Mercy “caused” us to be born again through resurrection (1:3). Born again into an inheritance (imperishable, undefiled, unfading), and “kept in heaven for you” (1:5), guarded and ready to be revealed.
1 Peter 1:1-5

This is the same powerful language of adoption that we find in so much of Paul’s own writings, and fleshed out here in the light of Peter’s own experience with the living Christ (being an eye witness of Christ’s Resurrection victory of the Powers of Darkness 2 Peter 1:16-19). I have long loved the picture that this verse in the letter of 1 Peter creates of our inheritance being “kept” in Heaven. It evokes the idea of Jesus praying for us (Hebrews 7:25; Romans 8:24) as he “guards” the truth of our identity in this already-not yet reality that we find ourself within. It’s hopeful, although in a slightly different way for me than the heavily modern “Calvinist” approaches that have held it hostage (within systematic theologies).  For me it evokes this wonderful notion that within our doubts, our questions, our wondering and our struggles, there is something to anticipate, something that is and will be revealed to us in its fullness. 

1 Peter in Context and Concern
1 Peter is addressed to dispersed Christians in Asia-Minor to places immersed in Greco-Roman culture. Further though, it is addressed to “Gentile” Christians (“elect exiles”) as a means of establishing the truth of their (our) adoption from within the grander narrative of God’s story. Christ’s saving work in their lives becomes a witness to the Spirit of Christ which was present “in the beginning” with the “prophets” (1:11), already bearing witness to God’s work in the Cross within the world of the Gentile believers. This is reminiscent of 1 John’s declarative opening statement, “in the beginning”, an understanding Peter uses to bring us back to Christ as the “living stone” (1 Peter 2:4).

These two ideas form the focus and interest of 1st and 2nd Peter, locating Christ’s saving work in the life of the world through the lives of these Gentile believers, and through their lives then building a case for adoption as a working metaphor for how salvation must work.

Adoption and God’s Forming Work 
As we move through the first chapter of 1st Peter, having established that God’s saving work is indeed alive and true in the lives of the Gentile Believers (mercy caused them to be “born again” 1:3), Peter turns his attention to then bearing this witness out over and against their current reality.

Here we find the first of a series of metaphorical depictions of a “forming” faith, that same faith that has not yet been fully revealed and which remains bound in our wonderings and our questions. Faith here is like “gold” that is being formed out of the “testing” ground that is our experiences within the not yet reality of this world. Our experiences point us to a greater hope. This idea is declarative rather than prodding. It is a hopeful precedent, that although this world throws our faith into question, this faith endures on our behalf. There is also a secondary part to this declaration, in that while we do not yet see (our redemption) clearly, our experiences in the here and now, amidst the Darkness of this world, can begin to reveal this faith (hope) to us in very real ways. This is what it means to be “faithful.”

This is why Peter can move to say “therefore” (because of this) set your hope on these small graces by conducting yourselves in the Way of your salvation. It is all about seeing this bigger picture of our faith being “kept” for a time in which this world, in all of its darkness, struggle and injustice, will once again be made right.

For Peter, the hope of this grace comes from a “Father” (anchored in this adoption language) who “judges impartially”. The point of this is both positive (reforming) and clear (practical) in how it aims to lift up God’s saving work within the life of the “gentiles”. And it has a connective and establishing feature that is moving God’s saving work further and further out into the world. “Because” the Father judges impartially (equally), they can then live out their faith with (appropriate) “fear” (freedom) (1:17), and in living this out bear the knowledge of Christ’s saving work (making what is wrong right) both in their lives and in the world.

This is similar to the argument about knowledge that we find in 1 John, where knowledge is a gift, not something that is earned. Knowledge is an outflow of our conduct, but it is knowledge of a truth that precedes our conduct. And equally so for Peter (as it is for John), this knowledge stands on the simple truth that without Christ all we have to stand on in our struggle, in the injustice and partiality of this world, is the reigning witness of Darkness and Death. This is why, as Peter comes back to in 1:21, Christ was present at the beginning in the declaration of the Prophets making us (out of mercy) “born again” (adopted) as children of God. This is the hope of a world being made new.

Adopted in and for the Spirit of Love
It is this same spirit that then establishes that the point of this attention to “conduct” is so that their “souls” can be purified for the sake of “love” (1:22), which becomes the reigning and affirmative picture that carries us through the remaining chapters. “So then”, as chapter 2 begins, “because” of this love (Peter likes these connective pictures and arguments), and for the sake of this love, put away all manners of conduct which are  not loving (malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander), all of which are the enemies of fellowship (which he shares with the letters of John as the thing that bears witness to to the light and life of the world, Christ).

Adoption in The Metaphor of Mother and Child, Christ as the Living Stone, and the Nature of God’s Love 
Here we now get the second metaphor for the working out of their adoption (God’s saving work), moving from the picture of forming gold to the picture of a child weaning on its mother’s milk (2:1-3). This metaphor takes the forming of the gold and sets it into an intimate picture of what it means to be a “child of God” in relationship to God. What a wonderful, and richly feminine, picture, one that will become important for unpacking chapter 3.

The intimacy of this metaphor opens us up to one of the most recognizable passages in 1 Peter, mother and child being set within the larger metaphor of a “spiritual house” (2:4). The mother translates through the “living stone”, which opens up this picture of God’s saving work in the light of this reigning already-not yet reality even wider. What will be revealed to us, what is being “kept”, is our lives as a “spiritual house”, one built by the “living stone” (Christ).

This is so massively important for moving into chapter 3 as good readers of scripture, those notorious verses that have been used to underscore the paradigm through which we arrive at this all to prevalent male-female divide (with the male as the head of the house and the wife in submission). In the analogy of the living stone, Christ is established in His work on the Cross, the means through which he is building this “house” that is our salvation (His saving work). With this as the central paradigm through which we are to see both God’s “adoption” and God’s adoption of the “Gentiles”, this then reaches out into the picture of the Christian life as a witness to God’s saving work as one that is anchored in faith, hope and love. This is what the language of the “living stone” as a stumbling block is meant to evoke, is the upside down nature of the Cross as one that calls us in its mercy towards a life of servanthood rather than distinction. This is the impartiality language at play and in context.

The reason the living stone is a stumbling block is because of the way it extends Christ’s salvation out into the world, without distinction and without regard for one’s conduct as the source of our saving work. Set within this Jewish-Gentile context, the election of the Gentile Believers and the declaration of them as a ‘chosen race” (distinct Jewish language) is paired with the declaration that God’s light is bearing witness in them for the sake of the world. This carries a sweeping force that works to dismantle their (and our) expectations, thus setting them apart, according to the virtues of the Cross (faith, hope, and love) in ways that stand antithetical to the world (in its Greco-Roman context and within the honor-shame systems that they are being pulled out of in their adoption).

Adoption and Servanthood
It is from this perspective that we can then understand the motivation behind the following verses and chapters, beginning with the call to be “subject to every human institution”, so that “by doing good you should put to silence” ignorance (2:15). Live as “free” people (in Christ), not using their adoption as a cover up for evil (matters with are antithetical to fellowship), but rather be “servants” (2:16-17).

The word servant feels like an affront to our senses of course, and yet this is the work of Christ on the Cross. It feels backwards, its challenging, it is even offensive. It’s “foolishness” when set in the ways of the world. This is even the case when seeing it through our modern lens (maybe even more so). The way to liberate oppression, be it racism, feminism, or any number of social issues, is not found in the Way of the servant, but rather in the raising of our rights as a means of counteracting discrimination (which follows in line with the indiscriminate judge that we find in Peter). And yet, the point Peter continues to make here is that if we see freedom exclusively in this light, a light that holds a shared dependence on the idea of the indiscriminate judge (equality), we will inevitably find ourselves bound to the same kind of honor-shame systems that governed the Greco-Roman world, one based on the aquisition of our rights as the way to liberation and one raises up new discriminatory lines in its place. Rather, the Way of Christ is one in which we are called to give up our rights for the sake of the world. We lower ourselves so that others might be raised up. We give of ourselves so that others can have. This is different than the raising up of our (equal) rights for sake of liberation. It is the only way we can truly arrive at a place that is indiscriminate in nature..

For the Gentiles to be considered equal to the Jews, this was not about declaring themselves to hold equal rights and deserving of God’s saving work. If it depended on this they would already be declared condemned by the nature of the Jewish inheritance under the “law”. Not only would they be condemned by it, but they would be left with a salvation that must, by nature, raise them above the world in which they exist as well, limiting the sweeping force of God’s saving work. What Christ does is pull us out of this narrative and set us into the light of the Cross as our foundational image, our building force.

Human Institutions, Wives and Submissiom: The Real Work of Redemption

Peter’s call to serve “human institutions” then flows out into the call of wives to serve their husbands, and the call of husbands to honor their wives. The flow of this verse is personal rather than descriptive. We see it pulling in the direction of 3:7, framed by the idea that wives are “heirs with you” (equal), and pushed by the narrative interest that precedes it, the case that Peter has been building (out of the grace and freedom found in the indiscriminate judge). The motivation for this personal admonition is at once particular (this is their reality and the reality of the world they lived in, entrenched in Patriarchal society and Greco-Roman ideals), and similtaneously forming (that this world is being made right). It is both judging (what is wrong) and saving (what is being made right), with the concern for the particular being the unity of Christ (fellowship) wrapped up in love as its guiding nature. It gives emphasis to the idea that we do not “repay evil with evil”, rather we work to demonstrate the Way of Christ as the greater way (that of the humble servant). It is by living into this “conduct” that Christ then becomes revealed as a light for the world, the thing that can defeat the Powers of Sin and Death (all the manners of injustice and partiality) and restore life to our particular contexts.

To be clear, this admonition does not come as an endorsement of the abuses these verses have led to in many Christian circles. In context, I believe these verses are concerned with drawing out the dangers of inequality. It carries a concern for the resistance of these worldly “institutions.” To be set apart from it. But if is a resistance that sees outwardly regardless of our position, one shaped by the power of witness over restitution, and one that desires to bring freedom and change from within. One that moves forward in the grace of God as the indiscriminate judge. It is a kind of resistance that takes a formative position with an outward focus, one that sees our adoption (the claim that we are free and that our situation is being made right) as a freedom “for the world:. Its meant to give hope in hopeless and oppressive situations, not to leave us stuck in it or willingly submitted to it. This is what it is for our kept salvation to breathe into our particulars, whatever that might be.

This all becomes even more poignant in Peters setting of Christ’s work on the Cross into the wider picture that lays claim to the salvation of the Gentiles. Peterson says that on the Cross Christ preached to the “spirits in prison”, those who were judged in the flesh in the days of Noah, so that they might find life in the Spirit. It sees the flood narrative in the light of “baptism”, which is the lens through which the metaphors of the gold, the mothers milk are then placed as an appeal, not of “the removal of dirt” but as a declaration of who we already are in Christ, a declaration which comes in the same spirit that formed the prophetic ministry of old. This is Christ’s work of righteousness (one who is not under the Power of Sin and Death) for the unrighteous (the created world which is under the Power of Sin and Death). (3:18)

Good Conduct and A Witness to the Light, and the Knowlege that Forms Us

Therefore, Peter exhorts using the same connective language at the start of chapter 4, “because” of this we are to think in a ‘similar way” as a servant, for what is not right does not determine our movement from death to life. What is yet to be revealed does. This is what our conduct bears witness to, otherwise why suffer the humiliation of a servant for the sake of the world if we are simply going to align ourselves with all manners of conduct that is antithetical to this fellowship? When we do so (live opposed to the proclamation that we have been made new) we are simply demonstrating that the world is still under the power of Sin and Death (the adversary being the Devil 5:8). The point of the (impartial) judgment of the household of God is so that the world may find righteousness (what is wrong being made right) 4:17,18, see that the Powers of Sin and Death have been defeated and that this world has been placed under the light and in life. Therefore “entrust your souls to a faithful creator while doing good” (conduct), trusting that God is restoring, confirming, strengthening and establishing us as “spiritual houses” in order to bear witness to the light (Christ).

This is the nature of the knowledge that Peter understands in his second letter. What we know in Christ is the work that God is doing through the “living stone”, brick by brick, the promise being that “we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” (2 Peter 3:13) Therefore, patience is required. Patience, as Peter’s first letter has established, is necessary (2 Peter 3:9). Indeed, patience is counted “as” salvation as we entrust the process to God. But we do so with God’s sweeping view in mind. What is happening to the whole of creation is what is happening to the gold that describes our own sanctifying work (3:10). And the Cross gives us a way into the world according to the impartial judge, not by way of our rights but by way of the servant. This is how the light shines in the face of Evil.

In the meantime, this knowledge affords us Power over Sin and Death, over the Darkness. The great supplementation phrase here essentially declares this- faith leads to virtue, leads to knowledge, leads to self control, leads to steadfastness, leads to godliness, leads to fellowship, leads to love, with love ultimately depending on the presence of faith for its expression in “fellowship” with one another.

