Banks wants to raise the profile of birth. Birth is “huge and untamed,” “morally dense” and “imaginatively rich” (5). She ponders what would happen if we stuck “birth” into philosophical truisms in place of “death”:

*From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth.

*Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth and to come to terms with our having been born.

*The great philosophers are those who practice being born and birthing.

*Keep birth daily before your eyes.

*Birth is evidence of our freedom.

*The fundamental purpose of art is to process the strange, painful, and miraculous experience of childbirth (6).

She gives due attention to modernity’s birth-skeptics. Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” is empty not only of other adults but, especially, of children (13). Shulamith Firestone lamented that women are “at the continual mercy of their biology – menstruation, menopause, and ‘female ills,’ constant painful childbirth, wetnursing and care of infants,” all of which leaves women vulnerable to and dependent on men (13). Natality rates are at historic lows, partly because some have deliberately become “Birthstrikers” (15). Anti-natalism has taken bureaucratic shape on a massive scale: Indira Gandhi’s sons directed an Indian program that sterilized 8 million people in one year – including, Banks says, her in-laws. The effort was “bankrolled by American taxpayers” (21).

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In Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Ludwig von Mises explains how enlightened self-interest, rather than love, is the lubricant of social collaboration:

Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

Mises’s argument is near-universal among economists. Given the narrow focus of their concerns, it’s not wrong. Why does the shoemaker sell me shoes? Because he doesn’t want me to go unshod? Maybe, but neither he nor I need his empathy. He sells because I pay, and he can use that money to pay for things he needs. Why do I pay him? Because I want him to have enough money to feed his family? Perhaps, but, once again, fellow-feeling is unnecessary. I pay because I don’t want to suffer the pain and shame of walking barefoot. Love’s got nothing to do with it.

Still, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It implies that what we count as the deepest and most noble human emotion has no place in the acts of production, distribution, and consumption that occupy the bulk of our waking lives. The bad taste turns emetic when we consider the imperialism of recent economic theory. In a joint 1977 manifesto, Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker and his Chicago colleague George Stigler dismiss the “traditional view” that economics must stop at the boundary of taste, which isn’t subject to economic analysis. In their view, on the contrary, economists never have to yield terrain to psychologists or anthropologists or other -ists, since “differences in prices or incomes [can] explain any differences or changes in behavior” (my emphasis).

Elsewhere, Becker writes, “the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior.” Becker is relentless, applying the logic of prices and income to marriage, child-bearing, and, well, everything. Love, it seems, has nothing to do with anything.

Common as it is, Mises’s observation is at best limited, at worst fundamentally mistaken. We need to push the question, “Why does the shoemaker make and sell shoes?” from the realm of means to that of ends. Gathering money from shoe sales isn’t, after all, the shoemaker’s ultimate goal. He doesn’t sell shoes to fill his mattress with cash, but to pay for food, clothes, shelter, and other goods for himself, likely also for others—his wife, children, guests in his home, perhaps the church food bank. And how does he decide how much to distribute to each? Can we answer that question without introducing love? Can we answer without the category of “gift”?

In his Redeeming Economics, John D. Mueller makes this point by analyzing the “Mother’s Problem,” a favorite thought experiment of the Victorian economist Philip Wicksteed. A mother has a scarce supply of milk to meet a range of demands. The cats want milk, so do her children; she likes a splash in her tea, and she wants to treat her husband to dessert every now and again. She doesn’t decide how to apportion her milk by abstractly balancing supply and demand; she decides by considering the relative value of the recipients. Whatever good she’s got, she’s always weighing two things: “the relative significance of each user of milk” as well as “the value of each use of milk.” Her decisions aren’t simply about means, but about ends. Most everyone on earth has “zero significance” as regards her distribution of milk, but she’s willing to sacrifice for those she loves. She’ll make sure her kids get their milk even if she has to drink her tea black. Everyone is that mother. Every economic action, every human action, is concerned with the relative values of both means and ends, with use of scarce resources and the persons who ultimately receive them.

One might, if so inclined, insist that the mother’s attention to her kids and cats is self-interested. She expects some return on her expenditure, intangible though it may be: Gentle purring from the cats, grateful respect from the kids. That doesn’t work. No matter how irritable she may be, she won’t starve her children to fatten the cats; or, if she does, she’s deranged, her loves disordered.

