. They are quite right to feel threatened, for they sense just how much they stand to lose in an alternative political economy.I’ve led and participated in numerous church studies of books like White Fragility since the murder of George Floyd, and I pastor in a mainline denomination where identitarian antiracism is such the reigning orthodoxy that at times it appears to have replaced creedal orthodoxy. Over the course of 300 pages, Tran identifies and unpacks what I’ve often observed about such congregational studies and institutional rhetoric—that it very often makes the problem worse by inflaming White people, and, more critically, does not change the situation it seeks to remedy.
“We keep getting stuck,” Tran says, “in the trap we’re trying to get out of.”Much like grace, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism is a gift we didn’t know we needed until we received it. It provides both a different mode of analysis for which many are hungry and a constructive, if radical, proposal for a way forward beyond a racialized political economy. My only lament about Tran’s work is its thoroughness and thoughtfulness. It is a thick and challenging book, one that many people who desperately need it surely will struggle to navigate. My recommendation of it comes with the hope that Tran will produce a more digestible version for a broader audience.
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April 27, 2023
King of Kings Not Secretary of After Life Affairs
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1 Peter 2.19-25
The lectionary epistle for the Fourth Sunday of Eastertide is 1 Peter 2. In the middle of his instructions to the elect community— instructions for how they are to embody publicly the messianic revolution begun by cross and resurrection— the Apostle Peter pauses, pivots, and quotes from the prophet Isaiah. This is clear reminder that the creed specifies no atonement theory for the church because the church’s canon and liturgy already function as its only explanation for it:
“He was despised, and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom others hide their faces…Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. All like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth…
Although he had done no violence, there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain… he makes himself an offering for sin."
No doubt, you know these lines from Handel’s Messiah. The Suffering Servant Song in Isaiah 53 is the fountain and the foundation for understanding the death of Jesus Christ as a substitution; that is, in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ the incarnate God suffers and dies in the place of— as a substitute for— all humanity.
Pro nobis.
For us.
In our stead, God the Son bears the verdict of the just sentence of God the Father. The Judge is judged in our place. Jesus Christ undergoes the the righteous wrath of God as the expiation for sins, offering his perfect, innocent, and sinless life as a vicarious substitute for your own.
As Karl Barth puts it:
“Our turning from God is followed by God’s annihilating turning from us. When it is resisted, God’s love works itself out as death-dealing wrath. Jesus Christ follows our way as sinners— in our place— to the end which our sinful way leads, into outer darkness.”
The prophet Isaiah’s suffering servant song is at the center of the tradition’s interpretation of the atonement as a substitution. From the earliest days of the Church, Isaiah 53 informed Good Friday liturgies. The ancient Church Fathers quoted Isaiah 53 lavishly in their preaching and writing. Mel Gibson inscribed his 2004 film, the Passion of the Christ, with a quotation from Isaiah’s suffering servant song.
For many Christians, this particular way of understanding the death of Jesus Christ (the New Testament uses a variety of motifs to interpret the meaning of the crucifixion), rooted in Isaiah 53, just is itself the Gospel. When people complain that preachers should steer clear of politics in the pulpit, avoiding public issues or current events, and instead stick to proclaiming the Gospel, they usually have in mind as the Gospel this particular way of understanding the Gospel.
“I don’t want to hear about politics in church just preach the Gospel,” I’ve heard more than a few folks gripe over the course of my ministry. Indeed many in the black Church have directed warranted criticism of the often exclusive focus on substitutionary atonement in the white Church for the way it severs the Gospel from social justice.
But it’s odd—
It’s odd that we would reduce the good news of the Gospel to the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ for sinners. And its odder still that we would make that version of the Gospel incompatible with the Church’s social and political witness.It’s a strange given that the only unambiguous use of Isaiah 53 to interpret the death of Jesus Christ, in the entire New Testament, comes here in the Apostle Peter’s epistle.
As crucial as Isaiah’s suffering servant song has been in the Christian tradition for understanding the death of Jesus Christ, the only instance of the New Testament using it is in this lectionary passage from Peter.
And notice the context of the text:Peter’s preaching politics.April 26, 2023
The Church is an Event within an Event
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Acts 2
The church tenders curious claim as it moves from the second to the third article of the creed credited to the apostles. Christians, the dogma requires, believe “in the holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
The preposition makes all the difference.
