It just registered with me that the shirt I just bought left off the God part. I confess I feel a little disappointed about that.
friend:
I did notice that. And then I noticed that I actually like that. And then I spent some time pondering—feeling some shame for being negatively associated with bad theology/“Christians" and if it was more accessible to people reading it that might discount the text if they knew it was a Bible verse, but might open the door for conversation if they compliment the shirt, and if that was just my excuse/out for being hesitant to wear a “God” shirt these days.
me:
Good thoughts. The Micah 6:8 commands are intrinsically good with or without direct reference to God, so in that sense, it’s still a great shirt. Yet it does seem unnecessarily diffident. I think I’ve noticed a tendency in progressive Christian circles to leave overt God talk to the conservatives. And I think this is counterproductive. It creates a unwanted positive feedback loop: If the only Christians talking openly about Christ, the Bible, and God are racist homophobes and jingoistic conservatives, then the world won’t be able to help but reach the conclusion that Christians are racist homophobes and jingoistic conservatives. And the more the world thinks that, the more progressives will feel embarrassed to talk openly about Christ, the Bible, and God.
It is precisely a re-coupling of God language with virtue and justice language that we ought to be bringing.
friend
So true. And exactly my little introspective mind circular thought process.
It never occurred to me how head-turningly paradoxical this command from Galatians is: “Become slaves to one another” (5:13). The very nature of a slave relationship is that the power is unipolar. How can slavery be mutual? (There’s certainly an antisocial, obsessional, probably erotic way of interpreting this that describes a possible meaning, but—hopefully obviously—neither desirably nor plausibly.) Paul here pushes semantic boundaries to rhetorically amplify Great Commandment no. 2. It’s a dangerous amplification: If only some people in a group heed it, then you’ve got a cult. But man, if everybody has bought in and there’s that kind of earned trust in a group, what a great way of thinking about it.
And talk about destabilizing institutional slavery! Masters commanded to be slaves of their slaves! Mm mmm. You probably didn’t hear too many American slaveholders quoting that translation of Galatians. Most translations soften things by saying “serve one another,” which I suppose a slaveholder could say he was doing by providing, say, shelter and food for his slaves. But they probably didn’t quote any translation of Ephesians 5:21 (“Subject yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ”). No idea how they would’ve gotten out of that one. Yes, the next chapter of Ephesians does have instructions for slaves to be obedient to their masters—but then it says, “Masters, do the same things to them” (emphasis mine)!
Just finished reading: Paul and the Power of Grace (2020) by John M. G. Barclay. A 70% reduction for laymen of Barclay’s well-received, paradigm-establishing academic doorstop Paul and the Gift (2015), which through a brief survey of the anthropology of gifts followed by close examinations of Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans establishes “grace” (charis) as the linchpin of Paul’s entire theological and ethical program and demarcates what is so amazing about it from what is not, thereby providing important correctives to Wright’s rendition of the New Perspective on Paul and to Paul Within Judaism, establishing a firm theological foundation for building churches/societies on mutuality and without regard to preexisting markers of social capital, and, most excitingly to me, resolving centuries-old Protestant soteriological conundrums.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” I’ve always taken this to mean something like “regard and act toward those around you as if they and their good are as important to you as you and your good.” We can call that an equivalential reading. It’s probably a valid way to take it. But a passing remark in John Barclay’s Paul and the Power of Grace (that I’m having some difficulty re-finding so as to quote) has me thinking of another subtly but importantly different way of parsing it: “Regard and act toward those around you as if they and their good are you and your good.” We can call this a constitutive or even identificatory reading. I like it.
[edit, 7/8/26] Here’s the Barclay quote:
Love, then, does not mean self-sacrifice in the sense of negating oneself for the sake of others and expecting nothing back. The scriptural citation—“You should love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, cited in Galatians 5:14)—could be understood in a number of ways, but it seems to include, not exclude, the self in the good that one shares with another in love (perhaps: “You should love your neighbor as if he/she were integral to yourself”). In other words, the self is not given away in love, but given into a relationship with others, a relationship in which all parties flourish“.
My basic problem with spontaneity—generating my own and fielding that of others—is one of greed: I learned early on that the only way to get done all the things one wants to get done is to fully regiment one’s time. I got no time for whim!
But I say to myself (as I’ve said before): I need to let go. It’s “do everything in love,” not “do everything you want or feel obligated to do.” The latter is impossible anyway.
May the scales of how I spend the leisure that’ll temporarily open up during Éa’s upcoming absence and then permanently open up in 2028 tip heavily toward doing good over enjoying good—and in forms that are highly altruistic, that make sense only in light of discipleship to Jesus and hope for resurrection, thus putting flesh on those propositions I call Christianity.
If I am to “follow the impulses of [my] heart and the desires of [my] eyes, yet know that God will bring [me] to judgment for all these things” (Ecclesiastes 11:9), how am I to distinguish the impulses and desires that God will judge favorably from those that He will frown upon? If a way already “seems right to [me]” (Proverbs 14:12/16:25), how am I to determine whether it’s the kind whose “end” is “death”? How am I supposed to tell a righteous “desire of my heart” from an unrighteous “desire of the flesh” or “desire of the eyes”?
