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A M B A S S A D O R S O F R E C O N C I L I A T I O N

BOOK DISCUSSION & REFLECTION

Michael. J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and


Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. 194-pp. ISBN-10: 0802862659;
ISBN-13: 978-0802862655 (pbk), $24.00 (U.S.)

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace....
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ1

SCRIPTURAL BASIS FOR RESTORATIVE JUSTICE & PEACEM AKING


Marcus Barth, the son of the great German Christian theologian, Karl Barth, once
claimed that “To say, ‘Christ’ means to say ‘reconciliation’ or to say ‘peace.’”2 What
Barth alludes to is a physical, materialist in-time embodiment of reconciliation and
peace. This is far from an emasculated, pietistic peace-of-mind or out-of-time indi-
vidual ‘spiritual’ experience reading the Psalms in the comfort of one’s own home or
attending church liturgy on Sunday morning. 3

For Saint Paul, Christianity is, if nothing else, a timeful community of revolutionary
God-seekers. But, revolutionaries of a sort that are so radical and counter-cultural
that their modus operandi to achieve an overturn of the established order is through
nonviolence and restorative justice towards their enemies (those who oppress them).
If anyone can conjure up a more unlikely and unbelievable premise in the history of
humankind for achieving safety and liberation of the human spirit, please come for-
ward. Recent real-life practitioners of this political theology were Ghandi, Martin

1Gorman makes the point that Bonheoffer “recognizes at the end of the day that discipleship is
not about imitation or even obedience to an external call or norm. It is about transformation,
theosis” (170). See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 4, Barbara
Green and Reinhard Krauss, trans. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2001) discussed in Gorman
2009, 168-173. .

2Marcus Barth, The Broken Wall: A Study of the Epistle to the Ephesians (Valley Forge: Judson,
1959), 44 quoted in Ched Myers & Elaine Enns, Ambassadors of Reconciliation, vol 1 New Testa-
ment Reflections on Restorative Justice and Peacemaking (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), xi.

3 Christian spirituality is only genuinely personal when practiced communally. “It is recogniz-
able and intelligible only when it relates fully to one’s neighbor.” “It is not enough to ‘do relig-
ious things’ regularly.” See Michael Battle, Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me (New York: Seabury
Books, 2009), 87-9.

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Luther King Jr., and the Living in the Truth movement in Eastern Europe that
brought down the Soviet Union peacefully between 1989-91. 4

Today, the practice of Christianity is so far from this vision of Saint Paul that adipho-
rization (the suspension of the ethical and moral from everyday decision-making)
and nationalistic quietism (whatever the state says or does is fine by us - thus, sup-
port for lingering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a health system that disenfranchises
the poor, etc.) characterize many of the mainline churches. A false form of secular,
conservative humanism that is actually anti-Christian often characterizes the non-
denominational ‘Christian’ (in name only) churches of America. How are we to re-
claim Saint Paul’s vision of ekklesia - a community of countercultural God-seekers?
That is where Mike Gorman’s Inhabiting the Cruciform God offers important insights.

POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH KENOSIS


What Dr. Gorman claims is that the central Master Story of Saint Paul is Philippians
2:6-11. In this passage, Paul is developing a political theology in direct contrast with
the imperial ideology of Rome. Christ, instead of buying into the ideology of power
and violence to exploit others for his own advantage, relinquishes this power (“emp-
tied himself”) and humbles himself “by becoming obedient to death - even on a
cross.” This is Christ’s kenotic act. An event in time that changes the world from here
on out. 5

The hermeneutical turn that Dr. Gorman makes is that not only is Christ’s kenosis the
model for humans going forward, but that through Christ, God is telling us some-

4For a description of a “Living in the Truth” manifest, see Vaclav Havel, “Spirit of the Earth,”
Resurgence, November-December 1998, 30.

5For Badiou, an event is that moment of being confronted by (and overwhelmed by) a truth.
But, this truth is better defined as a wager than a fact. A decision to accept something that is
neither fully calculable, knowable or demonstrable, “and for which the results [consequences]
cannot be known [fully] in advance, but to which the subject declares his faith.” See Alain Ba-
diou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. R. Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003), 45 discussed in Marcus Pound, Zizek: a (very) critical introduction (Grand Rapids &
Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), 78.

