Читать книгу After Crucifixion - Craig Keen - Страница 7

Those seers who keep their devices booted and their eyes fixed on global trends tell us that the center of gravity of what they call “Christianity” is shifting, socioeconomically and geographically. If one could survey the bodies assembled as local churches half a century from now, they say, the features that would most recur would not be Euro-pale, mature, male, and healthy, but dark, young, female, and marked by poverty. And so, if you happen to find your way through times and places to a land across which by then little churches will have been abundantly strewn, and you come face to face with one of their faithful, odds are good that her eyes will meet yours in her native Nigeria, say, or Brazil. Churches made up of the noticeably prosperous, classy, Caucasoid progeny of European forebears are expected to have generally declined significantly in number. Of course, even if population flow turns out to yield much more massive changes than expected, not all formal categorical textbook descriptions will need to be altered for all locales. Newer inhabitants may well carry with them patterns of life discarded by their well-established neighbors. Populations to the north of the Rio Grande, e.g., are expected to remain strongly “Christian,” but largely because of what will have traveled with more recent immigrants, both the “documented” and the “undocumented,” as they carve out living space alongside the grandchildren of the immigrants of another era.2

And what will have traveled with these newer arrivals? It is tempting to call it “belief.” And yet, that word is too easy, too familiar, too casual to be of much help here. It inclines us to gesture presumptively toward a vaguely untouchable inner life of discrete and discretionary private individuals.3 Certainly, as a devout woman with a history among ecclesial people holds her baby close, as they cross the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean or the Sonoran Desert, powerful memories and hopes carry her.4 Perhaps these are “beliefs” in some archaic sense of the word.5 However, to the extent that she is savory, to the extent that she does believe, she is moved otherwise than by psychic acts that might be graphed on a Divided Line or by electrochemical events some centimeters behind her anterior cranium or by “subjective”6 impulses racing down tracks laid by habitual association amidst the welter of sense impressions; she is moved otherwise even than by her “meu bem,” toward whom she travels and for whom she aches.7 The memories and hopes journeying with her north, say, from Brazil, are not her private property, as if they could be counted among her assets on a credit application. One would speak more faithfully, both of them and of her, were one to say that she is in them rather than that they are in her.8 These are the memories and hopes of a work that over disrupted time aligns by hospitable anticipation (even if unevenly) all she is about to think, perform, and speak, one in which she has come to live and move and have whatever goods she carries in the mochila on her back and the plastic grocery bag in her hand.9 And so if, under the glaring, bare bulb of cross-examination, we determined that her “beliefs” are anything but clear, that she could never articulate them to Socrates’ satisfaction and ours, it may only be that we have pressed ourselves upon her too hard, that we have been too swift to make determinations, that in our aggression we have not opened ourselves to her, that we have not loved her.

Were we to love her, we would not too quickly leave her side. We would wait with her.10 We would lean in toward her as novitiates, probationers. Love asks that much of us. We might walk with her, as she prays. We might attend to the prayers dancing on her lips. In time we might come to suspect that they and she are connected in ways we had not in our haste previously imagined. Even if only briefly, we might now wonder if these prayers were less borne by her and much more have borne her and bear her still, so far from home.11 Were we to abide with her, we might find that her prayers have marked her, have inscribed a passage across the movements of her hands, back, legs, and face, as one might with one’s finger inscribe an elusive message across the dust of the ground.12 We might in spite of ourselves learn from her how she remembers and hopes still with the assembly of the faithful from whom so many steps have separated her. She may in the heat of the moment join her petition13 and re-petition with theirs that this time in this lonely desert, too, will have been honest and true to the work into which she was born, that this time, too, will have been an outcry evoked from her throat, opened by a fair wind that blows without consulting your forecasts or mine.14

The prayer in which she and they still touch does not—by definition cannot—float intangibly either above them or us. It is situated in a time and place, as are all human works. Though it is indeed marked by the names their mothers and lovers call them, we are more tempted than they to point and call it theirs. Even as it happens, this is an event that will not be held fast to be owned. It slips away with deference. It defers indeed particularly, across an ugly, broad ditch.15 It defers to a transient moment, so disposable, so distant, so inapprehensible. It defers to an event so free and so forward that, in spite of ourselves, it comes alongside (para) us to make its appearance (doxa), all the while no less ranging beyond the horizon line of the most farsighted extrapolative retrospection. That is, the prayer they and she voice defers not to a cause or an idea or an exemplary champion of fair virtue (investment opportunities, kept in mind, to which only a backhanded deferral is possible). It defers rather to “one particular thing.”16 It defers beyond our line of sight (of all things) to the trace of an already departed vagabond, to a laborer (no[,] less), to a dark-skinned peasant, a no-count wonder-worker and prophet, to an elusive short life and prolonged death. It defers, i.e., in the mode of witness, even (perhaps especially) when good work cannot use either circumspection or compensation: em nome de Cristo.17

Thus in him (and even saying that little strikes us as excessive, if not unthinkable) the assembly, the liturgical avowal by which they assemble, and she concur. When in loneliness or defeat they cry out, it is his outcry they would repeat—articulated in two contrasting, but by no means mutually exclusive, phrases: (1) “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) and (2) “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).18 They pray in order to pray his prayer—his prayer that opens a way through the stone wall of his tomb—that a way may be opened for them, too, and for all, that in his abased and exalted body all things will one day shine.19 They pray that the logic of this new life—the logic of crucifixion/resurrection—will be given them, that they will be gifted with metanoia.20 There are even immodest moments when they pray that they, too, might join him in his sufferings, i.e., bear witness to his resurrection.21 That is, they pray toward and through his death and theirs. They pray not to push, not to coerce, but to give thanks, to react well to an action that they could never forestall. There is a yea-saying preventative, a precedent, an already, in the work of these people, like the warm memory of what is yet to occur, arriving before any imperial chess master could collect his thoughts to set up her best defense against it. They work in this way that they and their work may not collapse under their own weight.