It’s not, “I believe the holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” The baptized do not profess belief in the church’s testimony to the gospel. The church, oddly enough, is constitutive of that very gospel. It’s, “I believe in the holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
How odd of God.
Jesus is personally the second identity of the triune God, yet what St. Augustine called the totus Christus (the whole Christ) is Jesus-with-the-church. No one recognizes the ridiculousness of such a claim more than a preacher; nevertheless, both creed and canon stipulate that the church is a work not of God’s creation but a work of God’s salvation. According to the prior logic of the creed, Christians believe in God the Creator, but of creation itself Christians believe only that it is creation. According to the culminating logic of the creed, Christians believe in God our End, but of that End itself Christians believe only that our final destiny is in him.
Quite simply, Christians do not place their faith in the things of this world except we do place our faith in one of the most unremarkable and unreliable creatures of the world, the church.
The church is not simply the fruit of God’s work of salvation. She is its instrument.The Risen Christ makes his body available to believers in the church as loaf and cup. The Risen Christ makes his body available to the world as the church. That the church herself is constitutive of the gospel, necessarily instrumental in God’s work of salvation, believers seldom notice. More often, the church is taken to be the accidental, and perhaps option, association of those still waiting on the Risen One’s return. This is one of the challenges posed to the church by the lectionary’s habit, mandated by the liturgical calendar, of reading narratives out of order.
For example, this Sunday’s assigned reading from Acts 2:
They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
The lectionary assigns this passage, narrating the consequence of the Spirit’s outpouring upon the believers, during the season of Eastertide, prior to both the Ascension and Pentecost. What gets elided by so assigning it is this sheer and simple fact:
God institutes the church by not letting Jesus’s Resurrection be itself the End.Don’t forget—
The hope of Israel, of which the Father’s raising of the Son is the first rumblings of an affirmative response, was that Resurrection would signal the culminating End of God’s history with his people. Easter, then, is only a partial answer to Israel’s hope.
God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead.
But the End has not yet come.
There is still more history.
The Catholic modernist Alfred Loisy derided the tradition by famously quipping:
“Jesus announced the Kingdom, but it was the church that came.”
Yet this is exactly so.
And this is precisely according to God’s providence.
April 25, 2023
The "I" A.I. is Missing
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For shits and giggles, my friend Ken Jones recently asked ChatGPT to “write a sermon on Romans 5.1 in style of Jason Micheli.”
ChatGPT is the artificial intelligence portal that has occasioned much leery hand-wringing of late. In moments, A.I. can scour the available data in the digital square and assemble a relevant string of facts and propositions, and, importantly, it can do so in what appears to be the proper rhetorical form. For the uninitiated, the preacher’s work of attending to the coming Sunday’s scripture, exegeting his or her own congregation, listening for a word from the Lord, and only then writing down a sermon that will be God’s own living word is long, slow, labor-intensive work. And very often it ends in failure. ChatGPT, by contrast, can produce a passable facsimile of a sermon in moments.
A.I.’s implications for those who work with words have not gone unnoticed.
For example, here is the sermon ChatGPT spit out in seconds in response to my friend’s request:
Dear friends,
Today, I want to draw your attention to the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 5:1, where he writes, "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."
These words carry a profound message for each one of us, a message of hope and assurance in the midst of our struggles and trials.
You see, Paul's words remind us that our justification before God is not based on our own merits or works. We do not earn our salvation through our good deeds or righteous living. Instead, it is through our faith in Jesus Christ that we are justified and made right with God.
This is a message that runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of our world, where we are told that we must earn everything we have through hard work and dedication. But the truth of the Gospel is that our salvation is a gift freely given by God, and it is through our faith in Jesus that we are able to receive it.
Through our justification in Christ, we are able to experience peace with God, a peace that surpasses all understanding. No matter what challenges we may face in our lives, we can rest assured that we have a God who loves us and who has already won the victory for us.
So let us hold fast to our faith in Jesus, trusting in the power of his death and resurrection to bring us into a right relationship with God. And let us live each day with the confidence that comes from knowing that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
May these words of Paul be a source of comfort and strength to each one of us, now and always.
Amen.
