February 25, 2026

God Rejects Crucifixion Through Resurrection: Let us become resurrection to one another

God’s absolute rejection of the crucifixion expresses itself in the resurrection. “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” declares Jesus (John 15:13). In this declaration, Jesus associates love with death because Jesus well knows that love is perilous.

Hatred is safer than love, despair is safer than hope, and fear is safer than faith; hence their attractiveness. But Jesus does not call us to safety; Jesus calls us to life. Life is love in the shadow of death, and love in the shadow of death is love that defeats death. For this reason we can find God everywhere, even in “thick darkness” (Exodus 20:21), even in the tomb.

The symbol of love defeating death is the resurrection. Jesus did not rise from the dead; Jesus was raised from the dead by Trinitarian love, by the agapic communion of three persons. His resurrection was not the act of an individual; it was an act of community. It was communion celebrating itself and declaring victory over division.

To the extent that the “hero” is an individual who acts alone, without need of assistance, Christ is no hero. Were he such, then he would contribute to the forces of individualization and separation. But as the perfectly loving person who was crucified, entombed, and resurrected, he becomes Savior, opening us to the power of sacred fellowship, the holy place where we will find healing.

The power of God triumphs by means of the power of God, not by means of the power of this world. The Romans who crucified Jesus believed in the power of this world, which is the power of godless violence. Throughout the empire, many awaited the messiah, or “anointed one.” Previous recipients of this exalted title were Aaron, the high priest of Israel (Sirach 45:15); Saul, the first king of Israel (1 Samuel 24:10); and Cyrus, the Persian emperor who allowed the Jews to rebuild their temple (Isaiah 45:1). Given this pedigree, people naturally expected wealth, power, and conquest of their savior. They wanted a messiah who trafficked in absolutes, who would establish absolute dominion, thereby resolving all the ambiguities of history. They got no such magnificence. Instead, they got an authentic revelation of God as love, the image of all-forgiving meekness who prays for enemies and tormentors. They got reconciliation between persons, which is reconciliation with God.

God makes a universe that makes itself, that evolves from simplicity to complexity, toward God. Likewise, God makes persons who make themselves. We have the freedom to live plumb with the divinely sustained cosmos or against it. When choosing greed, hatred, and power over generosity, love, and community, we choose against God. The crucifixion symbolizes our freedom to make this choice, a freedom that makes our choice for God meaningful. Through the cross, inhumanity believed that it could defeat humanity. But the Spirit of the universe could not be defeated by the spirit against the universe. Hatred cannot defeat love, and division cannot defeat communion. The will of the godless cannot override the will of God, which is to life in its fullness.

In a context in which suffering is recognized as a universal human constant, the cross is an assurance. Jesus is God among the suffering; hence, Jesus is God among us. Through the divine identification with our condition, we receive assurance that God is with us in our affliction, denying our affliction the final word. God grants finality instead to Jesus, the Word of God, the Beginning from which all things come and the End for which all things yearn. Kent Annan writes that, if we trust the Christian story, “We don’t have to minimize either suffering or uncertainty. Our love for truth can help protect us from ourselves and from worshiping an untrue god that can’t survive the trials of this world. Let our faith too be nailed regularly to the cross of this world. Any faith that dies there was dead to begin with. What is resurrected is Life.”

Resurrection to life leaves us among the tensions of experience. Jesus was resurrected to us, not away from us. Resurrection is into embodied life, not a spiritual heaven. We can trust that, having tasted death, Jesus savored life all the more. He arose to hear the sounds of nature, smell life in the soil, and feel the warmth of the sun on his face. All these sensations must have felt wonderfully extravagant after three days in the tomb. He could once again feel the Infinite Creative Benevolence, not as a mountaintop revelation, but in the moment-by-moment experience of everyday life.

Resurrection is transformation. It is not just a historical event that we remember; it is an eternal truth that we participate in. The Holy Spirit, Sophia, now invites us to become resurrection to one another. We are to risk entry into one another’s lives, as Jesus entered our world. We are to walk in one another’s troubles, as Jesus walked in ours. And we are to raise each other up, as God raised Jesus. Such love is laborious, but labor is the height of creativity, and creative love fulfills the image of God within us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 202–205)

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For further reading, please see:

Annan, Kent. After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011.

Bulgakov, Sergeĭ Nikolaevich. Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions for the Church Year. Translated by Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

Madigan, Kevin J., and Jon D. Levenson. Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

February 17, 2026

The Crucifixion was a Crime: In an age of performative cruelty, we can't see Roman brutality as salvific

The crucifixion reveals God’s abhorrence of human-induced suffering. Americans live in an age of performative cruelty. Windows are smashed by government officials, immigrants are locked in filthy detention centers, children are separated from their parents, peaceful protestors are sprayed with pepper gas, lawful observers are thrown to the ground and arrested—or killed.

Oddly, much of this performative cruelty is supported by evangelicals who claim salvation through their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Even as images of violent ICE agents spread throughout the media, support for Trump’s deportation policy remains strong. But why do evangelicals celebrate performative cruelty when Jesus was the victim of performative cruelty? Why doesn’t the brutalization of Jesus by the Roman Empire give evangelicals an allergy to governmental brutality?

The answer lies in bad theology. The word “salvation” is related to the word “salve,” a healing balm for a wound. For too long, Western Christianity has interpreted the death-by-torture of Jesus as salvific: “Jesus was crucified as a substitute for our sins, taking our punishment on himself, granting us eternal life with God.” But the loving God preached by Christ would never choose murderous violence as the means to reconciliation. Brutality doesn’t heal, brutality can’t heal, and brutality hasn’t healed. The crucifixion is the wound. The resurrection is the balm.

Celebrating violence helps no one. The depths of life are unavoidable, and shallow answers to deep questions are like dead weight to a swimmer. Violent atonement theories are shallow answers. As the archetype of useless suffering, the cross speaks to us, but only as a protest against violence, against all the senseless suffering that we inflict on one another.

For this reason, placing the locus of salvation in the violence of crucifixion makes no sense. The disciples had already experienced divine empowerment simply from being in the presence of Jesus and sharing his life. Through this religious invigoration, they recognized Jesus as the Messiah (Mark 8:29), the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16), and the Savior of the world (John 4:42). Jesus himself implies that his death is not necessary for redemption: When Zacchaeus the tax collector commits to a new life of honesty, the not-yet-crucified Jesus declares, “Today salvation has come to this house!” (Luke 19 ).

No one in the fledgling Jesus community wanted or needed him to die. Then why did Jesus die? As mentioned above, the purpose of the incarnation is to express divine solidarity with life across the entire spectrum of joy and suffering. Jesus reveals the empathic participation of God within the life-giving yet sometimes brutal contrasts that characterize the universe. Abba, our Father and Mother, intends the adversities of embodied life to unite us in their overcoming. Such overcoming grants our lives meaning and consequence.

