Christopher Watkins Quotes

As James K. A. Smith points out, “It’s precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you’re most prone to absolutize the temporal.

To live in God’s city here and now is to enjoy God’s limitless peace, love, and creativity; it is also to live a subversive, revolutionary life in this world as we repeatedly scratch the surface of the earthly city to reveal God’s goodness, truth, and beauty under its makeshift palimpsest.

Neither we nor the universe are necessary. We may be important, precious, glorious even, but preciously and gloriously unnecessary.

idolatry is disordered love

We should maintain what C. S. Lewis calls a “scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from one’s own ideas.

So in terms of the concerns of the current chapter, a sovereign God can hold his creatures responsible for their actions not in spite of his sovereignty but only because of it.

Believers in the early church were not persecuted for worshipping God. They were persecuted for worshipping no god or emperor apart from God.9

As Chesterton says, “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad” because they are “isolated from each other and wandering alone.

They are two sides of the same coin, nicely summed up in the Anglican prayerbook affirmation that to serve God is perfect freedom.

Disordered loves, like addictions, also lead to all manner of personal and social pathologies: in Augustine’s terms “The punishment for every disordered mind is its own disorder.”69

Esther Meek summarizes this uncontractual dynamic in the following way: “Law, so prominent in Scripture, is not to be understood as creating relationship. Rather, law nourishes relationship.”11

This reflects in the sphere of epistemology the wider point made by Cornelius Van Til that “covenant theology is the only form of theology which gives a completely personalistic interpretation to reality.”18

To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell.

Resting in the calm eye of a storm raging all around him, Noah is saved in the ark as the flood surges over the land. In the flood narrative it is God who saves Noah from God. In the midst of the torrent of his own raging justice God places a floating ship of mercy.

We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.

It is just as matter of fact as the “there was” and “it was so” of verses 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 24, and 30. God speaks, and it exists. God speaks, and it is good. Both ontology (the existence of things) and axiology (the goodness of things) are equally and inseparably dependent on the divine word.41

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. . . . The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Blaise Pascal writes: Men despise religion, they hate it and are afraid it might be true. To cure that we have to begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason. That it is worthy of veneration and should be given respect. Next it should be made loveable, should make the good wish it were true, then show that it is indeed true.2 In

To live in the last days is to live in a series of overlaps and tensions, between the “now” and the “not yet,” between the “in” and the “not of,” between giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, all within a culture that thinks it is rejecting Christianity at the very moment it affirms its deep and irreducible debt to Christian figures.

This rebellion of the orthodox, or what John Milbank might call a counterrebellion, is neither straightforwardly conservative nor simply progressive: it seeks neither only to maintain nor only to overthrow. It is emblematic of the radical nature of orthodoxy in the last days: there is nothing quite so radically subversive today as sound doctrine and godly living.

They have put the kind of hope in their political leaders and policies that once was reserved for God and the work of the gospel. When their political leaders are out of power, they experience a death.”31 This loading of electoral fortunes with ultimate significance is what it means to bring religion into politics, and secular people can be guilty of it just as much as Christians.

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.

That is the privilege of greatness, the luxury of the 1 percent, and that is the model of heroism bequeathed by the ancient world and, as Lewis notes, the pattern with us still when we learn at school that the sports captain “might well be a noisy, arrogant, overbearing bully,”40 and when we regularly see that, for our politicians, celebrities, and business leaders, there is “one rule for them, another rule for us.

The cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk insists on what he calls “enlightened false consciousness” in which an individual or a group intentionally and ironically cultivates a state of consciousness they know to be false because it is advantageous to do so.35 Frankfurt school theorist Max Horkheimer argues for a similar idea: the bourgeoise embraces ideology out of cunning and a will to dominate, not because they are duped by it.36

Not for the last time in these pages, we find that the subversive logic of love quietly enters—then devastatingly explodes—the matchstick scaffolding of simple binaries upon which the modern world hangs its most cherished values. Ask a lover if she experiences her passion to please her sweetheart as a constraint; ask her whether she feels like a dupe of someone else’s power games: she will either laugh out loud or look at you with profound pity.