When the people gather, they are supported by nothing more solidly weight-bearing than a parable, an icon, a prayer.22 They are supported by an indeterminate future that they acknowledge as having priority over what they are and have been. Certainly they and the prayers they perform are flesh—“muscles and blood and skin and bones.”23 These are people with a past. They have always left tracks. Nobody has to plant forensic evidence on them in order to charge, convict, and sentence them. The professional staffs of both theoretical and applied sciences turn their attention to them with ease, to manage them, conceptually, programmatically. Philosophers, too, attend to them, to their structures and their doctrines, their creeds and their holy books, their “God” and their “Paul.” With little disquiet they wrap their minds around their ideas, finding about them nothing seriously anomalous.24 That, in gathering, these people might have a particularity, a particularity like and secondary to the particularity to which they prayerfully defer, a particularity that would elude all apprehension and exhibition, we are tempted to say, is unthinkable.25 A truly radically elusive particularity, one that would not stay nailed down, would at best be undetectable. If it proliferated, however, it could only like cancer unmake, only tear down, we think. The masters of good and evil could not hold it in their hands, could not tame it. Its future could not be ours. It would bode “nihilism,” we say.26 It would, if spread, turn every accomplishment into rubbish, into excrement.27 Such a particular people would travel without[,] a prayer.28 (As the man—who would, since Soconusco, take neither her dollars nor her sarcastic “Senhor Wilie E. Coiote”—stands watch under a thousand thousand apathetic points of someone else’s light in the otherwise heavy, well-woven blackness of an Imperial Sonoran Desert night, the woman who holds her baby close is above all prayer.)29

In the face of the prospect of such disaster it is understandable that we would in our anxiety crave a panoptic vision, a world view, which would take in and hold all that we have discerned and might ever discern,30 a ground for proper action and passion,31 a foothold off of which we might push to make our way into an otherwise paralyzingly uncertain future in the face of an otherwise inhospitably untamed natural world. Besides, we are people who wonder,32 we have a longing for rational unity,33 and we are driven by an aesthetic desire for a vision both coherent and adequate to the broad range of our experience or an erotic urge for far-reaching intellectual satisfaction.34 We are people who desire a grand, integrating vision.35

Surely no one could fault the pious for engaging in just this enterprise, specifying in some detail God’s relation to all the goods (ousia) their inquiries have surveyed, goods that come into their hands as their inquiries grow more and more ambitious.36 Of course, the pious would not wish too quickly to nail God to any vision. They perhaps remember that God is ambiguously related to the act of nailing down. They would want to give God the power to move about freely. Nor would they wish to give God only limited free range.37 And so, the pious might even dare to say that God is in league with that goodness or truth or beauty and in combat against that evil or falsehood or ugliness they have by rigorous and pious effort come to some degree to determine—but they would say this perhaps with downcast eyes, humbly, uncertainly or skeptically or with a knowing, hushed aside that God stands concomitantly in analogical opposition to—even in judgment against—their determinations.38 (That a displaced young woman, holding a little child, would have no place in their ordered whole could not be definitive, they think.)

In this way—perhaps against our best intentions—we have stumbled into the imposing tradition of the Greeks, those masters of health and unity, of balance and justice, of virtue and well-being, of ethics and ontology. The Greeks understood as well as any ever have that a people must keep the lines well drawn that mark the difference between “we are” and “we are not.”39 The literature of the Greeks is rich with a paideic vision, cosmic in scope, for the integrity of the body, the soul, and the city-state. Sublimely conceived, the Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey,40 the Socrates of Plato’s Apology,41 and the walled polis of Plato’s Republic42 each rises tall silhouetted against the ethereal sky of a sublimely conceived cosmos, threateningly mature, overtly or covertly beautiful, strong, virile, courageous, daring, wise, complex, well armed, just: whole.43 To be well adjusted is here to be hale, an inherent harmony properly exercised in controlled agony at one or another battlefield or palaestra or agora, centered, stalking steadily like a pelican on defensible ground.44 That there are the ill-adjusted among us simply means, they held, that therapeia is to be performed, a therapeia in fact that serves not only the patient, but even more the divine that radiates from the temple at the heart both of the city and of the heroic citizen.45 Indeed we human beings, they held, are here at the center of the cosmos to rise by struggle to become “like the divine, so far as we can.”46 The more we are like the divine, the more we are ourselves, and vice versa. Thus therapeia is in the strictest sense a healing act. Who could blame anyone, especially the pious, for praying for such healing? Indeed, who could blame them for conceiving of prayer as such as a salutary act, the deed in itself (whether it is heard by the Actus Purus or not) as therapy, as a medicine of the soul?47

For the more cerebral Greeks the grandest therapeia is what they called philosophia, a pursuit of wisdom that—far from fearing or petitioning the gods, e.g., for some undue ephemeral benefaction—aspires and conforms to the surpassing-divine goodness, truth, and beauty the gods, too, serve.48 Though it is certainly idealized, a kind of monolatrous prayer plays still in the background history of philosophia. And yet the gods, idealized though they, too, may be, are honored and trusted to do well the tasks they have been assigned (without the distraction of our entreaties).49 And we are to do well the tasks we have been assigned, to fit no less into this beautiful cosmos that is our native soil and theirs. The end of philosophical therapeia is adjustment to the eternally concentric archai that order the many, an adjustment that centers the attendant’s otherwise disparate faculties and makes him whole.50 What is truly one, truly whole, is simply self-identical, untouched by what is other than itself: A ≠ ~A! It simply is. “Integrity” = “identity,” “identity” = “being.” I am insofar as I participate in the integrity that most truly is. It is not accidental that the devotion of the Greeks to integrity led them into that discipline that sets out to clarify the foundational meaning of “being.” An inquiry into the significance of “being” is thus no idle pastime; it is a quest for healing.51

