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The Garden of the Heart Ep. 4 After letting C.S. Lewis take us on a tour of the glories and dangers of friendship, we look at the heart of the scandalous nature of the gospel—in Christ we are friends of God. In antiquity the three elements of true friendship were thought to be unity, mutuality/reciprocity, and equality. How is it that God can share these things with us? Can we be in a mutual and reciprocal relationship with God? Can we have equality with God? It all feels like too much to ask, and yet Jesus says, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Garden of the Heart Ep. 3 This week we discuss both the glories and the dangers of storgē—or the familial affections—ending with Jesus’ odd teaching that we must “hate” our family if we would be one of his disciples. “So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world. The illusion is immediacy. It has blocked faith and obedience. Now they know that there can be no unmediated relationships, even in the most intimate ties of their lives, in the blood ties to father and mother, to children, brothers and sisters in marital love, in historical responsibilities. Ever since Jesus called, there are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples. Christ the mediator stands between son and father, between husband and wife, between individual and nation, whether they can recognize him or not. There is no way from us to others than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him. Immediacy is a delusion…any time a [relationship] lays claim to immediacy, it must be hated for Christ’s sake.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 94–95) Here are the diagrams we used in class to see the difference between “immediate” relationships with our families (what Jesus calls us to hate) and those same relationships mediated by Christ. Diagram 1: Immediate Relationships (to be hated for Christ’s sake) Diagram 2: Relationships Mediated by Christ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Garden of the Heart Ep. 2— 1 John tells us that God is love. But does he really mean that literally? Or is this hyperbolic speech? This week we discuss the grounding reality of the Trinity, God’s divine love, and his divine humility which is his glory. Here is the wonderful quote from Gordon Fee on his experience of writing his commentary on 1 Corinthians 13 (as shared by his daughter, Cherith Fee Nordling): I remember the morning when I came to Paul’s description of love. I found it to be truly untranslatable. In most English translations it comes out as ‘Love is patient, love is kind.’ This way of translating Paul here tends to treat love as a thing that has characteristics like patience and kindness, or as a thing that God has and gives to us. However, the word ‘love’ here is actually a verb. It describes who God is by describing what God does. In other words, love is not statically patient but rather does patience. Love ‘patience-izes’ or something like that. ‘Patience’ also isn’t a very good translation either. Our meager understanding of ‘patience’ has to do with slowing down for the even slower person ahead of you at the checkout line at the store. Or when your computer doesn’t work and you take a breath and choose not to smash it in frustration. But that's not what Paul is saying about patient love at all. When translating his word for patience we really ought to go back to something like the King James Version: “Charity suffereth long.” Suffereth long. That’s what this word is all about. Suffering long on behalf of the other. Suffering long has to do with being inconvenienced or pained or challenged by the ways of others and enduring with them over the long haul. Suffering long on their behalf or for their good even when they are not working for your good, or you’ve been with them for a long, long time without seeing any signs of change that you might wish for. Love suffers long. And love shows kindness…. Meditating on those words I realized that Paul is describing God’s character. As I sat before the Lord in the text it became apparent that the first part–Love suffers long–is the passive side of love, the other side–love shows kindness–is the active side of love. Both are inextricably woven together in God’s character manifested toward me and you and the whole world in Jesus. As I beheld the goodness of God suffering long and his enacted kindness I wept for a long time before I could get back to work…Praise be to God he suffers long even when we think his endurance could last no longer, because this is who God–Love–is and what God–Love–does…this is what God is like. God is love. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Garden of the Heart Ep. 1— This week we begin a new study on the heart and mapping out the terrain of its loves. Our tour guides include C.S. Lewis (and his excellent little book The Four Loves), Chris Green (and his TheoCon lectures on “The Theology of the Heart”), St. Augustine (Confessions), St. Maximus the Confessor (Four Hundred Chapters on Love). This week we take a look at why so many Christians throughout the history of the church have found gardens to be such a fitting metaphor for the human heart, and we begin mapping out the three “flower beds” of Love: Affection, Friendship, and Eros/Desire. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 8 Robert Jenson on the church… Theological reflection about the church is in many ways a modern development. For most of history, Christian theologians simply took the church as a presupposition rather than as something specific to be talked about. It was the fragmentation in the Western Church at the time of the Reformation that sparked the church’s reelection on what it means to be the church. Yet, so long as each separate communion after the Reformations—the Reformed Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and so forth—regarded itself as the church and the others as non-churches each community felt no special, urgent problem about what it meant to be the church. But during the second half of the twentieth century, that is to say post-World War II, this bland conviction became, for a variety of reasons, hard to sustain. It was the so-called ecumenical movement that blossomed after the Second World War, roughly describable as the attempt to bring the fibers back together again, that brought the doctrine of the church or “ecclesiology” to the fore. For when my group (the church to which I belong) says of some group very different from my group (say, the church to which you belong) that it is also in some degree “church” (maybe not the church, but church nonetheless), the following question immediately becomes urgent. What is the church? Precisely what is this thing to which my group and your group and those other groups all more or less belong? What is the church like? How do we recognize it when we see it—assuming, of course, it even exists? There are many ways to approach this question. Here I will take the one that provides the easiest outline. Despite the premodern church’s relative disinterest in ecclesiology, the ancient church did bequeath us a standard list of the church’s essential characters, which will do very nicely for a synopsis. The Nicene Creed—which is to say, the creed recited in the main services of most Christian groups—says that the church is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” I want to answer our question by speaking about each of these in turn. I ended the class sharing some of Chris Green’s thoughts from this lecture on Bonhoeffer, Sin, and Rebuilding the Church: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 7 Robert Jenson on the doctrine of the atonement… By a “doctrine of atonement” we conventionally understand an account of why Jesus’ death on a Cross is important to us, and specifically for our relation to God. Notoriously, “atonement” is a deliberate coinage - though an old one, documented to 1513 - meaning the act of putting things at one, particularly where a previous unity has been broken. The word in its theological use thus presumes that what happened at Jesus’ death was a reunion between God and us - which seems a biblically sound assumption. A doctrine of atonement is then an attempt to say how Jesus’ crucifixion does that. It is a commonplace to observe that there is no dogma of atonement. Although, in Christology there is dogma established at all seven ecumenical councils, no council - or pope or other plausibly ecumenical authority - has ever laid down a dogma of atonement. If you deny that Christ is “of one being with the Father,” or that the Son and Jesus are but one hypostasis, you are formally a heretic. But you can deny any offered construal of how the atonement works, or all of them together, or even deny that any construal is possible, and be a perfectly orthodox believer. To be sure, if you simply deny that Jesus’ death does in fact somehow reunite us with God, you are no Christian at all, but that is a different sort of deficiency… So my first endeavor will be to present my diagnosis. Very early, Christian theology of the Cross made two paired errors - which are of a piece with wider error. The Bible makes sense of the Cross by narratively and rhetorically locating it in the total history the Bible tells, and by conceptualizing the linkage. The twin errors I am about to discuss did their damage in concert by together cutting out the event of the Cross from its location in the biblical story. The one error cuts the Cross off from its future in the Resurrection - without which, in the Bible’s general view of reality, a crucifixion would be anything but beneficial. The pattern of the primal kerygma of atonement is displayed in Luke’s presentation of the first Christian sermon: This Jesus you put to death by the hands of sinful men, but God raised him up; and therefore return to God, life in his Spirit, etc., are open to you. But this is not the pattern of our inherited post-biblical theories - indeed, so much is this the case that when theologians steeped in one of the inherited theories encounter this primal biblical doctrine outside the Bible, they sometimes do not recognize it. The other mistake was to sever the Cross from its past in the canonical history of Israel. Without its specific location in Israel’s adventure with God the crucifixion of this one provincial celebrity, on suspicion of religio-political conspiracy, would hardly have been noteworthy amid the thousands of such Roman executions, even if he had thereafter “appeared to many.” Nevertheless the inherited