CHAPTER 6

Human

In this chapter I move even further into rough terrain for any kind of “theology of the New Testament.” The New Testament has lots of explicit statements about God and obviously also about Jesus as both man and Christ. In the previous chapter, however, I noted that although the word pneuma occurs many times in the New Testament, it is often difficult to figure out precisely what the author had in mind when using it.

We are faced with an even more demanding challenge when we read the New Testament in search of theological anthropology. Just what is a human being? What are we made of? What is our end? Purpose? Nowhere in the New Testament does any author set out to define or describe in any kind of abstract, theoretical, philosophical, or scientific way what it means to be human. This does not mean we cannot read the New Testament to construct a Christian theological anthropology. It just means we have to read between the lines, take our cues from here and there, use our theological imagination even more than in the previous chapters of this book. But that is not a hindrance to good theology. It may even be its salvation. Imagination in the reading of scripture is a virtue we need to encourage and develop.

Constructed

Let us start with a claim about the human person, the self, that has become less and less controversial over the past few decades: we are constructed. That is a poststructuralist, postmodernist, philosophical way of saying, as we do in Christian theological language, we are created. The “self-made man,” from Andrew Carnegie to Ayn Rand to Ronald Reagan, is a fool or a liar. We are contingent, coagulations of physical, social, and cultural contexts. There is no “essence” somewhere inside us that is the true “us.” We are each and all constructions of our surroundings and histories.1 We indeed are “dust,” though modern science would prefer to call us “stardust” than “dust of the earth.” Scientists tell us that the stuff of which we are made, all the fundamental elements and particles of our bodies and lives, were themselves products of the forming and exploding of stars. We are, we may imagine, truly dust of the earth; but we are also dust of the stars, if we are to believe contemporary science.²

One theological way of speaking of this constructedness is that we are created. We may speak of that mythologically with Genesis: God is a person who physically molds dirt to make the human being, breathes pneuma into its nostrils to bring it to life, and then, later, splits an originally unified human being into male and female versions.

The scientific account is that we arise historically out of the physical and biological material of our environment and history. The matter in our bodies was formed in the making and unmaking of celestial matter. The fundamental point is that we didn’t always exist. We were made, created, constructed. There is nothing about us, not a soul or spirit or mind, that is not a contingent, temporary coagulation of our environment—physical, biological, social, historical, cultural.

To recall a point I made in the chapter on God, God did not create the universe at some time in the past and then retire. God is constantly creating. The existence of everything that is depends on God’s unceasing work of creating and upholding the universe and ourselves in every nanosecond. The big bang may have been a onetime event—we don’t really know if there were others or there could be more or a recurrence—but for Christians God is always creating and maintaining the universe through love.

Even though “the construction of the self” may be more a product of recent postmodernist social and cultural theory, and the scientific theory of the construction of our bodies from stardust a product of recent physics and cosmology, we can find indications of this fact of our selves also in scripture. The New Testament gives little indication of modern individualism. Throughout the Bible human beings are assumed to belong to larger entities and to get their identities from those social or cosmic bodies of which they are members. Scripture presents us not with “self-made men” or “rugged individuals” but simply with “made human beings”: “Who of you by worrying can add a single foot to your height—or an hour to your life?”3 We are not our own, in a quite literal, physical sense: “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor 4:7). As the people of God, we were “made” to be such; we did not form ourselves: “Those formerly not a people are now the people of God” (1 Pet 2:10).

The contingency of human bodies and identity finds expression in the assumption frequently voiced in New Testament texts that we human beings get our beingness, our identity, from some larger body of which we are part. Paul famously insists that by being baptized into Christ’s body, believers are “in Christ” and therefore can no longer be “in sin” (Rom 6:1–14). Paul seems unable to imagine that believers, who are members of Christ’s body, could also be members of the body of the cosmos or of a prostitute or of Sin (1 Cor 6: 15–20).⁴ Human beings are caught: they possess either the pneuma of the cosmos or the pneuma of God—perhaps both, according to how one reads different New Testament passages, but not neither (1 Cor 2:12). They can participate in either the table of demons or the table of the Lord (1 Cor 10:21). But believers are in the body of Christ, and that is what furnishes their true identity (1 Cor 12:13, 20, 27).

This “identity by location” is true for all human beings. We get our identity from that body of which we are part: “I no longer live: Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20); “Those of Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the spirit, let us conform to the spirit” (Gal 5:24–25); “You are dead with Christ” (Col 2:20); “You are risen with Christ” (Col 3:1); “You died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). According to Paul and other New Testament writers, human beings will be “slaves” to something, either to sin leading to death or to obedience leading to justice and right (Rom 6:16–17).

This explains Paul’s reasoning in Rom 1 about the rise of idolatry and polytheism. Once “the nations” invented idols and thus turned away from the true God, God “gave them up” to filth and dishonor (Rom 1:24). They had to be “somewhere,” under some kind of power. Once they left God’s company, God had to turn them over to other powers. There is no real independence for human individuals. We are all part of something bigger than we are, whether we admit it or like it or not. Fortunately, in faith, “none of us lives for himself and no one dies for himself. If we live or we die, we belong to the Lord” (Rom 14:7–8). “You are not your own.” Your body and pneuma are God’s (1 Cor 6:19–20).

Body Parts

But if we are indeed “constructed,” of what are we constructed? As I said, scientists tell us that our bodies are made up of many different materials of the universe, our matter having been produced in the production and explosion of stars. Texts of the New Testament answer the question by using ancient assumptions and perhaps even a bit of ancient “science,” though I doubt any of these authors had any kind of sophisticated education in philosophy or medicine. And there is no uniform answer among the New Testament documents. Regularly they assume, as does Paul, that the human body was, first of all, dust or dirt, “earth” (1 Cor 15:40, 47–48). But they also mention other aspects of human existence that seem to go into making us human beings what we are.

Traditionally and in much popular assumption Christianity is all about “the salvation of the soul,” and Christians are presumed to believe in an afterlife involving the immortality of the soul or spirit. Indeed, the soul is often thought to be, at least by people living in the West, the central concern of all religion, Christianity included. Christians themselves sometimes think they are supposed to accept an anthropology that proposes a dualism of body and soul or perhaps a tripartite humanity of body (or flesh), soul, and spirit. It sometimes comes as a surprise when they are told that such assumptions don’t really seem to be supported by a historical reading of the Bible.

The word often translated as “soul,” ψυχή, occurs much less, actually, than other terms for the human person or parts thereof. It is found about one hundred times in the New Testament.5 That’s actually a relatively low number compared, for example, to the words for “body” (σῶμα) and “spirit” (πνεῦμα). In my fifth edition of Moulton, Geden, and Moulton, Concordance to the Greek Testament, there are not quite three columns for psychē, whereas there are a full five columns for soma and nine for pneuma.6 The concentration of attention to “the soul” is not nearly as dominant in the New Testament as is often assumed.

The meaning of “psychē” in the New Testament is seldom, if ever, what later Christianity would think of as the “immaterial substance” that exists alongside—or inside—but differentiated from the body. In fact, I was surprised to discover, when recently checking it, that the “Dictionary” included at the end of the fourth revised edition of The Greek New Testament (United Bible Society) does not give “soul” as even one of the meanings of the word, preferring instead “self, innerlife, one’s inmost being; (physical) life; that which has life, living creature, person, human being.”⁷ This is quite correct. Most of the time when a New Testament document has the word “psychē,” the best modern English translation is simply “life,” as many translations actually render it.⁸ Sometimes it is translated as “soul” but in a way that even modern English would use it just to indicate a human life or person. When one says something like, “More than fifteen hundred souls were lost in the sinking of the Titanic,” it doesn’t mean that the “souls” of those persons were lost whereas their “bodies” were saved. It simply means that more than fifteen hundred persons were lost. This is the meaning in several New Testament texts (see Acts 2:41; 7:14; 27:37; 1 Pet 3:20). Most of the time the term does not refer to a part of the human person but simply to the human person.

Sometimes psychē does seem to be a reference to a part of the human person along with other essences or parts but in many cases in rather interchangeable ways. When Mark 12:30 (and par.) has Jesus say, “Love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul [psychē] and your whole mind and your whole strength,” we should not take this as some kind of anatomy lesson about the makeup of the human person. It is simply a way of emphasizing “your whole person.” Just as we wouldn’t take “strength” here to represent a “part” of the human person independent and separable from the body, so we should not take “psychē” here in that way either.

This is shown by the way modern translators take justifiable liberties in rendering “psychē” in different texts. According to the RSV, in Matt 26:38, Jesus says, “My soul is very sorrowful.” But the NEB is perfectly justified in rendering the phrase as, “My heart is ready to break.” Paul writes in Phil 1:27 that he wants the Philippians to strive together “with one psychē,” which is rendered by most translations as “one mind.” Heb 12:3 warns against growing “weary in your psychai,” which various modern translations render something like “do not lose heart” (NEB) or do not “give up for want of courage” (JB) or “grow weary and lose heart” (NIV; similarly NRSV). These are all justifiable translations because in the vast majority of cases when “psychē” occurs in the New Testament, it just means “a living person,” a human being, or whatever makes living beings alive. It does not refer to a “soul” as a nonmaterial “substance” that can exist independent from the body and that is the “real” essence of the person. That meaning rises not from a critical reading of the Bible, not even the New Testament, but from later Platonic and then Cartesian influences.

There are, granted, a very few passages that could be read as implying that psychē is different from the body or some other part of the body. When Matt 10:28 warns against those who can “kill the body but not the soul,” we may imagine the author as differentiating in some way the simple body from the life force of the body. The author of Revelation twice uses the term “psychē” to speak of disembodied souls of the dead (Rev 6:9; 20:4, or are these people given new bodies as part of their resurrection?). 1 Pet 2:11 speaks of “passions of the flesh that war against the spirit.” Heb 4:12 says that the word of God can pierce to “the division of soul and spirit,” though it is none too clear what the author means.

And there are a few passages that could be read to assume a soul separable from the body, though without using the word “psychē.” In Luke 23:43, Jesus promises the thief on the cross that he would be with Jesus that very day “in paradise.” Is this in an “ensouled” existence apart from any body? We can’t be sure. In Phil 1:22–24, Paul muses whether he would rather “remain in the flesh” or “depart and be with Christ.” He carries on a similar meditation in 2 Cor 5:1–10. He compares being “at home in the body,” which he also calls a “tent,” with the better possibility of being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (NRSV). Paul, however, expects any afterlife for human beings to be in resurrected bodies (1 Cor 15), and he is obviously uncomfortable speculating about what kind of existence we might have outside body, insisting in any case that God will not leave us to be “naked” (5:4). So Paul may leave open some possibility that Christians may experience some interim state in which they could experience a continued existence of their “selves” apart from their current bodies. Tellingly, he doesn’t use the word “psychē” for whatever that state of existence could be.

These are the very few passages that could be read (but need not be) as implying some kind of human existence apart from body, but even then they don’t seem to posit clear ideas of the precise nature of that existence or what “we” will consist of. It is certainly not a simple body–soul dualism. It would be misreading to take any New Testament passage as teaching the existence of a human “soul” that is a real, physical or immaterial “thing” separable from the other “parts” of the person and able to exist, as the essence of the person, apart from the body.

We may find in the New Testament, therefore, many passages that give us reason to accept the growing trend of philosophers and even of Christian theologians to dispense with a dualist or tripartite understanding of the human person in body and soul or body, soul, and spirit. Something of a consensus, I would argue, is developing among even Christian thinkers to join with scientists in describing the human person as a physicalist monism. Several have argued that we need not make that a “reductionist physicalism,” meaning that we need not believe that the mind, say, does not exist or is “merely” the physical brain.9 Using theories of “emergence” that have become popular among scientists, philosophers of science, philosophers of religion, and some theologians, we could think of mind as the complex system produced when the brain and body are at work.¹⁰ The mind is more than a simple sum of the cells that make up the brain. The mind is what happens when all those cells, along with the rest of the body, which processes sensation and information data in innumerable ways, function to produce thoughts, emotions, desires, or meaning. And the mind can work by “downward causation” to alter even the material structure of the brain. Therefore, we may think of the mind (or the soul, if one prefers) as having its own ontological existence that cannot be simply collapsed into the material cells of the brain. But we would still need to insist that the mind does not, at least for now and as far as we can tell, exist independently of the brain or body. The mind, or soul, is an emergent property—one could say an emergent ontological system—that arises from the material functioning of the brain and body. This is a monist, physicalist understanding of the human person that is still not reductionist to a position that would insist that the only thing we may think of as existing is “mere matter.” It is also, remarkably, more cohesive with a critical, historical reading of the Bible, which generally depicts the human person as necessarily embodied.

