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The Great Open Dance
The Great Open Dance's Journal
The Great Open Dance's Journal
May 8, 2025
My student, Torrey Joyner, was a brilliant academic, excellent basketball player, and campus leader at Emmanuel College in Boston. After graduation, he was teaching and coaching in a middle school in Connecticut when he caught a virus. The virus itself was relatively harmless, but his body’s immune system overreacted and attacked his spinal column, leaving
him partially paralyzed from the waist down.
Throughout the ordeal, he was supported by friends, family, and his girlfriend Andrea. Several years later, he and Andrea were married. Torrey, now in a wheelchair, wanted to stand to take his vows, so that he could look Andrea in the eye while giving them. He worked hard at physical therapy, but also relied on the support of his friends.
When the time came to take his vows, two of his groomsmen brought him a walker, then helped him to stand. They removed the wheelchair. Torrey looked Andrea in the eye, supporting himself, but also supported by his best man, who stood behind him with his hand on Torrey’s back. The first groomsman supported the best man, and the next groomsman supported that groomsman, on down the line, five men linked together in support of one, so that he could support himself and declare his love for the woman who supported him and whom he would support.
To see love is to see God.
“No one has ever seen God,” writes John. But his assertion does not mean that God is completely invisible: “Yet if we love one another, God dwells in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12). According to John, we see God by loving one another.
At Torrey’s wedding, we saw the invisible God. This experience should not surprise us, since God is love, and we are made in the image of God. But God as Trinity is not an independent self. God as Trinity is a community of interdependent selves who support one another. Likewise we, who are made in the image of God, are made to support one another. For this reason, notes Mark Heim, “The personal bonds humans form with each other are the repositories of the deepest fulfillment most of us know.”
I am not, nor can I be, a separate whole. I am interrelatedness. You might ask yourself: Where is your unrelated self? When was your unrelated self? The newborn’s first attunement is to its mother, not itself. Contemplation reveals that there is no I without You, no self without community. We are all located, and we are all integrated. This flow of locality into locality, of uniqueness into uniqueness, generates a pulsing cosmos.
Residing in a universe sustained by an internally differentiated and perfectly energetic God, we cannot flourish without difference. For this reason, the other—the one who is different from me, who does not conform to my established mode of interpretation, who renders the obvious suddenly unfamiliar—comes to me not as threat but as opportunity, as a symbol of God, as an “infinity from on high.” The other is the life-granting neighbor whom God invites us to love.
Because we are made for one another, peak experience will be unified experience. One example of unified experience is flowing conversation. Flowing conversation erases the boundary between self and other. When you are in a conversation, and your conversation partner’s words are affecting you, and your words are affecting your conversation partner, where is the dividing line between you? Through language my thoughts become your thoughts and yours become mine. We exchange feelings and laugh together and cry together. We enter the conversation in one state and depart it in a different state—comforted, enraged, saddened, encouraged, or enlightened.
But in such a flowing conversation, we do not change each other. Instead, we are both changed by the conversation. The conversation becomes, through our openness to one another, a third entity, an emergent reality, within which your thoughts and mine combine but are not confused. Yes, our thoughts constitute the conversation, but from those thoughts arises a new thing with its own activity and its own becoming, an unexpected and abundant manifestation that discloses the mysterious potential resident within relationship.
Abundant life flows with love.
Made in the image of God, we are made for flowing love. There is no part of us that is cut off from the rest of the universe. The isolated, pure, rational consciousness does not exist, has not existed, and will not exist. Indeed, it cannot exist, because the mind cannot be separated from the body, reason cannot be separated from the senses, and the self cannot be separated from others.
According to our Trinitarian understanding of humankind, Descartes’s project—his quest for certain knowledge through rigorous introspection—was wrongheaded. Thirsting for epistemological certainty, for perfectly reliable knowledge, he reduced himself to pure rationality. There, alone in his mind, he discovered God, the infinite cause of his concept of an infinite God. Being perfect, this God was not deceptive, so Descartes decided that he could trust his knowledge. Sensory experience was of real objects and reason was competent to analyze it.
Such confirmation would suffice a robot, but it is inadequate to human understanding, because we are more than robots. We not only sense and think; we also feel. Most gloriously, we feel love. But in his Meditations at least, Descartes had received no knowledge of love. How could he, as an isolated consciousness? Love does not grant us certainty. Rather, love casts us into all the complexities and ambiguities of this worldly existence and its attendant emotions. Love demands risk; love demands incarnation.
This understanding of humankind as relational endorses a centrifugal self. We are invited to expand more deeply into God, the world, neighbor, and self. Our nature is not to be fixed; our nature is to change, to increase, and to surpass ourselves, both as individuals and as societies. Through this process, we embrace reality ever more wholeheartedly. In contrast, petty egoism is impoverished. The great currents of life lie within and without, awaiting our participation. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 108-111)
For more reading, please see:
Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Heim, S. Mark. The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.
Voss, Michelle. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010.
What God looks like (metaphorically, anyway)
Interpersonal love reveals God.My student, Torrey Joyner, was a brilliant academic, excellent basketball player, and campus leader at Emmanuel College in Boston. After graduation, he was teaching and coaching in a middle school in Connecticut when he caught a virus. The virus itself was relatively harmless, but his body’s immune system overreacted and attacked his spinal column, leaving
him partially paralyzed from the waist down.
Throughout the ordeal, he was supported by friends, family, and his girlfriend Andrea. Several years later, he and Andrea were married. Torrey, now in a wheelchair, wanted to stand to take his vows, so that he could look Andrea in the eye while giving them. He worked hard at physical therapy, but also relied on the support of his friends.
When the time came to take his vows, two of his groomsmen brought him a walker, then helped him to stand. They removed the wheelchair. Torrey looked Andrea in the eye, supporting himself, but also supported by his best man, who stood behind him with his hand on Torrey’s back. The first groomsman supported the best man, and the next groomsman supported that groomsman, on down the line, five men linked together in support of one, so that he could support himself and declare his love for the woman who supported him and whom he would support.
To see love is to see God.
“No one has ever seen God,” writes John. But his assertion does not mean that God is completely invisible: “Yet if we love one another, God dwells in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12). According to John, we see God by loving one another.
At Torrey’s wedding, we saw the invisible God. This experience should not surprise us, since God is love, and we are made in the image of God. But God as Trinity is not an independent self. God as Trinity is a community of interdependent selves who support one another. Likewise we, who are made in the image of God, are made to support one another. For this reason, notes Mark Heim, “The personal bonds humans form with each other are the repositories of the deepest fulfillment most of us know.”
I am not, nor can I be, a separate whole. I am interrelatedness. You might ask yourself: Where is your unrelated self? When was your unrelated self? The newborn’s first attunement is to its mother, not itself. Contemplation reveals that there is no I without You, no self without community. We are all located, and we are all integrated. This flow of locality into locality, of uniqueness into uniqueness, generates a pulsing cosmos.
Residing in a universe sustained by an internally differentiated and perfectly energetic God, we cannot flourish without difference. For this reason, the other—the one who is different from me, who does not conform to my established mode of interpretation, who renders the obvious suddenly unfamiliar—comes to me not as threat but as opportunity, as a symbol of God, as an “infinity from on high.” The other is the life-granting neighbor whom God invites us to love.
Because we are made for one another, peak experience will be unified experience. One example of unified experience is flowing conversation. Flowing conversation erases the boundary between self and other. When you are in a conversation, and your conversation partner’s words are affecting you, and your words are affecting your conversation partner, where is the dividing line between you? Through language my thoughts become your thoughts and yours become mine. We exchange feelings and laugh together and cry together. We enter the conversation in one state and depart it in a different state—comforted, enraged, saddened, encouraged, or enlightened.
But in such a flowing conversation, we do not change each other. Instead, we are both changed by the conversation. The conversation becomes, through our openness to one another, a third entity, an emergent reality, within which your thoughts and mine combine but are not confused. Yes, our thoughts constitute the conversation, but from those thoughts arises a new thing with its own activity and its own becoming, an unexpected and abundant manifestation that discloses the mysterious potential resident within relationship.
Abundant life flows with love.
Made in the image of God, we are made for flowing love. There is no part of us that is cut off from the rest of the universe. The isolated, pure, rational consciousness does not exist, has not existed, and will not exist. Indeed, it cannot exist, because the mind cannot be separated from the body, reason cannot be separated from the senses, and the self cannot be separated from others.
According to our Trinitarian understanding of humankind, Descartes’s project—his quest for certain knowledge through rigorous introspection—was wrongheaded. Thirsting for epistemological certainty, for perfectly reliable knowledge, he reduced himself to pure rationality. There, alone in his mind, he discovered God, the infinite cause of his concept of an infinite God. Being perfect, this God was not deceptive, so Descartes decided that he could trust his knowledge. Sensory experience was of real objects and reason was competent to analyze it.
Such confirmation would suffice a robot, but it is inadequate to human understanding, because we are more than robots. We not only sense and think; we also feel. Most gloriously, we feel love. But in his Meditations at least, Descartes had received no knowledge of love. How could he, as an isolated consciousness? Love does not grant us certainty. Rather, love casts us into all the complexities and ambiguities of this worldly existence and its attendant emotions. Love demands risk; love demands incarnation.
This understanding of humankind as relational endorses a centrifugal self. We are invited to expand more deeply into God, the world, neighbor, and self. Our nature is not to be fixed; our nature is to change, to increase, and to surpass ourselves, both as individuals and as societies. Through this process, we embrace reality ever more wholeheartedly. In contrast, petty egoism is impoverished. The great currents of life lie within and without, awaiting our participation. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 108-111)
For more reading, please see:
Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Heim, S. Mark. The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.
Voss, Michelle. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010.
May 2, 2025
Made in the image of the Trinity, we are not made to be alone. Self-sufficiency is abhorrent to the human condition. The Bible declares this truth in the beginning: the Garden of Eden meets all of Adam’s material needs, grants him safety and security, and provides him with meaningful work. He even has God to talk to. Nevertheless our Creator, Abba, discerns that Adam needs a partner. Adam needs to do more than just work and live; he needs to work with and live with.
For Adam, and all humankind, self-sufficiency is insufficient. There is more. The soul (like God) seeks relationship not through a sense of lack, but from a feeling of potential, the intuition that openness to another offers increase. We are pulled by promise, not pushed by need.
The original Hebrew reveals the intensity of this desire. Recognizing Adam’s heartache, Abba creates for Adam an ezer: Eve. The term ezer has often been translated as “helper,” but ezer implies much more. The Hebrew Bible applies ezer three times to nations that Israel, under threat, sought military aid from (Isaiah 30:5; Ezekiel 12:14; Daniel 11:34). And it applies the term sixteen times to Abba/YHWH as Israel’s defender, protector, or guardian (Exodus 18:4; Deuteronomy 33
, 26, 29; Psalm 20:2; 33:20; 70:5; 115
–11; 121:1–2; 124:8; 146:5; Hosea 13 ; etc.). Given the semantic ranger of the word, ezer can be translated various ways: the NIV translates ezer as “strength” in Psalm 89:19, for example, but it can also connote support, partnership, and alliance.
In any event, Eve is no mere assistant. Just as God is Israel’s deliverance (ezer) from danger, Eve is Adam’s deliverance (ezer) from emotional desolation.
