In my researches about the Celtic fairy-faith, preparing for my class this summer in Ireland, I came across David Bentley Hart's 2009 essay "The Secret Commonwealth," which Hart has reposted on his Substack newsletter. 

In "The Secret Commonwealth" Hart sets out a defense of the fairy-faith. If you know Hart's work, this will not be surprising. For example, Hart's most recent book is entitled All Things Are Full of Gods, which takes its title from a quote from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus. You can draw a straight line from the ancient belief that "all things are full of gods," that nature is alive with spiritual powers and potencies, to the fairy-faith of the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. The Greeks believed that life was due to psyche, the life force or "soul." As Aristotle set forth, psyche animates vegetable, animal, and human life. All living things possessed a soul. And while this view of a spiritual potency, a soul, infusing living creatures might strike modern minds as outdated, primitive science, Hart argues in All Things Are Full of Gods that life remains a fundamental mystery that reductionistic materialism cannot solve. So perhaps the Greeks were closer to the truth than modern biological science. And if that's so, then so is the fairy-faith.

Hart begins his 2009 essay by introducing the work of Robert Kirk, a Christian clergyman, who published his treatise The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies in 1691. As Hart describes, Kirk wasn't just interested in documenting the lore of the fairy-faith, he was particularly interested in the Celtic seers and visionaries, those among the Celts blessed with "the second sight." As Hart observes: 

Kirk’s real concern, as it happens, was not simply the fairy realm, but also that rare breed of mortals who enjoy the ability to see its inhabitants with their own eyes. In large part, it is a treatise on the “second sight,” a special gift that Kirk believed to be possessed by only certain specially privileged souls—a great many of whom were, like Kirk himself, seventh sons—and one whose reality is attested not only in folklore, but also in scripture. Not to everyone do the “peaceable folk” appear, it seems, but a wealth of credible anecdotes—concerning persons who have experienced remarkable flashes of foreknowledge or encounters with the specters of friends who have died far away or other uncanny revelations—prove that there are those who have from birth been granted the ability to see the unseen, and even in many cases to pierce the veil within which the fairy realm is hidden. And such individuals, says Kirk, are of the same family as the prophets of ancient Israel, and of all the truly inspired prophets of every land and every race.

In commenting upon Kirk's work, Hart makes a few observations about what he calls "the essential sanity" of the fairy-faith, the "deep conviction that those traditions touch upon a real dimension of vital intelligence or intelligences residing in the world all about us, occasionally visible and audible to us, but for the most part outside the reach of our dull, earthbound senses." 

In defending the sanity of the fairy-faith, Hart makes two points.

First, the fairy-faith is much closer to the Scriptural imagination than our disenchanted modern imaginations. Simply put, the fairy-faith is biblical.  As Hart observes, "such warrant [for the fairy-faith] really can be found in the Bible if one chooses to look for it, and Kirk was simply a more careful reader than most other Christians on this matter." Hart points to the letters of Paul who described "elemental powers" ruling the cosmos. These cosmic and spiritual powers had once been in a state of rebellion but have now come under the dominion of Christ (see Col. 1:20). This is the same vision that C.S. Lewis uses in The Chronicles of Narnia where we see pagan nature spirits and gods come under the rule of Aslan/Christ. In Lewis's imagination, paganism is baptized. Or, as Michael Martin says, the fairies are Christian. 

Hart's second and bigger point in defending the fairy-faith is how its vision of the world pushes back upon a mechanical vision of the cosmos. The fairy-faith is saner than mechanistic visions of nature as it helps us recover a deep intuition that the world is, well, alive, suffused with mind, intelligence, agency, and personhood. Hart goes even further to say that there is a moral imperative in coming to see the world in this enchanted, vital way. Here's Hart making these points:

....there was an essential sanity in Kirk’s approach to reality that we would all do well to emulate whenever we find ourselves gravitating toward the obscene fantasy of a purely mechanical natural order. One need not yet believe in fairies to grasp that there is no good reason why one ought not to do so, and that there may even be some moral imperative that one should. To see the world as inhabited by these vital intelligences, or to believe that behind the outward forms of nature there might be an unperceived realm of intelligent order, is simply to respond rationally to one of the ways in which the world seems to address us when we intuit simultaneously its rational frame and the depth of mystery it seems to hide from us.

In short, the issue isn't can we believe in fairies, but that we must believe. And the reason for this, Hart continues, concerns how the way we see reality impacts our emotional and moral experience of the world. Materialism evacuates the world of meaning and significance. And as I describe in The Shape of Joy, this evacuation has both mental health and moral consequences. Thus, while believing in fairies might seem to be, from a scientific perspective, delusional, from the perspective of human flourishing and moral engagement the fairy-faith is a saner and truer view of the world. Here's Hart making these points in concluding his essay: 

Even if one is so misled about the frame of reality as to think that the world Kirk describes is sheer delusion, again that is of no consequence. A vision of reality this amiable is endlessly preferable to the sheer metaphysical boredom of the materialist view of things and, for that very reason, makes a moral demand on any responsible soul; boredom is, after all, the one force that can utterly defeat the will to care what is or is not true to begin with. It is only some degree of prior enchantment that allows the eye to see, and to seek to see yet more. And so, deluded or not, a belief in fairies will always be in some sense far more rational than the absolute conviction that such things are sheer nonsense, and that the cosmos consists in nothing but brute material events in haphazard combinations.

Another way of saying this, I suppose, would be that the ability of any of us to view the world with some sort of contemplative rationality rests upon the capacity we possessed as children to see in everything a kind of eloquently articulate mystery, and to believe in far more than what ordinary vision discloses to us: a capacity that endows us with that spiritual eros that allows us to know and love the world, and that we are wise to continue to cultivate in ourselves even after age and disillusion have weakened our sight.