The Holy Spirit Sophia is our guide in this process, but instead of listening to her, we have divided ourselves against one another in our infinite thirst for finite resources. Despite our choice for division, which is very much a rejection of Sophia’s guidance, Christ incarnated as Jesus, subjecting himself to moral evil as well as natural challenge. He reveals the divine purpose for us in the face of difficulty: alliance, helpfulness, generosity, courage, rationality, perseverance, etc.

He also provides ethical correction to dispense with our self-induced misery. His revelation repudiates moral evil, which acquires power through physical, social, and intellectual violence. In response, moral evil murdered Jesus on the cross.

The cross is the opposite of God. There, moral evil defeated divine love—briefly. There, the Son of God experienced God-forsakenness, as Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Divinity itself descended into protest atheism, the lament that there is too much suffering in the world for it to have been the design of a good God. Long before Rome perfected crucifixion, the psalmist had praised God: “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in Death, you’re already there” (Psalm 139:8). Jesus on the cross is the historical expression of the psalmist’s insight into faith: God is with us even in the atheism caused by affliction. God is not just spiritually omnipresent; God is experientially omnipresent. God is empathically, emphatically everywhere.

Propitiatory violence has always offended God. The presence of God in the God-forsakenness of the cross reveals the suffering of God in every useless sacrifice throughout history. Jesus is, in the words of John the Revelator, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8 KJV). Priests sacrificed animals to appease an angry god, centurions crucified rebels to appease a distant emperor, and overseers flogged serfs to appease a cruel lord. Rather than breaking the chain, Christian theologians developed violent atonement theories that made Abba the Sacrificer and Jesus the Sacrifice.

Jesus himself condemns religious violence as irreligious: “The hour is coming when anyone who kills you will claim to be serving God. They will do these things because they know neither Abba God nor me” (John 16:2b–3). Jesus is the power inverter, the murdered scapegoat who declares the violence of ritual sacrifice unholy. He inverts the violent social order, rejecting revenge for reconciliation and purity for embrace. He inverts the violent economic order, rejecting accumulation for generosity and stratification for equality. He inverts the violent religious order, rejecting respectability for justice and rigorism for kindness. In the words of René Girard, “The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the nonviolent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence.”

Violence and oppression are sinful. If “Jesus died for sinners,” then what does his death do for those who are sinned against? If Jesus dies for the sins of the oppressors, then how does he die for the sufferings of the oppressed? In truth, Jesus died for the oppressed, as the oppressed, demanding an end to oppression on the part of all oppressors.

The failure of Christian theology to make this point has allowed Christians to gleefully oppress. James Cone points out that racist “Christians” in twentieth-century America could hang Blacks from lynching trees while worshipping Jesus on the cross, without irony.

If the story of Jesus ended with the crucifixion, then the cosmos would be eternal night. The cynics who “know how the world works” would be right: cruelty would be more useful than kindness and power more useful than love. If Roman nails had the last word, then hope would be a lie and faith would be foolish. Sacred meaning would drain out of the universe to be replaced by calculated opportunism. We could no longer gaze upon the beauty of God. We would instead be condemned to casting furtive, fearful glances over our shoulder. Yet this cursed situation did not arise because, by the power of God, crucifixion yields to resurrection, despair to hope, and hatred to love. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 199-201)

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For further reading, please see:

Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011.

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: Harper, 1994.

Girard, René. Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.

February 10, 2026

Jesus didn't die for your sins: God isn't violent, so violent atonement theories are wrong

God is not bloodthirsty. Too many people have been alienated from Christ by Christian theology. One of the most alienating doctrines is penal substitutionary atonement theory, the belief that Jesus died as a propitiatory sacrifice for our sins, having taken our sinfulness onto himself to save us from eternal damnation. A close relative is satisfaction theory, Anselm’s belief that, since finite humankind has sinned against an infinite God and cannot repay its infinite debt, God sent Jesus as an infinite, divine-human substitute to satisfy the divine honor and expiate our guilt for us, thereby restoring right relationship.

Despite Jesus’s own prophetic privileging of social justice over propitiatory sacrifice, these “atonement theories” came to dominance in the Western Church. According to these legalistic theologies, God is one lawgiver giving one law, promising one reward (heaven) or one punishment (hell). Because no one follows that law perfectly, all are deserving of hell. But Jesus frees us from that fate by taking our punishment onto himself, balancing the scales of infinite justice, thereby granting us entrance into heaven.

Numerous criticisms of these doctrines have been made over the centuries. Salvation is largely pushed into the afterlife, affecting this life primarily by anticipation. Since all human conduct is reprobate, selfish, and displeasing to God, ethics becomes a theoretical exercise, at least with regard to the God-human relationship. The model of divine justice is retributive, demanding an eye for an eye, a demand that Jesus rejected (Matthew 5:38-39). And it rejects any possibility of spontaneous, unconditional forgiveness—or grace.

Jesus denies that Abba is an agent of legalistic wrath. The concept of God as a vengeful autocrat who can be appeased only through death by torture does not cohere with Jesus’s revelation of Abba as a loving Parent. Loving parents are not inflexible disciplinarians, and skillful parents frequently forgo their wayward children’s punishment and offer mercy instead.

Nor do good parents resort to violence. Our horrific cruelty to one another over the millennia has pained God. One more act of horrific cruelty, the crucifixion, did not end that pain; it just exacerbated it. Jesus rejects any “underlying image of God as an angry, bloodthirsty, violent, and sadistic father, reflecting the very worst kind of male behavior,” writes Elizabeth Johnson. The God of Jesus could not be the god of any violent atonement theory, because the teachings of Jesus are incompatible with redemption through violence. Instead, the ethics of Jesus propel humankind beyond its addiction to domination through violence.

Why can’t God just forgive us outright? Any schoolchild, upon learning that God needed Jesus’s death to be appeased, will naturally ask why God didn’t just forgive us outright, without demanding the brutal death of an innocent man. Frequently, the answer will have something to do with Adam and Eve’s “original sin,” which separated humankind from God and needed reparation.

But Jesus had never heard of “original sin,” nor did his Jewish tradition interpret Adam and Eve’s story the same way Augustine would four hundred years later. Judaism did not then (and does not now) teach that all humans inherit the guilt of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and therefore need collective forgiveness. Rather than collective guilt, Judaism taught and teaches that each individual is responsible for their own actions and can resist their evil inclinations, with great difficulty, thereby choosing the good.