In Mueller’s Augustinian formulation, “all human action is ultimately motivated not by utility but by love for some person or persons.” This, Mueller argues, was the holistic vision of Scholastic economics, which asked not only how humans determine the value of scarce resources, not only how goods are produced, not only how they’re fairly exchanged, but also how humans make decisions about distributing gifts and goods.

For several centuries, “final distribution” has been amputated from economic theory and, with it, love. For several centuries, economics has suffered from the amputation. Love’s got everything to do with it. Final ends never appear late in the game. The final cause is the first cause: We determine the aims of our actions (whipping up dessert), and then work out means to achieve them (purchasing a quart of milk). And the final end is a person, myself or a beloved other.

By deleting love from the calculus, economists give us a theory, and eventually a practice, of aimless production, exchange, and consumption—literally, purposeless abundance. Theories such as Mises’s run aground both normatively and descriptively. They describe a loveless society few wish to inhabit, but, fortunately for us, the dismal world they describe isn’t the real world.

This is not a paper or treatise but a set of provocations designed to spur debate. I begin with Scripture, move to Thomas, and conclude with a few quasi-philosophical questions about the category of “nature.”

Part I: Bible.

1. Does the Bible teach that human beings know…

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Nightingale Wood (1938) is a romantic comedy of manners, following the fortunes of the Wither and Spring families, who live near Chesterbourne in Essex. The novel bogs down in the middle, in a repetitive series of balls and garden parties, and ends like an improbable fairy-tale – though, in fairness, it’s a fairy tale all along. Even when it slogs, it’s spiced up with Gibbons’s witticisms: Victor Springs’s “tastes were simple: he liked the best and plenty of it.” “The steady pursuit of conventional pleasures, none of them lasting very long and all of them costing a good deal of money, was Phyllis’s ideal of how live should be lived.” (Victor and Phyllis get engaged – a match made at Harrod’s). For Hetty, Victor Spring’s bookish cousin, “Food only became interesting when it was symbolic, or when it was eaten to the music of witty talk, or by brave men in danger, by true poets who were starving.” Hetty remarks to Mr. Wither about the isolation of his home, “hoping to lure Mr Wither into making some Gosse-Barrett remark on the lines of ‘all-the-quieter-to-beat-my-daughters-in.’”

The Woods in Winter (1970) is more thoroughly successful. It’s the story of Ivy Gover, a fifty-ish, triply widowed Cockney charwoman, who moves from London to isolated Catts Cottage, which she inherits from a great uncle. Acerbic, witchy, a “tidy gypsy” with tightly bound black hair, Ivy puts off the romantic attention from Nobby Clark, a friend of her third husband, while gathing a menagerie: She steals a mistreated dog from a neighbor and names his Nebukadzer, feeds birds and badgers from the forest, indulges the mice and roaches that infest her cottage. When eleven-year-old runaway Mike shows up on a winter’s night, she takes him in like another animal and the two develop a spiky affection.

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One of the great blessings of reading Oliver O’Donovan is the pace he forces on his readers. You can’t help but slow down and think. In a world of glib, it’s something devoutly to be relished. I’ll follow a few threads of his argument.

1. The overall scheme of the book is a story of loss and recovery. Ethics has disappeared because it’s lost its object, its frontier, and its agent; that is, it’s lost the good of being, the frontier of time, and the human agent. Theology, O’Donovan argues, is the path of return. The doctrine of creation recovers the world as good; theology’s emphasis on law recovers time as history; and the work of the Spirit restores the reality of human agency.

2. His second lecture aims to rejoin “good” with “time.” Videtur (“it seems”) the two are disconnected. Goodness is eternal goodness, complete in itself, and accessed through contemplative ascent beyond time. That, O’Donovan insists, is a mistake. Pure enjoyment without time and action “is not something we can easily conceive of.” Rather, “in our actual experience, wonder comes to us, reality dawns on us. Discovery is an event.” When we engage reality, we not only ask, “What is this?” but “What is to be done about it?” We cannot engage the good without immediately taking action, which in turn takes time. And the first act of engagement with the good is worship (34).

Far from being atemporal, the good is temporally indexed: “Something is good for us not only by virtue of what it is, but by virtue of when we meet it.” Reality isn’t just being, ontological; reality, being, the good is itself temporal, such that it’s possible to meet new realities (35).

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He begins with the question of the relation between being and personal identity: “It is all too often assumed that people ‘have’ personhood rather than ‘being’ persons,” so that personhood “becomes a quality added, as it were to being.” You have to be first, and then act as a person. This viewpoint rules out any possibility for an “ontology of personhood.” Zizioulas, by contrast, argues that personhood “has the claim of absolute being, that is, a metaphysical claim, built into it.” The answer to the question “Who am I?” can be “I am who I am,” and that is a metaphysical statement. Not only “what” but “who” questions have ontological weight.

