In the fever dream which marks the conclusion of the Christian canon, the Son of Man, eyes like a flame of fire, walks among the menoroth, seven stars in hand, thunderously proclaiming: “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.” (Revelations 2:4-5) 

We are the New Ephesus, a church that has strayed. Let us heed this call. 

PART I: REMEMBER FROM WHAT YOU HAVE FALLEN

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.

—1 John 4 [NRSV]

We affirm very truly, without qualification, that God is love. This is the fundamental commitment on which all of the theological doctrines of our faith are premised; namely:

The Trinity: God’s very nature is a complete act of love: lover, beloved, and the love between them. [1]

Incarnation: the Love that is God did not remain transcendently removed, but spilled out into history in an act of merciful self-othering. Jesus the Christ was the full corporeal manifestation of Divine Love, fully divine and fully human. [2] Or, in the words of Elizabeth Johnson, “The God of inexhaustible mystery who is inexpressibly other is also with the world in the flesh of history, and is furthermore closer to us than we are to ourselves. Sophia-God is beyond, with, and within the world; behind, with, and ahead of us; above, alongside, and around us.” [3]

Resurrection: He who was incarnate Love truly died, thus absolutely taking on everything human. The recreated corpus is the living reality of the God that is Love, into which we can be bodily incorporated. We are invited to participate fully and truly in the resurrectional life of God. The church——wherever it might be, whomever it might include——is the body of Christ; our life in it is our life in the living God. 

Salvation: Our participation in the resurrectional life of God is our salvation, for it is the affirmation and consummation of our being. [4]

In short, our understanding that God is Love is the fundamental deposit of the faith from which all other doctrines derive their legitimacy and against which they must be judged. And it is the basis of our fundamental
teachings concerning the way of life to which we are called. 

We understand that God is a special kind of love, which we transliterate as agápe. This other-directed love is free and gratuitous, as opposed to conditioned; it seeks to be actualized in a relationship of mutuality, not one of static appropriation. Agápe, Michael Himes teaches us, may be best understood as “self-gift.” [5] In agápeic love, a lover cares for the other——gives of oneself to the other——for the sake of the other. Such self-gift is the very nature of God. As always already lover, beloved, and the love between them, God is a complete act and a complete community of love. 

Because God is Love, when we love another person for the sake of that person, without condition, we love God. Once again we can learn from Himes, who rightly argues that this point is expressed in the Parable of the Judgment of Nations: 

Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. [6] 

Importantly, the inheritors of the kingdom did not know that they were, in their acts of material solidarity, serving God. They did not do so with an eye to heaven or under a religious obligation. [7] 

We say that Good Shepherd gathered the flock together not as individuals, but as a body. God dwells wherever two or more are gathered together as loving community. We trust that such love is nurtured and continually transformed when it is undertaken in communion, not isolation; when lovers are united by their memory of, and thanksgiving for, Incarnate Love. When so gathered, they are the resurrectional, living body of the living God. This truth was experienced. It was given expression in the story of the disciples gathering after their master’s execution. They were unified by a spirit, such that they were not a mere aggregate, but a whole. Incarnate Word was really, truly present not only with them (as he had been), but as them, the community of disciples. 

We may put their revelation this way: the story of Good Shepherd, they realized, had not been drawn to a conclusion. The Divine had been incarnated in the lowliest of circumstances; had went about doing good deeds and preaching the good news, calling people such as themselves into the fullness of their being (even if they who were so called were unawares); and had then suffered and died a cruel death. In this sense, God had taken on everything human, even death. But death was not the end. 

Of the Christ’s death and resurrection, Kavanagh writes,

It was neither just a cessation of biological processes nor just an end to the sort of life he had led as a man among men. He died to more than what he alone had been: he died to what all men are. His death was, in short, to the human condition as the locale of sarx [flesh] and death, of law, of limit and all partialness. His risen life was the standing contradiction, in other words, to the kind of world men have made for themselves; it was a life not of sarx but of pneûma (not of the flesh but of spirit), not of death but of leaping vitality, not of law but of freedom, not of limit but of limitlessness, not of partialness but of totality... [8]


Our faith is that we really, truly become free from the bondage of death——from service to death——by bonding ourselves in and to love. By heeding the call and willingly placing ourselves in the service of love, death no longer operates as the horizon of meaning in our lives. In short, our freedom is found in loving others and loving love.

