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Introductions

Take off your old coat and roll up your sleeves,

Life is a hard road to travel, I believe.90

I have been a university teacher for about a third of a century. My area of presumed expertise is theology. Theology is, if it is anything at all, a way of giving attention to God. Simply put, professors of theology profess God. That is why good people send their children off to college to study with theologians, with people like me. And I—professor that I am—do profess God, overtly, loudly, passionately. What is so embarrassing, though, is that I have such a hard time saying what it is that God means. You would think that someone laboring in this field for so long would have at least that much nailed down! Yet I must confess that I do not.

The problem is not that I am a closet infidel, hiding behind some plastic mask of public piety (like a candidate running for office). I try very hard to be honest and open, particularly where I am most professional. That is, my comprehension-failure is no secret. In fact I would think nothing would be more evident, as I go on and on in class, than that I strain just to get that black hole of a little three-letter word out. But, of course, my task as a professor of theology is not just to get that one word out; I am to throw out a whole galaxy of words and ideas and images and passions and practices that are agitated by and drawn into that black hole.

Of course, speaking of God in this way is hopeless. To say “God” in the field where I labor is surely not to say “a compressed and compressing density, that heaviest, darkest phenomenon of orthodox physics.” And though there are speculative physicists and writers of science fiction who think of a black hole as a portal to another, distant point in space-time—and it might not be out of the question to think of one as an exit portal to some altogether different configuration of space-time, some new cosmos even—I have for a long time now been unable to speak of God as a way out of this earthy world. Speaking of God seems rather to be a way into it, even if as an alien.

There, I have already said too much. My location is showing. Yet there is nothing surprising about that. Every college sophomore knows that God is tradition-specific. One opens the OED to the “G” tab and there one finds a meandering account of the roots of the little English word, roots that draw nutrients from deep inside pagan soil, where perhaps the ordinary usage of God is more happily at home. Provocative phrases about sacrifice and invocation appear in the midst of its history, their subjects and objects mingle, and in it all there is no outbreak into anything particularly transcendent (though transcendence as a universal within this system appears). Everything swims in the warm, immanent amniotic fluid of human consciousness. God as such is contained, subjected to occupational therapy at the merest suggestion of aphasia, and assigned the task to speak well in accordance with reasonable expectations. Thus God says something that is generally true, able to be heard everywhere and by all; a grand linguistic phenomenon, an absolute truth, the chief exemplification of all metaphysical principles, no doubt.

And yet the OED is not the only big book. At the “Job” tab, one finds a meandering account of a particularly poor and troubled man, who—sitting on the ash heap, alone but for the company of dogs, aching, burning, and with every new upset tempted to curse God and die—turns his two wide eyes to the open sky and with a passion that rips apart the fabric of space-time and its God cries, “Violence!” (Job 19:7) and as if encountering something new on the far side of the sun, prophesies, “I know my redeemer lives” (Job 19:25; cf. Eccl 1:9). And I read that with him on the ash heap—in a maelstrom so fierce that even Job’s immeasurable suffering seems a shadow cast from what is for him yet to come—another poor and lonely man, hanging, dying, gasping for air, opens his throat and cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34); and when “the curtain of the temple [is] torn in two . . . [as if encountering something new on the far side of death and damnation], Jesus, crying with a load voice, [prophesies], ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’” (Luke 23:45–46). It strikes me that there is uttered in these narratives a word that no sequence of letters, however small or large, can contain. And I strain to say this new word when I stand before a classroom full of the children of good people, I strain to say it in such a way that no good person could ever say or hear it. And likely, were I just able to find a really good therapist, I’d put this obsession behind me and get on with my life.

The question for me then is “why, why do I see and hear this way?” Most of my colleagues these past decades have seen and heard differently. They seem much calmer about it all, speaking as they do of the good, the true, and the beautiful and of how God fits so well into a system of values, goals, and ideals, i.e., a worldview; of how the story of Job and of Jesus and of God is a story that resolves questions, not complicates and ruptures them. They have told me that it is all about absolutes and universals and all I seem ever to see and hear are contextualized particulars, the life-stories of people with particular faces and voices, of a God with particularly elusive faces and voices. Of course, it may just be that I have been beguiled by Protestant nominalism, that I have fallen prey to that most modern of all perversions, postmodernism, that I am a child of my age. Indeed, I suppose this is all true. How could I honestly say anything else, even as I strain to say something else than the banal or high-born talk of my age?

