The threefold and fivefold) synopses are the only places where I articulate the entire breadth of my answer to the why and how of Jesus’ self-subjection to crucifixion. Someday, I’d like to expand that synopsis into a complete essay. For now, I’ve posted the threefold synopsis on Github, where I’ve added a shade of conditionality to the first liberation and where I continue to tinker.
“I mean, you can’t just be a wimp and call yourself a pacifist.”
— Carla
“What is the causal joint?” I asked God.
“You* are the causal joint,” He replied.
*plural
Just re-read: The Epistle of James, and I am more convinced than ever of this: Donald Trump is an antichrist. (Please note the indefinite article.)
My God, please have mercy on all of us, including him, by relieving him of his power to do ill.
“Mere faith alone is not sufficient for salvation…Yea, I confess…that mere faith does not deserve to be called faith, for a true faith can never exist without deeds of love” (Balthasar Hubmaier).
Just finished reading: “The Nonviolent Atonement: Human violence, discipleship, and God” (2006) by J. Denny Weaver, which I summarize as follows: All previous accounts of the role of the Cross in how God brings us back to Himself, except for most Girardian explanations and the cosmic battle version of Christus Victor, implicate God as in some way needing violence to get the job done. Yet such a need stands in unacceptable tension with the consistently nonviolent life lived by Jesus, God’s perfect and authoritative image. Thus, we should to what I call “narrative Christus Victor,” by which I posit that neither the Father nor the Son in any way willed the Son to die, and that God brings us to Himself instead by vindicating Jesus’ way via the Resurrection. If we need forgiveness, we need only repent.
I disagree with Weaver about the Cross and don’t think his argument about it succeeds on his own terms: The Father is still “implicated” in the Son’s death if He knew that Jesus’ death was inevitable and did not rescue Jesus upon the latter’s request. Additionally, even if dying was not an intrinsic part of Jesus’ mission, as Weaver maintains, it is nevertheless untrue that Jesus couldn’t have fulfilled His mission without being executed: He could simply have evaded capture, as He did when pushed to a precipice in Luke 4:29-30.
Still, Weaver and I agree about this: “…the focus of being Christian is a life transformed by the narrative of Jesus.”
A friend asked me how I thought The Parable of the Prodigal Son related to my insistence that forgiveness, rightly practiced, requires amends be made. I initially responded: “This is an excellent question. The Parable of Prodigal Son comes up a lot in discussions of God’s forgiveness, mostly among folks who insist God forgives without requiring anything. So I have some answers percolating.” Later, I replied by subjecting him to a 10-minute think-aloud voice message, which I then revised and summarized in writing as follows: “The Parable of the Prodigal Son demonstrates, among other things, that God is so keenly interested reconnecting with and embracing His people that mere but provably genuine repentance can count as amends. (God’s relative position of power, which the parable keeps in view but which should be noted is not a feature of every relationship, facilitates this mercy.) However, the story is not absent an amends more concrete: Besides your beautiful, literary observation that, obliquely reminiscent of Leviticus and therefore of Jesus, an animal is slaughtered to facilitate the celebration of the restored relationship, the son was explicitly preparing to offer himself to his father as a hired hand. That his father saw no need for that demoting measure does highlight the father’s mercy, but it does not thereby reject the rightness of the offer. True repentance will always prompt the repenter to want to substantiate his repentance.”
Just re-listened to: Resurrection Letters, Volume I (2018) by Andrew Peterson. A stirring, orthodox anchor in my “progressive” Christian seas. CCM through and through, but with much stronger- and clearer-than-average theological ties to The Story and The Book.
Here’s a very concise summary of my take on the Cross of Christ: Jesus’ death can be a manumission of our minds from five things that would keep us in servitude:
- guilt,
- impunity,
- selfishness,
- the world, and
- the fear of death,
all of which facilitate separation from God.
John 20:23 and Matthew 18:18 say the same thing: God respects human decisions about what to forgive and what not to. That’s because God can’t forgive on someone else’s behalf; that’s a logical impossibility.
Just listened to: Light for the Lost Boy (2012) by Andrew Peterson. Probably a keeper, but I’m not completely sure about that because I know I give a positive bump to Christian albums whose theology and ethics I find agreeable. Two things regarding this album are obvious, however: First, he found a new producer. It’s striking how different this album sounds from all the albums he put out before it. Every review of this album you’ll read rightly talks positively of its use of “atmosphere” and “space.” It makes me wonder: Is receptivity to child-of-Lanois audio production a fruit of the Spirit?
For my part, as much I share this affinity, I nevertheless usually regard such atmospherics as a pleasing way to mask poor songsmanship, a deed of the flesh that sometimes seems endemic to Christian music. In Peterson’s case, though, not to worry: The lyrics here are among his strongest, and that’s saying something. He continues examine and deploy his favorite motifs (youth, memory, geography, the sun, the weather, and fire) to express his Reformed Christian thoughts, this time throwing in multiple allusions to The Yearling and at least one to Peter Pan. And this time around, Peterson’s lyrical force is helped by it sounding like sometime between making the prior album and this one, he had a long, doubt-laden drive of his own like the one on which he accompanied me.