In an old catechism we are taught:

There are two ways, one of life and one of death; but a great difference between the two ways. The way of life, then is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, your neighbor as yourself; and all things whatsoever you would should not occur to you, do not also do to another. [9] 

The actions and dispositions constitutive of the Way of Life have this in common: they are other-oriented forms of self-gift. The Way of Life is the going out from oneself, meeting the other in the spirit (that is, activity) of agápēic care and mutuality. Against this, the actions and dispositions characteristic of the Way of Death are self-satisfying and destructive, rooted in exclusionary self-concern, anxiety, despair, and stasis.

Concerning this contrast between life and death, one may ask, “Do not all existing persons, lovers and haters alike, participate in life?” Let us set aside the question. Neither ‘life’ nor ‘death’ are used in this catechism in the sense that the biological sciences use it, devoid of existential significance. To speak of “the way of life” in contrast to “the way of death” is not to distinguish between the animate (the living) and the inanimate (the non-living or dead). Rather, it is a distinction drawn within the animate and, more specifically, within the
category of living persons. The distinction is between two ways of being, two ways of existing. 

Let us also set aside the temptation to read this in a way other than presented, as if the teachings were about “the way to life” and “the way to death,” where both life and death are something beyond and external to real, existing material being. What we are taught are the ways of life and of death. To facilitate reception of the teachings, we may understand them as teachings about what it means to participate in living life or to participate in living death. Again, the existential significance cannot be ignored: the one is the way of being to which we are called, the other a way of being away from which we are called, but both are ways of being, which are open to us. 

Stepping back, let us now consider the mystery of our faith. It is a mystery that we may render——indeed, we have rendered it——as a series of contradictions: 

1. God is dead (“Christ has died”); 

2. God is alive, present and available (“Christ is risen”); but, nevertheless, 

3. God remains absent, in a state of becoming (“Christ will come again”).[10]

We simultaneously affirm these contradictions because we trust that in and through the intellectual tension that is called forth we hear the insistence of the divinity that is love. [11] Intellectually, the mystery of our faith is
like a darkened glass; the absurdity and contradictoriness cannot be penetrated by the rational mind, which can see only what is illuminated by reason. Yet we hear the call or invitation of Love that penetrates through the otherwise impenetrable barrier and resonates in the depths of our being, calling us into the holy activity of creating, sustaining, and ever-realizing loving community, even through our failures and missteps. 

We understand this invitation to love to be one and the same with the invitation to become bodily incorporated into the very being of God——the God which is Love. There is no difference between the two. And such participation, we have been taught, is the means and end of our salvation: to be a living member of the living God, to be taken up into the body of God, which is a community of love. 

Yet, we too often demand, as a condition of our discipleship, so much more. Our hymnals, prayer books, and catechisms testify to our dissatisfaction. Hence, we stand in need of repentance.

PART II: REPENT

To love, or to have loved,——this suffices. Demand nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a fulfillment.

—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

As a result of the bewitching influences of existential angst, ideology, and socio-economic pressures we are led into hubris, doctrinalism, and exclusionary parochialism. Our faith, in short, becomes an enclosed, shuttered community, which offers metaphysical consolation rather than a path to salvation. Our ancestors succumbed to these temptations, and we have magnified them. From such errors we are called to repent and return to faithful loving, to the Way of Life. 

REPENT OF THE DESIRE FOR FALSE IMMORTALITY

Our rapacious desire for life and paralyzing fear at the prospect of death leads us astray from the Way of Life. Faced with our mortality, we reject the goodness of our materiality, our creatureliness. [12] Against this, we demand entry to heaven, escape from this world and flight to another. How often have we heard it said, “This world is not my home”?

But let us not be too hasty! In a penitent spirit, we must distinguish here what is true and what is false. The lamentation of a broken spirit, the cry of hopelessness and despair in the face of oppression and cruelty is not our target. To such outpourings, which are themselves expressive of our very humanity, our response ought to be loving care and a determination to rectify injustices. We recognize that the “kingdom to come” and the “kingdom at hand” (which are one and the same) stand in opposition to the way things are. As James Cone has said, “The gospel is in the world but not of the world. That is what makes God’s word paradoxical... It is here and not here, revealed and hidden at the same time.” [13]

All of this is to say, again, that  the cry of hope for freedom from an oppressive and cruel world is not the target of our present criticism. Rather, we are concerned with the all too common desire to be freed from the world as such, which is a way of denying our humanity and distorting the gospel itself. Put another way, when our demand is for the “reign of God”, or for the “kingdom come,” we do not err. To aim at that——the unity of all things in love——is to commit ourselves to participate in bringing about the will of God “on earth as it is in heaven.” Of this we do not repent, for that would be the negation of our faith. The object of our penitential reflection is, rather, the reality that this often does not console, it does not satisfy. And hence, perhaps because we fail to recognize that salvation is not necessarily felt satisfaction, we seek something more. We seek to satisfy our impossible desire by deluding ourselves that we can and should escape from this mortal coil essentially intact. 