Preachers should loosen their sphincters and admit that not only is this shockingly not bad so far as sermons go but it’s also depressingly better, in terms of cogency and observance of the text, than what many listeners would likely suffer from their flesh-and-blood preacher in a sermon on the same scripture. For instance, A.I. avoided the urge to deconstruct the problematic Paul, turn the apostle’s theology into anthropology, or truck in contemporary politics or ecclesial concerns under the banner of “struggles and trials.” Ilúvatar be praised that A.I. doesn’t yet seem acquainted with the New Perspective on Paul.
The surface limitations of ChatGPT are straightforwardly simple to spot. I certainly have enough of a digital footprint for my friend’s request (“in the style of Jason Micheli”) to have been somewhat replicable. Yet no one who has heard me preach would believe I would bring such a paltry word count into the pulpit nor would I ever begin with a salutation (“Dear friends”) that is as limp as it is false. Just ask my church— they’re not all my friends. Some of them don’t like me. They’re only there because Jesus, who is not dead, has arranged our relationship.
Most critical, while A.I. appears able to spit out intelligible thoughts about God from a passage of scripture, ChatGPT appears to know not the purpose of proclamation. You can spot the fatal error in the move to hortatory at the end, “Let us hold fast to our faith in Jesus…”
It’s a “lettuce sermon.”
It’s a sermon exhorting its hearers to do.
This is deliciously ironic for a scripture on justification by faith alone.
Nonetheless, again embarrassingly so, this is an error that many (most?) incarnate preachers make every Sunday.
Ask ChatGPT for other homiletical offerings on different biblical passages and you will discover A.I. can perform accurate exegesis, provide clear statements about the Bible and its implications for daily living, and speak in relevant terms about the God narrated therein. None of these offerings, however, constitute proclamation.
And this is precisely the irremovable impoverishment of A.I. preachers.
Straightforwardly, the gospel is promise from Christ through a person to a person.Promise is the way the Living God words the world.Proclamation is not simply any word about God. If you have merely explained a biblical text, spoken on a scriptural theme, or talked about God (from the safe remove of second-order discourse), you have, quite simply, not proclaimed the gospel. Thus, you have shuttered the lips of the otherwise loquacious God. Once again, sadly, many incarnate preachers seem to be as ignorant of their primary task as ChatGPT.
The proclamation of the gospel is a promise from Christ spoken through a preacher to a sinner.
As Robert Jenson writes in Story and Promise:
“What happened to the world with Jesus was that at the end of the long history of Israel’s promises, a sheerly unconditional promise was said and became sayable in the world.”
In other words, because the Lord Jesus is risen, every passage of scripture functions as gospel. Therefore, the task of proclamation is not explanation. The task of proclamation is unconditional promise. Every preacher must ask of every passage not “What does it mean?” or “What can I say this Sunday?” or “How is it relevant?” but this question:
“What does the text promise and what may I thus promise that can be and only can be because Christ lives? What future, possible and certain on account of Christ, may I promise my hearers by the leading and authority of this text?”
Again, proclamation is not merely a report about or even an announcement of this unconditional promise. Preaching is a providential “speech-act,” the realizing of the Word by and in our speaking and our hearing. A sermon, in other words, does not merely say that Christ is risen; it enters into and makes available to others the reality of his resurrection. And the way in which the reality of Christ’s resurrection becomes available to us is in an embodied promise that can only be uttered if Jesus has death behind him.
The most basic way the reality of Christ’s risen-ness becomes available to us is in the office of the keys, “I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of your sins…”This is the I that A.I. is missing and will never possess.This most basic form of gospel proclamation shows forth ChatGPT’s most basic deficiency as a writer of sermons.
Namely, A.I. can almost immediately produce three hundred words on peace with God, but A.I. cannot absolve you.
For that, you need a sinner who knows the Lord Jesus even better than he or she knows your sins.
You need a preacher.
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April 24, 2023
Christophonics
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The lectionary Gospel text for this coming Sunday is John 10, but to hear it properly you have to start further back in history.
A little over a century and a half before the birth of Christ, Israel was riven by a bitter, partisan divide that put them on the brink of civil war.
On one side of the conflict were the traditionalists, conservatives allied with Ptolemy, the Pharaoh of Egypt.
On the other side of the fight were the Tobiads— progressives— those Jews who sought to synthesize their covenant customs with the practices and views of the wider pagan world.
