I recently had the joy of attending a gathering to celebrate the release of a new book of poems by Christine Perrin that is available now (shipping on June 01, 2026 from Eighth Day Books). After Christine’s first book, Bright Mirror (Saint Katherine Press, 2016), the poet Scott Cairns praised Christine for “her ongoing dialogue with prior utterance and her uncommon care with the word” that carried us steadily into “acts of participation with the living, with Life.” In her second book of poems, Dark Gospel: Figure of Descent, Christine shares from realms of her experience outside of light and life, but still with a steady apprehension of the figure who is the source of life. With one other new outcome flowing, in some sense, from her first book, I will also commend the album Trading Skies released last month by Noah Perrin (Christine’s son) with the song “Bright Mirror” as one of its ten tracks.

I have not yet read Dark Gospel, but I was blessed to hear nine of its poems read out loud at the release party for the book, and I was privilege to share a reflection on one of these (given below). This book of poems has been commended by a number of poets and Christian thinkers including B.H. Fairchild, author of nine collections of poetry including Art of the Lathe:

In Dark Gospel Christine Perrin has given us a book of wonders, natural as well as cultural, secular as well as spiritual, and their presence in artwork (mostly medieval and Renaissance) that lifts us toward a Platonic persuasion somewhat rare in American poetry these days. Formally adventurous (rather than “experimental”), she shapes her poems beautifully and with a hard-earned clarity. For the dedicated poetry reader, the wonders do not cease, and the ultimate reward is pure aesthetic pleasure on the highest level.

Bishop Erik Varden—author of six books including Towards Dawn: Essays in Hopefulness (2025), Healing Wounds (2024), and Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses (2023)—also recommends Dark Gospel:

True poetry, which is rare, says something new. There is newness here, and beauty. Christine Perrin offers us poems that, if attended to, teach us how to live aware; she offers them, one by one, as if they were ripe black raspberries picked from different bushes. Her bold claim holds: “Each bush has a singular taste”. Sober inebriation results. Even in the face of harsh realities, ever honestly named, the poet enables, somehow, joy. What gratitude I’ve felt on reading this collection!

Finally, I’ll note Gregory Wolfe, publisher of Slant Books:

Christine Perrin’s poetry takes us by the hand and walks with us down into the dark places we all experience—where pain, loneliness, and fear abide. But in these elegantly wrought poems we also discover that it is also in darkness where life begins—and hope and perhaps even redemption. Perrin’s gift, the good news that she pours out so liberally, is her ability to harness the power of imagination to bring us out of the dark into “the grace of created things.”

My own reflection below is from this poem within Dark Gospel:

Before Surgery with Sam and Owen

Green filters the light of August tenting
tall above our heads, all three of us dwarfed
by old growth, even the understory
is too lofty for us. Today the leaves
have cupped early morning rain and shower
blessing down again like prayers to the air
we breathe deeply—we don’t need poetry
to rouse us, rain is enough, or the wild
black raspberries we find off the foot path
that the dog first discovers and eats.
Each bush has a singular taste—
pith or earth, herb or peach, drawn from thorn
that bursts on our tongues—good flesh,
lucid and purple-dark with juice and seed.

In this poem, we celebrate the blessing of this small and untamed life together as we tent upon our shared earth where good flesh is found first by the dog and then drawn by us from the thorn. We are all small in this wet and childlike world, where “even the understory / is too lofty for us.”

It is as if our entire world is a familiar hideaway—a secret room within a larger house—but a room provisioned with delights. Realities of immediate and good participation in greater things permeate our unruly yet innocent little place. We, however, are unfit to receive more than this. This understory is more than we can fathom, but we recognize the rumors of even more goodness that pours out from somewhere into this world of ours. Green light flows down through the old growth to fill our layer, here beneath the underbrush. The light that guides us and our dog comes to us from above somewhere that is three heavens up—above the understory, the overstory, and whatever lies beyond. This light, though filtered twice, is still light, and it is fully ours, here and now. Rain, too, is given to us by a secondary means—the gracious cupping of leaves—who receive it from the sky and then release it, again, to us. We don’t need the heights of poetry, we who wander in such green light and tree-filtered rain—we have all the goodness of poetry trickling off our nose, filling us with deep breaths, and shimmering upon the berries that burst upon our tongues. With all the lust of children, we are ready to see what the dog sees and to join in the dog’s delights so that each bush becomes a small world of particular tastes—pith or earth, herb or peach—pulled out of thorns to feed us with good flesh that drips, lucid and purple-dark, with juice and seed. It is a simple communion and returned here with thanksgiving and promise of continued life—the body and blood under the knife of surgery, under the thorns pushed through by Sam and Owen, under the tongues tasting the fruit of our understory.

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Prayer—in the infinitesimal acquaintance that I have with it—is an extraordinarily gentle thing. God so tenderly touches the heart that is in agony and that can only just receive the most simple caress. This we find in the beauty of Jesus Christ who is the “Only Lover of Mankind” as we pray and sing while the light fades away each day to night. The downtrodden will always find Christ to be Isaiah’s suffering servant:

Despised and shunned by people, a man of sorrows and visited by illness. And like one from whom the gaze is averted, despised, and we reckoned him naught. Indeed, he has borne our illness, and our sorrows he has carried.1

It is true that God harshly opposes the proud and the powerful. They break against God like waves against granite cliffs. However, God’s condescension to the poor, the hungry, and the weak is measureless in its patient and quiet attention. God’s radiance blinds the arrogant who grasp at beauty, but it never blinds the contrite of heart. Instead, our Father’s beauty only just breaks like a blush over the horizon for anyone who will lift their weary eyes in search of light. It is like the faintest kiss of dawn warning us of a brilliance and warmth from which we must, for now, be gently hidden.

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Saintliness is the most natural thing in the world. It is far more natural than the stench of rotting flesh. Both holiness and decay, however, are utterly ubiquitous in our world. Despite the fact that both are almost continually and universally present with us and relatively easy to identify, they are not equally visible. Decay, while it can be horrifically colorful, takes only a few tedious forms and is difficult not to notice—although we seek to hide it for the sake of hygiene and common decency. Strangely enough, saintliness takes a vast variety of forms and can be rather easily missed—despite our strong temptation to parade it (which renders it instantly false).

To be clear, what is more natural does not come more easily to us or require less work. We have to work hard to be natural and not to decompose. It seems obvious, but decomposition is the result of inaction. Despite its difficulty and illusiveness, many around us every day do achieve holiness in large and small ways because it is what all of us are made to be and do. There are over 10,000 recognized saints in the Roman Catholic Church (which maintains centralized records) and 4,500 to 7,000 in the Eastern Orthodox Church (where records are spread out over multiple jurisdictions in a far less systematic way). Both churches insist that recognized saints are far from the full count as the glory of every saint is to go unrecognized by anyone other than their God. What does it take to notice the holiness surrounding us, and how is saintliness the opposite of corruption?

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Amid today’s avalanche of alienation from each other and from our world, why worry about how to restore our lost relationship with our first parents? Well, I suspect that our sense of connectedness to each other and to our world correlates closely to our sense of fellowship with Adam and Eve. Entering into Lent of late, I recall a series of supplications that we all pray together with Adam sitting outside the gates of Eden. With one of these, our first father appeals to the plants inside the lost garden to pray for his soul: “by the music of your rustling leaves beseech the Creator of all to open to me the gates which my sins have closed.”1 It is one thing to write about this prayer in an essay like this and another thing entirely to pray this prayer in your own little parish beside your family, coworkers, and friends. Having enjoyed this later privilege a few times (including just this evening), I can attest to the fact that it shows me how bound I am to all those around me. As I sit with my exiled father, God’s loving ears hear and join together the steady song of the leaves in Paradise with my own feeble words.

