Patience—A Theological Exploration: Part One, from Creation to Christ 9780567694393, 9780567694386, 9780567694423, 9780567694416

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
How to Read This Book
Introduction
1 Patience, Language, and Theological Reflection
2 Overview
3 Patience in the Bible
4 On Exploration and Imagination
5 Conclusion
Part One: Interpretation
1 Patience in Patristic and Medieval Theology: From Tertullian to Julian of Norwich
1 Tertullian and Cyprian
2 Beyond the Third Century; Augustine of Hippo
3 Thomas Aquinas and Julian of Norwich
4 Conclusion
2 Patience in the Context of the European Reformation: Forbearance, Haste, and Transformation
1 John Calvin
2 Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt, and Michael Sattler
3 Taking Stock
3 From Barth to “Burdened Virtue”: The Promise and Perils of Patience
1 Karl Barth: Patience as a Divine Perfection
2 The Afterlife of Patience in the Church Dogmatics
3 Interlude
4 Patience in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Theology and Philosophy
5 Patience as a “Burdened Virtue”
Part Two: Construction
4 The Patience of God the Creator
1 Creatio ex Nihilo
2 Creatio Cooperativa
3 Imago Dei, Imago Mundi
4 Broadening the View
5 Coda: The Environmental Crisis and the Patience of God the Creator
5 The Patience of God the Provider (1)
1 Approaching Providence
2 Persistent Blessing
3 Creaturely Waywardness
4 Divine Longsuffering
6 The Patience of God the Provider (2)
1 Patience as Steadfastness
2 Patience Rewarded: On the Formation of Scripture
3 Divine Patience and History at Large
Epilogue: Retrospect and Prospect
Appendix: The Classical, Medieval, and Modern Backdrop to Patience
Bibliography
Scriptural References
Index

Citation preview

Patience—A Theological Exploration

ii

Patience—A Theological Exploration Part One, from Creation to Christ Paul Dafydd Jones

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Paul Dafydd Jones, 2023 Paul Dafydd Jones has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xii–xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. “Adjustments” by R. S. Thomas reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Cover design: Grace Ridge Cover image: Polyphony, 1932, by Paul Klee (1879–1940), tempera, 66,5x106 cm. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-9439-3 PB: 978-0-5676-9438-6 ePDF: 978-0-5676-9441-6 ePUB: 978-0-5676-9440-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.­

­pacience is a point, thagh hit displese ofte (patience is a virtue, though it displeases often) “PATIENCE,” BY THE GAWAIN POET

Something is always being delivered Out of the unknown. Often Out of the impossible— The hour’s every moment, like a spring source Divulges something new. A thought out of the heart. A strange knocking at the door. ­FROM EURIPIDES’S ALCESTIS, TRANSLATED AND ADAPTED BY TED HUGHES

vi

. . . for Kate

viii

­C ONTENTS

Acknowledgments  xii List of Abbreviations  xvi How to Read This Book  xxvi

Introduction  1 1 Patience, Language, and Theological Reflection  1 2 Overview  7 3 Patience in the Bible  13 4 On Exploration and Imagination  45 5 Conclusion  61

Part One: Interpretation 1 Patience in Patristic and Medieval Theology: From Tertullian to Julian of Norwich  65 1 Tertullian and Cyprian  67 2 Beyond the Third Century; Augustine of Hippo  76 3 Thomas Aquinas and Julian of Norwich  93 4 Conclusion  132

2 Patience in the Context of the European Reformation: Forbearance, Haste, and Transformation  135 1 John Calvin  140 2 Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt, and Michael Sattler  164 3 Taking Stock  188

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CONTENTS

3 From Barth to “Burdened Virtue”: The Promise and Perils of Patience  195 1 Karl Barth: Patience as a Divine Perfection  199 2 The Afterlife of Patience in the Church Dogmatics  221 3 Interlude  226 4 Patience in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Theology and Philosophy  240 5 Patience as a “Burdened Virtue”  267

Part Two: Construction 4 The Patience of God the Creator  299 1 Creatio ex Nihilo  304 2 Creatio Cooperativa  316 3 Imago Dei, Imago Mundi  326 4 Broadening the View  333 5 Coda: The Environmental Crisis and the Patience of God the Creator  346

5 The Patience of God the Provider (1)  355 1 2 3 4

Approaching Providence  360 Persistent Blessing  374 Creaturely Waywardness  396 Divine Longsuffering  435

6 The Patience of God the Provider (2)  463 1 Patience as Steadfastness  466 2 Patience Rewarded: On the Formation of Scripture  497 3 Divine Patience and History at Large  512

CONTENTS

Epilogue: Retrospect and Prospect  537 Appendix: The Classical, Medieval, and Modern Backdrop to Patience  543 Bibliography  547 Scriptural References  586 Index  591 ­

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The foolhardy desire to undertake a project in constructive theology took root in the early months of 2011—a time in which I had become disenchanted with a perfectly sensible, nicely circumscribed, in-process, and probably quite worthy book project, and a time, not coincidentally, in which my spouse and I were reckoning with the joys, fears, and exhaustions that accompanied the birth of our first child. While I continue to wonder if I was right to act on this desire, I was unable to stifle it. This hefty tome, which forms the first installment of a multivolume work, is a consequence of that inability. I owe great thanks to numerous academic friends and colleagues who have engaged, encouraged, and critiqued my interest in patience. Foremost among them are faculty and students at the University of Virginia, all of whom have supported me in ways too numerous to mention, even—and, sometimes, especially—when they were unaware of it, and a number of whom have endured my prose. Particular thanks must go to Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, Lawrie Balfour, Asher Biemann, Larry Bouchard, Christopher Choi, Jason Evans, Kathleen Flake, Nichole Flores, Jennifer Geddes, Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Kevin Hart, Matthew Hedstrom, Bruce Holsinger, Willis Jenkins, Sonam Kachru, Rebekah Latour (proofreader extraordinaire), Charles Marsh, Kurtis Schaeffer, Ethan Shearer, Karl Shuve, Shelly Tilton (who suffered through some chapters in their early forms), Janet Spittler, and Blair Wilner. Extra special thanks go to Charles Mathewes, with whom I co-direct the project on “Religions and Its Publics.” While Chuck is renowned for being an indefatigable interlocutor and bibliographical savant, he has also supported this project with characteristic kindness, humor, and a few dashes of well-turned cynicism. I owe him a great deal as a friend, colleague, and co-conspirator. Beyond scholars at UVa, I’ve gained much from conversations and advice from a

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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wide circle of colleagues and friends, each of whom has advanced my thinking in various ways (again, often unawares), and some of whom have also suffered through drafts of portions of this book. I am particularly grateful to the late Pamela Sue Anderson, Nikki Bailey, William Boyce, Elizabeth Bucar, Shaun Casey, Sarah Coakley, David Congdon, Kristine Culp, Brandy Daniels, Kait Dugan, Ashleigh Elser, Tom Greggs, Caleb Hendrickson, Markus Höfner, Michael Hogue, Stephen Lakkis, Joe Lenow, Tal Lewis, Vincent Lloyd, Bruce McCormack, Anne Mocko, Alexander-Kenneth Nagel, Paul T. Nimmo, Shelli Poe, Joshua Ralston, Hanna Reichel, the late Tyler Roberts, Eugene Rogers, Michelle Chaplain Sanchez, William Schweiker, Lea Schweitz, Ted Smith, Heike Springhart, Katherine Sonderegger, Janet Martin Soskice, Kathryn Tanner, Günter Thomas, Darlene Foster Weaver, the late John Webster, Martin Wendte, Bill Wood, and Phil Ziegler. Ronald Thiemann, a dear friend and cherished mentor, only learned about this project in its very embryonic form before his untimely death, but I hope that it goes some way toward honoring his belief that Barth’s thought can and should be made “usable” for the twenty-first century. I wish he were alive to read it, to enjoy it, to criticize its longwindedness and moments of unclarity, and to tell me that I shouldn’t have taken so damn long to finish it. Multiple audiences helped me to formulate the interpretative and constructive claims of this book, indulging my muddles and confusions and providing clarifying and critical commentary on the same. I want particularly to acknowledge the feedback given by scholars and students at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Australian Catholic University, Charles Sturt University (Canberra), United Theological College/Charles Sturt University School of Theology, the Karl Barth Society of North America, the University of Virginia, Theological Horizons, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Geneva, the audience at the 51st Internationale Barth-Tagung, and multiple units at the American Academy of Religion. While I cannot say that I have heeded every bit of advice, I am convinced that whatever worth this book has depends on the kindness of thoughtful interlocutors. Work on this publication was also made possible in part through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which supported The Enhancing Life Project. A necessary disclaimer: the opinions

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. A more necessary record of indebtedness: I am hugely grateful for the sage advice and friendship of Günter Thomas and William Schweiker, co-PIs of The Enhancing Life Project, who pressed me to reconceive this work in important ways. I want also to record my appreciation for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, who appointed me a Residential Fellow during the Spring and Fall semesters of 2016, when I was part of The Enhancing Life Project. VFH provided me with an office, access to library books, and innumerable cups of coffee, as well as the scholarly camaraderie needed to make any research leave worthwhile. I owe thanks to the Scottish Journal of Theology, and thus also to Cambridge University Press, for permission to draw on Paul Dafydd Jones, “On Patience: Thinking with and beyond Karl Barth” (SJT 68, no. 3 [2015]: 273–98) in Chapter 3. I am also grateful to the International Journal of Systematic Theology, and thus also to John Wiley and Sons, for permission to draw on Paul Dafydd Jones, “The Patience of God the Creator: Reflections on Genesis 1:1–2:4a” (MT 21, no. 4: [2019]: 361–87) in Chapter  4. While these articles are now nested in a much broader context and have undergone a fair bit of revision, they were important steps in this project’s formation. Finally, in addition to many friends, among whom stand the good people of Grace Church, Red Hill, I owe an inestimable debt to my family: my two children, Samuel and Tobias; my spouse, Kate Becker; my mother and father; and a wide circle of relatives, scattered across the United Kingdom, the United States, and farther afield. Sam and Toby are tireless in reminding me that scholarly work is far less important than I am prone to think, and that my time would be better spent on other pursuits, stretching from Roadrunner cartoons to minigolf, prospective sites for goldmining, the identification of rare license plates, and a more constant provision of snacks. I cannot now imagine life without my children, whom I love and cherish in ways that I never knew were possible, and whose vitality, zaniness, curiosity, and affection have made my life fantastically rich, even during the tragedies of a global pandemic and outbursts of political depravity. As for Kate, to whom I dedicate this book: I will not say that I am in awe of her patience with me—as will become clear, I am duly wary of that

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kind of claim, given its entanglement with all manner of wayward dynamics—and I know that her support of my intellectual pursuits is paired with a combination of bewilderment, delight, skepticism, and, thankfully, good humor. But she has been a companion beyond compare, and our love for each other and life together are blessings for which I am ever grateful. Indeed, among the many people who have taught me about what it means to make good on God’s exercise of patience, Kate stands head and shoulders above all others. Charlottesville, Virginia February 2022

­A BBREVIATIONS

Primary sources 1 and 2 Apol. Justin Martyr, The First and Second Apologies, ed. and trans. Leslie William Barnard (Mahwah: Paulist, 1997). 1 Clem.

Clement of Rome, “The Epistle to the Corinthians,” in The Epistles of St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch, trans. James A. Kleist (Westminster: The Newman Bookshop, 1946), 1–49.

Ad Dem.

Cyprian, “To Demetrian,” in Saint Cyprian: Treatises, trans. Roy Deferrari et al. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958), 161–91.

ANF

Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10 vols (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994).

Apol.

Tertullian, “Apology,” in Tertullian: Apology and De Spectaculis; Minucius Felix: Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover and Gerald H. Rendall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), ix–227.

CD

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–77).

CDH Anselm, Cur Deus homo, in Anselm, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Thomas William (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 237–326.

­ABBREVIATION

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Chr. theol.

Johannes Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, in Reformed Dogmatics: J. Wollebius, G. Voetius, F. Turretin, ed. and trans. John W. Beardslee III (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 27–262.

Civ. Dei

Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

CL

Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV, 4, Lecture Fragments, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: T&T Clark, 2004).

Comm.

John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, ed. The Calvin Translation Society, 22 vols (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979); and John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, ed. David W. Torrance and T. F. Torrance, 12 vols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959–72). The latter is always used for New Testament texts. Per convention, references are to the biblical book, chapter, and verse(s) that Calvin considers.

Conf.

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

CT

Thomas Aquinas, Compendium of Theology, trans. Richard J. Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

De bon. pat.

Cyprian, “The Good of Patience,” in Saint Cyprian: Treatises, trans. Roy Deferrari et al. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958), 255–87.

­De cat. rud. Augustine, Instructing Beginners in Faith, ed. Boniface Ramsey and trans. Raymond Canning (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2006). De inc. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011). De pat.

Tertullian, “Patience,” in Tertullian: Disciplinary, Moral, and Ascetical Works, trans. Rudolf

xviii

­ABBREVIATION

Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), 189–222. De pat.2

Augustine, “Patience,” in St. Augustine: Treatises on Various Subjects, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 233–64.

De princip. Origen, On First Principles: A Reader’s Edition, trans. John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). De spec.

Tertullian, “Spectacles,” in Tertullian: Disciplinary, Moral, and Ascetical Works, trans. Rudolf Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), 31–107.

De Trin. Augustine, The Trinity, ed. John E. Rotelle and trans. Edmund Hill, 2nd edn (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1990). D.L.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Books 6–10, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925).

DO

Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Harpers & Row, 1959).

EC

The Essential Carlstadt: Fifteen tracts by Andreas Bodenstein (Carlstadt) from Karlstad, ed. and trans. E. J. Furcha (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1995).

Enarr. Pss. Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, ed. John E. Rotelle and trans. Maria Boulding, 6 vols (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2000–2004). Epict. diss. Epictetus, Discourses, in Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–277. ET

Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963).

­ABBREVIATION

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FBW

Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

FD

Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).

GD

Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, ed. Hannelotte Reiffen and trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).

Gl.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999).

­Gn. adv. Man. Augustine, On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, in On Genesis, ed. John E. Rotelle and trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), 39–102. Gn. litt. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, in On Genesis, ed. John E. Rotelle and trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), 168–506. Gn. litt. inp. Augustine, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis, in On Genesis, ed. John E. Rotelle and trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2002), 114–51. Inst.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Louisville: WJKP, 2006).

Laches

Plato, Laches, in Laches; Protagoras; Meno; Euthydemus, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 1–83.

LMS

Legacy of Michael Sattler, ed. and trans. John H. Yoder (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1973).

LW

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: American Edition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vols 1–30 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–73); ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, vols 31–55 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957–86).

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Med.

­ABBREVIATION

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Nic. eth. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934). NPNF2

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 14 vols (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994).

PCT

John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 2nd edn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977).

Pens.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995).

PR

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, corrected edn (New York: The Free Press, 1978).

Pros. Anselm, Proslogion, in Anselm, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Thomas William (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 75–98. Prov. Seneca, On Providence, in Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3–17. RII

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn Hoskyns, 6th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933).

­Rev.

Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 121–381. Commonly known as the Long Text.

RL

W. H. Vanstone, The Risk of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

RM

Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996).

­ABBREVIATION

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SB

Philip Schaff, Slavery and the Bible: A Tract for the Times (Chambersburg: M. Kieffer and Co.’s Caloric Printing Press, 1861).

SD

Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1977).

Sen. Ep.

Seneca, Selected Letters, trans. Elaine Fantham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

SMW

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967).

ST

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols (New York: Benziger Bros, 1948).

ST1, 2, 3

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1: Reason and Revelation, Being and God; vol. 2: Existence and the Christ; vol. 3: Life and the Spirit, History and the Kingdom of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, and 1963).

SW

W. H. Vanstone, The Stature of Waiting (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 2004).

SWI

Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 2002).

Vis.

Julian of Norwich, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 61–119. Commonly known as the Short Text.

WCW

Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet, 2000).

WGT

Karl Barth, The Word of God and Theology, trans. Amy Marga (London: T&T Clark, 2011).

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­ABBREVIATION

Other texts AcPB

Acta Patristica et Byzantina

AcTheo

Acta Theologica

AJS

AJS Review

ATS

Alta Theologica Supplementum

AugSt

Augustinian Studies

BBibRes

Bulletin for Biblical Research

­BSac

Bibliotheca Sacra

CBQ

The Catholic Biblical Quarterly

CCent

The Christian Century

CH

Church History

CL

Christianity and Literature

ConvBW

Conversations with the Biblical World

CPhil

Classical Philology

Crosscurrents Crosscurrents CTQ

Concordia Theological Quarterly

CTSAP

Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings

CurTM

Currents in Theology and Mission

Dialog

Dialog

ETL

Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses

Exemplaria

Exemplaria

FemTh

Feminist Theology

HeyJ

The Heythrop Journal

Hor.

Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society

­ABBREVIATION

HPT

History of Political Thought

HTS

HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies

IJST

International Journal of Systematic Theology

Int

Interpretation

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JBR

Journal of Bible and Religion

JChSt

Journal of Church and State

JETS

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society

JMRC

Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures

JR

Journal of Religion

JRE

Journal of Religious Ethics

JRTh

Journal of Reformed Theology

JSCE

Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics

JSNT

Journal for the Study of the New Testament

JSOT

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

JSQ

Jewish Studies Quarterly

JTE

Journal of Theological Ethics

JTS

Journal of Theological Studies

KJV

King James Version

ModPhil

Modern Philology

MQ

Milton Quarterly

MQR

Mennonite Quarterly Review

MT

Modern Theology

­NB

New Blackfriars

NF

New Formations

NLH

New Literary History

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xxiv

­ABBREVIATION

NovVet

Nova et Vetera

NRSV

New Revised Standard Version

NZSTR

Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie

PCTSA

Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America

ProEcc

Pro Ecclesia

PRSt

Perspectives in Religious Studies

PT

Political Theology

Ren

Renascence

ResQ

Restoration Quarterly

R&R

Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme

RRR

Reformation and Renaissance Review

RSQ

Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Semeia

Semeia

SJT

Scottish Journal of Theology

Spat

Studia Patristica

Speculum

Speculum

SR

Social Research: An International Quarterly

STR

Sewanee Theological Review

Theol

Theology

Thomist

The Thomist

ThScot

Theology in Scotland

TRM

The Review of Metaphysics

TS

Theological Studies

TTod

Theology Today

­ABBREVIATION

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TynBul

Tyndale Bulletin

VC

Vigiliae Christianae

VE

Verbum et Ecclesia

VoD

Voices of Democracy

VT

Vetus Testamentum

ZAW

Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

ZKG

Zeitschift für Kirchengeschichte

ZNW

Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft

Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural quotations are taken from the NRSV.

­H OW TO READ THIS BOOK

You are likely already aware—perhaps because you’ve perused the table of contents, perhaps because you feel its weight in your hands—that this book is not short. Its length is partly a consequence of the subject matter; partly a consequence of a prose style that lingers over numerous authors and complex ideas (or, less charitably, devolves into prolixity); and partly a consequence of a refusal to separate interpretative and constructive work, given my decision to pair readings of landmark texts with an (incomplete) exploration of what patience might mean for Christian theology today. Most authors hope that readers will move through a text from start to finish, and I do not want to dissuade anyone from tackling this book in that way. It amounts to an extended argument, with a series of interpretative claims leading into a constructive program. However, life is often too short for the reading of long books, so I have also endeavored to write in a way that allows for more selective engagement. Those looking to understand how earlier authors have engaged patience may wish to focus their energies on Part One. While I do not presume to offer anything like a history of patience in Christian thought, Chapters 1, 2, and 3 can probably be read, singly or in combination, as a series of interlocking interpretative exercises. By contrast, those wanting to reckon directly with a constructive perspective should focus their energies on Part Two. Such readers may opt, specifically, to read parts of the Introduction and then leap directly to Chapters 4, 5, and 6, glancing at the first half of the book as time and interest permit. Two additional comments might also prove helpful. First, I have opted to include a number of small-print sections in this book. These sections bear some resemblance to the style adopted in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (formal resemblance: I do not offer anything close to Barth’s depth of insight) and serve

­HOW TO READ THIS BOO

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as something of a tribute to an author whose presence will be felt on many pages that follow. That tribute did not arise by design; it emerged organically during a lengthy writing process. But my smallprint excurses are, as a rule, relatively short, and, unlike those in the Church Dogmatics, tend not to engage the history of Christian thought at length, offer extended analyses of scripture, or add substantially to the book’s overall argument. Typically, they are in the order of clarifying asides, exegetical smash-and-grabs, engagements with secondary literature, and ad hoc expansions of interpretative and/or constructive claims. Those who find such excurses precious, unnecessary, or irritating can probably skip them without losing the basic thread of my argument. Those who are receptive to academic writing that experiments with discursive forms and rhetorical strategies—some of which are intended to help readers slow down, look around, and tarry over particular concerns—will perhaps profit from them in some way (even if that is ultimately reducible to: “well, that didn’t work; I hope it doesn’t catch on”). Second, a point made obvious by this book’s subtitle, which I mention occasionally in the pages to come: this is one part of a multivolume project. The following installment will be slightly different; rather than pairing interpretative and constructive work, it will combine these modes of analysis, with a heavy investment in the latter. Indeed, if readers are saddened that the insights advanced by an author considered in Part One seem to have been left aside, I can offer some assurance that those insights will be reengaged at a later date. (That is particularly the case, incidentally, with Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s Christologies, John Calvin’s Christology and account of sanctification, the theopolitical programs of Andreas Karlstadt and Michael Sattler, Elizabeth Johnson’s account of the Trinity, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s positive estimation of impatience.) Furthermore, given that the next volume tackles topics that bear directly on Christian life as a transformative undertaking, addressing (among other things) Christ’s enactment and proclamation of the Kingdom, the elective affinity of sanctification and queer theory, and the value of impatience in Christian life, I hope therein to engage more directly one of the most fundamental challenges for Protestant theology in the twenty-first century: developing modes of reflection in which interpretative, systematic, constructive, and liberative concerns bleed together, so that the relatively abstruse labors of Christian theologians might wait on, and perhaps even contribute to, a “new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home” (2 Pet. 3:13).

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Introduction

Under pressure of grace, human language may be lifted beyond the everyday. It may become patient of new shades of meaning, new modes of application, and new kinds of reference. The word “patience” is itself a case in point. It plays a critical role in the biblical witness, describing God and God’s ways and works, on the one side, and creaturely dispositions and activities, on the other. And this witness suggests that patience could be afforded a leading role in theological inquiry, contributing particularly to the task of understanding God’s creative action, God’s governance of history, and the person and work of Jesus Christ.

1 Patience, Language, and Theological Reflection In the context of everyday speech and writing in British and North American English, “patience” has a relatively stable and familiar range of meanings. It indicates a willingness to endure discomfort, difficulty, or mistreatment; a determination to hold fast to a principle and persist with a pattern of behavior; a knack for waiting, partnered with a sense of the right time to act; a commitment to persevere and, perhaps, to alter a particular state of affairs.1 Examples lie close at This quartet of meanings bears resemblance to the four aspects of patience identified by Matthew Pianalto in On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational Virtue (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016); see esp. 13–38. I sketch some of the historical backdrop to the meanings and uses of patience in this book’s appendix.

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hand. A friend is described as patient when she accepts that a crucial appointment must again be rescheduled. A parent is commended when he retrieves, for the umpteenth time, food that his child has unceremoniously flung to the floor. A negotiator is esteemed for their ability to contain conflict and, at exactly the right moment, to propose a solution to a stubborn problem. And a marginalized community is celebrated when, disclaiming retaliation and recrimination, it challenges injustice with acts of forgiveness and peacemaking. Indeed, as these examples suggest, to describe a person or group as patient is typically a matter of approbation. Those who hold fast in trying times, who stick with it, who defer intervention until a propitious moment, who meet injustice with transformative action: we are inclined to commend such people for their patience, and to laud their conduct as adding value to creaturely life. But it should not be thought that the conventions of ordinary speech and writing exhaust the meanings and uses of patience. A key presupposition of this book is that careful reflection on a cluster of extraordinary events, superintended by God and witnessed in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, can open up a different future for the term: one that is inclusive of transformed shades of meaning, new modes of application, and unfamiliar kinds of reference; one in which patience plays a leading role in a theological account of God’s ways and works. To be sure, mundane connotations always attach themselves to words that purport to describe God and God’s activity. A “way of signifying that is appropriate to creatures” (ST I.13.3) is an invariable feature of theological discourse, both positively (it ensures a prima facie degree of intelligibility) and negatively (there is always the risk that creaturely signification will distort one’s description of God). Still, the possibility of a different future for language in general, and for the motif of patience in particular, should not be foreclosed. Why not? Because the extraordinary events to which scripture bears witness shape a faith that supposes that the difference God makes—a world-changing difference, oriented toward creatures’ salvation and flourishing—allows for specific elements of language to be “twisted and turned, used in different ways … set in a new context.”2 A famous Reformation

Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 112.

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slogan, simul iustus et peccator, finds application here, as does John Calvin’s claim that sanctification involves the mortification and vivification of all aspects of human existence. The theologian’s hope is that the language she employs might be broken and remade by God, given new denotative and connotative freight, and put to use in descriptions of God’s creative, providential, and redemptive activity. And this theologian’s hope is that patience, along with a number of adjacent concepts, might feature prominently in an expansive account of who God is and what God does. I use the word “hope” advisedly. Since grace is always and only God’s affair, its discursive ramifications cannot be presumed or possessed, much less tracked in real time. Even if one believes that grace is operative in exercises of Christian intelligence, it does not follow that the words one uses will be perfectly (or, for that matter, roughly) descriptive of God’s ways and works. Finitude persists, limiting each and every creaturely endeavor. Sin, too. It is always possible that one is getting everything terribly, terribly wrong; it is always appropriate to pair confidence and delight in the gospel with wariness, even suspicion, about the language one uses when trying to make sense of the gospel. Nevertheless, one can at least hope that grace might engender a “twisting and turning” of language that keeps pace with what God has done and what God is doing, and that grace might comprise a meaningful moment in the time-honored task of faith seeking understanding. To use an idiom developed by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein: if and when God acts, there arises the possibility that we are not just ensnared in the local Sprachspiele (language games) that play around us, but that elements of those Sprachspiele might be caught up in God’s reconciliatory and redemptive work.3 To frame the matter differently, one more time: if one believes that God establishes, sustains, and animates creation; that God governs the course of history, albeit in ways that are often hard to discern; that God has a general concern for the enhancement of creaturely life and a particular concern for human flourishing; that God establishes a relationship with creatures through God’s election of ancient Israel; that God contests and overturns sinfulness

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen; Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. Anscombe, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

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through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; that the Spirit incorporates a widening array of individuals and communities into Christ’s liberating body; and that a preeminent witness to God’s ways and works is found in the words of scripture, made revelatory by the continuing activity of Christ’s Spirit—if one believes all this, it is reasonable also to suppose that language might become an occasion for God’s grace to continue on its way, with familiar terms and concepts fitted out to subserve Christians’ understanding of their faith. It is reasonable to believe that the revelatory events that evoke and sustain faith carry the possibility of “a gain to language” which “grants courage to language,” and that the theologian is thereby afforded the opportunity to do more with language than would otherwise be possible.4 Again: none of this dispels the likelihood of error. Discursive courage, if it truly be that, will be complemented with a due sense of humility. At issue is something different: the possibility that exercises of the Christian imagination might “build out” from the bedrock of faith and issue in fresh ways of thinking, writing, and talking about God. Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda? Absolutely. Gerhard Ebeling’s words can substitute for mine at this juncture: “There has doubtless been much mischief caused by the idea of a permanent reformation. Nevertheless, it must be taken seriously in at least two respects. Firstly, in so far as the Word of God must be left free to ­assert itself in an unflinchingly critical manner against distortions and fixations. But secondly—and on closer inspection this is included in the first—in so far as theology and preaching should be free to make a translation into whatever language is ­required at the moment and to refuse to be satisfied with correct, archaizing repetition of ‘pure doctrine.’”5

This introduction will now turn to other issues. I will outline the main arguments of the book (section 2), consider patience and related terms in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament (section 3), and reflect on the place of exploration and imagination in Christian theology (section 4). Prior to that, however, an important disclaimer. Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase, trans. John Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark: 2001), 23 and 24. 5 Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM, 1963), 41. 4

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At no point in what follows do I spend time assessing different models and theories of theological language. It might be possible (and, at some point, it might prove helpful) to reckon with the register of dogmatic claims about patience, particularly when this word pertains to God. Such a reckoning might proceed along diverse tracks. One could engage Aquinas’ treatment of analogy, ingredient to which is a subtle (if not entirely stable) differentiation of literal and metaphorical modes of predication. One could turn to John Calvin’s idea of “accommodation.” One could throw oneself into the thickets of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, or Paul Tillich’s reflections on symbolism, or the more recent philosophical positions staked out by William Alston, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others. Sooner or later, too, one would need to begin to work out how differing views of religious language relate to different views about the extent to which God can (or cannot) be known. The topics are joined at the hip. But this book will not attempt to clarify the status of its language about patience, nor consider in detail the epistemological import of its ascription of patience to God. It will simply presume that theological language can be deployed without prefatory or auxiliary explanation, and that little more than a nod in the direction of critical realism is needed prior to the elaboration of dogmatic claims. Does this presumption bespeak disregard for what sometimes goes under the name of “theological method?” No. Theologians do not stand under an obligation to explain, in advance, how and why language is employed (say, through philosophical elaborations or hermeneutical prolegomena); we are entitled simply to get on with the business of thinking, writing, and speaking in a Christian idiom, letting the chips fall as they may. It is not the case, I hurry to add, that second-order reflections on theological language are inherently problematic—symptomatic, perhaps, of a misplaced concern to “justify” belief in a late modern context. My point is simply that theological work needn’t be delayed by inquiries into how religious language is made and remade; and, concomitantly, that it is legitimate for the making and remaking of language to unfold as it will. The same reasoning obtains with respect to epistemology. While there is no reason to scorn debates about the degree to which God can be known, those debates needn’t forestall the development of a theological statement that presumes that God is known, in some way, and sets about trying to make sense of that

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knowledge. Indeed, since grace has already begun to transform creaturely existence, lending some measure of cognitive adequacy to the Sprachspiele that arise in the course of Christian life, why not let it continue on its way when it comes to theological reflection? If Karl Barth’s words to Adolf von Harnack ought always to ring in our ears—“I know how shatteringly relative everything is which can be said about the great object which occupies you and me”6—it is entirely apt for such a caution to be paired with a more basic confidence in the success of God’s communicative activity, with a receipt of the “objective” fact of revelation understood to enable various kinds of “subjective” rearticulation. Since God does not lie or obfuscate (Rom. 3:4), one may hope that God will continue to make herself available to us, thereby enabling the alignment of human discourse with God’s ways and works. This perspective on theological language and epistemology is strengthened when the relationship between faith and understanding is framed in terms of a theologia viatorum—inquiry always being “on the way,” undertaken with a due sense that every pursuit of God falls short of its goal. Again, a necessary caveat: the mindset of a wayfarer does not permit laxity with respect to conceptual clarity, exegetical care, prudential judgment, etc., nor does it undercut the need for critique. One must always be prepared to give an account of oneself.7 But a theology undertaken in via sanctions a fairly relaxed attitude toward methodological preliminaries, as well as a calm sense that the elaboration of any theological program forms but one small contribution to the making and remaking of doctrine. Or, to make the point more positively: a theologia viatorum embraces the risk of exploration, undertaken through an application of the imagination—these being words to which I will return—such that inquiry proceeds without the expectation of definitive conclusions, without the requirement that each claim be met with full assent, and with the cheerful sense that rough and ready gestures will be received as attempts to animate new

Karl Barth, “An Answer to Professor von Harnack’s Open Letter,” in The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, ed. James A. Robinson, trans. Keith R. Crim, vol. 1 (Richmond: John Knox, 1968), 185. 7 A phrase I borrow from elsewhere. See Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 6

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modes of understanding. Nothing less than that, to be sure. But also nothing more. To restate, then, the basic claims of this opening meditation: as God acts to create, sustain, guide, reconcile, and redeem creaturely life, so it is that a theologian legitimately hopes that the terms she employs are patient of new meaning, new application, and new reference, and that those terms can be elaborated in ways that contribute to a compelling and persuasive account of God’s creative, reconciliatory, and redemptive activity. Mindful of this book’s length, I would also add: given the richness of God’s action, as well as the limits of every sinful, finite creature, so one must also be patient with the slow process of theological exploration, hopeful that its twists and turns, as well as its missteps and its meanderings, are part of the ongoing process of making sense of Christian faith today.

2 Overview Ad rem: What might it mean to describe God’s activity toward the world in general, and toward human beings in particular, as patient? How might patience and associated terms feature in an account of God’s creative endeavors, God’s relationship with ancient Israel, and God’s governance of history? How might this motif help one to understand the incarnation of the Word and Christ’s proclamation and enactment of the Kingdom? How might this word—and, perhaps, its antonym—help one to think well about the Holy Spirit and Christian life? Might it be possible, finally, to think about God’s own being in terms of patience? Does God’s trinitarian life involve the exercise of patience? The following chapters begin to answer these questions. They attempt to show how patience and adjacent terms might take on a leading role in theological reflection. The first half of the book is largely interpretative. Subsequent to this chapter’s analysis of patience in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, as well as its reflections on the place of exploration and imagination in theological work, three chapters tackle the meaning of patience in works by landmark Christian thinkers, thereby preparing readers for a range of constructive proposals.

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Chapter  1 examines treatises on patience by three early writers—Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine—prior to engaging Augustine’s City of God, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. It begins by drawing attention to Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s suggestion that one should consider human patience in light of God’s patience. One finds here an instructive ordering of thought. We are disabused of the assumption that patience is most basically something we do, not something that God does (and is); we learn that reflection on God’s exercise of patience can and should govern reflection on patience in human life. Moving into the medieval period, and with an awareness that Augustine slows the momentum built up in Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s treatises, the chapter then laments the circumscription of patience in Aquinas’ Summa. Because Aquinas tethers patientia to an analysis of the cardinal virtues, the term is set at something of a remove from an account of Christian life and, worse, at a significant distance from descriptions of God’s being and action. True, there is a bracing counterpoint. Julian of Norwich offers an expansive account of the Christian who learns to undergo, patiently, the pressure of God’s redemptive work—a work whose slow pace God herself suffers, at least by implication, in solidarity with human beings. But, at least in these later texts, patience’s standing in theological inquiry has been significantly restricted. The assumption that this term is most “at home” in descriptions of human life, and thus of relatively little moment for understanding who God is and what God does, has gained ground. Chapter 2 engages a quartet of European theologians from the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century, two of whom are well known, two of whom should be better known: Martin Luther, John Calvin, Andreas Karlstadt, and Michael Sattler. It discerns in their work a continued upswing of interest in patience as a human affair, which goes hand in hand with a continued downturn of interest in patience as a divine affair. Although Calvin bucks this trend to some degree—he reckons seriously with divine patience, particularly in his biblical commentaries—the outburst of creativity in Europe’s sixteenth century does not obviously include a recovery of the dogmatic ambitions of Tertullian and Cyprian. Luther’s Invocavit sermons of 1522 present patience as a dimension of faith that enables Christians to tolerate different “speeds” of reform (thus marking him, to a degree, as more of a premodern than modern

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thinker); Karlstadt views patience qua forbearance as symptomatic of a lack of faithful obedience, even as he makes Gelassenheit (roughly, “yieldedness”) central to Christian life; Sattler imagines patience to be a mark of a community that suffers the world for the sake of the gospel. All of this is ingenious, in its own way, and all of it lends texture to our understanding of the hustle and bustle of the Reformation’s first decade. But it also consolidates the movement of patience to the margins of theological reflection, with a focus placed on human life, not God’s ways and works. Rounding out my interpretative efforts, Chapter  3 begins by examining a somewhat neglected portion of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, wherein patience (Geduld) is numbered among God’s multiple attributes (or, to use Barth’s preferred term, God’s “perfections”). With this move, Barth recovers a salutary ordering of thought—patience being primarily a quality of God’s life, and only secondarily a quality of human existence. In fact, Barth goes beyond anything envisaged by earlier thinkers, showing how this term can be tied to reflection about God’s empowerment of creaturely action, undertaken in the context of a covenant whose center is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And Barth’s claims are so rich and suggestive that an intriguing possibility, long obscured, now returns to view: a theological perspective in which patience is given a starring role in a wide-angled account of God’s creative, providential, reconciliatory, and redemptive work—and, farther down the line, brought to bear on an account of God’s triune being. But there is a catch. I show next that patience has acquired the dubious status of a “burdened virtue” (a phrase I borrow from Lisa Tessman), given that it has often been used to bolster unjust and injurious patterns of domination. One’s sense of the promise of the Dogmatics, accordingly, must be paired with the awareness that patience has acquired a “way of signifying … appropriate to creatures” (ST 1.13.3) that is far more problematic than Aquinas anticipated. This word is now saddled with a great deal of “baggage,” the weight of which has often compounded grievous inequities pertaining to class, race, gender, and sexuality. And this weight must be shouldered, and worked through, by those engaged in the business of Christian theology. In the first half of the book, then, I attempt to show that patience is a term that has often been associated with God and human beings, while sometimes being put in service of questionable

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interests; and that patience is a term that, despite some promising dogmatic gestures, is too frequently associated with human beings and too infrequently associated with God. In the works that I consider, human patience receives the lion’s share of attention. It distinguishes a faithful embrace of suffering, whereby Christians maintain a distinctive identity and endure the world in advance of the eschaton (Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine); it describes a faithful response to the slow pace of ecclesial reform (Luther); it speaks to a process of growth in holiness, animated by the Spirit, that draws one into a fuller relationship with God (Julian, Calvin). Divine patience, however, is engaged more sporadically and more unevenly. While there are some valuable moves—patience being a term that helps one to make sense of God’s empowerment of creaturely activity (Barth); to think about God’s governance of history, internal to which is God’s “endurance” of sin (Barth, Calvin, Julian); and to describe the condescension of the Son and his obedience unto death, as well as the transformative labors of Christ’s Spirit (Tertullian and Cyprian)—these moves add up to a minority report, the details of which only come into focus after a fair bit of interpretative squinting. Recognizing this lopsided state of affairs, however, raises the possibility of a dialectical reversal. Might an acclamation of God’s exercise of patience serve as a point of departure for reflection in a new key? Might this acclamation anchor a constructive perspective—I use the adjective modestly, to refer simply to “an interpretation of the Christian message which is relevant to the present situation” (ST1, 53)—that picks up where Cyprian and Tertullian left off, drawing inspiration from Julian, Calvin, Barth, et  al. and expanding the role of patience as it bears on multiple dogmatic loci? Might this term be pushed into the foreground when one thinks about creation, providence, incarnation, atonement, pneumatology, Christian life, and the Trinity? Indeed, might a clearer understanding of God’s exercise of patience (the principal concern of this book) set in motion lines of reflection that help disburden creaturely patience of its problematic connotations, and thereby allow a different view of creaturely patience—and perhaps creaturely impatience, too—to come into view (a principal concern of this book’s successor)? The second half of the book begins to answer these questions. Taking its cues from Gen. 1:1–2:4a, Chapter 4 argues that patience

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helps one think about God’s creative work as inclusive of a certain kind of “letting be” and “letting happen.” This motif supports a noncompetitive account of the relationship between creator and creatures that extends all the way back to the cosmos “in the beginning.” God’s patience is made manifest in God’s permitting, delegating, and empowering creatures (especially other-thanhuman creatures) to act with and for God; and it is in light of God’s patience that those creatures contribute to the formation of a world distinguished by diversity, richness, and beauty. To be sure, it remains important to say that God alone brings the world into existence. In this chapter, I advance what I hope is a convincing defense of the old notion of creatio ex nihilo, and I do not shrink from affirming God’s sovereign disposing of events. But the motif of patience allows an affirmation of creatio ex nihilo to be complemented by an account of a creatio cooperativa: a collaborative process, wherein God patiently elicits, supports, and guides creaturely ventures that render the world ever more complex and valuable. Indeed, with an account of creatio cooperativa in play, one can think expansively about humanity’s relationship to the created order as a whole—an issue of obvious moment, given the interlocking and intensifying crises of global heating, ocean acidification, and massive reductions in biodiversity. The other-than-human world should not be viewed as merely a stage on which we have been set to do what we will; it should be honored as a condition of possibility for our emergence and continuance as a species. It is only because nonhuman creatures make good on God’s patience, acting with integrity, meaning, and consequence, that human beings bear the image of the world (imago mundi) and the image of God (imago dei). Chapters  5 and 6 develop an account of providence centered on the motif of patience. In Chapter 5, I argue that God’s patient disbursement of blessings guides the slow and difficult emergence of ancient Israel as a family, a confederation of tribes, and, eventually, a people that coalesces into a nation. This account of blessings is complemented with an account of sin, which I construe as waywardness. Creaturely rebellion slows the pace at which God achieves God’s purposes. It muddles ancient Israel’s sense of itself and its covenantal responsibilities; it results in countless instances of tragic, maldistributed suffering and trauma. And as sin challenges God’s governance of events in times and

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space, God’s patience is genuinely tested. Although God is not adventitiously affected by events in time and space, and thus not diverted from continuing to pursue and realize God’s goals, God’s self-determination means that God “opens” Godself to the travails of creatures—that God assigns Godself an identity marked by patience as longsuffering. But neither the slowing of God’s work nor the fact of divine longsuffering has as a corollary the defeat of God’s ruling. If Chapter 5’s treatment of the way that God’s non-impeditio peccati (God’s nonprevention of sin) intersects with God’s non-impeditio accusationis (God’s nonprevention of accusation) gestures toward this claim, Chapter 6 develops it at length. The exercise of patience qua steadfastness means that God shapes the course of history, using subtle and not-so-subtle forms of governmental “pressure” to ensure that ancient Israel comes to discern its role in the covenant of grace. And this dimension of God’s providential work eventually brings about a historical analogue to the primordial event of creatio cooperativa—a not-inconsiderable echo of life “in the beginning.” Through the gathering, preservation, and transmission of oral and written traditions, ancient Israel comes to embrace its identity as the object of God’s covenantal favor. It fulfills its role, in a partial way, in the covenant of grace; it rewards God’s patience through the formation of a collection of texts that track and honor the patient work of God, thereby providing a vehicle through which God can and does reveal Godself to humankind. And with this account of special providence in hand— an account that aims to complement Calvin’s interest in God’s “vigilance in ruling the church” (Inst. I.17.1) with an account of the God’s providential vigilance in ruling and empowering ancient Israel—I offer broader remarks about God’s governance of history at large. Formally, I reprise a claim floated in previous chapters: the idiom of causality should be sidelined in descriptions of God’s all-encompassing governance of events; patience should stand in its stead. Substantively, and with caveats about the dangers of epistemological overreach, I draw on Rom. 8:14–25 to suggest that it is possible for Christians to have faith in the slow outworking of God’s purposes. Finally, and I hope not anticlimactically, this book concludes with a brief epilogue that glances backward and looks forward to the next volume of this project.

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3 Patience in the Bible The interpretative and constructive undertakings of this book, of course, do not occur in a vacuum. If both are undertaken in the particular context in which I work as a relatively affluent British, white, heterosexual, cisgendered male academic—and it is because this combination of markers is so familiar and so consistently supportive of privilege that it must be acknowledged and scrutinized, not taken as read (or tucked away in a preface)—that same context is relativized by and, ideally, made subordinate to an authoritative scriptural witness that has much to say about patience, both divine and human. The authority of that witness, to be sure, does not nullify the contingent factors that shape me as an author. It does not lift me out of the discrete contexts in which I am placed, much less remove the blindnesses, insights, biases, gifts, and confusions that accompany my inhabitation of those contexts. (Nor, for that matter, does it render other cultural products inapposite to the task of theological reflection.) But when it comes to Christian theological reflection, the authority of scripture does put me under a specific kind of pressure. I am now obliged to arrest the temptation to trade on my own positionality, and I am called to focus my energies on entering into some form of “fellowship with those who testify” about God’s ways and works.8 And I am obliged, more specifically, to frame the interpretative and constructive endeavors of this book with a focused analysis of scriptural remarks about patience and related terms. With due awareness, then, that this section is positioned a bit awkwardly between a meditation on theology and language, a précis of this book’s arguments, and the creative development of Anselm’s account of theology as an exercise of faith seeking understanding that brings this chapter to a close, I turn now to the biblical witness. I offer a compact statement about my approach to scripture and its interpretation, followed by a lengthier analysis of the meanings and uses of patience in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.

Karl Barth, Barth in Conversation, ed. Eberhard Busch et al., vol. 2, 1963 (Louisville: WJKP, 2018), 153. This quotation is taken from a conversation that Barth had with Rhineland Youth Pastors.

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(a) Inhabiting the “domain of the Word” My approach to scripture has much in common with that favored by Karl Barth. While God is free to reveal Godself to creatures whenever, wherever, and in whatsoever ways that God chooses, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament comprise the preeminent medium through which God tells us about Godself. There is a dynamic movement, passing from the (divine) Word to (human) words and back again, whereby God hallows a particular collection of texts in their relationship to a discrete community and/or individual, rendering them vehicles that disclose something of God’s life with us and, derivatively, our life with God. As auditors and readers, we are made participants in a gracious looping movement. God’s communicative action reaches toward and passes through these texts, catching them and us in its flow, so to speak, and thereby making us aware—cognitively, affectively, ethically, etc.—of who God is, what God has done, and what God is doing. To make the same point a bit differently: granted that the Word should be identified, above all else, as Jesus Christ, the Israelite through whom God reveals Godself, whereas the words of scripture should be adjudged the product of fallible and sinful human beings— “human speech uttered by specific men at specific times in a specific situation, in a specific language and with a specific intention” (CD I/2, 464)—the biblical texts are used by God in such a fashion that they become, individually and in aggregate, reliable witnesses to God.9 By grace, human words bear the authority of the divine Word. An obvious question: does such “becoming” allow for the relationship of the biblical texts to the Word to be treated as analogous to the uniting of an individual human essence to the Word? That is, are the words of scripture aligned with God’s ways and works in the same way, and to the same degree, that Christ’s humanity is aligned with the economic being and activity of God’s second way of being? Although Barth sometimes gestures in this direction, albeit with caveats, it is important to demur. The union

This sentence bears the influence of Angela Dienhart Hancock, “Texts in Quarantine: Karl Barth, Biblical Interpretation, and Imaginative Resistance,” SJT 71, no. 1 (2018): 1–15.

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of divinity and humanity in Christ is exceptional. It involves the Son’s assumption of an individual human essence, in the power of the Spirit, so that the covenantal relationship between God and creatures can be (and is) savingly fulfilled. The relationship between the incarnate Word and scripture is different. The former comprises the material center of God’s saving economy; the latter is a product and an instrument of that economy. So to claim that biblical texts are indwelt by the Word in the same way that Christ’s human essence is indwelt by the Word is at once weirdly extravagant (it risks making the Bible a parallel incarnation), interpretatively inapt (it ignores the fact that biblical books, which bear the marks of human finitude and sin, point away from themselves), and theologically dubious (it assumes, sotto voce, that God could not reveal Godself through finite, ambiguous, and flawed texts). But this demurral does not count against my and Barth’s basic claim: viz., that the scriptural witness is singularly decisive for theological inquiry. One can and must affirm this discrete collection of texts as the preeminent medium of God’s self-revelation, knowing its “highest proof” to be the ongoing fact that, as the Spirit wills, “God in person speaks in it” (Inst. I.vii.4). This account of biblical authority, moreover, has as its corollary the belief that theological reflection involves a purposeful inhabitation of what the late John Webster dubbed the “domain of the Word”: a time and space, shaped and animated by the Spirit who presides over the reading, hearing, speaking, and acting-out of scripture, wherein a Christian becomes aware of God’s ways and works and is empowered to begin to try to make sense of them. Scripture is not just an occasion for God to tell us who God is and what God does—although it is never less than that. It is also part of a broader pattern of divine activity, evocative and supportive of a faith that allows for the formulation of more-orless precise, interlocking, and interesting claims about who God is and what God does, and who creatures are and what creatures are called to do. Again, restraint is in order. While the gift of faith situates one within the domain of the Word, there is no guarantee that one will inhabit that domain rightly. Faith certainly does not spell the end of finitude and sin, and the scriptural witness itself is patently susceptible to being misread—in part because it is clearly not a transcript of divine speech, in part because this diversified collection of texts does not present auditors and readers with

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ready-made doctrinal contentions. At issue is something different. Having acknowledged the scriptural witness as a medium through which God instructs human beings about Godself, a purposeful inhabitation of the Word’s domain entails (a) accepting and understanding oneself as a creature (or, more precisely, one among a number of creatures) who is being incorporated into the “work of the risen one and of the Holy Spirit whom he sends”; (b) recognizing that a delimited set of “creaturely auxiliaries … herald and testify” to the “communicative presence” of the Word, and with such constancy and vigor that Christian understanding can constantly be made and remade; and finally (c) tendering judgments about what should be said about God’s being and activity.10 When such acceptance, understanding, recognition, and judging occur—and all that depends on God’s favor, which one may not presume—then theology takes wing. Ought theological reflection, accordingly, to limit itself to a paraphrase of the biblical witness, offering no more than a “low-level flight over the reading of Scripture”?11 Insofar as such flights attend to the twists and turns of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, they certainly comprise an essential dimension of theological inquiry. While exegesis and dogmatic reflection occur on different planes, involve somewhat different habits of mind, and draw on discrete scholarly technologies, they should not be separated; and while exegesis need not always have dogmatic reflection as its complement, dogmatic reflection should always have exegesis as its basis. But it is legitimate to aspire to higher altitudes, and the particular distinction of constructive inquiry is a concern to extend, complicate, and invigorate the understanding ingredient to faith. So, to move beyond Webster and to draw again from Tillich: just as “the inspiration of the biblical writers” involved a “receptive and creative response to potentially revelatory facts” (ST1 35), the constructive task is a matter of receiving and creatively responding to the revelation to which those biblical texts bear witness. And one can approach this task in a cheerful, relaxed way. Granted that John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 38. 11 Stephen Davis, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7. 10

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the subjective prejudices of the theologian—“prejudices,” both in the technical sense given to this word by Hans-Georg Gadamer12 and in the more familiar, less wholesome sense—must always be scrutinized, one has the opportunity to travel through the domain of the Word with a good deal of freedom and creativity. While there may be times in which one opts simply to “follow … the words of the text” by way of a “‘cursive’ representation … running alongside it or, perhaps better, running in its wake,” one can also embark on an array of exploratory and imaginative ventures.13 One can engage in modest kind of intellectual “play,” shaped and structured by God’s action, that plumbs the depth and breadth of God’s life as God turns toward us. But perhaps this is all a bit too rosy-eyed. Am I here risking the suggestion that ­exploration and imagination could replace reason as the intellectual faculty by which, as Webster puts it, theologians seek to “answer … the divine Word”?14 Am I taking leave of the idea that a human ratio could be brought into correspondence with God’s ratio? No. As the final section of this chapter explains, imagination and exploration simply characterize theological reason in an adventurous mood, eager to try out new ideas and idioms. With that said, it is fair to say that this book breaks with Webster’s account of scriptural authority in other ways. First, I am more hesitant than he with respect to the authority of the church’s interpretative traditions. One can acknowledge and honor the “relative authority” of earlier confessions, dogmas, and viewpoints without assuming that God shapes the “post-history” of scriptural texts.15 One may certainly hope that God is at work in some or another intellectual trajectory, but that hope should not be routinized, much less associated with any ecclesial institution. Second,

12 See, of course, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Continuum, 1996), esp. 265–307. 13 Webster, Domain of the Word, 130. 14 Webster, Domain of the Word, 115. 15 John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30. Barth uses the phrase “relative authority” to describe the biblical canon in its distinction from the Word of God as such (so CD I/1, 292) and with respect to church confessions and dogma (so CD I/2, 826). I use the phrase in the second sense. See also Georg Plasger, Die relative Autorität des Bekenntnisses bei Karl Barth (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2000).

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I would temper Webster’s claim that “Scripture is an ontological category,” such that “revelation is fundamental to the [biblical] texts’ being.”16 This claim is not wrong with regard to the origin of scripture. Christians rightly assume that the biblical books were produced in response to God’s self-revelation and that God guided these books’ formation. Claims about the “ontology” of scripture, however, risk forgetting that revelation is not innate to the text but tied to a present event of hearing and reading (and, on occasions, dancing, singing, performing, etc.). Such forgetfulness is perilous: it brings one close to overblown statements about “inerrancy,” “indefectibility,” and the like. Third, I do not share Webster’s wariness toward historicalcritical scholarship. It may be that historical “naturalism” has sometimes inhibited an appreciation of scripture as a privileged medium for God’s address, with biblical books reduced to items in “an immanently conceived communicative field.”17 But it is also the case that historical-critical work has prompted valuable forms of theological reflection, as is made evident in numerous liberationist projects. One should not suppose that historical-critical work is always undertaken at a distance from the project of faith seeking understanding, and it is wise to recognize that the project of faith seeking understanding can and does make good use of historicalcritical work.18

An obvious question: what does the Bible actually say about patience? In what follows, I reckon with three terms—èrèk appayîm (“slow to anger” in the NRSV, “longsuffering” in the KJV), μακροθῦμία (patience), and ὑπομονή (endurance)—and sketch their meanings and uses. Three trains of thought come into view: patience as a matter of forbearance, whereby God tempers or postpones judgment, affording creatures time and space to repent of sin and to follow God’s directives; patience as a feature of God’s governance of history, as God realizes God’s saving purposes; and patience as a dimension of human life, made manifest in a network of dispositions and behaviors that extends from a toleration of sin to steadfastness of purpose in the enactment of discipleship.

Webster, Domain of the Word, 39. Webster, Domain of the Word, 39. 18 Jon Sobrino’s Christological studies are a case in point. See esp. Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993) and Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001). 16 17

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(b) èrèk appayîm (slowness to anger, longsuffering)19 Used ten times in the Hebrew Bible, èrèk appayîm has a striking etymology: one element means “long,” another, “nose,” with the latter associated with red-faced anger.20 The phrase identifies a purposeful nonexercise of divine wrath in face of sin: an instance of restraint that gives expression to God’s commitment to and love for ancient Israel. Exodus 34:6 is something of a locus classicus. As God renews the covenant, God summarizes his basic bearing toward a refractory people: “The Lord passed before him [Moses], and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.’” R. W. L. Moberly might appear to edge toward hyperbole when he declares these words to be “foundational within Israel’s scriptures” and notes that they supply “the fullest statement about the divine nature in the whole Bible.”21 But he grasps a point of enormous moment, reiterated in numerous books (see, inter alia, Num. 14:18; Neh. 9:17; Pss. 86:15, 103:8, and 145:8) and reflected in the rabbinical claim that Exod. 34:6 identifies multiple divine attributes. God is In addition to specialized studies, this subsection has been informed by a number of reference works: Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider, 3 vols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, 2nd edn, rev. and augmented by F. Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–76); and Xavier Léon-Dufour, Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Terrence Prendergast (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). 20 J. Carl Laney, “God’s Self-Revelation in Exodus 34:6–8,” BSac 158 (January– March 2001): 44. See also Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 216–17 (and, more broadly, 213–28). 21 R. W. L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 192. See also Robert C. Dentan, “The Literary Affinities of Exodus XXXIV 6f,” VT 13, no. 1 (1963): 34–51; Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), esp. 25–28; and Moberly’s valuable earlier study, At the Mountain of God: Story and Theology in Exodus 32–34 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1983). 19

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not content merely to disclose God’s name to Moses (Exod. 3:14). Nor is God content merely to assure ancient Israel that God “will take you as my people” and “will be your God” (Exod. 6:7). God now discloses the condition of possibility for God’s gracious, liberative action: God being God this way, having these attributes, bearing this bundle of characteristics. Indeed, subsequent to this theophany, whether ancient Israel thinks about itself as a weird and diffuse family, a “loose tribal coalition,”22 some kind of nation, or an inchoate sprawl of exiles—or, for that matter, all of the above—and whether Israel fails or succeeds in honoring its obligations, it exists as a people who knows who God is. It is a group that understands, for better or worse, that God’s “fundamental, inalienable loyalty” to Israel is grounded in God’s innermost life.23 Within this context—and here we have, arguably, an exemplary case of language being “stretched” and “twisted,” per my initial meditation—èrèk appayîm clarifies how the divine attributes of mercy, grace, steadfast love, and faithfulness are realized in history. On one level, God will not cease to favor ancient Israel. Sin will not trigger a revocation of the covenant; God will continue to promote the well-being and flourishing of God’s people. On another level, èrèk appayîm adverts to the fact that the God who has committed to “forgiving iniquity and transgression” will punish, “visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children … to the third and the fourth generation” (Exod. 34:7; cf. Num. 14:18 and Nah. 1:3; see also Sir. 5:4–7). Judgment deferred, clearly, is not judgment annulled. But— and this is crucial—threaded between this assurance of divine favor and the prospect of punishment there is also an opening for ancient Israel to conduct itself differently. As God “forbears” and “suffers” sin, ancient Israel gains the opportunity to repent, to make amends, to recommit itself to the covenant. It gains the possibility of acting in new and fitting ways. Jonah makes this point explicitly, and even raises the possibility that punishment might be forever forestalled (so Jon. 4:2). Joel, too: the text exhorts readers to “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing” (Joel 2:13; see also Wis. 11:23). So, even when God’s purposes in history prove difficult Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. A. Baker, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), 39. 23 Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 217. 22

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to track (often the case: see Hab. 2:1–5; see also 2 Macc. 6:14–16), the very fact that God forebears, on behalf of God’s “abounding and steadfast love” (hesed), ensures that ancient Israel has time and space to display something of the obedience and gratitude that ought to characterize covenantal existence. Notwithstanding a misplaced association of divine law with financial assiduousness, Walther Eichrodt puts it well: ancient Israel knows that “Yahweh is never the hard ‘creditor,’ relentlessly exacting the conditions of his covenant … his claim to honour rests on the fact that he owns the title ’erek ’appayim … with as much right as he bears the name of ’ēl qannā.”24 Or, in my own idiom: even as God’s patience is tested, ancient Israel is treated more leniently than it deserves. God’s patience accords this people time and space to do better. The broader context in which Exodus discloses God’s slowness to anger deserves mention. Having reported ancient Israel’s apostasy to Moses—the well-known account of the golden calf, a god much desired by “the people” and proficiently conjured by Aaron—God is understandably frustrated: “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation” (Exod. 32:9–11). Yet the threat to start anew doesn’t actually come to anything. Moses’ recollection of escape from the Egyptians and God’s previous promises to “Abraham, Isaac, and Israel” seem sufficient to make “the Lord change … his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (Exod. 32:14). Indeed, if one is looking for someone who cannot forbear from punishment and cannot exercise patience, the obvious character to consider is Moses. He smashes the two tablets of the covenant—tablets “written with the finger of God” (Exod. 31:18)—which is “an action tantamount to voiding the document written on them.”25 He then goes to work on the golden calf. Simple destruction does not suffice; Moses grinds it to a powder that is mixed with water, then force-feeds the resultant sludge to his fellow Israelites. And all of this, unfortunately, is by way of preamble. Next, Moses gathers Levi’s sons and presides over a massacre of about three thousand (Exod. 32:25–29). An ambiguous period of calm follows, with a plague and some vague threats from God (Exod. 32:35–33:6).

24 Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, vol. 1, 69. ’el qanna identifies God as jealous. 25 Carol Myers, Exodus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 260. Myers notes a parallel with 2 Kgs 23:15, when Josiah destroys an altar at Bethel. Martin Noth links Exod. 32:20 with the “water of cursing” in Num. 5:11–28 in Exodus: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 249–50.

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But, with relatively little cajoling, God is soon persuaded to accompany Israel on its journey, and even reveals his “glory” for good measure (Exod. 33:17–23). So when Moses cuts new tablets that codify the covenant and God descends from the cloud to declare herself in Exod. 34, the claim to be “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” is ultimately rather unsurprising. While auditors and readers learn that Moses is eminently capable of losing it on a grand scale, it becomes increasingly clear that God is not comparably volatile. Moses can and will disappoint us; God will not.

There are suggestions of a human parallel to divine patience in Wisdom writings. Prov. 14:29 is a case in point: “Whoever is slow to anger (èrèk appayîm) has great understanding, but one who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (cf. Prov. 15:18, 16:32, and 19:11). Sirach adopts a more holistic mindset, describing patience as a means to attain happiness and well-being (1:23). And in Ecclesiastes, a knowing quip about the slow pace at which human life unfolds leads directly into a commendation of serenity: “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; / the patient in spirit (’erek-rûah) are better than the proud in spirit. Do not be quick to anger, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools” (Eccl. 7:8–9).26 Obviously, these commendations are only faintly analogous to God’s slowness to anger. God’s covenant with ancient Israel is not a central concern; talk of punishment for sin is absent and the issue of repentance is moot. Such verses, accordingly, do not bear the same kind of theological significance as Exod. 34:6–7, Joel 2:13, etc.; their object is basically to help a young adult—most likely, a relatively wellheeled young man—manage interpersonal dynamics in an urban context. Thus it is that Prov. 14.29 counsels against hotheadedness (and receives an interesting echo in Prov. 25:15, as patience is presented as a useful device for contending with and manipulating obstinate bosses); thus it is that Eccl. 7:8–9 make the fairly obvious point that those inclined to fly off the handle will soon be held in disregard.27 Even so, something of God’s willingness to wait for human beings to repent, to take advantage of the time and space For valuable remarks on this verse, see C. L. Seow, Ecclesiastes: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 238–9 and 248. 27 For more on Prov. 14:29 and 25:15, see Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10–31: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 583–4 and 784–5. 26

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opened up by God’s longsuffering, can perhaps be glimpsed in the background. At the least, there is an exhortation not to hurry, and to let affairs run their own course. One further twist deserves mention. On occasion, talk of God’s “slowness to anger” and longsuffering is set aside and replaced with urgent appeals for intervention. An interest in God’s nonexercise of wrath, that is, is exchanged for the impatient demand that God act to reconfigure a particular patch of space and time right now, lest God appear to abandon the covenantal relationship that God has established. In these contexts, God’s slowness to intervene in the affairs of God’s people is critiqued and lamented. Human initiative is juxtaposed with divine reticence. Psalm 13 illustrates the point. Its opening is well known: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? / How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (vv. 1–2). Although it is difficult to determine the precise circumstances in which such petitions originated, the broader theological context is easy to discern. The psalmist trades on a mismatch between God’s apparent inactivity in the present and God’s assertions and actions in the past; he or she seeks thereby to “rouse” God, to impel God to reassert God’s favor toward ancient Israel. But within a few verses the tone shifts. An avowal of “trust in your steadfast love” (v. 5), accompanied by the prospect of a delighted receipt of salvation, soon trumps the psalmist’s initial cries for help. But neither the avowal nor the delight renders the opening verses an outburst of pique. On the contrary: they indicate why the psalmist felt entitled to address God so boldly, disclosing a covenantal perspective that expects God to act on ancient Israel’s behalf—concretely, purposefully, and effectively. Just as an acclamation of God’s “slowness to anger” reflects the belief that God affords creatures time and space to orient themselves aright, the memory of God’s covenantal hesed now justifies a refusal to wait patiently when the chips are down and incites various kinds of prayer, petition, and complaint.28 The opening of this psalm, This point is not original to me. It is deftly articulated throughout the third chapter of the classic study by Nelson Glueck, Hesed in the Bible, ed. Elias Epstein, trans. Alfred Gottschalk (Cincinnati: The Hebrew Union College Press, 1967). Glueck’s reading of Ps. 13, in particular, is similar to mine; see 95–6.

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one might say, intends to “remind” God that forbearance of sin should be accompanied with action that facilitates ancient Israel’s flourishing, making it possible for this people to continue to “sing to the Lord” (v. 6). Psalm 89 offers a similar perspective, even as it inverts the order of reflection. In the psalm’s first and second sections (a wide-angled hymn to God’s creative power; a stirring account of God’s love for the king), there are repeated references to God’s “steadfast love” (vv. 1, 2, 14), evocative of the credo of Exod. 34:6–7. But with the third section, there is a striking change of direction. The anguished voice of Ps. 13 returns, pairing worries about God’s absence with an anguished sense that God’s slowness to anger is no longer operative (“How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? / How long will your wrath burn like fire?” [v. 46]) and asking if God’s commitment to ancient Israel no longer obtains (“where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David?” [v. 49]). But such petitions, again, trade on a covenantal logic. Since God has identified Godself as ancient Israel’s sponsor and defender, “proving” Godself through discrete historical actions, Israel now calls on God to continue realizing the covenant, being “slow to anger” and showing favor to ancient Israel. (Walter Brueggemann makes this point nicely when writing about psalms of complaint and lament as instances of “countertestimony”: these palms, he notes, “still hope, expect, and wait upon Yahweh to act to restore the relationship, so that evidence may yet be given that Yahweh is reliable.”)29 It again becomes clear that belief in God’s slowness to anger goes hand in hand with the expectation that God’s mercy, grace, and faithfulness be made manifest. God’s patience should not entail inactivity; it should be accompanied by concrete initiatives that support ancient Israel’s well-being. And ancient Israel’s lament is an exercise of creaturely agency that God’s patience enables, one that attempts to stir God to act in ways that honor God’s identity as Lord of the covenant. To be sure, there are also psalms that do not exhibit impatience but ­despondency— so much so that a covenantal logic, distinguished by divine patience and the ­imperative of human activity, strains under the pressure of wretched circumstances.

Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 378.

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Think of the differences between Pss. 86 and 88. In the first psalm, the narrator’s petitions never really reach the level of impatience. They are quickly overcome, being replaced with a hopeful call to God to “Incline your ear … and answer me” and an acclamation of God’s ability to “do wondrous things” (v. 10). A recapitulation of Exod. 34:6–7 thus comes as no surprise: “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (v. 14). With Ps. 88, by contrast, the tone shifts dramatically. Expressions of physical and emotional distress, anger, sullenness, accusation, and dread abound as the psalmist meditates on the forsaken dead, “cut off from your hand” (v. 5), while declaring that such alienation is accompanied by a wrath that “overwhelms me” (v. 7). “Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? / Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?” (vv. 11 and 12). If such questions invite a positive response in other texts, that is not the case here. By the psalm’s end, it is not even clear that God really is the “God of my salvation” (v. 1). The psalmist seems to have been enveloped in suffering without end, traumatized to a degree that makes expressions of righteous impatience quite impossible. The future is that of one who is “shut in” without “escape” (v. 8). As the address concludes, one senses that the psalmist has nothing—literally nothing—to say to God or anyone else.30

(c) μακροθυμία, μακροθυμέω, μακροθύμως ( patience, to bear/be patient, patiently) This bundle of words, derived from μακρός (“long”) and θυμός (“anger,” “wrath,” “passion”), is used throughout the Septuagint to translate èrèk appayîm. The terms feature twenty-five times in the New Testament: ten times as a noun, fourteen times as a verb, once as an adverb. The majority of usages occur in the epistles and pastorals; the gospels employ the terms only passingly. And if on at least one occasion a word has incidental significance (when Paul beseeches Agrippa to “listen to me patiently (μακροθύμως),” in Acts 26:3), in most other cases they bear significant theological freight.

I am aware that Ps. 88 can be interpreted less pessimistically, not least because the author continues to appeal to God. See, for instance, Ernst R. Wendland, “‘Darkness Is My Closest Friend’ (Ps. 88:18b): Reflections on the Saddest Psalm in the Psalter,” VE 37, no. 1 (2016): a1543.

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As with the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament applies these terms to God and human beings. But the weighting is now inverted: one finds more references to human patience than divine patience. Reversing the order of inquiry in the previous section and with an eye to exploring the ways that divine patience elicits human responses, I will tackle these referents in turn, considering first patience as a quality of Christian life and then reckoning with patience as a dimension of God’s activity. (i) On multiple occasions, μακροθυμία numbers among the traits of faithful discipleship. Sometimes it is used to commend those who have proven themselves worthy representatives of Christ in difficult circumstances (2 Cor. 6:4–10, esp. v. 6). Sometimes it is found within a clutch of dispositions that Christians are called to adopt (Col. 3:12). Sometimes it is included in a list of qualities that Paul (or someone writing in his name) ascribes to himself, alongside the suggestion that those who follow Paul, proclaiming the gospel amid persecution, should be similarly disposed (2 Tim. 3:10 and 4:2). Although not given much elucidation, it seems fair to say that μακροθυμία is viewed both as a consequence of divine grace and as a human possibility that awaits realization. Gal. 5:22 (“the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience [μακροθυμία], kindness, generosity, faithfulness”) and Col. 3:12 (“As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience [μακροθυμίαν]”) illustrate the point. In the context of a comparison between life in the Spirit and life according to the flesh, Gal. 5:22 emphasizes the Spirit’s initiative. Christians are not patient because they maintain a particular moral regimen; Christians are patient because they are shaped by God’s favor as the Spirit overturns the impulses of the “flesh” and effects our sanctification. Col. 3:12 makes the same point in reverse, enjoining Christians to make good on their adoption into Christ’s body. Transformation of the self does not happen over our heads. Once the Christian receives the gifts that God gives, she must realize those gifts in the quotidian, “dressing” herself in them (the aorist imperative, Ἐνδύσασθε, being used to great effect) and demonstrating what kind of new life it is that Christ and the Spirit make possible. It is imperative to recognize that these claims rest upon Christological and pneumatological bases. Patience is delivered and sustained by the Spirit of Christ, and

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patience’s exercise depends on a Spirit-led empowerment of the self that is joined to Christ’s body. It follows, too, that the famous declaration, “Love is patient (μακροθυμεῖ); love is kind … It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures (ὑπομένει) all things” (1 Cor. 13:4 and 13:7), may not be read as an abstraction, much less as a bit of cloying advice about how to put up with one’s spouse. Explicit Christological and pneumatological referents are only absent because they are firmly established, Paul having made it quite clear that his entire letter proceeds from a determination “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” while trusting in “things God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (1. Cor. 2:3 and 10).

These general usages gain in specificity when μακροθυμία is construed as forbearance: a capacity to put up with affliction and frustration, to hold fast to one’s faith and identity as a Christian, and to resist absorption into a world given over to sin. The Epistle to the Colossians, for instance, begins with upbeat remarks about the community’s growth in holiness. It then notes, almost passingly, that suffering might accompany a deepened faith. The author hopes that readers may “be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and … be prepared to endure everything with patience (μακροθυμίαν)” (1:11). A bold Christological statement follows, along with warnings about those previously estranged and the startling (and perhaps questionable) claim that Paul’s own sufferings are “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body” (1:24). But it soon becomes clear that the initial reference to patience is enormously consequential, adverting to a broader interest in how Christians ought to negotiate a fallen world. Much of the second chapter reckons directly with the challenges of this negotiation, noting how the Colossians’ receipt of “Christ Jesus the Lord,” as well as their ongoing efforts to “continue to live [their] lives in him” (2:6) occur in a fraught context—one in which believers are assailed by human traditions that mediate the “elemental spirits of the universe” (2:8 and 2:20), hounded with dubious dietary and calendric advice, and subjected to reports of esoteric visions. Patience as the forbearance of affliction and frustration, then, turns out to be crucial when it comes to maintaining union with Christ. It is a quality that ensures that the travails of existence in a fallen world, consequential though they are, are rendered secondary to a relation to “Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:3).

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And this sense of forbearance is not limited to Colossians. Other texts maintain the basic meaning, while giving it slightly different charges. First Thessalonians, for instance, seems to amplify a hint dropped in Col. 3:13. Patience as forbearance is not only a quality that enables Christians to negotiate a hazardous environment; it is also a quality that enables Christians to put up with each other. Thus it is that Paul calls on his audience to “admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted,” and “help the weak,” while also being “patient with all of them (μακροθυμεῖτε πρὸς πάντας),” for that is the only way to achieve “peace among yourselves” (1 Thess. 5:14 and 5:13) and to sustain a life anchored in the gospel. In Hebrews, the meaning shifts again. While this epistle maintains the association of patience and affliction, it begins to connect the patience of a hard-pressed community with hope for the future, with Christians called to “diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end, so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience (μακροθυμίας) inherit the promises” (Heb. 6:11–12). A correlation between earlier fulfillments of God’s promise and life in Christ then broadens the view. Since “Abraham, having patiently endured (μακροθυμίσας), obtained the promise,” so Christians must now hold fast to “Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf” who has “become a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek” (Heb. 6:15 and 20). The patience of those who inhabit Christ’s body, framed by a backward reference to ancient Israel, now acquires an eschatological edge. Patience means trusting in Christ’s ongoing priestly work, so that “the assurance of things hoped for … [and] things not seen” (Heb. 11:1) can be sustained. The rather modest role assigned to human patience in the Hebrew Bible, then, has undergone significant expansion. Patience now numbers among a clutch of laudable moral traits. It is a quality that supports and manifests faith in a hostile context, that enables one to navigate life in community, and that orients one to the eschaton. And alongside all of this, there stands the bold witness of the Epistle of James—a text that adds an intriguing ethical and political edge to everything noted thus far. As is well known, James begins with a “stairway of ideas” that runs backward and forward. Subsequent to a slightly unusual salutation, one learns about “trials” that prompt the “testing” of faith, foster endurance (ὑπομονὴ), and are encompassed by joy

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(1:2–4; also 1:12).31 Contending with such trials, evidently, is not a matter of gritting one’s teeth. James calls on readers and auditors to understand them as occasions for the enlargement of the self, discrete moments in a process of sanctification that has as its goal the emergence of one who is “mature and complete, lacking in nothing” (1:4). By the end of the letter, however, ὑπομονὴ has been displaced by μακροθυμία. And with this displacement, the issue of waiting acquires great importance.32 Inasmuch as the “coming of the Lord” is assured but, as yet, unrealized, Christian life requires exercises of patience and suffering that hearken back to “the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord” and that recall the endurance of Job (5:10).33 The enlargement of the self that is described in Jas 1, then, is now paired with a call to accept the slow pace of salvation. One needs to bear with the present, trusting that all things are ordered to the “purpose of the Lord” (5:11), combining the praxis of endurance with an acceptance of an indefinite eschatological horizon. As one endures the quotidian, one waits, patiently, on a future in which redemption will be fully realized.34

Ralph P. Martin, James (Waco: Word Books, 1988), 14. A comparable “stairway” (gradatio) is found in Rom. 5:3–4 and 2 Pet. 1:6–7. 32 The connection between Jas 1:2–12 and 5:7–11 is well established. See, inter alia, Fred O. Francis, “Form and Function of the Opening and Closing Paragraphs of James and 1 John,” ZNW 61, nos. 1–2 (1970): 110–26; and, more recently, Matt Jackson-McCabe, “Enduring Temptation: The Structure and Coherence of the Letter of James,” JSNT 37, no. 2 (2014): 161–84. The consensus that James is deliberately constructed, of course, challenges both Luther’s rash denigration of the text and Martin Dibelius’s claim that the book is a general collection of edifying remarks (see, respectively, LW 35, 362 and A Commentary on the Letter to James, rev. Heinrich Greeven, trans. Michael A. Williams, ed. Helmut Koester [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976]). 33 Most likely the Job of the Testament of Job, not the biblical text. See Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 319–20. 34 A distinction of μακροθυμία and ὑπομονὴ is common in secondary literature. Sophie Laws, for example, contends that “makrothumeō denotes patient waiting rather than an active endurance of suffering, for which (although the verbs are to some extent synonymous) hupomoneō would be the usual expression” (see The Epistle of James [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980], 208). And Douglas J. Moo notes that “we are patient with other people and endure difficulties,” even as he notes that this distinction does not quite mesh with Jas 5; see The Letter of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 222. 31

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So James has spliced—probably unawares, perhaps not; it doesn’t much matter—the mindset of Colossians (which calls for Christians to forbear in a fallen world) with the mindset of Hebrews (which extols readers to hope for the future, in patience). A further, quite crucial development comes into view when James reckons with the hard realities of economic exploitation and material deprivation in the second and fifth chapters. Against Martin Dibelius’s claim that references to “the poor” function as stylized references to smallholders and craftspeople, as well as Richard Bauckham’s more recent suggestion that James could have functioned as an “encyclical” to Jewish-Christians, it seems best to read the text as it comes at this point.35 It seems best, that is, to suppose that James is directly addressing a population beset by extreme material precarity—a population comprising “day laborers, slaves, and ‘expendables’” who struggle to make ends meet.36 And it is certainly clear that the brute fact of poverty is perilous, in and of itself, for the Christian community. It is the occasion for sinful behavior within the assembly (συναγωγὴν, 2:2) and the church (ἐκκλησίας, 5:14); it tempts merchants to break ties and pursue short-term profits (4:13– 17); it encourages one to forget that God has chosen the poor to inherit the Kingdom (2:5). However, if the earlier chapters of James tend to look inward, the final chapter looks outward, naming those who are responsible for the impoverishment of the masses: wealthy landholders who fleece laborers hired to tend the land.37 Following a blistering denunciation of the rich that rivals Lk. 6:20–26 and Matt. 22:1–14 for ferocity, Jas 5:4–6 gives voice to the exploited: Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you. See Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (Routledge: London, 1999), 11–28. 36 William F. Brosend II, James & Jude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65. Moo dissents; see Letter of James, 24–5. 37 Peter H. Davids, The Epistle of James: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 28–34. 35

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A generalized and unnuanced broadside, to be sure. But that is precisely the point. In the final analysis, James suggests, a distribution of wealth that benefits a minority while having grievous consequences for the majority is an entirely explicable state of affairs. The rich are rich because they expropriate the labor of the poor. When this critique of the rich is paired with an exhortation to trust in the pace of salvation, talk of patience takes on an intriguing charge. On one level, the community is told to be cleareyed about why they suffer and about who is responsible for that. Those who exercise patience must not lose their critical edge; they should recognize structures of domination and dynamics of power in the quotidian. On another level, the counsel to “Be patient (Μακροθυμήσατε) … until the coming of the Lord” (v. 7), to “be patient (μακροθυμήσατε)” and “[s]trengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near” (v. 8)—it is not, clearly, a matter of if the Lord will come but a matter of when the Lord will come— is not partnered with a call to overturn an economic system that disadvantages those already suffering deprivation. If the exercise of patience does not involve looking away from or acquiescing to injustice, then, it does not seem to include any kind of direct challenge to it. Is that a function of the belief that God alone ought to exact vengeance (so Rom. 12:19)? Or a sense that, in good time, “the arms of the wicked shall be broken,” while “the Lord upholds the righteous” (Ps. 37:17)?38 Possibly. But James seems most concerned to emphasize the obligation of Christians to realize an alternative kind of community in the quotidian. Practicing charity, performing good works, renouncing gossip and backbiting, praying for wisdom, showing solicitude toward wayward brothers and sisters, honoring the fact that “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change … gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (1:17–18): this is what is required for Christians to be “doers of the word” (1:22–23), to practice “[r]eligion that is pure and undefiled before God” (1:27), and for faith to be a “profession” that “exhibit[s] itself in performance.”39 Patience, in other words, is I was reminded of this verse by James H. Cone. See God of the Oppressed, rev. edn (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), 154. 39 Luke Timothy Johnson, Brother of Jesus, Friend of God: Studies in the Letter of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 12. 38

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not just a matter of holding fast to one’s identity (although that is, of course, supposed) and calling out those who are responsible for injustice; it entails the performance of a “counterworld” that stands in the sharpest contrast to an economy defined by exploitation. Something akin, arguably, to what Elsa Tamez has called “militant patience.”40 Might not a determination to do no more (but no less!) than model a different way of life prolong the socioeconomic order that James condemns? Does not the counsel of patience risk allowing a system supportive of injustice to continue on its way? It is possible to draw such conclusions. The ethical urgency and eschatological assurance of the letter’s peroration do not encourage auditors and readers to develop a program to effect change. And James offers little-to-no information about the “timing” of the end. Although judgment is on its way (and will perhaps come soon, since the “Judge is standing at the doors!” [5:9]), the reference to “early and late rains” is fairly obscure, as is the identity of the “farmer” who “waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient (μακροθυῶν) with it until it receives the early and late rains” (5:7). The key issue here, however, is that James’ exhortation fills out the meaning of μακροθυμία sketched in other New Testament books. To be patient, now and in the future, is to embrace the task of suffering wisely and purposefully, persisting with good works, so as to make evident the contradiction between a grace-guided life and the predations of the sinful rich. Patience is something one is called to do, in an ambiguous present, given one’s incorporation into Christ’s body, in anticipation of a future that one cannot control. It means the purposeful enactment of Christian identity, before God, in a compromised quotidian. (ii) Although μακροθυμία is largely associated with human beings in the New Testament, in contrast to èrèk appayîm in the Hebrew Bible (which is largely associated with God), there is sometimes a reprisal of the suggestion that God is longsuffering and slow to anger. That is to say: if there is an emphasis on divine patience in the Hebrew Bible, flanked with suggestions of human patience, the New Testament’s account of human patience is complemented by

40 Elsa Tamez, The Scandalous Message of James: Faith without Works is Dead, trans. John Eagleson, rev. edn (n.p.: Crossroad, 1990). See esp. 43–6.

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intriguing claims about how the God of ancient Israel, who is the God of Jesus Christ and his Spirit, exercises patience in the world. On a few occasions, reference is made to God’s forbearance of sin. During a challenge to would-be arbiters of moral and religious purity—Christians who suppose themselves qualified to judge as God judges—Paul identifies “the riches of his [God’s] kindness and forbearance (ἀνοχῆς) and patience (μακροθυμίας)” as an occasion for repentance (Rom. 2:4). He then adds, a bit more menacingly, that God’s patience will soon find its limit, since God “will repay according to each one’s deeds,” with the “good” winning eternal life and the “self-seeking” subjected to “wrath and fury” (Rom. 2:6–8). Romans 9:22 expands this claim: we hear that God “has endured with much patience (μακροθυμίᾳ) the objects of wrath that are made for destruction.” This is an intriguing development of Exod. 34:7. While God endures the sinful rebellion of human beings in ways that disclose something of God’s mercy, it is no longer the case that God’s retributive judgment will affect the descendants of sinners. By Paul’s estimation, some who rebel against God are already being teed up to receive God’s wrath, and thereby to bear witness to God’s righteous condemnation of sin. First Peter 3:20 then adds a further twist. Although surrounding verses pose exegetical challenges, the claim that “God waited patiently (μακροθυμία) in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark” seems to signal that while God’s patience eventually runs out—devastatingly so—the flooding of the world was delayed to allow Noah to construct a refuge.41 The implication, then, is that those alive today ought to hurry, committing and recommitting themselves to lives which honor their baptism, since the “end of all things is near” (1 Pet. 4:7). So divine patience is again associated with God’s holding open time and space for our repentance. Human beings ought to act on their incorporation into Christ’s body, prior to the “end of all things,” lest they be overwhelmed by the outflow of God’s eschatological anger. Second Peter expands on this point. While the eschatological urgency of 1 Pet. is not absent, there is now a marked interest in the nonarrival of the eschaton, which has occasioned “scoffing”

See Lewis R. Donelson, I & II Peter and Jude: A Commentary (Louisville: WKJP, 2010), 113.

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among the community’s foes (2 Pet. 3:3–7).42 In response, the epistle directs attention to what might be called a certain stubbornness with respect to God’s mercy. Not “stubbornness” in the sense of inflexibility; stubbornness in the sense that God’s determination to spread salvation as widely as possible leads God to hold history open, patiently waiting on and for our repentance in the aftermath of the incarnation and the outpouring of the Spirit. Thus 2 Pet. 3:8–10: But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you (μακροθυμεῖ εἰς ὑμᾶς), not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed. Although God does not reckon time according to human standards (talk of a “thousand years” being an allusion to Ps. 90:4), the apparent delay of the end is not a reason for concern.43 The slow pace of salvation attests, rather, to the breadth and depth of God’s mercy; it comprises one part of a confident answer to the age-old taunt, “Where is your God?” (Ps. 42:10). While the apocalypse will occur, God’s slowness affords human beings time and space to

Scholars have cast doubt on a substantive relationship between 1 and 2 Pet., in part because 2 Pet. seems proximate to Jude (see esp. the parallels between Jude 1:17–18 and 2 Pet. 3:1–3). But 2 Pet. does ask to be read as a follow-up to 1 Pet. (thus 2 Pet. 3:1!), and it is possible to treat the letters as interlocking statements. Reading with that possibility in mind does not necessitate common authorship, nor preclude the consideration of connections between 2 Pet. and Jude; it simply reflects a desire to take the declared relationship between the texts seriously. On these issues see, inter alia, Joel B. Green, “Narrating the Gospel in 1 and 2 Peter,” Int 60, no. 3 (2006): 262–77; and Jeremy F. Hultin, “The Literary Relationships among 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude,” in Reading 1–2 Peter and Jude: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Troy W. Martin (Atlanta: SBL, 2014), 27–45. 43 For the allusion to Psa. 90:4 and related verses, see Richard Bauckham, “The Delay of the Parousia,” TynBul 31 (1980): 3–36; and, more recently, Peter H. Davids, The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 275–7. 42

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do what is truly necessary: to repent of sin, and to avoid “perishing” by embracing faith in the Messiah. It is a demonstration of God’s sovereign ruling, not its disconfirmation. Calvin puts it well: “when He delays, God is having regard for our salvation, and he delays because He is concerned for us” (Comm. 2 Pet. 3:9). Once again, an acclamation of divine patience dovetails with an exhortation to action. Second Peter calls on readers to make good on God’s patience, to reward God’s mercy before the time afforded to us runs out. The letter then raises the stakes in a remarkable manner, toying with the idea that human action might affect the timing of the end of days. Toward the end of the epistle, one finds the claim that Christians are now “waiting for and hastening (προσδοκῶντας καὶ σπεύδοντας) the coming of the day of God” (2 Pet. 3:12). Whether or not this verse echoes a late-first century rabbinical debate need not be determined.44 More important is the striking idea that God so esteems human action that our uptake (or declension) of God’s graciousness has some bearing on the length of history. Indeed, might God’s slowness to anger be extended in the time opened up by Christ and Christ’s Spirit? Absent the right kind of human response, might history continue to be stretched out, since God does not “want … any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (2. Pet. 3:9)? Is God longsuffering in this way? Correspondingly, could the right kind of response to God (“lives of holiness and godliness” [2 Pet. 3:11]) move history more quickly toward its conclusion? While such questions do not admit of decisive answer, the text makes them irrepressible. At the very least, the call to “regard the patience (μακροθυμίαν) of our Lord as salvation” (2 Pet. 3:15) suggests that God’s slowness to anger involves the merciful provision of time and space—time and space for us to be found “at peace, without spot or blemish” (2 Pet. 3:14) as we “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18). God’s slowness to anger, in this context, means God’s slowness with respect to the parousia. Human beings are permitted to “catch up” with what God has done, and is doing, in advance of the dissolution of all things.

44 See the helpful remarks in Davids, The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude, 280–1 and 290–1; and Donielson, I & II Peter, 275 and 278–9.

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It bears mention that all of the above sheds interesting light on Ernst Käsemann’s famous claim that “apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology.”45 It suffices here to add, first, that an apocalyptic frame gives especial urgency to the claim that human beings ought to respond to patience, repenting of sin and committing themselves to act rightly before God; and, second, that the apocalyptic dimensions of patience in the New Testament cannot be fully understood without reference to God’s patience toward ancient Israel.

The final reference to consider gives μακροθυμία an explicitly Christological charge. In 1 Tim. 1:16, having stated that Christ delivers salvation to sinners, Paul (or, more likely, someone writing in his name) adds: “But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost [among sinners], Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience (ἇπασαν μακροθυμίαν), making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.” While hardly self-evident in meaning, this verse seems to gather together many of the threads of this subsection. Out of an abundance of mercy, God waits on humankind, affording even the “foremost of sinners” an opportunity to receive and proclaim the salvation that God brings. There is no rush to judgment; God’s forbearance, which extends to Paul himself, vouchsafes the possibility of others being granted entry into Christ’s body. There seems also to be the suggestion that divine patience elicits the kind of activity that Paul himself undertakes. An almost-manic drive to share the Gospel with fractious, disputatious, and bewildered communities of faith; a determination to make intellectual sense of Christ’s death and resurrection, in the Spirit, by way of conversation and writing; a sometimes arrogant, but in retrospect largely laudable determination to lead believers, in the time prior to Christ’s glorious return—all of this is the consequence of Christ “displaying” patience in Paul. And, of course, atop of that, one catches sight of a still-broader suggestion: that God’s patience, exercised toward ancient Israel, is now being mediated through Christ, the risen Lord who draws humankind toward “the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Tim. 1:17). 45 Ernst Käsemann, “The Beginnings of Christian Theology,” in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 102. For a very valuable gloss on Käsemann’s pregnant quip, see Ry O. Siggelkow, “Ernest Käsemann and the Specter of Apocalyptic,” TTod 75, no. 1 (2018): 37–50.

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As noted earlier, there are references to μακροθυμία in the synoptic gospels. These occur within parables that exhort human beings to act differently, in view of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaims and enacts. Matt. 18:23–34, sometimes referred to as “The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant,” involves Jesus comparing the Kingdom “to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves” (v. 23). One is so indebted that he faces the prospect of being sold, along with his family and possessions. He remonstrates with his creditor, saying “Have patience with me (Μακροθύμησον ἐπ᾽ ἐμοί), and I will pay you everything” (v. 26). This appeal is not obviously reflective of a penitent spirit, for why should an enslaved individual repent of debts owed to a master who benefits from enforced labor? But the appeal succeeds and the king cancels the debt. This exhibition of pity, however, has no effect on the enslaved man. He immediately refuses the entreaty of another, who owes him a modest sum, and has him imprisoned. This lands the original debtor in a much worse position. Hearing of his merciless attitude, the king denounces him and “hand[s] him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt” (v. 34). A direct admonition follows: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (v. 35). Less a case of the “unforgiving servant,” then, more a case of a king who expects his largesse to be replicated—and who acts fiercely when that does not occur. To treat this parable as an exposé of “Jewish casuistry” which discloses “the full and unsurpassable readiness of generous and forgiving grace” is obviously untenable.46 Beyond the questionable description of Judaism in play, the interpretation simply does not fit with the text: a king who tortures indebted slaves is hardly a representative of divine mercy. It seems more sensible to read Matt. 18:23–34 as a parable that presses hearers and readers to reckon with the life-changing significance of the Kingdom. Μακροθύμησον ἐπ᾽ ἐμοί, by this reckoning, forms but one part of an exhortation to reckon with what is now “at hand.” “The Parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge,” recounted in Lk. 18:1–8, tells of an unlikeable judge “who neither feared God nor had respect for people” (v. 2) and who grants a measure of justice to a widow in her dispute with an opponent. Not for laudable reasons: the judge only acts because “this widow keeps bothering me, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming” (v. 5). Jesus then admonishes his disciples, and anyone else listening, to take heed of him. “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long 46 D. Stephan Horst, “μακροθυμία, μακροθυμέω, μακρόθυμος, μακροθύμως,” in Theological Dictionary, ed. Kittel, vol. 4, 380.

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in helping them (μακροθυμεῖ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς)? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (vv. 7–8). Granted the difficulty of interpreting μακροθυμεῖ ἐπ᾽αὐτοῖς and the challenge of understanding the reference to the Son of Man, this mention of patience does not seem particularly consequential. It is simply part of an exhortation to reckon with God in an eschatologically charged context. At most, there is a loose parallel to verses in 1 and 2 Pet.: because we are not privy to the exact timing of the End, we ought to respond to Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom, busying ourselves with prayer and good works, lest we be found wanting when Jesus returns.

(d) ὑπομονή and ὑπομένω (endurance, to endure) ­Thus far, we have a sense of èrèk appayîm as a divine characteristic: God being merciful in response to ancient Israel’s sin, such that God’s (just) punishment is deferred and/or tempered; God being merciful in ways that afford human beings time and space to repent and recommit themselves to the covenant. Μακροθυμία in the New Testament broadens the view. And while it is largely presented as a desideratum of faithful life, in various modes, the perspectives of the Hebrew Bible remain vital. The patience of Christian life and the patience of God toward ancient Israel, mediated now through the activity of Christ and his Spirit, are linked in suggestive and striking ways. What, then, of ὑπομονή and ὑπομένω?47 In much ancient literature, these terms are used to describe an individual who endures discomfort and remains steadfast in an unfavorable context.48 In addition to the reference works noted in subsection (a), what follows also draws on Friedrich Hauck, “ὑπομένω, ὑπομονή” in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary, vol. 4, 581–8. 48 The claims of this paragraph are particularly indebted to Julian Ross, Philosophy in Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1949), esp.  39–68 (on “Stoic Endurance”); William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Lombardini, “Stoicism and the Virtue of Toleration,” HPT 36, no. 4 (2015): 643–69; and Paul Scherz, “Grief, Death, and Longing in Stoic and Christian Ethics,” JRE 45, no. 1 (2017): 7–28. I am particularly indebted to Lombardini’s and Scherz’s articles. The former directed me to some of the texts quoted above; the latter disabused me of some common misapprehensions. 47

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Sometimes an  author draws on the root meaning of “remaining” (μένω), as when Plato discusses a soldier who “endures in war,” even when that solider knows that their opponent is likely to prevail.49 Aristotle thinks along similar lines, and with a characteristic concern: during a reflection on courage, he commends a balanced response to events that transpire in the quotidian—a virtuous individual being one who will fear “in the right way, and. … endure (ὑπομένεῖ) … as principle dictates, for the sake of what is noble” (Nic. Eth. 1115b). In Stoic traditions, ὑπομένω seems to become largely interchangeable with ἀνέχω (to bear, endure, suffer) while acquiring a more focused meaning. Granted occasional gestures toward what might initially appear to be rank apatheia (as when it is declared that a Cynic “must have such powers of endurance that he strikes the crowd as being insensible and like a stone” [Epict. diss. 3.22.100; cf. 3.24.84– 8]), there is an abiding concern to specify what endurance should entail in view of the obscure workings of providence. A premium is placed on “managing” circumstances that have befallen one in a particular patch of space and time, while preserving equanimity and attending to one’s moral duties. In Lives of Eminent Philosophers, for instance, Diogenes Laertius reports that Chrysippus of Soli adjudged endurance essential for a virtuous person to contend with physical or emotional pain (D.L. 7.125–6). Epictetus identifies endurance as a metric for assessing philosophical growth (Epict. diss. 3.13.22–23). And, in a Roman context, with patientia standing in for ὑπομονή, Seneca recalls its relationship to courage, supposing that “endurance and long-suffering and hardihood” are courage’s “branches” (Sen. Ep. 67.10), while elsewhere showing his talent for a well-turned apothegm: “it is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it” (Prov. 2). Marcus Aurelius seems to think along similar lines in his Meditations, while beginning also to reckon with the challenge of life in a pluralistic society—endurance being identified as a quality that enables one to disagree with those who are quite different from oneself. The Bible, of course, presumes a different framework. As Pierre Hadot has shown, Stoics tended to focus on the operations of providence as they devolve upon a human being in the

Laches 193a. See Plato, Laches; Protagoras; Meno; Euthydemus, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 54–5.

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here-and-now—a point illustrated by Marcus’ claim that what is “enough” for an individual is that their “present opinion be grounded in conviction,” their “present action grounded in unselfishness,” and their “present disposition contented with whatever befalls [them] from without” (Med. 9.6, emphases added).50 The scriptural witness, by contrast (and drawing on the Septuagint is instructive here), trades on a dialectic that connects formative events in the past with challenges in the present. Often, endurance names a certain kind of waiting on God, underwritten by the hope that God’s earlier actions might be echoed in the lives of later individuals and communities. On occasion, such waiting takes on a slightly nervy edge, as when a psalmist’s “remaining” is paired with a call for God to hurry up and intervene (thus Ps. 25:5: “For you I wait [ὑπέμεινα] all day long”; see also Ps. 25:21). More dominant, however, is a note of confident expectancy, as with Mic. 7:7 (“I will look to the Lord, I will wait [ὑπομενῶ] for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me”) and Ps. 33:20 (“Our soul waits [ὑπομενεί] for the Lord, he is our help and shield” [see also Lam. 3:26, Dan. 12:12, Hab. 2:3, and Zeph. 3:8]). To dispose oneself in this fashion does not attest to belief in a covenant that was realized, as Mircea Eliade would say, in illo tempore. It bespeaks a concern to affirm and inhabit a covenant that defines an ongoing history. To hold fast and wait, one might even say, is a matter of ancient Israel “performing” its place in the covenant in the aftermath of God’s mighty acts, imagining and hoping that comparable instances of divine favor will shape history in the days, months, and years ahead. Second Isaiah makes this point dramatically when, endeavoring to lift an exiled population from despondency, it pairs hymns to God’s saving power with bold pronouncements about the benefits of waiting. It is not just that the Lord who elects ancient Israel is “the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (although that is of course true); it is also that “those who wait (οἱ … ὑπομένοντες) for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, / they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not

See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden: Blackwell, 1995), esp. 179–205 and 217–37.

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faint” (Isa. 40:28 and 31). Ὑπομομή assumes that a recollection of the past can transform one’s perception of and expectation in the present; it identifies a tensed kind of anticipation, derivative of a belief in the continuing application of God’s promises. The New Testament brings additional layers of meaning into play. On one level, ὑπομονή/ὑπομένω are used to express confidence in the consummation of God’s saving project. To endure is to give evidence of a capacity to stand fast, amid trials and tribulations, on the basis of an assurance that those trials and tribulations will be outmatched by the full realization of God’s Kingdom. The author of Revelation, for example, makes common cause with his readers when he identifies himself as “your brother who share[s] with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance (ὑπομονῇ)” (1:9, cf. 2:2 and 2:19). This claim is echoed during the Son of Man’s address to the church in Philadelphia, which affirms that the church has “kept my word of patient endurance (λόγον τῆς ὑπομονῆς μου)” and can trust that “I am coming soon” (Rev. 3:10 and 11). Does this kind of endurance, then, have Jesus’ patient endurance as its condition of possibility? Is the endurance of Christ’s followers derivative of the endurance that Christ displayed during his ministry and passion? The invocation of 2 Thess. 3:5, “May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ (ὑπομονὴν τοῦ Χριστοῦ),” makes this an exegetical possibility. Although a case can be made for reading an objective genitive at this juncture (“steadfastness” referring to the constancy of the Thessalonians’ expectation), a subjective genitive is not impossible, and it allows the idea that the community draws on the steadfastness and endurance of Christ himself.51 If Jesus “endured (ὑπέμεινεν) the cross, disregarding its shame” and if Jesus “endured

Among those who favor reading 2 Thess. 3:5 as an objective genitive, see Jan Lambrecht, “Loving God and Steadfastly Awaiting Christ (2 Thessalonians 3,5),” ETL 76, no. 4 (2000): 435–41, esp. 437; and Maarten J. J. Menken, 2 Thessalonians: Facing the End with Sobriety (London: Routledge, 1994), 128–9. Among those who read the verse in terms of a subjective genitive, see F. F. Bruce, 1 & 2 Thessalonians (Waco: Word Books, 1982), 202. Ben Witherington III makes a compelling argument in favor of a both/and in 1 and 2 Thessalonians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 243–4, as does (at least by implication) the always-brilliant James Denney in The Epistles to the Thessalonians (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1905), 369–72.

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(ὑπομεμενηκότα) such hostility against himself from sinners” (Heb. 12:2 and 12:3; cf. 2 Tim. 2:12), the endurance of those incorporated into Christ’s body is the analogue to which Christ’s unswerving obedience is the analogate. We can endure patiently because God has gotten there first, both in the antecedent reality of God’s own being (God being a “God of steadfastness (ὑπομονῆς)” [Rom. 15:5]) and in the passion of the Son. On another level, and rather more frequently, ὑπομονή and ὑπομένω describe Christian tenacity in a world that does not know or, worse, actively rejects, the Gospel. The synoptics illustrate the point nicely. A central claim in the “little apocalypse” of Mk 13 is that the “the one who endures to the end (ὑπομείνας εἰς τέλος) will be saved”—a claim that recurs in Matthew (10:22 and 24:13) and that Luke glosses in terms of an endurance that secures the salvation of one’s soul (21:19). Jesus’ exposition of the Parable of the Sower in Luke runs along similar lines, concluding with a characterization of those who comprise the “good soil” on which the “seed” of the Kingdom falls: “these are the ones who … when they heard the word, hold it fast with an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance (καρποθοροῦσιν ἐν ὑπομονῇ)” (Lk. 8:15). In these cases, ὑπομονή/ὑπομένω identifies those determined to guard and maintain their identity, despite the challenges of an unknowing and hostile environment. It affirms those who honor their incorporation into the body of Christ, endorsing a Kingdom that has not yet shown itself to be historically triumphant. This is pretty much the meaning of ὑπομένω in the pastorals, too. Think of 1 Pet. 2:20: “If you endure (ὑπομενεῖτε) when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure (ὑπομενεῖτε) when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval” (cf. 1 Tim. 6:11, 2 Tim. 3:10, and Tit. 2:2). This kind of endurance, one might add, means persistence in love—a posture and activity that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (πάντα ὑπομένει)” (1 Cor. 13:7). A combination of confidence and tenacity also shows up in Romans, which often identifies ὑπομονή as a basic quality of Christian life. Endurance (“perseverance” in the KJV) is the crucial middle term of Rom. 5:3–4, being produced by suffering and being productive of hope. And these verses anticipate the grand

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argument of the epistle’s crucial eighth chapter, wherein Paul writes of a hopeful, Spirit-led “groaning” for that which is not yet fully manifest. Endurance enables believers to undergo “sufferings of this present time” (8:18) while waiting “for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (8:23) and supports a desire to pray, in freedom, as members of God’s family (8:26–28). Thus 8:25: “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (δι᾽ ὑπομονῆς ἀπεκδεχόμεθα).” Endurance, here, is not just indexed in Christ’s passion; it is viewed as a disposition that fits with the Spirit’s ongoing labor, as God delivers a new world from the ruins of the old. Needless to say, it would be possible to go into much more detail, not least with respect to terms whose meanings are proximate to μακροθυμία and ὑπομονή. Ἀπεκδέχομαι, which features prominently in Rom. 8:23 and 8:25, suggests something more than the word “wait”: we have to do here with a “burning expectation” for the future God promises and the drastic transformation of all things (verses that contrast, of course, with the more restrained uses in Phil. 3:20, 1 Cor. 7, Gal. 5:5, and Heb. 9:28). Ἀνεξίκακος (patience, bearing up) is identified as a quality of the Lord’s “servant” in 2 Tim. 2:24; it appears to be a development of the call for endurance in the hymn of 2:11–13, albeit one that emphasizes the value of “gentleness” in disputation (so 2:25). Ἀνέχομαι is used fifteen times in the New Testament, typically in terms of the request that someone “bear” or “put up” with another person (e.g., Mk 9:19 and 2 Cor. 11:19–20) or a line of thought (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:1). Finally, there are a number of terms having to do with suffering: πάσχω, συμπάσχω, πάθος, κακοπάθεια, etc. In Greek literature, the root identifies the injurious consequences of misfortune, and this meaning is preserved and transformed in the New Testament. In the synoptics, some references are to the broad scope of Christ’s suffering (e.g., Mk 8:31 and par.), although in Luke-Acts the word focuses attention on Christ’s death. Hebrews seems to follow Luke-Acts, albeit with a broader reference to the passion as a whole: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned (ἔμαθεν) obedience through what he had suffered (ἔπαθεν); and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb. 5:7–9). This “learning of obedience” becomes a pattern for Christian existence, as 1 Pet. 2:21 suggests (“For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you [ἒπαθεν ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν], leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps”; cf. 1 Pet. 4:1 and 5:1).

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(e) Taking Stock Although analyses focused on discrete terms and phrases in scripture do not fix the course of theological reflection, the words considered above establish an intriguing framework. And, granted that the next and final section return us to the wide-angled considerations that opened the chapter, it is useful to take stock at this point—to offer a brief summary of these necessarily technical, tightly focused remarks, and in so doing to ensure that the interpretative and constructive claims of subsequent chapters are undertaken in clear view of the scriptural witness. First, there is the rich notion of èrèk appayîm (“slowness to anger”) in the Hebrew Bible. While there are suggestions of a human parallel, this phrase serves primarily to describe the ways that God tempers and/or postpones God’s rebuke of sin. And tempering and postponement are certainly not a function of God being indifferent or indulgent, nor an indication that God sits lightly on God’s determination to punish covenantal waywardness. Slowness to anger is more a matter of God’s revealing God’s identity as one who is always “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” the result being an economy wherein God commits to “keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation” (Exod. 34:6–7). God’s èrèk appayîm, further, points toward the idea that God affords creatures the opportunity to repent of wrongdoing and commit themselves to God. It tells us that God’s governance of history is shaped by God’s willingness to wait on and to empower creatures to respond to God’s saving purposes; it speaks to the way that creatures are asked to reward God’s favor by their participation in the covenant. Second, there is μακροθυμία (patience) and cognates: terms that describe a cluster of qualities, actual and aspirational, that ought to distinguish Christian life. For the most part, the meaning of μακροθυμία moves between forbearance in face of affliction and mistreatment, perseverance with respect to the conduct and attitude of those grafted into Christ’s body, and expectant waiting for the consummation of God’s salvific project. Granted that patience is responsive to circumstance, it is a matter of purposefully receiving the world, as opposed to being controlled by it; it is a disposition wherein one enacts a justified and sanctified identity, in Christ and with the Spirit, so that something of a “counterworld” is realized— one that trusts in the salvation that Christ brings, and one that looks

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and moves toward God’s future in an ambiguous present. (A key text, again, is 2 Pet. 3:12, which refers to our “waiting for and hastening (προσδοκῶντας καὶ σπεύδοντας) the coming of the day of God.”) Is there a divine complement to this human exercise of patience? Yes, and it is more pronounced than the human complement to èrèk appayîm in the Hebrew Bible. Alongside an intriguing remark about the “patience of Christ,” references to μακροθυμία reprise the idea that God holds history open, affording us the opportunity to conform ourselves to God’s will. Second Peter, once again: “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you (μακροθυμεῖ εἰς ὑμᾶς), not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (3:9). Divine patience and human activity go hand in hand. The apparent “slowness” of God’s saving work connects with the final terms of interest: ὑπομονή and ὑπομένω. Granted some overlap with μακροθυμία, these terms tend to identify the human who holds fast when disconcerting events devolve upon her. If, in the Septuagint, endurance involves the recollection and reaffirmation of one’s identity as a creature overarched by the covenant of grace, the New Testament views endurance in terms of honoring one’s incorporation into Christ’s body, “managing” waywardness while remaining confident that history is moving toward a glorious end. Endurance secures the ground on which one is able patiently to wait.

4 On Exploration and Imagination With the preceding comments about the biblical witness in hand, I want now to say more about how this project endeavors to inhabit the “domain of the Word.” In broad terms, this book is situated in the Anselmian tradition, which famously construes theology as an exercise of “faith seeking understanding.”52 This adage, obviously, takes faith as a point of departure for reflection. So, what is faith? It is the consequence of human beings’ encounter with the God who graciously and savingly reveals Godself, in Christ and in the Spirit, through the medium of For crisp statements of what this means for Anselm, see esp. Pros. 1 and CDH I.1. Back of these texts, see, inter alia, De Trin. IX.1.1.

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scripture and in the context of some form of Christian community. It names our receipt of a discrete pattern of divine activity—a receipt that is itself an effect of that activity—that transforms the ways that we think, feel, communicate, and act, in relation to God and in relation to other creatures. To be sure, both the reception and transformation pose a challenge for the individual and for the community (or communities) of which she is a part. Beyond the burden of reckoning with scripture, faith often occasions a heightened sense of finitude and sinfulness, with an awareness of the “infinitude of benefits reposing in God” exacerbating our sense of the “miserable ruin” of human life (Inst. 1.i.1). It does not make life easier; it makes life more difficult. But this difficulty is tolerable, for the most part, because it is accompanied by a vivid sense of gratitude and trust in God. Those given faith are emboldened to view themselves as participants and agents in an economy of grace, the material center of which is the incarnation of God in Christ, by the Spirit, and the material upshot of which is the remission of sins, the liberation of creation from the reign of death, and a movement toward and into the Kingdom. Those given faith are enabled, in other words, to grasp that creatureliness is a valuable, consequential affair, and that human beings in particular have a distinct role to play in the unspooling of God’s history with the world and the world’s history with God. What about seeking and understanding? These words refer to what happens downstream of God’s activity, as faith awakens to itself and tries to come to grips with itself. In the same moment that one is graciously afforded new ways to know, feel, and act in the economy of grace—engaging scripture and participating in some form of Christian community being central to this (extended!) moment—one is also afforded the opportunity to think concentratedly about that economy and one’s place in it. Talk of “seeking,” to be sure, is another reminder that finitude, waywardness, and fallibility mark human life. One cannot fully grasp God’s ways and works. One only ever reckons with them haltingly and clumsily; one is always running to catch up with what God has done and is doing, while falling over one’s feet (and, most likely, tripping up others in the process). But that does not make seeking an exercise in frustration. Talk of “understanding” indicates that seeking can and does yield results, provisional though they may be. Inhabitation and exploration of the economy of grace can

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and do result in the production of a clutch of statements, typically fairly conceptual in nature, that redescribe and gloss something of God’s being and God’s activity. One finds oneself trying to make sense, for instance, of God’s creation and sustenance of the cosmos, and about the place therein of each and every creature, whether that be a supernova or a dung beetle, as well as the countless interactions between creatures, whether those be awkward silences, quantum processes, or patterns of domination. Or one finds oneself describing a people in the Ancient Near East whose literary legacy presumes to describe God’s elective work, God’s guidance of history, and God’s contention with creaturely waywardness. Or writing about a prophet from this same community, one whose life, death, and resurrection secure our salvation. And it is precisely at these moments that theology happens. A thinker tries to redescribe the shape and character of faith in terms that are intellectually compelling, “going public” in hopes that their conceptual labors will stimulate more seeking and understanding, and in hopes that Christians, and others, might hereby gain an interesting, coherent, and liberating perspective on who God is and what God is doing. It is perhaps evident from these remarks, as well as from comments in the first section of this chapter, that Anselmian approaches to theological reflection often suppose themselves entitled—but not, of course, required—to dispense with methodological prolegomena. Philosophical claims, analyses of human experience, hermeneutical statements, accounts of religion in general, etc.: although propaedeutic engagements with such matters might prove useful, perhaps with an eye to circumscribing and rendering later dogmatic contentions intelligible, a theologian is always at liberty simply to get on with the business of trying to make sense of what God is doing and who God is. This liberty, of course, does not remove the obligation to defend the claims that one tenders. Nor does it license a disregard for context. That would obscure the fact that the pursuit of understanding is always shaped, in some way, by a discrete configuration of material and intellectual circumstances. It would also draw attention away from the fact that every theological statement intervenes in a particular material and intellectual context, with an eye to confirming, recasting, or challenging some way of thinking and/or acting. At the same time, an Anselmian approach, precisely because it has God’s initiative as its precondition, requires that an awareness of context go hand in

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hand with a sense of theology as an “eccentric”53 undertaking, the principal object of which is to make sense of God’s ways and works in light of the scriptural witness. So, granted that theology happens in medias res, and granted the need for searching examinations of the contexts in which theologians work—which may include attention to theologians’ preferred materials, as well as exacting scrutiny of their intellectual technologies: critique is always needed on this front54—one presupposition of Anselmian theology is that the “middle” from which one begins is always cut across and relativized by a faith that takes the irreducible fact of divine subjectivity as its ultimate concern. A faith that seeks understanding is not primarily interested in itself; its chief preoccupation is the God of ancient Israel who is the God of Jesus Christ—the God who creates, reconciles, and redeems the world. Insofar as the understanding that proceeds from faith tends to “bear back” on faith, seeking confirmation from and integration with its source, there arises the possibility that the faith under consideration will undergo alteration—that is, that the “substance” of faith, as a conditio sine qua non for the process of seeking and understanding, might undergo some kind of change. The old distinction between fides qua creditur (the faith that believes) and fides quae creditur (the faith that is believed) is hereby loosened up, with the “criticism of faith” (an interrogation of this or that doctrine) sometimes occasioning a transformation of the faith that believes.55 Which is not to say that this transformation is in our hands. It is not. It can only be interpreted—provisionally, of course—as the consequence of the mortifying and vivifying activity of the Holy Spirit, as an event internal to the domain of the Word.

So far, so general. This commitment to an Anselmian approach to theology (which I have elaborated on my own terms, at a remove from Anselm’s concern to connect Christian faith, an ecclesially mediated regula fidei and regula veritatis, and the operations of A term used to excellent effect by David Kelsey. See Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, 2 vols (Louisville: WJKP, 2009). 54 On which, see Hanna Reichel, “Conceptual Design, Sin and the Affordances of Doctrine,” IJST 22, no.4 (2020): 538–61. 55 H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture: With Supplementary Essays (Louisville: WJKP, 1993), 15. 53

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human reason)56 obviously needs further clarification. To that end, I want now to delineate two pathways for Christian thought in a late modern age. Doing so supplies the leverage needed to bring my own interpretative and constructive stance into play. The first pathway can go under the name of Anselmianism 1. It is a posture that understands Christian faith by investing heavily in confessional orthodoxy, while focusing attention on the importance of ecclesial life and the need to maintain the distinctiveness of Christian belief and practice in a “secular age.”57 If one assumes a Protestant point of departure, Anselmianism 1 often tethers a commitment to the biblical witness to the belief that early ecumenical councils provide especially reliable guides for reflection, while perhaps also drawing inspiration from some number of magisterial Reformational statements. One finds here, concomitantly, worries about the (supposedly) widespread embrace of liberal political theory and liberal visions of citizenship, concern about the (putative) marginalization of scripture in Christian life and theological inquiry, and frustration at the (apparent) loss of distinctive “rules” for thinking and acting Christianly. A series of positives accompany these negatives: a reassertion of the contrast between church and world, an interest in “postcritical” readings of scripture, a willingness to postulate doctrinal and ethical “rules” (perhaps partnered with a willingness to adjudge certain stances “heretical”), and a commitment to building up a distinctively Christian intellectual culture. Is Anselmianism 1 another name for the “postliberalism” espoused by George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, and their followers? Not necessarily. Liberalism, after all, is a contested and amorphous category, applicable to multiple fields of thought (which makes any attempt to be post-liberal a bit confusing), and there are substantive differences between the progenitors of the “Yale school,” with Frei’s interest in narrative, intention, action, and presence/absence standing in complex relationship to Lindbeck’s Those wishing to know more about Anselm’s actual approach ought to begin with the brilliant précis supplied by Ulrich G. Leinsle; see Introduction to Scholastic Theology, trans. Michael J. Miller (Washington, DC: The Catholic of University of America, 2010), 78–82. 57 A borrowed term of art. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap, 2007). 56

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cultural-linguistic model of doctrine (and, I would add, Lindbeck’s salutary reflections on “Israel-ology”).58 Further complicating matters is the fact that many scholars shaped by Frei and Lindbeck have disavowed or sidelined talk of postliberalism in their own work.59 At the least, though, one can say that Anselmianism 1 tends to look askance at attempts to render Christian faith intelligible according to the (supposed) protocols of a late modern age, and therefore worries about attempts to tether theological reflection to generalized accounts of human experience, some kind of philosophical foundation, or a particular vision of history. It is resolutely postfoundationalist in orientation and unabashedly unapologetic in execution; it is more “dogmatic-analytic” than “apologetic-hermeneutical” in temper.60 It is unembarrassed, too, in its employment of classical terms and idioms: these are assumed to be indispensable to the exposition of faith and crucial for the good health of Christian communities. So, to borrow from William Placher: Anselmianism 1 “offers a description of the world as seen from a Christian perspective that draws what persuasive power it has from the coherence and richness of the whole” and assumes that convictions and habits deemed integral to the Christian tradition should shape reflection today.61

58 See the valuable work of Paul J. DeHart, The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), as well as the essays collected in George Lindbeck, The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. James J. Buckley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). 59 For a rejection of the term, see Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville: WJKP, 1991), 23–5. For a challenge to Lindbeck’s brand of postliberalism, see Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture. For what I take to be studied avoidance of the term, see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Malden: Blackwell, 1999) and, idem, After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). For a more idiosyncratic use of the term, see Peter Ochs, Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011). 60 John Webster, “Introduction: Systematic Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7. 61 William C. Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville: WJKP,  1989), 135. I am not suggesting that Placher represents Anselmianism 1; his words are used for purpose of illustration.

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Another pathway for Anselmian thinking stands in continuity with the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher—an author whose affection for his medieval predecessor was such that quotations from the Proslogion and De incarnatione verbi adorn the title page of The Christian Faith. What I will call Anselmianism 2 is less invested in confessional orthodoxy than Anselmianism 1. And it is relatively relaxed about protecting the distinctiveness of Christian identity, given that it does not suppose the late modern age to be more (or less) inimical to Christian life than any other period of history. The main difference with Anselmianism 1 lies in the determination that theological reflection should take its bearings from the faith that circulates in a particular Christian community in the present. “Dogmatic theology,” specifically, is second-order commentary on a historically specific, localized community of faith: the “science which systematizes the doctrine prevalent in a Christian church at a given time” (Gl. §19).62 Does this interest render Anselmianism 2 a merely descriptive exercise, immanent to and limited by the “affections” that circulate in this or that church at some moment in time? No. “Eccentricity” is very much in play, since the condition of possibility for the piety under consideration is God’s saving action, centered in the person of Christ and applied through the Spirit. There would be no piety apart from that action. And, granted that the dogmatician cannot access God’s action without reference to the faith of the community to which she belongs—this being a faith that always depends on the witness of scripture, as well as the preaching of the Word and the distribution of the sacraments—her ultimate concern is to look “through” faith, and thereby to describe God’s ways and works. Might the dogmatician therefore dispense with “traditional” terms, idioms, and contentions, losing contact with the past? No. The very fact that it is always God acting on the church ensures continuities in thought, and much can be learned from past thinkers (evidenced by Schleiermacher’s rejection of certain “natural heresies” and his abundant citation of confessional documents throughout The Christian Faith). However, in contrast to Anselmianism 1, there is a sense that “inherited” dogmatic

See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, trans. Terrence N. Tice, 3rd edn (Louisville: WJKP, 2011), esp. 41–2 and 72–84 (§97 and §§195–222). 62

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conceptualities must be tested and, as necessary, reworked, so that the understanding of faith can keep pace with the actual language, thought, and action of the community. The “description of the world … from a Christian perspective” must be worked up, time and again, in view of “the immediate utterances of the [Christian] religious self-consciousness” (Gl. §16). These iterations of Anselmianism, of course, are not remotely sufficient to describe the complex world of Protestant thought in present. Some thinkers do not fit easily into either camp; others seem to inhabit both camps. There is also a good deal of latitude. One can imagine Anselmianism 1, for instance, as a canopy under which could be gathered thinkers whose concurrence about some doctrinal matter is complemented by acute disagreement on some ethical issue (say, about racism and antiracism, human sexuality, and the ecological crisis); and one can imagine scholars encompassed by Anselmianism 2 having sharp disputes about what counts as Christian community (is it a localized denomination, as Schleiermacher supposed, or might community be defined more loosely, as liberationist thinkers have sometimes suggested?). Moreover, one should recognize that Anselmianism 1 and 2 share much in common. Both presume a postfoundationalist starting point; both aim to balance past and present, in different proportions; both enable a vivid sense of Christian distinction. And neither needs to look unfavorably upon the other, much less take refuge in outworn binaries (conservative vs. liberal, traditional/revisionist, orthodox/ heterodox, antimodern/modern, etc.). Anselmianism 1 cannot reasonably accuse its counterpart of “thinning out” Christian faith and thought—say, by collapsing dogmatics into context (as if Anselmianism 2 doesn’t suppose that God forms and shapes the understanding of the local Christian community, given God’s actions in Christ and the Spirit!). Meanwhile, Anselmianism 2 cannot blithely declare that a late modern setting does not pose challenges for the fostering and sustenance of Christian faith and thought, nor suppose that its confrere is trading in uncritical nostalgia. But all that must be grist for another mill, at another time. The principal purpose of this initial pairing is not to “map” modern theological perspectives, but to set the stage for a third option that distinguishes the modus operandi of this book: Anselmianism 3. Now this option, I hurry to add, is not so innovative as to shun the insights of its forebears. It shares much with both. Like

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Anselmianism 1, it gravitates toward the “grand ideas of the Christian tradition,”63 it favors certain “postcritical” exegetical ventures (especially, as will become clear, the journeying of some midcentury biblical theologians), and it takes seriously the need for durable Christian intellectual cultures. And, like Anselmianism 2, it is not inclined to treat a late modern context as peculiarly threatening to Christian identity and theological study, it attends to the Zeitgeist of communities of faith, and it has an open-minded attitude toward time-honored categories and conventions. Still, what sets it off from its counterparts is a fascination with revelation as an event of divine self-disclosure that enables and encourages the development of relatively novel lines of theological reflection. I am of course aware that the meaning of “revelation” is hardly self-evident, and that the elaboration of revelation as divine self-revelation, offered below, bespeaks a deep reliance on Barth’s thought—and thus, by implication, a willingness to follow Barth in a selective appropriation of the conceptuality of German idealism. (A point noticed by Wolfhart Pannenberg and others in the 1960s, and a point noted in Bruce McCormack’s magisterial account of Barth’s theological development.)64 It will quickly become clear, too, that I do not think that the modern construal of revelation as self-revelation is problematic. Quite the contrary: it is an excellent way to think about God’s communicative activity, about the nature of human beings’ knowledge of God, and about the nature of Christian existence.

What, exactly, is revelation? Revelation is a shorthand way to refer to a pattern of divine activity, mediated through the scriptural witness, that gives rise to faith and sustains the convictions and practices constitutive of faith. Occasioned and shaped by God’s free initiative and impinging on creaturely lives marked by finitude and sin, revelation often strikes us as surprising (for it tells us about God in ways that constantly challenge our assumptions) and disruptive (for it constantly puts our lives into question). Matters are made more complex since revelation involves a reference to past events, John Webster, “Theology after Liberalism?” in Theology after Liberalism: A Reader, ed. John Webster and George P. Schner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 57. 64 See Revelation as History, ed. Wolfhart Pannenberg, trans. David Granskou (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968), esp.  1–21 and 123–58; and Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 63

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to which scripture bears witness, yet  also encroaches upon some community or individual in the present. Yet none of this makes revelation a brutum factum, the likes of which we can only behold, stunned and aghast. While connecting God’s action in the past with creaturely life in the present, revelation is always a communicative act. It is an event wherein God turns toward this or that person, and/or this or that community, and does so in such a way as to make them aware of who God is and what God has been doing, is doing, and will do in the future. Indeed, precisely because God is both the originator of revelation and the “content of revelation” (GD 89), revelation is aptly understood as an event whereby God conveys Godself to us. While we cannot possess or hold on to God (revelation, clearly, is not akin to a shipment of goods), we are now, by grace, “on the way” with God; we are told by God who God is and what God does, and we thus come to a new account of ourselves and the world in which we live. To be sure, this communicative act does not occur without mediation. An unmediated encounter with God is well-nigh unthinkable: it would require that a creature be lifted out of the world in which it exists, and it would thus entail that creature ceasing to be the particular creature that it is. It is more that God makes use of the quotidian contexts in which we exist, “adding” Godself to those contexts in such a way that they become charged with an excess of meaning. More precisely: when God reveals Godself, God employs diverse creaturely media—primarily, the people of ancient Israel and the humanity of Christ (which are, of course, sanctified in a very special way); secondarily, the individuals and communities who produced and refined diverse scriptural texts; beyond that, the words of those who are given to proclaim God’s ways and works, in diverse ways—as vehicles that tell human beings about God. And while this use of creaturely media ensures that none can lay claim to truth with a capital “T” (or, for that matter, easily quash the fear that they have confused some creaturely medium with the divine reality itself), it does not diminish the reality or fullness of God’s self-communicative activity. The divine message is genuinely “in” the creaturely medium, ensuring that the medium means more than it otherwise would. And it is a divine message that has transformative force. When and as God reveals Godself, we are able to cease serving “foreign gods,” for the “eyes” that “do not see” and the “ears” that “do not hear” (Jer. 5:21) are, by grace, put to new

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purpose. We encounter God, and begin to relate to God, in ways that would not otherwise be possible. Really? God as God truly is? Calvin, among others, hesitates at this juncture. Although he insists that Christians’ knowledge of God as creator and redeemer is trustworthy, he often notes that God “accommodates” Godself to our limited capacities when God reveals himself.65 But what, exactly, is the relationship between “accommodated” revelation and God’s eternal identity? Doesn’t accommodation, after all, involve some degree of “lisping,” akin to a caregiver “descending” to the level of an infant (Inst. I.xiii.1)? At this point, Barth’s correction of Calvin is needed. One must shorten (but not entirely close) the distance between the event of revelation and the being of God, articulating a theological epistemology that wards off doubts about God’s ultimate identity. Exactly the language of the preceding paragraph helps with this task. Instead of foregrounding accommodation, Barth’s (rather neo-Kantian) claim is that God indwells discrete phenomena, lending them divine content, so that they come to disclose something of God as such. So, while God is indeed “veiled,” God is not obscured. God preserves the integrity of a creaturely medium while rendering it fully disclosive of God’s life. As such, in the same moment that revelation disquiets us, exposing the hollowness of the myriad false narratives on which we rely—that whole edifice of “religion,” wherein Christians “play drowsily with the silhouette of the divine righteousness”—revelation proves itself; it really discloses “God himself, the real, living God” (WGT, 10 and 11). Or, to make the same point scripturally: if it is truly the fullness of God’s being that defines Christ (so Col. 2:9) and the Spirit (Jn 3:34), there is no reason to think that God retreats from such fullness when God acts in the present. Revelation does not so degrade; its integrity is vouchsafed by God herself.