Listen to a warning from the 1960s, sent from the pen of Jacques Ellul: “A while ago, people made the monumental error of saying that democracy, liberalism, competitive capitalism were all expressions of Christianity. Today they make the same monumental error for the benefit of socialism.”26 Let us not, in our own day, make a further monumental error by hitching Christianity to whatever political cart happens to be passing. Our grandchildren will not thank us for it.

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” He asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional

We know love by what it does. God loved so he sent (John 3:16); we love so we obey (1 John 5:3; 2 John 1:6). When God loves, he does not act to acquire or accumulate; he gives his Son, his very self, for unworthy others (Rom 3:10–12). Trinitarian love is the Father sending the Son and the Son obeying the Father. God’s love “does not seek value, but it creates value or gives value; it does not desire to get but to give; it is not ‘attracted’ by some lovable quality, but it is poured out on those who are worthless and degraded.

This means that a biblical attitude to this world can neither be one of simple affirmation nor of straightforward condemnation. Wherever Christians look in the cultural world, they will find Hart’s palimpsests: no social movement, no artefact, no text, no church, no performance, and no academic discipline is free from the violence, selfishness, delusion, and rebellion of sin, however “Christian” they might appear, and similarly nothing in culture is so full of these things that it can fully erase the goodness of the original creation.

Acts of faithful remembrance reach across the centuries without collapsing them. For example, the last supper is folded on top of the Passover feast, establishing a proximity across the centuries and retroactively reinterpreting the Passover meal itself as the foreshadowing of Christ’s death. Similarly, Psalm 22 is folded into Jesus’s experience and interpretation of the cross as if it had been written for that very moment—which, in fact, it had. In the pages of the Bible and in the Christian experience of time, promise and fulfilment kiss.

This paradigm of the gift places us in the posture of recipients. We receive existence, we receive meaning, and we receive love. To be sure we are creative recipients, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, and receiving the gift of the universe certainly does not make us passive. But the fact remains that we are recipients nonetheless. The one thing we should not do with a gift is pretend we bought or made it ourselves. The giver is usually thanked, so our fundamental orientation to existence in the paradigm of the figure of gratuity is one of praise and thanksgiving.

The word translated “favor” in Genesis 6:8 is the Hebrew hen, which also means “grace.” With that in mind, there are two ways that this pivotal moment of the biblical narrative could be taken. The first is that Noah, because he was righteous and blameless in his own strength, attracted God’s attention and found divine favor. The second is that Noah was given grace on God’s free initiative, not because of any good behavior or spark of potential on Noah’s part, and that as a result of receiving grace he is righteous and blameless. Both the fuller context of a biblical understanding of God’s undeserved grace and the order of the propositions in verses 8 and 9 militate in favor of the latter interpretation.

If I am a Christian, those who disagree with me are not by default intellectually inferior, they are not rationally benighted, they do not lack imagination, they are not narrow, weak, or juvenile, they are not medieval, and they are certainly not a virus. They have every chance of being my betters in all these respects. I simply cannot look down on them. It is crucial to emphasize that this is no clever rhetorical flourish. If I claim to be a Christian and do not acknowledge that my “enemies” are very possibly my moral and intellectual superiors, I have simply failed to understand the gospel of Christ. I am still operating according to the performance narrative, not yet according to the grace narrative.20

Christians in the early church distinguished themselves in Roman society by their care for the poor and wretched. They adopted abandoned babies and bucked the trend of fleeing plague-ridden cities in order to stay and care for the sick. This so exasperated the Emperor Julian that he vented in a letter to Arsacius: “Why then do we . . . not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has done the most to advance their cause? . . . It is disgraceful when no Jew is a beggar and the impious Galileans [Christians] support our poor in addition to their own; everyone is able to see that our coreligionists are in want of aid from us.”27

One of the crucial pennies to drop in the minds of those who find their way to faith in their adult years is often the realization that, if there really is a God such as the Bible reveals him to be, then he is smarter than I am and his judgement is more reliable than mine: if he and I differ on a matter, and if he is really God and I am really a creature, then it is more than reasonable to assume that he is correct and I am mistaken. To reach any other conclusion would require a bizarre routine of epistemological gymnastics. Either God is God and I am not, in which case his judgement is to be trusted over mine, or else God is not God, in which case there is no reliable way of satisfactorily arbitrating at all between what is reasonable and what is not.