This May I'm teaching and leading a class on Celtic Christianity, taking a group of students to Ireland. 

I did a deep dive into Celtic Christianity to write my chapter on "Celtic Enchantments" in Hunting Magic Eels. I'm proud of that chapter for its scholarly integrity and academic rigor which avoids a lot of the commercialized nonsense one finds among those who sell visions of "Celtic Christianity" to spiritual-but-not-religious audiences.

Leading a three week class on Celtic Christianity has caused me to return to the pre-Christian Celts and the Irish monastic tradition. I'm wanting to lecture a bit on some of the peculiarities of Irish folklore and belief concerning the supernatural realm. And so, I've been learning a lot about fairies. 

One of the best places to start if you want to learn about the fair folk of Ireland is The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by Walter Evans-Wentz. Published in 1911, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries was Evans-Wentz's Oxford doctoral dissertation. As an anthropological study, Evans-Wentz traveled through Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Brittany, and Ireland collecting stories, folklore, and firsthand accounts of fairies. From these testimonies, Evans-Wentz concludes that the fairy-folk are real, or at least evidence of a supernatural realm existing alongside our own. Evans-Wentz places much of the blame for the loss of the fairy-faith among the Celtic peoples upon modern urban and industrial life. Modernity has deformed us and made us unnatural. Evans-Wentz writes:

The great majority of men in cities are apt to pride themselves on their own exemption from ‘superstition’, and to smile pityingly at the poor countrymen and countrywomen who believe in fairies. But when they do so they forget that, with all their own admirable progress in material invention, with all the far-reaching data of their acquired science, with all the vast extent of their commercial and economic conquests, they themselves have ceased to be natural. Wherever under modern conditions great multitudes of men and women are herded together there is bound to be an unhealthy psychical atmosphere never found in the country...they have lost all sympathetic and responsive contact with Nature, because unconsciously they have thus permitted conventionality and unnaturalness to insulate them from it.

Evans-Wentz argues that the fairy-faith--experiences of fairies, pixies, brownies, leprechauns, and other sorts of spirits, from ghosts to nature spirits--is the legacy of the pre-Christian faith of the Celtic people from the British Isles. Broadly speaking, the fairy-faith is an animistic vision of the world, a world full of spiritual agents and powers, along with a strong belief in the Otherworld which intersects and interpenetrates mundane reality. Here's how Evans-Wentz describes the Otherworld called "Fairyland":

Most of the evidence also points so much in one direction that the only verdict which seems reasonable is that the Fairy-Faith belongs to a doctrine of souls; that is to say, that Fairyland is a state or condition, realm or place, very much like, if not the same as, that wherein civilized and uncivilized men alike place the souls of the dead, in company with other invisible beings such as gods, daemons, and all sorts of good and bad spirits. Not only do both educated and uneducated Celtic seers so conceive Fairyland, but they go much further, and say that Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings than this world, because incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities.

In a word, the fairy-faith experiences the world as enchanted. 

Interestingly, the fairy-faith sits comfortably with Christian belief. Many of Evans-Wentz's interviewees were Christian ministers and priests who were occasionally called upon to deal with malevolent fairies. This syncretism between the Celtic fairy-faith and Christianity is one of those things that gives Celtic Christianity its unique and mystical texture. And it should also be mentioned that the fairy-faith remains alive and well to this very day.

Which brings us to an interesting question I'll ask my students this May and explore with you in this series: Should we believe in fairies? 

I'll turn to that question in the posts to come.

"It is good to give thanks to the Lord"

Gratitude is having a cultural moment. It has for a while now, due to the research of positive psychology making its way into wellness culture. I tell much of this story in The Shape of Joy. But it's important to make a distinction between interpersonal gratitude and what is called existential or cosmic gratitude. 

Gratitude, we know, is the emotional response we have to being given a favor or gift. When we receive these gifts from another person our gratitude is directed toward the giver. This is interpersonal gratitude. Relational thanks. But where is gratitude directed when we experience the gifts of life itself? The gift of a beautiful sunrise, a sandy beach, a soft spring rain, a delicate flower, the starry sky, the wind in your face? What about the gifts of beautiful moments? A warm cup of coffee in the morning, an engrossing book, an evening walk, your dog welcoming you home or your cat snuggling in close. For the love and belonging you experience? Family, dear friends, and the kindness of strangers. For life itself? This breath, the courage to take the next step, your heart still beating.

The list can go on and on. Where to direct this thanks? To whom is this gratitude due? From whence comes these gifts? What is the source of such grace?

This is why being religious is deeply sane. There is a ribbon of grace that threads through our lives. And when we experience it our hearts surge toward transcendence. It is good to give thanks to the Lord.

Cosmic gratitude traces the shape of joy.

Out at the prison we were discussing the "do not worry" passage from the Sermon on the Mount:

“Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they? Can any of you add one moment to his life span by worrying? And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wildflowers of the field grow: They don’t labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t he do much more for you—you of little faith? So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you. Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

This can be a difficult text to preach and teach. We live in an "age of anxiety." Young people are described as the "anxious generation." Anxiety on the rise and everywhere you look. Which makes Jesus' message extremely relevant but also hard to hear. To say to people "do not worry" can sound like you are disregarding people's experiences. Plus, simple religious exhortations are deemed inadequate for treating stubborn mental health issues. Lastly, a moralizing and judgmental attitude can show up if worry and anxiety are described as failures of faith and trust.

We discussed all this out at the unit, how to talk about worry and anxiety in a complicated mental health context. And beyond mental health issues, worry and anxiety are just natural human emotions. So, how are we to think and talk about Jesus' teachings about worry and anxiety?

I was struck by the word "Therefore" at the start of the passage. Which indicates that the "do not worry" exhortations are flowing out of something preliminary and prior. 