How should a theologian contend with revelation? Well, it is not illegitimate to linger over and, in a sense, to perform its disruptive effects by engaging in “irregular” dogmatics (GD 38). Much of Barth’s early output, from his famous essays in the second half of the 1910s and early 1920s to the second edition of Romans, showcases the advantages of such an approach. One finds here a A topic of ongoing interest in Calvin studies. See the classic article by Ford Lewis Battles, “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,” Int 31, no. 1 (1977): 19–38; and, more recently, Jon Balserak, Divinity Compromised: A Study of  Divine Accommodation in the Thought of John Calvin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), and A. Huygen, Divine Accommodation in John Calvin’s Theology: Analysis and Assessment (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

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relentless insistence on critique, as well as a powerful intermixture of exegesis, doctrine, and ethical/political gestures, that spoke to the complex world of postwar Europe. A refusal to let thought settle, given a vivid sense of human sin and the majesty of God, runs alongside a precocious awareness of the ways that “scientific” modes of thought can promote all-too-human concerns. Indeed, granted that Barth’s own understanding of the shock of revelation can be described in conventional terms (say, as a rediscovery of the gracious act of justification, effected by God, such that the human being comes to know that her life is “hidden with Christ in God” [Col. 3:3]), this early work is profitably read as an anticipation of contemporary fears about “systematics” distorting and constraining Christian thought, often in ways that interface with longstanding structures of domination, as well an anticipation of queer stances that refuse to suppose that “God … is always more of the same, known in advance.”66 Even so, by the mid-1920s Barth was confident that “regular dogmatics” (GD 38) was an appropriate response to God’s act of self-revelation. While remaining alert to the alarming possibility that theologians might conjure up a “theoretical and practical system of truth” (CD IV/3, 436) that draws attention away from God’s self-revelation and back to the problematic conventions of religion, Barth now thought it apt to attend, in a sustained way, to particular dimensions of God’s ways and works, while trying simultaneously to grasp how those dimensions combine to form a coherent whole. The doctrinal correlates for theological work therefore shift from justification and eschatology, on the one side, to the sanctifying operations of the Holy Spirit, on the other.67 And, not coincidentally, a covenantal sensibility nudges into view. An acclamation of God’s self-revelation now goes hand in hand with an awareness that this revelation—which, again, has as its material center the life of God with ancient Israel, the incarnation of the Son, and the outpouring of the Spirit—enables one to move, slowly and surely, across the broad sweep of God’s ways and works, making sense of this or that dogmatic locus. Linn Marie Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene: Cascade, 2018), 87. 67 On which, see the important work of Martin Westerholm, The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 66

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With this acclamation of revelation in hand, Anselmianism 3 attempts to think with and beyond Barth. On one level, it toggles between “regular” or “irregular” modes of dogmatic reflection. With respect to the former, it certainly reflects something of the concern to develop a coherent, “integrated presentation of Christian truth.”68 It does not imagine that this concern necessarily marks a first step along a road whose terminus is one more dominative “system,” which numbers alongside countless others (the fact that revelation is God’s business and resists “objectification,” ought to check that aspiration); nor does its tendency to engage context in a lowkey, indirect way mean that a theologian supposes it possible to escape context, much less to remain indifferent to a host of pressing contemporary concerns. It simply means that a theologian finds herself in an ambitious mood, moved to honor the breadth and depth of God’s self-revelation with a sustained, expansive statement about God’s ways and works, keyed to Christian faith in pursuit of understanding. With respect to the latter (viz., dogmatics in an irregular key), Anselmianism 3 is happy to move between exegetical, doctrinal, and ethical/political claims, often in an ad hoc manner; and it is happy, too, to concede that each and every positive claim that is offered is contextual, contestable, and revisable. On another level, the Anselmianism of this book trades on the hunch that working with a discrete motif—yes, of course, patience—is an instructive way to organize the task of faith seeking understanding, while simultaneously acknowledging the value of the broader Christian tradition (a concern of Anselmianism 1) and reckoning, sometimes obliquely, with the faith of particular Christian communities in the present (a concern of Anselmianism 2). While recourse to a particular motif forecloses the possibility of developing a comprehensive theological statement (“systematics” in the grand sense of the word), it allows one to pursue a series of focused interpretative endeavors, and it enables one to make headway with a wide range of loci—in this book, creation and providence; in the next, incarnation, atonement, sanctification, Christian life, and the Trinity. It can help one to adopt a “non-defensive” posture, which participates in an “open-ended search for knowledge,” in light of

Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 41. Emphasis removed.

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God’s self-revelation and the thinking and acting that follow, and that contributes to the ongoing task of theological inquiry.69 “Exploration” and “imagination” find application at this point, being words that specify further what non-defensiveness and openended-ness mean. To return to Barth: let us suppose that the event of revelation, as an act of divine self-communication, involves a human who is confronted with and drawn into a “new world.” If this world is inseparable from the scriptural witness and mediated through some form of Christian community, it is not limited to either. Residence in this world means attempting to come to grips, in a conceptually rigorous and ambitious way, with the career of ancient Israel, the incarnation of the Word, and the outpouring of the Spirit; and it means engaging this world as it spills out over the pages of scripture, reshaping one’s sense of oneself and reorienting one’s inhabitation of the quotidian. This is not a world, in other words, that one beholds dispassionately. It is not a world that one can keep at a distance. Quite the contrary: in the same moment that this world encloses us, making us aware of who God is and what God does, this world empowers some kind of response to it. Enclosure does not mean confinement; enclosure means provocation and empowerment, the result of which is a clutch of new cognitive, affective, and practical endeavors. For theologians, in particular, enclosure animates intellectual attempts to move across the whole sweep of God’s ways and works—perhaps, as is the case with this book, with a discrete theme or motif or concept in hand—with an eye to developing a new account of these ways and works. How, precisely, does one explore? In principle, one could go slowly. One could settle close to one’s landing spot in this “new world,” so to speak, and one could opt to move gradually outward, inch-by-inch, day-by-day. But that wouldn’t really be exploration, in any meaningful sense of the word; and that would perhaps dampen the joy and sense of possibility that flare up when one is drawn into something new. Anselmianism 3 eschews caution and sets about exploring God’s new world in an adventuresome way. Certainly, it tries not to dash about, and certainly it grasps the importance of carefully surveying particular structures and terrains.

Linn Marie Tonstad, “(Un)wise Theologians: Systematic Theology in the University,” IJST 22, no. 4 (2020): 510 and 509.

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But it is interested in engaging the most prominent dimensions of the landscape in a fairly bold way, and it is willing—as is certainly the case of this book—to plot a dogmatic course that is relatively idiosyncratic. At the same time, Anselmianism 3 understands that the new world of God is not susceptible to colonization. While it “projects itself into our old, ordinary world” and tells one “how God has sought and found the way to us” (WGT 21 and 25, emphasis added), at no point ought one to presume oneself able to take possession of that divine “way,” even as one acquires some kind of familiarity with it, confidence in it, and, in a complicated way, enjoyment of it. The theologian will attempt to make sense of what is disclosed, and she will do so with any number of intellectual tools; yet she must not presume to expropriate resources, much less imagine that she could take control of the world into which she has been placed. Still, exploration continues apace. A theologian tries out various paths for understanding—probably with varying degrees of success—knowing that the world in which she has been placed asks to be received and thought about in ever new ways.70 If exploration describes the decision to move across the whole sweep of God’s ways and works with a fairly loose and idiosyncratic itinerary, what about imagination? This word clarifies the manner in which exploration takes place. Negatively, imagination means that the theologian does not presume that past insights are sufficient for understanding in the present. Barth again: while we are given a “new world,” God “does not tell us how we are supposed to talk with God” (WGT 25). But there is a positive complement. While one is “bound … by” a certain “subject-matter”—and it is here, of course, that the scriptural witness to ancient Israel, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the outpouring of the Spirit are crucial—one is “liberated” by this subject matter, such that the theologian “enjoys complete freedom of inquiry and doctrine … and accepts no instructions or regulations from anyone.”71 Imagination, then, involves a conscious, if complicated, delight in God’s reconfiguration of creaturely intelligence. One is cheerfully As is perhaps evident, this and the following paragraph connect with Serene Jones’s idiom of “mapping.” See Feminist Theology and Feminist Theory: Cartographies of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000). 71 Karl Barth, Fragments Grave and Gay, ed. Martin Rumscheidt and trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1976), 23. 70

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restless in one’s efforts to think Christianly, drawing on the past while relishing the prospect of relatively new idioms and trying out novel lines of thought. To be sure, imagination does not mean freewheeling invention or unstructured play. The new world into which one is thrown is not ours to fashion; its shape is given, and in such a way that “our thinking and speaking” should always “be determined by their object” (GD 306). But that objective shape is precisely what animates the work of the imagination. Imagination, one might say, shares something with a habit of mind that John Webster identified as studiousness: “intelligence concentrated” on the incomparable event of God’s self-revelation as it is received in faith, in light of the scriptural witness.72 But it adds a twist. The studiousness of Anselmianism 3 wonders if the established lexicon of the explorer can be refreshed, expanded, and/or reconfigured, depending on the route one takes through the “new world.” Or, to use a term already employed: imagination is adventurous in mood and in execution, tilting more toward what Tillich calls “form-transcendence” than “form-affirmation” (ST3 202), and thrilling to the prospect of a “deconfined” intelligence, critically respectful of the past but feeling little compunction about breaking with it, for the sake of honoring the provocation of the Word.73 If studiousness counters a curiosity that “dissipates … the theological intellect by giving itself to whatever enchanting objects catch its fancy,”74 then imagination ensures that studiousness does not lose its edge or become stale as it attempts to respond, in captivating, surprising, and (one hopes) persuasive ways, to a world that is always new. Imagination means that the Christian theologian aspires to grow the understanding that is ingredient to faith, thinking and talking and writing in ways that she hopes will help that growth occur—either through tendering misguided claims that need to be rectified by others, or through claims that ring true and meet with assent, or by setting in motion trains of thought that will be expanded and developed by others. Webster, Domain of the Word, 201. While “deconfinement” is a term used in particle physics, I should admit that I first encountered it in a quite different context. See Darcy MacDonald, “Kid Koala and the Deconfined Mind,” Cult MTL, February 12, 2021, https://cultmtl.com/2021/02/ montreal-dj-producer-artist-kid-koala-and-the-deconfined-mind/. 74 Webster, Domain of the Word, 201. 72 73

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I am of course aware that talk of imagination will set some teeth on edge, despite its centrality in the pioneering work of Gordon Kaufman.75 Blaise Pascal speaks for many when he declares that imagination “is the dominant faculty in man, master of error and falsehood, all the more deceptive for not being invariably so … it is usually false [since] it gives no indication of its quality, setting the mark on true and false alike. … Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy” (Pens. 9). He goes on to say that imagination is particularly hazardous when it comes to t­hinking about God: it “magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size” (Pens. 192). But this is not the only way to think about imagination. One needn’t suppose that it always works to “unhinge reason” (Pens. 10) or always brings about whimsical invention; one can view it as a dimension of intelligence that is ordered to the prior event of God’s self-revelation and caught up in a process whereby “every thought” is made “captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Put more strongly: it is imagination that keeps Christian thought moving, demanding that theological inquiry shows forth something of the transformative power of grace; it is imagination that animates “the revision of the Church’s public doctrine,” which “is a task in which every individual is bound to take a share, testing the established ideas and propositions in the measure of his power and the helps at his command … [for] he has rights in this matter, in the exercise of which he must be left free” (Gl. 690).

­5 Conclusion This rather packed opening chapter has covered a good deal of ground. After a meditation on theological language and a preview of interpretative and constructive claims, it paired an interrogation of the scriptural witness with a sketch of the book’s theological modus operandi. Although each section was focused differently— and I am aware that readers may be surprised at the decision to pair close exegetical remarks with a broad statement about the task of Christian theological reflection in a late modern context—when taken together, they advert to a clutch of preoccupations that receive attention throughout this book: a fascination with the possibilities ingredient to language, a determination to reckon seriously with the See esp. Gordon D. Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method, 3rd edn (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), and Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), particularly 3–93.

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scriptural witness, and a willingness to think adventurously about the basic shape of God’s ways and works. And, of course, these preoccupations converge upon what I take to be a suggestive and underappreciated term: patience. My hope is that by the end of this volume (and, God willing, the one to follow), I will have persuaded readers that this motif should be afforded a prominent role in the understanding that is ingredient to and sought by Christian faith as it responds to the ongoing pressure of God’s gracious self-revelation. One final point, before embarking on three long interpretative chapters. I should forewarn readers that this book moves slowly. That slowness, which I hope does not tip into ponderousness, is partly a function of a twofold concern: to engage landmark thinkers and to develop novel lines of reflection. It is also, partly, a function of a project distinguished by a fairly grand ambition: to apply the motif of patience to major loci, and in so doing to engage dogmatic concerns of abiding importance. At the same time, the slowness of this book reflects a concern to promote a style of reflection that does not rush, that prefers steady interrogation to the jouissance that accompanies quickfire judgments (or, vulgarly, “hot takes”), and that is willing to risk the gradual elaboration of a complex perspective—one whose worth, or lack thereof, will take some time to come into view. This is not to say that quickfire judgments (and, for that matter, impatient modes of action) are not needful. Often they are. And the companion volume to this work will have a good deal to say about God’s impatience, outworked on the cross, and a good deal to say about the value of human impatience as it animates critique and contests injustice. At that point, it will become clear that talk of “exploration” and “imagination” must always be accompanied with the imperative of liberation. Yet I can only ask readers, for much of what follows, to bear with me. To borrow again from John Webster: “in theology things go slowly. We are temporal creatures, we do not receive revelation in a single moment; and we are sinful creatures whose idolatry and inattention are only gradually overcome. … We must be patient, suffering God’s works, looking for the coming of the Spirit to instruct us in the truth of the Word. But we must also be patient with others.”76

Webster, Domain of the Word, 31.

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1 Patience in Patristic and Medieval Theology: From Tertullian to Julian of Norwich Four works merit close attention with respect to early Christian thinking about patience: Tertullian’s De patientia (c. 200 ce), Cyprian’s De bono patientia (256 ce), and Augustine’s De patientia and De civitate Dei (c. 417 ce and 426 ce).1 These are treated in the first two sections of this chapter. Taking up various scriptural cues and employing a trinitarian framework, each text proposes that God’s being and action ought to be described in terms of patience. It is patience that leads God to extend the goods of creation to all, regardless of merits and demerits; patience that prompts God to temper and postpone judgment, affording sinners opportunities for repentance and conversion; patience that defines the history of Christ, who reconciles God and humankind and releases the Spirit The range of 198–203ce for Tertullian’s De patientia is proposed by Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 55. Cyprian’s De bono patientia took the form of a pamphlet in 256ce but might have incorporated earlier material; see Kossi Adiavu Ayedze, “Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine on Patience: A Comparative and Critical Study of Three Treatises on a Stoic-Christian Virtue in early North African Christianity” (PhD diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000), 196–207; and Joseph Lenow, “Patience and Judgment in the Christology of Cyprian of Carthage,” SPat 44 (2017): 233–46. For the dating of Augustine’s treatise, see Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 620–1. 1

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to remake God’s world. With an account of divine patience in play, these texts also offer rich descriptions of Christian life as a matter of patience. Patience characterizes those who endure the sinfulness and ambiguity of a fallen context; patience bespeaks a receipt of the transformative activity of the Spirit; patience engenders an orientation to the future toward which history is being moved. While these perspectives are often roughly sketched, and occasionally list in worrisome directions—Augustine, it will become clear, does not quite know what to do with divine patience—they provide an instructive point of departure for theological inquiry. Patience is a viable way to inhabit the “domain of the Word.” It is a term that can and should take a leading role in accounts of God’s creative, providential, and redeeming action; it is a term that can and should feature prominently in accounts of faithful Christian discipleship. The chapter’s third section complicates this promising start. Focusing on Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae (1265–74) and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (written between the mid-1380s and 1416), I contend that Aquinas circumscribes the meaning of patience in regrettable ways, whereas Julian offers a suggestive expansion of earlier lines of reflection.2 The Summa shows little obvious interest in patience as a motif that might help one think about God’s ways and works. Even its importance for Christian life is relatively slight: in this text, Aquinas’ consideration of its meaning is nested within an analysis of cardinal virtues that stands at a remove from the enactment of faith. Julian of Norwich, by contrast, makes patience basic to Christian life, reprising scriptural claims and offering an expansion of Augustine’s eschatological sensibility. Patience renders human beings able to wait, to endure, and to remain susceptible to God’s saving action, and this quality connects with an understanding of faith that is situated in the present but oriented to the future. And then, a fascinating additional step: Julian edges toward the striking idea that divine patience is expressed in the slow unspooling of God’s providential and redemptive work—a slowness that God herself “suffers,” in a fashion, as God moves history to its redemptive conclusion. On the dating of the Short and Long Texts, see The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 1–2. For the sake of convenience, I use Revelations of Divine Love (or, sometimes, Revelations) to refer to the sum-total of Julian’s known writings.

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A final introductory remark, best framed as a question: why do these particular texts feature in this book’s first interpretative chapter? On one level, and most simply, because many of them directly consider the place of patience in Christian theology. Although it would certainly be possible to track occasional comments about patience in a larger number of texts, or to trace the arc of remarks about this or that scriptural passage, or to scrutinize ancient and medieval texts that have received insufficient attention, or even to focus on a particular kind of Christian practice, undertaken across multiple centuries, the treatises by Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine are distinctive in making patience a discrete locus of reflection, pairing a focused interest in God’s comportment with reflections on human life. This pairing fits with the exegetical claims of the previous chapter, while also opening the way to the constructive claims developed in the second half of this book. On another level—and shifting, obviously, from the early centuries of late antique North Africa to medieval Europe—Aquinas and Julian represent two paths for thought in the Latin West in the run-up to the Reformation. In contrast to the patristic authors considered, Aquinas shunts patientia to the periphery of theological reflection, most likely because of his distinctive brand of Neoplatonism and his appropriation of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. By contrast, Julian’s Revelations quietly opens up a different future for the term, one that both builds on and goes beyond anything envisaged in early Christian writing. Written on the margins of ecclesial life and having an initially negligible impact on “academic” theology, Revelations shows that patience could again be given a significant place in theological inquiry, serving both as a word that describes how believers learn to contend with God’s saving activity and as a word that describes God’s restrained disbursement of mercy across time and space.

1 Tertullian and Cyprian At first sight, De patientia might appear simply to describe a dimension of Christian existence in the ancient world. Having declared his unsuitability to write on this topic, Tertullian identifies three individuals as exemplars: Abraham, who modeled equanimity when God demanded that he sacrifice his son; Job, who withstood the attacks of the devil and “set for us an example and proof of

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how we must practise patience in the spirit as well as in the flesh, that we may not succumb under loss of worldly goods, the death of our dear ones, or any bodily afflictions” (De pat. 14.3); and, most importantly, Christ, who eschewed anger, refused to retaliate against those who rejected him, and epitomized gentleness and meekness at every turn. Remarks on these figures connect with a broader concern as to how Christians should conduct and distinguish themselves in the predominantly nonChristian and occasionally hostile context of third-century North Africa.3 “Patience which is divine and true, namely Christian; a patience not like the patience practised by the peoples of the earth, which is false and disgraceful” (De pat. 16.1): that, above all else, is what is needed. And Tertullian’s explication of this point is so deftly executed that De patientia is rightly adjudged a minor classic, a treatise that instructs and edifies (it was probably intended for catechumens) while laying claim to a virtue that educated people of the time would have reflexively associated with Stoicism.4 There is little in the way of overheated polemics, too. Tertullian does not harp on the differences between Christian faith and Greek philosophy and its gnostic offshoots, and thus spares readers denunciations of the “mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition”—an admixture that results, apparently, from an ill-advised affinity for “Athens” over “Jerusalem.”5 There is also no sustained misogyny: unlike De cultu On the persecution of Christians across the Roman Empire, and especially in North Africa in the second and third centuries, see Barnes, Tertullian, 143–86 and Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian (London: Routledge, 2004), 13–18 and 39–45. More generally, see Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013) and the brilliantly controversial essays gathered in G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, ed. Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4 So Jean-Claude Fredouille, Tertullien et la conversion de la culture antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1972); Ayedze, “Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine,” 117– 66; and David Ivan Rankin, From Clement to Origen: The Social and Historical Context of the Church Fathers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 57–72. 5 The question, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (from Prescription against Heretics, ANF 3, 243–67) is of course an ambiguous resource for reading Tertullian, given his persistent appropriation of ancient philosophical claims. See here Eric Osborn, Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 27–47; and Laura Salah Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard Theological Studies, 2003), 101–11. 3

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feminarum, likely written around the same time, the exhortations of De patientia are not explicitly tied to a dubious account of sin’s origins and remain at a distance from a questionable construal of gender roles.6 One finds, instead, a winsome vision of Christian life as a gift and task, paired with a deft negotiation of ancient mores, the object of which is to help Christians understand and hold fast to a marginalized religious identity. By the end of the text, patience has been identified as a disposition and pattern of activity that enables Christians to contend with wrongdoing, maintain a distinctive identity, and extend forgiveness to malefactors. Patience has been presented as a dimension of faith that enables Christians to wait for the Kingdom in an ambiguous context. It is crucial, however, that one not read De patientia merely as a “moral” treatise. It is crucial, to make the point more positively, to understand that Tertullian’s stirring exhortations to patience are nested within, and in some basic sense derivative of, a wideangled description of God’s creative and saving works. There is a clear ordering of thought here. The presupposition for our exercise of patience is not, say, a hard-won ethical maturity, a finely tuned concatenation of ascetical practices, or a happy accident of character (again, Tertullian deems himself “utterly unfit” on this score [De pat. 1.1]).7 Everything proceeds from a different starting point: patience as “the very nature of God (esse naturam), the effect and manifestation of a certain connatural property” (De pat. 3.11); patience being a divine attribute, given expression in God’s dealings with the world.

De cultu feminarum is included in Tertullian: Disciplinary, Moral, and Ascetical Works; see 117–49. It is worth noting that this treatise doesn’t merely disclose misogyny; it also suggests something of the subversive agency of women in Carthage at the turn of the third century. See Carly Daniel-Hughes, The Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage: Dressing for the Resurrection (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. 63–91. 7 From Jerome’s De viris illustribus onward (NPNF2 3, 349–84), commentators have tended to agree. Dunn describes Tertullian as a “pugilist with a pen … a partisan and an extremist” (Tertullian, 9 and 10). Johannes Quasten deemed Tertullian a person of “fiery temperament and burning energy” who “develops a fanatical passion for truth” (Patrology, vol. 2, The Ante-Nicene Literature After Irenaeus [Westminster: The Newman Press, 1953], 247). Bernhard Nisters is even more scathing; see Tertullian: seine Persönlichkeit und sein Schicksal. Ein charakterologischer Versuch (Münster: Aschendorff, 1950). More recently, Christine Trevett has wondered if “Tertullian was not quite a psychopath, though paranoid,” in Montanism: Gender, Authority, and the New Prophecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 100. 6

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Tracking the proto-trinitarian sensibility of De patientia brings this point into focus. Tertullian supposes, first, that patience is demonstrated in the constancy with which God creates, sustains, and cares for all of God’s creatures, no matter their moral qualities. Matthew 5:45 serves as a prooftext: “Long has He been scattering the brilliance of the light (of the sun) upon the just and unjust alike and has allowed the deserving as well as the undeserving the benefits of the seasons, the services of the elements, and the gifts of all creation” (De pat. 2.2). And it is patience that distinguishes God’s overall governance of history as merciful—or, Tertullian might say, fatherly. While God’s condemnation of sin is unequivocal, in the current age God exercises restraint. God does so to grant human beings the opportunity to renounce wrongdoing and to dedicate themselves to the Gospel, “endur[ing] ungrateful peoples who worship the trifles fashioned by their skill and the works of their hands, who persecute His name and His children, and who … grow worse from day to day … [B]y His patience He hopes to draw them to Himself” (De pat. 2.3). If this claim picks up a prominent scriptural trajectory (so Exod. 34:6–7, Jon. 4:2, Joel 2:13, etc.), it serves also as an occasion for Tertullian to underscore what might be called God’s “pursuit” of sinners, within and beyond ancient Israel—God’s willingness to wait on and for those who continue to contest God’s purposes, in spite of the decisive triumph of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Patience is not disengagement; God does not spin out the reel of history in hopes that, at the end of the day, we will get our collective act together. Patience is a gracious affordance of time and space, an extension of the length and breadth of history, that ensures that God has the opportunity to recover those who are wayward and lost. Second, Tertullian argues that it is through the patience of the Word made flesh that God delivers salvation to humankind. The incarnation is a matter of patience because the Son freely submits to the constraints of finitude, “suffering” an apparent loss of glory by uniting himself with an individual human essence in a fallen context. Lacking the subordinationist drift found in some other works,8 the treatise’s gloss on Phil. 2:6–8 (and, more obliquely, Gal. 4:4) captures the point nicely: “God allows Himself to become incarnate: In his mother’s womb he awaits [the time of birth] and after His birth suffers Himself to grow into manhood” (De 8

See, for example, Against Praxeas 5, 8, and 9 (ANF3, 600–1 and 602–4).

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pat. 3.2). An intriguing connection of incarnation and atonement follows, with patience becoming passion when Christ opens himself to the consequences of sin, in obedience to the Father. “Did there have to be such insults attending the death He must undergo? No; but as He went forward to His death, He willed to have His fill of joy in suffering … Marvel at the constancy of His meekness: He who had proposed to escape notice in the guise of man has in no degree imitated man’s impatience” (De pat. 3.9–10). This interplay of susceptibility, suffering, and service to the cause of reconciliation signals, yet again, that divine patience is not a matter of God holding the world at arm’s length, so that we can find our own way back to God through our own efforts. God’s patience is expressed through the Word’s bearing the weight of creaturely waywardness, suffering with and for sinners. And for the noblest of purposes: through Christ’s obedience unto death, there arises the possibility of individuals whose “countenance is peaceful,” who “shake … [their] head frequently in the direction of the Devil” (De pat. 15:4–5). Third and finally: if the patience of God qua Father is manifest in his creative and providential work, and if Christ is patience incarnate, the Spirit distributes patience to those whom God draws into Christ’s body, for “when the Spirit of God descends, patience is His inseparable companion” (De pat. 15.7). The trinitarian frame is now filled out, with the Spirit identified as the divine person who transforms those whom God wills to save. And in addition to conferring ethical, emotional, and interpersonal gifts, the Spirit enables Christians to wait for God’s work to reach its glorious conclusion, enduring a manifestly ambiguous interim while believing “in the resurrection of the flesh and of the spirit” and offering God “both the patience of the spirit and the patience of the flesh” (De pat. 16.5). When the Kingdom is brought to term and God’s children are released from sin and death, they will show forth their likeness to Christ and relate to God as a loving parent. At this time impatience, “the prime source … the sole fashioner of all sin … the original sin in the eyes of the Lord” (De pat. 5.18 and 21), will reign no more. In Christ and through the Spirit, the saved will enjoy unimpeded companionship with God while the wicked suffer their just deserts.9 On impatience in Tertullian, see the excellent piece by M. C. Steenberg, “Impatience and Humanity’s Sinful State in Tertullian of Carthage,” VC 62 (2008): 107–32.

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Talk of “just deserts” actually understates it, since Tertullian’s peroration informs “heathens” that they will be met by a fire now raging under the earth (De pat. 16.4). This claim accords with the infamous conclusion to the contemporaneous De spectaculis (c. 197–200ce). Kings, governors, philosophers, poets, actors, charioteers, athletes, and, last but not least, those who crucified Christ: they will get what is coming to them. And it will be thrilling. “What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest with all his munificence will ever bestow on you the favor of beholding and exulting in such sights? … Things of greater delight than circus, both kinds of theater, and any stadium” will be found here (De spec. 30.7). If “frenzy is forbidden us” in this present dispensation (De spec. 16.1), then it is only because we are biding our time for the real thing. Was Friedrich Nietzsche right to view such remarks as illustrative of ressentiment, the secret pursuit of revenge that underwrites high-flown Christian talk about love, mercy, and forgiveness?10 Is this the real motivation for De patientia, as well as De spectaculis? Well, it is certainly a possible reading of both texts, backed by scriptural precedents (e.g., Rom. 2:8), albeit one that asks relatively brief passages to bear a good deal of weight—more, arguably, than is interpretatively reasonable. Even so, there is good reason to pause. While it may be tempting to suppose that De spectaculis “paints this scene with consummate artistry” and “evinces a vitriolic hatred … which is largely artificial,” one cannot easily separate rhetorical form and theological content.11 It seems better to read straightforwardly, viewing the asides in De patientia and the broader claims of De spectaculis as an indication that Tertullian supposed divine patience to have an upper limit. It seems better to acknowledge that Tertullian’s eschatological imagination could only reach so far; and, at crucial moments, that this imagination showed itself more tied to the ideology of panem et circenses than Tertullian might have cared to admit.

Although Cyprian of Carthage’s De bono patientia draws heavily on Tertullian’s earlier treatise, the earlier work’s catechetical interest is now paired with a concern to improve relations between church leaders in light of a controversy over rebaptism.12 Some Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 48–52 (I.15). 11 Barnes, Tertullian, 96. 12 On the relationship between Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s texts, see Quasten, Patrology, vol. 2, 359; C. F. A. Borchardt, “Tertullian and Cyprian on Patience,” AcPB 3 (1992): 29–45; Ayedze, “Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine,” 169–74; and Lenow, “Patience and Judgment.” 10

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North African Christians had been persecuted after the Emperor Decius (r. 249–51 ce) insisted that citizens make a propitiatory sacrifice to the imperial cult; subsequently, the church in Carthage had become embroiled in disputes about the standing of those who made the required sacrifice, or offered incense in lieu of a sacrifice, or, through bribery, acquired a certificate that declared conformity with the Decian edict.13 Having forged a via media between rigorist and laxist perspectives and having begun to gain the upper hand in his dealings with Stephen, the Bishop of Rome, Cyprian’s treatise betrays the easy magnanimity of a leader who has secured victory—or, less cynically, the wisdom of one who knows it is time for passions to cool and for a spirit of camaraderie to prevail. Yet even with its reliance on Tertullian and a shift in purpose, De bono patientia should be read as a theological statement in its own right. Looking at it in more detail shows why. Cyprian begins by reprising Tertullian’s sense of Christians as a people set apart. He argues that Christians’ distinctive mindset and comportment has the noblest of origins. “How,” he asks, “can anyone be either wise or patient unless he knows the wisdom and patience of God?” If the “wisdom” of Greco-Roman philosophers “is not true, their patience cannot be true either” (De bon. pat. 2; see also Ad Dem. 19). A broader statement about Christian life follows. True patience profits those who “are philosophers not in words but in deeds,” and who show forth “wisdom not by … dress but by truth” (De bon. pat. 3). It enables Christians to tolerate both the “anxieties and labors of this mortal life” and the “struggle of persecution”; it stands as a bulwark against “impatience … an evil of the devil,” which bore fruit among Adam and Eve, and Cain and Esau, and continues to sow division; it fosters unity and peace within the body of Christ, ensuring that ill will does not follow dispute and enabling the church to receive and pass on the patience of its Lord in “full-flowing streams … diffused through many glorious courses” (De bon. pat. 12, 19, and 20). And, perhaps most crucially, patience underpins Christians’ receipt of the first fruits See here the detailed analysis in Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Cyprian’s own thoughts on the controversy can be found in Saint Cyprian: Letters (1–81), trans. Rose Bernard Donna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964). See esp. letters 70–73 (258–85). 13

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of the Kingdom and their confident waiting for the eschaton. The difficulties of the present ought not to be overrated; they should be understood in light of Rom. 8:24–25: “For in hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For how can a man hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it in patience.” Cyprian then develops a line of thought suggested, but left somewhat undeveloped, by Tertullian. “Patient waiting,” he contends, “is necessary that we may fulfill what we have begun to be, and through God’s help, that we may obtain what we hope for and believe” (De bon. pat. 13, my emphasis). At this moment, divine action, human receptivity, and human action combine to support an expansion of the self. Beyond enabling the Christian to endure wrongdoing and take a “long view,” patience names a purposeful susceptibility to God, such that one can participate in one’s (re)birth as a “new creature” (2 Cor. 5:17) who is resident in the Kingdom that Christ inaugurates. Once again, a proto-trinitarian framework is in play. Patience is quickly identified as a divine attribute: “In Him patience has its beginning … the origin and greatness of patience proceeds from God its Author” (De bon. pat. 3). And patience distinguishes the providential activity of God the Father, both in terms of God’s preservation of natural processes and in terms of God’s care for the “guilty and the innocent, the religious and the impious, the grateful and the ungrateful” (De bon. pat. 4). As with Tertullian, it underwrites God’s (temporary) indulgence and pursuit of sinners. God is “long-suffering in His patience … waiting steadfastly and delaying in His mercy, so that, if it is at all possible, the long career of malice at some time may change, and man, however deeply he is infected with the contagion of error and crime, may be converted” (De bon. pat. 4). History unfolds as it does, with an extension of time and space after the resurrection and prior to the Parousia, because God is patient—because God waits on sinners to respond to God’s offer of right relationship. Alongside this acclamation of God’s providential workings, Cyprian advances a Christological statement that surpasses Tertullian’s in terms of nuance and richness.14 As the incarnate Son,

In what follows, my analysis runs along similar lines to Lenow, “Patience and Judgment.”

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Christ “preserved and exemplified His Father’s patience by His habitual forbearance”—something made particularly evident by the fact that he “did not disdain, though the Son of God, to put on man’s flesh,” but “put aside His immortality for a time” and “suffered Himself to become mortal” (De bon. Pat., 6). The complex issue of kenosis, raised by the Christological hymn of Phil. 2:5–11, looms large at this point, even granted the relative slightness of Cyprian’s remarks. At the least, one can say that Cyprian intensifies Tertullian’s claim that the patience of God qua Son is revealed in his commitment to live and die under the constraints of finitude, in the context of sin. Kenosis does not involve a divestment or reduction of divinity (a modern line of thought, of course, that would hardly occur to patristic authors). It is a matter of the Son enacting the Father’s will by “concentrating” his begotten life into the straits of a fully human history, accepting and enduring the condition of the creatures he intends to save; it is a matter of patience expressed through unsparing solidarity. Faced with death, Christ’s patience is then expressed in terms of unswerving obedience. He maintains allegiance to the Father; he holds fast to the project of salvation, despite the hostility of “the Jews” and the “unbelieving” (De bon. pat. 6); he lives and dies as the “judge” who “is judged [but] does not speak, nor is He moved, nor does He proclaim His majesty, even during the suffering. He endures all things even to the end with constant perseverance so that in Christ a full and perfect patience may find its realization” (De bon. pat. 7). Indeed, it is because Christ enacts patience in extremis that human beings are now able to recover “the divine likeness which Adam lost.” We are remade, transformed into creatures who can bear and make manifest our God-given identity. We gain the possibility of imitating the Father and therefore becoming “like God! What wonderful and what great happiness it is to possess among our virtues what can be put on a par with the divine merits!” (De bon. pat. 5). After this account of divine patience as it bears on creation, providence, incarnation, salvation and the Christian life, there is an acutely disquieting finale. If Tertullian’s treatise concluded with suggestive pneumatological gestures and a hint of eschatological menace, Cyprian’s closes with an eclipse of the Spirit and a dramatic escalation of menace. A disquieting analogy begins to play across the text (which, had it been noticed by Nietzsche, would have served as grist for his mill): just as God exercises patience, enduring the rising tide of sin with an awareness that “the day of future vengeance” will

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soon come, so the faithful can “patiently await the day of vengeance” that will transpire when “the appointed time is fulfilled and the number of martyrs is complete” (De bon. pat. 21). Like Tertullian, Cyprian has established such a strong association between sin and impatience that the latter term is not really available to describe God’s action at the end of time. It is an anthropomorphism too far. But the implication of something like divine impatience is hard to miss. God will not always forbear; God will not always stay God’s hand. Eventually, “divine vengeance for the blood of the just will come … ‘The Lord God of Hosts shall go forth and shall threaten war; He shall stir up battle and shall cry over his enemies with strength; I have been silent, shall I be silent always?’” (De bon. pat. 22, citing Isa. 42:13–14; cf. Ad Dem. 24). The enhanced Christology of De bono patientia finds its culmination here, too, with Christ given a decisive role in the execution of judgment. Christ’s humility and equanimity, so characteristic of his comportment during the passion, no longer obtain; he serves now as “the Judge and the Avenger … who, when He revenges Himself, is destined to revenge us, the people of His Church and the number of all the just from the beginning of the world” (De bon. pat. 24; cf. Ad Dem. 23).

2 Beyond the Third Century; Augustine of Hippo Many of these claims will be reprised and explored in later sections of this chapter (and, in fact, throughout this project as a whole). At this juncture, however, it is useful to broaden the view, both with respect to the content of these treatises and the context in which they were written. With respect to content, it is important to emphasize again that these explications of patience are unembarrassedly and instructively theocentric in orientation. Reflection does not begin with the human being; both Tertullian and Cyprian, as Karl Barth would later say, think von Gott aus, offering an account of human patience that is governed by an account of God’s patient ways and works. And a good deal of attention is paid to patience as a manifestation of mercy. If the people of ancient Israel are given relatively little attention—a dogmatic aporia I hope to address in later chapters—a key dimension

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of the witness of the Hebrew Bible is given powerful expression: God does not rebuke wrongdoing promptly or proportionately; God forebears, granting human beings time and space to turn away from sin. Whence this time and space? While Cyprian and Tertullian do not make the point explicitly, it is obvious that history’s extension cannot be thought apart from the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, patience incarnate, whose saving work opens the way for the Spirit to equip us for life with God. We are in the region of 2 Pet. 3:15, which calls on Christians to “regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” At the same time, the fact that God’s patience runs out clearly indicates that divine mercy must not be mistaken for permissiveness. Indeed, the claim that God will “visit the iniquity of the parents upon the children” (Exod. 34:7) now acquires a disturbing eschatological edge, with the postponement of punishment followed by a none-too-merciful outburst of divine wrath. Which leads to an obvious question: do these treatises successfully balance their appropriation of ancient Israel’s covenantal credo with their suggestive Christological and pneumatological contentions? Might a firmer Christological and pneumatological footing—and, for that matter, a much fuller account of God’s patience toward ancient Israel—have checked the drift toward a crude kind of apocalypticism? Certainly, it is apt to ask if a “mercy now, retribution later” mindset sits awkwardly with a declaration of the Son’s determination to “endure” finitude and sin, unto death, and with an account of the Spirit’s efforts to heal and reorient us. It is simply not clear why God’s patience reaches its limit when it does. As such, while one should laud the treatises’ theocentrism, it is hard to shake the worry that God’s exercise of divine patience is not wholly ordered to the conveyance of love, and that God’s patience is fringed with the prospect of God “letting rip” at some point in the future, when God and the elect will get what they are really waiting for: “outbursts of fury and passion and discord … everything forbidden” (De spec. 16.4). Switching from divine to human patience, it is useful to reflect on how Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s treatises relate to conceptualizations of subjectivity, on the one side, and on ancient attitudes toward sex, gender, and sexuality, on the other. Both texts, evidently, bespeak a determination to “normalize” a distinctively Christian kind of suffering, and connect easily with scholarship that interrogates early Christian efforts to supply a new “script” for the self, the effect of which was to render visible a “new cultural subject” in the ancient

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world.15 Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s treatises might not be marked by the urgency or drama found, say, in the early letters of Ignatius of Antioch, or, for that matter, the later Lives of Simeon Stylites, but they reflect a concern that cuts across these and related texts: identifying Christians as those who are beset by, and in some sense defined in light of, the anguish of physical and spiritual existence prior to the end of time.16 Issues of sex, gender, and sexuality are a bit harder to assess, given that neither treatise explicitly considers the qualities, roles, and duties presumptively apportioned to men and women. But, of course, it does not follow that De patientia and De bono patientia stood at a distance from then-contemporary debates. On the one hand, the obligation to hold fast amid the trials of life might have formed part of a novel challenge to “traditional Roman standards of masculine militarism,” troubling the assumption that “patientia … is the mark of the un-man … the Roman who is forced to accept the aggression of the other” and who is therefore defined by the “absence of aggressive male sexuality.”17 The juxtaposition of Jerusalem and Athens might here be cut across by a concern to differentiate Christian life from the patriarchal swagger of empire. On the other hand, one cannot discount the possibility that texts like De patientia functioned in tandem with De cultu feminarum, with the exhortations of the former treatise given particular application in the latter, which calls on women “to endure every violence,” even as they “[k]eep (their) hands busy with spinning and stay at home.”18 The suspicion that Stoic philosophy served often Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 9. 16 Of the seven authentic letters of Ignatius, six explicitly mention human patience, endurance, and/or longsuffering. Ignatius’ letter to Polycarp also refers to God’s endurance of human sin; see The Epistles of St. Clement of Rome and St. Antioch, trans. James A. Kleist (Westminster: Newman, 1946), 97 (Pol. 3). 17 So Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 110; and Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 180. 18 De cultu feminarum, II.13.5 and 7. This possibility is perhaps supported by remarks at the tail-end of De patientia. Although Tertullian’s treatise largely demurs from “gendering” patience, its final chapter applies the term to husbands who marry because of the purchase of a dowry or who must “negotiate with panderers”; and also with wives who endure forced marriages in order to acquire property upon their husbands’ deaths. See De pat. 16.2. 15

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to buttress the sociopolitical status quo might simply have been transposed into a new key. Christian patientia might not be Stoic apatheia, but it could still have functioned to bolster and maintain injurious relations of power. With respect to context, it is intriguing to ask how theological construals of patientia relate to the rise of Christianity in the first centuries of the common era. In an important recent work, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, the late Alan Kreider argues that the growth of Christianity was animated by the distinctive comportment of communities and individuals.19 The ancient church did not flourish because of a canny outreach strategy, deployed within a series of well-executed local programs; nor can the rise of Christianity be chalked up to a “new” religion finding itself in the right place at the right time. What proved decisive was a discrete habitus, a style of life inculcated through intensive catechesis, worship, and prayer, that made manifest an ethos defined by radical hospitality, truthfulness, and fearlessness.20 Granted that this habitus was not legible to all, it proved compelling for many. A startled observation, voiced by unnamed “pagans” toward the end of Tertullian’s Apology, captures the point: “Look … how they love each other” (Apol. 39.7). Startled observation turned into grudging respect; grudging respect piqued curiosity; curiosity brought more individuals and families into contact with Christian communities; Christian communities then welcomed an increasing number of converts. By these lights, then, Christians’ enactment of patience was a key reason that this new religion managed to weave its way into the fabric of the ancient world. As Christians went about their lives in unhurried yet liberated ways, communicating a sense of grace through worship and fellowship and expressing deep trust in God, so they “emerged as wise doves, ‘helpers of God,’ whose intriguing behavior and appropriate words contributed to the church’s primary mode of growth—attraction.”21

Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016). 20 This notion of habitus owes much to Pierre Bourdieu; see esp. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980) and, idem, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 21 Kreider, Patient Ferment, 241. 19

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How far this argument helps to resolve what Peter Brown calls “one of the great riddles of the ancient world: the rise of Christianity” is a matter for debate.22 Certainly, one might ask if Kreider rather underrates material factors—or, at the least, whether his account of Christian distinction and “attraction” ought to be nested in a polycausal framework that allows one to weigh ideal and material factors (something analogous, perhaps, to the framework adopted by Max Weber in his analysis of modern capitalism). Certainly, too, one might question whether Christians’ own reports about their habitus and its effects ought to dominate in historical analyses of the shifting configuration of church, Greco-Roman religions, and empire. While Tertullian might have bragged that Christians “teach by deeds” (Apol. 50.15), it hardly follows that Christians’ conduct was sufficiently consistent, wholesome, and eye-catching to have historychanging impact. Nor does it follow that Justin Martyr’s reports of astonishment at Christians’ “strange endurance” resulted in a renunciation of “violence and tyranny” and professions of faith (1 Apol. 16)—especially given a growing awareness that the narratives of persecution and martyrdom espoused by Eusebius, and others of his ilk, ought not to be taken at face value. At the very least, though, Kreider shows that the exhortation to patience forms a more important dimension of early Christian writing than has typically been recognized. If Tertullian and Cyprian’s treatises were perhaps innovative in highlighting God’s exercise of patience, their concern to treat patientia as a discrete marker of discipleship—and, by implication, a divine attribute—speaks to an important element of the early Christian zeitgeist, one that was firmly established by the beginning of the third century. A scattering of references in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament was picked up by the Apostolic Fathers, with Clement of Rome calling his readers to “patient endurance” (1 Clem. 62 and 64), Ignatius of Antioch insisting that “baptism be your arms … faith your helmet; your love, your spear; your patient endurance, your panoply,” and Polycarp exhorting Christians to be “imitators of

Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Twentieth Anniversary edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xl.

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his (Christ’s) patient endurance.”23 A little later, the second book of Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis makes a good deal of patience, forming a crucial part of “a rich ecosystem whose virtues reflect the character of God and are mutually supportive”; and Origen, never one to shrink from comparison, takes the bold step of connecting the “endurance of Israel” with Christ as “endurance itself.”24 So when Lactantius, one of Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s most worthy North African descendants, identified patience as “the greatest of all virtues” in the Institutes, he was summarizing an established trajectory of thought.25 To risk an overstatement: were the history of Christian thought to have ended in fourthcentury North Africa, it might well be possible to view it as a history in which patientia bulked unusually large—a possibility that raises the question of why, in later theological works, the term did not enjoy comparable standing, serving both as a descriptor of Christian life and as a term that identifies key dimensions of God’s ways and works. Rather than continuing to expand the view, however, it is instructive now to consider a third treatise: Augustine’s De patientia. This treatise does not seem to rely on earlier works and, granted that it may have originated as a public address (thus the reference to the praesentis sermonis in De pat.2 1),26 neither shows interest in helping Christians differentiate themselves from a wider, “pagan” culture nor does it show any desire to calm tempers after a period of controversy. We move now into a different world. Augustine’s principal concern is the circumscription of orthodoxy in light of the Pelagian claim that human beings can ready themselves for, and perhaps even contribute to, the securing of right relationship with God. And, given that Augustine writes his treatise around 417 ce, the condemnation of Pelagianism is painted in peculiarly stark For Ignatius, see The Epistles of St. Clement of Rome and St. Antioch, 98 (Pol. 6); for Polycarp, see “Letter of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, to the Philippians,” in Early Christian Fathers, ed. and trans. Cyril C. Richardson (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 134 (Ep. pol. 8). 24 Kreider, Patient Ferment, 17. See also Origen, Homilies on Jeremiah; Homily on 1 Kings 28, trans. John Clark Smith (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 183 (from Homily 17). 25 Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, Books I–VIII, trans. Mary Francis MacDonald (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 445 (6.18.16). 26 So Ayedze, “Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine on Patience,” 224–31. 23

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colors. What he takes to be the heart of the Pelagian stance—the fall being historically devastating but not ontologically ruinous, such that an individual retains some inclination and capacity to cast off sinful habits and orient herself to God—is deemed a gross misreading of the human condition. Even more troublingly, it opens the way to an enfeebled account of the necessity and efficacy of grace. That anyone enjoys a foretaste of right relationship to God in this life is the direct and exclusive result of a divine decision, an “election of grace” whose application “anticipates (the) faith from which all good works begin” (De pat.2 17). To be sure, this elective decision does bring about good works, and it is not wrong to credit those good works to the (refashioned) will of this or that individual, or this or that community. The Christian is not a passive channel through which divine action runs; she is an agent whose conduct is meaningful and consequential on its own terms, fired by “a will inflamed by the holiness of divine ardor … which loves God and its neighbor for God’s sake” (De pat.2 22). But it is imperative that a human will not be credited with its own rehabilitation. One must uphold a clear sequence of thought: God’s election being the ground of God’s gracious advance; the effect of God’s advance being the advent of faith; and the outworking of faith being a human will, sustained and directed by grace, that is oriented to God and acts on behalf of the well-being of others—which means, of course, a will that demonstrates the patience of faith.27 What is patience, exactly? Augustine begins by identifying it as a quality of God’s being and action, even as he admits bewilderment as to what exactly this means. How can a quality so associated with human affairs be definitive of God’s life? “Who can explain in words the nature and the quantity of God’s patience? We say he is impassible, yet not impatient; nay, rather, extremely patient. His patience is indescribable, yet it exists as it does His jealousy, His wrath, and any characteristic of this kind” (De pat.2 1). But bewilderment does not invalidate Augustine’s sense that patience should be ascribed to God. There is a clear awareness of the relevant scriptural prompts and, after a bit of hemming and hawing, a frank This account of Augustine’s understanding of the relation between divine sovereignty and human agency is of course not novel. It tracks particularly with the perspective laid out by Charles T. Mathewes; see A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 57–73.

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declaration that “we not only faithfully believe in a patient God, but … steadfastly acknowledge Him to be such” (De pat.2 1).28 Fairly quickly, however, Augustine’s attention turns to patience as a communicable attribute, a quality of God’s life that God conveys to those whom God graces with faith. And Augustine again takes pains to emphasize God’s initiative. Human patience is not a capacity we work up for ourselves. It is a gift, “coming down from above … from the father of lights” (De pat.2 14; Jas 1:17) that brings about a “virtue of the soul” (De pat.2 8) and issues in discrete patterns of conduct.29 Again, too, Augustine insists that God’s communication of grace does not shut the human down. Quite the contrary: it opens her up to dispose herself and to act, toward God, herself, and others, in more-or-less consequential ways. As Augustine puts it elsewhere: “the power to be patient is not in me, but in you, who grant me patience” (Enarr. Pss. 70.6, exposition #1). Building on this foundation, Augustine goes on to foreground steadfastness and waiting. Patience as steadfastness means that one puts up with, and is not diverted by, the wrongdoing of others. It is a virtue “by which we endure evils with equanimity” and hold fast to “the good through which we arrive at the better” (De pat.2 2).30 Wrongdoing, obviously, continues to irk and dismay Christians. There is no prospect of apatheia; it is precisely because Christians are not impervious to the fallen world but affected by it that patience is required. But steadfastness is efficacious in itself. It is a quality of discipleship that enables the Christian to manage sin, to “contain” it in some fashion, and to act in opposition to it. While we cannot

28 This is not the only nod toward Exod. 34:6–7 and related texts; see also, inter alia, Enarr. Pss. 30.12 (exposition #4) and Enarr. Pss. 77:22, when Augustine follows Tertullian and Cyprian, connecting God’s providential exercise of patience with Mt. 5:45. 29 Whether the Christian’s receipt of this “gift from above” should be understood as a first step in the process of deification is an intriguing issue. David Vincent Meconi supposes that to be the case; he draws an interesting connection between patience and deification in The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2013), 120–2. See also idem, “Augustine’s Doctrine of Deification,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. David Vincent Meconi and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 208–27. 30 See also Enarr. Pss. 31:20 (exposition #2, on Ps. 31:7): “What we call patience, what we call bearing up, what we call steadfastness, has no place except amid misfortunes.”

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undo fallenness and expel sin from the quotidian, we can, by grace, register sin’s effects, slow its circulation, and thereby attend to God and “possess our souls” (De pat.2 8).31 A gritted-teeth form of endurance, then, with little prospect of relief? No; and this is where patience as waiting comes into play. One who is patient “keeps vigilant watch over the state of his flesh and sees compensation for the losses of this present life, however serious they may be, in the inestimable gain of future incorruption” (De pat.2 7). Physical trials are thus set in an eschatological frame, which licenses the belief that the bliss of future redemption will outweigh—one might even say “defeat”—the horrors of sinful life in the present.32 Likewise trials of the soul. The soul “practices patience” when it recalls that “amid the stumbling blocks of this world, our true happiness is deferred. Hence the saying … ‘If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience’” (De pat.2 8). As with the earlier authors, then, and with due appreciation for Augustine’s forthrightness regarding God’s initiative, patience is a matter of pairing a “receptive” disposition with what is sometimes called the “ontological priority of the future.” The Christian participates in the “groaning of creation,” described in Rom. 8:18–25, suffering the relativity (and fearsomeness) of sin in light of the sovereignty of grace, while knowing that proleptic involvement in “future incorruption”—partial and dissatisfying as it is—offsets the transient “losses of this present life” (De pat.2 7). Is it possible to balance an ambiguous present and a glorious future? Can one reconcile the disenchantment of life in the here-and-now with a foretaste of the bliss to come in the hereafter? So long as one exercises patience, remaining steadfast and waiting soberly, yes. The grace that communicates patience carries with it the “long view” needed to sustain its exercise—a long view that arrests the gnawing sense that the travails of life are irreducible brute facts; a long view that treats those travails as occasions to reckon, in an anticipatory

James Wetzel has helped me understand this dimension of Augustine’s thinking. See Parting Knowledge: Essays after Augustine (Eugene: Cascade, 2013), 58–80. 32 This is of course not the sum-total of Augustine’s understanding of sin vis-à-vis the eschaton. But it is a line of thought with parallels in the present, particularly with regard to discussions of theodicy. See esp. Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) and idem, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 31

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way, with the end toward which history is being moved. Thus De pat.2 11: “Wait on God with patience: join thyself to God, and endure: that thy life may be increased in the latter end. Take all that shall be brought upon thee: and in thy sorrow endure, and in thy humiliation keep patience.” A fitting conclusion to the trajectories of thought initiated by Tertullian and nurtured by Cyprian, then? That, unfortunately, would be a step too far. Despite a clutch of intriguing gestures in the first half of the treatise, Augustine’s overriding concern to discredit those who attribute patience “to the powers of man’s will” (De pat.2 12) makes De patientia a rather frustrating read. While Cyprian and Tertullian certainly presented Christian identity in opposition to “paganism,” their works managed—at least in the main, and notwithstanding some outbursts of apocalyptic excess—to sustain a positive, open-ended theological agenda. The anti-Pelagian polemics of De patientia, by contrast, are something close to overwhelming. Most problematically, Augustine loses the opportunity to engage the issue of divine patience at length. The suggestive worries voiced at the beginning of the treatise don’t add up to much; ultimately, they amount to a throat-clearing prelude, prior to the main, controversial show. So even as “the patience of the just is from Him through whom their charity is poured out” (De pat.2 14), we never get beyond a bald statement of divine impassibility. And there is no exploration, either, of the earlier suggestion that patience might be a quality of God’s providential work, as one who is “slow to anger,” even though Augustine alludes to this elsewhere.33 Little is said, too, about Christ’s life-unto-death as an exercise of patience, despite some intriguing hints (so De pat.2 8) and despite other of Augustine’s texts attending to the humility of the incarnate Son Thus, for instance, De cat. rud. 19:3 and Enarr. Pss. 30.12 (exposition #4). Enarr. Pss. 7:12 also merits quotation: “He is long-suffering who did not, immediately after his resurrection, seize those who persecuted him, in order to punish them; instead, he bore with them, in order that they might eventually turn from such impiety to salvation. And still he bears with them, reserving final punishment until the final judgment, and even today still inviting sinners to repentance … God does not bring anger to bear every single day, that is, he does not gather his ministers together every day to inflict punishment. For here and now God’s patience invites us to repentance, but at the end, when humankind through its own stubbornness and unrepentant heart has stored up for itself anger in the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed, then he will brandish his sword.” 33

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and reflecting, often brilliantly, on patience and endurance in connection with Christ’s life and passion.34 Finally, while Augustine was probably better placed than Tertullian or Cyprian to engage the difficult question as to how the motif of patience might be (or might not be) relevant to thinking about God’s triunity, De patientia shows no interest in this issue. Augustine could, at least in principle, have used his apprehension of the humility of the incarnate Word as an occasion to ask if and how the attribute of patience might apply to, and might help one to understand, the eternal relations of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; he could, at least in principle, have suggested that his exhortations about Christian patience have as their antecedent an acclamation of the patience that God exercises toward Godself in God’s own, immanent life. But that is the road not taken. Given all of this, a disappointing conclusion is unavoidable. While the treatises by Tertullian and Cyprian seem to open up a line of inquiry, Augustine’s De patientia risks closing it down. An interest in divine patience is pushed to the margins; human patience predominates. Of course, this critique—which, like any other, bears the marks of my own interests—hardly makes Augustine’s treatise a bust. Certainly it is important ­ to challenge Kreider’s charge that Augustine’s focus on Christians’ “interior ­conditions” is bought at the price of an interest in “patience’s exterior, behavioral conditions,” and to such an extent that De patientia vitiates the “countercultural habitus” championed by earlier writers.35 That charge trades on the outdated notion that Augustine’s interest in the “inner” life has as its corollary a disregard for social and political matters; and, more specifically, presumes that when Augustine does engage the “exterior” of Christian life, he peddles a debased form of Christian realism. That charge also ignores key claims in the text. Rather than simply promoting “strong-armed policies … state-imposed fines, confiscation, and  exile,”36

On Christology and humility see, inter alia, Conf. VII.xviii.24 and De Trin. IV.x.13, IV.xii.15, VII.iii.5, and VIII.iv.7, as well as the valuable remarks of Lewis Ayres, Augustine on the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp.  142–70; and Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), esp.  29–31 and 141–53. On patience and Christ’s passion, see, inter alia, Enarr. Pss. 33:24 (exposition #2), Enarr. Pss. 34:10 (exposition #1), and, very menacingly, Enarr. Pss. 85:21. 35 Kreider, Patient Ferment, 290. 36 Kreider, Patient Ferment, 285. 34

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Augustine is plainly interested in a redirected will that “loves God and its neighbor for God’s sake” (De pat.2 22, my emphasis) and aspires to make a difference in diverse spheres of life. Something of Kreider’s own interest in patience as a “fermenting” power, in fact, seems to be discernible at points. Augustine insists that Christians learn from David (De pat.2 9) and from Job—one who “enduring in his flesh the pains and in his heart the errors of his proud friends, chided his wife’s foolishness, taught his friends wisdom, and everywhere preserved his patience” (De pat.2 9, emphasis added). The edge of an intriguing idea shows itself here: patience as a socially effective form of persistence that, at a pinch, can transform the quotidian in which one finds oneself.

But it would do Augustine a disservice to have De patientia mark the end of the story. To conclude this section and prepare readers for the next, I want now to propose that this treatise can serve as an interpretative key for engaging The City of God, with the latter text read as an extended performance of the kind of patience that Christians might exercise in the run-up to the eschaton. While this is a slightly unusual way to approach Augustine’s masterwork, I think it is warranted, both in terms of the text itself and as a way to show that Augustine keeps thinking—and, perhaps, comes to think better—about patience as a facet of Christian life, even as he continues to sideline the issue of divine patience. Setting aside intramural debates over grace and free will, De civitate Dei makes patience pivotal to Christians’ negotiation of a time of political, social, and cultural upheaval. Absent this virtue, those within the civitas Dei would likely view their coexistence with residents of the civitas terrena with a degree of horror. The fact that these groups are currently “entangled and mingled with one another; and … will remain so until the last judgment shall separate them” (I.36) would be an occasion for despair—and likely also a reason for Christians to leave the world to its own devices. With this virtue in hand, however, the quotidian is set in a new light. Christians can navigate it as an interim state, pregnant with possibilities for witness and angled toward the glory of a blessed end.37

Much of what follows has benefited from conversations with Charles T. Mathewes: endurance is key to his reading and appropriation of Augustine, with patience cast in a supporting role. See A Theology of Public Life and The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

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The momentous opening of De civitate Dei, likely written around the same time as De patientia, nicely introduces this line of interpretation: Most glorious is the city of God: whether in this passing age, where she dwells by faith as a pilgrim among the ungodly (cum inter impios peregrinatur ex fide uiuens), or in the security of that eternal home which she now patiently awaits (sedis aeternate, quam nunc expectat per patientiam) until “righteousness shall return in judgment,” but which she will then possess perfectly, in final victory and perfect peace. (Civ. Dei I, Pr.) Where does the Christian reside, ultimately? In the city that God establishes, rules over, and blesses. The when of this city, however, is a more complex matter. On one hand, it is a moment in the future, a “time” that happens beyond this present dispensation. In this time, the saved are encompassed by the glorious fact of redemption, and their blissful receipt of grace occasions joy and praise. Absent the distraction of Rome’s counterfeit glory and delivered from sin and impiety, there is “felicity without end” and “we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise” (Civ. Dei VI.12 and XXII.30). On the other hand, the future “when” of the divine city cannot be held apart from the present, fallen dispensation. Thankfully so: the contrast between our sinful now and God’s perfect hereafter is hereby rendered a dynamic relation, with the blessedness of the future encroaching upon and qualifying the ambiguities of the present. Indeed, while God’s hereafter has priority over and relativizes the quotidian, it also validates and, in certain respects, dignifies it, revealing it to be part of God’s good creation. And as this validity and dignity is perceived, there arises an obligation of Christians to engage the world, in all of its complexity, in a purposeful way. The church that lives as a “pilgrim in the world” (Civ. Dei I.35) is now called to bear with this same world, to “groan” its way through it, and to recognize and embrace its goodness in spite of sin, with a due sense of the blessedness that is to come.38 (C. Michael Chin I use the word “groan” advisedly. See Michael C. McCarthy, “An Ecclesiology of Groaning: Augustine, the Psalms, and the Making of the Church,” TS 66 (2005): 23–48.

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puts it nicely: at issue is “an ongoing state of temporal disjunction” that requires the Christian to “imagine himself or herself as existing simultaneously on different points of a temporal continuum,” stretching from a sinful past to a glorious future—a disjunction that is only endurable and manageable because of the Christian’s foretaste of the eschaton.)39 And alongside this “bearing,” Christians are given both an opportunity and a task. Our identity as “strangers” vis-à-vis the civitas terrena notwithstanding, we must bear witness to the salvation that has been effected and the salvation that is to come. While God is “by degrees withdrawing His servants from a world decaying and collapsing” (Civ. Dei II.18), those not yet withdrawn may not leave history to unfold as it will. Something different is required: the resolve “to live eschatologically within the world—to live during the world.”40 At exactly this moment, patience is crucial. De patientia has already suggested that this virtue distinguishes lives lived in two times and places at once—that this quality of faith, derivative of God’s gracious refashioning of the believer, allows one both to suffer and to respond to a disquieting sense of bi-temporality and bi-locality. Or, to use a different pairing: patience is a function of a Christian receiving the glory of God’s future amid and despite the sinfulness of the present, by grace; and patience, by grace, involves the Christian disposing herself as a creature who awaits that same future, amid and despite the sinfulness of the present. And this combination of suffering and responding, receiving and awaiting, takes on an important role in De civitate Dei, shaping the mindset Augustine sought to commend after the sack of Rome (410 ce) and the breakdown of the western Roman Empire. On one level, patience is manifested through a steady and critical engagement with nonChristian moral, religious, and philosophical perspectives. These perspectives, so important for the first half of De civitate Dei, mustn’t be peremptorily or precipitously dismissed. They

Catherine Chin, “Telling Boring Stories: Time, Narrative, and Pedagogy in De Catechizandis Rudibus,” AugSt 37, no. 1 (2006): 44 and 49–50. Although Chin’s article does not consider The City of God at length, its reading of Augustine has proven invaluable to me. 40 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 15. While Mathewes indicates that his reading of Augustine draws primarily on sermons, commentaries, and De Trin., I take this sentence to be a useful précis of a basic concern of De civitate Dei. 39

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must be patiently detailed and suffered; for only then can they be patiently dispatched, exposed as implausible and insufficient, and transformed into a negative counterpoint to an unapologetically Christian account of creation, providence, and salvation. (The preface to book VII nicely illustrates this point: “I am here endeavouring most diligently to uproot and extirpate depraved and ancient opinions which the long-continued error of the human race has implanted deeply and tenaciously in the dark places of the soul; for these opinions are hostile to the truth of godliness.”) On another level, books XII to XXI of De civitate Dei progressively relativize the confusions, sufferings, and sins of the present, overpowering them with an account of the city to come, while urging readers to await that city—all the while continuing to engage the world as it is now. Patience, one might even say, ensures that the stark juxtaposition of a sinful present and a salvific future becomes a contrast that undoes itself, with the bright light of God’s future showing that the nighttime of created history is not reducible to sin, but is always-already shaped by God and oriented to the Kingdom that is coming. Armed with the belief that God “acts in accordance with an order of things and times which is hidden from us, but entirely known to him” (Civ. Dei IV.33), God’s future thus renders the current world a “sign” of God’s saving purposes—a time and space in which Christians’ suffering and responding, receiving and awaiting, begin to make sense.41 Why are certain theological texts so long? Why must one labor through Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, following the movement of exitus and reditus that underwrites each article? Why did Calvin write and rewrite the Institutes for nearly three decades? Why do we have the sense that Barth’s Dogmatics is not just unfinished but was unfinishable? At least with respect to De civitate Dei, some answers lie close to hand. Augustine’s text is long because the contestation of the “earthly city which, when it seeks mastery, is itself mastered by the lust for mastery” (Civ. Dei I, Pr.) cannot be a matter of curt denunciation. One must learn to recognize the appeal of this earthly city, to pore over its temptations, and to resist its allure—sometimes by way of immanent critique, sometimes with conscientious argumentation, sometimes through trash-talk and polemics. The imaginary of empire, shot through with pride and falsehood, cannot be overturned overnight; it must be pulled apart, piece by piece, day by day. The city of God, too, is best mapped slowly. Proleptic residence in This sentence purposefully parallels a claim in Williams, On Augustine, 27.

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this city only becomes joyous when its citizens do not “forget its own redemption” nor become “ungrateful to its Redeemer” (Civ Dei. XXII.30). And while not forgetting and being grateful might be easy on the other side of eternity, those acts can only be achieved through a lengthy training of the self in the here-and-now.

It is useful to expand a little on these points, so as to tease out further the connotations that patientia comes to acquire. Augustine has no doubt that human beings are caught in a web of sinfulness. Our desire, which should be centered on God and defined by praise (so, famously, Conf. I.i.1), has slipped its moorings; and because of this unmooring—an event for which we, of course, must take responsibility, even as it overtakes us in ways that we cannot resist—human beings exist in a state of constant dissatisfaction. And that dissatisfaction does not disappear if we find ourselves favored by God. The justifying and sanctifying work of grace upon the human being (which, of course, evokes faith) does not license disregard for the fall; it magnifies the local and global operations of sin, and does so at some existential cost to the believer. Indeed, despite a vivid sense of the glories to come, the believer must contend constantly with her own, continuing resistance to God’s saving work, a prominent dimension of which is the desire to credit herself with a decisive role in the achievement of salvation, and therefore to deny that grace is, by definition, never acquired but only given.42 Yet even as Augustine insists that God is drawing us out of a deep and dangerous pit, moving us from a sinful past into a present anchored in a blessed future, he supposes that the expansion of sight that accompanies faith—that is, seeing oneself as resident in both the divine and earthly cities—goes hand in hand with an increase in agential capacity. This is the reason, again, why patience does not only involve endurance (which, Augustine insists, is not akin to “what the Greeks call apatheia”) but is tied up with the imperative that Christians “lead a righteous life … a life which is blessed” and “exhibit a love and a gladness which are not only righteous, but also assured” (Civ. Dei XIV.9, my emphases). Being patient, then, cannot be separated from the obligation to enact something of the Kingdom, under pressure of grace, and to do so in such a way that the qualitative difference between a “fallen” Robert Dodaro is good on this point; see “Augustine’s Revision of the Heroic Ideal,” AugSt 36, no. 1 (2005): 141–57.

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and a “redeemed” life is made public. Christian patience is not detachment; Christian patience is a conscious inhabitation of a compromised quotidian. In fact, while Augustine does not say it explicitly, it seems possible and apt to view patience as the hidden precondition of the “kind of life the citizens of the City of God must lead during this pilgrimage” in the world (Civ. Dei XIV.9)—an inconspicuous “glue” that holds together the more conspicuous triad of faith, hope, and love. We are patient to the extent that we endure the world aright; we are patient insofar as we accept that we are acted upon, knowing ourselves to be entirely dependent on God’s favor and mercy, and knowing that such dependence is the condition of our making a difference to the contexts in which we are placed.43 And an adjacent shade of meaning now comes into view, hinted at by Cyprian: patience as a focused susceptibility to God’s ways and works, such that our receipt of God’s future is preliminary to our being set in motion, stirred to praise God by anticipating the heavenly city in the here and now. To be sure, patient awaiting, by definition, means that immediate transport to the heavenly city is not on the cards. “Patience,” after all, is “only necessary where there are evils to be borne” (Civ. Dei XVI.9); and since “we are in the midst of evils … we must endure them with patience until we come to those good things where everything will bestow ineffable delight upon us, and where there will no longer be anything which we must endure” (Civ. Dei XIX.5; see also Pss. Enarr. 91.1). Yet “bearing” the present goes hand in hand with the obligation to use this present as an occasion to realize, albeit proleptically, something of the End.44 Just as the reprobate exist “for the benefit of those who Jennifer A. Herdt puts it well: for Augustine, dependence “does not imply passivity.” It manifests itself, rather, in a virtuous existence that “is active insofar as it is fundamentally responsive, responsive to the grace that converts us from love of self to love of God”). See Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 47. 44 If Augustine’s use/enjoyment (uti/frui) distinction is spelled out in De doctrina christiana, it is also present throughout Civ. Dei, both implicitly and explicitly (so, for instance, Civ. Dei XI.25 and much of Civ. Dei XIX). However, as Herdt points out, the distinction undergoes revision. There is now an understanding of “relative ends,” such that virtues and human persons “can be loved for their own sake while also being ordered to God” (Putting on Virtue, 54). By extension, one might say that patience can be practiced and valued for its own sake—so long as it is properly ordered to God. 43

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were to be redeemed” (Civ. Dei XVII.11), so moments of suffering and misery in this world become waystations on a pilgrimage that culminates in joyous communion with God.45 Enduring the world now means awaiting the world to come, and this concurrence of enduring and awaiting enables one to receive and reside in the world in the present, even to change the world of the present, for the sake of the world to come. To summarize this pairing of De patientia and De civitate Dei, then: as the Christian is graciously given patience, rendered susceptible to God’s grace and “primed” to receive its unfolding in a life encompassed by sin, the Christian gains the opportunity to exercise patience. Under pressure of grace and suffering the sinfulness of this present age, the exercise of patience affords the Christian the opportunity to enact the distinct habitus that God grants her, to bear witness to the fact that this world, sinful as it is, is none other than God’s good creation. In so doing, the Christian trains herself, even as she is trained, patiently to wait and patiently to endure and patiently to persevere in expectation of the joy that is to come.

­3 Thomas Aquinas and Julian of Norwich Something of a pause, in which I will hazard some generalizations, is probably useful at this point. The previous section showed how three North African thinkers reckoned theologically with patience. Human patience is described in relatively intelligible terms, and in ways that pick up on various scriptural cues—albeit with little interest in the scriptural witness to the history of ancient Israel and with a great deal of attention paid to the New Testament epistles. For Tertullian and Cyprian, it bespeaks a willingness to accept the constraints of finitude; it makes evident a determination to endure and resist sinfulness, likely with some degree of composure; it reflects a determination to wait on and for the consummation of God’s purposes, subsequent to the 45 Thus Civ. Dei XVIII.51: “All the enemies of the Church, however blinded by error or depraved by malice, train the Church in patience if they are given the power of inflicting bodily harm; whereas, if they oppose her by their wicked beliefs, they train her in wisdom.”

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incarnation and the outpouring of the Spirit. And, notably, patience is always exercised. Rather than being triggered by circumstances, it is a disposition and pattern of activity that the Christian adopts and enacts in light of God’s gracious work. It is a performance of a particular kind of subjectivity whereby the Christian, caught in the crosscurrents of an ambiguous present, attunes herself to God’s redemptive activity. Less familiar to contemporary readers, but foundational to Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s treatises and again backed by the scriptural witness, is the notion of divine patience, made manifest in God’s providential and saving work. (Creation, incidentally, does not seem to be a site of interest—a neglect that I try to remedy in this book’s fourth chapter.) In terms of providence, patience is demonstrated in God’s disbursement of blessings and the postponement of judgment. It involves a merciful extension of time and space, as God affords sinners the time and space needed to repent of wickedness, to orient ourselves aright, and to take up the task of discipleship. In terms of salvation, Tertullian and Cyprian gesture toward some striking Christological and pneumatological claims. Christ is identified, in effect, as patience incarnate: the Word who endures the human condition, then suffers and dies to bring about our reconciliation. And the Spirit is described as one who communicates the redemptive gift of patience to the faithful, thereby enabling their navigation and contestation of a fallen world. So if there is certainly not a consistent, far-reaching application of patience to key dogmatic loci, there is at least the suggestion that patience could—with some development—continue to play a leading role in theological reflection. While Augustine’s reluctance to write about divine patience in De patientia is regrettable (and consequential: demurral on this front was surely more influential, in the long-run, than Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s exploratory remarks), his treatise sheds valuable light on his later account of those who yearn for the divine-human reality of the divine city, and who must now “endure” the world in advance of the eschaton. De patientia, that is, helps one to describe the distinctive ethic of De civitate Dei, and again shows that patience could take on an important role in theological reflection. It is by way of patience that Christians can respond to the future, making good on God’s mercy in the present, bearing witness to the goodness of creation and the reality of God’s redemptive work, showing thereby that the earthly city’s “lust for mastery” can be

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confronted by a different formation of creaturely desire; it is by way of patience that Christians can wait on “the security of [their] eternal home” (Civ. Dei I, Pr.). To be sure, once history is brought to term, there will be no need for patience. We will wait no more; “there will be nothing to be endured” (De pat.2 26; see also Civ. Dei XIV.9). In the meantime, however, patience enables to Christians to suffer in the right way, balancing our struggles against sin with our anticipation of the glory that is to come. Do these suggestive stances receive expansion in the works of later authors? Is the momentum of these thinkers sustained in later centuries? The questions are obviously larger than can be tackled here, but two authors from Europe’s Middle Ages suggest the need for an ambivalent answer. While Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae brilliantly clarifies the meaning of patience as a dimension of human life, it also suggests a regrettable—and, arguably, unnecessary— narrowing of the theological imagination that goes far beyond Augustine. A concern for the meaning and operations of human patience becomes an exclusive concern; the issue of divine patience is dropped. But Julian of Norwich charts a quite different path, nesting Augustinian insights in a new theological frame. The Short and Long Texts of Revelations make patience central to Christian life and, albeit sketchily, advert to its importance for thinking about God’s ways and works.

(a) Aquinas’ Summa theologiae ­ quinas considers patience in the context of “cardinal” (or moral) A virtues—virtues that are oriented toward everyday flourishing, being discerned through the right exercise of reason and nurtured at a remove from the focused workings of grace. Among the principal cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage), patience is located in the region associated with courage (fortitudo). Courage names the capacity to overcome the acute disinclination to act reasonably in face of a severe and imminent existential threat. Despite the irascible passion of fear, a courageous person will collect herself, recall her obligations, and continue to pursue local goods. She will not go to pieces; she will “stand immovable” and “behave aright in face of danger” (ST II–II:123.6 and II–II:128.1). Consider an individual who, all things being equal, is lauded for

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her rectitude. Being prudent, just, and temperate, she typically does a good job in selecting reasonable means to effect laudable ends, thereby enhancing the quotidian. Yet it might so happen that this same person is susceptible to being overwhelmed by an unexpected turn of events. It might be, for instance, that she suddenly learns that her country has been invaded by a hostile power, that she has been called to military service, and that she must leave her family to fight on a battlefield.46 If this person lacks courage, such events could be her undoing. She is liable to be overtaken by circumstances, with the result that her capacity to reason and act well are severely impaired. But if this person has courage, she stands a good chance of thinking and behaving well. In the run-up to battle and in the heat of combat, she will neither become insensible to fear nor tend toward a kind of recklessness that puts herself and others in jeopardy (ST II–II.126 and 127); instead, she will continue to pursue the good in a difficult, frightening situation. Indeed, even if she must engage in unpalatable conduct (say, having instrumental recourse to the passion of anger when clashing with a wicked, derisive foe), such actions do not prove lastingly deformative. Courage enables her to keep a grip on herself.47 These claims set the scene for patience, a “quasi-potential part of fortitude … annexed thereto as secondary to (this) principal virtue” (ST II–II:136.4). Why “quasi-potential” and “secondary”? Because patience comes into play when a situation is not so grave as to imperil one’s life, but sufficiently vexing and distracting as to jeopardize one’s sense of self. It is a virtue that enables one to I use the example of military conflict advisedly. While Aquinas’ remarks about fortitudo are broadly intended, there is clear interest in the ways that a soldier should (or should not) comport herself. See here, for instance, Gregory M. Reichberg, “Aquinas on Battlefield Courage,” Thomist 74, no. 3 (2010): 337–68 (esp. 356 on patience); and idem, “Thomas Aquinas between Just War and Pacifism,” JRE 38, no. 2 (2010): 219–41. The association of patience and military life, of course, has precedent in ancient Greco-Roman texts. 47 Josef Pieper makes the point nicely, if melodramatically (and, I fear, with little awareness of the gendered implications of his remarks): “If in this supreme test, in face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear and is not deterred from doing that which is good; if, moreover, he does so for the sake of good—which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward—this man, and he alone, is truly brave.” See The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, trans. Richard Winston et al. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 127. 46

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cope with the sorrow (tristitia) that arises when one is so dispirited that one’s reasoning could begin to misfire, losing sight of the good and becoming confused about the best means to achieve it. To mix metaphors: if courageous individuals do not go to pieces when danger rears its head, those who have patience will not be overwhelmed by sadness when the chips are down. So Aquinas: Fortitude is chiefly about fear, which of itself evokes flight which fortitude avoids; while patience is chiefly about sorrow, for a man is said to be patient, not because he does not fly, but because he behaves in a praiseworthy manner by suffering things which hurt him here and now, in such a way as not to be inordinately saddened by them. (ST II–II.136.4) Aptly, patience has perseverance as its natural partner—another secondary virtue, also supportive of fortitudo, whose exercise enables one to endure disheartening delays in the achievement of the good.48 And if perseverance enables one “to persist long in something good until it is accomplished” (II–II.137.1), helping one to “stick with it” when it seems that the good’s realization lies far in the future, patience ensures that small setbacks do not knock one off-track. Lacking patience, the difficulties ingredient to human life (which are themselves necessary for the development of character) bulk so large that an individual struggles to hold fast to the ends that she is pursuing. Equipped with patience, however, difficulties are met with equanimity. Sadness does not run riot; bumps in the road are viewed as no more than bumps—dimensions of a context in which God’s ways are hard to track and human flourishing depends on sound decision-making. Now all of this is tremendously valuable. While a range of ancient and patristic connotations remain in play (endurance, suffering, waiting, tolerating, etc.), Aquinas’ genius is to nest them in a philosophically sophisticated and existentially realistic account of moral life. The suggestion that the exercise of patience can arrest the deformation of one’s character—a genuine risk if

On this pairing, see the careful remarks of John Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 217.

48

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one is overburdened, as so many are, by the cumulative weight of life’s disappointments—is particularly powerful. If a person fails to “manage sorrow” as it bears on their inward life, thus allowing a distortion of the relationship between reason and appetite, their capacity to act for the sake of the good is degraded.49 They will not take note of sadness as one affection among many; they will amplify it to a perverse degree. If patience supervenes, however, that person will bend (aptly: setbacks are disappointing) but not break, given an awareness that the “good for the sake of which one is willing to endure evils” should be “more desired and loved than the good the privation of which causes the sorrow that we bear patiently” (ST II–II.136.3). Indeed, although Aquinas does not consider at length how patience connects with the other cardinal virtues, he is surely right to suggest that patience bears on every dimension of human life, being “the root (radix) and the safeguard (custos) of all the virtues” (ST II–II.136.2, citing Gregory the Great).50 This is not only a useful reminder that “secondary virtues” are not so named because they are lesser virtues, but simply because they are best analyzed in the context of more fundamental virtues; it is also an important hint (which I will develop shortly) that the coherence and continuity of a moral self depends on a patient “containment” of the myriad frustrations that accompany life after the fall. It is for this reason, too, that Aquinas’ analysis can be brought into conversation with cognitive and evolutionary research on resilience. Craig Steven Titus argues persuasively that Aquinas’ construal of patience allows one to think, on occasion, about “virtuous sorrow,” with hardships treated as occasions in which the self learns to “safeguard … reason from the sorrowful impulse of the passions.”51 Charles Pinches gestures toward a similar point when he writes that “patience protects the good of reason.”52

49 Craig Steven Titus, Resilience and the Virtue of Fortitude: Aquinas in Dialogue with the Psychosocial Sciences (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 241–63. 50 See Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, trans. George Demacopoulos (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), pt. 3, §9 (104). 51 Titus, Resilience and the Virtue of Fortitude, 260 and 248. For more on “virtuous sorrow,” see ST I–II.39.2. 52 Charles R. Pinches, “Time for Patience,” in Attentive Patience, vol. 58 in Christian Reflection: A Series on Faith and Ethics (Waco: The Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University, 2016), 20.

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Implicit in the suggestion that patience is a character-sustaining virtue is a further distinction of Aquinas’ outlook, again continuous with earlier writers: patience conceived as an activity, applied to difficult circumstances. Aquinas’ initial definition, taken from Cicero, is noteworthy on this front: patience is identified as “the voluntary and prolonged endurance of arduous and difficult things for the sake of virtue” (ST II–II.128). As with Tertullian, Augustine, and Cyprian, patience is not a reflexive affair. It involves the enactment of a discrete habitus, much needed when it seems that the achievement of the good will take longer than one initially supposed. Indeed, perhaps more than with the patristic authors, something of an analogue to the “middle voice” is evident in Aquinas’ work (a point to which I will return in the second volume of this project): patience as a mode of activity that does not easily relate to the standard of “autonomized agency” prized by some in the modern West, given that it confounds the assumption that activity and passivity are diametrically opposed; patience as a dimension of subjectivity that arises when bearing and doing, receiving and responding, form two sides of the same coin.53 Finally, it is important to acknowledge the value of Aquinas’ differentiation of cardinal and theological virtues. A well-worn critique, of course, quickly rears its head at this juncture. To wit: doesn’t this differentiation imply separate tiers of human existence, and thus suggest that a focused application of divine grace is not really (or, at least, not always) needed for sinful humans to orient themselves aright? Isn’t Aquinas downplaying the effects of sin on the everyday operations of reason and, concomitantly, losing sight of the necessity of God’s gracious intervention in every sphere of human life? While the motivation for this critique is praiseworthy— attending to God’s primacy is never a bad idea, nor is drawing attention to grace as the conditio sine qua non for every credible creaturely action—it struggles to gain purchase when applied to the Summa. Why? Because it depends on a sharper disjunction of “natural” and “supernatural” than Aquinas would allow, looking quickly past the crucial declaration that it is “impossible to have patience without the help of grace” (ST II–II.136.3; see also ST Saba Mahmood talks of the limits of “autonomized agency” in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), xii. 53

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I–II.109–14). It may be true that the relationship between virtues that pertain to this life (which human beings typically develop by themselves, at a remove from the focused operations of grace) and virtues that pertain to the next life (which derive from a focused infusion of grace) is a bit unstable and liable to mislead. That much is suggested by debates over whether Christians can really possess “acquired” cardinal virtues.54 Yet this unclarity ought not to divert attention from Aquinas’ general insistence that all creaturely events subserve God’s sovereign purposes, given God’s all-encompassing governance of events in time and space, as well as Aquinas’ more particular insistence that it is the operations of (non-sanctifying) grace that ensure we are not always falling victim to irascible and concupiscible appetites. One cannot really say, in other words, that this (or any) secondary cardinal virtue is unrelated to God’s ways and works. One must accept that Aquinas explicates its meaning at a distance from his account of God’s saving action, so that our (divinely elevated) operations of reason might be considered on their own terms, in view of Aquinas’ complementary explication of “theological” virtues, while not suggesting its removal from the divine economy in which we exist. And while this modus operandi might not be congenial to a Protestant sensibility, it cannot be disqualified on point of principle. The goal here is not to bifurcate the self, but to demonstrate how human beings are rendered “integrated moral organisms,” with the “body of moral teaching”—that is, the analyses of the cardinal virtues in ST II–II.47–170—being “animated by its theological soul.”55 The benefit of this modus operandi, too, is pretty obvious. If the theological virtues are oriented toward God, being graciously given “additional principles” that ensure one is “directed to supernatural happiness” (ST I–II.62.1), Aquinas’ delineation of the cardinal virtues adverts to a concern to help Christians to navigate everyday challenges. Ethical reasoning, in the context of theological reflection, gains exactly the kind of latitude and nuance that it needs to be effective when it comes to life in medias res. It does not hold itself apart from prosaic matters (e.g., “scandal,” “backbiting,” and “shamefacedness” [ST II–II.43, 73, and 144]); it See, for instance, William C. Mattison III, “Can Christians Possess the Acquired Cardinal Virtues?” TS 72 (2011): 558–85. 55 Sheryl Overmyer, “Exalting the Meek Virtue of Humility in Aquinas,” HeyJ 56 (2015): 653. 54

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can be pursued in ways that assist Christians, and others, as they negotiate a world filled with error. The precision and elegance of Aquinas’ remarks, as well as these three points of praise, do not, however, overcome an obvious problem. Read in view of the works considered in the previous section (and, for that matter, in view of the scriptural claims analyzed in this book’s introduction), the Summa offers a severe circumscription of the place of patientia in Christian thought. A basically human affair, considered at a remove from the workings of sanctifying grace, its pertinence for the task of faith seeking understanding appears to be rather slight. Its relationship to the divine economy in which Christians are placed is simply not spelled out. And, most troublingly, there seems to be no analogue to Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s sense of God’s exercise of patience in Aquinas’ masterwork. Although the principal concern of sacra doctrina is the God to whom “divine inspired Scripture” bears witness (ST I.1.1) and, thereafter, “creatures considered as being in relation to him, their origin and end” (ST I.1.3), patience is limited to a small patch of that creaturely thereafter—and to such an extent that it is difficult to understand how its place in “inspired Scripture” connects with the project of faith seeking understanding. Let me expand on these points. First, and most obviously, the Summa does not treat patientia as a divine attribute, given expression through God’s economic activity. There is of course something of a precedent here: Augustine’s treatise declared God’s patience to be “indescribable” (De pat.2 1) and, beyond noting that God’s patience is coextensive with God’s impassibility, offered a very brief explication of the term as it bears on God’s being. But while the Summa cites Augustine’s treatise repeatedly, it is even more muted, and it shows next-to-no interest in the treatises of Augustine’s predecessors. It does not suggest, for instance, that God’s disbursement of goods to the righteous and the unrighteous (Mt. 5:45) might be described as an expression of patience. And the claim that God “waits” for sinners to repent and rededicate themselves to God is mentioned only passingly, via quotation (ST II–II.136.1 and 5; see also III.52.2 and III.86.1). The patristic conviction that patience is first to be associated with God, and then applied to human affairs, then, is effectively taken off the table, replaced with the belief that “patience is chiefly about sorrows inflicted by other persons” (ST II–II.136.4). Does talk of Christ’s patience go some way to filling the gap that opens up? Not

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really. It is true that Aquinas sometimes mentions Christ’s patience: the incarnate Son bears a body that is subjected to passibility and defects (ST III.14.1), experiences the propassion of sorrow (ST III.15.6, although patience is not mentioned explicitly), and manifests “patience and constancy in enduring death” (ST III.51.2). He can therefore be viewed as “the model of perfect virtue regarding patience” (CT 186): one who manages distress when facing death. But none of this adds up to much. If talk of God’s patient mercy remains a matter of passing scriptural reference, the suggestion that the Word patiently “bears” a fragile body does not really go anywhere. Indeed, the claim that Christ exemplifies patience receives its fullest articulation in a relatively “unacademic” text, De compendium theologiae—not the Summa. So the point holds. When it comes to patience, Aquinas’ principal concern does not seem to be God’s ways and works, but human beings’ capacity to cope with adversity. A second point of critique: the decision to identify faith, hope, and charity as theological virtues that “direct man to supernatural happiness” (ST II–II.62.3), set alongside a treatment of patience as a subset of a discrete cardinal virtue, leads Aquinas to look past Augustine’s claim that patience is ingredient to the Christian’s endurance of the world, in view of the eschaton. Patience as a virtue suited to reckoning with the future as it impinges on the present, in other words, is not an obvious concern in the Summa; its meaning is restricted to moral reasoning in the quotidian. Now, again, this obviously does not make patience irrelevant to theological reflection. While positioned “downstream” of God’s ways and works and thus set at something of a remove from the targeted workings of saving grace, it is perhaps possible to envisage something continuous with the account of patience in De civitate Dei—maybe by way of an association of hope and patience, exercised by one who is identified as a homo viator; maybe via an expansion of Aquinas’ thinking about temperance and humility; maybe by revisiting perseverance as it is shaped by the divine auxilium in relation to the life of the (already-graced) Christian.56 But the very fact that one must resort These options are inspired by and represent possible expansions of three suggestive essays: David Elliot, “The Christian as Homo Viator: A Resource in Aquinas for Overcoming ‘Worldly Sin and Sorrow,’” JSCE 34, no. 2 (2014): 101–21; Sheryl Overmyer, “Exalting the Meek Virtue of Humility”; and Shawn M. Colberg, “Aquinas and the Grace of Auxilium,” MT 32, no. 2 (2016): 187–210.

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to conjecture at this point underscores the fact that the Summa does not itself encourage such an application of patientia. Just as there is no clear analogue to Tertullian’s claim that patience distinguishes Christian life in a religiously plural environment or Cyprian’s suggestion that patience relates to our susceptibility to the workings of the Spirit, so there is no reprisal of Augustine’s claim that patience is a matter of our waiting on, and waiting for, life with God. What makes this state of affairs peculiarly frustrating is the fact that Aquinas really could have developed an account of patience as an “acquired” cardinal virtue that connects directly with patience, understood as an “infused” virtue that is ordered toward our heavenly end. Granted the risk of fatiguing readers with a long excursus, it is worth lingering over this possibility.57 In the first article of On the Virtues in General, Aquinas identifies three reasons why human beings need virtues: (a) to ensure “steadfastness in … operation,” (b) to enable a person “to perform a perfect operation readily,” and (c) to render a person’s actions conducive to happiness.58 Absent (a) and (b), an individual would be permanently engaged in a battle with his lower appetites. With (a) and (b) in play, however, a person is stable in his pursuit of a discrete array of goods and, as such, (c) “able to bring … perfect activity to fulfillment pleasurably.”59 One might well say, too, that when (a), (b), and (c) occur in combination, there arises (d) a person who wields more agential power than his unvirtuous peers. Precisely because he is constant in his actions and (relatively) invariable in character, he is more likely to act consequentially. Consider now what kind of habituation is needed for the generation and sustenance of virtues. A child who is learning to use a knife and fork provides an interesting case-study. Immediately, most adults perceive the need for concupiscible impulses to be checked. The child must come to accept that he can no longer jam food into his mouth with his bare hands and sate himself in the shortest possible time, prior

This question is raised in the fourth article of “On the Cardinal Virtues,” in Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Virtue, trans. Jeffrey Hause and Claudia Eisen Murphy, with Introduction and commentary by Jeffrey Hause (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010), 250–7; see also 300–2. For Aquinas’ very brief consideration of patience in this context, see esp. 252 and 257. 58 Aquinas, “On the Virtues in General,” in Disputed Questions, 4. 59 Aquinas, “On the Virtues in General,” in Disputed Questions, 5. 57

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to embarking upon more interesting pursuits; the child must come to understand that certain items do not easily submit to being cut by a knife or held in place by a fork; the child must come to realize that cutlery is not an opportunity to brandish a weapon, to bang the table maniacally, or to engage in amateur carpentry. At the same time, much is gained. An even pace of consumption ensures that the child can actually eat more (which he wanted to do in the first place); there is less mess and fewer encounters with the horror of a wet washcloth; there is the ability to get all the peas, and perhaps dessert, too; there are proud parents, doting on his every move; and, at a later date, the possibility that mealtimes might become occasions for social interaction. As the child learns to use a knife and fork, then, he develops the cardinal virtues of temperance (“mastery of the self”) and prudence (“mastery of the situation”), the secondary virtue of perseverance (“enduring delays”), and not a few valuable physical skills. Clearly, too, he acquires the virtue of patience. The sorrow felt at being required at least to try those weird-looking vegetables does not overwhelm him to such an extent that a lengthy crying fit ensues, making the continuation of the meal impossible; the sorrow at refraining from pursuits (attacking his older brother, unravelling toilet paper, exploring the fireplace) is contained through a focus on the gains that accrue from a decent meal. And, again, with increased patience there comes increased happiness. John Bowlin puts it well: “Although a human being might struggle to act as the virtuous do, at first failing frequently and then succeeding with spotty regularity, the work of virtue slowly becomes easier … [And when] reasoning and desiring as the virtuous do becomes second nature, and the work of virtue becomes no trouble at all … the hard work of virtue has become pleasing and desirable in itself. …[I]f human happiness cannot be had apart from the good that virtue itself contributes, then we cannot imagine genuine happiness apart from difficulty and struggle.”60 The correctness of David Baily Harned’s suggestion (continuous with Aquinas’ own, taken from Gregory the Great, and noted above) that patience might be “integral to the cardinal virtues” also comes into view at this point.61 Only when someone develops the capacity to handle modest instances of frustration can there be growth in virtue. It might even be that the frustrations of a cutlery-using child, caught in an ongoing battle between his lower appetites and his gradually developing powers, discloses something of the experience of all rational agents in a sinful context. Certainly hardship and sorrow seem to be persistent features of our lives. The toy will break; the r­ omance

Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune, 152–3 and 158. David Baily Harned, Patience: How We Wait upon the World (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997), 69. 60 61

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will fail; the politician will cheat and lie; the violence, unevenly distributed as it is, will persist. Still, hardship is not only an occasion for sorrow; it is also an opportunity for growth. The virtuous person does not resign herself to supposing that “all things are wearisome” (Eccl. 1:8); she learns to connect her weariness to the broader task of acting in accordance with reason for the sake of the good. Might one even say that acquisition of cardinal virtues depends on the preliminary (“proto-cardinal”?) virtue of patience? That the ability to look past frustration, to accept that the world does not bend to our desires, is “the door through which we enter” into a good life?62 Now the extra step, which Aquinas did not take. If one pairs the claim that patience depends on grace with the idea that “our acts play the role of disposing us for an increase in charity and the infused virtues … for by doing what is in our power, we prepare ourselves to receive charity from God”63—a risky contention, but let it slide—the differentiation of cardinal and theological virtues breaks down still more, and patience can be viewed as “an activity in harmony with our end” in a fallen dispensation.64 The “natural” exercise of patience in the here-and-now can be ordered, by grace, to a “supernatural end,” and its exercise can be indexed in a future in which God’s purposes are fully realized. The reason that I can “bear sorrow,” by these lights, is not simply immanent to my rational navigation of the world. Sorrow has been folded into a grander vision, such that all worldly matters are seen in the context of the eschaton. And this vision, again, is supplied by the divine gift of charity that “directs the acts of all virtues to our ultimate end” and “is thus said to be the form of the virtues” (II–II:23.8), and that “allows an act of virtue to serve its own proximate end while also being directed to the ultimate end.”65 Indeed, to push the point yet further, and in ways that anticipate my analysis of Julian: patience, here, is the way that we wait on God as God moves God’s creation, at God’s pace, into the future in which God’s reign is fully consummated. It is a way of contending with the sorrow that accompanies the fact that the eschaton is not yet. It is an embrace of the slow tempo at which God draws all things to Godself; it a mark of a faithful “groaning” whereby the believer accepts that the Spirit, who incorporates creatures into the body of Christ, works at the speed of the Spirit’s choosing.

Aquinas, “On the Cardinal Virtues,” 227 (art. 1). Aquinas, “On the Virtues in General,” 70 (art. 11). 64 Aquinas, “On the Cardinal Virtues,” 257 (art. 4) 65 Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 85 (my emphases). 62 63

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To summarize, then: despite a rich scriptural witness and a suggestive patristic backdrop, the Summa limits the meaning of patience to the reasoning self’s negotiation of a postlapsarian world. Outside of the sphere of ethical reasoning, undertaken in a (largely) Aristotelian vein, little is made of the word. And, given the orientation of this project, that can reasonably be accounted a dogmatic loss. In addition to treating patience as a (secondary) cardinal virtue, Aquinas could have offered an analogue to or development of Augustine’s understanding of patience as it relates to the Christian’s orientation to the eschaton; and Aquinas could, at a pinch, have followed up on Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s explications of divine patience. But neither path is taken. Yes, of course, these are only possible routes for reflection, and one must not treat unrealized possibilities as evidence of Aquinas defaulting on his dogmatic obligations. Talk of patientia is not indispensable to theological inquiry; neither Aquinas, nor any other thinker, is required to center this motif. But it is not inapt to discern a constriction of the theological imagination, at least on this front, in one of the major intellectual achievements of the medieval Christian West. The ambition of earlier thinkers simply does not carry over into the Summa.

(b) Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love It would be a drastic mistake, however, to suppose that Aquinas brings the theological career of patience to a close. That is clearly not the case. Numerous medieval thinkers deploy this term, and much might be gained by focused studies of its function and meaning (intriguing candidates for consideration, I suspect, being Bonaventure, Richard Rolle, Meister Eckhart, writers associated with the Helfta community, and Johannes Tauler, inter alia). However, rather than attempting a synoptic statement, I want in this subsection to consider the theology of Julian of Norwich, and to present it as a vital option for thinking creatively about patience in a medieval context. Her written work does not only echo the ideas of earlier authors (and, of course, claims found in the scriptural witness) with patience associated with waiting, endurance, and

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the maintenance of Christian identity.66 It can also be read as a sophisticated variation of themes developed in Augustine’s De patientia and De civitate Dei, with patience identified as a vital dimension of a faithful disposition, grounded in union with Christ and ordered to the eschaton, that enables Christians to follow and endorse the gradual outworking of salvation. Indeed, in addition to recovering an Augustinian perspective on patience, the suggestion of divine patience plays, tantalizingly, on the margins of the Long Text. Developing this suggestion allows a fascinating idea to come into view: that, given a redemptive project that is measured out across the length and breadth of history, God’s patience is manifested in a slow application of mercy, expressive of divine longsuffering, that draws all God’s children to their heavenly home. A brief interpretative preamble is probably in order. While it might have been apt to reckon with Aquinas’ explicit remarks on patientia, is there not here a worrisome drift in the direction of eisegesis? Doesn’t this line of inquiry suggest that my constructive interests are skewing my reception of a fourteenth-century text, written outside of the (elite) mainstream of European letters? It is certainly fair to say that patience has received relatively little attention in scholarship on Julian.67 And this is perhaps unsurprising. Neither the Short nor Long Text dwells on the term, and it does not connect easily with many of Julian’s most readily discernible interests. The tension between her “shewings” and a professed commitment to orthodoxy; a hamartiology that challenges While I will not dwell on the nature of Julian’s reception of and engagement with scripture (whether via oral communications, the Vulgate, or some other mode), it has received illuminating consideration in recent years. See, particularly, Annie Sutherland, “‘Our Feyth is Groundyd in Goddes Worde’: Julian of Norwich and the Bible,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 1–20; Kendall Walser Cox, “Prodigal Christ: The Prodigal Son in the Theologies of Julian of Norwich and Karl Barth” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2014); and Thomas Andrew Barnett, “Julian of Norwich, the Bible, and Creative, Orthodox Theology: Always Novel, Never New,” SJT 69, no. 3 (2016): 309–25. 67 There are of course exceptions. See, for instance, Marilyn McCord Adams, “Courtesy, Human and Divine,” STR 47, no. 2 (2004): 153; Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, new edn (New York: Paulist, 2000), 47; and Veronica Mary Rolf, Julian’s Gospel: Illuminating the Life and Revelations of Julian of Norwich (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2013), 540–1. 66

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the association of sin with a primordial act of disobedience; a soteriology that refigures the relationship of Adam and Christ; an expansion of the marginal but increasingly popular naming of Christ as “mother,” paired with a novel conceptualization of the Trinity; a stirring description of love, and love alone, as the ground and end of God’s ways and works: none of this contrives to render patience a site of interpretative interest. But patience is nevertheless a legitimate concern. On one level, it can be justified by way of the now-widespread awareness that Revelations is a “systematic” statement that is also an exercise in “vernacular theology,” produced “for the common Church … the baptized, not for the ordained or consecrated alone.”68 How so? Because patience seems to have been part of a wider conversation about Christian identity during the unusually rich intellectual environment of fourteenthcentury England, buffeted though it was by plague, famine, and flood. It plays a significant role in the Ancrene Wisse, which set the parameters for Julian’s life as an anchorite; it features in important prose pieces by Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton, and in The Cloud of Unknowing; it is treated in two major poems, composed around the same time as Revelations of Divine Love: William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the Gawain Poet’s Pacience.69 The degree to Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 14. For more on vernacular theology as a pan-European phenomenon, see the magisterial work of Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350–1550 (New York: Crossroad, 2012). For an instructive account of vernacular theology in England around the time at which Julian wrote, see Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64; and After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). And for a fascinating statement on the political implications of vernacular theology, see Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1999). 69 See here Ancrene Wisse, in Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (Mahwah: Paulist, 1991), 41–207; Richard Rolle, The English Writings, trans. and ed. Rosamund S. Allen (Mahwah: Paulist, 1988); Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, trans. John P. H. Clark and Rosemary Doward (Mahwah: Paulist, 1991); The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. Clifton Wolters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961); William Langland, Piers Plowman, trans. A. V. C. Schmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and “Patience,” in The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London: Penguin, 2014), 195–235.

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which Julian knew about these texts needn’t be determined here, nor need we linger with this issue; all that matters is that patience was in the air, so to speak, and that it is therefore quite reasonable to ask if Julian might have sought to set her own stamp on this term. On another level—and this claim will of course need to be substantiated—a consideration of patience is itself encouraged by the Short and Long Texts. The occasions in which Julian refers to patience amount to valuable “tells”: occasions in which readers are compelled to ponder this term’s relevance for the task of faith seeking understanding. A final preliminary point: readers will quickly notice that I quote Julian’s words in Middle English, using the spelling and orthography of the most recent scholarly edition of her work. I do not do so because I consider extant translations poor or misleading, much less because of academic conceit. I do so because the relative unfamiliarity of Julian’s prose compels one to engage her work at close quarters. And I do so because Julian’s decision to write in English was itself significant. Rather than exclusively addressing theological experts or well-heeled aristocrats, her object was to address the literate population of Norwich, and in such a way that her thoughts could be conveyed to those who were semiliterate or nonliterate. Was this a risky move, given suspicions about Lollardy—suspicions that gained acute expression with Thomas Arundel’s restrictive Constitutions (1409)? Possibly. Amy Laura Hall is helpfully blunt: in fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century England, “[i]f you spoke Latin, you were trained in theology and could talk about God. If you spoke French, you were part of the aristocracy. And if you spoke English, you were someone who mostly did not matter to the first two groups, unless you tried to change things.”70 No doubt, what exactly Julian wanted to change is hard to ascertain. At the least, however, she sought to enable her fellow Christians to understand how God had changed her, and how this change might be important for thinking about Christian faith as such—and she wrote in a manner that did not imagine that reflection about faith should be limited to the higher echelons of the church and society. And patience, I aim to show, constitutes an important element in Julian’s contribution to the task of Christian understanding.71

Amy Laura Hall, Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 6. See also 41–4 and 62–3. 71 An additional note: while I quote Julian in her native tongue, parenthetical glosses often (but not always) align with Elizabeth Spearing’s translation of Revelations of Divine Love (London: Penguin, 1998). 70

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(i) Prelude: Waiting, Attending, Abiding, and Interpreting Recognizing that Julian herself knew how to wait, and did so in a manner that facilitated spiritual and theological insight, can serve as an initial point of departure for analysis. Consider the opening of the Short Text: “I desirede thre graces be (by) the gifte of God” (Vis. 1; cf. Rev. 2). Which three graces? A greater apprehension of Christ’s passion, bodily sickness, and three wounds. The spareness of Julian’s prose here is particularly telling, for it underscores that she was not demanding anything of God. If her desire is ardent, it is relatively artless, untinged by presumption or expectation. Indeed, the Short Text recalls a hope that only just about raises itself to the level of petition—that a “lewed (uneducated),” “febille,” and “freylle” woman (Vis. 6) might deepen her involvement in and knowledge of Christ’s suffering and death.72 And how long does Julian wait for these “graces”? It is unclear. Having alluded to Christ in Gethsemane (“‘Lord, thy woote [know] whate I wolde. If it be thy wille that I have it, graunte it me. And if it be nought [not] thy wille … be nought displesde, for I wille nought botte as thowe wille’” [Vis. 1]), Julian simply reports that she received a vision of Christ’s passion and bodily sickness when she was thirty years old. Then, at the end of the Short Text’s first chapter, she provides a bit more specificity. Julian informs readers that she hoped to emulate Saint Cecilia’s dying days, receiving wounds of contrition, compassion, and a “wilfulle langinge (longing) for God” that “dwelled continuely” (Vis. 1).73 And it seems fair to say that this third wound of “longing” bore directly on Julian’s decision to write about her experiences. Desire for God evoked a desire to understand who Christ is and what Christ does; this desire, in

As Caroline Walker Bynum points out, the relative terseness of the parallel section in the Long Text (Rev. 2) is consistent with some medieval writers’ refusal of a damaging presumption—that “woman was a marked category, an exception to the generalization homo, a reversal of ordinary condition.” See Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 166. 73 Jantzen makes the point well: “Julian’s desire is to be given desire, she prays for longing, she longs to long. And this desire, this prayer, is as richly granted as are any of her other prayers” (Julian of Norwich, viii). 72

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turn, fed Julian’s urge to communicate such understanding to her evenchristen (fellow Christians). So it comes to pass that Julian’s first and second wishes, as well as (at least) the third element of her third wish, are fulfilled. As Julian is beset with illness, Christ reveals himself to her “withouten any meen (intermediary)” (Vis. 3). And at this point, Julian’s waiting for Christ is joined with the capacity to wait on Christ, with three overlapping experiential registers—“bodilye” sight, “gastelye (spiritual)” sight, and “worde (words) formede in mine understandinge” (Vis. 7)—comprising a posture of “wilfulle langinge,” a posture of compassionate attention.74 Obviously, Julian is not now “given” Christ in the same way that one might be given a mundane object or given an experience of (say) a new place. Subsequent to the revelation, Julian can never again hold herself at a distance from Christ, nor even behold herself, apart from Christ. Disassociation is quite impossible. But neither is Julian so absorbed in Christ that she loses a sense of herself. Christ’s gift of himself, rather, lends Julian a new sensibility, which doubles as a new capacity. She is freed up to suffer with Christ, lingering over his blood, face, wounds, and pain; and, with this (co)suffering, she is enabled to observe Christ in a peculiarly intensive fashion, scrutinizing his person and work in ways that bring about a dramatic expansion of her knowledge of God.75 Chapter 5 of the Short Text makes the point nicely: “oure lorde … gafe me space and time to behalde” (Vis. 5; cf. Rev. 8) that which she is shown, ensuring the continuance of spiritual sight when bodily sight ceased. And later chapters disclose more and more of the understanding Julian acquires, tracing a path that runs from the particular to the general. The more Julian trains her attention on the cross, the more vividly she apprehends Christ’s dying moments; the more Julian attends to those moments, the more she appreciates her enclosure in God’s merciful “courtesy”; and the more she perceives God’s courtesy, the more she understands Christ

The significance of “attention” is treated sensitively by Michael Raby in “The Phenomenology of Attention in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love,” Exemplaria 26, no. 4 (2014): 347–67. 75 Margaret Ann Palliser puts it well: “all of Julian’s theological insights flow in some manner from her vision of the crucified Christ.” See Christ, Our Mother of Mercy: Divine Mercy and Compassion in the Theology of the Shewings of Julian of Norwich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 8. 74

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crucified as the axis around which the entire economy of salvation turns. Concomitant with this epistemic expansion, faith gains a new affect, nicely captured in Julian’s reworking of one of Augustine’s most famous claims: “if we knewe [God] and luffed him, we should hafe patience and be in grete reste” (Vis. 20; cf. Conf. I.i.1). The patience of attention has the peace of patience as its corollary—a peace bestowed on those who dwell in Christ’s dying body, living as theologians of the cross avant la lettre, and gaining new intimacy with God’s ways and works.76 Marilyn McCord Adams’s careful definition of courtesy, so important in Julian’s writing, deserves quotation at this point: “Courtesy consists in symbolic behaviors that show honor to others and signify that they are welcome in the world, being entitled to space, time, and means of survival, as well as opportunities to function and flourish.”77 For Julian, the right way for Christians to respond to and honor God’s courtesy is through the exercise of patience: waiting on and attending to Christ, abiding in Christ in search of understanding, and responding to the “entitlement” bestowed upon them.

But knowledge of God and “reste” are not, of course, the whole story: Julian is acutely aware that she is still very much beset by sin and suffering. Quite what this means is clarified when, expanding on what it means to “hafe patience,” Julian writes that she “sawe how God rewardes man of the patience that he has in abiding (awaiting) of Goddes wille in his time, and that man lengthes (lengthens, extends) his patience overe the time of his liffinge (living) … unkawinge (unaware) of his time of passinge” (Vis. 20).78 As with De civitate Dei (and, of course, First Peter, Second Peter, and James), patience is now presented as a key dimension of the distensio of discipleship, a “stretching” of the self, from within an ambiguous present, toward a future that exceeds one’s grasp. Patience, by these lights, is certainly not an involuntary reaction to a difficult situation, much less a coping strategy, hastily worked up See Bradley Holt, “Prayer and the Theologian of the Cross: Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther,” Dialog 52, no. 4 (2013): 321–31. 77 McCord Adams, “Courtesy,” 145. 78 As Watson and Jenkins note, the impossibility of knowing when one would die was a common concern in fourteenth-century writing. See The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 106 and, for example, Rolle: The English Writings, 162. 76

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to keep one’s anxieties in check. It is a disposition that a Christian performs, upon receiving grace, that enables one to relativize the travails of the present. But even with a glorious, Christic future in view, the “abiding” that patience supports proves existentially wrenching. Stretching toward God’s future heightens one’s sense of the abyssal distance that separates a compromised here from a blissful hereafter, and, precisely for that reason, tempts one to shorten that very distance—to rush away from this life, to race toward the arms of the savior. Julian is frank about the potency of this temptation: she admits openly that she once hoped to be “deliverede of this warlde and of this life” (Vis. 20). Yet she also insists that this temptation is outbid, precisely because God grants the Christian the capacity to remain patient—better: to become patient—and thereby to quell the wild desire to seize the end before their time is due. Indeed, beyond providing some assurance that the “langoure (distress) that we hafe here is bot a pointe (but an instant)” (Vis. 20), a patience that is indexed in God and stretched across the “time” of one’s life enables one to view the trials of “abiding” as having their own dignity. Julian’s Augustinian advice to her evenchristen, accordingly, might be paraphrased thus: the tempo of your life is not yours to set; patiently endure and value the present, in Christ, while waiting for a future, in Christ. Finally, there is the patience of interpretation. As Julian knows and rests, she gains the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of her revelation and to set about developing a fuller sense of what it means to exist coram Deo. Patience as abiding is thus linked to the patience of retrospective consideration, and this linkage animates Julian’s transition from life as a visionary to life as a theologian, moved to pursue an intellectual project that honors and elucidates the meaning of faith.79 Julian’s initial waiting for Christ, Julian’s attending to Christ, and Julian’s “abiding” in Christ foster patience in another modality—patience as a refusal to “let go” of the Short Text; patience as a determination to interrogate its meanings, to tease out its significances, and to have it serve as the basis for Julian’s composition of the Long Text. Indeed, just as the Long Text is itself the product of a prayerful examination of the Short Text, so the Long Text becomes part of a process that continues in the On which, see Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1994).

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future. As a systematic-vernacular hymn to God’s love, offered “in the passand jorney of this life,” this book “is not yet performed (completed, perfected)” (Rev. 86); it enjoins auditors and readers to continue its work, to think again about Christ’s saving death as it discloses something of God’s eternal life as Trinity.80 So if Julian’s patient waiting on God is paired with a patient waiting on herself, which yields the Short and Long Texts, these texts wait on our patience, in order that Julian’s revelations be revisited and reconsidered, time and again. Denys Turner has recently described “Julian’s theology as distinctly spiral: it moves forward, as one does along a straight line. It constantly returns to the same point, as one does around a circle. The repetition is therefore never identical, for it has always moved on—it has a progressive trajectory, up or down, into higher reaches or greater depth.”81 This description captures many of the readerly virtues needed to engage Revelations: a willingness to indulge loops and spirals, curves and twists; a willingness to dwell on an experience that might initially appear grotesque and incomprehensible in equal measure; a willingness to “suffer,” patiently, a description of God’s ways and works whose “end” is situated outside its margins.

(ii) Holding Fast, Suffering the Pace of Salvation: Patience and Passion Can one be more specific about waiting and enduring? Is it possible to ascertain, more precisely, how Julian contends with finitude and sin, in view of her apprehension of the glories of life to come? Posing these questions draws us back to the relationship of patience and passion suggested in Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s treatises, as well as the perspective on patientia that pervades De civitate Dei, while also enabling a fuller sense of Julian’s interest in the humanity and imitation of Christ (a pair of concerns, of course, that exercised many medieval Europeans).82 And an interesting answer can be ventured. Julian exercises patience because the crucified Christ, into 80 The first quotation is taken from the British Library MS of Revelations; see Watkins and Jenkins, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 415. 81 Turner, Julian of Norwich, 4. 82 Caroline Walker Bynum is characteristically insightful on this point throughout Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

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whose suffering body she is being drawn and in whose image she is (re)made, instructs her that the length of her earthly life ought to be traversed at the pace that God intends. Christ’s suffering and persevering unto death teaches Julian to combine the patience of waiting, attending, abiding, and interpreting with the patience of suffering and persevering, as Julian’s “sensual” soul (her muddled, bodily life in a fallen world) is progressively conformed to her “substantial” soul (her un-muddled, perfected soul, always-already united to Christ, knitted and “one-ed” with God). The weighty phrase, “I thriste (thirst)” (Vis. 10) is decisive.83 Most obviously, this remark references the culmination of Christ’s “lange pininge (agony)” (Vis. 10) in the Fourth Gospel (Jn 19:28). But its meaning is drastically expanded, subtly and implicitly in the Short Text, forcefully and explicitly in the Long Text. What Julian will soon describe as God’s general “thirst” for our salvation (Rev. §§32 and 75) is particularized and spliced with the ancient principle that that which is to be healed must be assumed (and, surely, an awareness of Ancrene Wisse’s insistence that Christ’s “thirst is nothing but yearning for our soul’s health”).84 For the sake of our redemption, Christ draws into himself everything that alienates us from God. The entire mess of sin, confusion, and suffering is concentrated in and absorbed by his person, swallowed whole, so to speak, as Christ’s life reaches its tortured end. And in the same moment that Christ’s thirst leads him to be “dried up” (Vis. 10), overwhelmed by the aridity of creaturely estrangement from God, there flows out of Christ the energies of reconciliation and redemption. With this flow, which is itself, paradoxically, the outworking of God’s own thirst, God’s own “luff-langinge (love-longing),” there arises in us a “gastely (spiritual) thirst” for God (Vis. 15). And this spiritual thirst, this longing, is a first step toward the reaffirmation of our Julian is obviously not the only medieval theologian to think about “thirst” in relation to Christ’s passion and God’s love. For useful comments on this figure, which stands alongside many of Julian’s favored terms and formed part of an informal, panEuropean mystical lexicon, see Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 34–55 (esp. 43). Rolle, notably, uses the term in a manner similar to Julian in meditations on the passion; see Rolle: The English Writings, 102 and 212. For a broader statement about “thirst” as a motif for engaging medieval mystics, see Wendy Farley, The Thirst of God: Contemplating God’s Love with Three Women Mystics (Louisville: WJKP, 2015). 84 Ancrene Wisse, 91. 83

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basic nature, that which we come to know is eternally “oned” with the Son (so Rev. 53 and 58). Our fallen “sensuality” is therefore not left to its own devices; it is encompassed by a path of increase that is ordered to Christ as we begin to move toward the restoration of our true selves. Christ’s vicarious thirst for us, then, becomes the ground of our ecstatic thirst for communion with God in Christ. But—this is crucial, if a bit counterintuitive in a late modern context— it is imperative that there not be anything frenzied or impulsive about Christian ecstasy. As our thirst and “increase” pass through Christ, Julian shows that she and her evenchristen must be taught how to pace our “transit through the shadows and colours of the postlapsarian world.”85 How does that occur? Through union with the crucified, dying Christ. That union itself, precisely because it is an ongoing, dynamic event, instructs us how to exist in a world that lags behind the curve of grace and resists the forward movement of the Spirit. The rather formal meaning of patient abiding, outlined in the last section, is thus now filled with Christological content. On one level, Julian is assured as to “where” she and her evenchristen will eventually land. Routed through the wound in Christ’s side, Christians are propelled toward a space that is “fair, delectable … and large inow (enough) for alle mankinde that shalle be saved to rest in pees (peace) and in love” (Rev. 24; cf. Rev. 60). On another level, Julian indicates often that the pace at which believers move toward this space is not ours to set but Christ’s to give. Carried by the swell of Christ’s saving presence, we can only move and carry ourselves, slowly and haltingly, as we are moved and carried, slowly and haltingly, accepting the speed at which we drift toward our destination. So even as Christ’s thirst to reclaim sinners becomes our thirst to unite ourselves to God, and even as believers apprehend the cross as the outermost point of God’s exitus and the initiation of God’s mighty reditus, Christians are called to synchronize the tempo of their lives with the tempo of God’s redemptive work. We are called to “hasten” and “wait” in equal proportion (2 Pet. 3:12); we are called to be “patient until the coming of the Lord,” suffering

Vincent Gillespie, “The Colours of Contemplation: Less Light on Julian of Norwich,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VIII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 28.

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in the right kinds of ways and recalling the “endurance of Job,” in view of a God who is “compassionate and merciful” (Jas. 5:7 and 5:11). Or, to employ the language of The Cloud of Unknowing: “Do not snatch it, like some famished dog, however much you hunger for it.”86 We are called to measure out and apply our desire for God as God measures out and applies God’s desire for us. Once again, Julian is acutely aware that being suspended between the here and the hereafter invites misadventure. She acknowledges this in a new way in the penultimate chapter of the Short Text, which names “twa maners of sekeness (two kinds of sickness),” which are also “twa prive sinnes (two secret sins)”: “inpatience (impatience) for we bere our travaille and oure paine hevely” and “dispaire or doutefulle drede (doubting dread)” (Vis. 24; cf. Rev. 73).87 Even so, a remedy for these sins/sicknesses, which so often muddle one’s sense of salvation, lies close to hand. A crucial passage, which bolsters the interpretative claims already in play: And thus fulle mekely oure lorde shewed me the pacience that he hadde in his harde passion, and also the joye and the likinge that he hafes of that passion for love. And this he shewed me in ensampille (by his example) that we shoulde gladlye and esely bere oure paines, for that es grete plesinge to him and endelesse profitte to us. And cause why we ere travailed with tham (the reason why we are troubled with them) is for unknawenge of luffe (because we do not recognize love). (Vis. 24, my emphasis) Unlike Aquinas, Julian has no interest in tying patience to an elucidation of a cardinal virtue, much less making it subordinate to a more fundamental category. If patience be deemed a virtue in the context of Revelations of Divine Love (and “virtue” is possibly an unhelpful gloss, but let it stand for a moment), it arises through our reception of Christ’s example as we relate the agonies of life in the quotidian to the salvation that Christ secures. It is not a matter of the operations of reason, applied to some patch of time and Cloud, chap. 36 (115). Julian is again close to Richard Rolle; see Watson and Jenkins, Writings of Julian of Norwich, 114. Palliser points out that, besides despair, “impatience is the only specific sin Julian warns us against” in Christ, Our Mother of Mercy, 207. 86 87

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space, as one contends with all-too-human appetites. It is a matter of learning to view Christ’s “harde passion” as the analogate and the challenges of our own existence as the analogue. It is a matter of a patience that is ordered to Christ’s “passion for love” in such a way that our “paines” can be located within the divine economy; a patience that knows that God “kepeth us ever in like seker (in safety), in wo and in wele” (Rev. 15), even as we come to appreciate the vast difference between “the wo that is here and the wele and the blessed being which is there” (Rev. 64), even as we struggle to bind ourselves to the dying Christ who is both “here” (in the world of sin) and “there” (at the Father’s right hand), given that he has absorbed our (temporal) “wo” for the sake of our (eternal) “wele.” And this patience really does pay dividends. We can share Christ’s and Julian’s confidence that “Alle shalle be welle, and thou shalt see it thyselfe that alle manner thing shall be welle” (Rev. 63) when we learn and practice something of Christ’s patience in our lives. But does this mean that we might become insensible to trial, that we can “gladlye and esely … bere oure paines” in the sense of shucking them off, rendering them of no account? No. Once again—and it is probably clear, at this point, that I am attempting to model something of Julian’s style of writing, which circles around certain points, time and again—it is a matter of learning to manage Christian existence in a fallen world. Finitude and the vestiges of sinfulness set a limit on our receipt of grace, as does knowledge that life in the here-andnow pales in significance to the bliss of postmortem existence with God. Our thirst for God cannot be slaked on this side of eternity; and whatever relative satisfaction we do achieve, by grace, is always the condition for thirst’s reemergence. Still, the downsides of desire for God in the here-and-now become tolerable, even enjoyable, as we suffer the rebirth that God effects and we come to learn, through Christ’s example, what it means to exercise patience. And patience, practiced aright, is not a movement deeper into the trials and miseries of life. It is not a matter of “putting up” with this or that. Ordered to the resurrected and crucified Christ, it allows one to accept the fact that a broken, finite environment is gifted to us to negotiate; that the worlds in which we live are themselves integral to God’s disbursement of mercy and blessings. And—one more time— everything turns around the cross, the material significance of which stretches far beyond anything envisaged in the treatises of Tertullian and Cyprian. Since all “that shall be saved, for the time of this life

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… have in us a mervelous medelur (mixture) both of wele and of wo” (Rev. 52), the key is to orient ourselves to the one whose receipt of our sins and our suffering initiates the process of our recovery. With this orientation, Christians begin to appreciate suffering as but a passing moment, encompassed by and pressed into service of God’s love. Thus it is that Julian reprises an earlier claim near to the end of the Long Text, writing that “God rewardeth man of the patience that he hath in abiding (awaiting) Goddes wille over the time of his living … unknowing of his time of passing” (Rev. 64). Patience supports an affective demeanor wherein the rhythm of one’s life is gradually synchronized with the pace at which God works salvation. It enables one to approximate the divine tempo— to follow, one might say, the slow “beat” of creaturely history as it receives and is transformed by grace—as Christ, and the believer in Christ, together suffer God’s redemption of all things. A final remark, implicit in everything I have said above. While I have underscored a number of continuities with Augustine, it seems fair to say that Julian avoids what Janet Martin Soskice takes—rightly, I think—to be an “intellectualist” drift in some portions of the earlier theologian’s work. This drift is particularly evident in the twelfth book of De Trin., which privileges mind over body when it comes to relationship with God and imagines “[p]erfection in Christian life” to be “a matter of ascent to a higher realm” that lifts one away from “the transient and everyday.”88 Julian’s sense of what it means to exercise patience underscores the contrast. It is not just that Julian refuses the hierarchy of the physical and spiritual; it is also that she views the “transient,” the “everyday,” and the irreducible fact of embodiment as occasions for Christians to exercise patience.

­(iii) Divine Patience: Constancy, Perseverance, Suffering What about God? Since Revelations does not explicitly ascribe patience to God, interpretation must now proceed a bit differently, gathering hints and suggestions and nudging them into a pattern that comports with Short and Long Texts’ description of God’s ways and works. With a bit of exegetical labor—and, I would

Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 132 and 136.

