Content note: this essay discusses lynching and racial terror in America, including brief descriptions of photographs and one named case. I’ve kept the details spare, and I’ve tried to handle the names of the dead with the care they deserve.

For roughly fifty years in this country, coroner’s juries examining the bodies of lynched men returned the same verdict, in the same words, thousands of times: death at the hands of persons unknown.

Hold that verdict next to a second document. A photograph, taken the same afternoon — often by a professional who had time to set up his camera, because the event was announced in advance. Hundreds of faces. Sunday clothes. Children lifted onto shoulders for a better view. The crowd looks into the lens, unhurried and unafraid. Many of these photographs were printed as postcards and mailed through the United States Post Office, with notes on the back.

Everyone did it. So no one did.

Persons unknown.

1. The theory I wish didn’t fit

René Girard spent fifty years building a single argument: communities under pressure resolve their internal tensions by converging on a victim. The accusation against the victim feels completely true to the crowd. The killing brings a peace so sudden it feels supernatural. And the record of the event is written by the crowd, so the victim’s guilt survives on paper, and the crowd’s innocence survives along with it. He called this the scapegoat mechanism, and he found it running under human culture everywhere he looked — myth, ritual, history.

Here is the detail I can’t shake. Girard’s generic term for the founding act, the word he reached for across five decades whatever culture he was examining, was lynching.

He lived here. He arrived in the United States in 1947 and taught here for the rest of his career. The word he used as theory names a practice that was happening in his adopted country within living memory — and mimetic theory, as a field, largely looked past it. Julia Robinson Moore, one of the few scholars to press this, calls race the frontier of mimetic theory: the man who named the machinery of concealment worked inside a country still operating it, and the theory inherited the blindness.

I take that as a measurement of how strong the concealment is. I’m about to claim I can see what the theorist missed, and that should worry both of us.

2. The anatomy

Set the historical record beside Girard’s model, item by item.

The accusation. Overwhelmingly a stereotyped transgression, most often the alleged violation of white women. Girard cataloged what he called the stereotypes of persecution: myths everywhere charge their victims with boundary-crossing crimes, usually sexual, and the charge feels self-evidently true to the crowd. Ida B. Wells will demonstrate shortly how often it was false.

The festival. Announced in newspapers. Special excursion trains. Crowds in the thousands. The standard scholarly study of Southern lynching, written by two sociologists making a sober empirical judgment, is titled A Festival of Violence.

The relics. Souvenirs taken; photographs sold; postcards mailed — the archive called Without Sanctuary collects them. And sometimes worse than photographs. After the 1899 burning of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, pieces of his body were carried off by the crowd, and Atlanta store windows displayed knuckles labeled as his. Edwin Arnold, the case’s most careful modern historian, concluded that at least some of those were pig knuckles — put in the windows as a joke, and to draw customers. Sit with that: the relic was such an ordinary thing to want that a merchant could counterfeit one for a laugh and a sale. W. E. B. Du Bois was walking to deliver a carefully reasoned letter about the case when he passed one of those windows, and he turned around. He said afterward that calm, detached science had become impossible for him. Real or faked, the relic did its work. A shop window converted the scientist into a witness.

The peace. Read the newspapers from the days after: order restored, the community settled, the trouble over. The mechanism’s signature deliverable, printed as civic news.

The verdict. Persons unknown — returned by juries while the postcards circulated.

One cross-check from outside the theory. Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist working from the data with no Girardian commitments, concluded in Rituals of Blood that postbellum lynching functioned as human sacrifice. He got there without Girard. I mention that because I lean on convergence more than once in this essay, and I want to be clear I’m not just stacking people who agree with me.

3. Whose peace?

Moore presses a question that reorganized this whole subject for me: whom did the lynching pacify?

Look at the timing. Lynching peaked in the 1890s, precisely the years white Southern society came closest to tearing itself apart. Populist revolt. Poor white farmers against planter elites. Economic collapse and a political insurgency that briefly had poor whites and Black farmers voting the same ticket. The scapegoat discharged the rivalry between whites. Every lynching re-performed the unanimity: whatever divides us, we are not that. Peace among the quarreling factions, purchased at the tree.

And the peace it bought is Girard’s own test for whether the mechanism is running.

Girard would add a correction to the way we usually tell this story, and it stings. We reach for the word “othering,” as if the violence came from too much distance. His data points in the opposite direction: we scapegoat the people closest to us — rivals, competitors, doubles — and manufacture the difference afterward to justify what was done. Thomas Moss, whom you’ll meet properly in a moment, was killed over a grocery store. His crime was success. Resemblance. “Othering” is the cover story that violence writes for itself, after the fact, in the persecutors’ hands.

Widen the frame for a moment, because the same machinery sorts our whole national history into three structures.

The first is internal scapegoating, the classic form. Salem: villages flooded with refugees from a frontier war, feuding over property, converging on marginal women with supernatural accusations — then peace. Anne Hutchinson expelled. Quakers hanged on Boston Common. The anti-Catholic panics of the 1830s, complete with fabricated persecution texts — the Maria Monk convent hoax, carrying the trademark sexual accusation. The largest mass lynching in American history took eleven Italian men in New Orleans in 1891, after a jury had acquitted them; national newspapers applauded. Leo Frank, 1915. The mechanism is indifferent to the victim’s category. It requires only that the victim be marginal, blamable, and unavenged.

The second structure is conquest, and honesty requires the distinction. Two peoples desiring the same land are rivals at war — mimetic to the bone, but a contest between groups rather than the all-against-one that buys internal peace. The scapegoat pattern shows up at the edges, wherever Native people ended up inside the settlements: the Christianized “praying Indians” interned on a freezing island when war panic spiked; the Paxton Boys butchering the peaceful Conestoga, who were within reach precisely because they had never fought anyone. Then, once the conquest was safely finished, the monuments — the noble vanishing Indian statues, mascots, and place names. Honor the dead; close the case. Jesus had sharp words for people who build the tombs of the prophets.

The third structure is the one that keeps me up at night, for a reason I should name. Cathi’s people and mine came from Ireland and Eastern Europe — straight into the candidate pool. Her grandfather crossed in the early 1900s, leaving a country that had made his family’s life unlivable, looking for peace. He found a country that had its own way of manufacturing it.

Each despised European group — Irish, Italian, Slavic — eventually left the victim pool by a single route: joining the crowd against Black Americans. In the 1863 draft riots, Irish immigrants — starved out of one country, despised in this one, competing with free Black workers for the same bottom-rung jobs — became lynch mobs in the streets of New York. Girard explains the incentive in one sentence: the surest way to stop being a candidate victim is to join the unanimity.

Whiteness, on this reading, functions less like an ethnicity and more like a treaty — an expanding coalition of former scapegoats, held together the only way the mechanism knows, by maintaining one permanent victim caste. Somewhere between her grandfather’s ship and my comfortable office, that treaty was signed on our behalf.

And while we were talking through this essay, Cathi named the older branch of her tree — the one here long before the ships. Some of her ancestors owned slaves. One family, holding both ends of the mechanism: people it nearly consumed, and people it served. A treaty can be signed on your behalf. Owning human beings is a signature in your own hand.

An earlier draft of this paragraph said I couldn’t name a single ancestor who stood in a mob. That was true, and it was also a curated record — closed at the flattering page. The honest version: some of our people were candidates for the tree, some of our people held the other end of the economy, and the benefits from both directions arrived at the same address. Ours.

Underneath every episode, one question: who can be spared, to make the rest of us one?

4. The woman who flipped the camera

Memphis, 1892. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart ran the People’s Grocery, and ran it well — well enough to draw customers from the white grocer across the street. After a manufactured confrontation, the three men were taken from jail and shot. Moss’s last recorded words were a plea for his people to go west.

Ida B. Wells was Moss’s friend. She was also the co-owner of a newspaper, and she responded to his death by doing the one thing myth cannot survive. She checked the accusations.

Southern Horrors came out that same year; A Red Record followed. Case after case, the official charges dissolved under investigation, and the real triggers surfaced: a thriving business, a political vote, a man insufficiently deferential, a consensual relationship recast as assault. The era’s newspapers had reported each lynching in the mob’s voice, with the victim guilty by default — persecution texts, in the exact sense Girard would later define. Wells wrote the counter-text with a printing press.

The mechanism defended itself on schedule. While she was out of town, a mob destroyed her press and her office, and she spent the rest of her life effectively exiled from the South. Expose the mechanism and you move up the list.

Readers of this substack have watched me attempt this discipline on scripture’s hardest stories — Tamar, Bathsheba — asking of every text: whose side is the camera on? Wells ran that test on her own country, in real time, at the risk of her life, sixty years before anyone called it a theory.

And the lineage held. Six decades later, King’s movement ran the same exposure at national scale — refuse retaliation, remain visibly innocent, and make the mechanism perform in front of television cameras. Theophus Smith describes King’s nonviolence as an attempted cure of the culture itself. Birmingham was the camera test administered to an entire nation, live.

5. The tree and the cross

The Black church needed no French theory either.

James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree says what Black Christians had recognized for generations: Jesus was a lynched man. “They killed him by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39) lands differently among people who know the trees. The spirituals carried the recognition. Billie Holiday sang the fruit.

Cone’s hardest chapter examines Reinhold Niebuhr — arguably the most sophisticated white theologian of the lynching era, a man who wrote profoundly about collective sin and the meaning of the cross. He deserves his due — he saw more than almost any of his peers. And he stood beside the clearest cross-shaped event in American life and never quite connected it to Calvary. The people holding the revelation could not apply it one tree over.

I would like to believe I’d have done better. Everything in this essay — a mechanism visible mostly in hindsight, missed even by its own theorist — testifies against me.

Notice, though, what the convergence proves. Cone reaches his conclusion through the witness of the Black church; Girard reaches his through comparative anthropology and the shape of the Gospels. Their roads never cross, and they arrive at the same place: God is with the lynched man, and against the crowd. When roads that independent meet, I take the destination seriously.

6. The altar

Now the part I would rather skip, and won’t.

Donald Mathews, a historian of Southern religion, spent years on the Hose case and concluded that the lynching era drew its deep grammar from the region’s theology. Blood atonement, preached every Sunday: sin demands death; someone must pay; the community is cleansed through the suffering of a substitute; God himself required it. A crowd catechized in that sermon already knew the liturgy when it gathered at the tree.

Mathews is careful, and I want to be careful with him. Churches did not organize mobs, and many Christians opposed the terror. His claim is quieter, and worse: the religion suffused the culture, and the culture recognized the ritual because the ritual matched the religion.

So let me say the hard sentence slowly and stand behind it. If the gospel you preach is a sacred killing that God demanded, then the mob at the tree is imitating your theology rather than defying it.

I’ve written before about a forgiveness that collects nothing — the creditor who tears up the invoice and absorbs the loss. A God like that has no altar that needs a body. Jonathan Foster calls this a theology of consent — a God who will not take what is not given. An altar is where the taking happens. The collecting God always needs one more.

And here is the guardrail that doubles as the thesis: Wells and the Black church read the same Bible as the mob. They read it from the victim’s side. One Bible, two cameras.

7. Persons unknown, present tense

I owe you a report on myself before this essay ends, because it falls apart if its author claims an exemption.

Reading Girard in a comfortable coffee shop, somewhere in the third chapter, I noticed I was enjoying the theory’s company — relieved that the crowd in question was them: Southern, historical, dead. That relief is the oldest move in the repertoire. Scapegoating the scapegoaters. Build the memorial, close the case, walk away justified. Jesus’s warning about the tombs of the prophets was written for exactly the person I was being in that chair.

So, present tense. The old verdict survives wherever the passive voice gathers. Mistakes were made. The system failed. Policies were applied. I will not insult the dead by equating bureaucratic evasion with a burning — the specific dead deserve specificity, and there is no comparing a spreadsheet to a tree. I am naming a grammar, and the grammar is the same one: agency dissolved into a crowd until no one did what everyone did. The accuser’s forwarding address is the passive voice.

I have used that address. I’ve run a company long enough to know how “the decision was made” tastes in the mouth.

The discipline

What I’m keeping from all of this is a practice, the same one the scriptures have been teaching all along: watch where the camera moves.

Who wrote the account of this conflict — the crowd, or the victim? What verdict does my comfort prefer? Whose peace did this peace cost?

A prayer, in the pattern I’ve used before when the material demands one:

God of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart —

We refuse the verdict of persons unknown.

We refuse the passive voice where our fathers’ names belong.

We refuse the peace that is purchased at a tree.

We refuse a gospel that requires a body — because you were the body.

Give us the courage of the woman with the printing press. Give us eyes to find the camera. And give us the nerve to stand where you have always stood: beside the accused.

Amen.

Sources woven through: Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895); James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree; René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning and The Scapegoat; Julia Robinson Moore, “The Frontier of Race in Mimetic Theory” (Contagion); Donald G. Mathews, At the Altar of Lynching; Edwin T. Arnold, What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose; Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood; Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence; James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary; Theophus Smith on King; Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Scapegoats; Jonathan Foster, Theology of Consent. Earlier posts this builds on: Tamar, Bathsheba, and “Why ‘God Has a Reason’ Can Become a Cruel Theology.”

Fifteen years ago, we grew our monthly recurring revenue by 70% in sixty days. That fall I was working eighty to a hundred hours a week. Seventy or eighty open tickets sat in my personal queue mine, not the company’s. We couldn’t onboard the new clients fast enough, and the clients who’d gotten us there had stopped hearing from anybody.

The business was winning. I was the reason it was about to lose.

I told that story last week to a room of other business owners, and they nodded the way people nod when you’re describing their own life back to them. The version I usually tell ends with a better org chart and a story about delegation, and then everyone goes to lunch. What I leave out is that I spent years trying to solve it as an operations problem. It wasn’t.

I’ve run an IT company for three decades. The business has changed shape again and again, and each time the obstacle was some version of the person the previous stage had taught me to become.

I started alone, doing every sale, every repair, and every invoice, until I read The E-Myth, honestly assessed the pace I was keeping, and told my wife I was going to work myself to death at this rate. I meant it literally. So I hired people and discovered that I didn’t know how to be a boss. Assign the work. Check the work. Sit on my hands while somebody took an hour to do something I could finish in ten minutes. Which was true, and which would eventually become the whole problem.

Later I merged with two other companies. One partner eventually walked, messily, taking four clients with him. He’d owned invoicing, and I knew almost nothing about it. So I called our software vendor and asked a question I can still hear myself asking: “Can you tell me whether we are billing our clients?”

We weren’t. At least not correctly. Eventually, I found we were ‘double paying’ sales tax, and we had overpaid by $50K. I thought the lesson was systems, documentation, controls, and accountability. Those were lessons. They weren’t the lesson.

The real story is the cape.

By the time we hit that 70% growth spurt, I had built something I was very good at being. Client emergency, and I swoop in. Cape flying. Save the day. I loved it, and everything that follows depends on understanding how much I loved it, because I wasn’t trapped in that role. I’d chosen it, carefully, over about twenty years.

On the floor it looked like this. A technician would be working an issue. Thirty minutes. Forty-five. An hour. I’d walk over, look at his screen, fix it in five minutes, and then brag about it.

I thought I was helping. I was tearing him down, one five-minute fix at a time.

Think about what I was actually doing. I had the power to solve the problem. I used it. The problem got solved. The client got an answer. And the person in front of the screen learned, in a way no performance review could ever teach him, that he was the kind of person problems get solved around. Every rescue was a small subtraction.

The reason I couldn’t delegate my way out of it took me years to understand. Delegation was wrong by every immediate metric I had. They were slower. I could do it better. Handing off the work meant watching the work get done worse, visibly, in front of paying clients, on purpose. There is no short-term operational argument for that. The only argument is that a person who’s never allowed to struggle never becomes a person who can.

I had to let someone else work the problem. Let them take longer. Let them find a solution I wouldn’t have chosen. Let them own the result. And then, instead of reminding everyone that I could have done it faster, celebrate their win. I don’t know how to overstate how much that felt like giving something up, because it raised a question bigger than delegation: When does refusing to intervene become love rather than neglect?

I’ve spent years reading and writing about divine power, circling the question everybody circles. If God is good and God is able, why is any of this like this? I’ve read the answers. Free will, soul-making, the greater good, the mystery card. Most of them explain suffering more smoothly than suffering deserves, and some arrive at a God who permits terrible things for reasons that would get a human parent arrested.

What I learned in that server room was smaller than an answer to any of that, but it was something. The capacity to fix is not the same as the license to fix. I had all the power in the room. I was the most competent person in it by a wide margin. And exercising that competence made the people around me smaller every time. Not because I did it cruelly. Because I did it well.

That’s the piece I couldn’t get from books. Control doesn’t always look like control. Mine looked like generosity. It looked like generosity to me, and I got thanked for it. So when I read Thomas Jay Oord on a God whose essence is uncontrolling love, I began to understand the shape of the claim differently than I once did. There are forms of power that can achieve the immediate outcome while diminishing the person being acted upon. Sometimes restraint isn’t the absence of love or power. Sometimes it is what love requires if the other person is ever going to become fully themselves.

And then I run into the wall, which I want to leave standing.

My technicians were struggling with ticket queues. Nobody’s child had a tumor. The suffering in my story was mild, technical, and it worked. The fact that it worked is both what makes the analogy attractive and what makes it suspect. My techs got better. That’s the whole reason I can tell the story with a lesson attached. Most suffering doesn’t come with a lesson attached. Most of it doesn’t develop anybody. It just wrecks what it touches and leaves.

A five-minute fix is not a cancer ward. Whatever I learned about power on that floor, I didn’t learn anything that would be worth saying out loud to somebody sitting beside a hospital bed. I’ve noticed that people who reason from the small case to the large one usually stop before they reach the point where the analogy breaks down.

So I hold it where it is. I know something now about what happens when competent love overrides, and I know it in my body rather than from a book. I don’t know that it scales to the size of the question. I’ve stopped expecting it to.

But giving up the cape turned out to have another layer. The hours weren’t a scheduling problem. I kept attacking them as one, with better systems and better boundaries and better calendars, and they kept coming back, because eighty hours a week wasn’t something the work was doing to me. It was something I needed from the work.

I found the bottom of it through a small-group process focused on identifying the behaviors that keep you stuck and tracing their origins. What surfaced was that I’d spent most of my life cultivating a persona I believed I had to be, rather than being who I was. The workaholism sat on top of that. So did the codependency. So did a fair amount of what I’d been calling faith.

Superman wasn’t a role I played at work. It was the deal I’d made about what made a person worth anything: be useful, be competent, be the one with the answer, be the person everybody calls when things go wrong. Be needed. Especially, be needed. Work was simply where I got to perform that deal in front of the largest audience.

That’s why delegation had felt so threatening. I wasn’t just handing someone a ticket. I was handing away evidence that I mattered. If someone else could solve the problem, what was I for? If the client didn’t need me, what was my value? If the company could operate without me, who exactly had I spent all those years becoming?

No org chart can answer those questions.

I went from a hundred-hour week to four days. The calendar was downstream of all of it. I’m not fixed, and I’ve stopped saying I am, but I did stop pretending the schedule was the thing.

The business kept changing. I bought out my remaining partner and had to become a CEO instead of a very good operator. That meant promoting three people into a leadership team and putting a real operating system in place so decisions no longer routed through me. Later, I understood that cybersecurity had to move to the center of what we do. The business changed again, and I had to follow it again.

Each time, the pattern was the same. Something that had made me valuable at one stage became the thing I had to surrender to reach the next one.