My journey has been a particular one, too, of course. Everyone’s is. I don’t understand much of it. It is not over, after all. Yet I would venture to say that it is the way I have been given and made time, the way I have come to let time go, the timely way I have begun to be named. Whatever that tiny English pronoun—I—might signify in this case, the thinking and speaking and working attached to it happen here, in this story. And it isn’t just my story.91 I’m not even sure I qualify for a best supporting actor nomination.

It is not insignificant that my hard Scots-Irish ancestors92 cut their way across an ocean and the rivers and forests of a forbidding New World to reach for the promises they’d heard were hidden under the cruel Appalachian Mountains of eighteenth-century Virginia, or the cruel Ozark Mountains of mid-nineteenth-century Arkansas, or the cruel hills of late nineteenth-century Oklahoma; that both my parents were raised in abject poverty by single mothers93 just to the southeast of the official borders of the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl; that I am an only child; that I attended nine schools before I went away to college; that I was eighteen in 1968; that in the summer of that year, while reading the book of Acts in the Desert Southwest, I became a pacifist; that the theologians I first threw myself into were Søren Kierkegaard and John Wesley—no theologians at all, the Hollywood Foreign Press would tell us; that I have spent my life among Holiness people; that I still think about the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”; that I am an ordained deacon and not an elder; that I have been married over forty years, have three children and six grandchildren; that my parents, now in their nineties, live with us; that I have had already a long career as a professor in four private, self-consciously evangelical universities; and that I know how to be alone.

Perhaps it is all of that which inclines me on a brisk spring morning—obligated to stay put, though these days I am—to make my way to a tall, broad, clear window and there to dream of the open road.94 Perhaps it is all of that which inclines me to make my way to an icon—written with bright pigments across a salvaged plank of wood or in the interplay of the black and white on a printer’s acid-free rice paper or between the lines and words and along the margins of the credos of saints and sinners or upon the tales of liturgically martyred mothers and fathers or in, with, and under the playful work of the eating and drinking of bread and wine—and there to dream of God.95

And yet a dream of God—this God—is no ordinary dream, nor night terror, as Daniel and John the Revelator teach us. It is an apocalyptic vision. As such it makes manifest what good people do not want to see, perhaps cannot see. It manifests above all that there is a tomorrow that no yesterday can dictate.96 But it does so with the ambiguity that accompanies every call to revolution. “The Reign of God is coming,” it says, “and it is coming for you!” As a member of one of the world’s more comfortable socioeconomic classes, I should recoil with horror from this word. “Woe to you rich!” Jesus, the apocalypse of St. Luke, declares (Luke 6:24). And yet, perhaps stupidly, I find myself drawn to the apocalyptic literature of God. It is bewildering, a terrifying mystery story; but somehow fascinating.97

Not all mysteries are fascinating, of course, especially if like this one, they are irresolvable. The exact numeric value of pi is a mystery to which is attached neither tremendum nor fascinans. Those mysteries that most commonly fascinate us are those that we expect with some effort to resolve. They are intellectual challenges—mountains that we set out to conquer, even if only because they are there. They remain fascinating only so long as they simultaneously resist and yield to us. Once they are conquered, we move on to something else. We might wax proudly nostalgic, as we recount the thrills of our victories, but to remember a former mystery is not to face a mystery.

