Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

"Patmos" by Baxter Kruger (excerpt - ch 1)

Most Sundays that I am home, I sleep in as long as possible. But this Sunday had a mind of its own. A violent storm had raged through the night, and I hardly slept at all, which made me angry, as I needed rest after a two-week tour lecturing on theology. A little after six in the morning a strange silence—even more frightening than the storm—awakened me. I could feel the invisible war starting again. Although I had personally helped hundreds of people rise in their wars and find serious help, even victory, there was something unseen at work in my own life—dastardly evil that had a way of kicking my butt. I could see it coming like a dark cloud at sea moving toward me, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I knew sleep had vanished, so I decided to get up, throw on my khakis and a T-shirt, brew some coffee, and get the paper. I smiled thinking of how my wife, Mary, enjoyed real coffee—100% arabica, she would say—but I loathed waiting for it to brew. It pushed my impatience button, like when the meter on the gas pump suddenly slows to a crawl for the last few dollars when you have prepaid. I vowed long ago to never prepay for gas, simply because I hated that feeling of being hindered. Somehow hindrance summarized my life. How many times had I gotten on a roll in my search for answers only to feel some damnable, unknown parachute open and jerk me back?

The blue flashing light of the coffeemaker startled me out of my thoughts. I pushed the button to start the brewing and dashed out of the kitchen to get the paper. I couldn’t bear the insufferable wait. Wouldn’t it be great if you could text the coffeemaker and it would do the rest, and then it would text you when the coffee was ready?

As I turned the corner into the foyer, I expected to see our front door, but what I saw was as shocking as something from the book of Revelation and the wild visions of the Apostle John.

Strange lights are not unusual around our door. It has twenty-eight panes of beveled glass, and sometimes in the winter the bevels will catch the sunlight and create a few colors. But on this morning the light hitting the bevels created hundreds of flashing prisms, all moving and passing in and out of one another as if alive, generating a spectacle of dazzling light and color a few feet in front of me.

Ever since I was a boy, prisms have fascinated me, but I’ve never seen or even heard about multiple prisms coalescing to create a larger one. But that is exactly what appeared between me and my door. Pulsating with myriads of colors, rainbows within rainbows, it all mysteriously joined together into one living canopy. I stood still, mesmerized by the vision. And then the canopy started moving—toward me.

Download Patmos Chapter 1

CLICK HERE for Patmos the Book

THE SATAN - by Michael Hardin - episode 7 - "Where does evil come from?"

Editor's Note: Clarion is posting Michael Hardin's 20-episode series (excerpted from What the Facebook? vol. 1) on The Satan as a weekly release, each Thursday. CLICK HERE for the full pdf or kindle document.

(7) Where Does Evil Come From?

When we think of the world as being ruled by two supernatural beings, one good, the other evil, one God, the other the devil, we will end up dealing with a problem known as theodicy. Theodicy is a term which roughly translated means “How can God be just in a world where there is so much evil?” Or, “Why does God allow evil in the world?” Another way of putting it is the way the French intellectual Voltaire did: “If God is good, he is not all powerful, if God is all powerful, God is not good.”

That the world is “bent” I don’t think anyone would disavow. We use terms like broken or fallen to indicate that something is off with this thing called history. We see murder, wars, abuse of all kinds, slavery, discrimination, pain, heartache, misery, poverty, greed, theft, scarcity and all manner of selfishness. If God created the world and it is good, how can we account for the evil that is in the world? Traditionally there have been a few options.

