"all the trees of the forest will shout for joy"

One of the striking images from the Psalms is the communicative aspect of nature. Rivers clap, the heavens speak, mountains shout, the trees praise.

In the paperback version of Hunting Magic Eels I talk about Hartmut Rosa's work on resonance. According to Rosa, resonance is the experience of being addressed by the world. Reciprocally, upon being addressed we can answer the call. A dialogical relationship with the world is established.

The opposite of resonance, according to Rosa, is alienation from the world. The world is silent and mute. Without a voice, the world becomes inert and factual. Alienation, says Rosa, displays an "asymmetrical anthropology," where subjectivity is arrogated to ourselves leaving the world silent and objectified. In the language of the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, alienation creates an I-It relation with the world, where my side of the relation is alive and the other side is dead. Materialism, therefore, is a relationship with deadness, metaphysical necrophilia.

Staying with Buber, resonance establishes an I-Thou relation with the world. We step into to a symmetrical anthropology where life exists on both sides. There is a relationship of communication and exchange where I am addressed by existence and can answer in turn. 

In his seminal book I-Thou, Buber has us consider a tree. On the one hand, Buber says, we can observe the tree factually and scientifically. We can "classify it in a species and study it as a type." We can "subdue" the tree to analyze its chemical makeup, reducing its organic life to a "law." We can turn the tree into a number. In all this, says Buber, "the tree remains my object."

But a symmetrical, communicative relationship could also be established with the tree. The tree can address me. As Buber puts it, the tree "has to do with me." My relation with the tree, says Buber, is "mutual."

The life of faith is to participate in a sacred conversation with the world, to exist in an ongoing, resonant, I-Thou relation with life. You are being addressed by the world. If you listen well, you can hear the trees shouting for joy. 

Faith is answering that call.

Here's a game to play with the family on a road tip. 

Bob is dead in the living room. You must play detective to determine the cause of Bob's death. You can ask me any question about Bob's body or the house as you investigate. I'll answer your questions and from those answers you'll have to crack the case.

The questions come. Where is Bob? He's in the living room. Is there any blood or wounds on the body? No, there is no visible blood, cuts, injuries, or wounds. Is there a gun in the house? There is a gun in the basement. Any open medicine bottles around Bob? No, but there are medicine bottles in the bathroom. 

As the questioning continues, some weird details emerge. Bob is naked. Bob is wet. And so the game goes.

You might have played this game before. If you haven't, here's the secret. Bob is a goldfish who has jumped out of his bowl and died. The trick of the game is that when people hear "Bob is dead in the living room" they automatically and implicitly assume Bob is a human. The crime scene and detective setup reinforces the impression. And once that assumption is made this game can go on for a very long time, befuddling the detectives. And feel free to share answers about the house that deepens the mystery and causes the detectives to chase rabbits. Put a Ouija board on a table, a clown costume on a couch, or drugs in the bedroom. Anything to distract the group from asking the one question that will crack the case: "Is Bob a human?"

The "Bob is dead in the living room" game illustrates what psychologists call top-down processing. Our perceptions are shaped by prior knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, and expectations. We impose meaning upon the world, and while that meaning brings some things into view it blinds us a well. You've heard the old adage, "seeing is believing." Well, it's also true that "believing is seeing." Perception is more top-down than bottom-up.

In discussing value in yesterday's post I mentioned Jordan Peterson. If you know Peterson's work you know that one of his big ideas concerns how value guides perception. What Peterson is popularizing is top-down processing. The mind has to impose value, meaning, and order upon sense perception. Without top-down processing sense perception would be a chaotic flurry and buzz of impressions. Students of Kant will discern here something similar to Kant's notion of a priori categories that the mind has to impose upon sensation in order to meaningfully interpret the world. 

All this to make a point about faith. Faith is less about bottom-up processing than top-down processing. Faith is an a priori assumption that brings the world into view. Faith is the imposition of value and meaning that makes perception possible. 

We believe to see. 

In The Shape of Joy I use the research of positive psychology to bring the reader into a conversation about transcendence. Many lines of research converge upon the insight that psychological well-being is associated with living in relationship with transcendence. This is the "outward turn" I describe in The Shape of Joy.

But what is transcendence? In talking about transcendence with my students I don't specify the metaphysical content of transcendence. Rather, I take them on a psychological tour, noting locations where we bump into transcendence. The etymology of the word transcendence means "to go beyond." So here are five locations where we experience "going beyond" the merely physical, factual, and material:

1. Wonder and awe
2. Reverence
3. Value
4. Cosmic gratitude
5. Source of moral obligations

The Shape of Joy walks through many of these. Concerning wonder and awe, in the words of Jane Goodall, we are "amazed at things outside of ourselves." Reverence is different from awe, and concerns our experience of the sacred and holy. Of course, the sacred and holy can trigger awe, but I make a contrast between the hallowed and the wondrous, though the two can overlap.