Sadly, American Christians are inheritors of a continual deadening of anything that resembles communion with our first father and mother. There is really nothing about the Scopes trial of 1925—or much of anything that we have obsessed over in the intervening years—that brings us closer to our fallen parents or to our fragmented selves and our shattered places. Readers will find almost nothing that nourishes intimate communion within the 2013 book Four Views on the Historical Adam (Zondervan) or the 2024 book Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve: Four Views (Lifeway’s B&H imprint). These two books survey the standard debates over a historical Adam with regard to the authority of the scriptures versus evolutionary theory. As I will outline more fully below, both books offer four options that differ chiefly by means of escalating the up-to-date rigor of technical engagement with the latest research in genetics and Ancient Near Eastern literature. These are both excellent topics and well worth studying within a larger context of living communion. Taken in isolation, however, they actually tend to undermine anything like a real relationship with our first parents.

To be fair, in the modern West, Adam is hardly a father with whom anyone would want to invest much of their precious personal time. Even before we launched forth into endless debates over human origins, Western Christians had already spent centuries giving Adam just one unsavory job to do within the story of salvation: to secure for us all the inherited guilt that renders every child in history justly condemned to death upon conception. Thankfully, our ancestors in the faith—both East and West—found a lot more to ponder and relate to when it came to their first parents. We modern Christians have proliferated an expanding array of specialized questions about genetic science and positivist history over recent centuries, but those before us relied on skills such as the telling and retelling of stories. Their songs, prayers, icons, and stories piled up a treasury of insights regarding their first parents that both connected and enlarged the souls of our ancestors. Counting only major texts up through the medieval period, we have easily thirty narrative expansions or retellings of the Adam and Eve story from within the Jewish and Christian faith traditions.2

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My younger brother and I share a conversation here about those we have met who experienced folklore creatures in their everyday lives. These memories are from my childhood for my part and from my brother’s adulthood on his part. Here is a recording by my brother of a story from a man who encountered the Dev (a traditionally Persian mythic figure) beside an ash heap near his home:

Cyrillic alphabet transcription of the audio above by my brother:

Омадм—я ҷода хокистар мерезонанда, ами алода. Даҳамуводай пат. Яки дидмш да танаи девол амуқа ранги буқай гарамида ай даҳанш ҳавл меруя. Амиқа сиоҳай калонай ки БААААА додай. Омадм хонада ғалтдм ду стка хоб бдм.

English translation by my brother:

I arrived, and there—in an ash-heap where they dump the ashes from the fire—there he was—cursed be his father. All of a sudden I saw him against the wall—like a young bull—heat and steam pouring out of his mouth. He’s so black and huge! “Baaaaaa!” he roared. I ran home and collapsed and slept for two hours.

Conversation

Jesse: I’m very excited to be chatting with one of my younger brothers. How many years apart are we? Yeah. We are 14 years apart in age, and so we have different stages of life that we remember. We didn’t overlap a ton in our childhood at all. I guess, well, 14 years. I would have overlapped for about four years, really.

I experienced growing up in Taiwan in a rural kind of area on the outskirts—initially the outskirts—of the big city of Kaohsiung, but a very pre-modern kind of traditional Chinese culture with rice paddies and water buffaloes and a banana patch there that we played in. I grew up experiencing a kind of pre-modern human life, including a lot of activity with the local folk religion and ancestor worship and folk deities and shaman, and a lot of it was really scary.

But these are all childhood memories. I haven’t experienced any of that in my adulthood. But my brother has done a lot of work overseas in his adult life, and he’s experienced in Nicaragua and Central Asia a lot of pre-modern human kind of experiences of what we could call the supernatural. I’m not sure what terminology—we’ll talk a little about terminology—but I have certain things I don’t actually like about the term supernatural. But anyway, for lack of a better term for now, experiences of pre-modern human life that included a sense that the world is filled with all kinds of other types of life. This was in your adult life, and I don’t know that you experienced that in your childhood.

So there’s this kind of fun contrast, I think, between childhood experience, adult experience, and the two of us as brothers, with our different life journeys. You have a seminary degree from the Reformed Theological Seminary, and you do serious work—Bible translation—and have linguistic training. So you bring some of that theological and biblical knowledge and study to the topic as well. So thank you for chatting with me.

Younger Brother: It’s fun to be here.

Jesse: I would just love to hear your account. I’ve heard it a few times, but let’s start with Nicaragua—what you remember there. I recall it being generally very sad and very dark. I don’t think there was anything positive about it for the people involved that I can recall. What kinds of stories and things do you recall from the people there? And you could give a little context. This is the Miskito language—I’m not sure how to name the people group.

Younger Brother: So on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, there’s a mixed people group. They are partly African heritage from the slave ships that wrecked on the coast there. They intermarried with one of the local native people in Nicaragua. And so they became this Miskito people that has a blended heritage.

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On my way to work just a couple of days ago, I spent some time contemplating the place that my beloved United States occupied within my heart as a boy. I was still a boy in high-school when I spent almost $500 of my own hard-earned money on a first edition of David Ramsay’s 1807 groundbreaking biography of George Washington. Bookkeepers of another kind tell me that this is more than $1,000 in today’s money. A little research tells me that the book has at least held its value given that I should be able to sell it for something over $1,000 today with its attractive condition unblemished by any repairs or library marks and retaining the original binding as well as the frontispiece portrait. Because of it’s popularity with collectors, the book’s frontispiece is often missing, making my copy more valuable with this portrait still intact. The stipple engraving1 by William Satchwell Leney is after a painting by Gilbert Stuart and is beloved because it is an artifact connected to living memory. This frontispiece was initially cherished by owners who had been with Washington and who morned his death when his character and presence were a personal memory and not simply a part of our nation’s history to be celebrated. Although I could use the money far more now than I needed it as a boy, this book still sits beside me at my office each day, and its market value has never been a part of my continued appreciation.

While the Mason Locke Weems biography of Washington was the first published (in multiple cheap and expanding editions from 1800 to 1806) and the John Marshall biography was the “official” choice (printed in five volumes between 1804 and 1807), the biography by Ramsay in 1807 quickly became the people’s favorite. Unlike the moralizing myths of Weems, Ramsay was a careful historian (and a medical doctor) who had already written a widely respected History of the American Revolution published in 1789. Contrasted with the voluminous and often dry work of Marshall, Ramsay’s biography quickly earned a reputation as both more honest and more concise. Like Marshall’s life of Washington, Ramsay’s came out eight years after Washington’s death. Only eighteen years had passed between when the Constitution took effect in March of 1789 and publication of these first biographies. While factual and sanguine about Washington’s life, Ramsay’s book was not without it’s own wider story and framework with regard to our emerging national mythology. Published during the “Early Republic” period, Ramsay’s work was intentionally attempting to solidify our national identity. He portrayed Washington not just as a man, but as the personification of the young nation’s highest virtues. It also benefited from many later hallmarks of American commercial ingenuity. Because it was a single volume, it was much more affordable and widely distributed than Marshall’s five-volume set. It became the “standard” biography for educated American households across several decades.

But pardon me. This book has distracted me from my original intent for this essay. I’m here to share about how, just a couple days ago, I became more than MAGA for a moment as well as how our current civilizational implosion is robbing us all of anything like healthy childhoods or normal human feelings.

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“Red in tooth and claw” describes a condition that is sadly familiar to my own grasping and demanding heart. In this heartlessly self-serving world of ours, we are all here together to learn to walk the new pathway of God’s self-emptying love. All of history as we know it—about 13.8 billion years of it according to the Lambda-CDM model recently reaffirmed by the Stony Brook and Atacama Cosmology Telescope international collaboration—is just one nighttime prayer for help and guidance. As “The Starlight Night” by Gerard Manley Hopkins teaches us, our hearts need continually to turn and to set out anew for the true prizes: “Prayer, patience, alms, vows.” These offer the only starlight within the dark night of our souls. George MacDonald writes in Lilith:

Every life is a vigil. . . .Your existence here is a long, patient watching for the morning. You call it a fallen world, and so it is, but its fallenness is the very laboratory of your creation.