Early Greek thinkers were in fact in more than one sense “physicians.” They were above all concerned with what they named physis, with thinking it and thus serving it. It would be fitting, if anachronistic, to describe at least some of them also as “metaphysicians,” but not in the much later sense that discounts physis. The prefix “meta-” would not, indeed could not, in their case mean “beyond.”52 Physis, which is typically translated into English as “nature,” comes from the same root as the English “be.”53 It signifies “what is,” what rises by force out of the darkness to make a stand.54 Beholding physis filled Greek thinkers with awe and wonder. There could be nothing higher, deeper, richer, stronger, or purer. Indeed, the Greeks would have found odd any suggestion that there might be something beyond it. In this morning of Western Civilization, physis embraced everything without exception, including the earth’s rational animals and their gods. Homer and Hesiod, Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle all agreed:55 there is by definition only one whole, and it is the task of competent thinkers to show how and why and in that way to adjust to it—to imitate it, insofar as they can—and in turn to lead especially their kind to adjust to it as well.56 The intelligibility of the cosmos implies, they maintained, that “what is” constitutes a definite totality.57 Physis is one, a beautifully spherical inherence.58 Here everything is. There simply cannot be an outside. If we thought that we had identified an outside, it would by the very act of identification be inside; and an outside with no place inside is literally unthinkable.59

It is perhaps because the Greeks have taught us so well to wonder, to question, to stay awake (though perhaps a more ancient teaching is responsible) that we may not rest with them in their conclusion. And so, we may find ourselves, against ourselves, asking and asking if perhaps there might be another—uncanny, irrevocably prayerful—way of thinking, a way, say, not out to apprehend, overpower, deport, or naturalize the alien, but rather to defer to her? Might one be of a different mind than that of the founding geniuses of Western Civilization, a mind that opens to what it is not and cannot be? Might there be another way of thinking that would let the outside in without assimilating it? Now, such thinking—if it were possible—would undo “the Man of Reason.”60 It would open wounds through him out into the ground that had hitherto so well supported him, wounds possibly undoing integrity, well-being, wholeness—physis itself. The thinker who would think what cannot be thought would undergo a kind of passion.61 (She shivers in the cold midnight of the Sonoran Desert or faints in the heat of its afternoon. She hides from ICE and even more from Minutemen who would cast her out, with her baby and that strange man. “Pai Nosso, que estás nos Céus, santificado seja o Teu nome. Venha o Teu reino, seja feita a Tua vontade assim na Terra como no Céu. O pão nosso de cada dia nos dá hoje. Perdoa-nos as nossas dívidas assim como nós perdoamos aos nossos devedores e não nos deixes cair em tentação mas livra-nos do mal. Amém.”)

It was that tradition which does not shrink back from but rather celebrates passion62 that first gave trouble to Greek thinking, viz., that tradition which not only acknowledges but adores a Creator “who remain[s] outside the cosmos,”63 who is free in relation to physis, to “nature.”64 Perhaps Israel and the church that remembered Israel were less quick to grasp after an integral totality, because its people remembered what it was like to pray, frightened in the imperial desert of Egypt, and heard the declaration, “I am the Lord your God,” only as the command, “you shall love the alien as yourself,” still rang in their ears.65

And yet the church has not always remembered Israel well. The church’s intellectuals gradually, if unevenly, came to appropriate the synthetic presence of mind of the Gentiles of the northern Mediterranean basin. Doing so was a great and rewarding adventure. Their journey was long and difficult: from Jerusalem to Athens and to Rome,66 involving “some severe crises.”67 And how could crises not come? Both older and newer champions of physis had much to be said in their favor, of course. However, there was only so far the church’s gifted children could go toward synthesizing even the most purely idealized essences they and others had distilled from such decidedly uncongenial histories. Ideas never completely shake off the social bodies who gave them life. Before the Edict of Milan, more often than not both the members of the church and those of proper Roman society were struck and shaken by the difference that separated them, e.g., when from opposite sides of an open space,68 immeasurable in Roman feet, they turned their faces toward each other, a few in the bloody dust of the coliseum floor, many in the wooden or marble coliseum seats above.

Unlike the divine of the physicians of the Greeks (and their heirs), the Creator-God of the Testaments of the church was declared in its baptismal credo first to be “the Father” of the “one Lord Jesus Christ” and only then the “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, visible and invisible.” And the “one Lord Jesus Christ . . . through whom all things were made” is no universal, no centered identity, no bloodless, faceless integrity—but the one “who was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” Even when one finds in the texts of the young church what might be called “cosmic symbolism,” the cosmos is subsumed under the “one Lord Jesus Christ,” not the other way around. Indeed, the church’s Holy Scriptures affirm that the whole cosmos was created in, through, by, and for this abased/exalted one. Though freely and without anxiety welcomed into a roomy sanctuary, universality blinks before the broken body of the “one Lord Jesus Christ,” lifted up for all to see.69

Yet the church’s sages again and again struggled to find ways of thinking at once both the God at work in the Gospels and the “nature” that has neither work to do nor an outside in which to do it. It struggled to think them at once without forgetting the difference between the things of this world and the things of God. Certainly they recited the Creed of Chalcedon with gusto, forsaking all to follow the incarnate heavenly Logos. Certainly they knew in their bones that God is sharply different from this world. They sang doxologies to that God. And yet . . . it was so very hard to resist the temptation to gather all their thoughts on the way to a profitable vision of a more magnificent, integrated physis, one finally with everything inside.

What is impressive is the way this temptation was resisted time and time again in the work of the church’s doctors. Thus, though Francis of Assisi was certainly unlikely and exceptional, he was not even among intellectuals without foreshadowing. Yet it is perhaps telling that the revolt he heralded arose above all as he gave himself in naked prayer to the particular, human Jesus. That there might be revolution in this signals among these people the extent to which authorities (even ecclesiastical authorities) tend to pass by particularity—even that particularity—in order to get at the stable, integrating principles of which any particularity is by default taken to be an instance—and this, all the while rending a crusty, brown loaf of bread (bread the color of the skin of a tired young mother crossing the Sonoran Imperial Desert) and lifting a cup of deep red wine (wine the color of her thick blood starving for food, water, and air).