We also encounter transcendence in our experiences of value, like the value of human persons. We encounter value in how we navigate within an ecosystem of significances that push, pull, and shape our lives.  These significances address us more profoundly than the factual. This is, for Jordan Peterson fans, a point he often makes, how our goal-directed behavior, and even perception itself, operates against a background of value.

Gratitude is a relational emotion, our response to having received a favor or gift. Whenever we experience gratefulness for a moment of beauty or life itself we step into cosmic gratitude, a gratitude toward the source and origin of existence itself. Cosmic gratitude creates the I-Thou relationship with the world described by Martin Buber, what Hartmut Rosa calls "resonance." 

Lastly, the grounding and source of our moral obligations place us in relationship with transcendence. Whenever we stand within an obligating moral framework we are standing sub specie aeternitatis, under the gaze of eternity. 

Notice, again, that this tour of transcendence doesn't specify any metaphysical content. There is no object of "faith" in this list. Nothing to believe in or not believe in. This is one of reasons why I don't think atheism is a real thing. Oh sure, there might be a few dogmatic and fundamentalist atheists out there, but such types border on the delusional and deranged. Most people, even confessed atheists, experience transcendence as I've described it above. They experience wonder. They hallow. They act in light of value. They experience cosmic gratitude. They espouse a moral code. And while an atheist might not "believe" anything, they live their lives in relation to transcendence, "going beyond" the merely factual and scientific. 

Yesterday I made a contrast between post-Christian social justice activism--Wokeness--with the activism of the American civil rights movement that was steeped in Christianity. This is one of those contrasts that causes me to describe myself as a post-progressive Christian. 

As is well known, many of the leaders of the civil rights movement were preachers, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. John Lewis ended up in politics, but was in college to become a pastor when he got swept up into the movement. The movement was connected, organized, energized, and hosted by Black churches. The philosophy of the movement was rooted in the Sermon on the Mount and Gandhian nonviolence. And the Christian vision of love was its guiding moral value. Contrast all that with post-Christian social justice activism. 

Yesterday I described what I called the "revivalism" of the civil rights movement. I used that word to describe how much of the movement was aimed at conversion and evangelism. The movement explicitly attempted to change hearts and minds. And from those changed hearts and minds a social movement was born, energized, and sustained. 

Here's a clear example of what I mean in contrasting the revivalism of the civil rights movement with post-Christian activism: the role of music. Singing was ubiquitous in the civil rights movement. And even if you weren't a Christian you got pulled into the music of the movement, much of it rooted in Christian hymnody and Black spirituals. A regular and iconic image of the civil rights movement was people holding hands and singing "We Shall Overcome." Just watch some of the footage from the March on Washington in 1963. Better yet, listen to the March on Washington. That march was a massive church service. That is what I mean by revivalism. And it was a revivalism that wrought powerful social and political change.

And the march continues! But the landscape of political resistance has become increasingly post-Christian. Where's the music? Where is the revivalism? Where's the holding hands and singing? This lack of singing in today's political activism is, I believe, diagnostic. As I mentioned in the last post, there is little concern for the moral and spiritual aspects of social transformation. No connection to faith. No appeal to love. 

And yet, given that I wrote this three months ago, I expect one response to these reflections is that we don't need a faith-based revival as Christians themselves are the problem today. But guess what? Christians were the problem during the Civil Rights movement. Recall to whom MLK addressed his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: the white pastors of the city. If Christians are the problem, revival is the solution. That was precisely what MLK was doing, the evangelization and conversion of Christians.

Is a Civil Rights era revival possible today among Christians? Only the Lord knows. It may be that God is allowing false and lying prophets to lead American Christianity toward its doom in a cleansing, clarifying conflagration. Perhaps out of those ashes a more faithful church might arise. 

During the heyday of what some call "Wokeness" it was a social media truism that injustice was a systemic issue rather than a moral one. Social change couldn't and shouldn't be pursued through appealing to people's hearts. Trying to "convert" people to the light was pointless. Only a political revolution would do. We were told, for example, that racism wasn't really about ethnic animus in the human heart but policies that led to unjust outcomes. Focusing on the moral aspect of oppression--like calling others to love--was deemed a waste of time and counterproductive. The focus had to be squarely on the political and systemic.  

This debate came to mind when I reencountered this quote from Dorothy Day:

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers and sisters with that burning love, that passion, which led to the cross, then we can truly say, "Now I have begun."