Two caveats are necessary here. First, Eve’s status as Adam’s deliverer does not mean that all women are spiritually superior to all men. Abba could have made Eve first, and she could have needed Adam, in which case Adam would have been Eve’s deliverer. The order of creation is accidental, not essential. Hence, Adam and Eve’s status is interdependent and equal. They rescue each other—had Adam not already been there, Eve would have been equally desolate.
Second, Adam’s desire for Eve does not establish a heterosexual norm for all humankind for all eternity. Their love for each other symbolizes all human love, not merely erotic human love. Like all of us, they need an ally, companion, friend, coworker, conversation partner, counselor, and lover. These relationships, including erotic ones, occur across an array of genders. The depth of our love determines the quality of our relationships, regardless of gender.
We are made for community.
Genesis insists that we are not made for isolation; we are made for each other. Contemporary science endorses this religious insight. Medicine is asserting that loneliness can be lethal. Psychiatry declares any mental condition that separates us emotionally from others to be an illness.
The prime example of such illness is narcissism. For narcissists, self-love is exclusive love. Narcissism plucks the narcissist from the interpersonal web of life and confines them within themselves, depriving them of the reciprocating affection that is our lifeblood. Equally painful, the self-love of the narcissist is unrequited. They love themselves, but they hate themselves back for it. Their self-relationship is abusive; their internal diversity is a cacophony.
Tragically, the part of the narcissist that must die so that the narcissist might live is the part that makes the decision. Love threatens the narcissistic self because love invites the relational self into being. In an act of masochistic self-preservation, the narcissist must reject love and any hope of prospering with others. Narcissism is no mere personality disorder; it is a tear in the fabric of being.
Ubuntu: I am because you are.
God does not make humans to be. God makes humans to be with. Human being is being with others. The capacity for solitude is healthy, and the need for retreat is real, but enduring isolation sickens the soul. Any interpretation of human being must acknowledge our interpersonal nature, with our constitution by self, other, and God.
This melded life begins on the day we are born. We realize instinctively that our survival rests outside of us, that our destiny depends on our caregivers. Theologian John Mbiti articulates this truth through his interpretation of ubuntu, an African concept of humanity: “Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.”
According to Mbiti, the individual is inseparable from society, just as society is inseparable from the individual. So, there is no conflict between the two—only a just society achieves flourishing individuals, precisely because it recognizes their freedom, nurtures their potential, and encourages their cooperation. Unjust societies that deny equal opportunity are inherently against the individuals that compose them. Too frequently, those who extol “individualism” are only masking their privilege behind the rhetoric of virtue, through which they separate themselves from others. In the words of Barack Obama, “We can only achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves.”
To balance the individual and society always requires moral judgement. Our celebration of community must not subject the virtuous individual to any vicious crowd. What we are proposing here is a nondual understanding of humanity based on divine agape: God’s unconditional, universal love for creation. Because we are fully individual and fully social, influence flows both ways. Nevertheless, as fully individual, we cannot participate in any identity fusion in which our personhood is lost to the mob: “Thou shalt not follow a crowd to do evil,” warns the Bible (Exodus 23:2 WEB). At times, the individual must resist society for the sake of society, as did Harriet Tubman, Sophie Scholl, Bayard Rustin, and the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square, all of whom loved dangerously. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 106-108)
For further reading, please see:
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-5]. Washington, DC: APA, 2013.
Campbell, W. Keith, and Joshua Miller. “Narcissism.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity Jr., 5:369–70. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. Gale eBook.
Freeman, R. David. “Woman, a Power Equal to Man: Translation of Woman as a ‘Fit Helpmate’ for Man Is Questioned.” BAR 9 (1983) 18–32.
Rico-Uribe, Laura Alejandra, et al. “Association of Loneliness with All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis.” PLoS ONE 13 (2018) e0190033. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone. 0190033/.
Eve rescued Adam: Without others we are not whole
Eve rescued Adam.Made in the image of the Trinity, we are not made to be alone. Self-sufficiency is abhorrent to the human condition. The Bible declares this truth in the beginning: the Garden of Eden meets all of Adam’s material needs, grants him safety and security, and provides him with meaningful work. He even has God to talk to. Nevertheless our Creator, Abba, discerns that Adam needs a partner. Adam needs to do more than just work and live; he needs to work with and live with.
For Adam, and all humankind, self-sufficiency is insufficient. There is more. The soul (like God) seeks relationship not through a sense of lack, but from a feeling of potential, the intuition that openness to another offers increase. We are pulled by promise, not pushed by need.
The original Hebrew reveals the intensity of this desire. Recognizing Adam’s heartache, Abba creates for Adam an ezer: Eve. The term ezer has often been translated as “helper,” but ezer implies much more. The Hebrew Bible applies ezer three times to nations that Israel, under threat, sought military aid from (Isaiah 30:5; Ezekiel 12:14; Daniel 11:34). And it applies the term sixteen times to Abba/YHWH as Israel’s defender, protector, or guardian (Exodus 18:4; Deuteronomy 33
, 26, 29; Psalm 20:2; 33:20; 70:5; 115 –11; 121:1–2; 124:8; 146:5; Hosea 13 ; etc.). Given the semantic ranger of the word, ezer can be translated various ways: the NIV translates ezer as “strength” in Psalm 89:19, for example, but it can also connote support, partnership, and alliance.
In any event, Eve is no mere assistant. Just as God is Israel’s deliverance (ezer) from danger, Eve is Adam’s deliverance (ezer) from emotional desolation.
Two caveats are necessary here. First, Eve’s status as Adam’s deliverer does not mean that all women are spiritually superior to all men. Abba could have made Eve first, and she could have needed Adam, in which case Adam would have been Eve’s deliverer. The order of creation is accidental, not essential. Hence, Adam and Eve’s status is interdependent and equal. They rescue each other—had Adam not already been there, Eve would have been equally desolate.
Second, Adam’s desire for Eve does not establish a heterosexual norm for all humankind for all eternity. Their love for each other symbolizes all human love, not merely erotic human love. Like all of us, they need an ally, companion, friend, coworker, conversation partner, counselor, and lover. These relationships, including erotic ones, occur across an array of genders. The depth of our love determines the quality of our relationships, regardless of gender.
We are made for community.
Genesis insists that we are not made for isolation; we are made for each other. Contemporary science endorses this religious insight. Medicine is asserting that loneliness can be lethal. Psychiatry declares any mental condition that separates us emotionally from others to be an illness.
The prime example of such illness is narcissism. For narcissists, self-love is exclusive love. Narcissism plucks the narcissist from the interpersonal web of life and confines them within themselves, depriving them of the reciprocating affection that is our lifeblood. Equally painful, the self-love of the narcissist is unrequited. They love themselves, but they hate themselves back for it. Their self-relationship is abusive; their internal diversity is a cacophony.
Tragically, the part of the narcissist that must die so that the narcissist might live is the part that makes the decision. Love threatens the narcissistic self because love invites the relational self into being. In an act of masochistic self-preservation, the narcissist must reject love and any hope of prospering with others. Narcissism is no mere personality disorder; it is a tear in the fabric of being.
Ubuntu: I am because you are.
God does not make humans to be. God makes humans to be with. Human being is being with others. The capacity for solitude is healthy, and the need for retreat is real, but enduring isolation sickens the soul. Any interpretation of human being must acknowledge our interpersonal nature, with our constitution by self, other, and God.
This melded life begins on the day we are born. We realize instinctively that our survival rests outside of us, that our destiny depends on our caregivers. Theologian John Mbiti articulates this truth through his interpretation of ubuntu, an African concept of humanity: “Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.”
According to Mbiti, the individual is inseparable from society, just as society is inseparable from the individual. So, there is no conflict between the two—only a just society achieves flourishing individuals, precisely because it recognizes their freedom, nurtures their potential, and encourages their cooperation. Unjust societies that deny equal opportunity are inherently against the individuals that compose them. Too frequently, those who extol “individualism” are only masking their privilege behind the rhetoric of virtue, through which they separate themselves from others. In the words of Barack Obama, “We can only achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves.”
To balance the individual and society always requires moral judgement. Our celebration of community must not subject the virtuous individual to any vicious crowd. What we are proposing here is a nondual understanding of humanity based on divine agape: God’s unconditional, universal love for creation. Because we are fully individual and fully social, influence flows both ways. Nevertheless, as fully individual, we cannot participate in any identity fusion in which our personhood is lost to the mob: “Thou shalt not follow a crowd to do evil,” warns the Bible (Exodus 23:2 WEB). At times, the individual must resist society for the sake of society, as did Harriet Tubman, Sophie Scholl, Bayard Rustin, and the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square, all of whom loved dangerously. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 106-108)
For further reading, please see:
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-5]. Washington, DC: APA, 2013.
Campbell, W. Keith, and Joshua Miller. “Narcissism.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity Jr., 5:369–70. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. Gale eBook.
Freeman, R. David. “Woman, a Power Equal to Man: Translation of Woman as a ‘Fit Helpmate’ for Man Is Questioned.” BAR 9 (1983) 18–32.
Rico-Uribe, Laura Alejandra, et al. “Association of Loneliness with All-Cause Mortality: A Meta-Analysis.” PLoS ONE 13 (2018) e0190033. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone. 0190033/.
April 25, 2025
Jesus counsels self-love.
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” declares Jesus, quoting his own Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 19:18; Mark 12:31). Frequently, the Christian tradition has interpreted this statement to mean: “You shall now love your neighbor as you already love yourself.” But this interpretation errs twice: it assumes self-love, then it bases neighbor love on that assumed self-love. Jesus was far too insightful to assume self-love within his followers. The residents of Roman-occupied Judaea were conquered, humiliated, overworked, and overtaxed. Branded as inferior to their occupiers, they were taught to hate themselves.
Even today, healthy self-love is rare. As a teacher with profound insight into the human situation, Jesus is not assuming self-love; Jesus is counseling self-love. God-love grounds both self-love and neighbor love. These three loves are woven together; they are triune. How we treat others is linked to how we treat ourselves because, within God, we are members of one another (Ephesians 4:25). If love is the balm, then we must apply it universally, to both self and neighbor.
Self-love and neighbor love require balance.
But this practice creates an ambiguous situation. We are invited to self-donation, an openness to others that gives life to all. But in certain circumstances, self-donation can result in self-destruction. Parents can be controlling, lovers abusive, neighbors contemptuous, and bosses narcissistic.
The love of God may call us to suffer creatively for others, but it does not call us to suffer destructively for others. For this reason, we must reject any uncritical altruism, any concern for others that eclipses all concern for self. Self-donation never justifies self-erasure. Instead, the self from which we donate should be rich, so that we can donate much.
In the contemporary language of psychology, we are called to interdependence, not codependence. We do not approach one another out of lack, but out of confidence, because “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but one of power, love, and self-discipline (2 Timothy 1 ISV). The psalmist assures us of our internal riches and God-given value: “You created my inmost being and stitched me together in my mother’s womb. For all these mysteries I thank you—for the wonder of myself, for the wonder of your works—my soul knows it well (Psalm 139:14). The prophet Malachi asks, “Are we not all the children of God? Has not one God created us?” (Malachi 2:10).
Baptism celebrates our status as God’s beloved.