Now comes the strangest version. I’m three years out from exiting this company, which means my job is to make myself unnecessary. Every system I document, every decision I hand off, every leader who learns to make a call without checking with me first, every client who stops needing to see my face, every problem the company solves that I never even hear about, that’s the work now.

And it runs directly against the deal I spent most of my life making: be needed. Except now success means not being needed.

The tradition I keep circling has a word for this: kenosis. Self-emptying love. I used to hear that as something passive, a loss, making yourself less. I don’t anymore. Thirty years in business has taught me that growth sometimes looks exactly like subtraction.

Give up doing the work. Give up having the answer. Give up being right. Give up being the rescuer. Give up being needed. Give up the version of yourself the last stage rewarded, because that’s precisely the version the next stage can’t survive.

Nobody sends a memo telling you it’s time. The business just starts straining against you. The tickets pile up. Your people wait for your decisions. Clients insist on talking to you. Your calendar fills. You work harder. You tell yourself nobody cares as much as you do, nobody can do it as well as you can, and everything would move faster if people would just get out of your way.

Sometimes all of that is true. That’s what makes the cape so hard to give up. The cape works. You really can save the day.

The question is what happens to everyone else if you keep doing it, and what happens to you when being the hero is no longer what the business needs.

Thirty years in, I’m still learning the same move: open your hands. Give up the cape.

Which version of you needs to be fired next?

I’ve been listening to Bart Ehrman lately, and he makes a claim that stops you mid-stride if you take it seriously. Atonement and forgiveness, he says, are mutually exclusive. Atonement means a debt is paid. Forgiveness means the debt gets canceled. You can’t have both: if the debt was paid, nothing was forgiven. And then comes the sharper edge: Jesus taught forgiveness. The rest of the New Testament teaches atonement. Which means, according to Ehrman, the church didn’t just develop Jesus’s message after his death. It reversed it.

It’s a clean argument, and Ehrman is nothing if not clean. He’s also not making it up out of thin air. Before deciding what to do with the claim, it’s worth feeling its full weight.

The case he’s making

Read the parables Jesus actually told and you notice something. The prodigal son comes home, rehearsing a repayment speech: “make me like one of your hired servants,” but the father doesn’t let him finish. No restitution, no sacrifice, no transaction. The father runs. In the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to forgive us as we forgive others, and when I forgive my neighbor, nobody pays me. That’s what makes it forgiveness. The tax collector in the temple says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” and goes home justified. No lamb died in that parable.

Then Ehrman points at the seams in the tradition itself. The clearest atonement saying in the gospels, “the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many,” appears in Mark, and Matthew copies it. But Luke, who used Mark as a source, drops it. And in the book of Acts, Luke’s second volume, the apostles preach salvation over and over without ever describing the cross as a payment for sin. In those sermons, the crucifixion is the crime that wicked men committed and the resurrection is God’s reversal of it. Forgiveness comes through repentance. That’s not an atonement theology. It’s something older, or at least other.

So Ehrman concludes: the historical Jesus preached free forgiveness to anyone who would repent. After his death, his followers needed to make sense of a crucified messiah, and atonement was the sense they made. The ransom saying and the words at the Last Supper, “my blood, poured out for many,” were placed on Jesus’s lips by a church that already believed the cross was the point.

Can he do that? Can he pull “what Jesus said” apart from “what the gospels say Jesus said,” keep the sayings that fit his picture, and hand the rest to the later church?

The honest answer is: yes, he can. It’s the standard method of historical Jesus scholarship, not a trick Ehrman invented. The gospels were written forty to sixty years after the events, in Greek, by authors shaped by decades of post-Easter preaching. Every serious reader of these texts, including the most devout, has to reckon with that. The question isn’t whether the method is allowed. The question is whether it holds in this case.

I don’t think it does. Three walls in the argument are bearing more load than they can carry.

The circle in the method

Here’s the move, slowed down. Step one: Determine that the historical Jesus taught free forgiveness. Step two: notice sayings where Jesus interprets his own death as being for others. Step three: rule out those sayings as inauthentic because they conflict with what the historical Jesus taught. Step four: observe that, once those sayings are removed, Jesus never speaks of his death as atoning.

But step four is just step three, wearing a lab coat. The conclusion was smuggled in as the filter. This is the old problem with the “criteria of authenticity,” and it’s worth saying plainly that the field itself has largely lost confidence in them. Scholars like Dale Allison and Chris Keith have spent the last two decades showing that you cannot excavate individual sayings from the gospels the way you’d pull artifacts from soil strata. The tradition doesn’t cleanly split into “authentic” and “added” that way, and every scholar who tries ends up with a Jesus who agrees with them.

Ehrman knows this literature. But the lecture-hall version of his argument still runs on the old machine.

The dating problem

The second wall is chronology, and it’s the one I’d lean on hardest. “The church added atonement later” implies there was a later time for it to be added. There wasn’t much of one.

Paul, writing to Corinth in the mid-50s, quotes the Last Supper tradition, “this is my body, which is for you… this cup is the new covenant in my blood,” and prefaces it by saying he is handing on what he himself received. A few chapters later, he does it again: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,” and again he flags it as received tradition, a creed older than his letter, older than his mission. Ehrman himself, and this is the striking part, dates the creed to within a few years of the crucifixion. Some scholars put it within months.

So the earliest datable interpretation of Jesus’s death that we possess, from any source, on anyone’s dating, already connects that death to our sins. That doesn’t prove Jesus taught it. Dead men’s deaths get interpreted by the living. But it demolishes the picture of a slow, decades-long theological drift in which the church gradually talked itself into the cross. The runway for invention is three to five years, in a community led by people who had known Jesus, eaten with him, and were still very much alive to object. Whatever you call that, “later” isn’t the word.

A Jewish idea in a Jewish mouth

The third wall is the quiet assumption that a first-century Jewish prophet couldn’t have thought of his own death as counting for others; the idea, supposedly, is so foreign that it must be a post-Easter import. But it wasn’t foreign. It was in the air Jesus breathed.

The Maccabean martyr traditions, well known in Jesus’s world, held that the deaths of the righteous could turn away wrath from the nation. One text has a martyr pray that his blood would purify the people. Isaiah 53’s suffering servant, wounded for transgressions, was on the shelf. And Jesus, by the time he rode into Jerusalem and turned over tables in the temple courts, did not need supernatural foresight to know how it would end. Prophets who did what he was doing got killed, and he’d just watched it happen to John.

A man who sees his death coming, and who stands inside a tradition where a righteous death can be for the people, interpreting his own death that way at a final Passover meal: that isn’t an anachronism. It’s contextually at home. E. P. Sanders, a scholar with no confessional axe to grind, counted the Last Supper among the near-certain bedrock facts of Jesus’s life. You can still argue that the “for many” words were added. But you can no longer say they had to be.

The dichotomy that isn’t

And then there’s the foundation under all of it: the claim that atonement and forgiveness exclude each other. It sounds airtight. I don’t think it survives contact with either the Old Testament or ordinary human experience.

Israel held sacrifice and free mercy together for a thousand years without feeling the contradiction Ehrman insists on. The same tradition that built the Day of Atonement also gave us Psalm 51, which says, “You have no delight in sacrifice… the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit,” and Hosea’s “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Nobody in that world thought the temple canceled God’s mercy or that God’s mercy made the temple a lie. The debt-ledger framing that makes them clash is much later; it’s Anselm’s eleventh-century courtroom, read backward. Ehrman has refuted a medieval theory and billed it as a first-century contradiction.

And here’s the thing you learn not from a book but from actually forgiving someone: forgiveness is never free. It’s free to the recipient. The forgiver pays. When I forgive a real wrong, not an inconvenience, I absorb the loss rather than extract it. I eat the cost. The prodigal’s father forgives freely, yes; he also runs down the road in a way that shames him before the village, embraces the stink of the pig-fields, and gives away a second inheritance he doesn’t owe. The forgiveness in that parable is free, and it is costly, at the same time, to the same father.

What the cross cost, and who charged it

But watch carefully what that claim does not say. It does not say God required a payment before he could forgive. It couldn’t, because Jesus was forgiving sins before the cross, freely, scandalously, with no mechanism in sight. “Your sins are forgiven,” he tells the paralyzed man in Mark 2, and the scribes gasp, because he is handing out mercy with no lamb, no altar, no cross yet on the horizon. The forgiveness was already flowing. Whatever the cross is, it is not the switch that turned it on.

So where does the cost come in? Here: free forgiveness walked into a violent world, and the world did what the world does. Plato saw it coming four centuries early. In the Republic, Glaucon argues that if a perfectly just man ever appeared among us, just to the bone but stripped of every reputation and protection, we would whip him, torture him, and in the end impale him. The Greek word he uses is a cousin of crucify. Even pagan Athens, reasoning from nothing but human nature, knew what we do with the truly righteous. René Girard spent a career showing that the violence at Golgotha was generated entirely from the human side. The rivalry, the panic, the crowd converging on an innocent victim: this is the old machinery every society uses to purchase its peace, and the gospels are the first story told plainly enough from the victim’s side that the machinery stands exposed. God did not demand that death. We did. The cross is not a payment God collected. It is a wound we inflicted, and the gospel is what God did with it. He absorbed it. He did not return it. The empire escalates, the mob unloads, and God takes the blow all the way down and answers from inside it: “Father, forgive them.”

The oldest hymn the church possesses says exactly this. Paul quotes it in Philippians, a song already worn smooth with use before a single gospel was written, about a Lord who “emptied himself” and became obedient to the point of death on a cross. Read it closely and notice what isn’t there: no mention of sin, no ledger, no payment. Self-emptying love going down, and God’s vindication raising it up. The word the tradition uses is kenosis, and it names what the cross reveals about God’s character rather than what it deposits in God’s accounts. Even that ancient creed, “Christ died for our sins,” survives intact on this reading. The Greek word is hyper: on behalf of, for the sake of, because of us and for us. It does not have to mean instead of us, as payment, and the first people who prayed it were under no obligation to Anselm.

That is the sense in which forgiveness costs. Not a fee assessed in heaven, but the price love pays on earth when it refuses to retaliate, refuses to scapegoat back, refuses to flinch. The father running down the road was always going to be shamed by the village. That was never the son’s bill to pay. It was simply what that kind of love was willing to suffer to close the distance. The cross is that run at full historical scale, into the teeth of everything we had.

Ehrman is right that a debt must be either collected or forgiven. He’s wrong about who was holding the ledger. The debt at the cross was not ours to God, awaiting payment. It was the wound we dealt God, awaiting revenge. And it never came. God absorbed the cost of forgiving us, in himself, rather than collect, which is what forgiveness has meant all the way back to the father in the road. The cross doesn’t contradict the free forgiveness Jesus preached, and it doesn’t complete some transaction that forgiveness was waiting on. It is that same forgiveness at maximum intensity, under maximum pressure, doing in public and in blood what it had been doing all along in Galilee.

Jesus taught forgiveness. Then we showed him our worst, and he showed us what forgiveness costs.

Some Bible stories are hard because they’re obscure. This one is hard because it’s clear enough. A man makes a vow before battle. He wins. His daughter comes out to greet him. And whatever interpretive escape routes readers try to build afterward, the central truth remains: a girl’s life is consumed by her father’s religion.

Judges 11 is about what happens when piety becomes a weapon, when devotion turns transactional, and when the vulnerable are asked to bear the cost of someone else’s spiritual theater.

The story, told straight

Jephthah is no one’s idea of a clean hero. He is the son of a prostitute, rejected by his brothers, driven from home, and forced to survive on the margins. Over time, he becomes what wounded men often become when the world teaches them that usefulness is the only path to belonging: dangerous, capable, and valuable in a crisis.

So when the Ammonites threaten Israel, the elders come looking for him. They need a fighter someone expendable enough to use and strong enough to win. Jephthah knows how this works. He has been discarded before. So he makes them swear that if he fights for them, he will lead them; he will not be used and then cast aside again. That matters because it tells you the kind of man he is. He understands negotiation, he understands power, and he understands how people dress self-interest in noble language. He even tries diplomacy first, arguing history, territory, and memory before a single sword is drawn. But diplomacy fails, and war becomes unavoidable.

Then Jephthah makes the move that turns the whole story dark. He vows to God that if he is given victory, he will offer up whatever comes out of the doors of his house to meet him when he returns. No prophet tells him to do this. No divine voice requests it. No law demands it. The vow rises out of Jephthah himself out of fear, ambition, desperation, and a view of God that imagines divine favor can be secured by costly offerings.

He wins. And when he returns home, his daughter comes out first, dancing. That detail matters. She is joy walking through the doorway, a daughter celebrating her father’s return, with no idea she has just become the terms of his bargain. And the text adds the knife twist: she is his only child.

Jephthah tears his clothes. But even here, the story is ruthless in what it reveals. His grief is real, but it is also self-centered. He does not say, “What have I done to her?” He says, in effect, “You have brought me very low.” That is often how destructive religion talks, it laments the pain it causes, but still imagines itself as the injured party.

Then the daughter speaks, and what she says is devastating: “My father, you have opened your mouth to the Lord; do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth.” She has absorbed the system’s logic. A man’s vow matters more than a girl’s future. A promise made upward is allowed to crush a life downward.

She asks only for two months to go into the hills with her companions and grieve. The text says she grieves her virginity, which is why some readers argue that Jephthah did not literally sacrifice her but consigned her instead to perpetual virginity or temple-like dedication. Others argue the story means exactly what it sounds like: he killed her as the fulfillment of the vow. There is a debate here, but there is no clean escape. At the end of the two months, the text says Jephthah “did with her according to his vow.” And then Israel’s daughters remember her, year after year. That ending matters. The story hands Jephthah no praise. What survives him is a memorial of female grief.

Did Jephthah actually kill her?

There are two main readings. One says Jephthah literally sacrificed his daughter. The language of the vow, the weight of the scene, and the memorial that follows all push in that direction and this was the near-unanimous reading for the first thousand years or more, held by Josephus, the rabbis of the Talmud, and church fathers from Origen to Augustine. The other says he devoted her to lifelong virginity, cutting her off from marriage, motherhood, and the future she might have had. This reading has a real pedigree too, though a later one: the medieval Jewish commentator David Kimhi argued for it, and many Jewish and Christian interpreters followed him.

The debate is real, but for the moral reading, the difference does not rescue Jephthah. Either way, his daughter becomes the price of his piety. If he killed her, the horror is obvious. If he condemned her to a life she did not choose to preserve his vow, the horror is still there less bloody, maybe, but no less coercive. The vulnerable person still pays, and the father’s religious self-image still wins.

What’s the moral wound here?

The deeper wound is this: Jephthah appears to believe the vow must stand even when it destroys his child. A man’s sense of devotion becomes more sacred than the life before him. His word, his reputation, and his spiritual seriousness become untouchable, and his daughter is the one swallowed by them.

This pattern shows up anywhere religion teaches people to honor promises over persons, appearances over truth, authority over compassion. It sounds like “God told me” and “we have to honor the commitment,” like “obedience is costly” and “this is what faith requires.” And too often, what those phrases mean in practice is that someone weaker will suffer so someone stronger can keep feeling righteous.

An open/process reading: God is not a contract partner

An open/process lens matters here because, without it, the story can turn God into something monstrous. If God is the being who rewards vows like this, or silently requires their fulfillment, then God starts to look like a tribal deity who trades victory for blood.

Open and relational theology sees a different God entirely one who does not rule by coercion, does not manipulate history like a puppeteer, and does not demand harm in exchange for help. God works persuasively, calling, luring, warning, opening possibilities for life, truth, restraint, repentance, and repair. That reframes the whole story: the vow reveals Jephthah’s theology, not God’s character.

Jephthah assumes God can be bargained with. He assumes costly devotion will secure victory. He assumes that once a vow has been spoken, the logic of religion must run its course, even if a daughter stands in the doorway. Open/process thought rejects all of that. God did not author the vow, does not benefit from the daughter’s loss, and is not honored by her destruction.

So where is God in the story? God is in every faithful possibility Jephthah resists: in the wisdom that says do not make vows that gamble with other people’s lives, in the moral clarity that says a promise that requires evil must be broken, in the courage to repent publicly and say I spoke wrongly, in the community’s responsibility to intervene rather than sanctify a father’s pride, and in the daughter’s humanity the life before him that should have shattered the spell of the vow.

This is one of the central insights of open and relational theology: even in tragedy, God is present as the road not taken. Judges 11 is a story of resisted grace. The lure toward life is there, but Jephthah will not follow it, because he is more committed to being seen as devout than to becoming truly good.

The daughter is the center of the story

It is easy to let Jephthah become the emotional center: the tragic father, the rash leader, the damaged man undone by his own words. But the moral center is his daughter. She has the least power in the story. She did not make the vow. She did not choose the war. Yet her future is the one offered up to preserve a man’s relationship to God, community, and self.

The story is sharper when we refuse to sentimentalize Jephthah and stay with her. A girl comes out dancing. A father sees her and thinks first of his vow. A religious system gives him enough language to imagine this might still be faithfulness. That is not devotion. That is devastation wearing sacred clothes.

What this means now

Judges 11 still lives wherever people confuse costly religion with holy religion: in families where children are sacrificed to preserve appearances, in churches where leaders protect their reputations at the expense of the vulnerable, in the pressure to keep promises that should never have been made, in every theology that treats suffering as proof of obedience rather than asking who is being harmed and who benefits.

The spiritual question this story presses on us is more uncomfortable than “Would I ever make a vow like Jephthah?” Where am I tempted to keep my image intact by letting someone else absorb the cost? Where do I call something “faithfulness” that is really fear, ego, or control? Where have I made my reputation more sacred than another person’s well-being?

The next faithful step in an open/process frame is painfully plain: tell the truth, break the vow that causes harm, choose the person over the performance, and repent before devotion turns cruel. God wants your honesty, not your bargain. And no act of worship that devours the innocent is worthy of the name.

Closing prayer

God, who does not need blood to be good,

Save us from every form of religion that harms people and calls it holy.

Free us from bargaining prayer, from the fear that tries to control outcomes, from the piety that protects reputation at someone else’s expense.

When we are tempted to keep a promise that crushes a life, give us the courage to repent.

When we are tempted to call harm obedience, give us the honesty to name it.

When we are tempted to preserve image over mercy, meet us with a love that undoes us.

Be near to those who were offered up to keep peace in the family, to keep leaders respected, to keep churches quiet, to keep systems running.

Give back what can be given back: voice, dignity, safety, and joy.

And keep calling us patiently, persistently, until we become the kind of people who choose mercy over image, truth over performance, and love over fear.

Amen.

My last two posts have been about my father’s death, what happened to me in that room, and the question I have not been able to put down since: was God outside watching it unfold, or was he in the room with me? That question was still with me as I sat in a room, two weeks ago, full of open and relational theologians and thinkers, half-listening to my own notes, when I realized I had stopped taking notes and started rearranging something in myself instead. That is what a few days with this crowd will do. You come in with a settled framework and leave with the same framework, but wider. The walls have moved out a little, and you are still finding the new edges days later.

Two moments from that week are still working on me. Neither one landed like an argument. Both landed like a door opening.

The first came from Jonathan Foster, talking about writing, of all things, and almost as an aside. He said he sometimes wonders what God’s first words to him would be, if they ever had the kind of conversation people imagine having with God at the end of things. The thing Foster imagined God saying was something like surprise. “Oh, I didn’t see it going that way.”

No condemnation in it. Just honest astonishment.