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thing about his self-identity. That is, that kenosis = theosis. What defines God is his
immanence and self-limitation, not primarily his power and transcendence. 6

By taking this stance on kenosis of Christ/God as self-revelatory, Gorman is making


a wager on a temporal world defined by an unfolding, non-humanocentric universe 7
(“open theology”) rather than the block universe of classical theology (e.g. Boethius,
Augustine, Aquinas). In the block universe physical view of temporality, there is no
ontological difference between past, present, and future. A transcendent God stands
outside the temporal realm with His divine gaze, totum simul, the ultimate final cause
of all things. Open theology, on the other hand, pictures a kenotic God (divine conde-
scension and self-limitation) whose absolute nature is qualified by: (a) temporality is
operative (i.e. the four arrows of time exist in reality); 8 (b) the process of natural evo-
lution (the history of creation is unfolding); and (c) God exhibits current omniscience
rather than absolute omniscience (God condescends to act providentially as a cause
among causes).9

Where both the classical non-kenotic God and open, kenotic-God theology encounter
a difficult philosophical conundrum is how to treat indeterminacy. Physicists have
two choices. The first is to accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (a physically
determined epistemological limitation on what can be measured and known about
reality) as an ontological principle of indeterminacy. The second choice is to accept
David Bohm’s proposal that indeterminacy arises essentially from a deterministic

6God’s kenosis might be thought of as God’s love through which creation comes to being and
through which He “redeems creation through the outpouring of the divine life made known in
Christ” (Battle, 45-7).

7Non-humanocentric in that all of God’s good creation is taken account of, not just the present
desires of humankind. This also opens up a theology capable of handing non-terrestrial life
and even the discovery and acceptance of non-human intelligent life-forms within a common,
universal theology.

8 The four arrows of time include: (a) the arrow of deep time - cosmic history from the big bang
to the present; (b) the thermodynamic arrow of time that points towards increasing entropy
(disorder) of natural systems; (c) biologic arrow of time that tends toward systems of ever
greater complexity (i.e. the evolution of life); and (d) the “the psychological arrow, pointing
from a past that we can remember towards a future that we do not yet know.” See John Polk-
inghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
2009), 65.

9 Polkinghorne, 58, 60, 62-63.

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and necessary ignorance - i.e. humans are not God, are limited, and everything they
physically measure or attempt to understand will have gaps. 10

Theologians might see God’s/Christ’s self-revelatory, self-chosen kenosis not as just


“unfortunate patches of unavoidable ignorance (epistemological deficits), but they
will be seen as signs of some form of openness in physical process (ontological op-
portunities).” I believe that this theological openness is what enables Gorman to
make the links between Christ’s kenosis, God’s self-revelation, cruciformity and
theosis in Paul’s theology.

In Gorman’s estimation, humans exhibit God-like form (theosis) by their co-


cruciform (following the kenotic model of Christ) living into an engaged participa-
tory stance that seeks justice and peace. Paul ascribes to these progressive/
transformative movements of human liberation through non-violence. This non-
violence and restorative justice is what characterizes Christ’s/God’s archetype for
apprehending reality and model for living in the world.

Gorman describes this process as cruciformity and believes this is the basis for not
only Paul’s participatory, political spirituality but the impetus for his public and
communal vision for and activity of community-building ekkelsiai. The ekkelsia are
nothing less than communities for the support of like-minded, counter-cultural, revo-
lutionary persons. Paul’s ‘spirituality’ was anything but pietistic. His spirituality was
action-oriented and directional - always moving toward full liberation of the human
condition toward communion (pistis - faith) with/in Christ/God through the Spirit.11
For Paul, the work of the Spirit is this active molding of the Christian into the kenotic
likeness of Christ (71).

Dr. Gorman is a New Testament scholar, familiar with the Greek in Paul’s letters and
in full conversation with the exegetical literature on Paul, both recent and historical. 12
Instead of God abandoning Christ on the cross, or Jesus’ cry on the cross being that of
dereliction or acknowledgement of the death of the Big Other (as Lacan might sug-

10 Polkinghorne, 81-2.

11For a detailed discussion of Paul’s cruciform spirituality see Michael Gorman, Cruciformity:
Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).