Our status as children of God, revealed to the Hebrews as true for all humanity, is the sure foundation for our self-love. This status is indubitable, running from Deuteronomy 14:1a (“You are children of the Lord”) to 2 Corinthians 6:18 (“‘I will be your father, and you shall be my children,’ says the Lord Almighty”). This status is universal, since Abba is the maker of all. Amy-Jill Levine notes, “In Israel’s Scriptures, God’s concern is not restricted to insiders: it extends to strangers, to slaves, to women, and to any who are oppressed, for we are all children of God.”
Baptism is the ritual through which Christians observe humankind’s universal status as God’s beloved. Every Christian baptism recapitulates Christ’s baptism: “When all the people were baptized, Jesus also came to be baptized. And while Jesus was praying, the skies opened and the Holy Spirit descended on the Anointed One in visible form, like a dove. A voice from heaven said, ‘You are my Own, my Beloved. On you my favor rests’” (Luke 3:21–22).
Whenever we baptize, we declare the baptized person to be a beloved child of God, on whom God’s favor rests. Christian baptism is the particular rite that celebrates the universal truth of divine love. We can declare this fact at any age, whether the recipient is one day old or one hundred years old. Some churches baptize infants because, quite factually, God’s love precedes our capacity to respond. It is waiting for us to become aware of it and always inviting us into that awareness. So, the local church promises, for the universal church, to make God’s love known to the child. In speech and action, in all that it does, the church will declare, “See what love God has for us, that we should be called the children of God. And so we are!” (1 John 3:1).
Baptism protects no one from the difficulties of life, but it can inoculate the baptized against the misery that accompanies a misinterpretation of suffering. Suffering is not inflicted by God as punishment, nor is it a test of faith, nor is it the result of any ancestral stain. The origin of suffering is mysterious, but our status within suffering is assured: we are baptized, we are beloved, and we shall overcome with the support of our community and the love of God.
We are made in the image of God, for harmonized complexity.
Self-love is sacred, but it is also necessary because our interior lives are not simple. Our capacity for self-love and self-hatred, for self-doubt and self-absorption, implies internal differentiation. Augustine muses, “I have become a question to myself,” because a person is more like a society of persons than a single person. We can be both the person who loses their temper and the person who struggles not to lose their temper. We can be the person who hates herself and the person who wants to love herself. We can carry on an internal dialogue with ourselves, giving ourselves pep speeches or putting ourselves down. If you get angry with yourself, then you are the angry person, you are the target of the anger, and you are the observer who realizes that all this anger is useless.
We are made in the image of God, for loving self-relationship. But how is that image expressed through our interior complexity? Following Greek philosophy, Christian theology has traditionally asserted the absolute simplicity of God, an unfortunate theological move. Theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury argue that God’s self-being, self-reliance, and independence necessitate simplicity. Any composite object—like a chariot—is made of its parts. The being of the chariot depends on the being of the wheel, axle, carriage, draft pole, and yoke. If any of those are missing, then the chariot is incomplete and is not even a chariot. By way of analogy, since God cannot depend on anything for God’s existence, God cannot be composite; God must be simple. As Anselm writes, “Whatever is composed of parts is not completely one. It is in some sense a plurality and not identical with itself, and it can be broken up either in fact or at least in the understanding. But such characteristics are foreign to you [God], than whom nothing better can be thought.”
If God is simple, and human beings are made in the image of God, then human beings should also be simple. Faced with any tensive aspects of our being, like reason and emotion, simplicity demands that we prefer one and annihilate the other. Reason must be pure, unsullied by emotion. The spirit must transcend rather than sublimate matter. The soul must be freed from its earthly prison, the body. By deeming one aspect of ourselves an absolute good and the other a contaminating evil, we try to free ourselves from the tension between the two—and our own interior riches.
By reducing complex reality to simplistic fantasy, we hope to end all internal contest. For millennia we have attempted to understand through simplification, to our detriment. Seeing kaleidoscopic reality as a black-and-white still life may grant us cognitive control but only produces shallow misinterpretations, clumsy decisions, and continual confusion. The Bible, in contrast, values the person as a unity of body and soul, matter and spirit, reason and emotion. The Bible sanctifies human complexity—spiritual, intellectual, and moral.
The Bible also asserts divine complexity. For example, in the Bible God converses. Sometimes, the conversation even changes God’s mind (Exodus 32:14). When we humans converse, there is a part of us that is conversing and part of us that observes the conversation. One part participates, and the other evaluates. The evaluating part makes sure the conversation is going well, avoids pitfalls, regrets mistakes, and redirects when necessary. For any skilled negotiator or counselor, this evaluative part must be highly developed. It is also helpful at large family dinners.
Human cognition is expansive, which grants us consciousness of. We feel, and we know that we feel. We think, and we know that we think. Would we deny to God this basic human facility? When God spoke with Moses, was God pure participant, unaware that a conversation was going on? Is God so simple as to lack any mechanism for conversational evaluation? When we think of God, we think of infinite capacity, not inferior capacity. If our internal differentiation reflects superior mental capability, then God must possess this capability infinitely. Hence, God cannot be simple; God must be complex. And not just complex, but infinitely complex.
The beauty of God’s infinite complexity lies in its perfect harmony. God’s internal complexity is symphonic. The divine mind is like an orchestra, not a soloist. Being made in the image of God, we are made for the union of complexity and harmony. Love harmonizes complexity. Within the Trinity, the perfect love of each person for the other produces splendid harmony, which is divinity. Within any human, self-love unites internal diversity into healthy personality. Self-hatred produces a fractured person who suffers—and spreads that suffering to others. Self-love produces a unified person who flourishes—and shares that flourishing with others. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 102-106)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Anselm. Basic Writings. Edited and translated by Thomas Williams. Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2007.
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1991.
Bacon, Hannah. “‘Thinking’ the Trinity as Resource for Feminist Theology Today?” CrossCurrents 62 (2012) 442–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24462298.
Levine, Amy-Jill. Light of the World: A Beginner’s Guide to Advent. Nashville: Abingdon, 2019.
God makes us for self-love and self-unity: love harmonizes complexity
God Makes Human Beings for Self-Love and Self-UnityJesus counsels self-love.
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” declares Jesus, quoting his own Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 19:18; Mark 12:31). Frequently, the Christian tradition has interpreted this statement to mean: “You shall now love your neighbor as you already love yourself.” But this interpretation errs twice: it assumes self-love, then it bases neighbor love on that assumed self-love. Jesus was far too insightful to assume self-love within his followers. The residents of Roman-occupied Judaea were conquered, humiliated, overworked, and overtaxed. Branded as inferior to their occupiers, they were taught to hate themselves.
Even today, healthy self-love is rare. As a teacher with profound insight into the human situation, Jesus is not assuming self-love; Jesus is counseling self-love. God-love grounds both self-love and neighbor love. These three loves are woven together; they are triune. How we treat others is linked to how we treat ourselves because, within God, we are members of one another (Ephesians 4:25). If love is the balm, then we must apply it universally, to both self and neighbor.
Self-love and neighbor love require balance.
But this practice creates an ambiguous situation. We are invited to self-donation, an openness to others that gives life to all. But in certain circumstances, self-donation can result in self-destruction. Parents can be controlling, lovers abusive, neighbors contemptuous, and bosses narcissistic.
The love of God may call us to suffer creatively for others, but it does not call us to suffer destructively for others. For this reason, we must reject any uncritical altruism, any concern for others that eclipses all concern for self. Self-donation never justifies self-erasure. Instead, the self from which we donate should be rich, so that we can donate much.
In the contemporary language of psychology, we are called to interdependence, not codependence. We do not approach one another out of lack, but out of confidence, because “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but one of power, love, and self-discipline (2 Timothy 1
ISV). The psalmist assures us of our internal riches and God-given value: “You created my inmost being and stitched me together in my mother’s womb. For all these mysteries I thank you—for the wonder of myself, for the wonder of your works—my soul knows it well (Psalm 139:14). The prophet Malachi asks, “Are we not all the children of God? Has not one God created us?” (Malachi 2:10).
Baptism celebrates our status as God’s beloved.
Our status as children of God, revealed to the Hebrews as true for all humanity, is the sure foundation for our self-love. This status is indubitable, running from Deuteronomy 14:1a (“You are children of the Lord”) to 2 Corinthians 6:18 (“‘I will be your father, and you shall be my children,’ says the Lord Almighty”). This status is universal, since Abba is the maker of all. Amy-Jill Levine notes, “In Israel’s Scriptures, God’s concern is not restricted to insiders: it extends to strangers, to slaves, to women, and to any who are oppressed, for we are all children of God.”
Baptism is the ritual through which Christians observe humankind’s universal status as God’s beloved. Every Christian baptism recapitulates Christ’s baptism: “When all the people were baptized, Jesus also came to be baptized. And while Jesus was praying, the skies opened and the Holy Spirit descended on the Anointed One in visible form, like a dove. A voice from heaven said, ‘You are my Own, my Beloved. On you my favor rests’” (Luke 3:21–22).
Whenever we baptize, we declare the baptized person to be a beloved child of God, on whom God’s favor rests. Christian baptism is the particular rite that celebrates the universal truth of divine love. We can declare this fact at any age, whether the recipient is one day old or one hundred years old. Some churches baptize infants because, quite factually, God’s love precedes our capacity to respond. It is waiting for us to become aware of it and always inviting us into that awareness. So, the local church promises, for the universal church, to make God’s love known to the child. In speech and action, in all that it does, the church will declare, “See what love God has for us, that we should be called the children of God. And so we are!” (1 John 3:1).
Baptism protects no one from the difficulties of life, but it can inoculate the baptized against the misery that accompanies a misinterpretation of suffering. Suffering is not inflicted by God as punishment, nor is it a test of faith, nor is it the result of any ancestral stain. The origin of suffering is mysterious, but our status within suffering is assured: we are baptized, we are beloved, and we shall overcome with the support of our community and the love of God.
We are made in the image of God, for harmonized complexity.
Self-love is sacred, but it is also necessary because our interior lives are not simple. Our capacity for self-love and self-hatred, for self-doubt and self-absorption, implies internal differentiation. Augustine muses, “I have become a question to myself,” because a person is more like a society of persons than a single person. We can be both the person who loses their temper and the person who struggles not to lose their temper. We can be the person who hates herself and the person who wants to love herself. We can carry on an internal dialogue with ourselves, giving ourselves pep speeches or putting ourselves down. If you get angry with yourself, then you are the angry person, you are the target of the anger, and you are the observer who realizes that all this anger is useless.
We are made in the image of God, for loving self-relationship. But how is that image expressed through our interior complexity? Following Greek philosophy, Christian theology has traditionally asserted the absolute simplicity of God, an unfortunate theological move. Theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury argue that God’s self-being, self-reliance, and independence necessitate simplicity. Any composite object—like a chariot—is made of its parts. The being of the chariot depends on the being of the wheel, axle, carriage, draft pole, and yoke. If any of those are missing, then the chariot is incomplete and is not even a chariot. By way of analogy, since God cannot depend on anything for God’s existence, God cannot be composite; God must be simple. As Anselm writes, “Whatever is composed of parts is not completely one. It is in some sense a plurality and not identical with itself, and it can be broken up either in fact or at least in the understanding. But such characteristics are foreign to you [God], than whom nothing better can be thought.”