The traditionalists ousted the Tobiads from Jerusalem in 170 BC and the Tobiads found exile in Syria under King Antioches Epiphanes. No soon had they arrived in Syria the exiles began lobbying Antioches to invade Israel and restore their party to the power and authority that had been stolen from them. Those who ginned up the incursion got more than they anticipated. At the leader’s incitement, the Temple was stormed and looted. The proceedings in the Temple were halted. The chief priests at work there were hunted and beaten and killed.
As the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, writes in the Jewish War:
“The king being thereto disposed beforehand, complied with the Tobiads, and came upon the Jews with a great army, and took their city by force, and slew a great multitude of those that favored Ptolemy, and sent out his soldiers to plunder them without mercy. He also spoiled the temple, and put a stop to the constant practice of offering a daily sacrifice of expiation for three years and six months.”
In the aftermath of the violence, Antioches erected an altar to Zeus inside the Temple where the ark of the covenant had once resided. He banned the sign of the covenant, circumcision, and, in the holy of holies— where only the great high priest was clean enough to come— Antioches slaughtered a herd of pigs and smeared their entrails and blood upon the mercy seat. The breach of the Temple crossed a line. And it ignited a large scale revolt led by Mattathias, a Jewish priest, and his five sons Jochanan, Simeon, Eleazar, Jonathan, and Judah.
A year after the desecration of the Temple, Judah Maccabeus took the mantle from his father, becoming a guerrilla leader, earning the nickname “Judah the Sledgehammer,” and winning the title מָשִׁיחַ.
Messiah.
When his father commissioned him to lead the movement, Judah pledged to “avenge the wrong done by our enemies and to pay back to the Gentiles what they deserve.” Judah the Sledgehammer kept his vow, defeating Antioches two years later and deposing the seditionists.
Upon victory, jubilant Israelites showered Judah the Sledgehammer with shouts of “Hosanna!” And they rejoiced that perhaps the Sledgehammer was the Shepherd, the Good Shepherd, the Messiah of Messiahs, prophesied by Ezekiel.As it turned out, no. After defeating Antioches Epiphanes, Judah turned around and signed a treaty with Rome. The Sledgehammer suffered a failure of imagination and traded one kingdom for another just like it. But not before he became the prototype for the kind of Messiah Israel expected.
Upon his victory over Antioches, over eight days and eight nights, Judah the Sledgehammer cleansed the Temple, turning over the tables of the pagan altars, and instituted a festival to commemorate the Temple’s restoration.
Hanukkah.
Or, as the Gospel of John puts it in Sunday’s lectionary Gospel (as a FLASHING RED LIGHTBULB CLUE of you, dear reader), the Festival of Dedication.
Conspicuously missing from Jesus’ litany of “I am” sayings in the Gospel of John is a straightforward, lay-your-cards-on-the-table “I am the Messiah.”
There’s “I am the bread of life.”
There’s “I am the light of the world.”
And there’s “I am the resurrection and the life.”
“I am the true vine,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel.
“I am the way and the truth, no one comes to the Father but by me.”
But there’s no brass tacks moment when Jesus gets down to business and makes it plain, “I am the Messiah.”
Still, though, Jesus’s hearers are a quick study and they’ve been taking notes. After all, they’re stuck in some political unpleasantness of their own and they’re anxious to take up the sword and to lay down their hosannas on the next Sledgehammer. It didn’t escape their notice, for instance, that Jesus kicked off his ministry by pitching a temple tantrum, weaving a whip of cords, turning over tables, and screaming that what the collaborators had done was every bit as bad as what Antioches had done, “You’ve turned my Father’s house into a den of thieves.” And as the sheep and oxen scatter and the money-changers nurse their wounds, what does Jesus promise to do?
He promises to cleanse the Temple, once for all.
Just like the Sledgehammer.
Jesus never comes out and says it, “I am the Messiah.”
But for any with eyes to see the signs are all there.