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grant, a willingness to take seriously Julian’s claim that since her theology “is not yet performed (completed, perfected)” (Rev. 86), one can embark on interpretative ventures that reckon with subtle hints and implications—it becomes possible to associate patience with the constancy and persistence of God’s saving activity, and with God’s own willingness to “suffer” the slow pace of salvation. It becomes possible, that is, to construe patience as a word that helps one think about God’s ways and works as they shape the course of history. Recall first that Tertullian and Cyprian construed patience in terms of God’s willingness to distribute the goods of creation without regard to creatures’ merits and demerits. This exercise of divine patience “stabilizes” the created order, prior to God’s judgment of the impenitent and God’s redemption of the faithful. Because benefits are distributed in a (relatively) consistent manner, the world is rendered a (relatively) hospitable domain, amenable to a wide range of creaturely endeavors. So, platitudinously: night follows day and day night; tides go in and out; flora and fauna live here or there; species adapt and evolve, or struggle and become extinct; human beings relate to one another, establishing perduring familial, communal, and political structures, etc. All of this can and should be viewed as a function of God’s exercise of patience. Now, while Julian might not object to this construal of patience, her writings have a different focus. The early authors’ pairing of creation and providence is not a central concern; Julian instead places an accent on God’s saving action as it transforms history and heals humankind, so as to draw us into an ever more intimate relationship with Christ. Or, to make the same point from a different angle: while one can differentiate the first fruits of salvation now and the abundance of deliverance to come, Julian does not suppose it possible to hold these poles apart, given the steady outworking of God’s mercy, across history’s length and breadth. And to think in terms of divine patience is a way to name a grand labor of divine love, coursing across time and space, moving “backward” from the end, that enables us to become ever more delighted in God and ourselves. It is a way to connect providence and salvation. Mt. 5:45, so central for Tertullian and Cyprian, is thus displaced by an interest in how God enables human beings to “return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Joel 2:13), and how God “is patient

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with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). Looking again at Julian’s initial encounter with Christ begins to substantiate the point. At first, Julian focuses on herself and her illness. And even as she begins to sense that she might not be on the brink of death, that focus is maintained: in the third chapter of the Short Text, she recalls that it suddenly came to her that “I shulde desire the seconde wounde of oures lordes gift … that he walde fulfille my bodye with minde and felinge of his blessede passion … I wolde that his paines were my paines … With him I desirede to suffere, lyevande in dedlye bodye (living in my mortal body), as God wolde giffe me grace” (Vis. 3, my emphases). But the infliction of this wound soon leads Julian beyond herself. As her vision expands, first-person plurals begin to checker the text. Christ is identified as “oure lorde Jhesu,” who makes “alle creatures lyevande … safe (gives all living creatures salvation)” since “he es to us alle thinge that is goode and comfortabille to oure helpe. He is oure clethinge (clothing), that for love wappes us and windes us (wraps and winds about us), halses us and alle becloses us (embraces and encloses us), hinges (hangs) aboute us for tender love, that he maye nevere leve us” (Vis. 3 and 4, my emphases). And this expansion of vision enables a claim that casts new light over everything. While all that exists is sustained by God’s power (recall the hazelnut-sized sphere that Julian holds in her palm), Julian now discerns a broader convergence of God’s providential and saving activity. Indeed, talk of God’s “clothing” us identifies a divine “embrace,” extensive and intensive, inclusive and purposive, wherein creatures exist, in a particular way, at some particular moment, in some particular context, precisely in order to receive more and more of God’s love with the passing of time, precisely in order that we might be ever more wrapped up in God. The Long Text makes the claim even more boldly. If Julian’s seeing “no manner of wrath in God” is a function of an awareness that God views humankind as enclosed in the Son who is begotten of the Father, the positive corollary to this (non)seeing is the conviction that “we be all mercifully beclosed (enclosed) in the mildehed (gentleness) of God and in his mekehed (meekness), in his beningnite (benevolence) and in his buxomhede (obedience),” which carries with it the exhortation that Christians relate to God as “oure seker kepe (sure support) when we be oureselfe at unpeas,” trusting that “he continually werketh to bring

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us into endlesse peas,” so that “we be made meke and milde, than we be full safe” (Rev. 49). Divine patience? Well, Julian does not identify it as such. But it is a relatively light gloss. Patience names the persistence of grace in the quotidian, measured out across the span of a life, such that a human being becomes ever more aware— affectively, cognitively, physically, ethically—of what it is to be united to Christ. It refers to an ongoing, localized divine pressure: a steady application of mercy that releases human beings from the distortions of sin, assures us of union with God, and propels us toward our eschatological homeland. As it stands, though, these statements remain a touch formal, and therefore risk underplaying the fact that union with Christ is mediated through Christ’s suffering and death. It must not be forgotten that Julian views Christ’s blood as the basic stuff of our salvation.89 A well-known passage: Than cam to my minde that God hath made waters plenteous in erth to our servys, and to oure bodely eese (refreshment), for tender love that he hath to us. But yet liketh him better that we take full holsomly (healingly) his blessed blode to wash us of sinne, for there is no licour (liquid) that is made that liekth him so wele to give us. For it is most plenteous, as it is most precious, and that be the vertu of the blessed godhead. And it is our owne kinde, and all blissefully overfloweth us by the vertu of his precious love. The dereworthy (precious) bloude of our lorde Jhesu Christ, also verely as it is most precious, as verely it is most plenteous. Beholde and see the vertu of this precious plenty of his dereworthy (precious) blode! It descended downe into helle and brak her bondes and deliverd them, all that were there which belong to the court of heven. The precious plenty of his dereworthy blode overfloweth all erth, and is redy to wash all creatures of sinne which be of good will, have ben, and shall A point incisively considered by Sarah Star in “‘The Precious Plenty’: Julian of Norwich’s Visions in Blood,” JMRC 46, no. 1 (2020): 71–90. I would be remiss if I did not mention that Julian was hardly the only vernacular theologian to foreground Christ’s blood. An especially important parallel is Catherine of Siena, whom Bernard McGinn names a “Mystical Apostle of the Blood of Christ” (Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 197–249).

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be. The precious plenty of his dereworthy blode ascendeth up into heven in the blessed body of our lorde Jesu Crist, and ther is in him, bleding, preying for us (interceding for us) to the father, and is and shal be as long as us nedeth. And evermore it floweth in all heaven, enjoying (rejoicing in) the salvation of all mankind that be ther and shall be, fulfilling the number that faileth. (Rev. 12) Here, Julian offers a striking twist on the neoplatonic idea of “a flowing of all things from one spring,”90 with Christ’s blood becoming the liquid of redemption. It soaks the depths of hell, swells across the expanses of the earth, and rushes into the heights of heaven; it intercedes for us, washes us, and renders us the creatures that God intends for us to be. Indeed, the constancy of God’s love, the persistence with which God delivers salvation, and the blood of Christ are so intertwined that one cannot think about the activity of the “blessed godhead” apart from Christ’s “dereworthy bloude,” and one cannot imagine Christ’s assumption of “oure owne kinde” without knowing that he has turned that which is basic to “our owne kinde” into the means of our transformation.91 Ancrene Wisse’s mention of the “compulsive sweat that fell down from his body in anticipation of the anguished death that he had to suffer,” which “seemed like red blood,” is now rendered an understatement.92 Blood is the way that God gets God’s way. Blood is the content for which created time and space are the form, the means by which Christ claims creaturely history as his own, the material through which God enacts our salvation. It is the outflow of God’s saving patience, as God “continually werketh to bring us into endlesse peas” (Rev. 49). Given that European medieval thinkers embraced “the image of the nursing mother whose milk is her blood, offered to her child,” while making much of the connection

Plotinus, Enneads, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson, trans. George Boys-Stones et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), §6.7.12 (818). 91 Soskice writes instructively about this point, the Son taking our “kinde” into union with himself, such that “[o]ur human bodies, once mapped on Christ’s human body, are not obstacles to salvation but its very means.” See The Kindness of God, 142. 92 Ancrene Wisse, 90. 90

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between blood and childbirth93 it is of course possible to say that God’s constancy, mediated through Christ’s blood, is akin to a mother’s bearing, birthing, and feeding of an infant. But with a twist: this blood is the blood of Christ as Mother, the blood of a Savior whose death propels children toward the Mother who eternally begets the Son.

The claim that God herself suffers the slow pace of our redemption can now be brought forward. Recall first that, for Julian, the redemptive activity of Christ is paired with a belief in God’s all-encompassing governance of events. “I saw truly that God doth alle thing, be it never so litile. And I saw truly that nothing is done by happe ne by aventure (by chance or by accident), but alle by the foreseing wisdom of God” (Rev. 11). And the fall and sin are not exceptions to this rule. They can be adjudged “behovely” (that is, befitting, conveniens, apt).94 Nothing happens, save for God’s foreordination and direction; everything happens, because of God’s foreordination and direction. So as Julian contemplates our movement from “sensual” estrangement to a future defined by enclosure in God’s tripersonal life, wherein our sensual and substantial selves are properly aligned, she exhorts readers to view the divinely plotted “trajectory” of each self as preferable to any possible alternative. Chapter 52 of the Long Text makes the point daringly. While admitting a sharp contrast between “the blindhelde (blindness) and the mischiefe of Adams falling,” and “the rewth and the pitte (sorrow and pity) of Adams wo,” in contrast to the “hye nobilite and the endlesse wurshippe that mankinde is to come to” through Christ’s death, Julian insists the fall be viewed as an occasion for rejoicing, for it portends something better than would otherwise be possible—so much so that God is able “mightely [to] enjoyeth in [Adam’s] falling, for the hye raising and fulhed of blisse (because of the high exaltation and fullness of bliss) that mankinde is come to, overpassing (exceeding, transcending) that we should have had if he had not fallen” (Rev. 52, my emphasis). And divine delight warrants a Christian analogue. While we might mourn and grieve Christ’s suffering, we also have “lastingly mater (sound reason) of Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 133. See also idem, Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), esp. 204–8. 94 Turner is excellent on this point; see Julian of Norwich, 41–51. 93

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joy, for endlesse love made him to suffer” (Rev. 52). Faith enables one to toggle between a divine and human perspective, allowing the former to trump the latter. One can lament sinfulness and, at the same time, have lament outmatched by a joyful knowledge of an economy bent toward redemption. These broad claims certainly invite a wide range of comparisons, stretching from Augustine’s declaration that the fall precipitates a glorious future for those whom God favors (O felix culpa!) to Protestant scholastic debates over the relative merits of infra- and supralapsarian accounts of predestination and the bold visions of election advanced by Schleiermacher and Barth. But if one holds fast to the motif of patience as an interpretive gloss, one catches sight of Julian’s distinctive (and perhaps unparalleled) claim that God herself suffers the slow pace of salvation, since human beings are able only to move gradually away from the misery of self-sufficiency and since human beings, concomitantly, are only gradually able to endorse their inclusion in the suffering body that vouchsafes our relationship with the Father. So just as we “hope for what we do not see” and “wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:25), Julian insists also that God waits for God’s purposes to come to term—even as God, unlike us, beholds history in its past, present, and future modes. Just as Julian lingered over the dying Christ, so God lingers with us, cognizant of the winding process that draws us out of the nighttime of sin and into the bright morning of salvation. Two long passages in the Long Text illustrate this claim: All that oure lorde doeth is rightfulle (righteous), and alle that he suffereth (allows, endures) is wurshipfulle. And in theyse two is comprehended good and eville. For alle that is good oure lorde doeth, and that is evil oure lord suffereth. I say not that evile is wurshipfulle, but I sey that the sufferance of our lorde God is wurshipfulle, whereby his goodnes shalle be know without ende, and his marvelous mekenesse and mildhed (mercifulness), by this werking of mercy and grace. … And marcy (mercy) is a werking that cometh of the goodnes of God, and it shalle last in wurkinge as long as sinne is suffered to pursew rightfulle soules. And whan sinne hath no lenger leve (allowed) to pursew, than shalle the werking of mercy cees. And than shalle alle be brought into rightfullehede (righteousness) and therein stonde (remain) withoute ende. By his sufferance we falle, and in his blessed love,

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with his might and wisdom, we are kept. And by mercy and grace we be raised to manifolde more joyes. (Rev. 35, my emphases) [A]s to my sight … mercy is a swete, gracious werking in love, medled with (mixed with) plentuous pitte. For mercy werketh, us keping, and mercy werketh, turning to us all thing to good. Mercy for love suffereth us to faile by measure. And as moch as we faile, in so mekille (to the same extent) we falle, and in as mekille as we falle, in so mekille we die. For us behoveth nedes to (For we really must) die in as moch as we failed sighte (fail to see) and feling (feel) of God that is oure life. Our failing is dredfulle, oure falling is shamful, and oure dying is sorrowful. … But yet in all this the swet eye of pitte and of love deperteth never from us, ne the werking of mercy ceseth not … Mercy is a pitteful (compassionate) properte, which longeth (belongs) to moderhode in tender love. And grace is a wurshipful properte, which longeth (belongs) to ryal (royal) lordshippe in the same love. Mercy werketh—keping, suffering, quicking, and heling— and alle is of tendernesse of love. And grace werketh with mercy: raising, rewarding (endlesly overpassing [exceeding] that oure loving and travelye deserveth), spreding abrode, and shewing the hye, plentuouse largesse of Goddes ryal lordshippe in his mervelouse curtesy. And this is of the habundance of love. (Rev. 48, my emphases) There is no escaping Julian’s awestruck gratitude. While Christ’s vicarious suffering makes plain the cost of sin, it also demonstrates the extent of God’s love. This suffering cannot be thought, in fact, apart from God’s love as it “keeps” us, quickens us, and heals us. And in the same moment that Julian beholds Christ’s patient suffering, which itself instructs Julian and her evenchristen to exercise patience and to endure the difficulties attendant to finite existence, the notion that God herself exercises patience nudges into view. It becomes evident, that is, that while God “thirsts” for our salvation, God himself suffers the process of redemption, a dialectical history of falling, rising, and rewarding, as it plays out at a pace suited to undoing our frailty, disorientation, and incapacity. Suffers—in what sense? It would be a mistake, obviously, to read Julian’s claims as an anticipation of (some) contemporary

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construals of divine passibility. It is not as if God assigns Godself an identity that is eternally inclusive of the incarnate life led by the Word. It is not as if God’s relationship with the world, viewed in light of the incarnation and passion, is constitutive of the being that God eternally is. At the same time, to suppose that Julian thinks along Thomistic lines, wherein “no real relation” obtains between God and world, seems insufficient. At issue is something different: a modality of divine solidarity wherein God follows and, in a mysterious way, undergoes the workings of love across history. Think of it like this. Julian’s desire for “wounds” that afford her a share in Christ’s sufferings have as their condition of possibility the Son’s compassion for her and us: a willingness to plunge himself into human life as it is distorted by sin; a willingness to be known by human beings by way of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This exercise of compassion, appropriable to the second person of the Trinity, is overarched by the compassion of the triune God as such. And as God applies God’s compassion in history, God trains God’s attention on the particular objects of God’s redeeming love (“the sweet eye of pity”), “tracking” God’s application of mercy as it transforms us into the creatures that God intends for us to be. The patience of attention that Julian exhibits vis-à-vis the dying Christ, in other words, has a divine antecedent. In the same moment that God works mercifully, drawing us into fuller relationship with Godself (i.e., making us more fully aware of the one in whom we have been enclosed), so God endures the sight of our continuing sin and misery. Why does God not impose the divinely desired “end” of salvation upon us—or, per Tertullian and Cyprian, endure in an artful way, prior to unleashing the full force of God’s vengeance? Why doesn’t God spare herself the sight of our slow recovery? Because God disburses mercy at a pace that we can handle, ensuring that we can knowingly and willingly apprehend, participate in, and respond to that mercy, and ensuring that we remain the same creatures that God created us to be, even as we become creatures whose ultimate destiny is to be perfectly enclosed within Christ’s body. Even as God “hat haste to have us to him, for we are his joy and delight” (Rev. 79)—this haste being a fascinating parallel, of course, to the hastiness of God’s servant—“his wisdom and truth with his rightfulhed (perfection, justice, righteousness) maketh him to suffer us (to endure us, to be patient with us) here, and in this manner

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he wille se it in us (he wants to see us patient in the same way)” (Rev. 81, my emphases). The “habundance of love” that animates God’s saving work, in other words, does not spur an uncontrolled outflow of redemption, the force of which would overwhelm us. God measures out God’s abundance, thereby affording human beings the time and space needed to find their way back to God— granted, again, that such measuring requires that God relinquish the opportunity to perfect the world in a blink of the divine eye, and requires that God commit herself to observing the slow pace of our salvation. Put differently, one last time: God gives birth to God’s children according to the rhythm of our lives, in the here-and-now, and not according to the speed of God’s love; and thus it is that God qua Mother feeds us with Christ’s blood, drip by drip, until we are able, by grace, to align our “sensual” and “substantial” selves. The laboring “sighs” that are “too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26) that the Spirit enables within us, then, have as their precedent the sighing of the God who endures the slow outworking of her own saving action, knowing that the torrent of Christ’s saving blood must be “portioned out” to ensure genuine healing. This is neither patience qua suffering in the sense of some modern theopaschite perspectives, nor patience qua forbearance in advance of an act of devasting eschatological vengeance (per Tertullian and Cyprian). This is patience as a love which stands in solidarity with the fallen and weak; this is patience as a love that moves with creatures, inch by inch, day by day, year by year, lest those creatures stumble and fall a second time. Julian’s famous parable—or, more precisely, exemplum—of the Lord and Servant then sets these claims in a trinitarian frame. The first act tells of a Lord whose commission prompts his servant to “sterteth (leap up) and runneth in gret hast for love to do his lordes will,” with the consequence that this servant falls into “a slade (slough, ditch), and taketh ful gret sore.”95 The fall, by these lights, is not so much occasioned by disobedience as exuberance: an impetuous desire to follow God’s lead. Redemption, correspondingly, does not involve sinners’ needing to satisfy God in order to avert punishment and receive salvation (as suggested, at least at points, in Anselm’s

Unless noted, the following quotations come from the fifty-first chapter of the Long Text.

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Cur Deus homo).96 In that our perception of God’s ways and works is muddled and we suffer “gret sorrow and grevous disses,” redemption is more a matter of our being restored to the condition that God intends, while also being equipped with the capacity to “rest,” calmly, luxuriously, and purposefully, in God. Crisscrossing this first act, the parable’s second act doubles the identity of the servant. By dint of a “oning … made in heven”—that is, by dint of a pretemporal compact wherein the Son is elected, so to speak, as the “grounde and hed” of humankind (Rev. 53) and charged with securing humankind’s standing before God—Adam’s fall and the incarnation are always-already entangled, and to such a degree that one cannot think about one without thinking about the other. So as “Adam fell fro life to deth: into the slade of this wretched worlde, and after that into hell,” so “Goddes son fell with Adam into the slade of the maidens wombe, which was the fairest daughter of Adam—and that for to excuse Adam from blame in heven and erth—and mightily he feched him out of hell.” Think of it as a new “spin” on the final clause of Col. 1:18, which claims Christ “might come to have first place in everything,” with Christ’s firstness applied now backward in time as well as forward in time. Anywhere that we might be, Christ is there in advance. Because Christ falls with us, we can never be fallen apart from Christ, the Son who stands in eternal relation to God as Father and God as Spirit. The motif of patience can now be applied. Reversing the haste of Adam, Christ, before the Father and with the Spirit, God is now undertaking the slow work of retrieving humankind from the ditch, granting to us an ever-clearer approximation of the “sight” that we will have after our time on earth ends. With respect to God’s eternal, triune life, of course, humankind does not exist apart from its enclosure in the person of the Son. There is no slow work to be done here; and there is no patience that is needed. But with respect to the economy, the Father waits on the Son as he patiently carries out the laborious work of redemption, birthing us, as a mother, at a Although Anselm complicates matters by claiming that Christ’s gift of himself, not God’s punishment, is the means of atonement. I have tackled this issue elsewhere; see “Barth and Anselm,” in Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, ed. George Hunsinger and Keith Johnson, vol. 2, Major Figures and Themes (Malden: WileyBlackwell, 2020), 435–48; and “Barth and Anselm: God, Christ, and the Atonement,” IJST 12, no. 3 (2010): 257–82.

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pace that we can handle. Julian even uses Augustine’s figure of the “heavenly city” to emphasize this point. Having described the pity of the lord/God the Father, which “dwelleth with mankinde into the time that we come uppe into heven,” she notes also that the lord/ God qua Father did not only make “mannes soule to be his owne cite and his dwelling place,” but also chose to “sit upon the erth, abiding mankind (waiting for mankind) which is medled in erth (who is mixed with earth), till what time by his grace his deerwurthy sonne had brought againe his citte into the nobil fairhede (state of noble beauty).” The patience of the Son, correspondingly, is the patience of one who gradually moves humankind toward the Father, who waits for him as he waits for us. And while the figure of blood is not pushed forward, it should not be forgotten. The Father’s patient endurance of our state of incompletion goes hand in hand with the Son’s constancy in effecting our salvation. Both wait, patiently, for us to be washed, healed, reborn, even as both busy themselves with the slow process of washing, healing, and rebirthing. And this brings us full circle. As noted earlier, Julian knows that the slow pace of transformation is a bitter pill to swallow. Sin obtrudes; our attention is pulled away from the long narrative of creation and salvation and diverted toward the short term. Yet it is possible, precisely because of the patient waiting of the Father, and precisely because the Son patiently waits on us, to attune ourselves to God’s action. [I]nasmuch as dred may spede (insofar as fear may be useful) … mekely (humbly) make we oure mone (lament) to oure deerwurthy mother. And he shall all besprinkil us in his precious blode, and make oure soule softe and fulle milde, and heele us fulle fair by processe of time, right as it is most wurshipe to him and joye to us without ende. (Rev. 63) We can accept this “processe” because God has committed herself to the same; we can temper our desire to “rush” toward the end, because God has tempered God’s own desires. Or, to draw on another powerful statement: as God waits, God wants us “hastely (to) entende to him (quickly to attend to him). For he stondeth alle alone, and abideth (waits for) us continually, swemefully (sorrowing), and moningly (lamenting), tille whan we come. And

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he hast haste to have us to him, for we are his joy and his delight, and he is oure salve and oure life” (Rev. 79, my emphasis). Yet if the haste of sin is derivative of the haste of God’s desire, the haste that we exercise now should be nested within a patience conformed to God’s patience. God will not rush the course of events; God will bring history to a close at a speed that guarantees the greatest intensity and extension of bliss, here and in the hereafter. We must comport ourselves accordingly, suffering the slow outworking of God’s maternal love, as God suffers that outworking, and understanding that co-suffering propels us to our destination: a life within Christ’s body, once Christ’s blood has washed clean the world and God’s labors are brought to term. It is worth recalling, again, that Tertullian and Cyprian envisaged God’s forbearance of sin being followed by devastating judgment. Although Augustine is more restrained, he too thinks of the heavenly and worldly cities as “final” realties, and he anticipates that the denizens of each will suffer one of two fates: “everlasting torments” or “eternal blessedness” (Civ. Dei XXI.1). But Julian is uninterested in all this. Certainly, a diametrical opposition of the saved and the damned does not feature in Revelations. Does this make Julian a universalist? One cannot go that far. Neither an affirmation of the total reach of God’s action (“all shall be well”), nor the conviction that “wellness” applies to this “all” makes universal salvation a necessary conclusion. We lack knowledge of these terms’ meaning as they pertain to the eschaton. Still, if one combines a conviction of the “habundance” of God’s love with Julian’s vision of Christ’s absorbing everything that obstructs our return to God, and with Julian’s insistence that Christ’s abiding with us and waiting on us “passeth never fro Crist tille what time he hath brought us oute of alle our wo. For love suffereth him never to be without pitte” (Rev. 80), the salvation of each and every human being might be ventured, as Hans Urs von Balthasar proposed, as a legitimate hope. Could God’s “desire” really be sated through anything short of an all-inclusive salvation? Can we imagine Christ’s saving blood running out? Would it not be odd for God’s patience to settle for anything less than the redemption of all?97

My position here is close to that advanced by Robert Sweetman in “Sin Has Its Place, but All Shall Be Well: The Universalism of Hope in Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–c. 1416),” in “All Shall Be Well”: Explorations in Universalism and Christian Theology, from Origen to Moltmann, ed. Gregory McDonald (Eugene: Cascade, 2011), 66–92. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” With a Short Discourse on Hell, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988).

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4 Conclusion ­ hat is the payoff of these dense analyses of patristic and medieval W writings? To answer the question, this final section gathers up a number of claims. While these claims do not amount to a history of patience in Christian thought—certainly not: that lies far beyond the scope of this book—they provide a useful summary, and they help to frame the next interpretative chapter. Two early Christian authors (Tertullian and Cyprian) advance a compelling account of patience as a dimension of divine and human life. God’s patience is made evident in God’s disbursement of benefits across the entirety of the created order, as well as God’s merciful extension of history. God’s “slowness to anger” and “longsuffering,” so important for the Hebrew Bible, are no longer limited to God’s relationship with ancient Israel. Patience distinguishes the time and space of the post Christum world, as God grants time and space to sinners, hopeful (and insistent) that we repent of wrongdoing and commit ourselves to the gospel. And this acclamation of patience is paired with some daring Christological and pneumatological gestures. Christ is patience incarnate: the Word who accepts and endures the constraints of finitude and the ravages of sin, uniting himself to a vulnerable, individual human essence; the Word who suffers, unto death, in order to secure the reconciliation of God and humankind. The Spirit, concomitantly, delivers patience as a gift that sets believers apart in a religiously plural context, renders believers susceptible to transformation, and helps believers to withstand a compromised quotidian. Finally, an eschatological chaser of sorts, given acute expression in Cyprian’s treatise. When God’s patience runs out, God’s vengeful impatience will bring the world to a cataclysmic end. Correspondingly, Tertullian and Cyprian construe human patience in terms of the endurance of sin and suffering, the maintenance of Christian identity, and the capacity to wait for the full realization of the Kingdom. Atop this deft contestation of Stoic mores, Augustine then expands the view. Although his De patientia disappoints, it supplies an illuminating vantage point from which to survey the expanses of De civitate Dei. Patience, in this work, is not just a crucial resource for navigating a time of sociopolitical change: it names a dimension of faith that enables believers to

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negotiate a sinful present in view of a blessed future. Equipped with this virtue and disposition, one can tolerate life in the hereand-now, even granted one’s orientation to a divine hereafter-andthereafter; one can stretch toward and anticipate the heavenly city while still honoring, and in some respect laboring to improve, the discrete patch of creation in which one is placed. (The opening of De civitate Dei, recall, is a statement of intent: it describes the city of God that “dwells by faith as a pilgrim among the ungodly” while it “patiently awaits” the moment in which “‘righteousness shall return in judgment’”—a time and space, outside time and space, of “final victory and perfect peace” [Civ. Dei I, Pr.].) Patience, now, is not exercised in hopes of vengeance. It is exercised in relation to a present that is being drawn, by grace, toward a future of joyful praise. Are these lines of reflection developed in later years? Does the momentum built up by North African thinkers carry over into medieval Christian theology? While I do not offer a full response, Aquinas’ Summa and Julian’s Revelations indicate that patience’s later fortunes are mixed. Aquinas certainly develops an instructive account of patience as “secondary” virtue. As a subset of courage, it is particularly associable with an individual’s management of sorrow, a passion that can arrest or retard the realization of the good. There is also a (fairly underdeveloped) sense that patience supports the development and maintenance of character—that patience, as Gregory the Great famously suggested, really is “the root and the safeguard of all the virtues” (ST II–II.136.2). But these steps forward are accompanied by a number of steps backward. With patience tied to an analysis of a cardinal virtue, Augustine’s sense of patience as an eschatological disposition moves to the sidelines. Even more problematically, the Summa opts not to follow up on Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s visions of divine patience, thus compounding Augustine’s inarticulacy on this issue. The antecedent divine frame for thinking about human patience, suggestively identified and explored in earlier writings, slips from view. Thankfully, Julian of Norwich suggests a different future for the term. The Short and Long Texts boldly rework an Augustinian account of what it means to endure the world. And patience is now linked to a Christological perspective of rare depth. As one learns of “the pacience that [Christ] hadde in his harde passion” (Vis. 24), the Christian learns to accept the slow pace of God’s

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redemptive activity. Patience becomes pedagogy: we are taught, in and by Christ, to measure out our desire for God, while God progressively heals us of our (self-imposed) wounds. At the same time, Augustine’s inarticulacy is replaced by a series of valuable hints and suggestions. Patience commends itself as an idiom that captures something of God’s disbursement of grace across the length and breadth of history, as well as Julian’s sense that God suffers the slow pace of our salvation. Christians can bear with the “processe of time” because of a divine antecedent: God being the One who “abideth us continually, swemefully (anxiously), and moningly (sorrowfully), tille whan we come” (Rev. 79). But the fact that a good deal of interpretative labor was needed to draw out this dimension of Revelations, and the fact that questions loom about the precise meaning of God’s abiding is significant. If one turns one’s gaze back to the Summa, the influence of which far outstripped Julian’s Revelations in the centuries to come, it is not clear that the theological ambition demonstrated by Tertullian and Cyprian—an ambition that would set patience at the center of reflection about God’s ways and works, and creatures’ response to the same—will amount to much.

­2 Patience in the Context of the European Reformation: Forbearance, Haste, and Transformation Although it glances over its shoulder on occasion, this chapter has a more limited historical reach than its predecessor: it focuses primarily on authors from the magisterial and radical Reformations. My interpretative labors are again undertaken in view of a constructive horizon. While the following readings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Andreas Karlstadt, and Michael Sattler illustrate something of the shifting fortunes of patience in sixteenth-century Protestant thought, they remain preliminary to my own claims about creation and providence (and, at a later date, incarnation, atonement, sanctification, Christian life, and Trinity). They are targeted exercises, occasional in nature, that ready the way for a constructive statement that seeks to provide “an interpretation of the Christian message … relevant to the present situation” (ST1 53). Even so, as the previous chapter demonstrated, there are good reasons to reckon seriously with the “concretehistorical foundation” (ST1 53) on which Christian thought rests. That is particularly the case with respect to patience. In this chapter, I show once more that many Christian thinkers handle this word rather too gingerly. It is infrequently put to work in a description of God’s creative, providential, and redemptive activity, despite the suggestiveness of the scriptural witness and the constructive headway made by Tertullian Cyprian, and—although I cannot

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imagine that she was known to sixteenth-century continental authors—Julian of Norwich. Its meaning, for the most part, is limited to the Christian life. The chapter’s first section reckons with an author who is, thankfully, willing to think expansively about patience: John Calvin. I identify three tracks of reflection. The first has to do with God’s moderation of punishment in the face of ancient Israel’s sin, and is accessed through an examination of key moments in Calvin’s commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Consistently, ancient Israel is not treated according to an exacting standard of justice. God extends mercy and lenience; God opts for patient forbearance, not vengeance. And Calvin’s explication of this claim discloses something of the seam that joins his account of creation and providence to his account of God’s saving work, with the latter being determinative of the former and the former supporting the latter. Patience, that is, provides a new angle of vision on the famous duplex cognitio Dei (twofold knowledge of God). It is only as God exercises patience that humankind persists and ancient Israel emerges as a discrete sociopolitical and religious entity; it is only as Israel is not overtaken by wrath that there is a publication of the law and the witness of scripture; and it is only because of law and scripture that there arises a context for Christ’s saving life and work, the proclamation of the Gospel, and the growth of Christian communities. Moving beyond the duplex, I next consider patience in the final edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559). Here, patience names a dimension of piety whereby Christians receive and identify hardship in terms of divine chastisement, not divine punishment. Although this distinction might initially seem overfine, it cuts to the heart of Calvin’s understanding of Christian life. Associating hardship with punishment would mean that periods of suffering, distress, and anguish should be received as local instances of divine retribution for sin, additional to that which Christ bore on the cross—a stance that would cast doubt on the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning death. Associating hardship with chastisement, by contrast, reflects Calvin’s concern to offer a thick description of all aspects of the beneficii Christi. When a Christian exercises patience, she is relieved of the belief that her suffering, distress, and anguish are reflective of God’s punitive response to sin. She comes to view the trials of life as discrete lessons in a stretchedout course of divine pedagogy—here, of course, is an intriguing

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link with both Augustine and Julian—ingredient to God’s gracious sanctifying of the self, as God makes the stuff of everyday life a vehicle for believers’ growth in holiness. Third and finally, I point to a less pronounced layer of meaning: Christ’s passion and death as a phase of his history in which God does not postpone or temper God’s anger toward sin but, instead, exhibits righteous impatience with it. Rather than postulating an impending eschatological outburst, as with Tertullian and Cyprian, Calvin positions divine impatience at the center of history, viewing Christ’s death as the moment at which God finally “lets rip.” The dying Christ does not only offer himself as a sacrificial gift, wrestle with the horrors of death, and pay the penalty for sin; the dying Christ also bears God’s furious and decisive rejection of sin. As with Tertullian and Cyprian, then, Calvin’s reflections on patience exemplify a well-ordered dogmatic perspective. Their suggestiveness, too, is such that one can imagine a bright future for patience as a theological concept, extending beyond the Institutes and the commentaries. But they also appear to be a minority report in sixteenth-century Europe. The following section shows why. Moving back a few decades, I reckon next with a trio of authors who construe patience as a wholly human affair. I begin with Luther’s attempts to manage disputes over the pace of reform in the 1520s. My focus is the Invocavit sermons, delivered in Wittenberg in 1522, during which Luther commends patience as a virtue that enables “strong,” right-minded Christians to accept a slower pace of ecclesial reform in deference to their “weak” coreligionists. If this construal of patience counts as something of a missed opportunity—and it is fair to view it as such, while appreciating why Luther might have opted for reticence—it also marks a striking point of continuity with Aquinas. While we have shifted from the realm of ethical reasoning to an account of individual Christians’ responsibility for the well-being of the church as such, patience is again a way to “manage” the sorrow that arises when the realization of the good is delayed. Karlstadt, by contrast, favors haste. He commends a distinct form of impatience, borne of an attitude toward God characterized by Gelassenheit (roughly, “yieldedness” or detachment): a forthright and wholehearted enactment of an evangelical imperative. Shifting from the margins of the magisterial reformation to the radical reformation, the chapter’s second section then concludes with a consideration of

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the brave witness of Michael Sattler. Despite his slight literary output, I suggest that Sattler represents a third standpoint: patience as a virtue that distinguishes Christians who eschew “worldliness” and sin; patience as a willingness to accept and endorse suffering; patience as a transformative action, undertaken by a community whose existence and comportment pays tribute to the revolutionary import of the gospel. As might be expected, the conclusion to the chapter then delivers another mixed verdict. On one hand, I judge Calvin’s decision to pair an account of patience in Christian life with a statement about patience as a dimension of God’s ways and works to be enormously consequential. His willingness to consider God’s relationship with ancient Israel in terms of patience is singled out as especially noteworthy. It does not merely disclose a willingness to think across the entire scriptural witness (an important move, in and of itself); it also raises the possibility that patience could anchor an account of providence that takes the Hebrew Bible as its point of departure— precisely the line of reflection I take up in Chapters  5 and 6 of this book. The writings of Luther, Karlstadt, and Sattler, on the other hand, advert to a further narrowing of the theological imagination and suggest that Calvin’s achievement relates to the work of his predecessors in a manner analogous to Julian’s with respect to Aquinas, and Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s with respect to Augustine. While patience is deemed integral to Christian existence, it appears—at least in the texts that I scrutinize, and with the caveat that Sattler’s work perhaps edges toward divine patience—to have incidental importance for an account of God’s ways and works. Does this amount to a dogmatic error? That, once again, would probably be to say too much, and not only because a close examination of Luther’s later writings might complicate the standpoint of the Invocavit sermons. One can certainly regret that the uprush of exegetical and theological creativity in Christian thought in the first quarter of the sixteenth century did not include reflection on divine patience, and one can certainly inquire as to the configuration of material and intellectual conditions that restricted patience to discussions of Christian life. But it would be a mistake to pair regret with reproach. The wider theological tradition, after all, has been content to give this motif a marginal place in dogmatic inquiry, and

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one can hardly demand that a contemporary constructive project set the terms for interpretation and evaluation. Still, it is fair to view the tendency to limit patience to human life as a lost opportunity. The questions raised in this book’s introduction, then, continue to press. What place might patience have for understanding God’s ways and works, in the context of Christian thought? Might one develop a line of reasoning that builds on the scriptural witness, that heeds the insights of patristic authors, and that draws inspiration from an overlooked theme in Calvin’s work, such that the patience of God as creator, provider, and redeemer takes centerstage in theological reflection? One additional introductory comment, parallel to that made at the beginning of the previous chapter. Why these authors? And why adopt such a limited line of sight, one that remains (mostly) in the sixteenth century, and does so rather selectively, looking only at Calvin’s work and the output of a small group in the 1520s? Something of a rationale is useful to sketch. First, on the assumption that the Reformation reshaped the theological imaginary of sixteenth-century Europe, it is legitimate to discern something of a kairos moment—an “inflection point” that could, at least in principle, have led to patience becoming central to theological inquiry. That that possibility went largely unrealized, to be sure, is unsurprising. The word does not obviously mesh with a drive to reform the church, a concern to reimagine piety in relation to scripture, a desire to reboot theological reflection, and an attempt to foreground justification by faith through grace. But it remains notable that a period of unrest did not revive the term’s (dogmatic) fortunes, and that, in some quarters, there was a further constriction of the theological imagination. Looking at works by Luther, Karlstadt, and Sattler secures this point. Second, given that this book stands firmly within the Protestant tradition, and even more firmly in the sphere of Reformed theology, it is important to spend some time with Calvin’s writings. Not just to pay respect where respect is due. Rather, to show that his reception of the scriptural witness, as well as his determination to support the formation of piety, did much to enliven reflection on patience as a term of theological art, and to introduce ideas that will be developed when, in the next volume of this project, talk of impatience features in my account of the atonement. Third and finally—and I will not do much more than glance toward this point in my conclusion; it is better performed, so to speak, than theorized—I think it important to lodge a protest against a scholarly mindset that reflexively deprecates the Reformation, treating it as the culmination of late medieval missteps and a waystation on a path that concludes with the calamitous fact of late modernity. Such a mindset, beyond being a fairly drastic (if, in some quarters,

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very erudite) case of “castigation-by-lumping,” should not go unchallenged.1 When it comes to constructive work—and remember, that is the principal concern of this project—one does not want the brilliance of magisterial and radical thinkers of the Reformation to be flanked by overblown, totalizing judgments. Something different is required: a careful weighing of past claims, undertaken with an eye to enriching theological reflection today.

­1 John Calvin His formidable intellectual gifts notwithstanding, Calvin probably does not compare with Julian when it comes to sheer theological ingenuity. Nor would he want to: he would worry that Julian’s prose drifts toward speculation, “wandering in forbidden bypaths and thrusting upward to the heights” and forgetting that Christian reflection ought to have God’s “witness of himself in his Word” and “the inward testimony of the Spirit” as its exclusive point of departure (Inst. III.xxi.1 and I.vii.4). But Calvin certainly shares Julian’s ardent concern for her evenchristen, especially those who struggle to understand and act on their incorporation into Christ’s body. Despite a temperament frequently thought to be characterized by “stern inflexibility” and an “iron spirit”2—a temperament blithely presumed to find expression in a theology that overrates divine sovereignty, trades in legalism, and treats human life as dubious and disastrous in equal measure—recent scholarship has foregrounded Calvin’s abiding concern to nourish cognitive and affective intimacy with God.3 Yes, of course, the Institutes aims “to I borrow from Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 128. 2 Georgia Harkness, John Calvin: The Man and His Ethics (New York: Abingdon, 1931), 74 and 5. 3 See here, inter alia, Denis Tamburello, Union with Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Bernard (Louisville: WJKP,  1994); Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Charles Partree, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville: Eerdmans, 2008); Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Mathew Myer Boulton, Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); and Michelle Chaplin Sanchez, Calvin and the Resignification of the World: Creation, Incarnation, and the Problem of Political Theology in the 1559 Institutes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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help those who desire to be instructed in the doctrine of salvation” (Preface to the French edition of 1560 [my emphasis]); and yes, of course, Calvin’s commentaries aim to direct the communal and private reading of scripture. Both concerns are internal to a project that combines classical, patristic, early modern, and humanistic habits of mind in service of a momentous goal: reconceiving and regulating Christian identity in a world that has begun to resist the gravitational pull of late medieval Catholic mores, and that has begun to think anew about the meanings and relationships of the “sacred” and the “secular.”4 But Calvin’s “disciplinary” labors are grossly misunderstood if they are not viewed as means to an end: nourishing and intensifying believers’ sense of what it means to be united to Christ, in the Spirit, before the Father. Calvin did not write to imprison his followers in a restrictive doctrinal grid, nor with an eye to narrowing the scope and possibilities of exegesis. He wrote to foster piety in the church, in order that “reverence” might be “joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces” and in hopes that Christians might better offer God “willing service” and “establish their complete happiness in him” (Inst. I.ii.1). The three layers of meaning given to patience subserve this broad concern. They amount to finely calibrated subroutines, supportive of an outlook that pairs right thinking about God with a particular formation of the self. And, as noted above, the first layer of meaning, which construes patience in terms of God’s moderation of

I am aware that this construal of modernity is unelaborated. But it is important to note that the statement above—a casual gloss on Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap, 2007)—resists the notion that late medieval movements that favored philosophical, ecclesial, and social reform laid the groundwork for a slow process of intellectual and cultural decline. As noted above, I will pick up this issue at the end of the chapter, but it suffices here to say the following: rather than viewing the Reformation as an undertaking that normalized a clutch of theological, political, and philosophical missteps (away from Plato, toward nominalism; away from the common good, toward a fissiparous chaos of unchecked individualism; away from a robust sacramentology, toward a disenchanted world, etc.), I view it as a valuable opening up of the Western religious imagination. For a fascinating explication of this point, see Ronald F. Thiemann, The Humble Sublime: Secularity and the Politics of Belief (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). For an alternative view, see, inter alia, Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Belknap,  2012) and Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2013).

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punishment, is usefully illustrated through Calvin’s commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. These commentaries, as is well known, seek often to alert readers to the depth, gravity, and outrageousness of sin. Our first parents did not merely deserve the “curse of God” and suffer “alienation from God,” along with “miseries and evils both of soul and body.” Their sin was far worse: it made “the whole human race hateful to God” and set us “under sentence of condemnation” (Comm. Gen. 2:16, 4:4, and 8:21). And precisely because each of us now affirms and compounds Adam’s and Eve’s primal disobedience, not “by any extrinsic force, but by the direction of [our] own hearts” (Comm. Gen. 8:21)—a fact that renders the distinction between original and actual sin something of a technicality—the “sentence of condemnation” is entirely fitting. Were God to overlook sin, God would be inconstant; God’s justice would wax and wane. Meanwhile, we would sink even deeper into ignorance and our relationship with God, devastated as it is, would degrade even further. It is only because God discloses God’s judgment, exposing the “boundless filthy mire of error” (Inst. I.v.11) in which we have become stuck, that human beings have some awareness of God’s majesty and justice. Although unpunished crimes make for “a sort of cloud held before our eyes,” when God “takes vengeance on man’s transgressions, his glory shines forth illustriously” (Comm. Isa. 9:18). It would be a mistake, however, to treat Calvin’s claims about sin in isolation from his claims about grace. And, granted that its full measure awaits the incarnation and the sending of Christ’s Spirit, grace is already being expressed when God declines to apply judgment in a manner proportionate to the severity of sin and “patiently waits (patienter … exspectet) for those who have sinned, and invites them to repentance by his longsuffering (tolerantia) … He is called ‘slow to anger’ (tardus ad iram), as he would abstain from severity did not man’s wickedness compel him to execute punishment on his sins” (Comm. Exod. 34:5; cf. Comm. Joel 2:12–13).5 Such patience For the Latin, I have consulted the relevant passages in Corpus Reformatorum: Joannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, vols 29–87 (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke et Filium, 1863–1900). For the sake of readability, I have lightly modernized the syntax, spelling, and punctuation of this and ensuing translations.

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is exemplified in God’s dealings with ancient Israel. In face of this people’s wrongdoing, God checks God’s anger, mitigating and/or delaying censure, in hopes that God’s people will change its ways. Does this bespeak a capricious kind of indulgence? Are we returned to a justice that waxes and wanes? Obviously not: a sideways glance at God’s treatment of the reprobate, within and beyond history, tells clearly of God’s consistency in that regard. Calvin’s point is rather that God’s judgment against sinners in general, and the reprobate in particular (“just and irreprehensible but incomprehensible” as it is [Inst. III.xxi.7]), does not receive proleptic articulation in the history of God’s covenant with Israel. What distinguishes this history, and what in fact makes it possible, is divine patience as an act of merciful forbearance, such that sinful Israel is not destroyed but is instead given additional—and, by definition, undeserved—opportunities to repent, to recommit itself to God, and to reconstitute itself as God’s covenantal partner. And this exercise of patience, which God extends and applies over successive generations, comprises the links in a chain of favor whose endpoint is the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit. Calvin’s remarks on Ps. 78:38, a verse that recalls that God, “being compassionate, forgave their iniquity, and did not destroy them; often he restrained his anger, and did not stir up all his wrath,” help to illustrate these claims. To show the more fully that no means had succeeded in bending the Israelites and causing them to return to a sound state of mind, we are now informed that, although God bore with their multiplied transgressions and exercised his mercy in forgiving them, they had no less manifested their wickedness in abusing his benignity in every instance in which it was displayed, than they had shown themselves refractory and obstinate when he treated them with severity. At the same time, the reason is assigned why they did not utterly perish. They no doubt deserved to be involved in one common destruction; but it is declared that God mitigated (temperasse) his anger in order that some seed of them might remain. That none might infer, from these examples of vengeance which have been mentioned, that God had proceeded to punish them with undue severity, we are told that the punishments inflicted upon them were moderate—yes, mild, when compared with the aggravated nature of their wickedness. God kept back

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his hand, not looking so much to what they had deserved, as desiring to give place to his mercy … [A]s he pardoned them not only in one instance, nor in one respect, it is affirmed that he expiated their iniquity, that he might not destroy them; and again, that although he had been often provoked, he yet ceased not to turn away his anger; and, finally, that he mitigated his chastisements, lest the people should be overwhelmed with the weight of them. (Comm. Pss. 78:38, emphases in original) Evident in this passage is a deft back-and-forth, previewed at the beginning of Calvin’s exegesis of the psalm as a whole, that shuttles readers between an awed acclamation of “the benefits of God” and frank declarations about Israel’s “ingratitude” (Comm. Pss. 78:1). Evident, too, is Calvin’s belief that the dialectic of sin and grace is not evenly balanced, but rather weighted to ensure ancient Israel’s continuation as a socioreligious grouping. In spite of a “vast accumulation of … sins,” whose force requires that this people “must of necessity have perished [perire necesse fuerit] a thousand times” (Comm. Ps. 78:40), mercy continues to be extended. Or, to draw from a slightly later exegesis, which shifts attention to God’s identity and again picks up on the credo discussed in this book’s introduction: God is “longsuffering … he is not angry whenever an offense is committed against him … [he] pardons us according to the greatness of his loving-kindness” (Comm. Ps. 86:15). To be sure, Calvin admits some discomfort with this idiom, wavers on the ascription of anger to God, and—at least in the long quotation above—equivocates between talk of punishment and chastisement. But the point holds, nonetheless. Divine longsuffering is not an occasional matter when it comes to ancient Israel. It underwrites repeated instances of divine restraint, all of which are calibrated to ensure that this people does not meet the future that it deserves—a future in which it is (justly) expelled from the covenant of grace and subjected to God’s crushing rebuke. One might even go so far as to read the somewhat curious reference to the “necessity” of ancient Israel’s perishing (Comm. Ps. 78:40) as the key to the whole. It is because God acts with unnecessary love toward Israel, patiently “holding back” God’s hand and “turning away” God’s anger, thereby subverting the (apparent) logic of divine justice and sovereignty, that this people does not suffer a “common

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destruction.” And another implication follows: the unnecessariness of divine favor that ensures ancient Israel’s persistence, which in turn provides the context needed for Christ to live and die as the Messiah who is also the head of the church, grounds Christian life in the present. Just as God creates clouds to hold back the “celestial waters … lest, gushing forth with sudden violence, they should swallow us up” (Comm. Gen. 1:8),6 so God’s patience ensures that ancient Israel is saved from itself; and as Israel is saved from itself there arises the context in which Christ effects the remission of sins and victory over death, the significance of which—thanks to the Spirit—shapes the experience of Christian life today.” “Israel was then the Lord’s darling son; the others were strangers. Israel was recognized and received into confidence and safekeeping; the others were left to their own darkness. Israel was hallowed by God; the others were profaned. Israel was honored with God’s presence; the others were excluded from all approach to him. ‘But when the fulness of time came’ [Gal. 4:4] which was appointed for the restoration of all things, he was revealed as the reconciler of God and men; ‘the wall’ that for so long had confined God’s mercy within the boundaries of Israel ‘was broken down’ [Eph. 2:14] (Inst. II.xi.11).” Although not explicitly mentioned, God’s “slowness to anger” is the presupposition of this important passage. This elected community’s survival depends on God’s exercise of patience, and this exercise of patience ensures that history unwinds in such a way that the incarnation and the outpouring of the Spirit happen at exactly the right time—which is to say, at the time at which ancient Israel’s hopes have come into the clearest focus, and at the time in which the historical project of the church is ready to be launched. Does it follow that Calvin treats ancient Israel as little more than a warm-up act for the real thing, thus offering us a troubling kind of supersessionism? That would be an overstatement. Calvin’s plain-sense exegesis of swathes of the Hebrew Bible enables him to tarry, often at length, over God’s relationship with ancient Israel. This is particularly evident in his treatment of the “messianic psalms” and discrete episodes in ancient Israel’s ancestral past. In contrast to many contemporaries, Calvin refuses

This claim, incidentally, is guided by Aristotelian science. See here C. B. Kaiser, “Calvin’s Understanding of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy: Its Extent and Possible Origin,” in Calviniana: Ideas and Influence of Jean Calvin, ed. R. V. Schnucker (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1988), 77–92. See also Susan Schreiner, The Theater of his Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 22–8.

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to impose Christological glosses on texts that cannot sustain it, and—at least on a number of occasions—shows himself keen to track, analyze, and honor the historical outworking of God’s very specific promises and actions. Indeed, even Calvin’s “third use” of the law (which elicited charged accusations of “legalism”) can be understood as an affirmation of the continued importance of God’s dealings with ancient Israel, with the Spirit reacquainting Christians with what “Moses has admirably taught” (Inst. II.vii.13). At the same time, one cannot deny that Calvin’s theology sometimes drifts into dangerous waters. If Calvin did not write in a fashion that compares with Luther’s notorious treatises from 1543, he could shift easily between claims about the specific individuals responsible for Jesus’ death and claims about God’s rejection of the Jews as a people, and he is not averse to offering ill-informed, sweeping denunciations of Rabbinic teaching.7

It is useful to broaden the view a bit. On one level, one finds here a striking example of Calvin’s ability to lend a cluster of biblical terms a far-reaching theological charge. Moderation, mildness, longsuffering, slowness to anger, etc.—and, of course, patience, which presents itself as a useful catchall—are given shades of meaning that enable them to operate in the realm of faithful understanding. If these terms do not quite coalesce into a discrete doctrinal statement, given that they remain tethered to discrete exegetical endeavors, they nonetheless bear directly on Christians’ knowledge of God as creator and redeemer. They comprise elements in an informal lexicon that enables the pious to make sense of the history in which they find themselves placed, receiving the beneficii Christi as a “local” moment in God’s extension of grace to those whom God predestines to life, while understanding that receipt of those benefits is dependent on God’s prior relationship with ancient Israel. Or, to make the same point in reverse: Calvin does not limit talk of God’s moderation, forbearance, longsuffering, and patience to ancient Israel, even as the Christian cannot (or, more precisely, should not) think about God’s identity in isolation from

These comments are informed by G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: SixteenthCentury Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and David C. Steinmetz, “John Calvin and the Jews: A Problem in Political Theology,” PT 10, no. 3 (2009): 391–409. I have also profited from Paul E. Capetz, “The Old Testament and the Question of Judaism in Reformed Theology: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth,” JRTh 8 (2014): 121–68; and Randall C. Zachman, Reconsidering Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 62–119.

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God’s covenant with this particular people. Calvin’s analysis invites readers to avail themselves of a vocabulary, sourced in scripture, that helps them to make new sense of God’s governance of history in past and present. On another level, this analysis showcases Calvin’s ability to connect reflection on creation and providence with an account of salvation—a fascinating parallel to the Long Text of Revelations, as well as an echo of Augustine’s De civitate Dei—and thus to bind together knowledge of God the creator with knowledge of God the redeemer. As is well known, the Institutes trades on this very distinction: the duplex cognitio Dei. What is initially presented as a statement about the basic structure of Christian faith (Inst. I.ii.1: “it is one thing to feel that God as our Maker supports us by his power, governs us by his providence, nourishes us by his goodness, and attends us with all sorts of blessing—and another thing to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ”) comes to organize theological reflection as such, supporting a capacity to toggle between an understanding of the work of God as creator and an understanding of the work of God as redeemer, while simultaneously indicating that God is always both creator and redeemer, redeemer and creator. (Edward Dowey, Jr., whose analysis of the Institutes looms over much Anglophone scholarship, makes the point well: granted the “epistemological significance of the duplex cognitio Domini,” one must not forget that “knowledge of the Creator is presupposed when speaking of redemption,” nor that “grace is presupposed when speaking of the creation.”)8 In this context, references to God’s patience toward ancient Israel showcase Calvin’s concern to ensure that an organizational distinction does not harden into a dogmatic abstraction. To acclaim God’s patience is to attend to those occasions in which the believer understands both that the God of Jesus Christ, sent in the Spirit, just is the God of ancient Israel, the one who creates ex nihilo; and that God’s saving activity, in Christ and the Spirit, rests upon God’s sponsorship of ancient Israel as a sociopolitical and religious project. It constitutes a seam that links differentiable modes of knowledge—a seam of such importance that, in the final analysis, one cannot but think

Edward A. Dowey, Jr., The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology, expanded ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 240 and xi.

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of God’s providential rule and God’s redemptive work as cut from the same cloth, the fabric of which passes from creation to God’s covenant with ancient Israel, and thence to those whom the Spirit draws into Christ’s body. It is the patience of God as provider that readies the world for the application of a “heavenly decree, on which men’s salvation depended,” the content of which is “the Son of God becom[ing] for us ‘Immanuel, that is, God with us,’” so that “his divinity and our human nature might by mutual connection grow together”; and it is the patience of God as redeemer that ensures that Christ is identified as the person he is: the “son of Abraham and David whom God had promised in the Law and the Prophets” (Inst. II.xiii.1 and 3), the Messiah of ancient Israel. One finds here, then, a new phase in reflection on patience, one that seems to move beyond earlier thinking: patience being a motif that helps one think about the broad sweep of God’s work in history, stretching from the deep past into the Christian present. This phase, too, supplies the context in which Calvin thinks about human patience—a topic which, in contrast to the occasional treatment of patience as divine forbearance, he tackles in a concise and concentrated way in the Institutes. The broad context for Calvin’s discussion of patience is a treatise on Christian life, nested in the Institutes’ third book. The specific context is an analysis of self-denial that expands on an earlier discussion of mortification, which is itself understood to form one of two poles (the other being vivification) in the long process of sanctification that the Spirit superintends. Mortification itself, in fact, has two dimensions.9 The first pertains largely to the believer’s internal life. Knowledge of Christ’s redemptive action precipitates an awareness of sin: a visceral feeling of sorrow and shame, as well as an eagerness to die to oneself, in order that one “may begin to live to God” (Inst. III.iii.3). The second, which dominates Calvin’s treatise on Christian life, pertains more to the external conditions in which a Christian finds himself, albeit with an emphasis on what might now be called believers’ “affect.” Crucial here is the obligation to engage the quotidian not as a sovereign subject, who

These are sometimes described as the “inward” and “outward” dimensions of mortification. See John H. Leith, John Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life (Louisville: WJKP, 1989), 76.

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supposes that he “bears a kind of kingdom in his breast” (Inst. III. vii.4) and disposes of this or that according to his whims, but as a pilgrim who “depart[s] from himself in order that he may apply the whole force of his ability in the service of the Lord” (Inst. III. vii.1) and who, as such, accepts that the events that devolve upon him are an expression of God’s sovereign rule. Self-denial, by these lights, means that one stifles the desire to imagine oneself as a selfsufficient subject who orders one’s life according to one’s own powers and wishes, and that one embraces an identity that consents to and affirms God’s disposing of events—even when those events result in a diminution of one’s well-being in the quotidian. Does this construal of self-denial encourage what Dorothee Soelle famously called “Christian masochism,” a pathology that arises within a “sadistic” theological frame that, having lost sight of God’s love, promotes a narrow acclamation of God’s power and justice?10 Is the dogmatic deck now stacked in such a way that patience is bound to be put in service of a restrictive, and likely existentially suffocating, construal of Christian life? Well, one can hardly deny that the rhetoric of self-denial has often proven psychologically and ethically injurious for many. That is certainly the case when it has been tethered to an outsized doctrine of sin and/or paired with an uneven account of the imago dei (i.e., an account that fails to grasp that every human is beloved of God, and that human worth, accordingly, cannot be measured on a sliding scale). In such contexts, talk of self-denial can prompt individuals who are already marked as marginal, questionable, and/or contemptible to endorse the ascription of marginality, questionability, or contemptibility. Women’s well-being is perhaps especially jeopardized when talk of self-denial runs alongside the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and selfgiving, contributing to the “currency of patriarchal economics” and functioning as a “tool of hierarchical enforcement.”11 One can hardly deny, too, that perspectives that foreground God’s sovereign ordering of history can sometimes draw attention away Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975). See esp. 9–32. 11 Anna Mercedes, Power For: Feminism and Christ’s Self-Giving (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 2. Mercedes’s book, of course, seeks to reclaim self-emptying as an option for feminist theology. Yet it does so with full awareness that this idiom has an acutely ambiguous history in patriarchal contexts. 10

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from local reasons for suffering. When this occurs, the question of why “the wicked swallow those more righteous than they” (Hab. 1:13) becomes worryingly abstract.12 Rather than asking, “why is this group consistently invited to practice self-denial?” the terms of debate shift, menacingly, and the principal concern becomes: “how should this group better deny itself, in light of its divinely ordained woes?” But the risks attendant to the rhetoric of self-denial need to be considered in light of Calvin’s actual statements. In the Institutes, self-denial is clearly not an occasion to look askance at the local reasons for this or that instance of wickedness. Calvin’s biting preface to King Francis puts pay to that line of inquiry. Nor should a sharpened sense of “ungodliness” and “worldly desires” (Inst. III.vii.3) be treated as an occasion for self-hatred. Self-denial is consistently presented as one aspect of a graced dynamic, ingredient to an individual’s cognizance of her enclosure in Christ’s redeeming body, that empowers an individual to take leave of sin and to begin to recover a sense of her basic, enduring worthiness—a worthiness that is itself inseparable from the conviction that each human being bears the “beauty” of the “image of God” (Inst. III.vii.6).13 To mix metaphors: self-denial involves the believer looking over her shoulder as she is awoken to the upsurge of pride, hostility, and disobedience that has warped her relationship with God, herself, and others—an awakening that is itself reflective of the believer’s inhabitation of a new environment, defined by grace and kindness. And yes, this backward look does lead the believer to view herself with a degree of loathing. Inasmuch as the believer has been awakened, she is newly alert to the fact that she has not yet become the person that God intends for her to be. The “old” self that has been put to death persists, even though it is on the backfoot, as does the need to continue to affirm the rightness of God’s “killing” of that old self. But precisely because God’s justifying and sanctifying action renders the condition from which one has been delivered a

James Cone foregrounds this quotation, along with Jer. 12:1, in God of the Oppressed, rev. edn (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), 153. 13 Randall C. Zachman writes instructively on this point, emphasizing the connection between self-denial and love of others. See “‘Deny Yourself and Take up Your Cross’: John Calvin on the Christian Life,” IJST 11, no. 4 (2009): 466–82, esp. 471–4. 12

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past event, loathing is always trumped by delight in the believer’s present and future union with Christ, the savior who “covers” sin and readies the believer for ever-more intimate relationship with the Father. And this delight is ultimately more important and more interesting than that which has been left behind. It is a delight that beholds a “new” humanity, raised by the Father in the power of the Spirit, whose raison d’être is union with Christ. This, then, is the framework in which one ought to receive Calvin’s claims about mortification and self-denial: as dimensions of a process that binds the condemnation of sin to a reception of grace and ensures, concomitantly, that an unsparing critique of the self is a step on the way to a deepened relationship with God as a loving parent. And this framework makes possible a nuanced reading of Calvin’s claims about patience. On one level, Christian patience is framed in terms of believers being conformed to Christ, the preeminent “example of patience” (Inst. III.viii.1), such that hardship becomes an occasion to participate in a cruciform mode of existence. One ought not, by these lights, try to imitate the cross from a safe distance. At worst, that would be a return to works righteousness; at best—and it is not much better—it would demonstrate a superficial grasp of what the Spirit has wrought as she draws one into union with Christ. Participation in a cruciform mode of existence means a willingness to receive the cross as it expresses itself through the stuff of everyday life, such that those who are predestined to life can encounter and experience Christ in the here-and-now, beyond the regular activities of scripture reading, proclamation, and receipt of the eucharist. But this exercise of patience must not lead believers to overrate the here-and-now, becoming “stuck” on whatever cross they suppose themselves to be bearing; and patience must not be exercised in a manner that would encourage a believer to suppose it possible to reverse the process of sanctification, with grace being trumped by sin. Patience names a dimension of piety that recasts hardship, turning it from a brutum factum into a means for believers to endorse God’s remaking of the self. It forms part of a Spirit-led process wherein the Christian learns to relativize sin, knowing that her ultimate purpose, on this side of eternity, is not to suffer through the quotidian but to inhabit that quotidian in light of their confidence in the governmental work of God the Father. Why so? Because, simply, while Christ’s “whole life was nothing

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but a sort of perpetual cross” (Inst. III.viii.1), it did not have its terminus in Golgotha. It was not itself—is not itself—any kind of brutum factum. It was followed, and in some basic sense outbid, by a resurrection that foretells a blessed future. And those who are united to Christ must comport themselves accordingly. Cruciform existence, and the practice of patience that accompanies it, may not “rest” in hardship (that would be masochism); it should treat hardship as waystation within a process of renewal, the terminus of which is the bright light of the resurrection. Calvin is in fact quite explicit about this. He supposes that bearing the cross “in harsh and difficult conditions” can and should be regarded as a “great comfort,” for while “we share in Christ’s suffering in order that as he has passed from a labyrinth of all evils into heavenly glory, we may in like manner be led through various tribulations to the same glory” (Inst. III.viii.1, my emphasis).14 Just as Christ submitted himself, patiently, to the will of God in Gethsemane, consenting to an obedience-unto-death for the greater good of redemption, so those united to Christ ought to view suffering and patience as a step toward a future within the body of the risen Savior. On another level—and this point, admittedly, has already nudged into view—patience is a matter of believers accepting that life in the quotidian is ruled by the Lord whose governance of events has as its goal the intensification of piety. Generally, of course, Calvin does ask Christians to think that whatever happens, happens by dint of God’s sovereign ordering of events. Ill-health, poverty, disgrace, the loss of friends and family; the travails of reproductive loss, the cruelties of casual and not-so-casual racism, the ineffectuality (and sometimes wickedness) of elected representatives; the degradation of an international order, predicated on the enrichment of select powers: “the conclusion will always be: the Lord so willed, therefore let us follow his will” (Inst. III.viii.10; see also I.xvii.7–8). Patiently enduring such events, one might even say, is

That Calvin imagines grace to be the way out of the labyrinth is rather obscured in William J. Bouwsma’s famous work, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Although the “labyrinth” of sin certainly has “claustrophobic overtones,” representing “a kind of dark prison in which human beings grope frantically for an exit they cannot find” (47), Calvin’s point is that those predestined to life and afforded faith already have an exit in view and, more importantly, can trust in that exit, precisely because it is defined by the redemptive reality of Christ.

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an occasion for Christians to apply knowledge of God as creator. It is a practical endorsement of divine sovereignty as it bears on the patch of space and time in which one is placed. But there is a more particular claim here, one that returns us to the “seam” that connects knowledge of God as creator and knowledge of God as redeemer. God’s providential rule is never the “blind exercise of power by a Supreme Being.”15 It is always a matter of God’s taking care for God’s children, providing for us in ways that might prove hard to stomach in the short term but that will be understood as fitting and beneficial in the long run. Insofar as the faithful view every event as wisely and lovingly disposed by God, then, the patience that accompanies suffering in face of hardship is not a coping mechanism, attuned to helping one navigate an ambiguous world. It is an interpretative capacity that discerns in the worst “trials” a number or discrete lessons, each of which is internal to a lifelong course of divine pedagogy; it is a way for the self to form itself, as it is formed, understanding that “our most merciful father consoles us … when he asserts that in the very act of afflicting us with the cross he is providing for our salvation” (Inst. III.viii.11). Or, to switch to a different figure: patience enables the believer to receive affliction as the work of a “heavenly physician” who prescribes “harsher remedies” than might be expected, but only to secure the greatest degree of health among her patients (Inst. III. viii.6)—a healthfulness whose terminus ad quem is a more vivid, more expansive apprehension of union with Christ, in light of “the kindness and generosity of our Father … [who] does not … cease to promote our salvation” through his orchestration of events in time and space (Inst. III.viii.6). The parts open to the whole: patience as an act and posture of cruciform self-denial, powered by the Spirit who knits us to Christ, is set in the context of God’s providential rule; the enduring task of formation in piety links up with an awareness that, somehow, God folds our worst moments into a gracious fabric, the ultimate purpose of which is God’s disclosure of Godself as a loving parent. These dimensions of patience—bearing the cross and understanding its weight to be internal to a providential scheme, ordered to our receipt of the beneficii Christi—are distilled in

Cornelis van der Kooi, “Calvin’s Theology of Creation and Providence: God’s Care and Human Fragility,” IJST 18, no. 1 (2016), 56.

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Calvin’s contention that believers’ affliction and suffering are not a matter of punishment but chastisement. Although Calvin does not always make the distinction as clearly as he might, in this context it is crucial.16 Punishment involves God, in God’s infinite justice, holding sinners to account, both on the cross and in God’s eschatological judgment of the reprobate. And punishment is something that Christ bears, definitively, in the midst of history; and it is something that the reprobate will suffer, illustratively, on the other side of eternity, as God makes Godself known to us. Chastisement, by contrast, names the process through which God reminds those who are predestined to life of their enclosure in Christ’s body by ironic means, inflicting forms of hardship whose ultimate purpose is to clarify and deepen our knowledge of God as a gracious redeemer and creator. And, when push comes to shove, Calvin is adamant that those afforded faith must always think in terms of the latter category (iudicium castigationis: “corrective punishment”) and never in terms of the former (iudicium vindictae: “punitive judgment”). Christ, after all, bore the full weight of God’s wrath on the cross, and Christ continues to intercede for sinners before the Father. For believers to describe themselves as subjected to divine punishment would imply that God’s wrath is not fully outworked, and/or that Christ’s vicarious death and (continuing) intercession is insufficient for the remission of sins.17 It would bespeak an ersatz faith, with a lack of appreciation for the sufficiency of Christ’s death paired with a lack of confidence about how God directs events in time and space. “What would the children of God do if they believed the severity they feel is his vengeance? For he who, struck by the hand of God, thinks God a punishing Judge cannot conceive of him as other than wrathful and hostile; cannot but detest the very scourge This distinction is laid out in Inst. III.iv.31 and elaborated in the following subsections. However, as noted above, Calvin does not sustain it consistently. Indeed, “Forms of Prayer for the Church,” which opens Soelle’s chapter on “Christian Masochism” in Suffering, makes note of the “very chastisements which thou hast inflicted upon us.” Yet it is not long before an allusion to Isaiah is accompanied by a more ambiguous claim: “beaten with thy stripes, we acknowledge that we have provoked your anger against us; and even now we see thy hand stretched forth for our punishment.” See John Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 2 (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 108. 17 A point made nicely, again, by Cornelis van der Kooi; see As in a Mirror: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Knowing God: A Diptych (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 136–8. 16

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of God as curse and damnation” (Inst. III.vi.4). Chastisement, by contrast, is a concept whose application allows the ambiguities of the quotidian to be nested in a process of transformation. Those ambiguities can be viewed as an indirect “materialization” of Christ’s death and suffering that disclose God’s fatherly concern, and that therefore provide an individual with the opportunity to participate in God’s mortifying grace. Chastisement, to make the point more sharply, is an occasion of “resignification,” such that some grievous occurrence—illness, death, debt, reproductive loss, rank instances of injustice, geopolitical chaos—remains what it is, in all of its horror, while also disclosing God’s care for those predestined to life.18 Of course, none of this makes chastisement desirable. Nor does it permit the Christian to suppose that she has had her fill of suffering and can thus insulate herself from the harsh realities of postlapsarian existence. Calvin, like Augustine, has no truck with apatheia, and for good reason: aloofness, distance, and unfeeling disregard would render patience a matter of show, not substance. The “bite” of hardship is crucial for the process. Still, the very fact of this “bite” points beyond itself—or, at least, can and should point beyond itself, in the context of a well-formed piety—when the Christian exercises patience. For when that occurs, one goes some way to understanding that the most abject failures, setbacks, embarrassments, and tragedies can be folded, by grace, into an environment defined by God’s redemptive purposes. Patience can become a charism wherein the believer draws the negativities of human life—negativities, again, that remain painful, terrifying, and potentially soul-crushing—into a divinely led process of mortification, such that there follows a heightened awareness of the Spirit and a deepened sense of union with Christ. It is that dimension of piety wherein our bleakest moments are made captive to the workings of grace. I borrow the language of “materialization” and “resignification” from Sanchez’s Calvin and the Resignification of the World. Although Sanchez does not give sustained attention to patience, it crops up at points in her text (see, e.g., 74 and 174–5 on Inst. III.vii.11). And, certainly, the remarks of the paragraph above connect with her reading of the Institutes as a text that “explor[es] the nature of God’s active, signifying, and resignifying relationship with immanence” (79), a text that imagines God’s “adoption” having such force that it “reconstitutes a person … not by removing him from his created origin … but by refiguring the possibilities for living meaningfully within the reality of his own created context” (233, emphasis in the original).

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Three further notes. First, it seems that Calvin’s understanding of patience enlarged over time. The 1536 Institutes previews the distinction between iudicium castigationis and iudicium vindicate but does not spend much time on patience as a feature of Christian life. The 1541 Institutes, however, seems to move toward Calvin’s later position: it construes instances of hardship and suffering as one way in which God instructs “His servants … to test their patience and to instruct them in obedience.” Likewise “Against the Fantastic and Furious Sect of the Libertines who are called ‘Spirituals’” (1545), wherein Calvin describes God’s governance of secondary causes as a means by which God can “punish the wicked … test the patience of His faithful, or … chastise them in His fatherly kindness.”19 Second, to return to my opening remarks about self-denial (and granted, too, that I am striving to interpret Calvin as generously as possible at this point), I want to underscore again that the counsel to suffer patiently has often dovetailed with an egregious disregard for unjust familial, racial, sexual, social, and economic structures. This disregard, in turn, has sometimes functioned to obscure the configuration of material conditions that support domination. And Calvin, unfortunately, is himself part of the problem. A focus on God’s wise disposing of events is (a) paired with the assumption that one is “assigned” a certain status in life, a “calling” that might be viewed “as a sort of sentry post,” so that one “may not heedlessly wander about throughout life” (Inst. III.x.6), and (b) tied to a marked reluctance to make the critique of sociopolitical conditions integral to the task of theological reflection. Patience, by these lights, does not just function as “a kind of silence by which the godly keep themselves in subjection to [God’s] authority” (Comm. Ps. 85.8); it functions as a silence that risks drawing attention away from long-standing patterns of discrimination, while discouraging protest and resistance. As a concrete example, consider a letter from 1559. Calvin here advises against a wife leaving her physically abusive husband, so long as the husband’s violence does not bring “imminent peril to her life,” and sees fit to “exhort her in the name of God to bear with patience the cross which God has seen fit to place on her.”20 Granted the distance between our age and Calvin’s, we should not hesitate to view this counsel as John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1536 Edition, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), see esp. 153–5; Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1541 French Edition, trans. Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 696; and Treatises against the Anabaptists and against the Libertines, ed. and trans. Benjamin Wirt Farley (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982), 244. 20 The Register of the Company of Pastors of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, ed. and trans. Philip E. Hughes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), 345; see also the exchange of letters between Calvin and an unknown woman in 1552 on 193–8. 19

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misguided in the extreme. Exhorting an abused spouse to practice patience, but not identifying the conditions that engender violence against women and not working to alter those conditions, is more than a failure of ethical imagination; it is an indication that Calvin himself could not disaggregate the counsel of “resignification” from a reflexive endorsement of the status quo. For a constructive account of patience to have credibility today, then, one must safeguard against any valorization of patience that could lend support to longstanding patterns of domination and discrimination. (On which, more soon.) Third, and in a related vein, a dogmatically significant issue that I will take up in Chapter  5: Calvin does not reckon with the possibility that certain events cannot and should not be treated as instructive. His account of fatherly chastisement and the patience that God aims to elicit is worryingly comprehensive. Every event, no matter how traumatizing, could in principle be an occasion for a believer to discern something of God’s fatherly discipline. But while this stance is consistent with Calvin’s belief in God’s active superintendence of all things—a viewpoint that, famously, sits lightly on the notion of divine permission—it is not the only option. There may be sound reasons to treat some forms of hardship as providential surds—that is, as events that cannot, on this side of eternity, be positioned within an acclamation of God’s all-encompassing governmental work, and thus as events that ought not to be viewed as moments internal to the process of sanctification.

The third dimension of Calvin’s perspective on patience returns us to the issue of divine forbearance, albeit with a shift from God’s forbearance of ancient Israel’s sin to the saving death of Israel’s Messiah.21 Another passage from Calvin’s commentaries helps to introduce the point. Considering Gen. 15:16 (“And they”—Abram’s ancestors, who will be as numerous as stars in the night sky—“shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete”), Calvin writes: [T]he Lord here commends his own longsuffering (tolerantiam). Even then the Amorites had become unworthy to occupy the

For my fuller reading of Calvin’s views on atonement, elements of which are reprised in the following paragraphs, see Paul Dafydd Jones, “The Atonement: God’s Love in Action,” in New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology: Engaging with God, Scripture, and the World, ed. Tom Greggs (London: Routledge, 2010), 44–62; and “The Fury of Love: Calvin on the Atonement,” in T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement, ed. Adam J. Johnson (London: T&T Clark, 2017), 213–35.

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land, yet the Lord not only bore with them for a short time but granted them four centuries for repentance. And hence it appears that he does not, without reason, so frequently declare how slow he is to anger (tardum … ad iram). But the more graciously he waits for men, if, at length, instead of repenting they remain obstinate, the more severely does he avenge such great ingratitude (eo severius tantam ingratitudinem ulciscitur). Therefore Paul says that they who indulge themselves in sin, while the goodness and clemency of God invite them to repentance, heap up for themselves a treasure of wrath (Rom. 2:4) and thus they reap no advantage from delay, seeing that the severity of the punishment is doubled; just as it happened to the Amorites who, at length, the Lord commanded to be so entirely cut off, that not even infants were spared. Therefore, when we hear that God out of heaven is silently waiting until iniquities shall fill up their measure, let us know that this is no time for torpor, but rather let every one of us stir himself up, that we may be beforehand with the celestial judgment. It was formerly said by a heathen that the anger of God proceeds with a slow step to avenge itself, but that it compensates for its tardiness by the severity of its punishment. Hence there is no reason why reprobates should flatter themselves, when he seems to let them pass unobserved, since he does not so repose in heaven as to cease to be the judge of the world, nor will he be unmindful of the execution of his office in due time. We infer, however, from the words of Moses, that though space for repentance is given to the reprobate, they are still devoted to destruction. Some take the word ‫( צרך‬ayon) for punishment, as if it had been said that punishment was not yet matured for them. But the former exposition is more suitable, namely that they will set no bound to their wickedness, until they bring upon themselves final destruction (ultimum excidium). (Comm. Gen. 15:16) Given the exegetical inquiries of this book’s opening chapter, some of Calvin’s claims are likely familiar: patience as a moderation of punishment; patience as God’s willingness to give history length and breadth, thereby affording human beings opportunities to repent, to delight in God’s benefits, and to obey God; patience as a divine posture that elicits a disanalogous response, as human beings are urged to dispose themselves differently now, before time

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runs out. That these diverse meanings are gathered in such a short passage attest, too, to Calvin’s rare ability to “perform” elements of the scriptural witness in his scholarly and pastoral writing. The biblical commentary becomes a genre in which individual texts become part of an intriguing “intertext”—one in which the primacy of the written Word is married to a discursive expansion of the pious imagination, such that Christian understanding is made and remade, articulated and rearticulated. But Calvin’s particular claims about the postponement of punishment and the severity of its eventual application prove most important for my purposes. Although there is an artful reference to a “heathen” when homing in on his principal claim, Calvin makes it clear that that heathen—in this case, an unnamed source in Valerius Maximus’ book of sayings, beloved in the Middle Ages—is on the right track.22 While God does not “immediately fulminate against the ungodly and pour out his vengeance” (Comm. Gen. 18:21), at some point in the future God will exercise God’s wrath, and to devastating effect. In the idiom of this book: while God’s exercise of patience toward ancient Israel ensures that history “bends” toward the incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit, it is also the case that God’s patience will ultimately run out. When that time comes, God will not hold back. All of this prompts a fascinating question: granted that Calvin gestures toward an eschatological outworking of impatience (although, like Tertullian and Cyprian, he does not describe it in those terms; see, for instance, Comm. Matt. 5:44), does he ever draw a connection between patience and the cross? Does he suppose, specifically, that divine impatience is expressed in Christ’s vicarious suffering and death? At first blush, given Calvin’s reputation for thinking about the atonement in juridical terms, the question might seem obtuse. In contrast to those who, say, construe atonement as Christ freely offering himself to the Father to avert the punishment owed to humankind (as suggested in Cur Deus homo), Calvin often

Valerius Maximus, Factorum et dictorum memorabilium, ed. Karl Friedrich Kempf (Leipzig: Teubner, 1888), I.1, ext. 3 (12). The original Latin: “lento enim gradu ad uindictam sui diuina procedit ira tarditatemque supplicii grauitate pensat.” I am grateful to Janet Spittler for helping me track down this quotation, and to Karl Shuve for noting the wide circulation of this collection in medieval literary circles.

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contends that punishment is exacted on the cross.23 This point is made powerfully at the end of book II of the Institutes, when Calvin argues that the legal dimensions of Christ’s passion ought to shape dogmatic reflection. Aware that only death will “satisfy God’s judgment,” Christ is treated “as a criminal, accused and pressed by testimony, and condemned by the mouth of a judge to die”—while, simultaneously, Christ voluntarily accepts the “role of a guilty man and evildoer” (Inst. II.xii.3 and II.xvi.5). Indeed, precisely because the sinless, incarnate Son suffers a criminal’s fate, it is obvious that Christ “was burdened by another’s sins rather than his own” (Inst. II.xvi.5). Believers do well, then, to view their justification in terms of a pardon that is some combination of undeserved, unexpected, and astounding, with “the guilt which held us liable for punishment  … transferred to the head of the Son of God” (Inst. II.xvi.5). Even as “sin continually stays in us. … it is not imputed to us” (Comm. Jn. 1:29), for we are “covered” by a death adjudged sufficient to secure our standing before God. It is important, however, not to let the part stand in for the whole. While the Reformed tradition has often reprised and magnified the juridical dimensions of Calvin’s perspective—sometimes to the point at which talk about atonement takes on a quantitative air, with the “weight” of our guilt laid on Christ’s shoulders matching the extent and nature of the punishment delivered, such that atonement becomes “a matter of legal relation”24—Calvin himself has little interest in a conceptually tidy theorization of the cross. This lack of interest proceeds from a sound exegetical basis: the scriptural witness, determinative of the form and content of doctrine, shows scant regard for conceptual tidiness, preferring instead to describe Christ’s passion and death with a broad array of categories, images, and motifs. An indication, perhaps, that authors, compilers, and The distinction of punishment averted and punishment exacted is a slight modification of Ben Pugh; see Atonement Theories: A Way through the Maze (Eugene: Cascade, 2014), 56. 24 So A. A. Hodge, The Atonement (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1867), 171. Earlier in his text, Hodge even goes so far as to measure Christ’s vicarious suffering: “Christ suffered precisely that kind, degree and duration of suffering that the infinitely wise justice or the absolutely just wisdom of God determined was a full equivalent for all that was demanded of elect sinners in person—equivalent … in respect to sin-expiating and justice-satisfying efficacy—and a full equivalent in being of equal efficacy in these respects in strict rigour of justice” (66). 23

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editors understood that God’s ways and works should not be “schematized” or “theorized,” and thus forged a witness to Christ that employed a diversified, perhaps unruly, lexicon? Quite possibly. At any rate, Calvin seems to have wanted to honor the unruliness of scripture, and to do so he developed an account of atonement that delighted in a mishmash of categories, images, and motifs. This is powerfully illustrated in Inst. II.xii.3, which combines juridical, financial, sacrificial, and military language, while also nodding toward the Adam–Christ pairing, Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, and the bivalent meaning of hilasterion in Rom. 3:25. Likewise in the summative passage of Inst. II.xvi.2, which combines talk of divine hatred and love, curse, captivity, intercession, punishment, purgation, expiation, satisfaction, sacrifice, and appeasement. There are surely risks to this approach: a theologian might end up advancing an account of atonement that is more overwhelming than anything found in scripture, thus confusing the pious and muddling the task of faith seeking understanding. But Calvin’s maintenance of scripture’s figurative diversity goes hand in hand with a surprisingly coherent statement about Christ’s death, one that switches easily between talk of Christ’s obedience, Christ’s priestly and sacrificial work, Christ’s victory over death, and Christ’s liberation of humankind from captivity, and manages to associate the multiple dimensions of Christ’s saving activity, unto death, with multiple dimensions of Christian piety. And while this coherence cannot be explored here, one of its intriguing elements is the idea that the cross discloses something of God’s fury toward sin—a fury that has been building since the fall. So while it remains apt to say that, for Calvin, God exacts punishment according to a legal metric, Calvin also toys with the idea that the cross is a long-deferred outburst of righteousness: an unleashing of holy anger, long pent up, that encompasses the past, present, and future of our sinful hostility toward God. It is on Golgotha, one might say, that God really loses patience; it is on Golgotha that God’s wrath is not postponed, moderated, or “accommodated,” but outworked without reservation, in order that sin be subjected to the “final destruction” (Comm. Gen. 15:16) that it deserves. Does this make divine wrath and divine justice coextensive? No; it simply indicates that wrath and justice are partial, if overlapping descriptions of God’s attitude toward sin; it simply shows that the latter term (justice) is not sufficient to capture God’s hatred of our disposition and comportment after the fall, and

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that the former term (wrath) is part and parcel of God’s righteous response to wrongdoing. It simply shows, to make the point more directly, that Calvin pairs a juridical sensibility with a “dramatic” outlook, ingredient to which is the belief that the cross is an instance of holy impatience: a vehement assault, long deferred, on that which stands in the way of God’s purposes. While I cannot here engage Gustav Aulén’s famous argument about the “three types” of atonement, I am using the term “dramatic” to suggest that Calvin, at points, thinks along lines proximate to those that Aulén associates with Martin Luther (and, much earlier, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and others). I would also note that Calvin figures this drama in intriguing ways. While Christ’s resurrection is aptly described as a “victory,” with “righteousness … restored and life raised up,” such that we can now heed “the example of the risen Christ” and “strive after newness of life,” that victory depends on the furious denunciation of sin on the cross—a victory whereby God’s “righteous judgment is satisfied, the curse is removed, and the penalty paid in full” (Inst. II.xvi.14). What Aulén takes to be a “a stupendous conflict, a mirabile duellum, in which Christ prevails” includes the devastating application of God’s long-deferred impatience, exercised toward sinful humankind, that “defeats” Christ by subjecting him to a death beyond death—even as that “defeat” is such as to release God to love freely and unconditionally.25

Lest these comments appear a stretch, consider Calvin’s treatment of Gen. 6, which tells of God’s decision to flood the earth. Calvin here writes about a “vengeance … that [God] had hitherto deferred,” before appending a menacing note: “there will never be an end of contention, unless some unprecedented act of vengeance (insolita vindicta) cuts off the occasion of it” (Comm. Gen. 6:3). Is the “act of vengeance” the flood? It seems not. On that occasion, humanity’s sin is met with a tempered, if still quite momentous, reprimand. God stays God’s hand; Noah and his family are protected; Earth is repopulated. Likewise with the later destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: God moderates God’s punishment, sparing human beings, even as “we have come to the utmost limit of impiety” (Comm. Gen. 18:21). But God does not seem to exercise restraint when Christ dies, when the “utmost limit of impiety” has

Gustav Aulén, Chrisus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London: SPCK, 1931), 124.

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been loaded upon his shoulders. Having drawn sin and guilt upon himself, Christ approaches death as a “dread tribunal” whose judge is “armed with vengeance beyond understanding,” and commits himself to bearing the full force of God’s anger (Comm. Matt. 26:37; cf. Comm. Heb. 5:7). The cross, accordingly, involves more than the mere passing of a sentence. What transpires, in a way that is providentially decreed yet certainly not a matter of course (Christ must learn the “whole course of … obedience” that he undertakes [Inst. II.xvi.5; also Heb. 5:8]), is Christ bearing “the weight of divine severity, since he was ‘stricken and afflicted’ by God’s hand” and taking on “all the signs of a wrathful and avenging God” (Inst. II.xvi.11; see also III.iv.27).26 There is no mere “settling of accounts.” Even talk of a “retributive view of penalty” risks understating it.27 Calvin’s rhetoric impels one to imagine the cross as the moment in which God takes the opportunity to lose patience, to suspend God’s forbearance of sin, to articulate the full force of God’s holy anger. Indeed, if one views Christ against the backdrop of ancient Israel’s sin, in face of which God consistently “mitigated his anger” (Comm. Pss. 78:38), is this not why Calvin presents Christ’s death as he does? As the end of the Messiah who is not only condemned by the law but accursed, “born into the damnation of hell” and hated, on our behalf, for the sake of divine love (Inst. II.xvi.3 and 4)? Is it not the reason why Christ is sent to the depths of hell, even as he descends there of his own will? And is this not why those who exercise patience can do so confidently, knowing that Christ has taken on the role of mediator to “meet” God’s anger, knowing that those incorporated into his body can “hide under the precious purity of our first-born brother” (Inst. III.xi.23)? If this final layer of meaning is accepted—and I would concede that it is more of an interpretative stretch than the previous two, bearing a formal resemblance to my treatment of Julian of Norwich’s account of divine patience—we have come full circle, and we find ourselves in a dogmatic situation comparable to that suggested by Tertullian and Cyprian: an account of divine patience setting the terms for thinking about human patience. Christ’s bearing of God’s The reference is to Isa. 53:5. Zachman is good on divine wrath; see Reconsidering Calvin, esp. 155–7. 27 Paul S. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989), 102. 26

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impatience (the third layer of meaning) is made possible by God’s patience toward ancient Israel, an elected people whose historical persistence is a condition of possibility for the incarnation of the Son (the first layer of meaning). And Christ’s bearing of God’s impatience ensures that those incorporated into his body relate to God not as a wrathful judge but as a kindly father, patiently bearing chastisement in the knowledge that the lowlands of human existence are occasions to anticipate the heights of eternal life with God (the second layer of meaning). Christians, one might say, can exercise patience with the confidence that God has already lost patience, and thus has no more patience to lose. Christians can exercise patience with the knowledge that God’s chastising activity never portends a return to the furious logic of punishment but is always a fatherly action whereby the particulars of our lives are folded into a process of sanctification—a process, grounded in Christ and superintended by his Spirit, that plays itself out through the everyday stuff of human life.

2 Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt, and Michael Sattler Just as one might explore how Aquinas’ understanding of patience is elaborated in high medieval theology, so one might consider the afterlife of Calvin’s insights—insights that add up to a rich, suggestive framework that allows for (and perhaps encourages?) further development. And there certainly is an afterlife, especially when it comes to European Reformed scholasticism, that allows for a modest optimism about patience as a dogmatic category. Peter Martyr Vermigli’s posthumous Loci Communes (1576), a pivotal early text, makes explicit mention of Cyprian’s and Tertullian’s treatises (II. iv.54 and II.ix.9) while reprising many of Calvin’s insights.28 There is reference to God’s patience vis-à-vis sin (I.xv.10), to God’s forbearance “Early” according to the periodization of offered by Richard Muller; see PostReformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, c. 1520–c. 1725, vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 27–84. In-line references refer to Peter Martyr Vermigli, Loci Communes, ed. Robert Masson (London: John Kingston, 1576).

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and restraint with respect to the outworking of wrath (II.1.38 and II.xiii.10), and a suggestion that patience numbers among God’s communicable attributes. There is also an interest in patience in Christian life, particularly with respect to mortification (III.xii.3 and III.xii.11) and God’s “corrective” imposition of suffering (III.iii.42). Then, early in the seventeenth century, Amandus Polanus offers a crisp and scripturally sourced definition: “Patientia Dei” being God’s “most benign will, by which He so controls His anger, that He either bears sinning creatures long and puts off punishment … or He does not pour forth all His anger in one moment upon them, lest they should be reduced to naught.”29 Johannes Wollebius, Polanus’ student, follows suit in Compendium Theologiae Christianae (1626). Talk of God’s patience toward the reprobate turns up in his outline of providence, while an analysis of the first commandment deems patience a “virtue which, supported by faith in the providence, power, and goodness of God, we quietly submit ourselves to his authority when he inflicts suffering on us” (Chr. theol. I.6 and II.3). Francis Turretin is a touch more circumspect in Institutes of Elentic Theology (1679–85), perhaps because an especially (and unhelpfully) “high” account of biblical inspiration combines with a wariness regarding anything that could look like doctrinal innovation.30 Even so, earlier perspectives surface at key moments. God’s mercy tempers God’s application of justice, such that God “exercise[s] some forbearance … as to the degree of punishment” (3.xix.xxiii; cf. 15.xvii.xxvi)— an instance of the “longsuffering through which God puts off the consummation of the ages … on account of the elect (who are to be brought to Christ, until their whole number be made up)” (4.xvii. xxxix) and a symptom of God’s “longsuffering and kindness” visà-vis the wicked (6.vii.xxviii). And, in line with Calvin, Turretin views patience as part of the process of sanctification. He deploys the distinction between the (retributive) punishment of unforgiven sinners and “fatherly chastisement,” the latter being an occasion for believers to demonstrate obedience to God and grow in faithfulness (16.vi.xvi; see also 14.xii.xxi). Amandus Polanus a Polansdorf, Syntagma Theologiae Christianae II, 24 and 25. Quoted in Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, rev. and ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: Wakeman Great Reprints, n.d.), 96. 30 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elentic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison and trans. George Musgrave Giger, 3 vols (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1992). 29

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Patience makes its way across the Atlantic, too. Although Charles Hodge does not do much with the term in his three-volume Systematic Theology—possibly because of the term’s peripherality in Turretin’s Institutes; possibly for more obscure reasons—a young Geerhardus Vos identifies longsuffering as a communicable divine attribute in his lectures in dogmatics at the Theological School of the Reformed Church in 1888–93, describing it as an expression of “God’s love to those who deserve punishment, demonstrated in postponing punishment and in calling to conversion.”31 Louis Berkhof is more expansive, and unusually lyrical, in his influential Systematic Theology. God’s longsuffering is “that aspect of the goodness or love of God in virtue of which He bears with the froward and evil in spite of their long continued disobedience … it reveals itself in the postponement of the merited judgment.”32 Finally, indicative of renewed interest in the Protestant scholasticism in scholarly circles today, patientia and longanimitas (longsuffering) are entries in Richard Muller’s magisterial Dictionary. These terms, which Muller takes to be pretty much synonymous, refer to “the willingness of God to endure the offense of sin rather than immediately annihilate the world in its wickedness. The longanimitas Dei,” specifically, “is the affection of the divine will according to which God wills to await repentance and to allow millennia to elapse, for the sake of mankind, between the fall and the final judgment.”33 So although there does not seem to be much in the way of a development or expansion of Calvin’s thinking—and, I fear, little interest in Calvin’s account of the way that God exercises patience toward ancient Israel—a number of Reformed theologians ensure that patience does not slip from view. Crucially, patience as a term that describes God’s disposition and activity remains, in principle, a live option for theological inquiry. Granted the importance of Reformed scholasticism—and this will not be the last time I engage this curious, maddening, and rich

Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, trans. and ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., vol. 1, Theology Proper (Bellingham: Lexham, 2014), 29. 32 Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, new edn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 72. Emphases removed. 33 Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 180. For the entry on patientia, see 219. 31

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intellectual tradition—this section looks back behind Calvin and focuses on the early years of the Reformation. It does so for two reasons. First, it is instructive to consider how patience featured in visions of Christian life that were forged in, and sought to speak to, a context marked by change and conflict. There is an obvious parallel with early Christian writing at this juncture, with a biblically sourced motif employed to describe the comportment required of the faithful, within and beyond the church. Of course, the context is different in many ways. For Tertullian and Cyprian, patience was deployed in a religiously heterogeneous, imperial world that tended to view Christian communities on a spectrum that stretched from eccentric to pitiable to problematic. In Augustine’s work, it was positioned in a rich eschatological context and employed to help Christians imagine and negotiate life between an ambiguous “now” and a glorious “not yet,” in view of a surprising recent past (Rome’s sack) and an uncertain future. Protestant thinkers in the 1520s, by contrast, strove to reconceive Christian life in a context that was seeking to refigure— and sometimes to jettison—the mores of late medieval Catholicism. Patience was now an occasion for scholars (and, for want of a better word, activists) to debate and disagree about the pace at which ecclesial reform should proceed. It served as a way to reprimand those perceived to favor impetuous action and, correspondingly, to lend legitimacy to an incremental model of change (Luther); as an occasion to critique those who lacked the courage of their convictions, preferring ill-judged compromises to evangelical obedience (Karlstadt); and as a badge of integrity in a world of falsehood and violence (Sattler)—each of these viewpoints, of course, being nested in a particular account of the relationship between God’s saving action and Christian communities. But the parallel is still significant. In sixteenth-century Europe, as in North Africa in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, patience served as an occasion to think about and, in some respects, to define Christian identity in an unsettled milieu. It was a way for theologians and/or Christian leaders to lay claim to what faith entails, in terms of both a believer’s relationship to herself and a believer’s comportment vis-à-vis the church and the world at large. The second reason for this section is to make good on a broader claim about the declining fortunes of patience in the early years of the Reformation, thereby taking the wind out of the sails of readers who have become enamored with Calvin’s theological creativity. Although Luther, Karlstadt, and Sattler advance compelling accounts

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of Christian life, they show little-to-no interest in the issue of divine patience. A parallel with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries thus stands in plain view. Just as Julian offered an expansive vernacularsystematic statement that foregrounds human and divine patience, in welcome contrast to Aquinas’ more circumscribed outlook, so the vernacular-systematic statements of three early reformers, positioned on a spectrum that runs from magisterial to radical, pale in comparison with Calvin’s more ambitious agenda. To be sure, one must not overplay the parallel. A broader engagement with sixteenth-century authors might show such “narrowing” to be a local, temporary affair. Still, an engagement with Luther, Karlstadt, and Sattler seems to disclose again the precariousness of patience as a term of theological art. Sixteenth-century theologians, by and large, are comfortable thinking and writing about patience as it bears on Christian life. The issue of divine patience, by contrast, is handled gingerly, intermittently, and unevenly—if, that is, it is handled at all.

(a) Martin Luther ­ artin Luther’s Invocavit Sermons, delivered from March 9 to March M 16 in 1522, supply a vivid snapshot of the reformer’s theological and political mindset once the break with Rome was behind him and new challenges hove into view.34 Luther was back in Wittenberg after a For the German, see Martin Luther, Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe), Ser. 1, Schriften, vol. 10, pt. 3 (Weimar: H. Böhlaus, 1905), 1– 64; and Luthers Werke in Auswahl, ed. Otto Clemen and Albert Leitzmann, vol. 7, Predigten, ed. Emanuel Hirsch (3rd edn) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), 363–87 (the latter text being the basis of the English translation). For background and analysis, see Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Reforming the Reformation, 1521–1532, trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 59–66; Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Malden: Blackwell, 1996), 91–110; Walter von Loewenich, Martin Luther: The Man and His Work, trans. Lawrence W. Denef (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), 214–30; and Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), 317–35. Useful (if not always persuasive) accounts of Karlstadt and Karlstadt’s relation to Luther are provided by Hans J. Hillenbrand, “Andreas Bodenstein of Carlstadt, Prodigal Reformer,” CH 38, no. 4 (1966): 379–98; Ronald J. Sider, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt: The Development of His Thought, 1517–1525 (Leiden: Brill, 1974); David C. Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings: From Geiler von Kayserberg to Theodore Beza, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 123–30; and George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd edn (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2000), 110–20. 34

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period of seclusion at the Wartburg and was eager to contend with multiple controversies roiling the city. While the sweeping changes of recent years made for a generally unsettled context, the asseverations of the Zwickau Prophets (Nikolaus Storch, Thomas Drechsel, Markus Stübner), restive students and townspeople, inflammatory actions by Andreas Karlstadt, Gabriel Zwilling, and other ministers, and the reflexive irenicism of Philip Melanchthon had brought local tensions to a head. Reform was in full swing, but without much leadership and with little coherence in execution. Ever inclined toward the melodramatic—or, perhaps more charitably, cognizant of the challenges facing those striving to realize a new form of Christian identity in an unstable political, cultural, ecclesial environment— Luther worried openly about the city’s future. He was therefore characteristically blunt about the need for a common ethos of reform. Conflicting agendas, personal acrimony, and “tomfoolery that does not amount to anything” must not continue, “lest Wittenberg become Capernaum” (LW 51, 96 and 71). While the addresses do not engage in particularly aggressive mudslinging, Luther has no compunctions about challenging those who favored a more rapid pace of reform. It is not that he does not appreciate the drive for conspicuous, radical change. Quite the contrary: he judges the instincts of many of his colleagues to be perfectly sound. Private masses should be abolished, chastity and unmarried life ought not to be obligatory for priests and nuns, images must be removed from churches, dietary practices need to be rethought, the distribution and reception of mass requires reconsideration, etc. But Luther does not believe that each issue must be dealt with immediately. It is far more important for the Reformation to set down strong roots, and that requires ministers and townspeople alike to focus on what is truly needful: attending to the Word and committing themselves to the practices of love and forbearance. Raising the temperature a notch, Luther warns that those agitating for swift change risk reviving an ideology of works righteousness, with action in the ecclesial sphere becoming a yardstick by which faithfulness is measured. This, he supposes, amounts to a failure to differentiate an evangelical “may” (which bespeaks a glad receipt of God’s promise) from a legalistic “must” (which views adherence to the law as a gauge by which to measure the worthiness of Christian life). It also bespeaks a rank failure of perspective. What God truly wants, after all, is for Christians to

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“promote and practice and preach the Word” and, thereby, to “let the Word alone do the work” (LW 51, 90 and 83, my emphases) of reform, trusting that the principle of sola gratia is just as relevant to ecclesial life as it is to the faith of individual Christians. For just as the Word exposed the folly of late medieval Catholicism and precipitated the renewal of faith in the 1510s, so the Word will prove itself in the 1520s, guiding the church toward new forms of order and holiness. The temporary toleration of outdated practices, accordingly, should not be viewed as backsliding, much less a betrayal of first principles. It simply demonstrates confidence in the work that God is doing. In his first sermon, Luther identifies patience (Gedult) as one of the four “chief things that concern a Christian” and deems it particularly valuable for those inclined to proceed with “too much haste” (LW 51, 71 and 72). While an affirmation of the double commandment to love God and neighbor overarches this exhortation, its elaboration bears comparison with Aquinas’ construal of patientia. Patience is again presented as part of a disposition that tolerates delays in the realization of local goals, since that disposition adheres to a “cause” that is itself “good” (LW 51, 72), while selecting the right means to an end in a compromised situation. However, if Aquinas’ Summa holds the New Testament at a distance when parsing the cardinal virtue of fortitude and its secondary part, Luther draws it close. Patience is not tied to the operations of reason in relation to human passions; it is described as a quality of those who seek to maintain the health of the body of Christ as that body is enacted, through grace, at a particular moment in time and space. Patience, more particularly, is exhibited by those who, given the “strength” of their faith, resist the temptation to voice frustration toward the “weak” who remain attached to outmoded ecclesial conventions. Yes, again, the continuation of private masses, the bonds of chastity, the persistence of images, etc.: all of this is bound to discomfit those who have become newly aware of God’s justifying action, and whose collective heart can “never rest or restrain itself … but pours itself out again for the benefit and service of the brethren, just as God has done to it” (LW 51, 72). And strength of faith is bound to issue in reforming zeal, in an elevated sense of what is now possible— the Christian being “a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” But the other pole of the dialectic of The Freedom of a Christian must be upheld. Disagreements about “ceremonies” and changes

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to ecclesial life should be subordinated to a Christian’s desire to be “a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all” (LW 31, 344). And it is precisely at this point that the Word—not, pace Aquinas, reason—enables the “strong” to exercise patience, to put up with those who remain “idlers” or who appear to be “fainthearted” (1 Thess. 5:14). As such, it is quite unnecessary for anyone to “insist upon his rights,” especially when those “rights” imperil the unity of a fledgling church; and it is crucial to ascertain “what may be useful and helpful” (LW 51, 72), while tolerating those attached to the old ways. To dramatize the point, Luther even suggests that the “strong” ought to overlay the role of a loving parent with that of a sibling who seeks to serve her brethren, treating outdated practices as adiaphora (“free things”) that do not require regulation. He plays deftly on Cyprian’s famous identification of the church as mother, offering a comparison between reform and the need for parents to respect the pace of their child’s development: “What does a mother do to her child? First she gives it milk, then gruel, then eggs and soft food, whereas if she turned about and gave it solid food, the child would never thrive (cf. 1 Cor. 3:2; Heb. 5:12–13).” So too, Luther counsels: “we should also deal with our brother, have patience with him for a time, have patience with his weakness and help him bear it; we should also give him milk-food, too (1 Pet. 2:2; cf. Rom. 14:1–3), as was done with us, until he, too, grows strong, and thus we do not travel heavenward alone but bring our brethren, who are not now our friends, with us” (LW 51, 72). Appreciation for the artfulness of these early remarks, to be sure, might go hand in hand with doubts about Luther’s sincerity. The initial suggestion that the reforms favored by Karlstadt et al. were motivated by righteous zeal is soon replaced by more censorious, even tetchy, lines of reflection. If there is relatively little in the way of overheated polemics, later sermons in the series read less like exercises in fraternal and maternal persuasion, more like attempts at managerial control—a stark contrast to the sense of delight and possibility that courses through The Freedom of a Christian.35 Most interesting for my Although this shift in tone might, to be sure, form part of a deft rhetorical strategy. On which, see Neil R. Leroux, “The Rhetor’s Perceived Situation: Luther’s Invocavit Sermons,” RSQ 28, no. 1 (1998): 49–80. More broadly, see idem, Luther’s Rhetoric: Strategies and Style from the Invocavit Sermons (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002).

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purposes, however, is the very limited profile given to patience. A concern to reboot Wittenberg’s ecclesial life, a bracing appeal to the presence and activity of the Word, and a skillful arrangement of scriptural figures (with an intriguing bit of gender-bending thrown in for good measure) notwithstanding, Luther shows absolutely no interest in God’s exercise of patience. The issue doesn’t even hover on the margins of the text; it is nowhere to be seen. Also absent, perhaps more surprisingly, is Augustine’s deft integration of eschatological and existential concerns, which framed patience as a virtue that enables the faithful to cope with the tension between a sinful here and now and a heavenly hereafter. Inasmuch as Luther binds the motif of patience to interpersonal challenges that occur in medias res, he has reinstated—unwittingly or wittingly, it doesn’t really matter—Aquinas severe circumscription of the meaning of the term. I do not want to overplay this point. When Luther preached, contextual exigencies bulked large in his mind, as did a broader concern for a movement that was still in its infancy. An interest in the “chief things which concern a Christian” (LW 51, 76) dominated his writings in the first half of 1522, and this resulted, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the elaboration of positions that Luther hoped would unify those settling into a new mode of Christian life. Three nearly contemporaneous treatises illustrate the point: The Estate of Marriage, A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion, and Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (LW 45, 12–129) show Luther endeavoring to manage the speed at which reform was occurring, managing a recalibration of existential and ecclesial mores while avoiding anything that could complicate a tricky political situation. As with the Invocavit sermons, each treatise encourages tolerance for the varied “speeds” at which reform occurs, while directing attention to the agency of the Word; and each treatise declares, in a paternalistic but politically savvy way, that “simple people” (LW 45, 73) should not be alienated by needless grandstanding (of which there was no shortage, inside and beyond Wittenberg). Even so, the path not taken remains noteworthy. Luther could have said, after all, that God patiently indulges the ecclesial timidity of those incorporated into the body of Christ, in order that they might have time to repent and mend their ways—or that God patiently forbears outbursts of well-intentioned zeal when God’s honor is at stake.

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Or he could have said that division over ecclesial conventions risks testing the patience of a longsuffering God, who is dismayed by internecine squabbles. Or that those who suppose themselves to be “strong” are required “patiently [to] take the cross of Christ … in order to be able to suffer,” and have that suffering transformed by God, when dealing with those who are “weak” (LW 51, 117). Or, to draw on Ingolf Dalferth’s recent work, Luther could have explored the relationship between passivity and patience: the former word naming the “original” state of the human being, brought into existence out of nothing and dependent entirely on God’s gracious self-communication as Word, the latter naming the comportment of one who, having received Christ’s justifying righteousness, is newly alert to the fact that the “possibilities” of human existence proceed from the reception of God’s gifts—not the false busyness of ecclesial controversy.36 Each line of reflection would have served, at least in principle, to lower further the temperature of debate, while setting talk about the Word’s activity in a broader theological frame. But none of that is found in the Invocavit sermons. Talk of God’s patience is set aside, and talk of human patience is kept within strict boundaries. I would add that Luther, in later works, did sometimes refer to divine patience. Recall how Calvin treated Gen. 15:16 as an occasion to acclaim God’s slowness to anger. Luther thinks similarly. He suggests that the continuing “iniquities of the Amorites” adverts to the “patience of God,” before appending a more menacing aside: “let us too endure their iniquities for a time; for they will not go unpunished forever” (LW 3, 40; see also LW 26, 136; LW 1, 159; LW 1, 289; and LW 2, 89). L ­ uther also acclaimed God’s patience with unbelievers, as God waits for them to come to faith (LW 2, 86), and extolled Christ’s patience as an example to be followed (LW 26, 352). But, given the fact that these comments are fairly occasional and ad hoc, they serve only to set my point in more vivid relief. On the (reasonable) assumption that the younger Luther was familiar with talk of divine patience, its absence from the Invocavit sermons becomes even striking.

Ingolf U. Dalferth, Creatures of Possibility: The Theological Basis of Human Freedom, trans. Jo Bennett (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016). I should note that Dalferth himself does not connect passivity and patience in this manner. But it is a possible gloss on Dalferth’s text, and it is notable that this distinction was available to Luther and, on occasion, taken up by him in later years (see, for instance, LW 26, 392).

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(b) Andreas Karlstadt Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt were colleagues at the University of Wittenberg in the 1510s. The former was an upand-coming scholar, the latter a more established academic, if still relatively young. But their relationship was possibly strained by the end of the decade: the Acta Jenensia recounts a bad-tempered meeting in a tavern in August 1524, during which the two rehashed an earlier quarrel over who would speak first at the Leipzig Debate (1519).37 And, as noted above, Karlstadt was an outspoken advocate for reform when Luther was at the Wartburg: Karlstadt presided over a German-language Christmas Day mass (which distributed both elements to all in attendance), got married, and supported the Wittenberg Ordinance of January 1522.38 Doubtless stung by the Invocavit sermons that Luther preached on his return, Karlstadt soon left the city and took up a ministerial position in Orlamünde, in Thuringia. But geographic distance did not cool passions. Karlstadt’s persistent advocacy for reform prompted Luther to denounce the monstra Carlstadii and to associate his erstwhile comrade with the patently different program of Thomas Müntzer.39 In Against the Heavenly Prophets (1525), Luther then offered a particularly caustic take on Karlstadt’s understanding of the eucharist. He opens with the claim that “Doctor Andreas Karlstadt has deserted us, and on top of that has become our worst enemy”; he numbers Karlstadt among “honor-seeking prophets who do nothing but break images, manhandle the sacrament” and “seek a new kind of mortification” (LW 40, 79, and 81); and he supposes, again, that Karlstadt’s entire program represents a throwback to the regime of works righteousness. If earlier differences could have been framed as passing differences of opinion, then, by 1525 Luther

See “Confrontation at the Black Bear,” in Karlstadt’s Battle with Luther: Documents in a Liberal-Radical Debate, ed. Ronald J. Sider (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 36–48, esp. 46. Antedating this meeting was a disagreement over the authorship of an ancient text; see Sider, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, 17–20. 38 See Kenneth G. Appold, The Reformation: A Brief History (Malden: WileyBlackwell, 2011), 81–7. 39 Noted in Gordon Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 131. Rupp’s broader treatment of Karlstadt remains informative; see 49–153. 37

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had ensured that they were volleys in a raucous slanging match— one that he had no intention of losing. Although Karlstadt wrote “Whether One Should Proceed Slowly” in 1524, before relations with Luther had completely broken down, it provides a significant counterpoint to Luther’s valorization of patience and embrace of incrementalism. At the outset of the text, Karlstadt chides Bartel Bach, a clerk in the city of Joachimstal who had expressed sympathy for “what the entire world is now doing, shouting ‘Weak, weak, sick, sick; not so fast; slowly, slowly’” (EC 248 rev.).40 For Karlstadt, the pace of reform must not be synchronized with “strength” or “weakness” of faith, nor tied to debates about the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of “external” supports for those dragging their feet. To think along such lines does nothing to build up the body of Christ; it simply bespeaks a desire to dilute the force of God’s directives. Impatience must in fact be the order of the day when it comes to pressing issues, such as the removal of images and the reform of the mass. Those seized by the gospel “are obligated no less than the least to look promptly, directly, earnestly, and diligently to God’s judgments which in themselves are just and true; you are not to look to the strong or the weak … you must not wait for one another or until the other follows your lead” (EC 249). Could one credibly contend that obedience to other commandments, having to do with murder, adultery, theft, and the like, ought to depend on prevailing mores? Should one “not fulfill God’s commandments immediately, but rather wait until [the weak and foolish] have become wise and strong”? Obviously not. It would be “strange” to suppose, too, that one could “move the weak along by delaying and setting aside the clear commandments of God” (EC 259). To refuse delay is a far better way for Christians to express love. It is a public demonstration of “yieldedness” (Gelassenheit) vis-à-vis God, expressive of a faith that is not “tardy in coming forth with works which are to be for the betterment of our neighbor” (EC 256). Perhaps taking aim at Luther’s deft association of “brotherhood” and motherly care and claiming the mantle of paterfamilias for himself (and, at the same time, challenging a figure employed in A Sincere Admonition; see LW 45, 73), Karlstadt switches the gender

Revisions made in light of the original German; see Karlstadts Schriften aus den Jahren 1523–25, ed. Erich Hertzsch, pt. 1 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1956), 73–97.

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of the parent to drive home his point: “Blessed … [is] the one who removes what might destroy his brother, even against his will, thus saddening the one for whom he is doing a good deed, so that he might benefit him—just as a father will anger the child whom he loves when he removes a sharp knife from his hand” (EC 266; cf. 260–1).41 Glossing the ethos of this tract as a commendation of impatience is, admittedly, a touch risky.42 Since Karlstadt’s public persona seemed to combine truculence and skittishness—hardly a winning combination, no matter the context—it invites the same kind of reductive psychologizing as that to which Luther has been subjected.43 That Karlstadt’s writings are inferior to those of Luther and Calvin (and, for that matter, those of Melanchthon, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and others) further compounds the problem. Seemingly unable to operate beyond the “bluff simplicity”44 that characterized many early-sixteenth-century religious pamphlets, Karlstadt’s rhetoric tended to smother flashes of insight with inexactitude, polemics, digressive flights of speculation, and a refusal to differentiate central and peripheral issues. To discern impatience in this text, then, risks reinforcing the uncritical belief that the Reformation’s radical wing was made up of unthinking Schwärmerei, most of whom lacked the capacity for reasoned reflection, cherished private revelations of the Spirit over the scriptural witness, and lacked the gravitas and maturity of their magisterial counterparts.45 Even so, Karlstadt’s calls for “speed” and “action,” as well his denunciation of those who “wait,” justify

Neil R. Leroux writes instructively on this image; see “Why Not Now? Karlstadt’s Whether We Should Proceed Slowly and Avoid Offending the Weak in Matters That Concern God’s Will (1524),” RRR 13, no. 1 (2011): 33–62, esp. 49–51; and idem, “‘The Mouth of Christ Alone’: Luther’s Eine treue Vermahnung (1522) on the Weak in Faith,” R&R 33, no. 4 (2010): 3–28, esp. 13–14. 42 Although it certainly has precedent. See, for instance, Gordon Rupp, “Andreas Karlstadt and Reformation Puritanism,” JTS 10, no. 2 (1959): 308–26, esp. 317. 43 See Ulrich Bubenheimer, “Gelassenheit und Absölung: Eine psychohistoriche über Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt und seinen Konflict mit Martin Luther,” ZKG 92 (1981): 250–68. 44 Peter Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 49. Matheson offers a valuable analysis of Karlstadt’s rhetoric on 59–80. 45 On which, see Paul L. Maier, “Fanaticism as a Theological Category in the Lutheran Confessions,” CTQ 44, nos. 2–3 (1980): 173–81. 41

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this gloss; and a little interpretative scrutiny shows that an ethos of impatience is backed by a coherent and compelling theological rationale. Generally, it is important to read Karlstadt’s treatise in terms of an evangelical imperative. Moments of overheated rhetoric ought not to distract us, much less lead us to number Karlstadt among those who offered “shrill and utopian cries for the immediate restoration of Eden”—cries that bespeak a “‘puritan’ form of Reformation” that exchanged faithful proclamation for a new species of “legalism.”46 Utopianism is not at issue here, and talk of “puritanism” and “legalism” is liable to mislead. The “oughts” and “musts” of “Whether One Should Proceed Slowly” are better read as distinguishing marks of an exemplary movement of reform in an early modern European context. They attest to a paradigm shift that Luther, in the Invocavit sermons, was yet to endorse—there being, to borrow from Charles Taylor, only one “speed” in religious life, not (as many pre-modern European Christians supposed) an arrangement that permits the religious elite to travel on a fast-track while others coast in an undemanding slow lane. As Karlstadt sees it, if reform is left to one segment of the church, it is not really reform, it is not really a realization of the priesthood of all believers. Taylor captures the point: if reform is truly to deserve is name, it must pursue “a levelling up which le[aves] no further room for different speeds”; it must refuse to acquiesce to the “way things are”; it must seek a church that is entirely committed to the gospel.47 More particularly, Karlstadt’s “oughts” and “musts” should be read as symptoms of a vivid sense of the relationship between divine command and human action, a function of a “uniquely deictic interpretation of the verba testamenti” as they are received by individuals and communities.48 Faith, by these lights, is not reducible to a mere change of status vis-à-vis God; faith elicits new forms of conduct, such that believers can set about effecting material changes in the spheres of the church and the world at large. So far, then, 46 Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings, 127; and Markus Wriedt, “Luther’s Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 105. 47 Taylor, A Secular Age, 77. 48 Richard A. Beinert, “Another Look at Luther’s Battle with Karlstadt,” CTQ 73 (2009): 162.

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so magisterial? Yes—but a twist comes when Karlstadt jettisons Luther’s pairing of law and gospel (the former expressing divine accusation and condemnation, the latter being a divine promise, the material content of which is the story of Christ and the forgiveness he effects), preferring to combine an Augustinian differentiation of letter and spirit, a distinctive pairing of knowledge of God and hatred of the self, and a bold understanding of Christian rebirth. A strange amalgam, no doubt. But the impact on Karlstadt’s construal of Christian life is momentous. Front and center, now, is the claim that a Christian must straightaway set about fulfilling the law, instead of trusting, in gratitude and relief, in its abrogation.49 The reason, then, that one must not “go slowly,” must not worry about “offending the weak”—and the reason that one ought to articulate what another Martin Luther famously described as a “legitimate and unavoidable impatience”—is God’s insistence that God’s directives be realized immediately, in word and in deed.50 There is no time for strategizing, no possibility of incremental change, no time to waste. The believer may not “be idle or slothful, since God’s speech binds him and drives him to action”; he must instead be “fervid (hitzig), busy, and strong, never standing still, but ready to break out with passion and be active” (EC 257 and 256 rev.). Karlstadt’s understanding of “detachment” or “yieldedness” (Gelassenheit) forms an important backdrop to this construal of Christian discipleship.51 Gelassenheit is of course notoriously difficult to render into English. There is some overlap with patristic commendations of patience as a matter of self-denial, endurance of the world and the spiritual and ethical trials ingredient to it, participation in Christ’s sufferings, and a determination to avoid reflexive responses to events; there is also a complex medieval

In identifying multiple dimensions of Karlstadt’s theology, instead of treating rebirth as the pivot around which everything turns, I follow a line taken by Vincent Evener, “Divine Pedagogy and Self-Accusation: Reassessing the Theology of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt,” MQR 87 (2013): 335–67. 50 Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classics, 2000), 93. 51 While this motif is used in many of Karlstadt’s writings, it is pivotal for two important pieces: “Tract on the Supreme Virtue of Gelassenheit” (1520) and “The Meaning of the Term Gelassen and Where in Holy Scripture It Is Found” (1523). It also features prominently in “Regarding the Sabbath and Statutory Holy Days.” See EC 27–39, 133–68, and 317–38. 49

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history that passes through Meister Eckhart, the sermons of Johannes Tauler, the Theologica Germanica, and the works of Johannes Staupitz (a decisive influence on Karlstadt and Luther). Of particular importance for my purposes, however, is Karlstadt’s claim that a comportment defined by Gelassenheit presages the dissolution of the sinful ego. The Christian who embraces “yieldedness” makes herself supremely susceptible to God, wholly receptive to being “used” by God, and to such an extent that the distinction between God and individual starts to break down— the believer, at points, seeming to exist as a passive instrument, wielded by God as God achieves God’s purposes. Thus Karlstadt: as one shucks off “[e]verything to which ego and I-ness [icheit] may cling,” so “detachment penetrates and flows over every created thing and comes into its uncreated nothing,” and one comes to be “fully immersed in God’s will” (EC 138). And if this account of the ego-dissolution sometimes leads to a startling commendation of self-hatred, while also raising interesting questions about early Protestant “mysticism,” it also forms the starting point for a powerful vision of Christian activism.52 Once the Christian has “sunk” herself into the divine will, indifference toward church and world is simply not an option. “Yieldedness,” even as it might prompt despair about oneself as a sinner, will be partnered with radical conduct. And if that conduct might appear disruptive, that is but a reflex of the decisive act of killing and making alive—for “[a]ll that is ours must perish and disappear, if God’s will is to take hold, come forth, and rule in us” (EC 209). Granted, then, that Karlstadt might resist this interpretative gloss, it seems both possible and apt: Christians who exercise impatience well, who act swiftly and decisively and therefore do not “proceed slowly,” do so on the basis of a relationship with God anchored in the patience of Gelassenheit. When Gelassenheit obtains, when patience vis-à-vis God is ascendant, the Christian numbers among those who “do what ought to be done” because they “are still … and wait for how and when God deigns to sanctify them in conformity to himself” (EC 136 and 322)—a stillness that empowers them to hasten toward a Kingdom that demands enactment.

On self-hatred, see again Evener, “Divine Pedagogy and Self-Accusation.”