1. God created evil. Some cite Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I am the LORD, that doeth all these things.” In this view, God is the author of both light and darkness, good and evil. God is both a cursing and blessing God. The problem with this view is that God is ultimately Janus-faced. The New Testament response to this is to say that “God is love” and “God is light” (I John) or that “in God there is no dark side [no shadow of turning]” (James). If one believes that God’s character is fully and truly revealed in Jesus, then one must reject Isaiah’s way of understanding God.
2. The way around this is to say that God makes all things “good” (Genesis 1) but that good became evil. This is what the watcher myth or apocalyptic literature of second Temple Judaism did. In this view, the devil is a good angel who rebels, is cast from heaven and then wreaks havoc on humanity. Some cite Isaiah 14 or Ezekiel 28 to justify this view canonically but there are several problems with this. First is that Isaiah and Ezekiel are referencing human kings, second, that the satan plays only a marginal role in Jewish thinking about evil prior to apocalyptic literature (arising in the 3^rd century B.C.E.). The problem here is that the satan must be conceived in the realm of the transcendent outside humanity. The satan becomes an ‘almost divine’ type of figure in this scenario. One solution was that of the author of the prologue of Job which we shall explore in another post, another that of the apocalyptists. Neither is satisfactory.
3. A third possibility is that evil does not arise from without but from within the human condition. The rabbi’s came up with this idea which Paul reflects in Romans 7 and perhaps James in James 1: that God created humans with two ‘impulses’ or ‘yetzerim’, one good the other evil. Think of those pictures where humans have a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. Jesus may (and I say ‘may’) have been alluding to this in the Lord’s Prayer when he said “Deliver us from [the] evil [impulse].”

Each of these is a way of accounting for evil in the world. As I said in the first post, the devil is an idea with a history. Israel in the exile had to figure out why God had brought them to this state of despair. The dominant idea was not that of an external tempter but of the disobedience of the people. One finds time and again in the prophets that Israel rebelled and was paying the price of her rebellion. It is only after the exile under the influence of Zoroastrian thinking that the devil makes an appearance in Jewish literature. In the literature prior to the exile, Israel’s fate is determined solely by her covenant faithfulness or lack thereof.

Only the third solution puts evil squarely on the shoulders of humanity. I think the rabbis were on the right track when they made this leap away from some transcendent notion of the devil (although it must be admitted that some also found ways to combine it with both the first and the second views and superstitiously found demons lurking in shadows and other assorted places). As I explore Rene Girard’s view of the satan as a purely human phenomenon I in no way wish to minimize the reality of evil. Nor will I be saying that it does not have a spiritual component. I will use the work of Walter Wink on The Powers to hopefully show that evil has two sides: a physical or structural one and a spiritual side. Following Wink, I argue that we may dwell in an ‘Integral’ view of the cosmos, a view which suggests retains that which is both seen and unseen. To give you a preview of where I am going there is a realm of the spirit, just as there is a realm of creation. Just as there is God’s good creation (nature) so there is our human creation: society, civilization or what the writer of the Fourth Gospel calls the ‘kosmos.’ Just as God dwells in the realm of “spirit” so also we humans have created a realm of spiritual darkness with our violence against one another. If you have listened to my podcasts on the satan you will know that I have said that this spiritual darkness we humans created (which we shall talk more about in future posts) has in a sense ‘broken free’ from us, brought us into bondage to its darkness and from which Jesus has delivered us. The problem of theodicy can be solved when we as humans take the burden of evil on our shoulders, when we recognize that God does not create evil or darkness, that God is only light and love and that it we who have brought down the creation and ourselves. I am glad that the New Testament is at such pains to speak of our deliverance from evil, but it is our own evil from which we are delivered. We humans, not some transcendent being, are the bottom line in why the world is so out of whack. And it is Jesus, the True Human who restores to use our rightful place as sons and daughters of the living God, so that we may, as He is, be fully human and thus transform, challenge, and bring light and life to our world.

Next episode: (8) The satan as The Accuser

Richard Rohr - CWR Interview - What do we mean by 'Christian action'?

06 Richard Rohr - What do we mean by Christian action? from Plain Truth Ministries on Vimeo.

THE SATAN - by Michael Hardin - episode 6 - "The Personhood of Satan"

Editor's Note: Clarion is be posting Michael Hardin's 20-episode series (excerpted from What the Facebook? vol. 1) on The Satan as a weekly release, each Thursday. CLICK HERE for the full pdf or kindle document.

(6) Personhood and the satan

I am really appreciative of all the comments I have received on my recent series on the satan. Many posters are really struggling with me on the demystification of the devil. So far the biggest issue seems to be that how the concept of ‘person’ is understood.