Backing up, then, here's the passage that comes right before:

“Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness!

“No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."

"Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. You cannot serve both God and money. Therefore, do not worry." That's how the argument runs. The exhortations about worry and anxiety are connected to concerns about idolatry, serving money rather than God. As additional evidence for this connection, toward the end of the worry passage Jesus says "seek first the kingdom of God." 

Stepping back, it seems to me that Jesus' concerns about worry and anxiety are not about worry and anxiety per se. Jesus' broader concern is how worshipping and idolizing money--seeking treasures on earth rather than treasures in heaven--tip our hearts into anxiety and worry. As Jesus says, where our treasure is there will our heart be. Or, where our treasure is there will our worry be.

To be sure, Jesus' message is still hard for our culture to listen to. But framing his concerns as being about idolatry and less about emotions gives us a richer picture. We shouldn't shame people for feeling how they feel. Nor is it productive to tell people to stop feeling what they are feeling. But we can step back to assess and diagnosis how we've structured our hearts, where we've placed our confidence and trust, and how these investments are affecting us emotionally. That's a productive and much needed conversation.

For years in this space I've made the point that faith involves both orthodoxy and orthopraxy. There is both "right belief" and "right practice." The notion that one can "practice Christianity" is new to many people and is generally neglected. Christianity tends to become mental, theological, doctrinal, creedal, propositional, and metaphysical. Christianity is something we "believe in," "espouse," or "assent to." We hold to Christian "values," "beliefs," and "worldviews." But Christianity is also something we do. Christianity is acting, behaving, and living.  

Beyond orthodoxy and orthopraxy, there is a third description of faith that has increasingly come to occupy my attention. This word is "orthopathy." Orthopathy concerns "right passions" and "right affections." The emotional, passionate, affectional, and motivational life of the Christian has a particular shape, character, and orientation. I mention motivations as emotions are what drive or draw us toward a goal. For example, in some activity or life-defining goal we describe our investment as "pursuing our passions." We pursue what we are passionate about. Orthopathy, therefore, gets down into the deep motivational structures of our lives. In the Bible, orthopathy is located in the "heart" and, as Jesus says, it is from the heart where good and evil comes. 

Also, many of the imperatives of the Christian life aren't really behaviors but address our emotions. The arena is internal and affectional. The ask is for orthopathy. Love your enemies. Do not be anxious. Rejoice in the Lord always. Forgive. Such commands address our passions. 

And finally, there is the Augustinian notion that all sin is, in the end, malformed desire, a twisted love. If so, spiritual formation is primarily, to coin a new word, orthopathic, the right ordering of our passions and affections. 

So, if you've never heard of it before, I wanted to set before you this trio. There is orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy. Right belief, right practice, and right passion.

You often hear very earnest Christians proclaim that they love God "more" than anything else in their life. That we have to love God "more" than our spouses, our friends, and our children. And while I understand what I think these people are trying to say, I've always had a worry and concern here.

For example, as newlyweds and young parents, Jana and I once had a conversation with a very devout and earnest couple from church. We were sharing about our spiritual lives and how we wanted God to strengthen our marriages. And at one point in this conversation the couple said, "We don't want our marriage to be good for ourselves, we want our marriage to be good to glorify God." Some spiritually heroic sentiment was being expressed here, but I also found the statement a little weird. Implicit in this couple's vision of marriage was an agonistic relationship between God's glory and our good, an assumption that you could have a marriage that glorified God but wasn't flourishing. 

That's always been my worry with declamations about loving God "more" than others, the assumption that loving God and loving others can come into conflict. The stories here are numerous. Christians behaving hatefully because they love God "more" than their fellow human beings. Fundamentalist parents who control and manipulate their children. And that couple who wanted to glorify God with their marriage? They got bitterly divorced.

The problem I have with the "loving God more" framework is with the word "more." More implies less. For example, should a parent to say to their child "I love God more than you" all the child hears is "I love you less." And again, we can all share stories of how some distorted vision of "loving God more" has ruined families and hurt children, where some parental fever dream of holiness and righteousness came to terrorize a home. In my own extended family we have a story of a family member who got pulled into a fundamentalist, cultish Christian group and have witnessed the familial wreckage of "I love God more" zealotry. 

All that said, from an Augustinian perspective I understand what is attempting to be said with "I love God more." Things of earth can become idols. Loves and desires can become malformed. Thus, all our loves, including our love for our spouses and children, need to be rightly ordered toward God. I understand all this, and agree in principle. But here's my reframe. I don't think the word "more" accomplishes what we are striving for here, because the love of God itself can become its own idol. Exhibit A: The Pharisees in the gospel accounts. Far too often, loving God more means loving people less. Worse, loving God more often leads to hurting people. Our families included.

Rather than "more" I think the word we want here is "better." I don't think God wants us to quantitatively rank our loves from "more" to "less." Rather, God is seeking a qualitative transformation of my loves. For example, the better I love God the better I love Jana. And I think this is what the "I love God more" people are trying, but often failing, to say. That when I love God more and more I love you better and better. Loving God doesn't encroach upon my loving you, it enhances and deepens my love for you. 

All this is hard to put into words, so I'll share what this has looked like as a husband and a father. My love for Jana and my sons can be both selfish and lazy. But because of my love for God my love for my family has been transformed into something sacrificial, self-offering, and Christlike. The more I love God the better I love my family. God doesn't subtract from my loves but transforms them. 

True, to experience this transformation I have to make God my priority. But our loving God must always keep in view this Christological aspect, how loving God "more" means loving you better.

So while I understand what is trying to be said with "I love God more" I think the clearer, safer, and more theologically sound way to say it is: "The more I love God the better I love you."

At the end of the last post I mentioned that I was borrowing from Maximus the Confessor concerning the nature of sin at the first instant. 

