Bonfires II: What is Possible with God?
Teeing up a conversation on salvation, solidarity, and all the things that matter most.
Good Monday, everyone!
First, a little housekeeping: exciting things are happening at unRival, and I’ll need to be on-deck for most of it. For the sake of managing my attention and keeping this Substack high-quality, I’ll be moving from a weekly to a twice-a-month schedule for the foreseeable future. That means you can expect to hear from me next on May 27.
As for what you’ll hear from me about…
We’ve pulled a lot of threads together over the last 2 months. Maybe too many! But the central idea remains: if Christianity is a “religion for losers,” what does that mean and look like in practice?
What sort of spirituality do we cultivate when we take ourselves seriously as “losers”—those whom God has engaged through weakness, suffering, and death? What does that imply about our own vocations and relationships? What does it say about the ways we do theology?
How, finally, does our theology impact our politics? The ways we do life together?
We’re asking these questions during an election year–perhaps the most religiously inflected election any of us has ever seen. I have no special insight into the situation, but I think my reading is reasonable enough: the Republican party under Donald Trump has become a party of moral hypocrisy, criminal wealth, and white supremacy, encouraging its religious base towards blasphemy, idolatry, and vigilante violence. Opposite them, the Democratic party engages vulnerable people with a philosophy of noblesse oblige it markets as “progressive,” yet still leans on American religious mythology to justify its unconditional military support of Israel, reducing a dizzyingly complex situation with mostly civilian lives at stake to a simple “good vs. evil” scenario in which we are, yet again, the “good guys.”
Come November, we will re-elect an administration that sees itself infested with enemies from within, and is ready to wield violence like a chemotherapy that won’t distinguish between cancer and vital organs. Or, the present administration will continue dealing with homegrown injustice by exporting its violence onto the global stage for others to suffer.
Ours is a violent society. We celebrate the suffering of those who are wrong, and even rejoice in the collateral damage inflicted while holding our enemies to account. Violence is readily used by people in power, consistently chosen as a political strategy, easily trusted by us and our neighbors.
When I see Christians helping to tell this story of who we are and ought to be, my emotions go into meltdown. We are so completely betraying the God who died to give us life, who said of those who killed him, “They don’t know what they’re doing”—not because they were oblivious to his future vengeance but because God comes to each of us like a parent chasing their errant toddler into the road.
This God, who begged forgiveness for his murderers, we now invoke to destroy our enemies—the very same enemies he called us to love and pray for.
How on earth did we go from telling Jesus’ story to making him tell our story?
One story at a time, of course.
The history of theology shows Christians struggling mightily with the “weakness of God.” The gratuity of Christ is scandalous even to we who confess the Gospel. Over time, we’ve tried to answer the scandal of grace with theologies that feel a little more logical, a little more “tight.” We’ve produced systems that help us explain salvation, soothing our rage for order and giving us confidence that we’re “on God’s side,” that we are the “winners” of history—and that the people over there are the “losers.”
Bit by bit, we restore the self-emptying God to his “proper” place on a throne of earthly power. When God is on that throne, we feel secure in our own blessedness—and in our exploitation of those who don’t share in the blessing. We believe God shares our cause, and come to identify our cause with God. We are even ashamed of the God who speaks through Christ.
I’ve journeyed with these questions for a long time. In my doctoral dissertation, I closely read several poets and novelists who saw the “weakness of God” as something beautiful, as a desirable model for their lives, their art, and their politics. Trying to name what inspired these writers, I found the trove of Christian faith testifying again and again to something different from the militant, patriotic religion that influenced my growing-up. The God I discovered answered the problems of sin and death with his own life, leaving death itself nothing but a heap of bent bars and broken walls keeping us from him. Jesus, who sets the captives free, also inverts all our expectations about how such a thing is supposed to work.
This past Good Friday, I shared two quotes on Facebook which, side-by-side, sum up a great deal of my study and my faith. The first is from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s meditations on the Apostle’s Creed, describing Jesus’ death on the cross:
"Died and was buried." Died with the question to his vanished God as to why he had forsaken him, died with the surrender of his Spirit into the hands of the absent, died with a loud cry, in which...God's no longer articulatable Word reaches its culmination. Died a death in final companionship with all sinners, but a dark death; for which night is darker than the one that the forlorn God has known most intimately?
In this passage, Balthasar summarizes what astonishes me most about the Gospel: that God, taking on the very nature of humanity, also enters into and experiences human death. A death that is a “final companionship” with fallen, sinful creatures. God does not wait until we are redeemed and justified to draw near to and be intimate with us; God joins us in the very “wages” of our sin (Rom 6:23). Through those consequences, Christ creates a path to resurrection.
For theologian James Cone, this “companionship” with us in death–a “dark death” full of injustice and abandonment (because, fully human, Christ consents to the full terror of death)–gives and receives new meaning in the African American experience of slavery and persecution. Cone shows us this resonance, in heartrending detail, through the story of Sam Hose, tortured and lynched following false accusations of rape in 1899:
The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death.
Both Balthasar and Cone zero-in on how, before his resurrection vindicates him as both the judgment and salvation of humanity, Christ’s death expresses full friendship and solidarity with the absolute abyss of human experience. And in this solidarity, Cone reads a divine invitation for the Black experience, itself full of senseless violence and fear, to find new meaning:
The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. ... The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.
