July 14, 2025

The Kingdom of God is the Reign of Love (and love changes everything)

The Kingdom of God is the Reign of Love: and love changes everything


Jesus preaches the real possibility of the Kingdom of God. “Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread,” observes Judith Butler. The Bible agrees: “Without a vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). We tend to call artists, musicians, and poets “creatives,” and limit “creativity” to this category of persons. In fact, we are all creators in every moment of our lives, by both what we do and don’t do, by both how we conceptualize ourselves and how we conceptualize others.

We may not be able to draw, but every time we interact with a stranger we create emotions in that stranger by treating them respectfully or disrespectfully. We may not be able to sing, but our decision to feed hungry children creates one world and our decision not to creates another. We may not be able to write poetry, but whether we let the other driver in or crowd them out affects that driver as well as the overall traffic pattern on that day. Because we exist through time, to be is to become, and to become is to create. The Creator created us in the image of God, to be creative. Thus, we are homo creator, the species that creates and is free in what it creates. As creativity involves risk, it is an act of courage, like unto God.

For our creativity to be constructive, for it to go somewhere, it needs a goal. This goal interprets our times, directs our decisions, and energizes our activity. If freely chosen, it turns an aimless life into a purposeful journey. And with this purpose comes meaning, because inspiration accompanies aspiration.

Jesus received from his Jewish tradition a vision in which “the Lord will become king over all the earth” (Zechariah 14 a). This kingdom is good news for the generous but bad news for the greedy. Isaiah writes: “Woe to you who make unjust policies and draft oppressive legislation, who deprive the powerless of justice and rob poor people—my people—of their rights, who prey upon the widowed and rob orphans!” (Isaiah 10:1–2)

Isaiah’s God is not warm and fuzzy. Isaiah’s God cares deeply for the downtrodden. Their oppression—and their oppressors—anger God. This anger is resolute and consequential, provoking God to act. Speaking for God, Isaiah issues a threat: God will subject Judah to conquest and captivity for breaking the divine covenant through their dismissive cruelty toward the poor. But Isaiah also issues a promise, a road map to redemption. Judah’s repentance, expressed as care for all and neglect of none, will avert God’s punishment. After criticizing his fellow Jews for religious fasting even as they oppress their workers (Isaiah 58:3b), Isaiah continues:

This is the sort of fast that pleases me: Remove the chains of injustice! Undo the ropes of the yoke! Let those who are oppressed go free, and break every yoke you encounter! Share your bread with those who are hungry,. and shelter homeless poor people! Clothe those who are naked, and don’t ignore the needs of your own flesh and blood! (Isa 58:6–7)

To this day, Isaiah 58 is the haftarah, the liturgical reading from the Prophets on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. God’s blessing, according to Isaiah, does not result from individual virtue, rigorous legalism, or ritual purity. God’s blessing arises from the practice of charity as you work for justice. Religiosity that neglects mercy only angers God.

Jesus wants us to experience the joy that love offers. The Hebrew Scriptures demand kindness toward the outcast and reveal God’s active concern that this kindness be shown. Jesus intensifies this urgent concern for justice in his preaching of the imminent kingdom of God, also known as the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is God’s disruption of human history, redirecting it from injustice toward justice. Jesus, the herald of this new way of living, begins his ministry by declaring, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15).

Jesus’s characterization of his preaching as “good news” (euangelion) seems a bit exclusive, because it does not sound like good news for everyone. The New Testament records Jesus’s Beatitudes (“Blessings”) in both Matthew (the Sermon on the Mount) and Luke (the Sermon on the Plain). Most Christians have heard of the Sermon on the Mount, but fewer have heard of the Sermon on the Plain, and not without reason. The Sermon on the Plain is explicitly economic: while Luke declares, “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20a), Matthew hedges, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3a). Moreover, Luke couples each of Matthew’s blessings with a corresponding woe, a move that most likely gave rise to the church’s preference for Matthew over Luke:



Why does Jesus characterize a preaching that explicitly threatens the rich and powerful as “good news”? Perhaps because they (at least some of them, I hedge, because Jesus didn’t qualify his statements) need to be rescued from themselves . . . Perhaps because I (from a global perspective, I am quite wealthy) need to be rescued from myself.

Self-satisfaction in a world of poverty demands hardness of heart. To waste what others need, to consume ostentatiously while others starve, distorts the soul and diminishes our capacity for joy. It requires removing ourselves from the human family, separating ourselves from those with whom God created us to be in communion. God, who is relationship, creates us in the image of God, to be in relationship, not with some but with all, because all are God’s creatures. God is joy because God is love, and we (who are made in the image of God) shall become joy to the extent that we become love.

This world of suffering needs to become a world of love. May it be so. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 135-138)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Walter Brueggemann. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

Judith Butler. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004.

July 10, 2025

Jesus doesn't like oligarchs either: Christianity is an equality Gospel, not a prosperity Gospel

Jesus doesn’t like oligarchs, either: Christianity is an equality Gospel

Jesus overturns the social hierarchy. Humans aren’t particularly secure about ourselves, collectively, so we compete for pride of place. We struggle to acquire more power so we can acquire more money so we can consume more resources so we will have higher self-esteem. The origin and outcome of this competition is ceaseless comparison that produces either envy or pride, both of which are inherently painful.

Jesus saves us from ourselves by preaching and practicing a celebratory egalitarianism, a recognition that all are equally loved in the eyes of God. No one can be worth more than anyone else because all possess infinite value.