Anselm’s substitutionary atonement theory, aka “satisfaction theory,” in which Jesus substitutes himself for the punishment due to us, is based on the medieval feudal system in which it arose. The lord of an estate was the source of order, protection, and development for all residents, so the preservation of the lord’s honor—the source of his authority—was paramount. Any lord who had been offended by a serf had to punish that offense, for the good of all. Without that honor preserved, the social order would descend into chaos and everyone would suffer. In this way of thinking, Jesus is the lord’s son who takes the serfs’ offenses onto himself, thereby preserving the honor of the lord, the order of the estate, and the lives of the serfs.

The theory has a certain attractiveness as it renders the crucifixion an action by God for us, but it is insufficient to the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus preaches repentance so that people will enter into loving community. He wants them to change: to forgive, reconcile, include, be generous, be kind, be humble. In Anselm’s theory, the serfs do nothing. Theoretically, they watch the exchange, feel gratitude, and are transformed by that gratitude. But they aren’t characters in the story. They’re just spectators. To Jesus, his audience were active participants in an unfolding story, and he invited them to decide what role they would play in that story.

Anselm’s theory also prioritizes justice over mercy, but Jesus teaches: “Blessed are those who show mercy to others, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5 ). In the story of the prodigal son, Jesus reveals the unconditional forgiveness of God for the wayward child. For Jesus, God is mercy without reference to justice. But according to Anselm’s theory, any lord would feel compelled to demand expiation from an offending serf. Indeed, for the lord to demand expiation—to punish through violence— would make that lord like unto God.

Jesus rejects violence. Jesus did not punish through violence. He didn’t stone women. He kept them from being stoned (John 8:1-11).

Then, Jesus became the innocent victim of violence, which raises another objection to these violent atonement theories. One person should not be punished for the crime of another. Today, this is a universal principle of law that nearly every society sees as reasonable. God, being merciful, just, and rational, could not violate this principle. The use of a whipping boy could never enter the mind of God, because any such use would be abusive.

The whipping boys of legend were playmates of young princes who would be punished in the princes’ stead. This punishment conformed to Anselm’s theory of transformation through spectatorship: theoretically, the prince would feel bad that his friend was being punished and reform his behavior. In reality, the system allowed royals to act with impunity, knowing that someone else would bear the consequences of their actions. For the whipping boys (the historical existence of which is debated), there was neither mercy nor justice.

Substitutionary atonement theories are insufficiently healing. “Jesus Christ died for your sins” is the oft-repeated phrase that summarizes violent atonement theories. Alas, this declaration doesn’t stand up to the stress test of pastoral ministry. It doesn’t help pastors care for parishioners or parishioners care for each other.

For example, a couple finally gets pregnant after years of trying. Five months into the pregnancy, they discover that the fetus’s kidneys are developing outside its body. The condition is inoperable and the fetus is terminal, so they have to undergo a dilation and extraction procedure. Should the pastor reassure them, “Jesus Christ died for your sins”?

A woman was sexually abused by her father and brothers while she was growing up. Did Jesus Christ die for her sins? Did Jesus Christ die for their sins? What does that statement even do?

A child is diagnosed with schizophrenia. A spouse of sixty years develops Alzheimer's. A soldier returns with PTSD. True stories, all. To say “Jesus died for your sins” is an act of avoidance that negates Jesus’s message and ministry. It overlooks his teachings, paints Abba as cruel and vindictive, renders the incarnation naught but a means to crucifixion, makes no reference to the resurrection, and relegates humankind to mere spectatorship.

Sacrificial atonement theories render us passive. That is, I fear, the point. Jesus preaches a new social order, a universalism and egalitarianism that heartened the humble and threatened the proud. That preaching got him crucified. Then, as a new religion based on Christ arose in the Roman Empire, his teachings got crucified as well. Violent and politically mute atonement theories were substituted for the transformative life and message of the Christ. The church declared the social implications of the gospel dead and buried, laid them in the tomb, and rolled a rock in front of the entrance. But the rock wouldn’t stay, and the teachings would be resurrected. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 196-199)

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For further reading, please see:

Aulén, Gustaf. Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement. Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2003.

Foster, Jonathan. Theology of Consent: Mimetic Theory in an Open and Relational Universe. California: Verde Group, 2022.

Johnson, Elizabeth A. Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018.

February 1, 2026

Christ endorses love over against violence. So must Christians, especially in America today.

Who are we? In 21st century America, we debate whether we are strongest as a multiethnic or White country, as a multireligious or Christian country, as an internationalist or militaristic country. Similar debates occurred centuries ago, and Jesus took sides.

In the first century, Jews debated the relative importance of obeying religious law and pursuing divine justice. Generally, priests emphasized the former and prophets emphasized the latter. One rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, explicitly identified with those prophets who demanded a more compassionate society that included all and excluded none, that prioritized flexible love over inflexible legalism.

His mother may have had something to do with this, since she herself seemed to prefer the God of the prophets to the God of the hierarchs. Upon learning that she would bear the Christ child, Mary offers the first meditation on the meaning of the Christ, making her the first Christian theologian. In so doing, Mary reiterates Abba’s promise to correct the cruel stratifications of society:



According to Mary, God actively rejects distorted values that deem persons to be worth more than or less than others, a distortion that God never intended for one human family.

In keeping with Mary’s prophecy, Jesus explicitly identifies himself with the prophetic lineage when he begins his ministry. Anticipating his intense focus on the universal, unconditional love of God for all, especially those unloved by society, he quotes Isaiah 61, which declares good news to the poor and release to the captives.

Jesus rejects ritual violence. This endorsement of love and justice continues throughout Jesus’s ministry. What Jesus did not endorse was the ritual slaughter of anything or anyone to placate a punitive God. In fact, Jesus explicitly rejects ritual violence, demanding sacramental mercy instead.

When Jesus is criticized for dining with tax collectors and sinners, he instructs his critics: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Matthew 9 –13; see also Matthew 12 ). Here, he is quoting another Hebrew prophet of justice, Hosea. Writing in the voice of God, Hosea had declared, “For I desire kindness toward others, not sacrifice; acknowledgement of God, not burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).

When an expert in Jewish law asks Jesus which commandment is the most important, Jesus points to love of God and love of neighbor. The lawyer approves of Jesus’s emphasis on love, declaring, “This is much more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices,” to which Jesus replies, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (Mark 12:28–43a).

Elsewhere, Jesus condemns those who legalistically give a tenth of their income to the temple but neglect justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23). And Hebrews has Jesus quote Psalm 40: “You [YHWH, Abba] who wanted no sacrifice or oblation prepared a body for me, in burnt offerings or sacrifices for sin you took no pleasure” (Hebrews 10:5–6; Psalm 40:6).