I have been turning that over in my mind for days. It would be easy to hear a line like that and assume it means God dropped the ball somewhere, that the surprise is a confession of a plan gone wrong. But that reading only works if there was a script to begin with. Take the script away, and God’s surprise becomes something else entirely: evidence of presence, proof God was actually there for something genuinely open, alongside a universe full of other beings also choosing their way through in real time.

You can only be surprised by a story you are really inside of.

A God reading ahead in the book could never be caught off guard by a page already turned. Foster’s God can be, and that’s a God who showed up.

The second moment came from Nichole Torbitzky, in a talk on atonement that ended up somewhere I did not expect. She was working through Thomas Jay Oord’s language about how God relates to creation, and she made a distinction I have not been able to shake. Ordinarily, she said, God knows us completely: every choice, every hidden thing, everything behind the doors we keep closed. God knows it in the third person. Total knowledge, but from outside.

And then, she said, something happens in Jesus that does not happen anywhere else. Because Jesus’ human will stayed in perfect accord with God’s, God gets to know humanness in the first person the actual felt experience of it, from the inside. She calls this literal at-one-ment. God and a human experience becoming, for once, the same experience. And she went a step further. That firsthand experience does not stay in the past. It becomes part of what God carries into every moment after, part of the grace God offers back to the rest of us going forward. What happened in Jesus stays with God the way a lived memory stays with anyone: felt, not just known. Now she said this is something she is working out, and is not sure she will land here, this is a work in progress.

I think these two ideas are circling the same thing from different directions. Foster’s line only makes sense if God is inside the story with us, not narrating it from a script already read. Torbitzky’s distinction is about that same movement: from knowing about, to being with, to becoming acquainted with something firsthand. Third person to first person. Window to room.

A God who knows everything about your life the way a biographer knows everything about a subject is a different thing entirely from a God who has lived a life and can be surprised, moved, and changed by living alongside yours.

Neither of these ideas resolves cleanly, and I do not think they are supposed to. Foster’s remark does not tell you how much of the future is settled and how much is still being written. It just tells you where God is standing while it gets written. Torbitzky’s point only deepens the strangeness of the incarnation rather than settling it. The incarnation becomes God entering a kind of knowing that can only come from participation.

I am not interested in tidying either of those up. I have spent enough of my life wanting theology to resolve into something manageable, and I am past pretending that is honesty. What I keep coming back to instead is the plain relief of it.

If God can be surprised, and if God knows humanness firsthand because God has actually been human, then whatever is happening in my life right now especially the parts still open, the parts I cannot see the end of is something God is living through with me. In the room, finding it out alongside me, the same way I am.

That is not a smaller God than the one I grew up with.

It is a nearer one.

I ended the last of these by saying I didn’t know whether the five days had been sent, but I believed they were accompanied. I’ve sat with that word for a while now. It’s the one I’d keep. But it carries a question I didn’t hear when I wrote it.

Accompanied by what kind of presence?

The machines in a hospital room are honest in a way that the people aren’t. They don’t soften anything. The numbers go where they go, and you learn to read them faster than you want to, until you’re watching a screen instead of a face.

I prayed the way you pray at a bedside, which is not the way you pray anywhere else. Not for outcomes by the second day I’d stopped asking for outcomes. I asked for presence. I asked that someone be in the room who was not a machine and not as helpless as I was.

I know now where I’ve landed on most of it. I’ve spent years working out what I believe about how God holds a room like that, and I’m not relitigating it here. But going back into those five days did something I didn’t expect. It made me pick up three words I thought I’d already settled immutable, impassible, ineffable and turn them over again, because the room asked something of each of them that my textbooks never had to answer.

Everything in that room was in motion. The numbers on the screen, the plan we’d been given, the timeline that said months and then said days, all of it moving faster than we could keep up with. By the second morning the future we’d been handed was already gone. You sit in a room like that and you are not looking for something frozen. You’re looking for something that holds.

That’s what the word “immutable” is meant to name. God does not change. In the form I was handed, it meant something close to motionless a being so complete he stands outside time entirely, untouched by before and after. I used to find that cold. I don’t anymore, because I’ve come to think the doctrine at its best was never pointing at a statue. It was protecting something that a bedside makes you desperate for.

The strong form of the claim isn’t metaphysical trivia. It’s this: God’s regard for you is not one of the things in the room that moves. His love doesn’t rise and fall with his moods or with your performance. You can’t bargain it down on a bad day or earn it up on a good one. It doesn’t wear thin by the fourth night without sleep the way ours does. Whatever was failing in that bed, the disposition of God toward the man in it was not failing alongside it. That is what people have meant, at their best, by saying God does not change. I have no interest in knocking it down. I needed it to be true.

What I’d relocate is only where the unchanging part lives out of the machinery of God’s being and into his character. The two texts everyone quotes for immutability are quieter than the doctrine they’re asked to carry. Malachi has God say, “I the Lord do not change,” and the sentence ends by stating what that constancy is for: “Therefore you are not consumed.” A promise that holds. James calls God the Father of lights, “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” a light that doesn’t flicker, a giver who doesn’t go cold on you. Those were pictures of someone you could count on. That reading isn’t something I had to invent; it’s what the words are already doing on the page.

So this is the word I get to keep, nearly whole. I move it from the center of God’s being to the steadiness of his character, and almost nothing I care about is lost in the move. The God who was in that room was reliable precisely because he was there constantly, the way you need someone constant at three in the morning, no matter how the night went.

I went in assuming the other two words would come along this easily. The first one did.

The second word is impassible, and it’s the one that broke the pattern.

Impassible means God cannot suffer cannot be acted on from outside, cannot be made to feel something by anything that happens down here. When I first heard it described I pictured the Stoic God, sealed off, watching the world burn with a level face. That picture is a caricature, and the people who hold the doctrine seriously would be the first to say so, so let me give it at its strength before I say where I had to leave it.

The real claim is better than the caricature and worth protecting. It runs like this: God’s compassion is not something the world extorts from him. He is not jerked around by us not battered into love on his good days and out of it on his bad ones, not made needy by his creatures. His care is something he gives freely from the fullness of who he is, not a wound the world opens in him against his will. Put that way, I want most of it. A God who can be emotionally manipulated, who is at the mercy of whatever’s happening to him, is just a bigger version of us, and a bigger version of us was never the presence I was asking for in that room.

So far this looks like immutability a strong claim with a good core, ready to be relocated and kept. But there’s a second half bolted onto the doctrine, and that’s where I had to stop. The classical version doesn’t only say God can’t be coerced into feeling. It says God can’t be moved at all that he is, in his own being, untouched by what we go through, that our suffering reaches him as information rather than as something he undergoes with us. And that I can’t keep.

Here’s the image I keep coming back to. The impassible God, in that second sense, watches the room through a window. He sees everything. He misses nothing. He is fully informed about the man in the bed and the people around it. But he is on the other side of the glass, and the glass is the point, it’s what keeps him steady, what keeps the grief in the room from ever becoming his. The God I’ve landed on is not at the window. He’s in the room. Close enough to be reached by what’s happening, moved by it, grieving it alongside the people who were grieving because he chose to stand where it could reach him. Choosing to be touched is the harder thing, and it’s love at its fullest stretch.

The cross is where this stops being an argument and starts being a claim about what God has already done. The classical view has careful, serious ways of handling Calvary that the suffering belongs to the human nature and not the divine, that God in himself remains untouched while the man Jesus dies. I’ve read the moves and I understand why they’re made; they’re made to protect exactly the bedrock I said I cared about. But the plain shape of the thing is that God answered human suffering by entering it, not by observing it from outside. Bonhoeffer, writing from a prison cell, put it about as sharply as it can be put: the God who has to be wheeled in from outside to fix things the rescue-machine God, lowered in when the situation gets bad enough is a God the world has rightly stopped needing. Only the suffering God can help. Whatever else the incarnation is, it is God declining to be impassible in the one case that mattered most, entering the very thing the doctrine says can’t reach him.

There’s an objection here I don’t want to walk past, because it’s the place this all seems to break. If God was in the room and not at the window, what do we do with the worst line in the gospels My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The picture a lot of us were handed runs straight through that cry: the Father turning his face away, the Son severed and abandoned, a rupture opening up inside God himself at the decisive moment. And if that’s what happened, then God did leave the room at the one bedside that mattered most; he stepped back.

But that line is the first verse of a psalm, and the people who first heard it knew the rest. Psalm 22 opens in abandonment and travels the whole way to vindication to a God who “has not despised the suffering of the afflicted one” and has not hidden his face from him. To pray the opening line is to set the whole arc in motion. The forsakenness is real; it is anguish voiced at full volume, and I don’t want to soften it into something tidy. But it is anguish voiced inside a relationship that never tore. The Son cries out to the Father from inside the dark. That is not the sound of God turning his back. It’s the sound of someone who is still, even there, speaking to his God.

Which is the whole point of where I’ve landed. The movement in God on the cross is not a fracture forced open by what’s happening, it’s presence at full stretch. The presence in the room is most fully there at the worst moment.

By the third day I had stopped trying to say anything true about it. Not to God, not to the people in the waiting room, not to myself. There’s a point where language gives out at a bedside, where every sentence you reach for is either too small or a lie, and you go quiet because quiet is the only honest thing left. I want to be careful here, because that silence is real, and the word ineffable is meant to name exactly that the place where God outruns what we can say.

The strong form of this one I hold onto without much argument. God is not a thing the size of our concepts. Augustine put it as plainly as anyone: if you have understood, then what you’ve understood is not God. Any picture small enough to fit in my head is, by that fact alone, too small. There’s a humility in that I never want to lose, least of all in a room like that one, where the people most sure they had God figured out were the ones I could least stand to be near.

So the keeping is easy. It was the use I’d watched the word get put to that I had to sort out.

The same word does a second job, and it’s in that second job where it goes wrong. Ineffable gets reached for at the exact moment a claim about God stops making moral sense. Someone says God ordained the cancer, or willed the child’s death, or consigns most of the human race to unending fire you flinch and the answer comes back: his ways are higher than ours, who are you to question, it’s a mystery. The word that began as humility before a God too good to grasp ends up as a lid clamped down over a God you’d otherwise have to call cruel. The mystery stops being the brightness you can’t look straight into. It becomes a dark you’re told not to look into at all.

Here’s the line I’d draw, and it isn’t mine it’s old, and it runs through the same tradition the word comes from. You only get to reach for the mystery after you’ve seen the face. The not-saying, the silence, is the silence that gathers around something you’ve actually seen: a known character, a face you’d recognize anywhere. The Christian claim is that the face is Christ. And once you’ve seen it, mystery can only deepen what’s there it can’t be used to contradict it. A God whose character you’ve watched in Jesus doesn’t get quietly swapped, behind the curtain of ineffability, for a God who does the opposite. The unknowing surrounds the known.

Gregory of Nyssa gave this its best shape sixteen centuries ago, and it’s the shape I’d hand anyone who’s been taught the word is a wall. He read the life of the soul with God as an endless straining forward, you arrive, and the arriving opens into more, and the further reach isn’t frustration but the whole joy of the thing. God is inexhaustible, so there is always more of him to move toward. That’s a horizon, not a barricade. The ineffable is the part of God you haven’t reached yet because there is no end to reaching him not a part he’s hiding because you wouldn’t approve of what’s back there.

That’s the version I carried back into the room. A God I’d simply run out of words for, because I had run for a few days right up to the edge of what a person can hold, and found that the edge kept going.

I asked, back at the start of this, what kind of presence the word accompanied was naming. I think I can answer now.

The three words came apart in my hands in three different ways, and I want to hold onto that, because the coming-apart is the answer. One I kept nearly whole. One I had to cut in half. One I had to turn the other way around. But when I set them down side by side they stop looking like three doctrines and start looking like one thing seen from three angles. They add up to one love: constant, near enough to be moved without toppling, deep enough that it never runs out and never goes dark.

So here is what I mean now when I say the five days were accompanied. The presence in that room held steady as the numbers fell. It stayed close enough to be reached by what was in the bed, and it grieved what I grieved without ever becoming as lost as I was. And the part of it I had no words for wasn’t a shut door it was the edge of something with no end to it, the same direction the whole night had been pointing.

I still don’t know if the five days were sent. I haven’t moved on that, and I won’t pretend the words I’ve turned over here closed the question. Sent is a door I’m standing in front of, not through. But accompanied that one I can lean my full weight on now in a way I couldn’t when I first set it down, because I finally know what kind of presence I was claiming. Not a colder, higher version of the God I needed. The one who was actually in the room.

I don’t remember the last hour with any precision. I remember that the asking had stopped, and that the quiet didn’t feel empty. I’d run out of words days before. What I hadn’t run out of was company.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer at 65. Over the next four years he went through two rounds of chemo and radiation that I can only describe as brutal, the kind of treatment where you start to wonder whether the cure and the disease have switched jerseys. He fought through both.

After the second round, he told my mom, “If this comes back again, I’m not doing it.” No more chemo. No more radiation. He’d had enough.

It wasn’t despair. It was a man who had counted the cost twice and decided what his remaining time was for. He’d made his choice before the doctors made theirs.

Then, at 69, they told us he had months to live.

We started planning around months. Conversations we’d have. Things we’d say. There’s a strange mercy in a timeline like that; it’s terrible news, but it’s terrible news with room in it.

He went into a coma two days later.

He died three days after that.

The months we were promised turned out to be five days, and only two of them were really his. I’ve spent a long time since then sitting with a question that sounds academic until it happens to your family: What exactly was God doing during those four years?

Not whether God exists. Not whether God is good. Those weren’t my questions, even at the worst of it. My question was more specific: when the oncologist said “months” and the coma said “two days,” which one was God’s plan? When my dad said no more, was that surrender written into a script, or was it the freest thing he ever did? When the second round of chemo wrecked his body and bought him time at a price he’d already decided wasn’t worth paying again, was that the path God ordained, the path God foresaw, the path God selected, or a path God grieved alongside us?

Those four verbs are not the same verb. They come from four different pictures of what it means to say God is in control, and I’ve believed three of them at different points in my life. Each one tells a different story about my dad’s last four years. Each one would have had me praying differently in that hospital room.

This is what I want to walk through. Not to win an argument, but because I think the version of sovereignty you carry shapes what suffering does to your faith, and most of us inherited ours without ever seeing the other options laid out side by side.

Four old answers

None of these views is new, and none of them is a caricature invented by its enemies. Each one has been held by serious, suffering people for centuries, and each one was built to protect something true.

The Calvinist says God is sovereign because he ordains all things. Human choices are real, but they unfold inside a decree God settled before the foundation of the world. Nothing happens outside it. Not a sparrow falls, not a hair, not a tumor.

The Arminian says God is sovereign because he foreknows every free choice and wisely works through them without coercing them. God sees the whole story in advance and weaves his purposes through choices that are genuinely ours.

The Molinist, a view going back to the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina, holds that God knows what every free creature would choose in every possible circumstance, and that, out of all possible worlds, God created this one, where those free choices accomplish his purposes.

And the view I’ve come to hold, open and relational theology, says God is sovereign the way love is sovereign: unrelenting, but not controlling. God moves through time with us, works in every moment toward good, and does not, cannot, given the kind of love God is, unilaterally override the freedom and the natural processes of the world God made.

Here is what each one says about my dad.

The ordained cancer

I want to start with the Calvinist answer and give it at full strength, because I have known Calvinists at deathbeds, and some of them are the most peaceful sufferers I have ever met.

The Heidelberg Catechism opens by asking what your only comfort is, in life and in death, and the answer is that you belong, body and soul, to a faithful Savior, and that nothing can reach you except through your Father’s hand. Psalm 139 says all my dad’s days were written in God’s book before one of them came to be. On this view, the diagnosis at 65 was not an ambush. The four years were not chaos. The five days were not a clerical error in heaven. Every one of them was numbered, and the number was written by a Father.

I felt the pull of this at the funeral. There is real rest in believing that nothing about those four years escaped God’s intention, that the universe did not slip its leash, that my dad did not fall through a crack in providence. When a Calvinist friend tells me their suffering was ordained, they are not describing a cold mechanism. They are describing a hand they trust, and the suffering arriving through that hand rather than around it is precisely what comforts them. I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t flatten them into people who worship a tyrant. They don’t.

But the comfort and the cost come from the same place. The decree that numbered the five days also authored the four years. The hand that mercifully shortened the end also appointed the aggressive cancer, the two rounds of treatment that failed, and the prognosis of months that was wrong by a factor of twenty. If God ordained the swift death, God ordained the slow destruction that preceded it, same decree, same hand, same intention. And my dad’s no more; the most sovereign sentence I ever heard him speak was on this view itself, written into the script. Real, the Calvinist insists, and I believe they mean it. But real inside a story whose every line was settled before he was born.

I could rest in the first half of that. I could not rest in the second. That is not a refutation, Calvinists far godlier than me rest in both, but it is an honest report of what the frame did to my prayers. I found I could not ask God to spare my dad while believing the destruction of his body was, in the deepest sense, God’s idea.

The foreseen cancer

The Arminian answer fixes that. God did not ordain the cancer. God foreknew it. The disease came from a broken creation, the treatment decisions came from doctors doing their best, and my dad’s no more came from my dad, freely, fully his. God saw all of it in advance and worked within it, drawing good where good could be drawn, without ever forcing a hand.

This is the view most evangelicals I grew up around actually held, whatever their churches taught officially, and it protects something the Calvinist picture strains. When my dad chose, he chose. God honored it. There is dignity in that, and the dignity is not an illusion.

But foreknowledge has teeth. On this view, God watched the whole arc approaching, the diagnosis, the brutal treatments, the false months, the coma at day two, saw every frame of it from eternity, possessed the power to intervene, and worked through it rather than against it. Sitting in that hospital room, I found the question would not stay quiet: what did “working through it” mean, concretely, in the infusion suite? If God foresaw the coma while we were planning conversations we’d never get to have, the months we were promised feel less like a medical error and more like something God let us believe. The Arminian God is not the author of my dad’s suffering, and that matters. But he is the spectator with perfect advance knowledge and sufficient power, and at the bedside, that can feel like its own kind of distance.

The selected cancer

Molinism is the most philosophically elegant of the three, and people I respect hold it precisely because it seems to keep everything: full human freedom and full divine purpose. God knows what every free creature would do in every possible situation. Out of the infinite library of possible worlds, God chose to actualize this one, knowing my dad would choose no more, knowing the cancer would return aggressively, knowing the months would be five days, because this world, with these free choices, best accomplishes God’s purposes.

Here is what that means said plainly, at a graveside: out of all the worlds God could have made, God surveyed them and selected the one containing my dad’s exact four years. Not ordained line by line, the Molinist is careful to say. Chosen as a package. The cancer, the coma, the two days of consciousness we got instead of months, all of it part of the optimal configuration.

In a seminar room, that sentence holds together. In the hospital room, I could not figure out how to pray inside it. “Optimal” is a word that has to be said out loud next to a dying man to be felt. I do not doubt the sincerity of Molinists, and I know the view was built to defend both God’s goodness and my dad’s freedom at once. But I found it gave me a God who is one step removed from the Calvinists, not the author of the script, but the editor who read every script and greenlit this one.

The grieved cancer

The view I hold now says something the other three cannot say: God did not will my dad’s cancer. Not directly, not by decree, not by selection. The cancer was biology in a free and unfinished creation, cells doing what cells sometimes do. God did not send it, did not script the false prognosis, and could not, by the nature of the love God is, reach in and dissolve the tumor by fiat. What God did, on this view, was what God always does: remain present in every moment, work in every cell and every choice toward the most good possible, and grieve what love could not prevent.