Those at the center often deny the value of those at the margins, but God prefers to work through the margins, in a divine challenge to the perceived center. Jesus himself comes from the margins—poverty, Judaism, Galilee—and propagates the truth of their value until he is killed by those at the center. His genealogy anticipates his marginalization (Matthew 1:1–17). It lists Tamar, who had to disguise herself as a prostitute to become impregnated by her reluctant patron, Judah (Genesis 38). It lists Rahab, an actual prostitute who helped the Israelites conquer Jericho (Joshua 2). It lists Ruth, a Moabite widow who chooses to join an Israelite family (book of Ruth). And it lists Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, who was “seduced” and impregnated by King David, who then had her husband killed in battle (2 Samuel 11). We may look to the center for salvation, but God sends it from the margins.

As the revelation of God, Jesus becomes the new, “decentering center,” the center who denies us any boundary. The margins have the clearest perspective. The margins see the hypocrisy in hierarchy and realize that “what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15a). If God loves us all equally, which is absolutely, then there is no need to claw for priority of place. Christianity is an equality gospel, not a prosperity gospel.

Jesus sees through the deceitfulness and pretense of those who cherish places of honor in public while “devouring widow’s houses” behind the scenes (Luke 20:47). He condemns those who give ostentatiously, out of their abundance, praising instead the poor widow who gives even out of her poverty (Luke 21:1–4).

Egalitarian community is salvation. We seek eminence, but God wants charity; we seek gain, but God wants justice. For this reason, Jesus warns his disciples, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 14:11). Jesus inverts the social order in his practice as well as his preaching. When the disciples argue about who among them is the most important, Jesus reprimands them, pointing out that “I am among you as the one who serves you” (Luke 22:27b).

In the Gospel of John, Jesus emphasizes this life of service by washing his disciples’ feet. Travelers’ feet were dirty and sore and always in need of attention, but only servants washed other people’s feet. It was a job for the lowly. Peter was so uncomfortable with this awkward act of intimacy that he protested and initially refused Jesus’s ministrations, but Jesus prevailed:

After washing their feet, Jesus put his clothes back on and returned to the table. He said to them, “Do you understand what I have done for you? You call me “Teacher,” and “Sovereign”—and rightly, for so I am. If I, then—your Teacher and Sovereign—have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done for you. (John 13:12–15)

Oddly, although Jesus explicitly commands his disciples to “do as I have done for you,” foot washing never became a sacrament in the mainstream Christian denominations, perhaps because it was just too upside down and intimate for any institution to bear, especially hierarchical ones.

Today, we live in an increasingly stratified world, full of hierarchs and oligarchs and plutocrats and autocrats. Jesus weeps over the cruelty of it all. Too often, those at the margins want to join the oligarchs rather than help their neighbors. Infused with envy by the media and its romanticized depictions of wealth, we seek pride by imitating those who keep us down. But wouldn’t we all be better off—politically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually—if we all helped each other up? (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 134-135)

*****

For more reading, please see:

Cobb, John B. Jesus' Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.

Padilla, Elaine. Divine Enjoyment: A Theology of Passion and Exuberance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

July 5, 2025

Jesus reveals the universal, unconditional love of God

God loves outcasts. Through his teaching and actions, Jesus reveals the universal love of God for all humankind. According to the psalmist, Abba knits together each person in their mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139:13), hence is the Creator and Sustainer of all. Since each person is beloved by Abba, each person should be beloved by us, including those whom society deems vile.

This religious insight appears early in the Jewish Scriptures. Roman philosophers like Tacitus believed that “the gods are on the side of the stronger.” In contrast, Exodus proclaims that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker—the powerless, oppressed, enslaved Israelites who are struggling to obtain their freedom.

God’s special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the orphan. The most defenseless people in the ancient world were those who did not have a powerful community to protect them. With no effective justice system, safety derived from family or tribe, which would punish anyone who harmed a member. Hence, to be without family or tribe was dangerous. For this reason, the Jewish law expressed special concern for the orphan, widow, foreigner, and poor, none of whom had the protection of community.

The Jewish law did not simply insist on deference to the vulnerable; the Jewish law placed a special concern for the vulnerable into the vulnerable heart of God, who assumes the role of their father, hence protector (Psalm 68:5). Deuteronomy declares:



According to the prophets, the call to care for the poor is not a suggestion. It’s a command with consequences, and the consequences are brutal. The prophet Ezekiel interprets God’s destruction of Sodom as a direct consequence of their neglect for the poor: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant; they had abundant food and not a care in the world, but she refused to help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49–50). God is not an impassive observer of social structures; God condemns social stratification and advocates for those whom society ignores.
Jesus is a prophet of social justice. Jesus places himself within the tradition of the Jewish prophets. When he begins his ministry, he is selected to read the prophet Isaiah to his synagogue. Jesus reads:



Jesus then begins his ministry as includer of the excluded, enacting unifying love in a segregated world. His inclusion is so radical as to offend his listeners: “Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go two miles,” he instructs (Matthew 5:41b). Jesus’s audience would have known that this teaching referred to Roman soldiers, the hated occupiers, who could force any Jew to carry their gear for one standard mile. Jesus says to carry it for two, thereby fostering an audacious vision of reconciliation. But Jesus isn’t all talk; he expresses this love by healing the servant of a Roman centurion (Luke 7:1–10), showing love for the occupier, in imitation of the universal God who sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous.

Samaritans were loathed by many, accused of using the wrong Torah with the wrong tenth commandment, worshiping on the wrong mountain (Gerizim instead of Jerusalem), and intermixing with Greeks and Persians. Jesus visited and asked to stay in a Samaritan village, but they refused to host him since he was on his way to worship in Jerusalem. His disciples wanted to rain fire on the village, but Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:51–56). Then, he went on to make a Samaritan the hero of his most famous story (Luke 10:25–37).

When he did interact with the hated religious other, he did so charitably. Jesus met a Samaritan woman at a well. She had gone through five husbands and was currently living with another man out of wedlock. In the eyes of the ancient world, she was impure, of the wrong gender and the wrong religion with a stained past. So outcast was she that she was drawing water at noon, in the heat of the day. Most women drew water together, communally, in the morning and evening. This gathering was an important opportunity to talk, share news, and build community. If the woman was at the well alone, then she was shunned, and anyone interacting with her would be contaminated.