Jesus rejects substitutionary atonement theory. Jesus’s rejection of propitiatory sacrifice (sacrifice that appeases the divine wrath against sin), and his endorsement of sacramental mercy, must determine our interpretation of his crucifixion. Jesus did not die to satisfy the fury of an angry God against us. Jesus died because he revealed the love of a forgiving God for us. When he went to Jerusalem with the disciples, he attempted to worship in the temple but never made it past the courtyard, so enraged was he by the commerce taking place. He cleansed the temple, driving out the merchants, overturning the tables of the money changers, and chasing away those selling sacrificial animals (Mark 11:15–18).

Because temple commerce was so important to the Jerusalem economy, Jesus’s actions enraged the power elite to the point of murder. When evening came, he and the disciples left Jerusalem. I wonder if that night, realizing how much he had upset a cruel hierarchy, realizing that their vengeance was at hand, Jesus said to his disciples (and here I’m paraphrasing): “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. . . . And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Martin Luther King was murdered the day after giving that speech. He was murdered for attempting to repair relations between Blacks and Whites, and between the rich and the poor, to the benefit of all.

Two thousand years earlier MLK’s moral exemplar, Jesus, had attempted to repair relations through his teaching and actions, at the cost of his life. Reunifying the separated will bring great joy, great suffering, and great danger. Christ is love that unifies souls in separation. Therefore, Christ is danger. Those souls have grown accustomed to that separation. They are miserable but used to it. The terrain is ugly but they have it mapped, and they don’t want to go anywhere new. They don’t want a guide who speaks to them of new lands.

Can we even be made well? Monica Coleman asks, “Do you want to be made well? I like this question for all that’s behind it. The healers are asking: Are you willing to have a new experience? You know sickness, but you don’t know wellness. You’ve learned how to manage what you do know. You know it like the back of your hand.”

Healing God, help us replace our familiar misery with unfamiliar joy. Give us that courage. Amen. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 194-196)

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For further reading, please see:

Coleman, Monica A. Not Alone: Reflections on Faith and Depression. New York: Inner Prizes Incorporated, 2012.

Foster, Jonathan. Theology of Consent: Mimetic Theory in an Open and Relational Universe. Idaho: Sacrasage, 2022.

King, Martin Luther Jr. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Clayborne Carson. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024.

January 27, 2026

Love will sacrifice for justice: we are creating the beloved community

The love of Jesus reveals the love of God as active. Love is much more than a feeling or a thing—love is something you do (1 John 3:16–18). To participate in love is to participate in God; to refuse to participate in love is to refuse to participate in God.

Too often, faced with exploitation, oppression, and injustice—with an insufficiently loving and unjust society—we do nothing. We adopt a stance of apathy to protect ourselves from their suffering while we continue to profit from their suffering through cheap food, cheap products, and cheap services.

Faith understands the hungry to be our family whom we allow to starve. It also recognizes that, by God’s own choice, God has no other hands than ours. But becoming the hands of God will not grant us the kind of life we tend to fantasize about, a life of ease, recognition, and wealth. Instead, to become the hands of God involves sacrifice. This sacrifice is not to God, in order to placate the divine wrath. This sacrifice is for God, in order to create a more compassionate world and increase the divine joy. To use more technical language, the sacrifice that God values is not propitiatory—it does not attempt to appease God or atone for sin. Instead, the sacrifice is creative—it participates in God by repairing society, sometimes at great personal risk. To challenge injustice is to pick up the cross.

Creative suffering that overcomes injustice reduces the needless suffering caused by injustice. One example of unjust, needless suffering is the countless animals that have been killed over the millennia as sacrifices to appease wrathful deities. Like most early religions, ancient Judaism practiced animal sacrifice to purify the nation of its sins, thus making atonement with God:



Our modern minds may have several reactions to this passage that ancient minds would not. First, we may note that neither the goat that was killed nor the goat that was driven into the wilderness had done anything morally wrong, they being goats. Like the legendary whipping boys of medieval Europe, they bore the sins of another, though innocent themselves.

The scapegoating ritual reiterates one of Adam and Eve’s first abuses of their moral freedom: blame externalization. When Abba asks why they are clothed and if they had eaten fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. This instinct to assign responsibility for our own transgressions to others continues in the religiously sanctioned ritual slaughter of animals. Prior to the prescription of ritual slaughter, Abba had already revealed themselves to the Israelites as merciful and forgiving: “I AM! I am God, YHWH, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and faithfulness; faithful to the thousandth generation, forgiving injustice, rebellion, and sin” (Exodus 34:6–7a).

Today, one wonders why the ritualists ever thought that a God who identifies as merciful and forgiving would be propitiated by the slaughter of the innocent.

We may also wonder why the ritualists thought that God needed sacrifice, or any kind of transactional relationship with humanity, as if God had an empty belly that only priests could fill. But this idea of exchange between humanity and divinity, of a mutual relationship based on mutual need, permeated the ancient world. During sacrifices in Roman religion, the priest would pray, Do ut des, or “I give so that you may give.” The sponsor of the sacrifice did not give out of gratitude or generosity; the sponsor of the sacrifice gave to get. The ritual presumed that the gods would materially benefit from the sacrifice and respond with material benefits to the sponsor of the sacrifice. The ritual presumed a divine-human ledger sheet.

God is an overflowing fountain of life, not a bartering merchant. The Hebrew psalmists recognized the inadequacy of such a petty, transactional god and encouraged the practice of gratitude instead of propitiatory sacrifice. Writing in the voice of God, Psalm 50 declares: “I don’t need oxen from your stall, or goats from your folds, since every beast of the forest is mine already; I have cattle on a thousand hills! . . . Do I eat the flesh of oxen, or drink the blood of goats? Offer me a sacrifice of thanksgiving instead, and fulfill the vow you make to me!” (Psalm 50 –10, 13–14)

The uselessness of sacrificial animals’ suffering is not an insight of the modern animal rights movement. Anyone with an adequate concept of God as beyond neediness would see the needlessness of ritualized animal slaughter, as did Isaiah thousands of years ago: “Slaughtering an ox is like murdering a person; sacrificing a lamb is like breaking a dog’s neck” (Isaiah 66:3).

Apparently, God rejects human sacrifice as well as animal sacrifice. The progenitor of the Israelites, Abraham, had come within a hair’s breadth of sacrificing his son, Isaac, to YHWH. This story reassured the Israelites that they were as devoted to YHWH as their religious neighbors were to Molech and Baal, even though their religious neighbors (according to Hebrew testimony) offered human sacrifices. The Israelites, on the other hand, had been forbidden from offering human sacrifices to YHWH (see Deuteronomy 12:31; Leviticus 18:21; etc.)