We have been mired for so long, first in the metaphysics of Plato who divided the person into three discrete categories of body, soul and spirit and then in the Renaissance influenced and Enlightenment notion of the person as an autonomous free moral agent that it is difficult to be set free from these definitions. The shift from a ‘faculty’ approach to the human to a relational one is one that has been a hundred years in the making and still continues now with research on the human brain, the emotional states of cognition and the role of mirror neurons that enable us to live and learn by imitation.

The older philosophical debates about mind, will, choice, emotions and rationality have all been challenged by these recent shifts and discoveries. One important thing to keep in mind is that the church (the people in the pews) are about one hundred years behind what is being taught in the seminaries and the universities. A hundred years from now most of what I am suggesting will be ‘normal’ in the church, but for now my goal is bring the average person into the present and to be liberated from now useless ways of conceiving humanity. Our old ways have led only to violence, war, exclusion, scapegoating and other forms of making the ‘other’ out to be the enemy. We have too long lived with theologies that draw lines where there ought not to be lines.

Theology has always been an evolving science. Change is essential. I am sometimes asked if I believe in progressive revelation. My answer is no, but I do believe in progressive understanding; I think that as a species we are finally getting the message about God’s love in Jesus, how the character of God has been reframed by Jesus away from our tendency to make God in our own image as a Janus-faced (or two-faced) God. This is harder than it seems for many if not most of Christianity has emotionally invested itself in a god that is just like them, angry, belligerent, sacrificial and demanding tit-for-tat justice. The message of the gospel as I understand it is that God is wholly other (Barth) than we are and that God is only love. God’s character is revealed completely in the ministry of Jesus as one of compassion, mercy, inclusion and forgiveness.

Even if we quibble about the satan as a ‘person’ the fact remains, the satan is defeated. Jesus has cast down the satan as a principle by renouncing violence and retribution in his own life and ministry. Yes, evil is very real, yes it sometimes manifests itself in ways that seem incredulous, nevertheless, there are ways of understanding these manifestations in a rational way that does not require us to posit some supernatural metaphysical entity. I think we are best served when we are willing to rethink everything, that is when we are willing to change our ways of thinking about anything and everything (this is what metanoeo ‘to repent’ means). We need not fear change. Jesus doesn’t change (Heb 13:8) but we are constantly in need of transformation and this is the beautiful work of the Holy Spirit in us.

So, as we continue our discussions in the coming weeks on evil, the satan and how Jesus has overcome these blights on our history and species (and indeed creation itself), let us rejoice! For we all know that this ‘old lion who seeks to devour us’ has no teeth and can only use fear to stop us in our tracks and keep us from making our way down the road that is Jesus.

Next episode: (7) Where Does Evil Come From?

Universal Hope in the Orthodox Octoechos according to Hilarion Alfeyev - by Isaac Gregory Hollums

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, in his book Christ the Conqueror of Hell, makes this observation concerning Christ’s descent into Hades:

The Octoechos’ teaching can be systematized by the following questions: 

1. Who benefited from Christ’s saving accomplishments?
2. To whom was his preaching in hell addressed?
3. Whom did he resurrect from the dead?
4. Whom did he free from the power of hell, and whom did he lead to paradise?

The Church Fathers answered these questions differently. St Gregory Nazianzen did not answer the question: “Will Christ save all or just the faithful?” (Homily 45,24). St. Amphilochius of Iconium believed that ALL those who were in hell followed Christ after his descent and preaching. (Homily 6, Against Heretics). Theologians of the Alexandrian Tradition were inclined to believe that God “redeemed and led ALL OF US out of hell, or rather, the entire human race from death.” (Paschal Epistle 10,10.) Clement even numbered the pagans among the saved (Stromateis 6,6). St. Romanos the Melodist and St Ephrem the Syrian maintained that after Christ’s descent into Hades “ALL TOMBS were opened, and ALL the dead came out of them and rejoiced.” (Kontakion 45,17).