Exhausted from his labors, Jesus asked her to draw water for him. In a world of strict dietary laws, this request was a particularly intimate act of transgression, an invitation to the uninvited. In exchange for the well water, he offered her living water. In the Jewish tradition, Abba is the Source of living water (Jeremiah 2:13; 17:13), “Source” here being the Hebrew word maqor: fountain, spring, or womb (Leviticus 12 ; 20:18). Thus, in offering her living water, Jesus is offering her God.

For the Samaritan woman, was living water a symbol for inclusion, community, self-acceptance, respect, value? However she interpreted Jesus’s promise, she willingly accepted his offer of new life, to the great dismay of the disciples, who were still stuck in a purity mindset (John 4 –30). In a final display of compassion, Jesus never asked the troubled woman to leave her current partner because he knew that, in such a brutally patriarchal society, she would be defenseless without a man.

Jesus reveals the inclusive, celebratory love of God. Jesus also displays God’s universalism through his practice of table fellowship. Much like dinner tables today, dinner tables in Jesus’s day were segregated. Jew ate with Jew, Roman with Roman, rich with rich, poor with poor, healthy with healthy, and sick with sick. Some of these divisions were the result of social conventions, others were the result of religious strictures. All of them were designed to protect one group from contamination by another, especially during a meal, that most intimate of times when something that is outside of us enters us and becomes us. During a meal, we cannot allow those who are other to us to enter our household. We cannot allow them to pollute us.

Jesus preaches against this segregation: “Whenever you give a lunch or dinner, don’t invite your friends or colleagues or relatives or wealthy neighbors. They might invite you in return and thus repay you. No, when you have a reception, invite those who are poor or have physical infirmities or are blind” (Luke 14:12–13). In the ancient world, poverty and sickness were frequently considered divine punishment; hence, outcasts deserved to be cast out. Those who cast out the outcasts were simply enforcing the divine will.

By insisting on hospitality toward outcasts, Jesus is communicating the universal divine compassion. And he insists that God’s embrace of the rejected, as symbolized through Jesus’s inclusive ministry, will be consummated in the coming kingdom, in which “people will come from East and West, from North and South, and will take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God” (Luke 13:29). Over against any elitist conceits of purity and contamination, Jesus proposes the joy of open hospitality, joy that erases all social divisions and unites everyone into one family at one table sharing one meal.

In making this pronouncement, Jesus is not rejecting his religious tradition; Jesus is extolling the openness of his religious tradition. For example, Jose ben Jochanan, chief justice of the Sanhedrin in the second century BCE, had already declared, “Let your home be open wide and let the poor be members of your household.” We cannot know if Jesus encountered these specific teachings or not, but we can know that Jesus’s teaching was continuous with his tradition, even as he emphasized selected strains within it.

Jesus practices what he preaches by dining with the unclean, those whom his society hated, and not without reason. For instance, he eats with tax collectors such as Levi, Matthew, and Zacchaeus. Tax collectors were the quislings of their day, Jewish agents of the Roman Empire, backed by the violence of empire as they extorted money from their fellow Jews. Their greed sullied anyone associated with them, yet Jesus invites them into his new world in an intimate way.

God touches untouchables in the person of Jesus. Jesus dines in the house of Simon the leper (Matthew 26:6), breaking bread with the rejected. Asked to be healed by another leper, Jesus heals through touch, thereby returning him to the community, both physically and socially (Matthew 8:3). As Jesus is walking through a crowd, a woman with a twelve-year flow reaches out to touch the fringe of his cloak and is immediately healed. Jesus feels power flow out of him and demands to know who has touched him. The woman identifies herself, trembling in fear, undoubtedly aware of the taboo she has just violated, but Jesus simply responds, “My daughter, your faith has saved you; go in peace and be free of your affliction” (Mark 5:25–34).

Jesus endangers himself to reveal the agapic love of God. A crowd brought a woman “caught in the very act of committing adultery” before Jesus, asking him what they should do. They wanted to challenge his preference for mercy over punishment when almost every male present would have supported stoning her as well as, in all likelihood, anyone defending her.

The passage insists that she was “caught in the very act of committing adultery” to reassure readers that she had not been framed by a jealous husband who didn’t want the expense of divorce and saw a lynch mob as the most expedient solution to his problem. Still, it might have been a setup.
Or, it might not have been. Jesus doesn’t care. He goes on the rhetorical offensive, instructing the mob, “Let the person among you who is without sin throw the first stone.” After his challenge, the defeated men slowly shuffle away. Then Jesus says to the woman, “Where did they go? Has no one condemned you?” And she replies, “No one, Teacher.” To which Jesus replies, “I don’t condemn you either” (John 8:1–11a).

What if American Christians were more like Christ?

(adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 129-133)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Boyarin, Daniel. “John’s Prologue as Midrash.” In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 688–91. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Falk, Harvey. Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus. 1985. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003.

Margalit, Natan. The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking. Boulder, CO: Albion Andalus, 2022.

June 27, 2025

God is compassionate and vulnerable to us (any other concept of God is unbiblical)

Jesus reveals that Abba is a personal God who loves us. For Jesus, Abba (our Creator and Sustainer) is a person who cares about us as persons, and this love is what really matters. God offers no promise that life will be easy, but an absolute promise that God will be with us in all things. Hence, there is nothing to fear, for nothing can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:31–39).

Some people reject the concept of a personal God as trivial. Certainly, it can become so. The personal God can become like Santa Claus, the gift giver who plays favorites. For those who place a high premium on social order, God can become lawgiver, police officer, prosecutor, judge, and jailer all in one, ensuring punishment of those we deem deserving. For the bigoted, God becomes a projection screen onto which we cast our biases, assigning them to God in a covert act of self-deification. For the tribal, those who bitterly demarcate an in-group and out-group, God hates who we hate and loves who we love.