… Did I intend to be scandalous when I shared these quotes? Guilty as charged. I know that Cone’s is a radical take on the story of the Gospel. Especially to evangelical ears, Cone’s description of what God is doing when Christ dies on the cross can sound idiosyncratic, downright wrong, or even (and here is a word we over- and mis-use to our pain) heretical.
Sharing Cone’s words alongside Balthasar’s, I hoped to temper the scandal a little–to show that Cone is far from the only one who sees Christ’s solidarity with sinners as central to this thing we call the atonement. (Though Cone self-consciously notes he is unique in saying the cross and the lynching tree “interpret” one another.) Still, I hoped the comparison would provoke some thought.
It did. Soon after, an old friend of mine from the church where we grew up (and where my Dad is still the pastor) reached out to me with questions, and we started a conversation. They were both sympathetic to and critical of Cone:
I am wondering what Cone means by the cross and the lynching tree interpret each other? How is that so? He suggests that the cross and the lynching tree are inextricably linked… Is it saying that Jesus’ death on the cross is really about solidarity with the oppressed rather than salvation? [Because] I would be opposed to interpreting, measuring, or testing the cross of Christ via the lens of a human experience, and not solely through Scripture and the prophecies that were fulfilled on the cross.
Acknowledging the unique and intimate spiritual connection one has with Jesus when they are unjustly killed, mocked, beaten, oppressed, slandered, or hated, they resisted the notion that such experiences somehow “interpret” or add meaning to the cross, which belongs uniquely to Christ as the only innocent victim of suffering:
Though we may suffer unjustly by the hands of men, we are not without sin, and Jesus’ death on the cross interprets itself, as he became sin who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God. He was not killed by an angry mob, but rather gave up his life as a demonstration of love for us…for the sinner…whether rich or poor, the meek and godly, but also the ones who would perform executions and lynchings, and commit all manner of grievous sins.
And because the cross belongs uniquely to Christ, as the means by which God saves oppressed and oppressor alike, it’s very important that we get it right when we describe what was happening when Christ was nailed down:
It wasn’t *just* a demonstration (and I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir), but it was a necessary spiritual condition that the punishment for our sins would be paid (penal substitutionary atonement).
Now, if you’ve read me for the last eight weeks, you can guess my responses to many of these points. I have strong feelings that “penal substitutionary atonement” is not the exclusive (or even the best) reading of Scripture, for example. I’ll unpack my thoughts in the coming weeks, always going back to what I think is the core of the Gospel: “Power is made perfect in weakness.” There is no hope, no change, no growth without this insight.
When we have power or privilege, though, it can be very hard to have this insight in the first place (Luke 18:25). We’re easily biased against it, and against seeing the privileged places from which we tend to interpret. This means theological discussions are never clear-cut debates; they are plank-and-speck blends of earnest thinking, argument, and self-justification. This is true for me as much as for anyone.
So as we corresponded, I expected the impatience or defensiveness in myself I usually wrestle with. But oddly, those weren’t present to wrestle this time. Part of it was my friend’s approach, asking earnest questions, showing both conviction and profound openness: “I hope I don’t sound too blunt, but I fail to see the truth of interpreting the cross any other way. [But] I always hope to be open to being shown another way through the truth of Scripture if I have misunderstood or missed something!”
Theology can seem so abstracted from reality sometimes, especially when big Greek words or the “original Hebrew” show up, but I’m convinced that we are never merely opining when we get into discussions like this. We are telling stories, influencing one another’s imaginations about how the world works and how to credibly recognize the love of God, especially in the midst of evil, injustice, and suffering. Christian truth is open, expansive, so many things simultaneously, yet it is so often reduced to a narrow, digestible form–or even honed to a knife blade, into something destructive and violent, designed to take the other’s story away from them.
I don’t see my friend doing this to Cone. Yes, I see blind spots, and places of serious disagreement, but I also read an earnest desire for truth. I read the open-endedness of a hundred questions, every one of them consequential. Our present political situation is built on mountains of questions like these that have been asked and answered badly, or else never asked at all. We are at the mercy of the stories we’ve told and retold about what is and isn’t possible with God. The only way forward is to tell more stories, and let the Spirit of Truth refine them.
That’s when I realized the churning in my gut was cousin to compassion; I felt the full weight of how much is at stake in conversations like this, and it honestly made me a little claustrophobic. There is no waiting to have these talks until we’re safely shorn of all our biases. There is only our God-given desire to know, and all the sinful baggage that weighs it down.
So we work with what we have: each other. We build bonfires, and we get to work.
To those ends, I asked my friend if I might slowly publish my answers to their questions here in this newsletter, and they agreed. I am thankful for the opportunity, and for the reminder that the spectacles of culture and politics are nothing compared to these close-to-home conversations. I’m thankful for all the people in my life, even those I disagree with, who know the Gospel demands something “other” than what the world is offering. Who believe, or are at least willing to explore, that the Good News starts with being a loser.
This has been a long post, and it will be a long series—but I promise it will be conversational and collaborative. I’m eager to have you along for the ride. I’ll see you all in 2 weeks for a deeper dive into what I think Cone is saying, and how I believe–with some caveats–that his view of Christ’s solidarity with Black bodies can coexist with more “traditional” takes on the atonement.
I’m grateful to do this work under the banner of unRival Network, a non-profit organization that accompanies peacebuilders to nurture hope, inspire collaboration, and overcome destructive rivalries in a nonviolent struggle for justpeace. This newsletter is part of unRival’s mission to expand its community of regular people seeking ever-better ways of being together:
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Looking forward to this! Thanks for writing!