The basic idea is linking sensation to desire. When sensation dawns in consciousness desire follows. That desire pulls our loves toward created things and away from God. This, I am arguing, is the primordial fall, recapitulated in every person. Our desires "immediately" tug our loves toward the sensible world, causing us to lose contact with the invisible.

This isn't an exact example, since it has to do with fear rather than desire, but think of Peter walking on the water. The "instant" Peter takes his eyes off Jesus he sinks. I'm arguing that something analogous happens at the first instant of consciousness. Our first "waking" pulls our eyes and desires toward the world and we sink. 

 All this is a speculative way to unpack the metaphysics of Eve's sin:

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. 

First, sensation--"the woman saw"--followed by desire: "pleasing to the eye" and "desirable." In short, before creatures are even aware of what is happening, their senses and desires immediately pull them into the world where they become entangled by ignorance, desire, and fear. 

I've basically taken this idea from Maximus. For example, from Ad Thalassium 61:

When God created human nature, he did not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it; rather, he furnished it with a certain spiritual capacity for pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings would be able to enjoy God ineffably. But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity--the natural desire of the mind for God--on sensible things. In this, his very first movement, he activated an unnatural pleasure through the medium of his senses. 

Beyond being a description of the first sin, the first desire directed away from God, this is also the template for all sin, the very definition of idolatry. At the heart of all sin is misdirected desire, directing our loves toward created things rather than the Creator. And there is a natural psychology at work here, as I describe in The Slavery of Death. In the grip of ignorance, desire, and fear, creatures try to secure their own lives through created realities. As finite creatures, we must to pay attention to food, clothing, and shelter. But as Jesus said, "Humanity does not live by bread alone." This ontological truth is eclipsed by ignorance, desire, and fear which lock into a reinforcing feedback loop. Driven by ignorance, desire, and fear, our appetite for material abundance and our longings for messianic technologies that will rescue us from our finitude grows exponentially. This also curdles into paranoia and hatred toward groups who we feel threaten our resources and survival. We build walls and bombs. 

All this is triggered by a longing to escape our finitude, and it pulls us further and further away from God. In short, in describing the first instant of sin--desire directed away from God and toward the creation--I'm describing the whole pattern of sin. 

"You will tread on the lion and the cobra"

I love Psalm 91, but my relation to it is complex. What I love about Psalm 91 is that is reads almost like an incantation. It borders upon being a spell of protection. I know describing it that way will be triggering for many readers, but it's hard not to see the similarities between Psalm 91 and magic as it was practiced in the ancient world. For example, the caim circle prayers of the Celtic Christians I describe in Hunting Magic Eels. In the caim prayer the person makes a protective circle while invoking the Trinity. In a similar way, there is talisman-like quality to the protection being called upon in Psalm 91:

He himself will rescue you from the bird trap,
from the destructive plague.
He will cover you with his feathers;
you will take refuge under his wings.
His faithfulness will be a protective shield.
You will not fear the terror of the night,
the arrow that flies by day,
the plague that stalks in darkness,
or the pestilence that ravages at noon.
Though a thousand fall at your side
and ten thousand at your right hand,
the pestilence will not reach you.

No harm will come to you;
no plague will come near your tent.
For he will give his angels orders concerning you,
to protect you in all your ways.
They will support you with their hands
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the cobra;
you will trample the young lion and the serpent.

It is precisely this magic in Psalm 91 that the Devil appeals to in his temptation of Jesus. If Jesus threw himself off the temple angels would come to catch him. But Jesus rejects the magical approach, the display of supernatural power. Psalm 91 proves to be deeply relational rather than magical. After the litany of protection, Psalm 91 ends with a change in voice. God steps in to speak:

Because he has his heart set on me,
I will deliver him;
I will protect him because he knows my name.
When he calls out to me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble.
I will rescue him and give him honor.
I will satisfy him with a long life
and show him my salvation.

In the end, what Psalm 91 calls for is trust. Psalm 91 pulls us into a relationship rather than an incantation of power. That is the choice Jesus faces in his temptation. Magical power or trust? And the mystery deepens when we see how Jesus was not satisfied with a long life. And yet, he was rescued, saved, and given honor. Jesus was delivered from from both death and the Devil. As will those who follow him. Jesus did not test the Lord by jumping off the temple. Rather, he surrendered to the Lord. "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." And in that surrender every petition of Psalm 91 was fulfilled and enjoyed. As C.S. Lewis would put it, this is the Deeper Magic.

As I described in the prior post, I had a lot of comments and questions about Maximus the Confessor's notion that creation fell "the instant" of its creation. This, as you know, isn't the typical view. In the Biblical story Adam and Eve spend a season in Paradise, walking with God in the garden. How long this season lasted we don't know. But it presumes some "interval" between creation and fall. How, then, to reconcile this "interval" with falling at the "instant" of creation?

To start, the first thing I'd like to say concerns the degree an interlocutor is reading Genesis 1-3 literally and historically. If one is trying to reconcile Maximus' vision with a literal and historical reading of Genesis then, yes, that would be difficult. But a person holding to a literal and historical reading of Genesis has their own difficulties. In my estimation, they have more significant issues to deal with. All that to say, I won't be attempting to make my view fit a literal, historical reading of Genesis as I think doing so onboards a greater set of problems. 

Let's then turn our attention to theological readings of Genesis. 

What is being asserted in the biblical depiction of Paradise prior to the fall? A few things, but one of the most critical is that evil was not created by God. That's a central Christian claim that the depiction of Paradise is communicating. Creation is primordially good. We "fall" from this prior goodness. 

In short, when it comes to how to treat the sojourn of Paradise in Genesis 1-3 a critical issue, theologically speaking, isn't trying to imagine a historical situation at a geographical location but protecting a theological claim about the primordial goodness of creation and that God did not create evil.