theories discuss the Crucifixion in essential abstraction from Israel’s history. It is not surprising that they prove in the long run unconvincing. I will discuss these two ancient theological disasters in the order just laid out. First then, the separation of atonement and Resurrection. In one way or another the historically inherited theories of atonement presume that the action of atonement is finished when Jesus dies, so that the Resurrection then accomplishes something else, if indeed often no more than to repair collateral damage done by the Crucifixion. Anselm’s doctrine is perhaps the most notorious in its ability to do without the Resurrection. Anselm is, of course, regularly denounced on other grounds. Before proceeding to my own critique, fairness compels me to come to his defense. Many of those who attack - or affirm - “the Anselmian theory of atonement” do not seem to have read his text. Anselm does not say that Jesus’ death satisfies God’s wrath, or that God punishes Jesus instead of us. Quite to the contrary, Anselm presents Jesus’ death as God’s rescue of creatures who are on a self-destructive path, which God accomplishes by averting a regime of punishment and instituting instead a regime of repair. Nevertheless, Anselm’s doctrine does have a fatal flaw: the Resurrection is not integral to the achieving of this result. Both in Anselm himself and in the bowdlerizations of Anselm which are presented as “the” doctrine of atonement, God and humanity are reconciled when Jesus dies; the Resurrection simply tidies up. It is very likely that Anselm himself as a devoted reader of Scripture and as a bishop a regular celebrant of Eucharist simply assumed that nothing theological interesting works without the Resurrection; however his theory does not incorporate this. To grasp the second founding error, we should remember that aforementioned exegetical commonplace: that the Gospels’ own interpretation of the Cross consists for the most part in embedding it in the Old Testament narrative. As is well known, hardly a detail of the Gospels’ passion-narratives fails to invoke some Old Testament text or event. And Pauline and Johannine theology explained the meaning of the Cross with Old Testament concepts, used in their original sacrificial and eschatological force. But post-apostolic Christian theology quickly isolated the Cross from its biblical embedding in Old Testament discourse at the dogmatic level, if not in preaching or always in the liturgy. NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 6 Robert Jenson on the Image of God… Theology has used the word “freedom” as a slogan for this distinction between humankind and nature. That distinction, by the way, comes from the Greeks. Freedom, for Aristotle, was rather limited in its scope. Women stayed home having babies and caring for them because they were thought to be a part of nature. Servants, too, were bound by nature insofar as they had to do whatever it was they were doing. Like women, they were thought to be bound by necessity like any other part of nature. The free man, by contrast, is the one who is free from nature in the sense that what he does he does not have to do, which in Aristotle’s immediate political context, meant he is at liberty to attend to the business of the city, to be an office-holder, to vote and attend when the city assembly met, to serve in the army. All these are the proper doings of those who are not bound to nature. What Christianity did to this distinction was to say that on account of what we read about in Genesis, all humans are free. That is to say that human beings are not simply items in the natural processes as the Greeks had thought women and servants were. To be free in this way is to be capable of being a kind of counterpart or conversation partner of God. This, in my view, is the heart of what is meant by the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. To be made in the image of God is to be something like God’s “counterpart.” What it means to be created in the image of God is that human beings are creatures with whom God can have an active exchange, a back and forth, a relationship. The other thing that happens with humanity that does not happen with the animals is that God strikes up a conversation. Among the animals in the book of Genesis, the human animals are the ones that God talks to and who are expected to talk back. God strikes up a conversation with human beings. So it turns out that the counterpart relationship is effectively a discourse, a back and forth of address and response. Notice, then, that the doctrine of the imago dei is just an extension of Israel’s basic principle of religion. God talks to Abraham and Moses, and Moses and Abraham talk back. But now it is not just Moses or Abraham, and that is to say it is not just Israel; it is simply the human race as such. In the beginning it is the human race that is in conversation with God. This of course raises a question: precisely how is it that the God of Israel talks to Moses? How is it that somehow God speaks to us? Many Jewish, Muslim, and Christian theologians would say that God speaks to us through the moral law. But there is a more fundamental answer still: you pray. It might be possible, then, to say that according to Genesis and so according