I go back to Dorothy Day so often because she had a lovely habit of cutting across so many of our tired and false binaries. For example, Day was no stranger to the reality of systemic oppression, what she called our "filthy rotten system." Day remained a political activist her entire life, fighting for a world, in the words of Peter Maurin, where it is easier to be good. And yet, Day never stopped calling for a "revolution of the heart." For Dorothy Day, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., social change was a deeply moral issue. 

It has to be in a democracy. Which is something I've never understood about thinkers and activists who preach the power of the political and systemic over the moral, personal, and spiritual. Take Ibram X. Kendi as an example. Kendi's thoughts about antiracist policies, with their focus on equity of outcome over equality of opportunity, are an example of privileging the systemic over the moral. And yet, I've never understood how Kendi thinks such policies can become enacted without a "revolution of the heart" in the American electorate. Antiracism floundered because it reduced to virtue signaling among the already converted. And by ignoring conversion, the moral and spiritual struggle at the heart of racism, Kendi's project wasn't going to go anywhere beyond the lecture circuits of the coastal elites. 

To be clear, I'm not offering an evaluation of Kendi's work. You might be a fan or a critic. Nor am I trolling Wokeness. I think Jesus would get tagged as "woke" if he were alive today. My concern in this post is how, for a season, during peak Woke, Twitter became convinced that oppression and injustice wasn't a moral or spiritual issue. This was, and remains, a serious diagnostic error. An error that, I think, stems from social justice activism sliding more deeply into post-Christianity, losing touch with its spiritual roots. Post-Christian social justice activism doesn't have a category for Day's "revolution of the heart" or the activities that stoke such moral and spiritual transformation, activities like "evangelism" and "conversion." The word "love", so ubiquitous in the sermons and speeches of MLK, is homeless in activist circles. Which is why social justice activism today--Wokeness--has devolved into grievance-based virtue signaling in stark contrast to the revivalism of the Civil Rights movement. 

Dorothy Day and MLK knew that the political was the moral, and that the engine of social transformation was a revolution of the heart.    

That last sentence is where this post ended three months ago when I wrote it. And the post speaks to my main audience, progressive Christians. I don't write much about evangelicals since evangelicals don't follow me. Why would they care, or even know, if I had some thoughts? I don't like ranting into echo chambers. Still, publishing this post today, at this political moment, nudged me to add some reflections to say something about Trump and evangelicals. Love has gone missing from evangelicalism as well. Christians on the right have given up on the revolution of the heart. No longer interested in evangelism or conversion, Christians are opting for a revenge-driven exercise of power and coercion. Gospel proclamation has been replaced with a politics of ressentiment aimed at compelling compliance. In this, Trump is the mirror image of Kendi. Not in their ends, but in their preferred means. The revolution of the heart is skipped in favor of coercive political power. 

This isn't going to end well. I expect Democrats will exact their own revenge when they regain political power. A retaliatory, tit-for-tat, revenge-driven politics will become our new normal. Both left and right are being reduced to the will to power. Our democracy has entered a cold civil war. 

Was it utopian of us to believe that the Constitution of the United States, this democratic experiment, could forever resist and conquer human depravity? 

Only a revolution of the heart can save us. 

"Today, if you hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts"

My daily prayer routine is to pray the Divine Office (also called the Liturgy of the Hours). In the morning I pray the Invitatory, the Office of Readings, and the Morning Office. At night, the Evening Office.

The Invitatory of the Divine Office, the prayer I pray every morning to start the day, is Psalm 95. The lines that have become increasingly meaningful to me each day are these:

Today, if you hear his voice:
Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah,
as on that day at Massah in the wilderness
where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.

The events at Meribah and Massah are recounted in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20. Meribah means "quarreling" and Massah means "testing." In their desert wanderings, the Israelites find themselves short of water and begin to complain against Moses and the Lord. The Lord instructs Moses to bring forth water from a rock. The people are refreshed, but the place is named Meribah and Massah to mark the location where Israel quarreled against and tested the Lord.

The specific line that grabs me, the one I shared at the top, is: "Today, if you hear his voice: Do not harden your hearts." The line has become important to me, and I can only assume it's one of the reasons Psalm 95 was selected at the first prayer of the morning in the Daily Office, as it calls me to attentiveness. 

Today, if you hear the voice of God, do not harden your heart. Be wakeful. Be watchful and alert.  Listen well. Listen closely. The Lord may speak to you today. You may be addressed. 

O my soul, be ready.

When various soteriologies and eschatologies are compared and contrasted, lauded or criticized, one of the issues concerns if the vision is "exclusive" versus "inclusive."

