This confusion is due in large part to a muddling of the terms bigotry and racism. Bigotry is an active form of discrimination that is conscious, explicit, and overt. Bigotry has always existed. Whenever one tribe has hated and sought to exclude or enslave another, whenever one nation has accounted another as inhuman, or whenever one group has justified the elimination of another group, bigotry has been the power at work. Racism, however, is more insidious because it is implicit, often subconscious, and rooted in self-protection. It seeks to preserve social and economic positions that cannot exist apart from the suppression of other members of our society, but even as we do so, we deny it, as we cannot afford to recognize that our dominance depends upon the marginalization and exploitation of an other. 

Racism, furthermore, is perpetuated through societal structures that artificially provide advantage to some at the expense of others. The actions and attitudes of individuals are not insignificant in such arrangements, but neither are they sufficient for the reformation of these structures or the rectification of their wrongs. Indeed, the mode of existence to which we in the contemporary neoliberal order are habituated reconstitutes the agency of both the advantaged and disadvantaged, rendering us largely passive spectators rather than actors upon the stage of our society’s race-related drama. 

Because of the passive role we play in structural racism and our denial that our actions or inaction suppresses others, our confusion over racism is unsurprising. And it becomes even more convoluted when the beneficiaries of racism claim they are unmotivated by matters of race. This claim is true in many instances and yet their denial of the significance of race is made possible by a flawed conception of humanity, a conception promulgated by the hegemonic forces of neoliberalism. White Americans may not be bigots, but they assume a normativity to their whiteness. That is, what we may imagine as common to all human beings is in fact a reflection of the modern white male and the purchasing power he exercises. But if the particularities of any given human subject could be stripped away, we would not find a core humanity that is identifiably white. Nevertheless, this is the hidden presumption at work in many American Christians, both white and non-white, and it bears witness to the deceptive power of the systems through which we assume and exercise the forms of identity we are habituated to understand as natural.

Willie James Jennings writes that the burden for contemporary Christians is to “recognize the grotesque nature of a social performance of Christianity that imagines Christian identity floating above land, landscape, animals, place, and space, leaving such realities to the machinations of capitalistic calculations and the commodity chains of private property. Such Christian identity can only inevitably lodge itself in the materiality of racial existence.”¹ In other words, a social imagination that divorces identity from these concrete particulars will falsely present itself as a universal view of things, in effect masquerading one set of particulars as universally normative. Distrustful of the particular as part of a quest to transcend the vicissitudes of history, the enlightened European social imagination enshrines an abstraction it cannot recognize as its own particular identifiers. 

According to that view, the bonds between any people and their “land, landscape, animals, place, and space” would be seen, if at all, as jagged edges of deformity to be sanded down so as to fit the universally normative. It is as if these things were incidental to a thing’s being, as if the essence of any object or person were instantiated in anything other than its accidents within history. Reality in this paradigm is the stuff of detached analytic description rather than the thornily concrete persons, places, and things we bodily encounter wherever and whenever we are.

This supposedly objective viewpoint is one of the reasons that thousands of Native Americans were coerced into adopting, wholesale, white culture as a matter of United States policy. Setting aside the manifestly wicked protocols of Native removal, dislocation, and massacre, and this is how assimilation could be accepted as something good and decent undertaken to help Native Americans. This is the only way Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that Indian nations were “domestic, dependent nations” which related to the United States as “a ward to his guardian” could be averred as anything other than paternalistic bigotry. This is the only way “kill the Indian and save the man” could be promoted as a beneficent program or that such rhetoric could afterward be portrayed—with absolute honesty—as not being racist in its motivation.²

Of course, even saying that Native Americans were forced into adopting white culture is something of a misnomer. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing. Culture is a traditioned, communal response to this terrain—its seasons and its creatures. That connection to place is encoded in culture, which, as Wendell Berry insists, “contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used.” It is only with this type of formation that we are able to “carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and lovingly used, and moreover the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly.” Lacking this, “a place is open to exploitation, and ultimately destruction, from the center.”³

This is why white culture, as such, does not exist. What passes for white culture are the practices and dispositions which do not belong to whites alone or to any particular group of whites. Instead, a range of commodified goods is what constitutes white culture. But a culture that can be transplanted to any location, provided certain technological needs are met, is no culture at all. And to assume otherwise is to essentialize this particular subject, the modern white male, who is instantiated in no particular culture but rather interpellated by and bound to the forces of exchange and the sociology of knowledge constructed by the hegemonic powers of capitalism.⁴ For this particular subject has not always existed: he was invented and promulgated in the modern era by capitalist ideology to consume and to be consumed.

The conflation of commodified identity with culture reinforces the illusion of capitalism’s normativity. But this departicularizing mode of reason can only arise within the capitalist plausibility structure that shapes Western civilization and disciplines our notions of identity and desire. Capitalism severs the connection between peoples and the places with which they symbiotically become people, substituting a bogus vision of what life is meant to be and how we are meant to achieve it. Capitalism, therefore, is not a neutral means of accomplishing just any paradigm or concept of the good: it is its own religious paradigm, a power to be resisted by disciples of the crucified Nazarene. 

The supposed normativity of capitalism is a fraud, as it attempts to conceal its motivated particularity. This is not, however, to claim that the concept of universal normativity is itself an illusion. Such a claim would be self-defeating, as it would be only another example of an arbitrary assertion advanced by a select few because of its advantageousness to them. Opposition to the machinations of capitalism dissipates into nothing if normativity is not presupposed, as any such critique is based on a mode of reasoning tacitly held to be true in all places, at all times, for all persons. This reasoning is deeper and more pervasive than ego-based antagonism; it is rooted in a notion of justice to which we assume all responsible and compassionate persons are subject. 

Of course, capitalism obfuscates the very conditions that make right judgment possible by habituating us all to its bogus normativity. Mammon opxenly operates in the world, grinding away “land, landscape, animals, place, and space” to sculpt a people shaped after its own consumptive, idolatrous image, a people who are routinely blinded to its revelation. Christians are familiar with this name through Jesus’s assertion that no one can serve both God and mammon (see Matt. 6:24 and Luke 16:13). But what is it? 

Often understood as little more than a personification of money, mammon is the deification of all that property and provision promise. Wealth, possessions, and prestige are simply the accretion disc surrounding the insatiable black hole that is mammon. It acts and yet it is not a subject. It has an ontological density sufficient to be identified and condemned by Jesus, and yet it is not a personal being. It blurs the lines between entity and agent, as it is more like a field of force that attracts human desire and directs it towards futility. It is the principle animating the structures of covetousness that frame and direct our lives.

Mammon reconfigures our desiring so as to make contentment unattractive and dull. Under this regime, we feel most alive, perversely, in wanting endlessly. Subjectivity under mammon is instantiated through need and dissatisfaction. William Cavanaugh observes a similar pattern:

Dissatisfaction and satisfaction cease to be opposites, for pleasure is not so much in the possession of things as in their pursuit. There is pleasure in the pursuit of novelty, and the pleasure resides not so much in having as in wanting. Once we have obtained an item, it brings desire to a temporary halt, and the item loses some of its appeal. Possession kills desire; familiarity breeds contempt. That is why shopping, not buying itself, is the heart of consumerism. The consumerist spirit is a restless spirit, typified by detachment, because desire must be constantly kept on the move.⁵

It is human to desire what we do not have. This is not intrinsically wrong but can careen into something unhealthy and sinful. All of us lack and seek to overcome that lack. There is a distinct, albeit painful, delight in longing for what is not available to us, because it is in the past, is distant from us, or awaits us in the future. Healthy desire does not overindulge or seek its end in competition. The insidious thing mammon does to this delight, however, is to enshrine discontent as the chief virtue we are to pursue above all others. We crave, therefore we are.

To manufacture this discontent, mammon creates a demand for commodified homogeneity, and this extends into the context of race. Indeed, race is a category manufactured by mammon to subjugate both the suppressed and the dominant within society. Mammon has no regard for our ancestry or the hue of our skin except insofar as our differences can be exploited to engender the conflict which substantiates the spurious value of the simulacra it creates.

Difference is reconciled only within the economy of commodity exchange and its badges of accumulation. These markers of achievement distinguish those who have from those who lack, the deserving from the undeserving. They have become substitutes for the identities we would have received from our cultures and communities, but our formation under mammon conditions us to view these substitutes as desirable. It accomplishes its aims of subjugating bodies precisely by claiming that embodiment and its responsibilities are of negligible value.

But mammon cannot create a value of its own. Human beings have always added value to the things of the nonhuman world through their art and artisanship, but this has been best done when they have humbly recognized the primary origin of that value outside of themselves. “When humans presume to originate value,” Berry observes, “they make value that is first abstract and then false, tyrannical, and destructive of real value.”⁶ This delusion of having artificially created value destroys place, creatures, cultures, and with them, ultimately, human identity.

To grasp how this is so, we must specify what it is that identity identifies. Individually, it marks out the narrative shape of this particular life rather than that one. It indicates a history that differentiates this name from another. Collectively, it identifies who we are in relation to certain commitments and responsibilities, as well as our means to achieve those commitments. Identity names those particularities that anchor each of us in time, in space, and among our fellows.

Identity under mammon, however, is scarcely an identity at all, as the differentiation it offers is designed to perpetuate covetousness and division, nor is there a responsibility to place and creatures to which it is subject. mammon provides a counterfeit identity, a mass-produced placeholder suspended over nothing, severed from space and culture, designed to orbit and draw its significance from commodity. It advertises that bodies and matter and place are inconsequential, but its denials mask its intention to reduce the human subject to an atomistic vessel of insatiable covetousness. The common good promoted by mammon is a parody amounting to little more than gratification and accumulation as measured by artificial value. 

The material that binds communities together and binds them to land, to animals, and to place and space are concrete impediments to mammon’s regime. The erasure of Indigenous cultures in modernity has served its purposes precisely because, in the absence of such material particularity, it can fill that vacuum with the simulacra of culture. The forced reeducation of Native Americans did not make them white: it ground away their connections to their culture so as to assimilate them within a civilization centered around artificiality and instrumental reason. It is the accidental fact of history that the conquerors and commodifiers were white, but this explains how the mass-produced products of industry and the eagerness to interfere with and disrupt nature can be mistaken for and believed to be white culture. With this whiteness presented as the pinnacle of rationality, nonwhites can be habituated to clamor after such badges of identity and can come to accept this as the natural course of things. 

But there is nothing natural about it. Mammon can take root anywhere because it is not bound to “land, landscape, animals, place, and space.” This severing of concrete ties between human communities and the nonhuman world degrades humanity and the world both. Ruinous waste becomes viewed as normal; poverty becomes reinterpreted as a vice and greed as a virtue; and systemic racism becomes the lamentable but inevitable byproduct of the failure to live up to the reasonable expectations of the social order. The rates of incarceration of Black people, for instance, come to be viewed as the unfortunate consequence of Black people’s unwillingness to accept and adapt to reality after the manner of the majority of white people. The coming of Jesus Christ into the far country—the disorder and wreckage of fallen human history—     testifies, however, that these conclusions are false.⁷ But not only are they false: they corrode hope and embitter life. They preserve the narcolepsy of spirit that permits the perpetuation of these grievous evils. 

It must be asked, then: if racism is decried, but the regime of mammon is left untouched, what actually has been gained? One form of injustice—our direct or indirect treatment of people of color, for instance—may become more visible than it was before, but if the network of practices and exchanges that give rise to exploitation and hostility are left to govern our lives and determine their shape, then the cross has not confronted it to call it to account. There is no hope of renewal apart from the judgment carried out in the crucifixion of the present age.

The specificity of historical injustices calls for specific acts of repentance and restitution. This is always the pattern in Scripture of making right what has gone wrong. Additionally, however, the prophetic impulse is corrupted whenever particularity is sacrificed and the condemnation of injustice metamorphoses and degenerates into the condemnation of generalized groups of people. The gospel—and the tangibility of all the particulars in play in our shared lifeworld—challenges each of us to resist the temptation to erase the situatedness of those with whom we disagree, or else we will simply return evil for evil after the manner of what we are opposing. 

The end of such critiques is not the flagellation of those who have participated in systems of injustice, for guilt and self-inflicted torment will not lead to atonement. Moreover, an exclusive focus upon individual repentance leaves the oppressive, exploitative structures of mammon intact and operative in the lives of both collaborators and victims, as well as in the social structures that bind them together. 

Reimagining the relationships between peoples and places, needs and fears, is more than an injunction to reconceive theory; it is an invitation to see and to act free of mammon’s illusions. This is in keeping with the praxis prescribed by the Apostle Paul not to be conformed to the present age but to be “transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2 NRSV). 

Injustice perpetrated and injustice denied both provoke the yearning for recompense that, gone unheeded for too long, becomes a temptation toward hatred and vengeance. But Christian faith testifies that fragile, frightened white people are to be objects of mercy and compassion, not objects of insistent, active hatred, and this is in spite of the bewildering and injurious ignorance for which they are responsible. Such white people are also victims of mammon’s tyranny, not in precisely the same way or to the same extent as nonwhite people, but we are all, white and nonwhite, implicated in the thrall of mammon. We are all in need of the disciplining of our compulsions, the healing of our habits, and the recalibration of our vision. We have all allowed the particularities of our individual and collective histories to be erased and replaced by mammon’s machinations. 

But we are not all equally culpable or even culpable in the same ways. No: the beneficiaries of mammon’s hegemony bear unique responsibility for failing to recognize and repudiate the systemic injustices upon which their privileges depend. This is especially true for Christians, as this failure calls into question our allegiance to the one we claim is our Lord. Christian identity is inherently opposed to the hegemony of mammon because that hegemony is entirely antithetical to the One in whom Christians arrive at self-understanding and vocation. 

Christ has come to expose mammon’s lies and dismantle its machinery because, as Joel Green comments, it “has no place in the age to come.”⁸ Christian identity is not an essence but a recognition of having been claimed by Jesus Christ and filled with his spirit and a vocation to participate in Christ’s liberating reign. Christians are those whose narrative sense of themselves has been enfolded within the life of Jesus Christ. As such, they are to no longer regard anyone merely according to the flesh (2 Cor. 5:16)—the exploitative lines of demarcation that permit us to categorize and diminish the being of our fellow image bearers—nor are they to passively accept the priorities or the structures of meaning and exchange that characterize our time and place. The core of Christian identity is the sanctified imagination           that views the world and its creatures in accordance with the apocalypse and reconstitution instantiated by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Christian identity organizes the rudiments of culture in order that the disciple may inhabit this space, with these creatures, after the pattern of the last Adam. Christianity does not replace culture, as it cannot train human beings to inhabit or to respectfully and fruitfully use this place. It interrogates and completes culture but is utterly opposed to its counterfeits. Mammon, conversely, demolishes culture and replaces it with the bastardized machinery of hegemony. It preserves the old gods and incorporates them into its pantheon so as to direct their worship and allegiance to itself. It situates unity only within its economy of artificial value and homogenization. In Christ, however, unity does not dissolve particularity but meaningfully incorporates it.

The particularity of the suffering Savior and the vocation of Israel call the church to something more difficult than ideological wars of attrition. That path is too easy and will result only in cycles of vengeance and death without end. Our vocation is cruciform: to come to awareness of our contributions to the dismal disarray of our world, to repent in such a way that we contribute to the flourishing of that world and of those we have exploited or otherwise harmed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and to absorb the pain of that process in our communal flesh as the body of the One who made atonement. The persistence of the wounds of crucifixion into new creation demonstrate the profundity of mammon’s grip upon our world and the price required to uproot its corruption. Its overthrow is possible only in the resistance that could be mistaken for defeat, the resistance that does not seek the annihilation of its opponents but their transformation. 