By entering into this flow, the flow of God’s movement from Heaven to Earth that has been apparent not only from the time of the Prophets to Christ but through all of history, we bear witness to the light of Christ, and we are also reminded of this great proclamation ourselves. What we see in the stories of the angels, noah, sodom, and all of the ancient narrative that upholds the Jewish narrative through which God has been seen making Himself known to the world, is being made right. This is the truth that the Gentiles hold, and it is the truth that we can still lay claim to today as adopted sons and daughters of God.

One thing we know about the letters of John with a fair degree of certainty is that someone named John wrote them. Yes, this sounds obvious and even a bit contrived. It is called 1st, 2nd and 3rd John after all.

But bear with me for a moment, because this is not necessarily the case when it comes to a number of the New Testament writings. Names can be ambiguous, at times applied post-script, and often arrive with varying degrees of attachment and detachment from the proposed author in question (could be a product of one’s followers, for example).

The absence of certainty in authorship can make it somewhat harder to place the writing in its proper context. Thus, there is some significance to saying that good evidence seems to suggest that the letter of John was written by a person named John, and that what we have are the straightforward, uncomplicated words of a single individual. The authorship makes it easier to find and unearth that context.

This confidence in authorship can also help us see these letters as the product of a Church leader (“elder statesman”) who was part of a movement away from Jerusalem (before it’s destruction) towards ministry somewhere around Ephesus, which can easily (then) connect us with the teachings of Paul and the book of Revelation that connect to this area.

Finally, understanding the context for the letters of John can help us in unpacking its central themes- schism (division within the Church), fellowship (with fellow believers), love (as the great forming and liberating force), and knowledge (which connects us to encroaching “gnosticism” as the source of the schism). For John, these four things come together as a way of speaking to the “confidence” we can have in Christs’ work on the cross to move us from darkness to light, death to life.

Knowledge, Gnosticism, and John’s Connection to Paul
One of the things you will notice about the letter of 1 John (and the subsequent 2 letters) is the prominence of this word, knowledge. The Greek word for knowledge is “gnosis”, out of which we get the word “gnosticism”, and is the mostly likely word John would have had in mind when writing his letters. Before diving into the letter itself, I thought what might be helpful is touching briefly on Fleming Rutledge’s (since I just finished reading her book, The Crucifixion: Making Sense of the Death of Jesus) description of gnosticism, and gnostic teaching, as the great division that touched the New Testament world as it fleshed out its understanding of Christ and the Cross. This can help us as readers to make sense of the division John is speaking to in more specific ways as he admonishes us towards greater “fellowship” within the Church.

Fleming writes, “Gnosticism in its numerous and various forms has always been far and away the most pervasive and popular rival to Christianity- particularly in connection to the theologia crucis (theology of the Cross). This was so in the New Testament times, and remains so today.” (Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding Jesus’ Death, p45)

She goes on to say, “All the various forms of gnosticism are grounded in the belief that privileged spiritual knowledge is the way of salvation.” They are “mystery-mongers”. They “claim to know things that other people don’t know.”

Now here is what it interesting for the purposes of engaging the Letters of 1st, 2nd and 3rd John. Rutledge, who spends a good deal of time with Paul in her book (the Pauline writings reflects our earliest access to the ministry of Jesus) quotes from his letter to the Corinthians in underscoring the problem of gnosticism in the New Testament world. Paul “hopes to win them (the fellowship of believers) back to his message of God’s subversive plan to make foolish the wisdom of the world“, writing that “Knowledge (gnosis) puffs up, but love builds up.” and “If one loves God, one is known by him” (1 Cor. 8:1-13), which she recognizes “flips our focus from our knowledge of God to God’s knowledge of us.”

If one keeps this in mind when reading the letters of John, it would be impossible then not to see a deep and unifying connection between the teachings of Paul, who was equally concerned with knowledge (gnosticism) and the admonitions of John. Knowledge, fellowship, and love take precedence here in John’s first letter, with a deep desire to reframe “knowledge” as a given confidence rather than an earned confidence.

Light and Dark, Death and Life
As John opens his letter we encounter very early on some of the dominant language that will encompass his focus on knowledge, love, fellowship and schism- these competing forces of light and dark, death and life (1:5). If you notice the letter’s opening (That which was from the beginning…), you will begin to understand why scholarship has tended to associate these letters with the assumed Gospel writer of the same name. The language of light and dark and death and life as competing forces is a shared distinctive, with the Gospel of John leading us back to the beginning of “creation” and the letter of John leading us back to “Christ” as the beginning (a word that connects 1John 1:1 with 3:11, a powerful exposition of the Cain and Able story that then connects light and dark to death and life (3:11-15), allowing him to locate Sin within this narrative idea as the competing Powers that lead us towards schism or fellowship).

Further underscoring the picture of these competing forces, in Chapter one John sets out a working argument that is going to carry us through all three of his letters- the lie and the truth, with the idea being that if we have fellowship with one another we then have fellowship with Christ. This is why the Darkness is so interested in separating us from one another, because without Christ all we have is Death. This is also why 1:6 then declares that “God is light”, the competing Power to the darkness. And the schism begins with understanding the relationship between the lie and the truth that, by their very nature sets us under either darkness or light (life or death).

The lie is this- if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie… (1:6).
The truth is this- if we walk in the light, as he is the light, we have FELLOWSHIP with one another and (thus) the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. (1:7)

So here we have these dueling pictures- walking in the light or walking in the dark, with fellowship (and thus schism) the means or the maker through which we can know whether we are standing in the light or in the dark.

Sounds simple and clear enough.

Except John doesn’t stop there. In 1:8-10 we find a curious flip from the lie in 1:6, with John now connecting the schism to Sin, further expounding on the notion of the Power of the lie by suggesting that “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1:9) Further yet, “if we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us (the word being Christ).”

Thus begins this tension filled ride through Johns letter. If we walk in the darkness (Sin) and say we are in the light (Christ), we lie. And yet, if we also say we have no sin (Darkness), we lie and the light (Christ) is not in us. THANKS A LOT JOHN!!

I mentioned that connective piece between 1:1 and 3:11 earlier in this post (“from the beginning”). It is worthwhile revisiting the lead up to that bookmark (if you will) between passage, as it underscores this tension that John creates (intentionally so, I believe).

1 John 3:6-10 English Standard Version (ESV)
6 No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. ⁷ Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. ⁸ Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. ⁹ No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God. ¹⁰ By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”

Working our way backwards through this verse, we find that once again that fellowship is the means by which righteousness (which shares a root meaning and source word with “justification”, which is the idea of “making right what is wrong”) is achieved, and thus becomes that which distinguishes between the lie and the truth. The passage then (working backwards) positions us within the larger and necessary narrative to which Sin belongs- the works of the devil. This is why Christ came and died, setting up the declaration “from the beginning” as a proclamation. 

The Proclamation of Our Confidence in Christ
This phrase, “from the beginning” is what opens us up in 3:11 to John’s proclamation of what is, as he wants to show what our CONFIDENCE is. On the Cross Christ defeated the Power of Sin and Death, the defining marks of the Darkness. In this sense, John’s declaration, and the way he gives us into the tension he creates (intentionally) is not by works but through faith. Sin is more accurately understood here as a state of being rather than a moral action.

Another way to say this would be to ask, what do we have if we live without fellowship- death and darkness. That is what remains. What do we have if we live in fellowship? Light and life. Because that is what Christ has given to us in defeating the Devil (the Powers of Sin and Death). This is the confidence that we can have over and against the tension that John creates. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” (3:16) This is similar to what John is saying in 1:9 “If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” This confession comes with the confidence of God’s faithfulness to make things right both within us and in the world.

But the tension carries another notable force, because our confession also reminds us that God’s faithfulness rests on the idea that we, all of us, are under the Power of Sin and Death. This is why the Cross carries power to heal the divide that exists between Light and Dark, Life and Death. In 1 John 2:1-2, John says that God, in Christ, is for all. The whole world. This effectively erases the line between the godly and ungodly from which the above tension forms, thus affording us the confidence that comes in Christ. “By this we may know that we are in him, whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way he walked.” (2:6).

Here we come back to that idea of Sin as a state of being rather than an action. The truth that Christ has defeated the Power of Sin and Death precedes us, it is not contingent on whether we are walking in the light or the dark. The crux of John’s argument in the first three chapters (and the whole of the book) is to expose this truth as parallel to the confidence we have and the confidence we gain through “fellowship”. We have confidence through fellowship because Christ has brought light and life to the whole world. “The Darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining”, even if we can’t yet see it clearly. (2:9) This is the grand proclamation. We are no longer under the Power of Sin and Death (2:13), and for this reason we can have fellowship with one another. It is for this reason we can have confidence, and thus know (leading to a series of confidence sayings in 2:12-14 that connect around the phrase “you know”) that we have hope. Our hope comes because although the world passes away, Jesus is forever (2:15), therefore to love the world is to stand in Darkness without hope.

A Different Kind of Knowledge
In 2:18, John talks about the schism that gnosticism has created (which most notably is a schism it sees in Christ Himself), bringing it back to the competing lie-truth paradigm of chapter 1. He brings to our awareness these competing forms of knowledge for the purpose of proclaiming our confidence (hope) in his (Christs) righteousness (making right again, or in 3:3, the truth that what is not yet will be). “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called Children of God.” (3:1) And so we are a child of God. We have been adopted into God’s family and made to be foreigners in this world. This is what light and life does in the grand narrative that we see expressed in 3:1-10 (of the Powers of Death and Life).

At the same time John continues to bring this distinctive of being the children of God back into the idea of fellowship as that which marks us as in the dark or in the light. Righteousness=fellowship (3:10), with righteousness being fellowship that is expressed in love (3:11-24). Our confidence in Christ’s love (his fellowship with us, and thus his giving of life and light) emerges from our love for one another. This is the picture of freedom that John desires us to embrace. This is where the great tension that John has laid out really comes to fruition. “By this we shall know that w are of the truth and reassure our hearts before him. For whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. Beloved…” (19-20)

Everything hinges on this statement. To arrive at 3:21, which gives us a picture of a heart standing uncondemned (in confidence) “by” our walking in the light, “by” believing in what Christ has done (3:23), we must go through verses 19,20.

And yet what John offers is a different kind of knowledge (confidence) than that of the gnostics. His is not a knowledge gained, it is a knowledge given. It is not knowledge that uplifts us, it is knowledge that uplifts others. It is not knowledge that sets one over the other, it is a knowledge that lowers us down for the sake of the other.

The Tension and the Resolution: The Fellowship of Love
Here is one of the challenges in reading John. We like things to be defined. We like hard and fast descriptions of what we must do to see ourselves in the light and to know that we are not in the darkness. This is what it is to be human. Johns working tension doesn’t allow us to do this. In fact, by trying to do this we are essentially setting ourselves under the darkness. The reason for Christ’s propitiation  (2:2; 4:10), an important word to understand in its usage since it often gets confused with “expiation” (One means to take from, to expirate, or “take” our sins, the other means to give to, to propriate, to give “for” or “to” us), is to give us life and light. And 1 John’s final chapter (5), which states that in Christ we have overcome the world (of Darkness and Death) as “children of God” so that we “may know” the truth of light and life, this becomes the key focus of the repeated word “commandment”, a word deeply tied to our notions of law, law keeping and works. Keep his commandments “for” (the given statement of propitiation) “everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world.” (5:4). The temptation here is to dial back on using this to help us solve that original tension. How do we know we are in the light or in the dark? By following His commandments. John stops us in our tracks by saying (but) “this is the victory that has overcome the world- our faith” (5:4), the belief that “Jesus is the Son of God”, not our following of the commandment. The following of commandments acts as signpost to help us see this truth.

Love of others (fellowship)=Love of God (fellowship)=confidence (knowledge) becomes the reigning paradigm in 1 John 4 (4:7-21). Love is perfected in us (4:17) why? So that we can have confidence in love to reveal to us the light and life that holds us in its hands (no fear in love 4:18). This is the truth that the 3 witnesses of 5:6-12, Spirit, water, and blood, testify to and agree on (in fellowship). The truth is that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one (5:19), and for this reason we must find fellowship with one another in the witness of life and light through LOVE. Once again John is speaking of a repositioning rather than an action. Fellowship repositions us so that we can likewise bear witness to this knowledge, and this knowledge comes for the sake of reconciling the truth that the whole world, us included, stands in darkness.

From Tension to Tension: The Sin that Leads to Death
How fitting then that John both ends and begins his first letter by presenting us with a great source of tension. In one of the most difficult verses in the letter, following John’s exposition on love and fellowship in chapters 4 and 5, we encounter this verse. “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will give him life- to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death.”

Wait, what did you just say John? I thought we had deal with this!?
And maybe the main point here is that it is human nature to always be contention with this tension. That is what Jesus is doing in the Cross, is working out this tension in our lives.

So after all this talk about our confidence, we get this weird and seemingly convoluted statement that once again seems to suggest our “actions” as the determining factor for being either in the darkness or the light, of incurring death or life. It’s a verse that has had both scholars and laypeople, Christians and non-Christians puzzled for centuries. Everyone wants to know (surprise, surprise), what is this sin that leads to death!?