We seek immortality. 

Of course, if by ‘immortality,’ we refer to life in the living God, which is the means and end of our salvation, then we do not err. Immortality in this sense, participation in the Way of Life, is available here and now, and it is our holy vocation to participate in and call others into this new life, albeit this side of biological death.

Death! Will we, like all mortal flesh, return to the earth? Undoubtedly: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). To balk at this is to deny our very being, to reject the goodness of our actual being and vainly wish that we were something other than we are. It is to re-capitulate the original sin. [14] But do we not also affirm that it is by the “[God’s] gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior”? [15] Assuredly. But the gift through which we  enjoy this is precisely this: real participation in the life of the living and everlasting God. Since God is love, our real, true oneness with God is love. 

From any inhumane, escapist, or quietistic temptations we must seek repentance. As disciples of the Incarnate Word of the God which is Love, we must put away such distractions. When we teach a doctrine of immortality rooted in an escapist metaphysic that rejects the world and our place in it, shutting up our ears to the cries of the wretched of the earth and, indeed, the earth itself, we fall under the blazing gaze of Bright Fire Eyes.

EXORCISE THE EVIL SPIRITS

For two millennia, Christ-followers have been plagued by the problem of in-group-out-group relations and the perceived necessity to police the boundaries of their community. This led early members to articulate a parochial, as opposed to a universalist, ethic in which full love was restricted to fellow Christ-followers. [16]

In the late modern period, Ludwig Feuerbach rightly argued that the zealous righteousness nurtured by the faith stood in lived, practical contradiction with the very essence of the religion—-viz., love:

The Church was perfectly justified in adjudging damnation to heretics and unbelievers, for this condemnation is involved in the nature of faith. Faith at first appears to be only an unprejudiced separation of believers from unbelievers; but this separation is a highly critical distinction. The believer has God for him, the unbeliever, against him.... But that which has God against it is worthless, rejected, reprobate; for that which has God against it is itself against God.... Hence faith has fellowship with believers only; unbelievers it rejects. It is well-disposed towards believers, but ill-disposed towards unbelievers. In faith there lies a malignant principle. [17]

On this we stand accused. The Church and its members have repeatedly fallen victim to the evil machinations of a spirit of domination. Focusing in particular on the holocaust of women in the church in the late Medieval and early Modern period, Elizabeth Johnson explains, “For reasons that had much to do with the threatened patriarchal dominance of spiritual and healing power, hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million women were annihilated in the name of God.” [18] After recounting a horrifyingly descriptive litany of remembrance for women executed as witches, Johnson concludes,

What makes these Inquisition murders particularly obnoxious is that they were performed with the official approbation of a powerful religious institution by male leaders who were sure that they were carrying out the will of God. [19]

We add to this the complicity of the church in promoting antisemitism, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, apartheid——the list goes on. 


We recognize that the words of the South African prophets who penned the Kairos Document stand not merely as an indictment of the South African Church in the 20th Century, but the Ecumenical Body of Christ writ large:

Both oppressor and oppressed claim loyalty to the same Church. They are both baptised in the same baptism and participate together in the breaking of the same bread, the same body and blood of Christ. There we sit in the same Church while outside Christian policemen and soldiers are beating up and killing Christian children or torturing Christian prisoners to death while yet other Christians stand by and weakly plead for peace.[20]

The Body of the Christ has always been, and remains to this day, in a state of disease; the parochialism and tendencies toward intolerance, domination, authoritarianism, exclusion, and quietism are a cancer on the body. As such, these evil spirits (activities) stand as internal negations of the holy spirit that unites the Body of the Christ. Yet such evils undoubtedly arise, in part, from anxiety over the question of how we can survive and flourish as a community. This is the tragic paradox we must face: existential anxiety concerning the integrity of the community of Christ-followers in the face of the other has given rise to a form of life, a way of “being church,” which would seem to threaten the very integrity of the community as a sacrament of the Divine, as an agápeic community.