But the capacity for a concept, such as that of a personal God, to be abused does not warrant its dismissal. Human cleverness can always turn good into evil. The majority can use democracy to oppress a minority, but that abuse incriminates the majority, not democracy itself. Political power uses beauty, in the form of propaganda and pageantry, to legitimate its rule, but that abuse incriminates power, not beauty. Prosperity preachers apprentice God to their greed, but that abuse incriminates the preacher, not God.

In such a crafty world, impersonal notions of God as first cause, ultimate reality, truth, or The One may seem more attractive than any analogy to our mercenary humanity. But the cost of such abstraction is too high. These concepts overlook the blessing of personality, the crowning achievement of the cosmos. Billions of years of cosmological evolution have produced us—thinking, feeling, conscious beings with agency who not only exist, but celebrate our existence. We are the universe coming to awareness of itself, and we exult in that awareness.

Science recognizes the source of this process as the physical laws governing the universe (or multiverse). But what is the source of those laws? Could it be a joyful community of persons who wish to produce joyful communities of persons? Faith trusts that our personal God invites us into the fullness of personality by means of a person-creating universe.

Jesus reveals that the personal God is a compassionate God. According to Jesus, Abba our Parent is compassionate. In the story of the prodigal son, the father runs to welcome the prodigal home, because he was filled with compassion (Greek: esplanchnisthē . Jesus himself, as a manifestation of God, displays the same care and concern for those he meets. When he sees the crowd of weary outcasts waiting to hear him preach, he is filled with compassion (Matt 9:36; Greek: esplanchnisthē . In another instance, noting the hunger of the crowd and their need for food, Jesus states, “I am moved with compassion” (Matthew 15:32; Greek: splagchnizomai).

The Greek word for compassion derives from splagchnon, which means bowels or gut. Compassion is not some abstract ethical demand; compassion is something you feel in your “heart” (which is a frequent translation of splagchnon into English).

For Jesus, our compassionate Parent is a unifying symbol. Following Jürgen Moltmann, we can contrast it with the image of lord. The lord is distinct from the servant, above the servant, of a different class and family from the servant. But a good Parent unites their children into one family. The lord may care for his servants but does not concern himself with the ups and downs of their daily lives, while Jesus’s Parent is emotionally vulnerable and unconditionally available. The lord’s estate is a hierarchy, but the family is a unit. Hence, the lord separates, but the Parent unites. Thus, in describing God as Parent, as both Mother and Father, Jesus is inviting his followers to become one household.

Given the omni-gendered Hebraic concept of God, and the Christian interpretation of Jesus as the Child of God, we shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus uses explicitly feminine metaphors for God, such as the story of the woman with the lost coin (Luke 15:8–10), in which the woman symbolizes God in her desire for reunion with the wayward. Jesus refers to himself as a mother hen, gathering her brood under her wings (Luke 13:34).

Jesus reveals the divine vulnerability. A good mother or father is emotionally vulnerable to their children, even the most wayward. The word vulnerable derives from the Lain vulnus, which means “wound.” In the incarnation, God risks woundedness.

We have already argued that the incarnation was planned from the beginning, prior to history, as a divine celebration and ratification of creaturely existence. But we have also noted the freedom that God grants us, freedom for kindness and freedom for cruelty. God’s perfect openness allows God to feel more deeply than we do, to participate fully in the life-producing contrasts of pain and pleasure, grief and celebration, sorrow and joy. Given this capacity, our cruelty must have tempted God to abandon the plan, to remain in the safety of heaven. But God has also chosen to be ḥesed, loving faithfulness, and ḥesed always fulfills its promises. So God draws close to us, close enough to be killed.

Infant Jesus reveals our inhospitality to divine vulnerability. He was not allowed to be born in his hometown; empire forced his parents to Bethlehem. Once there, he was not allowed to be born in a house; social strictures forced them into a barn. Once born, there was no crib for him to sleep in, so they laid him in a feeding trough. Then he was forced to flee from his homeland into Egypt, to escape the murderous soldiers of a mad king. The rejection of God in the birth narrative only foreshadows the rejection of God in the crucifixion, yet still God comes, revealing the danger that God hazards for us.

If God is to celebrate creation, then God must do so unconditionally. God must become fully human, open to the prodigious expanse of events, sensations, emotions, and thoughts that God loves into being. God, having chosen to amplify joy through suffering and pleasure through pain, affirms this decision by subjecting divinity to the very contrasts that divinity created. God must delight, and God must sorrow.

Crucially, the Hebrew Scriptures testify to Emmanuel, “God with us” (Isaiah 7:8; 8 ). The incarnation of God in Christ is the flawless consequence of this sentiment. Jesus acknowledges our exposure to the soaring and searing spectrum of experience that God sustains by subjecting himself to the same range of events and their resultant passions. Entirely open to the ebb and flow of earthly life, Jesus will turn water into wine at a wedding (John 2:1–11) and weep over the death of a friend (John 11:35). He participates fully, he commends full participation to his followers, and he laments the guardedness of his contemporaries: “We piped you a tune, but you wouldn’t dance. We sang you a dirge, but you wouldn’t mourn” (Matthew 11:17). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 127-129)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Charles Hartshorne. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

Jurgen Moltmann. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

June 21, 2025

God's love overflows all boundaries

Divine agape cannot be contained.

The divine community is centrifugal, not centripetal. Because they abhor exclusion, they could never be satisfied with love curved in on itself, with love of like for like, of Parent for Son and Daughter. The divine community seeks out, by its chosen nature, love of other. According to medieval theologian John Duns Scotus, the creation of the world is the inevitable act of a divinity who loves yet always desires to love more. Participation in creation, vulnerability to it, is the inevitable expression of creative love. It was planned from the beginning, without reference to the history of the world, even as it makes that history sacred.