Nevertheless, it appears that, overawed by the ritual devotion of human sacrifice, some Israelites succumbed to temptation and practiced it. The prophets and historians of Judaism roundly condemn these actions. Ezekiel laments, writing in the voice of God, “You slaughtered my children and sacrificed them to the idols” (Ezekiel 16:21). Jeremiah repeatedly condemns the Israelites for child sacrifice. Writing in the voice of God, three times he laments their backsliding into an abomination which God did not command or decree, a crime so foul it could never have entered the divine mind (Jeremiah 7:31; 19:5; 32:35). According to the biblical historians, both Ahaz and Manasseh, kings of Judah, sacrificed their sons in the fire and were punished by YHWH for doing so (2 Kings 16:1–4; 21:1–6; see also 1 Samuel 15:22–23). All agree that human sinfulness is not reduced by inflicting useless suffering; it is increased.

Violence inspired by religion is unholy. Love inspired by religion is holy. The sacrifice that pleases God is the creative sacrifice that moves history toward the Beloved Community. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 191-194)

For further reading, please see:

Mattson, Stephen. On Love and Mercy: A Social Justice Devotional. Harrisonburg, Virginia: MennoMedia, 2021.

Soelle, Dorothee. The Inward Road and the Way Back. Translated by David L. Scheidt. 1979. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003.

Soelle, Dorothee. The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001.

January 18, 2026

The love of God includes all and excludes none. So teaches Jesus.

The unifying love of God strengthens us. God has chosen to be a “plenitude of longing love,” writes Sarah Coakley, who invites us into “full and ecstatic participation in the divine, Trinitarian life.” Life arises when we love God back and participate in the archetypal Love of which all worldly love is an expression. Paul prays that:


To be filled with the fullness of God is to live according to the intention of Abba, as exemplified by Jesus and inspired by Sophia. Together, the Trinitarian persons elevate us out of our selves into their selves.

Our parishioner Nicole Lawless had a very powerful experience of this elevation. Struggling as an adolescent with a potentially lethal illness, she received direct, concrete intervention from God:


The psalms refer to God as “our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble” (Psalm 46:1). For Nicole, this passage offers a concrete description of God’s activity, not an abstract idea about the divine nature. God will help us to do what we can’t.

Openness to divine assistance does not imply weakness. Jesus, the Child of God, had a very strong sense of self that he placed in service of others. The authorities feared him because he was strong, not because he was weak. Even more dangerously, he shared his strength with others. The powerful, sensing an increase in power among the powerless, responded with violence. They do the same today because tyrants always want us to have a weak sense of self. Unsure people are easily controlled, while confident people can disrupt the tyrants’ systems of privilege.

Healthy self-love is distinct from pathological self-love because healthy self-love opens us up to the other—divine or human—while pathological self-love closes us off. The true self wants to live and give life, and it does so by giving and receiving love: “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our siblings; if we refuse to love we are still dead,” writes John (1 John 3:14).

Too often we fear the wrong death. We fear the death of the old self for the new because we are the old self, and we are attached to ourselves as we are. To avoid transformation, we restrict ourselves to a love that we can manage. We are like caterpillars that are perfectly comfortable with their familiar tree branch and resolve never to fly.

Who, beyond ourselves, does God invite us to love? An expert in the Jewish law poses this question to Jesus:



The expert in the law wants Jesus to provide him with a categorical grid, a map of humanity that will tell him who is an ally and who is an enemy, who is in and who is out. Jesus, the preacher of the cosmic Creator who loves all their children, turns the question on its head. For the protagonist of the story, he selects a despised Samaritan, a resident of Judaea to whom many in his audience would have denied the status of neighbor, yet who acts neighborly. The villains of the story are the indifferent priest and Levite who are too rich, important, and busy to dirty their hands helping the unfortunate man.

Jesus’s atypical cast of characters obliterates the questioner’s preexisting categorical grid and denies him the usual markers of ethnicity, religion, and social status by which to determine human value. But Jesus isn’t simply trying to transform the man’s categorical grid. Jesus is trying to transform the man himself by inviting him into the mind of the universal Parent who deems all humanity their children, who wants us to treat one another, not just as neighbors, but as family. John sums up the teaching rather bluntly: “If you say you love God but hate your sibling, you are a liar. For you cannot love God, whom you have not seen, if you hate your neighbor, whom you have seen. If we love God, we should love our siblings as well. We have this commandment from God” (1 John 4:20–21).

As the symbol of God, Jesus loves those whom society deems unlovable, thereby restoring the unloved to society. At the same time, he frees society from its anxiety-producing stratifications and exclusions. In a world that declared some people pure and others contaminated, Jesus heals through touch (John 9:2–3; Matthew 8:1–3), defying contamination to reveal mercy. In so doing, he erases the false boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that have no place in the Vision of God, and he places everyone at the center of a new commonwealth that has no boundaries.

To be clear: in his healing, Jesus is not condemning disability. Jesus is condemning our rejection of the disabled. Jesus heals, not to show that these persons should be accepted now, but to show that their exclusion was always wrong. First and foremost, it is the self-righteous judgmentalism of the abled that Jesus is treating in these stories. God is love for all, as they are—not as we demand that they be. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 188-191)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Voss Roberts, Michelle. Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017.

January 7, 2026

Your emotions are gifts from God: they don't make life easy, but they do make life meaningful

The play of contrasts generates meaning. In the Genesis narrative, Eve and Adam are expelled from Eden. But nowhere does the Bible suggest that our salvation lies in a return to Eden. The biblical narrative begins in a garden (Eden, in Genesis) but ends in a city (the New Jerusalem, in Revelation). We cannot become innocents again. We cannot go back.

Our eventual wholeness must place us beyond our starting point, beyond naivete. Just as no child in the womb can anticipate what life will be like outside the womb, Adam and Eve could not anticipate what life would be like outside Eden. In all probability, they feared the agony but could not anticipate the ecstasy.

God places us within the play of contrasts, such as agony and ecstasy, to grant us significance. We live in a world of joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, activity and exhaustion, all of which conspire for our benefit. Beings and events reveal their fullness only in relation to their opposite which, through its opposition, brings them to completion. Hence, they are not opposites; they are mutually amplifying contrasts. The gnostic Gospel of Philip declares: “Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are siblings of one another. They are inseparable.”

The Gospel asserts that reality, like God, is dialectical—giving, receiving, changing, growing. Therefore, we should be unsurprised by our own movement through contrasts. God creates both the light and the darkness (Genesis 1:1–5), that the light might shine in the darkness (John 1:5), because there it shines most brightly. Thus, the meeting places of contrasts are not borders; they are areas of exchange. Each contrast flows into and out of the other, heightening one another’s being.

Participation in this process of openness and exchange makes us larger, freer, and more compassionate, but compassion is not easy. At some point, exhausted by the flux of life and doubtful of the good God, we will all join in Job’s lament: “Who continues to bruise someone when they’re broken and screaming for help? In the past didn’t I weep for the troubled? Didn’t I grieve for the oppressed? But when I expected good, evil came; when I waited for the light, darkness came” (Job 30:24–26).