Whoever would be cognizant of mammon’s exploitation of our fear, our distrust, and the desiring inherent to us as humans must interrogate their satisfaction with the present and the conditions of its possibility and then seek to understand the discontent of those who do not share the privileges that enable those conditions. If the most plausible conclusion that can be reached is that an entire mass of persons is more prone to violence, more prone to laziness, or the refusal of responsibility, then there is little doubt that mammon has captured the moral imagination. 

Then, whoever would participate in Christ’s resistance to mammon is called to bear the patience, the willingness to listen, and the generosity that alone can summon new possibilities out of the fissures in our social fabric. These are not forms of passivity by which the status quo is upheld; these are ways in which it is confronted and urged to be renounced. These are spirit-impelled forms of activity by which death is absorbed, borne by our dying to the demands of ideology. We are not permitted to pretend that all is well, nor are we permitted to right history’s wrongs by instrumentalizing death. That both continue to take place is an index of our failure as Christians to reimagine our conditions through the prism of the cross of Christ.

We must inhabit this place as stewards of unmanufactured value and forego the temptation to master the nonhuman world or construct our own identities. This is the way of being to which we have become habituated, which we unthinkingly enable every day. The resistance to which we are called is impossible without the life of God animating us to replicate the pattern of Christ’s mission in our individual and communal lives, but that is what is on offer through the spirit that God superabundantly shares with all who will take up their crosses and follow the path Christ takes in all its particularity. 

One of the most recent additions in the venerable tradition of Romans commentaries comes from Frederick Dale Bruner, whose publications span more than fifty years of biblical and theological research. He is perhaps most well-known for having contributed significant commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and John, which skillfully attend to the historical and grammatical contexts of New Testament texts and contemporary biblical scholarship while contributing a self-consciously theological approach to interpreting the Bible.² Bruner is a careful listener to the Scriptures in the company of both historically minded contemporary scholars and the testimony of the communion of saints. In some ways, his commentaries resemble an older tradition of ecclesial readings of Scripture. Today, many of us take for granted the modern division of the theological disciplines into fields of historical critical inquiry on the Bible, pastoral theology, systematic theology, and more, whereas the older tradition of Christian commentary on Romans, which began with Origen, used historical and grammatical tools but sought to listen verse-by-verse for the express purpose of glorifying God and edifying the church. These commentators, ranging from Thomas Aquinas to John Calvin, kept an eye on how the rule of faith and theological synthesis illuminated the diverse parts of Scripture in view of the testimony of the whole canon to Jesus Christ. Likewise, when you read one of Bruner’s commentaries, on page after page you encounter wisdom from patristic, medieval, Reformation, early modern, and contemporary readers alike, from bishops and monks to pastors and academics. Bruner’s latest commentary, The Letter to the Romans, continues this fruitful approach to interpreting Scripture. 

However, Romans is about a thousand pages shorter than Bruner’s earlier commentaries, and it is less of an argument about the epistle and more of a verse-by-verse series of stimulating meditations in the company of great interpreters. Many of us today expect a commentary to make one coherent argument about the text in question or to offer a sustained development of key themes across an entire epistle. Upon my initial reading, the commentary seemed incomplete, as though I were reviewing the finalized notes from a skilled interpreter before production into a more polished essay. But while many of us are accustomed to realist portraiture in Pauline commentary, Bruner operates here as more of an impressionist. 

The greatest strengths of this commentary are that it is explicitly written to serve those preaching the gospel today and that it celebrates the free gift of God given to us in Jesus Christ. Its unique style will especially reward meditative or contemplative rereading of Romans, and its ample use of Old Testament citations invites canonical reflection. For Bruner, Christ’s shedding of blood on the cross demonstrates that God is righteous and cannot tolerate the evil and sin that harms God’s beloved creatures while also showing that “God adores human beings and longs for them to have the deepest peace of all: close fellowship with himself” (61). 

Bruner’s catena of lengthy and sometimes conflicting quotations at times reminds me of reading medieval florilegia and their extended comments from the church fathers on theological topics that are sometimes not easily squared with one another, such as the compilation of patristic quotations in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Consequently, the overall theological outlook of the commentary is not easy to characterize or to map onto the various schools of Pauline scholarship that have emerged, such as the so-called old and new perspectives on Paul, readings of Paul within Judaism, and apocalyptic approaches to Paul. The latest is not necessarily the greatest when it comes to secondary literature in any given field, but this commentary is noteworthy for how it largely interacts with twentieth century Pauline scholarship and finds few conversation partners from the last couple of decades. For instance, readings of Paul within Judaism frame the epistle not as Paul’s theological proclamation to universal humanity but rather an epistle written only to gentile Christ-believers, exhorting them that they do not need to live like nor become Jews because they are in Christ as gentiles (Rom. 15:8). Such proposals, if they are apt, might challenge or at least reframe Bruner’s conclusions on many points, and their absence is palpable to those familiar with contemporary debates. 

Bruner’s own reading of Romans, which is deeply indebted to Martin Luther and Calvin on many points, would have greater explanatory power if he had incorporated insights such as those of John Barclay in his 2016 book Paul and the Gift about the different ways that gift and grace language were used in Paul’s context and throughout the reception history of Romans.³ Barclay clarifies that the language of gift or grace could be used to mean a wide range of different things—and sometimes multiple things at once—in Paul’s Jewish and Greco-Roman context but that, overall, “Paul took the Christ-gift, the ultimate gift of God to the world, to be given without regard to worth, and in the absence of worth—an unconditioned or incongruous gift that did not match the worth of its recipients but created it.”⁴ Bruner’s sparse comments on grace in Romans are not unhelpful (7), and his quotations of Luther, Calvin, J. B. Lightfoot, and Adolf Schlatter on grace are interesting (71–73), but surely the work of interpreters such as Barclay could have strengthened this commentary.

A sustained reading of this commentary feels comparable to reading rabbinic literature, where meaning is created through a quasi-Socratic dialectic of disagreement between various perspectives on the same topic. Bruner is indebted to historical Protestant readings of Romans from Luther and Calvin while also strongly critical of their antisemitism. Ernst Käsemann’s and Charles Cranfield’s works on Romans are extensively drawn upon, but so also are a great many Pauline scholars of widely differing persuasions. Bruner’s compilation of authorities on Romans does not develop the many differences among them, and it is not always easy to square how the insight of one is compatible with another. Moreover, while any commentary that aims for brevity on an epistle as complex as Romans will inevitably leave some stones unturned, there are key passages from Romans that here receive scarcely a comment, such as Paul’s crucial declaration of how Christ’s resurrection relates to justification in Romans 4:25. Again, to be clear, no commentary can cover every important text and topic in Romans, but surely the culmination of Paul’s multiple-chapter argument that the Messiah was “delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (4:25) deserves our attention.

By analogy to a mathematics homework assignment, in this commentary Bruner does not always show his exegetical work in reaching the conclusions he draws. That makes for a succinct and accessible commentary but one that at times involves more assertion than argumentation or demonstration. Granted, many of Bruner’s meditations are positively delightful; he relates, for example, that “when I teach this Gospel-of-Paul text in my Sunday School classes, I like to play the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ especially as sung by the King’s Singers, asking the classes to use their imaginations and hear the words ‘Hear Comes the Son’ in the song’s title refrain, and a fourfold ‘Here He Comes’ in the song’s next-to-last refrain” (61). 

But a notable problem related to Bruner’s approach is his treatment of faith early in the commentary. Bruner opts to read Paul’s faith language as indicating that it is God’s grace and not human performance that effects salvation, but this is more of a statement of theological preference than a direct reading of the texts. In the context of Romans 1:16, Bruner writes: “I will often preface the word ‘simple’ or ‘simply’ to the apostle’s words ‘faith’ or ‘believe’ in order to emphasize the wonder and grace of Paul’s crucially simple word for receiving salvation” (10). The problem is that this word is not simple at all, and Bruner doesn’t bother to interact with interlocutors of a different persuasion. It is disappointing to find Benjamin Schliesser, Teresa Morgan, Jeanette Hagen Pifer, Nijay Gupta, and many others absent from this discussion.⁵

Other times, Bruner’s comments are more indeterminate or perhaps evasive. On Paul’s condemnation of illicit sexual behavior in Romans 1:24–27, Bruner begins by rightly criticizing dehumanizing “antihomosexual” bigotry, like that exemplified by Westboro Baptist Church (17). Yet, when it comes to commenting on the verses that are perhaps the most significant scriptural texts in contemporary sexual ethics debates, he is noncommittal. Initially, he comments “We now rightly dismiss the Paul-attributed texts against women teaching or preaching in the church (1 Tim. 2:11 and 1 Cor. 14:33b–36), not least because the risen Lord had women sent as his first resurrection messengers in all four Gospels. Should we also, perhaps, pass over Paul’s present condemnation of homosexual practice in the light of Jesus’ general silence on the subject?” (17). Bruner finds recent arguments unpersuasive that in Romans 1:24–27 Paul condemns only pederasty or violent and coercive same-sex relations; just as Bruner finds no support for women’s ordination in 1 Timothy 2, so Bruner does not find support for condoning homosexual practice in Romans 1. Finally, Bruner describes reading a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about a story time for little children that is hosted by drag queens; he cryptically notes that this article “moved me, however, to appreciate afresh Paul’s present conviction. The churches’ major decisions on this important matter will be made in our time. May the Lord lead us into the truth by his Holy Spirit” (17). With Bruner, I too pray the Lord would lead us into the truth through the Holy Spirit—and that will inevitably mean reaching some kind of conclusion about these verses and their contemporary import for the church’s life. It is not entirely clear under which circumstances Bruner appears to approve of categorically dismissing some benighted-seeming passages of Scripture, such as 1 Timothy 2, rather than attempting to rightly interpret and heed the whole of Holy Scripture, “in whose sentence we are to rest,” as The Westminster Confession describes (1.10). In this early portion of Romans, the unveiling of God’s righteousness might be a word that cuts us, even as it heals and restores us into fullness of life; that is, although the gospel is light, we may not want to hear it in our idolatrous preference for darkness. Paul opens the Epistle to the Romans by writing that “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (1:16); notably, that declaration is addressed to the church, which presumably is supposed to believe the gospel but can drift off course. I warmly appreciate Bruner’s strong condemnation of any form of bigotry. Simultaneously, if we hesitate to heed what the apostle writes about sexual ethics then we might need to rediscover again that the gospel is not something to be ashamed of; it is good news (Rom. 1:16). 

Another area where Bruner’s Romans commentary suffers a lack of clarity or nuance is in his discussion of agency in the sacraments. Bruner claims that our union with Christ in his death and resurrection through baptism, as described in Romans 6:1–4, perhaps makes sense for adult converts but not for those who are baptized as infants and never knew a time when they did not love the Lord. Bruner opines, “Honestly, we didn’t consciously die with, receive burial with, or rise with Christ believingly at all in our baptisms. We just did what our parents were told to do. What shall we make of these voids? Perhaps if we occasionally paraphrase Paul’s word ‘baptism’ with the word ‘conversion,’ we could better understand Paul’s present phrase ‘the glory of the Father’ (Rom. 6:4). I believe this is Paul’s initial reference to the Holy Spirit in our passage” (83, italics in original). Commendably, Bruner concedes that “the church’s major theologians through the centuries (with the possible exception of the modern Karl Barth) have honored infant (or early Christian) Baptism. So I could well be mistaken in my questioning of this impressive tradition” (83). But despite interacting elsewhere with the Westminster Standards, he does not here interact with Westminster Confession 28.6, which explains how the efficacy of baptism is not tied to the moment of its administration. Indeed, Romans 6 becomes unintelligible only if we regard the significance and efficacy of the sacrament of baptism as tied to personal experience and cognition, which is by no means how Augustine, Calvin, and a great many others have understood the sacrament historically. 

Furthermore, Bruner’s suggestion that we paraphrase or translate Paul’s message in Romans 6 to concern “conversion” rather than “baptism” veers off course from illuminating and expanding upon Paul’s words to suggesting what words Paul should have written to convey what we think he meant to teach us today. One thing lost in Bruner’s framing of Romans 6 as a passage about conversion, a term he never defines, is the rich intertextual resonances between this passage and what Paul says elsewhere about baptism, as baptism is a vital theme across many Pauline texts (see Gal. 3:26, 1 Cor. 10:2, Rom. 13:14). Of course we don’t do anything in baptism. In Romans 6, through baptism we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection, in grace that precedes our very existence and is given to us who do not deserve it, not only for us as self-making individuals but for us as fellow members of the body of Christ. What better illustrates such grace than infant baptism?

In some places, Bruner offers insights that should be practical for all kinds of readers. He is particularly successful at this in his commentary for Romans 7, which is a famously challenging text on bondage to sin and the frustration of the self’s inability to do what one wants to do. Bruner primarily tackles this text with reference to his own Christian experience, recalling teachings from Henrietta Mears at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and his doctoral adviser, Walter Freytag at the University of Hamburg. He shares how he had encountered perfectionist, “victorious” forms of spirituality that taught that Christians shouldn’t struggle with sin, so it became liberating for Bruner to consider this passage as a contrast in which Christians continue to fall and are constantly in need of grace. After considering the Pentecostal idea of the “second blessing” of the “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” which he rejected because all of God’s spiritual blessings are given to us in Christ (Eph. 1:3) and we are only in Christ by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3), Bruner eventually came to realize that the chapter’s descriptions are of the Adamic self rather than the self that is reconstituted in Christ. In other words, the story of the Christian life is not a story of bondage and despair, a kind of hopelessness such that nothing but failure is inevitable; it is the joy and freedom to obey God through life in the spirit of Christ, as described in Romans 8, even if that life still involves weakness (8:26) and some stumbling. In relating all of this to his readers, Bruner offers a valuable narration of how Romans can be read in more and less helpful ways, not merely by New Testament scholars but by the overwhelming majority of people who read Romans in the pew.

Other passages contain less helpful pastoral suggestions, such as when Bruner attempts to thread a difficult needle in his response to Romans 13 and Paul’s writing about submission to the governing authorities. Christians at times might need to resist the state, and accordingly, Bruner quotes the Barmen Declaration and instances of theological criticism of apartheid. At the same time, heeding Paul’s words, Bruner explains why Christians should recognize the authority of the civil government. These are sensible responses, but Bruner runs into difficulty when he attempts to strike a middle-ground position in the context of the recent unrest in the United States following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. There, Bruner concludes, “Both sides—protestors and police, Christians and non-Christians—can learn a great deal about responsibly relating (to governments, to enemies and to the Great God and his Son) from both Paul’s present admonitions and from Jesus’s own words, life, death, and resurrection” (172). Again, Bruner is correct—reading Romans today means reflecting on these matters in light of God’s action in Jesus Christ, which should generate criticism of both racialized state violence and the indiscriminate destruction of anarchy—but his position needs further nuance. Bruner’s case would be stronger if buttressed with an acknowledgment of the long and troubling history of racism and misuse of civil authority and policing in particular in the United States. Also, it is far from clear what this both-sides approach gestures toward in terms of policy outcomes or material changes in the world today in the specific example raised of Black Lives Matter protests. Similarly, while I find some of Bruner’s comments stimulating on election in Romans 9 or the scope of redemption and Israel in Romans 11, they lack clear argumentation and are not likely to persuade those who do not already share his outlook.