to Jewish and Christian theological tradition, the human being is defined as the “praying animal.” You will see this reflected throughout the history of the church from Augustine to Hildegard of Bingen to Barth. What do they constantly exhort you to do in the perilous journey through this life? Pray! So to be made in the image of God is to have a role, and that role is to be in a relationship and a discourse with God and to occupy a place in the story that God has and lives with his people. And that story is not random, but has a plot. And the plot is given to it by the presence in the story of its author. What is really there within each of us, instead of what the Greeks call a physis, is rather something in which each of us participates—an ongoing drama with a plot. The human plot, the human story that is actually in progress, the play that is actually being produced, does have a plot and the plot is given to it by the presence of the author as also one of the dramatis personae. The story holds dramatically together and we do therefore indeed have something in common precisely because the author is triune, the triune God that I attempted to construe for you. In God, personal identity is indeed prior to essence. God the Father is first of all Father of that other personal identity the Son and he has that nature we call divine nature only in and by and on account of that relationship. The relationship and the personal identity given in the relationship—Father to the Son—that is the first fact about God. And that he is God—and then we will start laying out predicates: omnipotent, omnipresent, and so on—that is the second thing. So also then the Son: Jesus of Nazareth is first of all the Son of the Father and only thereby does he have the “divine nature.” So also then the Spirit: the Spirit is first of all the mutual Spirit of the Father and the Son together and only by and in that relationship can he be construed as divine. In God the personal identities are constituted in each one’s relationship to the other two. And then, in that one of those three is one of us; our life together has a structure determined by the structure of the divine life. We have something in common by which we hold together, through which we can come together. We have that which in Greek thought was enabled by the notion of nature in that God is the God I tried to evoke for you earlier. So, I am who I am—and of course Popeye would say, “And that is all that I am, I am Popeye the sailor man!” And that is a drastic statement of personal identity—in and by my relational place in the history God has with us, and just and only so there is indeed something we may call human nature if we wrench that word from some, at least, of its original associations and make it mean something like the word I have been using, the “plot” of the human story. NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 5 Genesis 1:3-4 And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good… The Hebrew word “tov” is like our English word good. It suggests that if something is “good” it must be “good for something.” There is purpose. Over and over again in Genesis 1 we read that God saw what he had made and that he saw it as good/tov. So, God finds his creatures good for his purpose with them. What is God’s purpose with creation? The old rabbis had no trouble here: God created for the sake of Israel. The apocryphal book 2 Esdras 6:55 reads “It was for us that you created this world.” This is a deep mystery. But one way to get at this idea is to say that the creation account in Genesis is only told from the standpoint of God’s redemptive work in Exodus. Exodus is the purpose of creation. Robert Jenson, quoting Karl Barth, says, “Because salvation, therefore creation.” Because God willed to be the savior, he had to create something to save. According to the old rabbis, God created the world so that there could be an Israel. So that he could have his own people—his bride. The church has held the very same position on the matter. God created for the sake of the church. Ephesians 1:4–5 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will… This is what creation is good for. Creation is good for Jesus! As Paul writes in Colossians 1:16, “All things were created through him [Jesus] and for him.” God created all things for Jesus’ sake—as a gift for his Son. Robert Jenson is fond of quoting Jonathan Edwards at just this point: “There was, [as] it were, an eternal society or family in the Godhead, in the Trinity of persons. It seems to be God’s design to admit the church into the divine family as his son’s wife…Heaven and earth were created that the Son of God might be complete in a spouse.” God refuses to be God without you because he has eternally decided to be God with you—Emmanuel. This is the meaning of all creation: We are created out of nothing by God’s free grace, and we are summoned into the eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit. We are brought into this fellowship through the Son, Jesus of Nazareth, by the power of God’s Spirit which raised him from the dead and now God has poured out that same Spirit into our hearts so that we can call on Jesus’ Father as “our Father.” We can only see the beginning and the end (goal) of creation from the middle: Jesus of Nazareth. He