My latest: on Jordan Peterson, in CT

Yesterday Christianity Today published my review of Jordan Peterson’s new book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine. The title of the review is “Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God?” Early on I write the following:

The volume is, to put it mildly, an enormous undertaking—quite unlike Peterson’s self-help books. Running more than 200,000 words, it is a thematic and allegorical commentary on the law of Moses, especially Genesis and Exodus. It is gargantuan in every sense of the word: energizing and exhausting, brimming with ideas and asides, full of insightful connections and baffling conclusions, consistent in its viewpoint, maddening in its dodges, impressive in its ambition, and tedious, at times, in its sheer funereal solemnity.

Read the full thing here. For comparison, here is Rowan Williams in The Guardian with a rhetorically more negative but substantively similar assessment.

The unspoken Name

In my experience, casual pronunciation of the divine Name is a telltale sign of an evangelical having attended a Protestant seminary. Sometimes it’s as minimal as having read Walter Brueggemann. (If he can do it, so can I!) Old Testament scholars in general can be the culprit, but far from always; of all Christians they’re usually the most familiar with Jewish writing and thought—with living Jews themselves and the ongoing practice of the synagogue—which means they tend to know better.

I decided a long time ago that I would forbear from enunciating the Name, if only out of respect for Jewish piety. There were always additional reasons, but I saw no excuse to transgress on thousands of years of Jewish and Christian devotional and liturgical reticence out of nothing more than an inflated sense of contemporary exegetical confidence.

In his latest book, Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Unity of the Christian Bible (2022), Kendall Soulen provides an additional reason for reverent non-vocalization of the Name, a reason so simple I can’t believe I’ve never encountered it before.

Start with why certain pastors and writers, usually but not exclusively evangelical, choose to vocalize the Name. First, because a name is meant to be spoken. God introduced himself by name to his people; shouldn’t we use it? Second, because the rabbinical practice of building fences around the Torah is not Christian; if gentile believers are not bound by ceremonial Law, much less rabbinic elaboration thereof, then they (we) have no reason to honor this convention while ignoring all others. Third and finally, the Bible itself does not forbid saying the Name. Absent explicit divine prohibition, we are free to do as we please (with sober reverence and pious speech, you’d think it would go without saying, but anecdotally that is far from the case—the hypothetical reconstruction “Y-a-h-w-e-h” becomes at once nickname and talisman, even as it signals the insider status and erudition of the speaker).

It’s worth mentioning a fourth reason that, thankfully, I’ve not seen in the wild: namely, that “YHWH” belongs to the old covenant; that it was God’s Name; that, therefore, this Name is of no lasting relevance to Christians, since it was replaced/superseded by either “Jesus” or “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” or both. Such a view would authorize merely historical reference to the Name, minus piety, faith, or reverence. Call this nominal Marcionism.

Here, in any case, is how Soulen responds: Nonpronunciation of YHWH is not unbiblical. Its chief practitioners are none other than the apostles. The New Testament is positively drenched in pious regard for the Name; you only have to read for a few verses before you discover a newly devised verbal mechanism to circumvent pronouncing the Name: the Power, the Blessed One, the Lord, He Who Sits On The Throne, the Living One, the Name That is Above Every Name—the list goes on and on.

And can you guess who is the principal model of piety regarding God’s Name?

It’s Jesus. He whose prayer begins, “Our Father,” turns first of all to God’s Name, asking that it be hallowed, consecrated, sanctified. Read the Sermon on the Mount. Read Jesus’s teachings on vows (in Matthew 6 and in Matthew 23). Read Jesus’s interrogation by the Sanhedrin (especially in Mark 14). Read Jesus’s “conversation” with God the Father in John 12 (the only such “back and forth” in any of the Gospels) about glorifying the Father’s Name and, later, Jesus’s high priestly prayer in John 17 regarding (again) the Father’s Name—which he, Jesus, says he received from the Father before he was sent into the world. That Name isn’t “Father”: Jesus is the Father’s Son. The Father’s Name is YHWH. Yet it is also Jesus’s own name, not only in this world but from all eternity. (Even at his birth his human name reveals it: Yeshua—YHWH is salvation.)