Although I have raised some probing and hopefully constructive questions, Bruner’s commentary is nevertheless a tremendous resource for proclaiming the good news about Jesus Christ today. Crucially, in Romans 1:15 Paul is eager to preach the gospel not merely to those who do not presently believe but to those at Rome who already believe; in other words, the gospel is something we must continually hear afresh and be reminded of, again and again, and Bruner’s unique style may be just the thing for making the gospel new. As Bruner writes, “for Paul, the Gospel is not only an object that he presents; it is a Subject that presents itself to and through him and to and through other believers, hence using the precious noun—euangelion (Good news)—as a verb here: ‘hence my longing to Good News you there in Rome as well’(v. 15). The Living Lord Jesus Christ is the Good News in person, who proclaims himself through and to his believing people” (9). If we as readers of Romans wish to hear and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, Bruner’s reflections and resourceful assembly of past interpreters will unsettle and challenge us, and it will welcome us to hear the gospel afresh in the society of the saints. 

Never jump into frigid water, another brother once told me. He’d been playing basketball on a sweltering summer day and then, adrenaline still pumping, sweat still sweating, leaped into a hose-water cold swimming pool and became ill: his stomach cramped, his limbs heavy. Ease in slowly, he often said afterward. His need to save me trouble, I suppose, but I angled into the story’s middle—that brief airborne interval between hot exhaustion and expectation, before the water momentarily claimed him, sobered him with unwanted lessons about acclimation.

In Costa Rica, rip current postings frame the beach—what to avoid and how to swim to safety. Do not struggle or panic. Swim slant to save yourself. Wave your arms to find help. Fighting the current just leads to exhaustion, to being carried farther and farther away. When swimming, I tried to keep my daughter close—near enough to touch.

Even with postings, I couldn’t discern what the lifeguards easily spotted: the broken wave pattern, the line of churning debris, or the calm surface that hid danger. If the phantom current reached for us, I’d pull her to me. Keep her from going out to sea. My unnecessary plans to save her have become my clearest memories from the trip.

Back in the day, we kids loved to shout underwater in my friend’s backyard pool. It was a game we played to divine what the other said, our voices muffled and impossible. The legs of brothers and sisters all around us, the silent bouncing of their own language from above. When we came up for air, we declared victory over the muddled words, our recollections as unpredictable as the water.

Turns out I needed a cleat hitch to tie up my brother’s boat. The half hitch with its two loops twisted one way and then the opposite way wasn’t enough to hold us for long. I misread the signals.

Still, no one fell when we crossed from the boat to the pier. Boat. Pier. One not much different than the other, and both so dependent on water. The right language another way to steady us, to keep us safe.

Frac is a three-dimensional version of Tetris created by two Swedish developers in 1990. Objects fall from the top of the screen, and players use the keyboard to toggle them into place. Instead of the 2D shapes found in the much more popular Tetris franchise, Frac delivers cubic structures and a 3D playing area. As with Tetris, the pieces fall faster the longer the game goes on, and when a player completely fills a layer, it disappears. Frac has no social mode or multiplayer option; it’s a primitive DOS-based game that my aunt originally gave me on a floppy disk for our family computer. Some twenty-nine years later, I found it on a website that hosts obscure abandonware games, and I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit positioning cubes into orderly layers.

There’s nothing unique about turning to video games for a break from a disorderly world, but Frac provides an especially clear metaphor for a safe, bounded universe in which perfect order is possible. Outside the window, the night air carried airborne disease, political turmoil, and a windstorm of angry opinion. Inside, the kids were safely asleep; my wife, Hannah, was upstairs watching a Chinese drama; and I could rest on the couch before the demands of another day.

I’d sip a glass of bourbon, finding, like so many others, my drinking inching upward during the lockdown. The game and the drinks gave me a numbing, comforting buzz, and I began to wonder if I were becoming too dependent on the two.

Our new home in Michigan was stuck in drab late winter, and I’d listen to the song “Julep” by the Punch Brothers on repeat. It evoked a vision of somewhere lush and warm and green: “I died happy in my sleep / with my children around and you looking down / heaven’s a julep on the porch.”¹

My kids will watch me play nearly any video game, but they find Frac boring and groan when they see me playing it. It’s too repetitive, and they’ve seen it too much. They would much rather watch me send Mario leaping through fantastical lands or racing go-karts above lakes of lava. What they don’t understand is that life with young kids during a pandemic is inherently unstable. Public health guidelines are constantly changing. The stability of our democracy is constantly changing. Their needs and interests and online-schooling setups are constantly changing. After days upon days of confronting new problems, the fixed familiar rules of a repetitive game are a relief. You place the pixelated block where you tell it to go, and it stays the hell there.

Of course, fitting new shapes into limited space is not unlike managing a home with young kids. A few years before the pandemic, we lived in a small apartment in Seattle with a crib, high chair, an assortment of noisemaking colorful things in which one bounces or drools or naps, and a scattering of toys across most floors. Whenever our kids outgrew a particular item, we happily gave it away and enjoyed the reclaimed floor space until we quickly found it replaced by a new gewgaw that had to be arranged, Tetris-like, into our crowded home.

One of the first things I learned about parenting is that your physical space is no longer your own. You have to check for Lego bricks before you flop on the couch. You have to move the pureed peas in the fridge to reach the beer. The book and coffee mug in your lap share space with the sharp-elbowed toddler who sometimes cannonballs in your direction. Even your bed is no longer yours and your partner’s alone. I’m not the only parent who dawdles away too many evening hours on Netflix or Facebook or TikTok; part of the appeal of screen-based distractions is that they seem like a space to call our own, even if they are populated by corporate algorithms.

Parenting itself is training children in the expectations of orderliness that guide society. We teach them to wear shoes and say thank you and practice table manners. We beg them to wash their hands thoroughly for once in their ever-loving lives. We train them to wear masks and avoid spreading contagious disease.

We do our best, and when the kids end up covered in finger paint, we take cute photos and share them with friends. I never wanted to become the kind of dad who gripes at his kids about spilling snacks in the car, and yet here I am, doing just that. Trying to maintain orderliness is a project that never ends. In a world of climate change and biodiversity collapse, it feels like a pathetic selfish goal. Yet there’s also something natural about wanting a safe, ordered space, a well-tended garden to call one’s own. There’s something human in it.

Frac belongs to the category of video games known as tile-matching games, which involve matching colors and shapes according to a small set of rules. The category includes Tetris, Candy Crush, and countless others. I once heard them described as “games of diversion instead of immersion,” things you could play for a few minutes waiting for a bus, as opposed to all-encompassing games that benefit from headphones and high-powered hardware.

But that’s not quite right. Despite their simplicity, these games can be every bit as immersive as the more high-octane World of Warcraft and such, pulling your mind away from the bus stop and the pandemic and into the steady rhythm of organization. There’s a sizable body of research on the cognitive effects of tile-matching games, from the Tetris effect of seeing shapes floating in your mind after you’ve left the screen to the beneficial effects of playing Tetris for processing trauma or the paradoxical discovery that such games actually require less brain power at advanced levels.

I grew curious about the two creators of Frac, whose names appear on the setup screen. The first name turned out to be a fake. “Max Shapiro” is a pseudonym for a scholar who didn’t want to sully his academic reputation with something as frivolous as a video game. Max Tegmark, as he revealed himself in later versions, is a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research interests run from cosmology to quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence. He has authored more than two hundred technical papers, has a slew of research appointments and awards, and is an occasional media commentator on how artificial intelligence will reshape our society.

Tegmark has a delightfully outdated personal website, probably of late nineties vintage, that mixes scholarly work with photos of his wedding, childhood stories, pictures of smiling grad students eating pizza, cheesy background graphics, book tour dates from seven years ago, and so on. However cautious a young scholar he might have been at the first release of Frac, he now seems to be a confident researcher with curiosity running off in eight directions at once.

His 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, has the ambitious subtitle My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Over the course of four hundred pages, he probes the possibility of parallel universes, seeks to advance Einstein’s theory of relativity in a serious way, and speculates that “our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematics, making us self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object.” He lost me around page three, but I skimmed on anyway, impressed by the fizzing energy of his mind, by the loose confidence of a scientist cheerfully trying to translate far-out ideas for the public, of a scholar willing to use language like “Holy guacamole! It works!!!”²

Tegmark mentions Frac in the book twice, first describing how it funded his trip around the world in 1991 (the game is free, but there is an invitation to send ten dollars to an address in Sweden), and second to illustrate a point about fractals, which fascinate Tegmark. The game, he says “embodies a mathematical structure where both space and time are discrete rather than continuous.”³

Again, I gazed in appreciation at a mind soaring several hundred feet above my own.

Tegmark’s scholarly articles have impenetrable titles such as “Tunable Efficient Unitary Neural Networks (EUNN) and their application to RNNs.” He also has a “Crazy” page on his website that introduces a personal code: “Every time I’ve written ten mainstream papers, I allow myself to indulge in writing one wacky one. . . . This is because I have a burning curiosity about the ultimate nature of reality; indeed, this is why I went into physics in the first place.”⁴

Tegmark’s cocreator on Frac, Per Berglund, is no slouch either. He is a physicist at the University of New Hampshire with a string of scholarly publications and a course list that includes such light fare as “Advanced Quantum Mechanics I.” Learning about their industriousness has not made me feel any better about spending evenings on the couch with the game they’d invented. 

For several months, I’ve been taking notes for this essay, and for just as long I’ve been hating the fact that I’m writing about myself on the couch with a drink and a video game. Early in the pandemic, I told a friend about Frac being my zone-out activity, and he sort of laughed. I felt a twinge of shame.

Maybe it’s that reaction I’m trying to understand.

Why am I ashamed of resting? Why do I think I should be writing about climate change solutions or quantum physics in my spare time? Tegmark and Berglund surely watch movies or zone out in their downtime, and I know rest is healthy, but it can be the hardest thing in the world to do. There is an insistent cultural imperative to be productive all of the time, to always be hustling and making something of yourself, even if it’s just cultivating your personal brand by posting vacation photos. I know it’s stupid, and yet that imperative to produce has a hold on me anyway.

An interviewer once asked the American soccer player Eddie Johnson which video game platform he liked best. “I don’t play video games. I’m a grown-ass man,” Johnson said, earning the nickname Grown-Ass Man for the rest of his career.⁵ Johnson and I are both in our late thirties. We grew up in a world in which video games had fully pervaded youth culture yet were still considered by our parents to be frivolous and suspect (or sus, according to the YouTube gamers my kids watch). Even as I rotate shape after shape on my computer screen, I can relate to Johnson’s conflicted feelings about masculinity, to the idea that we should be using our spare time to chop wood or fix up Camaros or stalk bison or something manly and productive.

I am trying to look back in clarity at a moment that has not fully passed. As I write this, we’re more than two years from the first days of the pandemic, and we still don’t have the scientific certainty we would like. We don’t have the social unity that we need. We are still juggling questions of safety, collective responsibility, and whether kids should go to a birthday party at a bouncy gym.

Back at the start of all this, after the first week stuck in the house, we figured hiking was a decent way to get outside and stay distant from others. We had lived in Michigan less than a year, so nearly every forest was new to us. Spring was just beginning to appear in the crocuses and fiddlehead ferns and peepers chirping from the ponds. Our boys, seven and four at the time, charged down muddy trails, scattering small woodland creatures. Hannah and I found moments to exhale and laugh and breathe in the warm damp air. We learned to identify chickadees and tree swallows and downy woodpeckers. We came to appreciate even the elegant swoops of turkey vultures overhead. The boys found a newly hatched turtle the size of a pinkie and beamed as I took pictures.

We kept at it as spring swelled into summer. Our seven-year-old learned native birds, pointing out kingbirds and nuthatches, confident in his identification where I was cautious and hesitant. At home, we devoured birding books and found binoculars and started a life list. We downloaded apps to quiz each other on bird calls and swiped through #birdfromhome and #michiganbirding feeds to build our knowledge together.

For me, learning about birds is not about reaching for new understanding; it’s about finding rituals to practice curiosity and patience. It’s about bonding with my kids. And it’s about finding a way to metabolize some of the anger, grief, and exhaustion that have marked my life as a pandemic parent. 

I still play video games more than I would like. I still have a hard time telling when it’s restful or merely habitual. I still eye the whiskey shelf with wariness, wondering if I could identify early alcoholism as easily as an indigo bunting. I still ask myself whether I’m studying the right things.

Maybe we all spend a lot of time in idleness and distraction. I’m not sure we’re called to make every moment productive or edifying. More and more, I’ve come to trust in curiosity as the value I want to maintain as I age. To remain curious is to remain alive to the world. But no one can spend all of the time processing new experiences, especially during a pandemic that imposes so much uncertainty on us. Familiarity has its place. Repetition has its place. I am learning to trust the impulse to return to familiar practices, even if I don’t fully understand it. There is a strange comfort in that.

After pouring your coffee, pause for a moment to feel the warmth of the cup, the steam as it reaches to caress your face. Move outdoors toward the wicker bench you have begun using for morning meditation. Recognize (again, without judgment) how great it is that you are willing to do your sit outside in all kinds of weather. Bow to yourself for this. Arrange the red indoor/outdoor pillow you added for butt comfort just right as you settle. 

Create a mudra of hands cradling your coffee mug. Consider how holding and sipping from said mug is really no different than gazing at a candle. 

Chant opening words, as opening words make it official you are now meditating. Realize that the line “May we be free from hunger and discord” practically blesses the drinking of coffee while meditating. 

Taste your coffee. Do so mindfully. Are there floral notes? What is the aroma and bouquet—note that you might be thinking about your five o’clock meditation. Return to right here, right now. Taste. Are there chocolate undertones? Have you added enough cream? Resist returning to the kitchen for just a dash of cinnamon. Be with the discomfort. 

Breathe. Feel your shoulders move down and away from your ears, feel your body relax into the bench while keeping your spine straight. With your chin tucked and your gaze still soft, notice the woman from down the block who walks her two labradoodles at this time every day. While she and the caramel one wait at the corner, the black one rolls in the dewy grass. After they have passed, wiggle the kink from your back. Try not to think about what to make for supper, though if you do, let the thought pass like kidney beans and tomatoes added to yesterday’s chili. 

Make sure your legs are uncrossed. Feet on the ground. Feel the pulse of the earth coming up through your feet and into the hands holding your expensive-yet-chipped pottery mug like a favored child. Observe the thin webs of spiders in the dying pine’s branches, the way the bees land on each flower, drink, and leave. End your time with another sip of coffee. Consider how the flavor changes as the coffee cools, how the color of the liquid seems to sink into itself. Bow to this good yard. Recite your closing words. May the hearts of all beings be opened.

The request wasn’t totally out of the blue. Shahla had been moved to tears a week earlier upon hearing from her friend Janice that our little group of Christians at the University of Toronto had been praying for her.

An Iranian woman who had escaped the violent repression of the Islamic Revolution, Shahla had, like so many Iranian émigrés, abandoned religion. Prayer was a tool of oppression and violence in Iran, and she had found a place of safety in a decidedly secular vision of life.

Nevertheless, she arrived on campus that day, and we walked down the long hallway to the chapel where the Wine Before Breakfast community gathered to worship every Tuesday morning.² We looked around the space, and she noted how beautiful it was. After a few minutes, I could tell that she was ready to move on.

But before Shahla and Janice left, I asked if they would come down to the chaplain’s office for a moment. I had something to give to Janice. The time in the office was also short, and the two women went on their way.

An hour after they had left, Janice called. “Brian,” she said, “This is pretty amazing. When Shahla and I left the office, she immediately told me of a dream that she had. Shahla takes dreams very seriously and often calls her sister in Iran to help her interpret them.”

Janice told me that the evening before, Shahla had dreamed of visiting our worship space and my office. In the dream, she somehow knew that she was in a sacred space. And more specifically, she knew it was a sacred space that was connected to Jesus. She explained to Janice that she had come to find that space. 

But when she arrived, it wasn’t the chapel that resonated with Shahla. As they walked home, she told Janice that when they came into the office that’s when she knew that she’d found the sacred space. This was that place in her dream.