I think seeing Johns letter in context though can help make some sense out of this phrase, especially if we set it within the same tension that John raises earlier. First, the most important thing to recognize is John’s use of the word “Sin”, which evokes the Greek sense (same as Paul) of Powers (of Sin and Death) rather than moral action. In this sense, death is a reality. It is a state. Without Christ it is what we are left with.

Second, the point of this verse is directly interested in John’s discussion of schism, fellowship, knowledge (confidence) and love which precedes it. If we see this verse through this lens we can also then see it in the light of the “fellowship of believers” to whom John is speaking to. Here he is again distinguishing in an affirmative and life giving way the difference between the truth and the lie. This is why he (I think) accompanies this verse with the idea of praying for (sins that don’t lead to death) and not praying for (sins that do lead to death). The emphasis here is on the sin of fellowship (or schism) that has followed John’s letter throughout. Therefore, it only stands to bear that “all wrongdoing” is capital letter Sin (The Powers of Sin and Death) which John has already established we all, the whole world, are under, but that there is a functioning community (children of God)  who are still “with sin” (the lack of fellowship) that do operate within (or an awareness of) the Light and life (the Power of the Christ).

The point of the verse then becomes this. If the proclamation that Christ has defeated the Powers of Sin and Death is not true, as the schism continues to bear witness to, prayer has no power because all we then have is death and darkness. If it is true, then prayer has power to move us from sin (lack of fellowship) to fellowship (love).

This is why John comes immediately back to this statement as a way of underlining this verse. “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” (But) The son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.” (5:19-10) Christ is for all, all are under the Power of Sin and Death (and thus located as sinners), and the reason for our fellowship (with one another, and therefore Christ) is to bear witness of His work (the defeating of the Powers of Darkness) to the world.

A powerful admonition indeed.

 

 

 

One of the most important sections of scripture for me growing up, and my favorite letter, was Philippians 2:1-11:

Christ’s Example of Humility
So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

There was always something so extremely compelling to me and hard to grasp about Christ’s approach to humility. It felt displaced, counter-intuitive, and often less than rational when placed within or outside of our religious circles.

And yet it is also the place where I found a good deal of hope. The call to find encouragement in humility is formed against the opening admonition of 1:7-8, where Paul speaks of his audience as “partakers with me of grace” from both a position of “imprisonment” and “proclamation”. And what is the proclamation? The proclamation is Christ, and that in Him a “good work in you will” be brought to “completion at the Day of Christ.” (1:6). Paul’s prayer then is that this good work is expressed in a love (vs.9) that grows, and grows, and grows with “knowledge and discernment” of the work Christ is doing within us. And what is this work? The work is the “fruit of righteousness” (vs 11), a term that is synonymous with the word “justification” in that it speaks of what is still yet incomplete will be “made right” and “just”.

What Paul then exudes in 1:12-19 is that in our hopelessness we can know the hope that is Christ’s work, a work being driven by “love” (1:16) and centred around the proclamation of Christ as the one who is making what is wrong right.

The problem that Paul points out is the ways in which some are proclaiming this work in their lives, not out of humility but out of “envy” and “rivalry”. To live is Christ and to die is to “gain” Christ. And yet as we live, we live for the love of others. (1:24), the kind of love that finds “one mind, one spirit, standing side by side” in the great hope of our Proclamation. This is what positions this love between the saving work (of Christ) and the destructive work (of the Power of Sin and Death), the two competing agencies that we are positioned within (1:28). Our hope is that while things are not yet complete, Christ is at work making it right.

Which then unfolds in this grand statement about HUMILITY as the great virtue that can uphold us in this hope, recognizing that in Christ the destructive Power of Sin and Death no longer hold us in bondage. The grand statement is that this work is complete even as it is also being brought to completion within us. And so because of this great proclamation, embrace humility as the freeing force that it can be in our lives. “Count others more significant than yourselves and “look not to your own interests” because this is the “mind of Christ.” This is what He was doing on the Cross. “He made himself nothing” so that “every knee” and “every name” in heaven and on earth and under the earth (the full sweep of creation being restored) can proclaim Christ’s work. In his death, death becomes no more.

This is the light that shines as we “work out this salvation” in the already-not yet reality that is Christ’s work in us and for us. (2:12-13). This is why we can proclaim that we do not “run in vain” (2:16). This is the “word of life”. To see ourselves as “blameless and innocent” is to place ourselves, as Jesus did, within the brokenness of others so that others can see Jesus bringing that brokenness to completion in them. To love is to see without precondition a world that is equally in bondage to the Powers of Sin and Death and a world equally freed by the work of Christ. This is why Paul says in 3:7, “whatever I gained” from the hope I once put in the flesh (as a Jewish man under God), is “counted as loss” in knowing the hope of Christ, a “resurrection hope” through which the Power of Sin and Death that the law makes known no longer has power over the life that we have been given. This is where our hope is repositioned away from the works of the law and towards the works of Christ, a repositioning that not only moves us away from exclusive ideas of God’s righteousness (that is, who is made right and how one is made right) and sets us in line with one another as equal participants of this (grace), but one that calls us to give up this notion of equality for the sake of the righteousness (being made right) of others. This is the way hope is expressed and made known in the realm of God’s creation.

“Not that i have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

This work, this hope, precedes us. This is why I found so much freedom in Philippians 2. This is why God’s work is built on the virtue of humility. Because of what Christs’ work proclaims we can begin to discover the work that Christ is doing within us and in the world. With this comes the firm declaration that without Christ the Powers of Sin and Death would still hold us bondage to its destructive and defeating force. Because of Christ we can proclaim that Sin and Death has been defeated and that we, all of us, are being transformed. This is the glorious truth that we are “making our own.” This is why we no longer need to be anxious, but “in everything by prayer and supplication (and) with thanksgiving” we can let our “requests be made known to God.” (4:6) This is the “peace” that hope brings. This is the “honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise” truth that Christ proclaims, and that we are called to proclaim in love to the world- what is wrong is being made right.

“There are no good and bad films, only good and bad Directors.
– Truffaut

The cinema is an invention without of a future – Louis Lumière

For most cinephiles (a French born term), Auteur Theory, or the idea of the Auteur, is likely a familiar term and idea, if not in definition than certainly within popular expression and application. To say that a Director is recognizable, distinctive, unique, artistic, all of these things are descriptives of an Auteur, which recognizes the Director as the “author” of a film. On a more complex level, taking from Notes on the Auteur Theory, which officially defined the term in 1963, “A Director must have an awareness of the craft, a distinguishable character, and this awareness and distinguishable character leads to interior meaning.”

There are many different entry points into a discussion of French Film. They essentially invented the visual artform, and have impacted and helped to shape the industry in a variety of ways over their long and impressive cinematic history. I wanted to begin with Auteur Theory though because of its relevance, not only to understanding the French New Wave, one of France’s most robust and recognizable movements, but France’s literary influence and the role that this literary foundation played in the development of the critic, which became integral to the development of film as an artform. These two things are important because they can help in understanding the character of French film and it’s interest in complex narrative arcs.

Theatrical, Literary Roots, and Shadows of the New Wave
One of the things that gaining a Global perspective of film history can help reveal (as I’ve been travelling around the world in 2020) is the deep connection between cinema and its theatrical and literary roots, with each Country’s emphasis on one or the other lending to the character and tradition of their film (and national) identity. Of course plenty of other things play into a Country’s cinematic identity, not the least of which is its socio-political backdrop. But understanding a Country’s storytelling tradition can say a lot about how these storytelling methods are able to capture and express that socio-political reality in ways that also advance and influence the cinematic artform as a whole.

And nothing came to define France more clearly and more deliberately than the French New Wave, an (unofficial) movement born from its development of the Auteur Theory.

What is most important about the idea of the Auteur, especially in understanding French Cinema, is the development of the idea of “personal authorship”. Francois Truffaut, a Director and Critic from the French New Wave, first published the “Auteur Theory” in the Cahiers du Cinema in 1954. You can read a wonderful essay on the development of the Auteur Theory here (https://www.elon.edu/u/academics/communications/journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/153/2017/06/01DavidTregdeEJFall13.pdf). Initially formed out of their close relationship with America and observing what America was doing, it then translated to, in more concrete theoretical ways, the art of French cinema as a working theory. Auteur Theory helped to develop the idea of form that would eventually come to define French Cinema against the competing American Cinematic Tradition, not only through its particular attention to form and style, but in the continued development and integration of new Directors/Creatives meant to create and recreate the form. 

The Auteur Theory is of course not without its own critics (although it was born out of the development of film criticism) and controversy. Whether its focus on Directors as the author of a film takes away from film as a multi-faceted and diverse artform made up of multiple artists and players is a worthy debate. But it certainly did change the face of the industry forever. Even today, we still retain a tendency to elevate the Director as the face of a movie, recognizing films based on their signature and presence.

This style (personal authorship) deconstructed Hollywood continuity, and gave a cheap and accessible way for filmmakers to employ a signature that allowed technique to comment on technique.

This idea of constantly reinventing oneself, or “technique commenting on technique” is contrasted with the traditionalism bred from the Hollywood system(s). This would lead French Film to pride itself on distinguishing between high forms of artistic expression, refusing to be bound to restrictive forms, but at the same time always remaining indebted to the literary influences that gave life to the grand French Tradition and identity.

A lesser known fact about the Auteur Theory (and German Cinematic History is subtle and sneaky in this way) is that it was actually an Austrian born, German language speaking Director named Max Reinhardt, with heavy roots in German Theatrical influence, who came up with the idea as far back as the early 1920’s, and even earlier. This is an interesting connection because German Cinema’s focus on the theatrical as a defining characteristic of German film becomes filtered in a particular way through France’s literary tradition. This is why we find language that evokes a “pen” and an “author” within the theory itself. What is known as mise-en-scene comes equally from observations of American tendency towards visual emphasis, but also from the idea of long form writing, emphasizing “long takes” and scenes that offer both depth of narrative and cinematic imagination. It evokes the idea of the “camera pen”, which essentially translates through the way a camera is placed and moves, thus heightening the cinematic form through externals (lighting,  long form writing (literary) into a visual “type” rather than relying on composition. In this sense, Directors become, as it has been often put, “metaphorical writers” with the screen as their page or “canvas”, something that was emphasized with the world’s first female Director (France’s Alice Guy), who created the idea of “film narrative”.

The Rise of the Film Critic And The French New Wave
The relationship between the film critic and the development of film as a constantly developing form that is able to then critique itself (thus always challenging static form) is a valuable concept to consider when looking at French film. The relationship between critic and filmmaker remains an important one, as it protects the ability of film to push boundaries and be creative, something that we see in these early filmmakers being both artists and critics themselves.

The French New Wave, influenced by Italian neo-realism and eventually birthed from France’s liberation from Germany, is a movement that sits outside of and challenges traditional forms of filmmaking. Beginning with the rise of film critic Francois Truffaut and the incredible The 400 Blows (1959), and later the extremely successful Jules and Jim (1962), the French New Wave would give rise to some of France’s most notable Directors, including Agnes Varda and the existential wonder that is Cleo From 5 to7 (1962), Jean-Luc Godard, whom Directed the wonderful Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1964), Jacques Tati (Playtime 1967), Melville (Le Doulos 1962), and Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthazar 1966), all of whom helped bridge this connection between film, critic, and form. These films are exceptional examples of the underlying spirit that flowed from the development of the Auteur Theory, embodying and fostering creative, unconventional, experimental, and narrative based approaches that helped shape Directors from this age and in the years to follow as “artists”.

More than this though, these films were instrumental in establishing art, through film criticism, as a form that was able to push socio-political boundaries by inventing and reinventing form as a commentary on itself. This is where The New Wave follows in the footsteps of Italy’s Neo-Realism, recognizing that socio-political realities can find their voice and representation within the expression of these “independant” stories and filmmakers (influenced by the writings of Alexandre Astrue and Andre Borzin, who helped to forge the way for this theory), and that the way to move a society forward is for form to constantly be “reforming” our perspective and our awareness of both art and the social condition. It’s not surprising then that what paved the way for the French New Wave was an independent documentary movement in the late 1940’s, a movement that raised up film as the voice of the people (documentary style), and helped to frame the narrative as something necessarily concerned with realism. This is the lasting legacy of the French New Wave that would leave its mark on French Cinema and French values to this day, influencing a variety of subsequent film movements (New Waves) around the world.

From The Birth of Cinema to A Unique Cinematic Expression

“France can, with some justification, claim to have invented the whole notion of cinema.” (https://www.volta.ie/#!/page/640/a-short-history-of-french-cinema)

One could make a case that Germany’s conceptual inventions predate the Lumiere Brothers Cinematographe, or that Japan’s connection to visual storytelling and visual storytelling methods were making “moving pictures” before the Lumiere Brothers. And then there is British Augustin Le Prince’s experimentations and innovations, Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, Edward Amet in America, or even Eadweard Muybridge (see the book The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures).