Zizioulas then more carefully analyzes the questions “Who am I? Who are you? Who is he/she?” The “who” calls for “definition or ‘description’ of some kind,” and thus is a call “of and for consciousness,” expressing a desire for articulate knowledge. Though this question seems to require “a developed degree of consciousness,” yet “it is a primordial cry,” which arises from the fact that we are faced with a “given world, and thus forced into self-assertion always via comparison with other beings already existing.”

The “am” of the question is “a cry for security, for ground to be based on, for fixity.” We ask the question of our being in the face of the fact that we have not always been here, and the fact that someday we won’t be here again. It is a “triumphalistic cry,” or “a doxological/Eucharistic one,” because it expresses “a sort of victory over non-being.” Zizioulas says that the sheer assertion of being implies transcendence, the “possibility or rather the actuality of a beyond,” and thus the question/assertion of being implies a metaphysics.

The “I” or “You” or “He/She” of the question is a “cry for particularity, for otherness.”

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It’s an odd place to begin. Why not the exodus? Why not the Ten Words? Moses doesn’t get to the Ten Words until Deuteronomy 5. He refers to the exodus constantly (e.g., 1:27, 30), but doesn’t speak of the passage through the sea until Deuteronomy 11:1-4.

There’s a literary-structural reason for this beginning. Yahweh tells Israel to “turn and journey and go to the mount of the Amorites” (1:7). Israel obeys the command: “we set out from Horeb . . . on the way to the mount of the Amorites” (1:19). Between command and compliance, though, there are ten verses about something else.

Then the same pattern is repeated. Moses tells Israel, “Yahweh your God has given the land before your face; ascend, take possession” (1:21). Instead of an immediate fulfillment, there’s another “interlude” about the spies who check out the land (1:22-25).

The two “interludes” (1:9-18; 1:22-25) share a number of details:

*In both, men are chosen for a particular task – to judge and to spy.

*Moses “takes” both judges and spies (1:15, 23).

*Moses proposes to choose judges, and it’s good (tov) to the people (1:13-14). The people propose to choose spies, and it’s good to Moses (1:23; verb is yatov).

*Judges “hear” (1:16); spies “spy” (1:24).

*Judges are not to fear (1:17); the spies’ report makes the people fear (1:29).

Thus, the overall pattern of Deuteronomy 1 is:

A. Command from Yahweh, 1:6-8.

B. Choice of men to judge, 1:9-18.

C. Compliance with command, 1:19.

A’. Command from Moses, 1:21.

B’. Choice of men to spy, 1:22-25.

C’. ?

The repeated cycle sets us up for the shock of 1:26: “You were not willing, but rebelled against the mouth of Yahweh your God.” Instead of the expected command-compliance sequence, we find an alarming sequence of command-noncompliance.

Choosing judges and spies is supposed to be part of obedience to Yahweh’s command to take possession of Canaan. Moses selects judges so Israel will be well-governed when they enter the land; spies are chosen to assist with the conquest.

Conquering and possessing the land isn’t enough. Yahweh wants Israel to inhabit the land, and to live well in it. To do that, Israel needs wise, discerning men of reputation, fearless men of justice who will hear the small, the great, and even aliens (1:16-17).

As Jeff Meyers pointed out in our Theopolis podcast on this passage, it doesn’t turn out that way. The spies bring a bad report about the good land. Along with the rest of the people, the judges believe the spies, their hearts melt, and they accuse Yahweh of bringing them out of Egypt to kill them in the wilderness (1:26-33).

Israel won’t get the judges they need until the first generation dies in the wilderness. Israel doesn’t get just leaders until a new Israel rises from the grave of the old.

The unity of humanity is rooted in creation: Of one man God made all the nations of the earth. Greco-Roman culture also had a concept of world unity, but came to it from a very different theological perspective. Among pagans, divinity was “part of the world, and the world had divine status,” so the “unity of mankind could be converted into political reality” (11). The biblical God, of course, is Creator, free in regard to the creation. He imposes the punishment of division at Babel, and His free and independent power alone is capable of reuniting the world. That’s what He’s promised to do, and the Old Testament is filled with visions of the pilgrimage of nations to Zion.