A fellow reader, Amy Hunt, has recently been researching the meta-historical human fall with me. She pointed me to several passages in MacDonald’s fairy tale The Golden Key where a boy named Mossy and a girl called Tangle find themselves both “longing after the country whence the shadows fell.” Such visions from MacDonald connected profoundly with C. S. Lewis and inspired him in countless ways including within The Great Divorce. As Amy and I continued to share thoughts and readings, the extent of MacDonald’s understanding and exposition of a meta-historical human fall within multiple texts such as Lilith and “The Creation in Christ” (Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3) became more and more clear.

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Merry Christmas, dear readers. We have gently departed the holy octave that echos the days of creation and re-creation to enter the quiet last days of the extended twelve-day festival that finally gives way to Theophany or Epiphany. I imagine in my mind how many of you keep all of the blessed feasts high throughout this holy season. It would delight me to be able to see some of these celebrations of yours for myself and to give a report of just how alive and thriving in our world today is a love for Jesus Christ and for the humanity that he assumed so that we might be reunited to God’s life by God’s condescending to die with us. Seeing your celebrations would encourage me in ways that I cannot even start to honor or approach in my own small efforts that nonetheless—and so unmeritedly—yield such richly-gifted experiences to me. Honestly, what I have in my own enjoyments of Christmas is already more than I can appreciate.

I am deeply grateful for a lifetime where Christmas has been an extended season, year after year, when I have had the absurd privilege of spending more time with my parish, with my family, and with my own contemplative labors. Last Christmastide, I got to put the astonishing 1996 book by Bishop Basil Rodzianko into English for the first time: The Theory of the Big Bang and the Faith of the Holy Fathers. This Christmastide, I have drafted 10,000 words of my own within book projects—largely within one aspiring book project out of three languishing under my poor care during the past year. I could spend the rest of my life trying to give thanks for all of the Christmastide blessings that have been lavished upon me so far (without any consideration of anything that is yet to come), and I would fail utterly to do justice to it all. Nonetheless, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, in this current slapdash essay, I will turn my attention to the history of celebration within the entire human experience, and I will no doubt sound a bit too bleak and curmudgeonly regarding our celebratory abilities in the contemporary world. Those few who endure to the end of my ramblings will see that I am not actually all that glum in my outlook, but there are some reckonings with sad realities that I hope are helpful along the way.

We humans are continually forgetting what is possible within our human experience. What would it have been like to hear bards or scops recite epics as long as the Odyssey or Beowulf out loud over multiple nights of feasting? A continuous recitation of the entire Odyssey would have taken approximately 17 to 20 hours, while the Iliad would have required 25 to 30 hours. Beowulf would have taken around 3 to 5 hours for a scop to perform. Or how would it have been to be the bards with those vast poetic works committed to memory? One of human history’s many bleak ironies is that true leisure was only possible when we labored most intensely to win sustenance from the earth by means of hunting, gathering, and farming. There was little to do when the sun departed but to find creative ways of surviving the dark night and the long winter, and Christmastide came to occupy the heart of all that midnight cold. The wealthy and powerful had their bards and epics. The poor had their storytellers and fairytales. There are entire mountain ranges of human experience lost within the swirling mists of time. Pathetically, there are small mountains of my own experiences lost to me just within the mists of my own lifetime.

Nonetheless, each year, one thing that I can say for myself on the positive side of the ledger, is that I have come to love Christmas a little more. That said, my own habits and capacities for celebration are far from consistent or impressive. Still, I am absurdly blessed with profoundly good celebrations surrounding me and brought to me by a sizable crowd of generous and fun-loving folks in my home (my wife’s cooking and her radiant laughter is enough to convince anyone of God’s existence), my steady and loving parish, my extended family (you should see the laden tables that my sisters can set for crowds of forty or more people as a regular occurrence), and many dear friends where I work. All of this unmerited thriving that I enjoy and for which I am grateful does not, however, mitigate my point about the state of affairs in our society at large. And whatever collective incapacities we might have are realities that include every one of us more than we might be inclined to recognize.

Christmastide is the only time of the rolling year within the modern world when some small portion of us pause a bit to wonder what a week of celebration might actually be like. Thanks to the happy interposition of New Year’s Day within the Twelve Days of Christmastide, some of us may even manage to come close to a full season of festivity and remembrance. I have long been enriched by a church with a generous offering of services for the many feast days of this season and with friends who invite my family over to celebrate and tell stories for these many holy days: Saint Martin’s Day (Martinmas), Saint Nicholas’s Day, the Feast of Stephen, the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Childermas), and Epiphany. All of this, however, is increasingly challenging to sustain for all of the good souls who labor to do so in our world today. In addition to the profound structural challenges, I suspect that even the most thoughtful and joyful of us in all of the deepest ways simply have no experience and therefore no capacity to see or desire various categories of celebration that would have been well known to many of our ancestors.

I can barely recall, somewhere in the remoter chambers of my mind, reading Max Weber’s case for how the religious ideas of Calvinism provided the psychological and cultural foundation for the modern capitalist system. I recall his “Iron Cage” to name how the rational, legal, bureaucratic, and economic structures created by this Protestant work ethic now enclose individuals in a world focused solely on efficiency and material gain even as the original spiritual motivations have almost entirely evaporated. Subsequently, I read and reread Josef Pieper’s argument that the “Protestant work ethic” described by Weber has become a modern pathology that Pieper calls “Total Work.”

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During a service in my beautiful parish—as I stood there surrounded by more bones of dead saints than I could count—it struck me afresh that this love for the physical remnants of Christ’s precious saints is profoundly intimate and also utterly defiant of sequential time’s relentless serving up of loss and death. Their bodily nearness engulfing me, in the form of over a hundred fragments of bone and raiment, blends with the movements, sounds and smells of the worship and prayer to give a sense of closeness and immediate presence that holds many far-flung bits of time together in a current moment—ignoring the passage of time and the brutal boundary line of death. Within the liturgy, we will not let our loved ones go, because there, within the heavenly temple courts of God, they are not gone. We insist that saints who died almost two millennia ago are like loved ones to us—that they are as close to us as our spouse, our children and our friends who stand beside us. My own attendance, with my own flesh and bones, participates in this defiance of Chronos time along with the relics of the saints all around me, and I’m invited to recognize myself as one who stands with the church triumphant upon the glassy sea around God’s heavenly throne. We are hidden with Christ in the heavenly places (Colossians 3:3 and Ephesians 2:6) and “we mystically represent the Cherubim” in our worship as we sing during the Liturgy.

This all is brought even closer as we approach the birth of Jesus Christ with the Nativity Feast and all of our attention to the Incarnation. God’s bodily presence with us in Jesus Christ and the intimacies of childbirth all call us even more to this embodied awareness shared between our own persons and those friends and family standing with us and, ultimately, with the great cloud of witnesses surrounding us all as incarnate bits of bone and even as images formed from wood and paint.

While the Orthodox are less bureaucratic than Catholics about the paperwork surrounding church relics, the Orthodox are actually far more strict about the necessity of relics in order for there to be a liturgy. In the Catholic Church, it is preferred but not absolutely required that every altar have a relic. In the Orthodox Church, however, the Divine Liturgy cannot be celebrated without a relic. This is achieved by the Orthodox through the antimension (Greek for “instead of the table”). It is a silk cloth icon of Christ as he was laid within the tomb, and sewn inside this cloth is a tiny fragment of a martyr’s relic. This cloth must be signed and consecrated by the ruling bishop, and it acts as the priest’s “license” to serve. Without a bishop’s provision of an antimension, the priest can offer no liturgy.