Hilarion mentions that there were also saints who contradicted this view and narrowed the preaching in Hades only to the “souls of the saints” (On Christ and the AntiChrist [ St. Hippolystus of Rome]) and St. Cyril of Jerusalem believed only the righteous were redeemed. (Catachetical Homily 14,19)

A careful study of the writings in the hymns of the Octoechos demonstrates that in about ‘five out of one hundred cases’ only the “pious, and righteous” are among the only people delivered from hades. Even more rarely in the Octoechos ‘possibly in two or three out of one hundred cases’ Christ grants salvation to all the “faithful”. But this offers not specifics if the “faithful” are those who believed in God during their lives or if it is those who believed after Christ’s preaching in hell.

CLICK HERE to download the rest of Christ-the-Conqueror-of-Hell

CLICK HERE for an introduction to the Octoechos

Where there is Neither: Dying to our Othering - by Caleb Miller

Othering is the process of casting a group, an individual or an object into the role of the 'other' and establishing one's own identity through opposition to and, frequently, vilification of this Other.

Taken at face value, we present ourselves as committed dualists. In nearly every situation, there is an either/or, with no room for adjustment or both/and. And the greater part of growing up—and especially growing up into the meat of that message we so flippantly call “the gospel”—is learning to nuance our arguments in such a manner as to be able to sit across the table from our opponent and find that neither of us reaches for our knife. In other words, a shared cup of sacramental wine amongst enemies might be the closest thing to heaven we’ll know this side of eternity, and is thus why we’re commanded to unashamedly open the table. This is what makes Jesus so scandalous. That we are presented with such a love that enemies become neighbors, and neighbors become friends, and that friendship itself is something more close than kinship, and thus, we ourselves are; friends of God.

What are the limits of everlasting mercy? Brad Jersak

"And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." Genesis 6:3

"For the LORD is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations." Psalm 100:5 

"O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever." Psalm 136:1

 Question: If God's Spirit "shall not always strive with man" (Genesis 6:3), then what are the limits of God's mercy? David proclaims God's mercy as enduring forever and his lovingkindness as everlasting. But doesn't his patience run out? Doesn't the story of Noah, for example, show that God is patient and long-suffering, but that he also has his limits ... limits that ended in world-destruction through the flood? Doesn't Peter imagine God's wrath being stored up for a final incineration of this world? (2 Peter 3:10). And what about the Book of Revelation? Doesn't it teach that the love and grace of Jesus Christ extend throughout this age, but culminate in a second-coming marked by Christ's violent overthrow of the powers and its people? (Revelation 19). Does this mean his lovingkindness is only forever for believers or the elect?

Response: The best way to resolve this tension, in my view, is to locate the limits of God's mercy elsewhere than duration (because mercy is rooted in his eternal nature, which is love). Even in Jeremiah's Lamentations, the prophet insists, "Because of the LORD'S great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail" (3:22). That's a lot of faith for someone's whose city was under siege and would in fact be consumed.

Moreover, Peter describes how the mercy of God towards those who perished in the flood even outlasted their deaths. His first epistle (chapters 3-4) describes a God who never gives up, even on the prototypical wicked. The divine Word assumes perishable flesh so that Jesus Christ can pursue them even into the underworld, where the "gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit" (4:6). 

If the limit of God's mercy is neither death nor duration, then what? I would propose that divine mercy finds its limits at coercion. When the Bible says his restraining Spirit "will not strive forever," it means that when our defiance escalates to critical mass, it is not that God's mercy ends--it's that he will not rescue us by coercion. As I've written elsewhere, "he gives us over" to the self-destructive consequences of our choices rather than forcing us to obey. That is, his striving stops short of violent intervention, but he never ceases to wait in love for our eventual return home. 

In A More Christlike God I describe how this "giving over" reality can metaphorically be called "wrath." But in fact, if we persist in refusing God's striving call home, sin itself destroys us (not God, directly) ... and even then, God's mercy is not exhausted. It remains forever, outlasting our willful rejection, out-waiting our self-destructive choices and even outliving death itself. So the limits of this mercy are not gauged by a patience that gets weary, but instead, a love that wins by love, but never will-violating force.