Those of us who have been struck by this apocalyptic vision of God would tell a different story. To be thus God-struck is to face what Kierke-gaard’s pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, points to, when he tells us that the passion of the thinker is to think what cannot be thought.98 This apocalyptic God is an irresolvable, engaging mystery that won’t let us go, that won’t ever let us rest in peace (cf. Ps 139:8 and 1 Pet 3:19). God revealed is God hidden and “how unrestingly active God is in all his creatures, allowing none of them to take a holiday.”99 The engagement of this mystery is absolute. It calls for each of us to stand up to it with her whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, as Wesley never tires of reminding us.100

I am a theologian. The work I do is largely academic and intellectual, the work of words. Just about every day I face the challenge of gathering my thoughts before a classroom of students or a blank computer screen. And I have a lot of thoughts, having read too many books and articles, attended too many lectures, attended to too many seminars, spent too many hours—way too many hours—before movie and television screens and loud speakers, and pondered too long the words and deeds of my family and friends and enemies.101 That means that I have many possessions, intangible though they may be—or at least that’s what I hear. The question for me, then, is only a slightly different version of the one that went through the man of Mark 10, the man whom Jesus loved. “You lack one thing, Craig; go, sell what you own, and give . . . to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21, sort of).

Now, I could look at Jesus’ command as an investment opportunity. “Treasure in heaven” sounds like a pretty profitable return. The problem is that when “treasure” gets attached to “heaven,” everything gets upended. “Heaven” is, if anything, elusive.102 “Our Father who art in heaven,” says above all that the God whom Jesus teaches us to address will not be laid hold of.103 “Treasure in heaven” is then a very strange treasure, one I cannot enter into a calculator, one that does not add to my net worth. And so, I’m left, having received the command of Jesus, with an unimaginable promise. It is a heartening promise, that I do gather from the passage; but it is one which I cannot objectify enough to covet. I suspect that even Husserl would have had trouble fixing his gaze on such a treasure.104 I am commanded by Jesus to give up all my property for the sake of a most unsettling impropriety; hardly an alluring proposal. And yet again and again and again the question rings in my ears—“Craig, son of James, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15–17, sort of). And something stirs in me and I want to say, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (17).

How do I not go away grieving? How do I feed his sheep? I’m a thinker and not a very good one at that. Am I to become more ignorant than I am already? Am I to become thought-poor? Is this a call to some Jungian sacrificium intellectus?105

How do I not go away grieving? Perhaps the answer—like the yes of a child to the voice of her mother calling her name—rises insolubly before the particular mystery precisely of the evocative gospel. “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1–2). The mystery before which I am to give up all my intellectual possessions, Paul is saying, is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

But this sacrifice of the intellect—and that is the right, though non-Jungian, phrase—is to be no suicide. The gospel insists that Jesus Christ gives himself to the coming of the “God not of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27), the coming of the living God. The gospel insists that Jesus’ Holy Father, alive in heaven, is made manifest in life. The gospel indeed insists that the forsaken death of the carnal Son makes the Holy Father manifest, but that it does so in the work of the Spirit through the resurrection of his dead and damned body. The gospel insists that it is in his glorified dead and damned body that we, too, are called to move; that it is in that life that we come alive, that we are saved; that there we repeat (derivatively) his life-rhythm of crucifixion/resurrection—through the liturgy of baptism and eucharist—because his body is nothing but the life-rhythm of crucifixion/resurrection.106 The gospel insists that our evenings and mornings become a kind of dance of death . . . swallowed up in life, that resurrection life is so alive that even death is no contrast to it. It is into this liturgy that Peter and I are called. We are called to Jesus’ sheep—standing wide-eyed as they do in this world God so loves—to offer them the food that is precisely this body into which we have been incorporated. We hear, Peter and I, and we may yet believe, that to eat this body is oddly not for it to be incorporated into us, but for us to be incorporated into it—and thus for us to repeat (derivatively) the rhythm of crucifixion/resurrection. It is in this way that we are to live, bodies together in one “living sacrifice,” a thoughtful worship,107 a “renewing of [the] mind,” which defers (Rom 12:1–3), one performed again and again and again, pouring out what is freshly given—as might a spring that gives water only as it is replenished with the gift of unearned rain (John 4:9–14).108 That, it seems to me, is the mystery of the gospel.