My priest, Father Timothy Hojnicki, goes far beyond this requirement, however. He has lovingly and enthusiastically filled our little parish church with an ever-growing assembly of relics—bits of bone, of vestments, even fragments of stone and tree bark from places connected to sacred events. I should try to count all of them some time, but I suspect that I would fail. The tiny theca (small reliquaries, typically embedded directly within the face of an icon) show up all around our church and far beyond the one long stretch of wall that is dedicated to them. In the image at the top of this post, you can see this wall of relics just to the left of our iconostasis with four rows of them arranged one above the other. On the day that I took this photo, we had two full sets of the relics from all twelve apostles with us in the liturgy. Because our church is named for the Holy Apostles, someone had been so excited to share with our priest a collection of the relics from all twelve apostles. When they offered to let us have these relics for a week, my priest had not had the heart to tell this person that we already had a full set of these relics that sit beneath our icon of the Twelve Apostles just outside of our altar in every service. So for one week, we had a second set sitting in the middle of our church through the Divine Liturgy with us as well.

Beyond this wall of relics and those that we bring to the center of our sanctuary for their feast days, we have many other icons all around the church and even in our fellowship hall outside that contain theca housing relics embedded within the surface of the icon.

As with much else, the Orthodox are more reliant on local authority and on personal trust within longstanding relationships when it comes to relics and their authenticity. We do not have the centralized bureaucracy and documentation that has been developed in the Catholic Church for the safeguarding of these things. With the icon of Matushka Olga above, it was made by one of our parishioners, Michael Roberts, and carried to the canonization service by our priest’s family when Matushka Olga was first formally recognized as a saint by the Orthodox Church in America on June 19, 2025. Our Archpriest Nicholas Molodyko-Harris served in Alaska for many years and brought the Eucharist to Matushka Olga once when she was in the hospital. His daughter, our own Matushka Anastasia, is married to our Father Timothy Hojnicki and grew up for much of her own childhood in Alaska. This trip as a whole extended family to attend the canonization service for Saint Olga involved many deep friendships and family ties as they carried her icons with them and returned with relics from her holy body that now sit with us in every service here in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. All of our relics have an authenticity that rests upon a long line of just such personal relationships and sustained loves.

Some of our relics are secondary (such as bits of vestment) or tertiary (such as bits of cloth or candle wax carried to a holy place and touched to a primary relic). One relic that raises some questions from guests is embedded on the face of a handmade copy of the famous Andrei Rublev icon of the Angelic Trinity (also called The Hospitality of Abraham). Of course, there are no relics from these three angelic visitors. This theca holds a particle of bark from the Oak of Mamre located on the grounds of the Church of the Holy Forefathers and Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Hebron, Palestine.

In the weeks surrounding the Nativity of Christ, the feast days of his many saints somehow capture my feeble attention a little more fully. From the start of the fast with Advent and through to the days of the Nativity feast, we have a steady line of luminaries: Saint Katherine of Alexandria, Saint Nicholas, Saint Ambrose, Saint Lucy, Saint Herman of Alaska, Saint Ignatius the God-Bearer, Saint Stephen the Protomartyr and Saint Basil the Great. To often have their relics with us as well is one more blessing among many, many blessings.

There is so much goodness in our fallen world, and the light of Jesus Christ makes all of it shine so brightly even from beneath, behind and within all of our cowardice, our ignorance and our endless, pretentious lies. Behind and within all of fallen creation is the Incarnation as the reason and the end: the alpha and the omega of creation as God wills it to be. Within fallen time, we encounter the Incarnation “along the way.” Although the angels heralded it, we experienced the Incarnation as small and difficult to find amid the hubbub of our sin—a refugee baby in a forgotten town almost entirely overlooked by the garish powers of this rebellious cosmos. Our God entered fallen time as a child who was born to die and who went voluntarily to the cross as a man so that God might be present with us even in death itself. Therefore, for those who are in Christ, the dead remain our neighbors. To learn how this plays out in the history of the church, read How the First Christians Changed Dying by William E. Kangas.

For me to be enjoying such a life of prayer and worship with my wife and children amid a host of beloved relics from past saints is really no less miraculous of a story than the man who was raised from the dead when those conducting his funeral were terrified by the approach of a raiding party and flung this man’s body into Elisha’s grave where the bones of the prophet raised him back to life. However, I could not tell my own story without raising suspicions and falling into a little sentimentality, so I will simply end here and invite you to ponder the Christ child this year with whom and where you will.

Subscribers here can find the full text of my talk below. (Please message me somehow or somewhere if you cannot afford a subscription and want one anyway.)

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Preamble

God’s salvation of his wayward human creatures is a story grotesquely misunderstood and mistold by most contemporary Christians. The accurate version of the story is layered and lovely yet clear throughout scripture. There is indeed a perspicuity to scripture for those who worship Jesus Christ in Spirit and in truth as I was correctly taught as a little boy. However, such worship has grown rather thin for several centuries in a row now, and we’ve made a diabolical hash of the entire story of salvation. When Jesus Christ carried out the will of his Father (whom he taught us to address as “our Father”), it was to seek us out within the pigsty of death, to unite God’s life to our death so that divine love would reach us within the darkest and most remote corner of our death-bound and hellish world. Instead, we now proclaim the “good news” that God made his Son submit to the divine need to kill someone on a Roman cross instead of us. When we consider the story of the prodigal son and recognize Jesus as the elder brother who does the will of the father, it is a terrible distortion to twist this into the story of a father needing to kill his elder son in the place of his younger son. This misportrayal of God is worse than distant and bizarre. Penal substitution blasphemously represents God as a tedious bureaucrat or a petty honor-hound.

Thankfully, most Christians never hold onto penal substitution in isolation. The rock-ribbed Reformed theologian John Murray, for example, says of soteriology that “nothing is more central or basic than union and communion with Christ” and that this union with Christ “underlies every step of the application of redemption” (Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, 1955). In the same tradition, Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. argues that justification and sanctification are not separate steps where one causes the other, but are distinct blessings that both flow simultaneously from our union with Christ (Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology, 1987). Finally, all such Reformed theologians are drawing on what John Calvin wrote about the centrality of union with Christ (especially in Book III of his Institutes). Properly speaking, within Reformed theology, penal substitutionary atonement is a peripheral or subservient concept that should support the deeper logic of salvation through union with Christ that is recognized in Paul by Calvin.

Sadly, however, the implications of this are not developed or brought in line with the fact that the scriptures and the early church fathers nowhere teach anything like penal substitutionary atonement. Nor do many theologians grapple with its shallow and senseless logic as George MacDonald so carefully does in Unspoken Sermons (with “Justice” and “The Consuming Fire” and “The Last Farthing” standing out in this regard). There are a variety of substitutionary soteriologies in the scriptures and the church fathers (such as being ransomed or bought back from prison or slavery), but none of these substitutionary soteriologies involve the logic or imagery of criminal or penal substitution. In our own imaginations today, however, all of these substitutionary soteriologies tend to get conflated with the specifics of penal substitution. This has been the case for many centuries now since the systematic theologies of Martin Luther and John Calvin perpetuated wave after wave of Protestant Scholasticism.

Our fantasies of a God who must kill rule-breakers and all the children of rule-breakers are now indelibly connected to passages such as 1 Peter 2:24 (quoting Isaiah 53:5) and Colossians 2:13-14 where no such concept actually exists. Moreover, we have read this tit-for-tat reduction of justice back into everything in the scriptures so that God is somehow thought to have found it helpful to punish good sheep in the place of their evil owners as an initial means of correcting and setting to rights the countless brutalities of human history.