For all this, however, the Name is never spoken. Not by Jesus, not by the Twelve, not by the apostle to the gentiles. Always we find euphemism, circumlocution, indirection, silence.

Hence when Christians, like Jews, avoid verbalizing the holy Name of the Lord God of Israel—in prayer, in devotional reading of Scripture, in public worship—they are not following man-made, unbiblical tradition. They are following the New Testament’s own authoritative example. No document, ancient or modern, is so ruthlessly consistent in avoiding enunciating YHWH (aloud or in writing) as is the New Testament. The apostles are authoritative here as elsewhere. And they are only following Jesus’s own example.

Shouldn’t we?

Trusting the Bible

I have a dear friend I’ve known most of my life who came to me recently with a question. The friend in question is a lifelong Christian; he loves Jesus, attends church, is a faithful person. He doesn’t struggle with “doubt” per se. It’s not the spooky stuff in Christian teaching that bothers him; God exists, Jesus rose from the dead, we’re sinners in need of grace, angels and demons are real—whatever: all a given.

No, what trips up my friend is the Bible. But again, a particular sort of obstacle. Not the Bible per se. He finds the Gospels utterly trustworthy: they give us Jesus, the real Jesus, the Jesus who lived two thousand years ago and who is alive and active today. Their accounts of him are accurate and we’re right to turn to them to hear his voice, learn his way, follow his example and teaching.

The rest of the Bible? Not so much. Or at least: TBD. Sure, the rest of the New Testament gives us much of importance. But just because it’s “apostolic,” does that necessarily mean it bears divine authority? that it’s infallible? that it’s inerrant? Might it call for a bit of picking and choosing, or sifting the wheat from the chaff?

All the more so, my friends avers, regarding the Old Testament. Does it contain wisdom and beauty and powerful stories? No doubt. Is it “revealed,” though? Not so sure. Is it all true? Meh. Is it “the word of God” himself? Nah.

At least, that’s his disposition, his instinctual posture toward the Old and New Testaments excepting the Gospels and granting the basic truth of (e.g.) the Apostles’ Creed. Knowing that this combination of beliefs—the reliability of the Gospels (and of the gospel) alongside the relative unreliability, or basic human fallibility, of the rest of the canon—is not exactly the traditional Christian position, he came to me with the question: Why should he place his trust in the Bible-full-stop? Why should a Christian like him who loves and follows Jesus confess that the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms and the Epistles are all alike “the word of the Lord”? Why, for instance, care about “getting the text right” when the text is Genesis 1–3? Why not just say it’s a lovely story full of rich insights without going further and committing oneself to believing it to be true in the sense of divinely inspired truth?

That’s the question. I think it’s a very good one. And I bet it, or something like it, is a lot more common in our churches than we might suppose. So I’d like to try to answer it as best I can below, leaving aside whatever is immaterial to the substance of the particular question in view.

I can think of six overall reasons to believe the Bible as such is God’s word, three regarding the Old Testament and three regarding the New.

1. The first and best reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that Jesus did so. This reason doesn’t apply to people who don’t already believe in Jesus, but if you already know Jesus and trust him, then that trust should follow Jesus’s own judgment that the scriptures of Israel are holy, reliable, and a revelatory vehicle of God’s will, character, and commands. Pick any Gospel at random, and you can’t go three paragraphs without finding Jesus somehow at the center of a question surrounding the interpretation of the Old Testament. Moreover, as children are rightly taught early in their time in Sunday school, Jesus’s manner of battling the temptations of Satan consists of nothing but the quotation of Torah. This is God himself in the flesh, facing down a rebellious angel who supposes he can force God’s hand with petty offers of power and fame, and what God does is put the words of Moses on his own lips. That’s because Moses’s words are his words; Jesus stands behind Moses. Quoting Moses is quoting himself, as it were, finding the right occasion for those words’ truest meaning and supremely fitting application. A holy mystery!