But by and large, the most recognizable names and the most influential figures in bringing the moving picture to the world stage through the invention of the cinematographe were the Lumiere Brothers in France. Since 1895, the Lumiere Brothers would see their machine enamor excited voices around the globe, eventually given tangible shape by George Melies (another Frenchman) in one of the earliest and most recognizable examples of cinema as a form (the still exceptional Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon ), thus giving rise to the great cinematic vision. As French History goes, Charles Pathe and Leon Gaumont would establish the first studios in France (Pathe and Leon, which remain France’s most important studios still today), giving rise to Max LInder, who opened the world up to the idea of the “international movie star” in 1905, forever altering the landscape of the film industry as one that is both local and internationally focused (an idea that would come to both complicate and enrich the French Cinematic Tradition).

International Pressure, Social Policy, and A Complicated Industry 
If France can fairly lay claim to giving birth to the Film Industry, it can also lay claim to being one of the most prosperous industries in the years leading up to World War 1, both in its local development and in its international influence. Un Chien Andalue (1929) is a great example of an early film that held a lot of influence in surrealist cinema, which helped to give form to the horror genre.

As history tells it, it was a shortage of film stock during the First World War that led the American Industry to effectively come in and “steal the international film market.” This has led to a back and forth, often rocky relationship with America, with the competing influence of both industries, once dominated by France and then at times running parallel in its development with America with America eventually overtaking it, flowing in both directions. This ebb and flow in France’s cinematic history was defined as well by socio-political realities (Nazi Occupation and German control being the biggest one, a period that produced films like Les Enfants Du Paradise 1945, La Fille Du Puisatier 1940, Volpone 1941, Le Corbeau 1943, and L’Assasinat du Pere Noel 1941, the first film to made under Occupation, followed by Boule De Suif 1945, one of the first films made after the Liberation), and policies (quota system in the 1920’s designed to limit American Film in its restrictions on foreign imports, and eventually the  Centre National de la Cinematographie (CNC), which still governs the way taxation in France feeds back into the film industry).

What remains true today, as much as it has over the last 100 plus years, is that often when the two entities (France and America) are talking about their individual film industries, you will catch comparisons to and analysis of the other leading the way in possible reform, with their competing socio-political approaches being forefront (free market capitalism over a heavy dependence on taxation and social policy). It is France’s taxation system that is their most interesting distinctive, even setting them apart from other socially minded governance within the European Nations.

Their taxation model, which is wholly impressive in its commitment and investment, is built around indirect subsidy. This indirect subsidy comes from places like t.v. and from mandates on public operations that filter external activity back into the collective support of the arts (not unlike similar policies that require downtown businesses to support local restaurants).

What’s mainly responsible isn’t “direct subsidy (public TV channels, advance on receipts, regional funding)” but rather “indirect subsidy (mandatory investment by private TV channels).”
– Richard Brody

France’s taxation system is certainly a bit controversial, but it is also very intriguing. Positioned to both bolster it’s local industry and to protect it from Hollywood infiltration, one of the challenges it faces is managing the relationship between films that make money and films that don’t, smaller projects and more commercial fare. The upside to the system is that it means the film industry has support regardless of how profitable films are. This means that filmmakers are free to experiment and get creative, and it also attracts new filmmakers, a key source for strengthening the future of France’s local cinema.

The problem though is a system in which funding does not discriminate. Where it protects these creative forces, films of lower quality can also funded. And when the rules of the system are able to be manipulated, tying funds to budgets and giving bloated budgets for bad films that would never otherwise make their money back in a free market system, filmmakers and studios can take advantage. This blurs the line at times too between the pressure to find more commercial films that will make money and feed back into the system. All of this creates a bit of a conundrum for a system that has been successful in maintaining and developing France’s long and illustrious film identity.

“The “cultural exception”—a term that’s just twenty years old—is the way that France defines its protection of its movie business against the demands of free-trade agreements and their inevitable opening of floodgates to Hollywood movies. But the notion of the “cultural” is two-fold: there’s the artistic element and the popular one, the creation of works of art that affirm France in future history, and the creation of mass-market works that sustain the film industry as a commercial enterprise and as a social phenomenon.”
– Richard Brody (The New Yorker)

One of the curious things regarding how France continues to navigate these issues is their rather strong position settled between the smaller industries of other European Nations and the big industry of America. Protecting against the inevitable saturation of American films, something that could bring in money but hurt the local film industry and thus the Country’s identity and ethos as well, means that they aren’t really in the game of exporting either. A Country needs both a strong local industry and representation abroad, especially in an ever changing global market, to flourish.

And yet, with that said, France seems to continually find ways to stay relevant despite of these challenges, with much credit going to the continual influx and development of filmmakers, both from within and from abroad. Ever since the creation of Cannes in 1946, there has been a certain allure and prestige that comes from being associated with French cinema, one that appears enviable and desirable, particularly for any interested in contrasting this with the behemoth that is the American Industry. The benefit to this has been the fostering and development of a real sense of identity and ethos within its filmmaking community, an identity that sits somewhat outside of industry expectations. Not surprisingly, the ebb and flow of their industry before the wars and after the wars, would see both hardships and resurgences, going from The French New Wave to a down period to a slight uplift in the 1990’s where we see a new kind of hyperrealism emerge, a greater dependence on comedies, and a romanticizing of France’s past. This period would also follow the inner workings of its socio-political developments, like the development of the European Union (1993) which led to new opportunities in relationship to film across European Nations, Cultural Exception, which opened the way for the arts to maintain a distinct presence against the commercial industry (and thus leads the way for France’s unique taxation model), and eventually Canal+, a part of that unique taxation system which continues to fund the French Film Industry today.

THE FUTURE OF FRENCH CINEMA
It’s hard to know how the future of cinema develops in France, let alone on a global level. There are so many shifting dynamics when it comes to the film industry, and as things change so do global relationships, which do have an immediate impact on film industries world wide. The interesting thing about France though is that they seem positioned better than most, certainly when compared to Capitalist markets like America and China which are dependent on economic gains and losses, to weather the storm in the interim in terms of maintaining a healthy cinematic identity and an industry that can make relevant and challenging films. The benefit of strong social policies that prioritize the arts through public and indirect funding is that it treats the arts as a necessary industry, as vital to the function of life as anything else, and beyond that necessary to a society’s development. This certainly has its problems, and it will be interesting to see how France continues to navigate this space in-between its unique social policies and its relationship to consumerist Countries. But there is no doubt that their presence continues to make a strong statement about what art is, what art can be, and how art can influence and build a society in important and necessary ways. Certified Copy (2010), My Life as a Zuchinni (2016), Transit (2018), The Girl Without Hands (2016), The Jewish Cardinal (2013), Holy Motors (2012), No Home Movie (2015), Amour (2012), Amelie (2001), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), and The Past (2013) are all examples of phenomenal and genre shaping films that have emerged from the French Film Industry in the past 10 or so years, and one should expect that they will continue to find ways to push form, reinvent and challenge the status quo.

*Here is my full list of French Films I watched on my travels, rated, ranked and reviewed:
https://letterboxd.com/davetcourt/list/film-travels-2020-france-in-progress/

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_France
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/mar/22/french-cinema-short-history
https://nofilmschool.com/2014/11/infographic-your-guide-history-french-cinema
http://www.frenchfilms.org/french-cinema-history.html
https://www.superprof.us/blog/history-of-french-cinema/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-future-of-french-cinema
https://indiefilmhustle.com/french-new-wave/
https://indiefilmhustle.com/french-new-wave/
Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2059436416681576
https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/njms/1/1/article-p67.xml
https://www.britannica.com/art/auteur-theory

Click to access 01DavidTregdeEJFall13.pdf

French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present By Rémi Fournier Lanzoni

 

As “one of the oldest film markets in the world”, Japan’s cinematic story is a fascinating, always exciting, and often inspiring narrative to unpack. It is ripe with the expected markers that tend to be shared by cinema worldwide- the arrival of the Cinematograph, the shift from social commentary to propaganda during the World War, the usual struggle to overcome international pressures, the onset of television, and a decline in theater going. But peek behind the curtain of this shared narrative and the story of film in Japan is bursting with socio-political intrigue, history and unexpected twists that have allowed it to carve its own path in the midst of these things.

Two of the biggest characteristics that have defined Japanese Cinema are
a) history and
b) uniqueness.

Finding It’s History and It’s Uniqueness
Japan’s history and its uniqueness are really two parts of the same coin that help to define its particular style of filmmaking. I don’t mean that in the way of uniformity. The richness of Japan’s cinematic landscape is diverse. I mean that in the way of distinctives, which have allowed Japan to constantly innovate, create, and recreate over the last 100 years. And there is little doubt that Japan’s history, and its awareness of this history, played a significant role in defining and shaping this trajectory.

Being Canadian, one of the unique facets of living in North America is that, given our more recent development, we lack the same history of those Countries and Nations and territories in the East (including Europe in the West). It wasn’t until the onset of the American Western that America was able to establish a recognizable history of its own, and in Canada it is even less established because our film industry carries far less of an international presence.

Japanese cinema, in contrast, grew out of its ability to tell the stories of its past, a genre of film called jidai-geki that focused mainly on the Edo Period. One of the ways this benefited Japanese film is that as the idea of moving pictures was coming into focus, Japan had a clear and given narrative/ethos to pull from in developing its early films.

As its film industry developed, it was able to then reimagine how these stories could be told and retold early on in the forms development, allowing it to forge its own path rather than being influenced from abroad. This also saw the quick adaptation from the Japanese historical drama to the modern drama as the Country began to learn how to apply film to Japan’s modern context. And while Japan would to explore these modern contexts over the 100 plus year development of its industry, the power of its formation as an independent and unique cinematic landscape would come from its ability to connect its present to its past.

Japan’s rich history is of course present in films about Samurai and conquest, and as well in the spiritual themes that are present in its heritage, but it might be most apparent in its indebtedness to its storytelling past. There has been much written about the Japanese Benshi, but one of the things that sets the Country’s early development apart is the use of these oral storytellers to enhance the experience of the silent film era. This gave their films a theatrical presence that connected the visual to their tradition and heritage.

More interesting yet though is how the Benshi contributed to the development of these early films.

In addition to the great influence that benshi had at the performance level, many famous benshi had strong input at the film making level. At cinemas managed by large film production and distribution companies, it was common for benshi to be shown film scripts before production began, and they often demanded a rewrite if they disagreed with any part. Thus, at this point in the development of cinema, it was the performance side that held greater influence than the production side. In order to maintain his or her position among great competition, each benshi developed an individual style.

As Japan developed a cinematic industry, with its first film company emerging in 1909, the rise of its own form of film criticism (The Pure Film Movement) in 1910 would eventually lead the industry away from the Benshi and towards more concrete developments of particular cinematic styles. But there is no question that the Benshi had a lasting effect on how Japanese film would develop, with many of the styles and genres retaining these influences, including the thriving of silent film well into the 1930’s (long after the West had abandoned them), such as An Inn in Tokyo (1935).

Film and Politics
Beyond this history though, Japan’s modern political landscape, wars, tragedies, and natural disasters continued to play a key role in how its film industry would develop and in the kind of styles and genres that would emerge. Reaching back to the arrival of the Lumiere Brothers Cinematograph in 1897, Japan’s conquest of Taiwan around the same time, along with its lengthy war with China and the American Occupation, all gave definition to its cultural development, be it an eventual focus on Empire and expansion, the tragic genocide of Beijing and the Chinese capital of Nanking (of which the harrowing City of Life and Death, 2009, captures in a powerful way), or its relationship to America.

Both expansion and the events of World War 2 (Chinese Genocide and American Occupation) gave clear definition to the films of the 1930’s and 1940’s, which is still recognized as a time of ongoing innovation and social development. Themes of Empire and propaganda films under Government control come to shape the landscape leading up to the war and through the war, while the shift from Empire into what is now considered Japan’s first Golden Age (1950’s-1960’s) under American control led to a whole new kind of filmmaking altogether.

“In the years following the war, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was tasked with revising the Japanese constitution and demilitarizing the nation. Japan was ordered to abolish the Meiji Constitution, thus ending the Empire of Japan. On May 3, 1947, the country adopted the Constitution of Japan and formally became Japan.”
– Japans Influence on Cinema After WW2

American Occupation and The Japanese Identity
One of the key factors at play in the American Occupation following World War 2 was the SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), which oversaw the redevelopment of the film industry at this time (1945-1952). Most relevant is the fact that this was a foreign institution (the branch which oversaw the film industry was called the CIE: Civil Information Education Section), which affected the industry in two major ways- it paved the way for an influx of American films into the Japanese landscape, and worked to reshape the Japanese industry according to American idealism, making Japanese film accessible abroad. This would forever alter the Japanese landscape going forward.

“During the occupation, MacArthur sought a way to combat the propaganda of Japanese cinema. An enlightenment campaign was launched, in which Hollywood studios would screen American films throughout Japan. Over 600 films were distributed, each showcasing the American way of life. The goal was to introduce America as a political, social, and cultural model for the Japanese population.”