Love in a dangerous universe requires courage. To be in deep relationship with someone is to be vulnerable, not just to that person, but to all that might happen to them. For this reason, many retreat from dangerous relation into safer isolation, where the sufferings of others cannot reach them. Such isolation need not be social; it may very well be emotional and moral, but it always protects us from enduring another’s pain.

Given the safety of isolation, why counsel compassion in a suffering world? Prudence suggests that compassion is too costly. But mysteriously, compassion grants us more joy, more hope, and more peace. These blessings seem to arise from relationality itself, from our human love which serves as a conduit of divine love. Compared with the safety of isolation, the risk of love now seems alive.

I myself have resisted love. When our first child, Josiah, was born, it was a thrill to watch him develop. His first smile, his first giggle, his lurching attempts to crawl, his drunken stumbling as he learned how to walk, the music as he exclaimed “Dada!” or “Mama!” were all gifts. Yet what I found was that, as Josiah grew, I began to love him more than I had anticipated. I began to experience a terrifying tenderness, and that scared me, because Josiah is mortal. I had no God-given assurance that everything in my life and in my children’s lives would pan out the way I wanted it to. As my love for Josiah grew, my fear grew along with it. What if something went wrong? What if there was a car accident?

We mute the song of the universe with fearful, cautious earplugs. We must risk grief to become alive.

My own advocacy of relationality and vulnerability rightfully opens me to criticisms of socioeconomic privilege. My own vulnerability is much less dangerous than the vulnerability of workers in the developing world, women in misogynistic societies, sexual minorities under fundamentalist regimes, and ethnic minorities under nationalist governments. It might be arrogant to prescribe vulnerability from my safe suburban home.

To address this legitimate concern, I will turn to the assistance of Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a novel about American Blacks living during the time of slavery. As such, it grants us a literary example of human openness under conditions of horrific suffering. In the novel, two characters disagree about the extent to which a human being should love in a racist, violent world. The maternal character, Sethe, is willing to risk love, while her lover, Paul D, recoils from such vulnerability: “Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.”

Paul D, understandably, wants to protect his self from the cruelties of White enslavers. To protect his self, he must not love too much. The invulnerability that he pursues leaves him with enough self to survive loss, even the horrible losses experienced by Blacks in mid-nineteenth-century America.

But Sethe disagrees; she must love: “That’s the way it is, Paul D. I can’t explain it to you no better than that, but that’s the way it is. If I have to choose—well, it’s not even a choice.” Why would Sethe, placed in a horribly dangerous situation, assent to love others who are subject to the very same danger? Because she has discovered that love cannot be separated from life without loss of life. In Sethe’s condition, her only power is the superabundant love that prudence demands she resist. She realizes that this love, in this situation, will necessitate her suffering. Yet she chooses it as an expression of her passion for life. The enslavers may steal her body, her sex, and her labor, and they may try to steal her children, but they cannot steal her love.

Sethe exemplifies the dangerous love that lies at the heart of God. If God is three persons united into one community through love, if God is Trinity, then vulnerability belongs to God. Therefore, God cannot be apathetic, unfeeling, or unchanging. Instead, God is passionate and emotional. To correct millennia of theological discourse about the unfeeling God, we now need theology that extols the openness of God to the world in all its glory and suffering. God no longer transcends human emotionality. Instead, God is the depth and source of human emotionality. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 185-188)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2016.

Isenberg, Wesley W., translator. “Gospel of Philip.” In The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James M. Robinson, 131–51. New York, Harper & Row, 1977.

Kasher, Asa and Diller, Jeanine. Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1998.

December 26, 2025

Eve didn't cause the Fall. Eve caused the Rise.

Sin is separation; salvation is reunion. If love unifies, then sin separates. Instead of reaching out to others, we coil into ourselves. We do this as individuals, sacrificing the common good to our petty selfishness. We do it as groups, looking for that negative reference group that our in-group can organize itself against.

Such separation defies the intention of God, who has joined all things together. All reality is nondual, united in agape. Separation itself—separation from the environment so that we can exploit it, separation from our neighbors so that we can use them, separation from other religions so that we can condemn them—separation itself is sin, a tear in the fabric of being that demands mending.

Sin alienates us from one another, then helps us come to terms with that alienation through the ruse of pride. Pride interprets the self as separate from and higher than others. In a bid to subvert pride and mend the fabric of being, Jesus declares, “The last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). Through this declaration, he is trying to save us from ourselves by condemning our pridefulness, instead counseling the participation of an open self in an open community.

The strength of this community is predicated on the strength and openness of the selves that constitute it. Therefore, Jesus also tries to save us from self-trivialization. Everyone has a sense for the transcendent that is woven into the universe. Everyone senses that mere matter cannot exhaustively explain the beauty and power coursing through experience. The Holy Spirit Sophia is present, within and without, inviting us to overcome.

We fear difficulty, but ease and comfort are the real dangers. Returning home after spending World War II in a Japanese POW camp, Ernest Gordon wrote:



Riskless life pains the living God, who offers us more. Since vitality is God’s desire for us, triviality is sinful. Hell might very well be air-conditioned.

The Trinity delivers us beyond Eden. Given the intransigence of our self-inflicted misery, we may be tempted to sigh for Eden. A return to innocence, simplicity, and unstudied spontaneity can prove attractive to anyone struggling through the inevitable complexities and disappointments of adulthood. But the fullness of life lies beyond Eden, not in a return to Eden.

Could God’s purpose for us have been fulfilled by running around naked in a garden for all time? Such a life would not have fulfilled the image of God within us, an image that includes the capacity for reason, the ability to create, and the necessity of choosing between good and evil. To fulfill the image of God within us, we had to become more than naked innocence. We had to become experience, and not just any experience, but experience that transcends itself.

If experience surpasses innocence, then we should thank God that Eve ate the fruit. It may have been God’s plan all along. Every child who learns the Adam and Eve story asks why God put the serpent in the garden, as well as the tree itself. If the goal was perpetual ignorance, then why not just leave them out? Of course, God also told Adam (not Eve, at least not directly) not to eat of the fruit. But Paul notes the tendency of any law to cause its own disobedience: “Does it follow that the Law is sin? Of course not! Yet I wouldn’t have known what sin was except for the Law. And I didn’t know what ‘to covet’ meant until I read, ‘Do not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetousness” (Romans 7 ).

Eden was a setup. God put the tree in the garden and said, “Don’t eat from that tree.” Then, God put a serpent in the garden as well. We mistakenly associate the serpent with Satan, an association foreign to ancient Jewish symbolism. Serpents were associated with intelligence, not evil, as the story itself suggests: “Now the serpent was more crafty [arum] than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made” (Genesis 3:1a NIV). The Hebrew word arum, as applied to the serpent, has been translated as “crafty,” “cunning,” “clever,” “subtle,” “shrewd,” and “intelligent.” But when applied to a person, as in Proverbs 14:8, it can be translated as “prudent” or “sensible.” Jesus himself says, “Be wise as serpents” (Matthew 10:16b).