If God is simple, and human beings are made in the image of God, then human beings should also be simple. Faced with any tensive aspects of our being, like reason and emotion, simplicity demands that we prefer one and annihilate the other. Reason must be pure, unsullied by emotion. The spirit must transcend rather than sublimate matter. The soul must be freed from its earthly prison, the body. By deeming one aspect of ourselves an absolute good and the other a contaminating evil, we try to free ourselves from the tension between the two—and our own interior riches.
By reducing complex reality to simplistic fantasy, we hope to end all internal contest. For millennia we have attempted to understand through simplification, to our detriment. Seeing kaleidoscopic reality as a black-and-white still life may grant us cognitive control but only produces shallow misinterpretations, clumsy decisions, and continual confusion. The Bible, in contrast, values the person as a unity of body and soul, matter and spirit, reason and emotion. The Bible sanctifies human complexity—spiritual, intellectual, and moral.
The Bible also asserts divine complexity. For example, in the Bible God converses. Sometimes, the conversation even changes God’s mind (Exodus 32:14). When we humans converse, there is a part of us that is conversing and part of us that observes the conversation. One part participates, and the other evaluates. The evaluating part makes sure the conversation is going well, avoids pitfalls, regrets mistakes, and redirects when necessary. For any skilled negotiator or counselor, this evaluative part must be highly developed. It is also helpful at large family dinners.
Human cognition is expansive, which grants us consciousness of. We feel, and we know that we feel. We think, and we know that we think. Would we deny to God this basic human facility? When God spoke with Moses, was God pure participant, unaware that a conversation was going on? Is God so simple as to lack any mechanism for conversational evaluation? When we think of God, we think of infinite capacity, not inferior capacity. If our internal differentiation reflects superior mental capability, then God must possess this capability infinitely. Hence, God cannot be simple; God must be complex. And not just complex, but infinitely complex.
The beauty of God’s infinite complexity lies in its perfect harmony. God’s internal complexity is symphonic. The divine mind is like an orchestra, not a soloist. Being made in the image of God, we are made for the union of complexity and harmony. Love harmonizes complexity. Within the Trinity, the perfect love of each person for the other produces splendid harmony, which is divinity. Within any human, self-love unites internal diversity into healthy personality. Self-hatred produces a fractured person who suffers—and spreads that suffering to others. Self-love produces a unified person who flourishes—and shares that flourishing with others. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 102-106)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Anselm. Basic Writings. Edited and translated by Thomas Williams. Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2007.
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1991.
Bacon, Hannah. “‘Thinking’ the Trinity as Resource for Feminist Theology Today?” CrossCurrents 62 (2012) 442–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24462298.
Levine, Amy-Jill. Light of the World: A Beginner’s Guide to Advent. Nashville: Abingdon, 2019.
April 18, 2025
The crucifixion reveals God’s self-risk for us.
At great risk, truth became enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. After ministering in northern Judea for some time, Jesus went to Jerusalem. He went there in the service of life, knowing he would die:
Christ, though in the image of God, didn’t deem equality with God something to be clung to—but instead became completely empty and took on the image of oppressed humankind: born into the human condition, found in the likeness of a human being. Jesus was thus humbled—obediently accepting death, even death on a cross! (Phil 2:6–8)
As the Author of life, Abba (our Creator and Sustainer) determines that intensity depends on contrast. Light has more existence in relationship to darkness; warmth has more existence in relationship to cold. Recognizing this, Abba creates a universe of contrasts, including the contrasts of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, celebration and grief. Christ, emissary of the Trinity, then ratifies this decision and expresses sympathy for the world by entering the human situation, as Jesus of Nazareth. Tragically, having granted us the freedom to reject truth, Jesus’s ministry leads to the passion and crucifixion.
Truth moves.
By defining Jesus as truth (John 1:14), the Bible denies truth any heavy, inert characteristics. Like a good cut that a carpenter would call true, Jesus is perfectly plumb with reality. He is truth, so truth becomes a way of being in the world rather than an unchanging thing to possess. Truth is more verb than noun: “They who do the truth come to the light, that their works may be revealed, that their works have been done in God” (John 3:21 WEB [emphasis added]).
Recognizing that truth is an activity, early Christians sometimes referred to their faith as the Way (Acts 19 ). This reference made sense, because the first Christians were Jews and practitioners of halakah, the totality of laws, ordinances, customs, and practices that structure Jewish life to this day. The term halakah derives from the root halak, which means “to walk” or “to go.” For this reason, halakah is usually translated as “the Way.” It is not an inert mass of unchanging rules. It is a way to go through life well, as community.
The way we go through life must constantly adapt to the way things are. In Judaism, this need has produced a long tradition of debate and argumentation. Jesus participated in these debates, producing his own interpretation of halakah, which his followers eventually came to call the evangelion, gospel, or “good news.” According to Jesus, the Way expresses itself through time in loving activity. In this view, an act of kindness is just as true as a skilled carpenter’s cut, balanced mathematical equation, or logically demonstrated argument.
Love suffers.
Alas, being the Way is dangerous. Prophets are always in danger: to patriots, they seem pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to those in authority, seditious.
According to the Gospel of Luke, after a last supper with his disciples Jesus retreated to the Mount of Olives and prayed, “Abba, if it’s your will, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). The cup would not be removed. Later in the night a crowd, led by Jesus’s disciple Judas, approached Jesus to arrest him. Infuriated, one disciple swung a sword and cut off a man’s ear, but Jesus rebuked him and healed the man (Luke 22:51). Then Jesus was led away to die.
Over the next few days, Jesus was mocked, beaten, crowned with thorns, and flogged. Finally, the Romans drove nails into his hands and feet and hung him on a cross, naked and humiliated before the world, until he suffocated to death. As he was dying, Jesus prayed, “Abba, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34a).
Crucifixion is an incomprehensibly “grotesque and gratuitous” act invented by the Romans to terrorize subjugated peoples. This torturous execution was public, political, and prolonged, reducing the victim to a scarred sign of the Empire’s power. In this instance, it also reveals the absolute participation of God in human history, in the person of Jesus.
Jesus, God’s fleshly form, is meek. Jesus is not the master of embodied life; he is subject to embodied life. He inhabits what we inhabit—the plain fact of human suffering, the mysterious joy of religious community, and the intimated assurance of a loving God. He symbolizes divine openness to the agony and the ecstasy, but also to the unresolvable paradox of faith: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries from the cross (Mark 15:34). He simultaneously acknowledges the presence of God and the absence of God. He accuses God of abandonment, demands of God a defense, yet dies before receiving one.
Perhaps God has no adequate answer. Theologically, the crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the unholy within the universe, useless suffering that freedom produces but God abhors. From the gift of freedom, something emerges in creation that is alien to Godself. God did not intend the unholy, but God allows it out of respect for our autonomy and moral consequence.
Love risks.
Crucially, God suffers from this demonic fault in reality. God in Christ undergoes alienation from God through crucifixion. In other words, freedom is of God, but the results of freedom may not be. Faced with a choice between freedom and insignificance, God has chosen to preserve freedom and allow suffering. We may wish it otherwise, but God prioritizes vitality over security.
Yet, God does not make these choices at a distance. In the incarnation, we see that God has entered creation as unconditional celebrant. On the cross, we see that God has entered creation as absolute participant. No part of the divine person is protected from the dangers of embodiment. God in Jesus is perfectly open to the mutually amplifying contrasts of embodied life, and God is perfectly subject to the grotesque and gratuitous suffering that God rejects but freedom allows. God is completely here; God is fully human, even unto death.
For the cosmic Artists in positions of creative responsibility, authentic love necessarily results in vulnerable suffering. Creation necessitates incarnation, and incarnation results in crucifixion. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 141-144)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Prophets. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Jurgen Moltmann. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Jesus didn't die for our sins: Agape is a risky endeavor
The crucifixion reveals God’s self-risk for us.
At great risk, truth became enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. After ministering in northern Judea for some time, Jesus went to Jerusalem. He went there in the service of life, knowing he would die:
Christ, though in the image of God, didn’t deem equality with God something to be clung to—but instead became completely empty and took on the image of oppressed humankind: born into the human condition, found in the likeness of a human being. Jesus was thus humbled—obediently accepting death, even death on a cross! (Phil 2:6–8)
As the Author of life, Abba (our Creator and Sustainer) determines that intensity depends on contrast. Light has more existence in relationship to darkness; warmth has more existence in relationship to cold. Recognizing this, Abba creates a universe of contrasts, including the contrasts of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, celebration and grief. Christ, emissary of the Trinity, then ratifies this decision and expresses sympathy for the world by entering the human situation, as Jesus of Nazareth. Tragically, having granted us the freedom to reject truth, Jesus’s ministry leads to the passion and crucifixion.
Truth moves.
By defining Jesus as truth (John 1:14), the Bible denies truth any heavy, inert characteristics. Like a good cut that a carpenter would call true, Jesus is perfectly plumb with reality. He is truth, so truth becomes a way of being in the world rather than an unchanging thing to possess. Truth is more verb than noun: “They who do the truth come to the light, that their works may be revealed, that their works have been done in God” (John 3:21 WEB [emphasis added]).
Recognizing that truth is an activity, early Christians sometimes referred to their faith as the Way (Acts 19
). This reference made sense, because the first Christians were Jews and practitioners of halakah, the totality of laws, ordinances, customs, and practices that structure Jewish life to this day. The term halakah derives from the root halak, which means “to walk” or “to go.” For this reason, halakah is usually translated as “the Way.” It is not an inert mass of unchanging rules. It is a way to go through life well, as community.
The way we go through life must constantly adapt to the way things are. In Judaism, this need has produced a long tradition of debate and argumentation. Jesus participated in these debates, producing his own interpretation of halakah, which his followers eventually came to call the evangelion, gospel, or “good news.” According to Jesus, the Way expresses itself through time in loving activity. In this view, an act of kindness is just as true as a skilled carpenter’s cut, balanced mathematical equation, or logically demonstrated argument.
Love suffers.
Alas, being the Way is dangerous. Prophets are always in danger: to patriots, they seem pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to those in authority, seditious.
According to the Gospel of Luke, after a last supper with his disciples Jesus retreated to the Mount of Olives and prayed, “Abba, if it’s your will, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). The cup would not be removed. Later in the night a crowd, led by Jesus’s disciple Judas, approached Jesus to arrest him. Infuriated, one disciple swung a sword and cut off a man’s ear, but Jesus rebuked him and healed the man (Luke 22:51). Then Jesus was led away to die.
Over the next few days, Jesus was mocked, beaten, crowned with thorns, and flogged. Finally, the Romans drove nails into his hands and feet and hung him on a cross, naked and humiliated before the world, until he suffocated to death. As he was dying, Jesus prayed, “Abba, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34a).
Crucifixion is an incomprehensibly “grotesque and gratuitous” act invented by the Romans to terrorize subjugated peoples. This torturous execution was public, political, and prolonged, reducing the victim to a scarred sign of the Empire’s power. In this instance, it also reveals the absolute participation of God in human history, in the person of Jesus.
Jesus, God’s fleshly form, is meek. Jesus is not the master of embodied life; he is subject to embodied life. He inhabits what we inhabit—the plain fact of human suffering, the mysterious joy of religious community, and the intimated assurance of a loving God. He symbolizes divine openness to the agony and the ecstasy, but also to the unresolvable paradox of faith: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries from the cross (Mark 15:34). He simultaneously acknowledges the presence of God and the absence of God. He accuses God of abandonment, demands of God a defense, yet dies before receiving one.