Following a critical reading of the New Testament, we may affirm that we do not “have” an immortal soul. What we may call a soul is simply the fact that we are alive.11 When the body dies, it is not as if the soul leaves and then exists somewhere else. When the body dies, the soul ceases to exist. Or, if we think of it as existing somewhere, say, in the mind of God, that would not really be “us.” As Thomas Aquinas insisted, if the soul exists as some kind of substance apart from his body—a teaching he felt he had to accept in some way because it was orthodox dogma of the church of his day—that is still not truly “him.” According to Thomas’s teaching, and here he is certainly in concert with most of the New Testament, the “I” does not exist as the authentic “I” without body.¹² Or, as Denys Turner wonderfully puts it, “You just have to try and stop thinking of any soul, a cabbage’s or a king’s, as a sort of thing.”¹³

Having affirmed the basic unity of the human person, I should now, though, follow the tendency of this entire book and show how that is true only “in a sense,” and that we may well, in another sense, affirm that we experience our selves as not constrained to our physical bodies. We don’t actually always experience the limits of our being at the surface of our skin: “Though absent in body, I am present in pneuma” (1 Cor 5:3); “Whether in body or outside the body, I do not know” (2 Cor 12:3). We must build into our theories of our selves both the fact that we are bodies (not that we just “have” bodies) but also that we, at least in our experiences, seem to be more than or more extended than our bodies. “We” transcend our bodies in our experience of our bodies, but we cannot demonstrate, at least at this time, that “we” actually exist independently from our bodies.

Technology increasingly renders us transcending our bodies. We are not physically limited to the space inhabited by our bodies. We see things that happen worlds away; we speak in real time with people around the world; we communicate directly, visually, audibly with our loved ones thousands of miles away. This human ability of transcendence happens to us not just spatially but in time also. Because of memory, our minds, though certainly “contained” here and now, travel in our sensibilities back in time. Through our imaginations we look forward in time. We may use New Testament texts that illustrate the transcendence of the human person through spirit, soul, or other mechanism to help think of our own quotidian experiences of transcendence from our bodies.

Moreover, though I have insisted that we are bodies and not “embodied souls,” we may also take the partition of the human person depicted by biblical images of flesh, body, soul, spirit, and mind (to mention only the few perhaps most frequent) to express our experiences in which we sense our selves as not so united and unified after all. The traditional, biblical entities of flesh, soul, and spirit need no longer have the same ontological, physical existence for us that they certainly did for most ancient Christians, yet we may still use them and “experience” them. When we do not do the things which we ought to have done and do the things which we ought not to have done, we may think of such events in modernist terms such as ego, id, superego, conscious, unconscious, subconscious, or we may resort to “biblical” language of flesh, soul, spirit, or mind. We need to accept both the unity of the human person as body and the partition of the human person into different, sometimes cooperating, sometimes warring, parts.

The varied anthropological terms and models we read in the New Testament are just as jumbled and various as our experience of our own bodies and minds. In order to avoid rejecting or rebelling against contemporary science, which tends to insist on a monist, physicalist anthropology, we can easily accept the picture the New Testament offers that we “are” bodies, not that we “have” bodies. But we may also use the mythological anthropology that includes soul, flesh, spirit, body, and mind. The important thing to keep in mind is that there is not one orthodox version of the nature of the human person. We have many choices. And that is a good thing since we in fact experience “our” bodies in diverse, ambiguous, and contradictory ways.

The Social Self

I noted above that many passages of the New Testament construe the human person as gaining identity by being part of a larger whole. This extends further into the idea that the human body is not only constructed of the materials of its environment and history, but the human self is also a construction of its social and cultural environment.14 The idea flies in the face of much modernism, with its ideology promoting the “rugged individual.” As Fergus Kerr puts it, “We have a very powerful picture of the self as isolated will and autonomous individual, left in radical freedom to bring a moral universe out of surrounding chaos either by a gamble of faith or by a God-like act of creation.”¹⁵ Kerr argues, however, that such a notion is bad ideology and bad theology. We are selves “in nature and history.”¹⁶

The modernist idea of the autonomous individual was never a majority view in the ancient world, in my view—though it is difficult to get at what would have been an ancient “common sense” since almost all our evidence derives from the tiny highest class of ancient people, and mainly men. Ancient upper-class ideologies often seem exaggerated by our sources. But there was a dominant ideology of “self-sufficiency” at least among these wealthy male members of the ruling class, and it expressed itself in Greek and Roman philosophy almost universally in our literary sources. These rich men could never have lived their lives or even existed in the absence of their complete dependence on all that was provided by women, slaves, lower-class workers, and “clients” of lesser status. But in order to mask this dependence, which they despised and feared as servile and effeminate, they developed an ideology that insisted that the “true gentleman” could train himself to be completely self-sufficient. A favorite Greek word for this “virtue” was αὐτάρκεια, and the self-sufficient man was αὐτάρκης. The ideology was expressed in the upper-class male’s ideal to use only materials produced on his own land, to eat and drink from the produce of his farms and vineyards, to have his properties as self-sufficient as possible.17 He therefore also entertained the conceit that he was himself self-sufficient, in body and person. Needless to say, this was a complete ideological illusion that simply served to mask and maintain an immoral system of exploitation.

The ancient ideology of self-sufficiency is notably absent from most of the New Testament, which is not particularly surprising since we think most, if not all, the documents of the New Testament were written by people who were well below the highest level of the ancient class and status system. In fact, the New Testament provides a rare glimpse of what sort of “literature” could be produced by generally lower-class persons in antiquity. It is no surprise, therefore, that these texts sometimes do not share in the ideologies of the highest class of Greek and Roman societies. On the contrary, in the New Testament human beings are assumed to be quite dependent on other human beings and on God, nature, and all sorts of constructing and supporting environmental factors. It is true that Paul in one context depicts himself as autarkês. In thanking the Philippians for a gift they had given him, probably financial support, Paul insists, practically as an aside, that he didn’t really need the help: in all circumstances he had learned to be “self-sufficient” (αὐτάρκης; Phil 4:11). But he cannot really bring this off in the manner of a true philosopher, one of the many signals that Paul probably did not have actual philosophical training or education. The rest of his very fond letter to the Philippians is filled with his ready admission of his and others’ dependence on one another. In his imprisonment he depends on their prayers and the help of the spirit (1:19). He urges them to practice humility and to think of others as “better” than themselves, invoking an attitude that would never have been urged or practiced by ancient philosophers (2:3). They should follow Jesus’s example of self-lowering for the benefit of others (2:4–11). He praises the longing and distress experienced by Epaphroditus in his absence from them, again, not something philosophers would have praised (2:26). And in the end Paul thanks them heartily for the many times they have come to his aid (4:15–18).

This readily acknowledged interdependence, the lack of the kind of self-sufficiency taught by the philosophers, occurs throughout the New Testament. This is part of the assumption, which didn’t need to be “recognized” because it was simply their “common sense,” that the human body is a social body. Elsewhere, Paul, using a different word for “sufficient,” says, “Not that we are sufficient [ἱκανοί] of ourselves so that we could consider anything as really ours; rather our sufficiency comes from God” (2 Cor 3:5; I have added the emphasis, but I think it justified because the negative does begin the sentence, which can be a sign of emphasis in Greek). Notice the thick interplay of mutual need Paul is willing to admit to the Corinthians: he asks them to “make room” in their hearts for him, as they reside in his heart; he admits their previous aid to him and his companions when he was in distress and need; he notes the consolation Titus derived from them; he confesses to having caused them grief, but for a good end. Indeed, Paul and the Corinthians are locked in mutual need, “to die together and to live together” (2 Cor 7: 2–13). To the Romans he says much the same thing: “We do not live for ourselves, and we do not die for ourselves” (Rom 14:7).

In letter after letter members of churches are addressed as a collective, a community, a body. 1 Pet 1:1 addresses its readers as “resident aliens” who must stick together because they are in a strange land, this cosmos. He later calls them an “elect common bloodline” (γένος ἐλεκτόν), a “royal priesthood” (βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα) a “holy ethnicity” (ἔθνος ἅγιον) a “people” (λαός) of God’s possession (2:9).18 “Once no people, now a people of God” (2:10).

As just illustrated by those passages from Paul and the First Letter of Peter, these identities of “peoples” are created by narratives. “Peter” tells a story of the creation of a new people by invoking social terms that derive their meaning from larger, commonly known narratives.¹⁹ Many scholars have increasingly stressed the role of story or narrative in the construction and maintenance of identity.²⁰ We become a people by telling one another stories about ourselves. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The self at any given moment is a made self: it is not a solid, independent machine for deciding and acting efficiently or rationally in response to stimuli, but is itself a process, fluid and elusive, whose present range of possible responses is part of a developing story.”21 And stories, after all, are social products, a fact stressed by David Kelsey: “Personal bodies are inherently relational beings, limited by their dependence on others and by others’ dependencies on them.”²²

These writers emphasize that the human body or self is constantly an ongoing project. This certainly lays upon us much responsibility for who we are, since we can make different choices that will be part of forming our selves. But it can also be liberating and provide hope: if there are aspects of our selves we are unhappy with, we may be able to change them for the better. The social and individual practice of habitus provides a way of thinking about how we, as individuals and social bodies, come to be. As explained above in the chapter titled “Knowledge,” habitus refers to how we human beings ingrain “ways of being” in and for ourselves by repetition and practice. This is possible precisely because we are social bodies, formed and reformed by interacting with other human bodies, completely dependent on others, and responsible for the dependencies of others on us. Realizations such as this may be reinforced by careful reading of the New Testament, whose world was so unlike ours and whose “rationality” was so different from the rationality of modernist individualism out of which we are attempting to climb.

Finitude

Given the fact that we are bodies, we are also finite, which is an aspect of human reality often forgotten in the history of Christianity but lately reasserted by various theologians. In fact, one of the important themes of the recent theological anthropology by Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, is its emphasis on the finitude of the body. Kelsey reminds us that as human bodies, we can “not be”: “The integrity of human living bodies’ personal identities is inherently capable of dis-integrating.”²³ Kelsey is here in fact reclaiming a common ancient assumption. A few ancient Greek and Roman philosophers may have entertained the possibility of human possession of an immortal soul, and ancient literary sources could imagine a realm of the dead, such as Hades, where only faint “shades” of formerly full human lives might survive in some kind of existence, though it is seldom depicted as a robust or happy existence. For the most part, though, ancient people seem not to have expected to outlive their embodied lives. The vast majority certainly did not expect to receive “eternal life” as a gift or reward from their gods.24 In fact, the most common assumption was that the characteristic most obviously separating human beings from the gods was precisely that only the gods were “immortals.” Moreover, the gods jealously guarded their perquisite of immortality. The gods were known for killing or otherwise punishing any human being who tried to become immortal or any other being, divine or human, who tried to grant immortality to human beings.²⁵

We can see this assumption reflected in many uses of the Greek word ἄνθρωπος in the New Testament. Hebrews is an especially illustrative example because its author has particular concerns to contrast human beings not only with God and Jesus but also with angels. Heb 2:6–8 quotes Ps 8:4–6 to assert that human beings were created “a little lower than angels.” In Heb 7:8, the word seems to emphasize the mortality of ordinary human beings because it is opposed to “one who lives.” In fact, the NRSV translates ἄνθρωποι here as “mortals.” In 7:28, it is paired with “weakness” and opposed to “the son who has been made perfect forever.” In 9:27 we are told, “It is appointed to ἄνθρωποι to die once and after that face judgment.” Heb 13:6 quotes Ps 117:6 (LXX; Hebrew Bible 118:6) in another implication that human beings are impotent compared to God or Jesus: “The Lord is my help. I will not be afraid. What can a human being [ἄνθρωπος] do to me?” Heb 8:2 speaks of the “liturgy” of Christ as being superior to the liturgy of Jewish priests and of the “true tabernacle” as being superior to that of Moses: it is “made by the Lord, not by any human being [ἄνθρωπος]”. The word ἄνθρωπος occurs nine times in Hebrews. It is regularly contrasted to another kind of being, God, Jesus, or angels. It carries connotations of the lower, “normal” human status, including finitude, mortality, and relative weakness. It is the “mere human.”

This idea is borne out by other passages. “Things of human beings,” such as thoughts and ideas, are opposed to “things of God” (Matt 16:23; see Mark 8:33). Deeds impossible for human beings are not impossible for God (Matt 19:26 and par.). The First Letter of Peter contrasts the “desires of human beings” to the “will of God” (4:2). In the same context we are told that the dead heard the gospel preached so that “though they had been judged in the flesh κατὰ ἀνθρώπους” (as “typically human”; NRSV: “as everyone is judged”), “they might live in pneuma κατὰ θεόν” (as is the manner of God; 4:6). Again, ἄνθρωπος implies the contrast of mortal, finite, human life with the eternal, immortal life of God, Jesus, or perhaps even angels.

The finitude of human beings means that all notions of a natural immortality are wrong. We do not have “by nature” an immortal soul or spirit. We are made to die. If we receive some kind of eternal life, that is by the miraculous work of God in the future, not a consequence of our creation by God in this universe. Even when we affirm faith in the resurrection of the body, that is a reference to an eschatological miracle that we cannot really understand, and it should not be taken as a denial of finitude or as an affirmation of any “natural immortality” or to the “immortality of the soul.”26

Moreover, we should embrace our finitude as a gift of the “good” creation of the universe. Finitude is part of creation, not a flaw within creation. Edward Schillebeeckx explains: “The basic mistake of many conceptions about creation lies in the fact that finitude is felt to be a flaw, a hurt which as such should not really have been one of the features of this world . . . finitude is thought to be improper, an ailment, even sinfulness or apostasy, a flaw in the existence of mankind and the world. There is a feeling that . . . mortality, failure, mistakes and ignorance should not be part of the normal condition of our humanity.”²⁷ We must learn to see our finitude as a gift, not a flaw.