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Jenson’s discussion of the “Being of the One God” at the end of the first volume of his Systematic Theology is intriguing both as historical and as systematic theology.

He summarizes the Greek answer to the question “What is Being” in three steps. Being is “immunity to time”; it is “what does not come or go, and therefore divinely is and therefore truly is, is ‘form’” and “what satisfies the mind’s longing for absolute assurance, for transcendence over time’s surprises”; it is, finally, the “shape that the mind’s eye sees.”

What can Christians do with this pre-Christian concept of being? How ought it be applied to God? Some theologians – Jenson mentions John of Damascus – accept this concept of being, apply it to God, but then limit the ways in which the concept applies. When “being” menaces God’s freedom, it is said that God is “‘above; the level at which such dangers menace.”

Alternatively, some theologians, especially those influenced by Heidegger, accept the concept but deny its applicability to God. God is therefore “above being” or even “non-being.” This is dangerous, Jenson thinks, because in modern thought “nonbeing is evoked as mere negativity, that is, as violence upon what is; Heidegger’s fascism was no accident or coincidence.”

The other option, which Jenson somewhat surprisingly attributes to Aquinas, is to reject the concept as formulated and “reinterpret it to accommodate the gospel, and just by so doing say what it is for God to be.”

How does Aquinas do this? First, against Aristotle’s claim that forms that are not instantiated in matter are divine, Thomas “teaches that a form’s lack of need for matter cannot in itself guarantee that it is not instantiated, and so does not qualify it as divine.” Angels are forms without matter, yet are still creatures.

Second, Aquinas “trumped” Aristotle with a second composition added to form/matter. Form and instantiation in matter is “essence,” but this is distinct from being or existence, even in cases of separated forms like angels. There is a “being” or “existence” which is not itself form; Being is “the actuality of essence, its step beyond potentiality.” What something is is not what it is but only what it may be. When we have determined the essence of a thing, we don’t yet know whether or not it exists.

This is not Aristotle’s view. For Aristotle “what a separated entity is implies that it is.” Things are “truly and unqualifiedly are contain within themselves the guarantee of their own actuality.” Thomas cannot accept this; it violates the doctrine of creation, which says that the existence of creatures is not rooted in anything in them but in the Creator.

In God, though, there is a perfect coincidence of essence and existence. “What God is, if he is, itself guarantees that he in fact is.” What interests Jenson is the possibility that this convertibility of essence and existence can also work the other direction: Essence is existence, but does “his existence sheerly as such constitute his essence? Is an otherwise unqualified act of existing the essence of God?” Jenson thinks that this is what Aquinas is after. God doesn’t have a form, but what occupies the place that a form would occupy is the actual divine existence, the action and life of the Trinity.

Turning from Aquinas to Gregory of Nyssa, Jenson argues that “God” is not the name of any particular person nor of the ousia. Rather, “‘God,’ according to Gregory, refers to the mutual action of the identities divine ‘energies,’ to the perichoretic triune life.” God or “the one God” or “the being of God” is “not a something, however rarefied or immaterial, but a going-on, a sequentially palpable event, like a kiss or a train wreck. The being of God, said Thomas, is not something actualized but the event of actualization.” This is the background for Jenson’s endorsement of Barth’s idea that God’s deity is an event.

This is also the background to Jenson’s argument concerning God’s infinity. Greek thought resists infinity, since without boundaries there is no form and a formless thing is simply nothing. Infinity can only be non-being, the threatening violence set against being. For Nyssa, Jenson argues, God’s infinity is not a matter of boundlessness but a matter of His power to overcome all boundaries. It is a temporal infinity, and it is fundamentally the eternity of God’s faithfulness – God’s power to knit together events, God’s ability and determination to overcome all obstacles, most especially death (time’s final boundary) to fulfill His promise.

Jenson writes, “God is not eternal in what he adamantly remains as he began, but in that he always creatively opens to what he will be; not in that he hangs on, but in that he gives and receives; not in that he perfectly persists, but in that he perfectly anticipates.”

This faithfulness has a Trinitarian structure, a “whence” (Father) and a “whither” (Spirit) and an instantiated present (Son). Jenson is even willing to entertain the notion that God has his own time:

The life of God is constituted in a structure of relations, whose own referents are narrative. This narrative structure is constrained by a difference between whence and whither that one cannot finally refrain from calling ‘past’ and ‘future,’ and that is congruent with the distinction between the Father and the Spirit. This difference is not relative and therefore not measurable; nothing in God recedes into the past or approaches from the future. But the difference is also absolute: the arrow of God’s eternity, like the arrow of causal time, does not reverse itself. Whence and whither are not like right and left or up and down on a map but are like before and after in a narrative.