12See Michael J. Gorman, Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His
Letters (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004).

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gest), 13 Gorman might suggest this kenotic event opens up a whole new political way
of being-in-the-world. A political stance of engagement with the world where power
and influence are no longer the supreme currency that produces progressive change.
Instead of the normative Roman cursus honorum (“the elite’s upward-bound race for
honors”), cursus pudorum (“downward mobility”), a radical, counter-cultural kenotic
witness to injustice and violence is proposed.

Paul in his epistles is doing nothing less than “reconstructing the meaning of God’s
essential attributes and thus the meaning of divinity itself” (27). From this vantage,
Gorman takes on the exegetical task of redefining what Paul means by justification.
First, Gorman establishes through his exegetical work that “Christ’s death is a unified
act of faith toward God and love toward others” (62). Christ’s love and faith are insepara-
ble. Thus, for Paul, “justification - restoration to right covenant relations with God
and others - occurs, not through performance of or zeal for the Law, but through par-
ticipation in Christ’s quintessential act of covenant-keeping” (63) - his cruciformity.

Mike Gorman in his Inhabiting the Cruciform God provides a solid exegetical platform
for future work in political theology. Hats off to him for this stellar interpretation of
the Apostle Paul’s radical and rejuvenating theology. The book is important for what
it says about what Christian community and ekklesia might look like in a 21st Century
world. Maybe most importantly is what this work on Paul recommends for Christian
self-referentiality (i.e. I am ‘Christian’ because I claim that I am vs. I am Christian
because of my co-cruciform living-in-relation-with/in Christ).

For example, would ‘Christian’ policy-makers choose counter-violence as the pri-


mary political recourse after 9/11? The 9/11 terrorist attacks resulted in almost 3,000
dead humans and $90 billion in property damage. But the U.S. violence-drenched
response to 9/11 resulted in more than two million humans, dead, maimed or dis-
placed from their homes and more than $3,000 billion in property damage and cost.

Dr. Gorman’s book offers an antidote to this conventional, never-ending mimetic vio-
lence. A political theology for breaking-out of the cycle of a false-theology of utility
(according to an elite, humanocentric, and often nationalistic utilitarianism) that

13For Zizek, these two interpretive choices provide the basis for his political stance where
“politics is a matter of faith... an absolute commitment where one risks everything for the un-
known, because only where there is risk, is there passion” (Pound, 13, 26).

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comes ‘wrapped’ in the cloth of Christianity. That is why anyone who has eyes to see
and ears to hear (Ezek. 12:2; Matt. 13:15-16; Mark 4:9, 23, 8:18; Luke 8:8, 14:35; Rom.
11:8) should engage with the ideas presented in Inhabiting a Cruciform God. In my
view the world needs these ideas and insights if we are to prevail.

THEOLOGY MATTERS
Theology matters. For Saint Paul, all theology is political. All politics is theological.
The empire that Paul formed ekklesia as a counter to was the Roman Empire: Pax Ro-
mana (“peace and security”) was the official theology and propaganda “motto of the
Roman world after the establishment of the Principate, that is, after Augustus’ mi-
raculous termination of the civil war and his establishment of ‘universal peace’” and
economy supported, to a large extent, by the slave labor of conquered peoples.

The Principate was a political theology that assumed that the Roman empire con-
tained “the chosen people of God” and was the divine vehicle to defeat the forces of
chaos in the world and to restore heavenly order in the form of a return to the “gar-
den” of the former Republic. 14 In this theopolitical realm, the emperor was the pater-
familias of all the people (called “Father”), deified and became the sole ruler of a uni-
verse where taxis (order) was the primary aim of social and political structures
achieved through a culture of meritocracy based on paideia (concept of heroic en-
gagement and sacrifice for the good of the state), competition, and nomos (the law)
imposed through coercion and force. Justice (iustitia) was first and foremost defined
as that which was beneficial to Rome and its citizens.