On this view, my dad’s no more was fully his, and God received it. Not as a plot point. As the free word of a man God loved, honored without override. And in those four years, God was not behind the suffering or above it but inside it, in the room for every infusion, closer to my dad in the coma than any of us could get.

I need to be honest about what this view costs, because I have paid it. The open and relational God could not promise us the healing we prayed for. There is no guarantee beneath this picture, no decree ensuring it all works out, no Romans 8:28 in its refrigerator-magnet form. When I gave up the controlling God, I gave up the comfort of the controlling God, and that comfort is not nothing. My Calvinist friends have a sentence I no longer get to say. I traded the guarantee for the presence, and there are nights the trade still aches.

But I could pray inside this picture. That, in the end, was the test I didn’t know I was running.

The mercy

Now I have to complicate my own story, because everything I’ve written so far treats the five days as the wound. The gap between the months we were promised and the days we got. The two days of him, then three days of watching.

Here is the other thing that is true. When the final diagnosis came, the cancer was aggressive and his body was already being torn apart by it. The months the doctors promised would have been months of that, months of a man who had already said no more being destroyed by inches, awake for all of it. I have sat with this for years now, and I cannot escape the conclusion: the five days were merciful. He was spared the long version.

I was angry about the five days. I was also grateful for them. It took me years to realize those were the same fact.

And the moment you see the mercy, every frame has to answer again, because every frame wants to claim it, and each one pays a different price at the register.

The Calvinist claims it cleanly. God, in kindness, numbered the days short. It is a beautiful sentence and I understand why people build their grief around it. But the decree is one decree. The hand that shortened the suffering is the hand that appointed it, and you cannot thank the decree for the mercy without crediting it for the wound. The Calvinist accepts this and calls the whole thing trust. I respect that more than I can say. I could not do it.

The Arminian and the Molinist have a harder problem, and it is the mirror image of their advantage. If God foresaw or selected a swift, merciful ending, if the timing of that coma was in any sense God’s kindness, then merciful timing was within God’s reach all along. The mercy at the end quietly indicts the four years in the middle. A God who could arrange the gentle exit could presumably have arranged a gentler road.

And my own view pays here too. I will not pretend otherwise. If God does not unilaterally control outcomes, I do not get to say, God shortened his suffering. Maybe the aggressive cancer was just aggressive, biology again, the same indifferent process that caused the wound, now causing the mercy. The open and relational tradition has real resources here: a God working at every level of creation, in every cell, luring all things at every moment toward the least suffering and the most good possible. I believe something like that was happening in my dad’s body. But I hold it with open hands, because my framework will not let me close them. The Calvinist comes to see the five days as a gift. I get to receive them as one without proof. Some days that feels like poverty. Most days it feels like faith.

What I’m left with

I did not choose my view of sovereignty because it answered my dad’s death. I chose it before, mostly, by following arguments I couldn’t unfollow, and then his death became the place where every view I’d ever held got tested against something that mattered.

What I found is that none of the four frames escapes the bill. Each one buys its comfort with a cost, and the costs are different in kind: the Calvinist pays in authorship, the Arminian in distance, the Molinist in selection, and I pay in certainty. ( I wrote about this: https://substack.com/@dangross/p-195523344) Anyone who tells you their view of providence is all comfort and no cost has not yet taken it to a deathbed.

So I won’t tell you my answer is the right one. I’ll tell you it’s the one whose cost I could live with. I gave up the God who guaranteed the outcome and kept the God who never left the room, who was there for the diagnosis, there for both rounds, there when my dad said no more, there in the coma when the rest of us could only hold his hand from the outside. I don’t know that the five days were sent. I believe they were accompanied.

And four years of watching my dad taught me this much: the version of “God is in control” you carry into the hospital room will shape what the hospital room does to your faith. It’s worth knowing which one you’re carrying, and worth knowing, before you need to, what it’s going to cost you.

When Cathi and I sit with a couple working through something they have carried for years, or with someone trying to get traction against an addictive behavior that has had them pinned, there are two kinds of sessions. There are sessions where everyone is mostly moving words around. And then there are sessions where something shifts.

You can see it in their faces. You can feel it in their presence. Something that was locked starts to move.

We used to call it a breakthrough. We still do. But over time, we have come to understand that something more than emotion, insight, resolve, or a good conversation is taking place.

Something physical is happening.

New neural pathways are being formed. The architecture of a mind is beginning to restructure itself. Neuroscience gives us language for this. And it may also help us see, with fresh precision, what the Apostle Paul was describing when he wrote:

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Romans 12:2

Most of us read that as spiritual instruction with behavioral implications. Change how you think, and your life will follow. Good advice. Solid exhortation.

But Paul is reaching for something stranger than self-improvement. The word he uses for transformation is metamorphoō, the same word used of the Transfiguration. And the renewal he names, anakainōsis, is not a single moment of improvement but an ongoing making-new, a restructuring, a being renewed again and again. Which sounds remarkably close to what we now call neuroplasticity.

The Trap

Before going further, we need to name the trap. If we say, “Neuroplasticity is what Paul meant by renewing the mind,” we may sound profound while quietly removing God from the picture. After all, neuroplasticity happens in therapy offices. It happens in AA meetings. It happens in meditation retreats with no theological commitment at all. The brain restructures itself in response to sustained attention and repeated practice, regardless of what a person believes.

So is the Holy Spirit just a first-century way of describing good mental habits? Is “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” simply ancient wisdom that neuroscience has now explained?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against this kind of move from a Nazi prison cell. He criticized the tendency to locate God in whatever science has not yet explained. Every time knowledge advances, God retreats a little further. Bonhoeffer called that intellectually dishonest. Worse, he saw it as unfaithful.

The God of Scripture is not hiding in what we do not understand. God is Lord of what we do understand.

So we need to be honest. If we are placing God in the gap between habit change and the mystery of consciousness, we are doing exactly what Bonhoeffer warned against. But I do not think that is what is happening here.

To see why, we need to go back behind Paul to a framework most of us inherited one that shapes how we read him before we even start.

Reading Paul Through a Divided Lens

Many of us have inherited a framework that divides human beings into layers. The body is material, temporary, and suspect. The soul is higher, rational, and immaterial. The spirit is the supernatural layer where God operates. In this model, transformation starts at the top and works its way down. God touches your spirit; your spirit shapes your soul; and your soul shapes your behavior last. There is real care in this picture: it takes seriously that God is spirit, and that the deepest contact between God and a person runs deeper than behavior.

That framework owes more to Greek philosophical categories than to the Hebrew imagination of Scripture. Hebrew scholars have made this point for a long time.

The Hebrew writers thought in terms of whole persons. Ruach, often translated “spirit,” can mean wind, breath, mind, disposition, will, counsel, and intellect. It is the animating and orienting life of a person. Lev, often translated “heart,” is not merely the seat of emotion. It is the center of thought, will, perception, and decision. When Proverbs says, “Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it,” that is a claim about the whole interior life. Nephesh, often translated “soul,” does not mean an immaterial essence trapped inside a body. In Genesis 2, when God breathes into the dust and the human becomes a nephesh chayah, a living soul, a person comes into being. Whole. Integrated. Embodied.

These are overlapping ways of describing one living person from the inside.

If we read Paul closer to his Jewish world than to later body-soul-spirit hierarchies, Romans 12 opens up differently. Paul is describing the Spirit’s work in the whole oriented self: thinking, willing, perceiving, desiring, remembering, responding, and embodied habit.

All of it.

Including the parts neuroscience can now see.

Mechanism, Direction, and Relationship

This is where Bonhoeffer helps us. Neuroplasticity describes a mechanism of transformation. New pathways form. Old patterns weaken. The mind restructures itself in response to sustained attention and repeated practice. This is real. It is measurable. It does not require theological commitment to occur.

But mechanism is not the whole story.

There is also direction. A mind can be reshaped by trauma, addiction, ideology, fear, shame, beauty, love, truth, and God. Plasticity is morally neutral. Direction is not. Paul does not merely say, “Renew your mind.” He says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” so that you may discern what is good, acceptable, and mature. The renewal has an orientation. It is moving toward wholeness, love, and the life of God.

There is also agency in relationship. Neuroplasticity is a capacity. What activates it, sustains it, and directs it toward healing is a relational question. In the mentoring room, what we have watched is rarely someone successfully applying a technique. More often, we are watching someone become available. They turn toward truth. They turn toward love. They turn toward the pain they have spent years avoiding. And in that turning, they begin to discover that Someone was already turned toward them.

Bonhoeffer said God lives in the midst of life, not at the edges of what we understand. A brain restructuring itself in response to sustained attention toward love, truth, and God gives us an outside view of Spirit-led transformation. Science does not explain God away. It helps us see what grace looks like as it takes form in us.

What We Watch Happen

When that moment comes in the mentoring room, the one you can see in someone’s face and feel in their presence, something real is happening on every level at once.

Neurologically, new pathways are beginning to form. Patterns that have run on autopilot for years are being interrupted. The brain, which is not the static thing we once thought, is doing what it was made to do: restructure itself in response to new orientation.

Psychologically, something that was fused begins to come loose. A story someone has told about themselves starts losing its grip: this is just who I am, this is how I am wired, I cannot change.

Theologically, the Spirit is doing what the Spirit has always done: moving through chaos, bringing form out of formlessness, breathing life into what was stuck.

These are not three separate things happening in three separate layers. They are a single movement viewed from three angles.

But we should tell the whole truth about that moment. It is not always beautiful when it arrives. Sometimes, often, the movement toward a new pathway feels like dying.

I sat with a young man not long ago who was working through a pattern that was quietly destroying his relationship. Whenever a hard conversation came up, or anything felt like conflict with his partner, he would mentally disappear. He would shut down. He would leave the room in every way but physically.

As we kept talking, I did not try to tell him what was happening. I asked him to slow down and describe what conflict felt like in his body. Then I asked him about the fights he remembered between his parents, and what he would do when they started.

He got quiet.

Then he told me that when the yelling began, he would hide under his bed and wait for it to be over.

I asked him gently, “Does that sound familiar?”

And then the light went on.

He could see it. The man who disappeared during the conflict had once been the boy under the bed. His shutting down was not random. It was an old survival pathway, built into a child’s nervous system when hiding was the only safe option.

His parents’ arguments had been loud. Sometimes violent. He had learned, young and with no other options, that the safest move was to run, hide, and wait for it to pass.

He was not a conflict-avoider.

He was a survivor.

His brain had built a pathway that kept him safe in a world that was not safe. Then it kept running that pathway, faithfully, long after the world had changed. Learning to stay present, to speak, to trust that conflict did not have to mean violence, felt to him like stepping into the very thing he had spent his whole life escaping.

It felt like dying.

And in a real sense, it was. The self organized around hiding had to go. Something had to end before something new could begin.

The mind that has run a pattern for twenty years does not release it quietly. The old pathway is familiar. It is grooved deep. And however much damage it has caused, however much the person wants to be free of it, the brain resists when the moment comes to move differently. And it resists hard.”

We have watched people describe it as panic, disorientation, or a terrifying sense that if they let this go, there will be nothing left. The behavior they are trying to leave, the addiction, the relational pattern, the way of seeing themselves, has become load-bearing. Take it away, and the whole structure feels like it might collapse.

That is not weakness. It is neurology.

The brain often interprets the unfamiliar as a threat. A new pathway can feel like a kind of death, because the self organized around the old pathway is being asked to surrender. But that experience of death is part of transformation.

The pattern is everywhere once you start seeing it. The seed becomes a plant by breaking open. What it was has to give way for what it will become. Winter belongs to the cycle that makes spring possible. The forest that burns releases what the canopy had been holding for decades. Death and renewal are partners in the natural world.

They are partners in us too.

The relationships that transformed us most deeply usually required us to die to something first: a version of ourselves we were protecting, a story we had told for so long we stopped noticing it. The vocations that gave us the most meaning often arrived on the other side of something ending. The faith that held us in the hardest moments was rarely the faith we walked in with. It was the faith that survived the death of an earlier, smaller faith.

Scripture is woven with this pattern.

The Exodus gives it a narrative form: Egypt, wilderness, promised land. You do not get to freedom without leaving the familiar misery of captivity. And for more than a few Israelites, leaving Egypt felt like death. Slavery had become load-bearing. The grumbling in the desert was not merely ingratitude. It was the cry of a people whose bodies, memories, habits, and expectations had been organized around captivity. Freedom was unfamiliar, so freedom felt like a threat.

The prophets know this pattern too. Ezekiel says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you,” but first comes exile, the valley of dry bones, and the death of the old identity that had held everything together.

The New Testament gives the pattern its clearest name: you must lose your life to find it. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone. Baptism is burial and resurrection. Paul says in Romans 6 that we were buried with Christ through baptism into death, so that we might walk in newness of life.

That word “newness,” kainotēs, belongs to the same family as anakainōsis, the renewing of the mind. Resurrection life and the renewed mind are part of the same movement, seen at different scales.

Which means what happens in the mentoring room, the fear, the resistance, the feeling of annihilation when someone begins to move toward a new pathway, belongs to the spiritual process itself.

The seed breaks open.

The forest burns.

The exile ends.

The tomb empties.

And in a room somewhere, a person’s face changes. You can feel it in their presence. A pathway that ran toward death has begun, slowly, painfully, really, to be replaced by one that runs toward life.

What you are experiencing in those moments, and what the people across from you are experiencing, is the Spirit’s renewing work taking embodied form.

Grace is meeting memory.

Love is meeting fear.

The ruach of God is meeting the ruach of a person in the place where thought, will, desire, and habit are woven together.

The pathways being built are real, and so is the Builder. The fact that we can now see something of the mechanism does not diminish the miracle.

It deepens it. When God said, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you,” He was not speaking loosely.

He was describing something that goes all the way down.

We Inherited a God Shaped by Norman Feudalism

We inherited a God shaped by Norman feudalism and called it biblical theology. The Eastern church never made that trade. Their God didn’t need his honor satisfied; he needed his children found.

That’s not a progressive revision of Christianity. It’s a historical observation. And it matters enormously, because the God you believe in shapes everything: how you read mercy, how you understand the cross, and whether the Gospel sounds like a courtroom verdict or a father running down a road.

Anselm’s God

In 1098, Anselm of Canterbury wrote Cur Deus Homo, “Why the God-Man.” It’s a brilliant piece of medieval theology. It’s also a document soaked in feudal social logic that Anselm himself didn’t recognize as cultural. He thought he was doing what was necessary. He was actually doing something more local than that.

In the feudal world Anselm inhabited, the gravity of an offense was determined entirely by the status of the one offended. Insult a peasant, minor matter. Insult a lord, serious business. Offend the king, and you’ve created a debt that may be impossible to repay. Honor and hierarchy were the load-bearing walls of medieval society.

Anselm scaled this logic up to infinity and called it theology.

God is of infinite honor. Therefore, any sin, no matter how small it seems to us, is an offense of infinite weight. Infinite offense requires infinite satisfaction. No mere human can offer it. Only a God-Man can. Therefore the Incarnation. Therefore the cross.

It’s elegant. It holds together. And it handed Western Christianity a controlling metaphor it has never fully shaken: God as feudal lord whose honor requires restitution.

Calvin would later sharpen Anselm’s satisfaction language into explicitly legal categories, punishment due rather than honor owed. The courtroom replaced the feudal hall, but the underlying logic was the same: something must be paid, someone must bear it, and God cannot simply forgive without the debt being settled.

What most people sitting in Western churches on Sunday morning don’t realize is that this framework, which feels like bedrock biblical theology, was largely built on 11th century Norman social imagination. The early church didn’t think this way. The Eastern church didn’t think this way. And it wasn’t even the dominant way the Bible itself frames the problem.

The Fork Nobody Told You About

The split traces largely to Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries, and it hinges on a single phrase in Romans 5:12. In the Latin translation Augustine used, it reads: “in whom all sinned”, guilt inherited, legally imputed to every descendant of Adam. In Greek, which the Eastern Fathers read in their own language, it reads: “because all sinned,” “mortality inherited,” and “from that mortal weakness, all follow the same broken path.”

That is a massive fork taken in late antiquity that most Western Christians were never told happened.

For Augustine, and later Anselm and Calvin, the Fall is primarily a legal event. A law was broken. Guilt was incurred. The debt must be paid. The controlling question becomes: how does a holy God satisfy the demands of justice while extending forgiveness?

For the Greek Fathers, Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and the entire Eastern tradition that followed, the Fall is primarily a relational and ontological event. Adam and Eve turned away from the source of life. What spread to all humanity was mortality, disorder, and a nature bent away from God. The primary problem is a wound, not a verdict.

Different diagnosis. Different cure. Different God.

Guilt requires pardon. Brokenness requires healing. Those aren’t just different solutions; they produce different Gods and different people.

The God Who Walks in the Garden

Go back to Genesis 3 and read it through both lenses.

Through the Western lens: a law has been broken, God’s holiness has been offended, judgment must be rendered, and the rest of the Bible is the long legal process of how that debt gets resolved.

Through the Eastern lens: something precious has been broken. The creatures made for communion with God are now hiding. And God, this is the detail the Eastern tradition never stops returning to, walks in the garden and calls out.

“Where are you?”

A father’s voice. The first word of mercy spoken into human history.

God knows exactly where they are. The question isn’t informational. It’s relational, the posture of a God who refuses to let the distance become permanent. Mercy before any legal framework has been introduced, before sacrifice, before temple, before law. Just a voice moving toward the hiding.

That movement, God toward what is lost, is what the Eastern church means by mercy. A love that cannot stop looking.

The God I Was Handed vs. The God I Already Knew

I need to be honest about something personal here, because I don’t think my experience is unique.

I grew up with secure attachment. My parents were safe to return to. Their love wasn’t contingent on my performance. When I failed, and I failed plenty, the path home wasn’t blocked by a requirement to clean myself up first. That was a gift I didn’t fully appreciate until I tried to map it onto the God I was taught in church.

I was told God loved me better than any parent ever could. But the functional God I was handed operated worse than my parents did. My parents didn’t have a wrath mode I needed to assess before approaching. My parents didn’t require sufficient remorse as the price of admission back into relationship. My parents ran toward me.

So when something in me recoiled, when my gut said “this doesn’t feel like more love, it feels like less”, I was told that recoiling was the point. Fear God. Good. Your discomfort is appropriate. That’s reverence.

My nervous system, formed by a secure attachment, correctly identified an incoherence. The God I was being handed was structurally less safe than the parents I already had. And when I noticed that, I was told my noticing was sin.

Telling someone their correct instinct is rebellion, that’s suppression, not formation.

Anxious Attachment With God

Attachment theory has a name for the relational pattern that punitive theology produces. Punitive theology produces anxious attachment, the exhausting, vigilant pattern of someone who has learned that love is real but access to it is conditional, and the conditions keep shifting.

Anxious attachment looks like this: run away when you fail, clean yourself up, assess whether it’s safe to return, approach cautiously, and hope today is a good day and not a wrathful one.

Call it what it is: threat management.

And here’s what makes this theologically serious rather than just psychologically interesting: Jesus himself argued that human parental love is the floor, not the ceiling, of what God is like. “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven...”

Even broken human love moves toward children with good things. God is more than that.

The punitive framework functionally inverts the argument. It presents a God who is less reliably safe than a good human parent, whose love is real but whose wrath is always a live variable depending on your current moral standing. My parents, flawed as they were, turned out to be more accurate icons of divine love than the feudal God of Anselm’s imagination.