One rule of thumb is to ask myself, in keeping with my working definition of love, the following question: “To whose importance am I responding?” If the honest answer is “my own,” then I am loving myself, and unless I am a doormat in need of some assertiveness training (which I myself am most verily not), then there’s my clear signpost: WAY OF DEATH.
A friend of mine at UBBC remarked last Sunday that to figure out Paul’s letter to the Romans, you have to “wade through so much Lutheran bullshit.”
I love that phrase, with all apologies to actual Lutherans, who may or may not hold to the biblical interpretation it denotes. The “bullshit” my friend has in view is the idea that somehow, contra James, faith in God without works is alive or is worth something. This friend tends not to like Paul and sees Romans as Paul thinking out loud and thus confusing things. (My friend is not alone in making a remark along those lines.)
In a bid to both correct my friend and the Lutherans he imagines, allow me to say that Paul is plenty clear about this matter and is never, ever saying that faith without works is alive. On the contrary, behold the reasons he puts forward just in Romans alone that God gives us His grace in the Messiah Jesus:
“…through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles in behalf of His name” (Romans 1:5).
“[G]race abounded all the more, so that…grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (5:20-21).
“We have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
“We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin would be rendered powerless, so that we would no longer be enslaved by sin” (6:6).
“But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life” (Romans 6:22).
“My brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in regard to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God" (Romans 7:4).
“You…have been shown mercy…oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!…therefore…present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God” (Romans 11:30,33; 12:1).
“[N]ot one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living" (14:7-9).
“…according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now has been disclosed, and through the Scriptures of the prophets, in accordance with the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith” (Romans 16:25-26).
And in Paul’s other correspondence:
“For you have been bought for a price: therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20).
“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
“[T]he love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose on their behalf” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).
“…who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age” (Galatians 1:4).
“[What] counts [is] faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10).
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and in a godly manner in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, eager for good deeds” (Titus 2:11-14).
What is the relationship that Paul wants us to understand between grace, faith, and good works? The words I bolded above telegraph the answer: We are saved by God’s grace (i.e., gift) through our faith (i.e., through believing Him about His gift or through Jesus’ faithfulness—or both) so that we do good works.
(See also the Paul-adjacent Hebrews 9:14 and 1 Peter 2:21-25, not to mention the liters of ink Paul spills simply telling Jesus-followers how to act and what to do.)
James may have be arguing with Paul’s hearers, including many Lutherans, Calvinists and evangelicals among us today, but he is not arguing with Paul himself. According to Paul, we can be—no, ought to be—both amazed at God’s grace andtherefore diligent to pay God back. God’s grace is freely, undeservedly, surprisingly, extravagantly, and purely benevolently given and it obligates us to grateful good works in response.
In the above, I’m just repeating an important takeaway from John M. G. Barclay’s Paul and the Gift or its lay reduction Paul and the Power of Grace, whose thesis I had Gemini reduce and polemicize as follows:
“Modern Christianity has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of ‘grace’ by projecting a modern, Western, ‘no-strings-attached’ fantasy onto the ancient world. Furthermore, modern scholars have flattened the explosive nature of Paul’s theology. God’s grace is undeniably free, but it is entirely obligatory; it requires a radical return, and its distribution shattered every existing Jewish and Roman system of social worth.”
After all that rumination on joy and on how to enact the less familiar modes of love I wish to practice, it turns out that for me for now, at least, the secret is this: “Whoever wants to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will preserve it” (Mark 8:35; see also Matthew, Luke, and John). (Let the record show that this illumination came to me yesterday while on a walk around Mount Nittany Middle School as I waited for Éa’s futsal tournament to begin—at least eighteen hours before I heard it in the scripture readings at church this morning. Thus says the Lord.)
What I mean is that over roughly the past ten years, in response to what I think can be safely summed up as social acceleration, I have grown to guard my attention and energies more and more in an attempt to preserve and optimize them for the subset of life’s overabundant opportunities that happens to make it onto my lists (to-dos, goals, albums to hear, and movies to watch).
I suppose that alone isn’t the problem. However, me being me, two problems arise:
Zealotry for my lists closes me off to novel opportunities, whether presented by impulse (my own or others’), emergent or newly revealed needs and desires (my own or others’), or invitations (God’s or others’). I often respond to invitations as if they are intrusions rather than “dancing lessons from God.”
I’m like a National Park Service employee who has decided it’s my desire or my responsibility to work on a path a hundred yards from the rim of Grand Canyon, where I often find myself working alone, and every single time a colleague closer to the rim invites me to come see what they see or to work alongside them on a path that descends into the canyon, I roll my eyes and shout grumpily, “Can’t you see I’m working?!” Some of the time, I go ahead and join them, but always with my path on my mind.
Since I claim to follow Jesus, such cranky insularity is an invalid option, and it forfeits my soul to keep trying it. Most unsettling among its effects is that I find myself growing stony: both unsympathetic and mildly anhedonic. Eesh! Let me be done with that. And yes, let me come see that vista you keep trying to get me to come see.
