AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

You are not a leader until you have followers; before that you are an explorer or an eccentric, perhaps even a saint. Those who retrace your steps – if they do – are not yet following you, they are merely coming after.

Those who follow a leader are not like those who follow a thief: they are not trying to catch up. Those who follow a leader take pride in his achievements, not their own.

The tyrant binds his adherents through fear; the leader binds his adherents through trust. The tyrant inspires dread of failure; the leader inspires anger. The tyrant is always looking back; the leader always forward.

Each day that passes brings us that much closer to the presence of God. We do not regret the passage of miles on route to our destination; nor should we regret the passage of time.

Every religion has created its god or gods in its own image. The genius of Judaism – carried forward into Christianity – was that it incorporated human moral intuition into its imagined god: thus justice and fairness were first imagined of Jehovah, and eventually meekness, humility, mercy and forgiveness of God the Father.

But when we create gods in our own image, the motive is inevitably self-congratulation, that is, self-separation and distinction. It is necessarily classificatory and therefore judgmental: what Nietzsche called the will to power, but which is rather the fear of freedom.

All human religions are therefore centered on separation. Their gods exist to execute the separation – or at the least to ennoble and reify it, to cast the separation itself as fixed and eternal.

And yet one of you is a devil.

The true meaning here is that God is not our creation. His ways are not our ways; His thoughts are not our thoughts.

Judas was neither a tool to be used for divine purposes nor a freedom to be thwarted for divine purposes. He was one of the twelve, like them in every respect that matters to God. That which we call devilish in men is meaningless to God; He does not know it; does not even see it.

The traits and characters, the personalities, the biographies of God’s children simply define their spiritual realities – and that is all there is to that. One fish is different from another fish – and that is all there is to that. Those created in God’s image cannot be separated from each other in any spiritual sense. They are simply real, and sui generis.

And yet one of you is a devil.

Do not look to me to be a resolution of your perplexity. I am not a problem solver, nor is your world a problem, nor you yourselves. I am the bread of life. Food doesn’t provide a solution to hunger. It is what reality uses to grow.

We have cast doubt on the meaning of ‘belief’ (or ‘faith,’ or ‘having a belief.’ or ‘appropriating one’s faith’) as designating whatever it is that, in historical Christian theology, serves to separate those qualified to receive God’s eternal blessing from those who do not so qualify. But however we designate that qualification, the dilemma remains: either it is something we accomplish ourselves, or it is something that is gifted to us.

If it is something we accomplish, then it is a ‘work,’ as St. Paul uses the word, and therefore not an alternative to the religion of works to which his Gospel is offered as an alternative, but simply a refinement or variation of such a religion. But if it is not something we accomplish, then it must be something that is provided to us, something that is gifted.

The accomplishment of separation so understood – as a gift – would indeed be an alternative to a ‘religion of works,’ but the question immediately arises: why are some gifted with this belief (faith, trust), with this distinguishing qualification, and not others?

That this distinguishing belief or faith is not an accomplishment of our own, but rather something provided to us by God is attested to by St. Paul in many places, perhaps nowhere more plainly than in Ephesians 2: 8: “For by grace ye are saved through faith, and this not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.”

The faith (or belief, or trust, or appropriation, or any other language we might use to designate the distinguishing qualification) is the gift of God. But then again: why are some given this gift, and not others?

“You did not choose me,” Jesus once told his followers, “but I chose you.”

The allegiance to separation of the culture into which God’s Word became incarnate was ethnic: the separation of the Hebrew children of God from the non-Hebrew children of God. The allegiance to separation of the culture – call it historical Christianity – that eventually established itself after the Ascension was epistemological: the separation of those children of God who have a certain ‘belief’ or ‘set of beliefs’ concerning Jesus, and those who do not.

Characterized in this fashion, Christianity’s difference from Judaism essentially amounted to shifting the boundary line of separation between two populations of the children of God. But St Paul offered his gospel of grace as an alternative to what he called ‘a religion of works,’ not simply as a refinement or readjustment.