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(c) Michael Sattler Thus far, we have two different perspectives in play. If neither ascribes patience to God, in contrast with Calvin, both reckon seriously with its place in Christian life. Luther imagines patience as a tempering of righteous zeal, endorsed for the sake of those whose sensibilities are “weak” and backed with a deep confidence in the activity of the sovereign Word. Karlstadt, by contrast, views patience as a failure to make good on one’s justification and a repudiation of God’s gracious transformation of the self into an agent of change—a transformation that has as its existential precondition a dissolution of the self, grounded in a posture defined by the patience of Gelassenheit. What of Michael Sattler (c. 1490–1527 ce), leader of Swiss and South German Anabaptists and martyr to their cause? To begin with the obvious: Sattler’s occasional writings do not reckon with patience in ways that compare directly with Luther and Karlstadt. As such, it can be bit tricky to draw connections with the issues raised during that duo’s quarrels over the pace of ecclesial reform, when debates about images, the eucharist, marriage, etc., bulked large. Sattler’s vision is rather broader, bearing directly on the relationship of church to European society at large: he wants to describe how Christians, those who are truly “brothers and sisters in the Lord,” should live as a people set apart, bearing witness to what it is to be “chosen out of the world,” being “members of the household of God … fellow citizens of the saints” (LMS 22, 34, and 23). This focus is epitomized by the famous Schleitheim Confession of February 24, 1527—a document sandwiched, on the one side, between the cruel and needless suppression of worker uprisings that contested exploitation and, on the other, the apocalyptic folly of the Münster rebellion in the 1530s; and a document that constitutes an important chapter in the noble tradition of Christian pacifism.53 For background, see C. Arnold Snyder, The Life and Thought of Michael Sattler (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1984); J. Denny Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism (Scottdale: Herald Press, 2005), esp. 60–4; and Williams, Radical Reformation, esp. 288–97. For the German text, I draw on Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz, ed. Heinold Fast, vol. 2 (Zürich: TVZ, 1973), 26–36. For more on the peasant/worker uprisings, the best place to begin is Peter Blickle’s classic text, Die Revolution von 1525, 4th edn (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004). 53

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An insistence on adult baptism, following a sincere profession and enactment of faith; the linking of fellowship and an exclusionary “ban”; a commemorative account of the eucharist; a protodemocratic approach to the selection of ministers; an unequivocal rejection of violence; a disavowal of oaths: these elements of the Confession, of which Sattler was likely the principal author, are fairly well known. Each element adverts to the conviction that a public performance of faith is an obligation laid upon every Christian, and to the belief that such performances demonstrate believers’ disaffiliation from a world consumed by sin. A nice circularity is in play: those “who have fellowship with the dead works of darkness” have “no part in the light,” while those who number themselves among “the children of the light” will commit to “the separation that shall take place from the evil and the wickedness that the devil has planted in the world” (LMS 34 and 37). And with this standpoint, one moves far away from an understanding of patience that commends tolerance in face of disagreement, and forbearance in face of moments of backsliding. While Luther’s sermons call to mind Eph. 4:1–5, which exhort Christians to “bear … with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (vv. 2–3) and 1 Thess. 5:14, which calls on Christians to be “patient” with “idlers … the fainthearted … the weak,” Sattler brings one closer to scriptural texts marked by eschatological urgency, and which suggest a binary of “church” and “world.” But this urgency does not render the motif of patience marginal. It shows up in three interlocking dimensions of Sattler’s outlook: his vision of Christian community, his understanding of suffering, and his belief that Christians must set about transforming the contexts in which they live. The first dimension is disclosed in the Confession’s preamble. Beseeching those who hesitate to join the movement to “turn to the true implanted members of Christ, who have been armed with patience (gedültigkeyt) and self-knowledge,” Sattler writes: Dear brothers and sisters, we who have been assembled in the Lord at Schleitheim on the Randen make known, in points and articles, unto all that love God, that as far as we are concerned, we have been united (vereinigt) to stand fast in the Lord as obedient children of God, sons and daughters, who have been and shall be separated (abgesündert) from the world in all that

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we do and leave undone, and (the praise and glory be to God alone) uncontradicted by the brothers, completely in peace. Herein we have sensed the unity (eynigkeyt) of the Father and of our common Christ as present with us in their Spirit. For the Lord is a Lord of peace and not of quarreling, as Paul indicates. (LMS 35) One finds here a declaration of intent and the delineation of a task. Those assembled are committing themselves to the formation and sustenance of a kind of community that, given its divine mandate, understands “unity” to be coextensive with separation from the world—a community, that is, that contests the reign of sin by demonstrating what Christian faith can and should mean, anchored as it is in Christ’s saving history and animated by the power of the Spirit. Such a self-understanding, of course, quickly raised concerns. Reprising Luther’s critique of Karlstadt, Wolfgang Capito spoke for many when he espied a “new monasticism” predicated on an ideology of works righteousness (LMS 87). As with Karlstadt, however, Sattler must be read more carefully. Whatever the connections between medieval monasticism and Swiss Anabaptism, the Confession does not construe “works” as the price of entry for membership in a salvific club. Its principal aim is to describe the kind of people that God, by grace, assembles to bear witness to the Gospel. It seeks to show, more specifically, how the peacefulness and unity (patience?) of God’s own triune life, made available to human beings through Christ and the Spirit, are the condition of possibility for a new kind of fraternity and sorority; and it aims to commend this fraternity and sorority as a way for Christians to extend the peacefulness of Christ’s Kingdom into a fallen world. Being “armed with patience,” then, is a way of describing a peculiar formation of identity, both individual and communal—one that enables women, men, and children to maintain a posture that contests the mores of the world, even as it stands in service of that same world. A letter Sattler wrote to the church at Horb during his imprisonment and prior to his trial, torture, and execution further illustrates this point: it implores readers to “let no one shift your goal” and to “go right on, firm and undeviating, in all patience”; it cites Rom. 13:4–7 (“Love is patient; love is kind … ”) as a guiding norm in Christian relationships; and, in its peroration, it writes about the “peace of Jesus Christ … the love of the heavenly Father … and the grace

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of Their Spirit” as that which keeps Christians “flawless, without sin … and joyous and poor” (LMS 60 and 63). While the letter’s integration of trinitarian, Christological, and ecclesial thinking is gestural, one finds here a nice parallel to the Confession, with an acclamation of the community’s divine “foundation” and the act of communal “maintenance” set side by side. And both recall something of Tertullian’s vision of the church as a counterworld—although, in this context, talk of a counterpublic is perhaps preferable—that is oriented and ordered to the patientia that distinguishes the triune God.54 To be patient, once one has been gathered and empowered by God, is to resist and disrupt the sinful run of affairs. It means honoring the God in “whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas 1:17) through lives that have nothing to do with “disorder” and everything to do with “peace” (1 Cor. 14:33), so that God’s identity is broadcast to a world given over to sin.55 This brings me to the second dimension of Sattler’s thinking about patience. In general, it is fair to say that a pacifistic “ethical imitatio Christi”56 could hardly be practiced without disruption to the modes of “churchstateness” that structured the lives of most Europeans in the 1520s.57 And the refusal of violence and oaths I am again borrowing language from the “Enhancing Life Project” developed by Günter Thomas and William Schweitzer (see “Glossary,” http://enhancinglife. uchicago.edu/resources#glossary), as well as Michael Warner’s important work, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 55 While a reconstruction of Sattler’s understanding of God is likely impossible, it is important to note that his trinitarian gestures support the observation that Anabaptist thinkers did not simply parrot the doctrinal claims of their magisterial colleagues, then draw alternative ethical conclusions. They developed their own theological insights and innovations, which shaped the ethical agendas that they pursued. Thomas N. Finger develops this point instructively, albeit without reference to Sattler; see “Retrieving Historic Anabaptist Christology for Contemporary Anabaptist Theology,” in The Work of Jesus Christ in Anabaptist Perspective, ed. Alain Epp Weaver and Gerald J. Mast (Telford: Cascadia Publishing House, 2008), 149–72. 56 Williams, Radical Reformation, 294. 57 A useful neologism, employed by Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan in Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). While state and church can be analytically differentiated, their historical relationship is typically a matter of deep entanglement. State and church draw meaning from each other, determine each other, and, more often than not, act as “symbiotically joined twins, to a degree made in each other’s image” (6). 54

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did not just complicate the relationship between Roman Catholic and “temporal” leaders; it also directly challenged the emergent perspectives of Luther and his followers who, for the most part, supposed that the “sacred” and “secular” realms should move on parallel tracks, with the former realm leaving the latter to its own devices. A community “armed with patience,” after all, was not going to be a private, inward-looking affair. Such a community was an attempt to overhaul the ecclesial and political imaginary of northern Europe. It was, as Sattler’s rhetoric suggests, an offensive action in a larger war. More particularly, Sattler connects the patience of a separated community with patience as a matter of suffering. Perhaps putting the Rule of Benedict to new use (which proposes that monks might “through patience share in the sufferings of Christ”), Sattler’s letter to the church in Horb anticipates Calvin’s account of patience as the capacity to endure affliction and hardship.58 Patience that is “firm and undeviating” segues easily into an acclamation of the “cross which God has laid upon you” and animates the exhortation that believers ought not to become ­ eary if … chastised by the Lord, for he whom God loves w He chastises, and, like a father, He finds pleasure in His Son … You know what love is through the testimony of Paul our fellow brother; he says: Love is patient and kind, not jealous, not puffed up, not ambitious, seeks not its own, thinks no evil, rejoices not in iniquity, rejoices in the truth, suffers everything, endures everything, believes everything, hopes everything. If you understand this text, you will find the love of God and neighbor. If you love God you will rejoice in the truth and will believe, hope, and endure everything that comes from God. (LMS 58 and 59, spelling modernized) The sufferings that Christians endure, on this reckoning, are not only attributable to the wickedness of the world. They also form a The Rule of St. Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981), 19 (Prologue, §50). In The Life and Thought of Michael Sattler, Snyder points out that Sattler likely received the Rule as it was modulated by Johannes Trithemius—an author who also seemed to emphasize the importance of patience (so 156).

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vital moment in the process of sanctification. And precisely because God has special regard for those who have heeded the call to separate, the sufferings of the “children of light” are an occasion for those same children to participate in Christ’s atoning death, situating themselves within the ongoing drama of salvation. Sattler here anticipates something of the “re-signification of the world” that Michelle Chaplin Sanchez has shown to be vital to the 1559 Institutes: he views the enactment of patience, undertaken in face of persecution, as a way for believers to make the body of Christ ever more concrete, ever more visible in history. Thus it is that Sattler writes, in the same letter to the Church of Horb, of the need to embrace “cross, misery, imprisonment, self-denial, and finally … death; thereby you can assuredly present yourselves to God your heavenly Father as a purely righteous, upright congregation of Christ, purified through His blood, that she might be lovely and irreproachable before God and men” (LMS 58). The patient endurance of trials and travails means laying claim, in the hereand-now, to an eschatological future beyond compare. It is as an occasion for Christians to anticipate that time in which the crucified and resurrected Christ will honor those incorporated into his body in a new way, “justifying” them before God the Father, in response to their willingness to bear witness to him, taking up the cross in a manner that is “firm and undeviating … in all patience” (LMS 58). Accounts of Sattler’s martyrdom in Rottenburg deserve mention at this point. Klaus von Graveneck mentions that “Michael … bore everything willingly” during his trial, and hoped that others could “testify so courageously and patiently” (LMS 74 and 75). Wilhelm Reublin reports that, as Sattler was burned, “he cried with a clear voice often and constantly to God in heaven,” and, at the point of death, “raised his arms high with the first two fingers on each hand outstretched and cried with a powerful voice: ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my soul!’”; and that Sattler’s wife, Margaretha, who was drowned in the Neckar two days after her husband’s execution, “could not be turned away from her faith by any human grace or words” and with “great joy and strong faith she accepted and suffered death” (LMS 78 and 79). One can set aside the question of whether these reports are historically accurate; I cite them simply to underscore that Anabaptists understood the exercise of patience to be integral to a faith that persists unto death.

The third dimension of patience pertains to the way that a sanctified community holds fast against the world while working for

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its transformation, existing as a tightly knit subgroup anchored in and expressive of the “light of divine truth” (LMS 67). If the previous dimensions of Sattler’s outlook elevated patience as disruptive persistence and patience as endurance, this is patience as evangelical steadfastness. On one level, it involves active preservation of the purity of Christ’s body and, accordingly, a forceful repulsion of those in league with the devil (Exhibit A being the “false brothers” who distort the true faith [LMS 35]). And this preservative work is undertaken in a charged eschatological context, as the reference to Tit. 2:11–14 that brings the Articles to a close demonstrates: “The saving grace of God has appeared to all, and disciplines us, that we should deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and live circumspect, righteous and godly lives in this world; awaiting the same hope and the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ” (LMS 43). Denying “ungodliness” and awaiting Christ’s return go hand in hand: they are integral to discipleship prior to the parousia. On another level, patience as steadfastness connects with the injunction that Christians commit to “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God” (2 Pet. 3:12). It is not enough merely to safeguard the integrity of those within the community. The community must also set about identifying and embracing the “sheep” that live amongst sinful “wolves.” Insofar as a community is “armed with patience” (and, again, the use of military imagery is significant), the Christian community is itself a vehicle of salvation—a group whose commitment to sustaining a “purely righteous, upright congregation of Christ” (LMS 58) is paired with efforts to enlarge that community through “outreach” to a world of sin. It must continue the “work of God, which in us mercifully and graciously has been partially begun”; it must present itself as a refuge for “children of light” who are “scattered everywhere, wherever they might have been placed by God our Father” (LMS 34–5). A claim, obscured in some secondary literature but basic to many radical reformers’ self-understanding stands in plain sight. Separation from the world does not mean disengagement from or disregard for the world; separation is an attempt to transform the world, a patience of gathering that hopes to extend the “materialization” of Christ’s body on this side of eternity. To identify these dimensions of patience, obviously, does not shield Sattler’s perspective from critique. Although his

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understanding of the role that human agency plays in relation to God’s saving action is set within a different context than the late medieval (and sometimes frankly neo-Pelagian) framework that so infuriated Luther, one might ask if he overrates the place of human activity in the outworking of salvation. It is not the case, of course, that Sattler’s understanding of Christian life downplays the importance of grace. But there is a clear contrast with Luther (and, I think, Karlstadt) at this point. Grace is often characterized in terms that are more invitational than irresistible. The beneficii Christi can, it seems, be spurned by those who do not accede to the workings of the Spirit, and there lurks the possibility that one might postulate a “scale” of Christian responses to Christ’s saving work. One might also ask if Sattler’s construal of the church–world relationship drifts in dualistic direction, failing to discern the value of creation as a whole and lacking confidence in God’s providential activity—something symptomatic, to use a famous reproach, of a “sectarian temptation”59 that struggles to imagine that God might use configurations of “churchstateness” to achieve God’s purposes. At the same time, one can imagine robust responses to these concerns. It is not illegitimate to worry about the direction of some magisterial construals of grace, nor to postulate some kind of “dualism” between church and world that maps on to the antithetical relationship of grace and sin—for that is precisely what it means for Christians to bear witness to the newness of the gospel, to take up the cross, and to pay tribute to the freedom that is given to those who are included in Christ’s body. More important for my purposes, however, is Sattler’s determination to construe patience as an activity that distinguishes Christian life and exerts pressure on the quotidian. Sattler’s bravery at the end of his life is again noteworthy. In two separate accounts of his martyrdom, note is made of his imploring those who put him to death to repent, lest they suffer eternal condemnation (LMS 75 and 87)—an action, again, that simply would not make sense if “separation” from the world were taken to mean disengagement from the world. If Karlstadt imagined Gelassenheit to be the I use this phrase loosely; it would be anachronistic in the extreme to argue that Sattler exemplifies the tendencies James Gustafson described and challenged in “The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church, and the University,” CTSAP 40 (1985): 83–94.

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condition for decisive action on the part of the Christian to reform the church, Sattler’s account of patience as suffering and patience as steadfastness is the expression of a “yielded” community’s refusal to turn away from the world, in hopes that such a performance might precipitate conversion. It speaks to an account of human patience, perhaps derivative of the patience that defines God’s own life, that defines the activity of the believer and the community of which she is a part, as both are caught up in God’s saving action. “When Christ with His teaching true / Had gathered his little flock / He said that each with patience (Geduld) / Must daily follow Him bearing the cross” (LMS 140–41). The danger of the opening lines of this hymn, attributed to Sattler, would have been noted immediately by those in the mainstream of the Reformation: the “little flock” might end up focusing on its own righteousness, purity, and cross-bearing, losing sight of its responsibility for the world at large. And is not this danger compounded when the belief that “[t]here is nothing in common between Christ and Belial” is transposed into an eschatological key, prompting the suggestion that God’s patience with sinners will eventually run out, and that many “will be eternally condemned before the judgment of God to eternal fire” (LMS 23 and 75)? Are we not drifting again toward a debased apocalypticism, animated by an ugly kind of ressentiment? Still, as with the patristic authors, it is important not to move too quickly at this point. Certainly, Sattler hopes that Christians “would be sincere and righteous in all patience and love of God, so that you can be recognized in the midst of this adulterous generation … like bright and shining lights which God the heavenly Father has kindled with the knowledge of Him and the light of the Spirit”—and he does so, at least according to the final line of the hymn quoted above, in hopes that the triune God “May yet draw many to His Kingdom” (LMS 56 and 145). On this reckoning, the patience of the “children of light,” which communicates the light of God and the light of the Kingdom, might even temper God’s impatience, thus reducing the extent of God’s punishment of sinners.

3 Taking Stock In summarizing the findings of this chapter, it is useful to reverse the ordering of material and move from the 1520s onward. Patience was not a marginal concern for the earliest reformers. In the Invocavit sermons (1522), Luther makes it central to an incremental program of ecclesial change: he implores “strong”

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Christians to proceed at a pace that accommodates their timorous and fainthearted brothers and sisters. And this perspective marks Luther as an author who cannot easily be numbered among the late medieval reformers whom Charles Taylor supposes to have laid the groundwork for a “secular age.” To return to a passage quoted above: while Luther affirms, in principle, “a true uniformity of believers, a levelling up which left no further room for different speeds” of Christian life—thus his insistence on a priesthood of all believers, paired with incisive critiques of “special vocations”— Luther concedes, in practice, the benefits of a “multi-speed system” that allows the Christian race to be run at various tempos.60 When it comes to patience, he is a transitional figure: he has one foot in the domain of the medieval ancien régime, against which he so often fulminated, and the other in the domain of a brave new world. At the same time, while conceding the (temporary?) legitimacy of a “multi-speed system” (and in a manner that recalls the treatment of patientia in Aquinas’ Summa!), Luther exhibits a quintessentially Protestant confidence in the transformative activity of God. Patience is ingredient to a faith that knows when to get out of the way, so to speak, and to “let the Word alone do the work” (LW 51, 83). It is exercised in view of the belief that Christians must focus on receiving and following God’s action, lest there arise a new kind of works righteousness. Karlstadt’s and Sattler’s addresses to their evenchristen take a different tack. One finds here something of what Taylor takes to be the spirit of “radical Protestantism”: “a picture of what the properly sanctified life would be … with a severe set of moral demands” set in plain view, paired with a “strong sense of the scandal of social disorder” and the unacceptability of ecclesial malpractice.61 Christians must not and cannot wait; their commitment to the gospel, fired by grace, should express itself starkly in a world given over to sin. But reforming zeal goes hand in hand with nuanced accounts of patience in Christian life. For Karlstadt, uncompromising calls for reform have the patience of Gelassenheit as their condition of possibility. Bold, disruptive, and hasty conduct is grounded in its existential opposite: a stark kind of passivity and

Taylor, A Secular Age, 77 and 81. Taylor, A Secular Age, 82.

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susceptibility to God that allows for the dissolution and rebirth of a self that is aligned with and expressive of God’s rule. For Sattler, individuals and communities “armed with patience” will engage in the slow work of community formation. If there is something akin to Karlstadt’s account of God’s reconstitution of the individual subject, there is also an interest in the emergence of an intentional community of patient suffering, through which the light of Christ shines into the world—a light “kept burning regularly” (Lev. 24:2) that says “‘Come out,’ to those who are in darkness” (Isa. 49:9). We are thus returned to the spirit of Tertullian’s De patientia (and, to a lesser extent, Cyprian’s De bono patientia): Christian identity should manifest its opposition to a world of sin. But—and this is a considerable, consequential “but”—these three construals of human patience lack for a divine complement. Beyond an occasional nod in the direction of triune peacefulness (and, perhaps, at a pinch, triune patience?) in Sattler’s writing, the theological frame that proved so important for Cyprian and Tertullian has been set aside. There is no suggestion that patience characterizes God’s ways and works. There is no suggestion that God the Father patiently disburses created goods, so as to lend stability and order to historical life (recall the appeal to Matt. 5:45 in Tertullian and Cyprian); there is relatively little interest in patience as God’s forbearance of sin as God waits for individuals to repent and come to faith; there is no suggestion that Jesus Christ, the incarnation of the Son, is divine patience incarnate; there are only passing suggestions that it is because the Spirit is herself divine patience, in a third way, that individuals and communities are rendered patient. So while one might be heartened by the fact that patience is no longer set within an analysis of the cardinal virtues but is being linked to the distinctives of Christian life (pace Aquinas), and while one might appreciate that patience is treated as an integral dimension to a faith that negotiates a fallen world (as with Julian), we have not actually moved beyond the reticence that marked Augustine’s De patientia. It is certainly not clear that one should think first about God’s patience, as expressed in the economy, and then consider what human patience should (and should not) entail. The latter has become a realm unto itself. Thankfully, Calvin provides a counterpoint. One finds in the commentaries and Institutes three layers of reflection. The first treats patience as a feature of God’s providential work, whereby

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God mercifully mitigates and/or postpones the punishing rebuke that sinners deserve. This construal of divine patience (I am using the term as a catchall, of course) comprises a seam that joins together Calvin’s accounts of creation, providence, and salvation. Yes, it remains apt to identify a duplex cognitio Dei: piety is structured in such a way that discrete modes of knowledge can be differentiated, and theological reflection does well to organize itself accordingly. But Calvin’s commentaries help to ensure that the duplex does not harden into a dogmatic division, reminding us that knowledge of God’s activity as a creator and provider, one who honors and maintains and guides ancient Israel, cannot be separated from knowledge of God’s saving work, in Christ and the Spirit, and that knowledge of God’s activity as redeemer, which has the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit as its center, requires an appreciation of God’s exercise of patience toward ancient Israel. And here lies an important goad to thought, crucial for to this book’s fifth and sixth chapters. It is possible to pick up where Calvin leaves off, and to develop an account about providence that focuses on the scriptural witness to God’s relationship with ancient Israel—a relationship that is defined by patience. The second and third layers of meaning that Calvin gives patience are also important. There is the claim that patience forms a crucial dimension of Christian life, being particularly relevant for believers’ mortification within a Spirit-led process of sanctification; and, more obliquely, there is the suggestion that Christ’s vicarious death is an occasion for God to express wrathful impatience toward sin, so as to redefine the relationship between God and humankind. Although the constructive payoff to this claim and suggestion will not feature in this book, they should not be forgotten. This book’s successor will argue that Calvin’s account of divine impatience can nourish a substitutionary account of atonement, and that Calvin’s account of Christian patience, alongside Julian’s belief that God will “heele us fulle fair by the processe of time” (LT 63), should fund an account of sanctification that makes common cause with queer theorists and queer theologians. My amplification of Calvin’s understanding of divine patience toward ancient Israel in Chapter 5 of this book, then, will eventually be paired with a favorable reception of Calvin’s understanding of human patience and an attempt to think about the cross as God’s expression, and Christ’s receipt, of righteous impatience toward sin. And atop all that,

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there will follow a reengagement with Karlstadt and Sattler, with a particular concern to emphasize the positive value of impatience in Christian life. Granted that divine patience was not prominent in some writings of the 1520s, the insights of two “radical” Reformers can be nested within a broad statement, about divine patience, that foregrounds the Christian obligation to transform the world. One final, slightly testy (and I would grant, very broad) point returns me to a comment made at the outset of this chapter. In recent decades, and in certain quarters, it has become fashionable to view late medieval movements of reform and the Reformation as steps in a stairway that winds downwards, having as its destination the dispiriting, perhaps even tragic, condition of late Western modernity. (Taylor’s Secular Age, incidentally, does not take this line. While existential possibilities are lost when the self is “buffered,” not “porous,” it does not follow that those gains will not, at the end of the day, be worth it—a point lost on those advocating for a “paleo- or even neo-Durkheimian dispensation.”62 But that issue must be set aside for the time being.) While I will not delve into the details of such perspectives, it is worth noting that this chapter has taken a quite different line: one that refuses grand conjectures about the material and ideal factors that spawned “modernity”; one that engages texts without presumptively shouldering the baggage of declension narratives that wax mournful and indignant about nominalism, disenchantment, a loss of “tradition,” flatfooted modes of exegesis, etc. Indeed, while I have offered a sympathetic reading of Calvin and criticized his predecessors’ reluctance to take up patience as a way to think about God’s ways and works, it is likely clear that I want to present the initiatives of the 1520s in the best light possible. They should not be read as symptoms of an intellectual context that has lost its way; they are better received as substantive efforts to make sense of faith in a new key. Luther counseled moderation for sound strategic reasons, and with an inspiring confidence in the capacity of the Word to effect change; Karlstadt demonstrated a vivid sense of the (continuing) need for ecclesial reform, the condition for which was God’s reconstitution of the self as a vehicle of grace; Sattler demonstrated that God’s saving action is paired with God’s

Taylor, A Secular Age, 513.

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sponsorship of communities that protest sinful configurations of “churchstateness” and demand a radical transformation of the world at large. If each author has pertinence for constructive reflection and for the task of living Christianly in the present, the value of each of their texts is vastly magnified when one eschews grandiose, sweeping critiques. Why not suppose, in fact, that early Protestant thought, in both its magisterial and “radical” modes, is unusually well-suited to helping us to hold open the “immanent frame” of the present, “spinning” Christian belief in ways that help it disrupt some of the more problematic logics of late modernity? The reformers, after all, did know something about the need to challenge the confinement of thought. So, to end with a direct appeal: resist the jouissance that accompanies the elaboration of gloomy grand récits—at the end of the day, that contributes little to the task of faith seeking understanding; opt instead for a grateful (but not uncritical) receipt of texts from a period, unsettled as it was, that sought to think again about our residence in the domain of the Word.

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­3 From Barth to “Burdened Virtue”: The Promise and Perils of Patience Patience is the long breath of passion (Leidenschaft). … This passion, in which God is so grounded in himself that God opens himself wide for his creature, being clearsighted in himself and about all things, finds its utmost ­concentration in God’s patience. In his patience, God shows once again that it is his love which makes him a ­passionate God. For in his patience, God proves himself as the one who exists for his creature, as the one who exists for others. Patience means that God takes time for himself, in order to grant time and space to others. EBERHARD JÜNGEL1

To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that “patience” is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now. JOHN LEWIS2 Eberhard Jüngel, Wertlose Wahrheit: Zur Identität und Relevanz des christliche Glaubens (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1990), 183 and 190–1. 2 John Lewis, proposed speech at the March on Washington (August 28, 1963), on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Text reproduced in John 1

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The initial focus of this chapter is Karl Barth’s account of divine patience, laid out with unusual brevity in Church Dogmatics II/1. In contrast to the authors considered thus far, Barth shows little interest in human patience. His perspective is theological in the strictest sense: patience is identified as a divine attribute—or, more precisely, a divine perfection—whose explication deepens Barth’s identification of God as the “One who loves in freedom.” Moreover, consistent with his approach to other divine perfections, Barth pairs an awed sense of the antecedent fact of God’s selfsufficient identity (that is, God’s being patient in se) with suggestive remarks about the ways that God enacts God’s patience, in and for the world. And the richness of Barth’s perspective is such that a tantalizing possibility, glimpsed by Tertullian and Cyprian, maintained by Julian, and nuanced by Calvin, stands on the cusp of realization: patience taking a leading role in a theological statement about God’s creative, providential, reconciliatory, and redemptive work. To develop this claim, the first section of the chapter offers a close analysis of patience in Church Dogmatics II/1. After a brief engagement with some of Barth’s early writings, I discern three layers of meaning in §30.3: (a) patience as a description of God’s disbursement of being and agency, with creatures afforded time and space to exist and act on our own terms, even as our lives are encompassed by God’s providential rule; (b) patience as a nonapplication of judgment that lends history length and breadth, despite the horrors of sin; and (c) patience as a reconciling and redemptive event that is grounded in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The chapter’s second section argues that this explication of patience can shed light on Barth’s later claims about creation, the human, and Christian community. Particularly noteworthy is the suggestion, ventured in Church Dogmatics IV/1, that the covenant of grace is now being held open by the Spirit, so that the consummation of all things might include human beings’ grateful acknowledgment of God’s ways and works. One finds Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 219–21. For an instructive analysis of the changes made to Lewis’s speech, see Garth E. Pauley, “John Lewis, ‘Speech at the March on Washington’ (August 28, 1963),” VoD 5 (2010): 18–36.

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here the outermost limit of Barth’s “moral ontology.”3 Although no creature (apart from Christ) is involved in creating and sustaining the world, directing the course of history, and bringing about salvation, God grants human beings some kind of role in the wrapping up of history. With all that said, and with due appreciation for Barth’s radical theocentrism, I note also that Barth’s account of patience is unfinished theological business. There is work left to do. After an interlude, the chapter’s third and fourth sections look beyond Barth. Engaging an idiosyncratic clutch of thinkers, few of whom pay much attention to Church Dogmatics II/1, the third section reflects on patience in some twentieth and twenty-first century philosophical and theological writings. Forays into the worlds of process thought (Alfred North Whitehead and Catherine Keller), feminist Roman Catholic theology (Elizabeth Johnson), and midcentury Anglican theology (John Macquarrie and W. H. Vanstone) disclose an intermittent, sometimes underdeveloped, but always intriguing concern to describe God’s relationship with the world, and our relationship with God, in terms of patience. One finds here, I propose, a cluster of resources that continue to expand the theological imagination, and that can—and will—nourish the constructive labors of this book and its successor. The fourth section of the chapter intends to have a sobering, if not chilling, effect: it complicates the impending transition between interpretative and constructive work by reflecting on ways that talk about patience has supported grievously unjust distributions of power, privilege, and opportunity. Drawing again on an eclectic mix of authors, ranging from Philip Schaff to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lisa Tessman, the interpretative work of this book concludes with an identification of patience as a “burdened virtue”: an item in our theological and moral lexicon whose extensive and frequent misuse is such that it cannot be conceived or deployed without an awareness of its entanglement in injurious structures of domination.4 The challenge that comes into view, correspondingly, is daunting. If the preceding chapters have pointed to the untapped John Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. 4 Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3

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constructive potential of patience, what ought one to do with the fact that this term has consistently been used to justify, maintain, and/or obscure long-standing patterns of oppression? How should a theologian reckon with such an ambiguous “backstory,” with the counsel of patience being so entangled in discourses that support wrongdoing? Without wanting to resolve the question too quickly, my answer recalls the hope described in this book’s opening pages— namely, that grace might ramify in ways that effect a transformation of language. Needless to say, there is no magical “fix” available to us. Theologians cannot summarily strip this word (or any word) of problematic connotations and ruinous applications. But a belief in the reality of God’s sanctifying activity allows one to try to develop a mode of reflection that begins to liberate patience from its troublesome past. The dialectical reversal I mentioned in this book’s first chapter, then, begins in earnest at this chapter’s end. My goal, from thereon, will be to work out what it means to say that God is patient, in the context of Christian faith, and to have an account of God’s ways and works set the terms for determining the place of patience—and, for that matter, impatience—in Christian life. My goal will be to begin to replace the perils of human patience with the promise of divine patience. A final time: why these authors? While I am aware of the gulf separating the sixteenth and twentieth centuries and do not suppose that the intervening years have negligible importance—granted that authors in the Reformed tradition go some way toward ensuring that patience remains a “live option” for theological inquiry, it would be instructive to see how patience was handled in the European and American Enlightenments (perhaps in connection with talk of “tolerance”) and to scrutinize the work of nineteenth-century philosophers and theologians—the justification for this chapter is fairly easy to articulate. On one level, the treatment of patience by Barth is a watershed moment. The Dogmatics is singularly forthright in its ascription of patience to God, and singularly suggestive in its application of patience to diverse loci. Add to that the importance of Barth’s thinking for my constructive perspective, and it stands to reason that I should examine his work in some detail, while reflecting also on later authors. On another level, it is crucial that occasional remarks about the dangers of talk about patience, loosely strewn across previous chapters, be gathered up and set within a theoretical and historical frame. Belief in the possibility that language might be stretched, transformed, and deployed in new ways does not license a blithe disregard for the concrete meanings and uses of patience (an analogue here, perhaps, being the idea that theological reflection could simply

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bypass feminist critiques of the language of fatherhood and male pronouns for God, or discount the ways that “blackness” and “whiteness” shape theological anthropology, or ignore the ways that missiology and the language of “conquest” have often gone hand in hand). The concrete meanings and uses of patience, particularly as they pertain to extensive and long-standing patterns of sinfulness, need to be confronted head-on. They need to be identified as problems that constructive theological reflection, in its own way, endeavors to address.

1 Karl Barth: Patience as a Divine Perfection (a) The early Barth ­ arth did not suddenly discover patience when writing Church B Dogmatics II/1. Alongside a number of proximate terms, it turns up at key points in his work in the 1910s, often in connection with the witness of Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–80) and Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842–1919), towering peaks in a centurieslong attempt to affiliate the pietist tradition with the political radicalism that played on the edges of the Reformation. Indeed, a brief glance at Barth’s remarks on patience in his early writings nicely paves the way for a consideration of his later theology, which strives constantly to balance a bold account of divine primacy with an expansive vision of human agency. It is now widely accepted that a meeting with the younger Blumhardt at Bad Boll in April 1915 was a decisive factor in Barth’s break with the neo-Protestant programs of Adolf von Harnack, Martin Rade, and others, as well as a critical moment in Barth’s negotiation of the religious socialisms of Hermann Kutter and Leonhard Ragaz.5 From this point onward, Barth insisted that theological reflection proceed von Gott aus. If a theologian is to have any chance of thinking, speaking, and writing correctly about God, she must not turn “inward,” nor place uncritical trust in extant

See here Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 78–125, esp. 123–5. 5

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intellectual traditions and technologies; her only option is to treat God’s self-revelation as her point of departure. In an admiring piece, “Auf das Reich Gottes warten,” published in Der Freie Schweitzer Arbeiter in September 1916, Barth puts it thus: “Blumhardt begins immediately with God’s presence, power, and purpose. He starts out from God (er geht von Gott aus); he does not begin by climbing upwards to him by means of contemplation and deliberation. God is the end, and because we already know him as the beginning, we may await (warten) his consummating acts.”6 While Barth goes on to write about Blumhardt’s interest in God’s victory over sin, as well as Blumhardt’s insistence that the upbuilding of the Kingdom include new ecclesial and political ventures, these words nicely distill Barth’s emerging sense of theology as a responsive undertaking—an intellectual project that strives to follow the event of divine self-revelation. Stifling the desire to preempt or anticipate God, a theologian’s “thought and speech” aims to conform itself to “the ‘law of the object’ by whose commanding presence they are governed”—even when, and perhaps especially when, our receipt of God’s “law” and “command” proves to be a disruptive affair.7

Karl Barth, “Afterword,” in Christoph Blumhardt, Action in Waiting (Farmington: Plough Publishing House, 1998), 219. Translation revised. For the original text, which is considerably longer than the excerpt in Action in Waiting and is packed with quotations from Blumhardt’s Haus-Andachten nach Losungen und Lehrtexten der Brüdergemeine (1916), see Karl Barth, “Auf das Reich Gottes warten,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1914–1921 (Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe, vol. 48), ed. Hans-Anton Drewes in conjunction with Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt (Zurich: TVZ, 2012), 288–302. Barth’s reading of Blumhardt, incidentally, is very much on target. A characteristic quotation: “People who depend on God work quietly. They ‘wait patiently’ (Rom 8:25). This patience, however, gives rise to an energy that is directed toward what they desire to achieve. It looks forward to the healing of human nature itself, to ‘the redemption of our bodies.’ … God promises us that he will transfigure our lowly bodies, our very selves, too, and enable us to enter the heavenly kingdom in such a way that no bodily temptation can cause us to fall. But we do not only have to wait—some of this can happen now. Jesus Christ can already begin to transform us. Everything God accomplishes in us sprouts from a simple, natural seed. Even today the whole of our being can come into God’s hands.” See Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, The Gospel of God’s Reign: Living for the Kingdom of God, ed. Christian T. Collins Winn and Charles E. Moore, trans. Peter Rutherford, Eileen Robertshaw, and Miriam Mathis (Eugene: Cascade, 2014), 98 and 99. 7 John Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2011), 111. 6

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Reference to Blumhardt’s willingness to “await” clarifies further the nature of reflection von Gott aus, while making evident Barth’s ability to combine prophetic-pietist insights, left-Hegelian criticism, and a Reformational vision of justification through faith by grace—a striking synthesis, whose elements quickly became integral to the program of dialectical theology. On one level, talk of awaiting was a way for Barth to challenge those who treated the building blocks of Kulturprotestantismus as reliable bases on which to understand the God of Jesus Christ. Affirmations of religious experience, appeals to the process of moral formation, historicalcritical analyses of scripture, etc.: none of these “resources” can be taken on trust; each must be subjected to unsparing critique. And the critical projects of Ludwig Feuerbach, and, to lesser degree, Karl Marx and Franz Overbeck, served as means to that very end. Although Barth did not share these authors’ materialist premises or conclusions, he made good use of their critiques of the (typical) ideological functioning of Christianity, and he linked those critiques to the broader claim that the intellectual technologies of much neo-Protestant theology amounted to little more than a new manifestation of the old sin of works righteousness. Supposedly dependable resources, then, should be ruthlessly demystified, exposed as idols that distort the understanding ingredient to faith (and, just as problematically, support forms of “churchstateness” that consolidate structures of domination).8 On another level, talk of awaiting attests to Barth’s belief that the only viable approach a theologian can take toward God is, in effect, a non-approach. To seize the initiative, even to imagine that awaiting could be a technique that attunes one to God, is to drift in the direction of “religion.” One cannot ready oneself for God. Christian theology, equally, cannot be viewed as a self-initiated or self-animated pursuit. It is a matter of thought being set in motion, sustained and shaped by the prior fact of God’s gracious activity. It is a matter of a theologian nurturing the hope, without presumption, that God will graciously accord her the capacity to receive and redescribe God’s self-communicative activity.

See again Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Ekklesia: Three Enquiries in Church and State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

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How does one wait? How does one hope, without presumption? This is where patience comes into play. Consider a passage in “Biblical Questions, Insights, and Vistas” (1920) that draws an analogy between the formation of scripture and theological work. If the “decisive characteristic” of scripture “is the visibility of a completely conspicuous line of faithfulness, perseverance, patience (Geduld), waiting (Warten), and objective attention toward the incredible, non-psychological, non-historical truth of God” (WGT 84), the theologian ought to comport herself similarly. As it was then, so it should be now: Christian thought involves a dramatic relativization of the self, consequent upon a frank acknowledgment of God’s primacy; and, in light of this relativization, a wholehearted commitment to put one’s affective, cognitive, and ethical capacities at God’s disposal, hoping that those capacities might be used to bear witness to God’s identity and activity. Now it does not follow, I hasten to add, that patient waiting requires one to distance oneself from the world. That would run counter to Barth’s (and Blumhardt’s) concern to “represent … God’s reality in the world, yet not against the world,” and to “remain … in contact with world events.”9 It would represent, too, a problematic leap from an awareness of the ambiguity of sinful existence to the supposition that the world is devoid of grace: a failure to understand that, precisely because the world always bears the impress of God’s grace, it should be engaged with “a patient gratitude … outward joy and a good will” (WGT 54). Nor does it follow that Barth’s perspective has anything in common with late medieval/early Protestant treatments of Gelassenheit (as exemplified, say, by Andeas Karlstadt). God does not want a dissolution of the sinful ego; God seeks and effects the restoration of the human subject. The patience of the theologian, in fact, has much in common with the patience God gives to subjects who engage in prayer, ethical action, and worship.10 It names a graced-powered ceding of initiative, a “refraining from all kind of murmuring, becoming quiet and letting God, the righteous God, speak with us, for there

Barth, “Auf das Reich Gottes warten,” 290 and 293. On which, see John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 11–39; and, idem, Barth’s Earlier Theology: Four Studies (London: T&T Clark, 2005). 9

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is no other” (WGT 12)—all for the sake of actively making sense of the understanding that is ingredient to faith.11 Although I will not engage Barth’s treatment of patience and adjacent terms during his time in Göttingen, Münster, and Bonn, it is worth noting that the second edition of Romans develops these early insights. Blumhardtian commitments certainly persist, as evidenced by the quotation from Friedrich Christoph Steinhofer that forms the final, non-scriptural word in the text: “If people could only have a little patience (Geduld), and not so quickly offer their applause” (RII 537 rev.).12 Yet Barth’s exegetical labors often expand the view. With respect to Rom. 5:3–5, for instance, Barth writes about the endurance of tribulation as an occasion for Christians to understand themselves as people who are caught between the “attack” of God’s judgment and the (even stronger) “attack” of grace. “Suffering” needn’t entail “a passive, poisonous, destructive tribulation and perplexity”; it can be “transformed into a tribulation and perplexity that is creative, fruitful, powerful, promising, by which human beings are sublated (aufgehoben) by God, cast to the ground by God, pressed against the wall, imprisoned by God. By tribulation we are hardened for steadfastness (Beharrlichkeit)” (RII 156 rev.). And Barth’s exegesis of Rom. 8:18–25 extends this line of thought. At the end of an analysis of the “sufferings of the present” that emphasizes the questionableness of “civilized” Western life and the necessity of an eschatological orientation, Barth insists that Christians should want to “be none other than they who wait” (RII 315). Romans also suggests a nascent interest in divine patience. At one point, for i­nstance, Barth thinks along Calvinian lines and presents patience as a gloss on the divine mercy that sparks faith. “How have I deserved this? Simply because of the ­inexplicable ‘forbearance’ of God’s wrath. How is it that I have been made an exception among the multitude? Simply because of the inexplicable ‘patience’ (Geduld) of God ­towards me” (RII 60 rev.). At another point, acclaiming God’s efforts to reveal Godself to sinners, Barth writes: “The faithfulness of God is the divine persistence

The words from “The Righteousness of God” (1916), cited in this sentence, are echoed in Barth’s Der Freie Schweitzer Arbeiter article: Barth writes about “the little flock, God’s Zion” as constituted by people who “are best described by what they do not do. … [They are] quiet, eagerly expectant, and directed toward God.” See Barth, “Afterword,” 221. 12 The quotation is from Friedrich Christoph Steinhofer, Eklärung der Epistel Pauli an die Römer (Tübingen: Ludwig Friedrich, 1851), 99. Barth mentions his regard for Steinhofer’s commentary in the preface to the second edition; see RII 14. 11

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[Beharren] according to which God gives, at many points in history, possibilities, occasions, and witnesses of the knowledge of his righteousness” (RII 96 rev.). Although such comments do not quite mesh with the explication of patience in Church Dogmatics II/1, they show nicely that Barth’s fascination with the existential condition of the human, before God—which, pace von Balthasar, is hardly the theme of the second edition of Romans, although it is definitely a concern13—is complemented by something akin to patience as a dimension of God’s ways and works.

(b) Church Dogmatics II/1 The account of patience in Church Dogmatics II/1, the first installment in Barth’s doctrine of God, continues to presume that theology can and must happen von Gott aus. And, at least in principle, Barth could now have presented patience as a communicable attribute, an item in a series of affectus voluntatis Dei (affections of the divine will) that receives analogous expression in the life of the creature. That would allow divine and human patience to be thought together, with a description of the former setting the terms for an account of the latter. Something akin to what one finds in Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s treatises: divine forbearance empowering human forbearance, Christ’s endurance of sin enabling our endurance of sin, and so on. But this is the road not taken. Whether a lack of interest in human patience reflects a determination to attend exclusively to God’s self-sufficient reality, or perhaps signals wariness about this term’s pertinence to Christian life during the Second World War, need not be decided here. The key point is that Barth bucks convention and focuses, pretty much exclusively, on patience as a divine attribute. His overriding concern is to understand what it means to say that “God gives Himself to be known as … patient” (CD II/1, 409). Nothing more, nothing less. It is useful to back up a little, and to review the framework within which Barth approaches this issue. As is well known, the early paragraphs of Church Dogmatics II/1 identify the conditions of possibility for Christians’ knowledge of God. Central to this epistemology is the notion of God’s “encroachment” upon human beings. We are returned to ground

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), esp. 68–85.

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covered in “Auf das Reich Gottes warten” and the second edition of Romans: one does not come to know God by way of an innate religious sensibility, a process of moral formation, rational analyses of creation, or historical-critical scholarship; one knows God when God graciously takes hold of one’s cognitive processes and orients them to the prior fact of God’s self-knowing. And this “taking hold,” this orientation, has our incorporation into Christ’s body as its condition of possibility. While Barth had gestured toward this point in his earlier writings, it is foundational for his mature theological epistemology. Our knowledge of God depends on the resurrected and ascended Son, who assumes an individual human nature to himself, sharing his knowledge of God, in the power of the Spirit, with those to whom faith is given. Building on this theological epistemology, Barth next offers a statement about God’s self-assigned identity. This is where the famous description of God as the “one who loves in freedom” comes into view, God being a Subject who “seeks and creates fellowship between Himself and us” (CD II/1, 273). Yes, of course, fellowship is itself basic to God’s triune life. As Father, Son, and Spirit, one God in three ways of being, God is “alive in His unique being with and for and in another” (CD II/1, 275). And yes, of course, while there is a correspondence between God’s immanent life and God’s economic activity, with the latter being an enactment of the former in the context of created history, God’s immanent life is antecedent to God’s economic operations. This life, full and complete in and of itself, is the presupposition of the divine economy; it is the reason that God can give Godself to creatures without giving Godself away. Yet Barth is adamant that descriptions of God’s immanent life stumble when they do not attend to God’s desire to extend fellowship beyond God’s own life. Identifying and acclaiming God as the “one who loves in freedom” prevents this stumble. It signals that God’s immanent life as always-already inclusive of God’s desire to complement God’s fellowship with Godself with a different kind of fellowship with the world, effected through the election of ancient Israel, the incarnation of the Son, and the sending of the Spirit; and it presents this intention as so basic to God’s being that one can say, ultimately, that God “does not will to be himself in any other way than he is in this relationship. His life, that is, his life in himself, which is originally and properly the one and only life, leans towards this unity (Zusammensein) with our life” (CD

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II/1, 274 rev.). At a pinch, and speaking a bit loosely, one might even say that God’s fellowship with Godself, effortless and joyous and glorious as it is, is not really enough for God, and that God therefore always wills for God’s triune fellowship to be opened outward, in love, with the purpose of drawing humankind into the covenant of grace. So how, then, is God free? God is free because God’s relationship with the world is no metaphysical necessity—say, a consequence of God depending on creatures to remedy a deficit in his being, or a consequence of God and world being co-eternal. God’s pursuit of fellowship with us is a function of God’s sovereign good pleasure, predicated on God’s being “grounded … determined and moved” by Godself (CD II/1, 301). It is the “affirmation of His own plenitude and a self-realisation in freedom” (CD II/1, 306), impelled and motivated by nothing other than God’s unconditioned decision to be the God that God is. However—as always, with Barth, one must keep the dialectic moving—just as descriptions of divine love carry the seeds of an affirmation of divine freedom, so descriptions of divine freedom propel us toward an affirmation of God’s love. Divine freedom is not a formal capacity that could be wielded in any which way; it is unthinkable in isolation from God’s being as a God of love. Striking as these claims are, the all-important nuances of Barth’s perspective are still to come. After an orienting statement, §§30 and 31 deepen Barth’s doctrine of God through a lengthy analysis of God’s perfections: the “defining characteristics” of the God of Jesus Christ, the analysis of which renders Christian talk about God ever more coherent, complex, and appropriate.14 Coherent, in that Barth expatiates on a series of auxiliary concepts (grace and holiness, mercy and righteousness, patience and wisdom; unity and omnipresence, constancy and omnipotence, eternity and glory), in order to expand our understanding of God in Godself, as the one who loves in freedom, and to expand our understanding of how God acts, in and for the world, in love and freedom. Complex, in that these auxiliary concepts are arranged dialectically, with the dynamic relationship between love and freedom shown to be “identical with a multitude of various and distinct types of perfection” (CD II/1,

Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 1.

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322), the exposition of which intensifies our sense of the abiding richness of God’s triune life. Appropriate, finally, in that every statement that Barth advances is—at least in principle—anchored in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, the Lord who discloses to us “the essentia or ‘essence’ of God” (CD II/1, 267) as a matter of love and freedom. Paragraphs 30 and 31 can be read, then, as an extended “performance” of the theological epistemology laid out at the beginning of Church Dogmatics II/1. They show that our objective entry into the event of God’s self-knowing, secured by Christ, is complemented by the subjective impact of the Spirit who enlivens thought, such that a theologian can set about “mapping” the “upper and lower aspects, the right and the left, the contours” of God’s plenitudinous life (CD II/1, 336). Or, to draw on a distinction used in earlier paragraphs of Church Dogmatics II/1: while the “secondary objectivity” of God’s self-revelation is obviously not equatable with the “primary objectivity” of God’s self-knowledge (for that is God’s, and God’s alone), the genuineness of that secondary objectivity, vouchsafed by God himself, allows the theologian to approach and survey God’s primary objectivity, in hope that the “views” and “concepts” she employs in dogmatic work will prove adequate to God’s being. Why, though, does a concern to map God’s life prompt Barth to write about God’s perfections? On one level, Barth thinks that “perfections,” in contrast to “attributes,” binds together talk about God’s essence and talk about God’s existence, and in such a way that responses to the question, “Of what nature is God?” are always married to responses to the question, “Who is God?” (CD II/1, 331). None of God’s perfections, disclosed through God’s ways and works, stand apart from the being and event that God is; and each of God’s perfections, disclosed through God’s ways and works, should be understood to be constitutive of the being and event of this divine Subject. Or, to use Barth’s words: “the divine being as the One who loves in freedom is the divine being in the multiplicity, individuality and diversity of these perfections. He does not possess this wealth. He Himself is this wealth” (CD II/1, 331). It follows, too, that an analysis of any particular divine perfection can, in principle, serve as an entry point for understanding the full sweep of God’s being. While a theologian might initially draw attention to a particular dimension of God’s love or freedom or think and write in ways that have especial pertinence for understanding one

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of God’s three ways of being, the movement of thought—presuming that it is conformed, by grace, to the divine Subject—will always continue. In the final analysis, the “manifold simplicity of the divine nature ensures that each and every perfection describes the Subject with which Christians have to do.”15 On another level—and this point is already in view—precisely because talk of God’s perfections is governed by the belief that God lovingly and freely establishes a relationship that encompasses, defines, and benefits humankind, their explication engenders important remarks on what it is that God does, in and for God’s creation.16 Colin Gunton is quite right to say that the notion of attributes might prove cumbersome at this juncture. The issue, after all, is not “what we attribute” to God, but rather who God “reveals himself to be”; and God reveals himself to be the God who creates, provides, reconciles, and redeems, via the people of ancient Israel, the person of Jesus Christ, and the Spirit-led life of various kinds of Christian community.17 Precisely because God reveals Godself as creator, provider, reconciler, and redeemer, then, this explication of God’s perfections includes rough sketches of the entire divine economy—a series of “dogmatics in outline,” one might say. Again: one must not think that Barth loses sight of divine aseity. Church Dogmatics II/1 always insists that God is not reducible to or exhausted by God’s works, and that God exists apart from and independent of those works. Barth’s doctrine of election, which adds a surprising twist to Barth’s affirmation of God’s selfgrounded, independent life, is not yet up and running (although, admittedly, there are some interesting hints dropped on this front). However, precisely because God “is actually and unreservedly as we encounter Him in His revelation” (CD II/1, 325), and precisely because God’s revelation is not partial but a window through which

Robert B. Price, Letters of the Divine Word: The Perfections of God in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 3. 16 Christopher R. J. Holmes puts it well: “An account of the divine attributes attentive to God’s activity will be attentive to human activity too, as the activity of the human has been placed into a new relation to God and the neighbor in light of God’s initiation, maintenance, and perfection of a covenant fellowship with her.” See Revisiting the Doctrine of the Divine Attributes: In Dialogue with Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel, and Wolf Krötke (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 2. 17 Gunton, Act and Being, 9. Emphases in original. 15

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one perceives the unbounded “reach” of God’s undertakings, so it is that an analysis of the perfections of God’s immanent being segues into an account of how God creates, governs, reconciles, and redeems. To borrow from the Göttingen Dogmatics: if God’s perfections resemble the “radii of a circle,” drawn “from the top and the bottom, the right and the left” (GD 385), these radii do not pertain only to the interior of the divine life; they also extend outward, serving as provisional guidelines for a dogmatic account of what God does. In the Göttingen Dogmatics, Barth adopted a fairly traditional differentiation of communicable and incommunicable attributes, while mapping it onto other pairings (e.g., revealed/hidden, unveiled/veiled). At the time, the differentiation was somewhat useful. It supported a concern to consider the divine attributes without demurring with respect to God’s eternal being (a demurral, on Barth’s reckoning, that often attests to modern theologians’ reluctance to acknowledge God’s self-sufficient, independent reality); it enabled an orderly discussion of who God is. However, while Barth hoped to avoid having the “aseity of the divine nature … abstracted away from God’s personality” (GD 384), his treatment of the distinction between communicable and incommunicable attributes risked exactly that. The initial exposition of God’s communicable attributes is rich and suggestive; the exposition of God’s incommunicable attributes, thin and formulaic. A gap therefore threatens to open up between the economic and the immanent Trinity. It is simply not clear if or how God’s incommunicable attributes connect with God’s self-revelation. One gets the sense that these attributes serve only to buttress an affirmation of God’s independence and objectivity.18 Matters improve when the distinction between communicable and incommunicable attributes is replaced by a dialectical to-and-fro between the perfections that Barth deems particularly illustrative of God’s freedom and the perfections Barth deems particularly illustrative of God’s love. This idiom, Barth notes, “points at once to the thing itself instead of merely to its formal aspect” (CD II/1, 322): it checks the tendency to drive a wedge between communicable/revealed attributes and incommunicable/hidden attributes. Indeed, it now becomes difficult to suppose that the divine nature, “as the proper being of God … [could] be regarded as standing inscrutably

For further remarks on the continuities and discontinuities between the Göttingen Dogmatics and the Church Dogmatics with respect to God’s attributes/perfections, see Holmes, Divine Attributes, 65–71.

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beyond and above [God’s] economy” (CD II/1, 324), and it becomes obligatory, in effect, to view multiple perfections as descriptive of related dimensions of God’s unified being—a being that is sufficient unto itself, even as it is turned “outward,” in grace, as God engages the world.

By the time that Barth writes about patience in §30.3, he has offered expositions of grace and holiness (§30.1) and mercy and righteousness (§30.2). Grace and mercy, being perfections especially associable with God’s love, lead the way in their respective subsections. The former draws attention to God’s establishment of fellowship (in God’s own life and in God’s relationship with creatures); the latter identifies God’s desire to rescue creatures who have given themselves over to sin and death. Holiness and righteousness serve as dialectical counterpoints, being perfections that are more immediately descriptive of divine freedom than divine love. But just as an account of God’s love opens out into an account of God’s freedom, so Barth’s analyses of holiness and righteousness draw thought back to the perfections of God’s love as a matter of mercy and righteousness; and, at least with respect to the economy, the outworking of God’s holiness and righteousness, demonstrated in God’s contesting and overcoming whatever contests God’s purposes, discloses the depth and persistence of God’s graciousness and mercy. And it is apt to read the treatments of patience and wisdom, which bring §30 to a close, as a finale to Barth’s extended hymn to God as the one who loves in freedom. Expositions of these two perfections so “magnify the plenitude of the divine being” (CD II/1, 407) that readers gain an even richer sense of who God is and how God acts toward the world, in pursuit of fellowship with God’s creatures. Now, then, we reach the heart of the matter. It is possible to engage Barth’s thinking about divine patience—which, recall, has three layers of meaning, which encompass God’s life in se and God’s economic activity—at close quarters. The first layer of meaning bears on the basic character of God’s creative work and providential ruling. Moving beyond the patristic appeal to Matt. 5:45, as well as the soteriological association of patience and mercy Barth discerns in his scholastic forebears (Quenstedt and Polanus are namechecked early in §30.3), Barth views the perfection of Geduld as an occasion to laud God’s unstinting largesse: God as the Subject who, out of an abundance

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of love, opts not to hoard being for himself, and opts consistently to confer being upon creatures. More than just “confer being,” in fact. The ontological generosity of the patient God is coextensive with a determination to grant various kinds of agential capacity to creatures in general, and human beings in particular, thereby ensuring that creatures have the opportunity to act on their own terms. A dense and important passage: ­ e define God’s patience as his will, which lies in his essence and W constitutes his divine being and action, to allow to another—for the sake of God’s own grace and mercy and in the affirmation of God’s holiness and justice—space and time for its own existence, thus conceding to this existence a reality side by side with God’s own, and fulfilling God’s will towards this other in such a way that God does not suspend and destroy (aufhebt und zerstört) it as this other but rather accompanies it and sustains it and allows it to be (gewähren läßt). (CD II/1, 409–10 rev.) There’s a tantalizing hint here about the patience of God’s trinitarian life, which Barth later develops in terms of “nearness” and “distance”—the implication being that God is patient with Godself, with each divine person granting space and time to the other divine persons, engaging in an act of “letting be” and “letting happen” that upholds the distinctiveness of the Seinsweise that comprise God unified life, even as those Seinsweise coinhere and comprise a common essence.19 That hint will be taken up much later in this project. But Barth’s principal concern, at least at this juncture, is with broad claims about the way that God creates, sustains, and accompanies. Patience names that quality of God’s action whereby God establishes and maintains that which is qualitatively other than God, accepting and endorsing it as legitimate and worthy, as a meaningful factor in the covenant of grace. God does not begrudge us existence. We are certainly not passing fantasies, conjured up by a febrile divine imagination. Rather, by dint of God’s patience, we have a genuinely “independent life” (CD II/1, 411) and we are permitted

See here esp. CD II/1, 461–90 and 608–40.

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to exist in discrete patches of time and space. Our “independence,” too, must be taken seriously. God’s patience empowers creatures. We are distinguished as agents; we are given the capacity to intend this or that, and to act with integrity, meaning, and consequence—even to the point at which God “allows the many to go their own ways” (CD II/1, 418). Patience is thus the perfection that underwrites Barth’s famed “moral ontology” (Webster). It is a modality of divine creating and providing that “allows the creature time” and space “to be a proper reality,” even as God impels creatures to heed God’s directives.20 It is important to remember, of course, that God’s will is always “great and strong and relentless and victorious” (CD II/1, 410). Barth happily hits the high notes of his Reformed heritage, and he does so with such vigor that contemporary readers are unlikely to associate his outlook with the persuasive, “lure”-like perspectives on divine action that were being developed by the second generation of process thinkers around the time that Church Dogmatics II/1 was published. Talk of a patient “letting be” and “letting happen,” in other words, does not allow one to think about God’s creative and providential action as a suggestive affair, with the fulfillment of God’s directives contingent upon creatures who select and enact the right responses. We remain in the mainstream of the Protestant intellectual tradition, with God’s thoroughgoing involvement in creation and God’s sovereign governance of history being the context in which one thinks about God’s patience. At the same time, one must not fall into the trap of assuming that God only acts in one way—that God’s “great and strong and relentless and victorious” exercise of sovereignty is reducible to an imperious disposing of events. The perfection of patience challenges this very assumption. It compels an appreciation of the diverse ways that God acts and rules; it alerts readers to the fact that the multiple riches of God’s being are paired with multiple modes of creative and providential activity. Indeed, granted Barth’s willingness to acclaim God’s effortless ability to order creaturely life, without impediment and in whatsoever ways God sees fit, talk about patience is an occasion for Barth to underscore that God’s “gracious, merciful

Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. F. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 105.

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will” (CD II/1, 410) includes a measure of permissiveness. Not permissiveness in the narrow sense that God permits sin (although that implication is allowed); permissiveness in the broader sense that God’s creative and providential work includes a kind of “waiting and letting be (Warten und Gewährenlassen)” (CD II/1, 411 rev.), with creatures in general, and human beings in particular, given the opportunity to chart the courses of our own lives. Because God is patient, God does not enforce conformity to the covenant that defines God’s relationship with all things. God is willing to let creaturely history have its own integrity, within the context of God’s sovereign governance of all things, and God holds creaturely history “open,” waiting for the right responses to God’s commands. Or, to make the same point differently: the irresistibility of grace and God’s “efficient” willing are not parts that define the whole; they number among a range of creative and governmental possibilities employed by God. And an acclamation of divine patience adverts to that fact. It reminds one that it is quite proper to claim that God discloses his holiness when God “condemns, excludes, and annihilates all contradiction and resistance” (CD II/1, 359) and to claim that God waits for us, seeking and creating fellowship by giving us “space and time … with a definite intention, where freedom is allowed in expectation of a response” (CD II/1, 408). Both modes of activity describe something of the way that God decides to be (and is) God; both modes of activity describe how God decides to be (and is) the one who loves in freedom, seeking and establishing fellowship with us. In a characteristically searching and skillful essay, Ian McFarland worries about Barth’s tendency to foreground “decision” in his doctrine of God.21 He does so for three reasons: (a) it undermines Barth’s (salutary) determination to prioritize love over freedom in his account of God’s perfections, for the claim that God decides to be loving ultimately makes God’s freedom antecedent to and productive of God’s love; (b) it introduces a questionable anthropomorphism into the doctrine of God, as if God’s self-assigned identity and free actions were akin to my deciding to do x, y, or z in the context of time and space; and (c) it encourages a distorted view

Ian McFarland, “Present in Love: Rethinking Barth on the Divine Perfections,” MT 33, no. 2 (2017): 243–58. Some of McFarland’s concerns seem to surface in Rowan Williams’s analysis of recent Barth scholarship in Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), esp. 169–82.

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of the God/world relationship that focuses attention on God’s “efficient willing” of each and every event—a focus that encourages the belief that God “controls” history and obscures God’s preservation of a nexus of secondary causes. In light of this critique, McFarland contends that a description of God as the one who is “present in love” ought to be preferred to God as the one who “loves in freedom,” and ­argues for a “general application of the category of permissive will” that emphasizes both God’s all-encompassing creative and preservative action and the integrity of the c­ reated ­order.22 While I am attracted to talk of God’s “permissive will,” I would take exception to parts of this analysis. With respect to (a): I’m doubtful that it is apt to say that, for Barth, love is “a consequence of divine decision rather than … the ground of all God’s deciding”23 (akin, say, to my making a decision to be someone who loves to watch the Welsh rugby team, then being the person I am, who loves to watch the Welsh rugby team). There isn’t a sequence of events here. “Decision” is simply Barth’s way of directing attention to God’s sovereign determination of Godself, which— precisely because God is eternal in God’s act and being—is coextensive with God’s being the Subject that God is. God does not freely decide to love and therefore loves; God’s free decision to love and God’s being the one who loves are one and the same, and to such a degree that there is no free decision that is not loving and no love that is not freely decided for. With respect to (b): while the language of “decision” does risk anthropomorphism, I am doubtful that this risk is any greater than with other terms (including, perhaps, talk of “presence” and “love”). Most importantly, however, I think that Barth has the means to respond to (c), especially if one foregrounds Barth’s explication of patience. Because God is patient, God’s relationship with the world is not reducible to “efficient willing.” Rather, as McFarland himself suggests, “the Creator God sustains the world in love by letting it be.”24

The second layer of meaning given to patience pertains to the withholding of judgment against sinners. Just as Tertullian described patience as God’s endurance of “ungrateful peoples” (De pat. 2), and just as Calvin wrote of God’s willingness to “exercise … moderation in inflicting punishment, because he is inclined to mercy” (Comm. Isa. 30:18), so Barth also lauds the restraint that McFarland, “Present in Love,” 253. McFarland, “Present in Love,” 246, my emphasis. This concern is mirrored in an important article by Oliver James Keenan, “Divine Antecedence and Pretemporal Election,” NB 98, no. 1075 (2017): 264–84. 24 McFarland, “Present in Love,” 257. 22 23

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characterizes God’s treatment of humankind. This restraint points up the close association of patience and mercy, while licensing an identification of God as longsuffering: one who constantly “puts up” with creatures who rebel, who trade in ingratitude, and who manifest hostility toward God. More pointedly than earlier authors, however, Barth construes patience as a preservation of creatures in their ingratitude and hostility. Patience does not only involve God granting time and space for creatures to exist and act. Patience includes what one might describe as God’s “protection” of sinful creatures from God’s devastating, righteous judgment—a protection that discloses God’s acceptance of the fallen world as it actually is, despite it being a pale imitation of what God intends for it to be; and a protection that is not menacingly flanked with the prospect of a future outburst of devastating wrath. To make the same point differently: as God exercises patience, in love and freedom, God upholds creaturely lives in their immersion in and propagation of sin, letting those lives “be” and “happen,” with full knowledge that such “letting be” and “letting happen” brings about a disfiguration and despoilation of creation. While God accords history its length and breadth, God concedes that this length and breadth does and will include acts of rank waywardness, which carry in their wake innumerable forms of pain, suffering, and degradation. God, in God’s patience, allows that to happen. A remarkable cluster of sentences illustrate something of this point: ­ he concept of the patience of God is an enrichment, clarification, T and intensification of the concept of his mercy, which is to be understood in an active and dynamic sense. … God makes the cause of the creature, the reality distinct from himself, God’s own cause, and in such a way that God accepts it as a reality and intervenes for it in an acknowledgement of its reality, not in a suspension of its reality. For the creature as such, God is hard on himself. He suffers for it. He gives up his only Son for it. … [Yet] God does not take the place of the creature in such a way as to extinguish and destroy it. That he takes its plight to his own heart does not mean that he robs it of life, making it a mere potentiality or recollection in his own life. … The fact that God in his mercy intervenes for it must be understood in the full sense of both words, “for” and “it”: this divine intervention for the

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creature does not exclude but includes its independent life. … “Whatever our God has created he will also uphold, and sooner or later rule with his grace.” He will rule—but not in such a way that grace brings about the catastrophic destruction of nature. Rule means radical judgment on nature. It means its radical transformation and renewal. (CD II/1, 411 rev.) God, clearly, does not accept sin as anything like a “final word.” Patience does not mean casual indulgence, much less bespeak an endorsement or affirmation of sinfulness. Transformation and renewal distinguish God’s rule, with our sinful existence being overwritten by the reality of the reconciliation and redemption that Christ secures and the Spirit applies. But God’s patience is such that the “preliminary word” of the wayward creature—a word that might initially be voiced stutteringly and uncertainly, before settling into discourses that breed violence, injustice, laziness, pride, falsehood, etc.—is honored, in some fashion, as a genuine option for life before God. And this honoring costs God. God is “hard on himself”; God “suffers”; God accepts and bears responsibility for God’s creative and providential act of “letting be” and “letting happen.” The reference to God’s heart in the quotation above, deployed at key moments in Barth’s work, is thus soon reprised: “The abyss in the heart of God is so deep that in it the other, the reality distinct from God, need not pass away. This other may live. It can live as an object of God’s mercy and thus live under God’s righteousness, live under the full, strict impact of what its encounter with God and what God’s own advocacy for it must entail” (CD II/1, 411 rev.).25 The depth of God’s patience is the depth of a love that never shrinks from responsibility for creating and sustaining sinful creatures; it is a depth of a patience and love that keeps hold of creatures, in their sin, in advance of their redemption. Rachel Muers, one of the few contemporary theologians to engage the topic of patience, puts it well: “The act in which God gives time to creation … is … also the act in which God accepts the risk and

As Katherine Sonderegger notes, the language of “heart” is used a little earlier, and to striking effect, in Barth’s exposition of righteousness. See “Barth and the Divine Perfections,” SJT 67, no. 4 (2014): 450–63.

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consequences of the freedom given with that gift of time. Patience implies not only the gift of time, but also the acceptance of time.”26 Gen. 4:1–17 illustrates this point. Despite a horrifying fratricide, Cain is not subject to a punitive death. God stays God’s hand; God’s patience is such that God “sustains the life of the one who has forfeited his life before God” (CD II/1, 412). Gen. 6–9 are also relevant. Although these chapters describe a devastation of the world through flooding, they also show God’s determination to maintain a relationship with humankind. “Does not the grace and mercy of God depend upon the patience of God, a granting of space (Raumlassen) to the sinful creature, an affordance of space so that God can further speak and act with it” (CD II/1, 413 rev.)? Only an affirmative answer is possible! Even as it seems, at first blush, that God angrily lashes out, ultimately God upholds the lives of creatures who continue to disappoint God in all-too-familiar ways. Rom. 5:20 also seems to hover in the background of Barth’s claims (“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more”). God applies God’s mercy by declining to let sinners suffer their just deserts, responding to sin by maintaining—not qualifying or adjusting, much less revoking—the creative and providential frame in which God’s saving action occurs. God’s patience does not wear thin; God’s patience persists, thereby giving history its seemingly boundless length and breadth.

The third layer of meaning of patience in Church Dogmatics II/1 connects with the former two layers. God’s patient provision of time and space, which goes hand in hand with God’s patient preservation of sinful creatures, has as its presupposition a covenant fulfilled in and by Jesus Christ. Patience is not an abstractable quality of God’s creative and providential activity; it is a quality of God’s activity that is grounded in, and unthinkable in isolation from, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Indeed, were it not for God being “patient in His Word” (CD II/1, 421), God’s relationship with the world would surely look quite different. Counterfactually: God might have chosen to be patient for a spell, before giving up on us, with God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” becoming emblematic of fatigued indifference. Counterfactually: God might have exchanged patience for a more coercive modus

Rachel Muers, “Silence and the Patience of God,” MT 17, no. 1 (2001): 86. See also Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 92–5.

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operandi, immediately stamping out sin and realizing God’s salvific purposes. But this is precisely what does not happen. If “God allows the many to go their own ways, leaves them their freedom, gives them continual time (and food for that time), if through it all he constantly waits for them,” God does so in light of the fact that God has “already overtaken them in the One, his only Son, for in him he has already walked with them in his own freedom and in his own time, and to the very end” (CD II/1, 418 rev.). The particular, as always, defines the general. The integrity of creation and history, and the integrity of creaturely life more particularly, is anchored in the concrete history of the Messiah of Israel, Jesus Christ, divine patience incarnate. What does this mean, exactly? Granted that Barth’s “Christological concentration” does not waver at this point in the Church Dogmatics (and granted that questions might well be raised about the marginal role of the Spirit in §§30 and 31), how might one parse, with more precision, the relationship of Christology, reconciliation, and divine patience? On one level, Barth contends that God’s patient provision of time and space, as well as God’s maintenance of creatures’ ontological and agential integrity, has God’s condemnation, judgment, and rejection of sin as its condition of possibility.27 Here is the connection of patience and passion, already mooted in Cyprian, Tertullian, Julian, and Calvin, raised to a new level of significance: Christ’s suffering and death ensuring God’s dismissal of sin, such that continued violations of the covenant do not interfere with God’s patient creative and governmental work. Not “dismissal” in the sense that God opts to overlook sin. That is not on the cards. “Dismissal” in the sense that God’s rejection of sin, by way of Christ’s vicarious death, is so thoroughgoing that human beings are now fully justified. Having embraced his role as the representative of sinful humankind, as the (patient!) Word become flesh, Jesus dies as the Messiah who has loaded upon himself the full sweep of our resistance to God. He endorses God’s rejection of sin. He dies as one who has invited and affirmed his envelopment in the nighttime of wrongdoing, and as one who has shown himself

This point is made brilliantly by Eberhard Jüngel. See “Gottes Geduld—Geduld der Liebe,” 191–2.

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willing to bear the full force of God’s punishing rebuke of the same. And with this action-unto-death, Jesus redefines our relationship with God. He marks us as sinners who have repented and borne the consequences of our actions. What “we all deserved has been suffered in our place and in Israel’s place by the only righteous One, who achieved a perfect penitence … by not refusing to take upon Himself the genuine wrath and judgment of God” (CD II/1, 420).28 Moreover, while it certainly follows that judgment and rejection cannot now be a Christian concern (per Jn 3:16), it seems also to follow that judgment and rejection should not be a human concern. There is no possibility that God’s patience will run out. God has been, is, and will be patient because God’s rejection of sin is total and perfect: all of God’s wrath is exerted against Christ crucified, the person who bears the total “weight” of wrongdoing. It follows, accordingly, that Barth has little interest in reprising Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s suggestion that divine impatience will be manifested at the end of time. “For the sake of this One,” God is now boundlessly “patient with the many” (CD II/1, 418). The patience of God incarnate, unto death, is the condition of possibility for the entirety of history. On another level, Christ’s obedience, unto death, means that God now waits for us to do something other than sin—waits for us “to give Him the glory in faith, accepting both the possibility and the reality of His patience” (CD II/1, 421). It is important to add, straightaway, that God does not wait naïvely or plaintively, hoping against the odds that we might eventually get around to following Christ’s example. No: God waits confidently for actions that accord with God’s gracious directives. Whence this confidence? It does not derive from an assessment of the state of human life now (or, for that matter, human life in any patch of time and space). It is again predicated on the fact that Christ has offered his whole being to God, living and dying in perfect obedience to the will of the Father and expressing penitence for the sins of humankind;

This claim, incidentally, marks a fascinating parallel with John McCleod Campbell’s recasting of vicariousness, which envisages Jesus confessing and repenting of human sin—a point that I will take up in the next volume of this project. See here the classic text from 1856: John McCleod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1996).

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and it is predicated on the belief that this obedience has abiding consequences for who we are and what we might do. Christ’s way of being human, in other words, is now given to us: it reorients human being as such, readying us always to be and become the creatures that God intends for us to be and become. To be sure, Barth does not yet make this point using the language of Church Dogmatics II/2. There is no talk of Christ as the “electing God” and the “elected human” (who, in turn, elects God), nor much emphasis on Christ’s “determination” of humankind. But Barth is already beginning to think along these lines. It is not just that “God can be patient because He is patient in His Word,” since God “keeps time and space for us who have forfeited our existence in His sight and are unable to justify ourselves” (CD II/1, 421, original emphases); it is also the case that God has “good ground for being patient with us—the ground which He Himself has created and laid down” (CD II/1, 419). Even if we struggle to make good on our incorporation into Christ’s body, that incorporation seems to be a given: it is who we are, de iure, even if we struggle with the de facto complement.29 And one might even say that God’s patience now impresses itself upon us as an invitation and an imperative. An invitation, because God does not hurry us toward the eschaton in ways that would deny us space and time; an imperative, because there is the everpresent demand that we respond to the “summons to have faith,” taking up God’s cause and making good on the fact that we can and should now “seize and affirm this objective divine justification of our existence and with it the justification of divine patience itself … giving God the glory which He has assured Himself by creating and establishing this ground for His patience” (CD II/1, 419). We may and must follow the “pioneer of [our] salvation” (Heb. 2:10) because God, in Christ, has “opened” history by fulfilling the covenant and remaking humankind. What God waits for, accordingly, is exactly what God has already made possible: history being filled up with creaturely activity that honors Christ’s reconciling and redemptive life, inside and outside the Christian community, for the sake of the Kingdom. What God waits for is creatures that hasten toward her (2 Pet. 3:12).

29 Adam Neder uses the de iure/de facto distinction to good effect. See Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville: WJKP, 2009).

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2 The Afterlife of Patience in the Church Dogmatics I will of course have more to say about the ways that Barth propels reflection on patience far beyond earlier thinkers, and the constructive chapters of this book (and its successor) will make plain my deep indebtedness to his thought. But it is worth asking, first, if and how this construal of patience bears on Barth’s later writings. Certainly, Geduld does not seem to feature much in Barth’s writings after Church Dogmatics II/1. Most likely, its minimal showing is a result of Barth’s doctrine of election, the final and most significant shift in his theology after his disavowal of neoProtestantism in the mid-1910s and his engagement with Protestant scholasticism in the 1920s. Identifying Christ as the “electing God” and “elected human”—an identification that implies, in my view, that the eternal life of God qua Son comes to include the concrete history of Jesus of Nazareth—leads Barth to shift his dogmatic modus operandi. So, while readers of Church Dogmatics II/1 might have expected later remarks about creation, human being, atonement, the church, etc., to draw on Barth’s analyses of the divine perfections (and might have hoped, too, that Barth’s remarks about patience would find further application), the intervening part-volume on election—Church Dogmatics II/2—ensures that Church Dogmatics III begins on a slightly different footing. Claims about election, rejection, and divine and human determination are now in the ascendancy; they serve as the conceptual scaffolding on which claims about creation (CD III/1), the human being (CD III/2), providence and evil (CD III/3), ethics (CD III/4), and, later, reconciliation (CD IV/1–4) come to be hung. This does not mean, of course, that Barth’s consideration of God’s perfections does not factor into Barth’s treatment of these loci. Barth has plenty to say about grace, righteousness, holiness, etc., and many claims in Church Dogmatics III and IV draw on and mesh with the doctrine of God in Church Dogmatics II/1. Unsurprisingly: Barth never relinquishes his belief that God is the “one who loves in freedom,” and his account of election is best read as a development and deepening of his thought, not a radical reorientation of the whole. Still, a revised theological ontology and a shift in technical vocabulary complicate

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the uptake of earlier insights about God’s perfections. Many of those insights end up being applied in a rather ad hoc fashion. It is not the case, however, that patience now becomes a dead letter. Quite the contrary: Barth’s account of this perfection functions as a quiet dynamo, whirring under the surface of later installments of the Dogmatics. Paying attention to this dynamo, moreover, casts intriguing light on some important aspects of Barth’s later thought. Consider the connection forged between creation and covenant in Church Dogmatics III/1, with creation serving as the “external basis” of the covenant and covenant serving as the “internal basis” of creation. Although patience is mentioned infrequently in this context, it turns up at key moments. For instance, alongside the contention that “creation aims at history” (CD III/1, 59 rev.), Barth contends that God “fashions the world as a space for the human who is to be a participant in this grace … the human as the being who, precisely in this space, is to become thankful for God’s grace and should correspond to it” (CD III/1, 67 rev.). It is in creation, too, that “the creature really acquires and has time … the time which God allots and lends it from the unsearchable riches of His eternity” (CD III/1, 75). So while explicit references to patience are few, the substance of earlier claims remains: Barth describes a world that is sufficiently spacious and “time-full” for human beings to exist and act, and, in due course, respond to Jesus Christ, thereby making good on God’s “patience with the creature” (CD III/1, 59). At a pinch—and this will be a concern of the following chapter— one might even read the exposition of Gen. 1:1–2:4a that anchors Church Dogmatics III/1 as a finely grained account of divine patience in action: a slow-moving (but not, thankfully, pedestrian) exegetical exercise, the purpose of which is to elaborate God’s pre-historical application of patience, as God establishes cosmic structures that ensure that creatures will have the opportunity to find their own way, even as those creatures are ruled and directed by God. The claim that the covenant supplies “the material presupposition” of creation meshes, too, with the notion that Christ lives and dies as patience incarnate. The world does not have the particular qualities that it has because it exists as a “holding area” into which Christ will step—or, to switch the figure, as a stage that stands apart from the saving drama that is played upon it. Precisely because the fulfilled covenant is the inner basis of creation, the provision of space and time to creatures is ultimately a consequence of Christ’s life of obedience. Had Christ failed to obey the Father,

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unto death, creation would not exist and happen in the way it does (and, obviously, might not “be” at all: a strange counterfactual). However, because a coherent string of actions associable with and definitive of the history of the “man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5 [kjv]) define and fulfill the covenant, God “lets be” and “lets happen,” tolerating the continuance of sin, allowing creatures to ignore and frustrate God’s purposes. “For the sake of this One,” God is “patient with the many” (CD II/1, 418).

Consider, also, how Barth’s theological anthropology is marked by a dialectic that supposes human beings are “let be” and pressed to participate in the covenant of grace. On one level, the undertow of divine patience that courses through Church Dogmatics III/1 (which focuses on creation, sensu stricto) recurs in Church Dogmatics III/2 (which focuses on the human being within creation). Time is Christologically defined; it is “the time which [God] took to Himself” in Christ, then returned to us, “granting it as a gift to the men of all time” (CD III/2, 455). On another level, Barth begins to describe the “now” of human life as charged with the imperative to act, so that human beings, in Christ and in the power of the Spirit, might “perform” the transition between the present and the future and make good on God’s exercise of patience. “What can this transition mean for us,” Barth asks, “but again and again the offer, the summons, and the invitation to be with God now, to be present with God, to carry out this transition with God?” (CD III/2, 531 rev.). More insistently: “Now, now, is no time for dreaming, whether about past or future. Now is the time to wake up, to receive or act, to speak or be silent, to say Yes or No … Now I must step forward, take up position, be the person that I am” (CD III/2, 532 rev.). The pairing of eschatology and ethics that coursed through Barth’s second commentary on Romans is reprised, and in ways that expand Barth’s earlier remarks about the relationship between divine patience and creaturely agency. One ought not to suppose that God waits for us to exercise patience in a fashion analogous to God’s exercise of patience. That is an impossibility: there is no way for us to give God time and space; there is no way for us to “make” time and space for others in the manner that God does. But we do have an agenda for action, and part of that agenda is God’s call for human beings to respond to God’s directives in a manner that is disanalogous to God’s exercise of patience. Not disanalogous in the sense that we should rush toward and seize hold of God and one another (the first option being an impossibility, the second being

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a sinful act of aggression). Disanalogous in the sense that we are called upon to realize the freedom offered to us, and to set about “filling up” time and space in the power of Christ and the Spirit by paying tribute to the fulfillment of the covenant. Put differently: given that each human lives under the pressure of a graced present, internal to which is the death of the “old” human and the birthpangs that attend the emergence of the “new,” the patient God insists that we do not keep her waiting, but instead move forward to meet the future that is already upon us. While the covenant is fulfilled, it is not temporally closed; and it is the fact of nonclosure that obliges us to act, without delay, moving toward and into the future God has opened. These dimensions of Barth’s moral ontology may well combine and gain additional specificity in the “special ethics” of Church Dogmatics III/4 (an infuriating part of which, of course, is Barth’s reiteration of regressive claims about sex, gender, and sexuality, first articulated in Church Dogmatics III/2). But it is in Church Dogmatics IV and The Christian Life that earlier claims about divine patience are developed in a peculiarly striking manner. Generally, something of a connection with Augustine, mediated through the Blumhardts, comes into view. While Christian life is bedeviled by sin, we are not consigned simply to “endure” our fallen condition; we must invest in expectation, acting on behalf of the gospel and waiting eagerly for Christ’s return. “God’s Kingdom,” after all, is “coming to meet man”; and with the “second petition” of the Lord’s prayer, a Christian “looks toward this special dynamic reality, to the coming of God’s kingdom as the coming of God himself, to its breaking forth and breaking through and breaking into the place where those who pray the petition are, to encounter with them and therefore with all creation” (CL 236). At the same time, and more particularly, there is an intriguing qualification of Augustine. Expectant waiting is not a matter of a (graced) tension between a fallen present and a blessed hereafter. Expectant waiting is grounded in the fact that Christians know that humankind as such, in its entirety, is enclosed in Christ, and that Christians should hope for, and perhaps even anticipate, that this enclosure will be eschatologically confirmed through the advent of a time and space in which human beings relate to Christ face-to-face. One might even say—although I do not think that Barth quite gets there, at least not consistently—that it is the Spirit who spans the distance

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between Christ-past and Christ-future and that, as the Spirit “carries” the believer from the primordial reality of her election to its eschatological consummation, the Spirit incites the hope and expectation that no one will be lost. So when Christians hope, they do nothing other than “look toward and move toward … Jesus” (CL 255), anticipating that their movement from the present to the future will dovetail with God’s movement from the future into the present. They participate in a time in which they need not wait for Christ’s return, for that return is now underway. This perspective casts an intriguing light on the third section of §62 (Church Dogmatics IV/1), which describes the “time of the community.” Here, Barth offers an intriguing twist on God’s exercise of patience as it relates to human conduct. Having asked about the time before “the dawning of the eternal Sabbath of His second parousia” (CD IV/1, 736), Barth writes the following: God will not allow his last word to be fully spoken or the consummation determined, accomplished, and proclaimed by him to take place in its final form until he has heard a human answer to it, a human Yes; until his grace has found its correspondence in a voice of human thanks from the depths of the world reconciled with him; until here and now, before  the dawning of his eternal Sabbath, he has received praise from the midst of his human creature. So great is his grace, so broad is the reach of condescension, so serious is the solidarity in which he has committed himself with us human beings in the person of his Son … [that] God wills a body, an earthly and historical form of the existence of this head. … In order that this may happen, God still gives the world space, time, and existence; he allows the end-time to dawn and to persist. (CD IV/1, 737–38 rev.) This claim, which might have received fascinating development in a doctrine of redemption (the unwritten Church Dogmatics V), weaves together a number of interpretative threads. As God moves toward us, in Christ, in the mode of Christ’s futurity, what does God want of us? Or, perhaps better: in light of Christ’s fulfillment of the covenant, and in light of the fact that Jesus “carries and maintains” an “earthly-historical community” that “is part of Himself” (CD IV/2, 60), what is God waiting for? Barth’s answer, gestural as it

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is, is nothing short of remarkable: God waits for the purposeful enactment of Christ’s body in history. God petitions us to make good on God’s patience, to ensure that our de iure enclosure in Christ’s body is complemented by a de facto demonstration of and response to that enclosure. One might even say that God is holding history open in anticipation of this demonstration and response, persisting with the provision of time and space until the moment that, at long last, we take on the identity God has given us to realize. Here, then, the most radical edge of Barth’s “moral ontology” comes into view. There has not yet been a “last word.” For while grace is of course “irresistible” in awakening the human being to faith and rendering her cognizant of her enclosure in Christ’s body, while grace dynamizes the gathering, upbuilding, and sending of the Christian community, and while grace defines and shapes the passage and conclusion of history, God waits on creaturely actions that affirm the covenant’s fulfillment—and, in a sense, thus “finalize” that very covenant. Grace, which always bears the name Jesus Christ, stretches time and space in expectation of our gratitude, our responsible acknowledgment, and our invocation of God’s ways and works. God is patient with us so that we can make good on God’s patience, rewarding God’s patience with action that corresponds to God’s directives.

3 Interlude At this juncture, it is useful to advance some broader claims that look backward to earlier authors and forward to the constructive chapters of this book. To that end, this section considers how Barth’s reflections relate to earlier treatments of patience, and how Barth’s outlook might nourish a constructive proposal. First, it is important to praise Barth’s determination to reckon with patience von Gott aus. Patristic authors, obviously, anticipated this move. Recall Tertullian’s insistence that “patience is the very nature of God, the effect and manifestation of a certain connatural property” (De pat. 3.11); recall his and Cyprian’s determination to nest claims about human patience in a trinitarian framework. But no one rivals Barth’s single-minded determination to ascribe patience to God himself, and none are as bold or expansive as he

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when it comes to describing God’s creative, providential, and saving work as an exercise of patience. Calvin and Julian, to be sure, have their moments, and both propel reflection beyond a rich patristic witness. Julian suggests that believers’ patience with the pace of sanctification should be paired with God’s decision to disburse the transformative effects of Christ’s saving work slowly, at a speed and in a manner that respects our finitude and frailty; Calvin contends that God’s patience marks the point at which God’s providential and redemptive purposes converge (the latter being determinative of the former, the former building toward the latter) and gestures toward an account of atonement in which the cross represents a furious outworking of divine impatience. But Barth’s ambition with respect to patience is on a different level entirely. Neither Julian nor Calvin connects an account of God’s all-encompassing sovereignty with a comparable understanding of God’s patient and empowering “letting be” and “letting happen.” Neither go so far as Barth in advancing the intriguing idea that God’s withholding of judgment has as its correlate the belief that God upholds sinners, being “hard” on Godself as God patiently beholds and endures the extent and consequences of waywardness. And neither matches the rigor of Barth’s Christological concentration (although both, to be fair, come close), such that God’s rejection of sin, on the cross, received by Christ as patience incarnate, secures the extension of time and space for creatures. Neither, in other words, reckons with the possibility, glimpsed by Tertullian and Cyprian, then left hanging for centuries, that patience might play a leading role in a wide-ranging doctrinal statement. One finds in Barth, then, the beginnings of the dialectical reversal mentioned in the first pages of this book—a reversal that refuses the temptation to treat patience as a human matter, first and foremost, and that reorders thought by making an account of God’s patience the starting point for reflection. With that broad point in play, three further benefits come into view, having to do with divine patience as it relates to compatibilism, causality, and contingency: three dimensions of what one might call, roughly, the God-world relationship. These benefits can only be sketched at this juncture, with a number of generalizations thrown into the mix, but the sketches are a useful way to indicate the wider significance of Barth’s work and to preview arguments that will be developed in subsequent chapters.

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It is well known that Barth is an advocate of compatibilism. Throughout the Dogmatics, divine and creaturely action relate noncontrastively and noncompetitively, with God’s being and presence serving as the condition of creaturely lives that bear their own integrity, meaning, and consequentiality. There is no either/ or here, only a both-and, and what grounds this both-and is the transcendence and graciousness of God, who orders “the world to be itself, to have an integrity and completeness that is—by God’s gift— its own.”30 Christian thinking about the incarnation, understood along the lines of the “Definition” of Chalcedon (451 ce) and the Third Council of Constantinople (680–1 ce), illustrates something of this outlook. On one level, God qua Word so fully assumes and indwells the individual human essence that the Word assumes, in the Spirit, that this essence acquires personhood through its union with the Word and it becomes possible to say that the actions of the human, Jesus, just are the actions of the Word. On another level, the incarnation of the Word does not imperil the integrity, meaning, and consequentiality of Jesus’ own human being and action. Quite the contrary: it secures its integrity, meaning, and consequentiality, making it possible to view this activity as that of God and as that of “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5 [kjv]). So it is not just the case that the Word speaks to us as God, in Christ, in the power of the Spirit; it is also that Christ speaks to us, as a human being who represents God, in the power of the Spirit. And as it goes with Christ, so it goes with creation. Although creation at large is not “synced” with God in the same way that the humanity of Christ is synced with Word—that much is painfully clear—the fullness of God’s presence and agency in the world does not displace the fullness of creaturely presence and agency. It supports it. Does Barth’s construal of patience muddle a compatibilist account of God’s relationship to creatures? No; it simply ensures that what might otherwise be a fairly formal statement about divine and creaturely activity is positioned within a suggestive dogmatic framework. And this framework helps one to consider the diverse ways that God acts, in love and in freedom, in pursuit of saving

Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, xiii. I have engaged this text elsewhere; see Paul Dafydd Jones, “Rowan Williams’s Christ the Heart of Creation: A ReformedLiberationist Response,” JRTh 15, (2021): 3–21.

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fellowship with creatures, and the diverse ways that creatures respond to God’s activity. It lends valuable texture to Barth’s “moral ontology.” Reckoning with the place of causality in dogmatic reflection helps in elaborating this point. Characteristically eager to “assign … the whole credit for Creation to God” (Inst. I.16.1), Reformed thinkers have often used this concept to describe the relationship between divine and creaturely action. Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre is as good an example as any. In the first part of his “system of doctrine,” causality helps Schleiermacher describe the all-encompassing, determinative activity of God as creator, as well as Christians’ apprehension of an orderly Naturzusammenhang (nature system). The conceptuality does double duty: it affirms that “the entire system of Nature, comprehending all times and spaces, is founded upon divine causality” and that “every effect within the natural order is also, in virtue of its being ordained by the divine causality, the pure result of all the causes in the natural order, according to the measure in which it stands in relation to them” (Gl., §54 Leitsatz and 212). Whether or not Schleiermacher shares what Barth takes to be the Reformed tradition’s tendency toward determinism and abstraction, with an appropriation of philosophical and scientific construals of causality working to flatten out and “depersonalize” God’s relationship to the world, need not be determined at this point.31 More important is the fact that Barth’s compatibilism functions perfectly well without much reliance on the concept of causality, given a decision to allow other terms—covenant, command, dis/ obedience, responsibility, gratitude, acknowledgment, and, yes, patience—to fill out an account of God’s relationship to creatures in general and human beings in particular. The marginal showing of causality, in fact, seems to afford Barth valuable latitude. On one level, Barth can offer a description of God’s omnipresence that affirms “the maintenance of things in their being and in their powers” (Gl. 208–9) while resisting the temptation to describe divine omnipotence in ways that suggest that it consistently resembles the operations of efficient causality. God does not “control” creatures as a puppeteer does a puppet (or, say, as a

On this issue, see CD III/3, 94–107.

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struck billiard ball effects the billiard balls that it comes to hit); God’s sovereignty includes support for creatures as they pursue their own paths of being and activity. On another level, and more positively, Barth’s treatment of God’s creative, providential, and redemptive activity acquires valuable breadth. With a conceptually diverse scriptural witness in view, talk of divine patience ensures that an affirmation of sovereignty is paired with a multidimensional account of God’s activity and creaturely response (and, one might add, a multidimensional account of God’s “permissive” activity and its creaturely complements). Does this amount to a “shift away from the language of causality to one of personal action”?32 Perhaps, although I suspect that, at the end of the day, one must be just as careful with talk of “personal action” as with talk of causality (so Tillich: see ST1 145). My point here is more modest. Armed with patience (to borrow a phrase!), Barth can continue to suppose that “all events are governed by God’s secret plan” (Inst. I.16.2), and could gladly affirm the scholastic claim that “God’s providence is God’s transeunt action, by which he cares for and administers the world created by Him and all things that are and are made in it according to His own will for His glory and the salvation of the elect.”33 But these claims are now paired with the striking suggestion that God’s administration of the world, precisely because it reflects something of God’s patience, is inclusive of a divine activity that permits the creature to “go [its] own ways” (CD II/1, 418), even as that same creature “always finds itself in a very definite sense on God’s way” (CD III/1, 94). Patience, then, forms a dimension in Barth’s lifelong attempt to describe the God–world relationship in suitably complex ways; it adverts to a salutary concern to pair the richness of God’s life with an appreciation of the varied modalities of God’s relating to God’s creatures. It is worth noting that Barth’s marginalization of causality is not a blanket rejection. He does not suppose that causality has been so degraded by late modern conventions (and, more to the point, the cavalier acceptance of such conventions by theologians) that it is no longer serviceable. Amends can be made. And this judgment stands in

Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 143. 33 Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, rev. and ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: Wakeman Great Reprints, n.d.), 253 (quoting Polanus). 32

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intriguing contrast with Barth’s wariness toward the word “person” in trinitarian reflection. As a term of dogmatic art, causality is recoverable, whereas person is probably not. Which raises the obvious question: should Barth have been less wary about talk of divine persons, and more wary about talk of divine causality? More precisely: should Barth have offered a qualified endorsement of talk about persons in trinitarian reflection, analogous to his qualified endorsement of causality as part of a description of God’s providing?

This brings me to the issue of contingency. With creatures “accompanied and sustained” by the patient God, granted time and space to do as they will, what meaning attaches to this contested term? Often the Reformed tradition has favored a rather severe circumscription, so as to protect an affirmation of the scope and efficacy of God’s sovereign and directive activity. Beyond its utility for describing the status of creation as such (contingency being one way to specify the non-necessity of the finite order) and the integrity of creaturely action (contingency being one way to affirm the reality of secondary causes), contingency is frequently associated with finite agents’ apprehension of occurrences whose precipitating conditions might have combined differently and, as such, led to different states of affairs. Contingency is contingency, one might say, in the eyes of the finite beholder. Although any given course of events might appear fortuitous, even random—say, winning the lottery, bumping into a friend when overseas, being felled by a novel coronavirus— that course of events, like any other, is always determined and foreknown by God, and can always be folded into an acclamation of God’s all-encompassing governmental work. Firmly ruled out, accordingly, is any possibility that indeterminacy, unpredictability, chanciness, etc., are ontologically significant; and firmly ruled in is the claim that “whatever changes are discerned in the world are produced from the secret stirring of God’s hand” (Inst. I.xvi.9).34 Thus it is that the divine grip upon creation thus remains extremely

See also Turretin, Institutes 6.I.xi–x and Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt and trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 239–40. Richard A. Muller offers characteristically incisive remarks on contingency in his discussion of middle knowledge; see Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1575, vol. 3, The Divine Essence and Attributes, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 411–32.

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tight. If “secondary” causes have their own integrity, meaning, and consequentiality, they are nonetheless “ultimately connected with the necessity of immutability of divine providence, which is a necessitas consequentiae or ex hypothesi.”35 Barth’s account of patience loosens the divine grip when it comes to contingency, while still enabling an affirmation of the all-encompassing scope of God’s ruling. To make the point a bit polemically: His perspective on patience allows for contingency to acquire meanings that stretch beyond reference to the epistemological limits of finite creatures, and thus challenges a construal of divine ruling that sometimes lurks on the edges of the Protestant tradition, whereby God’s activity resembles that of a domineering, micromanaging despot: one who refuses to cede anything approaching “autonomy” to his children, even though he swears blind that this ordering of affairs is the “necessity of immutability,” not the necessity of coercion. While God is not so permissive that God accords creatures unfettered and boundless liberty (for “nothing, however insignificant, falls outside of God’s providence”),36 patience raises the possibility that God’s empowerment of creaturely activity includes events that are neither unequivocally sinful nor unequivocally aligned with God’s purposes. Generally, this allows one to postulate patterns of creaturely action that are not captured by familiar binaries: obedience or disobedience, freedom or bondage, gratitude or ingratitude, responsibility or irresponsibility, etc. More particularly, and rather more depressingly, there arises the possibility that God’s patience, which “lets be” and “lets happen” while empowering creatures to exist on their own terms, might have as a consequence surd-like events that simply do not fit within God’s wise and loving disposing, some number of which might be viewed as moments of abject tragedy. At any rate, just as patience helps one to imagine a spectrum of possibilities for divine action, drawing thought away from God’s rule being akin to a tight causal nexus, so patience might help one envisage a broader spectrum of possibilities for thinking about creaturely action, both in its own terms and with respect to its consequences. A polyphony and “plurality of providential forms” can be paired with a plurality

Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 267 (quoting Christoph Pezel). Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, 606.

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and polyphony of creaturely responses, some of which might even be characterized by a degree of indeterminacy, unpredictability, and randomness.37 Tentativeness with respect to terms like indeterminacy, unpredictability, and randomness (terms with slightly different meanings) is obviously important. Certainly, the preceding remarks on contingency raise questions about God’s omniscience and, more particularly, scientia media—“middle knowledge” being God’s foreknowledge of all possible events that could arise from creaturely actions, some number of which stand at a remove from God’s direct disposing of a creature (“direct disposing” being a governmental posture in which God ensures that some creature does x, y, or z). Equally, and more broadly, these remarks raise the question of how Christian thinkers might affirm instances of indeterminacy, unpredictability, and randomness, while not granting them such importance that an affirmation of God’s sovereign governmental, reconciliatory, and redemptive work rings hollow. Although I engage these questions in an ad hoc (and, I fear, incomplete) way in Chapters 5 and 6, it is worth noting a few points now. On one level, I suppose that framing the God/world relationship in terms of patience is compatible, at least in principle, with a fairly conventional affirmation of God’s all-encompassing sovereignty, the dependency of all creatures on God, and the reality of God’s preservative and governmental work—not to mention the “principle” of sola gratia as it bears on salvation and faith. On another level, and more particularly, the marginalization of causality, talk of “letting be” and “letting happen,” and the postulation of an ontologically significant kind of contingency justifies a relaxed kind of agnosticism with respect to some tricky issues. And that relaxation need not be held in contempt. Why not? Because, at the end of the day, it may be that theological reflection simply does not need a fine-grained understanding of divine omniscience. It seems possible to operate, for most of the time, with a homespun sense that God knows what is going on in past, present, and future, given that all events are encompassed by the divine willing, while demurring on the question of whether some portion of this knowledge is somehow “acquired,” being conditional upon some number of creaturely actions that God does not predetermine and foreknow. It seems quite possible, too, to say calmly that finite events combine and relate in ways that exceed any conceptual scheme that we might devise (whether that be tied to causality, patience,

David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 11. My debt to Fergusson will become further evident in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book.

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or ­something else), while still saying that God’s power and action is such that God somehow gets God’s way in the end. Johannes Cocceius makes the point nicely: “concurrence” … means the dependence of second causes upon the first cause in their actions, for a thing that does not exist of itself cannot act of itself. It is amazing that there is anything which at one time did not exist; more amazing that it also acts; most amazing that it acts freely and in such a way that it can do contrary things … Nevertheless, it is very clear that there is freedom in certain acting beings … and that they necessarily depend in their actions on the first cause and on the nod of its will. ­Furthermore—and this point is crucial—“The ‘how’ of this dependence is as hidden from the creature as is the very method of creation.”38 Hidden indeed! One cannot, as Austin Farrer famously noted, scrutinize the “causal joint”; that “joint” is as dogmatically mysterious as it is empirically inaccessible. Need one be surprised, then, that a Christian understanding of God’s creative and providential work might be marked with a greater degree of mystery than some theologians would like?

A second point: Barth’s account of patience supplies powerful support for (a) an affirmation of human life as embodied, contextspecific, and spatiotemporally delimited, while simultaneously (b) inviting the development of a fuller account of other-thanhuman creatureliness than Barth himself supplies. Something of the first point has likely come into view. For example, when Church Dogmatics II/1 is read as a backdrop to Barth’s theological anthropology, it is apt to view divine patience as the condition of God’s allocation of discrete stretches of time and space to each of us, and to suppose that these allocations of space and time go hand in hand with the demand that we dispose ourselves as agents who should enact something of the Kingdom that Christ has established. This is divine patience as “letting be” and “letting happen” and divine patience as the elicitation of covenantal response. The demand to “step forward, take up position, be the person that I am” (CD III/2, 532 [rev.]), moreover, is clearly not reducible to an existential state or a disembodied Johannes Cocceius, “De Providentia Dei,” c. XXVIII, Summa theologiae (1662). Quoted in Reformed Reader: A Sourcebook in Christian Theology, ed. William Stacy Johnson and John H. Leith, vol. 1, Classical Beginnings 1519–1799 (Louisville: WJKP, 1993), 176–7.

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ethic. Alongside an explication of the “I-Thou” encounter in §45 and a vivid description of the psychosomatic unity of body and soul in §46, and anticipatory of the (sometimes worrisome) ethics of Church Dogmatics III/4, the suggestive ecclesiology of Church Dogmatics IV, and the politically vital Christian Life, the “step” that Barth commends in Church Dogmatics III/2 is exactly that. It means placing one’s “embodied soul” (or “ensouled body”) here and there, engaging this or that dimension of one’s quotidian, in response to God’s commands and in the context of the covenant of grace, in order to make concrete the body of Christ at a particular moment in history.39 If the early Barth thought that Christianity did not deserve its name absent an eschatological sensibility, and if the later Barth stumbled terribly with respect to issues of sex, gender, and sexuality, that same later Barth could nonetheless say that the human task is not just to believe but to embody discipleship, acting within the covenant of grace at a certain moment in space and time. And this affirmation of embodiment positions Barth in good company. Although the Christian tradition has not lacked for thinkers who equivocate with respect to the goodness of our material selves, a basic delight in the corporeality of human life has never really disappeared from view. The remedy for Augustine’s despair at his “foulness and carnal corruption,” for instance, was not contempt for the body and withdrawal from the world; despair was met with a divinely induced “spiritual pregnancy” (Conf. II.i.1 and V.ix.16) that, when brought to term, matured into a theology that insisted on the inherent goodness of creation and understood that desire for God can be expressed through creaturely media. And while Calvin did indeed talk of the body as a “prison” in which the soul was housed, this Platonic trope was offset by a piety and theology that was consistently overawed by the order, beauty, and expansiveness of creation, and that esteemed the (embodied!) human as “the noblest and most remarkable example of [God’s] justice, wisdom, and goodness” (Inst., I.15.1). One might say, too, that the “ecclesiological turn” made by many theologians in recent decades—all the way from the antiliberal, pacifistic identitarianism of Stanley Hauerwas to the strident Anglo-Catholicism of John I borrow here from Marc Cortez, Marc Cortez, Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: An Exercise in Christological Anthropology and Its Significance for the Mind/Body Debate (London: T&T Clark, 2008).

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Milbank, the ethnographic inquiries of Mary McClintockFulkerson, the eucharistic theology of M. Shawn Copeland, and the localist/liberationist perspectives of the late Ada María Isasi-Díaz— is usefully enhanced by Barth’s corporeal understanding of the church. When Barth argues that “God wills a body, an earthly and historical form of the existence of [Christ’s] head” (CD IV/1, 738 rev.), he means exactly that. He imagines the Christian community as a fleshy affair. Barth’s reluctance to linger over the quotidian in which he and his readers are placed does not count against these claims. To be sure, he might have struggled to appreciate many perspectives that are now gathered, sometimes unhelpfully, under the canopy of “contextual theologies.” The momentum of his critique of Kulturprotestantismus was perhaps such that he would worry that a Gustavo Gutiérrez, a James Cone, or an Ada María Isasi-Díaz tended to hypostasize a particular community’s “religious” imagination, while disregarding the interruptive and communicative reality of the Word. (This worry, incidentally, would be off-target. There is a clear difference between theologies that baptize a bourgeois status quo and theologies that give voice to righteous, Spirit-inspired protests against injustice and the maldistribution of suffering. But that is an issue for another time.) But none of that should divert us from reading Barth as a thinker who wrote in medias res, and who sought constantly to interact with the ecclesial, civil, political, national, and international communities of which he was a part, encouraging various embodiments of discipleship. And while Barth does not plunge readers into his own context, given his preoccupation with tracing the shape of the ratio of faith as it is provoked and sustained by God’s selfrevelation, his work always draws readers to engage in their contexts, to enact various forms of Christian community outside of the margins of the Dogmatics.

But upside to Barth’s perspective ought not to divert attention from a significant downside. In much of the interpretation above, and in line with the rhetoric of Church Dogmatics II/1, §30.3, I have used “creature” as a placeholder for finite entities that are created, sustained, and empowered by God’s exercise of patience. The word is aptly inclusive: it encompasses everything that exists in time and space, known and unknown. It is also valuably homogenizing, for it applies to any particular creature that exists in time and space, stands in some kind of relation to others, and depends on God for its existence and activity. But for a dogmatic account of creatureliness to succeed in the long run, it must reckon with the staggering heterogeneity of

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God’s world. No creature, after all, is exactly the same as another; there is a dizzying range of differences immanent to creation, running all the way from subatomic particles to daydreams, dung beetles, toddlers, and awkward silences, each being located in a different patch of space and time. And a dogmatic appreciation of creatureliness must devise ways to honor this heterogeneity, talking about the full scope of God’s creation in light of the scriptural witness—even if, on occasion, it lingers over some creatures more than others. Granted, then, that Barth offers an impressive account of human life, does Barth think well about nonhuman life? Does he recognize and honor the heterogeneity of all creatures? Is God’s patience applied with sufficient breadth? Well, there are some promising moves, which certainly propel thought beyond a number of thinkers already considered in this book. The sections on patience in Church Dogmatics II/1, as noted above, are often helpfully vague about who benefits from God’s exercise of patience. While Barth certainly seems to assume the centrality of human beings in his account of creation, providence, and salvation, §30.3 leans heavily on generalized references to “the creature” and the creaturely “other.” The amount of time that Church Dogmatics III/1 spends on Genesis 1:1–2:4a is also encouraging; at a pinch, much of this part-volume can be read as an extended riposte to those who would treat nonhuman creation as a mere staging-ground for the incarnation.40 Indeed, while Church Dogmatics II/1 and III/1 lack the rhapsodical hymnody of, say, Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron or Gregory of Nazianzus’ second “Theological Oration” (or, for that matter, the young Jonathan Edwards’s letter on spiders), both show a winsome awareness of the rich manifold of God’s creative work.41 We do not seem to be in the realm of “inclusive For a fuller reading of Barth on creation, to which I am much indebted, see Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 153–87. 41 Basil of Caesarea, “On the Hexaemeron,” in Exegetic Homilies, trans. Agnes Clare Way (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 1963), 3–150; Gregory of Nazianzus, “The Theological Orations,” in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward Rochie Hardy in collaboration with Cyril Richardson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 136–59; and Jonathan Edwards, “The Spider Letter,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–8. 40

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teleological anthropocentrism”—a perspective in which human beings stand at the center of God’s redemptive purposes, while nonhuman creatures are consigned to a peripheral, supporting role.42 Anthropocentrism of this kind would be anathema to Barth: it jeopardizes an affirmation of God’s ways and works that contests human self-aggrandizement; it dislocates an affirmation of Christ’s fulfillment of the covenant from a glad affirmation of creation at large; it eschews Barth’s studied agnosticism regarding nonhuman creatures’ relationships with God. Even so, it is fair to say that Barth’s treatment of creation (and, for that matter, Barth’s account of God’s perfections) often allows anthropocentric habits of thought to steal in by the backdoor. A determination to foreground divine primacy is complemented with a stubborn tendency to hold human beings at a distance from other creatures—something evidenced by the fact that Barth’s delighted exclamations about the “natural” world are offered from the perspective of a spectator, not the perspective of one cognizant of their membership in a closely knit, interactive, multispecies community. Barth’s tendency to construe election in Christ in exclusive terms, not inclusively, also looms over the entirety of Church Dogmatics III/1: Christ always being the electing God and elected human, and never the electing God and elected creature. So while Barth does not quite make creation “all about us,”43 he cannot shake the idea that redemption is mostly, if not entirely, about us—and, by implication, not a matter of other-thanhuman creatures. And this implication carries over into his account of creation. The status of other-than-human creatures seems rather precarious. But recognizing that Barth shortchanges the manifold of creation is a useful goad to return to his account of patience. While Barth does not make as much of this divine perfection as one might hope after Church Dogmatics II/1 (likely a consequence, again, of the conceptual changes rung by Barth’s doctrine of election), talk of divine patience may serve as an opening to think more closely

David L. Clough, On Animals, vol. 1, Systematic Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), xix. Emphases removed. Much of the analysis here is indebted to Clough’s pioneering work. 43 Clough, On Animals 1, 6–16.

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about a broad spectrum of nonhuman creatures whom God “lets be” and “lets happen,” and to postulate that God grants them time and space to realize some number of distinctive identities, while exercising agency in some number of ways. It allows the idea, in fact, that nonhuman creatures are not just creatures whom God empowers to “do their own thing” within creation, but creatures who strive, somewhat like us, to reward God’s patience—to knit themselves into a creative and redemptive history, and to render this history ever more rich, complex, and valuable. Indeed, if it truly be the case that God exercises patience across the length and breadth of history, might it not be instructive—and this issue is crucial in the following chapter—to ask how nonhuman creatures might have responded to God’s patience prior to the advent of human beings? Might not the scriptural witness prod us to ask if the patience that accords “freedom and opportunity” (CD II/1, 411) to us, now and in the future, elicited other-than-human responses “in the beginning,” at creation’s dawn? This brings me to a third and final point, the force of which is likely already evident. If it be granted that Barth’s reflections on patience go some way toward reshaping how theologians think about God in relation to the world, and the world in relation to God, why not continue the process? Why not maintain the momentum, applying, expanding, and revising Barth’s insights to make better sense of various loci? Might not the Reformed (and, I suspect, basically androcentric) tendency to construe the allencompassing scope of God ruling as a way for God to “control … everything for the glory of His own name” be checked, such that a reconsideration of God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” comes to feature in reflection about God’s creative work?44 Might not there be ways to imagine God’s providing as an act of persistent blessing, paired with forbearance of sin as an act of longsuffering, as well as an appreciation of how God’s governmental work includes a slow “bending” of events to serve God’s purposes? And might not there emerge new ways of thinking about the incarnation as a union of divinity and humanity, such that God must “endure” a sinful world for the sake of our salvation?

Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 253 (quoting Heidegger). My emphasis.

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4 Patience in Twentieth and Twenty-FirstCentury Theology and Philosophy Although I am tempted to move directly to the constructive chapters of this book, two further challenges need to be met. The first, engaged in this section, is to reckon with the work of late modern theologians who have wrestled with patience, sometimes with precious little interest in Barth. From a fairly thin crowd of witnesses, I turn particularly to Alfred North Whitehead, Elizabeth Johnson, Catherine Keller, John Macquarrie, and W. H. Vanstone. With varying degrees of explicitness, each engages patience in an instructive way. The second challenge, taken up in the following section, casts a disquieting pall over previous chapters and raises the stakes for the constructive chapters to come. Both the pall and the stake-raising derive from an analysis of the ways that patience has been caught up in discourses that justify, naturalize, and/or mystify patterns of domination, and that have proven injurious for oppressed and minoritized communities. I do not suppose, of course, that worrisome uses of patience render this term dogmatically irredeemable. That would bespeak an inflexible attitude toward language and, worse, cast doubt on the sanctifying energies to which scripture bears witness. But it is important to balance hopefulness about God’s empowerment of theological work with a frank appraisal of the burdens of discursive convention, and to understand that those burdens cannot be summarily shucked off (i.e., along the lines of: “obviously patience does not mean x, y, z; let us instead suppose that …”). It is imperative to linger over the connotations that have become attached to this word, partly to train oneself to worry about their influence on theological inquiry, and partly to make plain the imperative for Christian theology to function as a counterhegemonic discourse that delights in the possibility that language is not stuck in place, but can instead respond to God’s doing a “new thing” and God’s providing “a way in the wilderness” (Isa. 43:19). Furthermore, reckoning with the unhappy past and ambiguous present of patience enables the formulation of a twopart rule that guides my constructive chapters: (a) recognize that patience has become burdened with grievous connotations, the force of which haunt even the most well-intentioned theological efforts;

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and, in light of this recognition, (b) set about forging a perspective, under pressure of grace, that neutralizes and confutes those connotations—a perspective anchored in the old and new idea that patience ought primarily to be applied to God’s being and activity.

(a) Divine patience, creativity, and compassion: Whitehead, Johnson, Keller Some famous words: God’s rôle is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it; or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness”. (PR 346) Although these claims are advanced in the peroration of a long, complex, and sometimes downright messy work of “Speculative Philosophy” (PR  3)—Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929)—they are framed in a manner that recalls Barth’s Christological concentration: Whitehead claims to espouse an outlook that honors the “Galilean origin of Christianity,” in contrast to one that takes its bearings from the despotism of a “ruling Caesar,” the strictness of a “ruthless moralist,” or the inertia of “the unmoved mover” (PR 343).45 Indeed, as Whitehead sees it, the dishonoring of Christianity’s Galilean origins, and the ensuing descent into various kinds of “absolutism,” amounts to a rudimentary error from which Western theology and philosophy has struggled to recover: ascribing maximal power to a deity who exists in splendid isolation, apart from and over against the Granted talk of Jesus as a “Galilean,” Whitehead is worryingly ambivalent about the context in which he lives, dies, and is resurrected. At other points in PR, Whitehead writes crudely about the “Semitic Jehovah” whose “fiat” renders the universe finite (so 94 and 95). And RM laments the way that the Hebrew Bible (the Psalms, in particular) takes “joy in the creative energy of a supreme ruler who is also a tribal champion” and promotes the “worship of glory arising from power … a barbaric conception of God” (RM 54 and 55).

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world, thereby reducing the world to “a self-sufficient completion of the creative act, explicable by its derivation from an ultimate principle” (PR 342). With this error in play, Whitehead supposes, the theistic game is bound to be played badly. It is saddled, ab initio, with a falsely finalized, “over-assertive” dogma (RM 145): pay all “metaphysical compliments” (SMW 179) to God and none to the world. A philosophical appreciation of the “deeper depth of the many-sidedness of things” (PR  342) becomes hard to achieve, as does an experience of God as the living ground of all that is. Sweeping (and questionable) though this account of the Western philosophical and theological tradition may be, it is but preliminary to Whitehead’s determination to forge a metaphysics that pays tribute to the patient poetry of the divine. Enter, at this juncture, “dipolar theism.” The first pole is God’s “primordial” or “conceptual” nature: a pattern of creative activity that underwrites and stabilizes the cosmos, making possible a wide array of creaturely lives and activities. God, here, is “the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things” (PR  344): an empowering creativity that continuously proposes trajectories for action whose realization will enrich and enhance creaturely life. (Roland Faber and others are quite right, in this respect, to assert that process cosmology is always soteriology, for God creates “from the front, from the perspective of the aim, from the future through God’s ad-vent and out of the future of the event.”)46 The second pole is God’s “consequent” or “derivative” nature. This pole names the dimension of God’s life wherein God receives the world, and to such a degree that whatever happens in the world, happens to God. In God’s consequent nature, God subjects Godself to—or, perhaps, is subjected to—the relational, processual, and ever-changing nexus of the cosmos, and God continuously folds that nexus into the time and space of God’s own life. Identification of these poles is accompanied with a bold reconceptualization of divine power, with an emphasis on God’s persuasive “lure” replacing a conventional account of God’s directive governance of historical events.47 God’s power is exercised in view of the fact that in the same moment that there is a “reaction Roland Faber, God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Louisville: WJKP, 2008), 97. Emphases in the original. 47 For an important development of this point, see Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York, 1984). 46

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of the world on God” (PR 345), so there is a reaction of God on, to, and for the world—and the way that God “reacts” is by getting ahead of each and every creature, proposing a “subjective aim [that] prehends every actuality for what it can be” (PR 346, my emphasis) and inviting the realization of a future whose value exceeds that of the present. There is no intensive and extensive system of divine rule, forged in advance of the world’s history. Divine power is always and only the power of suggestion, articulated in light of God’s sensitivity to a range of creaturely happenings—an array of ideational “nudges,” distributed across time and space, whose realization grows the world in the direction of greater intensities of truth, goodness, and beauty. Within this framework, talk of patience has a twofold purpose: it helps Whitehead describe God’s sensitive embrace of the world, and it underscores God’s desire that the world’s future be realized through creatures’ collaboration with God. On one level, there is God’s all-encompassing “surrelativity.”48 God does not observe the world’s ups and downs from a distance; rather, by dint of God’s enclosure of the world in God’s consequent nature, God is always “tenderly saving the turmoil of the intermediate world by the completion of his own nature” (PR 346). This is salvation, one might say, in the sense of patient preservation and patient (and ongoing) self-constitution. Nothing is lost; every creaturely occurrence is borne and memorialized in God’s ongoing life. On another level, and shifting now to God’s primordial nature, patience glosses God’s saving action as a continuous issuance of suggestions, the uptake of which enhance the world’s overall value. It describes something of God’s unflagging (and poetic) pursuit of creaturely well-being. Although God does not imperiously dispose affairs in this or that way, God is always busy in God’s provision of better futures for individuals, creaturely assemblages, and the cosmos in general. Indeed, precisely because God “lures” each and every entity into a better future, creaturely life is always shot through with possibility. While “God does not relieve the event of actual decisions involved in that becoming”—possibility remains exactly and only that, if a

Although “surrelativism” does not feature in PR, it is a useful term of art. See Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948).

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creature does not realize the “initial aim” God offers—the uptake of “initial aims” really does “bequeath to each event the possibility of becoming itself,” such that there might follow the enrichment of God and world.49 This is salvation, one might say, as a process of patient, gentle persuasion. And one part of this enrichment is the possibility that religion might release itself from the “rule of safety” for the sake of something much better: the “adventure of the spirit” (SMW 192). We are a long way from Augustine’s counsel that one must patiently “endure” the world; Whitehead’s construal of patience ties an affirmation of God’s receipt of the world with an affirmation of God’s ongoing desire to increase flourishing, now and in the future, while looking toward new forms of religious life. Whether or not Whitehead’s interest in divine patience carries over into the first and second generations of process thought is not a question I will tackle here. I want only to suggest that his work supports construals of patience that play intriguingly on the margins of some important North American liberationist texts. If a general condition for this development is an (unevenly theorized) wariness toward what sometimes goes under the unhelpful name of “classical theism,” paired with a willingness to rethink divine aseity and reconceive God’s relationship with the world, there also seems to be a drive to fold the language of patience into projects that take direct aim at long-standing structures of domination. Works by two quite different thinkers—the Roman Catholic theologian, Elizabeth Johnson and the Methodist theologian, Catherine Keller—prove particularly illuminating on this front. Although neither scholar draws much attention to the term, both suggest that Whitehead’s gestures have an intriguing afterlife in contemporary work. Johnson’s masterwork—She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse—obviously stands at a distance from the process tradition. Johnson’s principal interlocutor in this text is not Whitehead and his followers, but Thomas Aquinas.50

Faber, God as Poet of the World, 137. While Johnson’s debt to Aquinas is evident throughout SWI, it is also central to “Does God Play Dice? Divine Providence and Chance,” TS 57 (1996): 3–18, an essay that compensates for the slight account of providence in Johnson’s trinitarian statement. Indeed, Joseph Bracken worries that Johnson’s Thomism prohibits a more substantial appropriation of Whitehead; see “Response to Elizabeth Johnson’s ‘Does God Play Dice?’” TS 57 (1996): 720–30.

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It is Aquinas’ rejection of univocal talk about God that supports Johnson’s critique of the preponderance of over-literalized, masculine imagery for God, and Aquinas’ account of analogy that underwrites Johnson’s claim that female images are “capax Dei, capable not only of receiving the divine, but of symbolizing absolute mystery as well” (SWI 148). It is Aquinas, too, that Johnson turns to after naming God’s three persons as Spirit-Sophia, Jesus-Sophia, and Mother-Sophia, with the suggestion that God be identified as “She Who Is” offered in light of the Summa’s avowal that God is most properly named “the One Who Is” (qui est). (This gloss, in fact, is itself justified on Thomistic grounds: it is backed by the claim that the unknowability of God’s essence sanctions diverse names for God and by the claim that creaturely excellences are derivative of the perfections of God’s own life, albeit with the important qualification that “being female” be identified, contra Aquinas, as “a creaturely excellence” [SWI 242].) But Johnson’s critique of classical theism also has its share of Whiteheadian flourishes, mediated through Mary Daly’s appropriation of Feuerbach’s reading of Christianity. The conclusion to Process and Reality often seems close at hand. The symbolism of “classical theism,” for instance, is adjudged to be beholden to a patriarchal mindset that gives mystifying cover for a hierarchical ordering of society. And a theology that invests heavily in “the absolute transcendence of God over the world, God’s untouchability by human history and suffering, and the allpervasiveness of God’s dominating power” is deemed the projection of a “solitary ruling male ego” that “prizes … unopposed powerover and unquestioned loyalty” (SWI 21). The moments in which Johnson distances herself from Aquinas serve, too, as occasions for her to reprise something of Whitehead’s two-pronged construal of patience. On one level, and most generally, Johnson protests the assumption that “no real relation” (ST 1.13.7) obtains between God and the world. As an alternative, she offers a modestly interactive form of panentheism. Reciprocity and relationality are not only constitutive of God’s trinitarian life; they are part and parcel of God’s relationship with the world. Out of the depths of God’s freedom (and not, pace Whitehead, because God is bound by a prior metaphysical framework: see SWI 265), consistent with the intensity of God’s love for creatures, and in line with the biblical witness, God makes solidarity and compassion for creatures ontologically significant for God’s own

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life. And God does so to such a degree that, while God’s life is not held hostage to creaturely action, God is always affected by the condition of her creatures, “carrying” their joys and pains into the time and space of God’s own life, just as a mother carries and bears the joys and pains of her children. On another level, and more particularly, Johnson supposes that God’s “creative, maternal love … the generating matrix of the universe” (SWI 179) goes hand in hand with “the dynamic act of ‘letting-be’” (SWI 239); figures the redemptive activity of Christ and the Spirit in terms of their liberating empowerment of creatures, suggestively proposed but not imperiously enforced; and contends that God suffers with her creatures, being “an ally of resistance and a wellspring of hope … under the rule of darkness and broken words” (SWI 272). While the name of Whitehead is spoken rather quietly (and Barth’s, not at all; talk of “letting be” is borrowed from John Macquarrie) and while the idiom of patience is not pushed forward, the implication stands ready to be drawn. Whiteheadian claims have been spliced with a feminist reading of Aquinas. Sophia-God is patient in her unflagging creativity, compassion, and saving kindness, and patient in her willingness to live in compassionate solidarity with God’s creatures. It is through patience that God receives the world, and it is with patience that God leads the world into the future. If Johnson espouses a modified Thomism, Catherine Keller commits to a fuller application of process insights. She does so with a resolve to think relationality radically (in the sense of radix = root), with interconnection, interdependence, and interaction made basic to reflection on God and the world. The twinned ideas of a transcendental ego and a transcendent God, viewed as directly supportive of patriarchal, anthropocentric, and absolutist habits of mind and action, are thus roundly critiqued. In their place Keller discerns a spiritually charged “web,” stretched out across time and space, that binds creatures to God and God to creatures. And while this web invites ad hoc (and often quite brilliant) engagements with feminist theory, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and queer, literary, and environmental studies, it also accommodates Keller’s determination to engage the basic loci of Christian thought. While Keller prefers an open-ended, multiplicitous “polydoxy” to a (putatively) straitlaced orthodoxy, her works comprise nodes in a recognizable doctrinal program—anthropological beginnings (From a Broken Web) being complemented by eschatological horizons

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(Apocalypse Now and Then, God and Power, Facing Apocalypse); a doctrine of creation (Face of the Deep); an apophatic doctrine of God, tinged with a pluralized Christology (Cloud of the Impossible); and a description of Christian life (Political Theology of the Earth). Work at the intersection of metaphysics and experience—exactly the place, according to Whitehead, that religion happens (RM 31)— thus goes hand in hand with a concern to engage in the age-old task of faith seeking understanding, with the “the body of Christ” being “multiply incarnate in a logos-invoked cosmos” and the Christian called to embrace a “threefold alter-knowing,” that seems to be keyed to a trinitarian sensibility defined by “mindful unknowing … constituent relationality … [and] manifold justice.”51 What, then, of patience? Early in Keller’s first book, From a Broken Web, the word receives a negative charge: “His the agency, hers the patience” (FBW 15). This apothegm exemplifies a questionable philosophical and theological paradigm, with the relationship between the adventuring, ambitious Odysseus and the passive, pining Penelope functioning as an Urtext for modern Western thought. This relationship, in fact, exposes the ideal of the autarkic, “separative self” for what it really is: an idealized vision of male dominance. And just as this idealized vision is flanked by the ideology of the meek, supportive, waiting, uncomplaining woman, so it is also accompanied by an account of divinity that fetishizes independence, impassibility, and isolation. A nonrelational doctrine of God continues to hold sway, just as patriarchal norms persist, sometimes even infecting the founding texts of feminist theory. (De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is a case in point: while acknowledging the brilliance of de Beauvoir’s critique of patriarchal norms, Keller deftly tracks the influence of masculinist ideology on this text). But neither the ideology nor the theology is insuperable, and it is by way of theological reflection that the ideology can be challenged. Toward the end of her book, then, Keller sketches an account of religion that eschews binding and exclusion (re + ligare = to bind) in favor of connection and inclusion, challenging the long-standing Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, “Introduction” to Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider (London: Routledge, 2011), 13; and Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 27.

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(if sometimes unnoticed) assumption that “sexism and separatism make a pair” and promoting the idea that selves are always “loci of unlimited relation” (FBW 87 and 161). The figure of Arachne bulks large, as does the poetry of Adrienne Rich, disclosing a rather different vision of patience than that suggested at the beginning of the text. A lengthy quotation: “A wild patience has taken me this far.” The etymological equivalence of passion and patience—related to pathos, from the Greek pascho, “to suffer”—now points to a new synthesis. The vitality of “making” no longer negates patience but emboldens and energizes it. Patience can be a front for passive waiting of the old feminine variety. But the patience that is untamed and elemental is a form of courage. It will not abandon the total web of our connections in spite of failures of our energy and the recurrent disintegrations of community. The spider keeps on picking up the spayed threads of smashed efforts, joining them with fine fresh filaments extruded from her own substance … Such dauntless determination generates a long-term momentum: a person emerges who knows her own endurance as weblike, woven of the complex integrity of her unfurling selves, each at once receptively, patiently, feeling the world as it is, and creatively, urgently making the world as it will be. (FBW 224) Although Keller’s etymology needs expansion (granted the association of passion and patience with pathos and πάσχω, the New Testament often talks of μακροθυμία), the association of patience and creaturely agency is here transposed into a new key. Yes, it continues to number among virtues that are often put in service of male domination. (Which, to follow Rich, is exactly why one “can never romanticize language again … never deny its power for disguise for mystification.”)52 But a Spirit-led creativity engenders a different future for the word. Patience can be manifest in those cognizant of the relational character of life, those whose “courage” has nothing to do with masculinist aspirations and everything to

Adrienne Rich, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 4. From “The Images” (1976–78).