Just re-listened to: Resurrection Letters, Volume II (2008) by Andrew Peterson as part of a slow-motion Peterson marathon meant to confirm or repudiate my September claim that he’s the most skilled evangelical songwriter of the century. This album, unlike the three that come between it and his 2000 debut, is evidence in favor of that claim. Polished folk pop expressing orthodox Christian thoughts. The Mullins mimicking continues, and that’s not a bad thing.
What’s more, this album will forever be linked in my life to one particularly long drive home from Florida back in October 2015. I drove a thousand miles through hot tears of doubt about God’s existence. Along those long highways, I had seven companions consoling and counseling me: over the phone, five good friends and one mom, and over the truck stereo, Peterson, who sang “I believe You are the Christ, the son of the living God” with enough conviction that I eventually joined in.
His Cross is not a coat of arms. It’s a teacher, a master, a goad.
Can anything good come out of universalism? /s
Just finished reading: “Beyond Words: On the role of silence in film and faith” (2025) by Arthur Aghajanian, whose main idea is that filmmakers can use and sometimes—but not often enough—do use silence to draw viewers in to spiritual experience.
Just finished reading: “From Dietrich Bonhoeffer to James Cone: The complexities of forgiveness in a racialized Society” (2024) by Reggie Williams, whose main idea is that in America, Black forgiveness is a maintainer of the status quo.
Some striking quotations:
- “Can forgiveness find a footing in broader systemic realities?”
- “To encourage [Black people] to see their suffering as righteous obedience to God in Christ is to sanctify a perpetual social death.”
- “In a moment of racial distress, forgiveness becomes a reflex response that serves the social maintenance of racial hierarchy.”
Some quick reflections: This is why forgiveness without amends is usually bad.
Potts is right that punishment and recompense will always be incommensurate with the wrongdoing (except for restitution, which can come close). That’s how you can say that forgiveness and justice can and do coexist: Forgiveness doesn’t say nothing is due; forgiveness says that what’s been paid is enough. Nothing more is due.
Just finished reading: “Forgiveness ≠ Reconciliation: Wisdom for Difficult Relationships” (2024) by Yana Jenay Conner, whose main idea is well summarized by the title. This was my favorite article in the Winter 2024 issue of Comment. Conner helped me realize that Matthew 18 contains a righteous unforgiveness: “And if he refuses to listen…let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector" (v. 17). And these two partial quotations struck me as beautiful: “I was a daddy’s girl without a dad…” and “Even if I was interested in adjusting my grip on the cross…”
Just finished reading: “Promise, Gift, Command: Mapping the Theological Terrain of Forgiveness” (2024) by Brad East, who main ideas can’t really be summarized but can be itemized. According to East, forgiveness is:
- from God [meaningless],
- peculiarly Christian [false],
- integral to but not the whole of the gospel [agreed],
- administered by the sacraments [false],
- tricky [can be, but not as a rule],
- when we extend it, evidence that we have been forgiven ourselves [can be, but not as a rule], and
- something about which he still has several important questions [good, because he is muddled and hasn’t written a cogent essay here].
Just finished reading: “Out of the Depths: How Forgiveness Brought a Sex Offender Into the Light” by a man who fell and “Into the Depths: The cost of forgiveness will be your life” (2024) by a wife who forgave.
The man who fell submits that both easy acceptance and permanent excommunication are not good, the former creating dysfunctional communities by ignoring the woulds of the aggrieved, and the latter destroying the sinner. (For my part, I’ll add that the latter also creates dysfunctional communities.) His wife forgave him, doing neither of the above. And by that, he was saved. It even elicited repentance, he says.
The wife who forgave says she forgave he husband, and it has cost her a lot. But it’s the way of Christ, and it, she says, has made her holy.
Just finished reading: ”New Eyes: Forgiveness is not erasing” (2024) by Amy Low, whose main idea is that there is danger that forgiveness will unjustly erase the past. There is also a danger that unforgiveness will spoil potential futures for aggrieved and offender alike. Let us avoid both ditches as we walk the path.
I dedicated the new TV I bought to the Lord. That felt like syncretism.
“Go, eat delicacies and drink sweet drinks and send portions to whoever has none prepared, for the day is holy to our master, and do not be sad, for the rejoicing of YHWH is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10, Alters). The enjoinment to enjoyment along with generosity, both in the name of the Lord, warms my soul.
Just finished reading ”Punishment and Retribution: An Attempt to Delimit Their Scope in New Testament Thought” (1965) by C.F.D. Moule, who argues that Retribution as satisfaction of abstract scales of an abstract justice is a sub-Christian and sub-personal idea. Punishment as reformatory, protective, or deterrent is fine. My take: Agreed, although he doesn’t spend enough time or brain reinterpreting the biblical passages that challenge this thesis, nor offering much of a picture of how the punishments mentions in the New Testament do work. In fact, he spends most of the article very weakly dismissing counterevidence.
I finally feel comfortable with my grasp of the relationship between non-retaliation, forgiveness, and reconciliation, together with God’s will regarding all three:
Mercy can be unwise.