The incarnation, as a superabundant event, ratifies this-worldly existence in all its particularity. It testifies that we are unique because it is good to be unique. We are someone somewhere, not everyone everywhere, because it is better to be concrete than abstract. And Jesus testifies that life, even with its intense suffering, is worth its passion.

After the incarnation we need not ascend to God, because God has descended to us, expressing the divine preference for finite particularity over any infinite absolute. Given the above, the incarnation is not a remedy for sin, nor is it a judicious adjustment to an unintended fall. Instead, the incarnation is an unconditional celebration of creation as creation. Incarnation follows creation like celebration follows birth.

In other words, having created the cosmos, God couldn’t stay away from it. God doesn’t love at a distance, but as a presence, even if that presence involves great risk. We, who are made in the image of God, may not want to see that image in all its perfection, to see how we have missed the mark. Distorted humanity, craving and grasping and clinging, fears the perfecting mirror and may very well shatter it upon meeting.

American photographer Lewis Hine (1874–1940) held up one such mirror. Hine was a trained sociologist who left a teaching position to work for the National Child Labor Committee in 1908. The NCLC was working against the child labor practices of the day. At the time, children younger than ten years old were working, bleeding, and dying in factories across America. Initially hired to research and write about their conditions, Hine also began taking pictures. Their publication led to threats of violence against him by factories’ security forces, who didn’t want the world to see the truth of working children’s suffering. To get access to the factories, Hine had to sneak in, like a thief in the night (1 Thess 5:2), masquerading as a traveling salesman, public official, specialized mechanic, and others. Over time his images took over the movement. Hine noted, “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” Through the efforts of Hine and many more, the federal government outlawed child labor in 1938.

Hine’s images changed America because images transform us, more so than abstract ideas. Hence, God came to us as a person, so that we might see the divine image (Heb 1:3). Jesus, as the perfect image of God, reveals both our hidden suffering and our hidden potential. The nondual nature of the incarnation opens us to paradox. We tend to consider spiritual dualities as repelling one another, like two ends of magnets with the same charge. The closer they approach, the more intensely they resist. But Christ came to marry heaven and earth, God and humankind, spirit and matter, body and soul. As Mary Luti observes, in Jesus “God accepts limits to dissolve the limits that made it seem as if God and humans were opposites. The great wonder of the Incarnation is that we’re not.”

The great statement of this unification came at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE, which declared that Christ is fully human and fully divine, the reunion of false binaries, the one in whom matter is spirit and spirit is matter. Jesus expresses these paradoxes through the manner of his incarnation. God as Christ was born an impoverished Jew in an occupied land. At the nativity, the wealth of God comes to us in poverty, the power of God comes to us in powerlessness, and the help of God comes to us in helplessness.

Jesus reveals the intimacy of God.

“YHWH is close to the brokenhearted and rescues those whose spirits are crushed,” declares the psalmist (Psalm 34:18). Jesus is the fulfillment of this assurance. In Jesus, we see that love draws near. This divine intimacy refutes the traditional Christian doctrine of divine impassibility—the belief that God is incapable of feeling either pain or pleasure, suffering or joy. Impassibility argues that God’s being is unaffected by our lives.

This belief derives from philosophy, not Scripture. Plato, for example, notes that the healthiest body is the most resistant to disease, the strongest plant is the most resistant to drought, the sturdiest house stands strongest against the storm, and the wisest soul is the most impervious to events. Since excellent things resist external influence, and God is most excellent, God must resist all external influence. Therefore, we do not affect God. Moreover, anything that is perfectly excellent cannot be improved and has no need for change. Therefore, God is unchanging.

This concept of God was picked up by Christian theologians and became standard in Christian theology, but it never fit with the biblical portrayal of God. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is emotional: “YHWH saw the great wickedness of the people of the earth, that the thoughts in their hearts fashioned nothing but evil. YHWH was sorry that humankind had been created on earth; it pained God’s heart” (Genesis 6:5–6 [emphasis added]). The doctrine of impassibility ignores numerous biblical texts in which God is interactive, even conversational (Exodus 33:11). The Bible ascribes qualities to God that imply divine feeling, such as compassion (Exodus 22:27). God even changes God’s mind when presented with a convincing argument (Numbers 14:13–25; Amos 7:3, 6). Impassibility implies that God is a majestic citadel, but the Bible claims that God is an ocean of feeling, open to the breadth of experience that God continually sustains.

What does the adjective impassible do to our concept of God? The word impassible is closely related to its cousin, impassive. The thesaurus offers first-order synonyms for impassive such as emotionless, reticent, taciturn, and apathetic. More alarmingly, it offers second-order synonyms for impassive such as cold-blooded, hardened, heartless, and indifferent. None of these terms describe the biblical God, whom Jesus reveals to be a vulnerable God, one of forgiveness and mercy.

God’s openness opens us to God: “God is the most irresistible of influences precisely because he is himself the most open to influence,” states Charles Hartshorne. God is true relationship, and true relationship changes both poles of the relationship. There is no absolute beyond the related, no escape hatch into which the Creator retreats from creation. God is ḥesed, loving-kindness, hence always fully present—undistracted, undisturbed, and undismayed. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 122-125)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Duns Scotus, John. Four Questions on Mary. Translated by Allan B. Wolter. New York: Franciscan Institute, 2000.

Luti, Mary. “Divinized.” United Church of Christ, Dec. 3, 2021. ucc.org/daily-devotional/divinized.

Plato. The Republic. Edited by G. R. F. Ferrari. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Sampsell-Willmann, Kate. Lewis Hine as Social Critic. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

June 7, 2025

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christa: Freeing salvation from gender

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christa: Freeing salvation from gender

No concept of Christ can cage the person of Jesus.