Not that the limits of mercy (shy of coercion) are anemic or powerless. Illumination can seem very forceful ... recall the Apostle Paul's conversion! The commitment of God to turning Paul's heart did not come in half-measures. But even there, if we hear Paul's analysis in 2 Corinthians 4, God did not shackle him into submission, but instead, unshackled him for redemption. God's patience--the Spirit's willingness to strive with Paul--was to the extreme, even giving Paul over to his murderous ways. But his wickedness did not outlast God's mercy and did not require God's coercion (if only barely). 

The point is, for there to be no contradiction between a striving that ceases and a mercy that endures, we set the limits of mercy at coercive force while counting on everlasting (limitless) love, which means even beyond the grave. "We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and to the LIFE of the age to come!" (Nicene Creed).  

Deconstruction or Reconstruction - Brian Zahnd

In describing my journey of rethinking Christianity over the past twelve years I’ve used a couple of metaphors. One I call “End of the Line.” I first used this metaphor when speaking to the staff of Charisma Publishing six years ago. Later I wrote an op-ed piece on this metaphor which was published in Charisma magazine in May of 2010. In that piece I introduced the metaphor like this:

“I’m reminded of the times I’ve been in Paris and traveling across the city on the metro system. If I want to travel from Notre Dame to Montmartre I can’t do it on one train. At some point I have to disembark, find the correct platform and catch another train. If you’ve never done it before it can be confusing. This may be a prophetic analogy for the confusion evangelicals feel in the first part of the 21st century. We’ve reached a terminus. We need to find another platform. We need to catch a new train. And we’re not quite sure what it is. But of this we can be quite certain: the train we have been on will not carry Christianity into the 21st century in a compelling and engaging way — no matter how enthusiastically we sing ‘give me that old time religion’ while we sit on a motionless train. What is this train stuck at the station? I think it can be summed up as ‘Christianity characterized by protest.’ We need to face the reality that the protest train has come to the end of the line.”

The other metaphor is “Water To Wine” — a metaphor I set forth in a memoir published earlier this year.

Finding the right platform to catch the right train to carry Christianity into the 21st century. 

Watered-down consumer Christianity being transformed into the rich wine of a robust Christianity.

I like these metaphors.

Which brings me to a way of talking about rethinking Christianity that I don’t like and my suggestion of a third metaphor.

CLICK HERE to continue

THE SATAN - by Michael Hardin - episode 5 - 'The satan as Mimetic Desire Corrupted'

Editor's Note: Clarion is be posting Michael Hardin's 20-episode series (excerpted from What the Facebook? vol. 1) on The Satan as a weekly release, each Thursday. CLICK HERE for the full pdf or kindle document.

(5) The satan as Mimetic Desire Corrupted

Well, by gosh and by golly, I have been called a Gnostic. Those familiar with my work know that for me Gnosticism is the worst possible relationship we can have to faith. In response to yesterday’s post one poster said “I’m starting to think this belief system is in opposition with the physical sciences, which is a telltale sign of gnostic thought. It seems to exalt social thought and relationship with no explanation to reconcile the governing physical realities.”

Let’s unpack this before we go further. I have been saying that the satanic is not a creation of good by God turned evil. I am saying that the satanic is human in its origination. There, my cards are on the table. Now I must explain what I mean by this and it will take many posts to do so.

In reply to the poster above I would suggest that imitation of desire is first of all non-conscious; it is not something we learn to do, we are hard wired to imitate. The discovery of mirror neural networks by Rizzolatti (and his colleagues) in our brains in 1996 (known as mirror neurons) has validated this insight on the level of physicality. The research of Andrew Metzloff on imitation of infants just minutes out of the womb is a social scientific proof of this as well. Readers may turn to Science and Mimesis edited by Scott Garrells for essays on this topic.

What bothers this poster is that I cannot seem to

“Reconcile the physical sciences and the obvious display of hierarchical laws as a physical representation of spiritual truth. Whether thrones or dominions they were made through Him. Everything is currently physically deteriorating- 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is not God’s original design in the creation. How do you suppose the physical laws of science were changed, so that the entire created universe began to decay- not just a social degradation, but a physical one.”