When Jesus reveals his Jewish deli powers, feeding five thousand with just five loaves of challah and two herring, how does the crowd respond?They want to take him by force, John says— not because he makes such fine sandwiches. They want to make him מָשִׁיחַ.King.There’s seven “I am” statements in John’s Gospel. But there’s no big reveal “I am Messiah” statement. Nevertheless, the crowds are wise to him. At the Festival of Booths in John 7, while Jesus teaches in the Temple, some who heard him asked, “Can this man, whom they seek to kill, be the Messiah?” Now, two months later, in John 10, its Hanukkah, the festival that celebrates the rededication of their desecrated monument and the armed restoration of their people to power. And once again Jesus is teaching in the Temple. This time he’s teaching in the portico of Solomon whose thick walls serve as a windbreak from the winter cold. And Jesus creeps so close to the edge his toes are curled over the side.
He doesn’t divulge it totally, “I am the Messiah.” I am your Sledgehammer.
But Jesus steps to within a hair’s breadth of it, gesturing back to the prophet Ezekiel. “I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus says, “the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came so that my sheep may have life and have it abundantly.”His hearers, though— they’re tired of the long, slow tease. They want their freedom back. They want their enemies defeated. They want their political power returned. They’re ready to enlist, to take up arms, to roll up their sleeves and carry a righteous banner. They just want to know, “Are you the Messiah, already?!” Quit being coy.
“How long will you keep us in suspense?” they ask him in today’s text, “If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”
Because if you are, we’ve got to get home and sharpen our swords.
In other words, put up or shut up, Jesus.
Jesus’s response has to be the most disappointing recruitment pitch in the history of enlistment campaigns.
There’s no “Be all you can be.”
There’s no “We’re cancelling the apocalypse.”
Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s speech Jesus’ reply is not.
Jesus doesn’t rouse them to do anything, in fact. “My sheep listen to my voice,” Jesus says, “I know them, and we walk together.”
Again, remember the prophet Ezekiel.Shepherd and sheep— this is messianic, martial imagery.The Good Shepherd is the Christ, promised by God and prophesied by Ezekiel, which makes the flock his Christian soldiers.But the responsibility he gives to his army is aural.“My sheep listen to my voice.”
And just in case you’re tempted to dismiss Jesus’ rally speech as a throwaway line, note how John has placed it right at the very center of his Gospel.
“My sheep listen to my voice.”
The only responsibility this Good Shepherd gives to his army is aural. Almost as important as the task Jesus gives to his flock are all the other tasks he does not give them.
Jesus doesn’t say:
My sheep do whatever is necessary to achieve their vision of society. My sheep resist evil and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. My sheep stand up and fight to protect their values and their nation.
No— and that’s what they expected him to say.
He doesn’t even say My sheep love their neighbors, or care of the poor, or give to good works.
The only responsibility this Good Shepherd gives to his army is aural.
“My sheep listen to my voice.”
As New Testament scholar, Frederick Dale Bruner says of this text, what comprises discipleship is Christophonics. What constitutes the Church and her task is deceptively simple. The Church are those who listen to him, who hear what God says in the gracious Word that is Christ.Or, as Luther says, to be a Christian is to cling to Christ’s word, the Gospel, for dear life. The sole responsibility the Good Shepherd gives to his army is aural. Our task is simple. And whenever the flock shuts their ears and complicates it, believing the Shepherd has given them more responsibilities than that one, they wander off and they get lost.
My friend Ken Sundet Jones writes that we hack God’s election of us in Christ whenever we convince ourselves that we need to add to Jesus’s recruitment pitch, whenever we think we’ve been drafted to be anything more than an aural army.
My sheep listen to my voice and they also_______ and they also_______….
Jones writes:
“The hacking of God’s electing work comes when the world, the devil, and my sinful self get me to think that I can’t count on God’s promises in Jesus. Divine election hacking happens with the proposal that God’s Word is irrelevant. This little Word that the hymn says subdues all the enemies of the Gospel comes to be seen as powerless, weak, and impotent. Christ alone is not enough, and something needs to be added to the cross. Usually what gets added is a moral program, a social benefit, or a political cause that the hackers in this election say is really worth your time. The opponents to the Word move in from both the left and the right. We get divided into camps…At best, these hackers want you to serve many noble causes and not-so-random acts of kindness that make the world a better or more moral place. But like Russian operatives, the result is always that you take your eye off the ball to serve your own autonomy. Your attention is pulled away from the one single thing you need for your salvation, the one thing that is required for the existence of the church and the redemption of the world. What’s missing from this picture is the promise of the Gospel, Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
The crowd gathered around Jesus on Hannukkah— They’re ready to enlist, to take up arms, to roll up their sleeves, carry a righteous banner, and make_______ great again.