Edwina Sandys, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, sculpted Christa “to portray the suffering of women.” Christa was a statue of Christ crucified, but as a woman, femininity hanging naked on the cross.

Christa’s initial revelation, in 1984 at St. John the Divine in New York City, produced a theological storm. Those offended insisted that Jesus was a man and should stay a man and that involving Christ in gender play harmed the faith. Episcopalian Bishop Walter Dennis accused the cathedral dean, the Very Rev. James Park Morton, of “desecrating our symbols” and insisted that the display was “theologically and historically indefensible.” Apparently, we are saved not just by the Messiah, but by a male Messiah specifically. Hence, to toy with the masculinity of Christ was to toy with salvation, a dangerous and unnecessary game.

But other followers of Jesus found the statue stimulating, even liberating. Did Jesus have to be a man? Or could a woman have gotten the job done? Or a nonbinary person? For some, Jesus’s male gender was necessary for salvation. For others, it was an accidental quality of the Christ, assigned at random. Or maybe it was a concession God made to our sexism; the Christ could have been a woman, but we just wouldn’t have listened to a woman back then. Would we listen to a woman now?

Certainly, the debates revealed much about the debaters. Some seemed to worship maleness as much as Christ, some saw themselves in the beaten woman, some seemed hungry for a female savior, and some wondered if nonbinary persons would ever be seen, if a still-binary Christa was causing this much of an uproar. Everyone saw Christa as unsettling. Either she was blasphemous, unsettling the ordained order; or she was empowering, unsettling an oppressive patriarchy. The difference lay in whether the viewer sought to be unsettled or not, whether they wanted to preserve the inherited or create the new.

“Who do you say that I am?” asks Jesus (Matt 16:15). Over two millennia, his followers have given many different answers to this question. The church has called councils to dispute Jesus’s identity, issued statements of faith providing definitive answers, and enforced those answers in sometimes brutal fashion. Yet Jesus always outwits our definition of him, like a trickster slipping his chains.

Although at times the Christian tradition has interpreted Jesus as a wrathful judge or tribal warlord, Jesus himself interprets his message as good news for all (Mark 13:10), rebuking his disciples: “You do not know what spirit you are of, for I have not come to destroy people’s lives but to save them” (Luke 9:56). According to Jesus, his appearance is an opportunity for divine joy to enter human hearts, that we might have abundant life (John 10:10; 15:11). For this reason, when he approaches the disciples Jesus assures them, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid” (Matthew 14:27 NRSV).

Accepting the appearance of Jesus as good news for all, in this chapter we will provide a life-giving interpretation of Jesus that accords with his own.

Jesus is the earthly expression of the heavenly Christ.

We have argued previously that creation is continuously sustained by the Trinity, three persons united through love into one God. Those three persons prefer cooperation to mere operation, so they divide their responsibilities between them, assigning priority even as they share responsibility. Of the three, one Sustains, one Participates, and one Celebrates. Jesus is the Participant, the one charged with coming to us concretely, in our time and our space. Hence, Jesus is the Christ.

To argue that Jesus expresses a divine person coheres with our Trinitarian position, which honors both relationality and particularity, both interpersonal love and the concrete world within which it acts. Jesus is a particular expression of a particular person of the Trinity, designated to relate directly to humankind. As such, he is Emmanuel, “God with us,” both fully human and fully divine.

This sentiment appears in the earliest biblical writings. Paul argues for the preexistence of Jesus as the Christ and the participation of Christ in creation:



In Paul’s understanding, Jesus of Nazareth is the Cosmic Christ, present at creation, grounding creation in communion, and then expressing that communion within creation. The cosmos itself groans for consummation, as do we (Romans 8:22–23), and Jesus is the image of this fulfillment. He is not just a wise teacher or inspired prophet; he is the human manifestation of Abba’s purpose for the universe.

Jesus’s resonance with the cosmos is so profound that, when the authorities insist his disciples quiet down, Jesus replies, “I tell you, if they were to keep silent, the very stones would cry out!” (Luke 19:40). Stones can sing because the appearance of Christ in the cosmos “christifies” all reality, revealing the interior illumination with which it has always been charged. As participants in the Christ event, we are now invited to see God shining through this diaphanous universe, to see the divine beauty within everything and everyone. (Adapted from The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology by Jon Paul Sydnor, pages 120-122)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Frank, Priscilla. “30 Years Later, a Sculpture of Jesus as a Nude Woman Finally Gets Its Due.” Huffington Post, Oct. 6, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christa-edwina-sandys-art

Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. London: Convergent, 2019.

Vasko, Elisabeth. “Redeeming Beauty? Christa and the Displacement of Women’s Bodies in Theological Aesthetic Discourses.” Feminist Theology 21 (2013) 195–208. DOI: 10.1177/0966735012464151.

June 1, 2025

We are co-creators with God: freedom is a gift, not to be rejected

Any flight from freedom denies our God-given personhood.

We fear freedom like the nestling fears flight. So, we flee from our God-given freedom in various ways. We have already discussed the temptation to declare every event the will of God, a declaration that is neither healthy nor biblical. Another way is to render ourselves automata by subjecting every decision to a divine mandate. In this way, we need not decide because God has already decided for us. The controlling God tells us how to worship, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, whom to marry, and where to live.

Such automaticity meets certain needs: fearing accountability, we avoid all decision. Fearing the expanse, we stay on the narrowest of narrow paths. The retreat into automatized activity frees us from the terrifying responsibility of choice, but this retreat is a tactical failure. No flow chart, no matter how ancient or intricate, can negotiate this infinite universe.

Our cosmos purposefully overflows all efforts at intellectual control. We cannot be an automaton within an algorithm, or a puppet under a puppeteer, because God doesn’t want us to. God wants us to think, choose, act, and accept responsibility for our actions. God wants us to be persons to whom our personal God can relate. And for us to be persons, God must deny us any automatic decision-making process within which we could hide our personhood. God must deny us certainty and grant us ambiguity.