Jacques Ellul has a word for this instrumentalizing attitude: technique. His analysis helps us to appreciate just how deep and wide the n-shaped dynamic runs in our society. He defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.”14 It is “never anything but a collection of means and the search for the most efficient means” in any given situation,15 with its origin in Cain’s city-building and Lamech’s polygamy.16 Up until the eighteenth century, Ellul argues, technique was largely absent from all areas of society apart from the mechanical, but in the industrial revolution, technical progress suddenly exploded and began to reconfigure every area of life, from industrial production through politics to the family. The result is that today technique is not a thing out there in the world; it is how we do everything we do in the world: “The Third World, Europe, militarization, etc., are all political matters. Inflation, exchange rates, standards of living, and growth are all economic matters. Yet technique has a part in all of them. It is like a key, like a substance underlying all problems and situations. It is ultimately the decisive factor.

Dismissive of Hegel’s and Marx’s claims to have provided a convincing account of historical progress, he quipped that “Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else” (OT, 285).

But if that is so, in what does our identity consist? It is, for Ricœur, an ipse identity: a “constancy over time” that consists in me holding myself to certain commitments, roles, or activities. I am who I am because I make promises to myself and to others, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, and I keep those promises (or at least enough of them to make my identity somewhat coherent). Beginning with the realization that “the self does not coincide with the same,” Ricœur argues that “keeping one’s promise” is a “challenge to time, a denial of change: even if my desire were to change, even if I were to change my opinion or my inclination, ‘I will hold firm.

Making people more articulate and more capable does not make them better people; it just makes them better at being what they already are. The

God’s covenants institute binding relationships, and contracts are a convenient agreement.

When human parents named a child in the ancient world, they would use the name to indicate what they hoped the child would become; when God names someone he names them according to what he knows they will become.

Every hysterical refusal of mastership is always in reality the equally hysterical demand for a new and more absolute master, as Jacques Lacan famously saw.

A capacious grasp of the biblical storyline will also equip Christian students, pastors, and laypeople to think biblically about the whole of life and defend the faith in the face of hostile attack more fully and more deeply than even the best prepared suite of individual arguments.

This disposition towards culture is summed up in the Latin maxim audi alteram partem: listen to the other side. The

Biblical Trinitarianism is the subversive fulfilment of Unitarianism and polytheism, or in the words of Gregory of Nyssa, the Trinity is distinguished by “destroying each heresy and yet accepting everything useful from each.”15

As Augustine notes, when we reflect on God as Trinity, we do so with the question, “What is true love, nay, rather what is love”?27

Chesterton, conveying an evergreen truth in a language that now may strike us as awkward and archaic, asserts: “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live.

As Augustine stresses: “The demons are beguiled by gifts; but the true religion teaches us not to show favor to anyone on account of gifts received. The demons are mollified by honors; but the true religion teaches us on no account to be swayed by such things.

The technical attitude is manipulative; the bountiful attitude is receptive. In the technical attitude, we recruit god or the gods to do our will, the will that was ours before we reached out to the divine. But in the bountiful attitude God recruits us to do his will. In the technical attitude the god is an instrument, a means, a technique, but in the bountiful attitude God is the ultimate end of all our means and all our striving.

Phenomenologists (people who study how things appear to us) argue that “lived time,” time as we really experience it, is like an accordion: time can appear elongated (as in the watched pot that never boils) or compressed (when we are enjoying time with a loved one).