2. The second reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that it speaks of Jesus before his advent. One way of describing this is to say that Israel’s scriptures “predict” the coming of Jesus. That’s a perfectly fine way to talk about it, but it lends itself to oversimplification. The Old Testament isn’t merely a collection of oracles, each of which finds one-to-one correspondence with something that happens later in Jesus’s career. Rather, its correspondence is much greater, more encompassing, and therefore more interesting than that. Jesus, as the Gospels and other apostolic writings proclaim, “fulfills” the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. They “speak” of him, sometimes with astonishing clarity, sometimes with mysterious hiddenness. But they speak of him nonetheless—Jesus himself says so: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46-47). Or consider the time following his Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the apostles and said, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26). Then the Gospel goes on: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). And a little later, just before ascending to heaven:

“These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (vv. 44-48)

Jesus, in short, was a Jewish rabbi who believed what all Jewish rabbis have always believed about the scriptures. This belief was and remains a nonnegotiable given for anyone who would come to follow Jesus or put faith in his name. This doesn’t mean such belief is easy, simple, or straightforward. But given Jesus’s own trust in the scriptures, and his teaching that those scriptures have much to tell us about him—miraculously, ahead of his coming, by the work of the Spirit in the minds, hearts, and words of the scriptures’ authors and editors—it follows that Christians have good reason to call the Old Testament the word of God for the people of God.

3. The third reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word follows from the first two: namely, that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the God of Israel revealed in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. The God of Jesus is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, the God of Joseph and Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Joshua and Rahab, Hannah and Samuel, Ruth and David, Solomon and Josiah, Ezra and Nehemiah, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel—and the rest. (Go read Hebrews 11: Jesus’s God is their God, the God of the cloud of witnesses, because Jesus is the One to whom they looked and in whom they placed their faith, ahead of time.) In other words, if you want to know who the God is whom Jesus called Father, go read the book of Exodus. Read the Psalms. Read the Song of Songs. Read Jonah. That’s him. That’s the one. No one else. And that’s part of the point: there is no other God except this God. As the Shema says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). Consider this encounter in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (vv. 28-34)

There is even more than this, however. It isn’t just that the Father of Jesus is one and the same as the God of Israel whom we find in the pages of the Old Testament—though that is true. It’s that the God we meet in Jesus is himself the Lord of Israel. That is to say, the God who is incarnate in and as the man Jesus is YHWH: He who called Abraham, the One who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the Almighty who delivered Israel from slavery—in fact, the Creator of heaven and earth. “The Word became flesh” means that to see Jesus is to see the God of Sinai; to embrace Jesus is to embrace the very One Jacob wrestled with by the Jabbok River. The face of Jesus, in a word, is the face of God, the one true God manifested to Israel. This gives greater depth and meaning to the claim that the Old Testament speaks about Jesus. It certainly does, since it speaks about God, and this God became incarnate in Jesus.

So much for the Old Testament. What about the New?

4. The first reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is apostolic. Why should that matter? Weren’t the apostles only human like you and me? To be sure. But they were also more than that. The apostles were personally chosen by Jesus himself to be his emissaries in the world. To be an apostle is to have been commissioned by the risen Jesus for the lifelong work of bearing testimony to the good news about him to whoever might listen. In the final words Jesus spoke to the apostles before his Ascension (words recorded by St. Luke, the same author as the third Gospel):

It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1:7-8)

The apostles are the reason any of us know or believe the gospel in the first place. No apostle, no gospel; no gospel, no faith; no faith, no church. And without faith or church, neither you nor I, as believers, exist. We have Jesus because of the apostles and only because of the apostles. Christian faith is mediated faith. Mediation is baked in from the beginning; it’s a feature, not a bug. We know Christ through others: first of all the apostles, then through their successors, then through all of Christ’s many sisters and brothers, including the parents or mentors or ministers or teachers who gave him to us—all, it goes without saying, by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.