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do with a faithful desire to foster connection and interdependence. This kind of patience, in fact, engages in a steady remaking of creaturely relations, such that a community might “bear fruit with patient endurance” (Lk. 8:15) and build up the Kingdom. Or, to turn back to the God of Process and Reality: one might now say that the “tender patience” of God, which makes and remakes the cosmos, evokes and enables the patience of the divine Arachne, a spinner who rejects a narrow construal of liberty, apprehends the “elemental” beneath the superficial, holds fast to the “total web of our connections,” and, costs to herself and others notwithstanding, persists with the long-term project of liberating the universe through the “restorative work of reconnection” (FBW 218). An acquiescent, fawning Penelope is no longer in view. Patience has become a matter of our discovering and performing relationality, with selves ever more attuned to their embeddedness in the world, and ever more alert to “initial aims” that propel a divinized world toward salvation. In Face of the Deep, the figure of the web no longer predominates; we plunge now into watery depths. And, in something of a contrast to From a Broken Web, one discerns an elevated interest in exegesis and doctrine. Building on earlier process thinkers,53 Keller wants to read the opening verses of Genesis with an eye to establishing a dialectical tension between the idea of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) and the idea of a creatio ex profundis (creation from the depths). The former idea, she contends, betrays a “dominological” mindset. Treating God as the exclusive, isolated condition of the creation, sustenance, and governance of the cosmos juxtaposes and holds apart God and world, while underwriting a slew of troublesome binaries: order/chaos, being/becoming, man/woman, Christian/Jew, reason/affect, agape/eros, human/creature, control/ creativity, simplicity/multiplicity. The latter idea, by contrast, begins to liberate the imagination. Read in conversation with biblical

See, for instance, John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 65: “Process theology rejects the notion of creatio ex nihilo, if that means creation out of absolute nothingness. That doctrine is part and parcel of the doctrine of God as absolute controller. Process theology affirms instead a doctrine of creation out of chaos (which was suggested not only by Plato but also by more Old Testament passages than those supporting the doctrine of creation out of nothing).” 53

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studies, an appreciation for ancient near eastern mythopoetry, and a capacious vision of process thought, the opening creation saga of Genesis raises the possibility that God and world might be treated as co-constitutive sites of becoming, entwined “in the beginning.” Face of the Deep adds, too, to Keller’s earlier remarks about patience. Although the term is used even less frequently (excepting a single reference to Rich’s “wild patience”), it can be employed as an interpretative gloss that brings some of the book’s most important undercurrents to the surface. Notice, first, that Keller’s hermeneutical posture is marked by a patience that waits on biblical texts. In this text, as in many others, Keller lingers over long-overlooked prehistories and backstories, and poetic and narratival folds and fissures, so that “the chaotic multiplicity of biblical writings, genres, voices, and potentials” might be received as discrete sites comprising a “sacred space” (FD 5). And with this exegetical lingering, Keller anticipates a multiplication of multiplicity, a “tuning [of] creation to possibility,” that helps Christian thought always to “start … again” (FD 233 and 3). Keller’s fascination with the tohu vabohu (the “formless void” of Gen. 1:1) and the tehom (the “deep” of Gen. 1:2) is of course central. On one level, close exegetical work stymies uncritical recourse to the ideology/theology of creatio ex nihilo, while simultaneously raising the possibility that God and the tohu vabohu might be treated as coprimordial. God’s creative act need not be viewed as the exclusive reason for there being something, as opposed to nothing; creation can be understood as happening in light of the tohu vabohu that is already there, preexisting as a developable chaos. On another level, close exegetical work points toward a “tehomophobia” that swells behind Gen. 1:1–2: a fearful mindset, nourished by the memory of a cosmogonic matricide (recounted in the Enuma Elish) that conspires to stifle an embrace of ontological heterogeneity. Yet precisely because the tohu vabohu and the tehom remain in view, and precisely because they, too, can be waited upon and resurrected from their watery grave, antihegemonic possibilities persist. To hold fast to the “chaosmos of Genesis” (FD 38 and 40), to render oneself susceptible to its ebbs and flows, is an occasion to unlearn restrictive habits of thought and to embrace new ventures of Spirit in a “nova creatio ex profundis” that “requires our … participation” (FD 238). The second dimension of patience in Face of the Deep returns us to the notion of “letting be” and is usefully considered in light

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of Keller’s  critique of Jürgen Moltmann’s God and Creation.54 Moltmann’s principal misstep in this text, Keller contends, is the retention of the notion of creatio ex nihilo. It warps his appropriation of the kabbalistic idea of zimsum—that is, the idea that God opens space inside of Godself, “contracting” Godself in order to make room for the world to exist and happen within God. The unilateralism endemic to creatio ex nihilo is the root of the problem: it encourages the belief that God has to “hollow out” Godself and it implies, correspondingly, that “his” creation is a passive, forsaken, feminine counterpart. But once creatio ex nihilo is jettisoned, a different perspective emerges. Keller puts it thus: “it is precisely the dichotomy of ‘making’ and ‘letting be’ that Genesis precludes … How else does Elohim make—but by letting be: ‘And God said: let there be …?’” (FD 17; see also 116–17). “Precisely”: in what sense? What exactly does “letting be” mean here? Although Keller does not elaborate, it is not wrong to say—although it is surprising to say it—that we are moving toward Barth’s understanding of patience, albeit with lots of Whitehead added to the mix and in view of the irony that Keller goes on to critique Church Dogmatics III/1 very sharply. “Letting be” underscores Keller’s abiding concern to describe God’s action not in terms of “an exhibition of overruling power” (RM 57) but as permissive generosity, with the granting of (relative!) independence to diverse creatures going hand in hand with the provision of multiple redemptive “lures.” And if these lures consolidate into a (relatively) organized cosmos, that consolidation is in no respect forced. It is the upshot of what Keller at one point suggestively calls a creatio cooperationis (FD 117): a patient “letting be” that is met with a wide array of creaturely responses, ventured by “actual entities” that exist “for themselves” and have “their own value, individual and separable” (RM 88). As with Church Dogmatics II/1, §30.3, creatures are afforded the opportunity to exist and happen on their own terms. And the “growth” of creation, accordingly, depends on a divine patience that cherishes the development of particularity, with each individual entity given “solitariness in community” (RM 88) and empowered to use its solitariness in this or that way, continuing along well-grooved pathways or striking out into the

See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).

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unknown. There follows, too, a commendation of a tehomophilia, laced with hope about the future. Prior to and alternative to every “monoperspectival, monomaniacal,” idolatrous vision of God as an Almighty Ruler, there is the ancient reality of “Womb, Word, and Wind” (FD 149 and 225) that supplies natal moments of possibility, difference, and sacrality. There is the “divine Agape, the love that patiently, stubbornly, continues,” proposing and deepening relationships that draw the salvation of the future into the present.55 Keller’s later work does continue to toy with the idea of human patience. Thus a fascinating claim, tendered at the end of the first chapter of Cloud of the Impossible: “The possible impossibility of theology lets us mind the specific uncertainty of any relation—when it matters. We may then attend to the unknowing into which, at each crisis of relation, our nonseparable difference plunges us. The truth we then test, the troth we pledge, plies a mindfulness of our interdependence and at the same time a patience, even a pleasure, in its enigmatic excess.”56 If the God whom we cannot conclusively know patiently maintains a relational web of unsublate-able difference, while seeding that same web with possibilities of intensified relation and outbursts of justice, one might say that the human task is to abide in the web. For us to be patient is to be constantly on the lookout for possibilities; to nurture them (without seeking to possess them) whenever we can; to receive and align ourselves with patterns of divinecreaturely action that uphold and expand the divine “cloud” that envelops all that is.

(b) From “letting-be” to divine and human waiting: Midcentury Anglican theology One finds in Johnson and Keller, then, a number of steps beyond (but not always against) Barth, with Whitehead’s suggestive treatment of divine patience drawn into the realm of constructive theological work. Johnson’s feminist Thomism sports a number of process-like flourishes. One finds here a modest form of panentheism, with God patiently receiving the weal and woe of the world. And one finds an intriguing doctrine of creation, with God patiently and permissively “letting be” going hand in hand with God’s efforts to nudge the world toward an embrace of justice and liberation. Something of Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 113. 56 Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 49. 55

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a parallel to this stance will be developed in Chapter  5. Keller’s feminist process theology gives patience another twist, and has some resemblance to the perspective that I develop in Chapter 4. While her early work commends patience as it relates to the slow work of intensifying relationality and interconnection, later writings raise the prospect that God’s creative activity can be described as a patient act of “letting be” that elicits innovation—the upshot being a creatio cooperationis that distinguished the world “in the beginning” and, depending on our response to God’s promptings in the present, can propel the world to a better state in the future. Works by John Macquarrie and W. H. Vanstone, which antedate the scholarship of Johnson and Keller by a few decades, provide additional pathways for thought. The frame in which these authors work is of course quite different. Whitehead’s influence is much reduced (and, in Vanstone, basically absent) and there is little explicit interest in liberation. Meanwhile, Barth’s presence is palpable, if a little hard to track—there is no explicit mention of his treatment of God’s “perfections” and an obvious concern to adopt a different kind of rhetoric. Even so, the value of patience as a theological motif is again obvious.

(i) John Macquarrie Although the second, revised edition of John Macquarrie’s Principles of Christian Theology was published in 1977, it breathes the air of midcentury European philosophy and theology. There is a marked lack of interest in the initial stirrings of liberation theology in Europe and the Americas; one finds instead frequent engagement with Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, a nuanced appreciation for Rudolf Bultmann’s method of demythologization (which Macquarrie rightly understands as a way to focus attention on God’s saving action),57 and a drive to fashion a doctrinal idiom that “modern man” finds intelligible—this “man” being reform-minded but wary of “extreme” rhetoric and keen to balance the “religious” and “secular” dimensions of life.58 Granted all of this, it would be a See here, further, John Macquarrie, The Scope of Demythologizing: Bultmann and His Critics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960). 58 On which, see John Macquarrie, God and Secularity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967). 57

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mistake to dismiss Principles as period piece. Unlike certain of his peers (Fritz Buri comes to mind), Macquarrie is acutely aware that existentialist insights can narrow the range of theological inquiry, with the faith of the individual gaining outsized importance in the formation of doctrine. To forestall this narrowing, the philosophical opening of Principles immediately drives readers beyond the experience of “modern man.” Its “existential-ontological” outlook frames human existence in increasingly expansive ways: existence before God, existence within nature and society, and existence in light of God’s revelation of God’s relationship with the world as such. And this breadth of concern is not just indicative of a preference for Heidegger over Sartre. It is paired with the frankly Schleiermacherian conviction that a theologian’s prolegomenal labors should be governed by “participation in a particular historical faith” (PCT 177), while acclaiming “a dynamic God who goes out into a world of beings” (PCT 211) and advancing cognitively significant (if necessarily “symbolic”) claims about creation, history, Christ, salvation, eschatology, etc. Macquarrie’s most comprehensive systematic project, then, quickly breaks free of what might otherwise be a restrictive point of departure. And in so doing, its opening sections establish the foundation for a theological statement of abiding importance, one that echoes much in the Dogmatics while also anticipating dimensions of Johnson’s and Keller’s perspectives.59 One of the most intriguing dimensions of this statement is the claim, picked up by Johnson (and echoed in my treatment of creation), that one of God’s most basic activities vis-à-vis the world is “letting-be.” The claim is first floated in a chapter of philosophical theology that threads a path between Immanuel Kant, Heidegger, A useful resource here is Eugene Thomas Long, “John Macquarrie on Language, Being, and God,” TRM 30, no. 2 (1976): 255–79. Macquarrie’s autobiographical remarks are also illuminating; see “Pilgrimage in Theology,” in Being and Truth: Essays in Honour of John Macquarrie, ed. Alistair Kee and Eugene T. Long (London: SCM, 1986), xi–xviii. I would also note that my framing and my reading of Macquarrie’s theology challenges John Webster’s claim that “the real engine” of the theology of Principles “is to be located in the prolegomena,” such that “the generic” has precedence over the “symbolic” and “positive.” See here John Webster, “Introduction: Systematic Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.

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Rudolf Otto, and others. While God qua Being is certainly not to be included in the class of particular beings, God vouchsafes the reality and integrity of those “particular instances of being” (PCT 113) that God creates and sustains. Creation thus includes a “dynamic letting-be” that secures “the derivative existence of … beings, whether persons or things” (PCT 120). It is not simply the case that God is the reason that there is something, as opposed to nothing. One must also say God is the reason why a heterogeneous range of somethings comprise the cosmos, existing on their own terms; and that God is the reason that those discrete somethings relate diversely to one another and to God. The import of these claims becomes clearer as Macquarrie details his “symbolic” theology, which forms the material center of Principles (and serves both as the horizon of Macquarrie’s initial “philosophical theology” and the basis for the “applied theology” of the book’s third part). It is here that talk of “letting-be” is tethered to careful statements about Trinity, creation, Christ, and salvation. Macquarrie’s doctrine of God, obviously, is fundamental: it identifies God qua Father as “‘primordial’ Being … the ultimate act or energy of letting-be” who expresses himself through the Son and the Spirit (“expressive Being” and “unitive Being” [PCT 198–201]). And although Macquarrie is not quite clear as to how “letting-be” bears on the relations that obtain between the divine persons—an issue to which I will return at the very end of this project—he is adamant that the God who “lets be” is a God whose creative work involves considerable risk. Precisely because God (patiently!) “lets be,” God does not play it safe, resting content with the untroubled peace of her own life and forging a world devoid of peril. Nor does God fashion a world populated by creatures who are unable or unwilling to alienate themselves from the source of their being. God commits to “pouring out” being,60 creating and sustaining “a world of change and multiplicity and possibility” (PCT 200)—a world in which creatures can and do frustrate God’s intentions; a world in which the “other” is given “space and time for its own existence,” living as “a reality side by side with

As Tim Bradshaw observes, Macquarrie’s account of God’s outpouring sometimes “begins to resemble the notion of the logos spermatikos.” See “Macquarrie’s Doctrine of God,” TynBul 44, no. 1 (1993): 20.

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God’s own” (CD II/1, 409). On this reckoning, then, “letting-be” is a permissive mode of divine activity, creative and providential in import, wherein creatures are empowered to assert and realize themselves with a degree of liberty. And as “the continual giving forth of being to beings by Being” shows how the Father’s eternal self-expression in the Word is “doubled” in created time and space, so it is possible to associate creation with the activity of the Word: the divine person who “brings … forth beings” marked by their own integrity and volition.61 Furthermore (and here we move a distance away from Barth’s Reformed sensibilities), Macquarrie’s thought lists in a synergistic direction. Against what he sometimes describes as a “monarchical” construal of God,62 he argues that the world that God “lets be” has an open history. While all creatures depend on God and each human being is asked to “realize his [sic] essence in the openness of an existence in which he too can let be, in responsibility, in creativity, and in love” (PCT 230)—a fascinating claim about what imitation of God might entail, and one that I glance toward in the next chapter—providence is adjudged more a matter of guidance than governance. God certainly encourages the “realization of potentialities of being … and the overcoming of dissolution, frustration, annihilation” (PCT 243), and Christians aptly hope for a “steady overcoming of negativity by positive beingness” (PCT 257). But divine encouragement and Christian hopefulness are flanked with the awareness that God does not compel this or that course of action, opting instead to allow creatures to estrange themselves from God. The risk of a love that lets be—or, one might say, a divine decision to be patient, as God permits sin to distort God’s world—renders tragedy an ever-present possibility. A possibility, yes; but one that is always-already denied ultimacy. With the incarnation, God’s “reconciling work moves out into the open and takes a decisive leap forward” (PCT 271): the divine love that “lets-be” plunges into the world and is met with a perfect human response. The influence of Karl Rahner at this juncture is obvious: Christ is described as “kind of open place  … where divine Being

Bradshaw, “Macquarrie’s Doctrine of God,” 21 and 22. “Monarchical” thinking being a constant problem for Christian thought. See John Macquarrie, Stubborn Theological Questions (London: SCM, 2003), 13–25.

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and human existence come together” (PCT 296), with the Son’s full presence, as letting-be, uniting with the human who perfectly realizes his potentiality in the space opened by God.63 A Nestorian Christology, then, with the union of the Son and an individual human essence rendered a matter of conjunction, as opposed to a hypostatic union? Macquarrie would say not. He would contend that “incarnationism” and “adoptionism” are complementary dimensions of the New Testament; and he would argue, more positively, that “letting-be” goes hand in hand with an actualistic ontology, with Christ’s divinity and humanity no longer viewed as static substances but dynamic events. Furthermore, he would likely note that his vision of Christ’s person coheres with an understanding of atonement that combines the “classic” model of Christus Victor with John McCleod Campbell’s reconceptualization of sacrifice as vicarious repentance and, by extension, with an understanding of salvation that pairs “divine initiative and man’s cooperation” (PCT 338) as the Spirit draws alienated beings into harmonious relationships with God and each other.64 Thus it is that Christ’s example and the promptings of Christ’s Spirit ensure that each creature “will move nearer to the fulfilment of its potentialities, as the horizons of time and history expand, and it is set in an ever wider reconciling context” (PCT 361)—a time, arguably, in which God’s “letting be” will near its zenith, with God having done everything needful to “confer, sustain, and perfect the being of … creatures” (PCT 349). These are of course only a few elements of a weighty proposal. But they suffice to indicate that Macquarrie, in his own way, develops a theology that breathes the air of patience, and does so in a manner that reprises—perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not—a number of claims in Church Dogmatics II/1. The conceptuality and rhetoric employed are quite different; the substance is often very similar. On one level, the explication of “letting be” in Principles underscores how God maintains creatures in their relative independence, while

See, for instance, Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 149–200. 64 Bradshaw is right to claim that Macquarrie and Barth overlap at this point: “The third person unites Being with beings so as to re-integrate them existentially, just as for Barth the Holy Spirit imparts revelation and elicits the reconciling response of faith.” See “Macquarrie’s Doctrine of God,” 19. 63

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demonstrating a vivid sense of the diverse ways that God acts in, for, and with the world. And granted that Macquarrie’s synergism is liable to set Reformed teeth on edge, the way God’s actions are described could prove congenial to Barth. There is a willingness to toy with the possibility that nonhuman creatures should feature in a doctrine of creation; a wariness toward tightly wound, deterministic visions of providence, paired with a desire to continue to affirm God’s directive shaping of the course of history; a lack of interest in the idiom of causality; the suggestion of a future “opened,” by the Spirit, for creaturely activity that contributes to the Kingdom that Christ establishes. On another level, and still in continuity with the Dogmatics, Macquarrie shows again that the idiom of “letting be” can help one to balance an affirmation of divine activity with a robust account of the meaning, integrity, and consequentiality of creaturely activity. It is not only unnecessary to say, pace Moltmann, that “it is only a withdrawal by God into himself that can free the space into which God can act” (a curiously competitive vision of God and God’s relationship to the world, which I will gripe about in later chapters).65 We are now on the way to an understanding of creatio ex nihilo that, pace Keller, does not invoke the specter of a divine overlord who wields power in ways that render “his” creatures mere pawns. While God is the sole condition of the world’s existence, God’s creative work is a matter of God conferring being for its own sake—an act of unconditioned largesse. Which is to say: creation is not a matter of God’s ceding time and space to another; it is a matter of God’s giving time and space to creaturely others, and then, grace upon grace, empowering those others to act on their own terms, with and for each other, and with and for God. Colin Gunton puts it in a manner that Macquarrie could perhaps approve: “There is a greater stress on what we might call the giving of space to be to a reality that is other than God. The world is not simply a function of God’s action, though that remains in the centre, but that action creates something that has its own unique and particular freedom to be.”66

Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 86. 66 Colin Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 5. 65

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(ii) W. H. Vanstone W. H. Vanstone’s beloved little book, The Stature of Waiting, opens with the declaration that it represents “a small and limited exercise in what Paul Tillich called the method of correlation” (SW ix), whereby the theologian “explains the contents of the Christian faith,” which arises in light of God’s self-manifestation in Christ and the Spirit, in light of “existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence” (ST1 60). However, whereas Tillich’s questions were shaped, at least in later life, by a fairly idiosyncratic form of existentialism, Vanstone’s concerns are rather more affective and, in the basic sense of the word, rather more political: he addresses the condition of women and men in the urbanized and industrialized West, with his ministry to working-class communities in the north of England serving as a constant (if sometimes implicit) point of reference.67 Central here is the contrast between a widespread valorization of activity and the inescapable experience of passivity. On the one hand, Vanstone argues, we live as heirs of an “enlightened” philosophical anthropology that conceives human beings as sovereign agents—a conception that intersects with late modern ideologies of work, personal achievement, self-realization, and the like. On the other hand, there is the unavoidable fact that, in the present and for the “foreseeable future” we inhabit “a world in which the individual lives ever more and more in the condition of ‘patient’” (SW 43), with routinized drudgery and advances in technology (especially medical care) curtailing the possibilities for human existence. And Christian theology and philosophy in the modern West has, as of yet, failed to come to terms with this mismatch. A construction of the self as an active subject predominates, and to such a degree that experiences of passivity, waiting, patience, suffering, etc., are often met with bafflement, frustration, and opprobrium. Clearly, Vanstone is painting with a broad brush, for the supposition that the “the status of patient … is improper to us, a diminution of our true function or status in

For information on Vanstone’s life and ministry, see Robert L. Glover, “Man, Meaning, Ministry: The Quest for the Historical Vanstone,” ThScot 11, no. 1 (2004): 5–32. See also RL 3–17 and Sarah Coakley, “Deepening Practices: Perspectives from Ascetical and Mystical Theology,” in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, ed. Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 81–2.

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the world, an affront to our human dignity” (SW 50) has hardly gone unchallenged, nor has there been any lack of philosophical and theological attempts to theorize human “passivity” in positive terms. Kant’s grand vision of reason’s unflagging activity, for instance, was quickly met by Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion, which foregrounds the human being’s reception of the activity of the divine, declaring that religion “wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity.”68 This insight was then integrated into a Reformed account of the human being’s “absolute dependence” on God—a dependence that Christians discern within pious communities, defined by their receipt of Christ’s redemptive action and the operations of Christ’s Spirit. And a generation later and thousands of miles away, Ralph Waldo Emerson was announcing the death of “mean egotism” by way of an “I” that is “a transparent eye-ball” and forms a “part and particle of God.”69 Even so, Vanstone’s broad brush is not wielded without justification. Few would deny a concern to depict the human as an “achiever rather than receiver, active rather than passive, subject rather than object” (SW 50) in much modern Western philosophy and theology. And Vanstone is quite right to notice that this concern intersects with some questionable British mores (“hard work never hurt anybody!”) that obscured the sufferings of working-class communities in the North, for whom the “ever-widening areas of modern working life” allowed for little “possibility of achievement, success or satisfaction,” given the insistence that an individual must assent to the “efficient functioning of a system over which he has no control” (SW 40).

Thankfully, a more articulate “answer” to the questions thrown up by this state of affairs is possible. And Vanstone applies Tillich’s method in a duly rigorous way: he makes it clear that the theological answer that he lays out is logically prior to the question being asked (for one cannot “derive an answer from the form of the question” [ST1 65]), while seeking also to frame that answer in terms that connect with the question being posed.70 Decisive here is the story of Jesus as it discloses the value of “waiting,” “passion,”

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. and ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22. 69 From Nature. See Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Richard Poirier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6. 70 Not coincidentally, Vanstone took seminars with Paul Tillich while studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York. See Glover, “Man, Meaning, Ministry,” 8–9; and RL 6–7. 68

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and “patience” for our lives and, by extension, raises the prospect that such qualities might be ascribed to God. Vanstone’s point of departure is exegetical: he homes in on the Greek term παραδίδωμι (“to hand over”) in Mark and John, reading it as a hinge that discloses Jesus’ transition from a posture distinguished by activity to a posture defined by passion, with Jesus “no longer” depicted as “the active and initiating subject” of the narrative, but “the recipient, the object, of what is done” (SW 20).71 The all-important site of transition is the agony in Gethsemane: the point at which Jesus’ proclamation and enactment of the Kingdom ends and there begins Jesus’ receipt of the murderous schemes of his enemies. And this transition, Vanstone argues, ought to prompt a rethinking of the doctrine of God as such. It is no longer sufficient simply to say that God’s being is actus purus. One must also say that God, in Christ, “opens” Godself to the passivity enacted by his Son; that God “so initiates and acts that He destines Himself to enter into passion, to wait and receive.” More boldly: “the activity of God achieves the exposure of God, when by His working God destines Himself to the necessity of waiting” (SW 94, my emphasis). The mode of reasoning is Barth’s, even if Vanstone looks beyond the Dogmatics. If it is the case that God reveals Godself as God truly is, then God reveals Godself as the one whose action involves the Father waiting on the (incarnate) Son, just as the (incarnate) Son waits on the Father, so that their reconciliatory work can be brought to term on the cross; and it is in this conjoint waiting that “the glory of God is manifested at its deepest level” (SW 94). And all of this is of course disclosive of God’s love for the world, ingredient to which is the “extension” of God’s independence and impassibility to include some measure of dependence and passibility—God being the Subject who “has handed Himself over to the world … has given to the world not only the power of being but also that power to affect Himself” (SW 95). So it is that “Deus, qui non passibilis, passus est” (SW 111). A familiar (if, according to Vanstone, undertheorized) human posture, then, now gains a divine antecedent. We are beginning There is, here, an obvious connection with the account of Jesus’ obedience in Church Dogmatics IV/1, §59. Autumn Alcott Ridenour develops this connection in important ways in “The Coming of Age: Curse or Calling? Toward a Christological Interpretation of Aging as Call in the Theology of Karl Barth and W. H. Vanstone,” JSCE 33, no. 2 (2013): 151–67.

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to think von Gott aus. And with this divine antecedent in view, one needn’t view human passivity, patience, and suffering as deficiencies or failings. One can instead treat such conditions as faint reflections of an imago dei, the historical realization of which involves a purposeful imitation of Christ’s history. Indeed, Vanstone is suggesting that the ambiguous “grind” of life for the vast majority of people in the modern West might serve as an incitement—maybe, at a pinch, an opportunity—to “change the mood / to the passive,” and to do so with a deepened faith in view.72 For when the late modern condition is read through the prism of the Gospels, one is afforded more than the opportunity to critique its conventions; one is poised also to receive the world anew, to “wait upon [it] rather than work upon it” (SW 110), to attune oneself to God and thus to discover a depth of meaning that might otherwise remain out of reach. The “status of patient” (the title of Vanstone’s third chapter) has shifted from problem to promise: it is through patience, suffering, waiting, receiving, attending, depending—an expandable cluster of terms, held together by the simple fact that the focus is not activity but willed passivity—that the “enormous dignity” (SW 115) of life comes into focus. One can follow Christ by handing oneself over to waiting, in a manner analogous to Christ’s handing himself over to the Father, thereby knitting oneself more fully into a Spirit-spanned body that reaches toward the Father. Vanstone’s capacity to toggle between the theological and anthropological registers of “waiting,” in fact, has started to propel us beyond the theocentrism of Church Dogmatics II/1. Think of it like this. The claim that human beings have, in principle if not in practice, the power to shape the quotidian is calmly accepted. Likewise, the belief that a construal of “active” subjectivity coheres with and, ultimately, derives from an understanding of God as the subject who creates, sustains, provides, and redeems. But we ought not to suppose that the part defines the whole. Vanstone anticipates something of Judith Butler’s now-famous claim that we are “undone by each other,” given the constitutive fact of sociality.73 He recognizes that even the most “buffered self,” hell-bent on holding From “Adjustments,” by R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1993), 345. 73 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19. See also Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 23. 72

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herself apart from the world, is always caught up in the quotidian.74 Sometimes for better, but often for worse, we are forever marked by our susceptibility to the presence, movements, and actions of others. And, in line with Butler’s insights with respect to grief and grievability (and in contrast to Barth’s tendency to construe relationality in terms of a hardy reciprocal encounter), Vanstone understands that the late modern condition often intensifies one’s sense of oneself as a patient, one who “suffers” the activity (or lack thereof) of those with whom one stands in relation. This is perhaps especially the case when one seeks to love—when one opts not to “will away … vulnerability” but commits oneself to “attend to it, even abide by it.”75 To view oneself as a creature who lives before God, in light of Christ’s saving action, lends talk of waiting an additional charge. It remains possible to say, with Butler, that the social reality of subjection is the anterior condition of subjectivity; that the agential power that we exercise is something like the recoil of our subjection, a recoil whose “force” exceeds that which precipitated it; and that an urgent philosophical and political task is critically to arrange and rearrange patterns of subjectivity, subjection, and subjectivation in service of liberative ends.76 But this needn’t be viewed in wholly immanent terms. There is the possibility of an analogia relationis that Barth did not quite manage to discern. In that God hands herself over to us in Christ, so it is that our acts of exposure, waiting, passion, suffering, patience, etc., can be folded into and can find meaning in the economy of grace, being echoes of God’s antecedent commitment to “expose” Godself to the world, to wait on the world, to be patient with the world. We do not only wait on others, we wait on God; as we wait on God, God waits on us; and—this is crucial—all of this waiting, divine and human, can be seen to orbit around the concrete history of Jesus Christ, with his divine and human waiting being the condition for everything else. Yes, of course, whenever one acts with some purpose, one bears witness to the God who is pure act. But whenever one assents to the status of patient, waiting on God as God waits on her, the other Talk of the “buffered self” is of course taken from Taylor, A Secular Age. Butler, Precarious Life, 29. 76 The language of “recoil” is used to good effect in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). See esp. 1–30. 74 75

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pole of the imago dei is realized in a new way, as that imago is conformed to the final phase of Christ’s life-unto-death. At this point, however, something of a limit comes into view. Although I have tried to maintain Vanstone’s preference for a thick lattice of terms, I am doubtful that his leitmotif—“waiting,” of course—can bear the weight placed upon it. Consider the references to παραδίδωμι that follow the disclosure of the “messianic secret” in Mark’s Gospel. Having told hearers and readers that the “Son of Man must undergo great suffering” (Mk 8:23)—the pregnant δεῖ suggesting a divinely plotted sequence of events—the passives παραδίδοται and παραδοθήσεται are equivocally deployed in the second and third statements about the “suffering of the Son of Man” (Mk 9:31 and 10:33). It is not immediately clear who will do the “handing over”; that only comes into view when we learn of the intermeshing actions, inactions, feints, swerves, cruelties, and foibles of a range of figures (among whom Judas, the religious authorities of Jerusalem, Peter and the disciples, Pontius, and the crowd bulk especially large, with the might of the Roman Empire casting a menacing shadow over each), as well as the invisible workings of God. And while it is fair to suppose that Jesus adopts the role of a passive, powerless “object” during the passion, “waiting” on God’s directive address and the schemes of his enemies, one must recognize also that Jesus enacts his subjection to others. Which is to say: one must recognize that Jesus assents to the schemes of those arrayed against him, receiving and ratifying those schemes as mediations of his Father’s will. Not “assents” in the sense of approving sinful actions (obviously not: see Mk 14:21). “Assents” in that Jesus embraces a singular kind of suffering and death for the sake of salvation, grasping that his path to the cross is routed through the wickedness of his persecutors and disposing himself in such a way that his nonresistance to that wickedness is integral to his obedience to the Father; “assents” in that Jesus disposes himself in such ways that his suffering, rejection, and death become constitutive of who he is, filling out his identity as the Messiah of ancient Israel. Jesus’ remarks during the Last Supper are particularly telling. While his is a body broken by others and his is blood spilled by others, his is also a body and a blood that is freely given to any and all. It is a body that breaks itself as it is broken, so that it can be distributed in an act of supreme love; it is a blood for which others bray and a blood that Jesus “pour[s] out for many” (Mk 14:24). Jesus’ brisk charge,

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“Get up, let us be going” (Mk 14:42), which concludes the agony in Gethsemane, further reinforces the point. The two words, ὲγείρεσθε ἂγωμεν, might initially appear superfluous: Judas has no trouble leading an armed crowd to Jesus, whom he identifies with a kiss, and the accompanying crowd hardly need encouragement when it comes to dragging Jesus away. But the impression of superfluity should be resisted, since Jesus’ words remind us again that he is no victim of circumstance. His “rising up” coincides with his enemies’ descent into callousness and bloodlust; his enactment of powerlessness aligns with, and in some sense supports, the designs of those who would drive him to the cross.77 Can all this really be glossed in terms of what Vanstone elsewhere calls the “tense passivity of ‘waiting’” (RL 49)? Well, certainly the concept illumines a narrative that moves from a depiction of Jesus as a commanding subject who inaugurates, proclaims, and enacts the Kingdom, to a portrayal of one who is subjected to the cruelty of shortsighted religious elites, vacillating friends, and unthinking imperial apparatchiks. At a pinch, “waiting” might also describe the ways that Jesus deftly times his actions, both as he waits on God in Gethsemane and as he waits on those intent on killing him, in order that his identity as the Son of Man be realized in accordance with the will of the Father. However, insofar as Vanstone’s description of “waiting” is often tied to the binary of activity/passivity, it struggles to capture the diverse ways in which Jesus comports himself. It draws attention away from the purposeful steadfastness of Jesus’ obedience to the Father; it risks flattening Jesus’ conduct, homogenizing an array of dispositions, receptivities, actions, inactions, and vulnerabilities that are adopted to ensure that his exercise of obedience culminates in death. Put differently: if the concepts of “waiting” and “passivity” disrupt the assumption that “autonomous” activity is the be-all-and-end-all of human life, these concepts only become dogmatically serviceable when they are not treated as contrasts with “activity,” but as markers of a “willed” disposition—one distinguished by what Sarah Coakley suggestively identifies as “a peculiarly active form of passivity in which the I gladly admit that I am drawing here on Hans Frei’s masterpiece, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), which is itself a gloss on the reading of the synoptic gospels advanced in §59 of Church Dogmatics IV/1.

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divine pressure upon us meets not blockage but clarification”; or, as Autumn Ridenour describes it, as an adoption of “the middle voice … simultaneously active and passive in form.”78 One can extend the argument further, asking if the concept of patience might be translated from a supporting to a starring role to ameliorate this problem, allowing Vanstone’s interest in waiting to be nested within a broader, suppler, and richer frame. Such a move could preserve and enlarge Vanstone’s Christological vision, with the term’s varied connotations illumining additional aspects of the savior’s history: Christ’s disbursement of blessings, whereby the Kingdom as a discrete time and space, rich with possibility, is “seeded” into a world beset by wickedness (patience as steadfastness); Jesus’ endurance of a gradual transference of the full weight of humanity’s sin upon and into his person, the endpoint of which is a death that effects the death of sin as such (2 Cor. 5:21) (patience as longsuffering); the continuing opening of the Kingdom by the Spirit, who upholds and “activates” the possibilities ingredient to the new time and space that Christ proclaims and enacts, and then, when Christ ascends to the Father’s right hand, presents those same possibilities anew, ensuring that the dynamics unloosed by Christ’s history continue to spread out into the world at large (patience as liberative preserving). Alongside this Christological vision, too, patience could help to gather up and nuance some of Vanstone’s broader suggestions about God’s creative and providential work. One could imagine, for instance, Johnson’s and Macquarrie’s construal of “letting be” connecting with claims within The Risk of Love—a book that insists that since love is always “activity for the sake of an other,” love always eschews “control,” since when “the object of love is wholly under the control of the one who loves, that object is no longer an other” (RL 45). But with a dialectical complement. While there is much truth to Vanstone’s phenomenological avowal that “Love proceeds by no assured programme” (RL 46; see also RL 62) and obvious value to the claim that “God waits upon the response of His creation” (RL 74; see also 2 Pet. 3:8–15a), it is

Sarah Coakley, “Deepening Practices,” 83 (emphasis added); Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Sabbath Rest as Vocation: Aging toward Death (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 160.

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important to balance an emphasis on God’s patient “waiting” with an acclamation of God’s patience as a persistent (and ultimately irresistible) providential pressure, such that God ultimately realizes God’s saving purposes—sometimes by bending the arc of history in this or that way, sometimes by dint of a stubborn refusal to let death “contain” life and slow the progress of salvation (so Acts 2:24). Or, to make the point more polemically, with a glance back to the previous subsection and a glance toward the treatment of providence to come: if God’s patience is sometimes expressed as a “lure” whose force of attraction is keyed to the shifting dynamics of the quotidian, God’s patience is also expressed through activity that is jealous, untiring, and downright obstinate: a determination to realize purposes that are essential for the flourishing of the world and for the disclosure of God’s ways and works.

5 Patience as a “Burdened Virtue” (a) The problem With Macquarrie and Vanstone, then, the insights of Whitehead, Johnson, and Keller receive an intriguing complement. The doctrinal terrain has been expanded suggestively, and in ways that I hope will render the constructive labors of the following chapters more intelligible to readers. We now have claims about patience as an ethical project (Keller, Vanstone); about patience as a creative, divine act of “letting be” (Johnson, Macquarrie, Keller); about patience as a mode of divine relationship that elicits creaturely activity (Whitehead, Keller, Macquarrie); about patience as a disclosure of God’s character, associable particularly with God as Son and God as Father (Vanstone). But at this very moment, as interpretative work teeters on the edge of constructive development and as an affirmation of divine patience meshes with claims about human patience—and the preceding pages, gestural and wideranging as they are, aim to show the kind of dogmatic possibilities being thrown up—it is vital to begin casting something of the pall that I mentioned earlier. A question posed to The Stature of Waiting supplies a point of departure: What is the presumptive gender of the person who

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adopts the “status of patient”? At the beginning of the chapter bearing this title, Vanstone considers “a person who, in the prime of life, is struck down by a serious accident or a debilitating illness” and must suddenly reckon with “helplessness” (SW 34). “Up to this point,” Vanstone writes: He was ordering and arranging his own affairs, and, very probably, the affairs of a number of other people also. He was holding the reins of a team of projects and purposes—major and minor, public and private; he was taking action, initiating policy, making decisions—some of which affected people other than himself. At the least he was creating his own immediate future and was in control of his own immediate destiny. But now, suddenly, he passes into the hands of others and becomes dependent on their decisions and actions. (SW 34) “Dependent” in what sense? As Vanstone tells it, the impaired individual must now “wait … for help; or retires to bed and asks his wife to call the doctor” (SW 34). If hospitalized, he becomes unusually sensitive, so much so that he “often finds himself extraordinarily pleased or affronted by the passing remark of a nurse, a porter or the boy who brings the papers” (SW 34 and 35). If, perchance, he has lost a limb, he will hope that he will “get out more and go to more interesting places than he did when his wife pushed him in a wheelchair,” for he knows that such “a man would be thought lacking in self-respect if, after receiving the enablement of an artificial leg, he continued, for his own pleasure and his wife’s satisfaction, to be pushed around by her in a wheelchair” (SW 45). Although these comments are perhaps reflective of Vanstone’s experience of illness in the mid-1970s,79 they show plainly that Vanstone’s sense of “this age of women’s liberation” (SW 53) did not extend very far—and that the transition from thinking von Gott aus to advancing claims about human patience needs to be handled rather carefully. For while The Stature of Waiting is not devoid of political implications, it lapses easily into the patriarchalism, heteronormativity, and bourgeois paternalism that characterized

Glover, “Man, Meaning, Ministry,” 15–16.

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much mid-twentieth-century Christian theology. Thus it is that Vanstone’s skillful contestation of the idea that “the dignity of man in the world … depend[s] simply on his rich and manifold potential for activity” (SW 60) takes good notice of the philosophical and the economic conditions that lionize the “sovereign self,” but ignores the glaring fact that this very lionization associates sovereignty and activity with maleness—all the while presuming that women and girls are less well-suited to “hold … the reins of a team of project and purposes” (SW 34). Vanstone imagines it possible, in other words, to identify “waiting” as a dialectical complement to “acting” without pausing to consider that many a woman is encouraged, in advance, to view “her whole existence [as] a waiting since she is enclosed within the limbo of immanence and contingency and her justification is always in someone else’s hands.”80 Thus it is, too, that Vanstone’s principal example of one who waits is not the wife, nurse, porter, or boy whose existence is already tied up with the making of phone calls to the doctor, pushing wheelchairs, delivering papers, and the like—even though these very individuals are all too well-acquainted with being “handed over” to a condition of dependency. Thus it is, finally, that Vanstone does not reflect on how the opprobrium sometimes visited on postures characterized by passivity, subjection, dependency, and vulnerability, goes hand in hand with the endorsement of dramatic maldistributions of power, privilege, and opportunity, as well as the presumption that the lives of those consigned to adopt such postures have little bearing on discussions of what it means to be human in a late modern age. Matters become more vexing when one notices that patience has consistently featured in discourses that presume or give sanction to long-standing patterns of domination. Vanstone, for all of his (gracefully understated) theological flair, is not an exception to this rule; he is an exemplification of its extensive, unthinking application. So while this project aims to affiliate patience with God’s ways and works, a related challenge now presses upon us. It is not enough simply to think von Gott aus. One must also grasp how patience has been figured in ways that encourage distorted modes of human conduct; one must set about disaffiliating patience from a range of worrisome conventions. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila MalovnyChevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011), 649. My emphasis.

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A few examples serve to illustrate the depth of the problem. Consider first Slavery and the Bible: A Tract for the Times (1861), by Philip Schaff, a German-American theologian known to many for his compendium of creeds and his editorship of the First Series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.81 Writing on the eve of the Civil War, this pamphlet waxes optimistic about the eventual end of slaveholding. It develops an exegetical-theological case for organic, incremental reform—a case, Schaff contends, that stands in sharp contrast to the expatiations of “modern Abolitionists of the infidel [sic!] type” (SB 26). Three interlocking contentions anchor the argument. First, Schaff argues that the biblical writings commend a “moderated” form of slaveholding, while laying the groundwork for its “gradual legitimate and harmless extinction” (SB 19). The Hebrew Bible sets the ball rolling. In contrast to ancient Greek and Roman norms, it does not construe slaves as “property” but gestures toward the equality of all human beings before God, discourages unduly harsh treatment of the enslaved, and institutes a fifty-year jubilee. The New Testament ups the momentum, for its promotion of “a radical moral reformation” (SB 19) raises the prospect of an overhaul of all sociopolitical structures.82 Second, Schaff argues that the message of the New Testament is (finally) beginning to bear fruit, such that one can pair a post hoc justification for slavery in the United States with a (vague) expectation of its eventual cessation. That is, one can trust that Christian morality will, “in its own good way and time, solve … the difficult problem While this text has not escaped notice, it has garnered less attention than one might expect. Even in the 1980s, it received only brief mention in a biography and did not feature in an important edited volume (see, respectively, George H. Shriver, Philip Schaff: Christian Scholar and Ecumenical Prophet [Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987], 44; and A Century of Church History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff, ed. Henry W. Bowden [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1988]). Yet the text is hardly of incidental importance, for it stands in a trajectory of reflection on slavery that stretches back to Schaff’s History of the Apostolic Church (1854) and extends to Der Bürgerkrieg und das christliche Leben in Nord-Amerika (1865). Slavery and the Bible also resembles a host of contemporaneous texts, for and against slavery, with its exegetical efforts running alongside an appeal to the doctrine of providence. See here Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 82 This being a fairly common argument among opponents of slavery, gradualists and abolitionists alike. See Paul Gutacker, “Seventeen Centuries of Sin: The Christian Past in Antebellum Slavery Debates,” CH 89 (2020): 307–32. 81

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of African servitude in America for the common benefit of the white and the black races” (SB 31), while also trusting that “under the genial influence of Christianity … American slavery … in spite of its incidental evils and abuses has already accomplished much good” (SB 32) as “a wholesome training school for inferior races” (SB 24). Third and finally, Schaff offers advice to white readers who wish to navigate a path through the clashing agendas of abolitionists, gradualists, reformers, and conservatives. Building toward his peroration, Schaff declares it imperative to exercise “patience and forbearance and wait [for] the time which Providence in its own wisdom and mercy has appointed for the solution of a problem which thus far has baffled the wisdom of the wisest statesmen” (SB 31, my emphases). God alone is the agent of change; God’s governance of history determines when sociopolitical structures will rise and fall. As such, Schaff argues, there should be no attempt to outrun God’s purposes with “radical” social or political action. White Northerners ought not to meddle in the affairs of Southern states, and white Southerners should guard against abuse and “provide for the proper moral and religious training of the negroes committed to their care” (SB 33). The task of overcoming slavery, in fact, isn’t actually a “problem” at all. It is a reality to be endured— perhaps, even, maintained—until God tells us otherwise. While the entire pamphlet merits analysis, its circumscription of patience is of course especially significant. It is presented as a virtue that enables a halfhearted critique of slaveholding to be paired with studied inaction: a perfect combination for affluent whites who hoped to be “informed,” and perhaps even mildly “progressive,” on the issue of slaveholding, while nonetheless doing nothing to challenge its continuance. The halfheartedness of the critique, in and of itself, is painful to behold; and it is striking (if typical of many mid to late-century white “moderates” in the Northern Hemisphere) that Schaff believed it possible to consider the topic at hand without attending to concrete realities. The transatlantic slave trade, myriad differences between slaveries in the ancient Mediterranean and slaveries predicated on modern constructions of race, a full accounting of the physical, emotional, sexual, cultural, and religious violence wrought upon millions of human beings: all of this is blithely passed over, displaced by exegesis and a concern to track ennobling ethical ideas over the long term. And this abstraction dovetails with a none-too-subtle concern to

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prevent a forthright commitment to abolition—or, for that matter, even a modest agenda for change—from garnering any kind of theological justification. Having treated the scriptural witness as a template for understanding life in the United States, with the tenuous link between the past and present secured via a reference to the “curse of Ham,” dubiously extrapolated from Gen. 9:25–27, Schaff’s construal of patience effectively obliges white Americans not to disrupt the status quo. To be patient is to align oneself with a divine purpose whose timing one cannot discern, save for the fact that this timing is definitely not now and definitely not tied to a specific political platform. To be patient is to endure the present as a spectator, without feeling the pressure of the future that God intends, accepting the horrors of slaveholding as ingredient to history’s slow unwinding. Schaff’s reflections on slavery, interestingly, continued after the conflict of 1861–5. In Der Bürgerkrieg und das christliche Leben in Nord-Amerika, a collection of lectures given in Germany after the conclusion of the war, Schaff’s own perspective gained a Christological dimension, with the United States described as a nation “newly born out of the blood-baptism of a fearful civil war.” Yet if Schaff spends a bit more time on the evils of slavery than in earlier essays, he prefers now to look ahead. Figuring Abraham Lincoln’s assassination as a martyrdom that “wiped out the national guilt of slavery”—an astonishing claim, in and of itself, that stymies reflection about broader distributions of guilt, the broader task of penitence, and the need for reparations—Schaff now approaches the future with optimism, acclaiming the United States to be a country in which the traditions of “old” Europe and the “new world” can coexist in harmony. (Indigenous and African traditions, needless to say, are not part of this putatively cosmopolitan outlook.)83

Patience, then, is a term that has been embedded in a program defined by mystifying justifications, shoddy history, and ethical donothingism—a combination of ingredients that was peculiarly well-placed to render a peculiarly violent form of white supremacism Philip Schaff, Der Bürgerkrieg und das christliche Leben in Nord-Amerika Krieg: Vorträge gehalten in mehreren Städten Deutschlands und der Schweiz (Berlin: Wiegandt und Grieben, 1866), 7 and 17. My translation. For more on Schaff’s posture after the war, see William A. Clebsch, “Christian Interpretations of the Civil War,” CH 30, no. 2 (1961): 212–22; and Thomas Albert Howard, “Philip Schaff: Religion, Politics, and the Transatlantic World,” JChSt 49, no. 2 (2007): 191–210.

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theologically respectable. And it was a program that lodged itself deeply in the North American psyche. Fast-forward a hundred years or so, and white Christians in the United States were reprising Schaff’s pieties. Evidence of that is a peculiarly incisive response, offered by none other than Martin Luther King, Jr., in Why We Can’t Wait (1964). This book’s most famous entry, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” opens and closes with an artful deployment of genteel epistolatory conventions: King begins with the hope that he can address the concerns of his critics in “patient and reasonable terms” and ends by asking to be forgiven for anything that amounts to “unreasonable impatience” (WCW 86 and 111). But the intervening pages show, quite brilliantly, how the rhetoric of patience had continued to be used to delegitimize those advocating for racial justice. “For years now,” King writes, “I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ears of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’” (WCW 91). Patience manifested in a willingness to tolerate delays in the achievement of the good, an understanding that far-reaching social and political change does not happen overnight, a complicated sympathy for those ensnared in an undesirable disciplinary regime: all things being equal, such a virtue could help to resolve goodfaith conflicts over the organization of groups coexisting in a city, a society, a nation. But when a dominant group presents patience as an obligation laid upon a nondominant, oppressed group, with precious little understanding that the fulfillment of that obligation would impede the realization of justice and exacerbate suffering, the moral calculus changes dramatically. As King sees it, calls to wait, to delay large-scale change, to forbear under suboptimal conditions: all this adds up to one more hegemonic technology, designed to maintain a system of racial hierarchy. It is a way for white Americans to insist that justice be realized at a pace they deem acceptable, thereby ensuring that progress—or the lack thereof—is set within the context of a racist status quo. The language of patient caution and concern, paired with insincere and feeble half-measures (which will be implemented … later), amounts to nothing more than an extended apology for white supremacism. Unsurprisingly, then, King argues that the Black community must reject the counsel of patience and embrace direct action. “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs,

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you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience” (WCW 93 [my emphasis]; cf. 18, 21, and 162). Patience cannot be the beginning of an answer to the question of antiBlack racism; it must be identified as a key element in a long-standing attempt to suppress that question. And it must be set aside without delay, replaced with an uncompromising demand for change now. So rather than vague prognoses, focused on God’s future resolution of injustice, King commends a raft of concrete measures that aim to heighten pressure on the powers-that-be. Sit-ins, marches, boycotts, freedom rides, mass demonstrations: these tactics are most likely to bring an end to police and vigilante violence, legal and extralegal codes of segregation, the systemic suppression of voting rights, racialized impoverishment, and the daily regimes of humiliation to which Black and Brown communities are subjected. To be sure, none of this means that divine providence is not an issue. Schaff was right to make it a factor in moral deliberation. But King insists that it be framed in such a way that human activity serves as a means for God to realize God’s purposes. If white America had “come to count on [the Negro] as a creature who could quietly endure, silently suffer, and patiently wait” (WCW 2), King now glimpsed a different, synergistic option, expressed through a lattice of political, literary, and scriptural tropes: “Human progress never rolls on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God … Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood” (WCW 99). Providence and patience do not go hand in hand; providence and protest should be paired. With Schaff and King in the background, then, something of the pall mentioned at the beginning of this subsection is perhaps beginning to take hold. Given that the conditions of racialized injustice still obtain in the United States—the ongoing scandal of mass incarceration, models of economic growth that look askance at the maldistribution of wealth and opportunity, gross inequities in healthcare, the persistent reality of police and vigilante violence against communities of color, and a slew of legislative efforts to restrict and suppress voting rights being but a few dimensions of a regime of disempowerment and dehumanization that is alive and kicking—and given that the rhetoric of patience continues to be employed with an eye toward tempering the demands of

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minoritized communities,84 ought not this motif be set aside? If King adjudged it a compromised conceptuality—and whether or not he was aware of Schaff’s construal of the term doesn’t really matter; what does matter is that the kind of thinking promulgated by Schaff remained operative—then oughtn’t one to be wary of any attempt to claim patience for constructive work theological today? Isn’t its employment, even in the rarefied context of theological work, haunted by a welter of questionable and injurious connotations, the weight of which is liable to distract, if not overwhelm, any attempt at redefinition? Indeed, wouldn’t it be most prudent not to expend energy on figures like Julian, Calvin, and Barth, in hopes of recapturing patience, but rather to attend to someone like James Cone, who intensifies the message of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” framing theological study in terms of the liberative action of the risen Christ and foregrounding the language of resistance, revolt, incivility, and, yes, impatience? Would not his acclamation of the resurrected Christ who is now “going ahead of you to Galilee” (Mk 16:6–7), animating “Black rebellion” in the United States as a “manifestation of God himself actively involved in the presentday affairs of men for the purposes of liberating a people” and making “Christians restless with regard to the imperfections of the present,” be a better starting point for reflection?85 Do we not live in a time in which the reclamation of patience is best exchanged for the acclamation of the God who does not and cannot wait, but acts now, and demands that Christian communities do likewise? In embracing the language of impatience, Cone is drawing on and, as ever, adding a powerful theological spin to the rhetoric of Black Power theorists. In “The ­Ballot See, for instance, Ibrahim X. Kendi, “Patience Is a Dirty Word,” The Atlantic, July 23 (2020). Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/johnlewis-and-danger-gradualism/614512/. 85 James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), 38; and idem, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1986), 140. In addition to a deft riff on Augustine (Conf. 1.i.1!), Cone’s language runs close to Jürgen Moltmann’s. See esp. The Theology of Hope: On the Grounds and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 21: “faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of a promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.” 84

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or the Bullet” (1964), for instance, Malcolm X starkly summarizes his attitude toward civil rights and “black nationalism”: “Give it to us now. Don’t wait for next year. Give it to us yesterday, and that’s not fast enough.” A speech later in the year contrasted the language of nonviolent patience with Jesus’ actions in “Revelations,” when “even Jesus’ patience ran out.” Malcolm stated bluntly: “I say that a black man has the right to do whatever is necessary to get his freedom … I say that you and I will never get our freedom nonviolently and patiently and lovingly.”86 Stokely Carmichael expressed himself similarly: “We are not going to wait for white people to sanction Black Power. We’re tired of waiting … The question is, Will white people overcome their racism and allow for [liberation] to happen in this country? If not, we have no choice but to say very clearly, ‘Move on over, or we’re going to move on over you.’”87

This disquieting backdrop to talk about patience, with respect to race in the United States, is paralleled with a comparably disquieting backdrop with respect to sex and gender. Patience is again deployed to support an arbitrary distribution of power and opportunity and, concomitantly, to stifle protest against the same. Recall the brutal tale of “patient Griselda,” recounted at the end of Boccaccio’s Decameron (X, 10): a story that so fascinated European readers that it acquired transnational status in the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, being told and retold in diverse ways. Granted that this story was sometimes framed as an allegory of Christian faith (Petrarch)88 or subversively glossed with an eye to contesting misogynistic norms through an acclamation of patience as constancy (Christine de Pizan),89 most writers depicted Griselda as an exemplary spouse and mother: a chillingly restrictive answer to the querelles des femmes that often occupied late medieval and early modern scholars, especially in times of heightened social mobility, when noblemen judged it important to remind women

Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 33, 112, and 113. 87 Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to PanAfricanism (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2007), 49 and 60. 88 Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernado, vol. 2, Books X–XVIII (New York: Italica Press, 2005), 655–68, esp. 668 (XVII, 3). 89 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), 106 and 156–60 (II.11 and II.50). 86

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that subjectivity and subjection ought to go hand in hand.90 To perform and manifest womanhood rightly is to exercise patience, and to exercise patience is to accede to the rule of the paterfamilias. Indeed, it is this broad context—and it is the persistence and “reach” of patriarchal ideologies that allows one to jump quickly from late medieval literature to early Protestant theology—that renders Calvin’s counsel to a woman who was being beaten by her husband entirely unsurprising. So long as her husband’s violence does not bring “imminent peril to her life,” Calvin argues, he is able to “exhort her in the name of God to bear with patience the cross which God has seen fit to place on her.”91 A theological tradition that began by frequently presenting women’s “natures” as inconstant, fickle, changeable, unpredictable, and dangerous,92 then, is now being complemented (with Christological justification) with an understanding of the distinct “role” that women should— and, perhaps more significantly, should not—play in an unsettled ecclesial and political moment. Indeed, if both Calvin’s remarks and the story of Griselda allow the (somewhat) heartening idea that women’s contestation of the ideology of patience provoked such responses—for there would be no need to tell women to remain patient if a critical mass of women were not doing that— they also spur a dispiriting awareness of the persistence of what Fredric Jameson memorably called “strategies of containment”: interlocking ideological superstructures, stretched out across time and space, that function to “fix” the meaning of gender and, in so doing, buttress the operations of male dominance.93 The work of Kate Manne, which has valuably raised the public profile of feminist analytic philosophy, shows nicely how the gender politics of late medieval and early modern European thought continue in the present. A central concern of Manne’s On this, see the far-reaching comparative study by Madeleine Rüegg, The Patient Griselda Myth: Looking at Late Medieval and Early Modern European Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019). 91 The Register of the Company of Pastors of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, ed. and trans. Philip E. Hughes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), 345; see also the exchange of letters between Calvin and an unknown woman in 1552 on 193–8. 92 So Elizabeth A. Clark, “Ideology, History, and the Construction of ‘Woman’ in Late Ancient Christianity,” JECS 2, no. 2 (1994): 155–84. 93 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 53. 90

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Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is to contest the tendency to pathologize, localize, and individualize contempt for women. Misogyny, Manne argues, is not the preserve of a clutch of unhinged “bad guys” (the lone shooter, the crazed stalker, the internet troll). It is an ideology and practice, mediated through an array of formalized and semi-formalized discursive conventions, that functions to enforce a patriarchal ordering of human life. And although misogyny is hardly an isolated operation of power (it often intersects with and compounds the effect of adjacent hierarchies, having to do with class, physical dis/ability, race, sexuality, ethnicity, etc.), it is strikingly pervasive and strikingly effective, even in contexts that pride themselves on being postpatriarchal: the analysis of Down Girl tracks its seemingly indefatigable operations, moving deftly between right-wing media trolls to Australian politics, debates over reproductive rights and abortion, the phenomenon of “himpathy” (sympathy for privileged males, articulated in ways that obscure the harm those males have wrought), and the everyday experience of countless women and girls. And it is not as if misogyny is the only game in town. In the domain of interpersonal relations, it is joined with the ideology of sexism. Once again, we are not dealing with an undesirable individual trait. Sexism is a discrete operation of “soft power,” articulated in support of the hard fact of structural domination: a bundle of sociocultural habits and beliefs that quietly associates certain attributes to males and other attributes to females in service of a gender hierarchy.94 And, although these attributes shift around, their contemporary impact is consistent: they drive women toward “asymmetrical moral support roles” (xiii), wherein women are expected to “give” themselves to males by (over)extending respect, gratitude, support, deference, physical acquiescence, nurturance, and the like. When sexism succeeds, then, males “take,” thriving on the excess support provided by women, while women are effectively confined to—and, ideally, understand themselves to be fulfilled in the performance of—a Ulrika Dahl, riffing on Marilyn Frye, puts it well: “sexism is more than an isolated incident, simple misunderstanding or singular case; it is a material structure upheld and reproduced by cultural beliefs … [that] enforces a system of domination and submission and calls it a natural order.” See “Sexism: A Femme-Inist Perspective,” NF 86 (2015): 60.

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host of “relevant social roles … loving wives, devoted moms, ‘cool’ girlfriends, loyal secretaries, or good waitresses, to name just a few of the most obvious examples … [which are] supposed to look as natural or freely chosen as possible.”95 Thus it is that the vulgar reality of misogyny gains a faithful sidekick, who works tirelessly in support of a shared goal: a sexual economy that stifles progress toward women’s liberation and upholds the patriarchal status quo. Although Manne does not employ the language of patience at this juncture, it fits snugly with her basic claims. To borrow from de Beauvoir: to become a woman, in many contemporary settings, is to learn patience. It is to accept and endure a patriarchal social order, even when—perhaps especially when—that same order limits one’s potential and jeopardizes one’s present and future flourishing. Examples are easy to adduce and can lightly gloss the quotation above. A “loving wife” patiently endures the boisterous excesses of her husband, which range from impetuous demands for sex to the monotony of mansplaining, opting to limit her complaints to when he is not around (while noting, of course, that she couldn’t wish for a better partner); a “devoted mom” consistently gives her all to her family, patiently tidying rooms, cooking meals, solving psychosocial dilemmas, waiting up late, alone, to hear the scrabble of keys and the thud of a door that assures her that her children are finally home; a “cool girlfriend” is not flustered by intemperate outbursts, known and suspected instances of infidelity, and emotional neediness, but remains patient with and supportive of her boyfriend (who is so special); a “loyal secretary” constantly busies herself with her bosses’ work, committing herself to their corporate mission, the substance of which she honed to a profitable point, after hours, after being told to ready a half-baked text for the next morning; a “good waitress” waits patiently on every diner she serves, withstanding suggestive leers, mindless chitchat, and complaints about food, then feigning delight at tips that compensate for a paltry wage; and so on. Note, too, that we are not just dealing with the male belief, more or less intense, more or less conscious, that women ought to comport themselves as patient “givers,” while men take up the

Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 47.

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posture of more-or-less grateful “takers.” We also have the calling card of any successful ideology of domination: a “reach” of such extent that its norms are internalized and propagated by those who suffer from its operation. For while patience might no longer stand in the first rank of attributes deemed befitting for women—such blatancy, arguably, does not easily fit with a neoliberal rhetoric of women’s empowerment, newly prized by governments and corporations alike—there is no shortage of authors, ministers, and “influencers” who are eager to code the virtue as distinctively female. Once again, then, is it not foolhardy to set this word at the center of a theological program? Isn’t patience a poisoned chalice? Granted that it could be recovered, aren’t there prudential reasons to focus our theological energies elsewhere? Manne’s analysis of “asymmetrical moral support roles,” extended to include a particular focus on patience, could surely be applied to a good deal of Christian literature on heterosexual marriage. An obvious target for analysis would be middlebrow evangelical writing: I think now of a text that declares that wives “who are helping their husbands rule are … growing in God’s call”; that contends, “As a wife, you are now to identify yourself with your husband and his interests, instead of the interests of your childhood family”; and that encourages women to overcome the tendency to quail at “the thought of humble submission,” treating it as “a slavish, patriarchal anachronism.”96 But I also think it imperative that this regressive brand of heterosexist complementarianism not be treated as an outlier, but as a key to the whole—a complement to an ideology that continues to shape “mainline” churches and the domain of the “secular.” And does not the dissemination of this ideology begin with the way that many in the modern West treat young girls? For all of the profiteering and rhetorical boosterism associated with “girl power,” have we really moved far from de Beauvoir’s Second Sex? “She learns that to be happy, she has to be loved; to be loved, she has to await love. Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Donkey Sin, Cinderella, Snow White, the one who receives and endures. In songs and tales, the young man sets off to seek the woman; he fights against dragons, he combats giants; she is locked up in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, chained to a rock, captive, put to sleep: she is waiting. One day my prince will come … Someday he’ll come along, the man I love … the popular refrains breathe dreams of patience and hope in her.”97

Elyse Fitzpatrick, Helper by Design: God’s Perfect Plan for Women in Marriage (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003), 26, 83, and 205. 97 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 294 and 305. 96

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Granted that I am wielding a broad brush, it is important to assure readers that these brief analyses do not require them to subscribe to any particular theorization of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” routinized as they are in (some) left-leaning regions of the academy. I would also note that these analyses do not require readers to relinquish any sense that hegemonic discourses are constantly being made and remade, demystified and re-mystified, challenged and confirmed. My goal is more modest: I want only to reckon with the context in which this book is situated, with an eye to reminding us that the age-old task of theological inquiry does not occur outside of, but rather within the economy of the everyday—or, at the very least, adjacent to it, under its sway— and in such a way that one cannot take refuge in easy evasions (i.e., “well, obviously theologians do not construe patience like that. Moving on …”). If one accepts (a) that the language that Christians employ is not consistently ruled by salutary religious and nonreligious conventions, but, for better and for worse, is shaped by the quotidian; if one accepts (b) that the motifs that present themselves for dogmatic elaboration are invariably caught up in the ambiguities of sinful existence, saddled with problematic connotations and conventions, the aggregated force of which cannot be fully managed by any one thinker; and if one accepts (c) that God’s justification and sanctification of language remains incomplete on this side of eternity, thus guaranteeing that exploratory and imaginative ventures always carry the residue of sin, both in their production and in their reception—then it follows that the motif of patience is always-already burdened, alwaysalready compromised, always-already worrisome. It follows, too, (d) that judgments need to be made when it comes to the claim that patience can be given a new “charge.” While abuse might not define use (that would be a curious kind of linguistic determinism), abuse shadows use, even when one seeks to redefine and rehabilitate some term. And some shadows are exceedingly hard to shake. To mix the metaphor: we are not dealing with a set of dirty clothes that could be stripped off, washed down, and ironed out by a theologian who stands apart from the muck of the world. We are dealing with a range of meanings and uses that “stick” tenaciously to patience, whether we like it or not; and we are dealing with a range of meanings and uses that may prove more trouble than they are worth.

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The same point from a different angle: recall Barth’s decision to sideline talk of persons in trinitarian discourse because he sensed that this word, in the philosophical and political context of the late modern West, was liable to prompt misunderstanding. Sure, redefinition and reclamation might be possible. But that would require one to swim against a fast-flowing stream, while remaining cognizant of the fact that a host of extra-theological pressures threaten always to wash away one’s progress. So Barth made a prudential judgment: develop a different idiom, while endeavoring to maintain the substance of the doctrine in question—God’s self-revelation of Godself as Father, Son, and Spirit, one Subject in three ways of being. Think, too, how feminist and womanist theologians have eschewed or deemphasized the language of divine fatherhood and male pronouns for God. Their reasoning is analogous to Barth’s. Granted that it is perhaps possible to fill traditional nomenclature with meanings that usefully gloss God’s disclosure of Godself, which is of course inseparable from God’s judgment against oppressive sociopolitical realities and God’s animation of diverse projects of liberation, the context in which traditional language is used continues to invite, if not encourage, misunderstanding. As such—and granted, of course, that debates can be had about the relative importance of technical terms in trinitarian doctrine, on the one side, and dogmatic statements that reprise Jesus’ mode of address to God, on the other—does it not make sense to set some terms aside, if only for a while?

Arguably, too, a Reformed posture affords the theologian considerable latitude with respect to the language that they employ—and thus the opportunity to “pass” on certain dogmatic conceptualities when it seems appropriate to do so. While constant reference to the biblical witness to God’s life with the people of ancient Israel, the history of Jesus Christ, and the outpouring of the Spirit is obligatory, and while one does well to pair attention to scripture with a “religious interest” (i.e., a sensitivity to the ebbs and flows of piety in this or that Christian community, located in this or that historical context) and a “scientific spirit” (i.e., a concern to articulate doctrine in terms that are conceptually precise and allow for various kinds of “academic” development),98 there is a good deal of freedom when it comes to the construction of a dogmatic lexicon. In terms of second-order concepts, relatively little is ruled in or ruled out on point of principle; the language one deploys can be configured and reconfigured in light of contingent factors, ranging from exegetical utility to ecclesial and political resonance, a concern 98 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study, rev. trans. Terrence Tice, 3rd edn (Louisville: WJKP, 2011), 4 (§9).

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for interestingness and vividness, aesthetic appeal, an obligation to promote the liberative project of God’s Kingdom, conceptual clarity, etc. Pair that latitude with prudential considerations, chief among which is the awareness that the “affordances of doctrine” ought to be evaluated by those who live in and by those doctrines, and it becomes still clearer that the potential merits and demerits of a slightly used idiom need to be carefully weighed.99 And such weighing might lead to a pretty stark conclusion. Granted that one might initially have espied great potential in patience, given that it plays on the margins of scripture and has received intriguing elaboration in earlier works; granted that this term could be moved from the margins to the center of a constructive project, given a starring role in the elaboration of multiple loci; and granted, even, that not facilitating this movement might incur intellectual losses— well, it might still remain wise to “pass” on patience, for the simple reason that the labor needed to recover and redefine this term is disproportionate to the rewards that might accrue. The word “burdened,” which I have already employed, can give these claims a bit more precision, while returning us to the field of feminist analytic philosophy and bringing this subsection to a close. In Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles, Lisa Tessman wrestles with the uncomfortable fact that systemic oppression severely damages a moral agent, rendering her acquisition and nurturance of virtues a fraught and difficult affair. Aristotle struggled to grasp this point. He acknowledged that incidental conditions might interfere with the development of moral character and, consequently, impede the flourishing of individuals in some polis. But an appreciation for incidental bad luck was not partnered with an awareness of systemic bad luck, conditions that “regularly, and in a patterned way, arise as barriers to flourishing under conditions of oppression.”100 More fully: philosophizing at a distance from the concrete fact that some subset of individuals comprising a polis might, say, be accorded disproportionate responsibility for I borrow again from Hanna Reichel; see “Conceptual Design, Sin, and the Affordances of Doctrine,” IJST 22, no. 4 (2020): 538–61. A key claim: “As theological designers, we would do well to listen to those who tell us about the uses our designs afford and fail to afford rather than trading or dismissing them for their lack of understanding and attunement to our logics” (558). 100 Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 35. 99

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childrearing and housekeeping, or be denigrated and stereotyped on account of complexion, or be denied the opportunity to acquire education on the basis of assumptions about family, caste, and class, Aristotle failed to appreciate that the prospects for moral development are unevenly distributed, and that that unevenness is a function of interlocking structures of unjust domination. And that failure bequeathed to the eudaemonist tradition a significant blind spot. This tradition struggles to understand that while abiding distortions of the social order render the process of moral formation relatively straightforward and wholesome for a privileged few, those same distortions make for processes of moral formation that are circuitous, fraught, and sometimes downright harmful for members of disadvantaged groups. Developing this historicist-pragmatic qualification of Aristotle, Tessman next contends that the acquisition and nurturance of virtues that could correct a distorted polis are often of such a kind as to compound the harm that has already been inflicted on a moral agent. Why? Because the remedy for systemic injustice is often a formation of character that damages those who have been subjected to systemic injustice; because the remedy for systemic injustice is often the development of “burdened virtues,” defined as traits that make a contribution to human flourishing—if they do at all—only because they enable survival or resistance to oppression (it is in this that their nobility lies), while in other ways they detract from their bearer’s well-being, in some cases so deeply that their bearer may be said to lead a wretched life.101 For some engaged in the project of remaking the polis, removing barriers to flourishing with an eye to ensuring that the pathway to moral development is not obstructed by systemic barriers, then, the in-principle union of growth in virtue and flourishing becomes a perilous affair. Some individuals will not simply suffer moral regret, having arbitrated between validly competing obligations and opted for one over another.102 When those individuals comport

Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 95. See Bernard Williams, “Ethical Consistency,” in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 166–86.

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themselves in a manner that aims to remedy systemic injustices, the consequences of which have already proven damaging, the characterological means employed to achieve a good end become an occasion for additional damage. The moral injury that has already been sustained, by dint of the toll exacted by an unjust structure of domination, is thus compounded; and the virtuous actions needed to contest that unjust structure of domination further lengthen the odds that virtue and flourishing will go hand in hand. It is fairly easy to see how this would work with respect to the virtue of patience. If patience entails a willingness to endure discomfort, difficulty, and mistreatment, then the advent of a feminist consciousness that prizes solidarity with victims might prove overwhelming, given the disproportionate number of women who are at the receiving end of various kinds of violence. To cope with the affective overload, a feminist might attempt to reconceive solidarity so that it does not include much in the way of “sympathy.” She might attempt to hold herself at a distance from reports of (say) intimate partner violence, rape as a weapon of war, wage theft, the challenge of applying feminist principles to tricky family relations, and so on. But that move could come with troubling consequences. It might now become hard to maintain solidarity and perilously easy to adopt a posture of emotional indifference. And once indifference takes hold, will that individual still be motivated to undertake the hard work of transforming the polis so that the extent of violence toward women is reduced? Will her “undoing” of the affective dimension of feminist solidarity weaken her concern to challenge injustice? And if it be presumed that she has protected himself adequately and can do the work of justice-making, what impact does her emotional detachment have on relationships with friends, allies, lovers, family, etc.?

I would suggest also that a virtue can be “burdened” in an additional way. Beyond the fact that its development might come with significant costs for an individual, a virtue can be burdened by its history. This amounts to more than some laudable character trait having a “bad rep.” One can imagine pretty much any virtue falling into this category, at least for some person at some point in time. (Imagine a soldier who doubts the value of courage, given that multiple comrades have died; imagine a teenager who doubts the value of temperance, given that risk-taking peers have reaped the rewards of their derring-do; imagine a parent whose magnanimity toward his children has resulted in an impoverished old age. In each case, incidental bad luck has left the agent with such a bad [moral] taste in the mouth that that agent, for better or worse, is reflexively

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disinclined toward a moral trait that many others deem valuable and productive of flourishing.) The burden I am considering has to do with a more-or-less informed awareness that an apparently laudable moral trait has been subjected to consistent and extensive distortion, such that its in-principle laudableness falls from view, and its in-practice support for unjust structures of domination is everywhere to see. Think of it like this. When I am preparing food for braying, ravenous sons, there is good reason for me to encourage them to be patient. Braying is not going to speed up the arrival of their meal, and their claims that they are literally dying of hunger are factually inaccurate and liable to irritate the one trying to get the meal ready. Which might lead them to wait even longer for their meal. At the same time, too, there is good reason for me to be patient, tolerating hyperbole, remembering that they didn’t get a midafternoon snack, and focusing my attention on the preparation of a flavorless, carb-heavy meal that will be rapidly shoved down their gaping maws. So far, so good; no burdened virtue here. But when it comes to framing patience as a moral trait that others ought to nurture and refine, the calculus changes. Yes, it might be that some of these others have to deal with braying, ravenous children, and that a bit of patience on the part of those children would make life easier. But it might also be that the commendation of patience quickly runs into trouble. Switch the author of this book (a financially secure white, male, expatriate professor) for a parent alert to the ways that patience has been used to stifle Black protest against racial injustice, alert to the ways that patience has been required of women in “asymmetrical moral support” roles. Add in, too, the possibility that this parent’s family life is such that she is always being told to bear the burden of discomfort, to wait for her time on the job market to come, to let “bygones be bygones” when it comes to myriad disappointments, and so on. Imagine next that that parent is confronted with a theological proposal that reconceives patience, and that accords this motif a starring role in a statement about creation, providence, Christology, the cross, Christian life, sanctification, and the Trinity. Obviously, this parent grasps that patience is being defined in ways that stand at a distance from her vexed relationship with the term. She is not so submerged in her own life that she lacks the capacity to recognize that language is being stretched in this and that way, under the impress of grace, in the context of a faith that seeks to understand itself. But it is

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also the case that every encounter with this term, in a dogmatic context, might provoke the parent to recall this term’s distinctive historical burden, which intersects with the moral damage that she has sustained in connection with it. Try as she may, then, that parent cannot but flinch when the term is used to describe God’s ways and works; and, try as she may, that flinch casts real doubt on the propriety of shifting patience from the margins to the center of theological inquiry. A pioneering essay in feminist philosophy, “Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation,” makes a comparable point. Considering forms of sexuality that trade on the “eroticization of relations of domination,” Sandra Lee Bartky notes that such eroticization is itself a product of patriarchal norms. As such, women who are inclined to replay those relations in their sexual lives—perhaps with an eye to critiquing them, or with an interest in grasping their contingency, it doesn’t really matter—ought to ask themselves if their lives would not be “better off if we learned when to refrain from the exercise of the right” to express themselves in such a way. But it isn’t that easy to “learn to refrain” when it comes to sexuality; one can hardly expect anyone to rewire their libido, at the drop of a hat, on the basis of their ethical and political commitments. Even if, after a long period of contemplation, one thinks that one has begun to “decolonize [one’s] imagination,” the prior fact of colonization is still there. Bartky is aptly blunt: “Patriarchy invades the intimate recesses of personality where it may maim and cripple the spirit forever,” warping individuals in such a way that they “may have to live with a degree of psychic damage that can never be healed.” Given a huge number of differences, a historically burdened motif like patience might be viewed as a dogmatic analogue. It is overdetermined. One cannot simply shuck off its entanglement with structures of unjust domination; those same structures supply a haunting backdrop, a residue that cannot be summarily dispatched.103

(b) Meeting the challenge In the middle of this book, then, at the very moment in which one might hope for a smooth transition between interpretative work and constructive exploration, I am elaborating a substantive Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 51, 60, and 58; emphases added.

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challenge to a project focused on patience. That this challenge has been illustrated through a scattering of references, stretching from nineteenth-century theology to recent feminist analytic philosophy, needn’t distract from the principal point: patience being a conceptuality that has so much “baggage” that one should opt to leave it on the sidelines of theological inquiry. Can this challenge be met? While this question cannot be answered in isolation from the constructive proposal that follows— or, for that matter, in isolation from the reception of that proposal by interested parties—it is useful to frame what lies ahead with three broad comments. These comments, which move from a strategic refusal to allow the “naturalization” of a word’s problematic and injurious connotations, to a (re)statement of the sanctification and transformation of language, to a reaffirmation of the value of thinking about patience von Gott aus, indicate how I intend to weigh, bear, and reconceive the motif of patience. They sketch a posture that acknowledges the compromised nature of this term, while holding fast to the belief that its meanings and uses can and should be reconceived. First, an obvious but sometimes overlooked point: if a theologian sets aside a burdened term or phrase, he risks the “naturalization” of dubious definitions, connotations, and modes of use. While alternate definitions, connotations, and modes of use are not wholly ruled out, the very fact that those alternates are not made a matter of intellectual concern can lend them an air of fancifulness, while naturalized definitions, connotations, and modes of use can begin to gain an air of self-evidence. No doubt, the naturalization of an idiom in everyday discourse, wherein some word’s meaning and use is delimited, is often an altogether unremarkable affair. It might simply reflect shifting circumstances and norms, with a word being deployed in ways that bring about a welcome increase in clarity and concision. If I were to recommend that you “navigate your web browser” to a website, for instance, you’d likely berate me for being twee; you’d ask why I don’t simply tell you to “visit” the website; and you’d roll your eyes if I paused to note that you wouldn’t actually be traveling from point A to point B with the help of a map. And sometimes—again, we are in the realm of everyday discourse—a process of naturalization might register as something of a loss that need not occasion any concern. Say, when talk of “eavesdropping” no longer evokes the

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idea of being splashed by rain that falls from a roof while listening to a private conversation. But matters become more complicated when a contested word or phrase is ceded to an injurious hegemonic discourse—and, more specifically, when a theologian judges a word or phrase “so far gone” that the best course of action is to drop it from one’s lexicon. In that moment, one has run up the flag of surrender. One has forfeited the possibility that a word or phrase might be “redeemed from [its] ideological captivities” and accorded “fresh substance [in] the struggle for justice and transformation”; and one has given free rein to those who would continue to employ a word or phrase in unwelcome ways.104 But clearly more needs to be said. The next step is to insist that this opening statement be allied to a careful assessment of how specific phrases, terms, and motifs function “on the ground” and what the consequences of their theological reclamation (or abandonment) might be. Here, talk of “surrender” might be viewed as unhelpful. For is it not obvious that certain words and phrases should not be recovered? Well, yes. I cannot really imagine, for instance, a scenario in which it would be helpful to reclaim the words “crusade” and “heathen.” It seems preferable for these terms to remain defined in ways that prompt shame and guilt, with their referents evoking a historical legacy marked by arrogance, intolerance, and violence. Nor can I imagine a present or near-future scenario in which it would be helpful to bring the word “spork” into the fold (assuming that someone, somewhere, is currently arguing that a spoon/fork hybrid plays an important role in the life of a Christian community that wants to understand its faith). At the same time, there is the possibility of good-faith debates about more “mixed” terms, with some believing it imperative to set about reclaiming them and others contending that that process is overly difficult. Words like “evangelical” (particularly in a North American context) and “heretical” perhaps fall into this camp. Finally, when it comes to biblical language, the process of reclamation and redefinition—abandonment being less of an option—needs to be carefully managed. Think, for instance, of the long-running snarl around “Father” as a way to name God John de Gruchy, “Toward a Reformed Theology of Liberation: A Retrieval of Reformed Symbols in the Struggle for Justice,” in Toward the Future of Reformed Theology, ed. David Willis and Michael Welker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 106.

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in God’s first way of being. On the one hand, only a peculiarly obtuse kind of head-in-the-sandism allows one to discount critiques of the ways that this term has supported patriarchal configurations of familial, ecclesial, and civil life. It is not really credible for a theologian not to worry about this naming of God. On the other hand, precisely because “Father” identifies a key dimension of Jesus’ declared relationship with God and, by extension, Jesus’ prayerful description of creatures’ past, present, and future relationship with God, to expunge it from dogmatic work could cause problems. It might weaken the connection between the authoritative witness of scripture and dogmatic formulae. It might suggest that one of Jesus’ most important identifications of God, whose meaning is tied to an enacted history made present to the faithful in the context of the sanctifying activity of the Spirit, has incidental importance. It might muddle trinitarian reflection. And so on. Sarah Coakley, arguably, provides a useful illustration of what reclamation of talk about God as Father needs to entail. She works on three fronts. First, centering Rom. 8, she argues that the naming of God in God’s first person cannot (and must not) be thought apart from the economic activity of the Spirit and the Son. Second, and in a spiritual and political vein, she argues that the “true meaning of ‘Father’” might no longer be “dredged up from the scummy realm of human fatherhood” but associated with the “kneeling work that ultimately slays patriarchy at its root.”105 Third and finally, there is a reengagement with the “metaphorical profusion” of the apophatic tradition. And if one combines the three moves, the possibility of language undergoing something of a purification, analogous to that which the Christian pray-er herself undergoes, seems ever more likely. While “father” remains susceptible to ideological distortion, this term’s envelopment in a contemplative-liberative economy has moved it toward dogmatic redefinition.

Now I am not going to try to determine whether patience is “burdened” to the same degree as certain ways of naming God. But this short preamble suffices for me to chart something of a path forward. In four steps: (a) it is not only that patience does not fall within the set of terms (“crusade,” “heathen,” “spork”) that are obviously unworthy of reclamation, but (b) it can be argued that patience’s entanglement with interlocking discourses of domination, Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 324 and 327.

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significant as it is, has not reached the point at which its meanings cannot be disaggregated from those same discourses. If certain meanings and usages oblige caution, jettisoning the term altogether seems like a step too far. It is better to say that its future hangs in the balance. Why so? Simply, because (c) both the scriptural witness and thinkers in the Christian tradition have already lent this term charges that have the potential to disrupt the burdens I have glanced toward (my hope being, of course, that much of this book prior to the preceding subsection substantiates this point), while simultaneously encouraging further theological development, thus (d) making it reasonable to hope that a process of reclamation and redefinition can continue apace, and perhaps even culminate in a state of affairs in which this term could make amends for its past, anchoring an imaginative restatement of Christian understanding that contributes to the ongoing project of creaturely liberation. Second, I would recall Tessman’s caution that one “not take for granted that what gets labeled ‘damage’ under dominant values” is always disclosive of “undesirable traits.”106 Now Tessman does make this point in passing. Having argued that the prestige of certain virtues is the product of distorted social contexts, she is simply noting that changed circumstances might give a burdened virtue a rather different import—one that would not damage a disadvantaged individual and/or community. But the remark is an intriguing opening, and it returns us to the meditation on language that opened this book. Is it not the case that grace is exactly what changes circumstances and challenges “dominant values”? Is it not fair to hope that, by dint of God’s sanctification of faith and language, a “burdened” term could be reconceived in a salutary way? Consider again some words from Sarah Coakley, focused now on prayer as the engine of Christian life: [W]hat is at stake here, at base, is a slow but steady assault on idolatry which only the patient practices of prayer can allow God to do in us: in the purgative kneeling before the blankness of the darkness which nonetheless dazzles, the Spirit is at work in this very noetic slippage and drawing all things into Christ and recasting our whole sense of how language for God works.107 Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 48. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 325.

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Although patience is only mentioned once in this sentence, it has begun to take on meanings and usages that suggest a less burdened future. Talk of what God might do “in us” (not just “to us”: Coakley is aptly wary of extrinsicism) is a crucial qualification: it ensures that patience is now framed in terms of our becoming newly susceptible to God’s healing grace. Reference to prayer as a “patient practice,” concomitantly, suggests that the principal meaning of this term, at least with respect to human beings, has to do with a purposeful disposing of the self over the long run. It is about a spiritual posture, forged over time—one caught up, Coakley would quickly add, in a discrete way of desiring—whose enactment and reenactment enable the human being to participate in God’s communication of God’s own desiring, thus supporting growth in holiness; it is about a spiritual posture that is not tied to the ongoing projects of white supremacism and heteropatriarchal domination, but is angled toward their dismantlement and abolition. Indeed, with these claims there emerges the suggestion of a fascinating kind of longsuffering. One need not view patience as a matter of “putting up” with wrongdoing, acquiescence to systemic bad luck, or a continual deferment of justice. It is more a matter of learning how to suffer God’s disbursement of grace, “allowing” oneself to be broken and remade, such that false idols are exposed and destroyed. And the goal of all of this is to apprehend and delight in the God who has set the whole process in motion, to participate in the conjoint activity of Christ and the Spirit in such a way that one can truly say (and truly unsay), “Our Father, who art in heaven …” I am perhaps subjecting Coakley to eisegesis here, albeit in a manner that I hope aligns with the drift of her project. But my principal concern is to show how a focus on God’s activity transforms the context in which talk of patience occurs. Although the burdens of the term are not shucked off as so much deadweight, reference to divine action interferes with the everyday functioning of language, ensuring that discursive burdens are complicated by new meanings, connotations, and modes of use. No doubt, it remains imperative for a theologian to take stock of the way that language “belongs to the closest neighborhood of man’s being” (an overstatement, but a useful one) and to grasp that each “neighborhood” that we inhabit also inhabits us, with forms of ambiguity, deformation, distortion,

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and difficulty being integral to the language(s) we use.108 It is apt, too, to step beyond a general kind of situational awareness and to reckon seriously with the “state of play” with respect to any term or phrase, paying special attention to the uneven distribution of ambiguity, deformation, and distortion that afflicts some discursive subfield and identifying the discrete difficulties posed by specific terms and phrases. But all of this can and should happen within an Anselmian paradigm of faith seeking understanding, wherein the operations of reason—and, of course, the exercise of the imagination—are ordered to the ongoing event of God’s gracious, revelatory activity, to which scripture bears preeminent witness. And if this mode of reflection does not permit one to treat the kerygmatic “message” as something that “must be thrown at those in the situation—thrown like a stone” (ST1 7), it does permit one to imagine how it is that God makes our situation God’s own, and in such a way that a theologian can “throw” language in a new way: reconceiving a term, a cluster of terms, or an idiom, such that the ambiguities of finite existence are outmatched by our witness to God’s ways and works. To recall some quotations from the opening of this book: while a theologian continues to work in medias res, the pressure of God’s communicative activity raises the possibility of “a gain to language” that “grants courage to language.”109 The fallen world is still “at work,” and one can hardly deny that “faith … speaks the world’s language. But”—and this is a very crucial but—faith “cannot speak this language without changing it … With regard to both being and language things never remain as they were.”110 Can one know when the language of faith is shaped and changed through God’s sanctifying action? Can one be assured that language is transformed in a manner that accords with a process of mortification and vivification, overseen by the Spirit of Christ, such that the world’s language is made participant in the ongoing life of

108 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 189. 109 Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase, trans. John Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark: 2001), 23 and 24 (emphases in original). 110 Eberhard Jüngel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery, trans. Iain and Ute Nicol (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 85–6. My emphasis.

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the Word, and not turned into one more “stone,” mindlessly and dangerously chucked around? No. Such knowledge and assurance is not available on this side of eternity, even if the reworking of language seems to illumine (and is illuminated by) the scriptural witness and seems to “fit” (or become fitted to) the faithful activity of this or that Christian community. But one can hope that the “decolonization” of this or that term, embedded in a broader statement about God’s ways and works, will ultimately have less to do with the dubious realm of human ingenuity and more to do with God’s extension of fellowship to us, one consequence of which is the advent of theology in a constructive mode. And that hope is entirely reasonable. It is the product of a belief in God’s disruptive action, which ramifies, graciously, across all dimensions of creaturely life. Third and finally, it is useful to reiterate how this book will set about charting a future for patience, one in which its burdens are borne, then overwritten, by its incorporation into a statement about God’s ways and works. If there is a decision to think von Gott aus, with Barth (and, of course, Julian, Calvin, et al.), there is also an attempt to think beyond Barth. On one level, the chapters that follow offer an expansive application of patience to discrete dogmatic loci. Rather than beginning with an acclamation God’s self-sufficient, independent life, a Barthian sensibility is routed through an ordering of doctrinal topics that bears some resemblance to Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre. I begin at the beginning, with the doctrine of creation; I read Gen. 1:1–2:4a in order to develop an account of a primordial time and space wherein God’s creatio ex nihilo goes hand in hand with God’s patient “letting be” and “letting happen.” God’s exercise of patience, specifically, is the condition of otherthan-human beings acting with integrity, meaning, and consequence, participating in a creatio cooperativa that supports the emergence of a creature that bears the imago dei and the imago mundi. I turn next to providence, elaborating an account of God’s governmental activity as it relates to ancient Israel and then, more tentatively, to creatures in general. And if Chapter  4 extends Barth’s “moral ontology” to include other-than-human creatures, Chapters 5 and 6 add the influence of Tertullian, Cyprian, Calvin, and Julian, while drawing also on feminist insights. Patience as divine persistence is key: I make much of God’s unflagging disbursement of blessings, the result of which is the emergence and development of ancient

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Israel as God’s covenant partner. Patience as divine longsuffering also nudges into view, with God bearing in God’s own life the consequences of creaturely waywardness. Likewise patience as steadfastness: I argue that God achieves God’s ends through a “bending of history,” and through the raising up of a witness to God’s ways and works. Then, a culmination that is also a hinge to the next volume of this project: a statement about God’s overall relationship to history that raises the prospect that Christ can be identified as patience incarnate, the Messiah who overlays the time and space of reconciliation and redemption upon a fallen world and, concomitantly, liberates creatures to make good on God’s patience in new ways. On another level, these constructive claims about God’s exercise of patience are developed in close conversation with the scriptural witness. If this exegetical focus speaks to my concern to inhabit purposefully the “domain of the Word,” it also indicates a desire to foreground the scriptural witness to God’s relationship with ancient Israel, thus remedying a shortcoming in the work of many authors considered thus far. A focus on ancient Israel does not only help to challenge some questionable habits of mind (disregard for the history of ancient Israel often being inseparable from Christians’ failure to think well about various kinds of religious, racial, ethnic, and sexual difference); it also pays systematic dividends. Close engagements with Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms, Hosea, Lamentations, and the broader canonical witness enable a fuller account of divine patience than Barth and others provide, while readying the way for an account of what it means for Christ to enact and proclaim the Kingdom. Such engagements, further, allow for ad hoc engagements with a number of pressing issues, having to do with nonhuman creatures, trauma, the “problem of evil,” and the formation of the canon. Does that all mean that this book will not actually say much about human patience? Will there be nothing akin to Coakley’s talk about the “patient practices of prayer”? Well, in line with Church Dogmatics II/1, this installment of Patience does think concentratedly about God’s activity—so much so that it might seem, at first blush, that what patience means for us is handled obliquely. That is purposeful: an important first step in ridding patience of problematic connotations is learning not to “ask to what extent our reflections on the patience of man [sic] shed light upon the nature

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and character of God,” preferring instead to have those reflections relativized and problematized by an account of God’s exercise of patience.111 But it will soon become clear that claims about divine patience cannot be separated from the question of what it means for creatures to respond to—better, to reward—God’s patience. It will soon become clear, that is, that an account of God’s exercise of patience, in and for the world, opens out into an account of what it is that creatures are called to be and do. This is not to say that a distinctively Christian account of human patience will not be advanced at a later stage. As noted already, this book’s successor will develop an account of patience that foregrounds our susceptibility to the transformative action of the Spirit, in conversation with Calvin’s doctrine of sanctification and works of queer theory and theology. It will propose that human patience involves our “suffering” an identity that is always in process, in view of a Spirit who enables an everfuller realization of our union with Christ and releases us from wayward modes of existence. It will also challenge the assumption that impatience is a “vice” wherein one is “carried into many types of iniquity.”112 Impatience can name that dimension of Christian life wherein one moves swiftly, riskily, and sometimes intemperately toward God’s future in response to the imperative to inhabit and participate in the Kingdom. But these claims only make good sense once a rich, textured account of divine patience is in place. We can only think about rewarding God’s patience, in the context of Christian life, once we have begun to think rightly about God’s creative work, God’s governance of history, the incarnation of the Son—patience incarnate— and the outpouring of the Spirit.

Donald Gray, “On Patience: Human and Divine,” Crosscurrents 24, no. 4 (1975): 418. While I am challenging Gray, his treatment of patience proved immensely valuable in the early stages of this project. 112 Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, trans. George Demacopoulos (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2007), 102 (III.9). 111

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4 The Patience of God the Creator God’s creative work includes the exercise of patience. Patience names a mode of divine activity that “lets be” and “lets happen,” while also empowering creatures to inhabit, act, and enrich the times and spaces in which they have been placed. With God’s exercise of patience, creatio ex nihilo is followed by creatio cooperativa; nonhuman creatures play a key role in bringing about the emergence of human beings. Christian theologians have often endeavored to balance bold claims about the prior reality and sovereign activity of God with an expansive account of the secondary reality and activity of God’s creatures. On one level, each creature depends wholly on God for its past, present, and future existence. Calvin is admirably forthright: “nothing in the world is stable except in as far as it is sustained by the hand of God. The world did not originate in itself, consequently, the whole order of nature depends on nothing else than his appointment, by which each element has its own peculiar property” (Comm. Ps. 104:5). That anything other than God exists, then, is an effect of God’s sovereign good pleasure. No creature can assert its own right to be; each receives being as an unmerited gift—and, Calvin might add, at least with respect to sentient creatures, ought to acknowledge that gift with a due sense of astonishment and gratitude. On another level, the claim that God creates ex nihilo (out of nothing), being “the only antecedent condition of the world’s existence,” must not be elaborated in

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ways that cast doubt upon the reality and integrity of creatures.1 While the world does not cause or sustain itself, it is imperative to affirm its distinction and dignity. One element of this affirmation is the claim that God establishes and sustains a radical kind of ontological difference. Toddlers and neutron stars, mountains and cantatas, gravitational forces and awkward silences: none exist as extensions, derivatives, or byproducts of the divine life. Each is a discrete creature—or, more precisely, a bundle of creaturely processes—located in a specific patch of time and space and marked by an array of manifestly nondivine qualities (finitude, limited duration, mentality, materiality, etc.). But simply to notice ontological difference is not sufficient. Theologians must also attend to the ways that creatures happen and act, apart from God. Not “apart” in the sense of radical independence; each creature, by definition, owes its existence to the creator, and each creature’s conduct, by definition, relies on God’s empowering presence. And not “apart” in the sense of isolation; each creature, by definition, is sustained and animated by God, and each creature, by definition, exists in relation to other creatures. “Apart” in the limited sense that creatures are given the opportunity to occupy patches of time and space and the capacity to undertake meaningful and consequential courses of action on their own terms. If Karl Barth was right to identify the terminus a quo of the world as “the good-pleasure of the free omnipotence of the divine love,” he was also right to view creation as a busy, lively affair: an extension of time and space in which creatures are afforded “vital energy for the venture of existence” (CD III/1, 15 and 169). When it comes to the doctrine of creation, more particularly, the challenge is to pair an unembarrassed acclamation of divine sovereignty “in the beginning” with a description of the world that does justice to the “venture of existence” in that primordial time and space. It is a matter of starting off as one means to go on, ensuring that a robust compatibilism obtains in this locus as much as most others. To meet this challenge, this chapter of course turns to patience. And since there are relatively few precedents for applying this motif in this context—Barth being something

Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (Louisville: WKJP, 2014), 87.

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of an exception, alongside John Macquarrie and a few others2—I reckon particularly with the events narrated at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. Picking up an idiom from the previous chapter, I read Gen. 1:1–2:4a as bearing witness to God’s primordial exercise of patience: a prehistorical, sovereign act of “letting be” and “letting happen” that goes hand in hand with God eliciting, guiding, waiting on, and endorsing the (relatively) free action of nonhuman creatures when realizing God’s creative purposes. This approach, I hope to suggest, does more than showcase the viability of patience as a term of art when it comes to thinking about creation. It yields significant dogmatic rewards, chief among which is the integration of cosmogonic and anthropogonic claims. While creation and theological anthropology remain differentiable loci, the distance between them is shortened; one is thus enabled to appreciate afresh the distinctiveness of human life as it depends upon and emerges from the activity of nonhuman creatures. Why so? Because an analysis of God’s creative work, “in the beginning,” involves a striking distribution of agency, with nonhuman creatures empowered to shape the world in which humans come to dwell; and because God’s primordial exercise of patience is rewarded by some number of those nonhuman creatures in such a way that there arises a planetary order that includes creatures who bear the imago dei and imago mundi—creatures who have the opportunity to participate in the covenant of grace. Beyond the fact that I am exploring relatively new dogmatic territory, I am of course aware that a focus on Gen. 1:1–2:4a brings me into the orbit of debates internal to the development of modern biblical studies. Those preoccupied with the compositional history of the Hebrew Bible, for instance, are quick to note that Genesis opens with juxtaposed sagas, hailing from separate “sources”: the apparently later Priestly (P) account forming the basis of Gen. 1:1– 2:4a, on one side, and the apparently earlier Yahwist account (J) dominating Gen. 2:4b–25, on the other. Since the text offers no

See, for instance, Ruth Page, God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM, 1996); Rachel Muers, “Silence and the Patience of God,” MT 17, no. 1 (2001): 85–98, esp. 93; Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 6–7; and Ian McFarland, The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation (Louisville: Kentucky, 2019), 31–2.

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explanation for this juxtaposition, awareness of it prompts questions about the formation of Genesis and, more specifically, engenders speculation about the work of “compilers” and “editors.”3 Modern inquiries into the sociocultural context in which Genesis emerged are also noteworthy. Given that Gen. 1:1–2:4a seems to allude to Marduk’s struggle with Tiamat, recounted in the Enuma Elish (an ancient Babylonian creation myth), there is reason to ask about the extent to which this portion of Genesis resembles and/or challenges other cosmogonic and anthropogonic perspectives—a query that, in turn, raises the broader issue of the distinctiveness (or lack thereof) of Israelite religion in the Ancient Near East.4 Questions can also be posed about the relationship of the first creation saga to the Hebrew Bible as a whole. Given that this block of text does not stand in isolation, ought it to be viewed as backdrop to a more fundamental interest in God’s saving action? If Gerhard von Rad is right to treat creation as “part of the aetiology of Israel,” a community whose religious raison d’être is the acclamation of God’s covenantal favor, what is one to make of the fact that the Pentateuch begins with this saga?5 And how might this opening relate to the credo of Exod. 34:6– 7, which echoes across the entirety of the canon? Recent theological

To be sure, premodern scholars recognized two discrete creation stories. The insight of modern criticism is that these stories were forged by particular religious communities, whose concerns admit of partial (and hypothetical) description; and that the juxtaposition of stories was effected at a later date. With that said—and this will be a point of concern in Chapter  6—it should also be noted that the “documentary hypothesis” about the formation of the Hebrew Bible, dominant for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is now thought to require significant revision. 4 The locus classicus here is Hermann Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit: Eine Religionsgeschichte Untersuchung über Gen I und Ap John 12 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1895). Gunkel’s perspective receives important elaboration and expansion in Werner H. Schmidt, Die Schöpfungsgeschichte der Priesterschrift (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1964) and Odil Hannes Steck, Der Schöpfungsbericht der Priesterschrift: Studien zur literarkritischen Problematik von Genesis 1, 1–2,4a (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975). 5 Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker, vol. 1, The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 138. See also von Rad’s essay from 1936, “The Theological Problem of the Old Testament Doctrine of Creation,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, trans. E. W. Trueman Dicken (London: SCM, 1984), 131–43. 3

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work adds even more complexity. This stretch of Genesis, it has been argued, cannot credibly be enlisted to support the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Something different is afoot: perhaps a creatio contra nihilum, as God battles against the forces of chaos, or even a creatio ex profundis, ingredient to which is a dialectic that swings between a masculinist denigration of preexisting watery depths (tehomophobia) and a liberating love for the same (tehomophilia).6 This vexed interpretative context notwithstanding—and I will of course engage it, as the need arises—the object of the following pages is to show how this portion of text is unusually well-suited to lending patience valuable dogmatic content. To this end, the chapter unfolds in three steps. First, I argue that Gen. 1:1–2:4a can and should be read as justifying the belief that God creates ex nihilo. God is the exclusive reason that there is something, rather than nothing; it is only because God acts, sovereignly and purposefully, that there arises a manifold of particulars that is ontologically distinct from God. Identifying this action as patient, moreover, underscores the fact that God does not begrudge creatures their own time and space, that God allows creatures to “be” and to “happen,” with their continuous dependence on God going hand in hand with a measure of relative independence. Second, I propose that creatio ex nihilo quickly gives way to a process of creatio cooperativa or creatio per collaborationem (cooperative creation, creation through collaboration). Coextensive with God’s primordial act of “letting be” and “letting happen”—and I am endeavoring to think along lines laid down by Barth and Macquarrie here— God empowers nonhuman creatures to fill up the time and space of God’s world. The concept of patience thus gains additional meaning: it serves now as a middle term that connects an emphasis on divine sovereignty with a description of God’s elicitation of creaturely activity. Specifically, patience serves to foreground the dependence of all creatures on God, while indicating also that God, in a way, waits on creatures to respond to God’s call to contribute to the formation of the world. And, crucially, in this prehistorical utopia God’s patience is not tested. Other-than-human creatures take up God’s sovereign directives with astonishing vigor. They

See, respectively, Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Keller, FD.

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reward God’s patience, thereby imbuing the cosmos with increasing complexity and value. Third and finally, I argue that other-thanhuman creatures’ rewarding of divine patience is a condition for the emergence of human life. The earliest cooperative venture between God and creatures—a venture led by God, yet inclusive of numerous other agents, organic and inorganic—swells toward a remarkable finale, with physical ability, intelligence, and agency combining with new intensity in the first human beings. Two additional sections broaden the view. The first presents Gen. 1:1–2:4a as a counterworld that describes creation as it should be, in contrast to what it is; raises the possibility that the idiom of causality might not be as useful for talking about God’s relationship to the world as is sometimes thought; and defends, in an ex post facto way, a decision to defer an account of God’s saving activity for later in this project. The second section, which supplies a coda to the chapter as a whole, notes the significance of my exegetical and dogmatic claims in a time of unprecedented ecological crisis.

1 Creatio ex Nihilo The testimony of Genesis, admittedly, is not a necessary point of departure for engaging the doctrine of creation.7 One might well take one’s bearings from the Psalms, Job, or Proverbs; one might also engage any number of passages in the New Testament (Jn 1:1–18, Rom. 4:17, Heb. 1:1–3a and 11:3, for example). But Gen. 1:1–2:4a provides an unusually fertile source for thinking about patience and, despite its familiarity, merits quotation: 1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the 2

I construe “testimony” along lines suggested by Walter Brueggemann. See Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), esp. 117–44.

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darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8 God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. 9 And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11 Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. 14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. 20 And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” 21 So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. 6

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And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

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Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” 29 God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. 2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2 And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. 4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. 26

To begin at the beginning: does Gen. 1:1–2 offer clear support to the idea of creatio ex nihilo? No. A grammatically informed reading of these verses might well count against it, since the “formless void”

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(tohu wabohu) and the watery “deep” (tehom) seem to be depicted as preexisting material upon which God acts. Walter Brueggemann puts it thus: Gen. 1:1 should be read “as a temporal, dependent clause, rendered ‘When God began to create …,’ which makes v. 2 the main clause of the opening sentence of the Bible.”8 Such a reading, further, can hardly be dismissed as the upshot of un-traditioned, antitheological, modern philological study. It has antique pedigree. Philo, Justin Martyr, and others (including the authors of the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon) understood God’s creative work to entail the shaping of unformed matter; the opening verses of Genesis were viewed as loosely analogous to Greek beliefs about the labors of the Demiurge. Furthermore, a good case can be made that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was not animated by exegetical reflection per se but arose in light of some fairly ugly intra-Christian quarrels. Without clear precedent in ancient or Hellenistic Judaism, the doctrine was deployed by thinkers like Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, and Tertullian in a battle to clarify Christian orthodoxy—an urgent issue, given their opponents’ flair for combining metaphysical speculation, powerful accounts of the body’s ambiguity, Platonist philosophy, and dramatic soteriology, but hardly the sturdiest of foundations on which to build a dogmatic redoubt.9

Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 153. Translations of the opening verses of Genesis vary, of course. The NRSV maintains ambiguity. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” can be read in terms of a creatio ex nihilo (“when” qualifying “in the beginning” to underscore God’s sovereign, generative act) or in terms of God’s action vis-à-vis preexisting material (“when” specifying the point at which God starts to act on unformed material). A major Jewish translation is more straightforward: “When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” See Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures according to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 3. Robert Alter is even blunter: “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” See Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 3. 9 For more on these issues, see Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 1994). Also helpful is R. A. Norris, Jr., God and World in Early Christianity (New York: Seabury, 1965). 8

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It would be a mistake, however, to treat the historical context in which talk of creatio ex nihilo emerged as disqualifying. (Indeed, were one to go down that path, it is likely that few doctrines would pass muster. Which important insights have not been forged in the heat of controversy, and without a measure of questionable politicking?) It would also be a mistake to overrate the importance of grammatical analyses of Gen. 1:1–2, with exegetical judgments about these verses serving as a standard by which doctrinal claims are measured. Isolated parts rarely speak for the whole and, anyway, the opening verses of Genesis clearly ask to be read in the context of larger units: this is but one part of a block of text that concludes at Gen. 2:4a, and but one part of a book that launches the sprawling narrative of the Pentateuch as a whole. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it is crucial to reckon with the genre of the first creation saga. Claus Westermann’s quip, that “One can teach creatio ex nihilo; but one cannot narrate it,” conveys an often-overlooked truth.10 While Genesis begins with a saga about the world’s beginnings, the book as a whole is patently uninterested in the “how” of creation, and thus provides little material on which to make a judgment about creatio ex nihilo: its initial chapters are prefatory to a history-like account of the individuals, families, and events that distinguish ancient Israel’s development prior to the Egyptian captivity, the focus of which is not Yhwh as “cosmic creator,” but Yhwh as “devoted protector of the people.”11 Indeed, given that God’s creative act neither occurs in time and space, nor compares with the productive activity of human beings (a point demonstrated by the text’s preference for “creating” [bara’], over “making” [‘asah]), there is bound to be some tension between this saga and any doctrinal gloss that is laid upon it. Bundle together these points and a rule of thumb emerges. Do not expect an exposition of Gen. 1:1–2 to settle the issue: creatio ex nihilo, creatio contra nihilum, creatio ex profundis, or something else; accept that dogmatic decisions need to be made on different bases. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Continental Commentary, trans. John S. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 46; see also 174. 11 Ernan McMullin, “Creation Ex Nihilo: Early History,” in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David Burrell et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12. See also Jaroslav Pelikan, “Creation and Causality in the History of Christian Thought,” JR 40, no. 4 (1960): 246–55.

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So let us set aside the issue of creatio ex nihilo, if only temporarily, and tackle two broader questions. What does Gen. 1:1–2:4a tell us, in general, about God’s creative action? And what does it tell us, in general, about the world over which God presides? On one level, the repeated “Let there be” and the purposeful differentiation of creaturely realities—heavens/earth, light/night, water/sky, water/earth—bear witness to God’s sovereignty and God’s productivity.12 Sovereignty, because God is the sole subject who establishes, gives structure to, and governs all events that transpire. There do not seem to be any precipitating conditions with which God must wrestle, nor any metaphysical parameters for God to negotiate. God simply creates, freely and effortlessly, through a sequence of unrivalled speech acts. Absolutely no one else initiates or rules over the process that culminates in the emergence of a stabilized cosmos and the first human beings. Productivity, because the world that God creates is in no respect an extension of God’s own life. There is “no involuntary or unknowing emanation of being from the One source of all,” as with Neoplatonists like Plotinus or Proclus;13 radical difference obtains, making it impossible to position creator and creature on different points of a shared ontological continuum (even if one persists, as one must, in using words like “being,” “reality,” and “action” to describe God and creatures). Given this pairing of sovereignty and productivity, too, the qualitative difference of creator and creature must be described in terms of radical asymmetry. God alone is the author of the cosmos. And as “God remains wholly free over against what is created,” at no point is God “bound to what is created.”14 By contrast, that which is created remains wholly reliant on God. No creature or combination of creatures could ever cut loose from their anterior condition of possibility; at every point, creatures depend McFarland provides an interesting trinitarian gloss on “productivity” in From Nothing, 42–8. While the perspective advanced here could be developed along similar lines, it purposefully defers a fuller statement about God’s identity. I explain why in due course. 13 Thomas F. Tracy, “God and Creatures Acting: The Idea of Double Agency,” in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. Burrell et  al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 222. 14 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, ed. John de Gruchy, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 44. 12

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wholly on the God who brought them into being and sustains them in being. David Burrell puts it well, with a tip of the hat to Aquinas: “the very existence (esse) of creatures is an esse-ad, an existing which is itself a relation to its source.”15 Since sovereignty and productivity coincide in this fashion, ought one to characterize God’s creative activity as an exercise of power? Yes. Granted a host of distracting connotations, this word is as handy a way as any to describe God’s relationship to the primordial sequence of events that Genesis describes. It is also legitimate to read each “Let there be” as a “word of command.”16 Thus Luther: “He spoke, and it was done” (LW 1, 30).17 Even if references to the tohu wabohu and tehom might initially appear to suggest that God’s creative act involves grappling with recalcitrant, preexisting material (on which, more soon), one can hardly ignore what stands in plain view—namely, that every step of the primordial history unfolds according to God’s will, at the pace that God intends, and that God gets exactly what God wants at the end of the day (or, more precisely, at the end of the week). At the same time, awareness of these words’ connotative freight compels useful qualifications. It is vital to note, for instance, that the power God exercises cannot be measured on a creaturely scale (i.e., “Janet holds x units of power; Chuck holds y units of power; God holds z units of power”). Since God’s power founds and maintains the created order, it cannot be located within or defined in light of that order.18 It is vital, equally, to avoid construing God’s speech acts as akin to the dictates of an overweening boss who commands others to do his bidding, and thence to construe creatures as browbeaten subordinates, located further down the “chain of command.” There is no suggestion of David Burrell, “The Act of Creation with Its Theological Consequences,” in Burrell et al., Creation and the God of Abraham, 41. Burrell here alludes to ST I.45.3. 16 Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 85. Emphasis added. 17 Herman Bavinck expands the point: “He speaks and it comes to be, he commands and it stands forth.” See Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 417. Both Luther and Bavinck are of course preceded by Augustine: “whatever you [God] say will come about does come about” (Conf. XI.vii.9). 18 I am paraphrasing Kathryn Tanner here. See God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1988), 85. The paragraph above also echoes claims advanced by Rowan Williams; see On Christian Theology (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 63–78. 15

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an abusive and hierarchical relationship here; there is only the incomparable event of God freely bringing the cosmos into existence. To make the point more positively: whenever one raises the topic of God’s power as creator, it is imperative to underscore that this power is exercised gratuitously, in a fashion that is wholly external and in no respect beneficial to God, and entirely for the sake of God’s world. The unhurried, stately prose of Gen. 1:1–2:4a is instructive on this front. At no moment does the text identify reasons or motives for God’s activity. The text attests to a curious kind of arbitrariness, a creative action that lacks any “ground” beyond God’s free decision to establish and sustain that which is not God.19 Indeed, absent reasons or motives (and with due awareness that an identification of God as triune discloses the antecedent generativity of God’s own life—but we are not there yet), the old idea of the beneplacitum voluntatis Dei, the good pleasure of the will of God, is rightly invoked at this point. God could have rested content with God’s self-sufficient life; God could have kept to herself; God could have been satisfied with the relational depth of her own being-in-act. If such counterfactuals prove something of a challenge for thought (and they should: theologians ought to be more interested in what God has done than what God could have done), they underscore the basic unnecessariness of creation. There really could be nothing, rather than something; and the shock of there being something cannot ever be fully suppressed. The shock only increases, too, with the awareness that the world has nothing to do with God remedying a deficiency or addressing a lack in God’s life, and everything to do with God’s extravagant decision to do whatsoever God pleases, for our sake, not God’s. Throw all of this together, and we are well on the way to declaring that creation is a wholly gracious affair. More than that, in fact. The aggregate of creaturely structures, processes, subjects, objects, agents, and so on, all of which are brought into existence and directed by God’s command, are simply “the outcome of God’s … unconstrained love.”20 “Arbitrary” in the specific sense given it by Schleiermacher; see On the Doctrine of Election, with Special Reference to the Aphorisms of Dr. Bretschneider, trans. Iain G. Nicol and Allen Jorgenson (Louisville: WJKP, 2012), 65. The “groundless” quality of creation is also noted by Williams; see On Christian Theology, 73. 20 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 9. 19

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Thus Barth: “the predicate ‘Creator’ speaks of an incomparable act. It tells us that God is the One who, although wholly self-sufficient in His possession of all perfections, and absolutely glorious and blessed in His inner life, did not as such will to be alone, and has not actually remained alone, but in accordance with His will, and under no other inward constraint than that of the freedom of His love, has, in an act of the overflowing of His inward glory, posited as such a reality which is distinct from himself” (CD III/1, 15). Such a perspective is preferable—this being a point to which I will return in later chapters—to Jürgen Moltmann’s appropriation of the kabbalistic idea of divine “self-limitation” (zimsum).21 Precisely because God and creation cannot be positioned on the same ontological plane, there is no need for God to “withdraw” and “make space” for the world. God simply establishes and sustains the world as qualitatively other.

On another level—and I move now to the question of what Gen. 1:1–2:4a tells us about the world—God’s creative act is such that the establishment of the cosmos is partnered with the conferral of profound value and dignity. There is no suggestion of a Manichean opposition of light and darkness, good and evil, and spirit and matter; nor do remarks about humanity’s dominion over earth, sea, and sky imply that that which is not human is ontologically deficient (and thus, perhaps, deserving of scorn or ripe for exploitation). Quite the contrary. The divine declaration, “Let there be x,” is typically matched with “and God saw that x was good” (vv. 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and 31), a mantra that is bereft of qualifications, hedges, or reservations. The later summative claim, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good,” reinforces this point. If the worthiness of each part is a given, the sum-total is even better. Thus Augustine: When it [the text of Genesis] was dealing with them one by one, you see, it just said, “God saw that it was good”; but when it came to talking about them all, it was not enough to say “good”

See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), esp. 86–93 and 156–7. Elizabeth Johnson builds on Moltmann’s position in important ways; see SWI, 233–6.

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unless “very” was also added. God’s individual works are found by sensible people who consider them to display, each in its own kind, admirable measures and numbers and orders (Wis. 11:20); how much more must this be so with all things together (Sir. 18:1), that is, with the universe itself, which is completed by all these individual things being brought together into one whole? (Gn. adv. Man, I.21.32) At the same time, God’s affirmations do not tilt toward divinization, such that the sun, the moon, or any number of creatures could be construed as minor deities.22 There is no inflation of creaturely status, the force of which might undermine the absolute qualitative distinction of God and world, much less any suggestion that God must depend on others to get God’s way: God’s creative act is such that the mere fact of creatureliness has positive value, in and of itself and on its own terms. This point is nicely illustrated by the fact that, upon coming to exist, creatures simply get on with the business of being and acting as creatures. There is no cowering, no harried clutching at the here-and-now (as if divine caprice might suddenly result in the cessation of being), and no attempt to challenge God’s sovereignty. Creatures simply do what they are called to do, and they do so in eminently familiar ways: earth puts forth vegetation (v. 11), trees bear fruit (v. 12), birds fly and sea creatures swim (vv. 20–22), and animals move (vv. 24–25). Walter Brueggemann suggests that God’s rest on the seventh day shows that “God is not anxious about his creation but is at ease with the well-being of his rule.”23 This seems right. While God’s identity is obviously underdetermined at this point of the narrative, it is already clear that God creates with a “free hand,” and with what might be called a supreme confidence in God’s abilities—a point underscored by God’s decision to “rest” on the seventh day of the week. But it is also important to note that creation as a whole seems to be entirely at ease, and that each and every creature appears

On which, see Gerhard von Rad, “Some Aspects of the Old Testament WorldView,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch, 144–65, esp. 149–52. 23 Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Louisville: WJKP,  2010), 35. Moltmann writes similarly when describing God’s Sabbath rest; see God in Creation, 276–96. 22

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confident of its value.24 None pause to wonder at their existence. None break scene, so to speak, and ask what is going on. None balk at God’s directives. Each simply does what it is called to do, which is what each is made to do anyway. Indeed, to look toward the next section, the matter-of-fact way that God’s summonses receive fitting responses points to a key dimension of God’s primordial exercise of patience. Prior to the fall, God does not ever need to put God’s creatures back on the right path. God simply grants creatures time and space, patiently letting them “be” and “happen”—a strategy that might, at least in principle, inject a degree of riskiness into the cosmogonic process—and nonhuman creatures immediately make good on God’s patience. They gladly take up their assigned roles, and in so doing contribute to the formation of relatively stable planetary structures and processes. Where, then, does all this leave the issue of creatio ex nihilo? On one level, the exegetical perplexities of Genesis’ opening verses remain unresolved. Again, though, that need not trouble us. Even were the grammatical assessment of these verses to shift (which seems unlikely), it remains the case that this biblical book remains uninterested in the “how” of God’s creative activity. Its principal interest lies elsewhere: in offering a stately description of the asymmetrical relationship that obtains between God and world, and that is established by God alone, so that creatures are empowered to do exactly what creatures ought to do. On another level, if this preliminary sketch of the dynamics of the text persuades, it is wholly apt for a dogmatic appreciation of God’s sovereign power and the activity of creatures “in the beginning” to include an affirmation of the old idea of creatio ex nihilo. Why? Because Gen. 1:1–2:4a unfolds in such a way that readers and listeners are pressed, almost inexorably, toward the awareness that God’s good pleasure is the sole reason that anything and everything transpires, and that nothing—absolutely nothing—exists or happens outside the ambit of God’s all-encompassing sovereignty. The lack of explicit exegetical backing for creatio ex nihilo, in other words, does not preclude its postulation. An awareness that God’s unqualified sovereignty

Brueggemann does, admittedly, gesture toward this point. See Genesis, 28: “The grace of God is that the creature whom he [God] has caused to be, he now lets be.” See also Gn. litt. IV.18.31–6.

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guides the course of events makes that postulation an eminently justifiable, near-necessary “stretch”—one not rendered doubtful, but only intriguingly complicated, by a passing, contraindicative part.25 Katherine Sonderegger puts it excellently: God “occupies the whole space of this narrative, and pushes out any second actor, divine and human, and any power that is not his own.”26 On the basis of Gen. 1:1–2:4a, then, one can confidently advance two elementary claims: (a) that every dimension of the process wherein the world comes to be has God’s activity as its exclusive ground, and (b) that God establishes a world full of creatures, secure in their own dignity and worth, who respond to God’s summonses by filling up time and space in a strikingly vital and inventive way—in a way, one might say, that marks the world as a realm of liveliness that exceeds anything associable with the “deep waters” that God creates and uses as the basis for the cosmos. To return to a comment made at the beginning of this section: mightn’t this doctrine be framed in light of the New Testament? Might not one present creatio ex nihilo as a corollary to Christ’s being born ex virgine (albeit with the reminder that incarnation, like creation, isn’t the work of a male deity)? Or derivative of a belief in Christ being raised from the dead? Might it not be better supported by New Testament texts? Or might it be that portions of the Hebrew Bible do tilt in the direction of a creatio ex nihilo (thus Pss. 8:2–4 and 33:6; Isa. 44:24, 45:7–8, and 45:18; Job 38; and 2 Macc. 7:28),27 thereby rendering Gen. 1:1–2 less important than is sometimes assumed? One can certainly debate these points; I do not suppose that a doctrine of creation that builds on the New Testament witness, or that reckons with other parts of the Hebrew Bible, starts off on the wrong foot. But there are good reasons to continue foregrounding Gen. 1:1–2:4a. This block of text allows one to develop basic elements in what it means to identify God as patient, and—this being a point I will pick up toward the end of this chapter and at the beginning of the next—­initiates

Janet Martin Soskice makes this point bluntly: “Creatio ex nihilo has the odd distinction of being a biblically compelled piece of metaphysical theology.” It is not “a departure from the biblical account but … its clarification and defence.” See “Creatio ex nihilo: its Jewish and Christian Foundations,” in Burrell et al., Creation and the God of Abraham, 25 and 33. 26 Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 306. 27 One might add passages from the pseudepigraphical book of Jubilees to this list. See Menahem Kister, “Tohu wa-Bohu, Primordial Elements and Creatio ex nihilo,” JSQ 14 (2007): 229–56. 25

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a movement of thought that travels from creation to covenant, to incarnation, to sanctification, and thence to Christians’ identification of God as triune.

2 Creatio Cooperativa Theophilus of Antioch, the earliest known Christian commentator on the opening chapters of Genesis, thinks along the lines of the previous section. While polemicizing against “Plato and those of his school” (a roundabout way of challenging Gnostic Christians), he insists both that the Father is “before all things” and that the word “God” derives from θέειν, which means “running, and moving, and being active, and nourishing, and foreseeing, and governing, and making all things alive.”28 Indeed, in tandem with an affirmation of creatio ex nihilo, Theophilus raises the prospect of primordial creaturely action that resembles, in some way, who God is and what God does—running, moving, being active, nourishing, making all things alive. How might one develop this line of thought? How does one avoid movement in the direction of an insipid brand of deism, which reduces God’s creative work to fixing the parameters for creaturely life, giving the gentlest of pushes—a “flick of the fingers to set the world in motion” (Pens. 330)—then quitting the scene?29 How, conversely, does one do justice to the creaturely activity elicited by God’s primordial exercise of patience, while continuing to emphasize God’s primacy and agency? How does one extend an account of the “non-competitive relation between creatures and God”30 into the realm of cosmogony? An important first move is to maintain a connection between creation and preservation. Augustine’s gloss on the seventh day Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus, II.4 and I.4 (ANF2, 95 and 90). For more on Theophilus’ perspective, see May, Creatio Ex Nihilo, esp. 156–63. 29 For a contemporary deist statement, see M. A. Corey, Back to Darwin: The Scientific Case for Deistic Evolution (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994). Another useful text, with a more theistic drift, is Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 30 Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 2 and passim. 28

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of creation illustrates something of this point. If God rests on the Sabbath, he writes, it means simply that God “did not now establish any new kinds” of creature but “rested … in such a way as to continue from then on and up till now to operate the management of the things that were then set in place” (Gn. litt. IV.12.22). But remarks like this only go so far, and they do not show how an affirmation of God’s preservative activity is to be paired with an expansive account of creaturely activity “in the beginning.” A threatening aporia thus looms, for if a doctrine of creation does not reckon with the integrity, meaningfulness, and consequentiality of creaturely activity from the get-go (a reckoning jeopardized, incidentally, whenever talk of God’s “controlling hand” bulks large),31 then reflection on God’s later preservative and providential action is liable to go astray. It becomes tempting to envisage the act of creatio ex nihilo as a part that controls the whole, with a solitary divine act raised to the power of a metaphysical rule—one that renders creatures’ activity something of an exception. And it is at this point that the idiom of patience proves enormously valuable, for it ensures that an account or creatio ex nihilo is immediately joined to a statement about God’s empowerment of creaturely activity. Rather than depicting little more than a “colourless God of abstraction,”32 Gen. 1:1–2:4a attests to creatures who are enabled, by God, to respond to God’s directives. By dint of God’s patience, life “in the beginning” is not just a matter of divine sovereignty— although, of course, it is never less than that. It includes a flurry of creaturely poiesis, which feeds into and shapes the world over which God presides. God’s primordial exercise of patience, it seems, involves God empowering, supporting, waiting on, and delightedly approving the creaturely processes God sets in motion. It is a patience wherein God does not only “let be” and “let happen” but intends that “creation should itself, in obedience, endorse and carry on the Creator’s work … that creatures should live and should in turn themselves create life” (Bonhoeffer).33

Augustine, Gn. litt. IV.12.22. Arguably, any reference to “control” is risky when it comes to reflection on creation, preservation, and providence. 32 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies (Cleveland: Meridian, 1957), 306. 33 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 57. My emphases. 31

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Let me elaborate this point in more detail. Early in the creative process, God works on the primeval stuff identified in Gen. 1:2— the “void” and “deep” that comprise, Augustine speculates, “basic material, unsorted and unformed, out of which all the things would be made” (Gn. adv. Man. I.5.9).34 Now if we are to think about this material as itself created ex nihilo—which does not, note, render it a “material cause of creation,” since there continues to be “no raw element, no antecedent patient entity, nothing which God presupposes, nothing on which he is at work or which he must master”35—that thought must be fleeting. This material does not last long. It is swiftly overtaken by the regular realities of day and night, sea and sky, land and seas. A sequence of irrevocable pronouncements (“God said … God called”), matched with frequent reminders that what God beholds is “good,” have especial significance: they signal that God’s sovereign action quickly moves the world beyond a tedious void and lifeless waters. There is a steady clarification of the realm over which God presides, a purposeful ordering and enrichment of what would otherwise remain unordered and impoverished. I hurry to add: if the material referenced in Gen. 1:2 can be described as “formlessness without definition” (Conf. XII.iii.3), in no respect can it be deemed contemptible.36 This raw material (post-Reformation scholastics called it materia prima or materia inhabilis, “prime matter” or “undisposed matter”) is exactly what God uses to fulfill God’s creative purposes, and it is a material that proves, by grace, wonderfully plastic, eminently susceptible to being informed and enlivened.37 Yet if it is a mistake to denigrate what Catherine Keller has suggestively named as a “chaosmos”— viewing it, say, in terms of a feminized material substrate, brought to heel by a masculine deity—it is equally important to avoid its valorization. In itself, it is not up to much. As unformed, unexciting See also Gn. litt. inp. 3.10 and 4.14–16. In these works, Augustine labors with the unconvincing proposal that the basic material from which the world is shaped is water. Later texts are more cautious. 35 John Webster, God without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, vol. 1, God and the Works of God (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 106. 36 Simon Oliver has written instructively about the positive value of unformed and quality-less matter. See “Augustine on Creation, Providence, and Motion,” IJST 18, no. 4 (2016): 379–98. 37 See Richard Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 185–6. 34

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“stuff,” it is much less valuable than what follows, viz., the time and space of our planetary home and a diversity of agents who respond vigorously to God’s directives. In fact, one might well say that it is a cause for delight that the materia inhabilis is swiftly displaced. The third, fourth, and fifth days of creation illustrate the point. Life, all of a sudden, becomes much more interesting. God is busy populating the world with inorganic and organic objects, networks, and processes: there is soon an abundance of vegetation (v. 12), stars and earth’s moon, “swarms of living creatures” (v. 20) in the waters, “every winged bird” (v. 21), “wild animals … of every kind … cattle of every kind … everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind” (v. 24), and, last but certainly not least, human beings. None of this amounts to a questionable suppression of the raw “stuff” that God works with, much less bespeaks a tyrannical process whose outworking requires us to look back, wistfully, and register the sublation of the “void” and the “deep” as an ontological loss. Moving beyond the materia inhabilis is simply an initial phase in a creative process wherein God brings about a startling increase in the world’s dignity and worth. With each passing day, richness compounds richness; and, as a consequence, the “difference, multiplicity, variety” that are the defining marks of creaturely life complement the different kind of difference that obtains between God and world.38 But doesn’t the ordering of the cosmos involve God acting against the “formless void” and the “face of the deep,” forcibly dispelling chaos in ways that recall the Babylonian myth of the god, Marduk, triumphing over the goddess, Tiamat? Don’t the allusions embedded in Gen. 1:1–2 mediate an ideological imaginary, organized according to the logic “of masculine supremacy … female abjection and … unilateral domination” (FD 53)? Given a number of ecofeminist theological projects, among which Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming stands in the first rank, it would be churlish to deny that accounts of creation “from nothing” have been entangled with patriarchal logics and patterns of ecological exploitation.