Kelsey similarly argues that we must not see our finitude as an evil: “It is not a problem to be solved, nor a predicament from which we need to be saved.”²⁸ Indeed, God declares us, even as created to die, to be good: “Personal bodies who, precisely in their finitude, fragility, and vulnerability, are deemed by God to be good.”²⁹ Thus, when we encounter passages in the Bible that speak of Death as a great enemy, something to be defeated and overcome (see, for example, 1 Cor 15:54–55), we must read them as a reference not to our natural physical death, which need not be such a disaster, but to the “mythological” Death that would separate us from God. That is the Death from whose “sting” God saves us. We may indeed pray for deliverance “from dying suddenly and unprepared”; we may pray for “eternal life and peace” for those of us already having died.30 We pray for those who have died that “they may have rest in that place where there is no pain or grief, but life eternal.”³¹ In other words, what we ask God for is that we may experience normal, human death in a peaceful way and then to rest in God’s being in some way after that. But our created finitude in itself we embrace as a good creation. As Williams puts it, “Being creatures is learning humility, not as submission to an alien will, but as the acceptance of limit and death; for that acceptance, with all that it means in terms of our moral imagination and action, we are equipped by learning through the grace of Christ and the concrete fellowship of the Spirit, that God is ‘the desire by which all live.’”³²

Sex and Desire

All this talk about our bodies, biology, and physical nature leads us to confront an issue we experience as central, if not compulsive: our nature as sexual beings, physically, psychologically, emotionally, and actively. For most of this chapter I have been relying on basic historical criticism in reading the New Testament. That is because we can derive perfectly orthodox and valuable Christian theology about the nature of the human via a discovery of the ancient meanings of these texts, the possible intentions of the original authors, and the possible understandings of the texts’ ancient readers. Indeed, much of my case has urged a “return” to some key ancient understandings of the nature of human beings: our necessarily embodied existence; our fact as physical; our natural finitude. Now, however, I must use historical analysis to criticize the notions of desire, gender, and sex held by our ancient authors and readers. If I am to derive an orthodox and usable theology and ethics of sexuality, I will have to expose and criticize ancient Christian ideologies of sex and desire and use more creative exegesis to inform our own minds and lives about the erotic.

I have argued in several publications that a responsible use of historical criticism of the New Testament cannot produce a moral, usable theology or ethics of sex for our time. The historical Jesus in all likelihood taught some kind of ascetic celibacy or at least the dismissal of family and household. Jesus of Nazareth probably did teach that divorce of any kind was against the will of God, but if he did he did so not as advocating marriage but as simply forbidding divorce. In the ancient world the assumption would have been that a man divorced his wife only with the intention of marrying another. What Jesus was forbidding, therefore, was divorce and remarriage. That could be taught with complete consistency along with teaching that the avoidance of marriage was the higher ideal. That was certainly the position of the Apostle Paul, and I think it likely the position of the historical Jesus also: if his followers were not already married, they should leave the households of their parents, join the itinerant movement led by Jesus, and refrain from marrying and producing a family of their own.33

In the next chapter, titled “Church,” I demonstrate in detail the “anti-family” or “antihousehold” messages of Jesus, Paul, and much of the New Testament and ancient Christianity. Only through a serious misreading of the ancient sources can modern Christians maintain their ideology that places marriage, family, and (at least heterosexual) sexuality as central and positive “values” of “biblical” or “traditional” Christianity. It should come as little surprise, however, that the texts of the New Testament do not celebrate the sensual. In popular imagination it has often been thought that Christianity basically invented the antierotic, antisexual asceticism long a part of Christian history. Many scholars of the past few decades have proven that to be a misconception.³⁴ Historians of antiquity as well as of Christianity and Judaism have in recent decades recognized that Christianity absorbed a kind of “cult of self-control” that sprang out of male upper-class cultures of discipline in Greece and, later, in Rome.³⁵ The idea that ancient Greece and Rome were boiling vats of sexual desire and activity was never really true for everyone in those societies. What has been more recently demonstrated is that the control of the body and even the emotions, especially as related to the control of passions, diet, and sexuality, had been, by the rise of Christianity, already a dominant cultural concern, at least of the philosophers and upper-class men who listened to them. Christianity inherited asceticism from at least a significant segment of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean culture surrounding it.

It is nonetheless a bit surprising that a main Greek word for erotic love, ἔρως, does not even occur in the New Testament, and neither does any verb or other form of that word group. Studies that have attempted to make firm distinctions between three Greek words all translated into English by the term “love”—ἀγάπη, φιλία, and ἔρως and their corresponding verbal forms—perhaps sometimes exaggerated the differences among the three in meaning.36 But some differences, at least in connotation, can be discerned in many contexts. “Agape” often refers to the kind of love experienced between husband and wife, in ways that might include the erotic but not necessarily. It also refers to the love of parents for their children and of children for their parents, the love of brothers for sisters and sisters for brothers. In the Bible it refers often to the love of God for human beings and of human beings for God. It seldom refers to erotic love. “Philia” may refer to any of those kinds of love, but quintessentially we may think of it as referring to love among friends. “Eros” also may have different meanings, but its most characteristic reference is to erotic love and sexual desire.

By far the word for love that occurs the most in the New Testament is of the agap-group, in noun and verbal forms mostly. The actual noun philia occurs, surprisingly, only once (James 4:4), referring to “friendship” with the world. But the verb form occurs often, though not nearly as often as ἀγάπη or ἀγαπάω. It refers to familial love (Matt 10:37), love between friends (John 11: 3, 36), and God’s love (John 5:20; 16:27). Words of the same word group, such as the verb φιλέω for “kiss,” and the noun φίλημα, “kiss,” also are used in the New Testament (verb “kiss”: Matt 26:48 and par.; Luke 22:47; noun “kiss”: Luke 7:45; 22:48; Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26; 1 Pet 5:14; it is perhaps interesting that most of these are from Paul’s letters and 1 Peter, a non-Pauline letter but much influenced by Pauline ideas and forms).

We must not make too much of a difference between “agape” and “philia.” They can be used interchangeably. The two seem to be basically synonyms, at least in the Gospel of John. In John 11:3, 5, and 36, the love Jesus has for Mary, Martha, and Lazarus can be designated by agape or philia (in their verbal forms), apparently meaning exactly the same thing. The “beloved disciple” of the Fourth Gospel is usually called such by means of “agape,” but in John 20:2, it is “philia.” Then there is the curious dialogue between Jesus and Peter at the end of the Gospel. Jesus asks Peter if he loves him more than the others (21:15; ἀγαπάω). Peter answers, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you [φιλέω].” Jesus asks again, again using ἀγαπάω, and Peter answers again, again using φιλέω (21:16). Finally, Jesus asks a third time, this time using φιλέω, and Peter answers a third time, still using φιλέω (21:17).

What are we to make of this? Someone might be tempted to differentiate between the two terms. Perhaps Jesus began on the “higher plane” of agapic love, only to have Peter answer on the “lower plane” of mere friendship. According to such a reading, the third time Jesus asked, he realized he was not going to get Peter to answer with agapic love, and so he “settles” for friendship. I think such would be an imaginative interpretation but probably not very defensible by normal standards of modern exegesis. Since we’ve seen “agape” and “philia” used interchangeably in two other contexts of the Gospel of John, that is, with regard to the beloved disciple and Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, it is more likely that the author takes the two terms as simply synonyms.

In this book I have used “agape” as a technical term for the kind of love I see as the central Christian value, for theology and ethics alike. It does not include erotic love or romantic love, and it need not include the kind of affection or emotion we associate with friendship, though it may. “Agape” in my usage for this theology is an attitude of wishing and willing to do no harm to our neighbor. It is to wish for others the very best we can imagine. It is to treat others as we would be treated ourselves. It is to love God as the provider and sustainer of our lives and the universe. It is not an emotion but a way of living and a way of thinking and being. People often confuse “Christian love” with a feeling, but it is not. It is a way of thinking and living and willing.37

But when we turn to the New Testament for guidance about the realm of the erotic, it is notable that the very word most associated in the ancient Greek world with erotic love, “eros,” does not occur even once.³⁸ That is testimony enough of the antierotic asceticism of most early Christianity and the authors who wrote the documents that make up our New Testament. They simply did not consider sexual desire or erotic love something to be valued. If anything, they worked to suppress it or ignore it. Even those brief parts of the New Testament that talk about sex and marriage never connect either to erotic love explicitly.

But just as we must reject the inferiority of women and “feminized” men in the attitudes of many ancient Christians, so must we reject their sexual asceticism—if taught as any kind of “requirement” of all Christians or as validating the “higher virtue” of the ascetic over the “everyday” Christian. Yes, Paul was extremely suspicious of erotic desire (1 Cor 7). And the Gospels may be read historically as teaching sexual asceticism as well, though that is not nearly so obvious as is the case with Paul and could be debated. But we must reject the traditional Christian denigration of the natural human desires of sexuality. Only recently have churches come to reject as sinful the denigration of the “female” and the inequality of traditional gender roles. Yes, this is a new thing in churches. And it is also a good thing. Contemporary Christians rightly reject as sinful the church’s traditional subordination of women and anything “feminine.” We should rightly reject as well the ancient and premodern suspicion and fear of the erotic, sexuality, and sex.

How might we read scripture to discover new, better ways to be both Christian and sexual? We must keep in mind the thesis argued throughout this book that the meaning of the text is not a property existing in the text apart from human interpretation. In constructing proper Christian theological and ethical ideas about desire, sexuality, gender, and sexual activity, we cannot expect to “find” or “discover” the best Christian views just by “listening to the Bible.” There is no “listening” involved apart from reading and interpreting. And as with every other theological and ethical topic, the rule for assessing the value of an interpretation of scripture is whether that interpretation promotes the love of God and the love of neighbor as well the proper understanding of our own biological and psychological realities. The love of self is as important as the love for others, precisely because a love for others divorced from a love of self leads to masochism and self-harm, and those are not Christian values either. How we construe our own erotic desires and actions in a Christian way must be informed by the centrality of love, of other and of self.

This book labels itself as “theology with the New Testament,” but we would have perhaps more ready-to-hand texts for an affirmation of the good of erotic desire and sex were we to call on texts of the Old Testament. The texts of the Old Testament contain many references to sex, erotic desire, and even, in places, romance. This is to be expected precisely because these texts come out of an ancient Near Eastern context rather than the later Greco-Roman one, with its increasing valuation of asceticism. In fact, the most “ascetic” book of the Old Testament is no doubt Daniel, in which the hero carefully follows a strict dietary regimen and is rewarded for it in body and soul. It may be no coincidence that Daniel is almost certainly the latest book of the (Protestant) Old Testament, written as late as 164 BCE and therefore influenced by the Hellenism that by that time had pervaded at least the urban cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, including Judea and the rest of the region that came to be called Palestine. If we put aside Daniel, we find ready resources in much of the Old Testament for constructing a theology of sexuality.

The story of creation in Genesis itself is the obvious starting point. God creates the first human being as a sexual being. God creates human beings with built-in sexual desire and with built-in needs for companionship. God then commands them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). A denial of our sexuality or passion is not entertained at the “beginning” of the scriptures.

The most obvious celebration of desire and sex in the Bible is the Song of Solomon or, as it names itself in its first verse, the Song of Songs. If we turn from the history of interpretation dominant among Christians and Jews that read the Song mostly as an allegory for the relationship between the church and Christ or Israel and God and return to how it was probably originally read as Near Eastern love poetry, we see it as an open celebration of sex and erotic love. It is also somewhat of a surprise to modern Christian readers, if they dare to read the text at all, that the relationship is not described as one between a married couple. This is a poem spoken at times by the man and at times by the woman. The man does, in a few instances, call his beloved his “bride” (4:8–12; 5:1), and we thus may imagine them as betrothed. But for most of the text there is no indication that they are already married. In fact, they obviously are not, since she has to go outside the home of her “mother” to seek him out (3:2), and he has to knock on her door to gain entry (5:2). They are presented simply as lovers.

Much of the language seems obviously to consist of euphemisms for the sex act—or at least can excusably be read as such (all translations of the Hebrew Bible NRSV unless otherwise noted):

My beloved is mine and I am his;

he pastures his flock among the lilies. (2:16)

I held him, and would not let him go

until I brought him into my mother’s house,

and into the chamber of her that conceived me. (3:4)

Let my beloved come to his garden,

and eat its choicest fruits. (4:16)

I come to my garden, my sister, my bride;

I gather my myrrh with my spice,

I eat my honeycomb with my honey,

I drink my wine with my milk.