In the end, what we need to counter act all of this is not just better training in the history of theology and in how to read God’s written word (although both of these are essential). What we need most is a deepening and ongoing life of worship in Spirit and in truth. In my own lifetime, nothing that I have read or studied has been nearly so meaningful or corrective as entering more fully into the sacramental and worshiping life of the church corporately. It is in the fullness of traditional liturgical services that I have first started to see and feel what a truly horrible thing it was that we did by crucifying our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Anointed One. (For example, see this reflection from a few years back.) Such lived experience within the church sheds so much light upon the scriptures that I almost think that there is no point in continuing any of the doctrinal battles with verbose arguments piled up and with all of the attending baggage. Just get to work and stay at work in your lifetime of learning to pray and worship. However, at times, I am reminded that it is still worth pausing to look back and to consider the case more systematically. So I will try to do so below here under five headings: 1) a quick survey of the sacred salvation story as correctly conceptualized, 2) a brief overview of the story as it is popularly misunderstood, 3) a note on typology and the road to Emmaus, 4) a tiny history of the ideas behind penal substitutionary atonement, and 5) a look at two key New Testament passages typically cited as proof texts.

Note: For some books about the sacrificial system and the cross as these things are actually understood in sacred scripture, see Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death by Andrew Remington Rillera, Welcoming Gifts: Sacrifice in the Bible and Christian Life by Jeremy Davis, Reclaiming the Atonement: An Orthodox Theology of Redemption by Patrick Henry Reardon, and Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation by Khaled Anatolios.

Salvation History Properly Understood

First, here is the truth in brief. God created humanity within a beautiful temple-garden to learn and to grow there in their responsibilities as his children—priests and kings who would show forth God’s image to all of the other creatures by their joy in them and care for them. God himself provided for these first humans all that they could wish as far as foods and delights, and God himself walked with them in the garden. God also clearly warned them that seeking to know good and evil on their own terms would take them away from God’s presence and into death. However, the first humans listened to a shimmering and crafty serpent who twisted God’s words and encouraged the humans to seek out knowledge on their own. Having brought upon themselves a cursed and death-bound existence outside of life with God, humans were mercifully separated from the tree of life by God so that they could not extend their life of ignorance and self-directed rebellion forever but would be limited by death. Living in exile from the temple-garden, humanity learned to bring sacrifices to God as an attempt to continue recognizing God as the source and end of life.

Those who continued to long for life with God would bring some of their best possessions to God as a recognition of the fact that their entire life belonged to God and was from God and for God. These sacrifices were active pictures of reality that counteracted and undid (in some measure) the brutal delusion of any ultimate independence from God by means of giving entirely back to God some portion of our life. Sacrifices restored communion with God in some real although limited way, and many of the sacrifices resulted in a meal with God such as the one enjoyed by Abraham and his three angelic visitors.

In the most extreme story of sacrifice within the Old Testament, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac which would have been an immoral command to follow had Abraham not believed all throughout the ordeal that God would provide an alternative or perhaps raise up his son from death in the aftermath. This sacrifice—as with the many other examples and types of sacrifice—was about the recognition of God as the source and goal of life as well as about the proclamation of a restored life and communion with God. Although a dramatic substitution is involved to save Isaac, this sacrifice had nothing at all to do with punishing anyone. No sacrifices were about punishment of sheep, children, farmers or fathers for anything at all. There was a scapegoat who carried the sins of the people outside of the camp in one ritual, but this was a ritual providing an enactment of relief from sin and does not inform us about the meaning or practices of sacrifice.

We also have the imagery of the firstborn of Egypt killed in the tenth and final plague with the blood of a lamb being put as a sign over the doorframes of Israelites so that the angel of death would pass by their homes. This is not about either the first born of Egypt or the first born of Israel deserving to be killed but having lambs killed in their place. It is about the way in which all life belongs to God and how God will free life that is in captivity to sin and death from this captivity into new life. Speaking of Moses and this tenth plague, Saint Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 to c. 394) writes in a way that is typical of all the church fathers:

Intending to remove his countrymen from evil, he brought death upon all the firstborn in Egypt. By doing this he laid down for us the principle that it is necessary to destroy utterly the first birth of evil. It is impossible to flee the Egyptian life in any other way. It does not seem good to me to pass this interpretation by without further contemplation. How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history? The Egyptian acts unjustly, and in his place is punished his newborn child, who in his infancy cannot discern what is good and what is not. His life has no experience of evil, for infancy is not capable of passion. He does not know to distinguish between his right hand and his left. The infant lifts his eyes only to his mother’s nipple, and tears are the sole perceptible sign of his sadness. And if he obtains anything which his nature desires, he signifies his pleasure by smiling. If such a one now pays the penalty of his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries: The man who has sinned is the man who must die and a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father? How can the history so contradict reason? Therefore, as we look for the true spiritual meaning, seeking to determine whether the events took place typologically, we should be prepared to believe that the lawgiver has taught through the things said. The teaching is this: When through virtue one comes to grips with any evil, he must completely destroy the first beginnings of evil. [From The Life of Moses.]

A lot of valuable time could be spent on this remarkable passage from Gregory (which continues beyond this excerpt), but I’ll simply note here that Gregory is not denying the historicity of this tenth plague or of the exodus events. Instead, he is simply saying that the historical event itself must be understood typologically within the light of subsequent revelation and ultimately of Jesus Christ’s perfect revelation of God as the fulfillment of this event.

All sacrifices are fulfilled and made effective only in the final sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross which continues within fallen time upon every Christian altar through the Eucharist as the source and fulfillment of God’s kingship and priesthood over all of creation. The “bloodless (anaimaktos) and rational (logike) sacrifice” of the Eucharist (as the Divine Liturgy calls it) is the living power of Jesus Christ offered for us from the cross—both timelessly (the lamb slain before the foundation of the world) and within fallen time—as God’s finished creative work, God’s final judgement, and God’s marriage feast of the lamb.

Christ on the cross unites himself to our sin with all of the consequences that it brings upon us, including death. While our chastisement and death does us no good at all apart from Christ, the death of God as God suffers our chastisement with us, is a new source of divine life for us. While there is abundant substitutionary language connected to Christ’s death upon the cross within the sacred scriptures and the church fathers, there is nothing at all anywhere regarding penal substitution. Christ is a substitutionary ransom paid to set free the captives, prisoners and slaves of sin, death and the ruler of this age. Jesus Christ on the cross is also the righteousness of God that man owed to God as God’s image bearers and that is finally enacted, delivered and offered up to God from Jesus Christ upon the cross as a debt paid on behalf of all humanity. There are hosts of other images for the salvation accomplished by Jesus Christ: the finishing of God’s creative work (“it is finished” as Christ says from the cross), the first fruits of a new life with God, the healing and cleansing of our diseases, the opening up of the Holy of Holies, the reconciliation and restoration of God’s family, etc.

As the elder brother who comes to us in the pigsty, Jesus meets us at the very farthest reaches of our flight away from God and joins himself to us there amid all of the consequences of sin that we have inflicted upon ourselves and everyone around us. When Jesus Christ says “Thy will be done” to the Father in Gethsemane, this is the faithful elder son fulfilling the love of the father toward the prodigal son by willingly traveling to the far country to meet the prodigal son within the pigsty of death. In this Christian version of the prodigal son story, at the moment of the prodigal’s wish to return home as a disgraced slave, his older brother is there with him carrying the heavy yoke of sin and death beside his prodigal brother. This allows his prodigal brother to learn to carry his own cross on their homeward journey and to be fully prepared to make it home and to enjoy the feast that is prepared by their father. Just as there is no need or desire by the father in Christ’s story of the prodigal son to find someone to punish in the place of his wayward boy, so Christ in Gethsemane is not submitting his will to the will of a Father in heaven who must kill someone so that a petty bureaucratic death sentence will be served or so that some family honor code is upheld.

Instead, on the cross, God shows us the self-emptying (kenotic) love of God that is capable even of union with our sin and death and of saying: “My God, my God, why hast Tho forsaken me?” Coming from Jesus Christ as both man and the eternally begotten Son of God, we hear in these words how God’s infinite and entirely actualized love—within the timeless life of the Trinity—demonstrates its capacity to join us within the emptiness of death itself and to set free the power God’s own life and love within the Hades wherein we are held captive. Jesus becomes our sin (as Paul says) and dies with us that we might have God’s life and learn to take up our own cross and to die with God in this fallen world through a life of repentance and sacrificial love.