For the purposes of our question, it is crucial to see that the Bible is part of this chain of mediation; in particular, the writings of the New Testament. In these writings we hear the voice of the apostles down through the ages, giving us once again their testimony concerning Jesus, risen from the dead. They knew him on earth. They saw him alive on the third day. They, and they alone, have the power and the authority to tell us the truth concerning him. All we have to do—all that falls to us to do—is either to trust their witness or to reject it. There’s no third option. We can’t take it piecemeal. It’s an all or nothing affair. That goes for the letters of St. Paul as much as the four Gospels. Every one of the 27 documents of the New Testament is “apostolic”: it contains and communicates the teaching of the apostles as the founders of the Christian community, apart from whom it would not exist and, consequently, none of us would know of the good news of Jesus. Most of the apostles eventually gave their lives for Jesus. Their credibility is airtight. We have all the reason in the world to trust them.

5. The second reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is all of a piece. Jesus did not write the Gospels. His followers did. We are right to trust their testimony, but that testimony is not different in kind from other types of apostolic testimony, such as Acts, the Epistles, and the book of Revelation. All of them speak of Jesus, and all of them are apostolic in character. When the preacher of the sermon we call “Hebrews” tells us that Jesus is a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, such a claim calls for our assent in the very same way as when the biographer we call “Saint Matthew” tells us that Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin betrothed to Joseph. The latter is not only a historical claim; it is theological, for it is supported in part by reference to the prophet Isaiah, just as Hebrews relies on Psalm 110 and Genesis 14. (Indeed, one useful way to approach the innovative way the apostolic writings reinterpret the Old Testament is as an extension of Jesus’s own exegetical practice: the disciples learned it first from him; it doesn’t originate with them alone.)

In short, believing Hebrews’ words about Jesus and believing Matthew’s words about Jesus are one and the same kind of action for Christians. There’s no reason to opt for one but not the other. Even biography is never mere reportage. It involves interpretation, selection of material, sequence of presentation, and so on. The gospel is mediated, as we’ve seen, which means it requires trust. To trust Jesus means trusting the testimony about Jesus given by his followers, which means finally trusting the whole New Testament, and not only part of it, in conjunction also with the prophetic (Mosaic and Davidic) testimony contained in the Old Testament.

Recall, furthermore, that I’m not adducing the best possible arguments for a nonbeliever to put her trust in the Bible. I’m offering reasons for someone who already believes that Jesus is risen from the dead and reigning from heaven as Lord to see why the Bible as a whole, and not only the Gospels, is reliable and true, is divinely inspired, and therefore is to be received and confessed as the word of the Lord to his people. Here’s one more.

6. The third reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that the church does. What do I mean by this? Simply this: Christianity precedes us. We don’t make it up ourselves. We certainly don’t build it from scratch. It’s not a DIY project. It’s just there, waiting for us before we come on the scene. It possesses something truly precious, or so it claims. That something is the good news of Jesus. As I’ve argued above, the church has the good news to share with others because she received it first from the apostles. The church continues to preserve and proclaim this message, keeping faith with the apostles, by means of the New Testament (along with the Old). It is the texts of the New Testament that ground, govern, and norm the church’s teaching about the gospel. Were it not for the New Testament, we would have no means of ensuring we were still getting Jesus right, all these centuries later. They function not only as a source for our beliefs and practices but also as a judge or measure of them. They keep us on the straight and narrow. Without them, we’d be lost.

It is for this reason that the church has always placed the scriptures at the center of her life, in her worship above all. Within that worship the full diversity of scriptural voices is always read—an OT text, a Psalm, an Epistle—but the heart or climax of the reading in the liturgy always comes from one of the Gospels. For these tell explicitly of Jesus and feature his very words. It is as if the “red letter Bibles” of recent American vintage were inscribed for centuries in the liturgical practice of catholic tradition: all rise, the priest processes with the holy Gospel to the center of the assembly, and both before and after the reading, all cross their minds, lips, and hearts, in order to hear the living Jesus speak in their midst by the words of his servants.