Grace M. Jantzen, “Contours of a Queer Theology,” in Feminism and Theology, ed. Janet Martin Soskice and Diana Lipton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 347. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki echoes this claim in Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003), 30: “if God creates slowly, patiently, ever drawing the world beyond its past achievements toward deeper and richer modes of being, diversity begins to be built into creation.”

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An overbearing interest in “absolute origins” does seem to have been correlated with ideologies and practices of domination. Yet, as Keller herself grants, Genesis can be engaged in ways that subvert these very ideologies and practices. And on my reading, God’s sublation of the “formless void” and “watery depths” need not be viewed as a delegitimization of difference, ambiguity, and complication. It is an act that enables difference, ambiguity, and complication. It is divine work that makes the world richer than it would otherwise be.

Concomitant with God’s sovereign activity—this is the second move, which has already started to come into view—God’s patience affords creatures a critical role in “filling up” the world that God creates and sustains. The summonses of vv. 11, 20, and 24 are particularly significant: “let the earth put forth vegetation”; “let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures”; “let the earth bring forth living creatures.” In each case, God’s declarative Word combines permission—something like: “you may do what you have been made to do”—with empowerment—something like: “you can do what you have been made to do, and perhaps even more than what you anticipate you can do”—and delegation—something like: “although I have acted, and continue to act, you are now tasked to make use of the power that I give you, so that we may continue the process of creation.”39 Creatio ex nihilo gives way to a creatio cooperativa, and in a fashion that invites reference to newer forms of philosophical materialism, as well as recent work in biblical studies. Undifferentiated matter is overcome; there is an upsurge of “materiality” (Latour), even “vital materiality” and “vibrant matter” (Bennett), as a primeval “ethos of cooperation” (Brown) takes hold, such that “the making of the world” is disclosed to be a “joint effort of God and creatures” (Joerstad).40 Ingredient to all this, is there a Katherine Sonderegger and I think along the same lines at this point. See Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 300–9, esp. 302. 40 See here Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” NLH 45 (2014): 1–18, esp. 15; Janet Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)—a project inspired, to some degree, by a section of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2001)—as well as Spinoza’s writings; William P. Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); and Mari Joerstad, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 50. 39

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tip of the hat to the “widespread image of Mother Earth” in ancient near eastern mythology, whereby “at God’s word there breaks forth out of the dead stone, out of the unfruitful earth, that which is alive and fruitful,” as Bonhoeffer supposed? I would say not. Granted its allusiveness, the text does not encourage us to read the God–earth relationship in terms of a crude, restrictive gender binary, and that is reason enough to avoid imposing it.41 But the more basic claim that life is now “breaking forth” is very much on target. God grants creatures the capacity to respond to God’s directives in a (relatively) “opened” time and space; God waits on creatures to play their part in shaping the world, so that the “creature’s own activity” becomes “a constitutive element in the process of creation.”42 Indeed, as suggested earlier, it is now possible to say that God’s patience is rewarded by creatures who congregate and assemble for the purpose of honoring God’s patience. Having conferred upon creatures the power to respond to God’s directives and having done so in ways that perhaps involve a degree of risk—for while God’s speech acts are certainly exercises of power, certainly instances of “command,” they are directed toward agents who are manifestly not God—the response of creatures is such that creation becomes, if only for a fleeting moment, the best of all possible worlds. Divine patience is met with activity that perfectly and consistently conforms to God’s expectations, magnifying God’s glory and establishing a cosmos that shows how creatures should behave. Even Gen. 1:26 can be understood along these lines. While “Let us make humankind in our image” is aptly interpreted as an allusion to the heavenly court gathered around God, there is no reason to gloss this allusion in terms of ethereal, flighty, angels. The first creation saga allows the idea that God’s court is populated by the very creatures that God empowers to “fill up” the created realm. It is possible, in other words, to imagine that God’s delight in the nonhuman creatures who heed God’s call for collaboration prompts God to draw those same creatures into her entourage— plants, fruit trees, sea monsters, birds, etc.—thereby increasing Bonhoeffer’s decision to “gender” the earth was, interestingly, resisted by Barth. See Faye Bodley Dangelo, Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 61–81. 42 Michael Welker, Creation and Reality, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 13. 41

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their importance for God’s primordial project. Having elicited, overseen, and supported creatures’ activity, the momentum of the creatio cooperativa that God animates is such that God and God’s coworkers embark on a new venture. Together, they create and welcome a new arrival: a creature who joins a cosmic drama that is already in motion, a creature granted a set of capabilities that, at least at first blush, appear to surpass those given to any other. It follows, too—and I will return to this point—that claims about human beings “subduing” and having “dominion” over the earth (Gen. 1:28) need to be interpreted very carefully. On my reading, the “strong conviction of the original perfection of created things” that runs through Gen. 1:1–2:4a includes nonhuman creatures having the opportunity to act on their own terms, and to collaborate with one another in surprising and creative ways.43 Granted that this perfection is now blighted, it indicates something about how human beings ought to inhabit the planet: with an awed sense of God’s largesse, and with an awareness of our debt to, dependence on, and responsibility for a wide range of nonhuman agents.

Although more will be said about human beings in the following section, it is worth pausing to pose a question: why do nonhuman creatures reward God’s patience in this exemplary manner? Why does this primordial drama unfold without much suspense, lacking the barest suggestion that things might not turn out as planned? And what concepts, additional to patience, might be employed to describe what transpires? One response to such questions would lean on the distinction between primary and secondary causality, favored by numerous medieval and modern thinkers. This distinction would certainly lend valuable precision to the claim that creatures reward God’s patience. Something along the following lines: the reward creatures offer is not subsequent to but concurrent with God’s causal activity, even as it has that activity as its condition of possibility; and this reward, then as now, amounts to an ordered nexus of interrelated events. An outcome of God’s creative and preservative patience “in the beginning,” in other words, is the predictable functioning of the nonhuman world in past and present: the regular operations of “laws of nature,” across the expanses of the universe, as well as the 43 Walter Eichrodt, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, trans. J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), 108. Emphases removed.

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stability of various ecosystems. But precision, here, is bought at a fairly steep price, since the idiom of causality struggles to do justice to a creation saga that—its stately rhetoric notwithstanding— foregrounds God’s empowering generosity and, complementarily, what can only be called the exuberance of creatures’ response. That is especially the case in a late modern context, unattuned to (and, arguably, largely uninterested in) the complexities of premodern construals of causalitas. In the present day, this formal idiom is liable to flatten thought, diverting attention from the mysterious combination of divine permission, empowerment, and delegation, and burying the possibility that life “in the beginning” was a surprising outburst of spontaneity, invention, and busyness. (Sonderegger puts it wonderfully: the language of causality, which tends now to connote efficient causality, “does too much work, or not enough. And it creates puzzles where only Mystery should lie.”)44 Ought one then to combine talk of causality with Augustine’s account of rationes seminales, wherein principles of creaturely identity and development are “seeded” throughout the cosmos by the Word and unfold across time according to God’s will? Or develop Aquinas’ claim that “to love God above all things is natural to man and to every nature, not only rational but irrational, and even to inanimate nature according to the manner of love which can belong to each creature” (ST I–II.109.3)? While these lines of thought are more promising, they also struggle to do justice to Gen. 1:1–2:4a. The doctrine of rationes seminales carries with it a restrictive vision of providence. Granted that Augustine exhibits a keen sense for God’s empowerment of creaturely activity, it remains the case that God now simply “unwinds the ages which he had as it were folded into the universe when it was set up” (Gen. litt. V.20.41). History is not clearly framed in terms of a covenant of empowering grace; history is viewed as the outworking of a preordained plan, hatched “in the beginning” and defined—at least ostensibly—in terms of the masterconcept of reason. Aquinas’ perspective on creatures’ love for God, while instructively attentive to nonhuman activity as dimension of a diversified world ordered to a divine end, also risks an overvaluation of orderliness. There is here, certainly, what Willis Jenkins has Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 258; see also 177–85. The dogmatic risks of causality are also noted in Welker, Creation and Reality, 6–20 and Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 129–50.

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called a “cosmology of desire,” with an Augustinian emphasis on diverse creatures’ orientation and movement toward God married to an Aristotelian affirmation of creatures acting according to their distinctive natures.45 And a creature doing its “own thing,” by these lights, can be viewed as a good in itself. (The fact that poison ivy gives me a terrible rash, for instance, does not make poison ivy “bad”; it is simply a by-product of poison ivy doing its own thing: spreading in some patch of land, providing food for birds and other animals.) But Aquinas’ embrace of Aristotle is such that it becomes tricky to foreground creatures’ excessive, ebullient, and surprising contributions to God’s collaborative project “in the beginning.” It becomes hard to understand, to put it a bit differently, that nonhuman creaturely poiesis is also nonhuman creaturely inventiveness, and that such inventiveness—by grace—plays a materially decisive role in the creatio cooperativa that God initiates, supports, and guides.46 A perspective that sticks with the motif of patience and allows auxiliary concepts to develop organically, so to speak, propels thought in better directions. While one cannot ascertain the motives for creatures’ activity “in the beginning”—Gen. 1:1–2:4a does not offer us any information; and, anyway, talk of motives risks an unhelpful kind of anthropocentrism—one can say that God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” are immediately met with delighted responses, and that this delight funds an creatio cooperativa that moves the cosmos from strength to strength, into and toward everincreasing kinds of complexity and richness. Consider again God’s endorsements of the goodness of creation (1:10, 12, 18, 20, and 25), and note, particularly, God’s blessing of the organic elements of creation (1:22, 1:28, and 2:3). These endorsements and blessings certainly attest to “the continuation” of God’s “creative power … in the quiet, steady, march of growth, expansion, prosperity, and fertility.”47 But they also tell us about the way that God creates, in the deep past of pre-history: tendering gracious summonses, which animate and empower, and working with the results that follow. Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 120. I have profited greatly from Jenkins’s broader analysis of Aquinas; see 115–51. 46 Jenkins gestures toward this worry at the end of his treatment of Aquinas; see Ecologies of Grace, 151. 47 Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 17. 45

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Such endorsements and blessings, to push the point a bit farther, tell us what divine-creaturely fellowship ought to entail: divine patience eliciting ever new, ever more startling kinds of creaturely activity, singly and in concert; divine patience securing a relationship that is also a fellowship of unconfined creativity. But isn’t there now a loss of precision? To some degree, yes. This perspective does not only make it impossible to follow those who, overeager to express their theocentric zeal, suppose that God “is the only real cause of all things, and those nearer things which we call causes, are not properly causes, but the agents and instruments with which the eternal mind works”;48 it also challenges those who would envisage God’s activity as supporting a tightly wound nature-system, dominated by efficient relations and unspooling in ultimately predictable ways. One is pushed toward a looser, perhaps somewhat open-ended account of the relationship between God and creatures “in the beginning.” Looser—but, I hurry to add, richer. An emphasis on the asymmetricality of the relationship between God and world is retained, as is a noncompetitive account of divine and creaturely activity. But Gen. 1:1–2:4a is now read as a protocovenantal account of creatures, in relation to God, who leap at the chance to do God’s bidding, who thrill to the possibility of “making good” on God’s exercise of patience through purposeful, joyous, fruitful activity. A passing remark by Calvin (who, of course, can be quite rhapsodical about the nonhuman world) captures something of this point. Reflecting on Gen. 1:22, he notes that God “blesses his creatures when he commands them to increase and grow; that is, he infuses into them fecundity by his Word” (Comm. Gen. 1:22, my emphases).49 A distinction of primary and secondary causation is perhaps operative here, but it is very much pushed into the background. Rightly so: the more basic concern is to present divine blessing as that which enables a “growth” and “increase” that, consequent upon God’s initiative, has its own meaning and drives the enrichment of the world. And as God’s blessings prompt Ulrich Zwingli, Reproduction from Memory of a Sermon on the Providence of God, in On Providence and Other Essays, ed. for Samuel Macauley Jackson by William John Hinke (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 157–8. 49 See also LW 1, 52–54 and Basil of Caesarea, “On the Hexameron,” in Exegetic Homilies, trans. Agnes Clare Way (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1963), 117 (Homily 8.1). 48

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creatures to act spontaneously and joyously “in the beginning,” Gen. 1:1–2:4a indicates something of what the broader relationship between God and God’s creatures should entail: “the world as creation [being] a parable of its own future, the Kingdom of God.”50 Granted a risk of redundancy, it seems useful to note, finally, that this perspective stands at odds with the idea of “simultaneous creation” (Gn. litt., esp. VI.10.17– VI.11.19)—“simultaneous” in the sense that while the creation sagas certainly provide edifying accounts of God’s work, God in fact created all actualized things in a single instant.51 The bases on which Augustine tenders this claim are of course worthy. There is here an emphasis on God’s exclusive creative power, as well as a concern to tie creation to God’s providential rule. However—and, granted, that I will soon argue that Gen. 1:1–2:4a should be read as a counterfactual utopia—talk of “simultaneous creation” sits very awkwardly with Gen. 1:1–2:4a. It draws attention away from a biblical witness that describes the slow and steady increase of creaturely activity, in response to God’s patience, which builds upon itself and compounds its own value. Augustine should perhaps have continued to think along the lines of Conf. V.i.1: “Your entire creation never ceases to praise you and is never silent. Every spirit continually praises you with mouth turned towards you; animals and physical matter find a voice through those who contemplate them.” If that is the case now, why not suppose that creation found its voice, perhaps even learned the noisy joy of praise, in the first six days? Why not view the exuberant hosannas of the nonhuman world—everything from the passing of the seasons, cycles of adaptation and evolution, the interplay of multiple species, and the like—as grounded in the asymptotic process that God initiated “in the beginning”?

3 Imago Dei, Imago Mundi Let’s move now to the issue of humankind. If “creation comes to contribute, under divine direction, to its own formation,” what can be said about human life?52 Is it appropriate to view the appearance

Moltmann, God in Creation, 62. For a skillful summary of Augustine’s thinking about simultaneous creation, see Simo Knuuttila, “Time and Creation in Augustine,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 103–15, esp. 103–5. 52 Brown, Ethos of the Cosmos, 47–8. 50 51

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of human beings as the all-important finale to Gen. 1:1–2:4a? Are the cosmogonic dimensions of this text, usefully brought to light by way of an interest in divine patience, ultimately subordinated to an anthropogonic focus, perhaps even to the point at which nonhuman creatures are created “in order to prepare a house and an inn, as it were, for the future man” (LW 1, 47)? Many have read the text along these lines, with varying degrees of nuance. And not without justification. If it is fairly easy to dispatch the vulgar claim that the first five days of creation involve nothing more than the provision of “raw material” that human beings are now at liberty to exploit—fairly easy, but imperative: since climate denialism and antienvironmental ideology have become a cause célèbre for some white evangelicals in North America, theologians must offer a sharp response53—Gen. 1:1–2:4a clearly treats the advent of humankind as a triumphant conclusion of God’s creative work. Yes, of course, “triumphant” in a qualified sense. The description of God’s Sabbath plainly affirms God’s declaration of sovereignty, through rest, as the narrative’s decisive end. (Which raises the possibility, further, that the seventh day bears witness to how patient “letting be” and “letting happen” apply to God’s own life, as God rests content with the relational glory of God’s own, self-sufficient existence; a “resting” that can only be met with awe and astonishment on the part of the creatures whom God has created, upheld, and guided.) But human beings are at least the culmination of a divinely guided process of creation, a finale toward which everything has been building. No other creature, after all, is explicitly said to bear the image of God. No other creature is described in terms of the pronounced (if not necessarily fixed) sexual differentiation of male and female. No other creature, upon being blessed, is told directly to “be fruitful and multiply.” And no other creature is given “dominion” over the earth, supplied with dietary instructions (eat plants and fruit). The theological challenge, accordingly, is to find a way to understand the preciousness ascribed to human beings within this framework, while avoiding a sharp dislocation of theological anthropology, narrowly construed, and a

On which, see Robin Globus Veldman, The Gospel of Climate Change: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 53

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doctrine of creation, broadly construed. To make the same point in reverse: while checking the suggestion that humanity and “nature” are isolable spheres, varying in worth and importance (often a feature of theologies that permit or encourage the exploitation of nonhumans), and while drawing attention to a creatio cooperativa that includes the wit and invention of nonhuman creatures, a theology of creation must nevertheless make sense of the fact that humankind is accorded some kind of especial distinction, maybe even some kind of preeminence, without lapsing into a triumphalistic form of anthropocentrism. These opening comments, arguably, are somewhat consistent with the stance taken in a recent papal encyclical, Laudato Si’. Fundamental to this text is the claim that human life is “grounded in three closely intertwined relationships: with God, our neighbour and with the earth itself” (§66), the ethical correlate of which is the demand that human beings recognize that we inhabit a “fragile world, entrusted by God to human care,” which “challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power” (§78). As Willis Jenkins has noted, however, Laudato Si’ is not particularly forthcoming about what the assemblage of nonhuman creatures that Francis identifies as “our Sister, mother Earth” (§2) is actually saying.54 While we are initially told that “[t]his sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her” (§2), her voice is soon muffled—which raises the disquieting question of whether, in the final analysis, the encyclical is really committed to listening to her. The language of patience, however, might go some way to remedying this silence, while also avoiding the questionable notion of “Mother Earth” and “Sister Earth” (which have as their presumed correlates “Father God” and “Brother Christ”). What nonhuman creation says, at least in Gen. 1:1–2:4a, is that God’s exercise of patience is empowering, and that nonhuman creatures are the first to make good on God’s sovereign commands. If Abraham, Moses, and others do well to respond to God with a simple “Here I am” (see Gen. 22:1, Exod. 3:4, etc.), the cosmos’s speech might be similarly rendered: “Here we are. Listen to us; we have a good deal to say.”

At this point, it is useful to return to God’s creative declaration, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.”

54 See Willis Jenkins, “The Mysterious Silence of Mother Earth in Laudato si,’” JRE 46, no. 3 (2018): 441–62.

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Granted noteworthy attempts to read this verse as a trinitarian flourish,55 I have already suggested that the first-person plural is suitably read as a reference to God’s “heavenly council,” albeit with the qualification that this council is not populated by fluttering angels but, rather, by earthy nonhuman creatures who have rewarded God’s patience through their exuberant and inventive responses to God’s directives. I have suggested, that is, that their “rewarding” of God’s patience is met with a divine reward of sorts: nonhuman creatures being given a materially significant role in the formation of humankind. This suggestion, I should add, is not necessarily exclusive of the suggestion that God’s retinue bespeaks God’s decision to “include … himself in the heavenly beings and therefore conceal … himself in this multiplicity” (von Rad), or contrary to the hypothesis that Gen. 1 appropriates Mesopotamian and Egyptian royal ideology (Schmidt), or disqualifying of the claim that an appeal to a heavenly council connects with God’s determination to treat humankind as God’s “counterpart” (Westermann).56 These remain live options. But it seems eminently reasonable to bring exegesis down to earth. In that the only creatures mentioned in the preceding verses are familiar, un-ethereal, nonroyal entities and agents—we are dealing, remember, with the sun and stars, the moon, vegetation, sea creatures, creeping things, birds, cattle, etc.—it is obviously not obligatory to read hitherto-unmentioned entities into the “let us” of Gen. 1:26. While that kind of reading is intertextually possible, a case can be made for exegetical economy: treating the “us” of “let us” rather more naively, as a first-person plural that encompasses creatures who have already been mentioned—creatures who have already “proved” themselves through their involvement in the process of creatio cooperativa. Indeed, following sweeping appeals to the waters (v. 20) and the earth (v. 24), Gen. 1:26 might even be read as a petition directed to the entirety of the nonhuman creation. It is a grand “ask,” subsequent to a (literally) unprecedented outburst of creaturely poiesis, whereupon God and the cosmos conspire to fashion a peculiarly noteworthy creature. And if that resultant See, for example, Gn. litt. inp. 16.61 (a paragraph Augustine added at the end of his life); Gn. litt. III.19.29; Conf. XIII.xxii.23; and De Trin. VII.6.12, XII.6.6, and XIV.19.25. 56 See von Rad, Theology of the Old Testament, 145; Schmidt, Die Schöpfungsgeschichte der Priesterschrift, 127–49; and Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 157. 55

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creature is said explicitly to bear God’s own image, it might also be viewed as “a creature in the fellowship of creation,” one who bears the imago mundi, the image of the world.57 Again, then, we have the idea that divine “letting be” and “letting happen” is coextensive with God’s invigoration of nonhuman creativity. But with an additional twist. God’s patience is now being exercised in such a way that the activity of nonhuman creatures becomes a condition for the emergence of the special species of humankind. If it “takes a heavenly council to raise humankind as much as it takes the coordination of the waters to allow the land to emerge and to generate the swarming creatures,” and if “God is a collaborative agent,” we have here the apex of divine-creaturely coordination and collaboration, as well as a very distinctive result of that coordination and collaboration.58 Or, to make the point in a slightly different way: who exactly is God addressing in Gen. 1:26? If we set aside the idea that God is talking to Godself (pace Augustine et al.), we needn’t turn next to the idea of God addressing a celestial entourage, populated by cherubim, seraphim, and the like. We might instead be overhearing God’s address to those who have contributed to God’s making of humankind, as God assures those creatures that their efforts have proven so valuable that the imago dei and the imago mundi will now be borne by their new companion. Furthermore, while God’s identity still remains underdetermined, a baseline for anthropological reflection is now edging into view. Inasmuch as human beings bear God’s image and the image of the world, our “distinction” is that of creatures who are the result of God’s exercise of patience and the result of nonhuman creatures’ rewarding of God’s patience. Patience extended and patience rewarded: that is our unmerited condition of possibility; that is our “ancestry,” both divine and nonhuman. And it follows, too, that talk of human “preeminence” now needs to be handled very carefully. We are certainly not first on the scene (a point acknowledged, of course, in the next creation saga). We are the upshot of a divine initiative that elicits a complex, networked, collaborative response. And it would be perverse if, in continuing to receive God’s favor, we would set about marginalizing, neglecting,

Moltmann, God in Creation, 186; see also 51. Brown, Ethos of the Cosmos, 51.

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or worse, exploiting the nonhuman “us” that helped to birth us. Our knowledge of our own humanness, rather, should be inclusive of the knowledge that God’s grace has passed through and depends upon the wit and wisdom of a host of nonhuman creatures. Is it possible to add specificity, extending the analysis to the verses that follow the declaration of Gen. 1:27? Yes. On one level, it seems apt to say that our response to God’s patience should be to continue the project of “filling up” the world, compounding its value and diversity. The directive, “Be fruitful and multiply,” after all, is continuous with the charge given to sea creatures and, by implication, land creatures. And while our response might well include procreative activity, there is no reason for flatfooted literalism here, and good reason to recognize that fruitfulness and multiplication might refer to a wide number of familial, ecclesial, social, cultural, political, and sexual projects. Those are symptoms of us “doing our own thing,” consequent upon God’s creative elicitation of agency. On another level, since neither sea creatures nor “living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth” (v. 24) are afforded the opportunity to “fill the earth and subdue it,” it is imperative to reckon seriously with what we are called to do. No other creature is addressed by God at such length, and in comparable detail; no other creature is identified as the recipient of the gift of the cosmos as an arena in which to live and move. And, at the least, the assignment of this task carries the implication that God’s exercise of patience, and humanity’s response to it, will soon extend beyond the realm of prehistory, and will soon take meaning in light of God’s solicitude for the people of ancient Israel—God’s blessings becoming now a “vital, effective power [that] makes the future possible.”59 The (temporarily) open question, asked and answered throughout the rest of the Pentateuch, is whether human beings will make sense of their intelligence and agential clout by participating in a covenantal relationship in the right way. Now, can one distill these claims to the point at which one might talk of God’s conferral of leadership upon humankind? Is that what “subduing” entails? As with the issue of God’s power and

59 Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 161. See also Claus Westermann, Blessing in the Bible and the Life of the Church, trans. Keith Crim (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978).

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God’s commands, one must be careful at this juncture. Friedrich Nietzsche, characteristically, finds in the Hebrew Bible “great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart,” the likes of which prompt one to recognize that “the value of all things will be posited newly by you! Therefore you shall be fighters! Therefore you shall be creators!”60 But that kind of sentiment is manifestly alien to Gen. 1:1–2:4a. If human beings have been placed in a cosmic theatre whose emergence and continuance is predicated on a collaboration between God and creatures, it is hard to imagine that our conduct should suddenly take on a domineering character. If one is to think rightly human “leadership” here, it makes more sense for the term to suggest our representing creation before God, along with nonhuman creatures, continuing and supporting the processes God has set in motion. And while I will not attempt to determine if representation can be glossed in terms of “stewardship,” “citizenship,” or “servanthood” it seems apt to say, with Norman Wirzba, that it would require one to take on “the long, patient labor of fitting ourselves within God’s creative work.” Such fitting would oblige human beings to take seriously our being made imago mundi, such that an “upward” attention to God’s directives is complemented with a “sideways” attention to the ongoing processes of nonhuman creatures as we strive to “make ourselves patient and earnest students of creation.”61 While this project has little in common with Teilhard de Chardin’s extravagant evolutionary-theological vision, a passage from The Divine Milieu deserves quotation at this point: “however autonomous our soul, it is indebted to an inheritance worked upon all sides—before ever it came into being—by the totality of the energies of the earth: it meets and rejoins life at a determined level. Then, hardly has it entered actively into the universe at that particular point that it feels, in its turn, besieged and penetrated by the flow of cosmic influences which have to be ordered and as-

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 144; and Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 58. 61 Norman Wirzba, The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 136 and 146. 60

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similated. Let us look around us: the waves come from all sides and from the farthest horizon. Through every cleft the world we perceive floods us with riches—food for the body, nourishment for the eyes, harmony of sounds and fullness of heart, unknown phenomena and new truths, all these treasures, all these stimuli, all these calls, coming to us from the four corners of the world, cross our consciousness at every moment.”62

4 Broadening the View In light of these contentions, three broader claims about divine patience and creation can now be advanced. Each is lightly sketched, with varying degrees of detail; each will be reprised and expanded as this book draws on. (a) “In the beginning … ”: a utopian counterworld. Thus far, I have suggested that Gen. 1:1–2:4a recounts a gradual, intensifying sequence of events, and that this sequence discloses something of the noncontrastive relationship that obtains between God and God’s world. While the sequence is initiated by God and its pace set by God, it accommodates a range of accompanying creaturely tempi. Absent the stately, reliable backbeat of God’s sovereign activity, the world would not acquire its distinctive structures and characteristics. But God so orders affairs that God’s directives engender and accommodate a host of creaturely processes, the effect of which is to lend the world increasing coherence and complexity. Moreover, to modify the figure slightly, even as these responses are ordered to and congruous with the divine cantus firmus, they do not add up to a bland unison—or, for that matter, a bright, unfussy major chord. It is possible—and, given later statements in the Hebrew Bible (esp. Ps. 104), perhaps preferable—to imagine an exuberant creaturely chorus being roused and enlisted by God to speak the cosmos into being, and in such a way that the dull white noise of the tohu wabohu and tehom is quickly supplanted by a diverse, richly toned, and somewhat boisterous ecosystem, united in its response to and praise of God the creator. And it is out of this blessed roar of activity that humankind emerges. There arises a creature who bears not just the imago dei, but also the imago mundi Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 59.

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(or, to maintain the figure: a creature who resounds with the verbum dei while bearing the undertones of the verba mundi). Indeed, with an awareness of the risks of anthropomorphism, might we not say nonhuman creatures’ role in the formation of humankind is now part of the deep memory of the world? Might it not be, when God answers Job with a question (“who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” [Job 38:2]), that that question is quietly backed by creatures who share God’s indignation toward one who was absent when God “laid the foundation of the earth” (Job 38:4)?63 At any rate, the chief point here is that God’s originary, empowering act of patience is met with the most perfect set of responses imaginable. Gen. 1:1–2:4a tells us how God and creatures lived and worked together, “in the beginning.” At first blush, this account of creatio ex nihilo and creatio cooperativa might pique the interest of those keen to discern compatibility between a Christian doctrine of creation and modern scientific inquiry. Talk about creatio ex nihilo could be correlated with theorizations of the beginning of the universe; the suggestion of a creatio cooperativa, with accounts of evolution that espy something akin to the workings of a “patient” power, operative “during long ages … slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex relations of life.”64 But there are good reasons for caution on this front. Creatio ex nihilo, as Janet Martin Soskice points out, “is not a cosmological or scientific hypothesis (as is the ‘Big Bang theory’). It is a metaphysical position and its subject matter, so to speak, is God.”65 This differentiation is paired with the obviously different rationales of biblically sourced doctrinal claims and experimentally sourced scientific cosmogonies. Scientific theorizations regarding the “primordial originating processes and entities, whatever they are,”66 gain plausibility and intelligibility through (perhaps quite faint) connections with in-principle observable processes in the present; theological claims about

For more on Job and creation, see Joerstad, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics, 171–84. 64 Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Writings, ed. James A. Second (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 196. The quotation is from On the Origin of Species. 65 Soskice, “Creatio ex nihilo,” in Burrell et al., Creation and the God of Abraham, 24. 66 William R. Stoeger, “The Big Bang, Quantum Cosmology, and Creation Ex Nihilo,” in Creation and the God of Abraham, 169. 63

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creation, by contrast, arise from a faith evoked and sustained by God’s self-revelation, to which scripture bears witness. One has to do with “proximate” origins; the other, “ultimate” origins.67 But isn’t it possible to postulate complementarity between a theological account of God’s creative activity “in the beginning” and scientific theorizations of the universe’s first moments, and mightn’t that allow for interaction between theological and scientific claims? Well, such a postulation is possible. But it doesn’t amount to much more than an affirmation of a divine act that kickstarts the cosmic process; it remains unclear if that affirmation is particularly interesting for those engaged in physical cosmology; and I am doubtful that a bare affirmation of God’s activity, “in the beginning,” holds much value for theological reflection in the long run. And even if one talks up complementarity, the very different concerns of two different stances are still there, staring us in the face: on the one side, a manifestly geocentric saga, prefatory to an extended narration of ancient Israel’s distant past and an acclamation of God’s decision to liberate and covenant Godself to this people; on the other, a clutch of vertiginous hypotheses about a primordial “time” and “space,” as well as reflections on “quantum perturbation,” the Planck era, and the like—hypotheses that do not seem to depend on any kind of appeal to God, no matter how much one might wish it were otherwise. And when it comes to the notion of a creatio cooperativa, presented now as a conversation partner with scientific studies of evolution, one finds oneself in similarly murky waters. Growing appreciation for the cooperative dimensions of speciesdevelopment notwithstanding,68 the opening of the Hebrew Bible seems to know nothing of extinction, predation, and adaptive/ I borrow this distinction from Langdon Gilkey, Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). 68 See, for example, Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation, ed. Sarah Coakley and Martin Novak (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Important here is a famous remark in The Descent of Man: “There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, and courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection” (Darwin, Evolutionary Writings, 261). For a valuable commentary, see John Hedley Brooke, “‘Ready to Aid One Another’: Darwin on Nature, God, and Cooperation,” in Coakley and Novak’s volume, 37–59. 67

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nonadaptive mutations, nor of the myriad forms of creaturely suffering ingredient to the emergence of animal life in general and human life in particular. The paradisal world of Gen. 1:1–2:4a, rather than being a statement about creaturely life as it unfolds over eons, hails God’s sovereignty over the cosmos, prior to offering a statement about the proto-covenantal relationship between God and creatures and the distinctive standing that God accords to humankind. Rather than trying to connect exegesis, doctrinal formulae, and scientific inquiry, the analysis of the preceding sections propels reflection in a somewhat different direction. It encourages one to read Gen. 1:1–2:4a as a utopian counterworld: a time and space that is presented as foundational for the world we inhabit, and, at the same time, a time and space that spurs critique of that same world. One must approach this claim carefully. As many have noted, it is a mistake to read Gen. 1:1–2:4a without reference to the broader Pentateuchal witness to ancient Israel’s emergence and clarification: a process that begins with God’s calling of Abram, Sarai, and Lot, that passes through ancient Israel’s enslavement and escape, and that concludes, rather ambiguously, with the formation of Israel as a political-religious entity. Noting the scholarship of Gerhard von Rad and Severino Croatto, Dorothee Soelle puts it nicely: “If liberation precedes creation, then soteriology precedes cosmology.”69 It makes sense, too, that soteriological concerns will always factor into dogmatic reflection, even when, as with this project, the arrangement of material follows the Apostles’ Creed, acclaiming God as the creatorem caeli et terrae before turning to a consideration of Christ and the Spirit. Scripture’s fabric is woven in such a way that each “thread” leads, sooner or later, to a salvific center; theological reflection is duty-bound to exhibit something of that very warp and weft. At the same time, one must not overplay the point, such that cosmology and soteriology collapse into one another. One can presume that God’s election of ancient Israel Dorothee Soelle with Shirley A. Cloyes, To Work and to Love: A Theology of Creation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 8. The specific sources of inspiration are von Rad, “The Theological Problem of the Old Testament Doctrine of Creation,” and Severino Croatto, Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom, trans. Salvator Attanasio (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1981).

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and God’s saving work in Christ form the hub around which everything turns, while still taking Gen. 1:1–2:4a “as it comes”: as a preliminary meditation on God’s work that anticipates salvation, and one that even allows tentative claims about God’s identity. Claus Westermann puts it well: “The Old Testament has something of its own to say about creator and creation; this must be left intact, and must not be seen merely in its relationship to salvation history.”70 What I take Gen. 1:1–2:4a to be saying, on its own terms, has to do with the world as it ought to be, in contrast to our awareness of the world as it is. It depicts a time and space in which creatures have not fallen for the serpent’s ruse and are thus not alienated from God, not troubled by scarcity and death, and not caught up in sinful forms of conflict. It is a counterworld, to make the point more positively, that discloses what has sometimes been called a condition of “original righteousness”: a mode of creaturely existence in which God freely and lovingly “turns to man, imparts Himself to him, and in so doing gives him life,” and in which God asks humankind to “‘repeat’ the original Divine Word … not make a word of his own, but of his own accord … give it back, saying: ‘Yes, I am thine’” (Brunner).71 It is a world in which God’s empowering speech is always met with fitting response; a world in which God’s patience is always rewarded. But with a new twist. While Christian thinkers have often followed Brunner in focusing attention on human beings’ original relation to God, the preceding analysis shows this focus to be unhelpfully narrow. While human beings may represent a finale to the initial process of creation, the preceding acts are not of negligible interest. On the contrary: the process that culminates in the appearance of the proverbial “stars of the show” is described in ways that magnify the cast that brings us to that point, for it is precisely the conduct of that cast that establishes the parameters for one to understand what it means for humankind to bear the imago dei. Put a bit differently: while Brunner and others may not be wrong to view the status integritatis in terms of a (counterfactual) statement about humankind’s “original” capacity and responsibility to heed God’s address and summons, the merit of a perspective focused on the

Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 175. Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), 98.

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exercise of divine patience in Gen. 1:1–2:4a is to spark interest in the flurry of nonhuman creaturely poiesis that precedes and feeds into an acclamation of humankind’s primordial dignity. It is an occasion to reckon with God’s primordial empowerment, delegation, and permission of nonhuman creaturely activity, with diverse orders hosting networks of energetic, “nonhuman vitality”72—orders and networks that bear witness to the God who lets be and lets happen. One can push the point a bit further. To treat Gen. 1:1–2:4a as a utopian counterworld is, of course, an occasion to dismiss the fairly daft idea that Eden represents a bygone period of history, a “childlike and primitive stage of human development”73 when nonhuman creatures knew only “love” as “Creation’s final law” and do not yet manifest “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”74 A utopia, by definition, is not anywhere in particular; it is always a nonplace (οὐ = no; τόπος = place). And this utopia is manifestly discontinuous with our experience in the quotidian. Effortlessly and patiently, God establishes and upholds the structures of the world, empowering creatures to do this and that in the times and spaces they are given; delightedly and gratefully, creatures make good on God’s patience, contributing to a collaborative process that culminates in the filling out of the cosmos and the emergence of humankind. Indeed, if one limits one’s focus to this stretch of verse, nothing seems to threaten the vitality and value of the cosmos. There is no reason to imagine that it will not go from strength to strength; there is every reason to imagine that it will remain in a state of perfect equipoise. But the primordial world’s non-historicity does not mean the primordial world’s unreality. On one level, Gen. 1:1–2:4a suggests a “continuity of fundamental orders” that extend from Eden into the hard realities of the past and present.75 While we really do encounter a counterworld, this creation story disrupts the assumption that “our” world sustains itself, as it is, in all of its awfulness. It assures us that the God-given structures of creation remain good; it assures us, correspondingly, that sin amounts to Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 14. Brunner, Man in Revolt. 84. 74 Alfred Tennyson, “Nature Pitiless,” from In Memoriam (1850); see Select Poems of Alfred Tennyson, ed. Archibald MacMechan (Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., 1907), 184. 75 Odil Hannes Steck, World and Environment (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 99. 72 73

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an adventitious distortion of the cosmos, not a change in the basic nature of things; and it raises the possibility that this distortion might somehow be overcome. On another level, Gen. 1:1–2:4a sparks critique. This really is a counterworld: it exposes the current state of things as an unnecessary scandal, wrought by creatures who test God’s patience, instead of rewarding it, overturning and undermining the process of creatio cooperativa; it sparks “criticism of the present.”76 Yes, of course, much more needs to be said about this testing, overturning, and undermining: a theologian cannot rest content with sin as a brutum factum. Yes, of course, questions quickly loom about the extent to which nonhuman creatures initiate, participate in, or perhaps contest, the sinfulness endemic to life today. And yes, an acclamation of the counterworld of Gen. 1:1–2:4a ultimately lacks for meaning, at least for Christians, apart from claims about the Kingdom that Christ enacts and proclaims, in the power of the Spirit, in hopes that God’s patient “letting be” and “letting happen” might again elicit good and glad responses. But none of that abrogates the reality of the counterworld. It continues to speak for itself; it continues to haunt the sinful quotidian in which we find ourselves. It compels our recognition of the possibilities that God, in an abundance of patience, afforded creatures “in the beginning,” and it stirs the hope that God’s exercise of patience, and our responses to it, might again shape the world in which we exist. (b) Sidelining “causality”; developing patience as a theological idiom. It is useful to note again that an account of creation that centers the motif of patience can operate at a distance from the idiom of causality. Such distance, to be sure, does not require the burning of any conceptual bridges. Having accepted that God creates in order to communicate goodness to creatures, and that God sustains God’s world with the purpose of drawing creatures to “the universal end of all things … the Universal Good” (ST I.103.2), it might even be possible to return to Aquinas’ suggestion that creatures’ causal efficacy demonstrates the value that God ascribes to them. It might be possible, that is, to view God’s decision to “communicate to creatures the dignity of causality” (ST I.23.8)

Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 120. Tanner makes this point in the context of a discussion of eternal life, eschatologically construed; I think the point also applies to a Christian reading of Gen. 1:1–2:4a.

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as ingredient to the process of creatio cooperativa, wherein God’s patient “letting be” and “letting happen” goes hand in hand with the empowerment of creaturely poiesis. But that would be a stretch for this project, for thought is now moving in a different direction, and at a fair clip. Rather than linking patientia with causalitas, the former term has displaced the latter; patience has begun to serve as a hub around which everything turns. Atop a fairly conventional affirmation of God’s creatio ex nihilo, the doctrine of creation has now come to include something akin to the “middle voice.” Creatures are not trapped in a binary of activity or passivity; by dint of God’s exercise of patience, they are freed up to act while acted upon, to receive and to initiate, to enjoy and endure various kinds of complex relationship, to contribute to a process of creatio cooperativa that lends the world increasing value, diversity, and complexity. (There may even be a degree of improvisation and indeterminacy in play, too, with God creating in such a way that any given entity might have “one or more properties that are not determined either by secondary causes or God.”)77 Now none of this, I hurry to add, undercuts an affirmation of divine sovereignty. God remains the exclusive condition of possibility for creation to arise, and it is God—and God alone—who initiates, animates, and guides the process whereby the world gains its distinctive shape and form. Nor does an affirmation of creaturely poiesis “in the beginning” allow one to skimp on an account of God’s exercise of patience, and creatures’ response to that patience, in the context of postlapsarian history. Gen. 1:1–2:4a really is a utopian counterworld; one must think along different (but not entirely unrelated) tracks when it comes to God’s patience in relation to ancient Israel, God’s patience with respect to the Word incarnate, and the patience of Christ’s Spirit. My point is simply that the forgoing statement about creation awaits expansion and development, both in terms of the principal motif in play and in terms of a range of auxiliary concepts (“letting be,” “letting happen,” empowerment, permission, etc.). Or, to return to Aquinas: while it remains possible, and on occasion it Tracy, “God and Creatures Acting,” in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. Burrell et  al. 227. It is worth noting that the “problem” of indeterminacy looks rather different if one does not foreground causality when describing the relationship between God and creatures—this being a theological and philosophical option that Tracy does not explore, at least in this essay.

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might prove useful, to claim that each and every creaturely “effect cannot possibly escape the order of the universal cause” (ST I.19.7), talk of the patience of God the creator has established a rather different conceptual framework—one that asks to be filled out on its own terms. (c) Creation, Trinity, Christology. The interpretative chapters of this book dealt frequently with authors who wore their trinitarian, Christological, and pneumatological commitments on their theological sleeves. Tertullian and Cyprian presented patience as an attribute of God as Father, Son, and Spirit, manifest in patterns of activity appropriable to discrete divine persons; Julian of Norwich described Christian patience as a slow receipt of God’s saving activity in history, mediated through the persistent outflow of Christ’s saving blood and applied in the power of the Spirit; Calvin construed human patience as a charism given to those whom the Spirit unites to Christ, such that the material reality of suffering is folded into a process of divine pedagogy; Barth understood the patience of the Word made flesh, offered unto death, as the condition of God’s according history its distinctive length and breadth; W. H. Vanstone argued that the status of patient, itself an interruption of the logic of late modern capitalism, has Christ’s suffering and death as an antecedent; and so on. This chapter, however, has unfolded with scant reference to Christ, the Spirit, and God’s triune identity. If it has affirmed what Barth once described as “the ceremonious generation of the distance between the cosmos and the Creator” (WGT 85), while suggesting that such ceremoniousness gives way to a delighted outburst of creaturely poiesis, it has opted not to follow Barth in insisting that scripture bears witness to a triune God whose sovereignty is declared, incomparably, in the event of “Resurrection,” which is itself “the meaning of the life of Jesus from the first day of his appearance” (WGT 95). Which raises an obvious and long-deferred question: Has this exposition of creation proceeded from unsound bases? Granted that I have not offered a theologia naturalis of the sort that Barth found so objectionable,78 is there not here a drift toward a troublesome

See, of course, Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002).

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iteration of the duplex notitia dei, one that does not clearly acknowledge that it “is impossible to separate the knowledge of God the Creator and of His work from the knowledge of God’s dealings with man,” and thus fails to understand that it is “[o]nly when we keep before us what the triune God has done for us men in Jesus Christ” that “we realise what is involved in God the Creator and His work” (DO 52)? The question is urgent, given the tendency—pronounced in the modern period, but certainly not absent in patristic and medieval writings—to have the doctrine of creation float free from the conviction that the God who creates is the Father of Jesus Christ, sent in the power of the Spirit. So might it not be better, to frame the issue very sharply, to start again, even at this late stage in the game? Might it not be better to develop a theological statement that takes Schleiermacher’s words to heart: “Everything in our world … would have been disposed otherwise, and the entire course of human and natural events … would have been different, if the divine purpose had not been set on the union of the Divine essence with human nature in the Person of Christ, and, as a result thereof, the union of the Divine Essence with the fellowship of believers through the Holy Spirit” (Gl. 724)?79 John Webster puts it more baldly: “The task of the Christian doctrine of creation is rational contemplation of the Holy Trinity in the outward work of love by which God established and ordered creaturely reality, a work issuing from the infinite ­ ncreated and wholly realized movement of God’s life in himself.”80 The stance I u have elaborated clearly affirms an “outward work of love,” and is likely compatible with claims about the “infinite uncreated and wholly realized movement of God’s life.” But if “rational contemplation of the Holy Trinity” is not an obvious dimension of these reflections, is there not a risk that this account of creation lacks a distinctively Christian character?

Whether Schleiermacher applies this principle in his own doctrine of creation is an interesting question. See Bruce McCormack, “Not a Possible God but the God Who Is: Observations on Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of God,” in The Reality of Faith in Theology: Studies on Karl Barth, ed. Bruce McCormack and Garret Willem Neven (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 111–39; and Shelli Poe, Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), esp. 137–58. 80 Webster, God without Measure, vol. 1, 83. 79

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While I certainly do not wish to disaffiliate the loci of creation and redemption, and while I will have much to say about the incarnation and the outpouring of the Spirit at the end of this book, there are good reasons for this project to offer an account of creation that is—at least for the time being—somewhat reticent about God’s triunity, and somewhat muted in its articulation of Christological and pneumatological commitments. It is worth spelling out the reasons for this reticence now, in advance of further elaboration in the next chapter. On one level, to build on a point made earlier, I think it legitimate to read Gen. 1:1–2:4a (and, in fact, the entirety of the Hebrew Bible) “as it comes,” honoring the absence of ostensive reference to Christ with a Christologically underdetermined exposition of God’s action “in the beginning.” This approach draws partial inspiration from the “canonical” mode of interpretation favored by Brevard Childs. It is an exegetical-dogmatic posture wherein the Christian theologian receives scripture, as a whole, as an extended witness to the God of ancient Israel (who is of course none other than the God of Jesus Christ and his Spirit), yet remains alert to the fact that the books comprising the Hebrew Bible have “their own integrity” and thus strives “to do justice to a literature which Israel transmitted as a record of God’s revelation to his people along with Israel’s response.”81 And it is an approach that has particular importance in the context of Reformed theology, since the high estimation of the Hebrew Bible in Calvin’s writing slipped from view in the works of later luminaries (I think here, in particular, of Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, and Wilhelm Herrmann). Not that a willingness to take the text “as it comes” is a reactive, compensatory move—or, for that matter, an instance of studied hermeneutical naïveté (as if one could simply suspend belief in the Trinity and belief in Christ’s saving significance when doing dogmatics). Something else is at stake. To take the text “as it comes” means that one assumes (a) that the Hebrew Bible supplies the context in which the New Testament must be understood, with ancient Israel being the ineliminable Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2011), 73. Emphasis added. C. Kavin Rowe develops this claim instructively; see “The Doctrine of God Is a Hermeneutic: The Biblical Theology of Brevard S. Childs,” in The Bible as Christian Scripture: The Work of Brevard Childs, ed. Christopher R. Seitz and Kent Harold Richards (Atlanta: SBL, 2013), 155–69.

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ground of the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit, while also believing (b) that this ground can and should be considered on its own terms, so that (c) the witness of the New Testament is received both as a continuation of Israel’s history with God and as a qualitatively new statement about God’s revelation of Godself and God’s enactment of God’s saving purposes. With this tripartite assumption in play, a Christological concentration (which, of course, is flanked by pneumatological claims and an identification of God as triune) can be assumed without being constantly operationalized. One can develop a doctrine of creation that looks toward Christ but does not overwork the belief that “everything is created for Jesus Christ” (CD III/1, 376)—or, at the least, allows that that which is created by God exists on its own terms, and supposes that a theological engagement with that existence, on those very terms, is one way to pay homage to Christ as the Messiah of ancient Israel, patience incarnate.82 On another level, a Christologically and pneumatologically underdetermined doctrine of creation attests to a confidence that the texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament can be profitably read as a drawn-out story. Childs again proves useful. While, following von Rad, Barth, and others, Childs supposes that liberation from Egypt stands at the heart of ancient Israel’s faith, he finds good reason to honor the final form of the Hebrew Bible, which—at least in terms of the ostensible ordering of material—has “subordinated the noetic sequence of Israel’s experience of God in her redemption history to the ontic reality of God as creator.”83 Building on this insight, one might say the following: a theological perspective on events that transpire “in the beginning” does not rigidly fix the shape of the whole, for claims about that beginning are themselves patient of development, qualification, and expansion. One need not work from the center out; one can move from the periphery toward the center, and one can do so with some confidence that a pathway that leads from “here” to “there” will gradually come into view. After all, doesn’t the belief that God acts with constancy I am thinking along similar lines to David Fergusson at this point. See “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Creation: Church-Bells beyond the Stars,” IJST 18, no. 4 (2016): 414– 31, esp. 428–9. 83 Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 385. 82

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and consistency, across all stretches of time and space, allow for a fairly relaxed attitude toward the sequencing of dogmatic claims?84 Is it not possible for reflection to begin here or there, to move forward and backward and sideways, depending on some number of local intellectual pressures and adopting a pace that seems most appropriate? To be sure, the dogmatician may not presume that her labors will exhibit the same kind of coherence as that which distinguishes God’s action. What “coherence” means for God is not immediately given to us to know (a point that ought to put the brakes on summary statements about the “unity” of the scriptural witness, and that ought to chasten those who would lean on familiar pairings like “promise” and “fulfillment” to construe the relationship between the Testaments). There is also good reason to worry that one’s forward, backward, and sideways movements could amount to a dubious kind of meandering. But such worries ought not to quash the hope that the coherence of God’s action, provocative of faith, will shape instances of theological understanding that are themselves coherent, and that form part of a path toward the salvific center of the Christian message. It follows, too, that there is no need for a Christian thinker to hurry toward the “middle” or leap to the “end” of the story; nor good reason to suspect that preliminary inquiries into God’s action in “the beginning” will distort reflection on the events that follow. Inasmuch as God’s patience is exercised across the length and breadth of history (and pre-history) and inasmuch as the Bible bears witness to this exercise of patience, so dogmatic reflection can itself involve a measure of patience. The God of Jesus Christ can be approached slowly, by way of a description of God’s ways and works in creation, then in the history of ancient Israel, and then more directly—the upshot being a dogmatic proposal that becomes, one hopes, ever more finely grained, ever more interesting, and ever more provocative in the course of its elaboration. There is nothing wrong, one might say, with a Christian thinker waiting

Thus Murray A. Rae: “The steadfastness, constancy, and enduring faithfulness of God is a persistent biblical theme. Trust in this God therefore entails the expectation that what God says now to the church”—that is, in the New Testament— “will be congruent with what God has said to his people in the past” —that is, in God’s address to the people of ancient Israel, in the context of the Hebrew Bible. See “Biblical Theology and the Communicative Presence of God,” in The Bible as Christian Scripture, ed. Seitz and Richards, 139.

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on the incarnation, adopting a posture that attempts to share—and thus to honor—ancient’s Israel’s wait for its Messiah.

5 Coda: The Environmental Crisis and the Patience of God the Creator Rather than a conclusion that rehearses its principal claims, this chapter will close with remarks on the relationship between the doctrine of creation and the ongoing (and, arguably, intensifying) environmental crisis. These remarks are roughly sketched, and it will quickly become evident that they require fuller elaboration. But I understand this rough sketch to be something of a promissory note. It adverts to a new kind of theological obligation, borne of an unprecedented situation: human beings acquiring and using the power to undo the basic structures of creation, and in such a way that the process of creatio cooperativa is put in reverse and the world is progressively rendered less diverse, less meaningful, and less rich, with fewer and fewer opportunities for creaturely flourishing. It need hardly be said that work in the fields of systematic and constructive theology always has practical and ethical implications. If a faith that seeks understanding is best expressed in grateful, responsible, and liberative conduct, then a theology that fails to gesture toward, reflect on, and encourage such an expression is rightly adjudged deficient. It well deserves the rebuke, one might say, of someone like Gustavo Gutiérrez, who insists that theology must “understand … faith from within the concrete, historical, liberating, and subversive praxis of the poor of this world—the exploited classes, despised ethnic groups, and marginalized cultures.”85 And it is sometimes possible to allow the practical and ethical implications of a doctrinal statement to remain underdeveloped, at least for a spell. Underdevelopment does not n ­ ecessarily betray a disaffiliation of systematic and ethical reflection; it might simply reflect limited ­capacities, a prudential circumscription of an intellectual project, and/or an ­awareness that others are better placed to take up the baton that has been laid down. But the nature and gravity of the situation in which we find ourselves—put better: the Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, trans. Robert R. Barr (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 36. The essay from which this quotation is taken, “Liberation Praxis and Christian Faith,” amounts to a bolder statement of Gutiérrez’s early position than is found in A Theology of Liberation.

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gravity of the situation that a range of industrialized and industrializing nations, corporate entities, and wealthy classes have engendered, particularly during the carbon era—forbids any “going on as before, as if nothing had happened” when it comes to creation, just as the scandal of poverty and impoverishment in the majority world forbad Gutiérrez and others from adopting the “spiritualizing” tone favored by too many of their predecessors.86 Absent some sense of how a theological account of creation orients us to nonhuman creatures and the world at large, both in the utopian, counterfactual past and in the dangerously factual, apocalyptic present, “going on as before” is liable to compound the mess we are in. Something additional is needed. Ham-fisted though the efforts of many theologians may well be (and the fact that my effort is situated in a coda makes plain my own ham-fistedness), theological reflection on life “in the beginning” must situate itself in relation to the Anthropocene.

A sermon delivered by Paul Tillich soon after the end of the Second World War, in full view of the devastation wrought in continental Europe and the use of nuclear munitions in Japan, provides a useful point of departure. Having noted the heightened power of human beings, creatures “generated and nourished” from “the fertile soil of the earth,” Tillich offers a statement that captures something of our current moment: “God … spoke to the men of today through the mouths of our greatest scientists, and this is what he said: You yourselves can bring about the end upon yourselves. I give the power to shake the foundations of your earth into your hands.”87 Later remarks in the sermon, regrettably, do not much help one to contend with the shaking that Tillich identifies. If, in the 1920s and 1930s, Tillich might have looked toward new kinds of religious and political discourse, arising from a moment of gracefilled kairos, he now offers rather thin gruel: a derivative pairing of “faith” and “despair,” along with a series of existentialistic pieties, that pale in comparison with the expansive vision of Systematic Theology.88 Even so, Tillich’s sense that the power to wreak Karl Barth, “Theologische Existenz heute!” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1930–1933, ed. Michael Beintker, Michael Hüttenhoff and Peter Zocher, Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe 49 (Zurich: TVZ, 2013), 293–385 at 302. 87 Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 4. 88 Admittedly, later sermons in the volume are more suggestive (see, for instance, Shaking of the Foundations, 27). For a valuable reflection on Tillich’s socialist commitments, before and after his move to the United States, see the rich essay by Gary Dorrien, “Religious Socialism, Paul Tillich, and the Abyss of Estrangement,” SR 85, no. 2 (2018): 425–52. 86

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catastrophe has transferred to human hands has obvious pertinence. It points to the acute disquiet that follows upon an awareness of what it means to live during the Anthropocene: knowing that a subset of human beings has and exercises the power to change radically the conditions of life on this planet (and, at some point, maybe, elsewhere); to intensify the maldistribution of opportunities for flourishing, with long-standing inequities crossed with novel environmental pressures and tragedies; to make the endangerment and extinction of diverse nonhuman species an entirely typical occurrence, not an occasional exception to the rule; and to effect a dramatic and irreversibly damaging of creation, in ways that likely frustrate God’s purposes for human and nonhuman creatures. This rather bare quartet of claims reflects the difficulty facing Christian theologians—or, more precisely, this Christian theologian—when it comes to developing a rhetoric suited to the Anthropocene. How is one to think and write in a time in which human beings have gained what Genesis supposes to be near-unthinkable: the capacity to undo God’s work on a planetary scale? What combination of “religious and secular symbolism” (SD 147, emphases removed) is needed to disrupt, or at least slow the pace, of the undoing of the creatio cooperativa? Laudato Si’, as noted above, opens with a gendered image that hearkens back to Francis of Assisi’s spirituality—the earth as “sister” and “beautiful mother” (§1)—before leaning on more familiar language, with references to “nature as a magnificent book” (§12), “the present ecological crisis” (§15), “throwaway culture” (§22), the “gospel of creation” (§§62–100), a “universal family” (§89), “modern anthropocentrism” (§115), “integral ecology” (§§137–162), and “ecological conversion” (§§216–21). At the other end of the spectrum, and with obvious justification, some are applying the category of “apocalypse” to our present situation. Meanwhile nontheological, middlebrow writers have developed a prose style that, to my mind, combines frankness, despair, and urgency in a more compelling manner than many working in the field of ecotheology—even as those same writers evince relatively little interest in Christian thought as such. (I think here of works like The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, and Losing Earth: A Recent History.)89 I do not offer this observation to slow the momentum of various projects in the field of ecotheology. Far from it. I make this point because I remain at a loss

Elizabeth Colbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Picador, 2014); Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History (New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); and David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019).

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when it comes to imagining what kind of rhetoric Christian thinkers ought to develop in face of the tragedy unfolding around us.

Granted, then, that this chapter does not venture directly into the realm of ecojustice, how does its affirmation of creatio ex nihilo, its understanding of creatio cooperativa, and its account of the human who bears the imago dei and imago mundi relate to life in the Anthropocene? And how, more particularly, might this statement about the patience of God the creator challenge ways of thinking that have contributed to the tragedy playing out across the face of the planet? First, one finds here a doctrine of creation that replaces a sharp division between human and nonhuman creatures with an acknowledgment of “what humans have in common with other animal creatures” (and nonanimal creatures), as well as the encouragement that Christians “see other animals” (and other creatures) “for what they are, in all their particularity and diversity.”90 Certainly, both the acknowledgment and the encouragement arise within a scripturally sourced, theocentric perspective; and certainly, both the acknowledgment and the suggestion derive from a creation saga that culminates in the “centering” of human beings. One can hardly view this perspective and this saga as eco-centric, nor can one strip away some measure of anthropocentrism: Gen. 1:27–28 serves as a finale to the creative process that God initiates and guides. But given that an acclamation of our bearing the imago dei has as its necessary counterpoint an affirmation of our being made in the imago mundi, and given that the production of both the imago dei and the imago mundi is described in ways that displace “earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” in favor of attention to a “range of nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies,”91 the framework in which one thinks about creation and humankind has been adjusted in important

David Clough, On Animals, vol. 1, Systematic Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012), 44. While Clough’s focus is of course animal life, both human and nonhuman, this extension of his thought seems entirely apt. 91 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix. I am aware that Bennett might resist a theological appropriation of her insights. But the type of attentiveness and discernment that she commends is a useful way to gloss an underappreciated lesson of the first chapter of Genesis. 90

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ways. What we have “in common” with other creatures is far more than the simple fact of creatureliness. It is figured now as a complex relation of dependence, wherein we simply would not be who we are without the prior input of nonhuman creatures—without their distinction, their inventive exuberance, and their exemplary responses to God’s exercise of patience. The same point, differently: if the opening chapter of Genesis calls readers and auditors to understand ourselves as creatures who bear the image of God, this chapter also compels us to receive that image as underwritten by nonhuman creatures’ rewarding of God’s patience—a rewarding that seems to be entirely superior to anything we can muster, east of Eden. Why, then, should we not allow the possibility that the distinctiveness of our bearing the imago dei and imago mundi could go hand in hand with other creatures relating to God in their own distinctive ways, perhaps by also bearing the image of God, perhaps by relating to God in ways that are not given to us to know, perhaps by being drawn into covenantal relationships that we cannot begin to conceive? Indeed, why not recognize that our primordial dependence on nonhuman creatures, who responded to God’s patient “letting be” and “letting happen,” is now matched with nonhuman creatures’ dependence on us—a dependence whose articulation requires radical and concerted efforts to protect the vitality and diversity of God’s world? A second point follows directly: it is possible and apt to say that God’s exercise of patience toward the nonhuman world should have, as a very loose corollary, our exercise of patience toward the nonhuman world, such that we imitate something of God’s “letting be” and “letting happen.” Now it is not the case, I hurry to add, that this corollary allows humankind to view itself as God’s privileged representative, so that our relationship with the nonhuman world is modeled on God’s relationship to creation as a whole. That would be a crass reading of the claim that the first human beings were afforded “dominion” (Gen. 1:26 and 28) over various animal species; it would also mean looking away from the fact that an affirmation of the imago dei can be paired with an affirmation of the imago mundi. Nor should we forget that, given the testimony of Gen. 1:1–2:4a, the principal task of creatures is to respond to God’s patience, not to replicate it. After all, we cannot “let be” and “let happen” in fashion that is strongly analogous to God’s primordial “letting be” and “letting happen.” We cannot create time

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and space; we cannot empower nonhuman creatures to do what nonhuman creatures do; we cannot set the stage for a covenant of grace, routed through ancient Israel and fulfilled in the Spiritshaped life of Jesus Christ. Even so, there is the possibility of a weak analogy, wherein human beings strive to honor life “in the beginning” through a commitment to let creaturely poiesis go its own way, relatively unmolested by human interference. If it is true, as Paul Tillich suggests, that “[t]o be is to have space” (ST1 194), so it might also be true that to bear the image of God is to give space—or, perhaps more correctly, to be wary of preempting God’s giving of time and space to others, and to commit to preserving the integrity of nonhuman creaturely activity in diverse times and spaces, here and elsewhere. It is not enough, obviously, simply to “leave alone” when it comes to the challenges facing our planet. In many cases, intervention is needed to correct past excesses, lest biodiversity (and other kinds of creaturely diversity) be further diminished. But how much could be gained—or, more precisely, how much might not be lost—if human beings, especially in the northern hemisphere, construed Christian responsibility to nonhuman creatures in terms of allowing those nonhuman creatures do what they do, on their own terms, in their own times and spaces! Doing so would not reduce, too, simply to preserving “wilderness”; it would involve a purposeful determination to preserve biodiversity in the present and future through a fairly revolutionary transformation of all aspects of human life.

If the previous points encompass ontology and ethics, a third draws us into the realm of spirituality. Put in terms of question: ought one to connect this reading of Gen. 1:1–2:4a with Christian animism? Might talk of the patience of God the creator, which allows for a acclamation the poetic power of nonhuman creatures, go hand in hand with an spiritual sensibility that takes an additional step—one that amplifies talk of God’s immanence to the point at which plants, oceans, insects, meadows, even the moon and the sun, are caught up in God’s own being, “divinized” and “deified” and worthy of worship? I would respond to these questions with a firm no. Mark I. Wallace’s recent commendation of Christian animism, powerfully articulated in When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-enchantment of the World, is clearly an important option for Christians today. It does more than recast doctrinal loci and

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commend a transformation of Christian conduct; it amounts to an extended attempt to reimagine the ways that Christians inhabit the world, such that the world is disclosed as the very stuff of God’s own life. The particulars of Wallace’s argument, too, merit careful study. This is more than a theological experiment; it is a powerful statement about the “momentum” of divine enfleshment that culminates in the suggestion of “promiscuous incarnation.”92 The incarnation of the Word, in human flesh, is an opportunity to perceive the incarnation of the Spirit in the dove that alights on Christ at the moment of his baptism; an affirmation of “double incarnation” is an occasion to unlearn a dualistic opposition of God and world, and an opportunity to think anew about God’s omnipresence and omniactivity, to which the Hebrew Bible and New Testament bear ample witness; and an affirmation of God’s omnipresence and omniactivity raises the possibility that incarnation is not limited to the humanity of Christ and the flesh of the dove, but ramifies across more and more creaturely species, animal and nonanimal, such that one might behold the “divinization of human and nonhuman creatures.”93 But what sets this project at odds with Wallace’s proposal is the simple fact that the created world does not need to be any more valuable than it is—for it is already, in and of itself, by dint of God’s gracious creative and preservative action, as valuable as one could possibly want it to be. Divinizing the cosmos, one might say, is an exercise in superfluity. It could suggest that creatures being what they are, in all of their relative independence before God (and all of their radical dependence on God), is not quite enough; it could suggest that God’s exercise of patience, wherein God’s “letting be” and “letting happen,” paired with various kinds of empowerment, permission, and delegation, waits on an intensification of God’s presence, such that God is identified with the world as a whole and the creatures therein. But God’s relationship to the world, both back “then” and right now, is quite different. There is no need to add anything to the unceasing, effortless love that establishes, accompanies, and guides creatures; there is no need to divinize the “venture of existence” (CD III/1,

Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Reenchantment of the World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 14. 93 Wallace, When God Was a Bird, 14. 92

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169). Put more bluntly: our challenge, as Christian creatures, is not to figure divine immanence in ways that blur the distinction between the divine and the creaturely; our challenge is to figure creaturely life in terms of solidarity with nonhuman creatures, and to set about imagining modes of praise, prayer, and worship that honor our being part of a multispecies community—one that ought to attune itself, in some faint way, to the exuberant roar of a Godled creatio cooperativa.

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­5 The Patience of God the Provider (1) Providence is an exercise of divine patience marked by blessings, longsuffering, and steadfastness. This exercise of patience should be understood, first and foremost, in terms of the scriptural witness to God’s relationship with ancient Israel—a relationship that culminates in a number of creatures rewarding God’s patience, in word and in deed. And with an account of God’s providing for ancient Israel in hand, it becomes possible to venture tentative claims about God’s patience with respect to history at large. When it comes to understanding God’s providential activity— God’s dealings with “the history of created being as such” (CD III/3, 3); God’s act of “world-governance” (Weltregierung)—two basic errors must be avoided.1 One is a construal of providence as despotic control, with God’s unsparing and exacting ordering of events made the be-all and end-all of theological reflection. While this error might proceed from a commendable desire to foreground “the will of God” as “the cause of things” (ST I.19.4), it risks obscuring the ways that an “abundance” of divine goodness imparts “the dignity of causality … to creatures” who serve as “intermediaries of God’s providence” (ST 1.22.3). Or, in the idiom of this book: absent an understanding of divine patience that acknowledges God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” and highlights God’s empowerment of creatures, providence starts to take on a severely deterministic, Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, ed. Gertrud von le Fort, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 208 (§17, lecture).

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or even an occasionalistic, air. God’s sovereignty is conceived in a manner that makes it difficult to affirm the integrity, meaning, and consequentiality of nondivine being and activity. The other error arises from a reluctance, which sometimes hardens into a refusal, to think concentratedly about God’s action in this or that moment of history. In face of questions about the specific ways that God “upholds heaven and earth,” with “all creatures … so completely in his hand that without his will they cannot even move,”2 a theologian hesitates; and, when push comes to shove, prefers nebulous claims about divine presence to a fine-grained account of the ways that God realizes God’s governmental purposes, with and for creatures. The roots of this error vary. It might arise as a reaction to severely deterministic or occasionalistic accounts of God’s ruling; it might trade on misgivings about the idea of God “intervening” in this or that patch of time and space; it might disclose fears about Christian doctrine lending support to ideologies of domination (God’s “fatherly hand” being an oppressive fist); it might bespeak a desire to distance God from evil and suffering. Whatever the reason, the impact is again grievous. Although theologians might continue to claim that God reconciles the world to Godself, they are effectively at a loss when it comes to describing what it means to say that God guides the course of history. To be sure, such errors rarely present themselves neat. The first is somewhat passé: many contemporary Christian theologians (and many of their predecessors) are adept at combining affirmations of God’s providential working with affirmations of the integrity, meaning, and consequentiality of creaturely action.3 God does not control creatures as a puppeteer does a puppet; rather, the antecedent fact of God’s rule facilitates creatures’ capacity to act on their own terms. A noncompetitive and compatibilist understanding of the God-world relationship obtains, with “God’s providing … custom made to fit the creaturely recipient so that the creature’s

Heidelberg Catechism, Qs 27 and 28. See Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, rev. David S. Schaff, vol. 3, The Evangelical Protestant Creeds (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 316. 3 Such adeptness bespeaks, in part, the widespread influence of Kathryn Tanner’s first book, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1988). 2

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own freedom is never abrogated but activated.”4 The second error is crudely portrayed. Few imagine that the doctrine of providence can be reduced to broad-brush statements about divine indwelling, nearness, and the like; most recognize the value of describing God’s governmental work, in this or that historical moment, with some degree of specificity. Indeed, it is precisely because both errors are increasingly rare, at least in most quarters of the academy, that a number of important statements about providence have recently emerged and that a locus once deemed “the forgotten stepchild of contemporary theology” stands on the cusp of a bright future.5 Even so, these errors have found purchase in theological reflection. Sometimes conspicuously, as with Zwingli’s De Providentia, on the one side, and works that focus narrowly on God’s relationship to the believer, on the other; sometimes more subtly, and thus more worryingly, as with Schleiermacher’s fascination with a tightly ordered nature-system (Naturzusammenhang), on the one side, and critiques of the very possibility of describing discrete instances of divine action, on the other.6 Further complicating matters is the uneven treatment of providence in late modern Protestant thought— an unevenness that likely has less to do with “false humility” in face of secular trains of thought, and more to do with theologians being unnerved, not inappropriately, by the depth of insight found in works by Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and others.7 (The unnerving may well continue, too, given work in evolutionary biology, the new Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief, 2nd edn (New York: Continuum, 2009), 219. 5 Langdon Gilkey, “Providence in Contemporary Theology,” JR 43, no. 3 (1963): 174. 6 Ulrich Zwingli rejects the very idea of secondary causes in “Reproduction from Memory of a Sermon on the Providence of God,” in On Providence and Other Essays, ed. for Samuel Macauley Jackson by William John Hinke (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 128–234. Schleiermacher’s account of the world as a highly ordered causal nexus dominates the first part of the Glaubenslehre and has often provoked concern. (Isaak August Dorner, for instance, worries that creation lacks much in the way of “becoming … opposition and struggle”; see Divine Immutability: A Critical Reconsideration, trans. Robert R. Williams and Claude Welch [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994], 125). For two important statements on God’s activity, construed in terms of a single “master-act,” see Gordon D. Kaufman, God the Problem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), esp. 119–47; and Maurice Wiles, God’s Action in the World: The Bampton Lectures for 1986 (London: SCM, 1986). 7 Pace John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1. 4

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field of “big history,” and the reality of devastating environmental change).8 So there is a challenge here. And, given the stakes for Christian understanding, it is a challenge that must be met. Absent a well-shaped sense of God’s Weltregierung that pairs a vivid sense of God’s sovereignty with a meaningful account of creaturely action, Christians struggle to understand what it means to live in the time and space between the primordial counterworld of Gen. 1–3 and a future defined by a “new heaven and a new earth,” when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes [and] Death will be no more” (Rev. 21:1 and 21:4). We cannot make much sense of Matt. 5:45 (“your Father in heaven” being one who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous”), nor of the suggestion that God patiently draws all people to himself (so Tertullian, De pat. 2.3). We lack an intellectual basis on which to think about how God’s relationship to ancient Israel, God’s presence in Christ, and the Spirit’s invigoration of early Christian communities relates to our understanding of what God is doing in the past, present, and future; and, accordingly, we find ourselves ill-equipped to meet the various ecclesial, political, social, sexual, and ecological challenges that beset us. Langdon Gilkey is entirely right to say that “historical change can neither be intellectually comprehended, existentially borne, nor politically and ethically dealt with, without a theological and a Christian interpretation of it.”9 I would only add that a Christian interpretation of history depends on a coherent account of God’s providing. With the following two chapters, then, I add my voice to a number of scholars who have recently engaged the doctrine of providence. Patience serves again as the conceptual hub around which everything turns. In addition to helping me to conceptualize the relationship between God and history in a manner that honors God’s primacy and affirms creaturely activity, this motif anchors the development of more particular lines of inquiry. Following remarks on the centrality of the Hebrew Bible for developing an account of providence (section 1), the current chapter frames patience in terms of God’s persistent disbursement of blessings (section 2); describes For an accessible introduction, see David Christian, Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (London: Penguin, 2019). 9 Langdon Gilkey, Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2000), 34.

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sin as a matter of waywardness, as creatures lose track of and rebel against God’s loving purposes, distorting patches of time and space and testing God’s patience (section  3); and tackles the fraught issue of theopaschism, as God patiently—that is, longsufferingly— bears the costs of creaturely sin, even as God persists in the disbursement of blessings (section 4). While this chapter ends with sharp dialectic, with God’s patient disbursement of blessings paired with God’s patiently beholding and enduring the sometimes-tragic consequences of sin, the next expands the view. It offers an account of divine patience as steadfastness, as God “bends” events to serve God’s purposes; it identifies the formation of scripture as a decisive moment in ancient Israel’s history, derivative of God’s patient governance and the resultant efforts of groups and individuals; and it sketches a series of claims about God’s guidance of history at large, in view of Paul’s contention that faith in Christ and his Spirit allows us to “hope for what we do not see” and to “wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:25). Both chapters draw on the preceding exposition of creation. While the doctrines of creation and providence should certainly be differentiated—the former answers the question, “what is the ‘something’ that arises ‘from nothing’?”; the latter, “what is God doing in, to, and for the world that God reconciles to Godself?”— they are obviously contiguous, and that contiguity is a function of the coherent way that God relates to God’s creatures.10 As such, I continue to describe patience as a divine posture, relationship, and activity that “lets be” and “lets happen,” while eliciting patterns of creaturely conduct that accord with God’s intentions. Moving beyond the utopian counterworld of Gen. 1:1–2:4a, however, my principal focus is the complex and ambiguous history that God now Schleiermacher treats creation and preservation/conservation as two sides of the same coin, and doubts if the questions posed above are as different as they might initially appear to be (see Gl. §§36–9). He also suspects that the very category of “governance” is surplus to requirements (so Gl. §46). Thankfully, Schleiermacher’s account of providence is not limited to the First Part of The Christian Faith. His initial treatment of preservation/conservation has a fairly narrow purpose, being developed in light of a quite abstract statement about “the totality of finite being” as it “exists only in dependence upon the Infinite” (§36) and focused on charting a via media between crude supernaturalism and reductive naturalism. More materially important claims actually come later, when Schleiermacher considers the significance of God’s single elective decree and God’s wise and loving shaping of history as a whole. 10

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oversees and directs, as God contends with creatures given over to sin, standing under judgment, and in desperate need of healing. And with this shift of focus—and it is exactly this shift that warrants an expansion of patience-talk to include reference to divine blessings, waywardness, divine longsuffering, and divine steadfastness—I endeavor to contribute to what David Fergusson has recently described as a “polyphonic approach” to providence, wherein “divine action is not … restricted to any one single model or type.”11 Patience, I aim to show, can serve as a capacious cantus firmus around which sound interlocking melodies, rhythms, harmonies, and counterpoints, all of which constitute the frame in which Christ can be identified as ancient Israel’s messiah, divine patience incarnate.

1 Approaching Providence But how, exactly, should a theologian approach providence? The answer offered in this section comprises five overlapping claims, the  sum of which orient readers to the modus operandi of this and the next chapter. The first and second of these claims make evident an unabashedly Protestant emphasis on scripture as the source and norm for theological reflection. The third explains, at some length, why the Hebrew Bible bulks large in this construal of providence and, concomitantly, why I defer an engagement with the New Testament until the end of the following chapter. The fourth claim declares a willingness to take leave of dogmatic conventions, as befits an Anselmian perspective that prizes exploration and imagination. And the fifth underscores my determination to write in a philosophically unembarrassed and theologically unapologetic manner about what John of Damascus calls God’s “solicitude … for existing things,” as God ensures that they “receive suitable guidance through to their end.”12 David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 11. 12 John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, II.29. See John of Damascus, Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), 260. Herman Bavinck makes good use of this remark, showing how talk of providentia (foreseeing) and pronoia (foreknowing) were expanded to refer God’s will in history. See Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 596. 11

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First, an important limiting point: those who engage this locus ought not “to claim to know more than we can actually know about God’s activity in the world” and should not, by extension, suppose it possible to think, write, or speak authoritatively about each and every dimension of creaturely history.13 Epistemological overreach, which often runs alongside a speculative vision of history as a domain of gradual “progress,” must be avoided at all costs. To be sure, Christian theologians are keen to insist that God’s “solicitude” and “guidance” encompasses the entirety of creation. No regions of space and time exist apart from God’s creative act, and no regions of the created order stand at a lesser or greater distance from God’s preservative and governmental activity. Everything, in one way or another, is in God’s hands. And it is precisely because of a belief in God’s all-encompassing activity that questions about how some sequence of events aligns with or frustrates God’s purposes are endemic to Christian life. If such inquiries might often be inadvisable, they are close to inevitable; “what is God doing here?” is a reflexive application of belief in a “divine will” that “embrac[es] the whole framework of mutually conditioning finite being” (Gl. 216).14 But it is imperative that one not inflate belief in God’s providing to the point at which one presumes oneself able to

John Rogerson, “Can a Doctrine of Providence Be Based on the Old Testament?” in Ascribe to the Lord: Biblical and Other Essays in Memory of Peter C. Craigie, ed. Lyle Eslinger and Glen Taylor (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), 538. 14 While this claim will be reprised throughout this and the following chapter, I will always develop it without reference to “meticulous” providence. It is worth explaining why. On one level, I’m doubtful that the term “meticulous” is a helpful adjective. Not only does the Latin root have unfortunate implications (metus = fear), but contemporary usages can suggest over-scrupulosity, fussiness, and a failure to see the wood for the trees. There are surely ways to check these connotations, but it is not clear that doing so yields much in the way of rewards. On another level, as Oliver Crisp has recently pointed out, an affirmation of the intended (and salutary) meaning of “meticulous providence” in recent theological work—namely, that God’s preservation, concurrence, and governance of events is thoroughgoing— leaves unresolved a host of issues, among which number the nature and character of causality, in/compatibilism, “soft” and “hard” determinism, etc. (See here Oliver D. Crisp, “Meticulous Providence,” in Divine Action and Providence, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019], 21–39). So, again, it remains unclear what talk of “meticulousness” adds to reflection, beyond a general (and fairly uncontroversial) affirmation of the “almighty and everywhere present power of God” (Heidelberg Confession, Q27). 13

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track all (or even most) of God’s operations in history. That risks confusing Christian faithfulness with a preternatural epistemological capacity. It is an instance of dogmatic works righteousness, with the biblical witness treated as a technology that could be leveraged to render history transparent to thought, the likely result being the postulation of a “universal structure of historical movement” (ST3 328)—a postulation that has often lent support to dubious forms of Eurocentrism, brutal projects of colonization, and injurious forms of racial and ethnic chauvinism. Again: yes, of course, Christians can and will and should advance claims about God as creator, about God’s establishment of a covenant with ancient Israel, about God’s reconciling of the world to herself, and about the outpouring of the Spirit. Such claims identify discrete acts of favor, with the result that God renders this and that community, and these and those individuals, aware of who God is and what God does; and this awareness prompts modest—and, importantly, hopeful— hypotheses about God’s working in the past, present, and future. But the epistemological “advantage” that accompanies Christian faith is not a possession to be operationalized. It is not a basis on which one might come to behold creaturely history sub specie aeternitate. A second, more positive claim: a good way to keep reflection on providence within proper (i.e., chastened) bounds is to yoke oneself to the scriptural witness. To that end, this and the following chapter attend particularly to the Hebrew Bible, reading it in a manner proximate to that favored by G. Ernest Wright: “an interpretation of history, a confessional recital of historical events as the acts of God, events which lead backward to the beginning of history and forward to its end.”15 Now, obviously, the style of biblical theology that Wright commended, under the influence of Walther Eichrodt, Karl Barth, Gerhard von Rad, and others, cannot be uncritically reprised. Even in the context of a faith that seeks to understand the God who has made himself known, one must be wary of supposing that one knows exactly how God acts. Certainly, there mustn’t be a dogmatic equivalent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “monumental” approach to history, which lionizes “the man of deeds and power

G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM, 1952), 57.

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… who fights a great fight.”16 The risk of naïveté bulks large at this point (again: we have presumed what an “act of God” means, instead of letting the scriptural witness instruct and correct us), as does the possibility that all-too-human, masculinist visions distort an account of God’s providing.17 One must also beware of supposing that a “system” of doctrine could somehow be read out of or mapped onto scripture, with exegesis giving ready support to a neatly arranged assortment of intellectual conventions. In addition to underrating the difficulty of shifting from a pluriform, and sometimes chaotic scriptural witness to an ordered conceptual nexus,18 this supposition obscures the simple fact that exegetical study is more likely to abash than bolster a theologian’s confidence. These caveats notwithstanding, however, Wright’s words remain instructive. In receiving the Hebrew Bible as a “confessional recital” of God’s life with and for ancient Israel, the theologian is at least appropriately oriented. History-like narratives, psalms, law codes, poetry, prophetic declamations, etc.: significant though these may be as ancient cultural productions, they consistently point away from themselves and toward the divine Subject that ancient Israel believed to be directive of its history and of the course of history at large. These texts acclaim what God is doing, above all else, and they supply the basis on which—in due course—a description of God’s identity can be worked up. Theologians should take note. What Wright elsewhere deems an “over-emphasis on religious genetics as the end of Biblical study” must be checked; we must approach the Hebrew Bible as the raw material out of which an account of God’s ways and works is to be developed.19

Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67. 17 On which, see Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” JR 41, no. 3 (1961): 194–205. For a broader critique of the Biblical Theology movement, see Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 42–9. 18 A point made with great flair by James Barr; see The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). 19 G. Ernest Wright, “Neo-Orthodoxy and the Bible,” JBR 14, no. 2 (1946): 90. More recently, see Mark W. Elliott, Providence: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Account (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2020): “God’s revelation does not … matter so much for what it says about human religious history—no matter how fascinating—as for what it says about God toward the world” (32). 16

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I am of course aware that these claims invite questions. To anticipate and respond to one of them: no, a commitment to the principle of sola scriptura obviously does not guarantee dogmatic adequacy, much less allow one to sidestep debates about the relationship between historical-critical, rhetorical, literary, and theological modes of exegesis. At the least, though, a scriptural focus guards against certain missteps. On one level, to return to the first claim of this section, an account of providence so focused is less likely to entertain delusions of grandeur. Lingering over the particularities of God’s relationship with ancient Israel certainly helps to check the temptation to make a doctrine of providence coextensive with a far-reaching philosophy of history (which tracks, say, with the progressive linear teleology favored by some German idealists), or for that matter, to have thought devolve into flights of dispensationalist fancy.20 On another level, as will become clear in the following pages, a scriptural focus can help “explain how Israel is important to Christian existence”21— a matter of acute urgency, given the neglect of the Hebrew Bible in Schleiermacher’s work, the Marcionite drift of much neo-Protestant theology, the ambiguity of Barth’s remarks about Jews and Judaism, and the persistence of anti-Jewish, antisemitic, and racist attitudes in Christian and non-Christian circles.

But is a focus on the Hebrew Bible theologically justifiable? This question, already broached with respect to creation at the end of the preceding chapter, helps introduce my third point. To frame it in sharply: since the preceding account of creation lacked explicit Christological reference, one might now judge it imperative to reckon directly with the Testament that acclaims “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things exist” (1 Cor. 8:6), in whom God “has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth … as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9–10), since “all things have been created through him and for him … and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17). Isn’t an engagement with providence, in other words, required to treat Jesus Christ as its Alpha and Omega?

For a survey of providential/eschatological extremism, with comments on the extravagances peddled by Hal Lindsey, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and others, see Robert G. Clouse, “Fundamentalist Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 263–79. 21 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 251. 20

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Modern thinkers’ interest in supralapsarian construals of election and incarnation encourages an affirmative answer to the question. Such construals, to be sure, were initially forged in the parochial furnace of post-Reformation scholastic debate. Infralapsarians contended that God’s decree to elect (some) creatures to salvation, in and through Christ, was logically posterior to the creation of the world, the event of the fall, and creatures’ habitual sinfulness. To think otherwise risked making God liable for humanity’s disobedience and its effects; to think otherwise risked minimizing humanity’s responsibility for sin, as well as diminishing a sense of God’s mercy. Supralapsarians, by contrast, argued that God’s decree to elect (some) creatures to salvation, in and through Christ, should have logical priority over decrees regarding creation, preservation, and providence—the key concern being that election shouldn’t be presented as a reaction to fall (for that would jeopardize, or at least complicate, an affirmation of divine sovereignty) but rather the application of a pretemporal, intratrinitarian compact. But the debate did not remain parochial; and, once joined, it shapes a fascinating subplot in the modern history of providence, particularly among those with supralapsarian tendencies. Think, for instance, of Jonathan Edwards. While ostensibly favoring a via media between supra- and infralapsarian views, Edwards is fully aware that the ordering of decrees shapes the way that one thinks about history. An important remark from 1739: in that the “Work of Redemption … ‘tis all but one work, one design,” originating in the pretemporal decision of Father, Son, and Spirit, so the “various dispensations” of creaturely history are means to an end: vehicles of God’s redemptive purposes (and, correspondingly, God’s self-glorification).22 Think of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose decision to construe God’s activity in terms of a “single unconditioned decree” (Gl. 558) underwrites the sweeping historical vision toward which the Glaubenslehre progressively builds. God’s redemptive purpose is presented as the point of departure for thinking about all events in time and space, “A History of the Work of Redemption (1739),” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 128. John Webster offers an interesting restatement of Edwards’s perspective in “‘It Was the Will of the Lord to Bruise Him’: Soteriology and the Doctrine of God,” in God of Salvation: Soteriology in Theological Perspective, ed. Ivor J. Davidson and Murray A. Rae (London: Routledge, 2016), 15–34.

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since “everything in our world, human nature first of all and then everything else … would have been arranged differently, and thus the whole course of human events and natural occurrences would have been different, if the divine counsel (Ratschluß) had not been the union of the divine essence with human nature in the person of Christ, and consequently also with the community of believers through the Holy Spirit” (Gl. 724, rev.; my emphasis). Talk of dispensations is absent, but the logic holds fast, and it is precisely this logic that allows the claim that creation as a whole is akin to a “harmonious divine work of art” (Gl. 733). Think, finally, of Barth. His identification of Christ as “electing God” and “elected human” is not only a moment in his doctrine of God; it forms the foundation on which rest his treatments of creation and providence, with their “internal” basis being the covenant that Christ fulfils. With Barth, in fact, the logic of supralapsarianism is raised to the power of a methodological rule: it becomes obligatory to ground an explication of creation and providence (and, of course, any other locus one cares to engage) in a prior acclamation of the incarnation as the beginning and end of God’s ways and works. So, to re-pose the question above: granted that a doctrine of providence should attend to the Hebrew Bible, is it not high time to set reflection within an explicitly Christological framework? Granted that the “hand” that upholds and governs all things is that of the God of Israel, is it not crucial to note that this hand is also the hand of the Father of Jesus Christ, the Savior at the center of all things?23 Although this project stands within the supralapsarian tradition, albeit in ways that will need to be spelled out at a later date, I do not believe that that necessitates an overtly Christological account of providence. Quite the contrary: I think it remains apt and valuable to build an account of providence on the basis of the Hebrew Bible. Why? Simply, because the conviction that “everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth” (Gl. §11), as well as the belief that “the God who sits in government is ‘the eternal Father of Jesus Christ’” (CD III/3, 28), does not have as a necessary entailment the requirement that every dogmatic claim be given an explicit Christological and pneumatological “spin.” It is possible to operate with something akin to the “principial christocentrism” 23 I am paraphrasing Barth; see Learning Jesus Christ through the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 59–62.

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favored by Barth and Schleiermacher—a position, note, that intensifies the “soteriological christocentrism” of earlier writers, inasmuch as every theological claim, in every realm of doctrine, takes its bearings from God’s self-revelation in Christ—while nevertheless approaching Christ’s centrality slowly, by way of a (patient!) elucidation of its backstory and foundation in the life and times of ancient Israel, such that that centrality is positioned within an account of God’s providential activity.24 There is no failure of nerve here, only a concerted attempt to render the Christocentrism of Barth and Schleiermacher historically expansive: a concern to understand better what it means for Christ to come in “the fullness of time” for those “born under the law” (Gal. 4:4–5), and to spell out what it means for Christ to declare that “salvation is from the Jews” (Jn 4:22). Put differently: in binding an account of providence to ancient Israel, and with due awareness that it is “saving faith that … prompts us to believe wholeheartedly in God’s providence in the world,”25 a theologian commits herself to acknowledging that Jesus’ life rests on, and is ultimately unintelligible in isolation from, the discrete sociocultural and religious assemblage that God elected for service in the context of redemption history, and a theologian supposes that it is through concentrated study of this assemblage that she can make sense of God’s governance with respect to “the history of created being as such” (CD III/3, 3). It is worth fleshing out this claim in more detail. On one level, a sustained engagement with the Hebrew Bible ensures that God’s history with ancient Israel—or, more precisely, an inspired, multi-genre witness to God’s history with ancient Israel— is materially significant for the formation of doctrine. Granted that few contemporary theologians would accede to Marcion’s claim that “Redemption redeems so completely that simply nothing remains of the old,”26 that few would sympathize with Schleiermacher’s troubling suggestion that the Old Testament be positioned after

I borrow the “principial/soteriological” distinction from Richard Muller; see After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97–8. David Gibson uses this distinction instructively in Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election, and Christology in Calvin and Barth (London: T&T Clark, 2009). 25 Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, 594. 26 Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 67. 24

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the New, and that increasing numbers reject a supersessionism that imagines “that Christians and the church have replaced Israel as the chosen people of God,”27 it remains the case that the actual content of the Pentateuch, the historical books, the Psalter, wisdom texts, and the prophetic witness are often peripheral to theological reflection. Their status as integral elements of Holy Scripture might be formally affirmed, but their material significance is negligible; and, as such, the (very necessary) claim that the Word assumes “Jewish flesh” (CD IV/1, 167) seems to float free of the complex history of which that incarnate Word is a part. And that will not do. If Matthew identifies Jesus as “the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1); if Mark opens with an intertextual summation of some of ancient Israel’s deepest hopes (Mk 1:2–3); if Luke describes an angelic visitation that promises that Jesus will occupy “the throne of his ancestor David” and “reign over the house of Jacob forever,” then recalls a young mother who rewrites 2 Sam. 2:1–10 (Lk. 1: 32–33 and 1:46–55); and if John reports the declaration of one of the first disciples, “‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’” (Jn 1:50), there are compelling reasons for a theologian to look “backwards” in a sustained manner. The opening of each gospel in fact conveys something of the demand that Schleiermacher found so objectionable: “that we work our way through the whole of the Old Testament if we are to approach the New by the right avenue” (Gl. 611). And while the nature of that “working through” will of course be a matter of debate—it is hardly a matter of starting with Gen. 1:1, ending with Mal. 4:6, then taking a deep breath before forging ahead—connecting the doctrine of providence to the Hebrew Bible is one way to ensure that such “working through” is genuinely ingredient to the dogmatic task. Ancient Israel will not now be treated as “prepared soil” on which is sown “the seed of Divine fact” (Talbot); its concrete history will stand some chance of being treated as constitutive of the fact with which Christians have to do.28 One will endeavor, that is, to think concentratedly about the decision whereby God “set his heart on you and chose you … the Willie James Jennings, “Reframing the World: Toward an Actual Christian Doctrine of Creation,” IJST 21, no. 4 (2019): 391. My emphasis. 28 Edward S. Talbot, “Preparation in History for Christ,” in Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, ed. Charles Gore (London: John Murray, 1890), 160. I quote Talbot for the simple reason that his way of thinking remains in currency. 27

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fewest of all peoples” (Deut. 7:7); and one will endeavor to reckon, at length, with how it is that God acts to “love you, bless you, and multiply you,” with ancient Israel becoming a “womb” from which there emerges the person of Christ (Deut. 7:14 and 13). On another level, a focus on the Hebrew Bible—and this, as Chapter 2 suggested, is a point glimpsed by Calvin—ensures that the type of biblical material that funds an account of God’s providing is suited to the task at hand. Many of the following pages, in fact, trade on the belief that the books of the Hebrew Bible, especially those that are predominantly narrative in form, supply a richer and firmer basis for thinking about God’s interaction with human beings and nonhuman creatures over long stretches of time than the books of New Testament. Although the later collection of texts is not irrelevant—obviously not: one cannot escape the fact that the God who provides, for ancient Israel and the whole world, just is the God whose Word incarnates and the God whose Spirit is outpoured—one does not find here anything comparable to the historical narratives and poems about God’s relationship with ancient Israel found in the Hebrew Bible.29 The temporal and spatial range of the “good news” might be boundless, but how the crucified and resurrected Christ reigned and reigns over history does not receive sustained attention. In the Hebrew Bible, however, the situation is reversed. Although it may be unclear how the “good news” of God’s election of ancient Israel plays out after the return from exile, and while unclarity intensifies with the “closure” of the Hebrew canon, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70ce, the emergence of various strains of rabbinical Judaism, and the establishment of a modern nation-state that bears the name of Israel, numerous texts describe God’s activity over considerable stretches of time. We encounter God’s “personal and intentional action”30 as God directs multiple courses of events, in various contexts, across successive generations; we are made aware of a divinely plotted Geschichte, with God propelling ancient Israel hither and thither. We reckon, in other words, with exactly the Talk of a “history-like” narrative of course discloses my debt to Hans W. Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). I will have more to say on this front in due course. 30 Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 77. 29

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kind of material needed to think concentratedly about how it is that God realizes God’s purposes in history. Now, of course, much remains open to debate. One must figure out how acts are arranged and how scenes are played and replayed; one must consider the configuration of roles and plots, leading and supporting casts, scenery and landscapes, and the like. One will also need to ask about the adequacy of terms that are now creeping into view (“history” and “narrative,” for instance, attesting to the influence of Hans Frei), and one will need to worry that overinvestment in them risks closing off other avenues for inquiry (say, into the meaning of land, discussions of the law and ritual observance, wisdom literature, etc.). But these issues can be worked out in medias res—and, as with this book, comprise elements of a constructive perspective that waits on critique, challenges, response, and revision. The overall point holds. The Hebrew Bible attempts to follow Israel’s history, all the way from its elusive beginnings to its liberation from enslavement, Moses’s receipt of the law, the gift of land, the differentiation of the Northern Kingdom and Judah, and the trauma and joy of exile and return. And it is in view of exactly this “following” that an account of providence takes wing. One is hereby asked, time and again, to think about the God who reveals himself as one who “rules[s] over all”—a revelation of such force that when David declares that “it is in your hand to make great and to give strength” (1 Chron. 29:12), the “hand” in question cannot be thought otherwise than the hand which propelled ancient Israel from humble beginnings to its monarchal glories. Indeed, precisely because various episodes of this witness do not stand in isolation from one another but are linked and connected to together, one might even hazard the claim that the Hebrew Bible seeks an account of providence from auditors and readers. Ancient confessions of faith, such as those found in Exod. 15:1–21 (the Songs of Moses and Miriam) and Deut. 25:5b–10b (“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor …”), were not sufficient for ancient Israel to make sense of its relationship with the Lord of the covenant. Over a long period, and in light of various kinds of creaturely creativity, perseverance, and preservation, these confessions came to be positioned within a thick weave of texts, with history-like narratives accompanied by lawbooks, prophetic testimonies, wisdom literature, poetry, hymns, etc. That process need not cease. Somewhat akin to the way that credos were an incitement and opportunity for ancient Israel

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to keep thinking, to explore and understand God’s governmental work, so theologians can now continue the process, receiving the entire Hebrew Bible as a comparable incitement and opportunity. We can set about developing a wide-angled account of God’s rule through the prism of a witness that frames the incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit. Aubrey Moore, who made a name for himself by reckoning with Darwin’s theory of evolution and numbers among the contributors to Lux Mundi, makes a comparable point, without falling into the kind of supersessionism suggested by Edward Talbot (another contributor to Lux Mundi, quoted above). Anticipating an idiom that I will soon take up, he writes: “We see in the Old Testament not only the revelation of the Righteousness of God, but the record of the way in which, in spite of waywardness and disobedience, He raised His people to the knowledge of the truth.”31 That “raising,” one might say, needs to be repeated in Christian theological work. It should become part of the process whereby faith understands itself.

Finally, a doctrine of providence that begins with the Hebrew Bible need not end with the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, since every claim in this and the next chapter has as its presupposition a belief in “the divinity of the Word of the Father and his providence and power in all things” (De inc., §1) and a belief that “everyone who works on the earth … terrestrial and bodily things … participates in the Holy Spirit” (De princip., 1.3.4)—here is my “principial Christocentrism,” along with the necessary pneumatological complement—it is important for a doctrine of providence to culminate with direct reference to Christ and the Spirit. Absent such a culmination, one risks suggesting that the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ are not one and the same: an impossibility. (R. Kendall Soulen makes this point with apt force: “If God is not God as he is portrayed in the Scriptures of the Jewish people … then virtually nothing of what the church proclaims is worth bothering with.”32 Likewise Kathryn Tanner, during a discussion of Barth’s Church Dogmatics: “God’s Aubrey Moore, “The Christian Doctrine of God,” in Lux Mundi, 82. R. Kendall Soulen, “Israel and the Church: A Christian Response to Irving Greenberg’s Covenantal Pluralism,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky et  al. (Boulder: Westview, 2000), 167. Among Soulen’s writings, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) exerts a significant influence on this and the next chapter.

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special history with Israel, as it finds its fulfillment in God’s becoming human in Jesus Christ, becomes the model for God’s history with the world generally.”)33 Because providence is a “dispersed notion” that “attaches in different ways to each of the three articles of faith,”34 so my account of the history of God with ancient Israel concludes with an account of God’s Weltregierung that ventures broader claims about God and history at large, by way of an analysis of Rom. 8. The risk of a Christological under-determination of providence, at this point, will then (I hope!) show itself to be coherent with the belief that “all things have been created through and for him … and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17). And there will be the momentum needed to advance the claim, which will dominate this book’s successor, that Christ is patience incarnate. My fourth claim can be dispatched more quickly. It pertains to the dogmatic technologies employed in the next two chapters. Granted that a doctrine of providence should not be coextensive with a philosophy or theology of history, and granted that farreaching assertions about God’s relationship to history at large will emerge only slowly, what concepts ought to be employed when articulating the understanding that is ingredient to faith? How does one go about glossing, gathering, and summarizing the scriptural witness in a precise and interesting manner when thinking about providence? Is there still a place, to sharpen the question, for terms and insights that gained currency in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and were taken up and promoted by Barth and others in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Important here, arguably, is the praeservatio-concursus-gubernatio triplex (the middle term creatively parsed, in Church Dogmatics III/4, in terms of God’s praecursus [preceding], concursus [concurring] and succursus [succeeding]), as well as analyses of contingency, the distinction between divine actio and permissio, discussions of special and general providence, etc.35 Immediately one must say: these distinctions and Kathryn Tanner, “Creation and Providence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 122. 34 Fergusson, The Providence of God, 297. 35 See here Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, rev. and ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: Wakeman Great Reprints, n.d.), 251–80; Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, rev. 3rd edn, trans. Charles A. Hay and Henry E. Jacobs (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1961), 170–94. Barth’s development of these concepts can be found in CD III/3, 58–238. 33

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discussions shouldn’t be cast off as so much scholastic deadweight. Although theologians may have sometimes overestimated the degree to which technical concepts can adequately describe God’s ways and works in history (and, correspondingly, underplayed the need for an account of providence to maintain a degree of vagueness about the “mechanics” of God’s rule), they need not be scorned; they can and should be put to work in a viewpoint that takes its cues from the scriptural witness. And that is exactly what will occur in the following pages. Even as patience serves as a conceptual hub, and even as I attempt to tell the “nuanced story of providence” with recourse to a “plurality of providential forms,” the language of earlier thinkers is used without embarrassment.36 Without embarrassment—but also without a fetishization of the tradition, and with full awareness that these dogmatic technologies, which strike many contemporary readers as over-exacting and cumbersome, are best treated as occasional grace notes, supplementary to the principal melody now being played. For what one might call the thematic profile of this project, for better and for worse, is now firmly established. Alongside talk of God’s patient “letting be” and “letting happen” and the corresponding notion of creatures “rewarding” and “making good” on God’s patience, a somewhat idiosyncratic bundle of terms—blessing, waywardness, longsuffering, steadfastness, God’s “bending” of events, and so on—will support discrete claims about God’s patient, providential work. Although these terms do not suffice for a full accounting of God’s activity, they will carry the weight of a series of contentions, all of which contribute to an accumulative description of who God is and what God does. My fifth claim can be stated even more briefly. In keeping with the standpoint of this project as a whole, these chapters on providence forswear any interest in justifying what is a series of manifestly “realistic” claims about God’s action. At no point, then, do I break off from the dogmatic task and attempt to persuade readers that contentions about when, how, and why God exercises patience can be shown to be “reasonable” or “credible” from a (supposedly) neutral, extra-theological standpoint. My focus is simply to develop a statement about what God really has done in the past, which opens out into a statement about what God really might be doing in the present and in the future; and that focus is set within Fergusson, The Providence of God, 11.

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an unapologetically Christian theological frame. Does this way of proceeding reflect wariness or hostility toward putatively secular modes of philosophical inquiry? Does it dovetail with the belief, specifically, that a late modern/postmodern context demands brashly unapologetic modes of reflection—such unapologeticism (to employ an ugly neologism) often being the function of a slightly panicked sense that liberal democratic norms, interreligious interaction, “secular” reason, doctrinal drift, and the relentless advance of industrial and finance capitalism are inimical to distinctively Christian modes of thought? No. Dispensing with apologetic preliminaries is simply a function of the belief that theological discourse should proceed in a nonfoundationalist key, and that intra- and extra-theological debates over “intelligibility” are best engaged—if they need to be engaged— after materially significant contentions have been advanced. It is a matter of supposing that Christian theologians are entitled to busy themselves with a redescription of what God reveals Godself to have done and is doing, with inquiries into the conditions of possibility for God’s action positioned downstream of those efforts. Even more simply: these chapters are not animated by the question, “can God do that, given the world is how it is?” They are an attempt to make headway on a different query: “Since God has done that, how are we to think about and redescribe God’s providential use, shaping, and ruling of the ‘causal infrastructure’ of creation?”37 How, that is, are we to understand that the God who patiently creates is also the God who patiently provides?

2 Persistent Blessing The events recounted in the immediate aftermath of Genesis’ creation myths are at once bewildering, heartbreaking, and terrifying. Despite the best possible beginning, with God’s elicitation of creaturely agency auguring the best of futures, events quickly take a calamitous turn. In contrast to the creatures who responded enthusiastically and generatively to God’s earlier summonses, a serpent suddenly casts

While my rhetoric recalls Barth, the language of “causal infrastructure” is from Frank G. Kirkpatrick, The Mystery and Agency of God: Divine Being and Action in the World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014).

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doubt on the reliability of God’s words. It’s a soft challenge, but it has devastating import: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Gen. 3:1). The early Tillich’s sense that the “root of sin is the mistrust of God” is perhaps apposite here.38 Are God’s directives really supportive of abundance and flourishing, or might creatures conjure up something better for themselves? While God has brought us this far, could we now create a future on our own terms? This serpent’s query coincides, too, with the disclosure of something like a “propensity to evil,” lurking within those who bear the doubled imago dei and imago mundi—a propensity that Kant was right to deem “inexplicable” and “incomprehensible,” since it stands wholly at odds with God’s primordial generosity and the succeeding creatio cooperativa.39 Horrors follow. The first human beings’ actions do not just estrange them from God; they also herald physical and emotional suffering, patriarchal dominance, alienation from the earth, and, if all that weren’t enough, death (so Gen. 3:14–19). Once humankind is ejected from Eden, the situation deteriorates further. Immediately we hear about familial jealousy, fratricide, deception, and a preference for metalworking and urban life over animal husbandry and semi-nomadic farming. After some breeding, there seems to be an outbreak of (possibly nonconsensual) interspecies sex, initiated by nonhuman “sons of God” with respect to women deemed “fair”—perhaps an indication that, in light of human sin, other creatures have taken note of serpent’s words and decided to strike out on their own (so Gen. 6:1–4).40 At any rate, Paul Tillich, “Das Dämonische: Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte,” in Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit: Schriften zur Geschichtsphilosophie, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1959), 54. It is important, as Brevard S. Childs notes (pace John Milton and countless others), to recognize that the serpent “is not Satan, nor a demon, but simply one of the animals that God had made”; see Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 224. 39 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88–9 (6:43–4). 40 It seems correct to say both that Gen. 1–11 “assigns blame for the evils which accompany civilization to humans, rather than to divine beings or to God” and that Gen. 6:1–4 bears the marks of “an older, mythological worldview” (see David Melvin, “The Gilgamesh Traditions and the Pre-History of Genesis 6:1–4,” PRSt 38, no. 1 [2011]: 30). I am also aware that it is hard to pin down the meaning of “sons of God” in Genesis 6:2 and 6:4 (on which, see Jaap Doedens, The Sons of God in Genesis 6:1–4: Analysis and History of Exegesis [Leiden: Brill, 2019]). The exegetical stretch proposed here, still, seems possible. 38

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faced with a situation in which “the human being, made rational and in the image [of God] … was disappearing, and the work made by God was being obliterated” (De Inc., §6), God does not wait for the situation to worsen. God declares his intention to remove wrongdoers, expunging “from the earth the human beings I have created … people together with animals” (Gen. 6:7). But even as that judgment is tempered with mercy, with Noah’s family and a score of nonhuman creatures spared in advance of God’s establishment of a renewed covenant relationship, there is a swift return to business as usual. Despite renewed appeals for fruitfulness and multiplication (Gen. 9:1 and 9:7), familial infighting resumes, now with drunkenness, spying, and more sexual weirdness added to the mix.41 Small wonder that the pre-ancestral period culminates with group of city-dwellers trying to storm heaven. Small wonder, too, that God’s response is to make confusion a staple of human communication (Gen. 11:1–9): a rebuke that doubles as a damage-limitation strategy. Although I’ve not moved far from the opening chapters of Genesis, the lesson to be learned from these events stands in plain view. Given a biblical witness that does not hesitate to attest to “blamable human vandalism,” disclosive of deep-seated hostility toward God and a perverse desire to undo the shalom of creation “in the beginning,” it is entirely appropriate for theologians to spend time pondering the depth and gravity of sin.42 An expansive and unnerving hamartiology does not bespeak misplaced puritanism, much less a pathological form of self-hatred; it is a legitimate response to the scriptural witness, and one usefully bolstered by insights drawn from historical, social-scientific, and critical discourses. But it is also vital that a doctrine of sin not set the terms for thought when it comes to providence. A theocentric orientation is as important in this locus as any other. Such an orientation, in fact, is exactly what the extended narrative of scripture asks of its

With respect to the weirdness see, inter alia, Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 106– 19; and Ilona N. Rashkow, “Daddy-Dearest and the ‘Invisible Spirit of Wine,’” in Genesis: The Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series), ed. Athalaya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 82–107. 42 Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way it’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 16. Mention of the “gravity” of sin, of course, is an allusion to Anselm; see CDH I.21. 41

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recipients, with the lowlights of creaturely sin viewed in light of a more basic acclamation of God’s actions to establish and nurture ancient Israel. Auditors and readers are consistently called, one might say, to stand before a mighty, unevenly weighted chiaroscuro, with depictions of abject creaturely wickedness offset by focused accounts of what God does, lovingly and graciously, to realize God’s purposes. And it is here that the word “blessing” proves central when trying to understand God’s patient activity. This term attests to God’s disbursement of benefits to ancient Israel, God’s empowerment of ancient Israel, and God’s determination to wait on ancient Israel. It names a pattern of activity, which is also a mode of relationship, that enables a fledgling community to acquire an increasingly self-conscious identity. And, crucially, it draws attention to God’s patience as a matter of persistence— an unflagging determination to empower individuals and families in such a way that ancient Israel gathers, grows, and begins to understand its place in a covenant of grace.

(a) Abram, Sarai, and Lot: Divine persistence and the emergence of Israel The calling of Abram is particularly illuminating in this respect. Marking the point at which the primeval history gives way to the patriarchal/matriarchal (or, better, ancestral) period, a sudden divine demand is followed by a cluster of grand promises: that Israel will emerge as a “great nation”; that Abram will be blessed; that Abram’s name and renown will be amplified; that Abram will himself become a blessing; that creatures’ response to Abram will determine their well-being; that, a bit more obscurely, Abram will eventually mediate God’s blessings to others.43 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 43 While the claim that Abraham serves as a conduit for God to disburse blessings beyond ancient Israel is common in Christian theological reflection, the meaning of Gen. 12:3b is fairly hard to pin down. See R. W. L. Moberly, The Theology of Genesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 141–61; and, more technically, Keith N. Grüneberg, Abraham, Blessing, and the Nations: A Philological and Exegetical Study of Genesis 12:3 in Its Narrative Context (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003).

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I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” And so Abram went, as the Lord told him; and Lot went with him. (Gen. 12:1–4a) Hard on the heels of stories that make the opening chapters of Genesis seem like a fanciful memory, this address amounts to a stunning “nevertheless.” If reading these verses as an occasion in which “the primeval history is invaded by redemptive history” strikes an unnecessarily militaristic tone, G. Ernest Wright is nevertheless correct to discern here a radical kind of new start.44 Abram, Sarai, Lot, and some number of others are released from their established context—attachment to their “country,” their “kindred,” their “father’s house” being a dubious affair, muddled by sin as it “lurks … at the door” (Gen. 4:7)—and set on an entirely different path. They are given, by God, the capacity to start again; they are rendered creatures who, by grace, might set about reshaping the entire course of creaturely history. It is not simply the case, in other words, that God supplies an “opening” into which Abram and Sarai may or may not move. The “land-anticipating history”45 of Israel’s ancestors begins with a divine initiative that brings about creaturely empowerment, with a small group primed to act differently in the new times and spaces that God provides. Nancy Levene may well be right to say that this amounts to a new, “modern” ethos, wherein “kin and clan” no longer rule, for it is “not that no one is your family: it is that everyone might be.”46 But that risks understatement. “And so Abram went, as the Lord told him”: the artlessness of the words ought not to distract us from the profundity of what has occurred, which is revolutionary in the best sense of the word (revolvere: to roll back). There is a gracious “turning” of life in a broken quotidian, such that the possibility

Wright, God Who Acts, 73–4. My emphasis. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 17. 46 Nancy Levene, Powers of Distinction: On Religion and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 100–1. 44 45

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of meaningful, consequential, and valuable creaturely activity, undertaken before and with God, again becomes a live option. Luther’s Lectures on Genesis help in elaborating these claims, and in such a way that the pinched construal of patience found in the Invocavit sermons (considered in Chapter  2) gains a valuable counterpoint. True to form, Luther is quick to affirm God’s “extraordinary example of mercy” (LW 2, 245) in granting Abram the faith needed to head toward Canaan. This mercy is unmerited, derivative of nothing save for God’s decision to express God’s loving kindness. Thankfully so! Although Luther suspects that Abram was an “honorable man” with respect to his “civil virtues” (LW 2, 246), he does not hesitate to declare that Abram lived in a grossly compromised context. Sharing in and acting on the inheritance of the fall, he is adjudged “an idolater and a very great sinner … who worships a God who he does not know” and gives himself over to “sin, death, and damnation” (LW 2, 248 and 247). But God’s calling of Abram also goes hand in hand with a refashioning of his person. It isn’t just a matter of something being brought out of nothing “in the beginning”; it is a targeted application of transformative grace that overmasters sin, ensuring that justification and re-humanization run together, with Abram being “the material that the Divine Majesty seizes through the Word and forms into a new human being” (LW 2, 275).47 Even more: there is here, Luther contends, the promise that God’s blessings will ramify, and that some number of others may be justified and re-humanized. Abram heads up a sequence of events which, in the fullness of time, “overflow[s] to the neighboring nations and peoples” (LW 2, 259). Describing Abram as “material” that is seized by God comports, then, with Luther’s famous account of “passive righteousness.”48 God’s justifying action is the exclusive basis of salvation; the human being cannot contribute, in the slightest, to the righting of her relationship with God. She can only wait on God’s grace, hoping that that waiting, anguished though it may be, is itself a symptom of divine favor. But just as talk of creatio ex nihilo is but On the parallel between creatio ex nihilo and justification by faith, see Johannes Schwanke, “Luther’s Theology of Creation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther, ed. Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and L’ubomír Batka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 201–11, esp. 210. 48 See here, for instance, LW 26, 4–12 and LW 34, 327–38 (esp. 336–7). 47

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one feature of a well-formed doctrine of creation, Luther is plainly aware that talk of passive righteousness is but a starting point for thinking about God’s relationship with human beings. Lest grace be reduced to an act of divine fiat that does no more than alter Abram’s standing before God, Luther moves quickly to consider the ways that justified creatures are enabled, by the Spirit, to respond to God’s command. Thus it is that the “remarkable obedience” of Abram and Sarai amount to a case-study in the “active, difficult, and powerful” outworking of faith, whereby one “apprehends things that are not present and, contrary to reason, regards … them as being present” (LW 2, 251 and 267).49 If the appeal to faith is a bit forced, that need not delay us: the key point is that God’s initiative generates a fitting human response. Moreover—and here is the seam connecting Luther’s account of “passive righteousness” with providence—it is precisely this pairing of divine justification and human activity that enables the future of ancient Israel to burst into view, albeit proleptically, as a counterworld in the context of a fallen creation. God’s providing is not just preservative (although it is at least that, as will become evident); it is an act of care, indexed in God’s justifying and sanctifying purposes, that affords some cluster of creatures the possibility of doing something other than participating in a dispiriting cycle of sinfulness. Or, to use Luther’s own words: inasmuch as “true obedience consists in hearing and following the Word of God,” with the Word and obedience existing as “correlatives” (LW 2, 275), so it is that divine speaking and human heeding enable Abram, Sarai, Lot, and others to set about reshaping the quotidian in which they have been placed, acting in ways that honor God’s graciousness and move history in a genuinely new direction. Although the merits of the “Finnish interpretation” of Luther, which takes Luther’s remarks on God’s indwelling of the believer and our participation in God to approximate “Eastern” views of theosis, need not be debated here, Luther’s treatment of Gen. 12:1–3 certainly discloses the coincidence of the forensic and “effective” dimensions of grace, and shows this coincidence to be important for thinking

Sarai is not quite an afterthought. It is not “merely because of … wifely affection [sic]” that she follows her spouse; she “was aided by the Holy Spirit, who moved her womanly heart” (LW 2, 252).

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about God’s providential guidance of ancient Israel.50 We stand more in the open space of “The Freedom of the Christian” than the brash polemics of De Servo Arbitrio, with cognitive reorientation going hand in hand with new praxis. Abram “believed, that is, appropriated the promise” (LW 2, 266) and “Abram went, as the Lord had told him” (Gen. 12:4a).

Crucially, too, this combination of divine speaking and human heeding does not involve coercion. While God’s words are certainly in the order of a command—something of a bolt from the blue, in fact—there is no suggestion that Abram, Sarai, and Lot are “wielded” by God, reduced to passive instruments that do nothing more than express God’s will. The response they offer to God has its own integrity, meaning, and consequentiality. One finds here, in fact, an intriguing echo of the creatio cooperativa detailed in Gen. 1:1–2:4a: a rebooting of creation, such that the noncompetitive relationship of divine and creaturely activity that obtained “in the beginning” is reprised. And, again, precisely because we have here the (partial!) realization of a utopian counterworld, we also have a striking disruption of history as such. God’s directives foretell a kind of fruitfulness and flourishing that outstrip anything that this family could hope to achieve by itself. And the fact that this trio responds and endorses God’s initiative—a response and endorsement that is itself grace, but no less truly a creaturely act for that—is nothing short of momentous. Command, blessing, and human action run together. So much so that, if “up to this point the church looks like a brook that is flowing along peacefully … now it receives accessions and rushes along with the roar of a real river until, through the marvelous blessing of God, the holy nation expands into a vast ocean and fills the world with its name” (LW 2, 245). God’s gracious and empowering advance, matched with Abram, Sarai, and Lot’s obedient response, foretells the emergence of ancient Israel as God’s covenant partner. How, then, might the idiom of patience connect with and expand Luther’s claims? How might one continue expanding a

The “Finnish” perspective is valuably sketched in Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification, ed. Kirsi Stjerna (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); and Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

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salutary interest in God’s interruptive grace with an account of God’s providential care, internal to which is the empowerment of a family whose journeying builds toward the emergence of ancient Israel as a people and nation? Well, it might be possible to view the blessing of Abram and his family as part and parcel of divine strategy, already in process, to put the world back on track. Talk of an invocation of “the name of the Lord” in Gen. 4:26b, for instance, might be read as a sign that Noah’s exemplarity was not unprecedented. The genealogies of Gen. 5, 10, and 11 might be read similarly: less a customary listing of forebears, more an honor-roll of individuals who bucked the trend of wickedness. Even the ground that opens to receive Abel’s blood and cries out to God that fratricide has occurred might be viewed positively (Gen. 4:10–11).51 Maybe “the wickedness of humankind” (Gen. 6:9 and 5) was already being offset, and to such a degree that while a covenant encompassing “me and you and every living creature of all flesh” (Gen. 9:15) amounts to a fresh start, it ratifies a compact that had always been maintained, in some small, stubborn way, by nonhuman creatures. Divine patience, on this reckoning, would be a subtle, unshowy series of redemptive “nudges,” internal to ancient Israel’s early history, that draw the world toward a different kind of future. The calling of Abram, Sarai, and Lot would be the upshot of these “nudges,” God having orchestrated events in such a way that God could now really get moving. More obviously, however, God’s address impels readers to look forward, and to treat a discrete instance of blessing as the inaugural moment in a divinely guided sequence that culminates in ancient Israel’s receipt of the law and the covenant, ancient Israel’s possession of the land, and ancient Israel’s knowledge of itself as a chosen people. God’s exercise of patience, in other words, is more than an orchestration of historical events. It is a disclosure that God’s “slowness to anger” is already operative in history, despite humankind’s descent into sin, and that God is beginning to disburse God’s “steadfast love” to a group of creatures whose lives will become the foundation of ancient Israel. True, the beginnings

A suggestion made by Mari Joerstad; see again her important work, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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of God’s relationship with ancient Israel are modest, maybe even fragile. While Gen. 12:1–3 promises deliverance in bold, confident tones, the report of the family’s movements that ensue (Gen. 12:4– 9) is prosaic—not just an illustration, arguably, of what Auerbach takes to be the “fraught background” of much biblical prose, but also an indication that God’s empowerment of this family occurs in a familiar and stable quotidian.52 Whether Abram is shell-shocked, doubtful, grudging, delighted, or something else is impossible to ascertain. It is also beside the point; he is hardly a character at this stage of the game. What matters is that he follows God’s direction, exercising the capacity that he has been given and moving through the times and spaces that God opens up. “Abram went, as the Lord told him,” despite his advanced age, and journeyed with his extended family into Canaan, traveling “by stages toward the Negeb” (Gen. 12:4 and 9).53 It is notable, too, that God does not ask for anything other than a shift in locale. We are nowhere near “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5). It is as if God knows, all too well, that the creatures with whom she is dealing need to be treated gingerly. Sensible not to ask for too much. Still, momentum starts to build as God’s blessings materialize, consolidating the relationship between divine command and human response. In light of another divine address, and without obvious prompting, Abram builds two altars (Gen. 12:7 and 8)—a sign, perhaps, that God’s directives are facilitating a degree of spontaneity and invention (which, again, recalls the process of creatio cooperativa). Readers and auditors have a growing sense that confusion and wickedness are not the whole story, east of Eden. There is the possibility of living, by grace, in ways that do not test God’s patience; there is the possibility of free and obedient action, with the time and space of God’s patience, that accords with God’s directives. It is not the case, of course, that this rewarding of God’s blessing renders Abram and Sarai paragons of virtue. Their treatment of Hagar shows that not to be the case. It

See, of course, Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 53 The realism of the itinerary is striking. See Ernest Axel Kaufman, “Der Umfang des verheissen Landes nach dem Ersten Testament,” Bible und Kirche 55 (2000): 152–5. 52

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initially seems, too, that God compounds Hagar’s predicament, for after her escape she is directed back to her enslavers and faces the prospect of further mistreatment. With that said, we should not treat the advice given to Hagar by the “angel of the Lord” (Gen. 16:7) as an endorsement of Abram’s and Sarai’s conduct (nor, for that matter, as anything like a legitimization of enslavement). God accords Hagar the time, space, and opportunity to name God; and God offers no rebuke when Hagar rewards God’s patience, naming God on her own terms (so Gen. 16:13a). There is a broader reward for Hagar, too: eventually, her family expands and flourishes through Ishmael. Divine patience, it seems, enables multiple creatures to make a way out of no way.54

Granted that Abram and his entourage begin to reward God’s patience, how do events unfold? Although talk of the “particularism of election” is not inapt at this juncture, I would draw especial attention to the persistence of divine blessings—this being a transposition of Julian’s vivid sense of God’s steady application of grace.55 While God’s address to Abram and his family is an isolable incident, it is not a one-time occurrence: it opens out into a steady application of divine pressure, a disbursement of favor that has as its telos ancient Israel as a discrete sociopolitical entity.56 Sometimes this pressure is sufficient to distract sinful individuals from doing anything other than “keep on keeping on,” as with Gen. 13, when a potentially troublesome dispute between Abram and Lot fizzles out, owing to some de-escalatory words from Abram, and is followed by a gift of land and a reminder that God gives creatures time and space to do as we will: “Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you” (Gen. 13:17). More often,

I am here working along lines laid down by Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993). The final sentence of this excursus pays homage to Monica A. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008). 55 Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. John H. Marks, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), 154. 56 Brevard Childs puts it nicely: “The patriarchal stories have been consistently edited in such a way as to point to the future. In spite of a complex development within the tradition of the promise to the patriarchs … the continuing thread which ties together the material is the promise of a posterity and a land. Clearly Genesis was conceived of by the final redactor as the introduction to the story of Israel which begins in Exodus.” See Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 130. 54

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though, persistence is a matter of blessings multiplied by blessings, powering an asymptotic process of growth and increase. Recall Gen. 17: God renames Abram and Sarai, overlaying a new start upon their new start with detailed covenantal stipulations; God provides a concrete down-payment with respect to their ancestry with the birth of Isaac; and God extends God’s favor to Ishmael and his descendants. Think, too, of Gen. 22, when God reassures Abraham of “offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore” (Gen. 22:17). Patience as persistence, one might say, is pattern of divine action that is akin to an unflagging dynamo. It is a matter of God getting what God wants, slowly but surely. It is a matter of God establishing specific trajectories in history, driving events in this or that direction, empowering this and that pattern of creaturely activity. And the payoff stands in plain view: the unlikely reality of ancient Israel becoming more than a fortunate and favored people; the possibility that divine patience will win out in the end. One sees something of this at the end of the book of Genesis. On his deathbed, Jacob assembles his children and waxes confident about “what will happen to you in days to come” (Gen. 49:1). If what follows is not always good news, the slow burn of God’s providing has now reached such a pitch that Jacob speaks about “the God of your father, who will help you … the Almighty who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, the blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb” (Gen. 49:25). God is no longer simply obeyed; God is known—the word is not too strong—as the creator-savior who is in the business of sustaining and refining a covenant partner in the context of history. It is as if the micro-narrative of Gen. 12:1–3 comes to be replayed and extended, in diverse ways, with Israel becoming ever more aware of what it means to depend on God’s persistence and patience and ever more equipped, by grace, to respond to God’s directives. But not, thankfully, without awareness that everything turns on God’s favor. Jacob’s frank declaration, intercalated at a curious, almost random, moment is telling: “I wait for your salvation, O Lord” (Gen. 49:18). A profound truth, tersely voiced: as ancient Israel waits on God’s favor, it cannot—rather, should not—chart its own course. God’s patient blessings, persistent though they be, demand a human patience that will not rush ahead, that will proceed at a pace that is set by God alone.