Salvation as it is Blasphemously Misunderstood by the Vast Majority of Christians Today

Now, here is what I grew up being taught by my wise and loving Christian parents. God made a rule in the garden for the first two humans and attached a death sentence to that rule that must be applied to any rule breakers. Once the first two humans broke this rule, all of their descendants were conceived in the womb as guilty felons with a requirement that God make good on the promised sentence of death in order to remain a just, honorable and holy God. Thankfully, God the Father ordered his only Son to let God kill him in our place so that the death sentence would be satisfied by someone who was worth all of us put together (with God being the only candidate who could offer a full equivalent to all of us). Within the petty and bureaucratic “logic” of penal substitutionary atonement, justice means nothing more than making sure that someone sufficiently important gets killed. Once that happens, all guilt for any past evils are magically expunged from the legal record. It’s the fantasy dream of either a Roman bureaucrat (with a fetish for balanced criminal justice ledgers between the opposing columns of crimes committed and sentences carried out) or of a tribal chieftain (who lives by some kind of an honor code that follows the brutish logic of blood feuds). Both images are utterly blasphemous with regard to what they imply about God.

A Brief Aside on Typology and the Road to Emmaus

In all of this, it is worth very briefly adding a layer of complication by pointing out that God never imposes himself upon us but only meets us where we are at. This includes God’s revelation in the sacred scriptures through the events of fallen human history and the pens of fallen human authors. John Calvin puts this well:

For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to “lisp” in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness. [Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 1: 121.]

Combine this with the Apostle Paul’s teaching that: “For as yet we see by way of a mirror, in an enigma.” Taken together, the material that God has to work with in revealing himself to us—leading up to Jesus Christ and then following the death, resurrection and accession of Jesus Christ—is rather a bleak collection of snippets from fallen time. Recall that, as Yahweh gives the law to Moses atop Mount Sina, Aaron, the brother of Moses, is leading the worship of Yahweh at the foot of the mountain in the form of a golden calf. Yahweh worship was never pure or entirely separate from pagan idolatry. All of the history of revelation in the Old Testament leading up to Christ is a continual refining of imperfect people and stories and historical experiences into a living experience of God that culminates in Mary’s divine son who alone can shed light perfectly back on the Old Testament as with the time when, “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, he expounded to them the things concerning himself in all the scriptures.”

In a host of ways, we must have the light of Jesus Christ shown forth from the gospels and epistles (read out loud and preserved over many centuries within Christian worship services) in order to fully see how God is revealed within the Old Testament. All of the church fathers understood that fallen history was an enigma and that, regardless of the historical or mythic nature of any passage in the Old Testament, all of it must be understood allegorically and typologically in the light of Christ. This passage from the early-6th-century figure Saint Dionysios (who took upon himself the name of a judge of the Areopagus court in Athens converted to the Christian faith by Paul on Mars Hill) is emblematic of this principle. It is the same concept that Calvin describes as God’s readiness to “‘lisp’ in speaking to us” just “as nurses commonly do with infants.” We should therefore not be surprised to find in God’s word these tendencies of the human authors:

When treating God’s intelligible providence or gifts, or revelations, powers, properties, and allotments, or immanence and progressions or distinctions, or unities, they enclose Him in a human shape or in the varied shapes of wild or domesticated animals, of plants, and stones. They clothe Him in feminine ornaments and weapon and armor of barbarian make; they attribute to Him as an artisan the attributes of the potter and foundryman; they spread beneath Him horses, chariots, and thrones; they serve Him certain delectable meats, and characterize Him as drinking, as drunken, as sleeping, and as having a hang-over [afterwards].

What would anyone say about His violent passion, His grievances, innumerable oaths and repentances, His curses and malicious anger, His many and dubious quibbling excuses for the failure of promises, the battle of the Giants in Genesis, when He is said to scheme against those powerful he-men out of fear, and this when they were planning to build a home, not harming others but simply for their own salvation, or about that scheme contrived in heaven to harm and deceive Ahab?

But let us not suppose that the outward face of these contrived symbols exists for its own sake. Rather, it is the protective garb of the understanding of what is ineffable and invisible to the common multitude. This is so in order that the most sacred things are not easily handled by the profane but are revealed instead to the real lovers of holiness. Only these latter know how to pack away the workings of childish imagination regarding the sacred symbols. They alone have the simplicity of mind and the receptive, contemplative power to cross over to the simple, marvelous, transcendent truth of the symbols. [“Epistle 9” from Hathaway’s 1969 translation.]

While no passage in the Old Testament teaches anything like a penal substitutionary understanding of sacrifice, there is much about the stories used by God in the Old Testament—even those stories that relay historical events—that must be understood allegorically and typologically in the light of Jesus Christ before they can be considered to convey theological truths. Recall Saint Gregory of Nyssa writing three centuries earlier about the first born sons of Egypt: “If such a one now pays the penalty of his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries: The man who has sinned is the man who must die and a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father? How can the history so contradict reason?”

While the Old Testament on its own merits consistently points toward Jesus Christ and teaches us about him, it is ultimately Christ’s life, death, resurrection and accession that most fully teaches us what is meant by everything that leads up to it. Only Jesus Christ sheds God’s light perfectly upon the enigma of fallen human history. (See this essay for some more about all of this.)

An Absurdly Brief History of the Antecedent Ideas

Anselm’s “honor code soteriology” (invented c. 1100 near the time when the churches East and West formally split) does not show up in the scriptures or in the church before him, and Augustine’s inability to understand the Greek text of Romans 5:12 caused him to first perpetuate the irrational and profoundly anti-Christian doctrine of inherited guilt near the time of the Roman Empire’s collapse. The insane and diabolical concoctions of later penal substitutionary atonement theories that subsequently developed from these earliest antecedents all stem from these two errors as Augustine battle Pelagius in the final hours of the Roman Empire and across substantial language barriers and as Anselm wrote to “explain” the need for the cross in terms of tribal honor codes to those outside of the church in Islam and from Germanic backgrounds. The fact of the matter is that neither Augustine or Anselm knew the word atonement or followed the specific theory of penal substitution in the logic of their own core soteriologies. Both were better than that. However, they are the ones who laid the groundwork for the final derailments of systematic soteriology perpetuated by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to such a degree that they now hold almost all post-Enlightenment Christian imaginations in abject captivity.

Two New Testament Passages

As noted, two favorite passages for those under the sway of penal substitutionary atonement’s diabolical delusions are 1 Peter 2:24 (quoting Isaiah 53:5) and Colossians 2:13-14. In the brutal ironies of fallen time’s capacities to hide the truth, both of these passages are actually opposed to the heinous concept that God the Father must scourge and kill his one and only Son as a means of making all of us wayward humans back into good creatures. God is not a God who makes rules and meets out punishments on those who break them as Archbishop Alexander (Golitzin) has said clearly. God has far more effective ways of sharing goodness with creation and of inviting it in return (as I’ve pointed to in many places such as this).

To start with, let’s look at 1 Peter 2:21-25 as translated by David Bentley Hart:

For to this you were called, because on your behalf the Anointed suffered also, leaving behind a model so that you should follow his steps: “Who committed no sin; neither was guile found in his mouth”; who, when reviled, did not revile in return; who, in suffering, did not issue threats; who delivered himself to him who judges justly; who himself, in his body, bore our sins upon the tree, so that, having died to sin, we might live for justice—“by whose scarring you were healed.” For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have turned back to the shepherd and overseer of your souls.