I am saying all this in order to complete the circuit we began earlier, regarding trust. We cannot trust Jesus without also simultaneously trusting his apostles; this trust in turn entails trusting the Bible, on one hand, and the church, on the other. For the church is the body and bride of Christ, and her task from Pentecost to Parousia is to maintain and to announce the gospel of Jesus. She does this by constant, daily recourse to the scriptures of Israel and the writings of the apostles. From them she hears the truth about God, God’s Son, and God’s Spirit; she learns of his ways and will and works in the world; she assents to what he would have her do, as she undertakes the great mission given her by Jesus between his Resurrection and Ascension. It follows that for us, for ordinary believers, to trust him is to trust her, for without her we would not have him; and vice versa, we would not have her were it not for him, for he and he alone is the founder, head, and Lord of the church, which is his body and the temple of his Holy Spirit on earth. It is she from whom we received faith in Jesus; she who baptized us in his name; she who feeds us his flesh and blood. And it is she who directs our eyes and ears to his living word in Holy Scripture. Having trusted him, we ought to trust her; having trusted her to give us him, we ought to trust her again that we will find him there, in the sacred pages of the canon.

In sum: The church believes the Bible is the word of God. If it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me. And, I hope, good enough for a faithful friend and member of the church, eager to learn from her what to believe about God’s word.

God’s love for Israel for its own sake

Any theological account of God’s relationship with Israel will have to approach it as a relationship that exists for its own sake. God loves Israel like a parent loves a child or like a husband loves a wife. Israel is not a means to a larger end but a love with its own intrinsic end. This is the way the Biblical narrative characterizes the relationship between God and Israel—in the Torah, in the prophets, and in Paul. Moreover, it is a relationship to which God commits Godself everlastingly. This forms the basis for Paul’s assertion of an eschatological universal Jewish salvation—they are beloved for the sake of the promises made to their ancestors.

This love is not exclusive. The Abrahamic blessing already implies that while Israel is not elected for the nations, its election will benefit the nations. They are blessed for Israel’s sake. God’s love for Abraham spills over to those around him. Paul offers a further interpretation of what this looks like: The Gentiles are to be included in Israel’s covenant, grafted onto Israel’s root and folded into Abraham’s family. To them now also belong “the adoption, the glory, the covenants.” The God who made promises to Israel is the one “from and through and to whom are all things” (Rom. 11:36). Nonetheless, this growing universalism of the narrative does not imply a waning particularism. It is Israel’s God to whom the nations are drawn; Israel’s root onto which they are grafted; Israel’s covenant in which they share. From being pagan polytheists they become monotheists. From being believers in violent or dualistic cosmogonies they embrace the Jewish idea of a good creation through a simple divine word. The ways they look at the world as the handiwork of the one God, the ways they reshape their ethics, the ways in which they conduct their liturgies are all shaped decisively by Jewish sources. They look forward to the glorious rule of a Jewish Messiah who will seat them with Abraham at a Jewish meal that they anticipate in every one of their worship services: the Messianic meal, the Eucharist. In short, they do something that Paul never had to do when he became a follower of Jesus: They convert. The eschaton is not a celebration of inclusive pluralism; it is the celebration of inclusion in Abraham’s family.

This Pauline account of God’s loving commitment to Israel and the grafting of the Gentiles onto the Jewish root aligns with the vision of Colossians and Ephesians of the patterned gathering of all things into Christ: beginning with Israel, the covenant with Abraham, and from there continuing with the Gentiles – those who once were far off, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise” (Eph. 2:12)—being gathered into this covenant as well. This vision is, I argue, a supralapsarian vision: According to these letters, the gathering activity of Christ is not a response to sin but the goal of creation. Likewise, the covenant with Israel, as the first step of this gathering work, is supralapsarian. Paul’s account of Israel in Romans squares with this interpretation: a people established by God’s loving election not for the sake of a sin problem but for its own sake and loved eschatologically, long after sin’s reign has ended.

 —Edwin Chr. van Driel, Rethinking Paul: Protestant Theology and Pauline Exegesis (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 310-312

The Holy One of Israel: A Sermon on Leviticus 19

A reading from the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verses 1-4, 9-18.

“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God….

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.

“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.

“You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord.

“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

The word of the Lord:
Thanks be to God.

May the words of my mouth
And the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our rock and our redeemer: Amen.