With that clarification some room opens up for speculation, ways to envision creation that protects this central Christian belief.

Now, the pinch comes when we consider the nature of material reality. Given its finite, contingent nature, material reality is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical systems are subject to entropy. Things tend toward disorder. Finite creatures name the effects of entropy as "evil," "natural evil" in theological discussions as "natural evil" is what causes the disintegration and dissolution of life. Basically, entropy implies disease, damage, decay, and death and creatures name these things as "evil."

Hopefully, you can see the tensions here. If physical systems are intrinsically and "naturally" prone to entropy, then if God creates a physical system then a proneness to "evil" is baked into the physical system's makeup. And yet, that's the very notion, "evil" as an inherent property of creation, that Christian creation theology must resist. 

Now, if you're a wild-eyed heretic, you might just bite the bullet here. You might assert that creaturely existence, being finite existence, is inherently prone to death and not due to a "fall." Such a contention would move you toward a more Buddhist view of material existence, where change and impermanence are inherent aspects of our existence and that suffering is caused by willing this change and impermanence to be otherwise. In this view, our relation to finitude should be non-grasping non-attachment. The attraction of this view is that it jibes with a scientific, materialistic vision of the cosmos which views entropy as baked into the equation from the very start. 

But the Christian account of Paradise cuts across this view and contends that entropy and impermanence were not created by God but are, rather, consequences of a primordial "fall." As the Book of Wisdom states:

God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. (Wisdom 1.13-14)

In contrast to an Eastern non-attachment, the Christian posture toward “evil,” therefore, is existential protest and the moral work of repair. The world should be otherwise.

So, God did not create or make death. How, then, to reconcile this belief with the contention that entropy just is a part of physical systems? Let me state this even more sharply. Creaturely existence, being creaturely existence, in inherently finite. And being finite prone to entropy. This is definitional. And yet, the Christian view of creation has to posit something that is seemingly contradictory--a finite creature not prone to entropy. 

Christians resolve the paradox by positing an ontological connection with God. A finite, physical system can fend off entropy if it takes in energy from another source. God is this source. God is like the sun, the source of "outside" energy that allows physical systems on earth to achieve order and structure for a season in the face of entropic decline. In short, finite and physical creatures can persist in the face of entropy as long as their being is connected to God. This union is what we call the primordial Paradise. Created being that is immune to death because it is connected to God. 

When severed from God created being becomes subject to entropy and begins its slide into non-existence. The creature names this slide as "evil." Death was not created by God but death becomes the destiny of created being when it drops away from God and suffers the fate of finitude. 

What causes this drop into finitude? This is a second theological assertion from Genesis 1-3. The ontological connection with God is severed because of human volition. A choice is made "away" from God. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. The tradition describes this primordial sin as ontological pride, a rejection of our radical dependence, trying to stand and exist autonomously from God. And as we've seen, any finite, physical system that tries to exist autonomously from God will suffer the forces of entropy. Thus, the sin of pride brings about the consequences of death. This is why, in the Biblical account, the "fall" is both moral and ontological. Sin and death are two sides of the same coin. 

Now, back to the "timing" of this drop into finitude. We could imagine that the original ontological connection with God persisted for a season, God's life sustaining the physical lives of Adam and Eve. We might even imagine the walls surrounding the Garden of Eden as protecting a finite ecosystem from the encroachments of entropy. Perhaps outside the Garden entropy and evolution were at work, maybe for millions of years. Again, we can try to get all this fitted into a literal and historical reading of Genesis 1-3. But like I said, this seems to me to create more problems than it solves. For my part, I find Maximus' notion of creation falling "the instant" it was created more straightforward and simple. God creates finite existence which is, by definition, intrinsically prone to entropy. Insofar as created existence comes from God it is primordially good and is protected from death due to its connection to God. Creation, however, upon stepping into existence moves away from God. It suffers an "ontological drop" into its creaturely finitude. Entropy begins to erode creaturely being. 

Perhaps a simple, theological way to describe the connection between our "ontological drop" and the onset of time is to deploy a contrast between kairos time and chronos time. When human existence was connected to God we participated in kairos time. Existence in kairos time is called "Paradise." Being linked to God in Paradise we existed outside of chronos time which is directed by the arrow of entropy. Upon the Fall came the onset of entropy and the start of chronos time. 

Deploying this contrast between kairos and chronos time we can say that creation fell "at the first instant" of chronos time since the onset of contingency defines, via entropy, the start of measurable, observable time. Simply, the Fall was the first tick of the clock and everything before that tick existed in the kairos time of Paradise. (Such a view could described as a "meta-historical fall" given that Paradise exists outside of chronos time.)

The advantage of this view, if there is any, is its simplicity and the ease in which it can be reconciled with scientific and historical accounts of the cosmos. From the perspective of science, contingency and entropy "were always there." And we don't need to shoehorn a historical Garden of Eden into the middle of a long cosmological and evolutionary account of the universe. Contingency and time begin together. 

Of course, the problem here is if we assume a serial historical sequence for the creation of the universe, like a Big Bang cosmology. If creation drops into its finitude "at the first tick of the clock" then what human will was present at the time of the Big Bang to effect the fall? If human choice arrived very late in the cosmological sequence what accounts for the presence of entropy at the start of cosmic evolution? 

The first thing to point out is that this same question bedevils literal readings of Genesis, how to account for cosmological and evolutionary history prior to human origins. So this is a general problem, and not just an issue with a Maximus-inspired account of creation. That said, here's my speculation, something I hinted at in my prior "Theology of Everything" Series.