As a theologian who would hear and believe, I am indeed to gather my thoughts, but only in order to give them away. Had the Rich Young Ruler not departed grieving, had he indeed followed Jesus, he, too, would have gathered his property, i.e., in order to dispose of it. But doing so is never dropping the ballast of worldly goods in order to soar into some higher “spiritual” realm, i.e., in order to get out. Following the crucified/resurrected Christ is the work of giving away our goods. However, it is performed precisely as an act of plunging into the world, the world hallowed when the carnal body of Christ is glorified in the glorification of the Father on Easter Sunday morning. That is, the glorified carnality of the body of Christ calls out to us, Peter and me. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes, “who . . . emptied himself . . . humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:5–8).109 Therefore, on the day new goods come into our hands, on that day our hands do not become unclean. They are gifted—with a gift that will not become property. And a gift that will not become property is there to be given. To follow Christ is with him perpetually to be emptied (cf. John 4:14).

But how am I, a theologian who has no trouble remembering that he is a human being, to pull this off? “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27). Trust in that, one hears. Yet one hears as well that neither can we trust. If we could, trusting would make us haughty (Ephesians 2). It is more than enough that, when we cannot, we do. When we cannot and yet do, we may perhaps learn to give thanks that in spite of ourselves this, too, was possible.110 The answer to the “how” question, that is, is another “how” question, which may be put in the indicative: It is grace . . . all the way down, just as it is grace all the way up.

To say grace and faith is to say Trinity. God the Father moves out through God the Son in God the Spirit to a world that first and last covets its riches.111 The Trinity opens to this world from the depths of hell and gathers it into the body broken and left to rot there, the body of Christ in whom the Spirit glorifies the Father. By entering into the body of Christ, the discarded bits of decaying tissue that litter hell are stitched together to make that body’s vital organs, they there partake of its glory—the holiness, the love, of the Father—and move in the Spirit into the very world that treated them and him so badly. My calling as a theologian is to do my word-work down this path, too, a body-part of a journeying body, praying without ceasing, in everything giving thanks, rejoicing evermore, moving back and forth from this groaning earth to the earth eschatologically redeemed, from the earth eschatologically redeemed to this groaning earth.112 My calling is to stand before a classroom full of students or to sit before a blank computer screen and in this way to pray, give thanks, and rejoice in the mystery of the gift.

I am to stand on the mound, cleats pressed into the rubber, senses raw and open to the park’s batter, runners, and fielders before whom I move, seeing and hearing, almost smelling, tasting, and touching what shifts within and without the strike zone, feeling the weight, density, and contour of the ball in my rosined hand, thought, emotion, imagination agitated, and with everything in me throw. Without balking. The Rich Young Ruler, Peter, and I are commanded to disperse our goods to the poor. How am I to obey this command without balking, I who profess God before classrooms full of students with the resources to attend expensive private universities?

If I held the opinion that Jesus’ attention to the poor in the gospel narratives is to be sublimated into a generic concern for other people (“aren’t we all poor in some sense?”), then I would have no problem at all. And on any but the heaviest and hardest days I would indeed say that all the students in all my classrooms are given before me by God to be served. However, as it turns out, there are in this present evil age men and women and children whose hunger is actual (if the word “actual” might for now be taken to gesture toward such a gnawing absence)—people like my mother and my father were, when they were hungry little children. To be poor is not to have a shortage of cash on hand, a paucity of consumer choices, a slow internet connection, unwieldy student or home loans, or too few toys. The poor are people, not especially good or bad, but more often than not ordinary people, whose life is being sucked out of them day in and day out, e.g., by the forces of what we so calmly describe as globalization. As long as I remember that God emptied the tomb of the crucified Jesus, as long as I remember that God made Adam out of the dust of the earth, as long as I remember that it is the body of Christ that is salvation, as long as I remember that the church is constituted by the work of the eating and drinking of the eucharist, as long as I remember that Jesus fed the hungry, as long as I remember that “the whole tenor of scripture” bears witness to God’s prevenient grace particularly for the poor—i.e., God’s preference for the poor—I cannot reduce them to one more item on a uniform list of those for whom we are to care. As long as I remember, it will follow, as surely as it follows that slaves are not greater than their masters (Matt 10:24–25), that we are to care for the poor in particular and above all. We are to care for the poor in particular and above all, because in the Jewish peasant, Jesus, God cares for them in particular and above all. This God’s grace is not an abstract “decision” to forego punishment for those who deserve punishment. This God’s grace is God’s movement out into the world to save it, i.e., to sanctify it. This grace of God is the Spirit of God, the Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. The Spirit here is explosive, holy life. She is the wind of a storm, the pounding current of a raging river. And God’s grace rushes particularly to the poor.113 We know that, because she rushed particularly to the poor man Jesus, laid out on a cold slab in a cold tomb. If we pray to enter into that grace, we pray that we will be carried on its current particularly to them, to people with names and faces, dirty, hungry faces, faces I know all too well. That is what I hear in Jesus’ call to the Rich Young Ruler, to Peter, and to me.