Consider, for example, the Biblical claim about Jesus from Acts 4.12: "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved.” That is an exclusive claim about Jesus. Salvation can be found nowhere else. Consider also Jesus' self-statement: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me." Again, a very exclusive claim.

It is generally assumed that such exclusive claims rule out inclusive soteriologies and eschatologies. And it is true that some inclusive soteriologies and eschatologies explicitly reject exclusive claims about Jesus. For example, there is the pluralistic view that world religions and faith traditions are each different paths going up the same mountain. In such a conception, Jesus is just one among many paths 

All that to say, there are particular visions of exclusivity and inclusivity that do contradict each other. But exclusivity and inclusivity don't have to be contradictions. You can make an exclusive claim about Jesus while still espousing an inclusive vision. Consider Philippians 2:9-11: 

For this reason God highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee will bow—
in heaven and on earth
and under the earth—
and every tongue will confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Notice how the vision is both exclusive and inclusive. Every tongue will confess Jesus. Jesus is the door and everyone moves through that door. 

Consider also the Christ-Hymn of Colossians 1:

For everything was created by him,
in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or authorities—
all things have been created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and by him all things hold together.
He is also the head of the body, the church;
he is the beginning,
the firstborn from the dead,
so that he might come to have
first place in everything.
For God was pleased to have
all his fullness dwell in him,
and through him to reconcile
everything to himself,
whether things on earth or things in heaven,
by making peace
through his blood, shed on the cross.

Again, an exclusive claim is being made about Christ, but that exclusive claim is made inclusive and universal. By him all things hold together, and through him everything is reconciled to God. 

My point here isn't to tell you what to think about soteriology or eschatology. My goal is simply to clear up a very common misconception. Inclusive and hopeful visions of soteriology or eschatology are not necessarily opposed to making exclusive claims about Jesus. You can have exclusivity and inclusivity at the same time. 

One of the big discoveries from cognitive psychology has been the dual processing model of cognition. Simply put, the dual processing model argues that human cognition operates through two distinct systems, called System 1 and System 2. System 1 is automatic, unconscious, and emotional. System 2 is deliberative, conscious, and logical. Daniel Kahneman has described the dual processing systems as "thinking fast and thinking slow."

The relevance of the dual processing model for spiritual formation concerns how we tend to assume that failures of virtue are System 2 issues when, for the most part, they are System 1 issues. That is to say, our failures of kindness or patience are not typically due to making bad moral choices. What happens, rather, in moments of hurry, stress, or irritation is that we act, judge, or speak uncharitably, harshly, or dismissively. The problem is with our rapid System 1 response. 

For example, when I reflect upon my failures as a parent these weren't ever due to making a poor choice, deliberatively speaking. My failures were emotional in nature. Reacting out of anger or impatience. 

That our moral failures are often System 1 issues presents a challenge for spiritual formation. How can you change or modify an automatic response? 

Ponder how you learn a musical instrument or learn a sport. To play an instrument or learn to hit a golf ball you have to practice. Through repeated practice we acquire automaticity. Practice shifts System 2 control toward System 1. Deliberation becomes habit. What was slow becomes fast. 

This, then, is the key to spiritual formation: We need practices that help us acquire holy automaticity. We practice until our kneejerk responses to life, our System 1 reactions, are virtuous. Jesus must become a habit.

In 2008 I published an article in the Journal of Psychology and Theology entitled "The Emotional Burden of Monotheism: Satan, Theodicy, and Relationship with God." The hypothesis of that research was that belief in Satan helps alleviate the burden of theodicy posed by monotheism. The problem of evil is acute in monotheism as God is ultimately to blame for the suffering in the world. Some of this burden can alleviated, however, if we posit a Satan. This belief creates a soft, good versus bad dualism where some of the bad things in life can be blamed on Satan rather than God. Blame shifts toward the Adversary and is thereby redirected away from God.

Eight years after publishing "The Emotional Burden of Monotheism" I published Reviving Old Scratch. One of the more interesting points I make in Reviving Old Scratch is how our compassion creates doubts. Compassion, I argue, is an acid that can dissolve faith.

How so?

Again, it has to do with theodicy, the problem of suffering. Our compassion pulls us deeper and deeper into the suffering and pain of the world, and as we are drawn deeper and deeper into the darkness our theodicy questions grow more and more heavy and intense. Where is God in all this pain? Thus my argument: Compassion pulls us into the suffering of the world and all that suffering creates questions and doubts.