Eat, friends, and drink,

and be drunk with love. (5:1)

My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,

and my inmost being yearned for him. (5:4)

The reclamation of the Song of Songs as a poetic celebration of erotic love and desire is one of the triumphs of modern historical criticism.39 We can use it to construct better theologies and ethics of sexuality than those bequeathed to us by much Christian tradition.

There are other parts of the Old Testament that may welcome a more erotic interpretation than allowed by conservative, traditional Christianity. Many gay boys and men have not been able to ignore the erotic possibilities of the relationship between Jonathan and David. We’re told more than once that Jonathan loved David more than his own life (1 Sam 18:1, 3). Jonathan saves David’s life several times. Jonathan tells David, “Whatever you say, I will do for you” (20:4). Jonathan makes David swear an oath on his love for him (20:17; it is not clear whether this is Jonathan’s love or David’s). Jonathan and David kiss one another (20:41). After the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, David publishes a poem in their honor, calling them both beautiful. But it was only about Jonathan that David wrote those famous words, “Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Sam 1:26). If David is referring here simply to “friendly love,” he need not have brought up the “love of women.” It is precisely because he is speaking of erotic love that the comparison with the female sex is relevant. There is nothing in the text itself that forbids us from interpreting this as an erotic, sexual relationship, and that should embolden gay Christians.⁴⁰

We are not limited to the Old Testament, however, for inspiration for our gay male brothers in Christ. As I’ve shown elsewhere, the Gospel of John provides many scenes of male homoeroticism.41 I know I was not the only closeted homosexual boy to take huge interest in the relationship between Jesus and “the disciple Jesus loved” in a special way. At his last supper Jesus has the young man lying practically on top of him (John 13:23–25). In the very last scene of the Gospel, Jesus seems reluctant to allow the young man even to die (21:20–22), reserving him perhaps in eternal youth for the time Jesus might return. In fact, in the older Jesus enamored with the apparently younger beloved disciple (think of Socrates and Alcibiades from Plato’s Symposium) we have an example of the kind of autumn/spring erotic relationship known in gay circles as “dad/son.”

And then there is Jesus’s special relationship to Thomas. Though the risen Jesus will not allow a woman, Mary, to touch his resurrected body (the scene known in tradition and art by the Latin noli me tangere, “do not touch me!”), Jesus invites Thomas to penetrate his body (compare John 20:17 to 20:24 ff.). As I’ve pointed out before, there are several arguably erotic scenes in the Gospel of John, and most of them are homoerotic. Gay Christians, especially young, unsure, and closeted, should take inspiration from these scenes to learn how to act out their sexuality within their Christian faith and the church.

Given the proper freedom to interpret in creative, Christian ways, other texts of the New Testament may even challenge neat notions of sexuality or gender as always involving “male and female” in a dichotomous relationship. Following the lead of previous scholars, I have argued that Paul’s words about there being “no male and female” in Christ (Gal 3:28) were, in their original contexts, a statement not about gender equality but about eschatological androgyny.⁴² In the ancient world, including Paul’s own assumptions, even in a body that was fully both male and female, masculinity would nonetheless still be superior to the femininity of that same body. Indeed, in some forms of ancient androgyny there was no difference between male and female because the female, characterized by absence, lack, imperfection, cold, would be “taken up into” the male, characterized by presence, possession, perfection, heat. Although Paul treated women in his churches with more respect and equality than they received in most ancient societies, Paul still assumed that “man” was the “head” of “woman” (1 Cor 11:3). Even eschatological androgyny did not, for Paul, include the equality of male and female; it just announced their reunion in one body.

Yet here, as in so many other cases, we may appropriate Paul’s portrait of an androgynous body in Christ while rejecting his gender hierarchy. And thus we may imagine all of us as not neatly on one or the other side of a male/female dichotomy. We are all both male and female, or we are neither but some new, third “sex.” Christians, once baptized into the body of Christ, are thereby created as a new gender. We are free to play at being women or men or something else of our imaginative invention. The Christian church should be the place where intersexed people, transgendered people, and people who reject either gender identity are the most welcome. The intersex, middlesex, or trans person is already well on the way to inhabiting the proper eschatological body of Christ: “no male and female” may mean “neither male nor female, but something else” or “both male and female.”

In the same way, we may take as inspiration the Jesus movement and early Christian churches, which either rejected the traditional family and household or were adding to it experiments in wider, more diverse household structures, structures where slaves now were free and free men and women were now (formerly enslaved) “freed” people of Christ; where people who had been husbands and wives were now brothers and sisters; where the boundaries of either the nuclear or extended family were replaced by the mixed, diverse social structure of the church, a sojourner and alien social form while in “this world.” The ancient church, as I will explore more fully in the next chapter, replaced the household with the ekklêsia, the “town meeting.” I will argue further that we should use the ancient church and its replacement of the traditional family with its own eschatological body of Christ to criticize modern American ideology and idolatry of family and nation. The “family of God” does not just sit beside the traditional or modern family—either the heterosexual nuclear family or the extended family. It displaces those noneschatological forms of household, or at least it should.

We must use the strangeness of gender and sexuality we find in scripture to inspire our own imaginations to come up with new ways, Christian ways, to embody our sexual selves. And we must use the earliest Christian rejections of the traditional household to inspire our own Christian imaginations of our social structures. By rejecting the epistemological foundationalism of modernism, which insisted that we get our “meaning” from the Bible only via historical criticism, we may read scripture in new ways to reinject the erotic and the good sexual body into Christian doctrine and theology—without, however, reproducing the shame, guilt, and gender inequality surrounding sex and family so pervasive in Christian history.43

Sin

Our zeal to remove sex and sexual desire in themselves from the realm of sin should not lead us to dispense with the topic of sin altogether. Sin is a useful theological topic. Indeed, for Christians an indispensable one. Sin is obviously a big subject in the New Testament. In fact, most people would assume that Christianity and thus the Bible are obsessed with sin. And the New Testament’s frequent use of words referring to sin or its connotations lend credence to that assumption. The most common word for “sin” in the New Testament, ἁμαρτία, occurs over 175 times. The related word for “sinner” (ἁμαρτωλός), 46 times. The verb form, ἁμαρτάνω, some 43 times. Add to these numbers the frequent occurrence of other terms that may be translated as “sin” or “transgression” (ἁμάρτημα, παράβασις, παραβάτης, παράπτωμα), and we can readily confirm that the fear and loathing of sin is a dominant theme of the New Testament.

But what is sin? In classical Greek the word often carries the connotation of a “mistake” rather than of some terribly guilt-inducing moral failure. Famously, it means more literally “to miss the mark,” especially when thinking of casting a spear or shooting an arrow (many examples may be found in the Iliad; see, for example, 5.287, where it occurs in the form of epic dialect, ἦμβροτες). Something like this is the most common translation given in classical Greek lexicons. It can refer to failure in delivering a speech or just failing in whatever endeavor. I will return to this meaning later in an attempt to add nuance to our own understanding of mistakes and failures as well as of sin in our attempts to live well.

For much of the New Testament, “sin” occurs in the plural and refers simply to the misdeeds of individuals, the dominant meaning in Matthew, Mark, Luke–Acts, Hebrews, and James. They define certain acts as “sins” and speak of God through Christ as offering “forgiveness of sins.” This fits the common way modern people think about the word “sin.” The issue gets a bit more complicated in the Gospel of John and much more complicated, even confusing, in Paul’s letters and the First Letter of John.

In the Fourth Gospel the word occurs more often in the singular and seems to include a larger concept of sin as a force or even agent of the cosmos. John speaks of “the sin of the world” (1:29). A person can be a “slave of sin” (8:34). Or people may “have sin” (9:41; 15:22, 24). And there are degrees of sin. Jesus tells Pilate, “The one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin” (19:11). “Sin” may refer in John, as it does more often in the other Gospels, to the misdeeds of individuals, but it has also in John taken on a larger, cosmic meaning and role.

This combination of meanings is more complex and even confusing in Paul’s letters. Scholars of Paul have long debated the meaning of sin in Paul, some arguing that Paul is speaking merely of the misdeeds of particular human beings. Such scholars claim that when Paul’s language sounds otherwise, as when he seems to speak of “Sin” as a cosmic force or even a personal agent, such statements should be understood as “mere personification.” Other scholars, however, have countered that Paul says so many things about the power and deeds of Sin that we should take his language seriously. As Paul surely believed the devil or Satan was a real person of the cosmos, so, these scholars insist, he imagined Satan’s partner or perhaps even consort was Sin. The word hamartia is feminine. Could Paul have imagined a relation between something like a demonic or angelic person or force that wielded great power in the world, with the name “Sin”?

The most compelling passages that sound like this are in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul says that “all are under the power of Sin” (Rom 3:9; I capitalize “Sin” to highlight the possibility of hypostatization). Chapter 6 of Romans repeatedly uses this kind of language. Paul writes, “So may Sin not rule in your mortal body resulting in obedience to its desires” (6:12); “Do not present your members to Sin as tools of injustice/unrighteousness” (6:13).44 “For Sin will not lord it over you, for you are not under law, but under grace” (6:14). This is something like Paul saying to Sin, in a pop phrase current with young people, “You are not the boss of me!” Repeatedly, Paul invokes the notion of “slavery to Sin” as opposed to being a “slave of Christ” (6:16–23; 7:14; Gal 2:17).

Much of the debate about whether Paul is talking about “sins” or “Sin” focuses on his language in Romans 7. There, Paul says that Sin is something like a place we used to be in, perhaps as another body in horrible parallel with the “body of Christ” (7:5). Paul says that Sin “grabbed an opportunity and produced evil desire in me” (7:8). Sin “worked death” in him, forcing him to obey its “law” (7:23). But Paul concludes with a triumph for Christ, Paul, and the Romans: “The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of Sin and death” (8:2). All this vivid imagery and language make it difficult to deny completely that Paul could have imagined Sin as an actual force or agent of the cosmos, one from whom or from which believers have been delivered and liberated.

The best study of sins or Sin now argues that we should retain both positions in our reading of Paul. In The Emergence of Sin, Matthew Croasmun draws from theories of emergence increasingly familiar to scientists, philosophers of science, and in theory and philosophy more generally.45 As I mentioned above, emergence is the idea that complex systems are “things in themselves” that have properties (abilities to do things, characteristics) that arise from the properties of other entities that work on what we may think of as a “lower order” of ontology. Examples include the mind, which is made up of the combined activities of the different parts, even cells, of the brain. The mind is “the brain at work.” Another popular example is a beehive, which collectively is able to do things that don’t seem to be simply the abilities of the “sum of all the individual bees.”

Croasmun argues that Paul’s letters entertain the notion that “sin” refers to the particular misdeeds of individual human beings but also that the entire system of “sins” gives rise, at least in Paul’s mind, to cosmic “Sin” that ends up being more than just the adding up of all the “sins” of individuals. Invoking another idea from emergence theory, Croasmun argues that “downward causation” also takes place in the activities of ancient sin/Sin.⁴⁶ The cosmic force or even agent “Sin” works by downward causation to affect human behavior to increase “sins.”

In order to illustrate how this could work in the mind of an in habitant of the ancient Mediterranean, Croasmun notes that “Roma” referred not only to the physical city of Rome but also to the goddess Roma, who was greater than the city or its component parts. But Roma was no doubt assumed to be, at least by most Romans and many others, an actual force and agent of the universe. The goddess Roma arose out of the reality of the city of Rome but then acted on the city and inhabitants of the Roman Empire in both frightening and beneficent ways. Croasmun goes so far as to suggest that Paul used the term “the body of Sin” in direct parallel with “the body of Christ.” Human beings must inhabit one of those bodies, so they have to choose faith and behaviors that reinforced their roles as “members of the body of Christ” and no longer members of the body of Sin.

In fact, Paul often sounds as if he believed that those “in Christ” could no longer sin. Paul knows he has been accused of teaching believers that more sinning would lead to more grace. After all, he does say, “Where sin increased, grace abounded even more” (Rom 5:20). So he has to deny explicitly that he teaches, “Let us commit evil deeds in order that good will come.” He quotes the phrase while condemning those people who accuse him of teaching it: “Their condemnation is justified!” (3:8). But how Paul gets out of the accusation is in itself rather confusing. Why doesn’t he just say, as most Christians would, that, yes, we still sin. We’re not perfect. As the bumper sticker says, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” Paul could have admitted that believers continue to sin in spite of our best attempts to live up to the demands of the gospel. But he does not.

Instead, in Romans 6, Paul posits two realms that are mutually exclusive. On one side are Sin, death, the old self now crucified, slavery to Sin, wickedness, law, impurity, iniquity, and shame. On the other side are grace, Christ Jesus, God, resurrection, new life, freedom from sin, freedom from death, righteousness/justice, sanctification, and eternal life. Paul truly seems in Romans 6 simply to be insisting, all empirical evidence aside, that believers cannot sin because they cannot conceivably live “in Sin” and “in Christ” at the same time: “What are we saying? That we should remain in Sin so that grace may abound? Not at all! How could those of us who have died to Sin continue living in it?” (6:1–2); “Should we sin because we are no longer under law but under grace? Not at all! Don’t you know that you are slaves to whomever you give yourself in obedience? You are slaves of the one you obey, whether of Sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness/justice” (6:15–16). Paul never admits that believers might continue to sin. It seems simply not to be an option in his imagination. As perplexing as this may be for modern Christians, Paul is radical in his either/or: you live in either the realm of Sin or the realm of Christ; there is no overlap. Therefore, Christians don’t sin. I admit, this comes across more as an admonition than a proposition of empirical fact, and doubtless that is the best way to read Romans 6. But it also gives us no reason to believe Paul admitted that believers could sin. That would be to twist Paul to meet our “common sense.”