(She, sojourner that she is, finds no comfort in nature’s appropriation of God.70 She is not drawn to its physicians and the well-being they hawk. It is out into the open that she calls and steps. A God at home in the presence of “what is” lacks the freedom to turn to “what is not” simultaneously to call her Godward and into an open future. That is, the weak, the least, the stranger, the alien finds in physis only more of the same hopelessness that has always told her to get back in her place. That liturgy of the eucharist that fills her memory, on the other hand, invites her voice, her deeds, her body to the living God; it lays out before her a path to a holy eschaton71 that is coming for her and her little baby, a future free to place in radical crisis, say, an empire’s judgment concerning her value for its growth potential.)

Still . . . the liturgy of the eucharist . . . smiles hospitably upon any who would make it their own . . . to consume it. It only asks that in the eating and drinking a reversal take place. Adam is at this wedding banquet to defer to Christ. The bread and the wine of the eucharist are gifts to be given, of course; but we who eat and drink are to be consumed by them, to be written into their story.72 The eucharist is hospitable by definition, a good (eu-) grace (charis). It invites any and all who labor and are heavy-laden to come in and yield themselves, their gathered thoughts and deeds. All that is asked is that those “that are” in eating might be “reduced to nothing” and find fellowship with the elect from among “the things that are not” (1 Cor 1:28). In this they will find fellowship with that particular dark-skinned woodworker who during Holy Week was hanged on a wooden cross in solidarity with “the things that are not.” But they will find also that they will have been driven to this end by the life’s breath that drove him to the cross and awakened to new life by the gift that awakened him from the dead. Or so the liturgy of the eucharist promises.73

The promise is that in a living ecstatic sacrifice of worship a particular child held by his particular mother will have opened toward an eschatologically holy Trinity that in one life history places all claims to ownership under a crisis that crucifies/resurrects every worldly good (and evil), however tightly grasped. Indeed, to say “Trinity” is to say the “outside” of the “eschaton.” The Trinity occurs as the unspeakably exalted Father and the unspeakably abased Son are held apart and together by the unspeakably quick Spirit. (Thus the man who stands watch in the night of the Sonoran Desert prays—perhaps only because of his proximity to her74—to the Father through the Son in the Spirit, even if he would hardly admit that such words come and go with his heavy breath.75 He leans against a rock still warm from the day’s hot sun, and is drawn by the body of the friend of transgressors, who in their memory and hope is lifted up still.76 In that prayer in the darkness of the Sonoran Desert he is sent from the Father through the Son in the Spirit into the world that is bent on taking him out, along with the mother and child he had planned by now to have discarded. To him and to this woman and this baby a Mystery gently and lovingly calls out: “The Peace of God is coming and it is coming for you!”)

The liturgy of the eucharist is above all prayer.77 It is an eating and a working, but an eating not about getting full and a working not about getting paid.78 In the liturgy of the eucharist a people eat a very particular performance of the will of the Father. Crucifixion/resurrection is their food and drink whenever they recline or sit upright at a table or lean in cross-legged on bare ground before an open fire, whether there is much or little on their plates, in their bowls, or steaming in their calloused hands.79 As their throats open to this food and drink, far from centering on itself, their work (leitourgia) flies away as a petition that all they do may have been gifted with gratitude and joy (eucharistia, charis, chara).80 To eat and drink the performance of the will of the Father is to pray that we would be inscribed into the particular story of Jesus. It is indeed to hunt and gather, to build and sculpt, to speak and think—all week long. It is to breakfast, dine, and sup. But as written into this story, a week’s meals and work become free acts of abandon. One carries them (“carries oneself”) to that altar at which a gathering of people is taken into the history that on Good Friday is totalized to death and on Easter Sunday is loosed to life. We might call this history, which is simultaneously crucifixion and resurrection, “a living sacrifice.”81

Thus, every proud discourse, experience, and belief is invited at the ecclesial assembly again and again to be given away. In their prayers the fabric these people weave all week long unravels outward to a world made new, an outside, an eschaton, an eschatos,82 that is to liberate what was and is—in the future of the particular body of redemption in whose name they pray. The telos of work is here no longer the “goal” of Greek teleology, the stately oak already hidden in the acorn.83 A new bright, sunless dawn breaks in on and thus dis-closes all 360° of every work-horizon. In time the geometric circle, as such, encloses only dead water. It is as it is spilled that water lives, i.e., that circles, coming to their end, empty what they might have contained, in deferral to the host, the guest,84 who kindly refuses both the offer to property rights and the threat of eviction. These liturgical prayers declare that there will have been “perfection,” “fulfillment,” “satisfaction,” “abundance,” “maturity,” “sanctification.” Even now, it is said, there is a donation of that eschatological teleios. Yet it will have happened only because it will have come; “so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:9). It is a holy circle, one precisely as many partake ecstatically85 in that elusive Holy Trinity that will forevermore occur, gratuitously, as a kind of “other-ing,” partake enhypostatically, not in every respect unlike the glorified mutilated body of Jesus Christ—that is to say, to love in a certain way.86

The liturgy of the eucharist is gift. It is given with the particularity of the name Jesus,87 a name with a baptismal history, a name washed in the coming of the Reign of that Holy Father who opens among and to one after another “little one” of this world and speaks there in the wingbeat of the dove: “this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.” This corporate work is no healing act, i.e., not as the institution of a closed integrity, a “wholeness.” It heals only as sacrifice,88 standing out prayerfully into the faithfulness of the Holy One who comes to dwell in the work of these people—without ceasing to be holy. It is a healing act in the way that the evocation of Abram from his Chaldean home, never to return, was a healing act, viz., as a journey of promise (Gen 12:1). It is a healing act in the way that the march of Moses into Egypt from the backside of the desert was a healing act, viz., carried by the shout of the unimaginably free God: “Let my people go!” (Ex 5:1; cf. 3:14). It is a healing act in the way that the raising of Lazarus was a healing act, viz., as a call issuing out of the coming Reign of God to “come forth” (John 11:43). It is a healing act in the way that the resurrection of Jesus was a healing act, viz., as the emptying of a tomb by the egress of a body still wounded—gloriously open and inviting (Luke 24:39; John 20:27). It is that healing act that breaks through “what is” from a future never to be cordoned off by the locked arms of a company of guards.