Given this, how do we maintain both compassion and faith in the face of horrific suffering? The argument I make in Reviving Old Scratch is that we have to adopt what Greg Boyd has described as the "warfare worldview" of the Bible. Or, as Fleming Rutledge puts it, we need to account for a "third power" in the world, beyond God and ourselves. The cosmos is a spiritual battlefield and we are thrown into the middle of an ongoing fight. True, we are not given much information about how the fight started. But we are called to pick a side.

Summarizing, Reviving Old Scratch seems to be doing exactly what I described in 2008, what monotheists do in the face of suffering: Push blame onto the Satan to alleviate our doubts about God's goodness and power. Is there, then, any tension between what I describe in my 2008 article and what I describe in Reviving Old Scratch?

In light of yesterday's post, one way to describe the distinctions between my article and book is to highlight the difference between our intellectual response to evil versus our moral response. N.T. Wright has a nice description of this in his book Paul and the Faithfulness of God:

The stronger your monotheism, the sharper your problem of evil. That is inevitable: if there is one God, why are things in such a mess? The paradox that then results--God, and yet evil!--have driven monotheistic theorists to a range of solutions. And by 'solutions' here I mean two things: first, the analytic 'solution' of understanding what is going on; second, the practical 'solution' of lessening or alleviating the actual evil and its effects, or rescuing people from it. In various forms of the Jewish tradition, the second has loomed much larger. As Marx said, the philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it.

To start, Wright makes the exact point I make in my article: "The stronger your monotheism, the sharper your problem of evil." He goes on to say that this problem can go into one of two directions, toward an analytical versus a practical theodicy. This is what Karen Kilby has described as our intellectual versus moral response to evil. My 2008 article was mainly about our analytical, intellectual theodicy, how many Christians create a soft, metaphysical dualism to "explain" evil in the world. Reviving Old Scratch, by contrast, is a call for a practical theodicy, a moral response to evil. In the words of Wright, the theodicy of Reviving Old Scratch is a call for "lessening or alleviating the actual evil and its effects, or rescuing people from it." As I put it in the book, the only theodicy the Bible gives us is resistance.

As I observed yesterday, one of the big points I make in Reviving Old Scratch is how our attempts to solve the analytic, intellectual puzzle of evil can be paralyzing. Even when we posit the existence of Satan, the emotional burden of monotheism remains. In the end, Satan is really no answer. Consequently, Reviving Old Scratch doesn't share an analytical, intellectual theodicy. The call is, rather, to focus upon practical theodicy, our moral response to evil, to "lessening or alleviating the actual evil and its effects, or rescuing people from it."

Simply put, Reviving Old Scratch isn't trying to alleviate the emotional burden of monotheism by viewing Satan as an "explanation." Reviving Old Scratch, rather, a call to face Satan as the "adversary" and to engage of acts of resistance.

I was recently in a conversation about the problem of evil and shared some of the ideas from Karen Kilby's article "Evil and the Limits of Theology." I reflected on this essay a few years ago, but it bears revisiting.

When discussing the problem of evil Kilby argues that we need to distinguish between our intellectual, moral and pastoral responses to evil. We often confuse these responses, which can muddy the waters and lead to some inept pastoral responses. 

First, the intellectual response to evil concerns our theological debates about why God permits evil to exist. 

Next, the moral response to evil concerns how we should refuse to be reconciled to evil and should struggle against it in the world. 

Finally, the pastoral response to evil is how we come alongside those who are suffering or who are victims of evil.

Kilby's argument is that we need to keep these responses distinct and separate or great damage can be done. For example, pastoral damage can be done if we try to offer an intellectual response to evil by a graveside. No one needs to hear "the reason" why a child has died. People who are suffering don't need an intellectual explanation about "why" this pain, loss, or suffering has occurred. Unfortunately, however, this is a too-common mistake as people have felt that a theological "explanation" might help soothe and salve the pain of a sufferer. But as we (should) know, our pastoral response to evil shouldn't be logical or theological. We don't share a "reason" or "explanation." We simply share presence, tears, grief, and love. We shouldn't be doing a lot of talking and explaining around pain.

Another thing to monitor is letting our intellectual response bleed into our moral response. This concern gets less attention, but it's still a big issue. Specifically, any intellectual "explanation" of evil has the potential to lessen its force, weight, and impact. If evil has a "reason" we become, in some small way, reconciled to its existence. This weakens our moral response to evil, our absolute, undiluted antagonism towards its existence. 

In this vein, Kilby goes on to make the provocative claim that assurances about God's presence in our suffering can tip into a theodicy, or something theodicy adjacent. That is, we don't know why evil exists, but we do know that God in Christ is "with us" in our pain. This is true, but Kilby warns against using this intellectual conviction as a pastoral response we push onto others. Yes, it is consoling to know that God is "with us" in our pain, but we need to monitor when such a consolation, even if true, is being pushed onto others rather than claimed for oneself.  