First, if creation exists ex Deo, and is rooted and founded in the Logos, then creation isn't piecemeal but a ontological whole. This seems to be Paul's view in Romans 8. Humanity, in this view, represents the responsive and erotic aspect of creation. That is to say, humans desire God and seek union with God. Humanity is created being longing for the Creator. And given that humans are connected as a whole to God, through the Logos, the entire human race represents the single, interconnected erotic longing of creation for God. This is why my vision implies apokatastasis. Creation comes to God whole, or not at all. No created bit or piece of the Logos is left behind. The Logos doesn't sit half in heaven and half in hell for all eternity. So, humanity comes to God whole, or not at all. Phrased differently, Adam is an ontological whole. Adam is collective humanity. Thus, all of Adam is saved, or not at all. God won't just save bits and pieces of Adam, an arm here or a leg there, but the whole.

I'd add here, to circle back to Romans 8, how Adam includes the whole of creation. Adam is made from adamah. There is an ontological connection, via the Logos (see Col 1.7), between humanity and the cosmos. Adam is, therefore, the whole of created material reality, all of creation, existing ex Deo in the Logos.

Regarding the cosmic timing of humanity's movement away from God, I see this from God's perspective. God's relation to creation is atemporal and not governed by a serial sequence. All of history is present before God. God's creative act is not in the distant past but is, rather, sustaining and ongoing. As the Creator of time, God didn't have to "wait" for humans to fall. God created the whole of space time and in that first instant of creation humanity moved away from the Source of Being dropping the whole of interconnected creation into contingency. From our perspective, this story unfolds in chronos time as a serial sequence, but from God's atemporal kairos-time perspective humanity's fall is simultaneous with every event on the cosmic timeline, its effects rippling both "forward" and "backward" in time. And if all this seems wildly speculative, let me just suggest that a good imagination for science-fiction can help you with some of these theological puzzles. 

A final comment. 

If we aren't imagining Eve eating an apple then what's going on, from a volitional standpoint, with the primordial sin? Again borrowing from Maximus, when creation steps into consciousness with human awareness our first sensations are of the created world. We look upon the world and desire it. Like Eve desiring the apple. In directing our erotic desires toward created being we take our eyes off of the Creator. In that first desire we take a step away from our Source. When that happens, created being becomes shadowed by finitude, which triggers fear. That fear drives the creature further away from God as it seeks to protect and preserve its life from the threat of death. A survival instinct takes hold as the creature tries to secure its own life. A whirlpool of desire and fear drags the creature further and further away from God. I'll share more about this in the next post.

Sin, therefore, is rooted in a delusion, the lie that the creature can sustain itself as a creature. Or that life can be secured though another created things. But finitude cannot save finitude. All creatures tend toward death. There is no escape. Radical autonomy, in the end, is a death wish. 

The creature's only hope is to turn away from created being to reconnect with the Creator. The pride of radical autonomy must be exchanged for the humility of radical dependence. This radical dependence is called "trust" or, more commonly, "faith." Which is why “faith” in God--humble, radical dependence--is salvific for finite creatures.

Back in September I shared a thirteen-part series entitled "A Theology of Everything" which was my attempt to pull a lot of theological threads together concerning creation theology, soteriology, and eschatology. 

Regarding creation theology, I got a lot of questions about one of the ideas I floated. So, I want to return to that series to address some of those questions. 

But before turning to that topic here's a summary of some of the critical ideas from the "Theology of Everything" series:

1. Creation is both ex Deo and ex nihilo, both "from God" and "from nothing." Created ex Deo, the ground of our existence rests upon God. Everything is spiritual. But as creatures our finite being is shadowed by non-being. Creaturely existence, therefore, tends in one of two directions, either toward Being or non-being, toward God or the void. 


2. Borrowing from Maximus the Confessor, at the first instant of creation humanity severed its connection to God. This is experienced by the creature as a moral and ontological catastrophe. Morally, the creature apprehends its moral distance from God and experiences dismay. Our eyes are opened to the knowledge of good and evil and with that awareness comes shame and hiding from God. Moral distance from God is experienced by the creature as "guilt," "wrath," and "judgment." Ontologically, upon separation from God creaturely being begins to drift toward non-being. Death, disease, damage, and decay come to haunt creaturely existence.


3. Anticipating the creature's separation following creation, God provides remedies for the moral and ontological catastrophe suffered by the creature. Morally, pardon is made visible within history in the life and death of Jesus. Assurance of mercy is communicated to the creature. Ontologically, by uniting created being with Being in the hypostatic union, Christ reestablishes ontological connection with God. This ontological connection, made available by the Holy Spirit, allows created being to survive death as demonstrated by the victory of Christ's created flesh over death in his resurrection. 


4. Having made these gifts available, both pardon and Spirit, God calls creatures back to Himself. This journey toward God is both moral and pneumatological. Creatures moving toward non-being, deeper into Sin and Death, are called upon to repent, summoned to "turn around" toward Being and Life. Creatures who persist in rebellion, like the Prodigal Son, journey into the "far country." They walk into the void and suffer the encroachments of non-being, morally and ontologically.  


5. Creatures united with Christ's Spirit will experience transfiguration and resurrection. Just as Christ was raised, so they will be raised to enjoy life incorruptible. Creatures who are not united with Christ's Spirit will experience death as an ontological catastrophe. Non-being will eclipse creaturely being, throwing the creature into darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. But not wishing any of his creation to suffer the fate of non-being, God continues to sustain the creature's existence. Existing ex Deo, the creature's life remains necessarily open to God. Experiencing the pedagogy of death and the outer darkness the creature will, eventually, repent and begin its journey toward God. Apokatastasis, where all created being comes to rest in God, is the completion and fulfillment of God's creative labors. Until then, creation suffers the birth-pangs.