Perhaps God has no adequate answer. Theologically, the crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the unholy within the universe, useless suffering that freedom produces but God abhors. From the gift of freedom, something emerges in creation that is alien to Godself. God did not intend the unholy, but God allows it out of respect for our autonomy and moral consequence.
Love risks.
Crucially, God suffers from this demonic fault in reality. God in Christ undergoes alienation from God through crucifixion. In other words, freedom is of God, but the results of freedom may not be. Faced with a choice between freedom and insignificance, God has chosen to preserve freedom and allow suffering. We may wish it otherwise, but God prioritizes vitality over security.
Yet, God does not make these choices at a distance. In the incarnation, we see that God has entered creation as unconditional celebrant. On the cross, we see that God has entered creation as absolute participant. No part of the divine person is protected from the dangers of embodiment. God in Jesus is perfectly open to the mutually amplifying contrasts of embodied life, and God is perfectly subject to the grotesque and gratuitous suffering that God rejects but freedom allows. God is completely here; God is fully human, even unto death.
For the cosmic Artists in positions of creative responsibility, authentic love necessarily results in vulnerable suffering. Creation necessitates incarnation, and incarnation results in crucifixion. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 141-144)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Prophets. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Jurgen Moltmann. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
April 6, 2025
The body does not compete with the soul; it unites with the soul to produce embodied, soulful experience. Embodied experience feeds the soul, while the soul informs embodied experience. Meaning arises from this union: embodiment allows loving relationship, materiality allows intense sensation, and decisions within time produce moral consequence. Soul and body are as inseparable for vitality as light and heat are for fire.
Despite the early church’s rejection of Marcion, who preferred spirit over matter and soul over body, early Christianity sometimes wavered in its commitment to embodiment as blessed. The church arose within the context of Greek philosophy and Jewish asceticism that sometimes devalued material existence, and the church sometimes absorbed these influences. For example, in the fourth century Athanasius wrote an influential biography of Anthony of Egypt, considered the father of Christian monasticism. According to Athanasius, Anthony “used to eat and sleep, and go about all other bodily necessities with shame when he thought of the spiritual faculties of the soul. . . . It behooves a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body.”
In the Philokalia, an anthology of early Christian monastic writings, St. Neilos the Ascetic marvels at Moses’s courage: “These holy men achieved such things because they had resolved to live for the soul alone, turning away from the body and its wants.” In the centuries that followed, flagellants punished their bodies, gnostics escaped their bodies, and women were seen as excessively embodied.
Given the above, the term soul has a problematic history, and some theologians have rejected the concept as inevitably anti-body. Yet soulless bodies may prove as unsatisfactory as disembodied souls, especially as we develop concerns about the “soulless” culture in which we live. The Oxford English Dictionary defines soulless as heartless, cold, and mechanical, lacking in warmth and feeling. By way of consequence, soulless culture is passionless, dull, and uninteresting, and a soulless place lacks character, uniqueness, and distinction. By way of extension, a soulless economy reduces human persons to units of production and consumption. Its marketers study our depths to control us, while advertisers manipulate our insecurities, politicians target our identity group, and elementary school students are defined by their test scores. Meanwhile, imperial accountancy translates everything and everyone into a dollar value. Threatened by an ever-encroaching thingness, a universe of hollow surfaces, we yearn for the abundance of life that surely exists somewhere, but certainly not here.
The body alone is ill suited to resist its own objectification. Indeed, separated from any inherent value or meaning, it becomes a vulnerability. Girls and boys are shown computer-altered images of “ideal” types and made to feel insecure. Anxious adults compete in the placement of their bodies, struggling to be seen at the right restaurant on the right vacation with the right people. After this calculated onslaught, we may doubt if we are in the right body.
Cunningly, these bodily insecurities are then offered the topical anesthetic of consumption. Clothes, protein powders, makeup, cars, jewelry, liquor, and “exclusive memberships” all promise to free us from our externally inculcated self-loathing. By design, these anaesthetics offer only a brief numbness after which the pain of insecurity will arise again—and the need for another anesthetic. So continues the cycle of anxiety-driven consumption upon which our economy is based, much of which is founded on our doubts about our own appearance and worth.
Powers and principalities want culture to be soulless, not soulful.
We do not experience this system as disembodied. We experience it as soulless. In this modern day context, we yearn for soulful culture. The Oxford English Dictionary defines soulful as “full of soul or feeling; of a highly emotional, spiritual, or aesthetic nature; expressing or evoking deep emotion. “Soulful” can be used as a noun: “As much as a soul can hold or contain,” as in “she got her soulful of tenderness from the community.”
In these examples, “soul” becomes a synonym for kindness, warmth, and depth, a cipher for our most human sentiments. We sense that our authentic self is at best neglected, at worst endangered, by our soulless culture.
So existentially useful is the concept of soul that the most prominent atheist in the Western tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, utilized it extensively, even as he attempted to reconstruct a culture in which God had died. Fearing an encroaching descent into triviality, Nietzsche elevated the soul to remind his readers of their most noble aspirations and prevent a descent into the Last Man:
According to Nietzsche, we need the soul to create soulful life in a soulless culture. Yet he insists that the soul must fulfill the body, not compete with it.
The concept of the soul has also been criticized due to its association with reward and punishment. In individualist religion, the soul bears the record of our deeds, like a secret police file. Based on this record, God judges the individual soul, sending it to either heaven or hell. But in this account the soul has no inherent relationality. Its function is exclusively eschatological—bearing our eternal destiny. The threat of punishment polices individuals, but does not indicate our basic call to community. For this reason, such legalistic concepts of the soul are inadequate to persons made in the image of the Trinitarian God.
We need a lifegiving, relational concept of the soul.
How could we reconceptualize the soul as interdependent rather than isolated? Any concept of the soul that is faithful to the Trinity must invite us to live for one another. We can recall our previous definition of God as “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Applying this geometric concept to humankind, we can define the soul as a point with an infinite number of radii, of infinite length, lacking any circumference. By their very nature, our souls radiate outward and seek connection, and connection grants us expansiveness.
Euclid, the founder of geometry, initiated this relational way of conceptualizing the universe. The most basic unit in his philosophy is the point. Euclid defines a point as that which has no parts or magnitude, thus has no existence in and of itself. Instead, points are granted existence by the pattern of relations in which they dwell, combining with other points to form a line, plane, cube, sphere, etc. By itself, the point is an abstraction. United to others, it constitutes reality.
The soul is nothing in itself. Only through its relationship to other souls does the soul come into being, connected and open. It becomes everything, even while retaining its own location, perspective, and identity. The soul can then offer its uniqueness to all other souls, thereby granting them their own uniqueness, a gift that they have already reciprocated. In this conception, the soul becomes a boundless horizon that we wall off only to our own detriment. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 99-102)
For further reading, please see:
Athanasius. “Life of St. Anthony.” Translated by H. Ellershaw. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2nd ser., 4. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1892. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm.
Copenhaver, Brian T., ed. The Greek “Corpus Hermeticum” and the Latin “Asclepius” in a New English Translation. Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, St., and St. Markarios of Corinth, compilers. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Edited and translated by G. E. H. Palmer et al. 5 vols. New York: Faber and Faber, 1979–2023.
God has united body and soul for human flourishing
We are ensouled bodies and embodied souls.The body does not compete with the soul; it unites with the soul to produce embodied, soulful experience. Embodied experience feeds the soul, while the soul informs embodied experience. Meaning arises from this union: embodiment allows loving relationship, materiality allows intense sensation, and decisions within time produce moral consequence. Soul and body are as inseparable for vitality as light and heat are for fire.
Despite the early church’s rejection of Marcion, who preferred spirit over matter and soul over body, early Christianity sometimes wavered in its commitment to embodiment as blessed. The church arose within the context of Greek philosophy and Jewish asceticism that sometimes devalued material existence, and the church sometimes absorbed these influences. For example, in the fourth century Athanasius wrote an influential biography of Anthony of Egypt, considered the father of Christian monasticism. According to Athanasius, Anthony “used to eat and sleep, and go about all other bodily necessities with shame when he thought of the spiritual faculties of the soul. . . . It behooves a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body.”
In the Philokalia, an anthology of early Christian monastic writings, St. Neilos the Ascetic marvels at Moses’s courage: “These holy men achieved such things because they had resolved to live for the soul alone, turning away from the body and its wants.” In the centuries that followed, flagellants punished their bodies, gnostics escaped their bodies, and women were seen as excessively embodied.
Given the above, the term soul has a problematic history, and some theologians have rejected the concept as inevitably anti-body. Yet soulless bodies may prove as unsatisfactory as disembodied souls, especially as we develop concerns about the “soulless” culture in which we live. The Oxford English Dictionary defines soulless as heartless, cold, and mechanical, lacking in warmth and feeling. By way of consequence, soulless culture is passionless, dull, and uninteresting, and a soulless place lacks character, uniqueness, and distinction. By way of extension, a soulless economy reduces human persons to units of production and consumption. Its marketers study our depths to control us, while advertisers manipulate our insecurities, politicians target our identity group, and elementary school students are defined by their test scores. Meanwhile, imperial accountancy translates everything and everyone into a dollar value. Threatened by an ever-encroaching thingness, a universe of hollow surfaces, we yearn for the abundance of life that surely exists somewhere, but certainly not here.
The body alone is ill suited to resist its own objectification. Indeed, separated from any inherent value or meaning, it becomes a vulnerability. Girls and boys are shown computer-altered images of “ideal” types and made to feel insecure. Anxious adults compete in the placement of their bodies, struggling to be seen at the right restaurant on the right vacation with the right people. After this calculated onslaught, we may doubt if we are in the right body.
Cunningly, these bodily insecurities are then offered the topical anesthetic of consumption. Clothes, protein powders, makeup, cars, jewelry, liquor, and “exclusive memberships” all promise to free us from our externally inculcated self-loathing. By design, these anaesthetics offer only a brief numbness after which the pain of insecurity will arise again—and the need for another anesthetic. So continues the cycle of anxiety-driven consumption upon which our economy is based, much of which is founded on our doubts about our own appearance and worth.
Powers and principalities want culture to be soulless, not soulful.
We do not experience this system as disembodied. We experience it as soulless. In this modern day context, we yearn for soulful culture. The Oxford English Dictionary defines soulful as “full of soul or feeling; of a highly emotional, spiritual, or aesthetic nature; expressing or evoking deep emotion. “Soulful” can be used as a noun: “As much as a soul can hold or contain,” as in “she got her soulful of tenderness from the community.”
In these examples, “soul” becomes a synonym for kindness, warmth, and depth, a cipher for our most human sentiments. We sense that our authentic self is at best neglected, at worst endangered, by our soulless culture.