All this leads to the somewhat strange formulation: “God’s being is a particular event, the active relation of the triune persons, the event in which we are involved in that the crucifixion and resurrection occur among us.” Events happen to something, so Jenson says that “the event of God happens to . . . the divine persons. The fundamental statement of God’s being is therefore: God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit.” But he also says that “God is what happens to Jesus and the world . . . . God is the event of the world’s transformation by Jesus’ love, the same love to which the world owes its existence.”

To un pack this, we have to recall that “God” is not the name of the ousia of God, or of any of the persons. God is the name of the “perichoretic triune life.” God is the word that we use to name what in God would be form if God had form. Since He doesn’t, and since his essence is existence/being, God is the name of His existence, His being, His infinite Triune life.

at least since the thirteenth century or the start of the fourteenth, since Dante’s Monarchy, Europe has been in search of the unification of human life in order to overcome the division induced by Christianity. This is not my personal historical interpretation. It is the very theme of European history and in particular the wellspring of the construction of the modern State (214).

Hobbes attacked the double-vision of Christian politics: “Temporal and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign.” Rousseau thought Hobbes had solved the problem: He “correctly saw the evil and the remedy” and “dared to propose the reunification of the two heads of the eagle, and the complete return to political unity, without which no State or government will ever be well constituted” (quoted, 214-5).

The Hobbesian state effectively domesticated the church, but it overreached. In confining religion to the private realm, it also represses ancient freedoms, that is to say, “the direct expression of civic commitments” and participation in common life, since representatives, not citizens, carry out all political deliberation. In this way, the State “rests on the repression, in any case the frustration, of the two most powerful human affects” (religion and political participation). As a result, the “soul no longer recognizes itself.” The post-Christian era is necessarily a post-civic era (217). Deprived of outlets for civic and religious passions, modern souls are listless, timid, vague, dry and disenchanted. The twin phenomena Manent identifies are well known – the triumph of the State over the church and the shrinkage of the soul. His brilliance is in recognizing that they are two aspects of the same movement.

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Back in 2023, Kruger, an Evangelical, produced a manifesto of sorts for the new British conservatism, entitled Covenant. Covenant, that is, as opposed to the social contract of Locke, Hobbes, and contemporary liberalism. A social covenant forms an “artificial brotherhood” that unites people who are not related by blood, as marriage forms a bond between previously unrelated people (unless you’re in the American South or a member of an old European aristocratic family).

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What to make of this? As an argument, it doesn’t work. If the absolute Maximum exists and is everything that can possibly be, we might infer that the Minimum is not among things that can be. Or, if the Minimum is among the things that can be, then it would imply that the Maximum is not everything whatsoever. But exposing the logical problems with this passage misses Cusa’s intention. He is not trying to establish that the Maximum and Minimum are identical. Rather, as Karl Jasper says, “he is endeavouring to render plausible his notion that the absolutely Maximum is beyond all opposition and otherness. That is, he does not use the preceding passage to prove that God is beyond all opposition; rather, he uses it as a step toward claiming that God is beyond all opposition. For he knows that the ‘argument’ can be ‘controverted’ by anyone who insists upon an unrelenting application of the principle of noncontradiction.”

Another indication is his use of terminology that is not clearly defined and his tendency to say things that lend themselves to misunderstanding. For instance, “Homo enim deus est, sed non absolute, quoniam homo; humanus est igitur deus” (“man is God, but not absolutely; for he is man: he is therefore a human God”). Or in de visione dei 12, when he claims that God is “created” as well as creator. Sometimes he speaks of God as the one in whom all contradictories coincide, and we immediately think, “including the contrary of good and evil”?

Cusa’s use of Scripture is also intriguing. He often interprets texts with philosophical ideas in mind. His doctrine of acquired or learned ignorance comes from 1 Corinthians 3:19, and his doctrine that God is all things comes out of 1 Corinthians 15:28. He finds a basis for the via negativa in Ephesians 1:21, the claim that God is above all principality and power and virtue and dominion.

This can seem like mere confusion, and to some philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, this is just what it is. But I think in fact it’s an example of Cusa’s transcendence of Greek philosophy in a Christian direction. His achievement is not perfect by any means, but it is quite remarkable. An extended example will be useful to treat: his treatise on de Possest, a neologism that he invented to express his fundamental doctrine of God.