Under the American Occupation, and in the period following the American Occupation, Japan saw a period of real innovation and creativity, both in the development of studios and in the rise of influential Directors. Leading the way during this time was Japan’s most popular and well known Director, Kurosawa, who navigated the international relationship with great success, or Kenji Mizoguchi, who made the impressive and influential Ugetsu (1953), and the monumental effort that is Tokyo Story (1953), Directed by Yasujirō Ozu. This era also included the first color film (Carmen Comes Home, 1951), and at its peak the Human Condition Trilogy.

On Rashomon.

“Rashomon showcased Kurosawa’s skill as a director. He had embraced Western filmmaking, the works of Shakespeare, and American pulp novels. By combining those elements with traditional Eastern culture, Kurosawa’s films would break away from the traditional Japanese style of directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi. His work would find an international audience, cementing him as a legendary director.”

The epic Seven Samurai (1954), one of the first films to really establish and navigate this American-Japanese distinctive with immense success, is a key example of a film that protects Japanese identity but was made with American influences and equally for American audiences. It’s success, and its notoriety comes from Japan’s ability to navigate this terrain well.

Since American Occupation was interested in demilitarization, the outflow of this directive (the flip side of of the censorship that defined Japan’s propaganda films) was an increased focus on social concern (such as we saw with the Leftist influences in the 1930’s in shomin-geki films, films about the common people) and a critique of Empire (and the Emperor).

“By displacing the recent war onto the more distant past, the films could be made palatable to both domestic and international audiences. But no displacement, no tricks, no hidden meanings were required to appreciate the obvious artistry on view.”(http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Japan-THE-SECOND-GOLDEN-AGE.html#ixzz6Iw0zcGjD)

What is important to note here, and which plays into the uniqueness and history of Japanese Cinema, is that not unlike its ability to navigate previous periods of censorship, war, and natural disaster (including the great earthquake and Bombing of Tokyo that destroyed a good chunk of Japan’s early film), Japan’s response to the developments of its more modern age, whether tragic or prosperous, led to both a decisive and intentional incorporation of these events into their ethos through the art of cinema, along with a return again and again to their lengthy history and roots and values. When you look at international influence in other Countries, it often represents a serious point of struggle and contention. To see it in Japan is to encounter a sense of confidence that works to retain their identity over and against it, and often alongside it.

Consider the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is through cinema that this event became a means of introspection and identity (Godzilla, 1954), going on to inspire an entire genre of film that is distinctly and recognizably Japanese. Or consider the later emergence of Anime in the 2000’s, reaching back to films like the incredible Millennium Actress (2001) and establishing the famous Studio Ghibli. Following a series of challenging events through the 1970’s and beyond (all of which gave their own distinctive voice to Japanese cinema), not the least of which was the economic crash (the demise of the Bubble Economy), the Aum Shinrikyo massacre, and the great Kubo earthquake, Anime (along with an increased focus on Indie films thanks to the development of the Japan Film Commission Promotion Council) took the Country by storm, using the newly developed multiplexes to stake their claim as a key part of the Japanese ethos, representing over 60 percent of Japanese film development in 2000 and beyond. Interestingly, one of the key embraces of the Anime industry was being distinctly cultural but also internationally accessible, a distinctive of Japanese cinema and a mark of its strength of identity.

Japanese Identity and the Future
With the modern success of a Director like Hirokazu Kore-eda, who made the popular Shoplifters (2018), and powerful and emotional films like I Wish (2011) and Like Father, Like Son (2013), and the success of my personal favorite more recent Japanese film by Yojiro Takita, Departures (2009), it is clear that Japan has had a lengthy and complicated history that has seen it develop to where it is today, one that pushes and pulls the industry through the last 120 years of cinematic development, but one that also reaches much beyond this into a long and illustrious past that gave Japanese film its identity and ethos. This helped give Japanese film that ability to retain a sense of inventiveness and creativity that was distinctly and uniquely Japanese, even when things threatened their identity.

Consider that even before the moving picture arrived in Japan, their familiarity with the idea of cinema had already found its expression in gentō (utsushi-e), the magic lantern, a form of visual storytelling that directly impacted and informed how Japan entered the cinematic age with connective purpose. Or the oral, storytelling traditions that gave Japanese film its spiritual core with a key embrace of spirit, ghosts and eternal themes, all of which were evident since Shozo Makino pioneered Japanese film in 1908. You can see Japan’s mark on cinema in its early and revolutionary embrace of woman actresses (Harumi Hanayagi, the first woman actress, in the Glow of Life (1918), and in the development of cinematic forms and filming styles like the initial adoption and development of the close up and cut back (see the Captain’s Daughter). Heck, there is even an argument that can be made that An Inn in Tokyo (1935) paved the way and jump started the neo-realism movement in Europe (and the New Waves). The fact that this was also still a silent film is kind of astonishing.

What stands out about Japan is its ability to survive and to thrive, most importantly within the pressures of international influence. This is an impressive feat that has seen Japan develop parallel to the United States rather than within or beneath its wide spread influence, rewarding the world with a rich cultural footprint and impressive slate of films that is able to reveal and develop the narrative of its national story and its people for their Country and for the world.

Here is a link to the films that I watched on my Film Travels (ranked, rated and reviewed):
https://letterboxd.com/davetcourt/list/film-travels-2020-japan-in-process/

SOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Japan
What Is Japanese Cinema: A History by YOMOTA INUHIKO
https://www.volta.ie/#!/page/651/a-short-history-of-japanese-cinema
https://www.ukessays.com/essays/film-studies/brief-history-of-japanese-cinema-film-studies-essay.php
https://schoolworkhelper.net/early-japanese-film-cinema/
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Japanese_cinema
https://www.tiff.net/the-review/the-big-five-of-japanese-cinema
https://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/a-brief-but-essential-introduction-to-japanese-cinema/

Click to access japan_history.pdf

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Japan-THE-SECOND-GOLDEN-AGE.html
A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film by Isolde Standish
https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/japans-influence-on-cinema-after-wwii/

 

 

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Having been immersed these last few weeks in Fleming Rutledge’s phenomenal and monumental The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus, 40: The Temptation of Christ (a recently released and independent 2020 release available for rent or purchase on most platforms) proved to be a fitting. highly visual, and complimentary addition for understanding and ruminating on Rutledge’s treaties of the nature of the Cross and the work of Salvation.

Central to Rutledge’s understanding of the Gospel and the Christian Witness lies this distinction between capital letter Sin and small letter sin. As Rutledge writes, “The Church has always been tempted to recast the Christian story in terms of individual fault and guilt that can be overcome by a decision to repent.” And this temptation comes from our need to control the narrative of the Cross in particular ways through a misapplication of the idea of “sin” as that which condemns and that which saves.

And yet for Paul, the earliest written witness to the Death and Resurrection of Christ, the dominant understanding, framed by (capital letter) Sin, is that of the “Powers” that hold us bondage, the Powers being Sin (evil and the devil, understood in its rich theological and literary context) and Death. For Paul, “the sequence is not sin-repentance-grace-forgiveness, but grace-sin-deliverance-repentance-grace.” As Rutledge points out, grace derives the sequence from first to last, with both Grace (the Power of God) and Sin and Death (the Power of Evil or the Evil One) precluding this movement from grace to grace.

This might sound like mere semantics, speaking of the same word in both capital and small letter form, but this understanding of God’s saving work is integral to understanding what it is God is doing on the Cross, the Way for which John came to prepare, the moment in which this film begins and opens with, and the powerful imagery of of Lent that we find in its depiction of Christ’s time in the Wilderness.

From the Temptation to the Cross: Finding The Grand Narrative
To understand what Jesus is doing, and what the Temptation Narrative is reconciling, we must understand the declarative and proclamative truth that the Cross declares, which is that “what is wrong (the injustice and suffering that we find in this world) is being made right”, both in the world and in us, both individually and collectively. The Cross, framed in the light of the Resurrection, declares to us that God is not under the power of the Evil One, and that the Powers that hold us bondage can be resisted. “Yeshua means God saves, and Matthews reference makes explicit the connection between the Messiah’s name and salvation from sin.” (Rutledge). As the film so aptly depicts in connecting Jesus’ formative years to His time in the wilderness, who Jesus is (God incarnate) and what Jesus does is one in the same- God’s saving work.

In one of the film’s flashback sequences, we hear a conversation between Joseph and Yeshua, where Joseph tells him, “Sin is the reason that we suffer Yeshua, it is the reason that we die.” This is framed against the visual and symbolic force of the Temptation that drives this film, a depiction the film brings to the forefront in through its grand and sweeping narrative context. It is here that we gain a picture, in its expressive and Mystical Eastern context (something we in the West have become adverse to), of this story of Good and Evil, competing forces that exist and persist outside and above ourselves, a spiritual warfare in which we have (all) become evil’s conscripts. Knowing that the scriptwriter for this film is a big, big fan of the horror genre, it is not surprising to me that this would prove a perfect playing field in which to evoke these very spiritually laden pictures, ideas and truths through tonal expressions befitting the genre. And not unexpectedly, the story is brought to life within some recognizable horror constructs (including the use of score, tension, and camera work that guides this tension between the known and the unknown, the tension and the resistance) able to capture the gravity of this narrative reality in its Scriptural context.

The Temptation, Righteousness and Understanding God’s Saving Work
Paramount to Rutledge’s understanding of the Crucifixion is her understanding of the theological idea of justification, or righteousness. When understood within modern constructs of penal substitution (the common understanding of salvation that sees our small letter sin (action) as the cause of Jesus’ death, and Jesus’ moral goodness (righteousness) as that which saves us from our sin), justification ultimately becomes enslaved to a works based solution that misses the true power of this grand narrative of The Temptation and the Crucifixion to which it points (which the film does through some nice use of flash forwards), and its proclamation that what is wrong is being (and has been) made right.

What is striking to recognize about the temptation narrative is how connected the Powers (capital letter Sin) is to the notion of power (small letter sin). Each of the temptations represents a concern for power, the power to attend to our suffering, our happiness, our benefit. It is through resisting this power that Christ shifts the view from Himself to the needs of the world. It is here that Sin and Death become expressed through the primary concern in scripture for the reality of injustice (and justice, or justification) in the world. This is why Rutledge believes, and often restates, that the Righteousness of Jesus, of God, is not a noun, but a verb. “It is not so much that God is righteous but that he does righteousness (justification).” We know this intuitively, but perhaps no more intimately than in our times of suffering. This is where we the Cross becomes good news. God, in Jesus, sees, identifies and is acting upon the injustice of this world, making this world new, bringing to bear the New Heavens and the New Earth, the new Creation. Therefore, through this proclamation we have hope.

“God did not son to the earth to condemn it, he sent His son to the earth to save it” is the declaration that we hear from Jesus’ definitive proclamation in the films climatic moment, a powerful and poignant depiction of Good and Evil standing face to face, a moment in which life is raised above death (in the powerful imagery of the lamb) as the greater Power.

“Were it not for the mercy of God surrounding us, we would have no perspective from which to view sin, for we would be entirely subject to it. That is the reason for affirming that wherever sin is unmasked and confessed, God’s redemptive power is already present and acting.” (Rutledge). What I really liked about the film is the way it connects this temptation narrative both to these flashbacks and flashforwards. It helps to remind us that the Cross is not retributive in nature, but declarative. It is a present work, not simply a historical reality. Jesus willingly sees a world under the Power of Sin and Death and aligns Himself to it, with it, and within it. He embodies the injustice of the Powers of Sin and Death and in so doing declares God’s justice (our justification) as that which is able to make what is wrong right.

This is why, as the film ultimately declares in its final (and beautiful) sequence, we must continue to walk in faith even when we cannot see. This is the truth of our already-not yet already. We are called as participants in what God is doing on the Cross, guided by the Word, the Word that is Christ, the Word, as Rutledge puts it, that is the Cross. This is the Way forward, not away from the suffering of our present reality but towards it, because in God’s righteousness, in His seeing, identifying and acting on injustice, this world is being made right again within this reality. To walk in the Way is to see this more clearly, is for this truth, the proclamation of the Cross, to be made known in our lives and in the world.

Here’s the link to the film’s info on Letterboxd:
https://letterboxd.com/davetcourt/film/40-the-temptation-of-christ/

I had the great privilege of hearing a recent interview with Fleming Rutledge, the author of The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death Of Jesus (a book I am currently working through and reflecting on), talking about her body of work and what a lifetime of preaching, pastoring, and writing have taught her in terms of big ideas, significant markers, and important themes/focuses (on the On Script Podcast if you were interested).

New to Rutledge’s body of work, I found this interview helpful in offering me a glimpse inside the life, the mind, and the spirit that guided her to pen this particular work that I am reading through now. Of interest to me was hearing her expound on the idea of the “Powers” of Sin and Death that I reflected on in my previous blog. These Powers for her are the third part of three central “agencies” reflected in Paul and the Gospels (and the whole of the apocalyptic tradition that we see throughout the latter part of the Old Testament and the whole of the New) that are active in this world- God, Humanity, and Satan (which in scholarship gains and holds many different names and references).