is the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end—only as the one who comes in the middle. When God summoned the world into existence, he said “Jesus.” And everything—from galaxies and stars, to mountains and oceans, to lions and bears, to you and me, right down to the tiniest cells and atoms—finds its meaning inside him. NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 4 Jenson on the doctrine of the Trinity… [This] is the root and substance and heart of the so-called doctrine of the Trinity. God has a history with his people and the personages of this history are the Father of Jesus who is the author of the story, Jesus Christ, and the Spirit. It—the doctrine of the Trinity, I mean—is moreover the root and substance of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray. Jesus said to start off this way: “Our Father”; and then he gave them the prayer which was a traditional Jewish prayer except for something new at the beginning. We translate “Father,” but the Aramaic word that he would have used was Abba, which is the Aramaic equivalent of “Daddy”or “Papa.” That is to say, Jesus taught his disciples to address God as their daddy and then to bring their concerns to God as his children. Now, calling God “Father” in a general sort of way is a thing that pops up normally. But calling him “Our Father” as a way to begin prayer—now nobody did that; that was the new thing. How do Christians dare do that? I mean what in the world gives me the right every day to start off a prayer “Dear Daddy?” It is the “our” in there that counts. Jesus himself always addressed God this way. And Jesus invited his disciples to piggyback on his own relationship to God. So we pray to Jesus’s Father with him, with the Son, and in the Spirit who is the spiritual energy by which or whom we hope to do that. In this respect the whole doctrine of the Trinity can be explained by simply remarking that Christians pray to the Father, with the Son, in the Spirit, and are convinced that by so doing they are properly caught up in the story that God lives with his people. NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 3. NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: Don’t forget to register for TheoCon with Chris Green if you haven’t yet! He will be teaching on Song of Songs and our union with Christ. You can register to attend in person or to watch the livestream by clicking the buttons below: Who is Jesus and what does it mean to say that he “is risen”? We discuss the determined identity of Jesus, which determines God’s own identity and the difference between resurrection and resuscitation. A Jensonian catena on the resurrection: “The resurrection was not the cancellation of Jesus’ death, a mere resuscitation.” “The gospel is the story of Jesus told as the story of the last future, as a message of hope. It says: the story of life-out-of-death and love-out-of-hatred which is enacted in the events of this man’s life will be the conclusion of your life also.” “A dead man is dead exactly in that he already has been all he ever will be. He lies there finished; and if we are further surprised by him, perhaps by what we find in his will, it is only because we were ignorant of what he was all the time…If Smith is dead, there is a closed definition of what it means to be Smith; if Smith is alive, the definition is still being written…Jesus lived and then died. Therefore we have a definition of what it means to be Jesus, we know what he is…If despite death he now lives, then this self-giving is not only an item of the past to be remembered, but a surprise in the future to be expected…To say ‘Jesus was dead and is alive’ is to say something about the last future.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 2. NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: We take up chapter 2 in Robert Jenson’s A Theology In Outline: Can These Bones Live? discussing the story of Israel with her unusual, timely God. Here are a few quick quotes from Jenson on God and time: “The gods of the great myths are ‘eternal’ in that they never change, but are timeless like the cyclical patterns [of the seasons]; [YHWH] is ‘eternal’ in that he is actively faithful to his promises, acting in time to make and fulfill them.” “God’s eternity is not that for him everything is already past, but that in love everything is still open, including the past. His eternity is that he can never be surpassed, never caught up with. He anticipates the future in the sense that however we press forward in time, we always find that God has already been there and is now ahead calling us on.” “It indeed better suits the gospel’s God to speak of ‘God’s time’ and ‘created time,’ taking ‘time’ as an analogous concept, than to think of God as not having time… God takes time in his time for us.” “God took time from our time to be His eternity…” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