All this is documented in the Acts of Augustus written in Greek on the walls of the
numerous temples to Augustus, recounting the salvific power of the gospel of Caesar.
This was a gospel that singled out the elite individual set apart by success--allegedly
for the benefit of the whole society. For example, “Following the violent death of
Claudius, the senate decreed his consecratio i.e. not only his life after death but also
his assumption and apotheosis” (the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a
god). The most penetrating political commentary on this system of empire occurs in
the letters of Saint Paul.

14On the ‘Recovery of Eden’ myth, see Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden (New York & Lon-
don: Routledge, 2004).

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Paul challenges the soteria (salvation from the forces of chaos) represented by Caesar
and his empire by claiming that pistis (God’s loyalty/faithfulness) is universal and
democratic, that it applies to all people regardless of their class, race, gender, wealth
or accomplishments and status in the world and this is expressed in God’s dikaiosyne
(solidarity and justice) with the entire human race, not just the elite. Paul describes
how those who claim to be superior or privileged, instead of making the world bet-
ter, just cause more chaos and bring on catastrophe [echoes of the snake in Gen 2-3
that offers ‘superior wisdom’ that leads only to disaster].

Instead, Paul offers Jesus as the exemplar of an archetypal human/divine being who,
through his faith of God, signifies what real peace and security looks like - not a he-
gemony or authority of domination and oppression, but the prototype of a commu-
nity pledged to life. Paul goes on to describe this community pledged to life, the ekk-
lesia, an exemplary community of those who are set free from the false precepts of
empiric power where, instead, identity is shaped by a radical democracy of justice,
difference, freedom, equality, and solidarity that set the ethical conditions; where the
critical events “for the fate of the universe does not come to pass in heaven with God
or among the gods. It does not involve force or violence or even the Law. It takes
place within and through a community held together by faith, love, and hope.”15

For Paul, The kingdom of heaven [God] was a standard religious code phrase meaning
an inbreaking of the divine realm into the realm of Caesar, Herod Antipas, Pilate, etc.
- olam-ha-bah (‘the world to come’). This vision relies on the view that the world we
live in can be repaired (tikkun olam); that a better world is possible through commu-
nal action. 16 Thus, “the kingdom of heaven is not, for the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, a
piece of real estate for the single saved soul; it is a communal vision of what could be
and what should be. It is a vision of a time when all debt are forgiven, when we stop
judging others, when we not only wear our traditions on our sleeve, but also hold

15 See Dieter Georgi, Theocracy: In Paul’s Praxis and Theology, trans., David E. Green (Minneapo-
lis: Fortress Press, 1991), 28, 34, 45, 59, 66, 67, 68, 71, 76, 86, 97, 99 from Lyle Brecht, “The God
Who Sacrifices His Desire and Gives Hope to all Creation: An Exegesis of Genesis 2:4b-3:24”
(March 2008) available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/10062312/

16The essence of Ubuntu theology: “The reason two antelopes walk together is so that one may
blow the dust from the other’s eyes.” “Ubuntu is more about participation in the process of
becoming lovable persons” within community. This love “is impartial, unconditional, and ob-
jective” (Battle, 21, 37, 98).

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them in our hearts and minds and enact them with all our strength. It is the good
news that the Torah can be discussed and debated, when the Sabbath is truly hon-
ored and kept holy, when love of enemies replaces the tendency toward striking
back.”17

What Paul was full cognizant of is that “Jesus did not die because he taught that the
poor would have an easier time getting into heaven than the rich; he did not die be-
cause he rejected Torah; he did not die because he preached love of God and love of
neighbor. He died because... in Roman-occupied Jerusalem [he was making a politi-
cal statement that the established order did not appreciate].... He died under the
criminal charge of sedition: Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews” - as a political
dissenter.18

What would Saint Paul have to say about the present situation in the world? During
2008 for example, the nations of the world spent nearly $1,500 billion (U.S.) on their
military forces for the purported purpose of national defense. 19 In the past 64-years,
since the end of WWII, the total spent on national defense globally is around $60,000
billion. One consequence of this massive, ongoing diversion of global resources (hu-
man, economic, scientific and technological capital) from meeting basic human needs
is the continued immiseration of many billions of the earth’s human population and
the the neglect of pressing critical global environmental, social, and economic issues.
As President Dwight Eisenhower stated in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in
the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending
the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. 20

17Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New
York: HarperOne, 2006), 51-2.