If you’re the Messiah, already, give us marching orders!
“Listen,” Jesus responds sparingly, “My sheep listen to my voice.”
The sole work the Shepherd asks his flock to do is to abide in the promise, the promise of the Gospel, returning to it again and again, to hear and receive it in Word and Water and Wine and Bread.
If that doesn’t sound like much to you, you’re right.
It isn’t.
There isn’t much for you to do but listen and trust because one day— on the last day— Jesus Christ is going to present us all to the Father on account of his righteousness— his permanent perfect record— and not at all in the power of our own totally inadequate records, good or bad, no matter if we’re part of the ninety-nine who think we’ve never strayed too far from the flock or if we’re one of those sheep who’ve strayed exceptionally far.
The Good Shepherd’s sheep are those who gather, over and again, to listen to his voice. Period. There’s no addenda. If that doesn’t sound like much to you, you’re right. It’s not.The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set for ourselves nor is the life of grace an effort to achieve our vision of how the world ought to be. The life of grace is instead a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving for us that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve anything or not. The life of grace is the ongoing attempt simply to trust that someone else has and is and will yet rectify all that is broken in our world.
“My sheep listen to my voice.”
On the one hand, it doesn’t sound like much.
On the other hand—
In a nation riven against itself, in a culture at war with itself, in a "Christianity” where so many lost sheep have been lured away by lies, perhaps what the conflict needs more than anything else is exactly this aural army, a flock who know, no matter what others tweet with black and white certainty, the Shepherd says to us all, “None is righteous, no, not one…For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”
Perhaps it’s no small thing at all that our Lord Jesus Christ has called forth a little flock who, by listening to his Word, know that it’s not a battle between good versus evil, light versus dark, for the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. We are all those whom choose the darkness that the Light nevertheless loves to death.
With so many of his flock trying to save the republic from the rest of us, it’s not a little thing that the Good Shepherd has conscripted troops who know one thing: That the only friends Jesus has are sinners, and, no matter what they’ve done or left undone, he is ever ready to eat and drink with them.And if you’re not ready to join them at the table…well…
Jesus calls that hell.
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April 23, 2023
What Exactly is Christ's Risen Body?
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In scripture’s longest— indeed the Bible’s only— meditation on the doctrine of the resurrection, the apostle Paul asserts with an inflexible alacrity, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.”
Paul’s argument is so thoroughly resolute and bracingly clear it begs the question if any have ever read him given the manner in which, on the one hand, believers make bodily resurrection an essential of orthodoxy and, on the other hand, skeptics balk at the whimsy of the amino acids of Pilate’s victim rekindling into Mary’s boy. Paul, who was himself encountered by the Risen Jesus, is quite clear. The news of Easter is not that the crucified corpse of Jesus came back alive; therefore, the promise of Resurrection for us is not simply the hope that our dry bones will live again.
Paul puts the mystery of resurrection in terms of the distinction between perishability and imperishability:
“And I say this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. Look, I tell you a mystery: Not all of us shall fall asleep, but all of us shall be changed, In an instant, in a glance of an eye, at the final trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable thing must clothe itself in imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself in immortality. And, when this perishable thing shall clothe itself in imperishability and this mortal thing clothe itself in immortality, then will the saying that has been written come to pass: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
— 1 Corinthians 15.50-54
The contrast is between a soma psychikon (a body ensouled) and a soma pneumatikon (a body that is of a spirited nature, made to live entirely by pneuma, ie, deathless spirit). It’s a contrast, as the epistle makes clear, between an earthly origin and a heavenly one. Resurrection is neither resuscitation nor reanimation of the material body one has in the fallen world. It is not, in fact, analogous to the raising of Lazarus or to Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. It is instead a radically different kind of life.
The resurrection body will be an altogether different kind of body. Christ’s resurrected body, therefore, is already an altogether different kind of body. Our bodies are not the prototype of a future model to come.
The hope of the resurrection body is not like a the difference between an iPhone SE and an iPhone 14 ProMax, even maximally imagined.
Christ’s risen body is the first fruit of a new and future creatio ex nihilo. We get the resurrection dogma wrong exactly to the degree we take our fallen soma psychikon as the definitional starting point.
Better then to ask a more fundamental question:
What is a body?
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