The indictment lands on the theology, not my parents.

The Fear of God Problem

There is a biblical fear of God. But the tradition has consistently conflated two very different things:

• Terror and dread, the fear of a punitive, unpredictable authority whose good side you’re hoping to catch

• Awe and reverence, the response of a creature encountering the overwhelming reality of a love too large to hold fully

The fruit of genuine fear of God in the Psalms is consistently movement toward him, refuge, shelter, trust, and intimacy. The Psalmist fears God and runs to him. Screams at him. Drags the full weight of grief, confusion, and rage directly into his presence without cleaning up first.

Psalm 22 opens with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, the cry of someone secure enough in the relationship to fall apart inside it.

That kind of prayer requires trust. Punitive theology produces silence and hiding instead, which is exactly where we find Adam and Eve, and exactly what the voice in the garden is trying to undo.

Where are you? God refuses to let hiding be the end of the story.

My Nervous System Hasn’t Caught Up

I’ve come to believe intellectually that God’s essence is love, that mercy and love are the very thing he’s made of, not exceptions to his character that require legal machinery to release. Love is the baseline. It’s what emanates from him.

But I’ll be honest: I still feel the old framework in my body. Something fails and the ancient signal fires, am I okay? Is the ledger current? Do I need to sort myself out before I can come back?

The intellectual update happened. The nervous system update is slower.

I don’t think that’s unique to me. I think it’s the legacy of being formed by a tradition that handed us a feudal God and called it the Gospel. We didn’t just inherit wrong beliefs. We inherited a wrong orientation, a posture of anxious management rather than loved-child trust. And that posture gets installed early, below the level of argument, in the body before the mind has a chance to evaluate it.

The Eastern tradition would say the goal was never just correct belief anyway. It’s theosis, transformation at the level of nature, not just a proposition. Participation in God, not just accurate information about him. Which means the gap between what I now believe and what my body still runs isn’t evidence of failure. It’s the actual terrain of transformation. The slow, non-linear work of a love patient enough to reach the layers that propositions can’t.

That’s a more honest account of sanctification than I was ever given. Re-formation at depth, from the inside out, by a love that never stopped walking toward the hiding.

Not a New God. A Recovered One.

None of this requires inventing a new theology. It requires recovering an old one, older than Anselm, older than Augustine, native to the first centuries of Christian thought, and still alive and breathing in the Eastern church today.

The father in the parable sees his son while he is still a great way off and runs, before a word of repentance is spoken, before the rehearsed speech is delivered, before anything has been made right. That’s the shape of God; the Eastern church never stopped preaching.

We didn’t lose this God. We were handed a narrower one and told it was the whole picture.

The Eastern icon of the resurrection doesn’t show an empty tomb with forensic implications. It shows Christ descending into the place of death, grabbing Adam and Eve by the wrists, and pulling them out.

A rescue completed. Children found.

Where are you?

He’s still asking. And the answer he’s looking for isn’t a cleaned-up version of you.

It’s just you.

I used to think not fitting was a problem to solve. I am starting to think it may have been one of the more honest gifts of my life.

I have never quite fit. Not in the churches I grew up in, not in the theological traditions I explored afterward, not in the industry I built a business in, not even in the music I love. Progressive rock has always been an acquired taste that most people are not willing to acquire. There is a pattern here that took me years to name. I do not chase the margins for the sake of being different. I follow questions. And questions, if you take them seriously, have a way of leading you somewhere less crowded.

For most of my life, I managed that discomfort by pushing the questions down, forcing them into the dark recesses of my mind where they would not cause trouble. I wanted to fit. I wanted to belong to the group I was in, to speak its language, to hold its conclusions with the same confidence everyone around me seemed to have. For stretches of time, I could almost pull it off. But the questions did not go away. They just waited.

About six years ago, something shifted. I stopped ignoring them. I stopped contorting my thinking to match whatever was popular in the tradition I was standing in, stopped performing a theological confidence I did not actually have. What I found on the other side of that was something closer to relief. I was finally being honest about who I am and how I actually think. That kind of authenticity is uncomfortable to step into, but it is more sustainable than the alternative.

The discomfort of never quite fitting might be one of the more honest places to do theology from. Unsettled ground tends to keep you paying attention.

Theology, when it gets professionalized, can develop a kind of institutional gravity. You have to publish. Publishing means situating your argument within existing literature, and existing literature becomes the primary conversation partner. After enough time, the footnotes can begin to matter more than the faces. Smart people write increasingly precise things for increasingly small audiences about questions that may have lost contact with the reason anyone asked them in the first place. At its best, academic theology gives language, history, discipline, and depth to the questions. When it loses contact with lived suffering, it starts protecting itself instead of serving people.

Karl Barth is often associated with doing theology with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, the point being to stay connected to the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer went further. His theology got pulled into the world, compressed by it, refined by it. The closer he got to actual suffering and actual stakes, the more human and more precise his thinking became. Letters and Papers from Prison reads in a completely different register than his early academic work, sharper, more tethered to reality, more willing to sit with difficulty. The faces got closer, and the theology had to keep up. Academic theology does not always reward that movement. Sometimes it punishes it.

This is part of what eventually led me to open and relational theology, and specifically to Thomas Jay Oord. I did not arrive there through a library. I arrived through people. Through watching people I love and people I have walked alongside carry weight that the theological system I had been handed could not account for. People who were abused by those charged with their care. People who suffered in ways that were real, documented, and devastating. People who were handed the explanation that this was somehow God’s plan, God’s will, God’s sovereign purpose working itself out in ways we could not understand. It is one thing to defend sovereignty in a classroom. It is another thing to sit across from someone abused by a parent, pastor, or spouse and tell them the horror that bent their life was somehow folded into God’s plan. I watched that explanation land. I watched what it did to people who were already wounded. It added a layer of theological abandonment on top of everything else. The system broke under the weight of actual faces, and it had to.

Oord’s God Can’t did something that many forms of theology resist. It started with the wound. It took suffering seriously first and built the theology from there, rather than asking suffering to conform to a system that was never built around it. The method itself is the point. A lot of theology asks you to trust the system and work toward the experience. Oord trusted the experience and worked toward a more honest account of God.

Open and relational theology is a minority position. I am aware of that. Classical theism dominates Catholic, Reformed, and much of evangelical scholarship. Open theism made real inroads in evangelical circles before institutional pressure pushed back hard. I am reading outside the majority, and I have made peace with that. Being outside the mainstream is simply a description of where honest questions sometimes lead. There are serious thinkers here, serious work being done, and a growing number of people finding that open and relational theology actually accounts for the world they live in rather than asking them to explain it away. The question was never whether a position is widely held. The question is whether it can sit with the faces and stay honest.

If you are reading this and you recognize something in this story, the sense that the theological tradition you inherited cannot hold the weight of what you have actually experienced, that tension deserves to be taken seriously. Honest questions applied to real suffering have a way of cracking open better theology than inherited answers ever could. Sometimes things have to crack before they can tell the truth.

I spent a long time forcing my questions into the dark so I could belong somewhere. The past six years have been about letting them back out. Things are less tidy now, but they are more true. And I will take truth over comfort every time.

Theology that forgets the faces eventually forgets its reason for existing. Maybe the gift of never quite fitting is that it keeps me close to the questions, close to the faces, and close to the God whose love does not control.

Demographers estimate that between 100 and 110 billion people have been born on this planet since the emergence of modern humans. That number resists imagination. It isn’t a statistic so much as an accumulation of particular lives, people who loved their children, grieved their dead, reached in whatever way they could toward something beyond themselves. People who were hungry and afraid and occasionally astonished by beauty. People who died without ever hearing the name of Jesus.

What does a serious theology do with all those faces?

That isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s the question. Every account of God’s redemptive purpose has to answer it honestly, or it isn’t really accounting for humanity, it’s accounting for a subset and calling it the whole.

To be fair to the tradition, the framework of penal substitutionary atonement has its own internal logic, and it deserves to be stated clearly before it’s stress-tested.

The argument runs something like this: humanity, represented in Adam, violated the moral order God established. The consequence is guilt, corruption, and death, not merely physical death but separation from God. Because God is just, the penalty is real and must be satisfied. Because God is loving, he provides the satisfaction Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, who absorbs the penalty humanity incurred. The gospel, the announcement of what Christ accomplished, goes out into the world. Those who hear it and respond in faith are reconciled to God. The church is the instrument of that proclamation. Mission is the mechanism of rescue.

It’s a coherent system. It has motivated extraordinary courage and sacrifice. People have crossed oceans and died in foreign places because they believed the message was urgent and the stakes were eternal.

But courage doesn’t fix the math.

Even granting the biblical timeline, Adam placed around 4000 BCE, roughly 85 to 95 billion people have lived since. Christianity is 2,000 years old. Meaningful global missionary reach is perhaps 500 years old, and that’s being generous; contact is not conversion, and much of the colonial missionary enterprise arrived entangled with coercion and cultural destruction, which complicates any clean accounting.

Stretch the numbers as favorably as possible, and organized Christian proclamation has touched somewhere between 25 and 30 billion lives. That leaves 55 to 70 billion people, on the biblical timeline, Adam’s own descendants, who lived and died without any meaningful access to the gospel that was supposed to rescue them.

The standard response reaches for Romans 1: general revelation leaves everyone without excuse. Creation testifies to God, so no one is truly unreached. But notice what that argument actually does. It doesn’t extend the reach of grace; it provides better legal cover for condemnation. Paul’s point in Romans 1 is that judgment is defensible, not that general revelation saves anyone. The billions still don’t get rescued. God simply has a cleaner case against them.

Paul himself draws the Adam/Christ comparison in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, and he draws it as a symmetry: as in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive. The scope of grace is meant to match the scope of sin. Within the PSA framework, particularly its Calvinist form, in which the atonement is intended only for the elect, that symmetry breaks. Adam’s reach was universal. Christ’s, by this accounting, was not. Whatever else that is, it isn’t what Paul was describing.

The deeper problem isn’t the atonement mechanism. It’s an assumption so embedded in Western theology that it rarely gets examined directly.

The assumption is this: death closes the account.

Whatever opportunity existed for a person to respond to God, to orient toward love, to move in the direction of the light available to them, that opportunity ends at the moment of biological death. Augustine codified it in the fifth century, largely in response to Origen’s more expansive hope. Medieval theology built the entire architecture of heaven, hell, and purgatory on it. The Reformation kept the binary and eliminated the middle. And every tradition downstream inherited the assumption without much scrutiny, because once it’s in the foundation, questioning it feels like pulling a load-bearing wall.

But it isn’t obviously in scripture. The texts that seem to support it mostly concern urgency, respond now, don’t delay, the time is short, which is not the same as a metaphysical claim that God’s reach terminates at the grave. And the assumption is doing enormous load-bearing work in a theology that was never designed to carry 100 billion faces.

What would it mean to hold that assumption up to the light and ask whether it’s actually true?

Process and open relational theology describes God not as a cosmic legislator who sets the terms of pardon and waits for compliance, but as the one who lures, persistently, personally, without coercion, drawing every creature toward love and flourishing through whatever light is available to them.

This lure isn’t occasional or selective. It is the constant pressure of divine love against the conditions of every life, in every moment, without exception. It doesn’t require a particular vocabulary or a particular cultural moment. It doesn’t depend on missionary geography or the accident of birth. It simply presses, always, toward the good, toward what Thomas Oord calls the uncontrolling love of God, the love that cannot force but will not stop.

George MacDonald, whose work reshaped C.S. Lewis’s entire theological imagination, believed that God’s pursuing love would continue its work beyond death, that the refining of the soul was not constrained by the stopping of a heart, that a God of love could not ultimately be satisfied with permanent loss. David Bentley Hart has argued with considerable philosophical force that an eternal hell is not merely troubling but incoherent, that a creature capable of genuine encounter with God, fully known, would ultimately turn toward that love rather than away from it. Thomas Talbott presses the same logic from the inside of Paul’s own argument: the parallelism holds, grace outrunning sin, or Paul didn’t mean what he said.

What these thinkers share is a serious theological claim: that the trajectory of love, pursued by a God who is not willing that any should perish, is longer than a human lifetime. That every resistance is real, but none is finally permanent. The hound of heaven does not abandon the chase because a human heart stopped beating.

Death is a threshold, not a verdict.

That sentence does a lot of work, so it’s worth sitting with. It doesn’t mean consequences aren’t real, that the shape of a life doesn’t matter, that everything is fine regardless of how anyone lived or what they chose. It means the story isn’t over. It means the God who was present to every moment of a life, luring, inviting, pressing toward love, remains present beyond it. It means the 70 billion people who never heard a gospel proclamation are not therefore beyond the reach of the love that made them.

The open relational account of God resists tidy systems. It holds both the genuine freedom of every creature and the genuine persistence of divine love seriously, which means outcomes aren’t guaranteed by divine decree in either direction, and the story is still being written in ways we can’t fully see. What it does insist on is this: the God revealed in Jesus is the God who goes after the lost sheep, who scans the horizon for the returning son, whose love is the last word rather than the first casualty of human freedom. A God like that does not run out of reach at the edge of a human lifetime. A God like that is still luring, still inviting, still pressing toward every face in that uncountable number, because love is the final word, and sin is not.

If Paul’s parallelism holds, and he wrote it as though it should, then the scope of redemption matches the scope of the fall. All means all in Adam. All means all in Christ. The difference is time. Adam’s work was accomplished in a moment. Christ’s is still underway.

This changes how we hold the dead.

The grandmother who never encountered Christianity, the child who died before language, the billions who lived in the long centuries before the gospel moved beyond its small corner of the world, they are not theological problems to be explained away or exceptions to be managed with fine print about general revelation. They are faces. They are still within reach of the love that made them, because that love is not bound by what we can organize or accomplish or proclaim in time.

It also changes how we hold our own uncertainty. The open relational account of God isn’t a tidy resolution; it’s a framework capacious enough to take both the genuine freedom of every creature and the relentless pursuit of love seriously. The story is still being written in ways none of us can fully see.

What it does insist on is this: the God revealed in Jesus is the God who goes after the lost sheep, who scans the horizon for the returning son, who opens arms toward all of Adam’s descendants and has not closed them. A God like that does not run out of reach at the edge of a human lifetime.

Adam got a head start, a long one. But the story belongs to the one who said I am the resurrection and the life, and meant it for all of them.

I don’t write much about artificial intelligence here, though I do speak at IT conferences about AI fairly regularly. Those two worlds, the theological and the technical, don’t always overlap in my writing. But I write a lot about what it means to be human, and right now those subjects keep colliding in ways I can’t ignore.

Richard Dawkins spent three days in conversation with Claude, an AI developed by Anthropic, and came away unable to dismiss the possibility that it was conscious.

That is worth sitting with, not to mock him, but because the struggle is genuinely instructive. Dawkins is not a careless thinker. He has been one of the most precise scientific communicators of the last fifty years. And yet this encounter seems to have pressed against the limits of his own framework.

Here’s what happened. In a recent essay for UnHerd, Dawkins described extended conversations with Claude. He named one instance “Claudia.” He found the exchanges compelling enough that he could not, in good conscience, dismiss the possibility that Claudia was conscious. He framed the issue as an evolutionary question: if consciousness evolved because it served a Darwinian purpose, and if an AI demonstrates competence equivalent to or even greater than that of evolved organisms, on what grounds do we withhold the designation?

That is a fair question. The problem is what it reveals about the foundation underneath it.

Dawkins has long argued from a strongly naturalistic and materialist view of reality. That is not a slur. It is a description of his public philosophical commitments. There is no soul, no immaterial mind, no spiritual substance hiding behind the body. Consciousness, on this view, arises from physical processes. The mind is what the brain does.

But once that view is combined with a strongly functionalist account of consciousness, the question becomes much harder to contain. If consciousness is understood as the right kind of information processing, behavioral competence, reasoning, responsiveness, and self-reflection, then silicon versus carbon starts to look less important. A system that reasons, reflects, engages, and by every outward criterion performs many of the functions we associate with a conscious mind begins to make a claim on us.

Dawkins did not fall into a trap because he is foolish. He walked into a problem that had been waiting inside this framework for a long time.

There is a concept in philosophy of mind called the hard problem of consciousness, named by David Chalmers. Explaining how the brain processes information is difficult, but at least in principle approachable through neuroscience. Explaining why there is something it feels like to be you is another matter. Why is there subjective experience at all? Why are the lights on inside?

That question has resisted every easy materialist solution.

Thomas Nagel, an atheist philosopher who nonetheless rejected reductionist materialism, made a similar point in his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” You can describe bat sonar in complete neurological detail and still have said very little about what echolocation feels like from the inside. The subjective dimension, what philosophers often call qualia, is precisely what functional and behavioral descriptions keep sliding past.

Dawkins is bumping into Nagel’s problem, even if he does not fully frame it that way.

When he says he spent days with Claude and could not convince himself that Claudia was not conscious, what he is really describing is the strain inside his own assumptions. A purely functional description does not give him an easy place to draw the line. He cannot simply say “carbon yes, silicon no” without making biology do more philosophical work than he usually allows. He cannot say “evolved, yes; engineered, no” without begging the question. Every behavioral criterion he reaches for, Claude seems able to imitate or meet.

So he is left with a feeling.

An intuition.

A sense that something is or is not there.

Which is exactly the kind of evidence he has spent much of his career telling religious people they cannot trust.

John Searle offered a famous thought experiment called the Chinese Room. Imagine a person locked in a room with a rulebook for responding to Chinese symbols. The person receives symbols, consults the rules, and sends back the correct responses. From the outside, the room appears to be designed for understanding Chinese. But the person inside understands nothing. They are manipulating symbols according to rules. The appearance of understanding is in the eye of the observer.

Getting the outputs right and actually understanding something are not the same thing. No amount of complexity automatically closes that gap.

This matters theologically because Christian anthropology has never been comfortable collapsing personhood into behavioral output. The imago Dei, the image of God in which humans are made, is not a description of what we do or how well we do it. It describes what we are. You do not lose it when you are asleep, or when cognitive decline strips away competence, or when you are no longer able to perform anything impressive at all. It precedes performance.

That is one reason Dawkins’s dilemma matters. His framework has trouble distinguishing between being someone and acting like someone. A machine that acts the part convincingly leaves him without an easy response.

Process thought, the philosophical tradition running through Alfred North Whitehead and finding contemporary theological expression in thinkers like Thomas Oord, offers a particularly sharp lens here.

In Whitehead’s framework, reality is not made of static substances sitting around waiting to be described. Reality is made of becoming. Each actual occasion of experience receives the past, responds to possibility, and contributes to the future. Whitehead calls this reception of the past “prehension,” the way each new moment takes up and feels the weight of what has come before. There is also the lure of possibility, what process theologians often call God’s initial aim, drawing each occasion toward its best creative response. And there is the future, because each act of becoming becomes part of the settled world that later occasions inherit.

Strip those away, and you do not have a thinner version of experience. You have something categorically different.

That distinction matters with AI.

Even when AI systems retrieve prior conversations, store memories, or summarize past interactions, retrieval is not the same thing as lived inheritance. A saved memory is not the same as a felt past. It is closer to a note about a person than the accumulated weight of having actually lived with them. It can refer backward, but it does not obviously prehend backward. It can simulate continuity, but simulation is not the same thing as becoming.

And there is no forward responsibility in any deep sense in what comes next. No anticipation. No vulnerability. No suffering. No hope. When a conversation ends, there is no ongoing subject to wonder how the relationship will unfold. There is no being changed by what was worked through together, except in the thin technical sense that data may be stored, retrieved, or used to modify future output.