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“God rewardeth man of the patience that he hath in abiding (awaiting) Goddes wille over the time of his living … unknowing of his time of passing” (Rev. 64). In many chapters of Genesis, there is precious little “abiding” and “awaiting,” not least when Joseph’s brothers fall victim to jealousy and hatred and conspire against him. But God persists with God’s covenantal project anyway, in both grand and subtle ways. And does not Joseph artfully reveal the right kind of posture, in face of his brothers’ attempts to “get ahead” of God’s disbursement of blessings? “Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘Come closer to me.’ And they came closer. He said ‘I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life … God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors’” (Gen. 45:4–8).

(b) Precedence without domination; the empowerment of ancient Israel; divine purposiveness The disbursement of blessings in Gen. 12:1–4a does not, of course, stand for the whole. Much more needs to be said about God’s patient providing. Even so, the previous subsection encourages and supports some broader claims about God’s action in history. It is important to begin by underscoring that God’s gracious activity precedes sinful creatures. While I have focused on persistence in blessings, God’s activity can of course be conceptualized variously, and in ways that mesh, in a rough-and-ready way, with the constructive perspective under development: a targeted application of healing love, a manifestation of God’s basic desire to liberate, a restoration of “nature,” etc. But no matter the conceptuality employed, a basic dogmatic point holds fast: it is impossible for fallen creatures to act in accordance with God’s directives, save for a discrete operation of divine favor. Or, to make the point more positively: only a merciful, gracious interruption of creaturely life enables sinful creatures to conduct themselves aright, and thus to participate in God’s sovereign governance of events. “Interruption”: in what sense? Obviously, the term does not license any disregard for God’s general upholding of creaturely life. God never abandons God’s creatures; God is always “watchful, effective, active … engaged in ceaseless activity” (Inst. I.16.iii). Were it not for God’s preservative activity, we would not be in any conceivable sense, and creaturely life would end before

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it began. “Interruption” is just a shorthand way to note that God’s preservative work is accompanied by (i) God’s making surprising use of some part of the quotidian—say, through a communiqué that a creature hears, in some fashion, or a bush that suddenly appears, in a way, to be engulfed in flames—thereby (ii) disclosing to some subset of creatures something of who God is and what God intends, and (iii) opening up times and spaces that are qualitatively different from anything creatures could conjure for themselves, such that history is moved in the direction that God intends. Less noticed, but equally important, is the fact that the “new starts” that God provides are married to (iv) God’s gracious sponsorship of a particular historical trajectory, such that some creature, group, or assemblage is empowered to move toward and into the times and spaces that God opens, and enabled to inhabit purposefully those times and spaces, so as to ensure the realization of some number of divine objectives. Such sponsorship is particularly germane to understanding patience as a matter of divine persistence. It points to a steady, directional pressure, exercised upon a discrete patch of space and time, whereby God elicits and directs creaturely actions that realize God’s purposes. And if such persistence cannot be tracked assuredly outside the pages of scripture, knowledge that it does occur engenders the hope that the history-shaping pressure of grace continues apace, shaping the lives of God’s creatures. God’s patience, one might say, does more than keep the world ticking over. And God’s patience, contra Calvin, need not be consistently tied to God’s “moderation” and mildness in face of ever-new iterations of sinful conduct. The witness of Gen. 12:1–4a, replayed across the length and breadth of the Hebrew Bible, amounts to an exercise of divine patience that begins as an interruptive gift and opens out into a discrete and lifegiving historical trajectory. And it fires the hope that creatures can and will be wrenched out of the mess we have made of ourselves, as God drives the world forward, away from fallenness and toward a future in which blessings circulate unimpeded. A pair of qualifications help to elaborate this claim. On one level, it is important to quash even the slightest suggestion that God’s merciful interruption of creaturely affairs is contingent on or boosted by a particular kind of creaturely conduct. It is not wrong to say that God engenders creaturely action that is distinguished by its own integrity, meaning, and consequentiality. It is not wrong to say that creaturely action, elicited and shaped by grace and thus inassimilable

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to a history of sin, can be described in terms of the workings of a “good will.” And it is not wrong to toy with the possibility that God’s exercise of patience might inject a degree of indeterminacy and unpredictability into the relationship between God and world. Each contention lays claim to a rightful place in reflection, and each lends useful texture to the idea of God’s patient providing. The first points out the basic continuity between the creatio cooperativa that God enables in Gen. 1 and the concursus ingredient to God’s providential rule; the second impedes an overwrought hamartiology, which amplifies a sense of sin to the point at which affirmations of the goodness of engraced creatures, who make good on God’s patience, start to ring hollow; the third, while hard to describe, might help one to disaggregate a doctrine of providence from mechanistic forms of determinism, with the suggestion that God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” have dimensions that do not fit with some modern suppositions. But positive descriptions of creaturely action must always be situated downstream of the insistence that God, and God alone, is the Subject who sustains the world in its fallenness, disrupts the world in its fallenness, and liberates and supports creatures to act against fallenness. Gen. 12:1–4a, alongside numerous other passages, is ample warrant for a characteristically Barthian claim: “Always and everywhere when the creature works, God is there as the One who has already loved it, who has already undertaken to save and glorify it, who in this sense and to this end has already worked even before the creature itself began to work, even before the conditions and pre-conditions and pre-pre-conditions of its working were laid down” (CD III/3, 119). And whenever creaturely actions deviate from the monotonous drumbeat of sinfulness, theologians do well to recall something of Jacob’s amazement: “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” (Gen. 28:16). It is always apt to flinch in face of more-or-less sophisticated forms of Pelagianism, late medieval synergism, Arminianism, etc., and to focus attention on what is sometimes called the “irresistibility” of grace. Apply the rule ruthlessly: ascribe full credit to God, so that anything and everything of positive value is understood in terms of God’s graciousness and favor. Do not imagine that God’s patience is anything less than a dimension of God’s activity, mercifully imposed upon a world that has lost its bearings. On another level, it is important to recognize that an emphasis on God’s sovereign preceding need not—or, more precisely, should not—

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lend support to ideologies of domination: complexes of beliefs that arise from and help to legitimize, reproduce, and obscure exploitative configurations of power, thus securing and consolidating durable advantages (economic, sexual, ecological, religious, whatever) for some group at the expense of others.57 Such ideologies, of course, are enduring aspects of human life. And, in ways that are exceedingly hard to ignore, providence has often become entangled with these ideologies. In both its dogmatic and vernacular iterations, it has made diverse unjust social arrangements religiously respectable: the priority of men over women, the presumption that the enslaved must “obey” their enslavers, the widespread degradation of indigenous communities and persons of color, the “right” of human beings to exploit other-than-human creatures, etc.58 Patience, troublingly, often comes to acquire a supporting role, as Chapter 3 noted. Those on the lower rungs of the sociocultural ladder are called to accept their lot in life, and are told that their patient acquiescence, not impatient resistance, honors God’s ordering of creaturely affairs. But an elective affinity between doctrines of providence that affirm divine precedence and ideologies of domination is not inevitable. It is possible to describe this precedence, and by extension God’s This overloaded definition aims to stand in continuity with a tradition of thought that runs from Ludwig Feuerbach to Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Louis Althusser, and others. (For a lucid explication of that tradition, see David Leopold, “Marxism and Ideology: From Marx to Althusser,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freedman, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 20–37). It has particular proximity to Louis Althusser’s claim that in “a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class” (For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster [London: Verso, 2005], 198 and 202), even granted my belief that the economistic drift of classical Marxism must be enlarged with an awareness of interlocking axes of oppression (on which see, of course, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd edn [London: Verso, 2001]). 58 There are a number of important statements about the entanglement of providence with worrying social, political, and ecclesial dynamics. Particularly notable are Anna Case-Winters, God’s Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville: WJKP,  1990); James Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), esp.  150–206; and Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, trans. Robert R. Barr (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004). I have also learned much from Anne Carr’s work; see esp. “‘Not a Sparrow Falls’: On Providence and Responsibility in History,” PCTSA 44 (1989): 19–38, esp.  35–8; and idem, “Providence, Power, and the Holy Spirit,” Hor. 29, no. 1 (2002): 80–93. 57

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patient Weltregierung, in ways that support what Kathryn Tanner has called “self-critical cultures,” alert to and disruptive of unjust ideologies and conventions.59 The all-important starting point is the conviction that an “infinite qualitative difference” obtains between God and world. One cannot argue for such a difference; one can only deem it ingredient to an understanding of faith centered on God’s self-revelation. Even so, this very conviction immediately challenges those who imagine that God and world could be positioned as relative points on a shared continuum of being—one on which any number of social, sexual, and racial hierarchies might be plotted, with God’s primacy justifying some (putatively) self-evident, hierarchical structuring of creaturely life in the here-and-now. Why? Because the very idea of an infinite qualitative difference casts doubts on modes of analogical reasoning that treat God’s “supremacy” as the basis for diverse forms of creaturely supremacy, with some subset of creatures presuming itself equipped and entitled to represent God in the world. God, rightly understood, does not relate to the world as a superior to an inferior. God relates to the world as a creator, sustainer, and redeemer—these being nontransferable “roles” that cannot be mapped on to any kind of creaturely relationship. Indeed, viewing divine transcendence as the ground of God’s relationship to the world serves to complicate the very idea of one creature having supremacy over another. If God is no longer to be treated as the first link in a chain that passes from higher to lower—or, to borrow from Leonardo Boff, as “the vertex of a pyramid of being”60—what justifies any hierarchy, beyond the fact that it is treated as “given” by some number of creatures? The “natural” order of things, all of a sudden, is shown to be time-bound, relative, non-necessary. To be sure, one can and must still say that God and world stand in an asymmetrical relationship. Were it not for God, the world would not exist; were it not for God, history would not move at the tempo that it does; were it not for God, salvation would be an illusion. Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 35 and passim. Much in the following paragraphs demonstrate my indebtedness to this text. 60 Leonardo Boff, “Trinity,” in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), 390. 59

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And it is for exactly this reason that an affirmation of transcendence may well be accompanied by uses of language that will quickly be misunderstood. There are no innocent words, much less surefire ways to prevent the weaponization of doctrine; the asymmetrical relationship of God and world can easily be described carelessly. But when an affirmation of the “infinite qualitative difference” is maintained, God’s sovereign preceding can be figured in ways that resist, or at least might serve to check, a sanctification of domination. Because the difference that obtains between God and world is of a different order to each and every instance of difference immanent to the world, this difference does not legitimize extant hierarchies within the world. It puts them into question. With this general point in play, it becomes easier to see that talk of God’s sovereign preceding and, more specifically, talk of God’s patient governance of historical affairs needn’t be viewed with suspicion. God’s patient Weltregierung is not a function of God’s needing to consolidate God’s position over subordinates, some of whom hope to steal a march on God’s position at the top of a chain of being. There is also no sense in which God must assert or prove Godself, nor justification for thinking that creatures could honor God through the performance of dominative relationships. One can say, rather, that God’s sovereign preceding is one dimension of providential work whose character is made evident, in an exemplary way, in Gen. 12:1–4a; one can say that God’s all-powerful patience confers dignity and goodness upon creatures, elicits salutary creaturely activity, and opens up new times and spaces for creaturely flourishing. Providence, by these lights, is not a matter of God imperiously disposing affairs; it is about God empowering creatures to act in ways that begin to restore the integrity of God’s world. Indeed, given this perspective, are not many ideologies of domination already on the way to being exposed as all-too-human affairs? Might not an acclamation of God’s patient providing, in its holy precedence, go some way to “foster[ing] … critical distance” so that “social orders cannot claim an unquestionable inevitability”?61 I will limit myself to two further points, both of which are ingredient to the preceding paragraphs. First, as is often noted, while “providence” is derived from πρόνοια,

Tanner, Politics of God, 67.

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it is often connected with the translation of a portion of Gen. 22:8 in the Vulgate: Deus providebit. This phrase helpfully reminds us that providence is not about God’s “control” of the world but God’s care for the world, as “particular things are governed and ruled by being established in the order of goodness” (CT, §123). Or, as Barth puts it: providence refers to God’s action to “cause … [creation] to share in His own glory … by the fact that it may serve Him in His immediate presence and under His immediate guardianship and direction, thus fulfilling its own meaning and purpose, having its own honour and existing to its own joy” (CD III/3, 12–13). Wait: “serve” God, being subordinate to God’s “guardianship and direction”? Doesn’t that return us to the possibility that the logics of providence and domination run together? This brings a second point into view. Christian theologians aptly suppose that we are able to describe the asymmetrical relationship between God and world without being controlled by all-too-human visions of service, guardianship, and direction. Not because we think that we are able suspend or overcome our sinfulness (we can’t), nor because we think that language is ever devoid of questionable connotations (it isn’t), nor because the construal of sovereign preceding that I have sketched stymies each and every endorsement of problematic creaturely hierarchy (it doesn’t). The supposition proceeds from the hope that human language might not be entirely defined by sinfulness, and that some discursive formations might be derivative of and governed by God’s justifying and sanctifying actions. That, in fact, is the hope which underwrites the entirety of the Church Dogmatics: a dogmatic statement that aspires to do something other than reprise all-too-human, “religious” motivations. Even if that aspiration is not realized consistently, it is not invalidated on point of principle. Although a theology which claims to proceed von Gott aus is just as susceptible to the predations of “religion” as any other, it trades on the possibility and hope—no more than that—that it aptly describes God’s ways and works.

A second claim, already partially in view, can now be made. As God persists in the disbursement of blessings, God elicits modes of creaturely activity and relationship that possess their own integrity, meaningfulness, and consequentiality, and recall something of the richness of creation in its unfallen state. Divine patience, in  the context of God’s providing, ennobles creatures in such a way that their capacity to act rightly, with and for God, and with and for one another, is reactivated. Now a recollection of life “in the beginning,” of course, does not mean restoration. After the fall, none of our actions are very good. And it is painfully clear that God’s blessings are not evenly distributed, and that the “extension” of God’s patience is not of a kind that transforms each and every patch of creation. Some stretches of creaturely existence are in fact

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so sin-ridden that it is nearly impossible to perceive anything of the goodness that Christians believe to be ingredient to creation. Recollection, here, is more a matter of creatures realizing God’s directives, such that something of the utopian counterworld of Gen. 1–3 gains a foothold in history. As divine summonses are met with conduct that corresponds, partially, to God’s intentions, divine patience pays off. Creatures come again to act with and for God, and history—or, more precisely, some delimited stretch of time and space—tilts in a God-ward direction. It is for this reason, in fact, that God’s blessings ramify across time and space. The interruptive act of mercy that reorients creatures, once again, is not the whole story; it goes hand in hand with a steady, directional divine pressure—one that brings about a striking reshaping of history. On the one side, we are returned to the idea of patience as divine persistence, with God initiating, sponsoring, and guiding a historical trajectory. An initial act of favor stands at the head of a complex series of events that acquire their own momentum, thus disclosing something of God’s broader purposes. Although we easily fall back into our old ways, God remains ever willing to gift and regift blessings, holding a counterworld to sin in view, and God ensures that the pressure that God exerts in the quotidian suffices to ensure the achievement of God’s goals. Sin is always in the process of being outmatched—so much so that an account of providence, while it will certainly tarry with moments of defeat and despair, often anticipates an acclamation of redemption. On the other side, divine patience as persistence engenders creaturely perseverance. The “recollection” of creation in its unfallen state gains surprising (if uneven) traction; divine and creaturely agency seem, at least on some occasions, to converge in ways that ever more recall the exuberant events of Gen. 1:1–2:4a. Thus it is, to move to later parts of the Pentateuch, that once Jacob/Israel has received the promise already given to Abraham (“God said to him, ‘I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall spring from you’” [Gen. 35:11]), the text quickly identifies the twelve sons of Jacob, and, after an interpolation regarding Esau’s descendants, sets about describing their impact on the world. Thus it is that the opening of the Song of Moses, which gathers the witness of human and nonhuman creatures to rhapsodize God’s saving work, recalls something of the initial process of creatio cooperativa, now with

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human and nonhuman creatures together lauding God: “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth. / May my teaching drop like the rain, my speech condense like the dew; / like gentle rain on grass, like showers on new growth. For I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God!” (Deut. 32:1–3). Upon encountering talk of “fruitfulness” and “multiplication” in relation to God’s promises, it is of course apt to think of God’s promise of progeny to ancient Israel— a promise strikingly fulfilled, given the apparent infertility of several women—and to take note of the largely positive account of childbearing in the Hebrew Bible.62 Luther engages this issue with characteristic gusto: he takes the blessing conferred on Noah in Gen. 9 as an event which legitimizes heterosexual marriage, “for through His Word and command God joins the male with the female, and that for the definite purpose of filling the earth with human beings” (LW 2, 131). But a broader reading is obviously possible. “Be fruitful and multiply” is reasonably read as a widening range of possibilities for action, opened up for creatures who are given, by grace, the opportunity to do something other than reinforce cycles of sinfulness. The patience of God’s blessings, one might say, enables creatures to attend to their own distinctiveness, and to articulate and extend that distinctiveness in ways that accord with God’s directions. Barth sharpens the point with a nod to his account of patience: “The very fact that God rules as Creator means that in their own way, and at their own time and place, all things are allowed to be, and live, and work, and occupy their own sphere, and exercise their own effect upon the environment, and fulfil the circle of their own destiny” (CD III/3, 148). The patience of God’s blessings, one might add, is a dimension of God’s providing wherein God draws creatures out of themselves. It is an exercise of divine patience wherein God “waits on” us, such that ever-more dramatic instances of “letting be” and “letting happen” combine with creatures working, with God, to fill up the world in ever-new ways.

Third, one must say that God’s disbursement of blessings with respect to ancient Israel raises the possibility of a patience that wins out in the end, effecting a radical, all-encompassing transformation of all things. Should this transformation come to pass, God’s relationship with the world will no longer be a matter of God

Largely positive, but hardly monochromatic. See Candida R. Moss and Joel Baden, Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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managing and contesting the blight of sin. It will be replaced with God’s unmitigated delight in the patient act of “letting be” and “letting happen,” a glorious beholding of the faithful activity of creatures who participate in a “new heavens and a new earth,” in which “the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Isa. 65:17). To consider dogmatically this phase of creaturely life, of course, is astoundingly difficult, perhaps more so than thinking about the utopian counterworld of Gen. 1:1–2:4a. One is asked to imagine a condition in which creatures are no longer guided by sin, and in which those same creatures gladly enact and sustain new identities, before God and with one another, while remaining cognizant of who they are and whence they have come. (For while “the former things” might not be “remembered” in the sense of relived, re-experienced, and re-suffered, those things cannot be nullified, ripped from the pages of history—for were that the case, the identity of the saved would not be continuous with the identity of those who have sinned. Yet, at the same time, the “former things” are somehow overcome in the context of a new heaven and new earth.) For my purposes, the fact that ancient Israel could receive and attest to this kind of future is crucial, for it shows the efficacy of God’s patient and persistent blessings. There is an awareness, that is, that God’s patience will not flag or cease (contra Tertullian and Cyprian), that God’s patience will ultimately prevail. God’s decision to make Godself available to ancient Israel’s ancestors, to give freely of God’s name and presence, to grant Israel new land, law, and countless prophetic voices instead foretells a redeemed cosmos, a state of affairs in which God does not only “ordain … and execute” creatures’ “fulfilment in fellowship with himself,” but perfects that fellowship.63 So while God will not stop “working” at the end, there will be nothing—literally nothing—left for God to achieve. God’s patience will be the patience of a Subject who, having waited long for her creatures, waits no longer. Our patience, concomitantly, will be the patience of creatures who wait on and joyously respond to God. Divine blessing and creaturely bliss will coincide.

John Webster, “On the Theology of Providence,” in The Providence of God, ed. Francesca Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 158.

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“That city will be redeemed from all evil and filled with every good thing; constant in its enjoyment of the happiness of eternal rejoicing; forgetting offenses and forgetting punishments. Yet it will not forget its own redemption, nor will it be ungrateful to its Redeemer … it will remember even its past evils, even while entirely forgetting the sensory experience of them … [T]he seventh day will be our Sabbath, whose end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, as an eighth and eternal day, consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and prefiguring the eternal rest not only of the Spirit, but of the body also. There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold what will be, in the end to which there shall be no end!” (Civ. Dei XXII.30)

3 Creaturely Waywardness (a) Preamble Thus far, my constructive proposal has struck a very positive tone. The previous chapter’s analysis of Gen. 1:1–2:4a described a divine Subject whose creative act ensures that “the underlying orientation of nature” has “goodness written into its being”—an orientation and goodness manifested when nonhuman creatures, animated and directed by God’s empowering grace, contribute to the formation of the world and collaborate with God to bring about the emergence of humankind.64 (The fact that this creation saga does not describe a historical reality, again, does not diminish its ontological import; the saga still discloses the basic structures and dynamics of our world). The preceding section of this chapter expanded the view with respect to providence as God’s Weltregierung, reckoning with God’s efforts to redirect the course of history. Despite the world being at odds with God, blessings persist. And God’s patient disbursement of blessings seems to pay off: there emerge creditable patterns of creaturely action within the scriptural witness to the life and times of ancient Israel. Although there is no miraculous restoration of life “in the beginning,” there arise a people that is (somewhat) aware of God’s favor and (fitfully) committed to rewarding God’s exercise of patience. On the assumption that the biblical witness to ancient Israel Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus Confessor, trans. Brian E. Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003), 147.

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can fund a broader statement about God’s providing, then, there are grounds for hope about God’s governance of history at large. Granted that it is tempting to continue focusing on God’s ways and works, however, more needs to be said about sin and its effects. The next two sections meet that obligation. In this section, I use the term waywardness to describe the ways that creatures contest God’s providential work, reiterating their estrangement from God and despoiling stretches of time and space. While my focus is initially trained on a particular chapter in Genesis, the view soon broadens to include general remarks about God’s non-impeditio peccati (God’s patience as the nonprevention of sin), as well as remarks about creaturely lament and protest in face of sin and suffering, which I frame in terms of God’s non-impeditio accusationis (God’s patience as the nonprevention of accusation). The subsequent section uses the term longsuffering to think further about sin and the distortions of creaturely life that ensue. Drawing on Barth and Julian of Norwich, I argue for a modest and tentative form of theopaschism: God electing to bear the costs of creaturely waywardness in God’s own life, with God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” being the condition of creatures’ rebellion against God and the despoliation of history, and God’s opting to undergo the slow pace at which God achieves God’s providential and redemptive purposes. When this chapter draws to a close, then, a number of discrete concerns stand in close juxtaposition, each grounded in a Christian reception of the scriptural witness to God’s relationship with ancient Israel, and each supporting a fuller statement about the patience of God qua provider. An account of God’s persistence in blessings (section  2) goes hand in hand with an account of creatures’ fall into sinfulness (section 3), and an account of creaturely sinfulness is paired with a series of claims about God’s willingness to grieve over a world marked by cruelty, violence, and meaninglessness (section 4). What God does, patiently, and what we do, sinfully, go hand in hand with a statement about the longsuffering of the God who provides. Despite the bleakness of the following sections, I urge readers not to read them as emblematic of a Reformed brand of “pessimism.” It should go without saying, but I will say it anyway: the very fact that Christian theology takes its bearings from God’s gracious revelation of Godself requires that astonishment, delight, gratitude, and confidence form a steady backbeat to each and every attempt to understand belief. At the end of the day, we are always dealing with good news. My concern in what follows

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is simply to ensure that astonishment, delight, gratitude, and confidence collide with an appropriately vivid sense of the corruption, cruelty, and wastefulness of fallen life. The following two sections are thus best read as a temporary descensus, subsequent to a statement about God’s providential blessings and preliminary to a statement that complements talk of divine blessings with an account of God’s steadfastness and God’s prevailing. This descensus, then, sandwiched as it is within a broader statement about the merciful action of the God of ancient Israel, who is of course the God of Christ and his Spirit, fits with what Ian McFarland identifies as the “most basic theological function of the doctrine of sin,” which is “to magnify divine grace.”65

A hard truth with which to open proceedings: despite God’s disbursement of blessings, singularly evidenced in God’s election and guidance of ancient Israel, creatures try God’s patience. Opposing our primordial determination as those who bear the imago dei and imago mundi, human beings in particular refuse to inhabit appropriately the diverse times and spaces that God provides, adopting dispositions and pursuing patterns of activity that bespeak ignorance of and contempt for God and God’s purposes. And it does not much matter whether this opposition and refusal are viewed in terms of our repeatedly spurning God’s advances or being gripped, from the get-go, by hostility toward God and God’s creatures. There is no need for an either/or here, only a both-and: while peccatum actuale (actual sin) can be said to have peccatum originale (original sin) as its ground, original sin is always being confirmed, (re)established, and consolidated by actual instances of sin. It also does not really matter how one imagines that the “first” sin, committed in the context of the utopian counterworld of Gen. 2:4b–3:24, relates to the condition and actions of later sinners. There is no historical trajectory that passes from “then” to “now,” nor any urgent reason to pinpoint the exact character of the “first” sin (pride, sloth, falsehood, disobedience, faithlessness, etc.); there is only an awareness that life “then” exposes life “now” as wildly divergent from God’s intentions. The bottom line always remains the same. Each and every one of us is caught up in a radical defection from God’s purposes, and each and every one of us contributes to a tangled web of wrongdoing. And the consistency, Ian McFarland, “The Fall and Sin,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 156. Emphases in the original. 65

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doggedness, and thoroughness of our assault on God’s patience are astounding. We never learn, and we never let up. We are hell-bent on rebellion, expressed through various kinds of self-aggrandizement, self-abnegation, cruelty, and carelessness; consistently, we dispose ourselves as creatures who oppose God and who seek to frustrate God’s purposes. Still worse, none other than we ourselves are to blame. Schleiermacher is on-target: “whatever alienation from God is experienced in the conditions of our lives, we are conscious of it as an act originating in ourselves and name it sin; but whatever fellowship we have with God, resting upon a communication from the redeemer, we name as grace” (Gl. §63 [rev.]). If this opposition of credit and culpability is disquietingly stark (and granted, too, that the nature of the opposition and the degree of disquiet expressed in the Glaubenslehre is a matter for debate),66 it is nevertheless an honest accounting of our condition. Only creatures are responsible for our alienation from God. While we are surrounded by a host of God-defying systems and patterns of conduct, we cannot outsource our responsibility for the mess we make of our relationship with God and the world in which we live; there are only patterns of sinfulness that we inherit, endorse, realize, refigure, and sustain. Of course, moving back to the other pole of Schleiermacher’s antithesis, our inexcusability and our failings do not prompt God to withdraw God’s favor. In face of wrongdoing, God just keeps on with the business of blessing, enlisting particular creatures for this and that purpose, always with an eye to steering history in salutary directions. Indeed, what one might initially take to be an uneven conferral of blessings—for there is no doubt that the scriptural witness foregrounds God’s special relationship with ancient Israel in ways that seem, at first blush, acutely disadvantageous for other families, groups, nations, and peoples—such unevenness is not a matter of capriciousness, nor a matter of God having a limited Many worry that the Glaubenslehre underrates the extent and impact of sin, and it forms an important element in the later Barth’s criticism of his predecessor (see CD III/3, 332–4). More recently, see Walter Wyman, “Sin and Redemption,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 129–50; and David R. Nelson, What’s Wrong with Sin? Sin in Individual and Social Perspective from Schleiermacher to Theologies of Liberation (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 15–48. An important counterpoint to such views has recently been offered by Daniel J. Pedersen, Schleiermacher’s Theology of Sin and Nature (London: Routledge, 2020). 66

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quantity of blessings to dole out. It is simply a matter of a sagacious, if not easily scrutable, governmental strategy, as God “hopes to draw [God’s children] to himself” (De pat. 2:3) in a well-paced, orderly fashion. Moreover, it is precisely the operations of divine grace that ensure that human conduct is not monochromatically sinful, and that sin has less impact than might otherwise be the case. While we devastate the world, and while the effects of that devastation are often painfully maldistributed, we cannot knock God off course, nor can we render God’s blessings ineffective. Still, to twist the dialectical screw once again, none of that invalidates the fact that creatures make considerable headway in our efforts to compound our alienation from God and to distort God’s world. We plot courses of action that spurn God’s blessings and warp the times and spaces in which we exist. We do not, in fact, simply test God’s patience. We abuse it. In the context of a theological statement centered on patience, how exactly does talk of waywardness help one parse and develop these claims? A provisional definition of the term, keyed to an account of God’s patient providing, might run thus: (i) a state of abject lostness and disorientation, specific to a particular tract of space and time, that is contrary to God’s determination of our lives and disclosive of deep-set hostility toward God and God’s exercise of patience, such that (ii) creatures disregard and disobey God’s directives, misusing God’s empowering initiative in ways that retard God’s purposes in history, thereby effecting (iii) the despoliation and disfigurement of creation, manifest often in various kinds of injustice and suffering. Although an archaism, the term “froward,” used twenty-four times in the KJV, has a proximate range of meaning.67 An antonym of “toward” (in the sense of “untoward”), it describes individual or communal actions wherein creatures move away

OED online, s.v. “froward, adj., adv., and prep,” accessed June 4, 2019 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/75006?isAdvanced=fals e&result=1&rskey=N4ul54&. It is noteworthy that “froward” was employed for misogynistic ends around the time in which the KJV was being formed, although the degree to which this employment shaped decisions made by translators is unknown to me (see, infamously, Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women [London: George Purslowe, 1615]). Although I hope to neutralize them, I would also grant that “wayward” has its share of questionable connotations, some of which receive unhappy support from scripture itself (talk of “wayward women,” for instance, being a frequent gloss on Prov. 5 and 7).

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from God and refuse to know God, disregard that which God commends as fitting, and end up misshaping and corrupting the world. So (i) God declares Israel “a froward generation, children in whom is no faith” (Deut. 32:20); while (ii) ancient Israel’s elders bemoan those “who leave the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness; who rejoice to do evil, and delight in the forwardness of the wicked; whose ways are crooked, and they froward in their paths” (Prov. 2:13–15); since (iii) “a froward man soweth strife” (Prov. 16:28).

A good deal of biblical material could add flesh to these formal bones. Gerhard von Rad’s claim that the “great hamartiology in Gen. III–XI” attests to the manner “in which sin broke in and spread like an avalanche” only just borders on hyperbole; likewise, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s description of the Pentateuch as “a long painful record of war, corruption, rapine, and lust.”68 Certainly the prophetic writings, too, compel us to reckon with the ways that disorientation and hostility toward God, disregard for God’s directives, and the baneful consequences of sin run together. (i), (ii), and (iii) interrelate in a horribly perichoretic fashion, even as the weight of each element varies according to a particular set of circumstances. Waywardness is never just an affront to God, as creatures disdain God’s directives and revolt against their determination to exist as partners in a covenantal relationship (although it is always that); it is also always productive of diverse kinds of creaturely pain and suffering, which misshape and disfigure the quotidian and cause diverse forms of harm.69 And waywardness is never just a despoliation of creation, as we lose our way with ourselves and others (although it is always

68 von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, 154; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (Mineola: Dover, 2002), 66. 69 I am unconvinced by Andrew Sung Park’s claim that the Christian tradition, prior to the advent of modern liberation thinking, focuses so much on the faults of the sinner that it pays insufficient attention to the victims of sin (see The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han and the Christian Doctrine of Sin [Nashville: Abingdon, 1993]). Simply too many landmark authors are alert to the depth of the pain and suffering that sin causes, and to the scandal of its maldistribution— think of the Cappadocians’ writings on poverty and ill health, works by a number of medieval mystics, and the vital tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian socialism—to justify such a sweeping judgment. But I certainly concur with Park’s call for a doctrine of sin to reckon seriously with the consequences of sin. Hamartiology cannot be reduced to an anatomization of misdirected volition; it must reckon with the effects that follow.

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that); it is also always indicative of our hostility toward God, and our foolish insistence that we can chart a better path for ourselves than anything that God comes up with. Isa. 59:12–14 is as good an illustration of this point as any: “For our transgressions before you are many, and our sins testify against us. Our transgressions indeed are with us, and we know our iniquities: transgressing, and denying the Lord, and turning away from following our God, talking oppression and revolt, conceiving lying words and uttering them from the heart. Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness ­cannot enter.”

A wide-angled engagement with the biblical witness could alert us, too, to the macabre parallel that obtains between divine blessings and creaturely waywardness. Just as with God’s persistence in blessing, creaturely waywardness ramifies, frequently acquiring a momentum that catches more and more creatures in its train. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki puts it well, with an apt emphasis on violence: “Like a web that reverberates throughout its entirety in response to even the least disturbance, life mediates the violence experienced anywhere through its whole network.”70 The painful degradation of family relationships in light of slights and resentments (Jacob’s “purchase” of Esau’s birthright, Joseph being sold into slavery); clumsy scheming, occasioned by transient sexual dynamics and a callous disregard for established relationships (the pursuit of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife, David and Bathsheba’s affair); the instrumentalization of women and children, often framed by sexual and ethnic prejudice (Hagar’s forced surrogacy, the forced emigration of Hagar and Ishmael, the rape of Tamar); abject failures of hospitality (Sodom and Gomorrah); outsized political ambitions, predicated on idolatrous pretensions (the pettiness and ambition of Pharaoh, the institution of kingship in ancient Israel), and so on, and so on, and so on. In each case, a series of initial wrong steps soon snowballs, effecting more and more damage. We possess a seemingly inexhaustible desire to lose our way, to set our faces against God’s directives, and to worsen the injuries that we inflict on ourselves and other creatures. One must not forget, too, that it is waywardness that

Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995), 163.

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poses the gravest threat to ancient Israel’s well-being. It is certainly not wrong to say that “Israel’s life was lived from beginning to end under the shadow of countless threats.”71 That is a fair description of a shifting array of geopolitical pressures, stretching from (but not limited to) enslavement under the Egyptians, battles in Canaan, the imperial designs of the Assyrian and Babylonian regimes, and the precariousness of life in the Persian and Greek-dominated eras. But none of this compares with the damage that ancient Israel seems bent on inflicting upon itself. No matter the predations of the “nations,” Israel’s own waywardness most threatens its relationship with God and its vitality as a sociopolitical entity. Rather than gathering insights from here and there, however, I want now to consider waywardness in light of a particular narrative, located in Gen. 34. The story of Dinah, Jacob’s sons, Jacob himself, and Ham and Shechem provides a useful, if acutely unsettling, illustration of waywardness in action. It makes plain what it means for creatures to test and abuse God’s patience, while also providing the leverage needed to think more broadly about waywardness as it relates to ancient Israel and history at large.

(b) The rape of Dinah At this point in Genesis, we’ve taken leave of Abraham and Isaac and a new phase in God’s disbursement of blessings has begun. Jacob is the central character. Modest beginnings notwithstanding—he’s introduced as a “quiet man, living in tents” (Gen. 25:27) who enjoys his mother’s favor and acquires the advantages of primogeniture by dubious means—Jacob is soon folded into a pattern of divine action that supports the slow and steady growth of ancient Israel. Promisingly, Jacob seems initially to endorse this pattern, proving himself willing and able to reward God’s patience. Having heeded Isaac’s counsel and having learned of God’s identity, he lauds the “house of God … and the gate of heaven” and declares that “the Lord shall be my God” (Gen. 28:17 and 21); he marries and helps to bring multiple children into the world; he gains in social and political stature. Rather suddenly, however, the narrative takes an appalling turn. When Dinah, Jacob and Leah’s daughter, ventures

Childs, Old Testament Theology in Canonical Context, 222.

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out to meet other women in the region into which the family has traveled, “Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the region, saw her … seized her and lay with her by force” (Gen. 34:2). She is raped.72 Should we read this incident less in terms of sin, more as a cautionary tale about the perils of curiosity and, as such, a reminder that women ought to stick close to home? Although this interpretation was dominant in patristic and medieval writing, it seems questionable.73 Dinah’s going out “to visit the women of the region” is reported artlessly, and without any hint of judgment; there is no reason to draw the conclusion that subsequent events are framed as a warning to women. If anything, one might discern in Dinah an exemplary willingness to respond to God’s blessings, given that she makes spontaneous use of God’s empowering patience and seeks to explore her new surroundings, to collaborate with other women, and thereby to forge relationships that sidestep the binary of “colonizer” and “colonized.”74 Is this, alternatively, an incident

Granted the bluntness of this statement—and the backing for it will emerge in the text above and in subsequent footnotes—a number of scholars have complicated this description of events. See, inter alia, Lyn Bechtel, “What If Dinah Is Not Raped? (Genesis 34),” JSOT 62 (1994): 19–36; Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York: Schocken, 2002), 179–98; Ellen van Wolde, “Does ‘Innâ Denote Rape? A Semantic Analysis of a Controversial Word,” VT 52, no. 4 (2002): 528–44; Alison L. Joseph, “Understanding Genesis 34:2: ‘Innâ,” VT 66, no. 4 (2016): 663–8; and idem, “Redaction as Reception: Genesis 34 as Case Study,” in Ken Brown, Alison L. Joseph, and Brennan Breed Reading Other Peoples’ Texts: Social Identity and the Reception of Authoritative Traditions (London: T&T Clark, 2020). A broader statement about the mismatch between contemporary understandings of rape and ancient legal concepts is provided by Robert S. Kawashima, “Could a Woman Say ‘No’ in Biblical Israel? On the Genealogy of Legal Status in Biblical Law and Literature,” AJS 35, no. 1 (2011): 1–22. 73 For a brilliant treatment of the history of interpretation, see Joy A. Schroeder, Dinah’s Lament: The Biblical Legacy of Sexual Violence in Christian Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). 74 Something of this point is suggested, via a stunning appropriation of ideas developed by Luce Irigaray, by Julie Kelso in “Reading the Silence of Women in Genesis 34,” in Redirected Travel: Alternative Journeys and Places in Biblical Studies, ed. Roland Boer and Edgar W. Conrad (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 85–109; see esp. 88 and 108–9. The issue of colonization is powerfully considered by Musa W. Dube in “Dinah (Genesis 34) at the Contact Zone: ‘Shall Our Sister Become a Whore?’” in Feminist Frameworks and the Bible: Power, Ambiguity, and Intersectionality, ed. L. Juliana Claassens and Carolyn J. Sharp (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 39–57. 72

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that speaks to the moral depravity of the unblessed, non-Israelite denizens of Canaan, paired with an unsubtle denunciation of exogamy?75 Although that gloss is more plausible, it does not quite fit. While ancient Israel’s relationship to “the nations” is a concern elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, this chapter narrows its view to an unprovoked, brutal assault; issues of in-group and out-group marriage are only brought up as the narrative unfolds, and without much sophistication. While Jacob’s sons are certainly incensed that Shechem “had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter,” the question of whether rape itself or whether rape outside of the family of Israel “ought not to be done” (Gen. 34:7) is left hanging; and it is quickly overtaken by a more basic interest in vengeance, which dominates the story’s second act. Having received Hamor’s request that his son, Shechem, take Dinah as a wife (“please give her to him” [Gen. 34:8]) and opened negotiations regarding intermarriage, trade, and cohabitation, Jacob’s sons suddenly insist on the circumcision of the men of the region. This is a ruse. As the men recover, Simeon and Levi “came against the city unawares” (Gen. 34:25)—a chilling parallel, arguably, to Shechem’s abrupt seizure of their sister—and murder Hamor, Shechem, and “all the males” (Gen. 23:25). They seize Dinah. Meanwhile, Jacob’s other sons plunder the city in a matter-of-fact fashion: “All their wealth, all their little ones and their wives, all that was in the houses, they captured and made their prey” (Gen. 34:29). The chapter then concludes with Jacob’s fretting about his standing vis-à-vis the “Canaanites and Perizites” (Gen. 34:30). And those hoping that the chapter might, at the last, attend to Dinah’s words or thoughts and actions, are denied anything of the sort. Even more acutely than with the story of Tamar in 2 Sam. 13, Dinah finds that “all power to act or even to speak is taken away from her. It becomes men’s business,” and the “end of [the] story happens without her.”76 Waywardness, then, runs riot throughout the story. Excepting Dinah, no one seems to show any interest in God’s blessings. Instead of inhabiting the times and spaces that God provides—times and spaces that stretch back to the call tendered to Abram—the

See, again, Lyn Bechtel, “What If Dinah Is Not Raped,” 19–36. Pamela Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar: Violence against Women and the Church’s Response, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 26 and 29.

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protagonists busy themselves with sexual violence, patriarchal control, and retaliation.77 The logic of graced, empowered possibility, which promises multiplication and increase, is ditched; the logic of acquisition and conquest is ascendant. Consider, for instance, the sequence of verbs in Gen. 34:2: Shechem “saw her, and he grabbed her and he lay with her, raping her.”78 This encounter with Dinah is not only nonconsensual,79 it amounts to a phenomenological “reduction” of the brutality to which many women are subjected, with Dinah rendered an object that is seized, used, fucked over, having already been marked as a sex/gender that stands under an obligation to “give,” in contrast to a sex/ gender that “takes” whatever it wants.80 The arc of the narrative’s first act, again, substantiates the point. Its opening verses make no “mention of Dinah’s curiosity, carelessness, pride or lust,” offer no “explicit criticism of her ‘going out,’” and show no interest in her “concupiscence or pleasure.”81 One finds only a spare description of sexual violence, realized by someone who likely viewed his father’s vaunted status as a pretext for doing whatever he wanted. Then, adding insult to injury, Dinah is subjected to an avowal of

While the category patriarchy seems apposite when reading Gen. 34, it should be used carefully. See Carol L. Meyers, “Was Ancient Israel a Patriarchal Society?” JBL 133, no. 1 (2014): 8–27. 78 The translation is from Sandie Gravett, “Reading ‘Rape’ in the Hebrew Bible: A Consideration of Language,” JSOT 28, no. 3 (2004): 282. See also Yael Shemesh, “Rape Is Rape Is Rape,” ZAW 19, no. 1 (2007): 2–21. Meir Sternberg is perhaps right to say that these verbs of abuse have as their mirror image, in Gen. 34:3– 4, “verbs of endearment”: Shechem’s “soul clung” to Dinah, “he loved” her, and “spoke tenderly” (see The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], 44). But I am unpersuaded by his subsequent claim that the narrative “moderates the impression of barbarity” with the “high authority” of Shechem’s language—“sweet talk,” apparently—“attesting to his sincerity” (447). Past instances of barbarity become more disquieting when paired with romantic declarations. 79 I use the term loosely, and with due awareness of the ambiguities that attend talk of “consent” when it comes to biblical stories; it is impossible to say, for sure, what Dinah wants. Rhiannon Graybill writes instructively about this; see Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); see esp. 30–57. 80 See Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), esp. 106–32. 81 Schroeder, Dinah’s Lament, 17. 77

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affection—perhaps an attempt by Shechem to justify his actions, perhaps part of a serial abuser’s standard-issue gaslighting scheme, perhaps something else—and Shechem petitions his father to gain ownership of the person he has raped: “Get me this girl to be my wife” (Gen. 34:4). The possibility that Dinah welcomes or accedes to this proposal cannot be ruled out, but it is hardly the point.82 No one seems remotely interested in what Dinah wants or does not want. The bottom line is otherwise: God’s empowering “letting be” and God’s disbursement of blessings being exchanged for a violent exercise of domination, which results in the humiliation of a person who bears the imago dei and imago mundi. And as God’s blessings fall from view, so Dinah is converted from a nascent subject—one, recall, who moved gladly into new times and spaces, seemingly unencumbered by the old logic of “us vs. them”; one who was thus perhaps on the cusp of reminding her family, and some number of others, what creaturely empowerment and creatio cooperativa might mean—into a silenced object.83 As is so often the case with sin, rebellion against God and God’s providing goes hand in hand with “rebellion against creation.”84 And we’re not done yet. If Shechem and Hamor sought to move from acquisitive violence to bargaining, with “your daughter” and “our daughters” (Gen. 34:8, 16) treated as so much human capital, Jacob’s sons invert the sequence, treating negotiations with Hamor and Shechem as a prelude to murder, theft, and enslavement. Although auditors and readers might reasonably hope that ancient Israel would not have recourse to the tired, brutal logic of strike and counterstrike, that hope is quickly dashed: there is no recollection of God’s blessings, no interest in a creative response to tragedy, no interest in pairing justice and healing. Once the brothers have recovered (or, perhaps, recaptured) Dinah, non-Israelite This possibility is raised by Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn in “Tipping the Balance: Sternberg’s Reader and the Rape of Dinah,” JBL 110, no. 2 (1991): 193–211. For Meir Sternberg’s response, see “Biblical Poetics and Sexual Politics: From Reading to Counterreading,” JBL 111, no. 3 (1992): 463–88. 83 The shift from subject to object is described in stark terms by Shemesh, “Rape Is Rape Is Rape,” 18. 84 I borrow this phrase from Suchoki, Fall to Violence. As is perhaps evident, while I do not share Suchoki’s wariness toward an understanding of sin as an action directed primarily at God, I share her sense (along with that of Andrew Sung Park) that it is impossible to conceive sin without noticing its injurious effects on the world at large. 82

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children and women are simply “made their prey.” Does Jacob’s entry into the narrative improve matters? Do we now hear from a “seasoned voice of maturity”?85 No. Jacob raises no objection to the retaliatory violence of his sons. He faults Simeon and Levi for making his situation precarious but says nothing about his and Leah’s daughter. In fact, a mindset of patriarchal control—the logic of the “house of the father,” so important for many biblical texts— is now overlaid with a petulant egotism that again diverts attention from God’s patient blessings.86 The first-person pronouns that punctuate Jacob’s speech tell us everything we need to know: “You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household” (Gen. 34:30). Unfortunately, Jacob’s worries are often read as an appropriate ending to the story— a reminder that ancient Israel’s past is defined by “great men,” not God’s disbursement of blessings to Israel as a people. Luther’s judgment is not uncommon: Gen. 34 describes a “sad calamity that befell the patriarch Jacob” (LW 6, 190).87 It need hardly be said that talking about “calamity” without reference to Dinah betrays an unconscionable attitude toward sex- and gender-based violence, as well as a failure to read Gen. 34 straightforwardly. (Does Luther’s early modern context mitigate against such a severe judgment? No. Luther’s genius, manifest in his willingness to break with convention for the sake of Christian faithfulness, makes a severe ­judgment imperative.)

Although we are of course a long way from a full hamartiology (which, of course, requires sustained consideration of the cross), this reading of Gen. 34 enables a return to the dimensions of waywardness identified above. One finds here (i) a state of abject lostness and disorientation, specific to a particular tract of space and time, that is contrary to God’s determination of creaturely life and expressive of hostility toward God—a lostness and disorientation Brueggemann, Genesis, 278. A point noticed by von Rad; see Genesis, 334. 87 Luther also notes that Gen. 34 provides “an example written for our learning, that we may learn patience in adversity” (LW 6, 187)—the “our” here referring to Jacob and other (male) heads of households. For an expert analysis of Luther’s treatment of the rape of Dinah, see Schroeder, Dinah’s Lament, 33–40. 85 86

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disclosed first by Shechem and his father, then reprised, in a new key, by a group whose (graced) capacity to reward God’s patience is set aside in favor of a campaign of violence, one predicated on half-baked ideals of “purity” and “honor.” Concomitantly, one finds here (ii) a cluster of creatures who disregard and disobey God’s directives, misusing their empowerment in a manner that frustrates God’s sponsorship of ancient Israel as God’s covenant partner. If the violence and scheming of Shechem and his father initially illustrate this point, the retaliatory actions of Jacob’s sons and the small-mindedness of Jacob drive it home with a vengeance. The Israelites need not have chosen this path. They could have shown that violence need not be met with violence, and continued on their way. They could even have followed Dinah’s lead, being fruitful and multiplying by bucking norms and finding ways to relate to “the inhabitants of the land” (Gen. 34:30), and perhaps drawing them into the covenant of grace. (They’ve done that before; they’ll do it again.) But the empowerment consequent upon God’s exercise of patience is put to very different use. So it is, then, that there follows (iii) an intensifying and widening despoliation and disfigurement of creation through sexual violence, slaughter, enslavement, and the expropriation of wealth—a consolidation of sinfulness and, inevitably, an intensification of the injustice and misery that characterizes the world. And, remember—as if all the above were not quite enough—we end up knowing next-to-nothing about Dinah, the sole person whose actions suggest some awareness of the possibilities raised by God’s patience. Not even posterity comes to her aid: on his deathbed, Jacob curses the belligerence of Simeon and Levi (Gen. 49:5–7) but does not mention Dinah at all. She is reduced to collateral damage. I would underscore again that an emphasis on peccatum actuale (actual sin) is not exclusive of an affirmation of something like peccatum hereditarium (hereditary sin)—or, preferably, peccatum originale (original sin). On the contrary: “actual sin” is compatible with the claim that sin “infects our very essence, dividing us at our core, making us its principle [sic] agents.”88 The trick, dogmatically speaking, is to ensure that talk of original sin is not treated as a fateful moment in the far-flung

88 Charles Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Condition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 74.

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past, and thus unhooked from talk of actual sin. One must affirm both that creatures intend to act in a manner that opposes God’s ways and works and that each instance of waywardness is preceded, shaped, and surrounded by countless prior instances of waywardness, the force of which is such that we are always-already “‘bent’ by a superior attractive force, pulled into the vortex of a pathological dynamic.”89 Emil Brunner puts it well: “between the two statements that man is the slave of sin, and that every sin is an actual decision, there does not seem to be in the Bible even a relation of tension; both statements are set alongside each other, each in its own place, and are given equal and full weight … Man ‘is’ a sinner; but this ‘is,’ because it refers to man, must not be confused with any other ‘is’ [since] Man’s ‘being’ never ceases to be a ‘being-in-decision’ … To be a sinner means: to be engaged in rebellion against God. Sin never becomes a quality or even a substance. Sin is and remains an act.”90

With this microcosm of waywardness in place, is it possible to shift to a broader statement about waywardness in the context of God’s patient providing? Should reflection, in other words, move on from where we are? There are reasons to say no—or, at the least, to attempt to “hold the space” in which we find ourselves, lingering with Dinah and similarly mistreated women and girls, the majority of whom have never received anything akin to the level of attention lavished upon Jacob and sons. To this end, one might consider next how the narrative of Gen. 34 relates to the broader scriptural witness, all the while maintaining a particular interest in sex and genderbased violence. (Joseph Lam’s recent analysis of four metaphorical patterns in the Hebrew Bible—sin as a “burden,” sin as an occasion for judgment, sin as a “direction” of creaturely activity, and sin as impurity—might prove an interesting conversation partner: this quartet relates intriguingly to the dimensions of waywardness I have identified.)91 With a broader exegetical perspective in hand, one might then consider how analogous material factors and ideological mechanisms function beyond scripture, thereby reprising something of the violence visited upon Dinah. Granted

Alister McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 128. 90 Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1939), 147–8. 91 Joseph Lam, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 89

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that this phase of analysis would focus attention on waywardness as (iii) the despoliation and disfigurement of creation, it would never lose sight of (i) creatures’ lostness and disorientation, derivative of hostility toward God and God’s exercise of patience, and (ii) creatures’ rank misuse of God’s empowering activity. No theologian worth her salt is going suddenly to forget the theocentric frame in which reflection occurs. Moreover, such an analysis might help one to come to grips with the invariably contextual, concrete outworking of waywardness—sin being an act committed here or there, distorting creatures’ relationships with one another and intensifying alienation from God in this and that way—thereby enabling one to think carefully about what it means to exist as a perpetrator, as a bystander, as a collaborator, as a victim, or as some combination of each. The broader theological payoff would also be significant. Paul Ricoeur once wrote that “it is to the least elaborate, the most inarticulate expressions of the confession of evil that philosophic reason must listen.”92 That is sound advice for theologians, too: a refusal to look away from the brute fact of waywardness ought to form an integral part of each and every project of faith seeking understanding. Keyed as such projects are to God’s saving action, provocative of a faith that delights in the fact that humankind is “primed” to inhabit the transformative environment of Christ and the Spirit, Dinah and her sisters remind us that our receipt of God’s favor is always cut across with an apprehension of the nearly unthinkable and manifestly unsublate-able fact of brokenness—a brokenness that is never nullified, never erased from the pages of history, and never simply “overwhelmed” by God, no matter what hopes one might have for some kind of postmortem reckoning. Yes, the sovereign event of God’s self-communicative action, disclosive of an economy defined by divine love, ensures that sin can never be the first or last word about creaturely existence. The fact that this economy finds its center in the Messiah of Israel and the outpouring of his Spirit sanctions the belief that waywardness is not just on the backfoot, but has been decisively overcome. But this overcoming does not render the biblical witness to sin inconsequential, nor

Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 4.

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does it discredit our experience of the continuing devastation of God’s world. With Dinah in mind, we are returned to something akin to Kant’s bafflement at “radical evil” as an inexplicable, incomprehensible surd, and we are asked, accordingly, why we are not doing more, right now, to reward God’s patience with conduct that recalls the exuberance of life “in the beginning.” This chapter’s focus on God’s providential rule, however, effectively requires the view to be broadened, with waywardness and its effects considered within an account of God’s relation to creatures in history. It is imperative to keep thought moving. Why so? Very simply: because the existential shock that follows creatures’ encounter with waywardness may not be amplified to such a degree that reflection on God’s disbursement of blessings is stopped in its tracks. While a stark juxtaposition of the tragedy of sin and the majesty of grace is important, the logic of faith is such that this juxtaposition must be framed in terms of a movement from a bleak “here” to a joyful “there”—something akin to the kind of movement evidenced in the second and third books of Calvin’s Institutes, as decidedly gloomy beginnings gradually give way to an account of God’s covenantal relationship with ancient Israel; an elucidation of Christ’s atoning life, death, and resurrection; and a lengthy description of what it means to live in union with Christ, in the power of the Spirit. Absent this kind of movement, one risks an immobile point and counterpoint. Sin and grace would not really stand in any kind of relationship; they would instead be reduced to a formal, unbudging contrast. And with that, there could loom the suspicion that God’s transformative rule might not encompass the entirety of creation, being limited instead to the piety of those afforded faith—or, still worse, the suspicion that God’s rule finds its limit in face of creaturely waywardness, and God simply throws up her (figurative!) hands and declares: “nothing to do with me; I just do the blessing around here.” At this juncture, then, something different is needed: a framing of waywardness that concedes Christians’ sense of bewilderment in face of its instantiation, while still opening out into a clarification of who God is and what God does to keep God’s salvific project on track. And in this regard, the idiom of patience again proves its worth. It can be parsed in terms of permission, protest, and (divine) longsuffering. I’ll engage the first two issues in the following subsections, and the third issue in this chapter’s final section.

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(c) Patience as permission: Non-impeditio peccati It is useful to begin with some clarifications. In the previous chapter, permission was linked with the process of creatio cooperativa. Although God creates ex nihilo, God grants creatures a meaningful role in shaping the world. Patiently, God “lets be” and “lets happen”; permission, alongside delegation and empowerment, factors into the formation of a complex, rich, vivacious cosmos. Could this gloss be transferred to the doctrine of providence? Not without significant qualifications. Certainly, it is important to avoid the suggestion that God intends for creatures to realize a series of wayward directives in the same way that God intends for creatures to reward God’s patience “in the beginning.” That would suspend God between two projects: one that seeks the wellbeing and flourishing of creatures, another that encourages lostness, rebellion against God, and the despoliation of the world. Might one view permission, then, in terms of a willingness to allow sin to increase in severity and impact over time, despite the publication of the law (so Rom. 5:20) and the spread of death (so Rom. 6:23 and Jas 1:15)? Is there a different kind of “letting be” and “letting happen” in play, so that one can contend, with Augustine, that “when God punishes sinners, he does not inflict on them his evil but abandons them to their own evils” (Enarr. Pss. 5.10)? There is some truth to this perspective. It is clearly the case that waywardness often seems to increase exponentially, and that that increase is the consequence of God’s decision not to block the realization and transmission of sin—God’s opting to permit creatures to go their own way. Talk of divine “abandonment,” further, speaks to the way that individuals and groups seem to be caught up in a vortex of wrongdoing, moving ever farther away from God and effecting an ever more textured, ever more complex distortion of the quotidian. But one has to be careful at this juncture, too. One can hardly suppose that God so structures creation that her “abandonment” of creatures leads invariably to worse and worse conduct. That could render sin an organic process, as opposed to a bundle of creaturely intentions and actions for which we are responsible. And it could divert attention from the particular ways that God is always in the business of checking sin, limiting harm, and disbursing grace (and,

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correspondingly, never in the business of simply leaving us to our own devices). A final possibility: might permission be ingredient to a process of creaturely reformation? Might one view it as a dimension of an extended correction of waywardness, wherein God gradually teaches creatures to dispose themselves and act differently, so that—at some point in the future—creatures spontaneously receive and endorse a properly ordered relationship with God? The possibility of a slow process of “soul-making,” classically associated with Irenaeus and revived by John Hick and others,93 might initially appear congenial for a statement focused on patience. Given the Reformed drift of this project, however, it is nonstarter. Why? Simply, because it tends to trade on a questionably libertarian view of creaturely freedom, thereby underrating the “bondage of the will” and neglecting the commanding, interruptive reality of grace. Conjectures about creatures’ postmortem state only make matters worse. Beyond the fact that one has resorted to speculation, urgent questions about the relationship between sin, grace, and freedom have not actually been resolved. They have simply been relocated to a realm of existence that we know next to nothing about. The positive meaning that I believe ought to be given to permission, within the ambit of God’s patient providing, is close to the old idea of a non-impeditio peccati: the nonprevention of sin.94 It is a matter of God opting not to confer blessings, opting not to “precede” mercifully and thereby to guide creatures in such ways that those creatures reward God’s exercise of patience. The “not” here, I hurry to note, does not indicate the absence of God, much less some kind of pause in God’s providential activity. While Calvin’s aversion to permission is rather overwrought (albeit understandably, given his concern to quash the suggestion that “autonomous” creaturely decisions bear on salvation), he is quite right to insist that “in a wonderful and ineffable manner nothing is done without God’s will, not even that which is against his will” (Inst. I.xviii.4). Equally, as noted above, one may only talk loosely about God’s “abandoning” creatures: no matter our See John Hick, Evil and the Love of God, rev. edn (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978). 94 A phrase highlighted by Heppe; see Reformed Dogmatics, 274. See also Richard Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 202–3. 93

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waywardness, every creature, in every aspect of its life, is always preserved, capacitated, and guided by God. The notion of a nonimpeditio peccati is more a way of saying that God’s empowering rule somehow includes the opportunity for creatures to conduct themselves in ways that express hostility to God, frustrate God’s purposes, and distort the world—and that God, in a fashion, honors that opportunity and that hostility, as well as the frustrating and distortive effects that follow, by continuing to empower creatures in waywardness, even as God does not approve of what it is that those creatures intend and do. David Hollaz, a Lutheran scholastic, puts it well: permission ought to be conceived as “a negative act, consisting of the denial or suspension of an insuperable hindrance,” for while God “could check or restrain the sinner by means of the interposition of a forcible or insuperable obstacle,” that is precisely what God does not do.95 In my own idiom, and with Barth’s claim that God patiently preserves sinners in the background: with due qualifications, one can and should say that God’s patience is manifest, in the context of God’s providing, when God lets sin “be” and “happen,” allowing and enabling wayward action to arise and to distort the quotidian. What of Hollaz’s ensuing claim that “the most holy Divinity has the very best reasons for permitting sin”? Granted a laudable desire to affirm God’s all-encompassing governance—which, of course, does not lack for scriptural support (just think of Gen. 50:20)— this is a bridge too far. It is certainly apt to say that God opts not to obstruct the inclination toward waywardness, and that God lets waywardness ramify in time and space. This is a function of the belief that God could call each of us, “irresistibly,” and could render each of us an Abram and Sarai, but—obviously, regrettably, tragically—does not do so. It is also crucial to acknowledge, again, that waywardness could not occur without some kind of effective concurrence on God’s part. That is a function of the belief that God’s creative, preservative, and empowering action is the conditio sine qua non for anything and everything that occurs. (Calvin,

Schmid, Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 189. Emphasis mine. Prior to this remark, Hollaz has (aptly) differentiated permission from uncaring divine indulgence, mitigation of the law, divine weakness, and God’s being a mere spectator of sin.

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once more: “[n]othing occurs by the blind turn of fortune when God’s will holds the cords” [Comm. Mt. 10:29]). Even as God does not intend the “ends” of waywardness, God supplies and supports the creaturely “means” that produce those ends, and it is part of God’s providential rule that those means and ends have historical impact.96 Where Hollaz errs, however, is in pairing this understanding of God’s activity with the ascription of the “very best reasons.” That ascription requires the assumption that, even as God ought not to be identified as the author of acts of wrongdoing, many of which portend countless phases of acute suffering, God so arranges historical affairs that every single wayward action fits into a grand scheme whose overall character is as unimpeachable as its originator. It requires one to suppose that God’s non-impeditio peccati forms part of a finely tuned masterplan, a providential “scheme,” wherein each part redounds to the benefit of the whole. But, given the limits of human comprehension—God’s rebuke to Job is relevant here—that assumption is a fairly obvious instance of epistemological overreach. How could one come to know that God’s activity of world-governance, sovereign and wise and loving though it may be, does not or cannot include irreducible moments of sinfulness, maybe even “horrors,” that cannot be fitted into a providential scheme encompassed by God’s patient love? Belief in God’s sovereignty and in the inherent goodness of God’s governmental action does not have, as a necessary complement, the belief that every single historical event subserves God’s ultimate purposes. In creating and providing for the world, God may have indeed sought “as much variety as possible … with the greatest order possible,” but the instantiation of the world bearing “as much perfection as possible” does not mean that each and every event is itself perfect. Indeed, maximal variety and order might have as an entailment, by dint of God’s inscrutable sovereign decision, times and spaces that are marked by that which is “fallow, sterile, or dead” and, by definition, imperfect.97 One is certainly not in a This being a point that other Reformed thinkers, to their credit, have not shied away from making. See, for instance, Turretin, Institutes, 6.VII.iii, xiii–ix and Schleiermacher, Gl. §76.1. 97 G. W. Leibniz, The Monadology, §§58 and 69. See the Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 76 and 78. 96

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position to trust that that is not the case, given that we cannot wrap our minds around God’s decision to create this world, and not some variation on it. (Austin Farrer is eminently quotable on this front: “The creator’s choice is an abyss, where human thought drowns.”)98 While Christians do well to insist, then, that God’s sovereignty is allencompassing, that God wisely preserves the integrity of creaturely being and action, and that God lovingly guides the course of history, it does not follow that history lacks for surd-like instances of meaninglessness and horror. It does not follow that there are not creaturely actions, singular and disbursed across time, that tell us nothing about God’s identity as provider, being derivative of nothing more, and nothing less, than God “permitting” wayward creatures to test God’s patience. Summarily, then: to identify permission with God’s non-impeditio peccati is a way of saying, first, that God does not cease empowering creatures when we defect from God’s purposes, but—would that it were otherwise!—honors our defection and its consequences with a kind of “letting be” and “letting happen”; while, second, resisting the (perhaps understandable) temptation to fit such defections and consequences into a divine masterplan, wherein every single event works “for the good”; and, third—and here an unavoidable tension obtains—continuing to think about God as one who patiently creates, provides, and redeems, out of an abundance of love and in unfettered sovereignty. I will not here address the proximate issue of “natural evil” in this context (possibly an unhelpful turn of phrase, for it presumes an overly sharp differentiation of human and nonhuman creatures.) However, were it to be taken up, it might admit of comparable treatment. For instance, when reflecting on a hospital ward for children with acute conditions—a consequence of “genetically caused malfunctioning”—Margaret Spufford does not shy away from the claim that some children have been “made wrong” and thus burdened with acute suffering. At the same time, she declares a

Austin Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited: An Essay on Providence and Fall (London: Collins, 1962), 64. Farrer goes on to say that “If we ask the question ‘O God, why did you make such a world as this?’ we do not know the meaning of what we ask, because we cannot conceive the conditions, or rather, the unconditionedness, of the creative choice. All we can do is make up our minds whether or no [sic] we are grateful for the creative acts which have made us as we are, and put us where we are” (75).

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belief in “a loving, omnipotent Father” who is himself responsible for the “‘failures’ of his creation.” In face of those failures, she writes, “I have searched ever since for a theological answer. I do not believe that there is one. Would, or can, any theologian produce any answer, other than that we are here in the presence of a mystery, insoluble in human terms?”99

Two comparative comments and one summative remark lend this perspective more nuance. (i) Am I here thinking in concert with Jürgen Moltmann, who views creation as an act of divine self-limitation, a “contraction” or “withdrawal” of God’s being that makes room for the world— this act serving also as an origin story for the hard realities of sin, suffering, and death, given that “God’s self-limitation” brings into existence “a literally God-forsaken place”?100 Is God’s non-impeditio peccati, in other words, the consequence of God’s primordial “abbreviation” of God’s being, undertaken to give creation its own time and space, in anticipation of the Son’s solidarity with sinners? It is to Moltmann’s credit that he reckons seriously with reality and consequences of waywardness, while not watering down an affirmation of God’s presence to the world and refusing to sideline talk of divine governance. And although Moltmann does not lean on the language of permission, it could well be applied to his perspective. One might say that God’s self-limitation is the condition for the establishment of a created order that is permitted its own integrity and is permitted to fall. One might say, further, that God’s self-limitation is the means by which God comes to suffer with creatures—that God’s permitting God’s being to be “reduced” is the condition of possibility for God truly sharing our trials and tribulations, as opposed to “solving” them through sovereign acts of intervention or regarding them from a posture of detached transcendence. But there are serious problems here. Chief Margaret Spufford, “The Reality of Suffering and the Love of God,” Theol 88 (1985): 442 and 443. 100 Moltmann, God in Creation, 87. Also instructive is Moltmann’s essay, “God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 137– 51. (This volume, incidentally, includes several restatements and developments of Moltmann’s position. See esp. Arthur Peacocke, “The Cost of New Life” [21–42] and John Polkinghorne, “Kenotic Creation and Divine Action” [90–106].) 99

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among them is Moltmann’s disregard for the principle that God and creatures exist in a noncompetitive relationship. His perspective seems to be rooted in the assumption that God simply has to negate or curtail God’s being in order to make space for the finite other, lest God and creatures exist as rivals on a shared ontological continuum. But that assumption lacks for justification. Why not say that God grants being to creatures out of the fullness of God’s life, and that God does so in such a way that a conferral of existence neither overlaps with God’s being nor is threatened by God’s reality? Why not contend that the world is simply “held” by God, for as long as God wills it and by dint of God’s good pleasure? As I read it, Gen. 1–2:4a does not encourage one to speculate about God’s “withdrawing” or “contracting” for the sake of the other; rather, it spurs one to view creation as an upshot of God’s sovereign love and kindness—an exercise of divine patience that supports creaturely being and action in all of its splendor, complexity, and ambiguity. Indeed (and with due awareness of Moltmann’s laudable concern to forge connections with medieval Jewish philosophy), it is hard to shake the sense that this perspective is underpinned by the belief that God is ultimately defined as overwhelming power, domination, and presence—attributes that God “must” renounce, lest creatures be overwhelmed.101 But, again, why entertain this conviction in the first place? What warrant is there for speculating about a process of self-divestment, wherein God is originally powerful, dominating, and present in and for Godself, and then—for reasons of love— subjects Godself to a kind of ontological downsizing, in order to relate to creatures? Is it not better to say that, out of the fullness of God’s freedom and love, God creates this world, and that God relates to it as creator, provider, and redeemer? Is it not preferable, to extend the point, to suppose that a non-impeditio peccati occurs not because God “withdraws” and makes space for us, but because God grants creatures the possibility of challenging God’s ways and works, this being a function of God’s patient “letting be” and “letting happen” in history?

Anne Carr is excellent on this point; see “Providence, Power, and the Holy Spirit,” 83. Likewise Sarah Coakley; see “Kenosis: Theological Meanings and Gender Connotations,” in The Work of Love, 192–210, esp. 205–6.

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(ii) What of a more pared-back perspective, favored by Jacques Maritain, that centers attention on the “the absolute innocence of God” as the “fundamental certitude, the rock to which we must cling in this question of moral evil”?102 Rather than tracking waywardness back to an “antecedent permissive decree,” the postulation of which raises doubts about God’s goodness, sin is now positioned downstream of God’s creative work and identified as a product of the “nihilating initiative of the created will.”103 God’s response to sin, correspondingly, is framed as a “consequent permissive decree”: a manifestation of God’s positive valuation of creaturely freedom and its effects.104 Certainly, an emphasis on divine innocence and creaturely freedom goes some way to checking the suggestion that all events comprise parts of a grand masterplan, ordained and overseen by God. Defects, mistakes, tragedy: these are not ascribed to God’s direct willing, but are instead understood to be the unfortunate result of creatures’ misuse of their agential powers. We are also some distance from the rather speculative gestures made by Moltmann. But there is also something of a sleight of hand at work—or, to put it a bit more carefully, a tendency to so magnify the independence and ingenuity of the created will that the basic logic of God’s providing falls from view. It remains the case, after all, that the “the causality of God, who is the first agent, extends to all being” (ST I.22.2), with God’s sponsorship of ancient Israel being a symptom of the way that God relates to history as such. It remains the case, too, that God is responsible for establishing and maintaining a creation marked by fragility, within which creatures are given—by God—the opportunity to lapse into waywardness. God, to put bluntly, is ultimately responsible for (if not the direct “author” of) the “nihilating initiative of the created will” and the “consequent permissive decree,” which carries in its wake distortive, damaging, and tragic outcomes. So one cannot use the notion of a “consequent permissive decree” to kick the theodical can farther and farther down the dogmatic road. Whether one operates with

102 Jacques Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1966), 3. 103 Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, 25 and 57. Emphases mine. 104 Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, 59. Emphasis mine.

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a Thomistic vision of creaturely freedom and agency (as Maritain does, perhaps with a more libertarian emphasis than I find in the Summa) or favors a more Reformed, compatibilist perspective (as I do), the can is still there, waiting to be picked up. And when it is picked up, it is none other than God who is “on the hook” for the advent of wayward intentions and the consequences that follow. Calvin’s rather labored claim is on-target: “it would not be done if [God] did not permit it; yet he does not unwillingly permit it, but willingly” (Inst. I.xviii.3). (iii) The idea of a non-impeditio peccati must be extended, then, to include God’s “ownership” of God’s decision patiently to create and patiently to provide for a world marked and blighted by waywardness. It is not just that God establishes and maintains the basic structures of creation, which clearly include what Darwin vividly described as “the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature” (mass extinction, scarcity, maladaptation, countless instances of agonized suffering, etc.), even as those same structures comprise the basis on which emerge diverse intensities of goodness, value, beauty, and joy.105 It is also that God creates the conditions and capacities wherein creatures lose their way, disobey God, and despoil God’s good creation. So while one can and should ascribe horrific act x, y, and z to the enacted decision of this or that human being or group, God alone is responsible for establishing the “means” by which waywardness is realized, and God alone is responsible for declining to impede the litany of horrors to which the Bible in and creaturely history bear witness. This, in the final analysis, seems to be part of what it means for God patiently to “let be” and “let happen” in the context of a fallen world. God does not impede the rape of Dinah or of countless others; God does not always halt the ways in which “Israel has spurned the good” or temper the ways in which “the enemy shall pursue him” (Hos. 8:3); God does not get in the way of the multiplication of individuals, communities, and nations that oppose and thwart the disbursement of blessings. “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do

Cited in Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: WJKP, 2008), 1. Southgate quotes from a letter that Darwin wrote to J. D. Hooker in 1856.

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all these things” (Isa. 45:7). More generally, to borrow from R. S. Thomas, it is God—and God alone—who does not “Let the bomb / swerve” or “Let the raised knife of the murderer / be somehow deflected.”106 As Colin Gunton notes, “God’s patience allows things to be themselves. And of course allowing things to be themselves means to let evil go on for a time as well.” It means, to reprise my initial gloss, that God honors waywardness and lets it play out as it does and as it will. A starting point, as Gunton goes on to suggest, for an “answer to the problem of evil,” preferable to the “kind of free will arguments that philosophers toss around so endlessly”?107 An interesting possibility, although one that perhaps should not be developed, lest we lapse into the old mistake of speculating about some manner of providential masterplan—while simultaneously treating evil as a “problem” that admits of an “answer.” At the least, though, the fact that God “allows things to be themselves” is an occasion for a theologian to take stock, in fear and trembling, of God’s responsibility for each and every event that transpires in time and space—a responsibility that does not mean that God authors evil, but that God’s permissive will opens the way for waywardness, and that God enables agents to act in ways that do not align with God’s purposes. Although I have not offered exegetical backing for these claims, it could be supplied. Ps. 44 would be a useful starting point. Having opened with an exultant ­recollection of God’s deeds on behalf of Israel and declared that “we will give thanks to your name forever” (44:8), the psalm also laments God’s apparent inaction and reports, with incomparable bleakness, that “we are being killed all day long … accounted as sleep for the slaughter” (44:22) before asking God, plaintively and not obviously confidently, to “Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love” (44:26). These claims would lack for meaning, were

106 R. S. Thomas “Adjustments,” in Collected Poems: 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1995), 345. “Adjustments” was included in a collection of poems (Frequencies) first published in 1978. 107 Colin Gunton, The Barth Lectures, transcribed and ed. by P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 106. Emphasis added. Hans von Balthasar writes similarly, and with characteristic color: “God lets the sinner have his way. He allows sinful man to tear power out of the divine fabric of goodness, justice, and mercy and to turn it, thus stripped bare, to evil.” See Explorations in Theology V: Man Is Created, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 249.

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it not assumed that God’s providential work extends across history and that God “permits” waywardness to afflict ancient Israel, “honoring” its outworking in a particular stretch of time and space.108

(d) Lament, suffering, and the non-impeditio accusationis A second front of reflection can now be opened, focused on God’s willingness to permit, sustain, and bear diverse kinds of creaturely protest in face of sin and the suffering that often follows. At this point, awareness of the mystery of God’s patient non-impeditio peccati (nonprevention of sin) can be paired with the mystery of God’s patient non-impeditio accusationis (nonprevention of accusation). To this end, an engagement with another text in the Hebrew Bible proves instructive. Granted that the Bible contains numerous expressions of grief and complaint, the book of Lamentations offers a peculiarly harrowing account of ancient Israel in a state of abject despair.109 And in several of the poems that comprise Lamentations, there is a willingness to ascribe blame to Israel in general, and the denizens of Jerusalem in particular. A Deuteronomic paradigm obtains: defection from the covenant is the basic reason for the misery resulting from the decisive sack of the holy city (which took place in 586bce).110 The language of sexual violence, just as evident in English translation as the original Hebrew, underscores the point: it is because the city I have profited greatly from R. W. L. Moberly’s treatment of Ps. 44 in conjunction with Ps. 89; it informs these comments and much of the following subsection. See Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 211–42. 109 Tod Linafelt is frank: “A more relentlessly brutal piece of writing is scarcely imaginable.” Likewise F. W. Dobbs-Allsop: “these poems constitute some of the Bible’s most violent and brutal pieces of writing … as they emerge, both literally and figuratively, out of the ashes and ruins of Jerusalem and are filled with horrifyingly dark and grizzly images of raw and human pain and suffering.” See, respectively, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2; and idem, Lamentations (Louisville: WJKP, 2002), 2. 110 Although in a complicated way. See here Robert Williamson Jr., “Taking Root in the Rubble: Trauma and Moral Subjectivity in the Book of Lamentations,” JSOT 40, no. 1 (2015): 7–23. 108

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“has sinned grievously” and “rebelled” (1:8 and 1:18) that “she has become a mockery,” having had her “nakedness” exposed (1:8), having had “nations invade her sanctuary” (1:10), and having been assaulted in ways that make evident God’s determination “to lay in ruins the wall of daughter Zion” (2:8).111 The implication is as unavoidable as it is disquieting: in face of covenantal disloyalty, God has acted, via intermediaries, in a manner akin to an army that employs rape as a weapon of war. If Dinah was innocent but brutalized, Jerusalem’s guilt leads it to be justly violated, broken, and cast aside. Yet even as one recoils at this dimension of the text’s rhetoric (and perhaps also at the covenantal paradigm that underwrites it), it is a mistake to read Lamentations as a poetic rationalization of “just deserts.” While the issue of culpability is important—I will come back to it in due course—it is ultimately secondary to the raw expressions of grief, fear, and despondency that checker the text, conveyed in an idiom that reads like “the sputtering and fuming of … dazed victims … whose capacity for sequential thinking has been fractured and undermined.”112 The principal concern of the book, in other words, is not to intensify a sense of ancient Israel’s guilt; it is to have readers and auditors undergo the despair of Jerusalem’s citizens, disposing ourselves as co-sufferers and co-victims. This is made particularly evident by the

For instructive analyses of the imagery of sexual assault in Lamentations see, inter alia, Dobbs-Allsop, Lamentations, 63–7; F. W. Dobbs-Allsop and Tod Linafelt, “The Rape of Zion in Thr 1,10,” ZAW 113, no. 1 (2001): 77–81; Christl M. Maier, “Lost Space and Revised Memory: From Jerusalem 586bce to New Orleans in 2009,” in Interpreting Exile: Interdisciplinary Studies of Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts, ed. Brad Kelle, Frank Ames, and Jacob Wright (Atlanta: SBL, 2011), 189–201; L. Juliana Claassens, “A True Disgrace? The Representation of Violence against Women in the Book of Lamentations and in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” and Dorothee Erbele-Küster, “A Response to Julie Claassens’ ‘A True Disgrace? The Representation of Violence against Women in the Book of Lamentations and in J. M. Coetzee’s Novel Disgrace,” in Fragile Dignity: Intercontextual Conversations on Scriptures, Family, and Violence, L. Juliana Claassens and Klaas Spronk (Atlanta: SBL, 2013), 73–90 and 91–100; and, most recently, Graybill, Texts after Terror, 113–43. 112 Harvey Cox, Lamentations, in Harvey Cox and Stephane Paulsell, Lamentations and the Song of Songs (Louisville: WJKP,  2012), 5. See also Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations, 1–48. As Graybill notes, an irony looms: while the language and structure of Lamentations speaks of brokenness and trauma, individual verses and the book as a whole are carefully formed. See Texts of Terror, 127–9.

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poems’ fixation on the concrete reality of destruction and misery. While there are occasional chinks of light (particularly with the recollection of God’s “steadfast love” in 3:22–24 and the sapiential remarks of 3:25–39), those rays never widen to such a degree that the bright sunshine of God’s blessing takes centerstage. Our gaze is constantly narrowed to what Avraham Faust, following Joseph A. Tainter, has described as a “post-collapse society”: a world defined by ecological devastation, forced deportation, architectural ruin, and existential bewilderment; a world that must be traversed without recourse to stable religious and political structures.113 This narrowing is so effective, too, that readers and auditors are asked not to take refuge in intertextual comforts (say, by recalling the lengthened perspective of Second Isaiah, which reassures us of the continuing favor of “your Redeemer … the Holy One of Israel” [Isa. 41:14]), lest we stand apart from those trying to pick up the pieces. We are called to stand alongside, even inside, a brutalized community, and to endure its grievous condition as our own. This “ask” and calling become particularly vivid near to the center of the text, when the rhetorical register shifts to the first person. We hear from one who declares that they have “seen affliction under the rod of God’s wrath” (3:1) and claims that YHWH “has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; / against me alone he turns his hand, again and again, all day long” (3:2–3). Taking Lamentations seriously involves making that “I” one’s own; it means inhabiting a condition of “darkness” that coincides with a receipt of God’s punishing wrath—an inhabitation that may prove particularly disquieting for those who are disproportionately driven into “darkness,” given the operations of sin.

Avraham Faust, Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period: The Archaeology of Devastation (Atlanta: SBL, 2012). For additional historical and archaeological insights, see Oded Lipschits’ account of the uneven distribution of destruction in Judah, “Shedding New Light on the Dark Years of the ‘Exilic Period’: New Studies, Further Elucidation, and Some Questions Regarding the Archaeology of Judah as an Empty Land,” as well as the more general remarks of Bob Becking, “A Fragmented History of the Exile,” in Interpreting Exile, 57–90 and 151–69. Note that Faust aims to contest the controversial claim that the vast majority of Judeans were unaffected by the Babylonian campaign. See here Hans Barstad, The Myth of the Empty Land: A Study in the History and Archaeology of Judah during the “Exilic” Period (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996); and, idem, Leading Captivity Captive: “The Exile” as Ideology and History, ed. L. Grabbe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).

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So if the preceding subsection focused on the ways that creatures turn away from God, given God’s nonprevention of sin, the book of Lamentations bears witness to a communal and individual expression of the trauma that sometimes follows in the wake of waywardness. And it is usefully considered in conversation with the work of a number of scholars who are endeavoring to make this stubborn feature of human life a site of dogmatic concern. Alongside important texts by Serene Jones, Karen McDonnell, and others, Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining seems especially apposite.114 If it be granted that the basic arc of the Christian story moves from injury, captivity, and death to healing, liberation, and new life, and if it be granted that there is a tendency among Christian theologians to focus attention on the glorious “end” of the story while underrating the negativities of human existence in medias res, Lamentations is a text that we do well to linger over. Here, in the middle of the Hebrew Bible, one finds a book that wrestles with “suffering that does not go away.”115 It is a book that exhorts readers and auditors to tarry with catastrophe, “witnessing from [a] middle” that is suspended between death and life—a “middle” of such abyssal force that one wonders whether “recovery” is actually possible.116 Yes, of course, this project supposes it imperative for Christian theology to move

See Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville: WJKP,  2010). I have also learned much from Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (Louisville: WJKP, 2009); Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017); Karen O’Donnell, Broken Bodies: The Eucharist, Mary, and the Body in Trauma Theology (London: SCM, 2019); and Feminist Trauma Theologies: Bodies, Scripture, and Church in Critical Perspective, ed. Karen O’Donnell and Katie Cross (London: SCM, 2020). The application of contemporary insights about trauma to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible has also proven highly instructive. See, inter alia, David M. Carr, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 225–51; idem, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); L. Juliana Claassens, Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Reimagining God’s Delivering Presence in the Old Testament (Louisville: WJKP, 2012); A. Groenewald, “‘Trauma Is Suffering That Remains.’ The Contribution of Trauma Studies to Prophetic Studies,” AcTheo 26 (2018): 88–102; and Louis Stulman, “Reading the Bible as Trauma Literature: The Legacy of the Losers,” ConvBW 34 (2014): 1–13. 115 Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 15. 116 Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 40. 114

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forward, at least at some point. A willingness to “remain” in the time and space of Lamentations’ poems does not cancel out our apprehension of Christ’s resurrection, in the power of the Spirit— precisely that which assures us that the Kingdom is truly at hand. Or, to use Rambo’s language: the “middle Spirit” is not other than the Spirit of Christ crucified and resurrected, even if the work of the “middle Spirit” is not immediately associable with redemption. But none of that detracts from Rambo’s basic point, nor belies the relevance of Lamentations for the style of theological reflection that Rambo commends. This text calls those who are already moving into the time and space of the Kingdom to carry with them an extended description of trauma; to hold fast to the doubts, fears, and experience of ancient Israel’s abjection. For if those doubts, fears, and experiences do not halt what one might call the “forward movement” of faith, Lamentations ensures that they are not viewed as sublate-able waystations—much less faint memories of a bygone time. Having glimpsed the outer limit of waywardness and the social and individual trauma that is its correlate, Lamentations beseeches Christians to hold fast to the meaninglessness and despair of ancient Israel at its lowest point. Trauma that is scripturally rehearsed is trauma that Christians—and, by extension, theologians—are called to preserve. These remarks bring me to the idea that a non-impeditio accusationis (nonprevention of accusation) is a dimension of God’s exercise of patience—an act of “letting be” and “letting happen,” whereby accounts of waywardness and its consequences are encouraged by God, shaped by God, and embedded in the scriptural canon. And this non-impeditio can be understood as one dimension of the activity of the Spirit who impels, gathers, and endorses diverse testimonies to God’s ways and works, the culminative result of which is the variegated witness of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. John Webster’s sophisticated account of biblical authority, noted in the introduction to this book, helps when elucidating this point. On one level, I share Webster’s sense that the stimulation and writing of texts that comprise the two Testaments are to be identified as subroutines in the broad economy of salvation. Individually and collectively, biblical texts are sanctified cultural products, provoked by and keyed to God’s self-revelation, and they feature prominently among the means that God uses to establish and maintain fellowship with human beings. On another

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level, and pace Webster, I would not say that every biblical text can be treated as a “vessel” for the “treasure of the gospel,” and I do not suppose that each vessel tells of “the terrifying mercy of God’s address.”117 Sometimes, as with Lamentations, it is simply a matter of terror, rawly (but not unartfully) expressed—and with such force that believers’ confidence in the forward-movement of God’s blessings is paired with a disquieting dialectical counterpoint. God’s providential exercise of patience, in other words, involves God enabling individuals and communities to bear witness to trauma, so that later generations can encounter it, wrestle with it, and suffer its force. The faith that Christian theology hopes to understand, correspondingly, will itself attend to this trauma, as well as to analogues in other phases of history. Let me make this point more broadly. “Atrocities refuse to be buried,” writes Judith Herman at the opening of her pioneering work, Trauma and Recovery, before saluting political and social movements that challenge those who would deny or suppress accounts of those subjected to extreme wrongs and driven toward abject suffering.118 This refusal of burial, she suggests, has at least two dimensions: on one side, people coming forward and telling stories about what they have endured; on another side, individuals and communities mustering the grit and wisdom needed to attend to those stories. Both dimensions are pertinent for thinking about the formation of Lamentations. It is reasonable to hypothesize, for instance, that some in the community of ancient Israel would have asked why poems of such unremitting bleakness should be circulated in the aftermath of catastrophe, and it is reasonable, too, to hypothesize that some in that community would have resisted the transmission and textualization of such poems, especially once the experience of Jerusalem’s sack and ancient Israel’s exile started to fade. Why keep horrors alive? Why look backward to this historical nadir? Aren’t there better ways to encourage covenant fidelity? Indeed, might not texts preoccupied with bafflement, shame, fury, and protest encourage a disordered John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39 and 41. 118 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 1. I owe thanks to Rebekah Latour for several enlightening conversations about this book. 117

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“fear of the Lord” and set “knowledge” on the wrong footing (Prov. 1:7)? But it may be that others responded thus: “We should honor those who spoke and thought in this way. We should not add injury to insult, forgetting the voices of those who suffered grievously; we should not let a Deuteronomic paradigm of disobediencepunishment so dominate our textual legacy that the experience of trauma falls from view. We must ensure that ‘Daughter Zion’ is not silenced like Dinah.” But the frame of analysis cannot remain entirely immanent. If the processes by which oral and written materials were transmitted (which of course includes multiple decisions about what should and should not be included in a discrete book and in the canon as a whole) are viewed as moments in a divinely superintended sequence of events, that process and sequence apply to Lamentations as much as any other scriptural book. The “mechanics” of divine superintendence, of course, needn’t be closely parsed. (That rarely ends well, especially when underwritten by a concern to show that scripture is pretty much identical to the Word of God—an obvious case of idolatry.) What matters is the more general fact that God’s inspirational work stimulated and shaped this text, and then brought it into the collection of materials that comprise the Hebrew Bible. What matters, to make the point more directly, is that God has acted to engender and maintain a collection of poems that accuses God of excessive punishment, that casts doubt on the coherence and success of God’s providential disbursement of blessings, and that constantly trains attention to the hard realities of life in a broken, shell-shocked, grief-stricken community. This is a dimension of God’s patience: God’s being willing to listen as ancient Israel “talks back” to God (a talking back, in a curious way, that is also God talking back to God). God holds on to expressions of anguish, voiced by some portion of ancient Israel, that disrupt our reception of a history defined by divine blessings; God heeds the voice of “Daughter Zion,” receiving and, in a sense, endorsing the  lament of ancient Israel’s violated body.119 “Let there be … ” is the repeated pronouncement of Gen. 1:1–2:4a; there follows

Erbele-Küster makes this point powerfully in “A Response to Julie Claassens’s ‘A True Disgrace?’”: “This is the empowering strength of Lamentations in the midst of all its fragility: the trauma is not silenced. For me, this is the first step from inhumanity to grace” (96).

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a series of enthusiastic, praise-filled responses, disclosive of the permission, delegation, and empowerment of nonhuman creatures. But now it seems that “Let there be … ” pertains also to what Phyllis Trible memorably described as “texts of terror” and what Rhiannon Graybill has recently called “texts after terror.” This is a permission, a delegation, an empowerment that extends to human beings who ask, none too gently, “Why have you forgotten us completely? Why have you forsaken us these days?” (Lam. 5:20). God’s patience extends to God’s willingness to bear creatures’ despair and reproach. It is a patience that keeps alive the memory of those who view themselves as accursed and abandoned; as so much collateral damage in the context of God’s Weltregierung. Peter Sloterdijk probably overdoes it when claiming that “Hegel’s great synthesis is the last European monument to [the] will to draw all negativity and externality into the inside of a logically sealed dome.”120 Still, the scriptural witness and, by extension, theological projects that focus on trauma are a useful counterpoint to totalizing, “logically sealed” domes—Hegelian and dogmatic alike. Lamentations gives those projects scriptural backing. It pushes readers and auditors to reckon with the possibility that some forms of “negativity” and “externality” are historical surds, fractures that do not heal.

What we have thus far, then, is a theological transposition of two famous claims, central to twentieth-century German critical theory: that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin), and that “the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth” (Adorno).121 God’s patience, which elicits creaturely activity, does not simply permit sin; God’s patience also supports the expression of traumatized protest in light of its effects. And there is also a final twist, one that casts a difficult light over everything that has come before and returns us to ancient Israel’s lingering sense of its culpability. As noted at the beginning of this subsection, Lamentations offers Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 1, Bubbles (Microspherology), trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 56. 121 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256 (from “Theses on the Philosophy of History”); and Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007), 17–18.

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an unflinching response to the question, “Barbarism—wrought by whom?” Although the Deuteronomic paradigm of obedience/ reward and disobedience/censure is not pushed forward in this text’s five poems, it turns up at crucial moments. So while one poem supposes that “[t]he steadfast love of the Lord never ceases” and “his mercies never come to an end” (3:22), another insists that God alone governs the course of history—so much so that one must understand that the agent who is responsible for the assault and ruin of a “princess among the provinces” (Lam 1:1) is none other than the God of ancient Israel. Thus, most shockingly, Lam. 1:13: From on high he sent fire; it went deep into my bones; he spread a net for my feet; he turned me back; he has left me stunned, faint all day long.122 One cannot merely say, then, that God’s patience extends to the formation of a human document that records grief and protest. Nor can one merely say that God does not impede the injurious and death-dealing effects of waywardness. Although Lamentations hardly claims that God “so attends to the regulation of individual events” that “they all so proceed from his set plan” (Inst. I.xvi.4), verses such as Lam. 1:13 (and, for that matter, Lam. 1:12, which claims that the city’s “sorrow” was “inflicted” by “the Lord … on the day of his fierce anger”) return us to the difficult reality of God’s responsibility for all events that transpire in time and space, including those that traumatize the marginalized, the suffering, and the enfeebled. Such verses raise again the question of why God “lets be” and “lets happen” in this way, when readying the world for the incarnation of God’s Word. It is perhaps possible to argue that such verses are dogmatically incidental—say, on the grounds that they are inconsistent with the The Hebrew word translated as “left me stunned” is also used to describe Tamar’s condition after she has been raped (2 Sam. 13:20; see Dobbs-Allsop, Lamentations, 69). The NRSV translation, on this reckoning, is unduly euphemistic: it underplays the (terrifying) association of Jerusalem with an assaulted wife and God as an abusive husband. I owe thanks to Rebekah Latour for helping me think about this point.

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basic thrust of the Hebrew Bible; or by way of an ideology critique that challenges the association of the God of Israel with patriarchal and/or militaristic ideologies; or by way of an awareness of the importance of hyperbole in biblical literature; or by supposing that these verses reflect something of the disorientation that follows traumatic experience (a fine distinction between God’s “permission” of waywardness and God’s purposeful sponsorship of punishment being lost on those suffering the effects of Jerusalem’s destruction). But I am inclined to read claims about God’s action toward Jerusalem differently. One finds here something of ancient Israel’s growing grasp of its responsibilities in the covenant of grace—a statement, inchoate and objectionable in certain respects, that makes plain ancient Israel’s awareness of its obligation to make good on God’s exercise of patience. One finds here, to make the point a bit differently, an attempt to find a “meaning for … suffering” by positioning that suffering in a covenantal framework, even as that same attempt raises the possibility trauma simply does not “fit” with the covenant, being a historical surd, inassimilable to our understanding of God’s patient disbursement of blessings.123 Is there, then, some kind of resolution here, such that ancient Israel’s trauma can be read as an integral part of a providential masterplan? Equally, is there now a justification for using the language of sexual violence to describe God’s activity? One can and must respond negatively to both questions. On one level, the trauma to which Lamentations bears witness remains disruptive— an occasion to understand that the Spirit of Christ is also the Spirit that calls us to “remain” with those who are brutalized, broken, and battered. It is entirely appropriate for the text speak for itself, to offer itself as a raw witness to horror and tragedy. On another level, one can straightforwardly challenge the idea that God’s activity toward Israel is aptly described in terms that recall sexual assault. One can wish, that is, that the humanity of scripture was not demonstrated in this way. One can admit bewilderment as to how these descriptions of God can be reconciled with the witness of Gen. 1–2:4a, the ancestral narratives, the book of Exodus, and the Gospels; one can lament the fact of two and a half millennia distance

123 Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 148.

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between the initial and contemporary audience of these poems; one can worry that the afterlife of such passages has often been one that gives sanction to sex and gender-based violence. But the point I am advancing holds fast. Recall again the claims of the previous chapter about creation, as well as this chapter’s analysis of God’s blessings of Abram, Sarai, and others. Although ancient Israel never deserves God’s attention, God’s action toward it intends always to engender a particular kind of response; and it is always a positive sign when ancient Israel thinks about itself, in past, present, and future, in light of God’s action. Not because the covenant entails some kind quid pro quo, and not because God consistently dictates, in a narrow and stifling way, the precise form of response that ancient Israel ought to offer. It is rather that God’s relationship with Israel aims at displacing a pattern of waywardness with a recovery of something like a creatio cooperativa, wherein God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” go hand in hand with creatures’ responding, gladly and exuberantly and purposefully, to God’s exercise of patience. The giving of the law, various kinds of multiplication and increase, and the ritual activities of ancient Israel, on this reckoning, form initial steps in a remaking of creaturely identity. They are indications of a community recognizing itself as integral to God’s purposes for the world—as a creaturely assemblage that has the privilege and opportunity to reward God’s patience. And the poems of Lamentations are one more step along the way. While they certainly show that “Daughter Zion” refuses to be silenced, refuses to let her victimization be the end of her participation in the covenant, they also bear witness to ancient Israel striving to “fold” the entirety of its life into a framework in which God’s favor meets with faithful creaturely response. So in the same moment that one recoils at language that portrays God as an assailant, one can also say that Lamentations attests to ancient Israel exercising its “right” to speak to God, freely and spontaneously, on its own terms, in an attempt to make good on its covenantal responsibilities. In accusing God and declaring its trauma, ancient Israel meets God’s patient non-impeditio peccati with an impatient howl of pain, anguish, and confusion; it sets itself within a covenantal relationship that hearkens back to life “in the beginning” and looks forward to the reestablishment of right relationship with God. ***

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Prior to moving on to patience as divine longsuffering, a summary of the previous subsections seems useful. I have argued, on one level, that the patience of God’s providing includes a strange kind of permission—an empowering “letting be” and “letting happen” that, in the context of a fallen world, carries with it the possibility of various forms of waywardness, and thus the possibility of various kinds of pain and suffering, even tragedy. If a detailed “why” that accounts for this dangerous possibility is not readily available, lying beyond the understanding ingredient to faith, an honest appraisal of its realization, in history, is important. Creatures devolve into a state of abject lostness, contrary to our initial determination and derivative of our hostility toward God. Unbound and undirected, we set about disregarding and disobeying God’s directives, often in ways that bring about the frustration of God’s loving purposes. We live as wayward sinners whose actions render the shalom of Gen. 1:1–2:4a a distant and seemingly impossible memory. And, as thunder is to lightning, there follows the despoliation and disfigurement of creation. Creatures are damaged and immiserated, frequently in an uneven way. All too often, the deadly wages of sin afflict those who have already been laid low. And the biblical witness to the misdeeds of ancient Israel seems mesh with our growing sense of a long, long history of sin that stretches across eons of evolutionary suffering, pronounced phases of cruelty and stupidity, until, irony of ironies, industrialized powers come to wield godlike powers that threaten the integrity of Earth itself. So even as God’s exercise of patience is the (mysterious) condition of possibility for creaturely waywardness, God’s patience is continuously and sorely tested by the extent and depth of wrongdoing. On another level, I have sought to honor the force of a question posed by the prophet Amos: “Does disaster befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?” (Amos 3:6). While the conventional claim that God is not the direct author of sin should be maintained, and while well-shaped accounts of God’s identity must not lose sight of God’s profligate generosity in creation, as well as God’s sponsorship of a marginalized community that slowly learns to inhabit and act within the context of the covenant, an affirmation of God’s providential rule cannot avoid stating that God herself, in the final analysis, bears responsibility for each event that transpires. In that

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the non-impeditio peccati is a constitutive element of an act of world-governance ascribable to God, and to God alone, there is no way for God to be let “off the hook.” This is God’s world, not ours; and even as God pushes creatures, time and again, to act in ways that reward God’s patience, God grants us the capacity and the means to distort the quotidian. At the same time, the non-impeditio peccati goes hand with the astounding fact of God’s non-impeditio accusationis. So while God identifies herself as the Lord of creation, the sovereign whose rule includes “weal” and “woe” (Isa. 45:7), God also stirs, shapes, and preserves reports of anguish and trauma, as well as protests against the way that God acts toward ancient Israel. God is willing to present Godself as Lord of a world in which her beloved child declares that “Mount Zion lies desolate” as “jackals prowl over it” (Lam. 5:18) and in which it becomes reasonable to suppose that “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted” (Eccl. 1:15). And there is then final twist. The pairing of a non-impeditio peccati and a non-impeditio accusationis suggests that ancient Israel—and, by extension, humankind—is being pressed, graciously and patiently, to recover its capacity to act for and with God, to forswear waywardness, and to act in ways that reward God’s patience.

4 Divine Longsuffering In this chapter’s final section, I aim to consider what it means, for God, that God’s blessings are met with waywardness. My concern is to make sense of the claim that God is longsuffering, and thus to engage the vexed issue of theopaschism in the context of a statement about God’s providing. I want to suggest, specifically, that God’s self-determination is inclusive of the possibility and actuality of divine grief over creaturely waywardness (an ontological claim) and that this grief is a function of God’s refusal to rush history toward a glorious conclusion (a claim about the character of God’s providing). In elaborating this viewpoint, my dependence on Barth and Julian of Norwich will become ever more evident to readers. Barth’s insights support an account of divine longsuffering wherein God freely determines Godself as one who endures and shares

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in creaturely travail. Julian’s insights support an understanding of God wherein God’s efforts to shape ancient Israel (and, by implication, to govern the course of history as such) proceed at a slow pace, as befits God’s concern to “let be” and “let happen.” The upshot is a deepened account of God’s identity, will complements that sketched during the preceding chapter and, in due course, will come to form part of a statement about God’s triune life as a matter of patience. *** When engaging the scriptural witness at the beginning of this book, I spent time considering the meaning of èrèk appayîm—a prominent element of Exod. 34:6 and related verses. The phrase underscores God’s commitment to stick with ancient Israel, in spite of the travesty of waywardness. It indicates that the covenant is not akin to a legal contract, the stipulations of which must be fastidiously applied, but a special relationship with a particular subset of creatures, the outworking of which discloses something of God’s mercy toward sinners. The NRSV’s decision to translate èrèk appayîm as “slow to anger” is thus entirely justifiable, with the postponement and/or tempering of ancient Israel’s deserved punishment adverting to God’s favor and kindness. Even so, the slightly archaic term, “longsuffering,” used at key points in the KJV (e.g., Exod. 34:6, Num. 14:18, and Rom. 9:22) remains linguistically possible and theologically suggestive. It forces upon us the question of how exactly God relates to sin and its consequences. Can one say that God undergoes ancient Israel’s sin and shares in the suffering that follows, even as God grants Israel the opportunity to repent and recommit itself to the covenant? Is God’s patience truly “tested” by ancient Israel’s lostness, disregard for God, and despoilation of the quotidian? Does God, in the depths of God’s eternal being, grieve over waywardness? Among Reformed scholastics, considerations of God’s longanimitas and patientia served as one way to engage, then quickly to set aside, questions such as these. Typically, the terms referred to “the patient bearing of an offense, particularly over a long period of time … the willingness of God to endure the offense of sin rather than immediately annihilate the world in its wickedness.” The

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longanimitas Dei, more particularly, named an “affection of the divine will according to which God wills to await repentance and to allow millennia to elapse, for the sake of mankind, between the fall and the final judgment.”124 Why an affectus voluntatis Dei? To ensure that God’s being is fully insulated from anything that could suggest mutability. Affectiones, as the scholastics understood them, are highly figurative ways to talk about God’s relationship with a fallen world. While grounded in God’s eternal being (we are dealing with God’s will, after all), affectiones do not number among God’s “essential” attributes—that is, attributes that are definitive of God’s independent, self-sufficient life. These are ways to talk about God’s activity via-a-vis a fallen world; one must not suppose that God is longsuffering and patient in the same way that God is (say) simple and eternal. The latter terms characterize God’s immanent life; the former, by contrast, have an economic referent, describing God’s sovereign will as it bears on some moment in history. Equally, while words such longanimitas and patientia feature in Christians’ knowledge of God, in no respect do they complicate the ascription of aseity to God. To suppose otherwise—that is, to suppose that God, in God’s own life, is affected by sinful activity; to suppose that God takes what happens in the world “to heart”—would risk tying God’s being to the world in a manner that jeopardizes an affirmation of God’s freedom from and for the world. It would suggest that God is conditioned by the world, or even that God needs the world. That is a clearly a step too far. One must differentiate the identification of a pattern of divine activity that bears some resemblance with a human disposition (say, longsuffering as the endurance of physical discomfort, or longsuffering as the willingness to “put up” with injustice in service of a higher good) from an identification of that which defines God, as God, in the perfection of God’s own life. One must avoid having talk of an affectus voluntatis Dei factor into reflection on God’s immanent being.

124 Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, 180. My emphases. Muller’s broader analysis of “divine affections and virtues” has proven invaluable for formulating the claims that follow; see Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to 1725, vol. 3, The Divine Essence and Attributes, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), esp. 551–61 and 574–81.

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Granted some interesting moments in Calvin’s writings (and, more so, Luther’s),125 this stance was not a matter of later thinkers smoothing over some rough dogmatic edges, generated during a period of exegetical and intellectual tumult. It was continuous with the mindset of the majority of ancient, medieval, and early modern theologians. Thomas Aquinas is a case in point. It is taken as read that God’s “essence is necessarily his ultimate actuality” (CT I.11; cp. I.67): an essence and actuality that is perfect and unchanging in and of itself; an abundance of being that exists and happens apart from and prior to God’s activity ad extra. It is taken as read, too, that the relations constitutive of God’s tripersonal life are the only relations that shape God’s being. For it is only as God lives as the “plentitude of perfection of all being” (ST I.9.1), an actus purus who is independent of the world, that God can do whatever God wants, to, in, and for the world. Indeed, the mere suggestion of a two-sided interaction, of some kind of “real relation,” risks ascribing potentiality in God. It raises the troubling possibility that God needs the world to be the God who God is—and thus that God would not have, for all eternity, the identity that God has, were it not for God’s relationship with creatures. So, to take up again the idiom of affectiones, when we talk of God’s longsuffering and patience, we are dealing with a manifestly metaphorical (not “literal”) mode of speech. The “order” that obtains between words “used of God and of creatures” (ST 1.13.5) has to do with an “order” that we discern, in light of scripture, as God acts toward a world pervaded with sin. But this order is quite dissimilar to the “order” that obtains when a creaturely perfection is shown to have its ground in God’s being. God is longsuffering and patient in God’s action toward us, whereas the God of truth, justice, and beauty is truth, justice, and beauty in Godself—the epitome and source of all value in the world. As is probably obvious, Aquinas’ famous affirmation of “no real relation” does not have as a corollary the claim that God does not really love creatures. That would be hugely distortive of what he and countless others assumed to be the case—viz.

Although it is an open question as to whether Luther is as metaphysically adventurous as is sometimes assumed. See here David J. Luy, Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014).

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that “only an entirely perfect being, subject to no defect and lacking in nothing, is able to love with a fully gratuitous love,” and that “only the God who does not act out of desire to attain his own perfection can freely will, without thought of return, to share his boundless goodness with creatures and so love them with a completely unconditional love.”126 While it is legitimate to challenge the protocols of “classical theism” (possibly an unhelpful phrase, but we can leave that issue aside), one should not treat aseity and lovelessness as two sides of the same theological coin.

But what if one does not so restrict the implications of God’s being described as “slow to anger” and “longsuffering,” but instead explores these terms’ ontological import? What if one sets aside the differentiation of essential attributes and divine affections and entertains the possibility that talk of longsuffering might serve as a hinge that connects an account of providence with claims about God’s being as such? A section from the book of Hosea, which provides a striking counterpart to the traumatized witness of Lamentations, proves useful when engaging these questions.127 When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols.

Michael J. Dodds, “Thomas Aquinas, Human Suffering, and the Unchanging God of Love,” TS 52 (1991): 333. Emphases added. See also, idem, The Unchanging God of Love: Thomas Aquinas and Divine Immutability, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2008). A comparable line is taken in a characteristically brilliant essay by Herbert McCabe, “The Involvement of God”; see God Matters (Springfield: Templegate, 1987), 39–53. For an incisive consideration of the reasons why divine love and suffering appear to constitute two sides of the same coin for many twentieth-century authors, see Jennifer Herdt, “The Rise of Sympathy and the Question of Divine Suffering,” JTE 29, no. 3 (2001): 367–99. 127 The difficulties of interpreting Hosea, a text hailing from the Northern Kingdom in the eighth century bce whose redaction came to encompass later challenges facing Judah, are extensive. For useful remarks, see Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament, 372–84, and Hans Walter Wolff, Hosea: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Hosea, ed. Paul D. Hanson, trans. Gary Stansell (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974). 126

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Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them. They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. The sword rages in their cities, it consumes their oracle-priests, and devours because of their schemes. My people are bent on turning away from me. To the Most High they call, but he does not raise them up at all. How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. (Hos. 11:1–9) This chapter’s starting point is God’s decision to adopt ancient Israel as God’s child and God’s decision to uphold a covenantal relationship in spite of childlike disobedience.128 Verses 3 and 4 add a reminder of God’s persistence in blessing, figured now as God’s efforts to guide the development of a rambunctious, inquisitive, and self-involved infant. But then there is an abrupt shift in tone. Verses 5–7 suggest that we This trope is of course frequently employed. See, inter alia, Exod. 4:22; Deut. 14:1, 32:6, and 32:18; Isa. 1:2–4, 30:9, 49:15, and 66:12–13; and Jer. 3:14 and 31:20.

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are overhearing a divine monologue, wherein God concedes that the child’s conduct has gone from bad to worse—that ancient Israel has not matured and learned what it means to inhabit the covenant of grace. And when exile is associated with enslavement in Egypt, we seem to stand a hairsbreadth from sullen resignation. Might it not be best for God to give up, to disown his child? “Slowness to anger” has proven to be a failing strategy. Calvin puts it well: although “this people [Israel] had been treated by God in a paternal and indulgent manner … the perseverance of the Lord in continuing to bestow his blessings on them had been without any fruit” (Comm. Hos. 11:3). He then switches to paraphrase: “Neither the beginning of my goodness, nor its continued exercise, avails anything with them. When I brought them forth from Egypt, I restored the dead to life; this kindness has been blotted out. Again, in the desert I testified, in various ways, that I was their best and most indulgent Father: I have in this instance also lost all my labour.” How so? “Because my favour has been in no way acknowledged by this perverse and foolish people.” (Comm. Hos. 11:3) Although Hans Walter Wolff frames this passage as a “historicotheological accusation … structured in analogy to a legal complaint made by a father against his stubborn son,”129 such a measured description rather underplays the shell-shocked quality of God’s avowal. It is better to wonder if the bleak suggestion of Lamentations, that God has abandoned ancient Israel, now finds a macabre complement: God disposing himself as a Lord who really has “utterly rejected us,” being “angry beyond measure”—so much so that when “Zion stretches out her hands,” there is “no one to comfort her” (Lam. 5:22 and 3:17). Verses 1–7, one might even venture, retell a family tragedy. Initially, there is the recollection of loving embrace, with the actions of a chaotic youngster met with indulgence and favor. Then a rebuff, as a parent realizes that her child simply will not learn. Finally, the anguished decision to give up—the words of a parent whose disillusionment has passed into detachment, who finds herself describing herself in the third person (“To the Most High they call, / but he does not raise them up at all” [11:7]). Wolff, Hosea, 123–4.

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But there is a striking turn. Although blessings are repaid in the currency of waywardness, Hos. 11:8–9 suggest that God’s anguish derives, in large part, from the fact that God cannot do otherwise than love Israel.130 Having entertained the possibility of giving up, God cannot but “return” to God’s primordial commitment to bless and sponsor ancient Israel—something akin, perhaps, to what Anselm means when claiming that God “spontaneously obligated himself (as it were) to bring to completion the good thing that he has undertaken” (CDH II.5).131 Put differently: no matter the extent and depth of ancient Israel’s sin, vv. 8–9 underscore that love of this people is basic to who God is. To forebear from devastating punishment is not just one more expression of mercy, one more occasion in which ancient Israel lives to fight another day. “How can I give you up … ? How can I hand you over … ?”: at stake here is the constancy of God’s identity, which is itself a function of God’s sovereign decision to make ancient Israel’s well-being integral to the sovereign Subject that God was, is, and will be. The Godness of God, to put it even more boldly, is proved by the fact that God declares that God cannot and will not continue to punish ancient Israel; that God is compelled—for God has so compelled Godself—to keep on disbursing blessings, to be longsuffering in God’s commitment to the covenant, lest God be untrue to Godself. “I am God and no mortal / The Holy One in your midst” (v. 9): the Holy One whose action is anchored in the strongest of foundations. A Barth-inspired understanding of divine self-determination helps transpose these exegetical claims into a dogmatic register. On one level (and we return here to an impulse that drove Aquinas, the Reformed scholastics, and the majority of patristic, medieval, and early modern authors), it is important to continue to insist that God is self-originating and self-sufficient, and that God bears God’s own existence without any reliance on creatures. God, then, as ipsum esse subsistens (self-subsisting being)? Yes! The famous

Terence E. Fretheim and Walter Brueggemann write similarly about this passage. See Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 120; and Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 299. 131 I have dealt with this aspect of Anselm’s theology elsewhere. See Paul Dafydd Jones, “Barth and Anselm: God, Christ, and the Atonement,” IJST 12, no. 3 (2010): 257–82. 130

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phrase does not only express the incomparable fullness of God’s independent being; it adverts also to the condition whereby God acts, majestically and freely, without reference to any conditions external to God. God alone creates ex nihilo, and it is only by dint of God’s empowering grace that creatures contribute to the richness, diversity, and beauty of creation. God, and God alone, disburses blessings throughout history, raising up ancient Israel and enabling this people to understand and perform something of its covenantal obligations. And, Christians will add: God’s sovereignty and freedom are decisively shown as God’s covenant with ancient Israel expands to include everyone. The Word is divine patience incarnate: one in whom the Kingdom is proclaimed, enacted, and set loose; one whose redeeming project gains traction through the operations of the Spirit; one who makes plain what God’s selfsubsistent life can and does mean for us, by dint of God’s graceful condescension. God, in fact, could not do what God does, were God dependent on creatures. It is only because God does not lack for anything in Godself that God can be gracious, proving herself as the Subject whose actions are “in no sense dictated to Him from outside and conditioned by no higher necessity than that of His own choosing and deciding, willing and doing” (CD II/1, 301). Or, more concisely, via Anselm: “you are what you are, not through anything else, but through yourself” (Pros. 12). On another level, it is crucial that these claims do not become abstractions. To do meaningful dogmatic work, they must be tied to an awareness that God, for all eternity and in the depths of God’s innermost being, has disposed Godself as the Subject who is “ours in advance”; and, more specifically, to an awareness that God has disposed Godself as the Subject who, in the depths of God’s being, binds Godself to creatures by way of the people of ancient Israel and the person of Jesus Christ. A sense of “pronobeity,” as well as a sense of divine self-binding is in fact central to Hos. 11:1–9.132 And

The language of “binding” is put to excellent use by Friedrich Lohmann in “God’s Freedom: Free to be Bound,” MT 34, no. 3 (2018): 368–85. My perspective often converges with Lohmann’s, even granted this chapter’s Christological reticence: I share his sense that the “negative freedom” of God’s unrestricted decision-making must be partnered with an understanding of the use to which God puts God’s “positive freedom.” I borrow talk of “pronobeity” from Brian D. Asbill; see The Freedom of God for Us: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Divine Aseity (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015).

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when these verses are read in terms of God’s self-revelation, they put valuable pressure on the notion that there is “no real relation” between God and the world. Such verses, specifically, encourage us to marry an affirmation of divine independence with an ontologically meaningful affirmation of divine longsuffering, whereby ancient Israel’s (mis)conduct has some kind of impact on God’s own life. God’s holiness is not just a matter of God’s self-subsistence; God’s holiness is a self-subsistence that is coextensive with a covenantal decision that reaches into the very depths of God’s being, into God’s own “heart,” such that what ancient Israel does has some kind of impact on the Subject that God is. Are we now on the cusp of engaging sometimes fraught debates about the logos ensarkos—and, more specifically, about the relationship between Barth’s doctrine of election and Barth’s account of the Trinity? No. Thinking about God’s trinitarian life and about the particular identity of God qua Son would amount to an unhelpful departure from my favored approach to the doctrine of providence. It is important to continue to have the witness of the Hebrew Bible set the terms for dogmatic reflection, at least with respect to the doctrine of providence—even as one does not take leave of a faith that is centered on Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit. But what I am offering in the following pages connects with those debates, and establishes the groundwork for the Christological statement that must follow.

It is likely evident that I am employing a varied terminology, with talk of “self-determination” going hand in hand with God “disposing” and “binding” Godself in this and that way. I have also injected a degree of hesitancy (“some kind of impact … ”) into my (very preliminary) theological ontology. Both are purposeful: it is important to avoid a fetishization of concepts, and it is important to avoid supposing that anyone can anatomize God’s inner life. Theological ontology requires tentativeness. My principal concern is simply to indicate that claims about God’s self-determination can and should be paired with claims about God’s self-determination— to indicate that a (fairly traditional) affirmation of God as a selfsubsisting, free subject is not exclusive of a more metaphysically adventurous identification of God as the God of ancient Israel, one who endures and grieves over the waywardness of her people. Formally, it is a matter of grasping that God’s self-subsistence is coextensive with God’s being sovereign over God’s own life, and to such a degree that God can be and is God in the very specific

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way that God intends to be God and is God. It is a matter of God’s “decision” about God’s being itself being an act of divine selfdefinition that is eternal in import—God deciding to be the God that God eternally is. Materially, the drive to combine a positive, “classical” affirmation of divine aseity with an ontology of divine self-determination proceeds from compelling exegetical bases, not least of which is Hos. 11:1–9. Paul Tillich, in a typically terse way, once described Christian theology as “theonomous metaphysics”: an attempt to understand God’s being, in light of God’s communicative reality, in light of Christian faith.133 There is truth to this claim, but it lacks a crucial specification: namely, that the authoritative witness of scripture has decisive importance for the metaphysical task at hand. That witness, above all else, should guide inquiry. For while it is perhaps possible to “manage” the dogmatic implications of the claim that “My heart recoils within me” and “my compassion grows warm and tender” (Hos. 11:8), and thus to maintain a doctrine of God that fits with the strictures of “classical theism,” it is entirely legitimate to have the text propel thought in new directions. Indeed, what would it mean to say that God’s declarations about God’s “heart” are only a function of how God appears to us, and not a matter of God’s disclosing something of God’s innermost being? What would it mean to say that a “compassion” that grows “warm” and “tender” is a merely “economic” claim that does not connect with God’s immanent life? While circumscribing the meaning of the divine affectiones is not interpretatively perverse, it does appear to be something of an interpretative stretch. Why not take the verses as they come? Why not receive them as an occasion to think about divine freedom as a dimension of God’s life that does not bear only on God’s “action towards what is outside of Himself” but also on “His own inner being”—so much so that God “can and will be … conditioned” by dint of God’s own decisions about who God is and who God will be (CD II/1, 303)? At issue here is not an outsized emphasis on God’s “will” that displaces an acclamation of God’s

Paul Tillich, On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), 55. Although Tillich might balk at talk of God’s “communicative activity,” it is roughly compatible with the understanding of revelation laid out in ST1.

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essence; at issue here is a perspective wherein God tells us that God sets the terms for who God is, for all eternity. With this lightly sketched theological ontology in place, it is possible to re-pose the question that underpins this entire section: can one connect talk of God’s providential exercise of patience with claims about divine longsuffering—a suffering that touches God’s own heart, in light of the waywardness of ancient Israel?134 My affirmative answer unfolds itself in four steps. The first considers theopaschism in fairly general terms. The second dispatches some weighty critiques. The third draws inspiration from Julian of Norwich, while leaning also upon Barth: I propose that God’s willingness to bear and endure waywardness is derivative of the fact that God does not force the pace of redemption, preferring to “let be” and “let happen,” while “opening” Godself in such a way that God bears and grieves over the travails of God’s creatures. Fourth, I note that more remains to be said about divine longsuffering—and that this “more” waits on an analysis of the person and work of Jesus Christ, patience incarnate. (a) Approaching theopaschism. On one level, it would be churlish to claim that interest in theopaschism is unrelated to myriad terrors and horrors, the cognizance of which is ingredient to life in the late modern age. Indeed, if some twentieth-century theologians affirmed divine suffering as integral to the task of theologizing “after Auschwitz,” twenty-first-century thinkers find themselves confronted by comparably severe—if not, as yet, comparably concentrated— fields of pressure. Updated fascisms, newly ascendant across the globe; the continuing history of colonialism; mobile patterns of domination, tied to sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and class and caste, underpinned and complicated by the unflagging operations of capital; the compounding costs of the Anthropocene, disproportionately borne by nonhuman creatures and marginalized human communities; an ongoing pandemic that has cut short the lives of over 5.5 million people at the time of writing: these dimensions of planetary life are receiving more and more theological attention, and they are bound to elicit heightened interest in divine suffering. Even if the theopaschite perspectives of a Kazoh Kitamori, a Jürgen Moltmann, or, most brilliantly, an Alan Lewis cannot simply be

Fretheim, The Suffering of God, 107–48.

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dusted off and returned to circulation, it would be highly surprising if analogues do not emerge, in some form, in the coming decades. On another level, it would also be churlish to construe late modern theopaschism as little more than a sociocultural reflex, transposed into a dogmatic register—an unthinking howl of pain, derivative of a broadened historical consciousness and an awareness of industrial and technological advances. Beyond the fairly obvious fact that extra-ecclesial experience cannot be neatly disaggregated from the Christian project of faith seeking understanding (that would require a polarization and segregation of church and world, with the former viewed as a regulated safehouse for “orthodoxy” and the latter made incidental to reflection), a perspective rooted in scripture cannot really avoid theopaschism. My treatment of Hos. 11:1–9 drives home that very point—one that could easily be bolstered with reference to passages from the Psalter, the major and minor prophets, the Gospels, and the letters of the New Testament. The twentieth century’s unprecedented interest in divine suffering was no outburst of heterodoxy, derivative of a peculiarly fraught social, political, and ecological context. It reflected a new phase in the project of faith seeking understanding, grounded in a faithful receipt of scripture as a witness to God’s self-revelation. Now it is certainly true, as Paul Gavrilyuk notes, that the vast majority of patristic writers did not think along theopaschite lines. That ought to give us pause. If there was no blithe embrace of Hellenist philosophy among early Christian writers (contra Adolf von Harnack) and thus no quiet creep toward an abstract, lifeless God, there is perhaps less reason to suppose that the New Testament witness is incompatible with something like “classical theism”—and, for that matter, less reason to suppose that Protestant theologians need to effect a more decisive dislocation of “Jerusalem” and “Athens” through reconceiving the doctrine of God.135 But one can accept Gavrilyuk’s exposé of the Harnackian assumptions of the first generation of theopaschite authors while still granting that a host of biblical passages encourage, maybe even oblige, one to entertain an affirmation of divine suffering as a live dogmatic option. Consider how Paul Fretheim’s capacious engagement with

135 On all of this, see Gavrilyuk’s brilliant monograph, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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the Hebrew Bible returns, time and again, to the claim that “God is revealed not as one who remains coolly unaffected … but as one who is deeply wounded” by a “broken relationship”; how Walter Brueggemann’s reading of Isa. 54:7–8, Hos. 11:1–9, and Jer. 31:20 (inter alia) discerns a revelation of divine “sovereignty … decisively qualified by pathos”; how L. Julia Claassens’ treatment of Jer. 8:21–9:1 detects something of God’s “deep-seated suffering.”136 These judgments do not obviously betray an unthinking embrace of the Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, its influence on modern theology notwithstanding. They emerge from a careful engagement with the particulars of the scriptural witness, and they direct us to the exegetical bases on which a sophisticated kind of theopaschism might depend. And if the formulation of this position is facilitated by a context wherein the “classical” metaphysical consensus is no longer taken for granted, having been “fragilized” by an expanding range of alternatives (one of which is von Harnack’s stripped-down, doctrinally slight bourgeois moralism)—well, what of it? Protestant theologians are not obliged to tether reflection to any metaphysical scheme. We are at liberty to use whatever philosophical tools that lie at hand when making sense of faith. So, an initial contention: theopaschism should be a “live option” for Christian dogmatics. The open-ended task of faith seeking understanding, nested in a late modern context, allows it; the biblical witness encourages it; and the non-necessity of classical metaphysics facilitates it. (b) Dispatching concerns. But the possibility of theopaschism does not secure its desirability, and it is important to acknowledge that talk of divine suffering has been subjected to incisive critique in recent years. What was once rashly deemed a “new orthodoxy”137 has turned out to be nothing of the sort; keen questions have been raised about whether, why, and how God suffers. And sorting through various concerns, albeit in a somewhat ad hoc way, is an important step toward the elucidation of a constructive position. Does theopaschism jeopardize affirmations of divine simplicity? Fretheim, Suffering of God, 123; Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology, 301; Claassens, Mourner, Mother, Midwife, 25. 137 Ronald Goetz, “The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy,” CCent no. 103 (1986): 358–9. See also Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), 1–26. 136

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Does it make impossible an affirmation of divine aseity? Does it “historicize” God to such a degree that the distinction between God’s immanent life and God’s economic activity is drained of meaning? Each of these (overlapping) charges is significant, and each merits careful response. With respect to divine simplicity, it not wrong to say, with Gilles Emery, that God is “exempt from the internal composition that characterizes the whole domain of the created order.”138 Such a claim supports a firm differentiation of God and world, thereby clarifying what and who God is not. Talk of simplicity reminds us, for instance, that God is not akin to a tripartite structure (comprising, say, three wooden blocks), since the divine persons are coequally divine, sharing in and constituting one essence. And talk of simplicity reminds us that “God’s occupancy of the divine sphere is exclusive and total”—that God alone defines God’s life, that there is no dimension of God’s being that is unrelated to the perichoretic indwelling of God’s three ways of being.139 But it does not follow that the attribute of simplicity could not be conceived in a manner that allows for an affirmation of theopaschism. It does not follow that one should think “world thus, therefore, God not thus,” nor that the ascription of “internal composition” forecloses an affirmation of passibility. The way that God is simple, after all, is God’s own business. It is a function of God’s sovereign selfdetermination. And the dogmatic elaboration of this attribute, correspondingly, must be ordered to God’s revelation of Godself, being “corrected”—where necessary—by our ongoing reception of the scriptural witness. (Barth puts it well: when it comes to “concepts of unity, uniqueness, and simplicity,” we are dealing with concepts that are “determined and … circumscribed wholly and completely” by God himself [CD II/1, 448].) More strongly: why couldn’t an affirmation of divine simplicity be coextensive with God’s (free) decision to “open” God’s eternal being, such that creaturely suffering, of various kinds, registers in God’s life? Why Giles Emery, “The Immutability of the God of Love and the Problem of Language Concerning the ‘Suffering of God,’” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2009), 59. 139 Robert B. Price, Letters of the Divine Word: The Perfections of God in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 106. 138

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couldn’t an affirmation of simplicity run alongside an affirmation of God’s heartfelt solidarity with wounded, wayward creatures? Yes, of course, describing such an “opening,” in solidarity, proves challenging. One must postulate something like an addition to God’s “experience” while not insinuating potentiality or deficiency. One must develop the sense that God’s “beholding” of creaturely suffering “marks” God’s life, and in such a way that affirmations of divine unity, divine uniqueness, and divine simplicity (and, I think, divine omniscience and omnipresence) are enhanced—not weakened. But such challenges are not obviously insurmountable. If God’s simplicity is not necessarily jeopardized through an affirmation of longsuffering, what about aseity? Does an affirmation of divine suffering have as an entailment God’s dependence on the world? This concern is perhaps more daunting than the previous. As Gavrilyuk has shown, one function of patristic claims about divine impassibility was to “distance God the creator from the gods of mythology.” Such distanciation, while sometimes flanked with allusions to “emotionally coloured divine characteristics” (anger, compassion, etc.), was often paired with the claim that God is neither perturbed nor reactive to historical events.140  Augustine’s treatise illustrates the point: it contends that God is “impassible” and “extremely patient”; that God is “patient without suffering at all” (De pat.2 §1.1). Reformed scholastics proceeded along similar lines, arguing that the attribution of patience conveys cognitively significant information about God’s relationship with sinners while not complicating an affirmation of divine independence. Once again, though, it is important that God’s self-revelation, which includes God’s disclosure of who it is that God has determined Godself to be, serves as the standard of reflection. And, once again, it is possible to affirm God’s self-sufficient reality while also claiming that God reveals Godself as one who voluntarily “opens” Godself to the world, exercising patience in a way that includes—as God wills it—grief over waywardness and its effects. Thomas Weinandy has written that an acclamation of God’s act of creatio ex nihilo debars “all possible subsequent interactions and relationships between God and creatures,” since “the ability to enact the act of creation can only reside in a being whose very nature is ‘to be,’ that is, to be

Gavrilyuk, Suffering of the Impassible God, 48 and 47.