_______________

Some years ago I was listening to a round-table of ethicists discussing a series of moral and political questions centered on human dignity and worth. A token theologian was included in the round-table for good measure. At some point one of the ethicists referred off-hand to how every human being is holy. It wasn’t a major point; it appeared to be a kind of throwaway comment, a premise assumed to be shared by everyone at the table, not least the theologian. But the theologian broke in and brusquely asserted the following:

“Human beings are not holy. Only God is holy.”

The bare, unqualified nature of the flat denial and exclusive affirmation stopped me cold. Surely the ethicist was simply saying in a roundabout way something unobjectionable: that human beings have value, that human life—as many of us are wont to say—is “sacred.” Is it, strictly speaking, true that human beings are not holy? Is it necessary to say so in such extreme terms?

The answer, I have come to see, is yes. The theologian was right—as we occasionally are. God alone is holy. Human beings are not holy. But that is not all there is to say. Because there is an intimate, unbreakable connection between these two statements; for there is an intimate, unbreakable relationship between the two characters or subjects spoken of in them, that is, a relationship between the One who alone is holy and those who are not holy, but may and will and shall be. A relationship of transformation, the name for which is sanctification.

If the Bible is anything, it is a book about sanctification: about the one and only Holy God’s undying and infallible will (1 Thess 4:5) to make holy what is not holy, to sanctify a people, to hallow the whole creation. Indeed, the gospel is the good news of holiness. How so?

Start—as every entertaining sermon does—with Leviticus. Here we are, in the middle of the Torah, listening in as God commands Moses to command the people of Israel how they are to live. And the fundamental umbrella command, beneath which all the other commands take their place and from which they derive their meaning, is the drumbeat of the book as a whole: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2; cf. 1 Pet 1:14). So holiness is a command, but a command to a particular people, Israel, rooted in the nature of a particular God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Hosts and creator of the world.

So at the outset, holiness is twofold.

On the one hand: Holiness is a principal attribute of the only true and living God, the God of Israel. Holiness means: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Holiness means: The idols of the nations are lifeless, they neither hear nor speak nor save. Holiness means: There is no court of appeal, no judge or Lord or sovereign or power, in heaven or on earth or under the earth, which one might petition, to which one might flee for refuge, apart from this God, the imageless and absolutely transcendent One, enthroned between the cherubim. Holiness means: Indivisible, inescapable, unquenchable life, without source or loss, beginning or end—a burning jealousy as unyielding as the grave.

On the other hand: Holiness is unlike other divine attributes, known technically as “non-communicable” attributes because God does not, because God could not, communicate them to creatures. Such attributes include omniscience, omnipotence—the omni’s in general. Whether or not we should understand humanity as originally created holy (I’m ambivalent about that), in a world ruled by the powers of sin and death, human beings are not and have never been holy, much less holy as God is holy. Yet here, right in the heart of the Torah, almost literally at its centerpoint, we hear God command Israel to be holy. So holiness is somehow a possibility, or at least an expectation, for human beings; or, if not for humanity as a whole, at least for Abraham’s children.

What does holiness entail for Israel? It appears to be a sort of image of the divine holiness, a creaturely counterpart to the uncreated holiness of the Lord. Just as God is utterly and unmistakably distinct both from the world and from the gods of the nations, so Israel is to be visibly and clearly distinct in and from the world, set apart from and among the nations. Israel is to be different.

And this difference is to go all the way down, to be inscribed on the body of Israel. Food, sex, hair, land, crops, money, family, parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and ruled, priests and otherwise, rich and poor, landed and homeless, native and alien—holiness touches everything and everyone, it is comprehensive and all-consuming, its details are exhaustive (not to say exhausting), and it knows no such thing as the separation of religious from political from moral from liturgical from family from individual from communal from economic from…(fill in the blank). Holiness encompasses everything, because holiness concerns God, and God is at once the maker of human life and the author of the covenant. There is nothing that is not the business of Israel’s God.

It doesn’t take, however. Or rather, it takes, but it doesn’t do the job. The commands do indeed set Israel apart from the nations, but the living, burning holiness of the Lord God—the jealous fire that cuts to the heart—it fails to take exclusive, permanent hold; it does spadework against injustice and idolatry, but it does not cut them out, root and branch. They keep sprouting up, in the heart and in the land. What must be done to ignite the consuming fire of God in the midst of the people of God without setting them ablaze—without burning them up, leaving nothing but a valley of dead, dry bones?