How can we reconcile ourselves to the paradoxical nature of the church, as both a community (threatened by brokenness, disunity, and loss of integrity) and as an agápeic body (threatened by self-enclosure, exclusion, and withdrawal from the other)? We may begin by remembering that the body of the Christ on the cross was, itself, broken and bloodied. This shall guide our understanding of the Resurrected Body, particularly with respect to the question of how the Body of the Christ can discharge its holy mission of standing in opposition to the strong forces of the world. The sacrament of the pax Christi will always stand in this relation to the sign of the pax Romana: where the latter is a totalizing, territorializing symbol of hegemony and power, the former is splayed out upon it, wrecked and writhing, violated and divided. Harbored within this weak but effective sign of the Word of God [I here mean “effective sign” in the Augustinian sense, as definitive of ‘sacrament’.] is the deterritorializing call that sounds out the “princes and principalities” as false idols, declaring that “the meek shall inherit the earth,” that “the first shall be last,” and all manner of other topsy-turvy absurdities and transvaluations. [21]

Let us also recall that the Christ is said to have cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46 NRSV) In so doing, the question of the efficacious-ness of the Incarnate Word has been sanctified for us. We, like our Christ, can ask, “Are we forsaken? Are we, as incorporated disciples, realizing the divine will, doing the holy work, manifesting the holy spirit?” Indeed, we are and ought to be the people for whom the question of the efficaciousness and reality of the Incarnate Word is a question. 

In recognizing that we are the people for whom this is a question, we face a temptation: viz., the temptation to perform a revaluation, to render the cross and the corpus Christi as totalizing, territorializing signs of hegemony and power. This would be the truest and most potent form of blasphemy against the holy spirit of the Body of the Christ. It is a temptation into which we seemingly perpetually slide, as manifested by our efforts to secure the church as a powerful socio-political institution, to police the boundaries of membership, and to obsess over its authority and unity. Yet, “they who seek God through those Powers which rule over the world, or parts of the world, are removed and cast away far from [God]; not by intervals of space, but by difference of affections...” [22] In order to “humbly repent... delight in [God’s] will... and walk in [God’s] way,” [23] we require a critical framework within which to examine this temptation. In this regard, we can learn from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

In Seminar X, Lacan explains that anxiety arises from the perturbations occasioned by “the lack of lack”:

What is most anxiety producing for the child is when the relationship through which he comes to be——on the basis of lack which makes him desire——is most perturbed: where there is no possibility of lack, when his mother is constantly on his back.[24]

Our recognition of the absence of God (“Christ will come again”) makes us a desiring body, and this is partially constitutive of our collective life as Christians. Yet our affirmation of the resurrectional reality of the Church (“Christ is risen”), presents us with the overwhelming sense of the impossibility of lack: where “two or three are gathered”——My God!——the Christ is really, truly present! The holy spirit actually indwells! This, we may theorize, is the basis for our anxious and obsessive concern with purity and boundary policing (and also, seemingly more paradoxically, our other-wordly flights of fancy): we can’t face this lack of lack. It is not the absence of God that occasions our neuroticism, but God’s overwhelming presence. Hence, we emphasize and magnify the absence (“Christ will come again”) to the exclusion of the real presence, thereby occupying ourselves with what is inessential and contrary to the very raison d'être of the Body of the Christ. In so doing, we find ourselves split and misdirected: we say we desire the kingdom to come, and our efforts are devoted to preparatory measures, but we fail to recognize the kingdom at hand and our agency within it. 

We cannot reconcile ourselves to the paradoxical nature of the church, as both a community and as an agápēic body, by shoring up our institutional structures. Indeed, the Church cannot be a community in the sense of other communities, defined as they are by boundary-policing. The Church is one body in virtue of the outward- and other-concerned holy (agápēic) spirit (relational activity) that unites its members. As such, it is a community only in a perverted sense—-i.e., in an unnatural sense, or contrariwise—-for it is a community which is compelled to always be effacing itself, giving preference to those who are (and may very well remain) outside. This reality stands as a perpetual challenge to the priestly vocation, which is to conserve, protect, and reproduce the community—-though not in the sense that it negates the priestly vocation; rather, it transforms our understanding of it. 

What, then, shall be our response to the question of the efficaciousness and reality of the Incarnate Word? Love. Tangible acts of material solidarity. 

PART III: DO THE WORKS YOU DID AT FIRST

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

—Acts 2 (NRSV)

Amen. Very truly, “Let us go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.” [25]