Again I can only write so much in posts. My reply is that if there is anything we know about creation it is that it has been unchanging since the ‘Big Bang.’ Physical deterioration has been built into the universe, there was no such thing as some kind of Edenic ‘perfect Platonic’ universe. The poster reads the cosmology of the Genesis text through the Platonic lens of perfect creation – fall – restoration. I have already pointed out that there are two creation narratives. The first is really not protological as much as it is eschatological; everything God made is good and will turn out, in the end to be very good. But it is not perfect. Had it been the writer of the first narrative would not have said ‘tov, tov’ after God finished the creation but ‘tov, tov, tov’ (Hebrew has no comparatives or superlatives so if one wants to say ‘good’ one says ‘tov, ‘better’ = ‘tov, tov’ and ‘best = ‘tov, tov, tov.’).

While this creation is ‘very good’ it is not yet the ‘best’ (or perfect). That time is still to come, and has already come in the resurrection of Jesus!

The satanic element is introduced into the story of creation only when the human turns away from ‘imitating God’ in whose image and likeness they were made to imitating each other, a process begun internally by the female and externally by the male. The serpent in the text is a metonym for desire. In fact the Genesis 2-11 text is all about the phenomenon on mimetic contagion issuing in violence. An anthropological reading of this text still yields great insights into the human condition. This is why I have said time and again we must first change the way we think about ourselves before we can change the way we view God. Another way of putting this is we must first learn to read the Bible anthropocentrically (from below) before we read it theologically (from above). As long as we treat the Bible as first a text about God, we will not be able to see just how we make God in our own broken image. Only after we see this can we begin to see just how and where in the Bible (and especially in Jesus) God is remaking us in God’s own Jesus focused image. (If you are new to these posts you may wish to listen to this podcast:

Next episode: (6) Personhood and the satan

"Jesus Showed Us" - Brad Jersak and Shari-Anne Gibson Vis

CLICK HERE find out more about the project (or to contribute!).

"Knowledge, Wisdom and Contemplation" - interview with Richard Rohr

05 Richard Rohr - Knowledge vs. Wisdom from Plain Truth Ministries on Vimeo.

Review of Shane Claiborne's 'Executing Grace' - by Caleb Miller

If you’re not familiar with Shane Claiborne, now is the time to go ahead and take note. Shane is well-known for his work with the Red-Letter Christians, Huffpost, and various other media outlets. He travels the globe teaching on social justice and what life is meant to look like for a follower of Jesus. But in this book, we [at last] get to meet Shane the pastor. From the onset, each chapter of Executing Grace reads as a sermon fit for any pulpit that desires to convey the gospel message of social justice, and specifically that of its rejection of all forms of retributive violence. Every chapter contains both theological thought as well as an exegetical understanding of the Bible, combined with real-life examples of the [far too frequent] failures of the current manner in which we dole out final justice to those who offend. This book is a call to repentance for anyone still clinging to the dying notion that the man of peace would ever have anything other than forgiveness to offer those of us caught in any form of systemic violence or theological oppression.

The clarity with which Claiborne’s argument is presented is simple enough for anyone to understand, and thorough enough for those still struggling with the issue of the gospel and the death penalty. For this reader, the most potent reminder and call to repentance in the book comes in chapter 5 –

“Any time we rejoice in death, we disgrace the cross”.

Executing Grace is a continual reminder for those who claim allegiance to Jesus of Nazareth that the most powerful agent of change is forgiveness, and that forgiveness never looks like retribution.

THE SATAN - by Michael Hardin - episode 4 - "Is The satan a Person?"

Peter Stormare as Satan in Constantine

Editor's Note: Clarion is posting Michael Hardin's 20-episode series (excerpted from What the Facebook? vol. 1) on The Satan as a weekly release, each Thursday. CLICK HERE for the full pdf or kindle document.

(4) Is The satan a Person?