So existentially useful is the concept of soul that the most prominent atheist in the Western tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche, utilized it extensively, even as he attempted to reconstruct a culture in which God had died. Fearing an encroaching descent into triviality, Nietzsche elevated the soul to remind his readers of their most noble aspirations and prevent a descent into the Last Man:
The soul that has the longest ladder and reaches down deepest—the most comprehensive soul, which can run and stray and roam farthest within itself; the most necessary soul that plunges joyously into chance; the soul that, having being, dives into becoming; the soul that has, but wants to want and will; the soul that flees itself and catches up with itself in the widest circles; the wisest soul that folly exhorts most sweetly; the soul that loves itself most, in which all things have their sweep and countersweep and ebb and flood. . . . But that is the concept of Dionysus himself. (Ecce Homo, 306)
According to Nietzsche, we need the soul to create soulful life in a soulless culture. Yet he insists that the soul must fulfill the body, not compete with it.
The concept of the soul has also been criticized due to its association with reward and punishment. In individualist religion, the soul bears the record of our deeds, like a secret police file. Based on this record, God judges the individual soul, sending it to either heaven or hell. But in this account the soul has no inherent relationality. Its function is exclusively eschatological—bearing our eternal destiny. The threat of punishment polices individuals, but does not indicate our basic call to community. For this reason, such legalistic concepts of the soul are inadequate to persons made in the image of the Trinitarian God.
We need a lifegiving, relational concept of the soul.
How could we reconceptualize the soul as interdependent rather than isolated? Any concept of the soul that is faithful to the Trinity must invite us to live for one another. We can recall our previous definition of God as “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Applying this geometric concept to humankind, we can define the soul as a point with an infinite number of radii, of infinite length, lacking any circumference. By their very nature, our souls radiate outward and seek connection, and connection grants us expansiveness.
Euclid, the founder of geometry, initiated this relational way of conceptualizing the universe. The most basic unit in his philosophy is the point. Euclid defines a point as that which has no parts or magnitude, thus has no existence in and of itself. Instead, points are granted existence by the pattern of relations in which they dwell, combining with other points to form a line, plane, cube, sphere, etc. By itself, the point is an abstraction. United to others, it constitutes reality.
The soul is nothing in itself. Only through its relationship to other souls does the soul come into being, connected and open. It becomes everything, even while retaining its own location, perspective, and identity. The soul can then offer its uniqueness to all other souls, thereby granting them their own uniqueness, a gift that they have already reciprocated. In this conception, the soul becomes a boundless horizon that we wall off only to our own detriment. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 99-102)
For further reading, please see:
Athanasius. “Life of St. Anthony.” Translated by H. Ellershaw. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2nd ser., 4. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1892. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm.
Copenhaver, Brian T., ed. The Greek “Corpus Hermeticum” and the Latin “Asclepius” in a New English Translation. Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, St., and St. Markarios of Corinth, compilers. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Edited and translated by G. E. H. Palmer et al. 5 vols. New York: Faber and Faber, 1979–2023.
April 1, 2025
They are the lords. We are the serfs. Republicans are creating a feudal economy.
Due to the number of charts and graphs in this essay, it is best to post a link:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/1/2313886/-They-are-the-lords-We-are-the-serfs
March 28, 2025
Podcast: Christianity needs to change radically if it is every to be faithful to Christ
For your consideration: I would like to thank The WizeGuys for having me on their progressive Christian podcast, and for engaging me in a wonderfully stimulating conversation. Christianity has unleashed potential! So let’s unleash it and repair this world! https://open.spotify.com/episode/0OMp6UrfWTtxZpu7Jg0qpy?si=UwYflu9EQHW3ZYasn0AQFA
March 22, 2025
Marcion of Sinope was a second-century Christian theologian. We know him only through his detractors, but the consistency of their account suggests some reliability. His thought was eventually rejected by the church because Marcion was a dualist—he interpreted reality as characterized by the opposing poles of soul and body, spirit and matter, heaven and earth.
Marcion preferred one pole over against the other, and it was always the unearthly pole. So thoroughgoing was his dualism that he even posited two gods: an Old Testament god of matter, who subjects humankind to unjust, contradictory, and brutal laws; and a New Testament god of spirit, who frees us from law into a new disposition of mercy and grace. Hence, the loving Father of Jesus is not to be confused with the stern Lawgiver of Moses, and Christianity would only be corrupted by any association with Judaism or its Scriptures.
Recognizing that Jesus was a Jew whose teachings derived from his Hebrew faith and its Scriptures, and whose arguments were primarily with other Jews about Judaism, the church eventually declared both the Hebrew Bible (the “Old Testament”) and the Newer Testament (the “New Testament”) canonical and authoritative. Through this choice, the church made a historical decision for the unity of reality. The Creator is benevolent, creation is real, and salvation occurs within the world; it does not take us out of the world. Matter and spirit, body and soul, time and eternity are to be united, not separated.
Although the term would have been unfamiliar at the time, the church chose nondualism. Dualism identifies two aspects of reality, declares them separate from each another, then absolutizes one and yearns for the annihilation of the other. Manichaean dualism, for example, exhorted followers to free their souls from their bodies.
But according to nondualism, nothing exists except through its relationships to other things. Our world is wholly related, produced by relations and dependent upon relations. Every part is open to every other part, to its core, so that every part belongs entirely to the whole. Made in the image of the related God within the related universe, our calling is to feel, think, and enact this relationality. We need not separate our soul from our body. Instead, we should celebrate and perfect their unity.
Faith trusts that meaning and purpose are real.
To fulfill the divine intention for creation, to experience joy, the universe needs faith—a deep trust in the fundamental unity of being. Faith does not free us from matter, nor does faith oppose material existence. Instead, faith completes material existence, imbuing it with meaning, purpose, and beauty. The Bible makes this argument: in Genesis 2, God makes Adam from adamah, the ground. Being of the ground, Adam (literally: “red”) is red, like the clay from which he was born. Even the life force within us, our blood (Hebrew: dam), bespeaks our earthly ties.
Adam is an earthling, quite literally, as are we. This status is not a limitation; it is our original blessing. We are dust quickened by God. We have argued above that the universe is the body of God, and God is the soul of the universe. To honor our God-given unity with the universe, and our divinely granted souls, we need bodies. Our bodies are our means of relationship with friends, family, and lovers.
Without the clear and distinct sense experience offered by our bodies, we would drift about in an existential ether. Relations would be dilute, personality vague, and uniqueness trivial. We would be abstractions, and as abstractions relating to abstractions, our interpersonal exchanges would be impoverished.
Unity with the cosmos is a peak human experience.
But the particularity granted by our bodies grants experience definition and signification. Hence, the body as a means of relation is a blessing. Because we are embodied souls in a cosmos, and because body, soul, and cosmos are all inseparable, our richest experiences will unite spirit and matter.
We can find innumerable examples of such experiences, when the border between self and universe disappears. Norman Maclean, in his memoir A River Runs through It, writes of fly-fishing along the rivers of western Montana. For Maclean, fly-fishing was more than sport. It was a gateway to the unity of all things and his own participation in that unity: “On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”
Religious mystics have always insisted on the unity of humankind and the cosmos within God. As a result of this unity, we can never be satisfied with either a Godless world or a worldless God; we need our souls to be filled with both. Certainly, we can wonder why the universe is so astoundingly huge and why we are as nothing within its endless expanse. Yet, if we erase the false boundary between ourselves and the universe, if we let the inside out and the outside in, then we become expansive indeed.
Such unification with the material cosmos may even make us more capable. Hector Cole, a master of traditional sword making, observes the unity of self and object that is necessary to his trade: “When you put the sword into the fire, your mind enters the fire with it. Otherwise, the endeavor will fail.” The dancer Maria Tallchief describes this disappearance of self into cosmos and cosmos into self as the very height of artistic expression: “From your first plié you are learning to become an artist. In every sense of the word, you are poetry in motion. And if you are fortunate enough . . . you are actually the music.”
How much do you contain? The answer to this question is determined by how open you are. If absolutely open, then you can contain the whole universe. If absolutely closed, then you contain naught but your empty self. You are as full as you are empty. You are as empty as you are full. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 97-99)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Almalech, Mony. “Cultural Unit Red in the Old Testament.” Language and Semiotic Studies 9 (2023) 104–42. DOI: 10.1515/lass-2022–2010.
Fackenheim, Emil L. The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.
Maclean, Norman. “A River Runs through It” and Other Stories. 25th anniv. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Stephenson, A. A. “Marcion.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by Berard L. Marthaler, 9:142–43. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2010. Gale eBook.
Voss Roberts, Michelle. Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.
God wants us to be at one with the universe
God makes human beings for unity with the cosmos.Marcion of Sinope was a second-century Christian theologian. We know him only through his detractors, but the consistency of their account suggests some reliability. His thought was eventually rejected by the church because Marcion was a dualist—he interpreted reality as characterized by the opposing poles of soul and body, spirit and matter, heaven and earth.
Marcion preferred one pole over against the other, and it was always the unearthly pole. So thoroughgoing was his dualism that he even posited two gods: an Old Testament god of matter, who subjects humankind to unjust, contradictory, and brutal laws; and a New Testament god of spirit, who frees us from law into a new disposition of mercy and grace. Hence, the loving Father of Jesus is not to be confused with the stern Lawgiver of Moses, and Christianity would only be corrupted by any association with Judaism or its Scriptures.
Recognizing that Jesus was a Jew whose teachings derived from his Hebrew faith and its Scriptures, and whose arguments were primarily with other Jews about Judaism, the church eventually declared both the Hebrew Bible (the “Old Testament”) and the Newer Testament (the “New Testament”) canonical and authoritative. Through this choice, the church made a historical decision for the unity of reality. The Creator is benevolent, creation is real, and salvation occurs within the world; it does not take us out of the world. Matter and spirit, body and soul, time and eternity are to be united, not separated.
Although the term would have been unfamiliar at the time, the church chose nondualism. Dualism identifies two aspects of reality, declares them separate from each another, then absolutizes one and yearns for the annihilation of the other. Manichaean dualism, for example, exhorted followers to free their souls from their bodies.
But according to nondualism, nothing exists except through its relationships to other things. Our world is wholly related, produced by relations and dependent upon relations. Every part is open to every other part, to its core, so that every part belongs entirely to the whole. Made in the image of the related God within the related universe, our calling is to feel, think, and enact this relationality. We need not separate our soul from our body. Instead, we should celebrate and perfect their unity.
Faith trusts that meaning and purpose are real.
To fulfill the divine intention for creation, to experience joy, the universe needs faith—a deep trust in the fundamental unity of being. Faith does not free us from matter, nor does faith oppose material existence. Instead, faith completes material existence, imbuing it with meaning, purpose, and beauty. The Bible makes this argument: in Genesis 2, God makes Adam from adamah, the ground. Being of the ground, Adam (literally: “red”) is red, like the clay from which he was born. Even the life force within us, our blood (Hebrew: dam), bespeaks our earthly ties.
Adam is an earthling, quite literally, as are we. This status is not a limitation; it is our original blessing. We are dust quickened by God. We have argued above that the universe is the body of God, and God is the soul of the universe. To honor our God-given unity with the universe, and our divinely granted souls, we need bodies. Our bodies are our means of relationship with friends, family, and lovers.
Without the clear and distinct sense experience offered by our bodies, we would drift about in an existential ether. Relations would be dilute, personality vague, and uniqueness trivial. We would be abstractions, and as abstractions relating to abstractions, our interpersonal exchanges would be impoverished.
Unity with the cosmos is a peak human experience.
But the particularity granted by our bodies grants experience definition and signification. Hence, the body as a means of relation is a blessing. Because we are embodied souls in a cosmos, and because body, soul, and cosmos are all inseparable, our richest experiences will unite spirit and matter.