That, of course, means that they and I are to spend our resources directly for the poor. However, there is in Jesus’ command a specific question addressed to me and to people like me, a question that has specifically to do with the word-work of a theologian. Standing face to face with a poor man or woman or child, it seems so bloodless and distracted and insensitive, but I am a theologian and I am compelled to ask it right out loud: what does it signify for me, a theologian, a word-worker, to obey the call of Jesus to give to the poor?

In part it signifies that I am to hope for and remember the poor with my words. I am to give my thoughts away before people who are not hungry for the sake of those who are. I am to teach in the direction of the poor, unhanding my intellectual goods for them, calling my students to unhand their goods, and confessing my own unworthiness to take such words on my lips, praying that I, too, will hear the words I am given to say, that I will hear them and obey. But there is more to the call of Jesus than this. To turn to the poor in obedience to the command of Jesus is not to give them a hand up, to teach them to fish, to give them the business skills to begin the steady climb into the middle class. All that already trembles before the principalities and powers we call capitalism. To turn to the poor in obedience to the command of Jesus does not even require that one be other than poor. The poor, too, are called to the poor. And we—rich and poor alike—are called to stand in solidarity with them—without demanding that they cease being poor. Doing so is a means of grace not only for them, but particularly for us.114

Grace comes particularly where calculation has come to an end. And does anyone doubt that standing in solidarity with the poor without demanding that they cease being poor requires an act of trust, of hope, before an incalculable mystery? Not to go away grieving signifies that in the word-work I do I am to take up the task of Isaiah 6 and Mark 4, viz., to be situated like a surd in the pounding, clanging, beating, deafening din of that social-political-economic machine that makes people poor. It is to name the beast that devours them and with them to look it in the eye, unafraid. That is, for me to give my goods away to the poor is for me to face the freedom of the God who raised Jesus Christ from the grave, a freedom that does not need sound economic policies, that does not need the system of acquisition, private property, productivity, fixed and circulating capital, investment and return, commodification, supply schedules, derived demand, profit and loss, competition, division of labor, markets, wages, and debt. To give my goods away to the poor is among other things to bear witness to an economy of giving and forgiving, an economy of impropriety, an economy that remembers the hope of the resurrection of the Crucified. That is, to give my goods away to the poor is to live and speak and write before the mystery of God’s holy love, a love that comes as an unsettling holiness that will never be a line-item on an asset-management tally sheet.

Trinity, crucifixion/resurrection, church, the poor, i.e., Jesus, who loved the one he calls “Father” with his whole heart, soul, mind, and strength,115 and because of that would not maintain his personal integrity in the face of his neighbors116—this is the mystery I strain so hard to say, when I stand before a classroom full of the children of good people. My task, as a theologian, is to think it and say it again and again and again. That is what meta-noia quite literally signifies in particular in my particular case. My task is to think-after, in pursuit of, the way of God into the world, to think-after crucifixion. My task is to take whatever thoughts I can find and let them loose before a classroom or a reader, i.e., in the liturgy of the eucharist, the liturgy in which the broken body and shed blood of Jesus are manna, food that is to be eaten, not stockpiled.