Of these ideas, the one that I've received the most pushback and questions about concerns Maximus' notion that creation fell the first "instant" of creation. As I shared in the original series, on three different occasions in his writings Maximus the Confessor describes how humanity fell the "instant" we were created. Two examples: 

"...our nature unnaturally fell at the instant it was created, thus depleting its whole potential." (Ambiguum, 42) 

"But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity--the natural desire of the mind for God--on sensible things." (Ad Thalassim, 61)

I've been asked about what this might look like or imply for our readings of Genesis. I'll share some speculations about this in the next post.

I've been reading through Augustine's The City of God and was struck by his discussions about the origins of evil.

Specifically, as with all Christian theodicies, Augustine has the puzzle of trying to explain how evil could come from good. That is, if the world was primordially perfect how could it fall? 

In pondering Augustine's answers, my attention came to focus upon the assumption that creates all this difficulty. Specifically, the conviction that the world was created good. This assertion, what some have described as "original blessing", is a bedrock Christian commitment. All the world, and all of us, are fundamentally good. And yet, this is the very conviction that creates what we call "the problem of evil." 

More simply, Christians are wedded to two claims about the world:

1. The world and humanity were created good.
2. Evil exists.

The "problem of evil" is the tension that exists between these two claims. For if you deny either claim the "problem of evil" goes away. This is what causes Augustine fits in The City of God. It would be much easier if Christians could say that evil always existed, that evil is a constitutive part of the cosmos. But that's not what Christians believe. Nor do Christians deny the existence of evil. So we're forced to live in-between these two convictions. 

In short, it's the Christian commitment to "original blessing" that creates the "problem of evil." What's interesting here is how a lot of the Christians who struggle most with the "problem of evil" are the same Christians who embrace and preach "original blessing" over against pessimistic views of both humanity and creation. Original blessing is used to ground both human dignity and creation care. As they should! But many of these same Christians miss how one of their deeply held convictions (original blessing) is implicated in their downstream faith struggles (the problem of evil). 

Like Augustine, we refuse to reject original blessing. Original blessing is one of the most beautiful ideas gifted to us from Genesis, that God looked upon world and saw that it was "good" and that humanity was "very good." But if we rightly embrace original blessing we will inherit its theological implications. So if you're struggling with "the problem of evil", just remember that those struggles flow from a very beautiful religious conviction that isn't worth letting go.

Ever since my encounter with C. Kavin Rowe's book World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age in 2013 I've found found myself returning to its central insights over and over again. World Upside Down is a book that has stayed with me.

Rowe begins his analysis of the book of Acts by noting the political paradox at the heart of the story. On the one hand, toward the end of Acts, Paul is repeatedly dragged before civic and Roman authorities and charged with political subversion and disturbing the peace. And in every instance, the civic and Roman authorities find nothing wrong with Paul. The message seems to be clear: In the eyes of Rome, the Jesus movement is an intramural theological squabble among the Jews that poses no political threat to Rome. Paul's message about Jesus' resurrection is deemed to be politically innocuous. 

And yet, on the other hand, Luke clearly recounts how city after city was thrown into political turmoil as the kingdom advanced. As the gospel moves into contested territory riot after riot breaks out. Clearly, the proclamation that "Jesus is Lord" is far from being politically inert.

So that's the political paradox of the kingdom in the book of Acts. On the one hand, Rome could find nothing politically subversive about the early Jesus movement. And yet, the kingdom turned the Roman world upside down, eventually even replacing it. How to make sense of that?

To get at the source of the civic upheaval caused by the gospel, Rowe works through a series of collisions in the book of Acts, locations where the gospel crashes into pagan culture. To understand these events we need to have a proper understanding of ancient pagan observance. Specifically, the issue wasn't merely about religious observance. Our modern separation between a public, secular sphere and a private, religious sphere was unknown in antiquity. Idolatry was, rather, an entire way of life, the cultural worldview that sat at the foundation of civic life--morally, socially, politically, and economically. Idol worship was the glue that held everything together. Leaving idol worship, therefore, wasn't simply a matter of changing where and how you worshiped. Turning away from pagan idolatry would upend an entire social order, unleashing drastic social, economic, and political consequences. As Rowe states:

The turning away [from idols]...was not simply an epistemological act--"knowing better," as it were. Rather, the removal from pagan religious practices, so Luke tells, was a public act with economic and political consequence...

[In the story of Acts] to follow the Way is to inhabit the world in a manner fundamentally disruptive to the practices inherent to the present religious order. That such a disruption unfolds economically is but a necessary consequence of the inseparability of ancient religion from economics, or, to put it more along Luke's lines, the primacy of the identity of God for a comprehensive pattern of life.

Rowe tracks this collision through the narrative of Acts, with particular attention given to the events in Lystra, Phillipi, Athens, Thessalonica and Ephesus. The events that transpire in Philippi and Ephesus nicely illustrate of the conflation of idolatry and economics. For example, in Acts 16 Paul performs an exorcism on a slave girl who is a soothsayer. Upon learning of the exorcism, the owners of the slave girl are thrown into a rage:

When the owners of the slave girl realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.”

Another example of this idolatry/economics conflation comes from the riot that breaks out in Ephesus in Acts 19. Magic was big business in Ephesus. Spells, charms, amulets, statues, totems and magic scrolls were used for almost everything--from blessing a business venture to healing disease. But as the Jesus movement established itself in the city the following happened:

When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear, and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor. Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed what they had done. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas. In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power. 

A contemporary fiscal estimate of the value of 50,000 drachmas can only be guessed at. But the economic impact was large enough to agitate the local economy, eventually leading to another riot.  

Such disruptions caught the attention of the Roman authorities. And at the heart of the Jesus movement there was a potentially seditious claim being made. As recounted in Acts 17, this was the accusation being leveled at the church: 

“These men who have turned the world upside down...they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” 

Acting against the degrees of Caesar and proclaiming another king would have been worrying to the Empire. Especially given the rioting in multiple cities. And yet, despite all this damning evidence, Luke also portrays the officials of Imperial Rome vindicating the followers of "King Jesus." 