The great confusion that lies at the heart of historical Christianity stemmed from a naivete – sometimes willful, mainly not – about the concept of belief. It is the naivete of regarding beliefs – whether invoked in the language of believing someone or something, or believing in someone, or having faith – as naming something, either a course of action or some sort of mental state, that can be chosen.

But of course, if having faith or a belief is something that can be chosen (or rejected), then it is a work as St. Paul understood the term, no different from the work of elaborate hand washing ritual, or the work of circumcision.

Historical Christianity, therefore, far from maturing out of St. Paul’s gospel of grace, instead formed itself into simply another religion of works.

The Hebrew genius did not accomplish wonders in architecture, in art, in science, in dynastic ambition. For those we acknowledge the Egyptian, the Far Eastern, the Hindu, the Mayan, the Hellenic, the Roman, and others beyond the reach of recorded history. Theirs are the genii that wrought civilizations out of the application of human ingenuity to the desiderata of the various elements of human nature, most fundamentally of human pride.

The mythologies of these civilizations were therefore populated with gods of recognizably human character, with recognizably human names.

The genius of the Hebrew was to meld human intelligence to that in human nature which lies deeper than pride, and seeks to root it out, and be again at peace. We have no name for what that is, and therefore the God of the Hebrews has no name.

C. S. Lewis and others find in Christ Jesus the reality of which ancient mythologies had only the intuition or foreshadowing. And this is of course true. The real death, the real resurrection, and the real, heavenly renewal of Jesus do indeed establish and maintain the operation of God’s creation. He is the deus ex machina, both of the material world and – what the ancients did not intuit – of the spiritual.

But the Hebrew intuition with its dramatic mythology goes dramatically far beyond theirs. It is an intuition of the redemption, testing, and final adjudication of God’s own children. And Jesus the Christ is also the reality of that mythology.

Mythology is the pre-scientific way of making sense of the world. Most ancient mythology was employed to make sense of the observed world – the movement of the sun across the sky, the change of seasons, the white stripes on a skunk.

The Hebrew mythology – uniquely – was employed to make moral sense of the world: the seeming inequities, the unfairness, the apparent moral randomness of fortune. That is its genius, in the original meaning of the word.

The Hebrew explanation was a mythology of disobedience. Beginning in the Garden, moral outcome is imaged as self-determined by obedience or its opposite, and therefore merited. At its heart, the mythology was thus a defense of the revelation, to the Hebrew, of the name of God.

There are responses – universal things – that spring from a deeper level than words, and therefore from a deeper level than understanding. Spontaneous smiling is an example. We all smile reflexively at the antics of toddlers, at hummingbirds, on sharing memories with old friends. These things pierce deep inside us, and engage something there, a primordial innocence at the bottom of the well of who we are, where wordy self-consciousness has not yet usurped the place of God’s voiceless wisdom.

The Fall is not the death of the soul, but rather its subordination to the self.

After a turbulent early life, one rich with romance, heartache, folly and adventure, a woman decided at the age of thirty to become a poet. From that time on she labored over her art, and produced several slim and highly regarded volumes, mainly sonnets although some free verse as well. Sometimes she assumed the voice of her childhood, but mainly she wrote in a timeless present, artfully reporting her experience of the world around her. Occasionally, during difficult times, a tone of melancholy crept into her poems, adding to them a sense of ineffability. As the close of her life approached, her poems became very simple, almost childlike again, almost haiku. After she died, her minor fame gradually dwindled and all but disappeared.

Many years later, a graduate student in literature happened across one of the slim volumes in a dusty used book store. On a whim, she bought the book, took it home and read it. Very much affected by the poems, she sought out all the other books the poet had written, and when the time came for the student to write a dissertation, she chose those books as her subject. She titled her dissertation, The Mind of a Poet.

At about the same time, a learned and renowned professor of theology completed the manuscript for his magnum opus, the culmination of his lifetime of study. After considerable introspection, and with a trace of pride, he decided to call it The Mind of God.