Without complexity and freedom we would not possess consciousness.

The algorithm-defying infinity of the cosmos also forbids us any resort to pure instinct—reflexive, predetermined, unexamined responses to situations. Instinct works for ants but not for people. The world simply presents our brain with too much information to immediately know the most profitable course of action. Instead, we must deliberate: gather missing information, consider our principles, imagine different outcomes, evaluate which outcomes are desirable, solicit the advice and insight of others, and finally, always prematurely, decide.

So complex is this process that our brains have evolved the best tool for such analysis: consciousness. Recognizing the danger of simplistic instinct in a hypercomplex world, consciousness interrupts our automaticity. It allows us to survey an expanse of options and think before we act. Through this demanding process we can make the better decision, which is almost never the first instinct.

There is no freedom with certainty, and no freedom without ambiguity. The reflexive certainty provided by strict legalism or brute instinct may free us from self-doubt, but would deprive us of both freedom and consciousness. Tragically, our thirst for certainty is a thirst for escape from our God-given condition, the ability to create freely, which was always intended as a gift.

We find evidence for this gift in the very directability of the universe, our capacity to co-create the future, with God. The present is contingent—it need not be, it could have been otherwise, had persons in the past made different decisions. The worst historical tragedies could have been prevented by more noble human efforts. And the future is unwritten because we coauthor the cosmic drama with God. We are both the playwrights and the actors, and we perform best when we understand that God is love. (Adapted from The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology by Jon Paul Sydnor, pages 117-118)

For further reading, please see:

Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt, 1994.

May 25, 2025

We are made for transformation: the image of God is an image of self-surpassing

God the Trinity gives us free will.

By God’s declaration, we are free (John 8:36). God wants free persons to whom God can relate, not puppets that God can control.

Some people assert that we are not free because we are born with characteristics we did not choose, into an environment we did not create. Since we choose neither our nature or nurture, and we are constructed by both, we are not free. But this argument makes an impossible demand on freedom: to be free, you must be completely uninfluenced. In this view, all influence is control. But such freedom would demand that we be born as a characterless nothingness into an empty expanse, like placing an actor on stage with no set, no cast, no audience, and no script. The actor would be absolutely free of constraint, but also devoid of potential. The actor would have nothing to do, nothing to say, and no decisions to make. The actor could create, but how much? To what end? For which people?

There is no absolute freedom, only relational freedom, even for God. Any thought otherwise is a destructive fantasy. We may find the relationships we are born into cumbersome and the world that we inherit distressing. But what would it be like to be unencumbered? The only way to be unencumbered is to be a vapor in a void.

Our capacity to influence others and be influenced by others gives us moral significance.

There is no effective freedom without moral significance, and no moral significance without inherited context. Catherine Keller observes, “We are indelibly marked by our past. We cannot escape the process of being influenced and of influencing. But we may exercise creative freedom within it.” Hence, context is the gift through which we express our free personhood. To be free is not to be uninfluenced; to be free is to be uncoerced.

Our freedom to influence and be influenced, coupled with freedom from coercion, makes us moral agents. We cannot choose our personal characteristics, family values, or national culture, but we can come to awareness of them and choose our response to them. Jesus, for example, could have joined those who hated Samaritans or he could have joined those who loved across religious difference. He chose the latter. He could have devoted his genius and charisma to personal enrichment, but instead devoted it to the exploited.

Like Jesus, within our personhood and context, we can choose. We can emphasize self or community, power or service, fear or love, greed or generosity. In this Trinitarian view, freedom is not characterized by pure autonomy, or freedom from. Autonomy frees us from external coercion, but this is only a preliminary step on the way to ideal sociality. The next step, which is dependent on but supersedes autonomy, is mutuality. Autonomy grants us freedom from the coercive other, but leaves us in fragmented isolation. The isolation produced by autonomy must become the mutuality produced by interdependence. Thus, freedom from best expresses itself as freedom for.

God makes persons in the image of God, for self-surpassing.

The end of subjection allows the beginning of community. Therefore, the purpose of our own freedom is to maximize the freedom of others. Made in the image of the ever-increasing God, we are capable of self-surpassing. Our actual self is laden with potential selves, so that we are in constant self-creation. But wisdom realizes that fullness of self is only found in the fullness of relation—in love. From love derive meaning, purpose, and joy. The more expansive the love, the greater the joy. Without love, all these godsends shrivel in the claustrophobic space of the self. With love, they flourish and grow along the branches of our relationships.

Since permanence is an illusion, we must seek disillusionment. We are not static; we are dynamic. We are not limited to who we are; we are enabled by who we can become. Our powers of imagination and creation allow self-expansion through time in the image of our infinite God.

Consider Karla Faye Tucker of Houston, Texas. In 1973, Tucker’s mother led her, at age fourteen, into a life of prostitution and drug use. At age twenty-one, in a drug-induced haze, Tucker broke into an apartment with her boyfriend, Danny Garrett, to “case the joint”. Surprised to find the occupants home, they murdered them with a pickaxe. Between committing the crime and her arrest five weeks later, Tucker bragged that each swing of the pickax gave her pleasure.

Tucker was arrested and convicted of murder. While awaiting sentencing, she read the Bible and had a powerful conversion experience. At sentencing, she was sentenced to death. Over the next fourteen years, as her appeals worked their way through the court systems, she became a model prisoner, married her chaplain, Rev. Dana Brown, and refused to commit violence even when attacked.

She sought to have her sentence commuted from execution to life in prison. As her execution date approached, numerous people petitioned for clemency, including Pope John Paul II, the World Council of Churches, and the brother of one of her murder victims. The warden of her prison testified that, based on her long-term behavior, she had in all likelihood been reformed. But all appeals were rejected and, on the order of Governor George W. Bush, Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker on February 3, 1998.