It may be that one day Alzheimer’s Disease will have rotted away all of my thoughts and that there will be effectively nothing there that a professor might give and no professor there to give it. And yet I will not be alone in that place either. Among the wonders of the gospel is that Jesus is there as well—shining with the light of God’s glory. Still, as long as I have eyes to see, I am called on each new day to look for the small round things that God has placed on the face of the wilderness where I sojourn, to pick them up and eat them, to hold out in the freedom of grace the works they enliven me to do, and to say right out in public with the plagiarizing Wesley, “I come, Lord, to restore to thee what thou hast given; and I freely relinquish it, to enter again into my own nothingness. For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with thee and by thee; as the air, which is void and dark, is capable of being filled with the light of the sun, who withdraws it every day to restore it the next, there being nothing in the air that either appropriates this light or resists it? O give me the same facility of receiving and restoring thy grace and good works! I say, thine; for I acknowledge the root from which they spring is in thee, and not in me.”117

90. Stookey et al., “Old Coat.”

91. Anymore than this essay is an autobiography.

92. There is some circumstantial evidence that the first “Keen” of my clan was in fact a German mercenary soldier of the Thirty Years’ War who settled in New Sweden. He changed his name from Jürgen Schneeweiss to Jürgen Kuhn (from “Snow-White” to the compensatory “Bold”), which over time degenerated eventually to “Urine Keen.” Nonetheless, the Scots-Irish predominate in our family.

93. My father’s father, decades older than my grandmother, his third wife, died in his early seventies in 1926, leaving my six-year-old father and his five siblings, the youngest a babe in arms, to be cared for by their mother. My mother’s father was an unchecked alcoholic who neglected and abused his family and was in many ways worse than no father or husband at all.

94. See Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 19.

95. Rogers, After the Spirit, 98–99:

Mary’s eyes beholding Eve

and looking down on Adam, were impelled to tears;

but she stays them and hastens

to conquer nature she who para phusin gave birth to Christ

her son.

Yet her entrails were stirred in suffering with her parents

—a compassionate mother accorded with the Merciful one

So she tells them —Cease your lamentations,

and I will be your ambassador to him born from me.

So Romanos the Melodist, the greatest liturgical poet of the Greek Church, speaks of something para phusin. . . . The Greek preposition para is well suited to contain the ambiguities of excess. Its root meaning is spatial: beside, alongside, as in the word “parallel.” If the lexicon lists the meaning “against,” that is best understood as “compared against,” as in “paragon,” “paradigm,” “parable,” which indicate no opposition. It would be misleading to indicate contrariety rather than comparison. No one supposes contrast in such words as “paraenesis” or “Paraclete.” Even “parasite” is one that “feeds beside,” while “paradox” and “paranormal” connote what is beside or in addition to the normal, rather than against it. A “paraphrase” is supposed to say the same thing, not something opposed. Modern coinages such a “paramedic” and “paralegal” continue the correct understanding of those who work with or alongside, not against others.

96. See Moltmann, Future of Creation, 41–48, for the difference between extrapolation and anticipation. Also see Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, 63, 139–41; and Basic Questions in Theology, 2:241–49.

97. I am thinking, of course, of Otto, Idea of the Holy.

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

99. Luther, De Servo Arbitrio, 200–239; the direct quotation is found on 234.

100. Neither Wesley nor Kierkegaard is an escapist mystic, however. They are both children of the earth, practical people who (unlike Luther) love the book of James, who love the way a command of God takes shape in the concrete evenings and mornings of ordinary women and men. Kierkegaard has a better eye for the ambiguity of all human works; Wesley for their definiteness as they become good news particularly for the poor. But the earthy concreteness of the work to which they both give themselves is inspired by a vision of the New Earth that we cannot see without the miracle of new eyes (cf. Heb 11:1). Kierkegaard may stress the “cannot” of this miracle and Wesley its “new eyes,” but in doing so they both bear witness to the impossible event in which we come to yield to an other who simply will not become our property. Indeed, as we perform the works that bear witness to this other, Kierkegaard and Wesley would have us let go of those works as well, as formerly Rich Young Rulers who, without grieving, follow Jesus through the eye of a needle (Mark 10:18–27). To keep the works of love, the works we have done, to hold on to them as our property, is to be poisoned by them, sickened unto death. See Wesley, Plain Account, 112[25.38.8]; “Repentance of Believers,” 352 [III.4]; “Original Sin,” 182–85 [III.1–5]; “New Birth,” 188–94 [I.1–II.5]; “Good Steward,” 296–98 [IV.1–4]; Kierkegaard [Anti-Climacus], Sickness Unto Death, 18; Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 40–43, 246–63.