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Jesus enters Capernaum and meets a centurion (Matt 8:5). Still in Capernaum, he stops at Peter’s house to heal Peter’s mother-in-law (8:14). That evening, people bring their sick and demon-possessed for healing. Mark tells us they gather at “the door,” presumably of Peter’s house (8:16-17; cf. Mark 1:29-34).

(Note the doorway theme here: Doorways as symbols of birth [Gen 18:1], the doorway as the passage out of Egypt [Exod 12:7]. The people healed at the door are the children of Abraham, raised from “stones” and ready to march to the promised land.]

Jesus then crosses the sea for Gadara, a Greek city in the Decapolis (8:23-34), then returns to His own city, that is, Capernaum (9:1). Two blind men follow Him as He enters “the house” (9:27-31) – still Peter’s house. There Jesus touches their eyes and restores their sight.

Early in Matthew, Peter’s house is the hub of Jesus’ Galilean ministry, a house of healing and liberation, an alternate temple, where the Lord is present in power.

And that’s why, after Peter’s confession, Jesus, the wise Master Builder, declares His intention to build His own ekklesia-house, His own house of salvation, on a Rock (16:17-20; cf. 7:24-25).

All that’s happened in “the house” will continue to happen in the ekklesia: Sick people will be raised from their sick beds, demons will be driven from demoniacs, the blind will receive their sight, a renewed family of Abraham will be reborn through the exodus that is the house.

Specifically, the Rock is Peter/Peter’s confession/Peter as representative of apostles (16:17-20). Jesus’ announcement doesn’t come from nowhere. Peter’s house has been the house of the kingdom from the beginning.

And though the church is Jesus’ house, it remains very much Peter’s house, still filled with the life-giving power of that house in Capernaum, where the peoples in darkness first saw a great light.

The Psalms’ declaration that “Yahweh is king” has three associations: He’s king of the natural order, and that ensures creation’s stability; He upholds the international political order, even when it seems that the truculent nations will overwhelm Israel; and He is King of Israel, ordering Israel’s common life by His law and justice (32). Eventually, the second of these becomes a task as well as a reassurance. And the two political dimensions of Yahweh’s kingship rest on a fundamental analogy: “as Israel is situated among the nations, so are the poor and defenceless situated in Israel. He who cared for the welfare of a servile nation in Egypt cares for the welfare of a servile class in Israel” (33).

As King, Yahweh also judges nations (Psa 9:7), and the nations’ leaders are summoned to acknowledge His rule. Even when the Psalms are most concerned with the suffering of Israel, “the international aspect is not lost sight of” (34). He calls kings and judges to kiss the Son.

Psalm 47 suggests that “Yahweh’s rule over the nations consists in nothing more than his assertion of Israel’s superiority over them” (66). But that’s never the end of it. Psalm 47 itself ends with the princes of the nations assembled to worship the God of Abraham. United in common worship, Yahweh elicits “co-operation, on terms of his own deciding, between his people and the nations that surrounded them” (66). Thus Israel’s conviction that it’s a precious chosen vessel doesn’t collapse into “a national monism” (67). What Israel wants when they call on God to judge, isn’t simply protection of their unique state, but the spread of Yahweh’s justice throughout the nations: All judges, not only Israel’s are called “to exercise just judgment” (68).

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It’s a city scape, a heavenly city above the firmament. But that heavenly city doesn’t stay in heaven: It is reflected below the firmament, on earth. The city is also at the edge of a sea, a symbol of nations, and is reflected in the sea. The effect is to imprint a cross on the entire cosmos: Heavenly city descends to earth through the firmament, and that forms a cruciform cosmos.

This is our aim: The heavenly city of the future has come to earth, and it takes form in the church. The church is God’s city, His “Theopolis,” and it exists to witness to and serve human cities, shining the light of Jesus into the dark world. We aim to renew and build the church so that she will be more and more like the heavenly Theopolis of the future, so that the world will come to resemble the city of God.

The materials of this building are simple: Word and Sacrament, delivered by human beings, pastors and teachers and ministers. The Theopolis Institute constructs and adorns the city of God by training skilled builders who know how to build in the power of the Spirit.

One of our central convictions is that culture is shaped and remade from the liturgy, by Word and Sacrament, and that it is directed toward liturgy, toward worship. Specifically, the visual and audible arts are the fruit of Word and Sacrament.