(Let us say that a Brazilian mother and her little baby make their way across the Sonoran Desert, elude the watchful eye of Homeland Security in the Imperial Wildlife Refuge, find kindness among strangers, are given transport across Imperial County and beyond, and at long last find a place to bathe and sleep and eat in South Central Los Angeles. One Sunday morning she, perhaps, makes her way with her baby and the man with the wide face, with broad shoulders and huge hands, who from all appearances could never have begun to finance such a long, long pilgrimage north, to this little church. Let us say that she and they sit just across the aisle from a politically sensitive and intellectually curious man who, because he could, has driven into the neighborhood from across town to attend a vigil at South Central Farm. Let us say that he and they rise together one moment, fall together into one line, walk one after the other toward the front of the church, and together kneel side by side at one altar rail to receive the one crusty bread and drink the one sweet wine. When that bread and then that wine touch their tongues, with what have they been fed? How are they now nourished to live, to respond, to pray?)89

1. Mark 2:22: “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.”

2. Jenkins, Next Christendom, 2–3, 90–105; and Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, 8–10. Cf. Senior, “‘Beloved Aliens and Exiles,’” 27–28: “Contrary to human wisdom, those who are comfortable in place, fortified with the security of land and possessions and food, are also in danger of delusion about ultimate reality. In the overall landscape of the gospel stories, the rich and powerful are often ‘in place’—reclining at table, calculating their harvest, standing comfortably in the front of the sanctuary, or seated on the judgment seat passing judgment on the crimes of others. The poor, on the other hand, are often mobile or rootless: the sick coming from the four corners of the compass seeking healing; the crowds desperate to hear Jesus, roaming lost and hungry; the leper crouched outside the door of Dives.”

3. Cf. Hagan, “Faith for the Journey,” 5: “poor and working-class Latin Americans share a long historical tradition of turning to religion for solace and guidance in times of personal crisis, such as illness or job loss. . . . The hundreds of thousands of daily petitions that pilgrims leave at shrines and churches throughout Latin America testify to people’s reliance on their church, its saints, and holy images when faced with personal problems or formidable challenges.”

4. Ruiz Marrujo, “Gender of Risk,” 226, 235: There are “growing numbers of women leaving their homes without documents. Estimates for the northern border [of Mexico] show that women now make up 20 percent of the migratory flows across that border, while data from the southern border reveal even higher rates. . . . [This is] reflected worldwide, where female migrants make up almost 50 percent of the planet’s migratory flows.”

5. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “belief, n.”: “The word shows considerable semantic overlap with the later French loan faith n. Especially in theological use, a distinction is frequently made between the two words, belief referring either to the intellectual assent to certain propositions or dogmas, or to the acceptance of the existence of God or another god, faith involving personal trust and commitment. This lexical distinction is absent from the cognate Germanic languages; in German, for example, Glaube covers the senses of both belief and faith.”

6. As opposed to “objective,” of course!

7. See Plato, Republic, 506–11; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 127, 127e [427]; and Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 27–31 [V].

8. Cf. Derrida, Dissemination, 56–59, 103–5, 126–30, 168–71.

9. See Groody, Border of Death, Valley of Life, 19 and passim.

10. Cf. Berry, “Watch with Me,” 77–123.

11. Hagan, “Faith for the Journey,” 7–8: “Among the sub sample of 202 departing undocumented migrants, more than three-quarters (78 percent) turned to God to help them with the decision to migrate. Moreover, four out of five members of the sample—women and men, Protestants and Catholics, Central Americans and Mexicans alike—prayed to God, a saint, a religious icon, or sought counsel from trusted local clergy within several days prior to embarking on their journey.”

12. Cf. Gen 2:7, 18:27; John 8:6–8. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 71: “Responsibility for the neighbor is precisely what goes beyond legality and obliges beyond the contract. It comes to me prior to my freedom, from a nonpresent, from an immemorial. Between me and the other there gapes a difference which no unity of transcendental apperception could recover.”

13. American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed., 67: “petition” from the root “pet-, To rush, fly.”

14. See Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, 10–25. Cf. Gen 2:7, Ps 104:1, John 3:8.

15. See Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” 52–55; Kierkegaard [Climacus], Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 93–100. Climacus, with some humor, of course, cites Mendelssohn’s response to Lessing: “To doubt whether there is not something that not only surpasses all concepts but also lies completely beyond the concept, that I call a leap beyond oneself” (105).

16. Bolaño, Amulet, 86.

17. Phan, “Migration in the Patristic Era,” 58: “The theology of migration as proposed by the Letter of Diognetus, centers . . . on the theology of the migrant’s life as imitatio Christi. . . . As a migrant, Jesus was a ‘marginal Jew,’ to use the title of John Meier’s multivolume work on the historical Jesus. His migration carried him over all kinds of borders, both geographical and conventional. . . . Because his multiple border-crossings were a threat to those who occupied the economic, political, and religious centers of power, he was hung upon the cross, between heaven and earth, between the two cosmic borders, a migrant until the end.”

18. Cf. Song, Jesus, the Crucified People, 228–29.

19. See 2 Cor 5:17; cf. Isaiah 60 and Revelation 21.

20. Cf. Phil 2:5.

21. Cf. Phil 3:8–15.

22. Bevans, “Mission among Migrants, Mission of Migrants,” 100: “‘The church’s finest hours are always at the borderlands of nations and empires, not at their centers.’ The body of Christ is the ‘Border Christ,’ always on the move, never at home in one place, willing to go where needed, wearing the simplest of clothes, carrying no more than needed—but because of this able to enter into every situation.”