Eve admired this quality of the serpent, then aspired to it: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Genesis 3:6 KJV).

Western Christianity has called this event The Fall. We will take a contrary approach. Eve does not cause The Fall; Eve causes The Rise. God needed a hero to cooperate with the divine plan and set humankind on the trying path of theosis, or divinization, that process through which we draw ever closer to the unreachable God. God needed a hero to lift humankind from preconsciousness to consciousness, a hero who could grant us the freedom within which we can relate to one another meaningfully.

Eve is that hero. As the founder of culture, she leads us into understanding. Genesis itself records this rise, as it remembers the first generations: “Adah gave birth to Jabal, the ancestor of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother was Jubal, the ancestor of all those who play the harp and the coppersmiths” (Genesis 4:20–22a). Through Eve’s decision, humanity’s “eyes were opened.” We have gained unimaginable abilities, discerning the tiniest elements of nature, observing the farthest reaches of space, visiting the darkest depths of the sea, and the journey continues.

Alas, awareness is painful. Adam and Eve, like toddlers becoming children, realized that they were naked. Ashamed, they made clothes for themselves. Then they took these clothes off to make babies, the brothers Cain and Abel, who grew into strong young men. And so the violence began. Our freedom to participate in moral judgment, to choose between good and evil, results in Cain’s murder of Abel. We became free, but we used that freedom to initiate violence against the innocent.

Even if we do not initiate the violence, we are free to respond in a disproportionate, retaliatory manner. Cain’s descendant Lamech declares: “Adah and Zillah, listen to my voice, spouses of Lamech, hear what I say: I killed a man who wounded me—a youth who merely struck me! If Cain’s deed will be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech’s will be avenged seventy-seven times!” (Gen 4:23–24) Lamech’s berserk vengefulness anticipates eons of human violence. We have been immersed in needless brutality like fish immersed in poisoned water, too accustomed to the situation to realize that anything is wrong.

We cannot undo Eve’s decision. Although some of us may sigh for Eden, there will be no return to innocence: “So YHWH drove them from the garden of Eden, and sent them to till the soil from which they had been taken. Once they were banished, winged sphinxes with fiery, ever-turning swords were placed at the entrance to the garden of Eden to guard the way to the Tree of Life” (Genesis 3:23–24).

Genesis declares that our expulsion from innocence to experience is permanent. We cannot go back, and we should not want to. Instead, we must go forward. If abundant life is to be found, then we will find it east of Eden, where joy and suffering entwine. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 182-185)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Gordon, Ernest. To End All Wars: A True Story about the Will to Survive and the Courage to Forgive. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013.

Habito, Ruben. Living Zen, Loving God. Boston: Wisdom, 1995.

Parker, Julie Faith. Eve Isn't Evil: Feminist Readings of the Bible to Upend Our Assumptions. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Publishing Group, 2023.

December 14, 2025

We suffer in myriad ways: God offers myriad balms

To alleviate suffering, we must recognize that different wounds require different balms. My beloved wife, Abby Henrich, is a pastor. Over two decades of ministry, she has supported, counselled, prayed with, and prayed for numerous parishioners with numerous challenges. Almost all these challenges were different in some way. Parishioners have struggled to recover from childhood trauma, sexual abuse, substance abuse disorders, and mental illness. Parishioners have gone through divorce, unemployment, and unexpected bereavement. Some have had trouble conceiving children, suffered miscarriages, and developed postpartum depression. Others have died after long, painful battles with cancer. Youth have come out as LGBTQ+ and worried about the reaction of their peers. Our entire community has struggled with the vexing grief of suicide.

Each difficulty and each individual require a different pastoral response. People with addictions need strength, divorcees need hope, abuse survivors need healing, youth need love, the unemployed need advice, and the terminally ill need courage. There is no one-size-fits-all response to suffering, no if-then algorithm that prescribes the perfect response to every situation, no single balm that heals every wound. Human problems are manifold, and our responses to them must be manifold as well, if we wish to heal.

Pastors (as well as parishioners themselves, because they are also involved in healing) must be flexible, wise, and present. Jesus was a pastor who healed in manifold ways. He healed spiritually, revealing the perfect love of God for all and the infinite value of each. He healed socially, erasing the artificial boundaries that segregationists had manufactured. He healed ethically, demanding the practice of love in a world riven by hate. He healed physically, curing people of disease. He even turned water into wine at a wedding, to make sure the dancing wouldn’t stop.

YHWH, Abba, God as Architect, designs and sustains a world that privileges dynamic growth over static ease, because the greatest gift we can receive is that of an enlarging soul. God recognizes the inevitable injury that will befall us as our souls confront the challenges that enlarge them. Jesus, God as Sojourner, enters creation to ratify the divine decision, validate our struggle, and reveal the fullness of life available within the trials of life. Sophia, God as Wisdom, continues the multiform healing ministry of Jesus, through our activity, inspiring humankind toward the love, justice, and wholeness that characterize the Reign of Love. The Trinity acts for us, but the Trinity also acts with us, and we become who we are by acting with the Trinity, by becoming Trinitarian.

Faith fulfills our Trinitarian nature. Faith is an existential possibility, an option for living, the experiential more for which we have hungered and for which there is satisfaction. To savor this abundance is to savor God. Alas, the abundance is always obscured. Loneliness, conflict, anxiety, bereavement, anger, self-hatred, other-hatred, regret, guilt, shame, addiction, poverty, illness, depression, and meaninglessness all dull our senses to spiritual beauty.

The range of human suffering is as broad as human brokenness itself. Jesus is a physician (Mark 2:17), and every physician knows that different diseases require different treatments. There is no panacea, physical or spiritual. For this reason, the love of Abba, Jesus, and Sophia is as diverse as human needs and takes as many forms as there are human difficulties. Any interpretation of their cooperative work must recognize the many healings that they offer and not reduce that multiplicity to one limited story. Theology’s approach to human suffering must be pluralistic, utilizing a variety of approaches to heal a variety of ills. Thus, in this and later essays, we will not discuss the one way that the Trinity heals; we will discuss the many ways that the Trinity heals.

Trinitarian healing is no opiate. Recognizing the challenges of life, Trinitarian faith seeks to heal the pain, not dull the pain. It offers transformation, not symptom relief. And, like the healing of a this-worldly physician, spiritual healing happens here and now, not in some lofty metaphysical realm or far-flung future.