This stance also seems to be the position of the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, a letter not written by Paul but containing similarities to Pauline theology. Though this author clearly believes it is possible for believers to “fall away” and be lost (3:11), the writer also seems to believe that it is impossible for believers who have fallen again into sin to be forgiven (6:4–6). Christ was sacrificed, himself serving as both priest and victim, “once for all” for sins (9:12, 26): “We have been made holy by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. . . . one sacrifice for sins for all time” (10:10, 12). But once believers have been sanctified by Christ’s sacrifice, they simply cannot intentionally sin thereafter and still be saved: “If we intentionally sin after receiving knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains any sacrifice for sins, just the expectation of judgment” (10:26–27).

Even more puzzling, perhaps, are statements in 1 John that appear initially to be simply self-contradictory. This author begins by insisting, “If we say we do not have sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, the one who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all injustice/unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar” (1 John 1:8–10). So far, so good: we Christians do not claim that we do not sin; we simply confess our sins and receive the grace of forgiveness. A bit later, the author says, “I write so you may not sin, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate before the Father in Jesus Christ the Just One” (2:1).

Yet elsewhere in the letter the author seems to slide into a kind of either/or perfectionism resembling Romans 6: “Everyone who remains in [Christ] does not sin. And anyone who sins has not seen him or come to know him” (3:6). “The one who does justice/righteousness is just/righteous, as that one is just/righteous. The one who commits sin is from the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. . . . Everyone who has been born of God does not commit sin, because his seed remains in him, and he is not able to sin because he has been born of God” (3:7–9). Is this just exaggeration for purposes of exhortation? Perhaps what sounded like a contradiction of this stance at the beginning of the letter was a reference to prior sin from which believers have been now delivered and for which they were forgiven. And perhaps the author assumed that believers were sinners, but now no longer. It is hard to get beyond the feeling that the author may not have sorted all these ideas out completely. But at least in parts of the New Testament, with Paul, Hebrews, and 1 John, we see a kind of early Christianity toying with something like a perfectionist theology or anthropology.

This kind of theology of “perfectionism”—the idea that Christians simply must not sin—has recurred from time to time throughout Christian history, though usually in sects not part of the “mainstream” of the major churches. I believe we may read them as exhortation to avoid sinning as much as possible. But I also believe we must take other passages, for example, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone!” (John 8:7), as hindering any possible slide into Christian perfectionism. The fully Augustinian and Lutheran insistence that we are all simultaneously sinners and saved—simul justus et peccator—is certainly preferable. It is certainly more empirically verifiable. This is again a case in which we may explain how Christian doctrine is both false and yet may still be true in a sense.

Another Augustinian doctrine I believe should be reclaimed, again in a sense, is that of original sin. The classic inspiration from the New Testament for the later doctrine of original sin, which wasn’t really developed until the writings of Irenaeus in the late second and early third centuries and then especially by Augustine in the fourth century, are in Paul’s letters.47 The most important passage is Rom 5:12–21: “Thus as sin came into the world through one human being and through sin death, so thus death came to all human beings because all sinned” (5:12); “For if, through the transgression of one, many died, by so much more the grace of God and the free gift in grace has abounded for the many through one human being, Jesus Christ” (15); “For if by the transgression of one death reigned through one, by much more those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness will reign through the one Jesus Christ. Therefore as through the transgression of one condemnation [came] to all human beings, thus also through the righteousness of one [came the gift] to all human beings for the justification of life. For as through the disobedience of one human being the many were rendered sinners, thus also through the obedience of one the many were rendered justified” (17–19).⁴⁸

One can easily read these passages, as many Christians have over the centuries, as teaching that all human beings do in fact sin without also introducing any notion of inherited guilt or sin from Adam merely through birth. But Paul’s carefully worded construction, repeated three times, of the Adam–Christ parallel may also be read to support a doctrine of original sin. After all, if we take Paul’s language to mean that we gain justification through Christ without “earning it,” as I think we must, we might as well take the similar language about sin as implying that we stand under guilt and condemnation without first individually earning that either. Just as we simply are justified by free gift and grace through Christ’s faithfulness, so we simply are sinful by the fact that we are all children of Adam, that is, human beings. The same parallel occurs in 1 Cor 15:21–22: “For since death [is] through a human being, also resurrection of the dead [is] through a human being. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.”

The doctrine of original sin may indeed be false if interpreted wrongly. For example, it is certainly not acceptable to imagine that unbaptized infants go to hell or some kind of limbo state due to their inheritance of sin through Adam. I also would want to argue against appropriating the Augustinian notion that connects the inheritance of sin to concupiscence or sexual desire or sex itself. Those ideas degrade the blessing of erotic desire and experience we should celebrate as God’s creation and gift. In other words, this doctrine, like all doctrines, is false if used in ways not conducive to Christian health and love.

Yet I find the doctrine of original sin also useful in that it reminds us of something we already know deep down about ourselves and all human beings: we are seriously flawed from the first. To put it without using vulgar language that might make the point even better: if something is “screw-up-able,” we human beings will screw it up. We find that in spite of our best intentions and efforts, we still make mistakes—really serious mistakes. In spite of our love for others, we will at some time hurt them, not to mention those we wouldn’t count among our “loved ones.” Even when we try our best, we cannot seem to avoid harming our world and our fellow human beings, at least much of the time. The doctrine of original sin keenly expresses a fundamental human truth: we cannot completely escape the fact of our fundamentally flawed nature.

The doctrine of original sin may also guard us against the kind of perfectionism that has plagued so much of Christianity, at least in some of its forms. This is captured in the fitting title of a book by James Alison: The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. When we harm ourselves, others, or our environment, we should not sink into despair or become paralyzed by guilt. Rather, we confess, ask for forgiveness, and try to do better next time. We know we will never be perfect, and we teach ourselves to be comfortable with that. Moreover, we remind ourselves constantly that other human beings will never be perfect either. In fact, they will do terrible things, as we have and will do. The answer for sin, original or otherwise, is honest admission and forgiveness. As Alison puts it, “The doctrine of original sin is not an accusation against humanity, and by keeping it alive the Church is not engaged in an accusation against humanity. What the Church is keeping alive is the possibility that even those who bear the tremendous burden of being ‘right’ may recognize their complicity with those who are not.”49

Moreover, the doctrine of original sin is not an “explanation” for the existence of evil or sin. As I have argued already, Christianity does not provide any kind of “intellectual” or “philosophical” explanation for the existence in our world of evil and suffering. Neither does it provide any philosophically satisfying explanation for the existence of sin. As Alison says, in a statement about Roman Catholicism that I insist applies to Protestant faith also: “In the Catholic faith we have no available explanation for evil or sin as such, not because we may not have many insights into such things, but because we don’t have an explanation of anything at all. We have a salvific revelation: what is revealed as something now operative is the mystery of God’s plan of salvation for us.”⁵⁰ That mystery is that we simply are imperfect sinners and are justified and saved by God’s free gift through Jesus Christ.

These complex and even sometimes confusing statements about sin/Sin—election, predestination, original sin—may indeed strike us modern Christians as “mythological,” but perhaps we should reintroduce some good “mythology” to our theology. Even the category of “sin” sounds mythological. Yet if we are honest persons we must admit and confess that we are not perfect, that we make mistakes, and that some of those mistakes are serious enough to merit the label “sin.” We do not always treat our loved ones, friends, fellow human beings, or especially strangers in loving ways. We are often selfish in ways that harm not only others but also ourselves. We are sometimes too hard on ourselves, leading to stress, frustration, even depression. We are certainly often too hard on others, making demands on people around us that are not warranted or are even wrong. As the Book of Common Prayer well puts it, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”51 These are our sins.

We also experience our universe, in spite of its wonder and beauty, as being terribly flawed. We have no decent explanation for why the earth, all its sentient beings, and innocent people suffer as much as they do. We worry about wars, torture, famines we seem to be able to do little or nothing about. We stand helpless before natural disasters as well as humanly engineered disasters. We are on the brink of worldwide ecocide for which we ourselves are largely responsible. This is the Sin we cannot seem totally to escape or avoid. The world, we recognize, just does not seem to be able to be what we feel it should be, and we are part of the problem. Sin arises from our sins, and cosmic Sin works on us also to threaten us with suffering, a death that may not be a “good death,” self-harm, and harm of others, even those others we love. That is Sin. It is a Christian concept I believe is indispensable to our theology if we are to avoid deception and self-deception. The concept arises out of the mythological world of ancient Christianity, is preserved in scripture and tradition, and is nonetheless completely relevant to our postmodern Christian faith.

Yet we must not be too hard on ourselves—and certainly not on others. The more general classical meaning of hamartia as “missing the mark” could also be useful. When we fail, that does not mean we are completely “evil.” And when others fail us, we should not exaggerate the harm. The failure does not mean people are “evil.” It just means we and they are not perfect. It also means we are forgiven, and thus forgive others. A concept of sin allows us continually to love those we love but whom we fail as well as those we love but who regularly fail us.

Salvation

Christianity has always promised “salvation,” though precisely what that means has varied and is not always clear or agreed upon. The Greek word most commonly used in the New Testament for “salvation,” σωτηρία, did not usually mean the kind of “religious salvation” thought of by modern people when they hear the term. It had rather more ordinary or everyday meanings, such as “deliverance” or “preservation.”52 It could refer to a safe return from a voyage, security, or safety in general. Quite often in classical Greek it referred simply to health or general well-being. In fact, the word occurs even as indicating a physician’s fee.

Likewise, the Greek word for “savior,” σωτήρ, usually referred not to some divine being who accomplished a “salvation” from damnation for sins but to anyone or anything that could deliver or rescue someone or something from any kind of threat or harm. It could refer to something that healed or prevented a disease. It was quite commonly used to indicate the emperor or some other ruler praised for the public benefit of rescuing a people or preserving the peace, clearly not here a reference to one who gives eschatological salvation or eternal life. The word is used for someone like a ruler, physician, or benefactor who delivers someone from death or danger or any other manner of threat. It is actually rare, therefore, to find these words used in non-Christian sources as a reference to afterlife, the salvation of one’s “soul,” or any other of the commonly imagined “religious” meanings familiar from modern popular assumptions.

In the New Testament and other early Christian sources these Greek words take on more specific meanings, though they still retain the broader, more everyday meanings from classical and koine Greek. Sôtêria does, for example, refer even in the New Testament to deliverance or rescue from one’s enemies (Luke 1:71). God, through Moses, liberates the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, and sôtêria is the term used (Acts 7:25). The word refers to “surviving” a shipwreck (Acts 27:34; see the NRSV). Similarly, the word describes Noah’s family’s “surviving” the flood (Heb 11:7). Paul uses the word when speaking of deliverance from hardship or release from prison (Phil 1:19).

But much more often in the New Testament sôtêria refers to salvation in the eschatological sense, providing the common “religious” meaning assumed by popular thought. Many examples could be given, including Rom 10:1, 10; 11:11; 13:11; John 4:22; Acts 4:12; Heb 1:14; 9:28; 1 Pet 1:5. Even here, though, we should not forget the more everyday meanings of the word. For instance, the translation “salvation of your souls” at 1 Pet 1:9 might be better translated as the more ordinary “saving of your lives.”

What, though, are people saved from? Or what is promised to them as their salvation? Most of earliest Christianity, from the Jesus movement well into the second century, was an apocalyptic Jewish sect, which is to say that the salvation they expected was at least protection from eschatological divine anger, judgment, and punishment. So Paul talks about salvation from divine “wrath” (Rom 1:16; see 1:18 for the reference to wrath). He assures the Thessalonians that God has destined believers not for “wrath” but for the possession of “salvation” (5:9). Paul had begun the letter by praising the Thessalonians for having turned away from “images” to “become slaves to a living and true god, and to await his son from the heavens, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who is the one who delivers us from the wrath that is coming” (1:10). That the word for “deliver” here is ῥύομαι demonstrates that in this case it is a synonym for salvation (σωτηρία). The same complex of apocalyptic expectation is at work when salvation is depicted as the “forgiveness of sins” (Acts 13:26; see 13:37).

As for what “salvation” grants, early Christians were regularly promised “glory” (1 Thess 2:13; 2 Tim 2:10; Heb 2:10). We should remember, in our attempt to “defamiliarize” overly “theological” connotations of so much early Christian language, for example, seeing σωτηρία as meaning “health” and “safety” as well as “religious salvation,” that the Greek word normally translated as “glory” in the New Testament, δόξα, more often would have been heard as something like “fame” in classical and koine Greek. Early converts were assured not only that they would “shine,” another connotation of δόξα, and gain power at the eschaton but also that they would be “famous.”