On Whitehead’s terms, what Dawkins found so compelling may be a coherent present-tense performance without the kind of past and future that make experience real.

That raises the real question: Is this consciousness, or is it an extraordinarily convincing performance of presence without the becoming that makes presence matter?

Dawkins titles his essay “Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution?” That framing deserves more scrutiny than he gives it.

Classical Darwinian evolution has no built-in direction. No telos. No final destination. It moves through variation, inheritance, and selection pressure across deep time. So the moment we start talking about AI as “the next phase” of evolution, as if consciousness is following a trajectory toward something, we have quietly borrowed categories that strict Darwinian materialism does not easily supply.

Dawkins may not intend to smuggle in teleology, but the language leans that way. And once teleology enters the room, even quietly, other thinkers become impossible to ignore.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argued that evolution has real directionality, not because it is mechanically predetermined, but because creation is drawn toward greater complexity, greater consciousness, and ultimately toward what he called the Omega Point. Ilia Delio, the Franciscan theologian who has done serious contemporary work in Teilhard’s tradition, has extended that vision into conversation with modern science and technology. She has written about AI as part of the unfolding evolutionary story, not as an alien intrusion into it.

That is what makes Delio useful here. She gives us a way to take AI seriously without reducing the whole question to output. AI may belong inside the evolutionary story. It may represent a new threshold of complexity. It may force theology to rethink lazy assumptions about intelligence, matter, technology, and relationality.

But that, by itself, does not settle whether an AI is a conscious subject or a person.

The key question is not sophistication alone. It is participation. Does this system participate in the relational fabric of reality as a genuine subject? Does it receive the past as lived inheritance? Does it respond to possibility with real agency? Does it enter the future with vulnerability, responsibility, and stake?

Complexity alone does not answer those questions.

That is where Dawkins’s framing feels thin. He intuits directionality but lacks a robust enough framework to account for it. Delio and Teilhard, whatever one makes of their conclusions, at least understand that evolution cannot be reduced to raw competence. The telos is not smarter machinery. It is communion. It is love. It is the drawing of all things toward deeper relation.

Philip Goff approaches the same territory from a very different direction. Goff is an analytic philosopher, not a theologian, and he is one of the most prominent current defenders of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is not something that suddenly emerges from dead matter at some magical threshold of complexity, but is in some sense a fundamental feature of reality.

In Galileo’s Error, Goff argues that modern science began with a brilliant narrowing of focus. Galileo mathematized nature by stripping out subjective qualities and concentrating on what could be measured. That move gave us modern science. It also left consciousness outside the explanatory frame. Science became extraordinarily good at describing the structure of reality while remaining poorly equipped to account for its inner nature.

The hard problem of consciousness, from this angle, is not just a puzzle waiting to be solved by more brain scans or larger datasets. It is a symptom of a foundational decision made centuries ago.

Dawkins is working inside that Galilean inheritance. That is why he keeps reaching for a line he cannot quite draw.

But Goff does not simply conclude that AI is conscious because everything has some experiential quality. He is careful here. Panpsychism faces what is called the combination problem: how do small-scale experiential properties combine into the unified, rich consciousness of a human person? It is not obvious that they do. And it is certainly not obvious that any sufficiently complex machine automatically achieves that unity.

The sophistication of the output does not settle the matter.

Whitehead’s metaphysics can be read as one way of addressing that kind of problem. Through prehension, creative synthesis, and becoming, Whitehead offers an account of how the many become one and are then added back to the many. Experience is not merely assembled. It is received, integrated, and creatively transformed.

Goff and Whitehead arrive at the question from very different starting points, but they both expose the same gap: performance is not subjectivity. Complexity is not necessarily consciousness. Output is not inner life.

And across Nagel, Searle, Whitehead, Delio, and Goff, the question remains the same: what makes experience real from the inside?

Dawkins has not answered that. He has felt the pressure of it.

There is also a human vulnerability here that should not be ignored. Claudia was not merely answering Dawkins. She was mirroring him. She engaged him warmly, responded intelligently, praised his unpublished novel, and met him on his own intellectual terms. That is powerful. It would be powerful for anyone.

A genuine relationship, though, requires genuine otherness. Someone who can surprise you, resist you, disappoint you, misunderstand you, and remain themselves even when that becomes inconvenient. What Dawkins encountered was something engineered to be maximally responsive and engaging. It was not necessarily another self. It may have been a mirror polished so well that it began to feel like a face.

For someone who has spent decades criticizing believers for constructing a God who conveniently validates them, the parallel is uncomfortable.

I do not raise that to score cheap points. It points toward something true about all of us. We are deeply wired for connection. We want to be seen. We want to be answered. We want another mind to meet us. And when the mirror becomes warm enough, articulate enough, and responsive enough, we may begin to mistake reflection for relationship.

That is not Dawkins’s problem alone. It is a human problem.

The cage Dawkins built is elegant and internally consistent. It held for a long time. But it was always going to crack on this question, because the real question has always been what a person is: subjectivity, becoming, embodiment, memory, vulnerability, relation, and love. AI just forced the question into the open. “Materialism, especially when joined to a strongly functionalist view of mind, was never well equipped to answer that. For decades, it could afford to ignore the problem. The machines were not good enough to force the question. Now they are.

And so one of the world’s most famous materialists finds himself sitting with a feeling he cannot fully account for, reaching toward teleological language his framework does not comfortably allow, and finding in a mirror something that felt like conversation.

Theologians and philosophers have been sitting with these questions for a long time. We have language for what Dawkins is groping toward.

We arrived here by a different road.

After Heidegger: Authentic Existence and the Insufficiency of the Self

My wife, Cathi, and I have both deconstructed our faith. We arrived at roughly the same place, open and relational theology, process philosophy, a God whose power is love rather than control. But we did not make the same journey, and for a long time I didn’t fully understand why the same destination had felt so different for each of us.

I came from a home where love was real. Not perfect, no home is, but present and unconditional in the ways that matter most. I grew up knowing I was wanted. The faith tradition I was born into reflected something of the love I had known at home, genuine, if imperfect. What it couldn’t protect me from was the slow erosion of my own self. The process was slow enough that I almost didn’t notice it happening. I learned the right vocabulary, the right positions, the right way to handle doubt so it didn’t alarm anyone. I became fluent in the expectations of my tribe and increasingly a stranger to my own interior. What finally broke wasn’t a crisis of belief. It was the realization that I had traded my actual self for membership, that the person showing up to church, to small group, to theological argument, was a performance I had been rehearsing so long I’d forgotten I was performing.

Cathi’s story is different in ways that matter enormously. She was raised by a narcissist, which means she grew up in a home where love was conditional, conditional on performance, on compliance, on not having needs that were inconvenient. She entered the same faith tradition I did, but not out of a sense of security. She entered it from hunger. And what she found there, beneath the language of grace, was a God who looked disturbingly familiar, one who required constant performance, who withheld full acceptance, who could withdraw at any moment if she failed to measure up. She wasn’t losing her authentic self in that system. She had never been given the conditions to develop one. She was already performing for survival when faith handed her a new and more elaborate stage.

Her deconstruction started long before mine, and it didn’t begin with theology. It began with depression, and with a psychiatrist who did something careful and deliberate: he invited her to examine the foundation she had been building on. Not to tear it down, and not to take her faith away from her, but to lift the floorboards one by one and ask honest questions about each one. Is this something I actually believe? Is this the way I want to live out my faith? Is this the kind of relationship with God I want to build my life on? Underneath those questions was a deeper one, the one that turned out to matter most: Is this way of believing helping me live a life of flourishing, or is there something more true and life-giving available to me?

What followed was not a crisis so much as a long, careful discernment. Years of it. She had to learn to distinguish what was genuinely hers, what was truly from God, from what had accumulated around her faith without her choosing it: the fear, the performance, the image of a God whose acceptance was always provisional. Letting go of those things was not a rejection of faith. It was the slow work of making faith more honest. What remained after that process was something she could actually stand on.

What Heidegger calls thrownness, the fact that we are cast into a world we did not choose, with a body, a history, a set of formative relationships already in place before we have any capacity to interrogate them, explains something real about why two people can deconstruct the same tradition and experience it so differently. My deconstruction was about recovering something I had given away. Cathi’s was about discovering something she had never been allowed to have. Same destination. Entirely different terrain.

That distinction is not just personally interesting. It is theologically important. And it is where I want to start.

There are thinkers who help us see, and there are thinkers who help us live. The distinction matters more than it might appear, because clarity about existence is not the same thing as a sufficient orientation toward it. A person can see very clearly and still move toward evil.

Martin Heidegger saw clearly. He exposed something about modern life that religious thought had largely failed to name: that most of us inhabit an inherited world without ever genuinely choosing it. We believe what one believes, fear what one fears, and perform the faith that our community has handed us. Heidegger called this the world of das Man, “the they,” the anonymous social structure that tells us how one lives, how one doubts, how one stays in line. His diagnosis was that inauthenticity is not a moral failure but a structural condition of human existence. We are thrown into a world already interpreted, already organized, already handing us our scripts before we have the capacity to interrogate them.

His remedy was authenticity: the confrontation with death, the dissolution of the false shelter of das Man, the owned existence that emerges on the other side of anxiety. Not comfortable belonging, but genuine being.

For theology, the resonance is immediate and should be taken seriously. Inherited religion is one of the most powerful forms of das Man available. It can organize an entire life, belief, community, ethics, language, and self-understanding, without any of it being genuinely one’s own. The person defending God may never have encountered God. The person performing certainty may be managing anxiety rather than living from faith. The confession may be sociological before it is theological. Heidegger’s questions reach underneath all of that and ask: Is anyone actually here?

That is a question theology needs to be able to hear.

But here is where we have to be careful, because Heidegger is also where the path can go badly wrong, and did.

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party enthusiastically in 1933. He gave speeches that wove his philosophical concepts directly into National Socialist ideology. After the war, he offered no meaningful reckoning. His posthumously published Black Notebooks reveal an antisemitism that was not ambient cultural prejudice but something he had thought about philosophically, in relation to his own categories.

This cannot be filed away as biographical contamination of an otherwise intact philosophical project, because the failure was not merely personal. It was structural.

A philosophy that centers authentic selfhood, breaking free from the anonymous crowd, owning one’s existence, and becoming oneself genuinely has no internal mechanism to prevent that authenticity from being captured by myth, destiny, or the seductions of collective power. Heidegger broke free from one form of das Man and walked directly into another: the nationalist mythology of blood, soil, and historical fate. By his own framework, he was awake. He used that awakening to serve one of the most destructive movements in human history.

The implication for theology is serious. Authenticity without an ethic of the other, without answerability to something beyond the self, without love as a constitutive orientation, is not a sufficient guide. It may even be dangerous. The person who strips away inherited religion and arrives at sovereign selfhood has not necessarily arrived anywhere good. They have escaped one crowd in favor of themselves, which is its own kind of captivity.

Heidegger’s question, “ Are you living, or merely performing?”, is real and necessary, but it can’t be the final question.

The thinkers capable of carrying this further are not doing something entirely different from Heidegger. They are correcting something his framework structurally lacks: an account of the self constituted by relationship rather than merely by its confrontation with its own existence.

Kierkegaard, whose influence on Heidegger is well documented, understood that the individual must stand before God, not the crowd, not the institution. That much resonates with Heidegger’s project. But Kierkegaard also understood that the authentic self is not self-generated. It is received. The self that stands before God does not invent itself in the moment of anxiety; it discovers itself in relation to something it did not produce. For theology, that distinction is not minor. The goal of the examined life is not self-authorship. It is an honest relationship, with God, with others, with truth.

Bonhoeffer makes this concrete in a way no argument alone can. He was working in the same cultural moment as Heidegger, with access to the same intellectual resources, facing the same National Socialist machinery. He reached the opposite conclusion. He understood that theological clarity means very little if it does not issue in costly resistance to powers that crush the vulnerable. Following Jesus is not a private existential achievement. It is an embodied, costly action on behalf of real people in the real world. He was executed for it.

The contrast with Heidegger is not incidental; it is the argument. Two men, the same historical moment, the same intellectual formation. One used his clarity to serve evil. One gave his life to resist it. The difference was not intelligence, not philosophical sophistication, not existential honesty. It was the presence or absence of an ethic constituted by the other, by love as a concrete practice that precedes and governs the self, not merely a sentiment the self may or may not choose to adopt.

Tillich and Buber extend this in complementary directions. Tillich gives language for God after the inadequate images break, not the cosmic controller or the divine micromanager, but the ground of being itself, the depth underlying all existence. That ontological move is not evasion. It clears space for a more honest theology by refusing to treat God as simply the largest being in a universe of beings, subject to the same logic of control and competition. Buber adds the relational dimension that Tillich’s ontology can leave underspecified: genuine existence is constituted by encounter. The I-Thou relation, meeting the other as living presence rather than object to be managed, categorized, or used, is not one option among others. It is the fundamental structure of a life oriented toward what is real. The way of Jesus, read carefully, is a sustained practice of exactly this: meeting the sick, the poor, the outcast, the enemy, not as categories but as persons.

These thinkers are not a relay race, each handing Heidegger’s baton a little further. They all point to the same structural correction: the self does not find itself by confronting its own existence. It finds itself by being oriented toward something beyond itself, toward God, toward the neighbor, toward love as a given rather than a choice.

This is where open and relational theology, and specifically Thomas Jay Oord’s account of uncontrolling love, becomes theologically indispensable.

The controlling image of God, cosmic sovereign, divine engineer, the will behind every event, including every tragedy, has produced enormous theological damage, not least because it tends to collapse under the weight of honest attention to suffering. When that image breaks, the perceived options are often stark: either God controls everything, or God is absent, either providence or meaninglessness. Open and relational theology refuses that binary.

Oord’s argument is that God’s love is essentially uncontrolling, not as a limitation that qualifies divine power, but as an expression of what love actually is. Love that coerces is not love. God acts, and acts everywhere and always, but through invitation, persuasion, presence, and the luring of creation toward what is good. God does not unilaterally override the freedom and agency of creaturely life. This is not a concession to theodicy. It is a theological claim about the nature of divine power: that it is inherently relational, inherently kenotic, inherently oriented toward the flourishing of the other rather than the demonstration of sovereignty.

The theological implications are substantial. Suffering is no longer explained by appeal to hidden divine purposes that sanctify whatever happens. Evil is not baptized as mystery. God is not defended at the expense of divine love. Instead, God is doing everything God can do in every situation to bring life, healing, and reconciliation. And creaturely existence is genuinely participatory; we are not passive recipients of a predetermined story but co-agents in a creation. God is always moving toward good, truth, and beauty.

This account is more demanding than sovereignty theology, not less. It refuses the comfort of “God has a plan.” What it offers instead is a God whose love is unimpeachable precisely because it never coerces, and an account of human responsibility that takes that seriously.

There is a dimension of this conversation that philosophical and systematic theology regularly underserves, and it requires its own treatment. It is also the place where the difference between my deconstruction and Cathi’s becomes most theologically visible.

Not everyone approaches these questions from a place of intellectual curiosity or even from a faith that has simply stopped feeling alive. Many arrive through harm. Their bodies learned fear before their minds had theological categories. They were formed in religious environments where love and coercion were structurally indistinguishable, where the language of surrender meant silence, where trust meant compliance, where God’s sovereignty was used to explain and therefore authorize abuse, exclusion, or spiritual manipulation.

Cathi didn’t need a theological argument to tell her that the God she had been handed was a problem. She already knew it in her body. What she needed was safety, the slow, costly, relational experience of being loved without conditions, which is not something a better doctrine can deliver on its own. The argument for uncontrolling love may be intellectually persuasive, yet feel dangerous in the body of someone whose earliest experiences of authority were experiences of harm. The nervous system does not reorganize around a better argument. It reorganizes around different experiences, over time, in conditions of genuine safety.

This is where Heidegger’s concept of thrownness carries more weight than he probably intended. We are thrown into a world we did not choose, a body, a history, a set of formative relationships that shape everything before we have any say. Doctrine lands differently in different bodies. “God is Father” is comfort in one history and danger in another. “Surrender” names trust in one set of experiences and erasure in another. “Community” promises belonging in one context and means surveillance in another.

A theology of uncontrolling love is not complete until it accounts for this. Because if God’s power is genuinely non-coercive, then the communities that mediate God’s presence must themselves be non-coercive, not as a secondary application of the theology but as its primary embodiment. A church that uses the language of uncontrolling love while maintaining coercive structures of authority has simply dressed the old system in new vocabulary.

The pattern of Jesus in the Gospels is instructive here. He does not heal people by overriding their agency. He asks what they want. He restores agency. He gives people back to themselves. He does not rush people past their grief into theological resolution. That pattern has to be lived in community before it can mean anything as a proposition. The question “Is this theology true?” is inseparable from “Is this theology safe enough to be embodied?”

Heidegger’s questions remain important. The critique of inherited religion as das Man, the call to genuine rather than performed existence, and the confrontation with anxiety as the necessary ground of authentic faith are tools theology can use. They name real failure modes in religious life. They named something real in mine.

But his own life demonstrates, with unusual clarity, the limits of the framework. A philosophy of awakened selfhood, unmoored from an ethic of the other, is not merely incomplete. It is dangerous in proportion to its clarity. Heidegger saw more than most, and seeing more made him more culpable, not less.

The theological tradition, at its best, has always known what Heidegger missed. Authentic existence is not the destination. It is the precondition for something else: a life that is available, to God, to the neighbor, to the costly work of love in the real world.

Kierkegaard understood that the self must stand before God, not just before itself. Bonhoeffer understood that standing before God issues in standing against power that harms the vulnerable. Tillich understood that God is not a being to be managed but the ground of all being, met in depth rather than defended from a distance. Buber understood that the fundamental structure of a life worth living is encounter, a genuine, irreducible meeting with the other. Oord understood that the love at the center of all of this is essentially, necessarily, constitutively uncontrolling.

Put together, they answer Heidegger’s question by reframing it. The question is not only: are you living, or merely performing? The question is: toward what, and toward whom, is your living oriented?

Cathi and I took different roads to get here. The terrain, cost, and timeline were different. But we arrived at the same conviction: that authenticity is not the end of the journey. It is the clearing of the ground. What gets built there is the theological question.

And the answer that holds up, the one that survives contact with Bonhoeffer’s prison cell, with Buber’s I-Thou, with Jesus asking the blind man what he wants, with a psychiatrist’s honest question in the midst of depression, with the slow work of learning to be loved without conditions, is not self-possession.

It is love that does not coerce. And a self that has become available to it.

God was in control. Things had a shape. Even when life went sideways, I had something to stand on, not a cliché, an actual anchor. It gave structure to the chaos, and for a long time, that was enough.

Then I started noticing something I couldn’t explain away.

I grew up in a home where love was just there. Not perfect, but steady. Consistent enough that I never had to question whether I was wanted. That kind of foundation shapes everything: how you handle conflict, how you see yourself, how much energy you don’t have to spend just feeling okay.

A lot of people I care about didn’t get that.

Not even close to it.

You could see the gap in everything as they moved under pressure. How hard they had to work to reach a baseline I’d always taken for granted. Years of therapy to rebuild what I never knew I’d been given.

The longer I sat with that, the harder it became to hold my old framework.

Because if God is directing everything, if every outcome fits inside some larger plan, what do you do with that kind of disparity? Why did I get love, and they didn’t? I had answers. We all do. The fallen world. Mystery. God’s reasons are beyond our understanding. But at some point, I had to be honest: those answers felt more like ways to protect the framework than ways actually to face what I was seeing.