When I share this story with people who have inhabited this campus ministry office over the years, they are astonished by the dream, but not by the sense that that office was sacred space. Even if they have never really thought of the office in those terms, such language immediately resonates. 

This was not your ordinary professor’s office. It was a large space with couches and chairs, coffee makers, a fridge and enough plates, mugs, and cutlery to feed a crowd. This was a place of deep conversation, learning, prayer, and Bible study, a place of tears and laughter, lament and celebration, hospitality and safety. It was a place where countless folks have met God, where they were allowed to argue with God and to give voice to their deepest doubts and fears. This had been a place of profound moments of knowing and being known, a place of memory making and storytelling, rooted in the deepest and widest story of all. And from that sacred space, people have gone out to reclaim all space—all places as sacred.

Toward a Liberated Imagination of Sacred Space

I believe that my office at the University of Toronto has been appropriately discerned to be sacred. And yet, I must confess that I am somewhat ambivalent about the very notion of sacred space or the way in which we talk about sacred space or creating sacred space. 

If we follow James K. A. Smith and “heuristically employ ‘imagination’ to name a kind of faculty by which we navigate and make sense of our world,” then it is undoubtedly the case that such “making sense” will entail an understanding and manner of relating and distinguishing space.³ For example, if one’s imagination is shaped by the dominant kind of Neoplatonic spirituality that dualistically draws sharp divisions between sacred and secular, holy and profane, heaven and earth, soul and body, the eternal and the temporal, then it wouldn’t be at all surprising that one would experience such a dualistic division between so-called sacred and secular spaces. By these terms, we would have expected Shahla to have experienced the chapel as sacred rather than the office. Indeed, when most of us think of sacred spaces, I am fairly confident that we first think of some sort of church or temple. It is this constriction of the imagination to such dualism that has occasioned my discomfort with much of the language of sacred space.

I come to these issues as a Christian theologian who insists that any discussion of spatiality, if it is to be Christian, needs to be self-consciously and explicitly rooted in a biblical imagination. Furthermore, if I am to affirm the legitimacy of the concept of sacred space, I will be able to do so only by reinterpreting and transforming the notion of sacrality in more holistically biblical terms.

So then, as I continue to think through the issues of sacred space in the Christian tradition, I offer the following series of theses.⁴

 1. A categorical distinction in space between the sacred and profane needs to be rejected. Such a distinction, with its corollaries of grace and nature, eternal and temporal, soul and body, faith and reason, and sacred and secular, is rooted in a Neoplatonic dualism that is alien to biblical faith.⁵

2. If we are to employ the category of sacrality at all, it must refer first and foremost to creation as a whole. All of creation—that is, all creational space—can be described as sacred precisely because this creation exists as a response to the loving and life-engendering word of God who declares this creation to be good and delightful (Gen. 1). No distinction between spaces as sacred and profane can be discerned in the creation narrative.⁶ Therefore, from the perspective of biblical theology, the distinction between sacred and profane can have no ontological legitimacy. Although I will offer some examples of how some places can function as sacred in human life, we must reject the notion that there is some sort of essential difference between places wherein one kind of space is inherently and essentially sacred while others are inherently profane.

3. Within a biblical cosmology, all of creation is sacred because creation is conceived as nothing less than the temple of God. In his stunning reclamation of a biblical eschatology of creation-centered hope (in contrast to heaven-centric hope), J. Richard Middleton unpacks a biblical “picture of the entire created order . . . as a cosmic temple—a sacred realm for God’s dwelling and rule in which all creatures (human and nonhuman) are called to worship their creator.” This sense of creation as temple is why there is divine resistance to the notion of David building a temple, an earthly house, for God. As Middleton asks, “Why would anyone need to construct a sacred space—a place to worship God—when all space is already sacred?”⁷

4. The story of the fall of Adam and Eve introduces the notion of cursed space and cursed relationships. The goodness of creation is rooted in the obedient relationship of love between the Creator and the creational stewards who were created in the image of God. Within a temple cosmology, human stewardship is a priestly calling. Misplaced stewardship—that is, a tending of our creational home as autonomous agents rather than loving stewards subject to the creative Gardener—breaks the covenantal harmony of creation, displaces the image of God with idolatry, and desecrates the sacred goodness of creation. So rather than projecting an ontological dualism of sacred and secular, a nuanced reading of the creation account in Scripture yields a dynamism of blessing and cursing in the unfolding story of God’s ongoing relationship with fallen humanity, as we are to be redeemed in a new creation.⁸

5. All space is conflicted space. In the shadow of the fall, all of life becomes a site of contest and conflict. Thus, all space is also a site of conflict, even so-called sacred space. We must always ask, therefore, whomay find a space sacred and who may be alienated and marginalized by someone else’s sacred space? A good example of this would be the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. There, an Islamic shrine is situated on the site of Israel’s Second Temple. By force of history and architecture, it is an Islamic holy place that remains deeply contested within both contemporary Israel and in certain sects of Christianity.

6. The more essentialist the view of sacred space in any given instance, the more intense the conflict. If any particular space is essentially and eternally sacred, then any alteration or threat to that space will appear like nothing less than desecration, occasioning (both literally and metaphorically) holy war. It could be argued, for example, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 consciously targeted the sacred heart of American ideology (economism and imperial militarism) as a direct retaliation for the desecration of holy Islamic lands in the Middle East. Moreover, essentialist understandings of sacred and profane space always have their anthropological corollary. In other words, just as there are sacred and profane spaces, so too are there sacred and profane people. And when those individuals who are deemed to be profane enter into so-called sacred spaces, they are perceived as if they have engaged in an act of desecration. 

7. Essentialist understandings of sacred and profane space (and people) necessarily spell the death of hospitality. The unclean, profane other can never be welcomed into a sacred space, as they function as a threat to that very sacrality. One need think only of Jesus at dinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee (see Luke 7:36–49). Simon has hosted a holy meal, prepared with ritually clean hands, modeling the holiness of the sacred practices in the temple and anticipating the very restoration of Israel, and that meal is desecrated by an unclean sinner who could never have been offered hospitality in this house. Jesus, however, recognizes holiness not in space, but in the practice of hospitality that this interloper extends to him through her tears, ointment, and intimacy.⁹

8. Reconciliation is “the reconsecration of desecrated space.”¹⁰ Since all of creation has been desecrated, the scope of redemption encompasses all of creation. As Paul puts it, “all things” have been created “in, through, and for” Christ; “all things” cohere in Christ; and “all things are reconciled” in Christ (Col. 1:15–20 NRSV). Furthermore, Philip Sheldrake is right when he says that “a place of reconciliation does not homogenize people or environments but creates space for the diversity of human voices to participate.” He goes on: “Most of all . . . a space of reconciliation invites all who inhabit it to make space for ‘the other,’ to move over socially and spiritually, to make room for those who are unlike, and in that process for everyone to be transformed into something new.”¹¹ Reconsecrated space is creational space suffused with hospitality. Indeed, redeemed space always makes room for sinners.

9. Sacred spaces are storied places. Particular places take on special meaning because of the significant events that have taken place there. The campus ministry office in my story was experienced as sacred not because of anything inherent to that basement space but because of the stories that space carried, the deep and welcoming hospitality that was offered there.

10. Storied places are communal places. Stories are intersubjective and communal, and therefore, storied places maintain their meaning in relation to the community that inhabits them and imbues them with that meaning. A space is sacred because it is experienced as such within the shared stories of a community. If a community disbands, or if it is forced to leave that space, the sacrality of that space in that time comes to an end. The best hope, then, is that the space will be opened to new reconsecration by another community, but it is always possible that only deeper desecration will follow.

11. Without embodied sacrality, there is no sacred space. As homes are broken when families are torn apart through abuse, infidelity, and enmity, so also does sacred space cease to function as sacred when the community fails to incarnate the sacrality of the space by the dynamics of their communal relations. So then, churches that are sites of sexual abuse, racial prejudice, economic injustice, and other systemic and habitual sins are no longer sacred spaces. But when a community gathers to practice justice and hospitality, to grieve and lament together, to rejoice and delight in each other, all of creation, and their Creator, then the sacred takes flesh and space becomes sacred.

12. When a sacred space becomes alienated from the story that rendered it sacred, that space loses its claim to sacrality. For example, in Genesis 28 Bethel is deemed a sacred space because that is where Jacob has his dream of a ladder opening the door between heaven and earth. The place is named Bethel (“House of God”) because it is a place in which the revelatory presence of God was experienced. However, when Bethel becomes a place of economic oppression in which the poor are cursed—not blessed—then the story is no longer alive in that space, and the space has lost any claim on sacrality. A place remembered as a place of promise, the very gate of heaven, becomes a site of betrayal, duplicity, and deceit; thus, it is no longer sacred. The gate to heaven has been closed. This was the judgment that Amos pronounced over Bethel (see Amos 3:14, 4:4, and 5:5).

13. Sacred spaces are places of narrated ultimacy. Spaces are deemed sacred when they are sites that focus the life of the community on that which is deemed sacred in the life and narrative of the community. Sacrality is here understood to refer to that dimension of ultimacy in human life commonly identified with myth, symbol, ritual, and worldview. All human life and all human communities manifest such a dimension of ultimacy that can be described with some phenomenological generality. Therefore, even so-called secular people and communities have myths, symbols, and rituals that embody a worldview. And it also follows that various spaces might well function as sacred in the life of such people or communities regardless of whether they identify them as such.¹² It is possible, then, that public monuments (such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), cemeteries (including nonreligious ones), shopping malls, sports facilities, centers for the performing arts, and nature reserves can all function as sacred in a secular society. Likewise, recalling my sixth thesis, all of these spaces are also contested and can be sites of conflict.

14. The central site of contested space in the Gospels is the temple. Jesus’s action in the temple, often incorrectly interpreted as a cleansing, both brought about his own death and proclaimed an apocalyptic judgment on the temple (see Matt. 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; John 1:13–22). Indeed, there is a tragic irony in the role of the temple in the biblical narrative. While all of creation is the temple of God, when a particular site becomes the focus of worship, the location of the sacred, this so-called sacred space becomes not only the site of the deepest conflict but also a haunt of devils that serves to legitimate imperial repression and violence.

15. Sacred space is Jesus space. In his life, Jesus replaces the temple as the site of revelation, authoritative teaching, forgiveness, and healing. Therefore, if there is to be sacred space, it will be space where reconciliation is happening, that is, it will be space where Jesus is. Sacrality, biblically reconceived, is a matter of restored relationships or redemption permeating all of life. Where Jesus heals a leper, a site of uncleanness is made clean. Where Jesus eats at table with sinners and tax collectors, a place of desecration is reconsecrated.

16. The body of Christ is sacred space. The shifting of the locus of sacred space from the temple to Jesus is extended to encompass the body of believers as the body of Christ. Both the embodied personhood of Christian believers and the body of Christ, which is the church, are described in the language of temple (see 1 Cor. 3:16 and 6:19; 2 Cor. 6.16; Eph. 2:19–21; and 2 Peter 2:4–10). Therefore, if it is true that where Jesus is, there space is resacralized and redeemed, it is also true that where Jesus is embodied in a faithful community, there space is also redeemed.

17. Jesus followers are called to the reconsecration of all space. We could restate the classic formulation of creation-fall-redemption as the following:
               All of creation is sacred space.
               Sin is the desecration of all space.
               The kingdom of God is reclaiming all space as sacred.

18. Space is reconsecrated when holy things happen in that space. Such holy things could include a shared tear, a moment of wonder, an experience of worship, a tending of creation, an overthrow of oppressive structures, an expression of creativity, or a cup of cold water. Therefore, when Christian people—individually and communally—are redemptively present on the shop floor, that space is reconsecrated. Where the body of Christ brings a redemptive voice and presence to the political arena, the arts, architecture, scholarship, medicine, and other areas of cultural life, those cultural spaces, those sites of cultural interaction, are at least partially made sacred. Neighborhoods are sacred spaces not because of episcopal edict or even because of supernatural events; rather, they are made sacred when the body of Christ incarnates the redemptive love of God in those places through street parties, social services, ministries of hospitality, environmental clean-up, and community building.

19. The heart of Christian eschatological hope is the reconsecration of all creation. If all of creation is sacred, sin is the desecration of that good, and delightful creation and reconciliation are the reconsecration of desecrated space, then Christian eschatological hope is for the reconsecration of all of creation. This is what the book of Revelation refers to as the new heavens and the new earth. The new earth will not be sacred space because the so-called profane or secular dimensions of life will be erased but because God will be at home in that new earth and will dwell with God’s renewed image-bearers (see Rev. 21). For Christians, it is this eschatological vision and hope that animates all of life and seeks the restoration of all space as space where God will be at home.

“Spectacle is the origin of the world”—that’s what Éric Vuillard claims in the opening line of The Sorrow of the Earth, his book about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and the tragedy that is show business.¹ I read that line shortly after finishing the second volume of Katherine Sonderegger’s systematics, and my first thought was that her work makes a rival claim. For her, sacrifice, not spectacle, originates the world. Nevertheless, in Sonderegger’s theology, the God who is sacrifice and in whose name Israel’s and the church’s sacrifices are made, does reverberate as something spectacular. As she says, “even in the primal history, God commands center stage; in the midst of His creation, He the Triune One to Himself; He alone stands there” (66). God, for Sonderegger, is the purpose of existence, a hard, demanding purpose.   

God as the Joy and the Sorrow of the Earth

Sonderegger acknowledges from the start that hers is “an unfamiliar, perhaps odd book on the Holy Trinity” (xxix). As Fred Sanders notes, she wants to dissent from the classical Trinitarian tradition on two fronts. First, arguing against distinct processions in God—processions is a term theologians use to name the ways in which the one God is Trinity so that the distinction of the “persons” is preserved but separation is not implied—she prefers to speak of “the Processional Act” that is “principally and most specifically Spirit” (457). Second, she asserts that the triune processions (i.e., begetting and spirating) and persons (i.e., Father, Son, and Spirit) are fully knowable already in the Old Testament, specifically in Leviticus and its sacrificial system of the priestly tradition. Sanders summarizes her suggestions nicely:

Sonderegger argues that there is processional divine life manifest in fiery sacrifice, without any divine sending making it manifest. In fact, in an important sense that takes some time to sink in, the manifestation of the processional life of God in Israel’s sacrifice is even more primal than its terminus in trinitarian persons. In classic trinitarian theology, it is the mission of any trinitarian person that presupposes a procession; but Sonderegger’s argument turns on the insistence that the mission of a person of the Trinity is not the only way for a worshiper to come into the presence of the Trinity’s processional life.²

Although he dissents from her dissent, Sanders finds Sonderegger’s proposal a “stimulating prompt” for discussion. I, however, am not entirely sure what to make of it. If her first volume left me somewhat (happily!) confused, this second one, which has more than its own fair share of hard-to-follow passages, left me something more like troubled.³ It is not primarily what she says about God’s processionality that bothers me, or her insistence that God wants to command our attention, or even her claim that the quintessential human act, the “real work of the cosmos,” is the making of sacrifices (464). What bothers me most is her assertion that God’s life is inherently, eternally sacrificial. 