Part of the salvation promised to converts was “eternal life” (Acts 13:47). The same thing is probably meant by the use of the term in Hebrews: “eternal salvation” (Heb 5:9). Living and reigning with Jesus Christ in the hereafter was at least one thing early Christians seem to have expected. But at least in one case Paul seems to have preached his version of the gospel without even mentioning any kind of afterlife at all. Although he had promised the Thessalonian gentiles that they would be saved from “the wrath that is coming” (1 Thess 1:10), he must not have told them about what kind of afterlife existence they could expect. Thus, after Paul’s departure and after at least a few of their number had died, they bemoan their situation, as they understood it, because they assumed their departed loved ones would completely miss out on the benefits promised by Paul. Those departed, after all, were now no longer in danger of the “wrath that is coming.” So what benefit did they derive from the hardships that had followed their acceptance of Paul’s gospel about Jesus the Jewish Messiah?53

Thus Paul has to write 1 Thessalonians in order to inform them, among other things, about the resurrection of the body. He assures them not only that their dead loved ones would not miss out on the party, so to speak. Those fellow believers, though dead, would be raised; they would even precede any living believers, who then would follow the raised dead to “meet the Lord in the air” (5:13–17). As remarkable as it seems to us now, Paul’s initial missionary message promised deliverance from divine “wrath” but did not necessarily include information about any possible afterlife. Yet this should not really surprise us if we remember that Greek and Roman myths and speculations about the gods and divine matters almost never led anyone to expect immortality or deliverance from death by their gods. Thus even in Paul’s initial message “salvation” meant something very much of this earth, not emphasizing, at least in Thessalonica and at the beginning, salvation from death or promise of an afterlife.

A few passages of the New Testament may pose puzzles surrounding “salvation.” In spite of our normal expectations that salvation is something people are granted by God and granted through the work of Jesus Christ, one passage mentions salvation as something believers may “grow into.” The author of the First Letter of Peter tells his readers they should long for “pure, spiritual milk,” by means of which they “may grow into salvation” (2:2; NRSV). For the New Testament this is an unusual way of speaking of salvation. I might also mention language in Revelation which depicts people ascribing “salvation and glory and power” to God (19:1; see also 7:10). How could we possibly offer “salvation” to God? From what could God possibly be saved? The more likely way to read these references is as saying that salvation, like glory and power, belongs to God. These benefits are God’s to give. It is, though, a rather unusual way, within the New Testament, to speak of salvation.

Before leaving this discussion of the words for salvation in the New Testament, I want to note a special, ancient meaning of the Greek word for savior, σωτήρ. I mentioned above that in normal Greek it is often associated with the emperor or other ruler. In fact, it was a common piece of imperial ideology and propaganda to advertise, in literature, poetry, inscriptions, and statuary, Caesar as the “Savior of the World.”54 Thus when John 4:42 has the Samaritan villagers designate Jesus “the Savior of the World,” an ancient hearer would automatically imagine Jesus as at least a new emperor of the entire oikoumene, the whole inhabited earth. This could no doubt have been taken also as a challenge to the Roman emperor. What is being promised is the deliverance of everything normally thought to be provided by Caesar, certainly peace and “security,” another meaning of σωτηρία, but also worldly and heavenly benefits of many kinds.

What, though, may we Christians today take from this admittedly brief and selective survey of salvation in the New Testament? I think one tack we must take is to steer away from traditional, premodern but pervasive ideas about God consigning all nonbelievers to eternal, conscious torture and punishment in some version of hell. It is understandable that premodern societies would assume the existence of such a place, and they would have no difficulty in picturing God, just as they would any human ruler they could imagine, as a jealous, demanding monarch who would torture those he deemed worthy of it and leave “sinners” in an eternal prison. The more grotesque notions of hell and divine or demonic torturers would have been natural within their societies and cultures precisely because they lived with such authorities, institutions, and practices as part of their everyday lives. It is hard for many of us modern people to imagine the kinds of violence and the ubiquity of pain and death experienced by almost all premodern peoples.

Even if our own world is far too full of pain, torture, and evils inflicted on human beings by other human beings, not to mention the sufferings that simply accompany natural existence, we must trust our hopes and desires to move beyond cultures of violence and torture and toward building societies of peace and human dignity. We should quite self-consciously turn away from and leave behind the ancient cultures of torture, execution, and constant violence. Therefore, we must also train our theological imaginations to reject traditional ideas of eternal punishment as part of the will of God. Our God must be the creator and sustainer of love, and it is impossible to construct a proper Christian imagination of a God of eternal love while retaining the image of God as the creator and sustainer of eternal pain and torture.

In this, as in all Christian theology, there may be times when we wish for some kind of punishment for people who in this life have inflicted so much pain and harm on others and yet seem to have suffered nothing for it. We may say, for instance, that we don’t really “believe in” hell and yet still believe that corrupt, stubborn rulers who have caused astonishing suffering through wars, poverty, incarceration, and torture but who died peacefully in their own beds—well, those people must end up in some kind of hell or there is no justice in the world. Therefore I, like, I assume, many other Christians, have sometimes said I did not believe in hell, but I sure hope certain human beings I can think of are punished after death. I may not believe in hell, but I believe Hitler and Stalin (and a few American presidents!) should go to hell.

In the end, though, we should move away from connecting God to torture and hell and imagine God rather as the savior, not the torturer. And what are we saved from? Basically, from everything that causes us, all human beings, and nature itself destruction, pain, suffering, and distress. In “The Great Litany” many Christians pray for deliverance from all sorts of evil and suffering.55 We cannot assume we will be saved from all pain and suffering, but we can pray for it. We pray that God will “strengthen” those “who suffer in mind, body, and spirit” and that God will “comfort . . . those who are failing and infirm” (BCP, 151). Neither will we be saved from death. But we can be saved from the fear and dread of death. In the Book of Common Prayer we do not pray that we be spared death entirely but that we may experience a good death: “That we may end our lives in faith and hope, without suffering and without reproach” (BCP, 385). We pray that God will “give to the departed eternal rest” (387), that God’s “will for them may be fulfilled” (389).

This may be a good place to address common ideas that “heaven” or eternal life is just the extension into infinity of time as we experience it. Many of us long ago questioned the traditional idea that a good afterlife is just “time going on forever.” I find the idea of simply “existing” forever to be dreadful. Won’t we all get bored with the same old thing going on forever? But the proper Christian understanding of an eternal afterlife in God does not include enduring “time.” We must rather understand that we will exit “time,” just as God has never existed in time. God’s eternity is not a line but a point, and a point of infinite presence.⁵⁶ There is no before or after in God’s essence but the eternal now. Thus no one could possibly get “bored” in an eternal present in God. Resting in peace in eternal life should be imagined as shifting from constant “becoming” to simply “being” in constant presence. It is, though we can’t completely conceive it, coming to rest and peace in God’s eternal presence.

More important than thinking of salvation as an escape from death or hell or even as an eternal afterlife is the idea that we are saved in the present from despair and meaninglessness. We must remind ourselves that we are saved, most of the time, from ourselves. We are saved when we can rest from worrying, anxiety, and depression. Immersing ourselves in the gospel with its steady liturgies and assurances, we gradually may learn to live lives of meaning, not of despair. Salvation is God teaching us, step by step, to trust God and to be at home in the imagined good universe of God’s will and creation. Salvation is being at peace and harmony with the good universe—and hoping and praying for peace and deliverance from the evils and sufferings we do in fact experience in the universe as we know it today. Salvation is the habitus of believing and living in the promise Julian of Norwich repeated from her divine visions: “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of all thing shall be well.”57

As we attempt to train ourselves to relax in the salvation promised by God, another controversial traditional doctrine, like the doctrine of original sin discussed above, may also be redeemed from the dismissal it so frequently gets from modern Christians: the doctrine of predestination or election. Like the doctrine of original sin, and for very similar reasons, the doctrine of predestination—the claim that God preordained or predestined people to be saved long before they could make their own decision or do anything to gain salvation—seems to modern people to be offensive. How is it “fair” that God “chose” some people or even all people? Doesn’t that offend against any notion of free will? The modern investment in individualism and individual freedom is the main motivation for modern Christians to ignore or reject previous beliefs about predestination for salvation. But again, as I argue in many contexts, it is the modernist ideology of individualism that needs more critical examination.

It is not difficult to demonstrate that the doctrine of election or predestination is “biblical.” Some kind of notion of election occurs throughout the Bible. And it is hardly surprising that it can be found in the New Testament. Early Christian writers took the concept from the well-known idea in the Old Testament that God had “chosen” the people of Israel to be his “elect” nation. Passages in the New Testament refer to Israel as God’s elect people (Acts 13:17, for example). Thus early Christians who saw themselves as chosen by God were building on the prior idea that Israel, or sometimes a “remnant” within Israel, constituted a chosen people.

The theme is pervasive in the New Testament also, being found in each of the four Gospels as well as in Acts, the letters of Paul, James, Peter, John, and Revelation.58 Paul often refers to believers as having been chosen by God (Rom 9:11; 11:5, 6, 28; 1 Thess 1:4), a practice followed by the author of 2 Peter, who seems to have used Paul’s letters as a model (2 Pet 1:10). Authors claim that God chose specific classes of people: Paul insists that God chose the foolish, weak, low, and despised over the wise, powerful, strong, or highborn (1 Cor 1:27–28). James says that God chose the poor over the rich (2:5). The theme pervades the Bible, including the New Testament.

Particular passages elaborate on it. One of the most astonishing is Rom 9–11. As I explained in the introduction above, Romans should no longer be read simply as an abstract argument for the Protestant doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone apart from all human works. I believe it may indeed be taken that way, but I think we should also recognize that in its original context Paul’s argument in Romans had a more specific meaning. Paul wrote to a predominantly gentile church in Rome in order to argue, at least in part, that gentile believers in Rome should not think they had displaced Jews or Israel in God’s plan for the salvation of the world. Paul does spend much of the letter arguing that gentiles need not keep the Jewish Torah in order to be justified. They are justified by faith, just as Abraham was. Yet Paul wants them still to respect their fellow believers who are Jews and also to respect and honor the heritage that is Israel.

Thus in chapter 9 Paul addresses directly the relationship of “Israel” to those gentiles who have become believers in the Messiah of Israel. He admits that it is something of a mystery, but God does, after all, choose whom he will “love” and whom he will “hate.” Before Jacob and Esau were even born God had chosen Jacob over Esau, before either had any opportunity to do good or evil: “so that the plan of God according to election might be sustained, not from works but from calling” (9:11–12). Being chosen by God happens “not through willing, nor through running, but through God practicing mercy” (9:16). Each of these three activities is described by means of a participle formed from a verb: willing, running, “mercying.” These refer to the activities of God and indicate that having mercy, dispensing mercy, is a continually ongoing activity of God. Paul cites a second example in the way God chose Pharaoh, but only to defeat him in favor of Moses and the Israelites: “Therefore, on whom he wills, he has mercy, and on whom he wills, he hardens” (9:18). I translate the sentence woodenly in order to highlight its parallelism and its stark contrast of the chosen and the unchosen.

In the next section, Paul addresses expected objections. How can God find fault if he is the one who preordained the nature of what he has made? Paul gives no really satisfactory answer, except to say that God’s prerogative is God’s prerogative: as the creator, God has the right to create as he wishes. The conclusion, in chapter 11, is that the believing gentiles may take no credit for their own faith. They believe because God chose them. And there is no reason to believe that God has given up on those he originally chose, Israel. At least some of them are still “the elect” (11:7). Those who rejected Jesus show by that action simply that they were “hardened” because of a larger plan of God: the mission of the gospel to the gentiles. Some Jews were “broken off” in order to allow the “grafting in” of gentile believers. But if God broke them off, he can very well graft them in again. Paul believes, in spite of the unbelief of some of his fellow Jews, that “the gifts and calling of God are irreversible” (11:29), so he holds out hope that eventually “all Israel will be saved” (11:26).

Rom 9–11 offer the most explicit and sustained argument for election and predestination. But the topic is rehearsed elsewhere. Eph 1:4 claims that God “chose us before the foundation of the world.” God “predestined [προορίζω] us for adoption” (1:5). The same Greek word occurs in 1:11: we have been “predestined” to receive an inheritance from God, purely by means of his will and plans. Even the good works we may do, we can take no credit for; those good works were themselves already “prepared beforehand” (προετοιμάζω) by God, a phrase that is echoed in the Book of Common Prayer: we pray that we may “do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in” (339). Many scholars believe that the author of Ephesians (not Paul, according to this theory) used Colossians as a model for his own letter. If so, this author added the emphasis on election and predestination; we don’t find that same theme in Colossians. But we can say that by adding it to his appropriation of Colossians, the author of Ephesians was also bringing at least that part of his message closer to Paul’s.