New Heavens and New Earth

As I’ve pointed out in my commentary, Revelation 21 presents the heavenly city’s descent twice over. 21:1-8 is final new creation, after judgment; 21:9-22:5 is the present city, the church, the millennial city. The present city is the one that is adorned, but, again, these are two phases of the same city. That suggests that the final city, which is shown first, is the fully adorned city. She is said to be “adorned for her husband” (21:2), and the same verb describes the walls of the present city (21:19).

21:24-26 says explicitly that kings bring their treasures into the bridal city, the church. That in itself is quite remarkable. This is the city of God, the city of which the Lord God and the Lamb are temple. But God permits kings to bring their treasures into His city, and allows the glory of kings to adorn His bride. We create things and God accepts our creations as adornments for His bride.

More, since these two visions are visions of the same city in different phases, we can conclude that the adornments the kings bring, their glory, becomes the glory of the final city. The bride is adorned with the glory of the nations. Our creations become a permanent part of the glory of the city of God.

This is the most complete vision we get of the city of God, and it comes in the last two chapters of the Bible. And in this sequence of visions, the final vision of the city comes before the present vision. We are given a vision of the future, to which we aspire.

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Today, Nicholas is best known as the authority of philosophical works so innovative that Ernest Cassirer dubbed him the “first modern philosopher.” He might also be called the first modern scientific thinker, known to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz for his brilliant if scattered observations on mathematics and astronomy. Still, “modern” is a misleading adjective to apply to Nicholas. He was more mystical than secular, and his arresting scientific insights arose more often from speculations in numerology or etymology than from observation or experiment.

In a crucial sense, though, Cassirer had it right. Augustine could stare in wonder at a spider eating a moth, but then he chided himself for succumbing to curiosity, which he thought of as a form of the “lust of the eyes.” Medieval thinkers by and large followed suit, often citing the same passage in 1 John that shaped Augustine’s views on the matter. Not Nicholas. He was modern in this sense at least: He valorized curiosity. For Nicholas, intellectual life was a pursuit, a quest, an endless exploration, or, as he liked to put it, a hunt for quarry that can never be captured.

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Saul first appears at the margins of the mob that stones Stephen to death (Acts 7:58), then immediately moves to the forefront of a ravaging persecution (Acts 8:1-3; 9:1). Converted on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19a), he begins to proclaim Jesus in Damascus (Acts 9:19b-22), where he faces such intense opposition that he has to flee to Jerusalem (Acts 9:23-28). There too, he arouses the opposition of the Jews and has to be spirited away, this time back home to Tarsus (Acts 9:29-30). He disappears from the narrative until Barnabas travels to Tarsus to recruit him to help lead the multi-ethnic church in Antioch (Acts 11:25-26; cf. 13:1, where leaders of the church include two Africans [Niger and Lucius of Cyrene] and a childhood companion of Herod Antipas [Manaen]). Saul accompanies Barnabas to Jerusalem to deliver famine relief (Acts 11:27-30), returning to Antioch with John Mark (Acts 12:25).

Before he ever begins a missionary expedition, the pattern of Saul’s life is set. He becomes head of the expedition as he was head of the anti-mission (note his subordinate place in the list of Acts 13:1; compare 13:13). Already, he moves from place to place to keep a step ahead of his murderous enemies. Already, he’s transformed from a persecuting Saul to a persecuted (herald of) David.

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I expected an emphasis on humility, calm, quiet, balance, emptiness, modesty – and found it:

*It is paradoxical but true -

the tender outlasts the rigid;

the gentle defeats the strong.

*The way of the Tao is simple -

stop striving, defeat desire.

*To wear jewels and silks,

to flash your weapons,

to eat and drink excessively,

to store up wealth and treasure -

this is the way of robbers.

Pomp is contrary to the Tao.

*A wheel may have thirty spokes,

but its usefulness lies in the empty hub.

A jar is formed from clay,

but its usefulness lies in the empty center. . . .

Matter is necessary to give form,

but the value of reality lies in its immateriality.

The collection includes several efforts to define the ineffable Tao. It’s the unnameable, indefinable source of everything, “the world’s mother,” seeming empty “yet it is never exhausted.” Unseen because colorless, unheard because silent, the Tao eludes anyone who tries to grasp it, for “it has no form.” Though the heart of all being, it’s elusive. Unfathomable, but its heart is spirit and truth. The Tao is “eternal and unceasing - / it is present at all beginnings.” Utterly simple, yet the world cannot contain it. Wise men live in accord with the Tao, not by following overt rules, but by imitating the Tao’s hiddenness, tranquillity, pliability.