I’m good at loving people by accomplishing and as a form of accomplishment. And I’m good at loving people by paying attention to them when called on or when prearranged. But there are other modes of loving people. I don’t know what they are. But I want to discover them.
Or is it REdiscover them? The above observation of myself is true, but it’s true in part because of the interaction of my psyche and social acceleration, I’m sure of it.
“Be yourself,” they say. “Stop trying to be someone else.” But what if who you are is wicked? But then again, who am I to judge myself? In any case, it seems to me the danger with “do the next right thing” is that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25). If I went with “do the next right thing” unchecked, I’d be lonely, because I’d always choose things I can control. “Do the next right thing” must be defined. And its definition is this: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”
C’mon, Enneagram 8! Use your drive for power and control on your own thinking—namely, correct yourself when you are wringing your hands in the face of circumstances you can’t control or people who are speaking or acting in ways you don’t expect. It’s just a variation of the partially reformed perfectionist’s hack: I am not exhibiting self-control if I cannot maintain love and joy when people and things are out of my control. (PSA: People are—justly—always out of my control.)
Lord, may everything I do today be done out of a deep-seated, automatic regard for You and those around me as important, desiring Your joy and their prosperity.
In a concordant, resolute response to Damon Krukowski’s brief “Revisiting the Pyramid of Inequality that is Streaming Music,” I remind myself that if I want humanity to keep recording music that isn’t of mass appeal—and I do—then assuming I have the means, I must buy records from the recorders and not merely rent them from the tech fiefs.
Noel made a distinction I’d never thought to make before: extraverted is not the same outgoing. He defined the former as something like “given to gaining energy from social interaction” and the latter as something like “fully at ease making new friends, as if by reflexive desire rather than by effort.” This was to help me understand the difference between me, an extravert who isn’t outgoing, and him and Mary, who are extraverts and outgoing.
The fact is, Noel and Mary are inspiringly friendly. They show enthusiastic, obviously sincere interest in other people, regardless of their initial familiarity, in the same way that I show enthusiastic interest in virtue, reflective conversation, expressiveness, and good music. I want to be like them.
I do usually find it energizing to interact with new people. But I just don’t seek out such interaction quite as liberally or reflexively. And I’m certainly not as skilled as Noel and Mary at the talk required to make such interaction smooth. Frankly, and to my shame, I’m also not as naturally, actually, intrinsically interested in other people.
But all this may be a matter of exposure and practice. The first step will be to build a new habit: I’ll try to change my behavioral bias such that if I see a neighbor, I’m more likely to approach than to avoid. (I think an overzealous commitment to my own agenda is to blame for the avoidance.)
After this He then says to the disciples, “Let us go into Judaea again.” The disciples say, “Rabbi, the Judaeans were lately seeking to stone you, and you are going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If one walks by day, he will not stumble, because he sees the light of this cosmos, But if one walks by night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (John 11:7-10).
If love is calling, damn the fear of death. Full speed ahead. Do what is right.
Walking and talking with You yesterday afternoon up to West Falls reminded me of two things:
I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity, and
it would be best if I arranged my prayer-walk time to allow for freedom to pray expressively, intently, fervently.
*Correction, 7:19 PM same day: I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity because of love. The point is not the intensity but rather the love—the purposeful regarding of others as at least as important as myself and wanting their good—that sets off the intensity. When I am praying fervently because I have set my face toward love, I feel very alive. And I think it’s the kind of praying that leads to action.
“Why does my heart feel so bad? Why does my soul feed so bad?” All year, You’ve had the strangle moral imperative to joy buzzing around my ears. It could be that I’m putting too much stock in a single command of Paul’s. But with:
“get to” being the word of the year,
Travis having made such an impression on me with the primacy he assigns to joy, and
all the specific words that have come to me on the subject this year,
it has been hard to avoid. And more than ever, the role of joy as an anchor for the words I say to others remaining words of life and not words of death has become apparent. I may not need to dig the well of self-love in order to love others, as so many folks extrabiblically claim, but I do apparently need to dig the well of joy: I have spoken brusquely again and again in recent weeks—this despite all the recent emphasis I have placed in my mind on letting “all my words be full of grace.” Why? Because it’s “out of the overflow of the heart” that “the mouth speaks.” If I feel despair, resentment, embarrassment, or any of joy’s other foils, I will not be able to keep those feelings off my tongue. Hence my alienating Carla yesterday evening after ending the workday feeling embarrassed and guilty that I had wasted an hour (at least) trying to coax ChatGPT and Gemini into providing me with business-hours difference formula I could use in a Salesforce report for Mike when a simple, classic Google search would have led me straight to the answer I sought. Hence my boorishly declaring my annoyance to Carla midmorning today after I spent two-and-a-half hours reviewing the College Township timeline into which she herself has put uncounted hours, a double layer of resentment (her absence and my feeling dragged into it). If I am unhappy, I am more likely—far more likely—to inflict my unhappiness on those around me. As such, digging and tending the well of joy—guarding my heart, as it were—is a moral prophylactic. Joy waters love. If any sentiments might be blocking or contaminating that well, I must spend the time and thought necessary to clear those sentiments out.