Israel’s Priestly Offerings and the Primal Origins of the World 

Sonderegger begins by affirming the holy unlikeness, the unfathomable otherness of the triune life, anticipating her conclusions in the book’s opening line: “The pilgrimage to the Mystery of the Holy Trinity begins in the temple” (1). After attending to what she calls “the intellectual legitimacy” (121) of trinitarian doctrine and “the trace of the Trinity” (201) in creaturely existence, she returns to that initial affirmation. In “Holy Scripture as Ground of Trinity,” the fourth of the book’s seven sections, she argues that the metaphysical reading of Scripture is the ground of dogma. As she sees it, everything depends on this assumption: Scripture is unique, and it is unique in such a way that we can “discover and learn of, learn from, and feed on, the Triune Being of God in the Old and New Testaments” (239). Thus, she feels that the modern notion that the Bible is not a philosophical text is a betrayal, a breaking of covenant: 

Holy Scripture, we might say, is a wholly redeemed creature—the only one, should we not include Mary, the God-bearer. . . .  The cosmos, we have said, bears traces of the Holy Trinity: the vestigia can be discerned wherever the real is sought. But the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are not bearers of vestigia only. No, they enjoy the sensus plenior, the fullness of the metaphysical Mystery, laid down in the patterns, sinews, verba, and events of this text. The Bible is the fully healed instance of a creature, put in service to the Living God. For this reason, it is inexhaustible ground of the dogma of Trinity. For this reason, it is Holy Ground. (268)

Finally, in section 5, “Leviticus and the Holiness School: Trinity as Holy,” she comes at last to the heart of the matter, anticipated, as I said, from the work’s opening line. And it is this section, which progresses through four subsections—“Levitical Sacrifice and Sin,” “Sacrifice as Triune Processions,” “The Unicity of the Divine Processions,” and “The Act of Sacrifice as Triune Holiness”—that especially vexes me.  

Sonderegger’s sensibilities draw her to what most contemporary Christians, at least in her own tradition, find “deeply alien and unsettling” (356). She is disheartened, even grieved, by attempts to lower the stakes of theology, or worse, to domesticate God. Something has gone wrong, she believes, if we expect to find in God “only the kindly, only the friendly, the avuncular” (358). “[A] Christianity that is only hospitable, only useful and edifying, has not taken the full measure of the Living God” (359). To be sure, Sonderegger believes that God is good—she means to leave no doubt about that—but God is also other than good. God is unaccountable, free not only from our expectations but even from reality as we know it. And for that reason, “bending down in awe before Almighty God is the first act of proper piety” (359). Her theology, as outlined in this volume, suggests that bending is also the last act.  

The Cost of Holiness

In Sonderegger’s reading, Leviticus, more than any other biblical text, witnesses to what is required of us by “the Presence of the True God,” a presence that is “shocking, an Undoing” (359). That presence, brought to bear by the Levitical witness, demands a “costly descent” for us—the very same descent God is and has made, everlastingly (352, 367). The Holiness Code has not been put away, and it cannot be, because “it is the very act of sacrifice, the concrete event of altar roasting and feasting, waving and smearing and sprinkling, that is central to this doctrine of the Trinity. The ordinances, statutes, and commandments of Leviticus have not passed away because they are unfolding, they are being enacted, now” (364).

She takes pains to explain that she does not intend to “reify the rites of Israel” (364) or to reinitiate “the slaughter and roasting of animals on a consecrated altar” (367). Above all, she rebuffs attempts to “Hegelianize” the temple cult into “the very Idea of Sacrifice and Self-Giving” (365). These ancient rites, she maintains, must not be reduced to ethical principles deemed acceptable for our “present bloodless age” (364). Instead, the doctrine of the Trinity must be made to fit the stipulations of the Levitical tradition. 

Israel’s temple sacrifices manifest and correspond to the Triune Lord’s Self-Offering, His costly descent and ascent as Gift. The Levitical account of sacrifice reinscribes the Processional Life of God, the Holiness of the Trifold Lord. . . . The deep things of God—His Life of Descent and Outpouring—constitute Holiness, and we catch sight of that Holy Life in Leviticus, Moses’s instructions to the priests and people of Israel. . . . The Divine Mystery is laid down in the sinews of the text, quietly and radically suffusing the whole, illuminating the whole with an alien Light, an astonishment and a Herald from afar. (367, 375, and 381)

God, in other words, sanctifies God’s self by making of God’s self a sacrifice. And in so doing, God not only reveals a sacrificial love but, indeed, God makes God’s self loving. 

To say the same thing another way, we can respond to the call to be holy as God is holy just because God has made the making of God’s self our very being. We are because God is, of course. But we are the way we are because God is self-sanctified: 

The Triune Lord generates Holiness: this is the Self-Sanctification of God. As the Word that the Lord God speaks into Eternity—welcome and the world comes to be—so the Self-Offering of God is jussive: let the Offering issue forth. . . . So, the Self-Offering of God enacts the Transcendence and inner Being of the Lord. He is Perfect Holiness, Perfect Infinite Being. In all Eternity, God is enacting the Structure of Being. He is exemplifying and affirming the Truth that Being Itself is neither shapeless nor amorphous, neither chaotic no defiled. It is rather the Perfection this Infinite, a Vast, imperious Ordered Reality, a Bounded Royalty. . . . Trinity means: I, the Lord, sanctify myself. (473 and 476–77)

At first blush, this seems to undo the distinction between Creator and creature. Yet I suspect Sonderegger means to assure that distinction, much as Robert W. Jenson did, via a “revisionary metaphysics.”⁴ Unfortunately, she does not to share Jenson’s neo-Chalcedonian Christology, so she seems bound to affirm not that God elects to be a creature with us and for us but that God creates God’s self. She also seems bound to affirm that God’s life stands against the lives of creatures, a rival to their being.  

Of course, Jesus does say: “I sanctify myself” (John 17:19 NRSV). But that is the work of the divine mission, accomplished in his body, the flesh of the Son. To put it sharply, he sanctifies himself for our sakes, not his own, and the Father is the sanctifier, not the sanctified. Leviticus reiterates this truth again and again: “For I am the Lord your God; sanctify yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44) and then later, “I the Lord, I who sanctify you, am holy” (Lev. 21:8). And when Leviticus speaks of God as the one who is sanctified, it describes the work of the people of God, a work accomplished mostly by what they do not do: “You shall not profane my holy name, that I may be sanctified among the people of Israel: I am the Lord; I sanctify you” (Lev. 22:32). Sonderegger certainly knows these texts. And her model, I’m sure, can make a kind of sense of them. Arguably, however, in the effort to develop such a severe and novel Trinitarian doctrine, she has unnecessarily tied her argument in knots, forcing the biblical texts to work against their natural senses and subverting the tradition’s witness to the inalienable reliability of God.   

God Is Not a Terror 

The Trinity is sacrifice, offered and received, and so we are called to make sacrifices, offerings that are “conformed to the very Being of God” (464). Our work works “just because it follows and imitates the Holy Life of God” (464). This is the soul, the center of Sonderegger’s argument in this second volume, and she takes Israel’s sacrificial rites as the proof of it. However, I would contend that the sacrifices in Leviticus are not revelatory but confessional, not theophanic but expiatory, offered in contrition and concern for the consequences of even unintentional and inadvertent sins. And while I agree that we’re called to be conformed to God, offering our lives as a living sacrifice, that’s not because God’s life is immanently sacrificial. Our lives are sacrificial because our alignment with Christ sets us at odds with the patterns of this world. The powers require sacrifice, not God. This, I believe, is what Leviticus teaches. 

Without a doubt, ancient Israel, no less than other nations, feared the costs of ritual pollution. An “unbridgeable chasm” separated Israel’s priestly tradition from those of its neighbors, but as Jacob Milgrom explains:⁵

The ancients feared impurity because it was demonic, even meta-divine, capable of attacking the gods. Hence men were summoned, indeed created, for the purpose of purifying temples to aid the benevolent resident gods in their battles with cosmic evil. In Israel, however, there are no traces of demonic impurity. . . . “Anti-God forces” do not inhere in nature. Not even the animal world can contaminate the sanctuary, for their carcasses, though impure, are no threat either to God or to man. The demons have been expunged from the world, but man has taken their place. This is one of the major contributions of the priestly theology: man is demonized. True, man falls short of being a demon, but he is capable of the demonic. He alone is the cause of the world’s ills. He alone can contaminate the sanctuary and force God out.⁶

Thus, Milgrom concludes, the Levitical rites are a performative theodicy. The sanctuary, like the picture of Dorian Gray, bears in its bodies the marks of Israel’s sins, and “unless it is quickly expunged, God’s presence will depart.”⁷ Accordingly, the priestly ministry is tasked with saving Israel from alienation from God, a task it fulfilled by keeping the sanctuary “clean.” 

Because she is concerned with what the sacrifices mean for God, Sonderegger’s reading of Leviticus misses these dimensions almost entirely. As she sees it, it is “fitting and altogether proper” that the Son should “take the way of suffering and death, be lowered into the earth, descend to those in prison, and in His death make many righteous” (314). The Word-made-flesh rightly makes of himself a sacrifice because he is, as the Word-without-flesh, “the Perfect Offering” (314). The incarnation, therefore, is “a fiery lesson” (311), burning away our illusions of ease with God. Sonderegger does not hesitate to say that Jesus was, indeed, “born to die” (314), not as a thwarting of the Father’s will nor as an obscuring of his own eternal generation but as its accomplishment and expression. But Hebrews 10, expounding Psalm 40, declares otherwise. The Day of Atonement sacrifices, offered yearly, did not “perfect” the worshippers (Heb. 10:1)—not because the law failed or because the priests failed but because the sacrifices were purposed, by the “remembrance” of sins, to turn the worshippers’ attention toward the coming of God. 

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said:

Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body you have prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, “See, God, I have come to do your will, O God”
(in the scroll of the book it is written of me). (Heb. 10:5–7)

For the author of Hebrews, everything rides on the difference between the sacrifices of blood and fire, sacrifices God never desired, and the body prepared for God in Mary’s womb. The good news is, because of that difference, Jesus’s obedience, perfected in death, abolishes the need for sacrifice by assuring us of God’s desire to be with us, no matter the cost. We can, in unshakable confidence, stand gladly in the presence of the God who would rather not be God at all than to be God without us. We cannot, in that presence, not bow. But when we do, we find that God has bowed, too, to wash our feet. 

The Body of Christ and the Spirit of the Scriptures 

Somewhat startlingly, Sonderegger admits she wants no part of Hebrews’s “spiritualizing” (410), at least not as a basis for the doctrine of the Trinity. For that reason, she turns instead to what she understands as the plain sense of the law: 

A systematic theology that aims to ground doctrine in Holy Scripture, one that holds that Scripture is both determinate and sufficient for dogmatic work, must be able to say more than a mild acquiescence in spiritualized exegesis. It must say something about the doctrine of God as manifested in the concrete life of Israel and the Coming King of this people. It must see the Intelligible laid down in the concrete, the Meaning of Reality, True, Necessary Reality bestowed on and integrated into the vital practice of ancient Israel. It must see Trinity in the costly sacrifice of altar and priest, the history of covenant Israel. It must see the Living Relation of the Divine Abstract to the Divine Concrete. Though of course this traces lineage back through the honorable notion of Scripture’s sensus plenior, it is lineage only, not an instance of it. We are not now seeking a depth dimension not carried by the literal or plain sense—or even less, a spiritual sense that elevates and corrects the plain. No! We do not attempt to find a more palatable notion of bloody sacrifice in the ideals of spiritual worship or sacramental rite. We are not looking for a “useable past” or a modern equivalent to the forlorn past. This is a different act altogether. My aim is to listen intently for the Presence of the High God, the Transcendent and Lofty One, in the plain, historical record of Israel and Israel’s Son. (411)

It is hard to see how this squares with what she says in her first volume about God’s humility and hiddenness. And, as I already suggested, it seems to run against the grain of the text of Leviticus, as well. That aside, how does it make sense, on the basis of her convictions, for her to say that the “Dark Depths of God” are known only in the “plain, historical record”? If Scripture is really God’s only perfected creature (apart, perhaps, from Mary), then why would its depths not be holy? And even if her reading of Leviticus’s supposed “plain sense” were right—and, again, I do not think that it is—how, on the grounds of her claims about Scripture’s holiness, can Hebrews’s “plain sense” be dismissed or bracketed out as abstraction? 

In his commentary on Hebrews 10, Thomas Aquinas concludes that the “Old Covenant” was rejected “first, because God does not want its sacrifices, and second because they do not please him.” His exposition refers to Psalm 40, Psalm 50, Isaiah 1, and passages from the Gospel of John. But he concludes with a quote from Leviticus: “The new coming on, you shall cast out the old” (Lev. 26:10).⁸ Sonderegger holds that “the Bible is about God, not about salvation, principally or exhaustively” (40). And it is easy to see why she does; she can make the case for sacrifice as a mapping of the divine processions only if sacrifice itself is understood as transcendental—good, beautiful, true—and “the new” is the unbroken continuation and flowering of “the old.” The problem is that she is forced by that desire to strain the biblical texts—overburdening Leviticus, as well as Isaiah 53, and filtering out Psalms, Isaiah 1, and Hebrews—and to break with the Christian dogmatic tradition she so obviously cherishes. 

The ancients and medievals had this right, I believe. As Hugh of Saint Victor put it, “Unless you acknowledge beforehand the birth of Christ, his teaching, his suffering, his resurrection and ascension, and all the other things which he did in the flesh and through the flesh, you will not be able to penetrate the mysteries of the ancient figures.”⁹ Sonderegger’s proposal essentially reverses the relationship between figure and ground, positing that Israel’s sacrifices were not figures, not old, not mysterious. As a result, for her,it seems Jesus has to be regarded as mysterious and figurative. In one passage, she calls up, and rejects as false, the belief that “in itself, and apart from sin, the Word made flesh would be fully known, not anonymous, luminous, and fully attractive” (305). The infinite, in other words, is for Sonderegger not beautiful, at least not in a traditional sense. She believes Christians wrongly long to say “that the contour of the Eternal Son made flesh would have been delightful had sin not gotten in the way” (305). In truth, however, “the concrete contour of Israel and of Israel’s Servant is not that, not at all” (306). God is good but not simply good for us—not even apart from sin. 

Sonderegger, in some portions of this book, appears not to fear God’s departure, as the Levitical tradition does, but God’s coming, God’s nearness. This is the weight of her reading of Isaiah 53, certainly: “Isaiah 53 tells us that the meaning of the Servant’s suffering is that Almighty God willed it, inflicted pain on Him, and laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (311). She also returns time and time again to speak of the cost of God’s life. The incarnation, she insists, was a “profound mystery of pain,” but it only “expresses the Alien Ways of our God, His Heights and Ways above all our ways, His Terrible Excess that is Deity.” She concludes with a warning: “We trust in Him; we love this Lord; we follow His Ways. But they are costly, a descent, a loss” (312). 

Why do I find this troubling? Because it mistakes gift for sacrifice, confusing not only the distinction between the divine processions and missions but also the distinction between God’s humility and the humiliation that God suffered on our behalf. Worst of all, Sonderegger’s account of God’s “Alien Ways” and “Terrible Excess” risks leaving the impression that salvation is nothing but capitulation to a God who is not only terrible but also a terror. To be clear: I welcome the audacity of Sonderegger’s proposal. But to my mind, the “classical” assumptions are still clearly preferable: God does not create God’s self, does not sanctify God’s self, and does not make a sacrifice of God’s self. And for those very reasons, we can rest in the confidence that God is our salvation from terror, not the terror we need to be saved from. The origin of the world is neither spectacle nor sacrifice but sweetness. 

Jesus abolished the need for any more atoning sacrifices because he fulfilled, once for all, the hopes awakened by their offering. In his life and the death that perfected it he created a genuinely new relation to God, one that did not abrogate Israel’s calling but fulfilled it, one that promised the same fulfillment to the nations. If, as Francesca Murphy says, God is not a story, then, for the same reasons, God is not a sacrifice.¹⁰ And he is “the perfect sacrifice” primarily, if not exclusively, in the sense that he saves us from imagining that God needs or wants the shedding of blood. In a word, God’s life, revealed in what happens with Jesus, is not costly; it is gift—the gift that exceeds not only every debt but also shatters, irrevocably, every economy of gain and loss.¹¹

Coda 

All my serious disagreements notwithstanding, and there are many, I am wildly grateful for Sonderegger and her work. Her nerve, her learning, her sense of humor, her patience in conversation, her extravagant prose. For me, reading Sonderegger is an immersive experience, a being-taken-in by her art. At times, her arguments strike me as frenetic and chaotic, like a Basquiat, like a Coltrane, experimentally juxtaposing, mixing, layering, upending. Other times, her arguments seem mazelike, multicursal—this or that line of thought dead-ends, and I find myself left at a loss. Still, the effect of her work always exceeds the sum of its parts. And that is why it is so hard for any review, let alone this one, to do justice to her offerings. 