Again, that's a strange paradox. According to Rowe, the answer to this puzzle is that Luke is crafting his narrative to ward off accusations that Christians, in claiming Jesus to be King, were violent insurrectionists. Yes, the gospel was socially, economically and politically disruptive--it turns the world upside down--but the followers of King Jesus were not calling for the violent overthrow of the Roman government. Given all the rioting caused by the gospel, Luke was worried, according to Rowe, that Imperial Rome would get the wrong idea about what the Christians were up to. So Luke presents a narrative where Christians, though proclaiming loyalty to King Jesus, were non-violent. At the same time, and this is the balancing act, Luke doesn't want to portray the gospel as culturally, politically, and economically innocuous. For the gospel was, in fact, highly disruptive. Here's Rowe summarizing this argument:

[T]he Christian mission as narrated by Luke is not a counter-state. It does not, that is, seek to replace Rome, or to "take back" Palestine, Asia, or Achaia. To the contrary, such a construal of Christian politics is resolutely and repeatedly rejected...

Basic, then, to Luke's portrayal of the state vis-à-vis the Christian mission is a narratively complex negotiation between the reality of the state's idolatry and blindness--its satanic power--and the necessity that the mission of light not be misunderstood as sedition.

Luke threads a needle to portray a non-seditious social upheaval. The revolution the church embodied eschewed the bloody path of political revolution to detonate a explosion at the civilizational foundation of Roman culture. Ignoring the political power of the empire, the early Christians interrupted the sacred order of Roman civilization. And that attack, upon the practices of worship of Roman culture, proved to be deadly and decisive. Rome would not survive. 

So that's Rowe's analysis of the book of Acts, and the reason I keep coming back to it is that, to my mind, the witness of the early church sets before us a vision of cultural influence. More and more, it seems to me, Christians on both the political right and left are obsessed with political power. Instead of converting others to the non-violent way of King Jesus the goal is to win elections to coerce compliance via the power of the state. That's been the shift, from conversions to elections. And by "conversion" I mean turning away from the idolatry at the heart of American culture, an idolatry that has come to possess American Christianity as well. Here's a simple test: The degree to which you place your hope in elections, as measured by your worry and dismay over electoral losses, is the degree to which you are beholden to false gods.  

And yet, to suggest that Christians eschew the coercive use of political power is to invite charges of moral and social irresponsibility. To turn your back on politics is to turn your back on your neighbor, a failure of love. Against this accusation all I can do is point to the witness of the early church in the book of Acts. Their apathy toward the state did not translate into abandoning their neighbors. What they did was neither irresponsible or ineffectual. 

In proclaiming King Jesus, the early Christians turned the world upside down. 

"Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

Psalm 90 is one of my favorite Psalms. I'm a very existential person and I think about death a lot. I've jokingly referred to my first three books--Unclean, The Authenticity of Faith, and The Slavery of Death--as my Death Trilogy. (Readers be warned, these books were written for scholarly, academic audiences before my books turned to popular, general audiences.) Existential topics and the predicament of death is a dominant theme in my Death Trilogy, most obviously so in The Slavery of Death where I bring existential psychology into conversation with Eastern Orthodox theology in naming death, rather than sin, as the central human predicament. 

Given my preoccupation with death, my fondness for Psalm 90 shouldn't be surprising. Psalm 90 is a meditation upon the brevity of life:

You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.

You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.

For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.

For all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Returning to dust we are soon gone and fly away.

If you're not existentially inclined you might read such lines and think, "Goodness, who could enjoy such morbid reflections?" For myself, I wouldn't say I "enjoy" such reflections. What I experience in Psalm 90 is a deepening sense of poignant preciousness. That's the best I can describe it. Each breath and heartbeat intensifies in profundity and significance. Time slows for me and I sink into the moment. I become alert to time and that wakefulness makes me want to savor its passing and live with keener attention. In this attentive posture time cannot slip by me, for I am alive, alert, attentive, and aware. My heart becomes a net in which moments are caught.

This is what I believe Psalm 90 means by "numbering our days." Attend to each day in its finite and fleeting particularity. Such attention to time creates "a heart of wisdom." I think this is what Ecclesiastes means when it says:

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.

Or, as the NLT renders it:

Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies—so the living should take this to heart.

I'll confess, I'd rather walk a cemetery than go to a party. I'm weird that way. And while I don't know if this tendency of mine has made me any wiser, it has allowed me to live at a spiritual depth of perception that has made me treasure every season, year, day, and second of my life. 

No day passes that I do not notice and number.

In doing a little bit of online research into some Greek words in the New Testament, I stumbled upon a connection I wanted to share concerning the word group around the Greek root χαρ- (char).

The base meaning of "char" implies something that brings joy or delight. Like a gift. Consequently, the Greek word for grace--charis--employs this root.

Relatedly, if you receive this gift then you experience joy. So, the Greek word for joy--chara--also comes from this same root. Basically, grace and joy are two sides of the same coin, the giving and receiving of delight. 

The connection goes on. The Greek word for thanksgiving--eucharistia--also comes from the same Greek root. The gift prompts joy which prompts thanksgiving, expressing our gratitude for the gift. 

And one more connection.

The Greek word for giving--charizomai-- comes from the same root. Charizomai is also translated as "forgiveness." This should make sense, as I can give gifts and extend grace to others.

Stepping back, what we have here, etymologically speaking, is a circle of grace. Grace prompting joy, joy prompting thanksgiving, and thanksgiving prompting giving and forgiving. The Greek root "char"--delight--threads through it all. And not just linked etymologically, as I recount in The Shape of Joy these connections thread through the empirical research on positive psychology as well. 

Grace, joy, gratitude, giving, and forgiving.

A cascade of delight.