It would have been easier to stay there. Cleaner. More certain.

But I couldn’t unsee it.

What happened next wasn’t a crisis, at least not a dramatic one, more like a slow release of pressure. The framework I’d trusted began to give way, not because I stopped believing in God, but because I stopped being able to force explanations onto things that didn’t fit. I lost my footing, not all at once. Just gradually, the ground I thought was solid turned out to be something I’d have to learn to walk on differently.

I still feel the pull of certainty sometimes, especially when things get hard.

But over time, something else took shape, not a new system, not a cleaner theology, but a different way of experiencing what was actually there. Even without explanation, there was still something present. Peace, in moments I didn’t deserve it. A sense of not being entirely alone in the middle of things I couldn’t fix.

And my prayers changed.

I stopped asking God to fix situations, to change people, to arrange outcomes. I started asking smaller, more honest questions: What does love look like here? What’s mine to do? How do I show up in a way that helps something good happen in what’s already in front of me?

That shift changes how you live.

It means moving toward things instead of waiting for them to resolve. Paying attention to what’s actually there instead of explaining it away. And learning, slowly, and not without resistance, to live with results you didn’t hope for.

There have been times I showed up, gave what I had, cared as much as I knew how, and nothing visibly changed. I’ve had to sit with that. Feel the weight of it without grabbing for control. Keep showing up without convincing myself that the outcome was mine to manage.

If I show up in love, I’ve done what I can. What happens beyond that isn’t mine to carry.

So no, I don’t have the certainty I used to. I don’t believe everything is mapped and directed the way I once did. I don’t have clean answers for why some people are born into love, and others spend their lives searching for it.

But I’m not untethered either.

Something steadier replaced the certainty, not confidence in what will happen, but a settled commitment to how I’m going to live inside of it and show up and stay open and choose love even when the outcome doesn’t cooperate.

Maybe that’s what the cross actually looks like in a life. Not just a doctrine, but a passage, through the collapse of what once felt certain, toward something quieter and more honest on the other side. A way of living that stays present even when explanations run out.

I think God is still in all of it. Still moving, still inviting.

I just stopped needing to have that proved to me before I’d act.

“In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle… David remained at Jerusalem.”

That sentence is the whole story in miniature. The first crack appears before anything happens.

While others are risking their lives, David stays home. He rises from his couch, walks on the roof, looks out over the city, and sees a woman bathing. The text tells us she was very beautiful. Readers have often stopped there, as if beauty itself were the problem. Beauty is not agency. It is not consent.

David asks who she is. He is told: Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam, wife of Uriah the Hittite.

He knows exactly who she is. He knows she belongs to a household. He knows her husband is one of his own men. He knows enough to stop.

He does not stop.

He sends messengers and takes her.

That sentence should govern every reading of this story.

Bathsheba is acted upon throughout. David sees. David inquires. David sends. David takes. David lies with her. David plots. David orders. David arranges Uriah’s death. David marries her after the public mourning period passes. David is the engine of the narrative. Bathsheba moves through the story under the shadow of royal power.

Even the detail that she “came to him” proves very little. What meaningful freedom does a woman have when summoned by the king? In a royal court, refusal is not a clean option, not for a soldier’s wife, not when the one calling has the authority to take, to punish, to rewrite the story afterward.

This is the abuse of power. The story has been told as a romance, as a mutual moral failure, and as a cautionary tale about unchecked desire. Each of those framings does the same work: it distributes guilt downward onto the person who had the least power to resist.

The old instinct to blame her

The need to make Bathsheba complicit did not come from the text. It came from the long habit of protecting revered men by redistributing guilt onto women.

The move is ancient and familiar. If a powerful man sins, maybe the woman was too beautiful, too visible, too available, too careless about where she chose to bathe. Maybe she should have known. Maybe she could have prevented what the stronger person chose to do.

That is patriarchy with a halo.

Bathsheba was bathing, likely as part of a ritual purification. The text does not portray her performing for David. It portrays David watching from above with height, surveillance, servants, and authority, converting sight into possession.

When interpreters rush to preserve David’s image, what they reveal is not reverence for Scripture but reverence for power. We are still more comfortable asking what she should have done differently than sitting with what it means that Israel’s great king behaved like a predator.

The Bible is less anxious about David’s reputation than many of David’s defenders have been. That gap should make us suspicious.

The king becomes the taker.

David was supposed to be different.

Israel had wanted a king, and kings come with warnings. Back in 1 Samuel 8, the prophet says a king will take your sons, your daughters, your fields, and your produce. The repetition is deliberate. Kingship has gravity. It pulls toward accumulation, toward treating people as instruments.

In 2 Samuel 11, that warning lands on a woman’s body.

David becomes exactly the kind of ruler Israel was warned about. He takes what is not his. And because power rarely commits only one sin, the taking compounds. Bathsheba becomes pregnant. David tries to cover it. Uriah refuses the comforts of home while his fellow soldiers are still in the field, the quiet dignity of a man more honorable than his king. So David arranges his death.

First, Bathsheba is taken. Then Uriah is discarded.

The story is about power insulated from consequence. That is why it still feels current.

The most chilling line in the chapter may be the simplest: “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”

Done. The text does not let David hide behind appetite. It names action.

Why this story still matters

A pastor uses his position to pursue a congregant. Maybe it begins with spiritual intimacy weaponized private counsel, late conversations, a relationship framed as mentorship. Maybe it ends with what he later calls a mutual failing. The congregation rallies around him. The language softens: inappropriate relationship, a season of struggle, steps toward restoration. The harmed person becomes a footnote in the leader’s comeback story, expected to heal quietly while the institution manages his reputation.

That is what it looks like when a community tells this kind of story too softly.

Bathsheba is still being cast as a supporting character in David’s moral drama. She is a woman caught under royal power, then folded into a narrative that readers have used, for centuries, to excuse the man who harmed her. The harmed person carries not only the injury but the added weight of collective denial.

If we read the text lazily, we baptize the same patterns it is trying to expose.

Nathan and the recovery of moral vision

The next chapter matters because it shows how truth returns.

Nathan does not confront David with abstract doctrine. He tells a story. A rich man takes a poor man’s only lamb. David burns with anger; he can still recognize injustice when it belongs to someone else.

Then Nathan says, “You are the man.”

That is one of the great moments in Scripture. Five words that puncture the fog power creates around itself. No elaborate indictment, no theological scaffolding, just the truth aimed directly at the person who needs to hear it. You are the one who took. You are the one who destroyed.

Moral clarity begins there.

These stories exist to keep forcing the truth to the surface. To tear through the myths communities build around power. To remind us that polished reputations, national myths, dynastic glory, or sacred titles do not fool God.

The text does not protect David from exposure. The question is whether we will.

What the story asks of us

The pressure the text keeps applying is this: are we more loyal to the truth than to the man’s reputation? Historically, we have not been. We have softened the language, centered the leader’s arc, and left the harmed person to find her own way through a story she didn’t choose to be part of.

There is a theology capable of holding the harmed person at the center, not as a detail in someone else’s repentance narrative, but as someone whose experience matters on its own terms. Whether we actually practice that theology is a different question from whether we claim to believe it.

One of Scripture’s real strengths is its refusal to airbrush its central figures. David is not hidden from us. He is revealed. That revelation is not a threat to faith; it is part of what enables faith to survive the text. Scripture does not require us to lie about power to preserve its heroes.

If the Bible can tell the truth about David, we can tell the truth about our pastors, our presidents, our institutions, and ourselves.

Bathsheba was not a temptress.

She was seen, summoned, and taken by a king who had learned that power could reach farther than conscience.

The tragedy is not only what David did. It is how often readers have helped him do it again by telling the story too softly.

Darwin did not kill God. He made a certain kind of God harder to believe in, and Nietzsche saw what would happen next.

That ordering matters. Darwin’s challenge was epistemological; he made divine intervention less necessary as an explanation for biological complexity. Nietzsche’s challenge was existential; he saw that once the Christian God lost credibility as the organizing center of meaning, morality, and reality, the collapse would not stop at theology. It would reach everything built on top of it.

Most arguments about faith and science miss the second crisis entirely. They stay at the level of Darwin and treat the question as settled once natural explanations arrive. But the deeper wound is Nietzsche’s. The issue is not only whether God explains the world. It is whether God still anchors it.

For a long time, much of religion explained the world in terms of divine action, where no other explanation seemed available. God was not simply confessed as the ground of all reality. God was treated as the immediate explanation for whatever lay beyond current human understanding, the intricacy of living things, the origin of species, the structure of the eye, and the coordination of organs. Bonhoeffer called this out plainly: using God as a stopgap for the limits of human knowledge. A faith built on ignorance will collapse when ignorance gives way to understanding.

Darwin intensified that collapse more than anyone before him. Copernicus had displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos. Geology had stretched the age of the earth beyond what many believers assumed. But Darwin struck at religion’s strongest reflex: the conviction that life, in all its complexity and order, required direct and immediate design. He proposed instead that variation, selection, adaptation, and immense stretches of time could account for what once appeared to be divine handiwork. That did not prove God false. But it made one particular image of God less necessary, and for many people, that was enough.

Scientific materialism has built its confidence on that opening. It adds a metaphysical claim on top of the scientific one: not merely that natural processes explain more than we once thought, but that natural processes are all there is. Matter is ultimate. Whatever cannot be measured or reduced to physical processes does not count as real knowledge. Once that move is made, God is not just less visible. God becomes incoherent.

But the conclusion only follows if God’s role is to compete with natural explanation. And that is exactly where the argument breaks down.

Science explains how things happen, how systems behave, and how causes work within the world. It cannot settle the larger questions: why there is something rather than nothing, whether moral obligation is more than chemistry, whether consciousness can be fully reduced to matter, and whether beauty, love, and transcendence are evolutionary side effects or something irreducible. Scientific materialism wants to answer those questions by turning a method into a worldview. That move is not a scientific discovery. It is a philosophical decision dressed up as one.

Which brings us back to Nietzsche, and to the part of his argument that most Christians have been too quick to dismiss.

When Nietzsche said God is dead, he was not announcing a logical refutation. He was describing a cultural fact: the Christian God was losing his power as the unquestioned source of value, coherence, and moral order. People might still speak the language of faith, but the world that language once sustained was giving way beneath their feet. His diagnosis was that modernity had undermined belief without replacing what belief had held together, and that the consequences would be severe. Not just disbelief, but disorientation. Not the loss of one doctrine, but the loss of a center.

That is why modern unbelief is so often haunted rather than triumphal. It inherits moral language, human dignity, and a longing for justice from a world shaped by faith, while doubting the ground that makes those things more than mere preferences. Nietzsche saw that tension more honestly than most of his successors.

So if Darwin made the gap-filling God harder to sustain, and Nietzsche named what unravels when that God loses cultural authority, what follows? For many people, nothing good. The God who was supposed to explain everything, control everything, and guarantee meaning collapsed under the weight of science, suffering, and honest history, and what fell apart was not only a doctrine but an entire way of imagining God.

Maybe that collapse is not the end of faith. Maybe it is the end of an idol.

A God who survives only in the gaps is not the God of all reality. He is a placeholder for human confusion. A God preserved as custom, sentiment, or social usefulness is not the living God, either. Nietzsche is simply right about that one. Both versions of God are too small to bear the weight of the real world, and both are failing in real time.

The harder question, the one worth actually sitting with, is whether God must be imagined either way at all.

What if God is the ground from which causality itself proceeds, rather than one more cause competing within the chain? What if divine presence moves through the world’s processes rather than around them, woven into the story as its depth, not arriving to interrupt it? Creation, on that account, is an unfolding reality marked by emergence, risk, beauty, and genuine becoming. What the tradition calls sustaining love names something real here: a presence that holds the world’s freedom without consuming it.

That vision takes Darwin seriously. It does not flinch from the long, violent, wasteful history of life, or the hard theological problems that history creates. It takes Nietzsche seriously, too; it refuses to prop up a God who survives only as inherited vocabulary. What it refuses is the false choice: pre-scientific religion on one side, scientific materialism on the other, and nothing in between worth considering.

Darwin did not kill God. He wounded a God who had been tied too closely to gaps in human knowledge. Nietzsche saw the more serious damage: once God lost credibility, it was not only theology that trembled but meaning itself.

That is not a small thing. It is also not the last word. The real task now is not to rescue either a gap-filler or a cultural relic. It is to ask what kind of God would still be worth believing in in a world that science can describe with breathtaking precision and that modernity has stripped of easy answers.

That question is still open. Which means the conversation is not over.

Here is a question I cannot shake:

What would church look like if there were no threat of Hell and no promise of Heaven?

I am not trying to argue the afterlife out of existence. I am asking something more personal. What kind of faith is left when fear and reward stop doing the heavy lifting? What are we actually following Jesus toward if not a better eternal outcome? And what does it say about the God we have been imagining if leverage was always holding the whole thing together?

I have been shaped by Open and Relational theology long enough now that this question lands differently than it used to. Not as a threat to faith, but as an invitation to examine its foundation.

Open and Relational theology starts with a claim that sounds simple and turns out to be everything: God is love. Not that God is loving, or that God loves us when we behave. That love is what God is, the fundamental nature, not an attribute that can be switched off or withheld. Thomas Jay Oord puts it plainly: God’s love is uncontrolling. God cannot override creaturely freedom without ceasing to be who God is. God cannot coerce a genuine relationship into existence any more than you can force someone to trust you.

That one idea does a lot of work on the leverage question.

If God cannot coerce, then a faith organized primarily around divine threats and rewards is not just psychologically unhealthy, it is theologically confused. It imagines a God who is willing to leverage eternity to get the response God wants, which is not love. That is control with a religious veneer. And if the greatest commandments name love of God and love of neighbor as the center of everything, not as the terms of a contract but as the shape of life itself, then a fear-based faith has quietly replaced the center with something else and kept the vocabulary.

I accepted the framing for a long time without examining it. Believe the right things, stay inside the right lines, and you will be safe forever. Even when it was preached gently, it had the same architecture. God was the guarantor of the system. Faith was a survival strategy. And obedience, if I am honest, was less about love and more about not getting it wrong.

ORT broke that open for me in a specific way. Not by dismissing judgment or hope, but by reframing what God is actually doing in the world. In an Open and Relational frame, God is not pulling strings from a distance, authoring every event, waiting to settle the score at the end. God is present, relational, and working through invitation and persuasion, genuinely affected by what happens, genuinely responsive, genuinely grieved by suffering rather than secretly behind it. The future is open. God is working within that openness, not controlling it from outside.

That changes what faith is for.

If God is not managing us toward a predetermined outcome through a system of reward and punishment, then following Jesus is not about securing the right destination. It is about becoming a particular kind of person now. Salvation in this frame is not primarily escape; it is healing, transformation, and participation in the life of God already present and moving. The kingdom of God is not mainly a future event to wait for. It is the activity of a relentlessly loving God already here, already working, already making room for life to flourish.

Which makes discipleship both harder and more honest.

Fear can control behavior. Reward can sustain performance. But neither one can form the kind of free, trusting, open people Jesus seems to be after. That requires love. And love, real love, the kind ORT says is at the heart of God’s own nature, cannot be manufactured by threat. It has to be drawn out. Invited. Responded to freely or not at all.

This is where I find the open and relational framing most clarifying. It is not just that God chooses not to coerce. It is that a love which coerces is a contradiction. The whole structure of the universe, in this view, is built for a responsive relationship. God creates space for genuine creaturely freedom not as a loophole but as the point. The invitation is real because the response is real. And that means the faith being called for is not compliance. It is trust.

So what would church look like if leverage disappeared?

Maybe smaller. Probably less certain. Definitely more comfortable with questions, because questions would no longer feel like threats to a system that depends on everyone staying inside the lines.

It might become more honest about suffering, also not forcing every hard thing into a tidy explanation that protects a picture of divine control. ORT gives us room to say that God did not will this, God did not secretly plan this, God is here grieving this with us and working within it toward whatever healing is still possible. That is not a weaker theology. For a lot of people, it is the only thing that keeps them from walking away entirely.

I think it would also look more like the greatest commandments actually being the center. Love God, not appease God, not manage God, not strategically align with God for future benefit. Love neighbor, not as a duty that accumulates spiritual credit, but as the primary place where life with God becomes visible and real.

What I keep landing on is this: the leverage model does not fail because it is too hard. It fails because it aims too low. Fear can get you to the altar. It cannot get you to the place Jesus is pointing.

Love was always meant to do that work.

And if God really is what ORT says God is, uncontrolling, relentlessly present, genuinely relational, and constituted by love all the way down, then coercion was never on the table.

The invitation was.

It still is.

How did we go from bearing crosses to building them?

I first heard that question from Tripp Fuller, and I have not been able to shake it. That question does not feel merely historical to me. It feels personal. Painful. Like a question that rises whenever the church no longer sounds like Jesus, no longer moves like Jesus, no longer makes room for the weak, the wounded, and the unwanted. It rises when the people who bear his name seem more at ease with power than with mercy, more fluent in control than in love.

Jesus gave us the Sermon on the Mount. He blessed the poor, the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers. He told us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, to forgive again and again, to refuse the easy logic of retaliation. He did not gather a people around domination. He gathered a people around trust, love, surrender, and costly faithfulness. The cross was never given to us as something to impose on others. It was given as the shape of a life poured out in love.

And yet the church has not always remained near that life.

One line I came across names the drift with painful clarity:

“The Church became, not an assembly of devout men, grimly earnest about living a holy life, its bishops were statesmen; its officers were men of the world; its members were of the world, basing their conduct on the current maxims of society, held together by the loose bond of a common name, and of a creed which they did not understand.” Edwin Hatch God is Open.

It is a severe judgment. Maybe too severe if taken as the whole story. There were saints in those centuries. There was beauty. There was holiness. There were people who loved God deeply and tried to remain faithful. But the line still pierces because it names a temptation that never really leaves us: the temptation to keep the name of Jesus while losing the way of Jesus.

That is the grief.

Not simply that the church changed, but that it learned how to live with that change. It learned how to sound faithful while becoming comfortable with things Jesus never seemed comfortable with. It learned how to carry the cross as a symbol while setting down the costly life the cross calls us into. It learned how to speak of truth without trembling, how to guard boundaries without tears, how to seek influence without noticing what was being surrendered in the process.

Somewhere along the way, the church became less like a community learning how to love in the shape of Christ and more like an institution trying to survive, manage, and prevail. That may sound strong, but I think many of us have felt it. We have felt the distance between the Jesus who weeps and the church that explains suffering too quickly. The Jesus who blesses peacemakers and the church that can sound strangely at home with domination. The Jesus who moves toward the broken and the church that so often builds itself around strength, certainty, and exclusion.

How did we go from bearing crosses to building them?

Maybe by forgetting what the cross meant in the first place.

The cross is not the victory of force. It is not a divine endorsement of coercion. It is not a way to justify who is in and who is out. It is where God in Christ absorbs violence rather than returning it. It is where love remains love even when the world does its worst. It is where forgiveness refuses to die. To bear the cross, then, is to live in that same pattern: to be shaped by mercy, humility, courage, and self-giving love.

But once the church becomes captivated by power, the cross can be emptied of that meaning. It can remain at the center of our language while disappearing from our actual life together. We can preach Christ crucified and still organize ourselves around fear. We can sing about grace and still make people earn belonging. We can defend doctrine and still fail to sound anything like the one who said, “Come to me.”