A final, final word: it is not lost on me that Sonderegger quotes Habakkuk 2:20 at the head of this volume and again at the foot: “The Lord is in His Holy Temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him!” Thankfully, she knew what kind of silence the Lord wants, what kind of silence we need, and she gave herself to moving us toward it, whether we like it or not. 

This incident was a foreshadowing of what was to come in the summer of 2020 when a nineteen-year-old biracial university student started a petition to ask that the Confederate statue in the middle of our town be moved to a museum. She did not want to see it torn down, merely moved and contextualized. Within hours, she received the first death threat. 

This led to weeks of protests in the center of our small Tennessee town. Those of us standing for the dignity of Black lives gathered silently on our university’s front lawn and sidewalk. We kneeled. We prayed. Across the street, those standing for the Confederate statue and all it stood for gathered around it. They yelled insults and waved flags: US flags, Confederate flags, “blue lives matter” flags, and Trump flags. On occasion, they came over to our side to try to create conflict. 

This is the contentious context within which I teach large groups of students about the sin of racism, its devastating intergenerational impact, and our need to confront it, repent for it, and seek change. 

Like most private Christian universities in the United States, our student demographic is predominantly white. Every fall, I teach two large humanities survey classes in which I relate issues of racial injustice, implicit bias, and profiling to my students’ reading of William Shakespeare’s Othello. And every spring, I explore similar topics of race and justice when I teach Frederick Douglass’s Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass. At the beginning of the semester, some white students flinch with teeth-gritting resistance when I put up slides of Black Lives Matter protests and tell the stories of the many unarmed Black Americans unjustly executed by the police. But by the end of the semester, the miraculous happens—and it happens every semester—as many, if not all, of the white students in my classes begin to understand that the theological reality of the sanctity of every human life, the presence of the imago Dei in all human beings, has been largely neglected in our national conversations about race, especially within the white American evangelical church.

This collective lack of acknowledging God’s sacred image in all human beings is what led author and speaker Jemar Tisby to advocate for a second Reformation. In a series of Reformation Day lectures at Covenant College, he argued that just as “faith alone” was the doctrine of the original Protestant Reformation, “the image of God needs to be the core doctrine of a Racial Reformation.”² Only by embracing this core theological truth can white Americans begin to reimagine the way to love our Black brothers and sisters, seeking to learn their stories of struggle and responding with empathetic lament and the hope for liberation. For this reason, I begin each semester by telling students that we must actively acknowledge and honor the imago Dei in one another as we enter into conversation. I also challenge them to practice acknowledging and honoring the imago Dei when reading the words of the authors in classroom texts, whether they died three hundred years ago or are still living and writing today. These thinkers were and are image-bearers, and their human dignity is affirmed in the many ways that their writing reflects this: creativity, intelligence, compassion, conviction. 

As we enter conversations with great minds from the past, I tell my students that we must not become consumers but listeners. And while listening, we must discern that which leads to life and truth and that which leads to death and falsehood.³ This is perhaps the most difficult intellectual step a college student must take. It’s a leap of faith away from authoritative lists prescribing which books, films, and ideas are considered right and wrong; it is the hard process of developing wisdom through hospitable yet discerning engagement. 

In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann argues that the jarring, life-giving impact of prophetic ministry should lead to both lament and hope. Shakespeare’s Othello and Douglass’s Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass both prophetically critique a manifestation of what Brueggemann calls the “mythic claims of the empire.” The empire’s most powerful tool is its invisibility to those who benefit from it, and these pieces of literature help to make the invisible become visible for discerning readers. Reading (witnessing) and discussing (processing) both texts helps students gain ears to hear and eyes to see the devastating ramifications of our Western ideological inheritance of colonization and chattel slavery. Indeed, before they can be “energized,” as Brueggemann says, by recognizing the hope uncovered in a shared Christian doxology, it is important to practice what Esau McCaulley calls a “theology of mourning.” This shared grieving is an honest human response to the “economic, social, and political oppression” that is “the physical manifestation of the spiritual sickness at the heart of the empire.” These manifestations must be named, and we must see the ways in which they attempt to mar, maim, and even destroy the image of God.⁴

Perhaps it is a bit surprising that Othello, a play that has led so many of my students into a deeper empathetic identification with the Black community, was written by the most esteemed member of a mostly white, male literary canon. Shakespeare so often represents the establishment in the popular literary imagination. Yet this play subverts Elizabethan ideological claims about both race and gender by positioning the two most unlikely characters, an African man, Othello, and a lady-in-waiting, Emilia, as, arguably, the most honorable figures in the story. The play centers on an interracial marriage between Othello, who serves as a general in the Venetian army, and Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian nobleman. This relationship would have been a cultural taboo just fifty years ago, so its inclusion in a British text written in 1604 is particularly shocking. During the time of Othello’s writing, the British collective imagination contained a strict dichotomy for the understanding of race, what can be seen as protoconstructs for the categories of race we have inherited and advanced in the United States. In this false paradigm, the white European male is ruled by reason, good sense, and self-control, whereas the Black African male is seen as irrational, dangerously hypersexual, and driven by passion and engagement in the dark arts. The play’s central villain, Iago, references these false distinctions when he tells his dullard sidekick, Roderigo, “For we work by wit not by witchcraft.”⁵

Iago, a white man, is, ironically, the character most ruled by passion as he plots to destroy Othello, a Black man who trusts him and believes the two to be best friends. Iago is angry because Othello overlooks him for a coveted promotion. He also tells us that it is rumored that Othello slept with his wife. Although he says he does not believe the rumor, he nevertheless chooses to act as if it were true in order to fuel a hate that cannot be entirely explained by resentment. Indeed, the most dehumanizing, racist language in the play is used by Iago, suggesting that Othello’s skin color is the primary reason for Iago’s hate. For instance, when Iago tells Desdemona’s father about the elopement of his daughter and Othello, he uses sexually explicit, animal imagery, thus reenforcing the contemporary Elizabethan stereotypes of Blackness: “You’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse / you’ll have your nephews neigh to you.”⁶ Iago’s incendiary language gives visibility to the deepest fears of white supremacist Europe, the mixing of blood lines that would supposedly lead to a less-evolved, tainted, and more animalistic type of human being, a human that is subhuman. In reading Shakespeare, we are reminded that long before Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, the seeds of social Darwinism had already been planted.

When I point these things out to my diverse classroom, the white students tend to be shocked. The Black students are not. They know the history of this ideology and its inheritance in their lived experience. And they are also not shocked when the play ends with the honorable man, Othello, falling prey to the very stereotypes that have been used to abuse him. Othello commits a monstrous act in killing his wife, yet Shakespeare gives him a voice at the end, allowing him to explain and show that he, himself, is not monstrous. 

I couple this story with various examples from contemporary American culture, disclosing the enduring presence of these dangerous, inhuman stereotypes. We watch a clip from the first film shown in the White House, The Birth of a Nation. Although technically and aesthetically innovative, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film is white supremacist propaganda that centers members of the Klu Klux Klan as heroes who rescue a white woman from the lascivious arms of a Black man—a Black man who is really a white actor in blackface. This fear of Black sexuality is initially not so obvious when looking at the censoring of Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley, whose moves were deemed suggestive. But the underlying fear becomes more evident in clips of Presley’s critics who claim he is exposing white youth to the evil beats and moves of the Black man.

These unwarranted fears that led to systemic and cultural criminalization of the Black male resonate even more with students as we talk about the recent killings of unarmed Black men, including Terence Crutcher. When Crutcher was apprehended, another officer watched the scene from a helicopter, saying, “That looks like a bad dude.” Moments later, Crutcher was fatally shot by an officer on the receiving end of that message. In considering these examples and listening to the powerful songs “Coulda Been Me” by Trip Lee or “Make it Home” by Tobe Nwigwe, students recognize that the deadly, fear-based ideologies from Shakespeare’s day are still in operation. As Tisby states in The Color of Compromise, “History demonstrates that racism never goes away; it just adapts.”⁷ And as students develop empathy for Othello, an initially innocent man who is subject to suspicion, accusations, and manipulation, they begin to appreciate how this has affected the lives of their Black peers. When I ask them to write responses to what they are hearing and seeing, many of their reflections are confessions of a racism that they hadn’t previously had eyes to see in themselves, their home communities, and their country. The invisible begins to gain visibility. These testimonies are powerful testaments to the way that the arts can help us grow in our capacity for empathy and seeing the image of God more vibrantly. Here’s an example:

Growing up . . . I was used to the idea that it was not appropriate for me to marry outside of my race. Also, it was okay to use the n word in my family. . . . The story of Othello broke my heart in a sense that he was being torn apart because of his skin color.

Reading and discussing these texts also provides an opportunity for Black students to publicly bear witness to their own experiences of racism. Although I believe it is important to never ask a Black student to publicly share their story (or to label a student as a representative for their race), many of my Black students have voluntarily shared painful episodes. These are some of the most holy, life-altering experiences I have had as a professor. Teaching Othello not only highlights overt racism but also initiates conversations about the covert microaggressions that Black students endure on a daily basis. When Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, finds out that his daughter has married a Black man, his former friend becomes an enemy. He repeatedly accuses Othello of using witchcraft to seduce his daughter because he cannot imagine why she would run to the “sooty bosom” of “such a thing as thou—to fear, not delight!” He brings the case before the Duke, hoping for some legal say in the matter. But the Duke is on the couple’s side and approves of their marriage, and he expresses this in a famous couplet: “If virtue no delighted beauty lack / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.”⁸ When analyzing these lines, most students begin to recognize the nice racism of the Duke, who is telling Brabantio that although Othello is frightening to look at, he is white on the inside.⁹ Black students have at times shared their painful incidents of nice racism, too, including being told, “You’re not like other Black people” or “You are pretty for a Black girl.” 

These moments are empowering for the Black students in class, and as we bear witness to injustice and critique its ideology, my white students are also transformed. I receive many comments similar to this one:

Our discussions of race have called into question many of my beliefs. I have always tried not to be racist, but I know that I have behaved in ways that betray that I do have some racist perceptions. . . . Hearing from Black classmates has made a huge difference. I have really learned from hearing their stories.

These conversations create an opportunity to reimagine ways to see the imago Dei in all human beings, as we begin to recognize how our own imaginations have been constricted. 

The call for change is even more profound when we read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I find that most of my students have received little education about the reality of American chattel slavery, and the reading of a firsthand experience of an enslaved person is both eye-opening and deeply convicting. They often feel betrayed by their past education as they begin to connect the dots between the past and present. As we discuss Douglass’s words, “to be accused was to be convicted,” once again we talk about street executions still suffered by Black Americans.¹⁰ Although the entire work is powerful and prophetic, the two focal points that affect my students the most are Douglass’s description of slavery as a system and ideology and the ways that this system was upheld by many self-described Christians.

We read Douglass immediately before reading Karl Marx’s critique of religion, and there are many interesting connections. Both men point out the ways that religion has been used as a weapon to indoctrinate the oppressed and to gain and retain power over them. In his autobiography, Douglass explains that when he is sold to a new master, he fears that this man is a Christian because the Christian slave masters tend to be the cruelest. These ruthless men use decontextualized Scripture to self-righteously justify their positions of power and their treatment of other image-bearers. Prohibiting the enslaved from learning to read is one more tool of disempowerment in the arsenal of the demonic institution of slavery. In Douglass’s story, he is surprised and delighted when a new master’s wife, Mrs. Auld, “a woman of kindest heart and finest feelings,” actually treats him like he is a human being. She recognizes his keen intelligence and is eager to teach him to read, but her husband soon feeds her the poison of white supremacist ideology, forbidding her to teach Douglass because he would then become “unmanageable.” Once Mrs. Auld begins to follow this command, Douglass witnesses the decay of her soul as she becomes even more cruel than her husband. He notes that, “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me,” preceding Martin Luther King Jr.’s claim that racism “distorts the soul and damages the personality.”¹¹

Although Douglass prophetically critiques the religion of slave holders, he is careful to make a distinction between what he calls “the Christianity of this Land” and “the Christianity of Christ.” In the appendix to his narrative, he uses Matthew 23 as an anchor to denounce the cruel, irreligious of hypocrisy of these “whitewashed tombs:”¹²

We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together.¹³

Seeing Christ’s name used to justify such inhumane acts proves to be almost unbearable to my white students, most of whom have little knowledge of the American church’s long complicity with racism.¹⁴

As harrowing as Douglass’s story is, it also highlights the dignity, humanity, and value of those who have been dehumanized. By reading this story, engaging with Douglass as an image-bearer, and connecting the spiritual corruption of white supremacy to current events, students can imaginatively identify with the Black community. It is also important that they see the “energizing” dimension of the Christian history of so many of enslaved believers. Even as their masters attempted to oppress them with the words of Scripture, the oppressed faithful read through the heretical omissions and misapplications to identify with a crucified Christ who liberates his people. The real-world theology of enslaved image-bearers is heard in their spirituals that reveal both “the highest joy and the deepest sadness.” They preach joy in the darkest of circumstances while bearing witness to the pain of those circumstances and holding hope for liberation. The “unknown Black bards” who composed these spirituals also constructed an oral theological tradition that was passed down, providing a space for both lament and joy. These works of art provide some of the most profound examples of Brueggemann’s two-fold aspect of prophetic ministry: critiquing and energizing.¹⁵

Douglass’s testimony of oppression, along with his prophetic distinctions between the Christianity of the power-hungry empire and the humanizing, sacrificial Christianity of Christ, is both painful and life-giving. The truth of Douglass’s claims is historically and morally undeniable. In order to truly see, to reimagine the glory of another image-bearer, we must feed our imaginations with the testimonies of those who Howard Thurman calls the “disinherited,”who bear witness to their own suffering.¹⁶ The more we listen, the better we can imagine and empathize. Only then can we face the consequences of our complicity and repent before moving toward real interracial unity.

In this sense, teaching and reading narratives that expose racial injustice and rightfully critique its inhumanity are both acts of activism. Educating ourselves about the history, culture, and dignity of our Black brothers and sisters is as important as standing on the side of the road holding signs, perhaps even more so. As a tool of the Spirit’s intervention, these narratives of justice and truth can ultimately lead to changed hearts and minds.

The willingness to witness trauma is often autobiographical. This is true of me in my role as a professor of theology who is active in our university’s Institute of Trauma and Recovery. During my postgraduate education, I tried to stay in one lane and focus solely on Reformation theology and history. That would have been clean and tidy—theology in the academy, and trauma in the real world. But trauma and recovery has pursued me and refused to let go.

No one starts from nowhere. We all carry stories that frame our daily professions and relationships. So how did I end up teaching integration of theology and psychology to trauma therapists after completing postgraduate research in John Calvin? I am still not sure. But I do know that these thought worlds, separate as they might seem, are deeply integrated in me, the person; that we cannot help but be who we are; and that there is a clear reward to integrating our professional lives with our lived experiences. A person-centered, holistic approach to life may just be what the world, divided as it is today by endless abstract classifications, is hungry for. What we may need is to encounter reality fresh and face-to-face, whether that reality is violent or beautiful. 