Michael Horton comments, “Created in God’s image yet fallen into sin, we have our identity shaped by the movement of this dramatic story from promise to fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

Paul Ricœur has two terms that neatly sum up this difference between modern contracts and God’s covenants.12 Contracts obey a logic of equivalence, a regime of strict justice in which unerring calculation determines the just measure of commitment in each case. It is the logic of the transaction and of the market, a reciprocal paradigm in which debts must be paid in full, but no more. The logic of equivalence belongs to a view of the world in which every gift is a trojan horse that requires reciprocation sooner or later: “They invited us round for dinner and baked their own dessert; we will have to do the same!” It is the ethics of a Derrida who ruefully acknowledges that “for there to be gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter-gift, or debt.”13 This is an impossible standard that leads him to conclude that the pure gift is impossible and could not even be recognized as such: gifts always fall back into economies of debt sooner or later, a grim reality that leads Terry Eagleton to remark “one would not have wished to spend Christmas in the Derrida household.”14 The contractual logic of equivalence is the logic of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is a human logic. God’s covenants, by contrast, operate according to a logic of superabundance, a lavish, gracious, loving paradigm of excess. God walks between the animal parts alone; the exodus rescue precedes the Sinai law; Christ lays down his life in the new covenant in his blood. This is the logic of the “how much more” of the Pauline epistles (Rom 5:9, 10, 15, 17; 11:24; 1 Cor 6:3; 2 Cor 3:9) and the letter to the Hebrews (Heb 9:14; 10:29; 12:9), of going beyond the call of duty, beyond what is right and proper, beyond what could reasonably be demanded on a ledger of credit and debt. The logic of superabundance replaces the fear and submission of Hobbes’s Leviathan or the tyranny of Rousseau’s general will with the love and sacrifice of Christ. It is the logic of grace and the gift. It is a divine logic. The

This gesture of self-critique is not limited to the Old Testament prophets; it sets a pattern for the whole of Christian history in which the church from Athanasius through Luther to Kierkegaard “can be understood as a gesture of reformation whereby the essentially secular order of the existing or established church is undermined in order to approach the religious core of faith.

Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a Christian as “someone who believes that the New Testament is a divinely-inspired book, admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor”!7

Charles Taylor’s vivid phrase, “all religion is ultimately Moloch drinking blood from the skulls of the slain.”12

No reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him; I am the fool of the story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.

The book of Amos is an industrial-strength excoriation of Israel’s reprehensible treatment of the poor.

Or in Augustine’s more succinct phrase rendered in the Book of Common Prayer, Israel belongs to the Lord “whose service is perfect freedom.”11

Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit

When threatened with all manner of tortures, Polycarp replied, “It is splendid to pass through evil into God’s justice,” and as he was burned alive in AD 155, he is said to have cried out, “O Father . . . I bless you for counting me worthy of this day and hour.

Over the course of a long writing career, John Frame has developed the approach that he calls “triperspectivalism,” based on a Trinitarian model. Whereas God’s knowledge is omniperspectival in a way that ours can never be,55 we can grow in wisdom by increasing the number of perspectives we take into account. In terms of human knowledge, Frame’s three perspectives are normative, situational, and existential. The normative perspective deals in obligations and highlights God as lawgiver; the situational perspective deals in states of affairs and situations and highlights God as in control over his world; the existential perspective deals in our subjective experience and self-knowledge and highlights God’s “personal presence in everything.

I therefore propose the term transperspectival to indicate the way in which the same reality is experienced across and through (trans-) different perspectives.

Let us begin with verse 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Taken together, the final two clauses of this verse suggest, in D. A. Carson’s elegant phrase, that the Word is both “God’s own self ” and “God’s own fellow.

Christ, insists Calvin, is “not good and just, but goodness and justice,”23 and Herman Bavinck notes that Christ is most unlike other religious leaders because he “is not the founder of Christianity, nor the first confessor of it, nor the first Christian.” Rather, “he is Christianity itself, in its preparation, fulfilment, and consummation.”24

N. T. Wright argues: “If the main purpose of Jesus’ ministry was to die on the cross, as the outworking of an abstracted atonement-theology, it starts to look as though he simply took on the establishment in order to get himself crucified, so that the abstract sacrificial theology could be put into effect. This makes both ministry and death look like sheer contrivance.