I wrote in my previous blog about how seeing Sin (and Death) as an agency rather than a matter of works and moral conditioning, an idea I first encountered in N.T. Wright, is necessary for expounding on the different facets of the Christian life in appropriate ways. This is especially necessary when it comes do discussing and approaching the Cross, because beginning with these three essential agencies protects these auxiliary theological ideas (like small letter “sin”) from turning salvation into a works based belief system and ending up with a Cross that is thrown off balance and that symbolizes our ideas of how God works as opposed to the work God is doing on the Cross.

Understanding the Cross, and Jesus’ death on the Cross, as something that speaks to a world that is not right and that is being made right is best understood not in the trenches of working out our salvation, but rather from within the larger narrative to which this discussion of salvation belongs. Seeing “Sin” as “Power” allows us to see that a not right world is under bondage to a third agency that holds a real (and active) presence and force, and that the Cross is ultimately Jesus’ declaration/proclamation that this world (including you and I) is no longer under its power because, at is declared, God is not under its power. This is the Cross’ primary, declarative force, and it is the means through which we can begin to make sense of the death of Jesus as necessary, and the means by which we can begin to flesh out the theology that this informs.

The Cross and God’s Justification
It is, then, from here that we can begin to appropriately move from the Cross to matters of what, theologically speaking, we can call justification. What is important to understand about the idea of justification (a word that carries close to mirror relationship to “righteousness”, or the idea of being made right) is that matters of “justice” and “injustice” are its primary concern. For Rutledge, “The all-important connection between the method used to execute Jesus and the meaning of his death cannot be grasped unless we plumb the depths of what is meant by injustice.” (p106) Understanding the unjust death of Jesus as something that is concerned with shedding light on the injustice that we encounter in this world is a two fold awareness, one that begins with that larger narrative of the Powers and flows out into a concern for our (humanities) place in this narrative as the second of these three primary agencies.

A Justice For the World 
Just to dial this back once again to reinforce that connective piece that was so important for me in rediscovering the Cross over these last number of years, if we begin, as many Christians do, with the Cross primarily emphasizing our small letter “sin” (as in, because we were sinners Jesus died for our sins, and on the Cross atones for those sins), what we end up with is a story that moves from us out towards the concerns of the world. And yet the concern of the Cross and the reason for Jesus’ death begins with His concern for the world. As Rutledge writes, The condemnation of Jesus means redemption for the world, and by extension God’s condemnation of the sin of his people is part of his redemptive purpose. (p106)

What we encounter in the Cross is not simply the declaration that our sins have been forgiven, but that the Powers of Sin and Death have been defeated. This is more than simply a matter of semantics. What we are stepping into on the Way of Jesus is the declaration that this world is not right and God, through Jesus, is making it right. This is what we are called to be participants of, is the New Creation, the New Heavens and the New Earth.

And the key marker of this New Creation? God’s justice.

“God’s justice is not vague or amorphous. It is not general or indeterminate. It is specific and particular, showing that God is attentive to the material details of human need.” (p109)

And just to underscore this point, Rutledge goes on to say,

“When we speak of setting right, we are not talking about a little rearrangement here and a little improvement there. From the perspective of the Old and New Testaments, the whole creation has gone drastically awry. The incarnation of the Son of the God should not be understood as the divine benediction on all that is. It was an incarnation unto the cross, and therefore an incarnation that sets a question mark over against the way things are.” (p126)

This is what bears out our hope. Is small letter “sin” part of this? Absolutely. All of us are called to be participants in the work God is doing, and by nature of this work sin is a product or outflow of the Powers that hold this world bondage. But the concern of God’s salvation, Christ’s saving work is much bigger than our sin. It is concerned with seeing all of Creation being made new.

Justification and The Wrath of God
One of the most difficult aspects of the Cross to deal with is the idea of God’s wrath. But if the Cross is about God’s concern for the injustice in this world, it means that God’s wrath must play a role. And one of the biggest obstacles to understanding God’s wrath is the tendency to define the Cross and Jesus’ death according to our small letter sin. When we do this, God’s wrath ends up solely squared on us rather than on the injustice that we find in the world. And we begin to imagine or shape God’s work according to retribution rather than restoration. We are left with some form of salvation that understands God needed to punish us for our sin, and therefore Jesus takes on the punishment in our place so that we can be saved. And it’s only from here that we are then able to reconstruct a Christian idea of a God for the world.

When we begin with the Cross as God’s interest for the whole of creation, a creation in bondage to the Powers, this allows us to then to see the whole work of God as being manifested in our lives rather than the other way around. This is an incredibly freeing thing, because it allows us to then reframe what God’s wrath is directed towards. As Rutledge puts it,

All of us are capable of anger about something. God’s anger, however, is pure. It does not have the maintenance of privilege as its object, but goes out on behalf of those who have no privileges. The wrath of God is not an emotion that flares up from time to time, as though God had temper tantrums; it is a way of describing his absolute enmity against all wrong and his coming to set matters right. (p129)

And then she goes on to outline a crucial point when it comes to matters of God’s wrath.

To be sure, most people, of whatever color, tend to be intensely interested in justice when it is for themselves. It is the notion of justice for all that is missing from much of our public discourse. (p128)

At least one of the problems that arises with the idea of God’s wrath is that when we see it as God’s anger towards us, we deprive ourselves of the ability to see God’s wrath in the context of God’s saving work. This is why so much of our theology and our theological discourse remains so limited. When we narrow God’s work down to the saving of individual lives according to a works based mindset, we limit our ability to exercise what C.S. Lewis called the “Spiritual Imagination” in the injustice spaces that we encounter in the world. We are forced to find something other than the Powers to attach our anger to, which opens us up to that inevitable practice of creating ins and outs of perpetrators, villains and victims

The real problem, and this is something that Rutledge does an amazing job of unpacking, is that when we narrow salvation down to what God is doing in my life in saving me from my sin, the danger is that we either a) fail to see the injustice in this world, or b) contribute to these acts of injustice through our oppression and condemnation of others. “Righteousness has the character of a verb rather than a noun’ it is not so much that God is righteous but that he does righteousness.” Which plays out into this idea of the Cross as making this world right as opposed to the righteous one making me “righteous”.

But to think of the Cross in this way is messy. We like our formulas. And formulas that can easily define who is in and who is out are even more attractive. The reality of God’s wrath though remains a fluid force. As Rutledge points out, it can be as concerned with an individual as it is with large groups who are either being oppressed or doing the oppressing. It is constantly condemning while at the same time reforming. It attends to at times while in other times responding to in pain and remorse. God’s wrath is both judgment and salvation at the same time. And the truth is that none of us are operating on the same plain at the same time all the time. Sometimes we are doing the oppressing, and sometimes we are the oppressed. And as Rutledge points out, “Even more astonishingly, he (JEsus) underwent helplessness and humiliation not only for the victimized but also for the perpetrators” (p151) all at once. Which in the grander picture of things suggests, “in the final analysis, the crucifixion of Christ for the sin of the world reveals that it is not only the victims of oppression and injustice who are in need of God’s deliverance, but also the victimizers. Each of us is capable, under certain circumstances, of being a victimizer.”

To encounter the Cross is the encounter the messiness of this reality. It exposes what we all share in common- the desire for justice in the unjust places of our lives, but moves us to consider, as God sees, the injustice that we encounter in the world and the injustice that we all partake in. This is shift the Cross forces us to consider, and this shift forces us to move in this direction precisely because this is the work the Cross is interested in and where the Cross points us towards. The good news is, this is where God’s wrath can begin to take shape as a more hopeful and life giving reality.

“We are not likely to be attracted to a righteous God unless we are looking for justice. The meaning of the word righteousness in Hebrew, however, is a world away from our idea of legalism or moralism. When we read in the Old Testament that God is just and righteous, this doesn’t refer to a threatening abstract quality that God has over aginst us. It is much more like a verb than a noun, because it refers to the power of God to make right what has been wrong.” (p133)

The Cross is, as Rutledge puts it, “the movement of God toward us even when our backs are turned away from him.” And once again, this is an uncomfortable idea because it means that we are not in control. “The radical message underlying it, and the one we resist, is that God does this right-making in spite of our resistance. This is the real meaning of Pauls use of dikaiosis, traditionally translated justification, but better translated rectification (rectify from the Latin rectus) or righteousness.” And it is because we are not in control that Jesus’ death calls into the realm of our awareness, into our line of sight the reality of the injustice in our lives and in this world as God’s main concern. The Christian faith does not allow us to remain ignorant about this. It is not static and it is not apathetic towards the Power that Sin holds in this world.

Building A Bridge Between My Salvation and the Salvation of the World
One of the things Rutledge does which I found so helpful in trying to make sense of the messiness of God’s justifying work in my life and in the world is that she creates these inroads between the individual and the collective in matters of injustice. These two things are of equal concern in the eyes of God. He sees us as readily as he sees the death of millions. One is not more or less tragic than the other. One of the things this frees us to do is take what we know and experience personally and apply it to places that we could not and would not be able to understand. And what frees us to do this is our understanding of capital letter Sin as the same Power that holds this whole world in bondage. It recognizes that in the fluidity of God’s saving work, the one place that God’s saving work must make sense is in the injust places, the not right realities of our world. “God’s new creation must be a just one, or the promises of God will seem like mockery to those whose defenselessness has been exploited by the powerful.”

And as Rutledge points out, this truth encompasses the whole of God’s justification (or righteousness), including the spiritual paradigms of forgiveness, restoration, judgment and salvation. “Forgiveness must be understood in its relationship to justice if the Christian gospel is to be allowed its full scope.” 

How can we begin to speak even of forgiveness, let alone transformation, in the worst of the worst situations? The extermination of millions does not cry out for forgiveness. Never mind millions; what about just one baby burned up in a microwave oven by its own father? After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Forgiveness is not enough. There must be justice too. (p126)

And further,

If we think of Christian theology and ethics purely in terms of forgiveness, we will  have neglected a central aspect of God’s own character and will be in no position to understand the cross in its fullest dimension. Furthermore, if we fail to take account of God’s justice, we will miss the extraordinary way in which it is recast in the New Testament as kerygma.

Kerygma simply means “proclamation.” And the proclamation is this. That God is making this world right. That God sees, identifies (the two primary starting points for Rutledge) and acts towards injustice. And we can trust that He is because Jesus, through His death on the Cross, saw, identified and acted towards the injustice that holds this world in bondage by taking on the oppression of this world.

“Who would have thought that the same God who passed judgment, calling down woe upon the religious establishment (Matt. 23; Luke 11), would come under his own judgment and woe? This is a shockingly immoral and un-religious idea; as we shall see over and over again, however, the crucifixion reveals God placing himself under his own sentence. The wrath of God has lodged in God’s own self. Perfect justice is wrought in the self offering of the Son, who alone of all human beings was perfectly righteous. Therefore no one, neither victim nor victimizer, can claim any exemption from judgment on one’s own merits, but only the merits of the Son.”

And Jesus does this by way of giving us a picture of His wrath over and against His mercy. “The wrath of God, which plays such a large role in both the Old and New Testaments, can be embraced because it comes wrapped in God’s mercy. To appropriate the inspired misstatement of Shakespeares Dogberry, the cross shows us how we, in Christ, are condemned into redemption. ” And it is because of this that we can see the fuller picture of what Jesus is doing in dying on the Cross. “The goal is restoration and renewal”, a truth that has the power to reframe our perspective of God’s relationship to us and to this world, and open up the Christian Imagination to the immense and incredible picture and possibility of a world renewed.

“Thus the whole area of God’s justice and righteousness has been relocated from the usual tit-for-tat scheme of crime and punishment into a completely new sphere where the righteousness of God (dikaiosyne), understood as power to grant what it requires, has dismantled the old system of righteousness by-the-law and incorporated us into the new-world-creating righteousness of God. When this is enacted in our world by faith, however imperfectly, we know that God is on the move.”

 

 

 

 

The Cross is offensive to everyone, religious people (“Jews”) and secular people (“Greeks”) alike. It is this radical undercutting of who is in and who is out that makes the cross so deeply threatening to many. All human achievement, especially religious achievement, is called into question by the godlessness of Jesus’ death. If God in three persons is most fully revealed to us by the Son’s accursed death outside the community of the godly, this means a complete rethinking of what is usually called religion.” (p105)

I have spent a lot of time, far too much to count, reading the Bible over my lifetime. Over that time I have found inspiration, challenge, a bolstering of my belief, and a reoccuring call to step out in confidence with faith and action. All good things that are meant to come out of my daily devotional life and the teachings of the Church.

What I didn’t always understand, and still don’t fully do if I am being honest, is that this inspiration, this bolstering, this call to step out, they all formed the basis by which I was to be a Christian and live out my Christian life as one who is “saved” according to a specific doctrine. They were truths given to me to help declare myself as an insider, one of the faithful within this doctrinal system. These teachings helped to form a line in my mind between who was in and who was out, thus providing me with the tools I needed to judge the world accordingly against God’s good grace afforded to me in His saving work and from my privileged position being one of the saved.