As a professor of theology and pastoral counselor, I have had the privilege of witnessing countless students and friends share stories of surviving violence. I have also had the privilege of sharing my story with them. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I live daily with the symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) that affect every aspect of my life. Recovery has been slow and steady. The journey is long, but the friends on the road are more numerous than I had assumed, even in the academy. Indeed, it has been a privilege to research trauma with fellow survivors and witnesses who are keen to explore how theology can be reimagined in our “east of Eden” world.¹

Stories like mine and my students are not uncommon. Recent studies report that 70 to 90 percent of adults experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. As a result, some psychiatrists have concluded that “trauma is now our most urgent public health issue.”² The COVID-19 pandemic and political unrest of 2020 and 2021 make such an assessment hard to deny. Scholars in the last thirty years have also proposed that traumatic violence is a global public health issue best approached through interdisciplinary collaboration, but theologians have only just begun to join this conversation. We are just beginning to ask how theology can contribute to our understanding of trauma and possibilities for recovery.

But there’s a more specific question that I hear repeated often by students, friends, and colleagues, and it’s a question that has been important to my journey as well—how are we to understand the experience people often have after trauma that they are angry at God and feel alienated from God by their suffering? Put differently, what can theology contribute to our understanding of human persons who feel forsaken by God after trauma, and how might theology offer insight in trauma recovery?³

A Basic Sketch of PTSD

But before mining theological resources to assist in recovery, we must first understand trauma.

What is the story of trauma? Where did it come from? The clinical study of trauma waxed and waned throughout the 1900s, and it was not until 1980 that the treatment of outspoken Vietnam veterans led the American Psychiatric Association to canonize traumatic stress with the diagnosis PTSD.⁴ The medical treatment of combat trauma in the late 1900s opened up doors for parallel diagnoses related to such atrocities as domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, and political captivity. 

Trauma has come to be defined as “an inescapably stressful event that overwhelms one’s coping mechanisms.” During a highly stressful event of overwhelming violence in which one is powerless to fight or flee, human persons are able to survive the psychic stress of the event by undergoing a complex process of hyperarousal and alterations of consciousness that protect the person from fully experiencing the threat. In clinical terms, this process is a “freeze” response called “dissociation” that has been formally identified as the central pathogenic mechanism involved in PTSD.⁵ During dissociation, a traumatized person who is threatened with violence undergoes an extreme narrowing of perception as a defense mechanism, and this numbs the person’s consciousness against the brutality being experienced. 

Survivors frequently report dissociation as a kind of out-of-body experience in which they have the perception of floating above their own bodies, as if they were watching the trauma happen to someone else.⁶ Through such experiences “the helpless person escapes from [their] situation not by action in the real world but rather by altering [their] state of consciousness. . . . this altered state of consciousness might be regarded as one of nature’s small mercies, a protection against unbearable pain.”⁷

However, clinicians and neuroscientists agree that while dissociation is adaptive in trauma, it is maladaptive for recovery.⁸ Because the traumatic experience is walled off from ordinary consciousness, the memories of the trauma are not recalled in an integrated fashion in the post-traumatic context. Instead, they may be experienced as intrusive and sporadic flashbacks of sensory overload. Freud was essentially correct, then, when he noted that traumatized persons “suffer mainly from reminiscences” because “the patient is, one might say, fixated to the trauma.” Traumatized persons suffer from unintegrated memories of terror that interrupt their present consciousness. Serene Jones writes that in PTSD, “the mind’s meaning-making structures have collapsed” and that “because [information] cannot be processed and stored, [it] simply wanders and consistently replays itself.” This ongoing repetition results in what Babette Rothschild describes as a  “misperception—in mind and body—that past trauma is still happening.”⁹ The experience of having one’s present mental state constantly interrupted by the fear of an overwhelming threat of the past is at the very heart of the PTSD syndrome.

In the last thirty years, the study of trauma has moved off the psychoanalytic couch, making its way into the humanities. Trauma theory began in the mid-1990s as an interdisciplinary attempt to explore how trauma affects human self-understanding. Literary scholar Cathy Caruth was particularly influential in summarizing a traumatic event as a “missed” or “unclaimed” experience. She describes trauma as the wound that results from an event of such terrifying magnitude that the event is too much to process as it happens—the terror is too great to comprehend. As a result, the memories of the past violence haunt the human psyche seeking to be processed or “claimed.”¹⁰ When traumatic memories are unclaimed in this way, it creates the experience of a “double-wound”: the initial traumatic event and the stress that follows. Even though the traumatic events are over, the terror continues to wound the mind in the present.

From these conceptualizations of trauma, literary theorists have developed a framework that is now called trauma theory through which hermeneutical possibilities are opened in the important differences between suffering (which has ended and is in the past) and trauma (which persists so that suffering continues in the present). As Freud puts it, the threat of trauma is continually felt by survivors “as contemporary experience, instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past.” This sense of continual experience is what theologian Shelly Rambo gets at when she asserts that trauma is radically different from general suffering. Suffering is what one can recover from, what one can heal from. Trauma, however, is what is unbearable, what one cannot handle, what overwhelms. Rambo says that “this is the difference between a closed and an open wound . . . trauma is the suffering that does not go away. The study of trauma is the study of what remains.”¹¹

Post-Traumatic Relating to God

Given the way that psychological trauma remains even after the events are over, survivors experience negative effects on their relationships with other human persons in the present. However, recent philosophers and theologians have also pointed out that traumatic events do not only disrupt our relationship with other humans; they also disrupt our relationship with God. Some scholars have called this post-traumatic disruption of the divine-human relationship a “stain on the soul,” as if it were a kind of moral leftover or residue from adverse experiences.¹²

Surviving violence can cause one to live with a deep suspicion toward any previously held notions of the goodness or trustworthiness of God. One psychiatrist puts it this way: “The traumatic event challenges an ordinary person to become a theologian, a philosopher, and a jurist. The survivor is called upon to articulate the values and beliefs that she once held and that the trauma destroyed. She stands before the emptiness of evil. . . . all questions are reduced to one. . . . Why? . . . . Why me?”¹³ Asking the question why? is a natural and legitimate response to horrendous evils because trauma has negative effects on human persons’ perceptions of their relationships with God. 

Trauma can cause persons with post-traumatic stress to doubt God’s goodness or to see God as “a cruel judge” who is either powerless to help, unwilling to help, or altogether indifferent.¹⁴ For example, consider the story of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as told by Judith Herman:

There are people with strong and secure belief systems who can endure the ordeals of imprisonment and emerge with their faith intact or strengthened. But these are the extraordinary few. The majority of people experience the bitterness of being forsaken by God. The Holocaust survivor Wiesel gives voice to this bitterness: “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget those things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”¹⁵

While stories like these are uncomfortable to hear, it is imperative that we listen. Many people assume that this kind of insecure connection with God is contrary to religious faith, that faith means feeling only that God is one’s “safe haven” and source of comfort, protection, delight, and security.¹⁶ What about those like Wiesel who feel forsaken by God? Is there room for faith in feeling forsaken?

Questions like these present a unique challenge to theologians and students in the religious disciplines today. It appears that psychological trauma creates a loss of connection with God and can cause persons to feel alienated from God and angry toward God. And because trauma is a double wound, this sense of alienation from God is compounded and difficult to address. If theology is the discipline that addresses the relationship between God and human persons, what can theology contribute to our understanding of this experience of feeling forsaken by God? How can the religious disciplines facilitate recovery for these experiences?

Feeling Forsaken by God: Calvin’s Traumatized Christ

To answer these questions, I will draw from my PhD research, which has focused on the Christian doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell, particularly as the doctrine was articulated by the Reformer and theologian John Calvin, who makes hell sound strikingly similar to trauma.¹⁷ In Calvin’s theology, hell is rarely conceived of as a physical place—it “signifies not so much the locality as the condition of those whom God has condemned and doomed to destruction.” Hell, then, is the “wretched” feeling of being “cut off from all fellowship with God.” For Calvin “where there is guilt before God, there hell immediately shows itself,” such that “we always find a hell within us.”¹⁸

Scholars have noted that Calvin is able to pastorally apply this psychological understanding of hell not only to those who “entangled in sin, carry death and hell along with them” but also to those who suffer persecution and endure mental distress: “there is no condition more unhappy than to live in trouble of mind, and to have a continual warfare raging within one’s self, or rather without ceasing to be tormented by a hell within” (tormente dune gehenne interieure).¹⁹

Calvin’s psychological description of hell results in a certain kind of demythologized account of Christ’s descent into hell. He suggests that the traditional story of Christ harrowing souls imprisoned in Limbo is “childish” and is “nothing but a story,” whereas Christ’s actual descent into hell occurred when he “suffered in his soul the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man.” Calvin calls this experience a kind of “death of the soul,” a terrifying sense that one’s relationship with God is in peril:²⁰

Would you know what the death of the soul is? It is to be without God—to be abandoned by God. . . . full of terror and desolation, [it] drives those to despair who feel that it is inflicted on them by an angry and punishing God. The only thing which can temper the bitterness of its agonies is to know that God is our Father, and that we have Christ for our leader and companion.²¹

Hell in Calvin’s theology is thus the condition of a soul that results when we are entirely bereft of the conviction that God is favorably disposed toward us because we perceive ourselves to be engaged in an adverse relation with God. To be in hell is to feel forsaken by God rather than loved by God.

Calvin indicates that this feeling of being forsaken by God is what Christ experienced in the garden of Gethsemane and during the crucifixion, two intense emotional struggles that caused severe psychological pain and stress on Christ’s body. He pays profound attention to the embodied expression of Christ’s fear: “Something commonly considered miraculous was related about him: from the fierceness of his torments, drops of blood flowed from his face.”²² And he employs Christ’s bloody sweat as proof that his fear was extreme. This traumatic fear of death continued to the climax on the cross when Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

There, Calvin points out a key paradox in the words of Jesus. First, Christ says “My God, my God.” He is calling God his own and taking God to himself. This is a cry of faith and trust. Second, Christ cries “why have you forsaken me?” He is crying out against God. This is a cry of despair and fear. Calvin notes that this is a remarkable coincidence that seems paradoxical: Christ does not cease to call God his own and to put his trust in the Father even as he cries out against him. Even when Christ felt forsaken and “suffered beyond measure,” Calvin notes that “he did not cease to call him his God, by whom he cried out that he had been forsaken.²³

This raises an important question. Was Christ sinning when he cried out against God? If faith in God is a religious virtue and Christ is supposed to be morally perfect, how can Christ experience some kind of a loss of faith? Calvin responds that these emotions are apt given the violent events, and therefore, “it in nowise detracts from his heavenly glory. . . . There is no reason why Christ’s weakness should alarm us.”²⁴ So even though Christ felt forsaken by God, Christ did so in the context of a relationship of lament with God. This demonstrates that it is possible to conceive of faith as a dynamic struggle that is not the opposite of doubt but is rather the very presupposition that legitimates doubt as an appropriate response toward surviving violence. 

This means that for Calvin it is possible that doubt and despair are not sinful but are appropriate responses to extreme suffering. Christ has demonstrated by his descent into hell that it is possible for human persons to suffer unspeakable torments, to despair with imperfect faith, and to doubt God’s goodness while still reaching toward that goodness. Feeling alienated from God does not mean we cannot be in a legitimate relationship with God.

Faith and Doubt

The insecure dynamic that Calvin identifies between Christ and God is helpful, I think, when we consider our own relationships to God. That dynamic shows us that insecurity in terms of our attachment to God is not sinful as such. Even Jesus felt this way. Consider again the cry of dereliction, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” It seems that Jesus was experiencing an insecure attachment to God during an event of traumatic violence.

It may seem alarming at first to say that Jesus, the eternal and perfect divine Son of God, experienced an insecure attachment to God. But drawing from Calvin, I am arguing that Jesus’s sinlessness and moral perfection are compatible with feeling alienated from God. I think this is why the book of Hebrews says that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15 NRSV). As Calvin says, Jesus is “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh”; he is like humanity in every way, yet he has never sinned, and so an insecure attachment is not sinful as such.²⁵ Thus, I believe that Christ’s cry of dereliction can be a helpful framework for those of us who have suffered the effects of trauma in relationship with God. It means that when traumatized persons such as myself feel a loss of safety in relationship with God, we are not sinning, and we are not alone. We are, in fact, in the best of company. We are having an experience that God has also experienced in a morally perfect way in the person of Christ. It is completely legitimate to lose a sense of safety in one’s relationship to God after trauma, since even God’s own sinless Son knows this experience. As those who are included in Christ by the power of the Spirit, we are likewise included in Christ’s perfect life before God, which does not prohibit emotional expressions of doubt but includes them in the embrace of perfect faith.²⁶

Moreover, as Calvin indicates, we may learn to lament with Christ by crying out “why have you forsaken me,” and this lament is possible in the context of a committed relationship with God, where we can call God “my God.” In other words, expressing feelings of alienation from God or anger toward God can be a completely legitimate mode of relating with God in the aftermath of trauma and can even be a cathartic or healing experience that is divinely sanctioned by the example of the person and work of Jesus Christ. That is good news for people who feel alienated from God. It is a paradox, but we can say that God knows what it feels like to be alienated from God, and God also knows how to find reconnection with God through such an experience.

Seeing that insecure attachment with God is not sinful is important for an effective response to trauma survivors that can facilitate recovery and healing. Consider the case of Diane, an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse:

My father abused me until I was four years old. He threatened to kill my mother or younger brother if I told. . . . Yet my mother continued to keep us in that environment. They eventually divorced. . . . After her divorce, my mother had affairs—the first one involved a priest; the other, a married man. The priest was sexually inappropriate with me. . . . [he] molested me when I was eighteen. . . . Growing up was also filled with constant health issues, nightmares about being chased and raped. . . . I have felt alone and unprotected most of my life. I knew God was there, but his promises were not for me. . . . Although I sought and served God with all of my strength, I still felt a wall and a distance between us.²⁷

How can Diane be blamed for a lack of connection with God given the trauma she has survived? She recounts, “I was furious with God. I was also terrified of him, but longed to be close to and secure in him.” When sharing these conflicting desires with one of her professors in college, the response she received from the professor startled her: “How could you not have trust issues with him?” There was no judgment, no chastisement. Instead, the response was empathetic, validating, and freeing. Diane says that this response freed her to take initial steps in trusting God again. Knowing that her insecure attachment was a legitimate response to trauma and was not sinful freed her to find secure attachment again.

Christ’s Body Keeps the Score

How can one conclude a story about trauma? As Judith Herman says, always return to the body.²⁸ Along those lines, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has recently become popular for his studies in PTSD showing that “the body keeps the score” of the effects of trauma on persons. That is, trauma is not merely about emotional despair or feeling forsaken; it is about how these feelings manifest in unbearable sensations that people feel in their bodies. 

Here, I think Calvin’s theology can be of help as well. Recall that for Calvin, Christ’s descent into hell was not just when he cried out to God on the cross but also when he feared violence and sweat blood in the garden of Gethsemane. We might say that Christ’s body was keeping the score of trauma.²⁹ In this way, we can show not only that it is legitimate to feel alienated from God but also that it is legitimate to feel disabled in one’s body as a result of trauma.

I end by recalling my story and the stories of my students and friends. Like many survivors, I live with daily triggers and reminders of the violent past that disrupts and disables. I am thankful for the recovery that has made it possible for me to walk again, even if with a limp. As Judith Herman (a hero of mine) says, recovery doesn’t mean that the past is completely healed or that the memories are gone, just that they are losing their gripping and paralyzing force. With time and care, they become integrated into a larger story of grace, memories to befriend rather than avoid. I am comforted that there are theological riches that can be retrieved and reimagined to help in this befriending process. Unlikely as it may seem, Calvin has been a friend to me on that journey. And the Christ of whom he speaks remains the dearest friend of all. I still believe this Christ can teach us how to doubt with faith, how to relate to God after trauma, how to stay in the tension of death and resurrection, and how to hope for the dawn even while it is still dark.