Before he dies, Moses tells us. Through Moses, God promises Israel that, following its waywardness and disobedience, following its failure to love God and to keep God’s commandments, following its punishment and exile and re-gathering in the land—after all that, then God will perform a mighty deed: “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut 30:6).

None other than God will do so, because none other than God can do so. The mark of the covenant on the body of Israel will cut to the heart. God will make it so, because God is able, and God’s grace to Israel is everlasting. Likewise, the command to be holy is transformed from an imperative to a promise: No longer, “Be holy,” but, “You shall be holy, for I myself will make you holy.” Indeed, circumcision of the heart just is what it means to be holy to the Lord. God will give Israel a holiness proper to human beings, but a holiness from beyond their means or ken: God’s own holiness.

For the Holy One was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, the grace of holiness. The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus, the Messiah and Holy One of Israel (John 1:14-17).

Holiness is incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Holiness touches the body, the flesh and blood of a human being, this one Jew. Holiness cuts to the heart of this one. He is absolutely set apart; he is one of us, but he is not us. He is different. His life is a single sustained offering to the God of Israel, every minute and every action dedicated to the will and glory of the Lord. He loves the Lord, his God and Father, with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He is ablaze with the fire of God’s Holy Spirit, but he is not consumed; his flesh, like the leaves of the bush at Horeb, is not burnt up (Exod 3:1-2). He, Jesus, is holy, as God is holy.

And when God makes the life of Jesus, the Lord’s servant, an offering for sin (Isa 53:10), God does not abandon him to the grave, will not let his Holy One see decay (Ps 16:10; Acts 2:27). God raises him from the dead with power through the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4): The Holy One is alive; the fire is not quenched. And by the will of God, we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Heb 10:10). The righteous one has made many righteous; the Holy One has made many holy (Isa 53:11). For the holiness of Christ is a hallowing holiness, a sanctifying sanctity. As the Father hallows his name (Matt 6:9), so the Son sanctifies himself for our sakes, that we might be sanctified in the truth of God’s love (John 17:18-19); and God’s love, the flaming tongues of God’s holy word (Acts 2:3), has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us (Rom 5:5).

And through the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11), we are a temple of God’s Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), holy bodies bearing the Holy One in our midst, saints circumcised in the heart through baptism into his death. We ourselves are the one body of Christ, set apart from and for the world, ministers of and witnesses to his holiness. He commands us to be holy; he has made us holy; he shall make us holy at the last. For the one who began the work of sanctification among us will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6).

We bear the holiness of God to one another, this unmerited and unpossessable gift of the thrice-holy triune God of Israel. The holy Father, the holy Son, the Holy Spirit: This God, the one God, our God, is with us. We stand in the presence of the living God, at the foot of the sacred mountain (Heb 12:18-24), as God’s holy people—and we are not burnt up.

Figural christology in Paradise Lost

In the last two books of Paradise Lost, the angel Michael instructs Adam about what is to come. Together it amounts to a poetic summary of the whole biblical narrative, focusing especially on the bookends: the first 11 chapters of Genesis (the immediately subsequent history of Adam and Eve's progeny) and the antitype of Adam, Christ the Son of God incarnate, in whose life and work Adam finally finds consolation for the misery his and Eve's sin will unleash on so many generations of their children.

One of the most striking features of Milton's biblical precis is his depiction of figures from the "primeval history" of Genesis, those chapters between Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden and the calling of Abram. Specifically, his language about Enoch and Noah evokes Christ, not least through its anonymous description: by not naming the person in question, Milton leaves ambiguous just who is in view. The overall literary and theological effect is a brilliant, compelling figural christology, using words apt for the Gospels' protagonist to redescribe the initial descendants of Adam, planting verbal seeds in the mind of the reader as she is led, eventually, to the figure's fulfillment in the flesh.