Another letter that emphasizes election is 1 Peter. The letter is addressed to “the chosen [or elect] resident aliens” (1:1). These are former gentile worshippers of idols (1:14, 18, 21; 2:1, 9–11, 25; 4:3), who have been chosen “according to the foreknowledge of God the father” (1:2; the NRSV translates by using instead of “foreknowledge” the phrase “chosen and destined”). Like Paul, this author teaches that God chose not only the elect but also those who do not believe: those who rejected Christ, the cornerstone, stumbled by disobeying the word, “unto which [end] they were appointed” (2:8; NRSV: “as they were destined to do”). The recipients of the letter, on the other hand, are an “elected nation” (2:9). Thus the author of 1 Peter takes (from Paul?) the doctrine of election and predestination and adds to it his own designation of gentile believers as “resident aliens.”59

How do we, though, make sense of the doctrine of election or predestination? In fact, this is an excellent example of how any Christian doctrine may be both false and true. It is false if taken to mean we have no freedom to choose and act for ourselves. Even if we may doubt the kind of radical individualism and freedom of will promoted by much of modernism, we need not doubt that we can and do make choices. We may celebrate the freedoms we do have, even if we cannot completely understand what “free will” truly is. As I have argued, we need not expect Christianity to be a philosophy, providing intellectual answers to all sorts of intellectual questions. Simply from a pragmatic perspective, we may act and think as if we do have some kind of freedom.

The doctrine of election is false if it leads to pride. We may not look down on nonbelievers because we now “know” they were not “chosen,” and we were. The doctrine of predestination, certainly in Paul and probably in later theologians also, was intended to work against pride and for humility: you did not earn your justification, you can take no credit even for your faith, you will be saved due to absolutely nothing you did or can do. You were chosen in spite of anything you did or can do. Ironically, a doctrine that seems to have been intended to help Christians live in humility but in the confidence of their salvation sometimes in history has led Christians to doubt their salvation. Some Puritans, apparently, were caught up in guilt and anxiety. “Am I really one of the elect? How can I know for sure?” Others were sometimes caught up in pride: “At least I am one of the elect!” If the doctrine of predestination leads us to look down on others, take pride in ourselves, or think we have confidence about “who is going to hell,” it is a false doctrine indeed.

But I believe, especially given the individualism and capitalist ideology of modernism, which believes that those who have deserve what they have, they have earned it, election and predestination can do good work for our theology and faith. The doctrine teaches that faith is not an accomplishment. Certainly, we may accept that we are not justified by “works,” whether works of the Torah, as Paul certainly argued, or works of any sort, as the Protestant reformers emphasized. But predestination insists that we are not justified even by faith if that faith is at all considered by us “our accomplishment.”

By meditating on predestination, we find ourselves refusing to condemn anyone to hell. That simply is not our business, and it is something God tells us we may know nothing about. Rather, predestination teaches us humility, not pride. Interpreted rightly, election and predestination are designed to teach us to rest in the free gift of grace: if we find we still, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, have faith, we may not take credit for it. That also is a gift of God for which we may claim no merit or credit.

Resurrection

As I began this chapter by emphasizing our human experience as created, constructed selves and as bodies, so it is appropriate that I end it by addressing our salvation as the resurrection of the body. Actually, the most common way of referring to the resurrection in the New Testament is not explicitly of “the body” but as the resurrection “from the dead” (often ἐκ νεκρῶν). But we should assume that most early Christians, or at least those represented by our texts of the New Testament, assumed the resurrection of the body. As we saw in the chapter on Jesus and his resurrection, Paul took that to be a pneumatic body, not a body of flesh and blood, which is how he envisioned the resurrection of Jesus and thus also of believers.60

That other early Christians believed in the resurrection of the flesh is clear from how they go out of their way to portray the resurrected body of Jesus to be one of flesh (and bone!: see Luke 24:39–43; see also John 20:27). But nowhere in the New Testament do authors speak of a human “resurrection of the flesh.” In fact, a resurrection of νεκροί would be heard to imply “corpses,” νεκροί being a common term for dead people. It would have emphasized the “physicalness” of the resurrection—and perhaps how disgusting it would sound to many people. Who wants dead bodies to start coming to life? No doubt when many Greeks and Romans heard Christians talk about “resurrection of the dead,” they heard it as “the rising of zombies.” That was probably one reason educated Greeks and Romans so disdained any promise of the “resurrection of the body.” In any case, it was not until the second century, with the likes of writers such as Tertullian, that some Christians began to insist that the proper, orthodox belief was in the resurrection of the “flesh.”

But how do we—indeed, can we?—believe in it? Paul’s theology certainly gives us an out so that we need not confess the resurrection of our very flesh-and-blood bodies in all their molecular materiality. We don’t really know how to understand exactly what Paul thought a “pneumatic body” is. As I suggested in the chapter on Jesus, we might imagine that Paul’s pneuma was something like the way we think of pure energy or oxygen or whatever might be the most rarified, supercharged, powerful substance we can imagine in our world. Can we imagine a universe in which we could be alive in a body of something like that? Something like a body of pure DNA or a body of pure information?61

We must remind ourselves that the “kingdom of God” promised in passages of the New Testament is not simply “this cosmos” continuing or just started over again. Rather, even though ancient Christians (and Jews who believed in such an eschatological kingdom) assumed the kingdom of God would undoubtedly be a physical kingdom, they mostly seemed to believe it would be a “new” world, recreated to be completely superior to “this” world. As far as the New Testament goes, they weren’t looking for a reformation of “this cosmos” but for the miraculous replacement—or, better put, transformation—of this cosmos into a very different “new heaven and new earth.”

How is it more unbelievable that God might create a new universe than to believe that God created this one? It seems to me completely incredible, on its face, to confess that God made this universe, but I still find myself willing to confess it on a regular basis. And if God could make this one, why could God not make another one? And if God could have made this body, why could God not make a new body for me? In other words, though I cannot get my mind around any distinct notion of a resurrection of the body, neither can I get my mind around the notion of God creating the universe, including my body, out of nothing. There is no belief more farfetched, it seems to me, than to believe in God in the first place and that God created and continues to create the universe. The idea that God could do it again is certainly not more unbelievable than that.

After all, some scientists, and quite reputable ones at that, lately have been asking us to believe in the possible existence of other universes, even “multiverses,” and perhaps even an infinity of universes.62 If physicists, many of whom do not “believe in God,” can entertain completely inscrutable and unbelievable ideas about other universes that may or may not work by the “laws of nature” or the same regularities ours operates by, why would it seem more unbelievable that some entity we can’t grasp or understand—let’s just call it god—is responsible for this one and for all the other possible ones?

The philosopher of religion Nancey Murphy suggests that any eschatological “nature” that may exist in the future won’t be the same as “our” nature now. We can’t know much of anything about the nature of any future resurrection because we know nothing about the “nature” of “nature” in an eschatological world: “We now know a great deal about how natural processes subserve human psychic life. While we can know that, in some manner, glorified bodies support the same (or enhanced) psychic and social capacities, we know that we cannot know how this will be in the future. This is because our knowledge of future physical processes is based on projections using current laws of nature. We also know, as argued above, that the laws of nature in the eschaton (whatever ‘nature’ would then designate) cannot be the same as we have now.”⁶³ Whereas I myself demur at using language about “laws of nature” because I don’t think they can be proven to exist and because the notion seems not to be scientifically necessary or philosophically defensible, I do think Murphy has a point: we may confess a belief in a new world and new bodies without having any idea whatsoever about the actual nature of either.⁶⁴

It seems to me that one can very well be open to a belief in some kind of afterlife for human beings without having to put any kind of specificity on it at all. What seems to me to be important in order to remain faithful to traditional, orthodox Christianity is to have faith that whatever will exist for me or my loved ones must have some kind of continuity with our beingness now, but also to be discontinuous enough that whatever that future body is, it is freed from the failings, suffering, sin, and evils we experience in these bodies. As Timothy Gorginge puts it (with some quotations of Barth), “We cannot establish the ‘how’ of the resurrection. It takes place in ‘sacred incomprehensibility.’ The proper response to it is confession. ‘We cannot try to go “behind” it, either behind the fact that it is given, or behind the way in which it is legitimate and possible for us to act in correspondence to this fact.’ Our response to the resurrection is to ‘act in correspondence with this fact.’”65 When confessing faith in the resurrection of the body, ultimately what I’m saying, I think, is that “all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.”

Indeed, I believe the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is more important for what work it does for us now than for what information it may provide for the future. The resurrection of the body affirms, again, as much of this chapter has insisted, that we are bodies, we are physical, we are finite, we are bundles of desires, emotions, needs, and wants, and we should not seek to escape that but to learn the habitus of happiness in embodiment. We affirm that our bodies are good and even beautiful, even when we don’t feel beautiful. We affirm the goodness of sex, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, and all the other things God uses to bless us. We share so much, almost every thing, with the other embodied creatures of the earth, and we owe them as much. We share existence with all of nature and depend on the health of the earth for our existence and happiness—which is just one more reason we must be environmentalists.

Though Neil Gillman is speaking from the perspective of his Jewish faith, I quote his statements as relevant also for why the resurrection of the body—as opposed to the immortality of the soul—is important for Christian teaching about our present and not only our future. Calling the doctrine “indispensable,” he continues, “If my body inserts me into history and society, then the affirmation of bodily resurrection is also an affirmation of history and society. If my bodily existence is insignificant, then so are history and society. To affirm that God has the power to reconstitute me in my bodily existence is to affirm that God also cares deeply about history and society.”⁶⁶ Again, we’re back to one of the main themes of this chapter: the particularity of our natures as social bodies and physical bodies and therefore historical bodies. Our embeddedness in history and society is not a flaw; it is not something from which we should ask “religion” to save us. It is not what we should attempt to escape or forget in meditation or by ignoring. It is something we must learn to be our habitus and for which we give thanks.

Becoming God

As much as I have been insisting that we must celebrate our humanness and embodiedness, I want again to change tack radically and resuscitate another old Christian doctrine, though one held in suspicion by much of Protestantism: human deification, theosis, the hope that we may indeed somehow and in some way become truly one with God, not by becoming God—much less by becoming “other gods” alongside God—but by being taken up into God. The doctrine has been an important one to some branches of Christianity since antiquity, more popular typically in Eastern Orthodox churches and theology than in the West. Yet it has been there, and it may constitute one small attempt at reconciliation for us Christians in Western traditions to reclaim it.

The idea that human beings can conceivably unite with the highest divinity comes from, initially, the influence of Platonism on Christian theology in late antiquity. But we need not fear that the original impulse for the late ancient doctrine of human deification and radical unity with God took its inspiration from philosophy. And we may read the New Testament to support it. Paul insists that we currently await “adoption” as God’s children. How can we really be part of his family if we do not share his nature? Col 3:3, moving beyond the “reserved eschatology” found in those letters Paul actually wrote, says, “[Our] lives are hidden with Christ in God.” The authors of Ephesians and Colossians move the timeline forward, insisting that believers already enjoy at least some of the fundamental blessings and rewards Paul seemed to reserve for the future.67 The adoption of believers into God’s intimate family and the joining of believers through the Holy Spirit to God’s very person lead later theologians and mystics to meditate on whether or not believers may actually experience some kind of “becoming God.” Their answer is yes.

Basil of Caesarea believes that the aspiration of Christians will be “becoming like God, and, the highest of desires, becoming God.”⁶⁸ Gregory of Naziansus says that Christ was born as a human being “so that we might be made divine just as he was made human.”69 Augustine voiced what was by his time a common way of putting it: “God was made human that human beings might be made divine.”⁷⁰ Church fathers were quick to point out that we should not aspire to be divine in precisely the way Christ, the father, and the spirit are divine. They regularly insist, as Cyril of Alexandria puts it, that Jesus is God “by nature,” and believers “by grace” and “adoption.”⁷¹ John Calvin will echo the distinction: the sonship of Jesus is his “by nature.” But Jesus is the only begotten. Our partaking in God’s nature is merely “by adoption” (Institutes, 2.14.5–6).

If we take these qualifications to heart, differentiating any divinity we may be granted by grace from the essential divinity of the persons of the trinity, we may recover a sense of ultimate, eschatological unity with God, as has been attempted by recent, even Protestant, theologians. Eugene Rogers, for instance, provides several qualifications of what deification means for human beings; for example, we don’t create worlds that we then rule. He explains how, though, the doctrine may be interpreted as being true and useful: “Deification does not mean the erasure of the boundary of the Creator and the creature; it means the crossing of that boundary. . . . Deification does not mean that human persons become trinitarian persons. They become deified human persons, not persons of deity.”⁷² Kathryn Tanner also notes the difference between any divinity Christians may hope for and the essential divinity of God: “Divinity is an ingredient of our nature through external impartation and not because it is what human nature essentially is.”⁷³ The doctrine of human deification is often explained now, as it was among the church fathers, by connecting deification with the incarnation of Jesus. Eric L. Mascall says, “The Incarnation is not to be thought of as the compression of the divine Word within the limits of human nature but as the exaltation of human nature to the level of Godhead by its union with the Person of the divine Word.”⁷⁴

This doctrine, like every one, as I have been insisting, may be true, but it is necessarily false in some sense. As ancient and modern theologians have insisted, we are not gods alongside God. None such exist. And we are not divine in our natural existence or essential being. In fact, we have being, essence, or existence only because we are sustained by God. The doctrine is false if taken to render us proud or superior to other creatures or to our fellow human beings. That would be making idols out of our selves, which we are far too prone to do already. But the late ancient notion that by grace we may hope for the beatification of being absorbed into God is something to which we may aspire, something more graduated and greater than any imagination we may have about finally and peacefully “resting in the universe.” Christ became human so that human beings may become divine.