The word translated “word” in almost all English versions of John 1 is the Greek logos, a term with a rich and diverse philosophical heritage. The term is common to a number of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. For Heraclitus (535–475 BC), whose thought only remains known to us in small fragments and is therefore very difficult to reconstruct, it appears that the logos is a principle of transformation that orders the cosmos. Its symbol is ever-changing fire, flickering and consuming ever more material, although, in so far as it never does anything other than change, it remains constant. The term also appears in the fragments that remain from the writing of Parmenides (sixth-fifth century BC), who uses it to mean something like thinking, in opposition to habit and sense experience. Whatever the differences between these uses of the term and its other occurrences in ancient Greek thought, one feature marks each of them as distinct from the Johannine account: in every case but John’s, the logos is impersonal. To

The danger of thinking in dichotomies and placing yourself on one side of them is that you become shaped by what you oppose and hate. You occupy the space left vacant by it, desperate to distinguish yourself from it in what often comes down to what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. If your opponents are for something, then you must be against it; if they reject it, you must embrace it. The relationship becomes symbiotic, and little by little, you become dependent on what you oppose.

The earth was given to man with this condition, that he should occupy himself in its cultivation. . . . The custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things that God has committed to our hands, on the condition that being content with frugal and moderate use of them, we should take care of what shall remain. . . . Let everyone regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then will he neither conduct himself dissolutely, nor corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved.65

C. S. Lewis argues that “mistaken for our mother, she is terrifying and even abominable. But if she is only our sister—if she and we have a common Creator—if she is our sparring partner—then the situation is quite tolerable.”66

Chesterton puts this surprising consequence of sin in stark relief: original sin is an “obviously unattractive idea,” but “when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king.

I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “God is the beyond in the midst of our lives.”12

The perpetual frustration this causes is captured in the famous line “l’enfer, c’est les autres” (“hell is other people”).

Evil arrives at the party of existence once it is already in full swing, and it leaves before the dancing is over.

In Genesis 11 we witness a delicious subversion of the tower builders’ self-aggrandizing pretentions. They name their city Bab-el, Akkadian for “gate of the gods,” but God makes their ambition a byword for babel: a near homonym for the Hebrew word meaning “confusion.

Lectures on Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper resists reducing diverse biblical genres to one prosaic master-truth, arguing with rhetorical flourish that “no Calvinist ever allows the critic to dash out of his hand, for a moment, the prism itself which breaks up the divine ray of light into its brilliant tints and colors.

In general, each prophecy is to be read in terms of three cumulative peaks of fulfilment, each subsequent peak higher than the one before. The prophecies receive their first fulfilment in the biblical history of Israel; a greater fulfilment in the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and their ultimate fulfilment in Christ’s second coming and the advent of the new heavens and the new earth.

In Luther’s paradoxical phrase, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

Theology,” Hart insists, “turns away from tragedy’s mystification of violence, its awe before the sublimity and inevitability of violence, and back toward Israel’s cry for eschatological justice.

This complex stance signals, for James K. A. Smith, “a complete reconfiguration of the place and status of political authority,”10 because all that a state can now achieve, all the judgments it can pass, all the power it can exert, all the possessions it can safeguard, and all the values it can seek to uphold are exceeded and succeeded by the dawning kingdom of God in a way that means earthly political power cannot be the mediator of God’s triumphal rule, for this was secured in the ascension and will be revealed at the parousia.

For Chesterton, this radical revolutionary stance is, with not a little irony, the height of orthodoxy: “To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell.

Shalom is “the webbing together of God, humans and all creation in equity, fulfilment and delight.”17

This is the difference between Jesus’s agony in the garden and Socrates’s equanimity facing death in the Apology:36 Jesus is in anguish because life is good, and “it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31); Socrates is in equanimity because he does not know whether life is better than death or not.