From a different angle, we can also mistake our intellectual quest about the problem of evil for our moral response. We can come to mistake our theodic angst, how theologically distressed we are about the suffering of the world, for actually doing something about the suffering of the world. Our rage against the evil of the world can become performative, theological playacting. As I describe in Reviving Old Scratch, I was once caught in this trap, mistaking my intellectual response toward evil as a moral response. But as I say in the book, evil isn't a puzzle to be solved but a reality to be resisted. Don't mistake your intellectual response to evil for a moral response. Of course, think about the problem, but don't mistake thinking for acting. 

To summarize, then, it's important to make distinctions between our different responses to evil. They each have their proper purpose and place, but we must be alert to the problems that arise when we mistake one response for another.

"The Lord is a God who avenges"

I've mentioned that I'm writing a new book. The working title is "The Book of Love." It's a book about how the read the Bible, cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation, as a book of love. 

One of the things I tackle in the book is the theme of Judgment Day. A lot of readers of Scripture are chilled by lines like this one--"The Lord is a God who avenges"--from Psalm 94. And yet, we seem to have curious relationship with God's vengeance. 

For example, in my book I talk about two songs written by Johnny Cash toward the end of this life, one was an original song that I talk about in Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash, and the other was a cover of an old folk song. The original song was "When the Man Comes Around." The folk song was "God's Gonna Cut You Down." Both songs were huge hits, and both songs were about Judgment Day. Curious!

For example, take a peak at the music video of "God's Gonna Cut You Down," all those artists and celebrities singing the lyrics:

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down

Go tell that long-tongued liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back-biter
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down

Well, you may throw your rock, and hide your hand
Workin' in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What's done in the dark will be brought to the light

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down
Sooner or later, God'll cut you down

So, yeah, we have a curious relationship with Judgment Day. 

Easily triggered by "The Lord is a God who avenges" but loving to sing "Sooner or later, God'll cut you down." 

As Stephen Bullivant has pointed out in his book Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, for every one convert the church makes we lose five "Nonverts." A Nonvert is a person who was raised in a religious tradition but who now identifies as a None, as in "no religious preference." That is to say, a Nonvert is a person who has left the faith. Nonverts are also called the "Dones," those who were raised in church but are now "done" with church. 

Why are people nonverting? Why are more and more people "done" with church?

Following upon the work of Charles Taylor and Andrew Root, the argument of Hunting Magic Eels is that faith in a secular age is difficult for us due to pervasive disenchantment. And while I do think disenchantment is implicated in the rise of the Nonverts, something else is at work as well.

Specifically, after publication of Hunting Magic Eels pastors have shared with me that the biggest factor driving nonverting isn't disenchantment but the moral witness of the church. People are just fed up with the church. From the sex and abuse scandals to the ugly political polarization. 

If this is so, re-enchantment won't fix the Nonvert problem. If the problem is that the church has lost its moral credibility, then what are we supposed to do?

My response here has been to turn to the religionless Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Specifically, in the wasteland that was the German church after the rise of Hitler and WW2, Bonhoeffer sat in prison reflecting upon the future of the Christian witness in Germany. Bonhoeffer was struggling with the same despair we are facing regarding the church: its moral failures and corruption. Given all the things that have gone on in the church in recent decades and years, what is the future of the Christian witness in the world?

Pondering his situation, the compromised moral position of the German church, Bonhoeffer suggested that, going forward, the church must become "religionless" in the world. This was the only way the church could rehabilitate itself and regain the confidence of the world. What does a "religionless" witness in the world look like? I think the key line from Bonhoeffer's letters and papers is this one:

The primary confession of the Christian before the world is the deed which interprets itself.

When the church loses its moral authority its witness in the world must become "religionless." Rather than speech, the church is called to silent righteous action. Having lost the confidence of the world, the only sermon the church can preach is "the deed which interprets itself." Our actions become our witness. 

This "religionless Christianity" was how Bonhoeffer felt the church could regain its moral credibility and authority after Hitler. Our actions must speak louder than our sermons. Perhaps, after a season, the world would start caring again about what we have to say. But this is a right that has to be earned. Trust has to be regained.

Here, then, is how I think we need to respond to the Nonvert trend. We can't talk our way into moral credibility. Why would anyone believe us? When the church loses its right to speak the only sermon it has left is the deed which interprets itself. Silent righteous action is how we regain the trust of our children and the world. 