I think the moment my life was really turned upside down in my understanding of this connection between my Christian life and my salvation is when I began to recognize just how much of scripture actually stands as a condemnation of these privileged positions. The Gospel arrives from the places that least expect, condemning the safety and piety of our religious positions. It is really quite striking and unsettling when this hits for the first time, and it also revealed to me how convoluted and dangerous my ideas of salvation had unkwoingly become in the process of missing this reality.

The reason scripture was inspiring and comforting and bolstering of my beliefs is because it tells me how and why I am on the “inside”. It tells me why I am on the right side of the truth. And yet, scripture, by nature of its coming to us from those outside places, exposes this way of thinking as dangerous, not just for us but for the world. And all of the grand theories and belief structures and formulas that I had spent so much time constructing and holding near and dear suddenly became sign markers of this condemnation.

The more I thought about this the more it made sense though. The very things that seemed to assure me of my salvation were the things that also seemed to continuously leave me in fear of it. Back and forth this would go, even though I didn’t realize this was pendulum was swinging or even why I felt the things it was making me feel. The more I tried to find confidence and assurance in my salvation, the harder I would crash when scripture threw this off balance, because the words I thought were bolstering my beliefs were actually condemning my privileged position.

At the core of this struggle sits the Cross. There is no other symbol in Christianity that so directly implies and reflects the idea of salvation in its essence. And at the root of my understanding of the Cross sat this idea that it was my sin that killed Jesus, and that the reason Jesus had to die in my place was because, as God, He was the one who had committed no sin.

The real problem with this way of thinking about the Cross is that it turns Jesus into the very thing that scripture, and His ministry, condemns. If, as I had so often been taught, the law cannot save us, but Jesus in turn does save us from the law, how can it be that Jesus salvation then comes by way of the law? To make the Cross synonymous with this way of thinking holds salvation in bondage to the very thing the Cross is meant to deconstruct. It sets Jesus under the law and makes salvation a works based endeavor,  creating a conundrum that is difficult to ignore. I would eventually come to discover that nearly every modern denomination was born from a desire to address this problem innately particular way and with a particular motivation, but in the meantime my own emotional state was certainly affected by this conundrum in a very real way.

Sin As Sin, Sin as Power
It was through N.T. Wright that I first encountered a way of seeing God and seeing Christianity that freed me from this way of thinking, and subsequently this awful pendulum of fear and anxiety that it induces. And it all comes down to the way we understand this tricky and precarious word “sin”.

As I mentioned in my previous reflections, my enslavement to fear and anxiety over my salvation had never been more heightened than when I walked into a particular belief system that elevated the notion of sin to the highest of levels to . In the idea of penal substitution, the cornerstone of this particular belief system that I had inherited, sin causes us to be removed the from equation entirely. Salvation comes by way of Christ’s ability to not sin, it comes through the death of the one who committed no sin, and it is given to us in the fact that God can now see Christ (Himself) in our place rather than us because of the sacrifice He endured. This is how we then are saved.

And yet, in the modern, highly evangelical way of thinking which holds this kind of penal substitutionary thought captive, the way we know that we are one of the saved is through our lives imitating Christ and being a witness to our salvation by echoing this same sinless nature. The fear that I had remains, only it is now heightened within this more concrete understanding that Christ chooses some to be saved and some to perish, which by nature, according to this approach, is what makes God sovereign and supposedly gives us the confidence we need to trust in our salvation.

Ironically, the immediate effect it had on me personally was that it made me even more piously protective of that insider position (I am the chosen one), and made the crashes on the other side of that never ending pendulum that much harder every time I encountered scripture and it caused me to question whether my life was doing enough to prove that I was in fact one of the chosen at all. Again, it is striking how much grace scripture gives to those on the outside and how condemning it is of those on the inside of these protective, theological structures.

What really offered me freedom though was this. The idea of “Sin” in the Bible is not primarily seen as human activity, a list of rights and wrongs that define whether we are saved or not, but rather denotes the idea of “Power.” Sin is the “Powers” that hold this world and us in bondage. It is the state of being in which the world sits. In the second chapter of her book The Crucifixion, the book that has been inspiring these personal reflections on the Cross, Fleming Rutledge writes this.

“He knew no sin; he was made sin. Note that Paul does not say “Jesus never sinned” or “Jesus did not commit sin.” That is because Sin in Paul is not something that one commits; it is a Power by which one is held helplessly in thrall.” (p101)

Rutledge shares much in common with N.T. Wright here, recognizing that before we arrive at any sort of attempt to unpack ideas of “justification” (the means by which we are made right through salvation), we must make sure to see Sin in the light of its Pauline, and very Judeo-Christian centric understanding. Because if we don’t we are very likely to end up somewhere lost in the endless systems of theology (systemic theology) that try to wedge it into some corner of Christendom and turn it into an idol, the danger of course being that we then miss the Jesus and the Cross that was so central to the Pauline witness.

“For Paul, it is not God, but the curse of the law that condemned Jesus. In his death, Paul declares, Jesus was giving himself over to the Enemy- to Sin, to its ally the Law, and to its wage, Death (Rom. 6:23; 7:8-11). This was his warfare.” (p101)

There is a reason why Rutledge spends time outlining in her introduction some of the terms she feels needs qualification. Sin is one of the most apparent of those terms, because it is the word upon which we find so much division within our religious systems. And it is the single word through which we find so many in the New Testament scripture building their case against Jesus, simultaneously being condemned by their own desire to position their piety over and against Jesus’ ministry, undercutting the reality of the “Word of the Cross”, or the Way of the Cross as the Way of Christ into the world.

What is being condemned in scripture over and over again is the act of the religious using religious theories and constructs to identity the nature of what it means to be on the inside or the outside of God’s saving work. And not surprisingly, the measure of these religious constructs come by way of the “Law”, the very thing many modern Christians like to condemn while working to recreate a new Law in the likeness of their new life in Christ.

Sin and the Law
What I really like about what Rutledge does in Chapter 2 is that she uses our understanding of Sin as a way to then expose our understanding of the “Law”, both in what it is and what it does. Many of us, as Christians, are taught that the Law is what condemns us and that Jesus is the one who saves us from the Law. It’s in how we understand the Law to function that this gets tricky. Once we interpret it as a list of to do’s and to don’ts, we are then able to place the Law back within the its Jewish context as the key measure of their judgment and their salvation. The Law is what they must follow in order to be saved, and yet their reliance on the Law is also what condemns them. We are left once again with a conundrum.

And in truth, it doesn’t take long in the New Testament, be it in Paul’s writings or later in the Gospels, for us to see this is precisely what the religious elite were preaching as well.

The problem comes when we try to re-apply this and reframe this against the Cross.  In the arrival of Jesus the Law now holds no power. Jesus has fulfilled it in His sacrifice and thus we ar no longer underneath it. And yet Jesus is seen to do this by following the law perfectly in a way that se could not do for ourselves. The truth that emerges in this train of thought though is that the Law, then, still holds power. And it still holds power because it remains the measure of the salvation we hold near and dear. The Cross becomes a symbol of a salvation dependent on dos and don’ts.

Here is where the understanding of Sin’s relationship to the Law becomes important. Rutledge writes, “Paul shows that Sin and the Law are partners in a conspiracy involving a third partner, Death.” (p100) She goes on to say, “In Romans 7:11, Paul depicts Sin using the Law as an instrument to deal Death to humanity, almost as though Sin were using the Law as a lethal club. And indeed that is more or less what Paul is saying.” (p101)

According to Rutledge (and Wright), the Law in scripture is not the measure of our salvation, rather it is the natural (and necessary) measure of our reality. It is the thing that declares the Powers that holds this world bondage to be real and active. And it reveals Sin as the Power that wields it. The Law signifies the great spiritual war that is waging between Life and Death around us, in which injustice, suffering, hurt and struggle find their way.

The Cross and Spiritual Warfare
One of the most glorious things about encountering both Wright and Rutledge is the way in which they seem free to tap into a long lost aspect of the Christian faith we find in the West- the idea of spiritual warfare. In the West, the idea of Spiritual Warfare has been either ignored or abused. Both writers appear to have a connection with and a value for more Eastern ways of thinking, a tradition and practice which retains closer ties with the ancient world and more ancient ways of understanding our faith. In their perspectives, the idea that the Cross must be placed directly in the context of the “Powers”, if it is to be properly understood, is as natural as saying in the evangelical, Western world “Jesus Saves.” Further, this is precisely why they can declare that Jesus Saves so readily, is because of what the Cross declares to us about this great spiritual war.

And I know, to speak in a Western context using such seemingly supernatural terminology is to sound ludicrous and foolish. But to borrow from Wright, to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural is the first sign that our thinking might be off track. As Rutledge writes, “It (the cross) is foolishness to secular people not only because of its intrinsic nature but also because of its affront to the educated, sophisticated mind.” (p85) More surprising sometimes though is how foolish it sounds to Christians who feel like using this language somehow poses a threat to rational and systematic thought. We much prefer the language of sin, as it is something that we can control, manage and locate in the rational world.

And yet, to understand such grand ideas as Law and Sin in this light is to be freed from that never ending pendulum that our addiction to these rational and systemic enslaves us to. It is, in the end, the very thing that brings us to where many of our theologies believe and declare we already are- freed from the constraints of the law, and freed from our own abilities to save ourselves.

Finding My Way Back to the Cross
Let me be clear here. This is not to do away with Christian ideas such as sanctification, forgiveness, and small letter “sin”. These are still relevant aspects of our Christian lives. It is simply to say that if we cannot approach these ideas theologically without seeing the Cross first in light of the Sin (Powers) that hold us bondage, we stand in danger of elevating any of those ideas to prominence over and above the Cross as the means of our salvation. And that is dangerous territory to tread.

Most importantly though, beginning with the idea of the Powers as that which Jesus is engaged with on the Cross freed me to look again in wonder and marvel at the Cross as the source of Christ’s saving work in this world and my life. Rutledge writes, “It has always been difficult for the Church to hold on to the cross at its center.” (p82) This is true for both secular and the religious, if one can be so bold as to resurrect those problematic terms. And it is true for so many reasons, not the least because of its intellectual affront. As Rutledge has pointed out, the Cross has been scrutinized in light of its most valued source of witness in both its ancient and modern context, including the Women who first declared it to be, the Pauline traditions that bear its earliest witness, the seemingly contradictory Gospel writings, the offensiveness of trying to read God as a human and a human as God, and the affront it presents to our rational and progressive way of thinking.

By and large, by breaking into our world from the outside in, from the margins to the inner circles, from the perceived sin soaked places to the pious faithful, “the cross is irreligious because no human being individually or human beings collectively would have projected their hopes, wishes, longings, and needs onto a crucified man.” (p75) And yet, somehow and in someway the Cross still holds immense power in this world, in our lives and in our theologies. It remains today as seemingly absurd as it was for the ancient world, even if for slightly different reasons. But, when seen in the light of what God was and is doing, it has the power to free us and bring us hope in the most hopeless of places.

This is what it means to discover and rediscover the Cross over and over again. It’s a reminder that where this world is not right, we can know that it is being made right. And to re-engage the stories of those who first encountered it is to know that it is in the ability of the Cross to reorient our way of seeing this world, our faith, God, Salvation, and even ourselves, that remains the most alluring aspect of it. As Rutledge writes,

“.. the early church was threatened by far worse consequences than the contempt of the fastidious. During the first three centuries, the cross was not the sign in which the emperor conquered. It did not adorn medals and honors. It was not bejeweled, enameled, or worked in precious metal. It was a sign of contradiction and scandal, which quite often meant exile or death for those who adhered to the way of the crucified One.” (p82)

The Cross might be scandalous and foolishness, even to the religious and religious elite, but it is its declarative presence that can tell us that the Powers that hold us bondage need not hold sway over us anymore. And that is a great hope indeed.

 

“The way ahead is found in the tension itself. This is not the same thing as having it both ways by seeking a bland, safe position in the center between the poles. Christian theology and the Christian life are best found on the frontiers, where our thinking and doing are engaged by the dynamic tension between two seemingly contradictory truths.”
-Rutledge

In both the introduction and in the first chapter of her book “The Crucifixion: Understanding The Death of Jesus Christ”, Rutledge recognizes the existence of contradictory feelings, ideas and truths as necessary constructs for understanding what it is that faith desires to do within the context of Christian theology and the Christian life. Both faith and science hold equal interest in exploring the tension that our questions, the source of these contradictions, are able to bring forth, but where faith differs from science is in its greater interest in exploring the intersection of theology and a life lived in relationship to this God we are wondering about.

The Christian faith, then, shapes the way we live particularly according to the ministry and witness of Christ, and it is Rutledge’s conviction that the Cross, and the idea of the Cross, remains its greatest and most important source of tension. This is true for a variety of reasons, but Rutledge does an amazing job in her first chapter of outlining the relevance both of our common resistance to the (idea of the) Cross and the primacy of the Cross in the Gospel of Jesus.

If faith is about hope, the Cross is often the thing that feels the least hopeful, while at the same time being declared as the most vital part of hope’s emergence in the story of the Christian faith. As she writes, “The Gospels are designed, each according to its own perspective, to show, after the fact, how Jesus’ sacrificial life led to his sacrificial death.” And yet, as she goes on to point out, history has marked itself by a familiar resistance to the Cross and its imposition. The Cross has long been considered and described as an “offense”, a contradictory roadblock in our attempts to understand a loving God.