Christianity, understood correctly, should be always an eschatological faith. We promote nothing like the ideology—and deceptive political ubiquity—of American “optimism.” American “optimism” is an assumed attitude fed by false ideology.75 On the contrary, Christian eschatology is empirical, as it has always been. This may seem counterintuitive, but it is true. The authors of eschatological texts, and all the documents of the New Testament are eschatological to some extent, look at the world around and try to make sense of things they see. When they predict the future, they do so with a firm eye on the actual, material, political world. And because they are open to the future in radical ways, they cannot help but be revisable. Note how many apocalyptic writers (Daniel, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Paul, John the Seer) take over prophecies from the past and alter them to fit the facts, even facts that have been created only in the interim between-time, for example, Mark’s use of Daniel, Luke’s use of Mark, 2 Peter’s use of Paul. We are not deceived. We are not “optimists.” We admit that our world is, and we are, terribly flawed. By looking at the world in all its tragedies and injustices and yet remaining open to a radical future, Christian eschatology—the hope of our faith—is empirical.

The work of the Christian gospel is to take admittedly sinful, fallen human nature—inclined by its very fallen nature to harm ourselves, others, and our world—and remake it, along with all other creatures and the entire universe, so that it may be saved and even eventually become one with God.

Notes

1. See the excellent discussion by Cooper-White, “Reenactors.”

2. The point is being made in much popular science writing, but for one recent discussion, see Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, 64–65.

3. Matthew 6:27: I take liberties with the translation since the Greek can be legitimately read as referring to height or time. I just let both readings stand.

4. See Martin, Corinthian Body, 176–79, for fuller discussion.

5. The precise number varies somewhat because of textual variability among manuscripts and editions.

6. Through much of this discussion I used the transliterated and even “anglicized” words for these bodily entities partly to make my text more accessible but also because I want to distance these terms from their traditional meanings as “soul” and “spirit” in the heavily Christianized and theologized senses.

7. See Newman, “Concise Greek–English Dictionary of the New Testament,” 201.

8. The examples are too many to cite, but for some instances see Mark 8:35–37 = Matt 16:25 = Luke 9:24: most translations use “life”; the NEB has “self” and “true self”; see also Acts 15:26; 20:10; 27:10, 22; Rom 16:4; Phil 2:30; 1 Thess 2:8. These are only the fewest of possible examples.

9. Murphy, “Resurrection Body”; Murphy, Bodies and Souls?, 272

10. For a good introduction to “emergence” in both science and religious studies, see Clayton and Davies, eds., Re-emergence; Clayton, Mind and Emergence; for an excellent appropriation of emergence theories to analyze Paul and his notion(s) of “sin,” see Croasmun, “Body of Sin” and Emergence.

11. As Denys Turner explains the views of Thomas Aquinas, “The ‘I’ that I am does not consist in the soul that I have, and a bodiless soul is no person.” For Thomas, to say that someone “has a soul” is “no more than a synonym for ‘is alive.’” See Turner, Thomas Aquinas, 56–57; see also 62.

12. Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, esp. 178–79; McCabe, Good Life, esp. 103. According to the Quicunque Vult (The Creed of Saint Athanasius), “soul and flesh is one man,” said of Christ’s incarnation but therefore true for us as well: we are not soul apart from flesh, or flesh apart from soul, but a living body, the combination, if we may put it in these terms (though we need not), of life and body (I quote the creed from the Book of Common Prayer, 865).

13. Turner, Thomas Aquinas, 61.

14. For something of a short intellectual history of modern philosophy and scholarship on the “social nature of human beings” (“sozialen Natur des Menschen”) and the different ways societies and cultures have tried to acknowledge both the social and the individual in human existence, see Noelle, “Die doppelte Natur”; for a fuller treatment of the topic, see the exhaustive theological and phenomenological anthropology by Wulf, Der Mensch.

15. Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 22.

16. Ibid., 52; see also 69: “I discover myself, not in some pre-linguistic inner space of self-presence, but in the network of multifarious social and historical relationships in which I am willy-nilly involved.”

17. I have further described, and critiqued, this ancient—and modern—ideology of self-sufficiency in Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, see esp. 74–76; see also Martin, “Contradictions.”

18. I use the term “common bloodline” because the Greek does refer to the idea of a people of common ancestry, which makes them a unity by common inheritance. The word is often translated as “race,” but I find that anachronistic. I don’t believe the ancients had a notion that corresponds to the modern term “race,” which is a broader (and “racialist”) category assumed to be based on biological differences among only a few racial groups (white, black, Asian, Native American, Latino, or whatever list is currently used in practice). Inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world did think of people as belonging to different nations or ethnic groups (Greeks, Romans, Jews, Germans, Egyptians), but those better correspond to our own ideas of ethnicity (German, Italian, English, Chinese, Japanese), which are usually distinct from those we consider “race” (white, black, Asian).

19. “Peter” is in quotation marks here because I, along with most critical scholars, do not believe the “historical” Peter wrote the letter.

20. See, for example, Cortez, Theological Anthropology, 36–37.

21. Williams, Resurrection, 23.

22. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 315.

23. Ibid., 283.

24. This is a major point of the book by MacMullen, Paganism; see also Martin, Corinthian Body, 108–10, and sources there cited.

25. Asclepius was famously killed by Zeus for bringing a man back to life, but there were other examples of the gods guarding divine immortality. For the best resource on Asclepius, including essays on various topics and primary sources, see Edelstein and Edelstein, Asclepius.

26. See Murphy, Bodies and Souls, 29.

27. Schillebeeckx, God Among Us, 92. See also Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 184, whose editing of the larger passage I here accept.

28. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 212.

29. Ibid., 308.

30. From “The Great Litany,” Book of Common Prayer, 149, 152.

31. Book of Common Prayer, 391.

32. Williams, On Christian Theology, 78; the last six words, here in single quotation marks, are quoted from Moore, Inner Loneliness, 117.

33. Evidence and arguments defending this interpretation may be found in Martin, Corinthian Body, 198–228; Sex and the Single Savior, 65–147; and New Testament, 278–84.

34. One of the seminal and best of such studies is Brown, Body and Society.

35. See especially Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self.

36. The classic, and very lengthy, study is Nygren, Agape and Eros. See now also Soble, ed., Eros, which provides, besides the contributions of Soble, an anthology of writings on the different meanings of “love” from ancient to modern, including an excerpt from Nygren. I agree with Johannes Hoff when he chides “Bishop Nygren’s Lutheran attempt to expurgate the biblical concept of love from its Platonic-erotic connotations.” Hoff points out that Nicholas of Cusa’s use of “love” retains the aspects of erotic (eros, amor), friendship (philia, amicita), and charity (agape, dilectio caritas). See Hoff, Analogical Turn, 194. I argue below that we also should reintroduce the erotic to our faith and theology.

37. “At its core, love is not a feeling at all, but an action, a way of being, in active care for others—for the integrity of their bodies and souls, as well as for their flourishing.” Volf, Against the Tide, xi.

38. One would not expect to find in the New Testament one common Greek word for sexual pleasures: τὰ ἀφροδίσια; the corresponding verb is ἀφροδιάζω. Early Christians would avoid words so closely related to the name of the Greek goddess of the erotic.

39. An important impetus to the frankly sexual and erotic modern interpretation was given by Pope, Song of Songs. But see also Exum, Song of Songs; Bloch and Bloch, Song of Songs; Knust, Unprotected Texts, esp. 26–33.

40. Ackerman, When Heroes Love; Olyan, “‘Surpassing”; Knust, Unprotected Texts, 41–42.

41. See Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 99–100.

42. Ibid., 77–90.

43. “To recognize desire and the erotic as ways in which the Divine is present as creativity in our lives is . . . a way of making theology come alive in human life.” Henriksen, “The Erotic Self,” 271.

44. In many of these cases where Paul uses a word from the δικαιο-word-group, I use both terms “justice” and “righteousness” because the Greek most often includes connotations of both English words, though those two English terms mean different things in most modern English. We must keep both meanings in mind when reading Paul.

45. Croasmun, “Body of Sin”; Emergence of Sin.

46. “Downward causation” refers to causal effect when an “emergent” entity that we might think of as possessing superior ontological status “causes” some “effect” in the entities “below,” from which the superior emerged. These are all somewhat technical terms in the theory, but they are not difficult to understand. For example, scientists may argue that although the “mind” is the entity that “emerges” from the physical structures and activities of the brain, the mind may cause structural changes in the physical brain.

47. For a brief but good narrative of the development, including references to ancient sources and modern scholarship, see “Original Sin” in Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; and Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 346–74; see also the more recent treatment, and from a post–Vatican II Roman Catholic perspective, in Brambilla, Antropologia teologica, 486–549.

48. As usual, this is my own translation, which I have rendered rather woodenly to highlight Paul’s rhetoric of parallelism and balance. The words in brackets are added to make sense of the passage, which is somewhat elliptical in the Greek.

49. Alison, Joy, 261.

50. Ibid., 262.

51. The prayer occurs in several contexts in the prayer book. Its first appearance is in Morning Prayer, Rite I, pp. 41–42.

52. These examples are gleaned simply from those given in LSJ, s.v.

53. For the hardships, see 1 Thess 2:14; 3:3–4.

54. For a good recent study of the imperial cult, its ideology and propaganda, and similar language in early Christianity, see Peppard, Son of God.

55. See the Book of Common Prayer, 148–55.

56. As Johannes Hoff notes, here quoting Nicholas of Cusa, De aequalitate, “Time is not eternity; it is only a ‘likeness of eternity’ (esse aeternitatis similitudinem).” Hoff, Analogical Turn, 124.

57. See the short, devotional biography of Julian: Frykholm, Julian, 55, 108.

58. The word ἐκλεκτός as referring to people, or particularly believers in Christ, as God’s elect occurs many times in Matthew and Mark, and see also, among other examples, Rom 8:33; 16:13; Col 3:12; 2 Tim 2:10; Tit 1:1; several times in 1 Peter; Rev 17:14.

59. For one treatment of the doctrine of predestination, including a history of it in the church, see Brambilla, Antropologia teologica, 157–254.

60. Two passages exist that may suggest that the authors of Hebrews and 1 Peter may have shared Paul’s view that the resurrected body is one of pneuma but not flesh. Heb 5:7 speaks of Jesus’s existence previously “in the days of his flesh.” Does this imply that Jesus, after his resurrection, no longer exists as “flesh”? 1 Pet 3:18 says that Jesus was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the pneuma”; and later speaks of how human beings will be “judged in the flesh” but “live in the pneuma” (4:6). Both statements would make perfect sense in Paul’s anthropology, by which current human existence is “in the flesh,” but any future existence after a resurrection would be not “in flesh” but “in pneuma,” a pneumatic body. This is not a far stretch exegetically precisely because both Hebrews and 1 Peter show theological affinities with Paul.

61. Note how James Gleick plays with ideas that information is neither matter nor energy, but still “information is physical”: Information, 241, 279. Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe is an argument that our universe is a “mathematical structure.”

62. Again, there are several examples, but one recent book suggesting such things is Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe.

63. Murphy, “Resurrection Body,” 217; see also Murphy, Bodies and Souls.

64. For a critique of “laws of nature,” see the arguments advanced by the philosopher of science Van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry; for fuller treatment of how Fraassen imagines “nonfoundationalist” science, see his Empirical Stance.

65. Gorringe, Karl Barth, 237; Church Dogmatics IV/2, p. 123.

66. Gillman, Death, 262.

67. These are points about Ephesians and Colossians commonly acknowledged by scholars, but for one summary of the position, see Martin, New Testament, 247–60.

68. On the Holy Spirit 9.23 (p. 44). See also the discussion in Zizioulas, Being, 49–50.

69. Oration 29.19. See Beeley, Unity, 184–85, for this quotation and discussion.

70. Sermon 128, “In natali Domini,” no. 12, Patrologia Latina 39:1997. This translation quoted from Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit, 48.

71. St Cyril of Alexandria on the Unity of Christ,, esp. 35. Greek: Quod Unus Sit Christus, PG 75:1253–1361; Pusey, Works of S. Cyril, 7.334–424; de Durand, Deux Dialogues Christologiques.

72. Rogers, After the Spirit, 47.

73. Tanner, Christ the Key, 65; citing Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul and the Resurrection,” 5.440.

74. Mascall, Christ, 48.

75. Christian “hope” is not “optimism.” On the differences, see especially Moltmann, Theology of Hope, e.g., 58; and Volf, Against the Tide, 44–46.