23. Merle Travis, “Sixteen Tons.”

24. Agamben, Time that Remains, 1: “First and foremost, this seminar proposes to restore Paul’s Letters to the status of the fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition.”

25. Cf. Milbank, Word Made Strange, 152–53, 160, 165.

26. Cf. Gen 3:4–10 and Phil 2:5–11.

27. Cf. Phil 3:8.

28. Cf. Matt 26:36.

29. See Ruiz Marrujo, “Gender of Risk,” 229, 231–36.

30. Cf. Kierkegaard [Anti-Climacus], Sickness Unto Death, 43–44; Kierkegaard [Climacus], Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 122–25; and Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 2.

31. Cf. Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 20–21, 92–93.

32. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b.

33. See Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 89–90 [349–50].

34. Cf. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 219–20.

35. See Dewey, Common Faith, 32–33, 50–53.

36. Cf. Luke 15:12: “The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property [tēs ousias] that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property [ton bion] between them.” Marion, God Without Being, 95–96: “This question leads us to . . . the parable of the prodigal son, in Luke 15:12–32. This text ineluctably demands our attention, since it offers the only usage in all of the New Testament of the philosophical term par excellence, ousia (Luke 15:12–13): ‘A man had two sons. And the younger of the two said to his father: “Father, give me the share of ousia that is coming to me.”’ . . . But ousia also admits, first of a prephilosophical acceptation that shares with its properly philosophical turn the indication of a present disposability: ousia indicates that which, here, and now, remains to be useful for . . . , in short, disposable goods; this trait common to the two acceptations of ousia, which Heidegger underscored in his course at Marburg, has to do with the disposability of a ‘possession’ (Besitz) which thus assures a ‘power’ (Vermögen).” See also 97–102.

37. As one might, say, a June bug tied by the leg to a long thread.

38. Thomas Aquinas, Nature and Grace, 76 [1.13.5]: “But when we apply the same name [ordinarily applied to a human being] to God . . . it leaves what it signifies uncomprehended, and beyond its power to denote.”

39. See Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 256–57. Parmenides, of course, most thoroughly and beautifully sublimates this notion.

40. See especially the last four books of The Odyssey: “Odysseus Strings His Bow,” “Slaughter in the Hall,” “The Great Rooted Bed,” and “Peace.”

41. The whole of the Apology could be cited and much more (certainly including the interchange at the end of the Symposium between Socrates and Alcibiades), but this little passage from the Apology, 28d–e (33–34) is perhaps illustrative: “This is the truth of the matter, gentlemen of the jury: wherever a man has taken a position that he believes to be best, or has been placed by his commander, there he must I think remain and face danger, without a thought for death or anything else, rather than disgrace. It would have been a dreadful way to behave, gentlemen of the jury, if, at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium, I had, at the risk of death, like anyone else, remained at my post where those you had elected to command had ordered me, and then, when the god ordered me, as I thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others, I had abandoned my post for fear of death or anything else. That would have been a dreadful thing, and then I might truly have justly been brought here for not believing that there are gods, disobeying the oracle, fearing death, and thinking I was wise when I was not.” Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 173: “[Socrates’] death is a sort of apotheosis, and he leaves his pupils with calm cheerfulness, like a truly free man. There knowledge is described as the soul’s collecting itself—one of the immortal psychological images invented by Plato: it ‘concentrates’ itself from among the dispersed senses, all pressing outwards to the sensory world, and bends to its own proper inward activity.”

42. For example, Plato, Republic, 469a–71e.

43. See Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 145–46, 173.

44. Plato, Symposium 221b.

45. See Plato, Timaeus 90c, and Liddell et al., Greek-English Lexicon, 792–93.

46. See Plato, Theatetus 176b; Republic 613a–b; Phaedrus 248a, 249c; and Timaeus 47c.

47. See Ritschl, Three Essays, 244, 255–56. Cf. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:267; 3:191–93.

48. See Plato, Laws 716c–717a; and Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 285–88.

49. Plato, Laws, 885b; cf. Republic, 364b–365e.

50. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 269 [10.8:1179a]: “For if the gods have any care for human affairs, as they are thought to have, it would be reasonable both that they should delight in that which was best and most akin to them (i.e., reason) and that they should reward those who love and honour this most, as caring for the things that are dear to them and acting both rightly and nobly. And that all these attributes belong most of all to the philosopher is manifest. He, therefore, is the dearest to the gods. And he who is that will presumably be also the happiest; so that in this way too the philosopher will more than any other be happy.” See also 16–17 [1.8:1099a–1099b].

51. Members of the church who take on this divinely humane intellectual task are set to work. In their aspiration to the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty to whom they pray, they must specify—more diligently than did Plato or the Stoics—the way their God is to be conceived ontologically. God, they may say—without forsaking Plato or the Stoics—is (a word that may perhaps be used only in passing) “the Supreme Being,” “the ground of being,” “the cause of being,” “being itself”—perhaps even “beyond being” (a less ambiguously ontological assertion than it may seem). It is to this God who is that they then pray and in so doing look to obtain integrity themselves.

52. Perhaps it could signify “after,” as in “to pursue.”

53. Claiborne, Roots of English, 9. A “physician” in this sense would be one who served the cause of one’s “being,” swearing, e.g., to do no harm.

54. I admit that I am thinking of Heidegger’s most self-consciously “German” account of physis here. See, e.g., Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 14–19, 147–48, 167–72, 188–92, and passim.

55. As would their heirs, Hegel, Whitehead, and Heidegger, by the way.

56. See Plato, Theatetus 149a–152c, and Apology 29e–30b.

57. Integrity also signifies definiteness.

58. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 21; Parmenides Fragment 8.