What underscores this resistance is the ability of the Cross to “reorient” our lives in ways that make us uncomfortable. That is what makes the cross an offence, is its imposition. And yet that is also the power the cross holds as a “contradictory” statement. What makes contradiction necessary and vital is its ability to protect an idea or truth from becoming a product of our own making. It helps us to know that what informs our lives, our questions, comes from something outside of ourselves, which is what we are able to trust. This is true for scientific method and theory. This is even more true for the process of faith.

The Offense of the Cross and A Cross of Offense: Facing a Contradiction
I wrote in my earlier blog that part of the tension that I carry with me into my reading of this book is the way I had been taught to view the Cross. To see the Cross was to hear the singular message that God despises me because of my sin, and that the only way for God to see me was to see Christ in my place. This was, as they said, an act of love. And despite coming to this view by way of a desire to find a more intellectually aware and robust faith, this way of thinking led to an incredible struggle with depression, a devaluing of not only myself but others, and a constant state of fear and anxiety.

One of the things that I had to do was confront and recognize this apparent tension or contradiction within the confines of my faith. I questioned this view of the Cross, but at the same time I also recognized that without the Cross my Christian faith had lost its relevance. This became apparent when I abandoned my faith for a while, and even more apparent when I came back to the idea of faith in God later on. Only now I knew that I needed to rediscover the Cross with this tension in tow, a journey I still find myself on.

So much of what Rutledge writes keeps poking at the source of this tension for me. As she points out, it is human nature to want to spin out and away from the offense of the cross when confronted by it. Despite the challenges I had and have in reconciling the way I was taught to see the Cross with the Cross I was rediscovering, the even greater problem was rediscovering a Cross that was perhaps even more offensive than the one I left behind. Only it is a different kind of offense. To open myself up to what the Cross wants to do in my life can be a frightening prospect precisely because of the ways it wants to reorient my life in unexpected directions. It turned me from being offended by the Cross to understanding the offence of the Cross.

Rediscovering The Cross: A New Found Freedom
What I have found in this space though and on this journey is a greater degree of freedom and hope. And what I have found particularly helpful in reading this book is the way Rutledge seems to have given definition to this freedom and hope as, to use her term, the “Word of the Cross”. The Cross is a revelatory, life shaping, spirit forming reality that wants to shape the way I live according to the Way of Jesus. This is the offense, and this is also the freedom and hope that we find in it.

Further, perhaps one of the most informing things about this is the way Rutledge has helped me (re)frame the Cross the Resurrection together as the singular work of God in my life and in this world. Tension often arises when we see the Cross as the less than hopeful part of the Christian story and the Resurrection as the source of our hope, and thus compartmentalize them, separate them, and isolate them as separate parts of the same story. And yet,

“The Resurrection, being a transhistorical event planted within history, does not cancel out the contradiction and shame of the cross in this present life; rather, the resurrection ratifies the cross as the way “until he comes.”

What she goes on to define in chapter 1 is that the ways in which the Resurrection vindicates the Cross. In other words, we approach the Cross in light of the resurrection. That is what gives the Cross its shape. This is the idea of “redemptive suffering”, that we are called as Christians to travel in the Way of Jesus not away from it, and the reason this distinctive is so important is because of the relationship between faith, hope and love.

The reason redemptive suffering is a necessary idea in light of this relationship is because it is still the reality that we find in this not yet but already reality that frames the Cross and the Resurrection as a whole. This points us back to what God is doing and what God desires to do in the midst of this suffering as participants not observers, a people of God attentive to the suffering of others.

Rutledge does such an amazing job at helping to unpack how this was and is the great tragedy of Gnosticism, is that it pulls us out of suffering for the sake of ourselves rather than pushing us into it for the sake of others. Not in the sense of looking for suffering, but rather in recognizing that the work of God is to attend to this suffering. This is why she can say something so bold as, “The Christian gospel- when proclaimed in its radical New Testament form- is more truly inclusive of every human being, spiritually proficient or not, than any of the world’s religious systems have ever been, precisely because of the godlessness of Jesus’ death.” And this becomes our witness because, borrowing from Bonhoeffer, she writes, “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross (Bonhoeffer).” 

The Cross as Signposts For Our Lives
I love this image that Rutledge paints- resurrection life must always be marked by the signs of the cross. In reflecting on my own story and what the spirit is looking to teach and show me as I journey through this book, I am struck by how the Cross, despite my inability to understand it, my resistance to it, and even its problematic place at points in my life, has been shaping me and molding me according to its hopeful purpose even in my ignorance. There is a point in chapter 1 where she speaks about how people tend to look back on classical Christendom and classical Christian teaching with less than favourable eyes because they see “creed” as synonymous with outdated and dangerous. It’s interesting then to consider that in my own journey I found myself eventually drawn into a liturgical and confessional Church environment that gives classical Christianity a presence and a place. I think I was drawn here because I had come to understand that a faith without lived without tension was not much of a faith, and that to live in a way that ignored the Cross or with no faith at all was to live in a world of my own making. A world made in my own image.

I need a faith that is able to reorient me out of my places of self interest, a self interest that can be located firmly within the realm of Gnostic (and modern) teaching. If Gnosticism, as Rutledge helps us to understand, is the great rival to Christianity precisely because of the ways it sees “privileged spiritual knowledge” as the way to salvation or enlightenment (thus creating a natural hierarchy with people on the top and people on the bottom), it is in the way that the Cross is able to place us all on equal ground that love as an idea both lavished and imparted on us can emerge.

“In gnosticism”s portrayal of salvation, the power to redeem (God’s power) has been subsumed into our capacity for being redeemed. Therefore the crucifixion becomes unnecessary.”

These signposts, these Cross markers in my life become the story God is telling as I, and we, anticipate the New Heavens and the New earth being made new. It is this cruciform pattern of life that must mark our communities as self giving and sacrificial as we anticipate this reality. This is the love that we find at the Cross. To live in the resurrection without the cross is to neglect the “now” for the not yet, and “to believe that we can do this without the cross.” The Eucharist declares itself as food for the journey not because it frees us from suffering but because, when seen in the light of Resurrection hope it can reveal to us through the Cross that this world is being redeemed, that we are being made new, and that we are being made whole. 

I still remember the day I picked up my first John Piper book, the popular preacher, teacher, theologian, and resident spokesperson for many in the ultra conservative brand of the Reformed Calvinist camp. The book was called “Desiring God”, and at the time it represented a major shift for me in how I understood my faith. It was an effort to return to scripture and a more intellectually concerned and robust way of being a practicing Christian.

Piper represented a movement of fellow disgruntled Christians, long caught up in popular forms of what called Church “lite”, towards a worship that could better reflect good and proper theology. I bought into it and even craved it, reading one, and then another, and then another yet. The well was deep, and there were many impassioned voices willing travel deep into the well along with me. I even passed along his name (and books) to skeptical friends, thinking they need to read this with me and be enlightened to its wonders.

The irony was, at the time I had no idea what “Reformed” actually meant, or the difference between a Calvinist and a Methodist or a Lutheran and Arminian. All I knew was that I was attracted to the promise of greater, intellectual engagement.

Calvinism, The Cross and A Growing Disillusionment
It would be a number of years later (and a good number of Seminary years later) that I would gain a better understanding both on what I was craving at the time (and still do) and the ways in which this movement, rather than satisfy this craving, actually left me greatly unsettled and kind of dead inside.

Which is not to belabour my spiritual journey since this point. I have written about that in this space at length already. Rather, the reason I bring this up is because one of the areas in which I was left greatly unsettled was in the way this movement had taught me to understand the work of Jesus on the Cross. The essential belief of popular Calvinism is what you would call “penal substitution”, and it is this belief that John Piper preached and wrote about on a daily basis (along with others in his camp). To borrow from a very simplified definition, penal substitution choses to see Christ as taking the punishment for our sins on our behalf in order to appease God’s anger. When one applies the layers that go along with this, which are written and expressed all over the Desiring God series, what you then discover is a God who not only cannot look at us because of our sin, but a God who when he does look at us sees not us but rather Jesus in our place.

This way of thinking about the Cross, and Jesus’ work on the Cross, has led me through years of crisis and self doubt. It not only came to seem strange to me, particularly as I began to engage more with scripture itself, it seemed incredibly harmful and misplaced. If sin is an idea that we find in the Christian story, and I believe it is, it was as if this understanding had reached in, extracted it from the Gospel story and turned it into some form of an idol meant to glorify God at the expense of His creation. And what’s interesting to note about this idea is that most of what I had been taught and experienced up to this point was a form of Penal Substitution. It was simply filtered through a different theological expression, and articulated in a way that failed to narrow down (intellectually speaking) to such a pointed and expression theoretical position.

Rediscovering The Cross
Although I had long since distanced myself from Calvinist teaching, it was perhaps fitting that both Piper and N.T. Wright, someone who would become an invaluable source on my journey out of that Calvinist bubble, would go on to pen two complimentary conversational pieces regarding their competing views on the “justification” of God, which is simply a theological term that describes the specific “act” of God removing our guilt and our sin and claiming us as righteous in its place. In any case, what has become important for me over the years, and necessary as I continue to wrestle with these theological ideas, is a continued reconciling and meditating on what Jesus’ work on the Cross means for my life, for the life of others and for the world. It seems necessary to me, because if I cannot reconcile this confession (and for me it is confessional), it seems that my Christian faith loses much of its relevance.

Not unlike the topic of prayer, the idea of Jesus’ death and resurrection is something I find I need to return to over and over again in order to reconcile that tension that still exists within me, between the oppressiveness of what I felt and the freedom that I know Jesus’ death and resurrection declares as a Gospel reality. While this reconciliation certainly happens through the liturgy of our weekly Sunday Worship, thanks to a book recommend, along with the reality of this current Easter season, I have found yet another opportunity to come back to this Gospel reality over the coming weeks by engaging with a book by Fleming Rutledge, an “American Episcopal priest, author, theologian and preacher”, called The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.  

Here is a link to the author: https://generousorthodoxy.org/
And a link to the book, which is currently available for $3 on Amazon for the Kindle version. Can’t turn that down :): https://www.amazon.ca/Crucifixion-Understanding-Death-Jesus-Christ-ebook/dp/B01AJ5P014/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Crucifixion&qid=1586114618&sr=8-1

A Process of Self Reflection in Self Isolation
My hope in the coming weeks is to be able to use some of this global self isolation time we all find ourselves in at the moment to reflect on and think about some of the things that come out of my reading of this book. I’ve only just read the introduction and already I find my highlighter going a bit crazy, so I have high hopes for the journey.

I’ll be honest though, any time I approach a book on the subject with an author I do not know I find myself treading with much trepidation, fear and caution, waiting for the bomb to drop that this individual is going to present an “argument for…” this theory or that theory. She set me at ease on page nine when she took to task our tendency to boil theology down into theories. As she writes,

“Theory is a poor word to choose when seeking to understand the testimony of the Bible. The Old and New Testaments do not present theories at any time. Instead, we find stories, images, metaphors, symbols, sagas, sermons, songs, letters, poems. It would be hard to find writing that is less theoretical.” (Page 9)

Later she goes on to talk about the shifts in modern scholarship and current trends that she identifies as moving towards a more “literary style of interpretation” and rediscovering the “plain meaning of a text.” She sees this as an important facet of conversing about the death and resurrection of Jesus, because this can lead “to a discussion of the Word and a discussion of Jesus not being a reconstruction of the past but a living and breathing reality in the here and now.” 

This aspect of our faith feels deeply important to Rutledge, and in fact vital and necessary for the Cross to hold any meaning in our lives at all. As she says, “Christian faith has never- either at the start or now- been based on historical reconstructions of Jesus, even though Christian faith has always involved some historical claims concerning Jesus. Rather, Christian faith (then and now) is based on religious claims concerning the present power of Jesus…” (Page 29).

Which resonates for me as I continue to discover the power that the “Word of the Cross” has, to borrow her descriptive, to reform and transform my life on a daily basis. What I have come to hold onto over the years is that the Cross is less of a statement on my condition and more of an invitation into something new and something healing. I have no problem understanding dissatisfaction and dissolution with the present, be it in my own life or within the present reality of our world. Somehow and in someway the Cross speaks to this in a necessary and life giving way. That is the hope that I have come to cherish, not this idea that God can only see my sin (and even worse then, subsequently the sin of the world), but that the incarnate God continues to pursue me in hopes of inviting me into the work that Jesus is doing in this grand vision for the New Heavens and the New Earth.  After all,

“If God is not truly incarnate in Jesus as he accomplishes his work on the cross, then nothing has really happened from God’s side and we are thrown back on ourselves. If there is no incarnation of the Godhead in Jesus’ sacrifice, then there is no salvation apart from what human nature can contribute.”(Page 31)

and that to me feels hopeless. Thank god that the Gospel brings us good news.