The second effect of the book of Revelation—namely, instructing God’s people how to live in the last days—is achieved in large part through two symbols: the New Jerusalem and the figure of the martyr.

Finally, “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that Augustine, drawing on Paul, invented the idea of the will.

Mirabile dictu, the quintessential symbol of Roman potestas has become the preeminent emblem of Christian caritas.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lack’d anything. “A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”; Love said, “You shall be he.” “I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear, I cannot look on thee.” Love took my hand and smiling did reply, “Who made the eyes but I?” “Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve.” “And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?” “My dear, then I will serve.” “You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.” So I did sit and eat.16

It might seem somewhat peculiar or peripheral to argue that one crucial consequence of the resurrection is that Christianity is a singing faith.

But a common love of self is what Augustine calls a “private” love because there are as many different selves to love as there are people loving, and each of these selves has its own vision of the good. Listen to the fascinating way Augustine describes the love of the earthly city: “Others, however, delighting in their own power, and supposing that they could be their own good, fell from that higher and blessed good which was common to them all and embraced a private good of their own,” bartering the unity of love for a “zeal for selfish ends.

The Reason for God, Timothy Keller argues that grace breaks decisively from the “performance narrative,” understood as the attempt to ground one’s status before God either partly or wholly in one’s performance in any number of moral or ritual areas.17 This performance narrative also rhythms contemporary society, crystallizing in what Michael Sandel calls the “tyranny of merit,” namely the assumption that the only factor limiting success is a lack of effort or ability and we can achieve anything if only we want it desperately enough. So both in terms of religion and in terms of daily life, we rate our success and our worthiness by our performance.

As Miroslav Volf argues, “Every construction of innocence and guilt partakes in the corruption of the one undertaking the construction because every attempt to escape noninnocence is already ensnared by noninnocence. Just as there is no absolute standpoint from which relative human beings can make absolute judgments, so also there is no ‘pure’ space from which corrupt human beings can make pure judgments about purity and corruption.

In addition, Christ’s love for us is not in view of the qualities we currently possess but in view of those we will possess through his love:

Agapē does not compete with other loves; it enables them.28

In the Heidelberg disputation of 1518, Luther defends the following thesis: “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.”12 In other words, we cannot draw a straight line between the way things appear now and God’s kingdom and ultimate plan. Right now the rich prosper and the poor are downtrodden, for example, but we err if we think that this is a good indicator of God’s ultimate intention. In the next thesis Luther says, “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

This word of the cross is impenetrable to a world hypnotized by linear glory, as Kierkegaard well understands when he asserts that Christ “is the paradox that history can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism

Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt argued in 1922: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver, but also because of their systematic structure.

As Augustine intimates in On Christian Teaching, “the deepest of philosophical chasms, the distinction between subject and object is itself an illusion born of sin and not an inherent quality of reality.”42 It is born of the sin that reduces love to mastery, praise to possession, and creation to calculation.

Now one often finds that the beginner, who has just mastered the strict formal rules, is over-punctilious and pedantic about them. And the mere critic, who is never going to begin himself, may be more pedantic still. The classical critics were shocked at the “irregularity” or “licenses” of Shakespeare. A stupid schoolboy might think that the abnormal hexameters in Virgil, or the half-rhymes in English poets, were due to incompetence. In reality, of course, every one of them is there for a purpose and breaks the superficial regularity of the metre in obedience to a higher and subtler law: just as the irregularities in The Winter’s Tale do not impair, but embody and perfect, the inward unity of its spirit.36 In

Commenting on Genesis 1:19–20, Henri Blocher notes, “The French philosopher Condillac (1715–80) held that science was simply an advanced state of language. Language in any case is the form and condition of science, and in language the act of naming is the first and indispensable operation.”52 To name something is to call it out from the flux of the world as a figure, not just a background; it is to recognize in it the dignity of identity. This is the task and the privilege that God sets before Adam.

The church is a forward-living, eternity-anticipating, hopeful, and prophetic community, a city on a hill in the overlap of the “now” and the “not yet” witnessing to the present world as the firstfruits of the new world.