Then, in December, her condition deteriorated rapidly. She was hospitalized for two weeks. At that time, the pandemic was at its peak in California and morgues were running out of room. To protect the most vulnerable from the coronavirus and prevent further stress on hospitals that were already at capacity, no visitors were allowed.¹ We hated being so far away. We hated that she was alone. We blamed those who did not take seriously restrictions related to COVID-19. 

When she was released from the hospital, we were glad she would at least be able to be home with her husband again. But we could not make peace with the separation, with being abroad rather than holding Kaye’s hand as she transitioned. We felt compelled to be with her in her dying hours. But just as my husband began looking for flights from Edinburgh to Los Angeles, my father-in-law cut us off—my husband has a heart condition that could make him especially vulnerable to complications from COVID-19. You have three children, he reasoned with him. Paralyzed between practical constraints and our hearts’ desires, it was clear we had to stay put.

The day after Christmas, when we would typically be getting together with extended family for another Christmas celebration and a visit to the family burial plot, we instead received a video call from my father-in-law. Kaye’s spirit had left her body. He asked if we wanted to see her. We did. We said goodbye to my mother-in-law’s physical presence on this earth via video chat. We wept.

Like many families, we have been forced to grieve from a distance. We felt the helplessness of having sick family members who were isolated at a time when the comfort of loved ones is most needed. We felt the inadequacy of saying goodbye to someone we love via Zoom. We encountered the infuriating necessity of choosing between a virtual memorial or waiting God-knows-how-long for a safe time to be physically present with one another in remembrance. It is a grief that feels impossible to hold.

Mary’s Persistent Grief

I was an ocean away from Kaye at the time of her death. I am still waiting to be able to physically accompany and mourn with our family. That means that I sometimes forget that she is gone. This woman has been one of the central figures in my life for fifteen years; I have taken her existence for granted for so long and am so far removed from her death that I can easily forget she is gone. Then a simple glance at my bag reminds me that I will never see her purse on the chair by the front entrance to her house. I make myself a cup of tea upon returning home from work and remember that I will never share another cup with her again. Being removed from the emptiness of my in-laws’ house without her presence, it is even easier for me to slip into this forgetful denial. 

As a Catholic woman whose work has largely focused on Mary the mother of Jesus, my first instinct has been to look to her for guidance in navigating this distanced feeling of trauma. In the Catholic tradition, Mary is called both the cause of our joy, since God would become incarnate through her, and mater dolorosa, or mother of all sorrows, the patroness of grief. Likewise, the early Christian community in which Mary took part was a traumatized community experiencing the continued threats of persecution and death. 

It is, of course, important to acknowledge the profound differences between the grief experienced by Mary the mother of Jesus and that of my family, which I will reflect upon here. Jesus’s mother witnesses the death and torture of her child. She then participates in a community in which her son’s friends and she, herself, are vulnerable to persecution. Mary’s grief is the product of physical violence, not illness. However, it is the depths of Mary’s sorrow and helplessness before the political death of her son that ensures her understanding of grief more broadly. Thus, in a Catholic context, the memory of her perspective is reflected upon in times of trial and all manner of grief. 

We can imagine, then, that the ordeal of watching her son die, unable to do anything but stand witness, remained with Mary for the rest of her life. If the marks of Christ’s wounds were to remain as part of his resurrected body, we can imagine that Mary’s internal wounding also remained.² David Schnasa Jacobsen asserts that in resurrecting into new life, Jesus’s experience has not been erased; it is rather “taken up into the purposes of God. Revelation’s final vision in chapters 21–22 includes the wiping away of tears in 21:4. Please note: there will be tears to be wiped away.”³ Thus, the resurrection and the promise of the reign of God do not erase our experiences of suffering; they integrate our suffering into new life and identity in Christ. By choosing to continue to live in community with the disciples, Mary, the mother of Jesus, chose to cultivate relationships with people whose actions would put them at risk of their own cross, including crucifixion, torture, imprisonment, disbanding, and exile. After the death of her son, Mary continued to live in a community that was vulnerable to trauma—this perhaps might seem broadly familiar, as we continue to struggle through years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mary’s presence with the disciples at Pentecost also allows us to imagine her integrating the trauma of her experience of Jesus’s death into a new purpose that allowed her to be in relationship with him in a new way despite his physical absence. While she was formerly able to feel physical closeness and experience their relationship as mother and son in a tangible way, after the ascension and Pentecost, she would now feel his presence through the Holy Spirit, particularly in the mutual care she finds in relationship with his friends and the mission of the early church. However, according to Judith Herman, integration like this can take place only if grief has been given its due.⁴ If, following suffering, we are to cultivate a sense of reconnection to our daily routines, personal worth, and purpose, grief must be honored as it inevitably resurfaces and evolves. Thus, Mary could have found life after trauma only by creating a space for her grief.

Despite physically appearing to the disciples and sharing meals with them numerous times prior to the ascension, Jesus could not be present as a son to his mother in the same way he would have been prior to his death. Thus, while Mary must have experienced reassurance, meaning, and a new way of communing with Christ through the Holy Spirit, there were still innumerable little deaths. We can imagine her ongoing grief at not being able to muss his hair when he says something cheeky, to hear his laugh from another room, to feel his embrace, his smell. Nor does Christ’s resurrection erase the betrayal of his close friends, the violent public spectacle of his death, or the power taken from her as a mother who aches to console and protect her child. One can only imagine the layers of anger and grief. Even when new life is found after trauma, grief remains.

I find myself wondering whether she and Joseph questioned how they raised Jesus, whether they worried that they set him on a path that would inevitably lead to the cross. Was she angry at herself? At Jesus? At Peter? Did she relive the horrors of standing witness to her son’s death in her nightmares? Prior to Pentecost, could she speak beyond the wails of mourning? How long was it before she could eat again? Or sleep? In these ways, we can imagine Mary’s grief being wide ranging, encompassing both the death of little things, like watching him eat his favorite meal, and the horror of his passion. We can also imagine that the remaining of this grief was heightened at particular times, such as when young followers of the Way were persecuted.⁵ Once again she would need space to grieve in order to continue finding new meaning in communion with the early church. Thus, it seems that Mary and the larger community of disciples were able to carry on the work of Christ because they allowed themselves to grieve. Indeed, early ecclesiology was likely an ecclesiology of grief. To whatever extent trauma was present, such grief would arguably have been an important aspect of the life of such a community.

Scattered Grieving

Although we may find ourselves alienated from our church communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe we can draw a sense of solidarity from first-century Christians, who knew in a special way the identity crisis of what it means to be a church when gathering as a community is neither safe nor possible. Despite the joys of the resurrection, this was a community who had the horrors of the crucifixion seared in their collective consciousness even as they struggled with vulnerability to ongoing trauma. Jacobsen thus argues that early Christian texts may be viewed as responses to grief, trauma, and crisis.⁶

The book of Acts testifies to this, stating:

On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went (Acts 8:1–4, NIV).

1 Peter, too, begins with a greeting rooted in exilic experiences vulnerable to trauma: “To God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia” (1:1). The words exile and scattered are pregnant with tales of persecution. Donald Senior notes that Christians were considered exiles not only because they have in many cases been driven out of their home communities due to persecution but also because of their historical status as a fringe minority group. He further notes that by using exile as an identifier, the author is making an eschatological claim—“the end of all things is near” (1 Pet. 4:7) and, thus, one’s true home is not the place of one’s birth, which is temporal, but one’s place in Christ.⁷

In this unity with Christ, members of the early church stumbled upon a way to find meaning while mourning the physical absence of their friend. This pattern was then replicated as they experienced grief related to the martyrdom of their fellow community members. Holding grief as a communal experience as members of Christ’s body allowed the early Christians to feel supported in their grief even when persecution caused their community to disband. Thus, we can imagine that when Mary hears of the death of another one of her son’s friends, this new death is tied to that of her son, which may reawaken her trauma while also serving as a reminder that their community is one whose Spirit cannot be divided by distance, imprisonment, or even death. Their union is found in her risen son. This does not mean a lessening of grief but a sharing of its weight. 

Deanna Thompson calls this distended membership of the body of Christ a virtual phenomenon. The virtuality of shared Christian experience is, to her, exemplified in Paul’s letters. She explores how the Pauline letters were meant to be read as a church community, such that through his written word and their prayers, Christ may still be present to them. In 1 Corinthians, Paul states, “For though absent in body, I am present in spirit,” (1 Cor. 5:3).  Thompson further points out that such virtual networks, whether cultivated through letters, word of mouth, remembering those afar in prayer, or taking part in hearing shared testimony, mark the beginning of the church’s growth. Thus, even when unable to celebrate or mourn with friends and family, the joys, sorrows, and traumas of Christians in one area were held in common with those in another. Most importantly, mourning is not simply something the churches did but one of the manners in which the identity of the church was cultivated.⁸

In the Catholic tradition, it is taught that Mary the mother of Jesus was already a widow by the time of Jesus’s passion. As a widow and the mother of Jesus, she would have had a particular role within the early Christian community. Along these lines, Margaret Macdonald discusses the essential contributions of women to the identity of the nascent church through individual and communal acts of accompaniment, noting that by the second century widows had formed communities within their local churches, taking it upon themselves to bring food and comfort following deaths, persecution, and imprisonment.⁹ Mary and her sisters in Christ would have cradled the trials, grief, and hope of the community and offered prayers of lament, “crying out or groaning for deliverance [to] a God who hears and promises to deliver, even while he (sic) may delay in acting.”¹⁰ In this way, Mary the mother of Jesus would have experienced grief not only passively, as something which overtook her, but also actively, as a ministry. She and other widows would have chosen to express the grief of the community. Thus, lament is required for the individual and the community in order for new life to be found. Creating space, lamenting, and offering up grief prior to a simple moving on is the historically Christian response.

Holding and expressing grief from a distance would have become especially important as exile, imprisonment, and martyrdom increased. It is unlikely, for example, that martyrs such as James the brother of John had their families present when they were killed. Nor is it likely that care was given to the bodies of martyrs like James. We can imagine that those who loved him, his family and Mary the mother of Jesus, heard of this news only after it had happened and from a great distance. We are told only that the popularity of James’s execution inspires officials to seize Peter as well, uniting the church in all its distant fragments in prayer on his behalf (see Acts 12:1–5). 

Unity in Fragmentation

In their article “Fragments from within the Pandemic,” Katie Cross, Clare Louise Radford, and Karen O’Donnell begin to describe how a continued demand for productivity is at odds with the way in which COVID-19 has ruptured our daily experience, but as they attempt to make meaning in their writing, they find their speech to be fragmented. This fragmentation, they suggest, is a consequence of preexisting patterns of injustice that have been exacerbated by the ongoing stresses of the pandemic.¹¹ And it is a fragmentation that I recognize in my own life. 

My mother and her friends are fully vaccinated and have begun seeing each other in person again. Children are talking to their friends at school. And after a long winter, cafés, restaurants, and shops have reopened their doors. We are slowly rejoining the web of in-person communities and relationships that give us life. And yet when I first drafted this essay, the coronavirus had killed over 540,000 US residents, and the social upheaval that has accompanied the pandemic has brought about an increase in targeted race- and gender-based attacks. We continue to be pummeled with news of social calamity such that there is always something to grieve on either the macro level or in our own local communities. We have the masks and the war over mask requirements to remind us that all is not right. And interwoven with the joy of once again being able to touch those we love is the grief for those who are missing, for those who we never got to give a proper goodbye, for those like my mother-in-law, Kaye.  

And despite the more than 5 million deaths caused by COVID-19 and the jarring loss of Kaye’s passing, I still had a thesis to write, conference papers to turn in, and meetings to attend. I faithfully completed these tasks, but my mind was elsewhere. I started projecting this desire for nonproductivity on my colleagues. Surely, I could not be the only one thinking that everything should be canceled? That for at least a month everyone should stop? No papers. No conferences. No obligations other than getting through the day with our children. Nothing to do but bake bread, garden, breathe, cry, and mourn our dead and our world as it was prior to COVID-19. Of course, most of us do not live in a society where such a reality is possible given the existing socioeconomic structures. Even at the start of the pandemic, heeding the advice to stay at home was the luxury of those who could work from their computer and the upper middle class. 

There was one place where my family’s grief was honored and not papered over by the implicit demands for productivity—my online weekly Bible study group. This became a space for sharing loss, joy, and frustration, for finding opportunities to meet each other in our struggles. For being the church. Like Mary the mother of Jesus, and the widows of the early Church, this small community of women provided the space for communal mourning, even when we could not be physically present to one another.

The distended experience of grief caused by the pandemic has also manifested as a mourning within our mourning, as we grieve over our ability to mourn in the manner of our choosing. As such, the space my family has needed for grieving has largely been in the acknowledgement of our fundamental need to grieve over Kaye’s passing, over the fact that we have not been able to physically tend to our family in the United States or be tended by them at this time. The space for this grief was created by those in our virtual community through their prayers and when they checked in on our needs and emotional well-being. Every meal delivered to us by friends created space for our family to take comfort in one another without having to perform, without doing. We could nourish our bodies without laboring to create a meal. Every baked good brought to our doorstep and card we received was a reminder that our sense of loss was seen and should not be eclipsed by society’s desire that all remain as it was.¹² Perhaps more importantly, it empowered me to say no to the forces or thoughts that demanded I ignore grief in the name of carrying on. It helped me to spot the lie in equating the continuation of meaningful work with ignoring my need for pause.

Herman notes that it is common for mourning and remembrance to be avoided when we fear we might fall into a pit of despair from which we might never climb out. She also notes that while we cannot predict how long a period of mourning may last, particularly as grief is something that ebbs and flows rather than starting and stopping, it is nevertheless necessary to mourn if we are to integrate our loss after a traumatic experience.¹³ Being encouraged to mourn, to pause, to reflect, and to honor feelings of loss has helped me integrate my loss and allowed me to acknowledge that need in others. I have begun to search for opportunities to meet others in their grief, making space for their own need to pause, to feel sorrow, to honor the mourning within their mourning. Like Mary the mother of Jesus, we thus find ourselves entrusting our grief to those around us who acknowledge its validity and persistence while also nursing the suffering and losses of others. In giving grief its due, we lessen the risk of superficial happiness veiling over repressed sorrow. And because we have created a space for feeling the ache of loss in virtual community, we can also share in each other’s joys.

Today, as I write this essay, I am in the final days of Lent. I look forward to celebrating the promise of the resurrection this coming Sunday. I look around me and see a reflection of Christ in the springtime flowers and the return of longer days. COVID-19 persists in new mutated forms, but vaccines provide an Easter hope. Perhaps now we can begin to address the new vulnerabilities caused by the pandemic, to address the racial, environmental, socioeconomic, and gender-based injustices that have now become more obvious.¹⁴ Attempting this work means cautiously treading back into the world of in-person relationships outside of the family home, and I suspect we will experience both a sense of newness and a sense of loss, for the world we are breaking back into is a new one in which the effects of this pandemic will play out in the coming weeks, months, and generations. By acknowledging our grief, we can cultivate a space to mourn and open ourselves up to including it as part of our story, just as grief became a new part of Mary’s story. Coming back to the world to find it changed will mean that my grief over Kaye and our grief over our lives as they were prior to the pandemic will likely resurface and transform. To take part fully in this new life will thus mean a continued openness to remembrance and to resurfacing grief. Indeed, the persistence of Jesus wounds, Mary’s trauma, and our remembrance of this suffering is integral to the sharing of the gospel. Our church waits in joyful hope because we share grief in community.