Summenary Ep. 1. NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: Making our way through Robert Jenson’s, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live we begin with the question: “What is theology?” “Theology,” says Jenson, “is thinking what to say to be saying the gospel.” The gospel can not simply be parroted from one generation to the next. It is a living message, that speaks a fresh, new, liberating word to each new hearer. This is why, he argues, the gospel can never be preached the same way twice: Precisely to be itself, the gospel is never told the same way twice. The formulas which yesterday opened Jesus’ future will tomorrow bind to the past. “We are justified by faith alone,” said Luther, and liberated four generations. When preachers say these words today, supposing themselves to be following Luther, they bind us to the terrible law of having to save ourselves by the quality of our sincerity, for that is what “faith” has come to mean since the eighteenth century. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Will of God Ep. 7. NOTE: We will be starting a new study next week through a short book by Robert Jenson called A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? Each week we will take a chapter of the book for our class. I’m encouraging everyone to read along. You can find a PDF of the first chapter below. Bonhoeffer on becoming guilty for Christ’s sake… By turning our focus back to the origin of all responsibility, we come to understand what willingness to become guilty means. Jesus’ concern is not the proclamation and realization of new ethical ideals, and thus also not his own goodness (Matt. 19:17), but solely love for real human beings. This is why he is able to enter into the community of human beings’ guilt, willing to be burdened with their guilt. Jesus does not want to be considered the only perfect one at the expense of human beings, nor, as the only guiltless one, to look down on a humanity perishing under its guilt…He does not want to acquit himself of the guilt by which human beings die. A love that would abandon human beings to their guilt would not be a love for real human beings. As one who acts responsibly within the historical existence of human beings, Jesus becomes guilty. It is his love alone, mind you, that leads him to become guilty. Out of his selfless love, out of his sinlessness, Jesus enters into human guilt, taking it upon himself. In him, sinlessness and bearing guilt are inextricably linked. As the sinless one, Jesus takes the guilt of his brothers and sisters upon himself, and in carrying the burden of this guilt he proves himself as the sinless one. Now in this sinless-guilty Jesus Christ all vicarious representative responsible action has its origin. Precisely because and when it is responsible, because and when it is exclusively concerned about the other human being, because and when it springs from the selfless love for the real human brother or sister–it cannot seek to withdraw from the community of human guilt. Because Jesus took the guilt of all human beings upon himself, everyone who acts responsibly becomes guilty. Those who, in acting responsibly, seek to avoid becoming guilty divorce themselves from the ultimate reality of human existence…They place their personal innocence above their responsibility for other human beings and are blind to the fact that precisely in so doing they become even more egregiously guilty. They are also blind to the fact that genuine guiltlessness is demonstrated precisely by entering into community with the guilt of other human beings for their sake. Because of Jesus Christ, the essence of responsible action intrinsically involves…becoming guilty. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Will of God Ep. 6. This week we try to think through the reasons for the anxiety that seems constituent of modern life and seeking to do the will of God. Here is the passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics that we finished with: All that we have said thus far implies that we have abandoned the abstract notion, largely dominant in ethical thought, of an isolated individual who has available an absolute criterion by which to choose continually and exclusively between a clearly recognized good and a clearly recognized evil. Such an isolated individual does not exist…The error of such an abstract ethical scheme is this: only the isolated individual is considered ethically relevant; only what is absolute and universal is seen as normative; and only the choice between the clearly recognized good and the clearly recognized evil is acknowledged as an ethical decision…What this amounts to is individuals pulling back from the living responsibility of their historical existence into a private realization of ethical ideals by which they see their own personal goodness guaranteed…this attitude will lead, by way of withdrawing from responsibility for the whole, to a purely private bourgeois existence. However, in practice the ethical isolation of the individual is a fictitious notion. For no one can withdraw completely from human community, indeed, everyone’s life is dependent on it… This means that a human being necessarily lives in encounter with other human beings and that this encounter entails being charged, in ever so many ways, with responsibility for the other human being. History arises out of accepting this responsibility for other human beings or for entire communities or groups of communities. Individuals do not act merely for themselves alone; each individual incorporates the selves of several people, perhaps even a very large number. The father of a family, for example, can no