We can find innumerable examples of such experiences, when the border between self and universe disappears. Norman Maclean, in his memoir A River Runs through It, writes of fly-fishing along the rivers of western Montana. For Maclean, fly-fishing was more than sport. It was a gateway to the unity of all things and his own participation in that unity: “On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”
Religious mystics have always insisted on the unity of humankind and the cosmos within God. As a result of this unity, we can never be satisfied with either a Godless world or a worldless God; we need our souls to be filled with both. Certainly, we can wonder why the universe is so astoundingly huge and why we are as nothing within its endless expanse. Yet, if we erase the false boundary between ourselves and the universe, if we let the inside out and the outside in, then we become expansive indeed.
Such unification with the material cosmos may even make us more capable. Hector Cole, a master of traditional sword making, observes the unity of self and object that is necessary to his trade: “When you put the sword into the fire, your mind enters the fire with it. Otherwise, the endeavor will fail.” The dancer Maria Tallchief describes this disappearance of self into cosmos and cosmos into self as the very height of artistic expression: “From your first plié you are learning to become an artist. In every sense of the word, you are poetry in motion. And if you are fortunate enough . . . you are actually the music.”
How much do you contain? The answer to this question is determined by how open you are. If absolutely open, then you can contain the whole universe. If absolutely closed, then you contain naught but your empty self. You are as full as you are empty. You are as empty as you are full. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 97-99)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Almalech, Mony. “Cultural Unit Red in the Old Testament.” Language and Semiotic Studies 9 (2023) 104–42. DOI: 10.1515/lass-2022–2010.
Fackenheim, Emil L. The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.
Maclean, Norman. “A River Runs through It” and Other Stories. 25th anniv. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Stephenson, A. A. “Marcion.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, edited by Berard L. Marthaler, 9:142–43. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2010. Gale eBook.
Voss Roberts, Michelle. Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017.
March 16, 2025
To live a good life, we must consider what life is for. Certain forces in our culture may not want us to experience the fullness of life. To serve their own purposes, these powers and principalities need to keep us distracted so that we will toil, consume, obey, and/or hate. And to ensure our conformity, these forces will spread a metaphysical sickness—a diseased interpretation of life.
Often, this mass-marketed spiritual disease promotes comparison between persons, assigning them higher and lower status. Such ranking produces anxiety about place, an obsessive concern with our relative worth. Trapped in a zero-sum universe, we compete for power and prestige. Tragically, we “accept praise from one another, yet don’t seek the praise that comes from the One God” (John 5:44b).
The endless agitation caused by this struggle exhausts us. Are we more or less important than they are? How can we know for sure? One way to convince ourselves of our value is to acquire symbols of success, cultural expressions of our superiority—clothes, cars, houses, jewelry, memberships, etc. But someone else always has a more flamboyant expression of relative worth, thus ending our brief intoxication. And so the cycle continues.
No benevolent God would create such a cutthroat mess. A benevolent God could invite us only into abundant coexistence. This anxious, hierarchical arrangement arises from elsewhere.
Below, I will provide an alternative understanding of life, grounded in the conviction that unity is our natural state. Religious charlatans and spiritual pickpockets may present God as a mere assistant in the cutthroat game, an attendant who helps us rise above others. But honest religion frees us from our insecure ego, thereby revealing our intrinsic importance within the sacred whole. To experience this divinely granted importance, we must know why we are, and who we are.
God makes human beings for unity with God.
To briefly review the first three chapters of The Great Open Dance: Human existence is not a glorious accident; it is a divine gift. The giver is the Trinity—three persons united through love into one perfect community, pulsing with life. Lamenting our nonbeing, the Infinite overflowed itself, thereby granting us being through creation. By the grace of God, we are delivered from nothingness into fullness. And this process has not ended: Infinity overflows itself continually, for us.
We reside in the abundance of God. Everywhere we look we see divinity—in nature, in neighbor, even in the mirror. All reality is sacred; in response, we are to celebrate all reality—including our self—as sacrament. God loved us before we became aware of ourselves, knows us better than we know ourselves, and pervades us like heat pervades fire. “In God we live, move, and have our being,” Paul asserts (Acts 17:28), because God is everywhere: within and beyond, immanent and transcendent. For this reason, Augustine declares that God is “more intimately present to me than my innermost being, and higher than the highest peak of my spirit.”
To the extent that we open ourselves to this inner wellspring, to that extent we cultivate our true self. To the extent that we close ourselves to this inner wellspring, to that extent we cultivate our false self. The abundant life demands that the false self die to the true self (Mark 8:35). The first Christians called this process theosis. This Greek term has been translated as divinization, although that translation is a bit misleading since we will never become God. But we can become more Godlike—more loving, generous, and open.
The Bible makes this possibility clear. In the Gospel of John, Jesus himself declares, “As you, Abba [Father], are in me and I in you; I pray that they may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21). Peter agrees that we are invited to “become participants in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). And Paul promises, “We, who with unveiled faces reflect our God’s glory, grow brighter and brighter as we are being transformed into the image we reflect” (2 Corinthians 3:18a).
If divinization is the process of becoming more loving, then demonization is the process of becoming more hateful. Love treats the other as a blessing who deserves life, just like we do. Fear treats the other as a threat that endangers our own being. In the eye of faith, every person is a second universe who offers to challenge and enrich our own. In the eye of fear, every person is an adversary, a competitor for resources who diminishes us.
Empire doesn’t like God.
In a triumph of imperialism over mysticism, the Western Church repressed this invitation to theosis, or transformation into the image of God within us. They feared that followers would claim to be God, rather than to be unified with God. In this fearful theology, divine-human unity would threaten the status of Christ as unique, and God as transcendent.
By analogy to human affairs, an accessible divinity would threaten the status of an exalted emperor, the monarch on high who maintains social order. Therefore, according to imperial logic, the celestial ruler must be separate from the ruled just as the earthly ruler must be separate from the ruled: power must be held by objective authorities uncorrupted by emotion, personally invulnerable, politically distant, and (all too frequently) willingly violent.
In contrast to the god of empire, Jesus had preached a warm, accessible concept of God as Abba: “Father” or “Dad” (Luke 11:2–4). Astoundingly, Jesus’s church became the official religious institution of the Roman Empire, which had executed Jesus only three hundred years earlier. Unfortunately, Jesus’s nurturing divinity did not serve the religious or political needs of the imperium, which turned God into a wrathful enforcer of imperial values, and transmogrified Jesus from a loving rabbi into an unforgiving judge. Today, there is a Christian movement returning to the affectionate God preached by Rabbi Jesus. This God is our father (Mark 14:36) and our mother (Luke 15:8–10) who deeply desires our well-being.
God is affection and warmth.
Feeling insignificant, we may doubt this love and ask, with the psalmist: “When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, and the stars that you set in place—what is humanity that you should be mindful of us? Who are we that you should care for us?” (Psalm 8:3–4). But Jesus assures us of God’s intimate concern: “Aren’t five sparrows sold for a few pennies? Yet not one of them is neglected by God. In fact, even the hairs on your head are counted! Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than a whole flock of sparrows” (Luke 12:6–7).
No matter how limitless the universe, no matter how infinite the stretch of time, no matter how countless the teeming beings, God loves you—personally, infinitely, and exhaustively. Those who are parents can attest: having a second child does not dilute their love and delight in the first child.
The Krishna-worshiping tradition within Hinduism powerfully illustrates this divine delight. Their vision of salvation is to play, especially dance, with Krishna in the gardens of Vrindavan. But Krishna’s devotees need not wait or take turns. Instead, Krishna multiplies himself endlessly, that he might dance with each devotee individually, devoting his full attention—spiritual, emotional, and physical—to his partner. For Krishna worshipers, the inexhaustible God is absolutely present to every devotee: no matter how numberless the dancers, God will partner individually with each.
We are each God’s own dancing partner. Every lover wants to give to their beloved. Recognizing this truth, every lover must be willing to receive from their beloved. Love is either reciprocal or twisted. God, who invites us into divine love, blesses our self-giving and laments our self-withholding. If God is invulnerable to us, if we cannot move God to celebration or lament, then God is not love and the Bible is untrue. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 94-96)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1991.
Charles Hartshorne. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.
Larry J. Kreitzer. “Apotheosis of the Roman Emperor.” Biblical Archaeologist 53, no. 4 (Dec. 1990).
Graham M. Schweig. Dance of Divine Love: India’s Classic Sacred Love Story; The Rasa Lila of Krishna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
What is life for? (Certain powers fear abundance.)
Comparison is the thief of joy.To live a good life, we must consider what life is for. Certain forces in our culture may not want us to experience the fullness of life. To serve their own purposes, these powers and principalities need to keep us distracted so that we will toil, consume, obey, and/or hate. And to ensure our conformity, these forces will spread a metaphysical sickness—a diseased interpretation of life.
Often, this mass-marketed spiritual disease promotes comparison between persons, assigning them higher and lower status. Such ranking produces anxiety about place, an obsessive concern with our relative worth. Trapped in a zero-sum universe, we compete for power and prestige. Tragically, we “accept praise from one another, yet don’t seek the praise that comes from the One God” (John 5:44b).
The endless agitation caused by this struggle exhausts us. Are we more or less important than they are? How can we know for sure? One way to convince ourselves of our value is to acquire symbols of success, cultural expressions of our superiority—clothes, cars, houses, jewelry, memberships, etc. But someone else always has a more flamboyant expression of relative worth, thus ending our brief intoxication. And so the cycle continues.
No benevolent God would create such a cutthroat mess. A benevolent God could invite us only into abundant coexistence. This anxious, hierarchical arrangement arises from elsewhere.
Below, I will provide an alternative understanding of life, grounded in the conviction that unity is our natural state. Religious charlatans and spiritual pickpockets may present God as a mere assistant in the cutthroat game, an attendant who helps us rise above others. But honest religion frees us from our insecure ego, thereby revealing our intrinsic importance within the sacred whole. To experience this divinely granted importance, we must know why we are, and who we are.
God makes human beings for unity with God.
To briefly review the first three chapters of The Great Open Dance: Human existence is not a glorious accident; it is a divine gift. The giver is the Trinity—three persons united through love into one perfect community, pulsing with life. Lamenting our nonbeing, the Infinite overflowed itself, thereby granting us being through creation. By the grace of God, we are delivered from nothingness into fullness. And this process has not ended: Infinity overflows itself continually, for us.
We reside in the abundance of God. Everywhere we look we see divinity—in nature, in neighbor, even in the mirror. All reality is sacred; in response, we are to celebrate all reality—including our self—as sacrament. God loved us before we became aware of ourselves, knows us better than we know ourselves, and pervades us like heat pervades fire. “In God we live, move, and have our being,” Paul asserts (Acts 17:28), because God is everywhere: within and beyond, immanent and transcendent. For this reason, Augustine declares that God is “more intimately present to me than my innermost being, and higher than the highest peak of my spirit.”
To the extent that we open ourselves to this inner wellspring, to that extent we cultivate our true self. To the extent that we close ourselves to this inner wellspring, to that extent we cultivate our false self. The abundant life demands that the false self die to the true self (Mark 8:35). The first Christians called this process theosis. This Greek term has been translated as divinization, although that translation is a bit misleading since we will never become God. But we can become more Godlike—more loving, generous, and open.
