Jerusalem the Movie

If you get an opportunity, check out the beautiful footage of the land of Israel captured by National Geographic in a short film called Jerusalem:

*Disclaimer: As it is a National Geographic feature you might have to excuse the incredibly shallow assessment of the difficulties, conflicts, and differences over Jerusalem.

Returning to Eden and Other Hopeful Delusions

The human condition is unavoidably filled with brokenness, pain, and grief says psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Jennifer Kunst.  In her book Wisdom from the Couch she says further that we also innately feel that "suffering was never meant to be.  The toil, pain, and profound sense of alienation that we experience are all a big mistake.  The world wasn't supposed to be broken.  It didn't have to be this way..."  We long for something more.  She continues: "Whether we are searching for the fountain of youth, unconditional love, or transcendental mountaintop experience, we human beings seem to have an innate longing to return to a lost ideal, a protected, blissful state.  Some call it the Garden of Eden.  Others call it Nirvana.  Psychoanalysts call it the womb.  In any case it seems clear that we have a picture of a perfect place that we once inhabited, and then lost, and now we're trying to find again."

Kunst goes on to share that these longings and stories about our origins get one thing exactly right: Our world is a very broken world.  But the additional part that says, 'it wasn't always like this or it wasn't meant to be like this' is actually a fantasy.  The brokenness of the world is no ones fault.  It is just broken.  The reason we feel this way is the subconscious effects that come from being forcefully evicted from our safe, sheltered, and continuously nourished state within the womb.  We subconsciously want to return to that untroubled paradise.  Feeling deep down that there is something more, something we lost, we tell stories that makes sense of it -stories like the Garden of Eden.

Kunst writes about psychoanalytic theory from within the Christian tradition.  Despite the limitations she perceives, her background and faith clearly seem to inform her picture of a healthy life and psychology.  There are parts of her faith she proudly commends, but others she finds hard to digest.  I deeply appreciate the honesty and the beautiful way in which she attempts to synthesize both these sources of wisdom to cast a vision for a truly healthy life.  But what should we make of this contention?  Is brokenness just what it means to be human?  Is it a fantasy to hope and long for a world without brokenness?  Is the brokenness of the world really no ones fault?

I'm sure you know my answers to those questions.  But I want to commend to Dr. Kunst the scope over which these questions hang.  These are not peripheral questions that Christianity is relatively neutral on.  These questions stand at the very core of the Christian faith.  And it is not because the core of Christianity has a particular view about the intricacies of the afterlife or about the literalness of the first three chapters of Genesis.  It is because the core of Christianity says something about Jesus.  And that Jesus has strikingly set in motion an unprecedented path for human reconciliation, redemption, and healing.  Things that psychologists care a lot about.  As St. Paul says, death and corruption have been swallowed up in victory (1 Cor 15:54).  How?  Because the sting of death is sin he says, and in the most unlikely of ways Jesus has defeated (though not yet eliminated) sin.  The cosmic defeat of the poison of sin is the centerpiece of Jesus' healing project.  For St. Paul, Jesus cuts out the very root and source of corruption and death.  Another way of saying it is, for the Christian faith the roots of brokenness, conflict, and death are not "value neutral aspects of life."  The roots of brokenness have to do with sin.  And sin is never "value neutral." (Note: I am not saying corruption and brokenness in one's life is because of specific sin in the same person, like some sort of karmic equation.  But I am saying in the big story of the Christian faith, brokenness and corruption did parasitically enter the world by sin; the same sin that has a grip on all of us).  And the guilt, shame, and fear that comes from it does destroy us, as Dr. Kunst observes.  But these are put to rest not by dismissing our fault and not by obscuring our role in the brokenness around us.  It is put to rest by rejoicing in the core Christian conviction of a victory that undercuts the power of fear, shame, and erases our guilt.

Dr. Kunst talks about the self-imposed limits and boundaries of her faith commitments that also give her freedom to search and explore important truth within her field.  I'm not entirely sure where her limits begin and where they end.  But I would commend to her that a world where human brokenness has no source and ultimate redemption is a fantasy is a world that misses the very core of the Christian faith.