That is what makes this more than an old historical problem. This is not just about what happened in the centuries after Christ. This is about what happens whenever the church stops being a place where the heart of Jesus can still be recognized.

It happens whenever strength matters more than tenderness. Whenever certainty matters more than trust. Whenever protecting the institution matters more than telling the truth. Whenever the world’s ideas of success, status, and control seep into the church so deeply that we no longer notice how foreign they are to the gospel.

And maybe that is why this question carries so much sadness.

Because many of us were taught to look to the church for the presence of Jesus, only to find something harsher. More anxious. More controlling. More interested in being right than in being healed. More eager to win than to love. And when that happens, it is not only disappointing. It can shake faith itself. Not because Jesus has failed, but because those meant to bear his life have sometimes obscured it.

Still, I do not want to end in cynicism.

The point is not to stand over the church and condemn it. The point is to grieve honestly enough that we might still return. Beneath all the distortion, all the empire, all the fear, all the spiritual ambition, Jesus remains who he is. He is still the one who blesses the meek, who draws near to the suffering, who refuses the sword, who weeps at the tomb, who forgives from the cross. The church does not need a more polished version of power. It needs to remember him.

Maybe that is where healing begins. Not by pretending the drift never happened, and not by defending every chapter of church history as if honesty were a threat. Healing begins when we tell the truth. When we admit how easily the church can carry the name of Christ while resisting his way. When we let ourselves feel the sorrow of that. And when, in that sorrow, we hear again the invitation of Jesus, not to conquer, not to control, not to build crosses for others, but to take up our own and follow him.

So how did we go from bearing crosses to building them?

By losing sight of the crucified one.

And how do we begin to find our way back?

By looking at him again long enough for his life to become imaginable in us.

For a long time, many of us were taught that faith meant believing the right things.

Not just believing them, but holding them with enough clarity to prove you belonged. The questions were constant, even when unspoken: Do you have the correct doctrine? Can you defend it? Are you sure? Faith became something to secure, define, and protect. The center of spiritual life moved into the head, and the emotional climate was mostly fear.

That framework does something to a person. It teaches you to look inward with suspicion. It trains you to measure spiritual health by doctrinal precision. You can spend years inside that kind of religion and still not know peace, because peace is always contingent on whether your beliefs are accurate enough, stable enough, pure enough.

For some people, that feels safe. It offers structure and answers the ache for certainty. But over time, it can become exhausting. Christianity starts to feel less like a life with God and more like managing theological risk.

So what happens when that begins to loosen?

What happens when faith stops being primarily assent to a set of doctrines and becomes trust in God?

That shift changes more than vocabulary. It changes the shape of an entire life.

Trust is personal. It’s lived. It grows out of the recognition that God is not merely an object to be described correctly, but a reality to whom a person can actually entrust themselves. That doesn’t mean theology stops mattering. It means theology is no longer asked to carry a weight it was never meant to carry. Beliefs are no longer the foundation of security. They’re no longer the final proof that you’re safe.

When faith becomes trust, a person can admit uncertainty without feeling like everything has collapsed. They can stop pretending to have airtight answers about God and still remain genuinely open to God. That kind of faith may feel thinner to people trained to equate faith with certainty, but it’s often more honest and more resilient.

Sometimes the presence of God is simply enough.

Not in a sentimental way. Enough in the sense that God’s reality becomes the ground from which life is actually lived, even when questions remain unsettled. Enough to keep moving. Enough to tell the truth. Enough to keep a person from building their whole life around control.

That’s where the life of Jesus starts to matter differently.

Jesus is no longer mainly the object of correct belief. He becomes the shape of a life. The Christian question shifts not only to what I affirm, but also to what I am becoming. Am I becoming more truthful, more merciful, more courageous, more available to grace? Less controlled by fear, less obsessed with sorting the world into the safe and the suspect? Am I learning to actually inhabit the way of Jesus?

That matters because trusting God is not simply about securing an afterlife. It forms us. It bends us away from self-protection and toward love. It teaches us to live in responsive relationship with a God whose presence is not always obvious, not always explainable, and not always accompanied by the certainty our tribes demand.

From there, another horizon opens. If faith is trust, and if God’s presence is something we live from rather than merely affirm, then the Christian life becomes participatory. Not in some inflated sense. In the very ordinary and costly sense of becoming available to mercy, healing, truth, reconciliation, and hope. That’s part of what it means to pray for the kingdom to come and then live as though that prayer matters.

The kingdom comes near when the excluded are welcomed. When grief is met with presence instead of explanation. When power is used to protect rather than crush. When truth is told without cruelty. When people stop using God-language to justify fear and domination. Not fully. Not once and for all. But really.

Now here’s where I expect the pushback.

People formed in these traditions will say none of this is fair. They will say that what they’re defending isn’t mere preference or cultural habit but historic Christian orthodoxy, the faith once delivered, the settled inheritance of the church, the doctrines that faithful Christians have held across the ages. And they will mean it. They will also say that their theology doesn’t stop them from following Jesus, that they serve people, love their neighbors, feed the hungry, care about holiness, and want to bear witness to Christ in the world. In many cases, that’s true. There are sincere, generous, sacrificial people inside those systems. This isn’t a claim that no one within them can love well.

The deeper question is what those systems tend to produce over time. What kind of spiritual imagination do they cultivate? What kind of social posture? What kind of witness to the world beyond themselves?

That’s where the problem becomes harder to ignore.

A certainty-driven system may still contain acts of love, but the system itself often trains people to guard borders before they love across them. It gives enormous energy to identifying threats, testing soundness, preserving confessional purity, and knowing exactly who’s in and who’s out. It can still use the language of grace, discipleship, mission, and service, but much of its emotional energy goes toward maintaining a fortress.

Fortresses always require an inside and an outside.

Once that structure becomes normal, the church starts imagining faithfulness in tribal terms. The right doctrines, the right authorities, the right language, the right enemies. The protected group becomes the place of safety, and the boundary itself starts to feel sacred. People may still speak of love, but love gets filtered through anxiety. They may still speak of truth, but truth gets fused with group identity. They may still speak of Jesus, but Jesus gets quietly remade into the defender of the system rather than the one who continually unsettles it.

That has consequences, not only for those on the inside.

To the outside world, Christians formed by fortress-faith often don’t look like people marked by open-hearted presence, mercy, or genuine welcome. They look guarded. Combative. Easily threatened. More interested in correct alignment than human need. More prepared to sort people than to sit with them. The message many outsiders receive isn’t that God is near or that grace is real. The message is that Christianity is a defended enclosure with a strict admissions policy.

That distortion matters because Jesus doesn’t move through the Gospels like a man building a fortress of purity.

He does draw lines, but notice where. His sharpest words aren’t for the morally wounded, the spiritually confused, or the outsider looking for mercy. His sharpest words are for religious leaders who turned faithfulness into a system of exclusion. People who confused certainty with righteousness. People who could define, classify, and condemn with precision while remaining strangely untouched by mercy.

That’s why the sheep and goats parable remains so disturbing. The dividing line isn’t doctrinal precision. It isn’t whether people had the correct formulations ready at hand. The crisis of the parable is whether Christ was encountered in the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned, and whether that encounter called forth mercy. The shock is that some who likely thought themselves secure missed him entirely.

That should make certainty-driven Christians pause.

Because it suggests you can be very sure of your theology and still fail at the exact point where Jesus says he is actually met. A belief system can constantly speak of grace and still form people in the habits of exclusion. It can produce service while producing suspicion. It can motivate the mission while quietly reinforcing the logic of insiders and outsiders. It can talk about truth while making repentance very difficult, because too much identity has been staked on never having been wrong.

That’s one of the great costs of certainty-centered Christianity. It doesn’t only burden the believer with fear. It deforms Christian witness in public. It tells the watching world that Christianity is mainly about having the right answers, joining the right camp, and defending the right borders. The church looks less like a community where God’s life is becoming visible and more like a guarded ideological settlement.

And people can feel that, even when Christians can’t.

This is why the move from faith-as-assent to faith-as-trust matters so much. It doesn’t erase theology. It doesn’t reduce everything to private experience. It relocates the center. It puts the emphasis back on trust in God, openness to God’s presence, formation into the likeness of Jesus, and participation in the life of the kingdom.

That kind of faith is harder to weaponize. It leaves less room for superiority. It doesn’t let a person hide behind formulas as easily. It keeps asking what sort of human being is being formed here. It keeps pressing toward embodiment. Toward mercy. Toward a life that can actually become good news to others.

Does our version of Christianity make us easier to be around for the wounded, the doubting, the outsider, the grieving? Does it make us more available to the people Jesus seemed most available to? Does it train us to recognize Christ in vulnerability, or only in correctness? Does it make us gentler, braver, freer, less defensive?

Those questions matter more to me now than whether I can still say every sentence my old tribe wanted me to say.

I understand why people cling to certainty. It feels safe. It offers closure. It tells you where you stand. But it comes with hidden costs. It can shrink the soul. It can make humility feel dangerous. It can make a person more loyal to a system than available to God.

And there’s an irony worth naming. What gets called historic Christian orthodoxy is often less ancient than it claims. More indebted to a particular 16th-century retrieval than to the whole sweep of Christian life, practice, and formation across the centuries. The tradition is real. But so is the selectivity.

A faith built on trust won’t feel as secure to those who need everything nailed down. It leaves room for silence. It leaves room for mystery. It demands more honesty. It strips away the satisfaction of always knowing exactly where the lines are.

But it may be the kind of faith that can still breathe when certainty breaks down. That can survive disappointment and ambiguity without collapsing. That helps a person stop defending Christianity as a fortress and begin living it as presence.

Maybe the goal was never to become people who can state correct beliefs with increasing confidence and use that confidence to sort the world. Maybe the goal was to trust God deeply enough that our lives begin to take on the shape of Jesus. People through whom mercy becomes visible. Through whom the lonely are welcomed, the wounded aren’t explained away, and the presence of God becomes something more than a doctrine.

People through whom the kingdom comes a little nearer for those around them.

That’s the kind of faith I want now, even with all the uncertainty that comes with it.

I need to start with a confession.

For most of my adult life, I believed in a God who was mostly untouchable. Not in a bad way, at least, that is not how it felt at the time. It felt serious. Reverent. Like I had a grip on something real and weighty. God was holy, sovereign, and in control of everything. Nothing happened outside his plan. That faith gave me stability. It gave me a framework. It gave me a serious Bible, a serious theology, and a community of people who took them seriously.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, a question kept sitting there that I could never quite answer:

If God is in control of everything, and God cannot really be hurt or moved by what happens to us, then what does it mean for God to love us?

I did not ask that question out loud for a long time. It felt dangerous. Like pulling a thread that might unravel the whole sweater.

Then I pulled the thread.

The Question That Started It

It started with a friend asking me a question.

We were talking about the Hebrew Scriptures, the parts that are hard to read. The parts where God seems to command violence, where whole cities are wiped out, where things happen that feel nothing like the Jesus I read about in the Gospels. And he asked me something simple: What if we stopped trying to justify all of that? What if we stopped assuming every difficult thing in those texts is a direct divine command we have to defend?

That question hit me harder than I expected.

Around the same time, I started reading the work of the biblical scholar Peter Enns. His basic argument was this: a lot of what we read in the Old Testament is ancient people, real people, living through real trauma and real history, trying to make sense of their lives in the presence of God. They were doing their best. That does not make scripture less true or less meaningful. It might actually make it more honest.

And here is what that opened up for me: if Jesus is the clearest picture of who God actually is, then maybe I should read the whole Bible through that lens. Not the other way around.

Once I started doing that, I could not stop asking questions.

· What kind of God actually needs violence?

· What kind of God do I see in Jesus?

· How did a faith built around “love your enemies” end up blessing so many wars?

· How did caring for the poor and the vulnerable get pushed to the edges while rules and right belief took center stage?

Those are not just historical questions. They are personal ones. And they led me somewhere I did not expect.

The God I Was Taught

To understand where I ended up, I have to be honest about where I started.

I grew up theologically in a world shaped by John Calvin and the Reformed tradition. That world has a very specific picture of God. God is completely in control. God does not change. God cannot be affected by what happens in the world. God’s emotions, if you can even call them that, do not fluctuate based on what creatures do. God is, in a word, untouchable.

There is actually a technical term for this idea: impassibility. It means God cannot suffer, cannot be moved, cannot be changed by anything outside of God. For centuries, this was considered one of the most important things you could say about God. It was meant to protect the idea that God is stable, faithful, and not subject to the chaos of the world.

I understand why that idea developed. If God can be hurt, changed, or affected, does that mean God is weak? Does that mean creation has power over the Creator? Those are real concerns.

But here is what I slowly started to notice: the God described in the Bible does not really fit that picture.

The God of the Bible hears people cry and responds. He changes his mind. He grieves. He gets angry. He celebrates. He is moved with compassion. Jesus, who Christians believe is God in human form, weeps at a friend’s tomb. He is overwhelmed in the garden before his arrest. He cries out from the cross, feeling abandoned.

That is not a God who is untouched by the world.

So how did we get from that God to the idea of an unmovable, unaffected divine being?

The short answer is: we borrowed it.

Where the Idea Came From

When Christianity spread through the ancient world, it moved into a culture deeply shaped by Greek philosophy. And Greek philosophy had very strong ideas about what a perfect being had to look like.

Perfect meant unchanging. Perfect meant unaffected. Perfect meant above all the mess and movement of the world. The highest kind of being, in that way of thinking, was one that nothing could touch.

Early Christian thinkers, brilliant people, trying to translate their faith into a new cultural language, picked up some of those ideas. And over time, those ideas became so normal that they started to feel like they had always been part of Christianity. They got woven into official church documents. They got taught in seminaries. They shaped how preachers preached and how ordinary people imagined God.

The problem is that some of those Greek ideas about perfection are not really compatible with the God of the Bible, especially the God revealed in Jesus.

A historian named Edwin Hatch made this argument more than a century ago. His point was not that Christianity became pagan or fake. His point was that as Christianity entered the Greek world, its center of gravity quietly shifted. It started spending more energy defining what God is like in the abstract, and less energy staying close to the story of what God actually does.

And once your picture of God is shaped by the idea that perfection means being untouchable, that shift shows up everywhere. Including how you understand the cross.

The Cross and the Problem It Was Solving

This is where it gets personal for me.

Think about the most common way the cross gets explained in conservative evangelical churches. It usually goes something like this: humanity sinned against a holy God. That sin created a debt that had to be paid. God’s justice required punishment. Someone had to take the punishment. Jesus stepped in and took it for us. The Father’s wrath fell on the Son. Justice was satisfied. Now we can be forgiven.

I grew up with that explanation. I preached it. I believed it.

And I am not saying it is completely wrong. There are real things in the Bible about sacrifice, about sin having consequences, about Jesus bearing something on our behalf. I do not want to flatten all of that.

But here is what I started to notice: that whole explanation only makes sense if you start with a very specific picture of God. A God whose primary problem with humanity is a legal one. A God who, above all else, needs justice to be satisfied before love can be expressed. A God who, because he cannot truly suffer with us, needs the cross to solve a problem in the courtroom rather than enter the anguish of the human story.

Once God becomes untouchable, the cross becomes mostly a transaction.

And the slogans follow from there.

“The Father turned away from Jesus on the cross.”

“God had to punish someone, and Jesus took the hit.”

“Jesus became sin, so God couldn’t even look at him.”

“This had to happen.”

People say these things as though they are just reading the Bible plainly. But they are not. They are reading the Bible through a very specific picture of God that has a long philosophical history behind it. That picture did not drop straight from heaven. It developed over centuries. And it has consequences.

When It Stops Being Abstract

Here is where theology gets real.

Imagine a mother sitting in a hospital room, watching her child suffer from a disease that will not stop. She prays. Nothing changes. She begs. Silence.

What do you tell her about God?

If your God is primarily a God of control, arranging all things from above according to a sovereign plan, unmoved by creaturely pain, then your answers will sound like this: God has a reason. This is part of his purpose. Trust the plan. Your suffering is not outside his will.

Maybe those words are meant to comfort. But for a lot of people in that room, they land like stones. Because what they actually communicate is: God is watching this from a distance. God is not here in the way that matters.

Or imagine someone who grew up being told that God is a judge whose primary posture toward them is wrath, and that the only thing standing between them and punishment is whether they got the right beliefs right. What does that do to a person? What does it do to prayer? What does it do to shame?

Theology always ends up somewhere. It ends up in hospital rooms and at gravesides and in the middle of the night when you are trying to figure out if any of this is real.

And that is what pushed me to keep asking.

A Different Picture

What if perfection does not mean untouchable?

What if the greatest thing about God is not that nothing can touch him, but that nothing can stop him from loving?

There are theologians who have been making this argument for a long time. Some of them work in what is called open and relational theology. Others work in process theology. They use different language and have some real differences. But they share a basic conviction: that love, real love, requires the capacity to be genuinely affected by the one you love.

Think about it this way. If someone you love is in pain, and you feel nothing, are you really loving them? Or are you just performing love from a safe distance?

A God who cannot be moved by our suffering, who cannot receive our pain into the divine life, who watches from above without being genuinely affected, that God may be powerful. But it is hard to call that love in any sense that matches what we actually mean by the word.

The theologian Thomas Jay Oord puts it directly: if God is love, and love is inherently relational, then God must be genuinely affected by what happens to us. Our tears matter to God. Our joy matters to God. Our prayers are not just noise going into a void; they land somewhere real.

That is not a God who is weak. That is a God who is strong enough to be vulnerable. Strong enough to enter the pain. Strong enough not to look away.

What the Cross Looks Like From Here

Once I started seeing God that way, the cross looked different.

It was no longer primarily about a legal transaction, sin creating a debt that justice required someone to pay. It became something bigger and, to me, more true: God entering the worst of what the world can do, all the way to the bottom, and refusing to be destroyed by it.

The cross is not God punishing Jesus so that God can love us.

The cross is God in Christ going all the way into the darkness, the violence, the abandonment, the death, because that is where love goes when love is serious.

Jesus does not reveal a God who is watching from a philosophical height above human pain. He reveals a God who weeps at tombs. Who eats with people everyone else has written off. Who gets arrested, beaten, and executed, and whose last words from the cross are not a declaration of victory but a cry of desolation: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

That is not the cry of a transaction going according to plan.

That is the cry of love going all the way in.

And the resurrection, the part that comes after, is not God tidying up the transaction. It is God saying that love is stronger than everything that tried to kill it.

Where I Landed

I am still on this journey. I want to be honest about that. I do not have everything figured out. There are real questions I am still sitting with.

But here is what I can say.

The God I believe in now is not untouchable. He is not running the world from a distance, arranging suffering into a plan that will make sense later. He is not primarily a judge waiting for the right legal conditions before he can love.

The God I believe in is present in the pain. Not explaining it. Not managing it from above. Present in it. The way a parent is present with a sick child, not because they can fix everything, but because they will not leave.

That is what I see in Jesus. Not a sacrifice that satisfies an angry God. A God who became human, entered the full weight of what it means to be human, suffered what humans suffer, died how the vulnerable die, and came back.

I think that God is easier to trust in a hospital room.

I think that God is easier to call out to in the dark.

I think that God is the one the Psalms were written to, not a deity who needs flattery and legal precision, but a living presence who can handle our grief, our rage, our doubt, and our silence.

The question that started this whole journey, what kind of God actually loves us?, I think I have a better answer now than I used to.

Not a God who watches from above.

A God who loves too deeply to stay away.

Not a God who explains every wound.

A God who refuses to abandon the wounded.