Prior to her execution, Karla Faye appeared on the Larry King Show on CNN, in which they discussed her crimes and her faith:



Karla Faye Tucker’s radical change in personality, which was denied by those who celebrated her execution, suggests the impermanence of the self and the potential for transformation that this impermanence confers. Impermanence is not a threat; it is our greatest opportunity, providing us with a redeemability that permanence would deny. Christ saw this divine potential in everyone he met, as should Christians today. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 113-117)

*****

For further reading, please see:

King, Larry. “Karla Faye Tucker: Born again on death row.” CNN.com. Posted 4:53 p.m. EDT, March 26, 2007. https://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/21/larry.king.tucker/

Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008.

McDougall, Joy Ann. Pilgrimage of Love: Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life. AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.

May 18, 2025

Freedom, Agency, and Authenticity are Divine Gifts

Divine love assures human freedom.

“When Christ freed us, we were meant to remain free” Paul declares (Galatians 5:1). Curiously, the Christian tradition has too often denied human freedom, asserting that God foreordains every thought and every action of every person.

In one way, such a view must be reassuring. Everything that happens is the will of God. We need not understand; we need only trust that this course of events is divinely ordained, no matter how seemingly horrible to our human eyes. Regarding our own actions, given that we don’t know what God has ordained, we can act as if we decide, as if our decisions matter, as if we are free. But all the time, a power and wisdom greater than ourselves is in control, acting in our own best interest, even if we cannot recognize the beneficence.

We can make multiple critiques of this theology. First, it opens religion to Freudian calls for atheism. Freud asserts that religion arrests human development by replacing the biological father figure with a psychological god figure. The Father God provides comfort but leaves the believer in a state of permanent childhood. To mature, Freud insisted, we must overthrow this father figure, both biological and psychological, and assume full responsibility for our lives:



According to Freud, religion is an escape mechanism by which humankind flees from reality into fantasy, generating an illusory universe that stunts human development. Reason and observation, in the form of psychoanalysis, can free us from the illusion, but only for the courageous individual willing to risk the true terror of life.

Second, theistic determinism—the belief that everything happens in accord with the will of God—approximates nihilism. Nihilism is the belief in nothingness. This belief can bring comfort since, if nothing matters, then there is nothing to worry about and nothing we do matters. But the same can be said for worship of an all-controlling God since this God rejects all human value. Again, nothing we do matters. All our reasoning, no matter how exacting, is farcical since every decision is predetermined. All our actions, no matter how loving, are meaningless since they do not emerge from a free self.

Finally, the assertion that all things happen according to the will of God is not biblical. If everything happens according to the will of God, then why did God inspire the prophets to preach social justice? If the world is always perfectly in accord with the will of God, then nothing could happen contrary to the will of God, and there would be no need to change anything. Yet God constantly speaks through the prophets, admonishing Israel to return to the covenant, to the way of compassion:



If ancient Hebrew society had been already ordered in accord with the will of God, and the prophets knew this, then they would have had to adjust their rhetoric. They might have said: “Everything happens according to the will of God, so everything is as it should be, and we shouldn’t change anything. But to give us some make-work, God is asking us to improve our society, so that we can all pretend to make a difference. And whether we do that make-work or not is up to God, so now let’s pretend to decide.”

To believe in God is to believe in humanity.

Jesus, who worked in the tradition of the prophets, also recognized the glaring gap between God’s will and human practice, teaching his disciples to pray, “Thy [Abba’s] will be done.” But if it is already being done, then why do Christians pray for it to be done? And who is supposed to do it?

Jesus prays for the will of Abba to be done because it is not being done. The will of Abba is a world in which generosity is universal, power is honest, prosperity is shared, and fear is renounced. This world did not exist for the prophets, it did not exist for Jesus, and it does not exist today. For this reason, Jesus invites us to enact the divine will, to become the hands of God on earth, to redeem society with justice.

For the prophets and for Christ, hence for Christians, theism is a humanism—a deep faith in the importance of human well-being. God is the most humanizing concept we have, because God ascribes infinite importance to every person. Christ is God as humankind, just as Christ preached a God for humankind. To live out this preaching, Jesus prioritizes love over all else.

Since Christ is a humanist, Christian thought must be humanistic. And given our inherent need for a feeling of agency, to experience ourselves as active participants in our own lives as well as the unfolding of history, humanistic thought must recognize human freedom.

Our freedom and agency must serve our authentic self.

This vertical relationship between God and humankind, characterized by freedom and love, translates into the horizontal relationship between humans, also characterized by freedom and love. That is, we are called to love one another as God loves us—we are called to love one another’s authentic self.

We each possess an interior region of being, unique to ourselves but available to others through self-communication. This uniquely personal interiority allows us to contrast with one another. Through this contrast we jar one another out of the prison of self-identity into an expanse of kinship.

For sacred community to flourish, we must offer our true self to others, and we must ask others to offer their true self to us. We must be authentic. Others are not called to be who we want them to be; they are called to be who they are. You are not my need and certainly not my neediness. You are you. And if I truly understand us, then I will recognize that I need you to be you if I truly want to become myself. Because if you are you, then you are surprise, you are unexpected, you are grace. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 111-113)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989.

Shaw, Joseph M. Readings in Christian Humanism. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1982.

May 15, 2025

The Christian Trinity and Gender Inclusive Language for God (that includes nonbinary persons)

Since everyone is made in the image of God, our language for God must include women and nonbinary persons. Fortunately, the Christian Trinity provides an ample resource for such inclusion. Please click here to explore one proposal for fully inclusive Trinitarian language:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p0mMgaB2EbpRq3q9GuMvnKZARyZDGyG77p4ZEltF_8Q/edit?usp=sharing