If you are knowledgeable about evangelical end times beliefs you might have raised some objections about yesterday's post. (I generally write posts three months out, so I can only guess what reactions might be.) The specific issue concerns how Trump features into a lot of end times prophecies and scenarios. 

But let me back up. 

Over the last ten years I've kept bumping into weird things regarding evangelicalism and Judaism. I won't go into all the details about how I end up in these various spaces, but I often find myself among pentecostal evangelicals, where evangelical support for Trump is strongest. These are the same spaces where end times prophecy is deeply connected with right-wing politics. I'm a bit of a theological and political fish out of water in these rooms, but I'm an affable fellow and get along with people across religious and political divides

I was once in a room where a gentlemen, in the middle of his presentation about our need for Bible study, went off on a tangent about how, secreted away in the Vatican, were New Testament manuscripts written in Hebrew, manuscripts that pre-dated the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In short, he claimed, the New Testament was actually written in Hebrew but this fact had been hidden. The original Hebrew New Testament was being suppressed and covered up by the church. 

This was obvious nonsense, as anyone familiar with New Testament scholarship knows. We have no Hebrew manuscripts of the New Testament that pre-date the Greek manuscripts. Consequently, I looked around the room as the presenter made this claim, citing only Youtube as his evidence, to see if I could detect any signs of incredulity. I didn't spot any. Everyone was just nodding along, taking it all in, hook, line, and sinker. 

On a different occasion I was organizing baptisms out at the prison. A chaplain associated with another Christian Bible study asked if he could join us. I did the first few baptisms using the Trinitarian formula, "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." After a bit, I stepped aside so our guest could perform the next few baptisms. He did, but used a very different baptismal formula. Speaking in Hebrew, he began to baptize "in the name of "Yeshua HaMashiach." And so we went back and forth, between "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit" and "in the name of "Yeshua HaMashiach." It was such an obvious contrast I visited with the man afterwards about the origins of his baptismal formula. He was an evangelical, he said, but had recently begun to identify as a "Messianic Jew." I found this curious. Generally speaking, ethnic Jewish persons who come to confess Jesus as Israel's Messiah are called "Messianic Jews." But this gentlemen was a Gentile evangelical Christian who was now describing himself as a "Messianic Jew." 

Over the years, I've had increasing contact with evangelicals-turned-Messianic-Jews out at the prison. Many of the men in my Bible study have "converted" from evangelicalism to the "Messianic Jewish" community out at the unit. They wear the kippah, adopt Jewish dietary practices, and celebrate Passover. Interestingly, the practices and beliefs of the Messianic Jewish community out at the unit aren't in any conversation with actual Jewish people or communities. The religion they are practicing is wholly of their own invention, guided by self-appointed leaders who have educated themselves in Jewish customs and beliefs. A lot of the men out at the unit are attracted to this group because it seems to be a more "authentic" version of Christianity, connected as it is to Jewish observances and practices. But given its lack of connection with actual Judaism, the "Messianic Jewish" community out at the unit has a mish-mash, do-it-yourself, bespoke kind of feel. 

One more story. At the little church I've written so much about, Freedom Fellowship, this year some of our leaders have taken to celebrating the Jewish New Moons every month, complete with blowing a shofar at the start and end of the service. 

Now, what is going on with all this? 

On the one hand, a lot of the interest in Judaism and the Old Testament is simply due to a healthy and legitimate interest in the Hebraic roots of Christianity. And given the history of antisemitism and supersessionism in the Christian tradition, this is a welcome development. 

That said, as illustrated in some of the anecdotes above, there's also some weird stuff going on in evangelical spaces when it comes to Judaism, some of it patently conspiratorial. 

Which brings us back to Donald Trump and the end times.

Much of the evangelical interest in Israel concerns the role the Jews are believed to play in various end times prophecies. Specifically, based upon an end times reading of Romans 11, many evangelicals are looking forward to a mass conversion of the Jews, to either "Messianic Judaism" or "Christianity." So if you've ever wondered why evangelicals are so pro-Israel, this is the reason. Israel must be supported and protected because Israel, in its mass conversion, is a historical trigger in bringing about the Second Coming. Consequently, many evangelicals look for signs coming out of Israel of this pending mass conversion. For example, I was in another evangelical space where great excitement was expressed that a "red heifer" had been spotted in Israel. Again, since this isn't my world, I had no idea what the "red heifer" was referring to or why it caused so much excitement. Well, if you didn't know, the appearance of a "red heifer" features in some end times beliefs regarding the re-building of the temple, another purported trigger of the Second Coming.