A Few Observations on the Trinity Discussion

On Secundum Scripturas, Bruce Ware has given a very helpful defense of his position of "Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission" (ERAS).  Remember this is a view that God the Father and God the Son have had not just relations of authority and submission during the incarnation, but there are functional relations of authority that have been a part of the inner divine life even before creation.  A few interesting arguments and responses by Matthew Emerson and Luke Stamps are worth commenting on.

Singular Will

Emerson and Stamps had raised earlier the problem this view might have with the traditional creedal statements of a singular unified will within the Trinity.  Historically, the Trinity does not have 3 wills, one for each person.  There is only one singular volitional capacity.  And it is only in the sense of Christ's human nature that Christ's will and the Father's will can actually be two distinct realities (Luke 22:42).  Emerson and Stamps have concerns that if submission in the Trinity is a reality before the incarnation than it seems to imply two wills.  A will that possesses authority (the Father) and a will that submits (the Son).  How then can there be only one will in the Trinity?  Borrowing language from Anatolios, Bruce offers a unique response: 

"While each possesses the same volitional capacity, each also is able to activate that volitional capacity in exercising the one will in distinct yet unified ways according to their distinct hypostatic identities and modes of subsistence. So, while the Father may activate the common divine will to initiate, the Son may activate the divine will to carry out, e.g., “from” the Father, “through” the Son—as has often been affirmed in Trinitarian doctrine following the pattern in Scripture itself (e.g., 1 Cor 8:6). Given this, one might even speak of one unified will of God, as the volitional capacity common to all three, along with three “inflections” of the unified divine will (borrowing Anatolios’s wording), or three hypostatically distinct expressions of that one divine will."

Very interesting.  But Emerson and Stamps are not entirely convinced.  They have additional concerns that are also helpful questions that Bruce would probably need to clarify.  Nevertheless, I wonder what a purist position about the divine will (like Stamps and Emerson) would need to say with regard to the Father's "sending" and the Son's "going" before the incarnation.  Maybe there is no distinctive authority to read in here (which would seem to me a hard bullet to bite).  But even still there must be some sort of distinctive volitional choices happening here that Ware would have the ontological resources to explain.  Yet I'm unsure how the traditional position that denies these distinctives within the divine will would address this.

On Sonship and Eternal Generation (EG)

Emerson insightfully points out that one of the problems with the discussion is a hermenuetical one.  Many people settle for trying to find proof texts instead of using the entire pattern of scripture as the foundation for how we are to understand these distinctions.  As he outlines a defense for EG, he says: "...Even beyond these particular texts, they [the Nicene fathers] saw that the scriptural pattern of speaking about the relations of the first and second persons of the Trinity are inherently related to generation. “Father” and “Son” are relational terms. If it means anything to be a son, it means to come from one’s father.”

The fatherhood of God and the sonship of man is of course a prominent theme in scripture.  And while there are scriptures that talk about God's fatherhood over all creation (Acts 17:28), the more prominent and significant biblical concept of God's fatherhood over creation has nothing to do with origin or generation.  His children are adopted into God's family as sons and daughters (John 1:13, Eph 1:4, Gal 4:6-7).  It is one of the most beautiful and central truths in all of scripture.  And in fact the Galatians passage actually clarifies exactly what the significant characteristic is regarding us being sons:  It is that "sonship" means we are adopted heirs of Christ.  If the most significant and central biblical meaning behind God's "fatherhood" and our "sonship" has nothing to do with generation, then it is hard to know the biblical warrant for saying the biblical concepts "father" and "son" inherently relate to generation.

To be fair, in another article Matt does supplement his case by bringing in a discussion of Phil 2:5-11. This a very helpful passage, and it does emphasize the incarnational submission we see in Christ's life.  But I still find myself confused how it inherently precludes any other passage that could talk about pre-incarnational submission.

By the way, I've always enjoyed my conversations with Matt and I have the utmost respect for his scholarship and his sharp mind.  I hope my thoughts and questions contribute meaningfully to the discussion.