What I didn’t expect is the recurring emphasis on proper uses of power. The Tao is a political manual, often a wise one:

*Because wise rulers love the people,

they lead without using force.

*Common rulers are feared by their subjects.

Good rulers win the affection and praise of their subjects.

But when great rulers lead,

the people are hardly aware of their existence.

*Those who try to seize power and remake society will fail.

Society is a divine thing that cannot be remade.

One who attempts to remake it will only deface it.

*Great rulers identify with orphans, inferiors,

and the unworthy, because they recognize their roots

in the lowest of their people.

And I certainly didn’t expect to find traces of the Trinity:

The Tao produces unity;

unity produces duality;

duality produces trinity;

trinity produces all things.

All things contain both the negative principle (yin)

and the positive principle (yang).

The third principle, energetic vitality (chi),

makes them harmonious.

He examines Thomas Aquinas to see if he gives us the intellectual tools we need to grasp the Trinity as the fullness of love (he doesn’t, not quite).

Then Crickenberger turns to the great 20th-century Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and asks the same question. With a few tweaks from other theologians, Balthasar comes through!

Here I focus on a Pentecostal thread in Balthasar, one of his most intriguing and daring suggestions: The Holy Spirit is the Fruit of the Trinity.

Why would he say that? He starts with the Father and the Son. Both, he says, receive the good of their union as a gift.

Each gives Himself, emptying Himself as a gift to the other. And their mutual self-giving and receiving is itself a gift.

They receive this gift of mutual love as “an unfathomable more, a fruit, an ‘overflowing.’” Their loving giving and receiving of one another goes beyond mere reciprocity and takes shape as the Fruit of their love.

The Spirit is the “more” of the love of Father and Son. Balthasar sees an image of the Trinity in the birth of a child as the “fruit of the ‘one-flesh’ relationship of man and wife.”

This works out in a couple of ways. The Father loves the Son with perfect paternal love; the Son loves the Father with infinite filial love.

What’s lacking in their mutual, reciprocal love is a common love, a love that unites Father and Son in love for Another.

Think about it this way: A man and wife love one another, but their love is mysteriously, immeasurably deepened when they share love for their children. Something analogous is true of Triune life.

Balthasar also says a child is “proof” that the love of husband and wife isn’t sterile but fruitful. So too, he suggests, the Spirit serves as “proof that this loving indwelling [of Father and Son] has succeeded.”

For God and for human beings, the self-gift of love is a seed that produces the “more” of Fruit – the Fruit who is the Spirit, the fruit of a woman’s womb planted by the man’s seed.

And here’s the upshot: Having, raising, and loving children is one of the most common events in human life. Balthasar shows that every time that happens, God unveils His inner life right before our eyes.

Like other recent writers, Borg recognizes the continuity between post-liberal theology, birthed at Yale Divinity School, and post-liberal political theory and practice. More specifically, he traces the continuity between Radical Orthodoxy, which is partly an elaboration of Yale theology, and post-liberal politics. Chapter 1 bears the startling title, “From Radical Orthodoxy to Donald Trump” (could have been, “What Hath Nottingham To Do With Mar-a-Lago?”).

He highlights differences between British and American post-liberalism, and distinguishes, as others rightly do, between post-liberalism and permutations of conservative and Christian nationalism. The inclusion of international relations and gender/sexuality is welcome, since these are oft-neglected facets of post-liberalism.

What is post-liberalism? Though not an homogenous movement, post-liberal political thinkers share common themes. For those of a theological turn of mind, post-liberalism “has been articulated in opposition not only to liberal theology but also secular social theory tout court,” and that assault on secular order persists in post-liberal political theory (5).

Post-liberals often mount a class critique of liberalism, arguing that power and wealth have concentrated in the hands of a band of rootless meritocrats who, convinced they’ve earned their elevated social position, hold ordinary people in contempt as they use their power to mold a system for their own benefit. Young people are pulled from their local communities to distant colleges, where they’re inducted into the ideology of the “overclass.” Graduates enter lucrative professions and reproduce themselves by sending their own children to the best colleges, thus creating an elite as hereditary as the aristocracies of earlier centuries.

In this, post-liberals like left-leaning Michael Lind (New Class War) and right-leaning David Goodhart (Road To Somewhere) draw on the work of Christopher Lasch, who warned in the 1990s about the “revolt of the elites,” as well as on James Burham’s 1941 book on the Managerial Revolution.

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