18 Levine, 222.

19 Defense budgets in 2008 were: United States - $607 billion, China - $85 billion, France - $66
billion, Britain - $65 billion and Russia - $59 billion. The world total represents an increase of
45% in military-related budgets (in constant dollars) over the past 10-years (Stockholm Interna-
tional Peace Research Institute).

20 Eisenhower ’s “Chance for Peace” Speech on 16 April 1953.

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Maybe the most obvious weakness to allocating so much of the world’s capital to
national military preparedness is that it often fails to protect nations from the war
and destruction it is supposed to prevent. Dr. Gorman, through his imaginative and
scholarly reading of Paul’s letters, offers an alternative, counter-cultural political the-
ology to this normative, imperial stance of defense through force and counter-
violence. What if Christians actually lived into the faith and vision of community that
Paul illuminates? That Gorman exegetes as kenosis = theosis. Where true faith in
Christ embodies “a countercultural life of fidelity and love, generosity and justice,
purity and promise-keeping, nonviolence and peacemaking” (172). Might only then,
Christians actually become the ambassadors of reconciliation envisioned by Saint
Paul? 21

What Dr. Gorman does is remind us living today of the passion and radicalness of
Paul’s preaching via his epistles, read aloud to the various congregations of ekklesia to
whom his letters were addressed. Paul, in his act of interpretation of Scripture was
“engaged in world making.”22 This new ‘life world’ so constructed is always provi-
sional, subject to change based on new data, fresh perspectives, new experiences, and
changed circumstances. The intent of this imaginative ‘world making’ from the text is
to describe a counter-reality to the banal day-to-day “that can be appropriated, [and]
out of which the community is authorized and permitted to live a different kind of
life.”23 According to Walter Brueggemann, in presenting this counter-world, this
world defined by the kingdom of God (heaven), Paul had only four strategies to choose
from:

“To present a ‘world of transformation’ to those who yearn and hope for trans-
formation. This is done when oppressed or marginalized people are invited to

21“So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat
you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20, NRSV). But unlike the am-
bassadors of Rome (Gk. presbeutes; Lat. legatus) who represented imperial interests, Paul’s vi-
sion is of disciples of Christ encountering the world, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.
upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, with “unarmed truth and unconditional love
will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil
triumphant” (quoted in Myers and Enns, 14).

22See Walter Brueggemann, The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word (Minneapolis: For-
tress Press, 2007), 96.

23 Brueggemann, 97.

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hope for the basic changes of social reality that are given in the texts for trans-
formation;

“To present ‘a world of equilibrium’ to those who wait and yearn for transforma-
tion. This is done when oppressed or marginalized people are invited to accept
and participate in the present regime as their proper duty and their only hope;

“To present ‘a world of transformation’ to those who value the status quo and do
not want the world changed. This is when those who benefit from present social
arrangements are called, in the face of that benefit, to submit to change as the will
and work of God;

“To present ‘a world of equilibrium’ to those who crave equilibrium and regard
the present social world as the best of all possible world, a world decreed by
God. This is done when religion becomes a comfortable endorsement of the
status quo.”24

For Paul, his intent was to counter a Roman consciousness that assumed “that the
world is a closed, fixed, fated given.”25 Paul’s message was an “offer of another
world.”26 His good news of Christ was to open this “closed system of reality to
newness.” 27 What Gorman is re-visioning for us today is Paul’s “summons to the
reality that is in the end our God-given true self and true community.”28 This is a
world in which “we know to be God’s live word that utters, shatters, destroys, and
creates” a world worth fighting for and living in today. 29 “[B]y the power of the Spirit
of Father and Son, the new people, the new humanity bears witness in word and
deed to that glorious future by participating now in the life and mission of the triune
cruciform God.”30

24 Brueggemann, 99.

25 Brueggemann, 100.

26 Brueggemann, 101.

27 Brueggemann, 3.

28 Brueggemann, 43.

29 Brueggemann, 45.

30 Gorman 2009, 173.

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