So here's the thing. You have to be pretty far down the Youtube end times rabbit hole to know about the red heifer. And this is what I think is fueling a lot of the evangelical interest in, and conflation with, Judaism. Specifically, if you want to know more about the timing of the end times you need to know more about Judaism. Judaism is the key that unlocks the end times box. What you find, therefore, in pentecostal sectors of evangelicalism, where end times prophets and prophesies fill the Youtube channels and pulpits, is a fascination and melding with Judaism, some of which, due to the end times emphasis, borders on the conspiratorial. 

And this is where Donald Trump comes in. In taking his very pro-Israel stances, like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, many evangelicals believe Trump is moving Israel toward the end times triggers, like rebuilding the temple and its mass conversion. 

All that to say, my post from yesterday ignored this connection. I asked evangelicals to be "consistently apocalyptic," and in this I meant viewing every nation as being inexorably pulled toward Judgment Day no matter who wins or loses an election. Fair enough, but many evangelicals do see Trump as playing a critical part in end times beliefs in how he is a defender and promotor of Israel. In this, evangelicals are being "consistently apocalyptic" given how they feel that Trump is moving us closer to the Second Coming. 

Having now made this clarification, I do want to end with an ironic observation.

As I mentioned above, a lot of the evangelical interest in Judaism is legitimate and welcome. And yet, underneath a lot of this interest boils conspiratorial and politicized end times beliefs concerning the state of Israel and fate of the Jewish people. And while a lot of Jewish people have appreciated the pro-Israel support from evangelicals, many Jews have also expressed concern about how evangelical interest in Israel is mainly due to viewing the Jews as an end times domino. Evangelical interest in Israel, we could say, is a sort of eschatological utilitarianism, the Jews as means toward an eschatological end. 

In one of the chapters of The Shape of Joy entitled "The Superhero Complex" I talk about how end times beliefs function as an ersatz hero system among many Christians, in the same way conspiracy theories provide existential benefits to their adherents. In fact, end times beliefs are often just religiously-inflected conspiracy theories. 

When I say end times beliefs are an ersatz hero system I mean how end times beliefs make a crazy, unpredictable world more comprehensible and provide a pathway toward heroic identity and meaning. End times beliefs, like conspiracy theories, describe the world as a Manichean struggle of Good versus Evil, and the redpilled believers are enlisted in this holy war. End times beliefs provide an existential drug that is hard to find anywhere else. 

End times beliefs also get deployed in our other big hero system: Partisan politics. The two, end times beliefs and politics, are regularly conflated. The Apocalypse can help you win elections. And it's here, with the politicization of the end times, where some theological inconsistencies come into view. 

Specifically, in the lead up to the last election I witnessed, like many of you, how end times prophecy was used to demonize the Biden-Harris administration. The Biden-Harris administration was marching us toward Armageddon. This message was, of course, every energizing for the evangelical electorate, especially in those pentecostal pockets where prophesy and end times belief blend with party politics. Dire end times warnings helped get out the vote. 

And then Trump won. Which raises a question: Are the end times called off? Was the breaking of the Seven Seals paused the day after the election? Since Trump won is Armageddon being rescheduled?

It seems to me, if you want to be consistent, that the election of Donald Trump did nothing to the end times unfolding. If we were doomed under Biden-Harris we're still doomed under Trump. The end times don't start and stop dependent upon electoral outcomes. The end times isn't an on-again off-again affair. And yet, for the next four years we'll see a toning down of end times discourse. Evangelicals aren't going to finger Trump as the Antichrist. They'll wait until the next Democrat takes office to bring up 666 again. It'll take losing an election to get Armageddon back on the schedule. 

Here's my point in bringing this up. I don't mind anyone reading history through the lens of Revelation. I do. And what I find in John's visions is pretty pessimistic. But here's the contrast: I am consistently pessimistic. I consistently think America is symbolized as Babylon. I believed this to be the case under Biden-Harris, and I think it now with Trump-Vance. The end times aren't rescheduled whenever I win or lose an election. I have a very non-partisan view of the Antichrist. 

Lest there be any misunderstanding here, I'm not saying you shouldn't vote your conscience. Nor am I trying to draw false equivalencies between political parties. My interest here isn't political. My interest is Biblical. Specifically, if you want to espouse end times beliefs, that's great, but you need to roll those beliefs through every presidential administration. You can't call off Armageddon when you win and bring it back when you lose. If the end times clock is ticking during the Biden years it keeps ticking during the Trump years. If you want to read Revelation into history, fine, but do so consistently rather than opportunistically. Otherwise, you're letting your politics dictate your reading of Scripture rather than letting Scripture dictate your reading of politics. 

If you want to be apocalyptic then be consistently apocalyptic.