For most Christians, the satan is a malevolent person just like they are but without a human body. This begs the all important question: what is a person? How do you define what constitutes a person? What is personality? Before you continue this post, take a moment and write down your response to this question.

Most of us tend to think of people as ‘persons’ as agents of independent moral authority, that persons are those that can chose or have so-called ‘free-will.’ However, the concept of personality is far more complex than that. Even if we say that a person is an autonomous moral agent that has free will we then need to define free will. What is will? What makes it free? And then we would still have to define the terms we use when it comes to our definition of free will. The problem here is that we once we go down this road, we leave all knowledge gained from the human sciences behind and end up simply speculating and creating a view of ‘person’ far more indebted to our presuppositions than to what we actually know about people.

Especially since the Enlightenment (c. 1800), we have been taught that people are autonomous moral agents, that we all stand alone and that we are all responsible for our own choices. In the last one hundred years however, there has been a turn away from this way of thought to recognizing that the concept of ‘personhood’ requires redefinition. We are no longer to be conceived of as ‘free moral agents’ who make choices determined by our own individual wills. Relationality is now the watchword when it comes to understanding what it means to be ‘persons.’ Speaking of humans, we are beings-in-relationships. Our identity comes not from some isolated thing in each of us but from our relationships. So, e.g., there is no such thing as Michael Hardin. Who ‘I’ am is the confluence of all my relationships. Take away my relationships and ‘I’ do not exist. ‘I’ am my relationships.

We are not individuals. To use a term coined by Rene Girard, we are interdividuals. This has huge implications for how we understand the concept of person and will also have huge implications for how we understand, not only the satan, but also how we image the inner-trinitarian life of God as ‘three persons in unity.’ As long as we understand personhood as discrete individual entities, each with their own will, rationality and ability to choose, we will remain mired in discussions that are little more than speculative quagmires.

Scientific research in social psychology and in the human brain has demonstrated that we are in deep structural relationship with one another well beyond the conscious level. We are inter-dependent beings. Our choices do not come from within but from without inasmuch as our desires, which we perceive to arise from within ourselves, are actually experienced internally even though they externally derived. What we want to call our ‘own’ desires/wants, are in reality the non-consciously taking up of the desires of others and making them our own.

This is a huge shift. For many people it will be troublesome. However, I would rather have a definition of ‘person’ that has some grounding in reality (that which is scientifically demonstrable) than in pure speculation. So as we consider what it means for the satan to be a person it is important to remember that our worldviews will determine how we understand this and what we bring to the table in our definition of ‘personhood.’ Would you rather just speculate as to what a ‘person’ is or would you rather take advantage of all the wealth of accumulated science that has helped us to see ourselves, not as islands on the ocean, but as part of an inner connected reality? These posts will do the latter and thus by reframing our definition of person we will come to see that the satan is not a person in the older sense of an autonomous good free moral agent turned evil, but that the satan is bound up intimately with what it means to be human. This is the turning point we are at.

Next episode: (5) The satan as Mimetic Desire Corrupted

The Jesus Revolution - Brian Zahnd

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know, we all want to change the world
—The Beatles

During the heady days of the Jesus Movement there was a pervasive conviction among the young people involved that we were part of something revolutionary. Our lives had been radically transformed by Jesus and we wanted to relive the Book of Acts. Church as usual was not an option for us. We weren’t interested in being conservative or playing it safe. We carried a strong counterculture ethos. We saw Jesus as a revolutionary and we wanted to be revolutionaries too. We shared much of the theology of conservative evangelicals, but our vibe was decidedly counterculture, with our long hair, patched blue jeans, and tie-dyed t-shirts. We preached on the streets, in the bars, and at rock concerts. 

More significantly we had inherited a distrust of government and a disdain for war from the Vietnam era. We saw a Christian critique of war as being faithful to the revolutionary Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount. We had no interest in serving the political causes of either Republicans or Democrats. We saw Christianity as a revolutionary movement that was incompatible with power-hungry political parties. We wanted to change the world in the name of Jesus; we weren’t interested in who was the current resident of the White House or the composition of Congress in the name of politics.

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