The Trinity heals by offering us full personhood. The triune God is the source of all personality, the esteemer of each and every person, and the quickening ground of interpersonal relationships. God makes true personhood possible. But if true personhood is possible, and if we are created for fullness of life, then this state begs the question: How true am I as a person? How closely do I follow the grain of the divinely sustained universe? How much do I cut across that grain, rendering my own journey—and that of those around me—more difficult?

Our standard is Christ. Jesus reveals the abundant life available to us as embodied souls, as expanses of feeling resident within material bodies. Jesus jars us out of our existential slumber into new life pervaded by possibility. Faith trusts that this new life is possible because faith trusts that God has not created us absolutely different from God, but has created us in God’s own image, to participate in the life of God.

Indeed, we are so like God that one of us, Jesus, can be called the Child of God. Jesus is the picture of divine life, the earthly manifestation of the Trinitarian relationality that lies within, beneath, and beyond the fabric of the universe. He exemplifies humanity as a perfect expression of openness and vulnerability. He is communion itself; in Jesus we see love perfectly expressed through human activity. We experience him as fully human and fully divine, and we sense our own invitation to become fully human, which is to become love. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 181-182)

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

Baker-Fletcher, Karen. Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective. Saint Louis: Chalice Press, 2006.

Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns. 1988. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Coleman, Monica A. Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

December 7, 2025

Love suffers, celebrates, and questions: God is love

Love suffers, celebrates, and questions: God is love

Love suffers, celebrates, and questions. “Is the whole universe worth the tears of one tortured child?” asks Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. He raises the perennial question: If God is love, then why do we suffer so much? This question burns through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.

Theologians call attempts to answer this question theodicy, from the Greek theos (God) and dikē (justice), or a “vindication of divine justice.” There are some topics that wise theologians avoid, humbly heeding the psalmist: “YHWH, my heart has no lofty ambitions, my eyes don’t look too high. I am not concerned with great affairs or marvels beyond my scope” (Psalm 131:1). We, being imprudent, shall indeed concern ourselves with great affairs and marvels beyond our scope.

We aim too high when we attempt to reconcile human suffering with a loving God. Our answers will fail us, but that failure is necessary, because the struggle to answer is a spiritual discipline. Our failure will form us. The goal is not a definitive solution; the goal is a strengthened soul. And thinking about God with others, freely and openly, strengthens the soul.

The exercise of theodicy is roughly analogous to the Zen practice of meditating on a koan. A koan is an unsolvable riddle: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The practitioner watches their mind search frantically for a solution, trapped in its addiction to definitive answers and firm truths. Eventually, the meditator realizes the futility of the search, but this realization does not produce defeat. Instead, it opens the meditator to the presence of a truth beyond language, accessed in a sudden flash of insight, or satori.

Likewise, with regard to theodicy, our conversation may not produce conclusions, but it can produce transformation. Such transformation is not rational (produced by reason and reducible to reason) nor is it irrational (in violation of reason). Instead, it is transrational, beyond reason, like the beauty of a melody or painting. And like beauty, such transformation can produce reliable truths that then inform all reasoning.

Theodicy is only for those who are not currently suffering, at least not any more than usual. For those in anguish, we can offer only our own tears: “Weep with the weeping,” Paul advises (Romans 12:15). Those who are suffering will interpret any justification of God as an intellectual evasion of compassion. To speak of theodicy when your neighbor is suffering curses them with deeper loneliness; theodicy is incompatible with a ministry of presence.

Theodicy is for those who want to make sense of life and are willing to fail. Wrestling with theodicy now will at least save us from beginning the process—distraught, frantic, and desperate—when suffering strikes us later.

The Bible acknowledges the reality of suffering. The book of Genesis offers a strange and powerful story. On the night before Jacob crosses the Jabbok to reconcile with his brother Esau, a stranger approaches him. They wrestle throughout the night until daybreak when the man, unable to defeat Jacob, injures Jacob’s hip. Jacob eventually gains the upper hand, and the man demands to be let go. “Not until you give me a blessing,” replies Jacob. In response, the man renames Jacob “Israel,” or “he struggles with God.” Jacob demands to know the man’s name, but the man refuses to give it and departs. The injured Jacob then names the place Peniel, or “the face of God,” because there he had seen the face of God and lived.

The story is remarkably honest, denying easy answers or hollow exhortations. To be in relationship with God is to wrestle, to triumph, to be injured, and to be blessed. The Hebrews could have been named those favored by God, those blessed by God, or those protected by God, but they were named “Israel,” those who struggle with God.

Today, we too are Israel because we too struggle with God. We should not—yet must—attempt theodicy. We should not attempt theodicy because it does not help the suffering and may even harm them. We cannot succeed at theodicy because the answers never suffice. Yet we must offer a theodicy because human beings are the species that persistently, sometimes obsessively, asks “Why?” This bold questioning is one of our greatest glories. We dare to ask questions that we cannot answer. Incessantly asking “Why does that happen?” has produced science—and knowledge of the universe down to the smallest quanta. It has produced philosophy, asking, “Why are we here?” It has produced psychology, asking, “Why do we act the way we do?”

And it has produced theology, asking, “Why do we sense a God within and beyond our trying universe?” Because human beings are the species that asks why, we must ask why this loving God sustains such a trying universe. Embarking upon theodicy, we implicitly ask if our universe is comprehensible and risk the possibility that it may not be.

Our struggle for understanding is noble. If we fail in our search for a final understanding of the spiritual universe, then we are not alone. The physical universe currently presents a similar opacity. Approximately 85 percent of the matter in the universe is dark matter of an unknown nature, approximately 68 percent of the energy in the universe is dark energy of an unknown nature, and physicists increasingly turn to an unobservable multiverse to explain their observations.

Theists are no more obligated to cease their search for understanding than cosmologists. The current, and perhaps permanent, incompletion of the project does not render it worthless since progress occurs through the search itself, through the searching. Perhaps, for both theology and cosmology, reconciliation will be ever approached though never achieved.

The most appropriate response to suffering will always be ethical, not intellectual. It will focus on what we do, not what we think. In a “perfect” world, we could never be heroic or sacrificially loving. But in this broken world we can work to heal. Love becomes the trademark practice of faith in a suffering world. Through the practice of love, we increase. This dangerous abundance blesses human thought, feeling, and action with so much significance that we call it holiness. To be holy is to bear both beauty and consequence. Given our status as active agents in an active world, our primary question should not be “Why is there suffering?” Our primary questions should be “How can we alleviate suffering? And how can we alleviate it together?” (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 177-180)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Fiddes, Paul S. “Suffering in Theology and Modern European Thought.” In The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, edited by Nicholas Adams et al., 169–91. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Foster, Jonathan. Death, Hope and the Laughter of God: An Unlikely Title about the Unlikely Paths Where God Finds Us. Bloomington, Indiana: Author Solutions, Incorporated, 2017.

Hall, Douglas John. God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1987.