This passage powerfully connects the cross to the suffering servant images of Isiah 53. Most specifically, to versus 4 and 5 here as translated by Robert Alter:

Indeed, he has borne our illness, and our sorrows he has carried. But we had reckoned him plagued, God-stricken and tormented. Yet he was wounded for our crimes, crushed for our transgressions. The chastisement that restored our well-being he bore, and through his bruising we were healed.

We have a lot of images in this and the surround passage of Isiah 53 including illness, sorrow, grief, punishment and crime. Leading up to these verses, with the previous two, the text considers how unattractive this suffering servant is to us:

He had no features nor decent appearance— we saw nothing in his looks that we might desire. Despised and shunned by people, a man of sorrows and visited by illness. And like one from whom the gaze is averted, despised, and we reckoned him naught.

Although the overarching image here is Christ’s participation and identification with us in our sinful condition, even becoming our sin as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5:21, there is the most powerful language in the scriptures with regard to the image of penal substitution in what the First Epistle of Peter picks up on specifically with the phrases “bore our sins” and “by whose scarring you were healed.” With these phrases, Peter evokes or directly quotes specific terms from Isaiah 53:4-5:

Surely he has borne (nāśāʾ) our griefs and carried (sābal) our sorrows. . . .He was wounded for our crimes, crushed for our transgressions. The punishment (mûsār) that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

In its mildest sense, mûsār, the word translated punishment, is equivalent to education or moral teaching as proactive protection from waywardness. More forcefully, mûsār is a sharp reproof or warning given verbally when one deviates from the correct path. In the most severe sense, mûsār refers to physical punishment or distress sent or permitted in order to correct behavior. This is the reactive aspect, though its purpose is always restorative and not simply punitive.

The Hebrew word borne (nāśāʾ) has priestly meanings as well as evoking the penal substitutionary ritual of the scapegoat. A priest is constantly “lifting up” or “bearing” things with and on behalf of both Jesus Christ and the people. A scapegoat does carry the sins away outside of the camp and physically remove them through a kind of exile and punishment enacted on the goat instead of the sinful people. Even here, however, we most likely to best to think of this kind of “bearing” of our sins as being connected with Christ yoking himself to us in our sinful condition and carrying the load alongside of us (Matthew 11:28-30) as we learn to carry our own cross (Luke 14:27). In both cases—with the priest as well as the scapegoat—the phrase “bear our griefs” is best understood in the sense of union and participation. We have griefs and sorrows. We have brutal consequences for sin. The wages of sin is death. Christ does not, in fact, keep us from dying. Christ, instead, dies with us and conquers our death by his death. Prior to death, Christ does not remove our suffering but carries it with us and teaches us to repent and to suffering joyfully with our Lord and Savior.

When we read in the First Epistle of Peter about how Jesus Christ “delivered himself to him who judges justly,” we are reading of Christ submitting his will to the will of his Father who desired to enter into death with all fallen creature and to bring them hope and life within their miserable condition of separation from their Father. Notice in the 1 Peter 2 passage that Jesus Christ, “in his body, bore our sins upon the tree” so that God might be united to our sins and become the one “by whose scarring you were healed.” This is not language of punishment for a crime or of replacing one person’s sentenced to death with another who deserves no death at all. Instead, we have language of someone wounded and in need of healing, trapped by sin and bound for death and who is going to have another join them and lift the load and the burden that they cannot bear alone. God the Father is not killing his Son but is, in the Son, being uniting God to our sin and our death by the power of God’s own kenotic love that is perfectly enacted by Jesus Christ as God and man.

Once again, here is 1 Peter 2:21-25 in the English Standard Version:

When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

While the ideas of a penal substitution is easy to take from this (and certainly reinforced by the Isaiah passage behind this), neither Peter or Isaiah are actually claiming that God the Father is looking to settle an account by killing his Son instead of us. Far more consistent with the texts is a reading that God the Father is joining his Son in being united to our fallen human condition so that God might take up with us the burdens and the sufferings that we have inflicted upon ourselves. When God joins us in our death, then our death is destroyed by the power of God’s living presence.

Part of all this is a proper understanding of sin itself. Sin is not the breaking of a rule. It is something far more serious. Sin is a failure to see God clearly, to know God’s love for us, and to pursue God directly and effectively in return. This misdirection of our loves leads to only one place: separation and death. Overcoming the narrowly legalistic and bureaucratic understanding of sin as rule breaking is a critical aspect of learning to read the sacred scriptures correctly.

Finally, let’s take a look at Colossians 2:13-15 and the surround text that actually works against penal substitutionary atonement in a profound and direct way (although a way that is rather bizarre to modern ears). Here is the immediate passage in the English Standard Version:

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

This passage comes within an intense accusation by Paul against those “insisting on asceticism and worship of angels” (to continue with the ESV) or those “affecting humility and a religion of the angels” (to use a better translation). It goes on to note that “with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world.” Reading all of this properly, Paul is clearly saying that “the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands” was written by incompetent or even tyrannical angelic powers who had rather overrated their claims upon God’s righteousness. God turns the tide, however, when his eternal Son joins us in death and leaves their pompous death sentence hanging up a Roman cross. In fact, the specific text within this order of execution by the hoity-toity angels is rather obvious: “You, oh false Christian, have not been faithful to the commands of God to circumcise your flesh and to observe all of the holy days of old, etc. This failure of ritual observances coupled with your greedy and hurtful actions leaves God hating you with a righteous hatred and eager to leave you to rot upon a tree as an example to everyone else in the world of total depravity.” To be sure, the persnickety angels are not all wrong. We are, in fact, faithless to God and to God’s law. We have in fact, willfully chosen sin and death instead of our loving God. This angelic death sentence has a kind of earthly justice about it, and it does hold us captive to death. Our condemnation by the law is in line with God’s holy expectations of us as his image bearers and with his exile of us from the Tree of Life following our foolish attempt to gain knowledge on our own. However, God is not the one who condemns us. Instead, God is the one who you has provided Jesus Christ to us that we might be “made full in him who is the head of every Rule and Power” and “buried with him in baptism” by which we are “also raised along with him by the faithfulness of the operation of the God who raised him from the dead” and finally set free from the condemnations of the angels who administer an earthly law so that “stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession.”

It is a major theme of Paul and other New Testament authors that angelic powers of various kinds (with an admixture of outright evil for some and a rather relatable administrative incompetencies for others) are the chief enemies of humanity and that the Old Testament law is of a lesser authority than the law of Christ because it was administered by angels instead of by the Son of God exalted upon the cross, raised from the dead and seated upon the heavenly throne as God and man in Jesus Christ (Hebrews 2:2–3, Galatians 3:19 and Acts 7:53). This gets into topics that require more wisdom and time than the condemnation of penal substitutionary atonement.

Staying focused, however, if this passage from Colossians 2 is read well, it is actually antithetical to penal substitutionary atonement. God the Father is opposed to our death sentence and sends his Son to die with us so that we might be raised to new and victories life with his Son. God the Father is not killing his Son in our place. Instead, God the Son is fulfilling the desire of God the Father to be with us in our death (as Jesus taught us that God is with every sparrow at its the death). And God is destroying the death sentence brought against us by faithless powers. Here is the full passage in David Bentley Hart’s translation:

Watch that there be no one who robs you by way of philosophy and empty deceit according to the traditions of human beings, according to the elemental spirits of the cosmos, and not according to the Anointed; because in him dwells all the Fullness of deity bodily, and you are those who have been made full in him who is the head of every Rule and Power, in whom also you were circumcised with a circumcision not accomplished by hand, through the shedding of the body of [the sins of] the flesh, through the circumcision of the Anointed, buried with him in baptism, by which you were also raised along with him by the faithfulness of the operation of the God who raised him from the dead; and, while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh, he gave you life along with him, forgiving all trespasses, expunging what is written by hand against us—contrary to us—in decrees, and has removed it, out of the way, nailing it to the cross; stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession. Therefore, let no one judge you for eating and drinking, or for taking part in a festival or in a new moon celebration or in Sabbaths; these are a shadow of things to come, but the solid body thereof is that of the Anointed. Let no verdict be passed against you by anyone affecting humility and a religion of the angels, venturing upon visions he has never had, blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, not holding to the head from whom all the body—furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures—will grow with a growth from God. If with the Anointed you died away from the elemental spirits of the cosmos, why are you submissive to dogmas, as though living in the cosmos.