The Bible makes this possibility clear. In the Gospel of John, Jesus himself declares, “As you, Abba [Father], are in me and I in you; I pray that they may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21). Peter agrees that we are invited to “become participants in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). And Paul promises, “We, who with unveiled faces reflect our God’s glory, grow brighter and brighter as we are being transformed into the image we reflect” (2 Corinthians 3:18a).
If divinization is the process of becoming more loving, then demonization is the process of becoming more hateful. Love treats the other as a blessing who deserves life, just like we do. Fear treats the other as a threat that endangers our own being. In the eye of faith, every person is a second universe who offers to challenge and enrich our own. In the eye of fear, every person is an adversary, a competitor for resources who diminishes us.
Empire doesn’t like God.
In a triumph of imperialism over mysticism, the Western Church repressed this invitation to theosis, or transformation into the image of God within us. They feared that followers would claim to be God, rather than to be unified with God. In this fearful theology, divine-human unity would threaten the status of Christ as unique, and God as transcendent.
By analogy to human affairs, an accessible divinity would threaten the status of an exalted emperor, the monarch on high who maintains social order. Therefore, according to imperial logic, the celestial ruler must be separate from the ruled just as the earthly ruler must be separate from the ruled: power must be held by objective authorities uncorrupted by emotion, personally invulnerable, politically distant, and (all too frequently) willingly violent.
In contrast to the god of empire, Jesus had preached a warm, accessible concept of God as Abba: “Father” or “Dad” (Luke 11:2–4). Astoundingly, Jesus’s church became the official religious institution of the Roman Empire, which had executed Jesus only three hundred years earlier. Unfortunately, Jesus’s nurturing divinity did not serve the religious or political needs of the imperium, which turned God into a wrathful enforcer of imperial values, and transmogrified Jesus from a loving rabbi into an unforgiving judge. Today, there is a Christian movement returning to the affectionate God preached by Rabbi Jesus. This God is our father (Mark 14:36) and our mother (Luke 15:8–10) who deeply desires our well-being.
God is affection and warmth.
Feeling insignificant, we may doubt this love and ask, with the psalmist: “When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, and the stars that you set in place—what is humanity that you should be mindful of us? Who are we that you should care for us?” (Psalm 8:3–4). But Jesus assures us of God’s intimate concern: “Aren’t five sparrows sold for a few pennies? Yet not one of them is neglected by God. In fact, even the hairs on your head are counted! Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than a whole flock of sparrows” (Luke 12:6–7).
No matter how limitless the universe, no matter how infinite the stretch of time, no matter how countless the teeming beings, God loves you—personally, infinitely, and exhaustively. Those who are parents can attest: having a second child does not dilute their love and delight in the first child.
The Krishna-worshiping tradition within Hinduism powerfully illustrates this divine delight. Their vision of salvation is to play, especially dance, with Krishna in the gardens of Vrindavan. But Krishna’s devotees need not wait or take turns. Instead, Krishna multiplies himself endlessly, that he might dance with each devotee individually, devoting his full attention—spiritual, emotional, and physical—to his partner. For Krishna worshipers, the inexhaustible God is absolutely present to every devotee: no matter how numberless the dancers, God will partner individually with each.
We are each God’s own dancing partner. Every lover wants to give to their beloved. Recognizing this truth, every lover must be willing to receive from their beloved. Love is either reciprocal or twisted. God, who invites us into divine love, blesses our self-giving and laments our self-withholding. If God is invulnerable to us, if we cannot move God to celebration or lament, then God is not love and the Bible is untrue. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 94-96)
*****
For further reading, please see:
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1991.
Charles Hartshorne. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.
Larry J. Kreitzer. “Apotheosis of the Roman Emperor.” Biblical Archaeologist 53, no. 4 (Dec. 1990).
Graham M. Schweig. Dance of Divine Love: India’s Classic Sacred Love Story; The Rasa Lila of Krishna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
March 8, 2025
Regarding the natural environment, human beings have too long acted greedily, as if nature were a resource external to us. Such an interpretation insists that human beings are separate from nature and that nature exists to serve humanity’s desires. If so, then it has no intrinsic value. Our current practices suggest an economistic ontology that reduces all things to their financial utility, rendering the world around us dead and subordinate. We see dirt, not nature.
For those of us who believe in God, to produce a theistic environmental ethic we must first generate a sound theology of nature—an interpretation of the world as it relates to the divine. This theology of nature will propose what the world is and, by way of consequence, how we should act toward it. Since God transcends nature and assigns nature its value, this cosmology is more than a natural theology—an interpretation of religion that reduces all spiritual phenomena to a material cause. This cosmology is a theology of nature—an interpretation of nature as sustained and ensouled by Abba, our Creator God, hence alive, sacred, and intrinsically valuable.
Environmental ethics were not a pressing concern when the Bible was written. The total human population probably numbered one hundred million. Wilderness still covered most of the earth. Rivers were free of industrial pollutants and landfills were uniformly biodegradable. But people were in constant danger from wild animals, disease, and starvation. The biblical environment was threatening, not threatened. For this reason, we can extract no explicit environmental ethic from the Bible. Yet we can ground a twenty-first-century environmental ethic on its theology of nature, which carries rich implications for human behavior toward the world.
First and foremost, because the universe is the body of God, and God is the soul of the universe, whatever we do to our environment, we do to God. To use another metaphor: God is the Architect, and creation is God’s cathedral, within which God dwells. We may forget this truth, but nature does not: “Turn to the animals, and let them teach you; the birds of the air will tell you the truth. Listen to the plants of the earth, and learn from them; let the fish of the sea become your teachers. Who among all these does not know that the hand of God has done this?” (Job 12 –9).
We can enjoy what we love and protect.
Certainly, nature can be enjoyed—just as it is proper to enjoy our own bodies as expressions of God, so we can enjoy nature as an expression of God. Indeed, our love of God will facilitate our enjoyment of the world. If we try to make it serve us, we will be frustrated because that is not its purpose. But if we enjoy the world in service to God then we will know true satisfaction, for both we and the world will be fulfilling our function.
Second, we must recognize that our relationship with nature is one of mutual immanence. We are in nature, and nature is in us. Exploitation implies dualism and separation, the belief that whatever is good for us must be good for nature. But our intensifying environmental crisis insists that what is good for nature is good for us, because our relationship with nature is nondual.
If we truly knew God, and God-in-nature, then we would meet our needs in a way respectful of the environment. Instead, we poison our own well: “How much longer must our land lay parched and the grass in the fields wither? No birds or animals remain in it, for its people are corrupt, saying, ‘God can’t see what we do’” (Jeremiah 12:4).
Human life is potentially rich, so rich that it might be called blessed. We have the grace-given ability to integrate God and world into one sentient, conscious experience until we can feel St. Patrick’s blessing: “God beneath you, God in front of you, God behind you, God above you, God within you.”
God and world do not compete within human experience in a zero-sum game. Instead, the most abundant life is that which perfectly combines the experience of God, self, and world. This combination does not produce a pantheistic fusion, an indistinct mass of divinity, ego, and matter. Instead, it produces a triune experience of God, self, and nature as distinguishable yet inseparable, cooperating to render life holy. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 91-92)
For further reading, please see:
Ramanuja. Vedartha Sangraha of Sri Ramanujacharya. Translated by S. S. Raghavachar. Mysore: Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, 1978.
Richard Rohr. Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer. Rev. and updated ed. New York: Crossroad, 2003.
Whatever we do to nature, we do to God and ourselves.
Whatever we do to nature, we do to God and ourselves.Regarding the natural environment, human beings have too long acted greedily, as if nature were a resource external to us. Such an interpretation insists that human beings are separate from nature and that nature exists to serve humanity’s desires. If so, then it has no intrinsic value. Our current practices suggest an economistic ontology that reduces all things to their financial utility, rendering the world around us dead and subordinate. We see dirt, not nature.
For those of us who believe in God, to produce a theistic environmental ethic we must first generate a sound theology of nature—an interpretation of the world as it relates to the divine. This theology of nature will propose what the world is and, by way of consequence, how we should act toward it. Since God transcends nature and assigns nature its value, this cosmology is more than a natural theology—an interpretation of religion that reduces all spiritual phenomena to a material cause. This cosmology is a theology of nature—an interpretation of nature as sustained and ensouled by Abba, our Creator God, hence alive, sacred, and intrinsically valuable.
Environmental ethics were not a pressing concern when the Bible was written. The total human population probably numbered one hundred million. Wilderness still covered most of the earth. Rivers were free of industrial pollutants and landfills were uniformly biodegradable. But people were in constant danger from wild animals, disease, and starvation. The biblical environment was threatening, not threatened. For this reason, we can extract no explicit environmental ethic from the Bible. Yet we can ground a twenty-first-century environmental ethic on its theology of nature, which carries rich implications for human behavior toward the world.
First and foremost, because the universe is the body of God, and God is the soul of the universe, whatever we do to our environment, we do to God. To use another metaphor: God is the Architect, and creation is God’s cathedral, within which God dwells. We may forget this truth, but nature does not: “Turn to the animals, and let them teach you; the birds of the air will tell you the truth. Listen to the plants of the earth, and learn from them; let the fish of the sea become your teachers. Who among all these does not know that the hand of God has done this?” (Job 12
–9).
We can enjoy what we love and protect.
Certainly, nature can be enjoyed—just as it is proper to enjoy our own bodies as expressions of God, so we can enjoy nature as an expression of God. Indeed, our love of God will facilitate our enjoyment of the world. If we try to make it serve us, we will be frustrated because that is not its purpose. But if we enjoy the world in service to God then we will know true satisfaction, for both we and the world will be fulfilling our function.
Second, we must recognize that our relationship with nature is one of mutual immanence. We are in nature, and nature is in us. Exploitation implies dualism and separation, the belief that whatever is good for us must be good for nature. But our intensifying environmental crisis insists that what is good for nature is good for us, because our relationship with nature is nondual.
If we truly knew God, and God-in-nature, then we would meet our needs in a way respectful of the environment. Instead, we poison our own well: “How much longer must our land lay parched and the grass in the fields wither? No birds or animals remain in it, for its people are corrupt, saying, ‘God can’t see what we do’” (Jeremiah 12:4).
Human life is potentially rich, so rich that it might be called blessed. We have the grace-given ability to integrate God and world into one sentient, conscious experience until we can feel St. Patrick’s blessing: “God beneath you, God in front of you, God behind you, God above you, God within you.”
God and world do not compete within human experience in a zero-sum game. Instead, the most abundant life is that which perfectly combines the experience of God, self, and world. This combination does not produce a pantheistic fusion, an indistinct mass of divinity, ego, and matter. Instead, it produces a triune experience of God, self, and nature as distinguishable yet inseparable, cooperating to render life holy. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 91-92)
For further reading, please see:
Ramanuja. Vedartha Sangraha of Sri Ramanujacharya. Translated by S. S. Raghavachar. Mysore: Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, 1978.
Richard Rohr. Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer. Rev. and updated ed. New York: Crossroad, 2003.
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Name: Jon Paul SydnorGender: Male
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts
Home country: USA
Current location: Boston
Member since: Wed Oct 2, 2024, 02:02 PM
Number of posts: 125