longer act as if he were merely an individual. In his own self, he incorporates the selves of those family members for whom he is responsible. Everything he does is determined by this sense of responsibility. Any attempt to act and live as if he were alone would not only abdicate his responsibility, but also deny at the same time the reality on which his responsibility is based. For he does not cease to be the father of a family; rather, instead of being a good father, he is now simply a bad one. He is a good father if he takes on and acts according to the responsibility reality places on him… The moment a person accepts responsibility for other people–and only in so doing does the person live in reality–the genuine ethical situation arises…The subject of the action is no longer the isolated individual, but the one who is responsible for other people. The action’s norm is not a universal principle, but the concrete neighbor, as given to me by God. Further Resources… Chris Green on post-individualism, Bonhoeffer, and rebuilding the church: Rowan Williams, “Truth, faith and politics in a post-truth world: exploring Bonhoeffer today”: Stanley Hauerwas, “Church Matters”: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com

The Will of God Ep. 5 “Whoever accuses or judges a brother or sister, accuses the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.” -James 4:11 Bonhoeffer commenting on James 4 writes, Judging stands in absolute opposition to doing…There are two types of behavior with regard to the law, judging and doing; they are mutually exclusive. Those who judge understand the law as a measure that they employ against others, and see themselves as responsible for seeing that the law is implemented. They thus place themselves above the law. They forget that there is but ‘one lawgiver and judge, the one who is able to save and to destroy’ (James 4:12). For both Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer the two dirty words when it comes to God’s will are “application” and “interpretation” because both have to do with knowing/judging rather than doing God’s will: God’s commandment leaves human beings no room for application and interpretation, but only for obedience or disobedience. [God’s commands demand ]acts of obedience to be performed on the spot in a specific way, pure decisions the meaning of which is not open to discussion, because they do not in any sense point to a higher law, but is rather contained in the fact that God has decided in this way and spoken accordingly, so that human decisions can only obey or disobey the divine decision. In these texts there is no such thing as a general rule which can be debated and needs to be filled out in its application. This is the first temptation of that “pious serpent” in the Garden of Eden: “Did God really say…?” The temptation is to go behind the word of God to interpret it, to examine it for herself. But for us to interpret and apply God’s commandments puts us above the commandment for the moment. It leaves us in charge and gives us the power to do as we think best rather than simply obeying. The great irony here is that what the serpent tempts Adam and Eve with is something God has already promised: to be like God. The serpent tells them that if they grasp the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they will be like God. The Latin is sicut deus. But God has already made Adam and Eve in his image and likeness. Imago dei. They fall from receiving the imago dei into being humanity sicut deus—or what Bonhoeffer calls “god-against-God.” To have grasped after the knowledge of good and evil is to become gods-against-God because it is to falsely become one’s own source, origin, and judge. Rather than living from the knowledge of God Adam and Eve now live from their own knowledge of good and evil. Thus the split between knowing God’s will and doing it. In his sermon “The Last Farthing” George MacDonald says that the greatest way to obscure Jesus’ teachings is to interpret them rather than do them. The parables and teachings of Jesus only make sense to the person that’s doing them. Elsewhere he writes: What have you done this day because it was the will of Christ? Have you dismissed, once dismissed, an anxious thought for the morrow? Have you ministered to any needy soul or body, and kept your right hand from knowing what your left hand did? Have you begun to leave all and follow him? Did you set yourself to judge righteous judgment? Are you being wary of covetousness? Have you forgiven your enemy? Are you hungering and thirsting after righteousness? Are you seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness before all other things? Have you given to some one that asked of you? Tell me something that you have done, are doing, or are trying to do because he told you. If you do nothing that he says, it is no wonder that you cannot trust in him…You do not do his will, and so you cannot understand Him. …He knows that you can try, and that in your trying and failing He will be able to help you, until at length you shall do the will of God even as he does it himself. …If we do what He tells us, His light will go up in our hearts. Till then we could not understand him even if he explained it to us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com