None of this is simple or obvious in a world where the ideas and the vocabulary have been distorted over many centuries and across multiple languages.

However, it all leaves me with little doubt that God hates penal substitutionary atonement. It makes God out to be happy with a chimera of righteousness externally imposed upon us as part of a purely bureaucratic justice that simply needs someone to be killed given that killing had been declared to be the proper punishment for the breaking of these rules. This power of God to erase the past without any real change or process is a kind of black magic. It also encourages gnosticism (a sense of history being entirely irrelevant and cut off from the life of God) because it claims that God can simply erase all of our past wrongs by fiat once God finds someone who is worthwhile enough to kill in our collective place. These confusions and inventions of Augustine and Anselm developed into a juridical and bureaucratic soteriology that remained entirely unheard of in the Orthodox Christian tradition for centuries and that was considered profoundly antithetical the Christian gospel by Orthodox Christians once they did hear about it. I’ll simply say that the best way that I’ve ever found to start hearing the clear teachings of God’s written word is to worship our living Lord and Savior Jesus Christ within a community centered wholeheartedly upon the realities of the Eucharist.

And now to share my recent conversation with Addison about Father Christmas, Saint Nicolas, Mary the Mother of God and other topics related to the fasting and feasting surrounding Christ’s Nativity that can bless our schools and homes at this time of year. Find links from here under “Subscribe” to all of the standard podcasting platforms or listen from YouTube:

Readers here might also enjoy my last two conversations with philosopher D. C. Schindler as well as with the publisher and educator Dr. Christopher Perrin (who is also my friend, fellow parisioner and employer):

• Episode 34: Teaching in Reality: D. C. Schindler on Classical Education and Metaphysics

• Episode 33: Leadership in the Classical Tradition with Aristotle, Aurelius, and Christopher Perrin

Finally, I’ll also mention the 2024 Christmas edition episode which was a conversation with Dr. Matthew Milliner focused on Mary.

Spirit is too substantial to explicate in metaphysical terms. We can talk about things such as soul, life, mind, body and matter with definitions, boundaries and ranked relationships. Spirit, however, is the innermost source and ultimate objective for each and every person that comes directly from and moves fully back toward the actualized life of God’s own triune and self-giving love. Spirit is the bedrock of all creaturely embodiments and personhood. Even within the Trinity, Spirit is both the overflow and the substance of life and love: Spirit timelessly expresses and springs forth from the mutual adoration of Father and Son. We cannot fully categorize or define this source and end within ourselves that touches upon the infinite and timeless fullness of God’s own life.

All of this makes spirit both helpful and unhelpful when seeking to stir up in our imaginations something outside of the present collective entombment within Cartesian dualism that is all that we have known for several centuries now. For the most part, these days, God either does or does not exist alongside of a long list of other spiritual and immaterial realities such as angels, demons, and the dead who came before us. We can only consider God within the de facto Cartesian categories that dominate our imaginations regardless of what our more abstracted metaphysical commitments might be. However, God is not one among other beings but is the infinite actuality that is both the beginning and the end of all other beings. Moreover, in classical terms, God is the only immaterial reality. As Saint John of Damascus wrote, “all that is compared with God, we find to be dense and material” because “in reality only the Deity is immaterial and incorporeal.”1 Angels have spiritual bodies which are the most substantial bodies of all, and the Apostle Paul says that we will all receive spiritual bodies when our present bodies are sown into the ground as seeds (1 Corinthians 15:44).

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It does not come “naturally” to us these days to recognize this rebellious world that we inhabit as a fragmented distortion of God’s creation. In fact, for most of recorded human history, we have found few reasons to hope for more than this world offers. Arguably, it was Christianity that introduced the idea of a fallen world into the flow of human ideas. If this thesis is defensible, it rests upon the claim that Christians understood the extent of our darkness because they had seen the light of Jesus Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension. As Christ taught: “Take heart—I have conquered the cosmos” (John 16:33). In one sense, it is obvious that our world and our hearts are unwell and capable of great evils. However, only the resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us a reason to fully challenge the status quo of life as we have it here within the confines of death and to suspect that each frantic and feeble moment now actually contains the seeds of eternal peace and potency.

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Albus Dumbledore is easily accused of irreverence or laxity. He frustrates me, for example, with his apparent lack of support to the bumbling efforts of his often strange and sometimes downright inept selection of faculty members. Rubeus Hagrid could have benefited, one has to think, from more direction and guidance in his early efforts as a professor in the Hogwarts class on Care of Magical Creatures. What is Dumbledore doing up in his office while his students and teachers muddle their way through dangerous classroom activities or battle deadly enemies within the dungeons and forests surrounding the ancient school under his care? If the passwords protecting his office are any indication, Dumbledore is apparently syphoning off uncomfortable thoughts into his Pensieve while nibbling on Sherbet Lemons and Cockroach Clusters. Not only this, but Dumbledore encourages the foolishness of his favorite students as he provides Harry with the invisibility cloak from his lost father and winks at Harry over the possession of the Marauder’s Map that Harry has stolen from the office of the school’s caretaker, Argus Filch. Even the apparently decorum-minded professor Minerva McGonagall is glad to break the law with Dumbledore’s blessing as she secretly provides Hermione Granger with a time-turner. As Dumbledore presides over all of this chaos and disregard for discipline and common sense, all that he has to offer to his scattered flock are four-words speeches such as: “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!”

As I read the Harry Potter books out loud to our third child, a friend of mine is doing the same with his oldest. My friend recently asked me about this question of authority and reverence in the Harry Potter world. Just as there are in reality, three kinds of authority exist within the Harry Potter stories:

1. a false authority maintained by intimidation and raw, self-serving power (i.e. evil “authority”),

2. a false authority dependent upon rules and regulations or measurable outcomes (i.e. bureaucratic or legalistic “authority”)

3. and a true authority that invites others to join in the pursuit of a goodness and truth that is available to all without being easily or readily apparent to anyone (i.e. contemplative and Christian authority).

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I really enjoy Justin Coutts! And it is definitely a case of “more and more joy” each time that I get to chat with him. His early background in serious religious traditions (including Quaker and Native American communities if my memory serves me correctly) has given Justin a wealth of practical wisdom and experience upon which to draw. On top of all this, Justin’s deep reading of John Scotus Eriugena and much more (especially within the Celtic Christian tradition) gives him a host of insights and profound questions. Most of all, however, he is comfortable, earnest and delightful to the core and in equal measures. My one criticism is that he slightly oversells our conversation in the opening words of this description copied below (given that I have no real capacity to engage “deeper intricacies” in the works of thinkers like Origen, Eriugena, Bulgakov, and Hart). However, with that caveat in place, I will say that, if you are a layperson who enjoys some of these authors, you will probably have a good time listening. And here is that full description from Justin:

Jesse Hake and Justin Coutts discuss the deeper intricacies of Christian Sophiology, drawing primarily from Origen, Eriugena, Bulgakov, and Hart. All these questions are discussed, none of them are definitively answered.

Who is the female figure of Sophia (Wisdom) we meet in the book of Proverbs and other wisdom literature?

• How does Sophia relate to Christ?

• Does she represent a fourth member of the Trinity?

• Can she be understood as the pre-incarnate Logos, making her another face of Jesus?

• How does the concept of an eternal Adam (who is the whole of humanity) differ from the Sophia of Bulgakov et al?