59. Cf. Luke 9:58.

60. Lloyd, Man of Reason, ix, 2, 11–13, 17, 103: “The maleness of the Man of Reason . . . lies deep in our philosophical tradition. . . . From the beginnings of philosophical thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind—the dark powers of the earth goddess, immersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers. . . . In Greek thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with the non-rational, the disorderly, the unknowable—with what must be set aside in the cultivation of knowledge. Bacon united matter and form—Nature as female and Nature as knowable. Knowable Nature is presented as female, and the task of science is the exercise of the right kind of male domination over her. . . . The dominance relation . . . now holds between mind and Nature as the object of knowledge. Knowledge is itself the domination of Nature. . . . Both kinds of symbolism—the Greeks’ unknowable matter, to be transcended in knowledge, and Bacon’s mysterious, but controllable Nature—have played crucial roles in the constitution of the feminine in relation to our ideals of knowledge. . . . Our ideas and ideals of maleness and femaleness have been formed within structures of dominance—of superiority and inferiority, ‘norms’ and ‘difference,’ ‘positive’ and ‘negative,’ the ‘essential’ and the ‘complementary.’ And the male-female distinction itself has operated not as a straightforwardly descriptive principle of classification, but as an expression of values.” Cf. Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 171–73.

61. Kierkegaard [Climacus], Philosophical Fragments, 37.

62. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “passion, n.”: “Originally < classical Latin passiōn-, passiō . . . ; subsequently reinforced by Anglo-Norman passioun, paissiun, Anglo-Norman and Old French passiun, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French pasion, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French, French passion, Middle French pascion suffering of a martyr (second half of the 10th cent.), sufferings of Jesus (end of the 10th cent.), narrative of the sufferings of Jesus (1119), physical suffering (beginning of the 12th cent.), strong emotion, love (beginning of the 13th cent.), fact of being acted upon (1370), enthusiasm, zeal (beginning of the 16th cent.), anger (1553), grammatical passivity (1555), violent love (1572 in plural, passions), sense perception (late 16th cent.), person as an object of affection (1671), deep emotion expressed in a literary work (1674) and its etymon classical Latin passiōn-, passiō an affection of the mind, emotion, in post-classical Latin also the sufferings of Jesus (Vetus Latina), suffering, affliction (late 2nd cent. in Tertullian), the sufferings of a martyr, martyrdom (early 3rd cent. in Tertullian; frequently from 8th cent. in British sources), sense perception, one of the five senses (early 3rd cent. in Tertullian), ailment, bodily affliction (early 3rd cent. in Tertullian), account of martyrdom (4th cent.), grammatical passivity (4th cent.), quality, attribute (from 9th cent. (frequently from 13th cent.) in British sources), reading of the Passion (from 10th cent. in British sources), the condition of being acted upon (from 12th cent. in British sources) < pass- , past participial stem of patī to suffer (see patient adj. and n.) + -iō -ion suffix1. In Latin chiefly a word of Christian theology, which was also its earliest use in French and English, being very frequent in the earliest Middle English. Compare Old Occitan passio violent love (c1200), Old Occitan passion suffering, torment, narrative of a saint’s suffering (c1070), sufferings of Jesus (c1100; Occitan passion), Spanish pasión sufferings of Jesus (1228–46 as passion, now also in sense ‘intense emotion’), Italian passio gospel of the Passion (13th cent.), passion emotion, suffering (1294), also Middle High German passie, passiōn sufferings of Jesus, narrative of the Passion (German Passion strong emotion, dedication to a cause, sufferings of Jesus, narrative of the Passion).”

63. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 3; cf. 22, 29, and 126–27.

64. Ibid., 29–30: “An all-inclusive concept of kosmos such as the Greeks knew did and could not exist in Israel. The whole of creation manifested Yahweh’s power and presence, but it never attained the kind of self-sufficient unity that the Greek kosmos possessed. Moreover, the later [teaching of the church] . . . of a world created ‘from nothing’ [ex nihilo] and hence devoid of intrinsic necessity would have conflicted with the divine character of Greek nature.” It is worth noting that Dupré does not celebrate this apparent impasse (see his “Introduction,” e.g., 7).

65. Lev 19:33–34.

66. This “Prelude” is not best understood as a species of Tertullian’s position on this point.

67. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 31.

68. Of course, they oppose each other in very different ways.

69. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 31: “Moreover, if God had definitively revealed himself in the ‘man of sorrows,’ how could one continue to regard the splendor of the universe as the image of a God who had appeared ‘in the form of a slave’?”

70. There is comfort for her, however, in Rogers’ expropriative understanding of “nature”: “Nature, in short, is what the Spirit does with it.” Rogers, After the Spirit, 151.

71. Note the ancestors of the word eschaton (the third numbered item in its language family) in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed., s.v. “eghs.”: “eghs Out. (Oldest form *eghs. 1. Variant *eks. a. ex1, ex-, from Latin ex, ex-, out of, away from; b. ecto-, ex-, exo-, exoteric, exotic; electuary, lekvar, synecdoche, from Greek ex, ek, out of, from. 2. Suffixed (comparative) variant form eks-tero-. a. estrange, exterior, external, extra-, strange, from Latin exter, outward (feminine ablative exterā, extrā, on the outside); b. further suffixed (superlative) form most (-mo-, superlative suffix). 3. Suffixed form *eghs-ko-, eschatology, from Greek eskhatos, outermost, last. 4. Celtic *eks-, out (or), in compound *eks-di-sedo-, (see sed-1). 5. samizdat, from Russian iz, from, out of, from Balto-Slavic *iz.” Note: whenever an asterisk appears in etymological material, it indicates that the word marked has a strongly attested yet still hypothetical status.

72. See Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 231–32; and Schmemann, Eucharist, 110–11.

73. A promise that, far from being a bribe, is taken in only with the bread and the wine of the liturgy and the baptism in whose wake they work.