101. And found out too many times that I had gotten it all wrong and had to begin again from the beginning. Perhaps that simply shows that even when one has gotten it all wrong, one might still pray. See Barth, CD 3/3, 265.

102. Von Rad, “ouranos, Old Testament,” 507; Traub, “ouranos, New Testament,” 520–21, 525.

103. See Gundry, Matthew, 106. “Hallowed by thy name” makes a similar point, it seems to me, that we do not name God; God does. This strikes me as an answer to Derrida’s account, in Gift of Death, 95–115, of the apparent investment logic of obeying the command of God.

104. See Husserl, “Phenomenology,” 700; and Ideas, 105–7.

105. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 215.

106. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mystery, n.1”: “In later Christian use mysterion became equivalent to sacrament (in several passages, e.g., Dan 2:18, the Vulgate renders it by sacramentum, even when it means only ‘secret’; in other passagesmysterium is used).”

107. The Greek phrase of verse one that the NRSV translates as “spiritual worship” is “logiken latreian.” The KJV translates it “reasonable service.” Neither translation seems to me to deliver the provocation of the juxtaposition of “logos” and “latreia” here. I do not read this passage the way Sarah Coakley does, however. See her Sacrifice Regained, 25–28.

108. Cf. Wesley, “Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God,” especially 434–36 [I.8, II.1] and 442 [III.2–3].

109. Cf. Wesley, “On Zeal,” 308–21.

110. Barth, Evangelical Theology, 200.

111. See LaCugna, God For Us, 222–23.

112. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 31–46.

113. My friend Donna Techau has told me (in a Facebook conversation, February 2, 2011) that I might also say that the Holy Spirit “is a gentle fresh breeze. She is non-coercive repentance. She brings peaceable joy. She gathers us in her arms and holds us close. She dances lightly across our skin.” Rogers notes that “the Spirit blows not only like a hurricane but like a prevailing wind” (After the Spirit, 198).

114. Wesley, “On Zeal,” 313 [II.5].

115. See Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 159–60.

116. Ibid., 164.

117. Wesley, Plain Account, 113 [25.38.8]. These words are a part of a larger passage that Wesley calls “Farther Thoughts on Christian Perfection.” That passage ends with an eight-page section that Wesley has adapted from the work of Jean Duvergier. “These ‘Reflections’—as can be detected from the style—are not original to Wesley. They trace back, through a series of extracts, to the Lettres Chrétiennes et Spirituelles (1645) of Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, Abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581–1643). Wesley’s immediate French source was an extract from Lettres by Robert Arnauld d’Andilly titled Instructions chrestiennes (Paris, 1672). Wesley selected and translated 335 of the 1160 numbered reflections in d’Andilly, titled them ‘Christian Instructions, extracted from a late French Author,’ and placed them (alongside ‘Thoughts on Christian Perfection’) among the additional tracts at the end of Vol. IV of Sermons, published in 1760 (see Bibliography, No. 131.v). This extract was apparently issued as a separate publication the following year by William Strahan of London. Then in 1763, to provide this conclusion to Farther Thoughts, Wesley undertook another round of extracting, reducing his original 335 select reflections to 64, arranging these passages in eight numbered groups with the theme of each group identified by the italicizing of a key word or phrase, and making some further abridgements or revisions of his translations. This final selection from Hauranne’s meditations was carried over into the Plain Account with little change except for the omission of the first item, and some renumbering of the sections in the edns. of 1785 and 1789. The reflections were omitted from Plain Account in Works (1773, vol.24) because the longer extract from Hauranne was included in this same volume, retitled ‘Christian Reflections, translated from the French’” (Randy Maddox, Private Correspondence, October 8, 2012). The details of Wesley’s editing and use of Duvergier’s work will be laid out in Maddox’s editorial comments to vol. 13 of The Works, to be published in the near future.