Here is how Milton describes Enoch:

...till at last
Of middle age one rising, eminent
In wise deport, spake much of right and wrong,
And judgment from above: him old and young
Exploded, and had seized with violent hands,
Had not a cloud descending snatched him thence,
Unseen amid the throng. (XI.664–671)

Enoch, like Christ, proclaims judgment and righteousness; escapes the violent mob by walking through their midst; and departs from the earth by ascending to God's side on a cloud. When Adam asks Michael, "But who was that just man, whom had not Heaven/Rescued, had in his righteousness been lost?" (681–682) the angel replies:

But he, the seventh from thee, whom thou beheld'st
The only righteous in a world perverse,
And therefore hated, therefore so beset
With foes, for daring single to be just,
And utter odious truth, that God would come
To judge them with his Saints—him the Most High,
Rapt in a balmy cloud, with winged steeds,
Did, as thou saw'st, receive, to walk with God
High in salvation and the climes of bliss,
Exempt from death, to show thee what reward
Awaits the good, the rest what punishment . . . . (700–710)

Again: Like Christ, Enoch is the one righteous man in a fallen world, generating hatred to the point of violence, and calling down God's judgment upon all unrighteousness. For his pains, Enoch is raised to life eternal with God and freed forever from death, at once the divine exemplar and the divine pedagogy for all humankind.

Adam next foresees Noah, and here is how Milton depicts him:

At length a reverend sire among them came,
And of their doings great dislike declared,
And testified against their ways. He oft
Frequented their assemblies, whereso met,
Triumphs or festivals, and to them preached
Conversion and repentance, as to souls
In a prison, under judgments imminent;
But all in vain. (719–726)

Noah here figures the ministry of Christ, joining his neighbors as he finds them but not condoning their behavior, instead bearing witness to another way. Not only does he meet them with the proclamation of a message of repentance, like Christ at the outset of his ministry, but he did so "as to souls/In a prison," almost word for word a transposition of 1 Peter 3:19's account of the crucified Christ preaching to the spirits in prison—traditionally interpreted as the descent into hell. Noah typifies the Son of God in both his earthly and his spiritual missions to the lost.

Michael elaborates the sense for Adam:

So all shall turn degenerate, all depraved,
Justice and temperance, truth and faith, forgot;
One man except, the only son of light
In a dark age, against example good,
Against allurement, custom, and a world
Offended. Fearless of reproach and scorn,
Or violence, he of their wicked ways
Shall them admonish, and before them set
The paths of righteousness, how much more safe
And full of peace, denouncing wrath to come
On their impenitence, and shall return
Of them derided, but of God observed
The one just man alive: by his command
Shall build a wonderous ark, as thou beheld'st,
To save himself and household from amidst
A world devote to universal wrack. . . . (806–821)

To which Adam responds in delight:

Far less I now lament for one whole world
Of wicked sons destroyed, than I rejoice
For one man found so perfect, and so just,
That God vouchsafes to raise another world
From him, and all his anger to forget.
But say, what mean those coloured streaks in Heaven,
Distended as the brow of God appeased? (874–880)

Finally, of the "peace from God, and covenant new" (867) that Adam spies, the angel replies and thereby concludes their discourse as well as Book XI:

Day and night,
Seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost,
Shall hold their course, till fire purge all things new,
Both Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell. (898–901)

Milton lays his cards on the table by explicitly referencing 2 Peter 3:1–13, inviting the reader to make the connection that the biblical author has already drawn: Noah and the ark are to the flood as Christ and the church are to the purifying fire of the End, which like the deluge is a consummating sign of both new covenant and new creation. Christ, as the Second Adam, is in fact the Second of all Adam's children, and thus a Second Enoch and a Second Noah, the one just and perfect man come to rescue God's good but fallen creatures from their own violence and, consequently, from God's righteous judgment. So when, on "The second time returning" (859), in the bill of the Spirit-dove is found "An olive-leaf . . . pacific sign" (860), then "from his ark/The ancient sire descends, with all his train" (861–862): all, that is, of Adam's faithful sons and daughters, delivered from death and kept safe in the fleshy ark of his true Seed's body, the church. For the church is a mother to Christ's new sisters and brothers, who, along with their first parents, are now spotless children of God the Father.