74. Cf. 1 Cor 7:13–14.

75. See LaCugna, God For Us, 126–27.

76. Cf. John 12:32. See Nava, “God in the Desert,” 71–74.

77. Schmemann, Eucharist, 83, 173, 180: “The Great Litany bestows on us, reveals the prayer of the Church, or, still better, the Church as prayer, as precisely the ‘common task,’ in its full cosmic and universal extent. In the church assembly man is called above all to give up, to ‘lay aside’ his ‘cares’ for everything that is only his own, personal, private, and as it were to ‘dissolve’ himself and what is his own in the prayer of the Church. . . . What , then, gives this chief, truly ‘consummate’ prayer of the liturgy its unity, transforms it into that whole, in and through which we affirm that this sacrament of sacraments is accomplished? The Church has answered this first and fundamental question literally from the first day of her existence by naming not only this prayer itself but also the entire liturgy with one word. This word is eucharist, thanksgiving. . . . The Church lives in thanksgiving; it is the air she breathes. Let us listen and, to the measure of our acceptance of this thanksgiving, we shall grasp, and not by reason alone but with our entire being, that here and only here, only in this knowledge/thanksgiving, occurs our entrance into the sole true—for it is of God—freedom. It is the freedom that the Holy Spirit . . . grants both as our breath, our royal nobility, and as power and perfection, fullness and beauty of life, or better still, life in abundance.” Italics Schmemann’s.

78. Bieler and Schottroff, Eucharist, 96, 104, 107, 109: “The economy of grace is about an exchange of gifts in which not accumulation but spending is the primary action, and in which is established an order of gratuitous wasting and not of calculation. . . . Thus the act of thanksgiving is intimately connected with the acknowledgment of God as the giver of life in its very basic physical sense. . . . The appreciation of the givenness of life as it is expressed in this kind of prayer acknowledges the limits to total accumulation and ‘thingification’ or ‘commodification’ of human productivity and natural resources. . . . What is given to me is not earned by me; it is not my exclusive possession. The gift rather refers back to the giver and the relationship it constitutes. . . . When we give thanks to God as the giver of life we reject the invisible mechanisms that come with the fetish character of goods.” Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 321: “Oh, when you think of God, never forget that he does not have the least understanding about money.”

79. Cf. John 4:34.

80. See Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 25, 37, 55, 87.

81. Cf. Rom 12:1.

82. Jenson, Triune God, 67 n. 16.

83. American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed., s.v. “kwel-1”: “Greek telos, ‘completion of the cycle,’ consummation, perfection, end, result.”

84. The host (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “host, n.4”) is both host and guest (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “host, n.2”).

85. A reader of Kierkegaard may be tempted to write “existentially.”

86. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 77: “The hypostasis is not the product of nature: it is that in which nature exists, the very principle of its existence. Such a conception of hypostasis . . . implies the existence of a fully human existence, without any limitation, ‘enhypostatized’ in the Word, who is a divine hypostasis. This conception assumes that God, as personal being, is not totally bound to his own nature; the hypostatic existence is flexible, ‘open’; it admits the possibility of divine acts outside of the nature (energies) and implies that God can personally and freely assume a fully human existence while remaining God, whose nature remains completely transcendent.” Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 182: “Think of an arrow flying, as is said, with the speed of an arrow. Imagine that it for an instant has an impulse to want to dwell on itself, perhaps in order to see how far it has come, or how high it is soaring above the earth, or how its speed compares with the speed of another arrow that is also flying with the speed of an arrow—in that same second the arrow falls to the ground.”

87. Barth, CD 1/2, 346, 348, 355, 356–57: “The name of Jesus Christ creates the Christian religion. . . . We have to think of [the Christian religion] in the same way as we think of our own existence and that of the world, as a reality which is to be and is created by Jesus Christ yesterday and today and tomorrow. Apart from the act of its creation by the name of Jesus Christ, which like creation generally is a creatio continua, and therefore apart from the Creator, it has no reality. . . . There never was a man Jesus as such apart from the eternal reality of the Son of God. . . . The human nature of Jesus Christ has no hypostasis of its own, we are told. It has it only in the Logos. The same is true, therefore, of the earthly-historical life of the Church and the children of God, and therefore of the Christian religion. . . . In a secondary sense we can, of course, explain the necessity of the rise of Christianity in the light of Judaistic development and the political, spiritual and moral circumstances of the Mediterranean world in the Imperial period. But in its reality we can never explain or deduce it from that source. . . . It is this name [of Jesus Christ] which stands in relation to the world of religions, as does the sun to the earth. . . . It means that the Christian religion is snatched from the world of religions and the judgment and sentence pronounced upon it, like a brand from the burning. It is not that some men are vindicated as opposed to others, or one part of humanity as opposed to other parts of the same humanity. It is that God Himself is vindicated as opposed to and on behalf of all men and all humanity.”

88. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “sacrifice, adj.1”: “Etymology: < Latin sacrificus, < sacri- , sacer sacred (sacra neuter plural, sacrifices) + -ficus : see –fic suffix”; s.v. “-fic, suffix”: “Repr. Latin -ficus ‘-making, -doing’ ( < weakened root of facere to make, do), forming adjs.” “Sacrifice” thus signifies “making sacred or holy.”

89. “Is this Brazilian woman an actual, living, flesh-and-blood human being, a woman with a name and address? I mean, do you know this woman, have you met her, have you talked with her? Because if she is and you have—how dare you tell her story?! What gives you the right to steal her narrative voice? What gives you the right to objectify her? Frankly, I find it offensive and demeaning that you would presume to represent her here, to commodify her, to force her into this work and force us to become voyeurs with you!” “There is no answer that I—or anyone—could articulate to resolve such questions. Everything would be so much simpler, if I could simply answer that I have made it all up. But something like this, someone like this, something so exceptional, so contrary to the demographics of ‘immigration trends,’ cannot be made up. If these are my words (and, of course, in a litigious world of property claims and rights, one could argue that case), it is my prayer that, by the time another day of hard work is done, they will have at least stopped being ‘mine.’ ‘Is all this, then, fictive? Is she a symbol of something?’ If she is a ‘symbol,’ she is a non-representational—an iconic—one, or at least this is my prayer. And, if she is ‘fictive,’ she exceeds fiction, the way every saint, Catherine of Siena, for example, exceeds not only her story, but all the stories of the saints.”