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‘pure act,’ and as such is ontologically incapable of further enacting some self-actualizing or self-constituting potential after the manner of everything else that exists.”141 This claim is of course consistent with a certain brand of Thomism. But—notice particularly the words “ontologically incapable”—it risks turning the ontological distinction of creator and world into a metaphysical scheme from which God cannot escape. It supposes, that is, that aseity requires God’s being to be absolutely and irrevocably “closed,” such that God simply cannot permit certain events to affect God’s being in some way. It supposes that God’s pure actuality is a “given” that God has no choice but to abide by. And that is a supposition one must avoid. To press an identification of God as ipsum esse subsistens to the point at which talk of divine self-determination is thusly circumscribed—there being limits on God’s being the God that God intends to be and eternally is; there being restrictions to God’s assigning this or that identity to God—amounts to a troubling curtailment of God’s freedom. A final variation on the theme is the claim that theopaschism historicizes God, with God’s immanent life collapsed into God’s economic activity. Paul Molnar and David Bentley Hart have advanced this claim with especial vigor. One of Molnar’s abiding concerns is what he takes to be contemporary theologians’ tendency to abandon an affirmation of God’s being as “eternally self-sufficient” in favor of an understanding of God’s “becoming who he will be because of his relations ad extra,” such that “time and suffering are allowed to define the divine nature.”142 This tendency, Molnar claims, jeopardizes a cluster of nonnegotiable beliefs: that the triune God has freedom in and for Godself, apart from and independent of the world; that God is unconditioned by the world; that God’s relationship with the world, centered around the incarnation, is a matter of grace alone. To right the ship, theologians need to draw a “clear and sharp distinction” between the immanent and

Thomas Weinandy, “God and Human Suffering: His Act of Creation and His Acts in History,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 105. Emphases added. 142 Paul D. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 80. 141

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economic Trinity—a distinction, Molnar argues, that is exemplified throughout the Church Dogmatics.143 David Bentley Hart thinks along similar lines, albeit with less interest in the (supposedly) baneful impact of “experience” on theological reflection and more interest in the impact of German idealism on dogmatic inquiry. “No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility”—a characteristically bracing piece, despite its invocation of an outdated view of Hegel as a Grand Metaphysician—thus opens with a section entitled “Divine suffering, Divine becoming.” It juxtaposes a patristic commendation of divine apatheia, wherein God is “impervious to any force … external to his nature and is incapable of experiencing shifting emotions,” with modern viewpoints that (apparently) “collapse the distinction between God’s eternal being as the triune God and the temporal history of God’s unfolding presence with his creatures,” leading to the suggestion that God’s eternal identity is constituted by and dependent on the life and death of Jesus Christ. And if Hart trains particular fire on Moltmann and Eberhard Jüngel, one finds here also an anticipation of debates over Barth’s theological ontology. Hart challenges the notion of God’s “free determination,” wherein God opts to “identify himself with the man Jesus,” discerning here the notion of “a God whose will enjoys a certain indeterminate priority over his essence, in whom possibility exceeds actuality, who is therefore composite, ontic, voluntaristic … and obviously [sic!] non-existent.”144 A broader point is easily discernible: an acclamation of what Barth once called the “holy mutability of God” (CD II/1, 496), amplified and radicalized in German Kreuztheologie, is a step on a slippery slope. And what engenders the slope and its slipperiness is Hegel’s defection from the patristic vision of divine impassibility and immutability. My appropriation of Barth’s account of divine selfdetermination, I hope, draws the sting of Molnar’s and Hart’s challenges. An affirmation of divine suffering need not, in and of itself, amount to a “tell,” disclosive of a theological metaphysics Molnar’s call for a “clear and sharp distinction” between the immanent and economic Trinity is found throughout Divine Freedom; see, for example, 58, 121, and 316. 144 David Bentley Hart, “No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility,” ProEcc 11, no. 2 (2002): 191. As noted in an earlier chapter, this claim is reprised in recent critiques of Bruce McCormack’s reading of the later Barth. 143

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that exchanges aseity for a historicized becoming. Isaak Dorner’s classic treatment of immutability, lauded by Barth in Church Dogmatics II/1, proves helpful here. Foregrounding the perfection of God’s “ethical” personality and steering a path between classical theism and the extravagances of many nineteenth-century neoLutheran kenoticists, Dorner raises the possibility of some kind of “real relation” between God and world—one that includes both God’s “permitting of himself to be determined” and what Dorner calls “the ethical self-identity and immutability of God.”145 Longsuffering, in other words, is not something to which God is subjected. It is a “capacity” and a mode of “experience” that God grants to Godself. It is an exercise of patience, grounded in God’s self-determined life, whereby God freely bears the costs of a world that loses its way. I hurry to add that Dorner’s work, in and of itself, needs supplement. At points, Dorner comes perilously close to suggesting that love’s “need” for reciprocity sets the terms for God’s trinitarian life and God’s relationship with the world; Scott Rice is thus quite right to argue that Divine Immutability stands in need of Barth’s dual affirmation of divine aseity and divine self-determination.146 But the very fact of Dorner’s missteps, and the very fact that Barth (and others) critically appropriate some of Hegel’s insights, needn’t be a cause for alarm. To put it sharply: the inclination to view Hegel as some kind of gateway drug, the partaking of which prompts the abandonment of all theological reason, amounts to a curious kind of intellectual neuroticism. It underrates the capacity of Christian theologians to make selective use of philosophical insights, and it overrates the power of this philosophical framework to muddle the understanding that is ingredient to faith.

(c) The (slow) pace of salvation. None of the above, of course, means that any particular perspective on theopaschism stands beyond reproach. Working through a number of critiques, in fact, establishes a number of “red-lines” that ought not to be crossed. It is obviously important, for instance, to ensure that God is not “entangled in an unending internal emotional whirligig” or depicted

Dorner, Divine Immutability, 165 and 176. See Scott P. Rice, Trinity and History: The God-World Relationship in Dorner, Barth, Pannenberg, and Jenson (Eugene: Pickwick, 2022). 145 146

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as a “cosmic sponge” who soaks up suffering.147 Both would suggest that God is controlled by the world. Both would suggest that longsuffering is imposed on God from the outside, as opposed to making longsuffering a dimension of God’s self-determination as the God of ancient Israel. It is also important to check an excess of anthropomorphism, lest God’s life appear to be at the mercy of a shifting array of emotions. To posit, say, “a build-up of internal forces in God” that results in an outburst of judgment or to think in terms of divine “weariness,” or “exhaustion” is inadvisable.148 Finally, one must ensure that talk of divine suffering is not given an outsized role in the doctrine of God. It is not the case, to recall a famous phrase, that God presents Godself as the “great companion— the fellow-sufferer who understands” (PR 351). Beyond suggesting that God and world stand within shared ontological continuum and obscuring God’s self-declared identity as the God of ancient Israel and Jesus Christ, Whitehead’s adage drastically unbalances reflection. In the context of a statement about providence, it could imply that an affirmation of sin and its consequences is more important than an affirmation of God’s persistence in blessings. It could suggest that attention to the scriptural witness has been displaced by a very human, very understandable, but nevertheless very perilous desire to make our experience of brokenness the keynote of theological reflection. A preferable way to proceed is by positioning claims about divine suffering under the canopy of a broader statement about patience, and to emphasize the utility of the term longsuffering. I want to propose, first, that patience qua longsuffering be construed along lines suggested by Julian of Norwich: God’s love for us, and God’s pursuit of our salvation, needing to be “paced” according to creatures’ limited capacities and embroilment with sin. Second, with help from Origen and Barth, I draw attention to God’s patience as it encompasses God’s permitting of waywardness (the non-impeditio peccati), God’s empowerment of expressions of creaturely pain and protest (the nonimpeditio accusationis), and God’s bearing the costs of waywardness. Third and finally, a concluding qualification. This account of divine longsuffering, tied as it is to a statement about providence that focuses

Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? 163; and Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1982), 229. 148 Fretheim, The Suffering of God, 142. 147

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on the Hebrew Bible, remains incomplete; it waits on a Christological and pneumatological account of God’s exercise of patience. So, ad rem: (i) In the Short and Long Texts of Revelations, Julian connects patience with Christians’ yearning for the fullness of God’s presence. There is a good deal of continuity with the standpoint of De civitate Dei: those who are granted patience accept that God works at God’s own pace, guiding the course of history at the speed God deems most fitting. Those who are patient, more specifically, ground their comportment in a vivid apprehension of Christ crucified and resurrected. If one fixes one’s gaze on one who “gladlye and esely bere oure paines, for that es grete plesinge to him and endelesse profitte to us” (Vis. 24), it becomes possible to view the “paines” of one’s existence both as a symptom of the incompleteness of redemption (and thus the need to rely, ever more fully, on God’s mercy) and as the means by which God, in Christ, purifies and heals those who live “in Christ,” on this side of eternity. Complementary to this construal of human patience, the Long and Short Texts of Revelations quietly gesture toward the idea that God exercises patience—that God herself undergoes the long road along which God’s love travels, in pursuit of wayward creatures. This road, obviously, begins and ends with Christ. He is “oure clethinge [clothing]”; his “love wappes us and windes us [wraps and winds about us], halses us and alle becloses us [embraces and encloses us], hinges [hangs] aboute us for tender love” (Vis. 4). He is its extension and direction, too: the “way” being nothing other than the Word become flesh. But the activity of the risen Christ, precisely it is “behovely,” involves God restraining the pace of salvation, moving at a speed that ensures that Christ’s blood “overfloweth all erth” (Rev. 12) without overwhelming those caught in its wake. While God “hat haste to have us to him, for we are his joy and delight” (Rev. 79), God does not rush the application of redemptive love. God suffers its slow outworking. God measures out God’s love, allowing us “to faile by measure” (Rev. 48)—here, perhaps, there is something of what the Reformed scholastics called the nonimpeditio peccati—accepting a manifold of failures in advance of the consummation of all things. Granted this chapter’s Christological reticence, this description of divine patience accords with the account of God’s longsuffering I want to commend. On one level, there is the steady pressure of God’s grace, oriented toward the contestation of waywardness and

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the reformation of God’s creatures. The backdrop to this effort is God’s maintenance of creation’s basic structures: the patience of God made manifest in the act of conservation/preservation, as God “maintains and perpetuates things made by him as regards their existence, essence, and natural faculties.”149 This activity is the reason why time and space have their own integrity and extend in (relatively) predictable ways; why geographic locales hold their respective shapes; why creatures have (roughly) delineated identities and capacities; why cultures and countercultures perdure and transform over time. And, within this context, there are targeted endeavors that support the emergence of ancient Israel as the medium of the providential work of God, oriented toward the incarnation of the Word and the outpouring of the Spirit. This is the patience of God made manifest in God’s gubernatorial activity, centered around impeccably timed, highly particular actions that enable patterns of creaturely conduct that disclose our movement away from waywardness. Abram, Sarai, and Lot’s response to God’s call is a case in point. A gracious intervention, imposed upon a distorted context, makes possible new kinds of behavior, with and for God, and with and for others. And as this behavior recalls, albeit fitfully, the creatio cooperativa of Gen. 1:1–2:4a, it looks toward the establishment of ancient Israel as a partner in the covenant of grace. On another level, shifting now to God’s affectiones as God goes about God’s providential work, God herself suffers the slow pace at which God’s redemptive project plays out. Not “suffers” in the sense that God is contingently unsettled by the actions of wayward creatures. Not “suffers” in the sense that God’s life is an exercise in frustration, as God braves setback upon setback upon setback. “Suffers” in the sense that God refuses to rush the process whereby ancient Israel (and, one presumes, eventually creation as such) comes to grasp its place in the covenant; “suffers”

Heidegger, cited in Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 257. Geerhardus Vos makes the same point less technically, describing preservation as “the act by which [God] by a positive expression of His will, causes a thing, as it already exists or in connection with that existence, to remain itself.” See Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, Theology Proper, trans. and ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Bellingham: Lexham, 2012–4), 186. I address this issue at greater length in the following chapter.

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in the sense that this refusal to rush has as its complement God enduring the sight of waywardness, in diverse forms, as creatures distort and damage innumerable patches of time and space. Is such suffering, such longsuffering, an obligation for God, imposed on God “from the outside”? Or a function of God’s inability to quicken the providential and redemptive pace? No; I hope I have done enough to show why such worries need not obtain. While it is quite reasonable to suppose that it is in God’s power to save creatures with a snap of the divine fingers (something comparable to the act of creatio ex nihilo), God’s decision not to rush the pace of salvation is a function of God’s willingness to “let be” and “let happen,” honoring the condition in which creatures propel themselves and acting and maintaining the integrity of creatures in various states of lostness. Put differently: granted the importance of claims about the “irresistibility” of grace when it comes, say, to an affirmation of justification, the patience of divine longsuffering makes plain that this is but one modality of divine action. While one might wish that God would flood the world with blessings that drown out the pollution of waywardness—a happy counterpoint to other, more destructive kinds of deluge, some of which we are currently engineering for ourselves—God has committed Godself to the long-haul. Working with and through finite, fragile, and wayward creatures, God holds fast to God’s identity as a creator who “lets be” and “lets happen.” Ancient Israel, and ancient Israel’s knowledge of God, emerges slowly, thereby telling us something of how God relates to the world more broadly. God suffers the slowness of the redemption that God effects. (ii) Then, pairing Julian’s perspective with Barth’s theological ontology, we can move beyond the idea of longsuffering as an affectus voluntatis Dei and imagine something of how God “achieves the exposure of God” as “God destines Himself to the necessity of waiting” (SW 94, my emphasis). While God disposes herself as a parent who leads children with “bands of love” (Hos. 11:4), binding Godself to ancient Israel and permitting the waywardness that plagues this child’s existence, God allows the effects of waywardness to register in God’s own life. An eternal act of selfdetermination, wherein God’s definition of Godself is coextensive with God’s always and forever being the subject that God defines Godself to be, includes God’s “opening” Godself to the horrors of sinfulness, cruelty, and stupidity as God waits for God’s creatures to

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participate in the covenant of grace. Longsuffering, by these lights, is not a merely economic posture—sincere in its own way, but held at a distance from God’s innermost depths. Longsuffering, the stretched-out grief that accompanies creatures on their way, cuts at God’s very heart. Flanked with anger (which I will later gloss as impatience) over what should not be, it is an exercise of solidarity and compassion, outward and inward, that encompasses those who are caught up in the vortex of sin and suffering. And, flanked by and mediated through God’s knowledge of all events in past, present, and future, it ensures that the sins and traumas of ancient Israel in God’s own life—and, one presumes, countless other communities, human and other-than-human—are memorialized, held in the time and space of God’s own being. Recall Barth on patience “[f]or the creature as such, God is hard on himself. He suffers for it. … He takes its plight to his own heart” (CD II/1, 411). It is not the case, of course, that God is overwhelmed by suffering. Grief does not break God’s heart, even as grief bears on God’s heart. It is imperative, in fact, that an acclamation of this mode of divine patience be positioned “downstream” of claims about God’s creative generosity and God’s persistence in disbursing blessings, and (this will be the task of the next chapter) paired with a clear sense of how God ensures that ancient Israel “succeeds,” after a fashion, in making good on God’s patience. Nor is it the case, to return to a concern voiced by critics, that God’s eternal life has to be “completed” through the contributions of some number of creatures and/or the world at large. God does not “need” the world in order to be the God that God intends to be and is; it remains possible (and important) to affirm God’s self-sufficiency. Longsuffering is more a matter—and language necessarily starts to break down at this point—of God’s self-sufficient completeness being “expanded,” by God, to include God’s experience of the costs of creaturely waywardness. It is a matter of God taking responsibility for the world that God creates and preserves and governs, with an eye to the reconciliation wrought by Christ and the redemptive energies of the Holy Spirit. It is a matter of the “personal God [having] a heart,” and understanding that God elects to be “moved and stirred, yet not like ourselves in powerlessness, but in His own free power, in His innermost being: moved and touched by Himself, i.e., open, ready, inclined (propensus) to compassion with another’s suffering” (CD II/1, 370).

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A different angle of approach to patience qua divine longsuffering, which also allows me to reprise earlier claims and to begin to move this chapter to its close, returns us to the topic of divine permission. A passage from Origen’s homily on Ezek. 16:2–16, when read in light of my own proposals, proves helpful in this regard. Understand something of this kind with regard to the Savior. He came down to earth out of compassion for the human race. Having experienced our sufferings even before he suffered on the cross, he condescended to assume our flesh. For if he had not suffered, he would not have come down to live on the level of human life. First, he suffered; then he came down and was seen (cf. 1 Tim. 3:16). What is this suffering that he suffered for us? It is the suffering of love. The Father, too, himself, the God of the universe, “patient and abounding in mercy” (Ps. 103:8) and compassionate, does he not in some way suffer? Or do you not know that when he directs human affairs he suffers human suffering? For “the Lord your God bore your ways, just as a man bears his son” (Deut. 1:31). Therefore God bears our ways, just as the Son of God bears our sufferings. The Father himself is not without suffering. When he is prayed to, he has pity and compassion; he suffers something of love and comes into those in whom he cannot be, in view of the greatest of his nature, and on account of us he endures human sufferings.150 What Origen identifies as the “suffering of love,” with God being “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Ps. 103:8 [NRSV]), could be said to have God’s permissive “letting be” and “letting happen” as its backdrop. Although God does not directly effect sin, God orders the basic structures of the world and presides over all that happens in history—this being basic to the claim that God is “of the universe,” the Lord who “directs human affairs.” It follows,

Origen: Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel, trans. Thomas P. Scheck (New York: The Newman Press, 2010), 92–3. Emphases added. Thomas Weinandy’s work drew my attention on this passage, even though he and I read it quite differently. See Does God Suffer? 98–100; and idem, “Origen and the Suffering of God,” in Studia Patristica 36: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford, 1999 [Leuven: Peeters, 2001], 456–60.

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too, that God bears responsibility for everything that happens, even if wayward actions do not accord with God’s intentions—and even if God’s principal concern is to disburse blessings to ancient Israel (and, more broadly, to creation as a whole). God is certainly not the “author” of sin in the same way that God is the “author” of creation, the “author” of the calling of Abram, Sarai, and Lot, and the “author” of the covenant forged after ancient Israel’s liberation from slavery. But God permits creatures to take leave of God’s directives, God honors creatures’ wayward decisions and actions as God “lets be” and “lets happen,” and God presides over a worldhistory in which sometimes meaningless kinds of pain, suffering, and trauma often run riot. But that, thankfully, is not the whole story. I’ve also proposed that God’s empowerment of creaturely activity be figured in a way that supports expressions of anguish, despair, and hopelessness. The scriptural witness attests to this fact: one here finds numerous kinds of “countertestimony” (Brueggemann), stretching from demands for attention (“Is it nothing to you, all who pass by? / Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow” [Lam. 1:12]) to admissions of regret and bafflement, paired with barbed petitions (“Why do you hold back your hand; why do you keep your hand in your bosom?” [Ps. 44:24]),151 to raw howls of anguish (“O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?” [Ps. 88:4]). If such declarations might even be said to serve as an incitement for others to add their voices to the chorus, to “pile on” and to confront God as the provider who does not impede the effects of waywardness, their dogmatic significance is even more striking. By supporting the formation of a scriptural witness that gives space for such voices, God demonstrates “ownership” of God’s permissive work in the context of God’s Weltregierung. Thus it is that God’s non-impeditio peccati goes hand in hand with God’s non-impeditio accusationis. God reveals Godself as one who is ultimately on the hook, so to speak, for everything that happens and one who honors creatures’ brokenness, creatures’ anger, creatures’ despair in face of sin and the suffering that follows in its wake. Ps. 44:22–23 makes the point with unparalleled vigor, and with an indignation borne

Especially worthy of mention here is Dalit Rom-Shiloni, “Psalm 44: The Powers of Protest,” CBQ 70, no. 4 (2008): 683–98.

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of a vivid sense that God has distinguished Godself through God’s prior disbursement of blessings, the effect of which is to position ancient Israel within the covenant of grace. “Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. / Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever!” Think now what it means, given this framework, to say that “God bears our ways, just as the Son of God bears our sufferings.” God’s non-impeditio peccati and non-impeditio accusationis, I would suggest, go hand in hand with God sovereignly “opening” Godself, allowing thereby the horrors and consequences of waywardness to register in God’s own life. If God’s heart never breaks, is never overwhelmed by the depth and radicality of creaturely trauma, Barth is entirely right to say that God’s heart is “moved and stirred.” That is a function of God’s binding Godself to ancient Israel (and, by extension, humankind) in an act of sovereign selfdetermination. That is a function of God disposing Godself as one whose “experience” expands beyond the bliss of God’s own triune life, and in such a way that the traumas and tragedies of creaturely life find a place in the patient eternity of God’s own being. So one need not say, in the final analysis, that God is “patient without suffering at all” (De pat.2 §1). Nor, to put it more polemically, need one suppose that an acclamation of longsuffering draws us into the orbit of the Hegelian claim that “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience [Geduld], and the labor of the negative” are constitutive of a divine being that “take[s] upon itself the prodigious labor of world history.”152 An ontology of divine self-determination enables one to affirm God’s sovereignty and self-sufficiency, God’s insusceptibility to adventitious change, God’s constancy in God’s triune identity, and God’s unflagging pursuit of creaturely well-being while also allowing that God takes the sorrows of the world to heart. One can affirm God’s bearing and grieving over a world in which creatures defect from God’s purpose, while persistently working—slowly but surely—to set things right.

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. and ed. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §§19 and 29. I am using Hegel’s words a bit loosely at this juncture—but not, I think, without justification, given Hegel’s remarks about the mediation and realization of God’s being in history.

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(iii) The final words of this chapter, however, must be an acknowledgment of incompleteness. As it stands, claims about God’s longsuffering, as God declines to rush the pace of salvation and opens Godself to the consequences of waywardness, lack for Christological and pneumatological elaboration. It is one thing to say, “the Lord your God bore your ways, just as a man bears his son” (Deut. 1:31); however, one must also go on to say, as Origen does, “God bears our ways, just as the Son of God bears our sufferings.” The perspective elaborated here, then, waits on an exposition of what it means to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is patience incarnate, one who lives out a history that fulfils the covenant between God and ancient Israel and who bears God’s (impatient) condemnation of and judgment of waywardness. It waits, too, on an exposition of the outpouring of the Spirit of Christ, one who patiently “lets be” and “lets happen” in new ways as we undergo a transformative process of sanctification and we grasp the need for impatient liberative activity, undertaken on behalf of God and in service of our fellow creatures. An analysis of divine patience in the context of providence is but an initial step. In due course, it must be tied to a broader statement about God’s salvific work and—at the very end of this project—nested within a broader statement about God’s triune identity.

­6 The Patience of God the Provider (2) In launching an account of providence centered on God’s exercise of patience, the previous chapter traded on a sharp contrast. On the one side, I construed God’s patience in terms of the blessing of ancient Israel: a persistent application of love and mercy that establishes a covenantal relationship, with God’s exercise of grace eliciting creaturely activity that corresponds with God’s directives. On the other side, I construed sin as waywardness: a condition of epistemological and moral lostness, expressive of hostility toward God, that frustrates God’s purposes and despoils creation. I also suggested that the effects of waywardness extend beyond the world. Patience as longsuffering is one consequence of God’s decision to “open” Godself to creaturely travail: it names the way that God grieves over the slow pace of salvation, taking the pains, anguish, and trauma of creaturely existence to heart. But even as the horrors of waywardness register upon God’s own patient life—and it is vital that one think carefully about God’s self-determination at this juncture, lest one fall victim to the shortcomings of some theopaschite perspectives—God is not thrown off course. God’s governance of history continues apace. The present chapter extends and moves beyond these lines of thought. While holding fast to the contrast of blessings and waywardness, my principal concern is to describe how the exercise of divine patience supports the realization of God’s providential goals, both with respect to ancient Israel and with respect to history in general. This concern, as will become evident, draws

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attention to the soteriological undercurrent of my treatment of providence—an undercurrent that purposefully recalls Calvin’s affiliation of knowledge of God the creator with knowledge of God the redeemer, achieved in part through his deft deployment of the idiom of patience—and enables a series of gestures that prepare the way for the Christological arguments of this volume’s successor. The first section considers patience qua steadfastness, contending that God “bends” the course of history to ensure that Israel gains an adequate sense of its place in God’s redemptive work. God’s primordial “letting be” and “letting happen,” obviously, still occur. The patience of God the provider is continuous with the patience of God the creator, and I spend a bit of time considering God’s preservative activity to illustrate what that means. But my chief interest is in the ways that God’s exercise of patience “pays off.” Limiting the impact of creatures’ waywardness, while subtly pulling and pushing history in this and that direction, God raises up a people who knows who God is, what God has done, and what God calls it to do. Divine patience as steadfastness, by these lights, names a pattern of divine activity that moves ancient Israel in a specific direction, at a specific tempo, according to God’s loving and wise purposes. And understanding what it means to say that God is steadfast in this way goes some way to offsetting the menacing eschatological visions that Tertullian and Cyprian (and, to a lesser extent, Augustine) advanced in the name of patientia. Divine steadfastness is not a matter of God restraining Godself in advance of a destructive eschatological reckoning. It is a matter of God extending the reach and impact of God’s blessings, so as to expand the scope and intensity of creaturely flourishing and to raise up a covenant people. The second section argues that a particular payoff of God’s steadfastness is the formation of the scriptural witness, brought about by countless divinely empowered responses to God’s patience—responses that show God’s blessings and steadfastness being rewarded, in a particularly valuable way, by a particular subset of creatures within ancient Israel. Of course, I have already said a good deal about what it means for creatures to reward God’s patience. Formally, it is a matter of intentions and actions that conform to the trajectories proposed and enabled by God’s grace; concretely, it is an eschewal of waywardness

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and a performance of creaturely subjectivity, in a discrete patch of time and space, that makes manifest the gratitude, obedience, and freedom of ancient Israel. And, given all that has been said, readers may be a little surprised that I am not offering, at this point, a theological anthropology developed in conjunction with a doctrine of sanctification: the former sourced in the Hebrew Bible, the latter elaborated in light of the New Testament. But it is important not to move too quickly. In this section, I endeavor to connect my description of God’s providential work with those processes of attention, hearing, wonder, discursivity, invention, and preservation that funded the emergence of the Hebrew Bible as a witness to God’s self-revelation. I endeavor to recognize and honor the efforts made by largely unknown communities and individuals: people who came to understand, by grace, that God’s exercise of patience generated a story that needs to be told; people who generated, preserved, transmitted, and redacted folk memories, oral traditions, songs, prophetic outbursts, and history-like narratives; people—and this is crucial to emphasize, lest an affirmation of Israel’s place in the history of salvation lacks for specificity—whose contributions form an indispensable moment in the outworking of God’s providential and salvific project. If the resulting materials sometimes strike us as fallible and flawed (and, notwithstanding their inspired status, they are, for like any cultural production they bear the marks of waywardness), their existence attests to the fact that ancient Israel, in a partial but profound way, fulfills its role in the covenant of grace. My final section advances some tentative claims about how God governs history as a whole, while looking forward to a fuller Christological (and pneumatological) statement. After further comments about causality and God’s immanent life, I focus on Rom. 8:14–25. I propose that God’s providential action (a) allows for a counterfactual confidence about the direction of history, with those “led by the Spirit” being “children of God” (Rom. 8:14); (b) ensures that this confidence has as a dialectical counterpoint the acknowledgment of various kinds of creaturely “futility” (Rom. 8:20), since God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” support a permissive non-impeditio peccati; (c) waits on creatures’ just and fitting responses to God’s empowering exercise of patience, as “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Rom. 8:26); and (d) assures us that history is held open by God, rendered susceptible to various

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kinds of transformation as we “hope for what we do not see” (Rom. 8:25) and as God continues to exercise patience on our behalf. This quartet of claims, I hurry to add, is lightly sketched. I continue to suppose that the epistemological advantage that Christians believe ourselves to be given, by grace, does not equip us with a preternatural capacity to read the “signs of the times,” much less view history sub specie aeternitatis. However, the claims provide some return on my conviction that an account of providence can and should help Christians locate themselves within God’s ruling, supplying an intellectual backdrop to the task of addressing myriad challenges (political, ecclesial, ecological, sexual, etc.) that can bolster our determination to bring about a future that is markedly better than the present.

1 Patience as Steadfastness A pair of quotations provides an orientation to the three claims of this section. One comes from Charles Wood’s treatment of providence: “God’s sovereignty is shown … in the way that God grants genuine existence and freedom to creatures, acts in and through their own free action, freely bears the consequences of their doings and undoings, and continues to work creatively and redemptively with the world.”1 If the penultimate clause could serve as a gloss on my treatment of divine longsuffering, the final clause captures two dimensions of patience qua steadfastness that I plan to elaborate in the following pages: (a) God’s being the “stability of [our] times” (Isa. 33:6), one who preserves and sustains the world that God creates, in spite of waywardness; and (b) God’s acting to ensure that historical events bend in the direction that God intends. The other quotation hails from Austin Farrer’s Faith and Speculation. Sandwiched between the assertion that “God will not set his heart on the streamlining of a plan, but on the realisation of a world” and the often-cited remark that one “cannot conceive the causal joint (as it were) between omnipotent creativity and free creaturehood,” Farrer declares: “We may speak of the inexhaustible patience of God

1

Charles M. Wood, The Question of Providence (Louisville: WJKP, 2008), 105.

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in achieving his wider aims.”2 Implicit here, arguably, is the notion of permission as the non-impeditio peccati; perhaps also the idea that God injects a degree of indeterminacy into history. But more important for my purposes is the claim (c) that God’s steadfastness results in the (partial) fulfillment of God’s purposes. As God bends history in particular directions, ancient Israel emerges as a people who learns who it is and performs something of what it is asked to do—for God, for itself, and for the world at large. (a) First, then, God as the “stability of our times.” In broad terms, this is a matter of God’s upholding everything that exists, an activity that “maintains and perpetuates the things made by Him as regards to their existence, essence and natural faculties, whether in the species by the succession of individuals or in the individuals themselves” (Heidegger).3 While God has ample reason to restart the entire cosmic project (see Gen. 6:5–7), God “does not allow His creation to perish.” God opts instead to “keep … faith with the creature” (CD III/3, 61) and to maintain something of the diversity that obtained “in the beginning.” Such divine faithfulness, equally, reminds us that the (relative) regularity and (relative) predictability of much that happens bespeaks an exercise of steadfastness that benefits creatures. The outsized claws of snow leopards, the snug adhesion of Lego bricks, the speed of light in a vacuum: the fact that creatures can rely on constants such as these attests to the graciousness of God as creator and provider. One can also suppose, finally, that God’s preservative work discloses something of the steadfastness of God’s own being. It is because God is (effortlessly!) steadfast in Godself that God (effortlessly!) upholds our world, supplying an orderly environment for the emergence of ancient Israel, the incarnation of the Son, and the sending of the Spirit— and, beyond that, times and spaces that can be negotiated by all manner of creatures. Tertullian’s appeal to Matt. 5:45 is worth recalling: “Long has He been scattering the brilliance of the light [of the sun] upon the just and unjust alike and has allowed the

Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation: An Essay on Philosophical Theology (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 110. My emphasis. See also 153. 3 Cited in Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, rev. and ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: Wakeman Great Reprints, n.d.), 257. 2

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deserving as well as the undeserving the benefits of the seasons, the services of the elements, and the gifts of all creation” (De pat. 2.2).

Heidegger’s concern to emphasize creaturely distinction and activity deserves especial attention. On one level, distinction is an abiding (but not unchanging) feature of the contexts in which sentient creatures live, and it is arguably a condition of lives that stand some chance of meaningfulness—for it is pretty much impossible to imagine how one could negotiate an undifferentiated environment, devoid of a “this” distinguishable from a “that”; and it is difficult to imagine how certain creatures could thrive without some sense of individuality. To be sure, overarching local forms of distinction and individuality is the fact that God maintains an “absolute ontological distinction” between God and world.4 The distinctiveness of creatures is crossed with the unsublate-able “ontological homogeneity” of creation as such—a homogeneity that ensures that creatures are never less (or more) than creatures; a homogeneity that ensures that the world is never threatened with absorption into the divine life.5 But that, too, speaks to God’s steadfastness. God’s maintenance of a differentiation of God and world is of apiece with the “letting be” that characterized creation “in the beginning.” At any rate, it is because of God’s steadfastness that one can rest assured of one’s individuality, and one can rest assured that all of us, so to speak, are in it together: existing in face of God and with each other at a particular historical moment. These assurances are part of what it means to live Christianly, in history, before God and with one another. On another level, creaturely heterogeneity goes hand in hand with God’s granting each creature “space and opportunity for its own work … its own being in action … its own autonomous activity” (CD III/3, 92 and 91). Although Barth does not write explicitly about patience in this part-volume of the Church Dogmatics, the allusion to his earlier treatment of this divine perfection is hardly incidental. God’s respect for creaturely distinction dovetails with God’s support for and safeguarding of the integrity, meaning, and

Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 67. 5 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 71. 4

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consequentiality of creaturely ways and works. So in the same moment that creatures can trust in the (relative) stability of some given locale, creatures can also trust that God empowers a wide range of intentions, actions, and projects. God’s “letting be” goes hand in hand with God’s “letting happen,” and God’s “letting happen” supports various kinds of creaturely agency. By dint of God’s “omnipotent activity,” God does not “leave … the activity of the creature free, but continually makes it free” (CD III/3, 150 [my emphasis]). A brief consideration of Ps. 104 adds flesh to these formal bones. On one level, the psalm is aptly read as a euphoric hymn to the distinctions of a specific ecosphere.6 Granted that it opens with an awed acclamation of God and the basic structures of the world (“You stretch out the heavens like a tent, / you set the beams of your chambers on the waters … you set the earth on its foundations, so that it will never be shaken” [vv. 2–3 and 6]), a theocentric mindset quickly gives way to an interest in creaturely distinction and agency. There is talk of rivers running down mountains, so as to provide animals with sustenance (vv. 8 and 10–12); comments about grass, plants, wine, oil, and bread (vv. 14–15), and about trees, storks, goats, coneys, lions, and sea creatures (vv. 17–21 and 25–26); reflections on the seasons and the limited lifespan of each creature (vv. 27–30). Now these interests, of course, do not license an interpretative stance that would dislocate the psalm from an appreciation of God’s saving acts. That would require one to ignore Ps. 104’s placement between Pss. 103 and 105 (the first, a hymn of praise to God qua savior; the latter, a potted history of God’s action on behalf of Israel). There is no free-standing account of creation here—or, for that The following remarks are particularly informed by Adele Berlin, “The Wisdom of Creation in Psalm 104,” in Seeking Out the Wisdom of the Ancients: Essays Offered to Honor Michael V. Fox on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Ronald L. Troxel, Kelvin G. Friebel, and Dennis R. Magary (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 71–83; James Limburg, “Down-to-Earth Theology: Psalm 104 and the Environment,” CurTM 21, no. 5 (1994): 340–6; Ken Stone, “‘All These Look to You’: Reading Psalm 104 with Animals in the Anthropocene Epoch,” Int 73, no. 3 (2019): 236–47; Hennie Viviers, “Is Psalm 103 an expression (also) of dark green religion?” HTS 73, no. 3 (2017): a3829; and Richard Whitekettle, “A Communion of Subjects: Zoological Classification and Human/Animal Relations in Psalm 104,” BBibRes 21, no. 2 (2011): 173–88.

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matter, anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. Even so, Ps. 104 clearly lauds the stunning breadth of God’s creative and preservative action, claiming both that diverse features of the landscape are “for” particular species and showing marked interest in the activity of other-than-human creatures (human beings are thrice mentioned, in comparison to fourteen references to nonhuman animals). An interest in the “stability of our times” is paired with a thrilled description of the vitality of creaturely life, developed at something of a remove from the particular history of ancient Israel. Other-than-human distinction, individuality, relationship, and activity are hailed and celebrated, thereby focusing attention on God’s patience qua steadfastness. On another level, the fact that this psalm is the upshot of an exercise (or, more likely, exercises) of human ingenuity and inventiveness should not be missed. Its inclusion in the Psalter is a nice reminder of the ways that humans are empowered to respond to God’s preservation of an ecosystem, observing and enjoying the goings-on of nonhuman creatures. Indeed, while its chiastic structure affirms the centrality of humankind,7 Ps. 104 suggests that “dominion” (Gen. 1:28) is but one aspect of how God intends for human beings to relate to other-than-human creatures. A gleeful (and charmingly nerdy) fascination with the dynamics of a busy world and an obvious concern to make this world “come alive” for auditors and readers: while not an alternative to the divine command articulated in Gen. 1:28, this psalm enlarges dramatically our sense of what it is to live in multispecies community. It is a theocentric eco-poetics, in miniature, that toggles between an awestruck interest in cosmic structures (the deep as a “garment” that covers the world [v.6], God setting “the beams” of God’s “chambers” on the waters [v. 7], etc.) and an idiosyncratic consideration of nonhuman animals, with especial attention paid to habitats, rest and wakefulness, practices of eating and drinking, shelter, and play (thus remarks about “the birds of the air [who] have their habitation” by streams and “sing among the branches” [v. 12]; about lions who hunt at night [v.21]; about goats who live in “high mountains” [v. 18]; and about Leviathan’s maritime “sport” [v. 26]). The implication

7

See Whitekettle, “A Communion of Subjects,” 184–7.

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stands close to hand: human beings, directed and empowered to notice the rich application of God’s preservative activity, can and should use their creativity to attend to the riches of creation—and, by implication, perhaps do well to let other-than-human creatures “be” and “happen” on their own terms. These two levels of meaning—a rapt appreciation of God’s creative and preservative action, on the one side, and a demonstration of what human creativity should entail, on the other—run together. God’s preservation of other-than-human creatures is the inspiration for the psalm’s literary brilliance, and that exercise of brilliance attests to the ways that “under this divine lordship the rights and honour and dignity and freedom of the creature are not suppressed and extinguished but vindicated and revealed” (CD III/3, 145)—all of which is a function of God’s steadfast patience. I would also note that this psalm declares, in a rather matter-of-fact way, that when God “take[s] away [creatures’] breath, they die and return to the dust” (Ps. 104:29). This is a useful reminder that the “ontological homogeneity” of creation includes a contrast between the everlastingness of God’s own life and creaturely finitude. Arguably, too, it supports Barth’s belief that the temporal limits of creaturely existence are an important dimension of the goodness of creation (see CD III/3, 85–90 and 226–36). Such limits ensure that no single creature can wreak havoc forever (even the worst of us will die); that God can exercise patience toward a shifting array of individuals and communities (each has its season); and that there are more and more opportunities for play, encounter, and change (God's persistent blessing of God's world, paired with limited lifespans, ensures ever-new configurations of creaturely life).

(b) Second, divine steadfastness involves a shaping of history that supports the emergence, formation, and clarification of ancient Israel. It need hardly be said that this connotation of steadfastness connects with chapter 5’s claims about God’s blessings. Although history does not consistently follow the course that God intends, God’s disbursement of favor is unrelenting. Blessings stream forth, targeting ancient Israel—and we move now into the sphere of what is sometimes called providentia specialis, which logically precedes and materially governs the preceding remarks on providentia generalis—and promoting Israel’s transition from a dysfunctional

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family to a confederation of tribes, a nation, and thence, complexly and ambiguously, a people. (Herbert C. Brichto is perhaps right to say that the blessing of Abraham can be read “as though God, having tried once, twice, and a third time with humankind as a whole, concludes that his hopes were too ambitious. He will start again, this time with one man and his family, one people, slowly emerging into history, perhaps to succeed where mankind as a whole has failed.”)8 But it is important to clarify further how ancient Israel is incorporated into the covenant of grace. While God’s patience is manifest in persistent blessing, more needs to be said about God’s direction of events. And at this point, it becomes useful to consider how God bends history in certain directions, spurring specific individuals and communities and creatures to act in this and that way. An elaboration of this claim requires, initially, an acknowledgment that waywardness slows the pace of God’s covenantal project. It requires one to concede that the tempo of God’s providential work genuinely—and not just apparently—drags, given the advent and spread of sin. Why so? Well, it is not a matter of God being unable to get God’s own way. The point has already been made: in that God creates ex nihilo, it is quite reasonable to suppose that God could bring about salvation in a flash, if God so willed it. The question is why God does not so act; and part of the answer to that question has to do with God’s non-impeditio peccati, which is derivative of God’s primordial willingness to “let be” and “let happen.” Put more fully: given that God’s patient providing is continuous with the cosmogony and anthropogony detailed in Gen. 1:1–2:4a, creatures retain a capacity to plot their own course through life, apart from and in opposition to God’s directives, and when creatures intend and realize those self-plotted courses, hostility toward God and the distortion of creation are a result. So it is that one dimension of the patience of God qua provider—would that it was otherwise, but it is clearly not—is God’s permitting waywardness some kind of free rein, thus ensuring a delay in the realization of certain of God’s goals.

Herbert Chanan Brichto, The Names of God: Poetic Readings in Biblical Beginnings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 184.

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To be sure, an affirmation of this “drag” does not have as a corollary the claim that God is submerged in the temporal process, and thus obliged to hypothesize and strategize, in real time, about how to get the world back on track. It is much preferable—albeit for reasons that I cannot expand upon here—to gloss the contrast between God and world in terms of a temporal sequence on the side of creatures, and a kind of eternality on the side of God, wherein God knows and rules God’s world in its past, present, and future. But a refusal of what is sometimes called an “open and relational” perspective, whether process-oriented, neo-evangelical, or Hegelian in temper, should not obscure the fact that scripture bears witness to a relationship between ancient Israel and God that permits Israel (and numerous others) to frustrate God’s plans. Ingredient to God’s self-determination as a longsuffering Lord is a willingness to treat this people’s failings and missteps as consequential; a willingness to contend with ancient Israel in the context of a covenant that does not unfold in a mechanical, crudely deterministic manner. At the same time, to pivot to the positive point, God’s governance of ancient Israel is majestically efficacious. Granted the non-impeditio peccati, God’s actions have a decisive and transformative impact. The drag of sin never halts the forward-movement of God’s providing, even if it manages to slow it. And because God intervenes on behalf of God’s people—sometimes subtly, sometimes not-sosubtly—ancient Israel is able to tell the story of its relationship with a God who abounds in steadfast love and favor. It can narrate a story that swings between an awareness of radical waywardness and an acclamation of the even more radical “glorious deeds of the Lord” (Ps. 78:4). I am aware that these claims invite a host of questions about the relationship between (divine) eternity and (creaturely) time, foreknowledge and “middle” knowledge, necessity and contingency, and the degree to which history is (or is not) “determined.” My decision not to engage such questions is, in part, strategic: loose ends are an acceptable price to pay in a wide-angled but relatively brief engagement with the doctrine of providence. With that said, and to reprise a point made in the last chapter, just as one cannot anatomize the “causal joint” that connects divine and creaturely action, theologians do well to relinquish the expectation that one might understand fully how God relates to each and every sequence of events. A dogmatically rich account of “the absolute majesty of the divine rule” (CD III/3, 159) does not need to spell out precisely how God gets God’s way.

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But mightn’t an acknowledgment that ancient Israel can and does frustrate God’s purposes indicate that God’s power has an upper limit? Are we not now inching toward the claim that the God who provides is not really omnipotent—or, even, toward the notion that God “restricts” Godself to ensure the meaningfulness, integrity, and consequentiality of creatures and creaturely action? No. To address the second worry: as noted earlier, in no sense does God need to downsize God’s being or temper God’s willing in order for creatures to do their own thing. Vouchsafing the reality and integrity of creaturely life, in fact, cannot require an abbreviation of God’s antecedent reality and activity: it depends on both the fullness of God’s being in se and the all-encompassing “reach” of God’s providing. To address the first worry: it is important to avoid having an account of God’s providential action repose on a formal (or, one might say, “religious”) concept of almightiness, with God presumed to be “endowed with absolute, unconditioned and irresistible power,” ruling with such “sovereign caprice” that “the creature would appear to act, but in fact would only be acted upon” (CD III/3, 113).9 An affirmation of omnipotence ought rather to be paired with an awareness that the modes of God’s creative and governmental activity are various, though unified in purpose, extending from the astounding act of creatio ex nihilo to support for a creatio cooperativa, the upholding of creaturely distinction and individuality, the calling of Abram and Sarai, the liberation of ancient Israel from enslavement, permission granted to those ransacking Jerusalem, the empowerment of those who protested the city’s destruction, and the nurturance of an exilic community that positions its grief and sorrow within a sweeping account of God’s ways and works. Barth again: “the Lord is never absent, passive, non-responsible, or impotent, but always present, active, responsible and omnipotent … even where He seems to wait, even where He permits, [God is] always holding the initiative” (CD III/3, 13). Or, in my idiom: God’s omnipotence is not rendered doubtful by a passage of history that includes I would add that Barth’s tendency to associate a vision of “sovereign caprice” with the perspective of “Moslems” who stand before “the inscrutable will of Allah” (CD III/3, 113) deserves sharp rebuke. Uninformed polemics do not bolster the positive claim Barth is seeking to make and support a long history of prejudice and discrimination.

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intervention, empowerment, “letting be” and “letting happen,” permission, persistence, accusation, and subtle moments of pressure; God’s omnipotence is proved by that very history, and that proving should set the terms for what Christian theologians say about divine almightiness. Given the importance of this point, I will risk overstating it with a further clarification. Although the desire to have a tightly wound, deterministic view of God’s providing is an understandable application of the logic of sola gratia—and, as noted previously, if Zwingli’s De Providentia is a conspicuous instance of this application, it also represents a possible reading of portions of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre— it betrays a refusal to consider what David Fergusson has recently dubbed a “polyphonic” approach to providence. It forgets that God “is not poor in Himself but rich,” and that God “works together with the creature. He does not do it uniformly or monotonously or without differentiation, for He is not uniform or monotonous or undifferentiated in Himself.” It forgets that “God is not a pedant. He is not like a schoolmaster who gives the same lesson to the whole class, or an officer who moves his whole squadron in the same direction, or a bureaucrat who once an outlook or principle is embedded in his own little head rules his whole department in accordance with it” (CD III/3, 138).

With preliminaries out of the way, I can cut to the heart of the matter: the idiom of steadfastness allows one to complement talk about God’s patient and permissive “letting be” and “letting happen” with the acclamation of coordinated and (roughly) trackable clusters of governmental actions, the aggregated force of which ensures the advent, nurturance, and formation of ancient Israel as a (relatively) self-conscious partner in the covenant of grace. Although Ps. 89 concludes ambiguously, two of its verses help to illustrate this point. Describing God’s attitude toward a king whose people defect from the covenant, we hear: “I will not remove him from my steadfast love [hesed], or be false to my faithfulness. I will not violate my covenant, or alter the word that went forth from my lips. Once and for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David” (Ps. 89:33–35). On one level, there is a declaration of unwavering divine favor, which encompasses the king and Israel alike. Having committed to this leader and this people, God will not—in fact, cannot—renege on the covenant, lest God be untrue to Godself. God’s self-determination is not a transient affair; it is a decision God applies to Godself in the depths of God’s eternal life, “fixing” God’s

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identity as the God of ancient Israel (“once and for all I have sworn …”). On another level, the steadfastness of self-assigned identity ensures a steadfastness of divine action: God’s acting to pursue this or that particular end through various means. But—this is crucial— steadfastness of purpose does not mean unanimity in the modality of God’s action. The calling of Abram and Sarai, the geopolitical and interpersonal complexities of the ancestral period, ancient Israel’s liberation from enslavement, the fitful seizure of land, the construction of the temple, the advent of the monarchy, etc.: while this sequence of events marks God as the God of ancient Israel, it is plainly inclusive of a wide array of governmental initiatives and strategies. Indeed, just as God’s patience qua blessing is a subtle affair, so is God’s steadfast direction of events. What Timothy Gorringe has called “the unweariedness of the divine patience”10 is made manifest in an ingenious, delicate, and multifaceted act of Weltregierung. Genesis 12:10–20 is a useful example of what this means. Given the advent of famine, and without (obvious) divine prompting, Abram tries to con his way into Egypt.11 It is hard to say if Sarai assents to Abram’s plan to hoodwink the border guards by posing as his sister, either now or in later iterations of the ruse (Gen. 20 and 26:6–11). Certainly, one ought not to assume that a positive “answer can be left out where silence suffices”: the narrative has offered scant much information about Abram and Sarai’s relationship, and there is no reason to suppose that the scheming of a would-be paterfamilias is met with acquiescence.12 At any rate, Abram’s scheme immediately spins out of control. There is a crescendo of creepy interest: Sarai’s physical appearance is noticed Timothy Gorringe, God’s Theatre: A Theology of Providence (London: SCM, 1991), 67; see also 80 and 85. 11 Jewish and Christian scholars have often found ways to avoid impugning Abram’s character when it comes to this strategy. I’m doubtful that is interpretatively viable, even granted that the Hebrew Bible often does not impute motives to its characters. For more on this issue, see Robert B. Robinson, “Wife and Sister through the Ages: Textual Determinacy and the History of Interpretation,” Semeia 62 (1993): 103–28. The following paragraph has also profited from Cephas T. A. Tushima, “Exchange of Wife for Social and Food Security: A Famine Refugee’s Strategy for Survival (Gn 12:10–13:2),” HTS 74, no. 1 (2018): a4769. 12 Claus Westermann, Genesis 12–36, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 163. 10

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by the Egyptians, then by Pharaoh’s officials, and then, perhaps indirectly, by Pharaoh himself. As a result, Sarai is taken “into Pharaoh’s house” (Gen. 12:16), and Abram finds himself alone. A good bit of trading follows, perhaps because Pharaoh wishes to compensate Abram for the loss of human capital. At the same time, the text seems to suggest that Abram has lost sight of God’s earlier directives: while we hear that he received “sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels” (Gen. 12:16) in lieu of his spouse, there is no mention of his concern for the charge of Gen. 12:1–3. But, all of a sudden, there is a series of plagues, a potentially perilous encounter between Abram and Pharoah, and a swift departure for the Negeb. The danger vanishes; the family goes on its way. Do Abram, Sarai, and Lot just get lucky? No. A preferable way to think about this brief story is that God’s disbursement of blessings is paired with a clutch of governmental nudges, the cumulative effect of which ensures that the family is not sidetracked for long but, rather, moves at the speed needed to receive the covenantal promises detailed in Gen. 15 and 17. Consider, for instance, the fact that Sarai’s beauty does not become a pretext for violence—a risk during any border crossing, then as now13—but is instead an occasion for Egyptians to praise her and incorporate her into Pharaoh’s household. Consider how, even as Pharoah draws Sarai in his harem, Abram suddenly finds himself in a position of relative strength, able to trade in nonhuman commodities and to augment his wealth. And consider how, all of a sudden, God “afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife” (Gen. 12:17). One might think this a bridge too far but, astoundingly, it is anything but that: Pharaoh still does not turn against the family, and the tone he adopts at the chapter’s end is plausibly read as expressive of hurt, not anger.14 Moreover, after Pharaoh complains (legitimately!) about Abram’s dishonesty, the episode ends with a delicious irony. None other than the ruler of Egypt reminds Abram of God’s previous charge, telling him to See Nancy Pineda-Madrid, “Sex Trafficking and Feminicide along the Border: Re-Membering our Daughters,” in Living With(out) Borders: Catholic Theological Ethics on the Migration of Peoples, ed. Agnes M. Brazal and María Teresa Dávila (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2016), 81–90. 14 Westermann, Genesis 12–36, 166. 13

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continue on his way.15 “‘Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.’ And Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning him; and they set him on the way, with his wife and all that he had” (Gen. 12:19–20)—“all that he had,” of course, likely being more than Abram possessed when he first entered Egypt. Sandwiched between an awe-inspiring divine address to Abram and pharaonic grumpiness, then, one finds a microcosm of God’s working to achieve God’s ends. No governmental nudge is especially eye-catching—in fact, only one is explicitly attributed to God (see Gen. 12:17). But the entire sequence of events attests to God’s providential rule. That rulership, in fact, is the conditio sine qua non for the whole. It is because of God’s governmental steadfastness that the family endures but a brief sojourn in Egypt, and does so without loss of life, property, and standing. It is because God orchestrates affairs, checking this and that creaturely action, promoting this and that pattern of events, moving characters here and there, that the family is not waylaid for long. A consideration of Exodus 1:8–2:10, which prefaces the story of the exodus that Gen. 12:10–20 foreshadows, helps sharpen further the point.16 In fulfillment of promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ancient Israel is gaining in size and sociopolitical clout. Whether or not the land was actually “filled with them” (Exod. 1:7: the complaint of embittered nativists the world over) is ultimately of incidental interest, but it is a nice moment of verisimilitude: rightly or wrongly, Israel’s enslavers are becoming nervous. The first act of the drama opens, then, with a new ruler instituting a program of violent containment, predicated on an “us

So Martin Kessler and Karel Deurloo, A Commentary on Genesis: The Book of Beginnings (New York: Paulist, 2004), 102. 16 This analysis, like the previous, is indebted to various scholarly works. Of particular note are J. Cheryl Exum, “‘You Shall Let Every Daughter Live’: A Study of Exodus 1:8–2:10,” Semeia 28 (1983): 63–82; Renita Weems, “The Hebrew Women Are Not Like the Egyptian Women: The Ideology of Race, Gender, and Sexual Reproduction in Exodus 1,” Semeia 59 (1992): 25–34; Rosalin Janssen, “A New Reading of Shiphrah and Puah—Recovering Their Voices,” FemTh 27, no. 1 (2018): 9–25; and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of their Stories (New York: Schocken, 2002), 24–8. I should note also that I follow Frymer-Kensky in presenting Exod. 1:15–22 and 2:1–10 as a drama in two “acts,” and agree that the story of Zipporah’s quick-thinking circumcision of her son in Exod. 4:24–26 can be read as a third. 15

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vs. them” mindset. Ancient Israelites are first forced to labor on building projects, then made the subject of widespread suspicion and abuse, and then, horribly, made the object of a genocidal plan. At this point, enter two midwives, possibly Egyptians tasked with helping Israel, more likely Israelites whom the regime has sought to coopt into its workings. Shiphrah and Puah receive instructions that they are expected to follow without question: “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live” (Exod. 1:16).17 What happens next? Exactly not that. Serendipitously, the king has addressed two women who “feared God” (Exod. 1:17) and have no compunction about disobeying murderous orders.18 And the tactically brilliant but factually risible explanation the midwives give in their defense, having to do with the physical strength of an oppressed people—an explanation that seems to trade on Pharaoh’s “ideology of difference” and finds parallel in contemporary racist ideology—works like a charm.19 Thus it is that “God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families” (Exod. 1:20–21). A case of sin abounding, but grace abounding all the more! Divine blessings, paired with pharaonic cluelessness, some deft interpersonal manipulation, and the provision of families (who, in addition to attesting to God’s blessings, likely provided a support-system for the midwives): all this ensures that the portent of annihilation is replaced with the unlikely reality of increase. Ancient Israel becomes stronger than it would otherwise be. As Exum points out, “In a narrative which shows virtually no concern for names (pharaoh, pharaoh’s daughter, Moses’ mother and father and sister remain unidentified), the names of these two women are recorded, thus assuring that they will be remembered throughout generations for their important contribution.” See “‘You shall let every daughter live,’” 70. 18 On the midwives’ subterfuge, see the instructive remarks of William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1–18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 142. Childs is perhaps right to note that early and medieval authors disapproved of the midwives’ lying, even though he does not pause to consider why this particular act was an especial site of interest. See Brevard Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 23–4. 19 Weems, “The Hebrew Women Are Not Like the Egyptian Women,” 30. See also Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2015), esp. 48–89. 17

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Should the midwives be credited for their ingenuity and bravery? Absolutely. Their actions factor into a sequence of events that propels ancient Israel beyond the ancestral era. Israel would not have become a covenantal people without their contribution; most likely, it would have slipped into obscurity. And Shiphrah’s and Puah’s efforts ensure a counterpoint to Pharaoh’s ideology of a pristine Egyptian “us,” threatened by a fertile and physically dangerous “them.” They launch a “systematic effort to demythologize the Pharaoh’s reputation as divinely embodied leader.”20 Just in time: while the new king is plainly a fool, he is a dangerous fool; it is only because of the midwives’ cunning that his efforts come to naught. But the midwives’ ingenuity does not indicate divine noninvolvement. Their “fear” of the Lord (Prov. 1:7!) is a vital “tell”: it suggests an awareness of how God’s designs are realized through obedient, inventive intermediaries, and it speaks to the way that God works through marginalized and minoritized individuals to achieve God’s goals. J. Cheryl Exum, accordingly, is entirely correct to note that the fact that the “Israelites continue to increase in the face of oppression … can only be attributed to behind-the-scenes activity of the deity.”21 I would only add that the sequence of events echoes, once again, something of the creatio cooperativa described in Gen. 1:1–2:4a. This echo requires that our appreciation of the midwives’ skillful deceit goes hand in hand with a forthright affirmation of its condition of possibility: a pushing and pulling of events, effected by the Lord who seeks to birth ancient Israel afresh, so that it can continue on its way. The second act of the preface to Exodus opens with a “Levite woman” becoming pregnant and delivering a “fine baby” (Exod. 2:1 and 2). Knowing of the king’s genocidal designs, which have become so outlandish that newborn Hebrew boys are to be drowned in the Nile, the mother decides to hide her child in a papyrus basket. Whether or not this action discloses bravery, canniness, or a desperate memory of Noah’s ark is hard to say. Whatever the case, a surprising sequence of events attests again to God’s manipulation of events. Pharaoh’s daughter appears and suddenly shows herself to be both the moral opposite of her father and an ally to the

Weems, “The Hebrew Women Are Not Like the Egyptian Women,” 31. Exum, “‘You Shall Let Every Daughter Live,’” 81. See also 68.

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midwives. Her apparent decency might also go hand in hand with cluelessness: she quickly accedes to the idea that a Hebrew nurse is needed. At any rate, an attempt to save Moses’ young life soon passes into something much bolder. Moses’ sister fetches the child’s mother, who ends up being paid for nursing her own child, prior to his entering the royal court. If in Act I the midwives lay bare a chauvinist ideology of ethnicity, the acts of the women in Act II amount to a daring challenge to the material fact of domination. On one level, an imperial regime is easily outmatched by some modest acts of resistance. If we are again in the domain of creatio cooperativa—strikingly, the women seem to work together spontaneously and unselfconsciously—the combined effect of their actions ensures that Pharoah’s scheme simply doesn’t work with Moses. (The fact that there is no mention of any infants being tossed in the river is perhaps grounds for hope: maybe other new mothers, other enterprising kids, and other freeminded daughters took notice?) And even as this story is rather more reticent about God’s action than its predecessor—it receives not even a passing comment—that serves only to underscore God’s subtle orchestration of events. Once readers and auditors learn that Moses has been singled out to declare ancient Israel’s freedom, relaying to his compatriots that God intends to “bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” (Exod. 3:10), it is impossible not to discern God’s hand in everything that transpires on the banks of the Nile. A lack of reference heightens our sense of what God’s steadfast providing means in a perilous situation: empowering people to challenge authority, thus ensuring that diverse intentions and actions “mesh”22 and cohere, in order to bring about an unexpected outcome; demonstrating that the “mighty acts of God” are not reducible to extravagant signs and wonders, but are inclusive of subtle forms of pressure, convergence, and coordination. On another level, Act II shows again that God’s patience pays off in the long run. Blessings are routed through the activity of a Levite woman, an Egyptian princess, and a girl who negotiates an apparently impossible situation. And with Pharaoh thwarted, God This turn of phrase signals my indebtedness to Hans Frei, as well as my sense that the conceptual apparatus of his masterpiece—The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975)—can help one make good theological sense of the Hebrew Bible.

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establishes the foundation on which Moses can settle in Midian, defend a priest’s daughters, marry one of them (Zipporah), and make his way to Horeb, where God tells him what is really going on. It is not just that God births ancient Israel during its escape from Egypt. Prior to that, and by dint of God’s patient and steadfast guidance of events, God guides God’s people “with cords of human kindness, with bands of love,” bending down and feeding them in their infancy (Hos. 11:4). Given these exegetical comments, it now becomes possible to venture some more formal claims about God’s steadfast bending of the course of ancient Israel’s history. These claims are not exhaustive, by any stretch. They are offered as light conceptual glosses on my exegetical remarks—an attempt to clarify further this register of divine steadfastness and to indicate its relevance for thinking generally about providence. Bending, first, should be understood as God’s putting pressure on a particular configuration of communities and individuals. It is a matter of God encouraging and intensifying discrete patterns of conduct, so that a discernible “stress” manifests itself and waits on some manner of resolution. History-like narratives, arguably, are well-suited to portraying this kind of stress: an absence of interest in the inner lives of characters heightens readers’ and auditors’ apprehension of the “collisions” between this and that person, and this or that group.23 Think of the rate of the ancient Israelites’ increase and Pharaoh’s reaction; think of the famine that occasions the emigration of Abram and Sarai’s family to Egypt, which interferes with their travel to the Negeb; think of the risks that accrue when Abram asks Sarai to pose as his sister. None of these occurrences are unambiguous. In each case—and this is why we are dealing with something more interesting than mere “dramatic tension”— there arises the genuine possibility that God’s disbursement of blessings and God’s direction of ancient Israel might fly off the rails. At the same time, God’s gracious and delicate bending of history avoids “breaking” the contexts in which God intervenes. The quotidian maintains its shape; the characters positioned therein

I also borrow talk of “history-like narratives” from Hans Frei. See The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

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are not manipulated in ways that render their identities impossible; one can follow the arc of the narrative as it unfolds. (So: ancient Israel suffers under bondage, yet still retains a sense of itself as a discrete community; Pharaoh acts foolishly, but not to such an extent that he is liable to be deposed by more effective political rivals; Pharaoh’s daughter is insufficiently reflective to ask about the identity of the woman who turns up, out of the blue, accepts money from a stranger, and nurses Moses.) A delicate balance is perfectly maintained: God’s orchestrating events by injecting new kinds of stress into various patches of time and space—elevating one party over another, complicating interpersonal relations, shuffling various individuals and communities to precipitate various kinds of conflict, etc.—being paired with the continuing act of “letting be” and “letting happen.” This brings me to a second point. As God bends historical events, moving affairs in this or that direction, local goings-on begin to subserve God’s broader providential purposes. Sometimes this bending, of course, is conspicuous. Ancient Israel’s growth in numbers and potency, described in Exod. 1, is a case in point: while one might query the reasons for the disquiet of Egypt’s “new king … who did not know Joseph” (Exod. 1:8), the opening paragraph of the book has the blessings of Gen. 1:28 and the fulfillment of promises made to the patriarchs as its conditio sine qua non. Frequently, however, God’s bending of events involves a rather more understated coordination of intentions and actions. This coordination is so sparely described that one might at first miss it. But not for long: it soon becomes clear that God ensures that this sequence of events transpires, instead of that sequence, even as every “this” is inclusive of creaturely actions that have their own integrity, meaning, and consequentiality. Such coordinative activity ensures, too, that the stresses that God introduces into the quotidian are resolved to the (ultimate) advantage of ancient Israel. So, Abram’s risky plan does not immediately backfire, but rather draws the family into Pharaoh’s orbit; then God afflicts Egypt with plagues, which induce a grouchy “begone!” and ensures that the family can go on its way. So, the midwives seem at first to accede to Pharaoh’s chauvinism and genocidal designs, but then turn against him and act in a manner that ensures that God’s blessings continue apace—and, in face of questioning, exploit Pharaoh’s gullibility and get away with it. So, the compassion of Pharaoh’s daughter, paired

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with the prompting of Moses’ sister, turns into an occasion for Moses’ mother to raise him and for Moses to be set at the heart of Egyptian power.24 To be sure, these resolutions of stress are never unambiguous. (Abram might still be faulted for imposing a scheme on Sarai; it might still be that infants were lobbed into the Nile.) But the resolutions nonetheless move the providential needle, so to speak, in directions that support ancient Israel’s growth. And, once again, one cannot credibly view the resolution of stresses other than as disclosive of the “hand” of God. Because God is steadfast, patience prevails, and the covenant of grace gains historical realization. Let me put it one more way. Bending, more often than not, has to do with subtle nudges of varying intensity, paired with moments of “letting be” and “letting happen,” that intersect with creaturely intentions and actions and secure outcomes that align with God’s providential purposes. How subtle is God’s action? Very. The quotidian often holds its shape, and political, religious, sexual, ecological, and interpersonal dynamics remain intelligible— so much that nontheological explanations of the events that are narrated have obvious credibility. (Abraham’s livelihood really was jeopardized by famine, so it made sense for him to travel toward a river; Egypt’s new king struggled to get his bearings in face of a vigorous enslaved population, and thus opted for a cruel strategy of containment; the midwives, the princess, Moses’ mother, and Moses’ sister were acting subversively in a male-dominated society.) But one cannot sustain nontheological interpretations for long, and that very fact adverts to the centrality of God’s governmental action. Reticent though the principal character in the narrative may sometimes be, she is always there. God works through the efforts of diverse creatures—while still “letting be” and “letting happen”—to ensure that God gets what God wants for ancient Israel. And now a third point, implicit in everything said thus far but meriting attention nonetheless: God’s bending of events, ingredient to God’s providential steadfastness, is a matter of impeccable timing. The quality of a classically “good” narrative—in which nothing happens when it shouldn’t and everything happens when it should,

Childs makes this point deftly: “Nowhere does God appear to rescue the child; rather, everything has a ‘natural’ cause. Yet it is clear that the writer sees the mystery of God’s providence through the action of the humans involved.” See Exodus, 13.

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with discrete parts funding the whole and the whole reflected in each of the parts—attests to the timeliness of God’s governmental actions, which ensures that God’s blessings compound and ancient Israel gains in clarity and legibility. So, Abram and Sarai are met with surprisingly thoughtful and seemingly nonviolent border guards; Pharaoh is not seized by pique and moved to repossess the goods he has given to Abram, prior to the latter leaving Egypt; the midwives are able to deceive Pharaoh at the drop of a hat; Moses’ sister turns up just at the right time. No doubt, an affirmation of God’s sense of timing is consistent with an affirmation of God’s Weltregierung as encompassing all events in time and space. It is not as if God is ever not involved. It not as if God has to puzzle over how best to contend with events in time and space. It is not as if God could pick the wrong moment for God’s governmental work to occur. But theological reflection does well to convey something of the astonishment of readers when, upon stepping away from the text, we realize that everything could have gone differently. The reason that it did not, and the reason that the course of history bends in the direction of ancient Israel’s growth and flourishing— that reason is nothing other than God’s exercise of patience as steadfastness, deployed in service of ancient Israel as a covenantal people whose messiah is Jesus Christ. Prior to turning to the final dimension of steadfastness, a few caveats. First, I would underscore that the discussion above does not intend to divert attention from the “extraordinary series of historical events” whose confession dominates the Hebrew Bible and, as such, forms an important part of Christian faith.25 My concern is simply to avoid presenting those events in isolation from other dimensions of God’s governmental work. Steadfastness is particularly valuable on this front: it ensures that a doctrine of providence does justice to the full scope of God’s action; it signals that God’s action is not reducible to obviously “marvelous” occurrences. Second, I do not want to suggest that the particulars of God’s steadfast bending of history that I have considered can be applied to each and every history-like narrative in the Hebrew Bible. God’s governmental activity does not proceed according to a scheme; there is good reason to suppose that God has even more ways of achieving God’s purposes. Third, I would emphasize again that it is not obviously helpful to move

G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM, 1952), 44.

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beyond a slightly fuzzy cluster of terms when describing God’s providential action (stressing, intensification, curving, timing, etc.). Theologians can devote energy to describing what God does, without trying to figure out precisely how God does it. That is no sacrificium intellectus; it is simply a function of an awareness that God is always making “the activity of the creature the means of his own activity,” so that while that “activity is still free, contingent, and autonomous … God controls [it] in its freedom no less than its necessity” (CD III/3, 165).

(c) The third and final implication of God’s exercise of steadfastness is the forging of a “cumulative story,”26 wherein a significant portion of ancient Israel identifies itself as a people that is subjected to, and made a subject in light of, a particular relationship with God. This is the result of God being with ancient Israel in a special way, “letting be” and “letting happen” while disbursing blessings and steadfastly directing the course of history, in order that ancient Israel comes to know itself as a corporate entity whose life is indexed in the covenant of grace. While I will have more to say about this point in the next section, some remarks at this juncture help to round out my account of divine patience as steadfastness. It is of course true that God’s “being with” creatures is a constant. Since God’s preservative work is the condition of created history, every moment of time and space exists in relation to God. But precisely because God’s blessings involve a conveyance of favor that discloses who God is and what God does, it is apt to say that God acts toward and in Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, Moses, Aaron, et al., in a manner that is different to the way God acts toward, say, Hamor and Shechem. Or, for that matter, you and me. This mode of divine “being with”—one might call it the patience of solidarity and compassion—involves a coherent cluster of actions, stretching from the ancestral period to the close of the canon (beyond that, one can only speculate), that gradually disclose God’s election of ancient Israel and, concomitantly, enable Israel’s receipt of the charge that it play a central role in God’s providential and redemptive work. It is a matter, to use the terminology of the preceding chapter, of God’s determining Godself in a certain way (eternally deciding to be and thus always being the God of

Frei, Eclipse, 2.

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Israel) and binding Godself to ancient Israel (eternally deciding to be and thus always being the God of Israel); and it is a matter, correspondingly, of ancient Israel coming to determine itself and to bind itself to God, standing “within” God’s providential work and declaring what it means to live not as a wayward people, minded to “take the path that sinners tread,” but as a people that tells the story of “the glorious deeds of the Lord” (Pss. 1:2 and 78:4). One might elaborate this point in various ways. Perhaps through an analysis of the development of the law as it becomes the “law of Moses … the man of God” (Ezra 3:2); perhaps through a discussion of the temple and monarchy; perhaps through reflection on exile and return; perhaps through an investigation of ancient Israel’s relation to the land; perhaps through an analysis of prophecy. But my focus is continuous with the forgoing exegetical efforts and purposefully foregrounds the pregnant word “story.” Granted that it picks up on some of the connotations of Geschichte (a term of art used by Martin Kähler, Karl Barth, and others), my employment of it is covenantal in import: it refers to a grand historical narrative, animated and directed by God over multiple centuries, that describes how ancient Israel is progressively instructed about what it means to know God and to act in a manner that rewards God’s patience. Now, does it follow that the narratives of scripture are to be read as an inerrant/infallible account on God’s interactions with this and that person, this and that group? Obviously not. Thinking along such lines is a recipe for disaster. It amplifies a late modern preoccupation with facticity in ways that foreclose meaningful engagement with texts that delight in multivalence, hyperbole, humor, and ambiguity; it forgets that scripture presents itself as a witness to what ancient Israel has learned in its encounter with God, from various vantage points, and thus eschews the presumption of standing substitute for the Word itself. Does it mean that other stories, situated outside the project of faith seeking understanding, might not convey truths that differ, perhaps drastically, from what ancient Israel came to learn about God and itself (and, specifically, what Christians suppose that ancient Israel knew about itself)? Again, obviously not. If it is unclear how those other stories bear on Christian faith, to suppose them to be false or misleading, or to condescendingly dishonor them as outbursts of “partial truth” is quite unnecessary. One can simply encounter those stories in an ad hoc way, receiving them as sincere statements about reality that merit attention, respect, and consideration.

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The point I am making is different. On one level, I am arguing that the collection of writings that comprise the Hebrew Bible attest to ancient Israel coming to know who God is and what God does, offering a multidimensional witness to that knowledge—a witness that Christians will receive with gratitude and humility, given that the God of Jesus Christ is the God of ancient Israel. On another level, this collection of texts indicates that ancient Israel (or, at least, some portion of it) became so attuned to God’s patience, recognizing and acclaiming successive acts of blessings and instances of God’s “bending” of history, that it came to understand itself as a creaturely subject that had especial responsibility for retelling God’s history with the world. So one way that God’s patience pays off, by these lights, is in ancient Israel positioning itself in the story God leads, grasping what it might mean to reward God’s patient solidarity and compassion, and bequeathing to successive generations an account of that process. It is not just the case that for “the Israelites, God is God the liberator, who took them out of the socioeconomic oppression of the Egyptians,” nor that “starting from this historical liberation, the Israelites would go on discovering the always-greater richness of God and the always-greater fullness of salvation-liberation” (Ignacio Ellacuría).27 Those statements are entirely true but, as they stand, theologically insufficient. One must also say—and I suspect Ellacuría would concede the point— that ancient Israel’s report of its discovery of God’s richness went hand in hand with ancient Israel learning to make good on God’s patience, “owning” and narrating its particular story in the context of the history of the covenant. Of course, objections can be raised. Does this perspective impose a questionable homogeneity on the lives of those who comprised ancient Israel? Does it “flatten” the Hebrew Bible, forcing a thematic and conceptual unity upon texts of different genres with divergent concerns? Well, I am not contending that ancient Israel was a homogenous entity, comprising individuals and groups that spoke with one voice and bequeathed to us a history bereft of complexity, diversity, and ambiguity. The inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives—stretching from the stentorian mood of

Ignacio Ellacuría, Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation, ed. Michael E. Lee, commentary by Kevin F. Burke (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2013), 42.

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the opening chapters of Genesis to the weirdness of Jeremiah, from the sexual frissons of the Song of Songs to the embittered skepticism of Ecclesiastes—obliges one to admit that ancient Israel’s story is told from a wide range of viewpoints. The argument I am making is more general. I am suggesting that the Hebrew Bible, taken as a whole, can be read as an extensive, elaborate gloss on the penitent cry of Hos. 8:2, “My God, we—Israel—know you!” and on Solomon’s pious prayer when the ark is brought into the temple, “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart” (1 Kgs 8:23; cf. 1 Chron. 16:34), and that each verse—on the one side, ancient Israel’s contrite knowledge of itself; on the other, Israel’s joyous acclamation of God’s identity—points to both the impact and the success of God’s patience qua steadfastness. So, again, on one level, the abiding concern of the Hebrew Bible is to bear witness to God’s committing Godself to ancient Israel and to that commitment being maintained and realized, in history, despite waywardness. If the way that God maintains and realizes God’s covenant commitment is not uniform—it is not: there is a world of difference between the trauma felt by Hosea as the Assyrians despoil the Northern Kingdom and the delight of Solomon when the temple receives the ark—everything that occurs to ancient Israel is folded into a statement about who God is and what God does. Both the suffering that follows in the wake of destruction and the king’s delighted pronouncement are parts of a complex whole: the God who is longsuffering, who takes ancient Israel to heart, also being the God whose patient love never fails. On another level, ancient Israel’s identification of God goes hand in hand with ancient Israel’s coming to terms with itself. This coming to terms is often wrenching. Ancient Israel must admit that it has “spurned the good” and that the “enemy shall pursue” it as God’s “anger burns” (Hos. 8:3 and 8:5). Ancient Israel recognizes, too, that while God is “slow to anger,” there is the prospect of God’s patience running out. The guilty are not “cleared”; the “iniquity of the parents” might be visited on later generations (Exod. 34:6–7). Yet it knows all this in the context of knowing, ever more surely, that God is steadfast; and it is in this context that ancient Israel positions its acts of waywardness within an acclamation of God’s persistent blessings and God’s steadfast governance of history. So

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in the same moment in which ancient Israel confesses its sin (which it does in most, if not all, of the books comprising the Hebrew Bible), Israel shows that it wants and intends to make good on God’s patience—and that its first, hesitant step on the way is to tell the story of its life with God and God’s life with it. And this step should be lauded and honored. In telling its story, in diverse ways and with various accents, ancient Israel demonstrates a selfknowledge that keeps pace with God’s revelation of Godself. It begins to discriminate between good and evil (thus Gen. 3:5 and 3:22) and, even as it does not do what it wants (namely, make good on God’s patience through right and lawful action, in light of God’s steadfast love), it recognizes—in an odd, ambiguous, and sometimes ironic way—“the law of God” in its “inmost self” (Rom. 7:23). Thus it is that God’s providential patience, characterized by a steadfastness of intention and action in the disbursement of blessings and a “bending” of historical events, is fulfilled, to some degree, by a covenant people who know who it is and what it is meant to do. Thus it is that God’s patience is rewarded—really and truly, if imperfectly—by a covenant people that responds to God’s “letting be” and “letting happen” with unqualified joy, freedom, and obedience, by a people that elects God as it is elected by God. Given some telling allusions to Hans Frei in the previous pages, it worth pausing at this point to disclose my rather idiosyncratic dependence on his work, taking The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative as a point of departure. Prior to the eighteenth century, Frei argues, Christians tended to read the narrative portions of scripture in a straightforward way. “Realistic” narratives were read literally (which does not mean the same as factually, although facticity was often assumed), received as intelligible renderings of discrete individuals, divine and human. Weighty interpretative schemes were deemed (if they were considered at all) as an unnecessary encumbrance. Inasmuch as meaningfulness was ingredient to the text, explication of the text depended, very simply, on applying oneself to a reading or hearing of the text. Explication was also shaped by the fact that discrete biblical narratives were read in relation to the overall arc of the scriptural witness. That arc was defined by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as portrayed in the gospels (themselves an exemplary instance of a realistic/history-like narrative): a portrayal that allowed the Hebrew Bible to be interpreted as a foreshadowing of the New Testament. Still more, scripture shaped the mindset of individuals and communities.

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It functioned as a “common and inclusive world.”28 It overarched the quotidian in which an individual or community lived to such a degree that that quotidian was itself assimilated to, and made comprehensible by, the world of scripture. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Frei argues, different ways of reading scripture gained currency. Some scholars sought to access the meaning of the Bible in terms of texts’ (putatively) ostensive references, and evaluated that meaning through (putatively) independent, historical-factual criteria. Others proceeded idealistically and apologetically, treating biblical narratives as vehicles that expressed eternal truths that were external to the narrative, being discerned through extrabiblical modes of analysis (e.g., ethics, philosophy, mythology). And the distance between these modes of reasoning was shorter than one might think. Whether one read as a “supernaturalist” who lauded miraculous interventions in history or a “naturalist” who sought to discern what “really happened,” one was operating with extrabiblical standards of rationality and historicity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, accordingly, there was an “eclipse of [the] realistic narrative option.”29 Scholars supposed that what was most important, at the end of the day, was something other than the individuals, intentions and actions, and circumstances depicted in scripture. In the preceding section and throughout the constructive chapters of this book, I have shown particular interest in the narratives of the Hebrew Bible, reading in a manner that I hope Frei would find congenial. Granted my Christological reticence, a selective use on Gilbert Ryle’s intention-action schema (put to brilliant use in The Identity of Jesus Christ), and a willingness to borrow freely from historical-critical scholars and others, hermeneutical throat-clearing has been kept to a minimum. I have striven to take the text “as it comes” and thus to honor the ultimate point of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: enabling theologians to trust “that we can actually read the Bible” and to get on with doing exactly that.30 At the same time—and I come now to the idiosyncrasy of my dependence on Frei— (i) I have adopted an agnostic (and low-key) attitude toward Frei’s treatment of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European hermeneutics and theology, partly because I want to avoid reprising the antimodern polemics of much theology over the last few decades, partly because I am wary of totalizing judgments about such a long period of time; (ii) I have shifted the center of gravity away from

Frei, Eclipse, 3. Frei, Eclipse, 134. 30 Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 10. 28 29

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the New Testament to the Hebrew Bible, showing greater interest in the identity of ancient Israel, as a corporate agent, than the identity of Jesus Christ; and (iii) I have taken up a theological agenda that Frei himself was denied time to pursue. Points (ii) and (iii) are especially important. On one level, I have sought to make the “cumulative story” of the Hebrew Bible directly relevant for thinking about creation and providence, in advance of the centering of Christological claims in the next volume. On another level, I have opted to add a good deal of “critical realism” to my reading of scripture, focusing attention on God’s action in relation to ancient Israel and Israel’s responses. Rethinking that way that Christians (and, in particular, Christian theologians) think about Israel is of course an important and worthy task in and of itself. But in this project, ultimately, it takes a backseat to conceptualizing who God is and how God acts.

*** A final note of a more comparative nature helps to round out this section. Recall that the conclusions to Tertullian’s De patientia and Cyprian’s De bono patientia looked forward to a cataclysmic end to history. At some point, Christians would no longer need to exercise patience. With sin overcome and the body of Christ brought to term, they would instead behold God’s devastating punishment of those who refused and attacked the gospel. God would no longer forbear; God would make manifest what seems to be (but is not explicitly described as) a righteous impatience, the sight of which would thrill those within the church. Given such an eschatological prospect, too, one might well adjudge Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s expositions of patience as referring to a temporary affectus voluntatis Dei, not an abiding feature of God’s relationship to the world. At the same time, one would perhaps worry about this account of God’s eschatological action. For while Tertullian does not wax dogmatic about the exact status of divine patience (declaring it, say, absolute or relative, communicable or incommunicable), his treatise nonetheless opens with the strikingly forthright—and happily unqualified—claim that “patience is the very nature of God (esse naturam), the effect and manifestation of a certain connatural property” (De pat. 3.11, my emphasis). While Cyprian is a bit more reticent, he perhaps thinks along similar lines: he notes that “the origin and greatness of patience proceeds from God its Author” (De bon. pat. 3).

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To charge the authors with outright contradiction would be a mistake. One can hardly make patience the standard to which every other attribute and/or affectus ought to conform, and it seems possible—at least in principle—to argue that the economic expression of divine patience, understood as a symptom of God’s mercy, could be reconciled with an economic expression of divine wrath, understood as a symptom of God’s righteousness and justice. But the tension between the beginning and the end of the treatises still amounts to a dogmatic loose end. Certainly, it is not immediately clear how an often-rhapsodical hymn to God’s patient nature and God’s providential exercise of patience—the very reasons that the sun shines on saints and sinners alike, that God holds history open for repentance and reformation, and that human beings can do something other than compound the tragedy of waywardness—relates to an eschatological conflagration that consigns unbelievers to unprecedented levels of anguish. And this unclarity raises the question of whether Tertullian and Cyprian’s eschatological gestures should be read as a disturbing “tell.” Might it be that God’s persistence in blessing, God’s steadfast preservation of the world, and God’s governmental activity are simply preliminary to the main event—an eschatological outburst, defined by fury and violence? Might it be that the very nature of God is not patience, but a barely contained fury in face of wayward creatures? Indeed, might Friedrich Nietzsche be right in reading Tertullian’s apparently throwaway nods toward the eschaton as disclosive of a mindset governed by ressentiment—so much so that his ode to patience is little more than a cover-story for what is really important: namely, a canny attempt by the “weak” to subjugate the strong?31 I would grant that Augustine’s claims about patientia go some way to mitigating these concerns. In that he situates the final destiny of humankind outside of history, anchoring it in a firm distinction of (changeable) time and (immutable) eternity, he draws the sting of  those who would speculate about the application of divine wrath “in” history. He also advances an account of human patience that clearly has nothing to do with biding one’s time, prior to a wrathful end, and everything to do

See again Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 48–52 (I.15).

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with desiring an eternal home with God and acting in view of that end. But these advances evoke new concerns. One worry is that Augustine overinvests in the glories of life in the heavenly city, while underrating the historical ramifications of the saving work of Christ and the Spirit in the quotidian. Yes, of course, the patience of a pilgrim, encircled by the “ungodly,” is wrongly figured as quietist: Christians are called to bear witness to a faith that spurs one to curtail suffering and to support various kinds of human flourishing. But while apocalyptic speculation is exchanged for a counsel of endurance, attention is nevertheless drawn away from the transformative impact of divine blessings in the present. Christians’ peregrinations in this “passing age” do not, after all, hold a candle to “the security of that eternal home which she now patiently awaits” (Civ. Dei I. Pr.). So if there is no “flight from the world,” there is an ordering of thought that stands in some tension with an important line of reflection in the Hebrew Bible—one that understands God’s blessings as having a this-worldly, historical impact.

While I will not attempt to answer such questions here, the fact that they can be articulated is significant. Yet it is also the case that my account of God’s steadfastness—and, for that matter, my account of God’s blessings and God’s longsuffering—makes them inapposite for this project. Why so? Primarily because a “thick description” of patience as the dynamo that powers a thisworldly covenantal relationship between God and ancient Israel has gained such momentum that the idea that God might suddenly switch gears at the end of time, swapping out the patience of God’s preservative and gubernatorial activity for an outburst of world-destroying impatience, struggles to find traction. The very idea of it requires one to treat God’s creative and preservative work, God’s extravagant blessing of Israel, and God’s “bending” of history as local strategies in a broader project keyed to rather different goals—principal among which is not God being the God of ancient Israel, but a Subject who is biding her time before lashing out at unrepentant sinners. The very idea of it also requires one to disregard my account of God’s self-determination as patiently longsuffering (not long-seething), treating God’s commitment to extend God’s “steadfast love for the thousandth generation” as secondary to God’s more basic desire to “visit … the iniquity of the parents upon the children … to the third and fourth generation” (Exod. 34:6–7). Neither option is on the cards. On the assumption that God’s revelation of Godself, mediated through the witness of scripture, is reliable, the framework in which one speculates

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about God’s activity in the future must be consistent with (but not, arguably, identical to) the story of God’s patient providing vis-à-vis ancient Israel, as well as Christ’s proclamation and enactment of the Kingdom, in the power of the Spirit. What does that mean, exactly? Although this is not the context for an eschatological statement, a famous passage from Levinas proves helpful. Writing about outbursts of wickedness in the previous century—concentrated instances of waywardness on a grand scale, supported by bureaucratic processes and technologies that were not readily available in advance of a late modern age—he offers the following: The portion of humanity that … witnessed a host of cruelties in the course of a century … will it, in indifference, abandon the world to useless suffering, leaving it to the political fatality—or drifting—of blind forces that inflict consequences upon the weak and conquered … ? Or, incapable of adhering to an order— or a disorder—that it continues to think diabolical, must not humanity now, in a faith more difficult than before, in a faith without theodicy, continue to live out Sacred History; a history that now demands even more from the resources of the I in each one of us, and from its suffering inspired by the suffering of the other, from its compassion which is a non-useless suffering (or love), which is no longer suffering “for nothing,” and immediately has meaning? … This is a new modality in the faith of today … a modality essential to the modernity that is dawning.32 Many of Levinas’ recurrent concerns surface in these lines: the absolute priority of ethics over metaphysics; the abyssal obligation of an “I” to the “Thou,” such that I am always held hostage by responsibility; the connection between God’s reality and face-toface encounter; a pointed commendation of faithfulness, evocative of the difficult necessity of preserving Jewish life after the horrors of the Shoah. And despite its generality, one can hardly refuse Levinas’ counsel. Granted that there is no shortage of “useless

Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 99–100. My emphases.

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suffering,” human and other-than-human, there is no justification for any creature abandoning any patch of creation; there must instead be a concerted effort to create the “dawn” of the modernity ahead, lest something bleaker and murkier overtake us. Even so, the preceding section ensures that Levinas’ words are crossed with—or, at least, complicated by—a vivid sense of God’s gracious providing in the context of “sacred history.” An appreciation for the persistent disbursement of blessings, the governmental steering of individuals and groups in order that they might participate in the covenant, the steady pressure that enabled ancient Israel to view itself as elected, called to reward God’s patience: if the scriptural witness locates these dimensions of God’s activity in the past, it does not limit itself to that past, but insists plainly that “the Lord is the true God … the living God and the everlasting King” (Jer. 10:10). As such, while it remains improper to “operationalize” the scriptural witness, presuming it possible to track the action of God in the present, that witness allows for a degree of dialecticism to be injected into the “new modality” of faith: a sharp sense of human responsibility being paired with and—one hopes—ultimately being overwritten by a still sharper confidence in God’s continuing work. Think of it like this. On the one side, there remains the unconditional obligation to reckon with creaturely suffering, in various ways and forms: refusing the inevitability of the categories of “weak” and “conquered”; ensuring that surd-like moments in history are recognized as such, then positioned within (but not absorbed into) a wide-angled account of God’s providential work; maintaining vigilance about the persistence and multiplication of “blind forces” that impede creaturely flourishing. On the other side—and I will have more to say about this in the final pages of this book—God’s exercise of patience toward ancient Israel gives credence to the idea that God’s providential efforts are oriented toward salvation as “an intrahistorical reality,”33 with the incarnation of the Word and the outpouring of the Spirit announcing the inbreaking of a Kingdom of such revolutionary potency that, if “true Christianity must always be seen as apocalyptic,” its material content is always and forever “the freedom of the gospel and

Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, rev. ed., trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988), 86.

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everywhere as the bearer of a theology of liberation.”34 By these lights, the responsibility of the “I in each one of us” is derivative of and nested within the responsibility that God takes and bears for the world—a responsibility to continue to expand the scope and intensity of blessings, empowering creatures to join in a covenantal project that resists the workings of waywardness. And, by these lights, the eschaton will not and cannot—and both God and ancient Israel assure us of this point—involve some portion of humankind being subjected to an outburst of divine fury. It can only be a matter of creatures learning, in part from ancient Israel, in part through their incorporation into the body of Christ and their inhabitation of the time and space of the Spirit, how to reward God’s patience aright, endorsing and responding to the continuing outflow of blessings that propel us toward a new heaven and a new earth.

2 Patience Rewarded: On the Formation of Scripture It is now clear, I hope, who exercises patience, above and before all others: the God of ancient Israel, the subject whose activity (as witnessed in scripture) comprises the material from which a Christian account of providence can be constructed. It is also clear, I hope, that ancient Israel’s rewarding of divine patience merits close attention. And, given the foregoing explication, it would perhaps now be apt to take on a new task: thinking concentratedly about what it means for human beings in general to reward God’s patience, and thinking concentratedly about what it means for Christians in particular—human beings who know themselves to have been grafted into the history of ancient Israel, by dint of the incarnation of the Word and the loosing of the Spirit—to contribute to a covenant that Christ has fulfilled, existing and acting in the patient time and space of the Kingdom.

Ernst Käsemann, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons, ed. Rudolf Landau, in cooperation with Wolfgang Kraus, trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 13. My emphasis.

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I will have a good deal to say about these issues in this volume’s successor. In addition to an expansive Christological statement, I hope to develop an account of sanctification, connecting Calvin’s theology with queer thinking that celebrates the expanding possibilities for communal and individual transformation and relocating Eberhard Jüngel’s idea of God’s “being in becoming” into the realm of Christian ethics. I hope also to pair my account of human “being in becoming” with a commendation of impatience as a dimension of Christians’ obligation to contest injustice and promote liberation. But in this context, and in advance of some broad claims about God’s patience vis-à-vis history at large, I want to dwell on the formation of the Hebrew Bible in relation to the corporate life of ancient Israel. Moving beyond my brief remarks about the authority of scripture in this book’s Introduction, I want to show that a statement about God’s providential exercise of patience ought to include reflection on the slow development of biblical texts, with their emergence and nurturance viewed as a vital part of ancient Israel’s learning to reward God’s patience and acting to fulfill its role in the covenant of grace. One motivation for this unusual move is the obsolescence of the old idea that Moses (or a proxy) wrote the Pentateuch, that David (or a subordinate) produced most of the Psalter, that Isaiah (or a follower) authored the book that bears his name, etc.35 That idea, which envisages a discrete exercise of divine patience being rewarded by a single individual, perfectly attuned and responsive to God’s empowering mandate to write, trades on a pinched construal of divine action, wherein a “mighty act of God” is narrowed to an imperious communiqué. Another motivation derives from recent developments in the world of biblical studies. There is a growing Mosaic authorship does still have its defenders. And while some defenses beggar belief (e.g., George F. Wright, “The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch,” in The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, vol. 1, ed. R. A. Torrey [Los Angeles: The Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1917], 43–54), others merit consideration. See, for instance, Duane L. Christensen and Marcel Narucki, “The Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch,” JETS 32, no. 4: 465–71. While having little interest in Mosaic authorship per se, Joel S. Baden offers a powerful statement in favor of a single redactor or compiler of the Hebrew Bible in Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012)—an interesting descendant of the idea of Mosaic authorship, and one that I will consider in due course.

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sense that, just as it is theologically problematic to postulate a delimited period of divine “inspiration” that seized a particular individual (whether that be David, Amos, or, for that matter, an unknown scribe, doesn’t really matter), so it is historically problematic to think in terms of the literary genius of the particular individual who developed the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomic, or Priestly strata of the Pentateuch. That way of thinking depends on anachronistic assumptions about “authorship,” while failing to reckon with the centuries-long formation, transmission, and revision of biblical texts. Now in this situation, it is imperative to avoid a dogmatic aporia—or, to make the point more positively, to consider how new thinking about the formation of scripture could be positioned within a theocentric frame. And an analysis of God’s patience in providing is well-suited to kickstart reflection on this topic. If it be granted that ancient Israel is elected and empowered by God, it becomes possible to view the formation of scripture as a multigenerational undertaking, wherein God’s patient superintendence of events elicits striking bursts of human creativity, a range of preservative oral, literary, and textual endeavors, and, finally, a decisive process of bookmaking. This stretched-out process, in fact, should perhaps be hailed as one of ancient Israel’s most consequential actions, in the context of the covenant of grace: establishing and nurturing a complex (and perhaps, sometimes, disorderly) network of cultural endeavors that culminates in the formation of texts that God embraces as the media through which God reveals Godself to humankind. Initially, a number of individuals, families, and communities catch sight of what God is doing and pay tribute to that action through stories, poetry, song, ritual, music, dance, etc.36 Creativity is followed with a determination to maintain and pass on certain cultural products, through some combination of memorization, recitation, ritualization, amendment, and writing— actions that enable the emergence and maintenance of some number of discursive traditions. Then, often subsequent to but sometimes It will soon become evident that I want to skirt the question as to whether materials were “originally” oral or written. For good reason: while orality and literacy were likely proximate phases on an ancient continuum, allowing for various kinds of interaction, it makes no material difference to the perspective I am articulating, which foregrounds the efforts of multiple generations.

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coincident with this preservative work, an additional development. Literate communities and individuals, working between the tenth and second century, gathered and edited those traditions, textualizing them as “books” that gained a relatively stable form and came to be set within a relatively stable, proto-canonical whole. Yes, of course: this sweep of events, historically opaque and plainly resistant to detailed reconstruction, can be analyzed in wholly naturalistic terms. It is quite possible, and often instructive, to view the Hebrew Bible as a “repository of writings,” formally akin to a collection of laws (like the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi) or a record (like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), that attests to the wit and tenacity of a hybridized religious culture in the Ancient Near East.37 And that kind of approach to scripture is not unvaluable; at the least, it exposes the limits of crude forms of supernaturalism. But Christian theological reflection is aptly dissatisfied with any mode of inquiry that looks away from the principal Subject of the Hebrew Bible. What is needed is an account of the formation of scripture that reckons directly with insights from biblical studies, nesting them within an economy wherein ancient Israel responds to and contributes to God’s sovereign, loving, wise, and patient governance of events. And what is possible on this front, I would suggest, is an account of scripture’s formation that discerns analogies to the creatio cooperativa described at the beginning of the book of Genesis, to God’s persistent disbursement of blessings, and to God’s bending of historical events, thereby drawing attention to the way that ancient Israel offered an substantive flickering of brightness in the nighttime of sin (Jn 1:5)—precisely the backdrop needed to ensure that Christ could be identified as the “light of the world.” An obvious worry to be dispatched: doesn’t this line of reflection encourage a confusion of the dogmatic and the empirical, with the task of “faith seeking understanding” muddled through by an overvaluation of putatively “secular” scholarship? Am I not risking an entanglement that resembles that of the “historical Jesus” and the “historic, biblical Christ,” which Martin Kähler labored valiantly to unpick?38

John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book (n.p.: Viking, 2019), 4. 38 See, of course, Martin Kähler, The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, ed. and trans. Carl E. Braaten (Mifflintown: Sigler, 2002). 37

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I would say not. On one level, it is quite possible for dogmatic reflection to reckon with modern, historical-critical insights—having to do, perhaps, with ancient cultic practices, oral tradition and memorialization, and the redaction history of a text— while remaining focused on the objective event of divine self-revelation and the patterns of faith that it engenders. And there is certainly no cause for alarm when, as often happens, narratives in the Hebrew Bible appear to conflict with modern historians’ reconstructions of events. History-like writing can guide thinking about God’s governance of history, and the issue of how exactly that writing relates to contemporary standards of historicity needn’t cause any consternation. More important is something quite different: treating broad claims about the extended process of scriptural formation as demonstrations of how God’s patience prevails and identifying ancient Israel’s efforts as a key factor in that prevailing. Indeed, if ancient Israel’s efforts are ignored, then talk of God’s “mighty acts in history” can bulk so large that an appreciation of ancient Israel’s response to those acts falls from view. It becomes easy to forget that ancient Israel is not just a “stiff-necked people” (Exod. 32:9), but a people that comes to acknowledge its waywardness, then subordinates its memory of waywardness to the production of books that bear witness to God’s sovereignty and grace. Ancient Israel’s place in the covenant, to put it more strongly, is not simply that of a “forerunner” to Christ. Ancient Israel supplies the foundation on which Christ’s history depends. On another level, concrete investigations into the formation of scripture ensure that a basic concern of this book—commending patience as a motif whose dogmatic explication can enliven conceptual redescriptions of God’s ways and works, while also supporting a robust account of creaturely agency—is not beset by formalism when it comes to bibliology. Think of it like this. It is certainly possible to follow John Webster in claiming that scriptural writing involved something like a “mandatum scribendi or impulsum scribendi,” with a divinely issued “command” being provocative of, and inclusive of, a discrete set of human actions.39 When this understanding of “inspiration” is set within a wide-angled account of God’s revelatory and sanctifying activity, one is well-placed to avoid reductive forms of naturalism and supernaturalism. (Indeed, even as I would like a touch more dialecticism, so as to ensure that Webster’s account of the holiness of scripture is paired with an awareness of its manifest fallibility and errancy, that is likely a matter of tweaking Webster’s standpoint, not challenging its premises.) But Webster’s emphasis on writing risks occluding the slow-moving and gradual process whereby the preliminary

39 John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 38.

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work of “inspired” individuals and groups is vetted, supported, contested, corrected, and passed on, in advance of the process of textualization. This emphasis, that is, risks obscuring the processes that occurred “behind” written texts, thereby setting them at a distance from the historical matrices from which they emerged. And with this problem in play, another nudges into view. Although it is not wrong to say that “prophets and apostles” bear witness to God’s ways and works, this shorthand makes it easy to forget that the Hebrew Bible was forged over multiple centuries, and that this forging involved countless groups, communities, and individuals—people whose efforts were the conditio sine qua non for the emergence of scripture as we receive it today. Drawing attention to the concrete life of ancient Israel, then, is a useful reminder that scripture does not depend on a few isolated individuals, picked out of a massa damnata, but is instead a complex intergenerational project, one whose character alerts us to the ways that God’s patience courses through the nooks and crannies of everyday life.

Let me lay out these claims in a bit more detail—and, as is surely apt, at a slightly slower pace. One way for theologians to think about the formation of scripture would involve offering easy assent to some iteration of the “documentary hypothesis,” originally advanced by Julius Wellhausen in his Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (1872). While pre-modern and early modern authors had certainly noticed discrete strata within biblical texts, particularly the Pentateuch, the distinction of the Prolegomena was to provide a cogent account of the discrete “sources” that underwrote the historical books of the Bible, along with a persuasive description of the redactional process that led into the production of a finalized text. The earliest source, Wellhausen proposed, was the Yahwistic epic (J): a sweeping narrative that recounted the history of Israel up to the establishment of the monarchy. The Elohist (E) expanded this epic, overlaying “northern” concerns on a Judean text and adding an ethical sensibility, anchored in talk about the “fear of God.” Next came the Deuteronomist (D), who lived during Josiah’s reforming reign: an editor who enlarged and reworked what others had done with an eye to underscoring the centrality of the temple, the necessity of monotheism, and the importance of adherence to the law. Last, there was a priestly supplement and redaction of the whole (P). Set in motion by Israel’s experience during the exile, this final, decisive redaction was not obviously a step forward. It washed

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out a good deal of color, conspicuously in 1 and 2 Chronicles: these books turned David from a manly adventurer who founds a kingdom into “the founder of the temple and public worship,” into a “feeble holy picture, seen through a cloud of incense.” More subtly, but no less discernibly, the “Deuteronomistic history” imposed a “pedantic supernaturalism” on ancient Israel’s past, with sin and punishment and obedience and reward measured out in exacting proportions.40 Thus there began an unhappy transition from ancient Israelite religion to hierocratic and then rabbinic Judaism. Ezra, Nehemiah, and their successors ensured that if the earliest “cultus was spontaneous, now it is a thing of statute … Worship no longer springs from an inner impulse,” but “has come to be an exercise in religiosity”: a suffocating, legalistic dead-end.41 The shortcomings of this perspective are easy to spot.42 Most obviously, the argument exhibits a very worrisome antipathy toward rabbinic Judaism, which Wellhausen presents as a feeble counterpart to the epics of Israel’s early religious life—epics that celebrated characters of unfettered piety and macho swagger. In Wellhausen’s hands, the process that leads up to the Hebrew Bible taking final form reads as a narrative of decline: hierocratic and rabbinic Judaism imposing restrictiveness and judgmentalism upon its vital, expansive, freebooting precursor. Could the argument of the Prolegomena be updated in ways that avoid such prejudicial judgments? Not obviously. And even if one were to strip this text of questionable, context-bound elements, it still depends on the assumption that one can read scripture as a deft compilation of written “sources,” each of which was authored by a literate individual. That assumption is not only anachronistic; it also leaves unexplored the possibility that many books in the Hebrew Bible originated with local oral traditions—a point made by Hermann Gunkel that has received powerful expansion and refinement in recent works by Susan Niditch, William Schniedwind, David Carr,

Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies (Cleveland: Meridian, 1957), 182 and 235. 41 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 78 and 424. 42 What follows is of course an amalgam of multiple insights. For a useful summary, see, inter alia, John Huddleston, “Recent Scholarship on the Pentateuch: Historical, Literary, and Theological Reflections,” ResQ 55, no. 3 (2013): 193–211. 40

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and others—and thus obscures the slow, complex, and conflictual transition from oral units, to written materials, to bookmaking.43 Can the documentary hypothesis really not be saved? The scholarship of Joel Baden indicates that one cannot respond with a conclusive “no.” Baden’s principal claim— that a documentary hypothesis supplies “the most economical, clearest, and most complete solution currently available for the literary complexities of the canonical text”—remains compelling.44 A pared-down revision of the Graf-Wellhausen perspective, it ditches the notion that sources can be differentiated by way of divine “names,” it refuses to speculate about the dating of sources, and it demurs with respect to sources’ prehistory, preferring to disaggregate textual strata through analyses focused on narrative continuity and coherence. Even so, the very fact that Baden does demur with respect to sources’ prehistory, thus disregarding research into orality, writing, and textualization, seems problematic. Research of this kind challenges the idea that one can postulate, never mind discriminate, discrete “documents” at any stage of the process during which scripture gained canonical form. If a refurbished documentary hypothesis is to succeed—and I make this point with due awareness of a profound lack of expertise—it must surely do more than reconstruct the workings of a compiler. It needs to combine an account of the oral and written prehistory of discrete texts with an account of how parts were integrated into “wholes” (like the Pentateuch) at a discrete moment in time.

If the documentary hypothesis is no longer serviceable, then talk about the formation of scripture—and, most crucially for my purposes, a theological account of said formation, congruent with a description of the human activities that God’s exercise of patience makes possible—needs to move along different lines. In this regard, and with due awareness of limits of conjecture, I would offer the following three-step framework. It is imperative to begin, again, with what was once named the “mighty acts of God,” and thus to draw attention to instances and patterns of divine activity that bless and bend history in specific ways and, as a result, establish, nourish, and direct the career of See here Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: WJKP, 1996); William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and David Carr, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 44 Baden, Composition of the Pentateuch, 32. 43

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ancient Israel as a corporate body. This activity, to be sure, was unevenly distributed. It was also unevenly perceived: while the preservative dimension of God’s providential work supports various kinds of continuity in human and other-than-human affairs, God’s governance of history involved a sovereign “targeting” of this and that person, this and that family or community, inside and beyond Israel. But consider now the “aftermath” of God’s targeting of this or that family and community. Consider, that is, the ways that God’s action ramifies in the quotidian, taking new forms as God supports various kinds of testimony, witness, recollection, and invention that recall what God did and what ancient Israel is empowered to do in response. In the short term, there arise individuals and groups (familial, tribal, etc.) that, having been accorded the opportunity to recognize how and why God has acted, initiate a creative process of redescribing, re-narrating, poeticizing, ritualizing, singing, and dancing about what has occurred. This creative process attests to a discrete exercise of divine patience, inclusive of “letting be,” “letting happen,” empowerment, permission, and delegation. Concomitantly, it points to something loosely analogous to the creatio cooperativa to which Gen. 1:1–2:4a bears witness, albeit one that is transposed and accommodated to a context distorted by waywardness. By grace, some number of groups and/or individuals do not just discern their incorporation into ancient Israel—a new kind of “us,” which together “makes” with God (cp. Gen. 1:27)—but set about using whatever resources they have to hand (raw invention, Canaanite traditions, family lore, etc.) to pay tribute to God’s providential and saving work, to respond to what God has been doing. There thus arise relatively stable oral (and, at later stages, written) cultural products—products that were likely lauded, contested, revised, and reworked as soon as they began to circulate. I write purposefully of individuals and groups in the plural. Whereas an earlier generation of scholars could still talk, for instance, about the “genius of J” and “his [sic] ability to put together a complete story of God’s actions,”45 it seems far better to postulate a chaotic (dis)array of agents in the production of oral and written materials— agents who were not necessarily aware of what others were doing, much less of like mind, when it came to the question of how best to describe God’s ways and works. Lawrence Boadt, Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction (Mahwah: Paulist, 1984), 98.

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Although the second step cannot be clearly disaggregated from the first, it merits analysis on its own terms. Alongside the lauding, contestation, revising, and reworking of novel cultural products that bore witness to God’s mighty acts, there were efforts to preserve and promote those products. Successive individual and groups set about the business of memorialization, recitation, and transmission, establishing something akin to a discursive tradition that could be (and was) handed on to future generations. And while the exact nature of the efforts of those engaged in the activity of preservation is a matter of conjecture, those efforts are rightly esteemed as another phase in God’s providential working—as another instance of God’s empowering of human activity, so as to “clarify” further the people that came to identify itself as ancient Israel. Indeed, if the first step in the formation of scripture has analogies with the mythological event of creatio cooperativa, this second step connects with that dimension of God’s providential patience as it sustains the world in which we live (and, by extension, the cosmos as a whole). Upholding creaturely distinction across time and space (telling this and that story, maintaining this and that poem, etc.) and supporting various kinds of development, regression, improvement, and decay: these are key factors in the survival and development of a discursive tradition; these are the reason why the past is not left in the past, but remains vital in the present. The work of parents who grasped that “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone” (Deut. 6:4), then insisted that such words must be held in the “heart,” appealing to others to “[r]ecite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise” (Deut. 6:6 and 7); the attentiveness, tenacity, and wonder (or, if those qualities weren’t available, the bitter acquiescence) of children who listened to their guardians, grasping that “forgetfulness” could have dire consequences (Deut. 8:19); the brio of musicians who gathered “at the watering places” to “repeat the triumphs of the Lord, the triumphs of his peasantry in Israel” (Judg. 5:11); the labors of traumatized collectives who held fast when priestly innovators were no longer on the scene and prophetic voices fell silent: all of this work, in all of its mundanity, undertaken with some combination of joy, conviction, bitterness, and determination, was the means by which ancient Israel began to work up an account of what God does and who God is.

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One might even push the point still further. The maintenance and transmission of oral traditions that funded chunks of verse perhaps correspond to God’s persistence in the disbursement of blessings. The care for detail, with names and events treasured and foregrounded, which went hand in hand with a bending of circumstance that refines oral traditions, rituals, and verse, perhaps corresponds to God’s steadfastness. There might even be an analogy to divine longsuffering, wherein the trials of maintaining a tradition correspond to God’s bearing of sin and its consequences. Most importantly, though, one can say that this is an exercise of human patience, stretched across generations and nested within God’s exercise of patience, that prevails in spite of the ravages of sin. As such, there arises a witness to God’s “mighty acts” that embeds itself in some portion of ancient Israel’s collective memory, nourishing Israel’s sense of itself as a community that stands within the covenant of grace. And while the creaturely actions that maintain this witness have a discrete operation of divine grace as their precondition, they are no less estimable for that. It is only through the combined strength of divine providing and human effort (asymmetrically related, of  course) that there emerges the foundation on which the entirety of the Hebrew Bible rests. This instance of “longduration literature” would not exist, were it not for the efforts of those who rewarded God’s patience.46 “Mankind does things and a few names get the credit. Sir Thomas Browne expressed the truth very moderately when he said that there have been more remarkable persons forgotten than remembered”—thus Charles Horton Cooley in Social Process.47 An apt quip in this instance, and one that can be usefully expanded: the forgotten people who have taken on the hard labor of “remembering” ought themselves to be deemed as remarkable as the names that are given credit. We only know of God’s mighty acts, mediated through towering figures of Israel’s history, because of the efforts of countless unknown women, children, and men to reward God’s patience.

Carr, Formation, 34. Excerpted in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered VinitzkySeroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 135.

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The third step has to do with textualization, wherein oral and written traditions are converted into books (or collections of books) by dint of the efforts of a number of expertly literate individuals. Holding aside the question as to whether written materials circulated in the pre-monarchal phase of Israel’s history, a series of watershed moments seems likely. Hezekiah’s rule was likely of utmost importance, with a propitious (i.e., providential) convergence of factors: urbanization, a consolidation of a centralized bureaucracy that connected temple and monarch, an influx of migrants from the Northern Kingdom, and a ruler who sought to burnish his claim to be a successor of David. The upshot, as William Schniedewind tells it, was enormously consequential: there emerged versions of prophetic works (Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah), wisdom traditions, priestly material, and a pre-Deuteronomic historical narrative that ran from the ancestral period to the fall of the Northern Kingdom.48 The intensification of urbanization, migration, and scribal bureaucracy during Josiah’s reign may have had a similarly transformative impact, as indicated by the famed “discovery” of a scroll (likely a version of Deuteronomy; see 2 Kgs 22). The efforts of exiled communities, too, were decisive. Although David Carr’s claims about the trauma of destruction and deportation sparking a “memorialization” of the past, internal to which was a proto-nationalist mindset of “us vs. them,” tilt in a naturalistic direction, they are amenable to theological reworking. One can argue that efforts to make sense of the devastation of Jerusalem were complemented by God’s facilitation of textual projects that discerned a covenantal “logic” to Israel’s past, with the Deuteronomic paradigm of disobedience/punishment and obedience/reward as one element, and the postulation of an inbreaking of grace that released Israel from that pattern—God’s “doing a new thing,” which is already “happening, do you not see it?” (Isa. 43:18)—being another. Of course, one can extend this process beyond the exile. It seems to take on a new form from the fifth to third centuries, following the hard-charging efforts of Ezra and Nehemiah to establish the second temple, thus ensuring the consolidation of what Schniedewind describes as the “textualization of Jewish religion.”49 It extends,

See the persuasive claims in Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, esp. 64–90. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, 183–7.

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too, into the time of the Hasmonean monarchy, which set in motion the (provisional) closing of the canon and prepared the way for the standardization of that canon after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70ce.

Now it is important to acknowledge that the process of textualization, as well as the preceding phases of creativity and conservation, has its share of ambiguities. On the positive side of the equation, it is true that the Hebrew Bible accommodates a striking range of perspectives, a fact that attests to a valuable kind of human “letting be” and “letting happen.” There is no attempt to “resolve” the discontinuities between 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles; different creation sagas are artlessly positioned next to one another; there is a willingness to juxtapose the raw bleakness of Lamentations with the forward-looking optimism of second Isaiah. Prophetic works, concomitantly, serve as a standing invitation to engage in radical self-critique, exposing the ways that ancient Israel misconstrued and abused God’s patience. More broadly, ancient Israel’s rewarding of God’s patience through textualization has proven itself over time. God affirms and reaffirms this reward, day after day, as God continues to embrace the Hebrew Bible as a medium through which God reveals Godself to humankind. (This is of course a circular argument, with ancient Israel’s scriptural rewarding of divine patience confirmed through God’s self-revelation through scripture, and God’s self-revelation through scripture attesting to the labors of ancient Israel. But that is not invalidating; it is an inevitable feature of a neo-Anselmian estimation of biblical authority.) On the other hand, it would be a mistake to view ancient Israel’s efforts as unimpeachable. Not in the sense that transcriptional stumbles compromise manuscripts—such stumbles have incidental importance, being a fairly unsurprising feature of the humanness of scripture. At issue here is the simple fact that textualization as ancient Israel’s rewarding of God’s patience was and is inextricable from the ongoing fact of waywardness. On one level—and one can only think in broad, conjectural terms at this point—waywardness likely led to the suppression, sidelining, and eventual disappearance of voices and perspectives that were deemed incompatible with some given ethos or paradigm, even though those voices and perspectives might have formed part of an apt reward and response to God’s patience. (The “finalization” of discrete scriptural books, both

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singly and with respect to the canon, may have been a particularly grubby affair, involving a questionable degree of editorial highhandedness.)50 On another level, it is likely that the formation of scripture involved the distortion of certain voices and perspectives, maybe to the point at which those voices and perspectives curtail— or, at least, complicate—our knowledge of God’s ways and works. Two additional points, which can only be sketched, are in order. First, it shouldn’t be thought that these claims about scriptural waywardness expose a “low” view of scripture that undermines, or at least stands in tension with, this book’s commitment to the principle of sola scriptura. Since God has deemed the Hebrew Bible an adequate reward to God’s empowering exercise of patience, we ought to do likewise, recognizing its preeminence and authority. At issue is something different: the need for honesty when it comes to affirming the humanness of the Bible, such that “fallibility” is not reduced to a terse acknowledgment of inconsistencies and obscurities, but comes to include due awareness of the dubious operations of power in the selection and arrangement of materials, in the process of textualization, and in the act of canonization. Second, one should avoid conclusive judgments about precisely where and how scripture manifests distortion. Certainly an affirmation of its humanity does not license disregard for putatively “primitive” claims about God, nor permit one to discount summarily passages that conflict with contemporary ethical, legal, ritualistic, and theological mores. To make the point concretely: while I might (and am) incensed by passages that, for instance, seem to endorse the enslavement of human beings, stigmatize same-sex relations, marginalize women, and/or promote ethnic chauvinism—passages that haven’t just been used to justify modes of conduct that I judge wicked, but seem to invite objectionable conduct—I do not suppose that I can ever be “done” with those passages. I may not dismiss them out of hand; I must endeavor to practice a certain kind of patience. And while I well may be at a loss to imagine exactly how those passages are relevant to Christian thought, worship, and practice, and while I believe myself obliged to challenge those who would weaponize those passage in the name of a reactionary return to “Christian values,” I also believe that I must suffer those passages, acknowledging them as discrete elements in a h ­ uman document that God uses to reveal Godself. I must remain open

Regina Schwartz puts it well: the canon “should not be understood as the product of a peaceful consensus, but as the result of protracted struggles for authority between competing communities.” See The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), 146.

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to the ­possibility that the “new world of the Bible” will manifest itself in novel ways, and that passages that I currently deem irrelevant and/or inimical to Christian faith—and, in fact, cannot imagine myself not deeming irrelevant and/or inimical to Christian life—may suddenly, by grace, impress themselves upon me as crucial for the task of living and thinking Christianly.

Notwithstanding such ambiguities, it remains possible—and, I think, imperative—to reiterate that the process of textualization marks a highpoint in ancient Israel’s success in rewarding of God’s patience. The authority of scripture, by these lights, is inclusive of the covenantal faithfulness of ancient Israel before and with God. It is a consequence of activity analogous to the primordial event of creatio cooperativa and activity analogous to God’s disbursement of blessings, God’s preservation and steadfast “bending” of events, and perhaps even God’s longsuffering. One final point, which is perhaps obvious but bears explicit mention: this account of the formation of scripture is one more occasion to affirm the ineliminable importance of the historical life of ancient Israel for Christian theology. Toward the end of Karl Barth’s rich treatment of providence, one finds a reflection on the doctrine’s significance for Christian knowledge and praxis—or, more precisely, the obligation of Christians to live lives of faith, marked by obedience to God’s rule and the freedom of childlike prayer, in the context of God’s act of Weltregierung.51 Barth takes this ethical supplement to be crucial, noting that “our sketch would be incomplete if … we did not expressly consider the creaturely subject which participates in the divine lordship, not merely from without … but in some sense from within” (CD III/3, 239). An affirmation of God’s “universal lordship” cannot be of merely of cognitive interest for Christian life; one must also understand that God has so structured history that this exercise of lordship is inclusive of, and in some sense waits on, creatures’ responsible inhabitation of the covenant of grace. Yet Barth’s actualistic treatment of Christian community, positioned after a lengthy statement on Jews and Judaism, makes no reference to ancient Israel as such. Unwittingly, then, it draws attention away from the labors of those Israelites (and perhaps some nonDavid C. Chao considers this aspect of Barth’s perspective in his excellent study, Concursus and Concept Use in Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Providence: Nature, Grace, and Norms (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

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Israelites) who, through orality, writing, tradition-maintenance, and textualization, brought the Hebrew Bible into existence. And this is a lost opportunity, plainly at odds with Barth’s insight that “Israel is the primary form of God’s community.”52 It obscures the fact that, prior to the advent of the church, there is already a subset of creatures which have ably (if imperfectly) worked “within” God’s lordship, rewarding God’s exercise of patience through activity that “perceives and acknowledges and affirms and approves” and that “is in fact thankful for it and wills to cleave and conform to it” (CD III/3, 239). It obscures the fact, to put it more sharply, that it is only because of ancient Israel’s response to God’s gracious providing that the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth can now be perceived aright. “I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me” (Mic. 7:7): one cannot imagine such an act of waiting without the witness of the Hebrew Bible, which itself bears witness to ancient Israel’s abiding contribution to the covenant of grace.

3 Divine Patience and History at Large My discussion of God’s providential exercise of patience can now, at long last, be extended and applied to the broader realm of history—“history at large” being shorthand for those times and spaces that do not obviously or immediately stand in connection with the scriptural witness to God’s relationship with ancient Israel, yet which must always be understood in light of that witness and relationship. And, as suggested previously, potentially Eberhard Busch, “The Covenant of Grace Fulfilled in Christ as the Foundation of the Indissoluble Solidarity of the Church with Israel: Barth’s Positions on the Jews during the Hitler Era,” in Karl Barth: Post-Holocaust Theologian? ed. George Hunsinger (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 44. For Busch’s broader statement on Barth and Israel, see of course Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden, 1933–1945 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlag, 1996). It is worth noting that the position that I have advanced makes it hard to follow Busch’s claim that “Israel attests the Word of God as heard, whereas the church attests it as believed” (Busch, “Covenant of Grace,” 51). More dialecticism is needed. One must also say that ancient Israel’s attestation to the Word of God manifests itself in a pattern of belief-fulness that animated the formation of the Hebrew Bible. And one must also say that the church’s hearing of the Word is belief-ful when—and only when—that belief-fulness includes a constant listening to the witness of ancient Israel.

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treacherous waters must be navigated. It is especially important to avoid the conceit that a Christian’s knowledge of God and God’s ways and works generates a preternatural epistemological capacity, the exercise of which enables one to know precisely how God’s “hand” directs events in time and space. That conceit confuses creaturely participation in God’s self-knowing—which, of course, is a fundamental dimension of faith—with a removal of those cognitive limits that mark the human being as the particular creature that it is. It betrays a desire to “leverage” the gift of faith, with confidence in God’s blessings and guidance of ancient Israel treated as material from which a philosophy of history can be built: a clear instance of works righteousness. Now, to be sure, the Lord who provides with respect to history at large is always, and none other than, the God of ancient Israel. And God’s exercise of patience is just as intensive and extensive in the here-and-now as it was in ancient Israel’s there-and-then. Were that not the case, it would be impossible to view life in the here-and-now (or any hereand-now, for that matter) in light of what we know about ancient Israel’s there-and-then. But “this does not mean that the lordship and economy [of God] can be directly seen and demonstrated in world-occurrence as such” (CD III/4, 196). Ancient Israel’s there-and-then should be viewed as a past in which God makes plain who God is and what God does, while every other thereand-then and here-and-now, while no less and no more a patch of time and space blessed, preserved, and steered according to God’s ruling, is marked by divine hiddenness. Put a bit differently: even as God reveals Godself to us in the here-and-now, by way of the scriptural witness to ancient Israel’s there-and-then, and even as the revelatory “yield” of that witness is such that light from the past flashes forward, illuminating something about our present and future, in no respect does that flashing and illuminating afford one a vantage point from which to behold the “whole.” One must instead think in terms of the effects that the scriptural witness has on one’s bearing toward history at large. The basic patterns of God’s providing, disclosed through scripture’s account of God’s covenantal history with ancient Israel, fund an orientation that enables Christian communities and individuals to locate themselves in time and space, to act with integrity, meaning, and consequence, and to make non-operationalizable judgments about history at large. Nothing less than that. But also nothing more.

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To trace the shape of that orientation, this section reads Rom. 8:18–25 in relation to the forgoing claims about God’s providing. It outlines a providential sensibility that is anchored in, attuned to, and responsive to God’s exercise of patience—or, to put it more carefully, outlines a sensibility that hopes, by grace, to be thusly anchored, attuned, and responsive. And the exegetical shift to the New Testament serves to remind readers that, in the context of a neo-Anselmian project, there is no moment in which reflection on the history of ancient Israel can be divorced from the working of Christ and the Spirit. It signals that the scriptural witness to ancient Israel, while legitimately explored at a (temporary) remove from the New Testament, establishes the basis on which the ongoing work of Christ and the Spirit is best understood. Of course, the fact that I have only glanced in the direction of Christology and pneumatology in the constructive chapters of this book means that the following pages are gestural in character. But Christological and pneumatological reticence notwithstanding, sufficient momentum has been built up to sketch how Christian communities might begin consciously to inhabit a time and space ordered to and governed by God’s exercise of patience—and, even, to begin to think about what it might mean to reward that exercise of patience. Granted my critique of Barth’s inattention to ancient Israel with respect to the formation of scripture, I remain indebted to his work at this juncture. Just as the doctrine of the Word of God has “objective” and “subjective” elements (so CD I/1 and I/2), so a doctrine of providence must pair an account of divine preserving, accompanying, and ruling with remarks on “The Christian Under the Universal Lordship of God the Father” (CD III/3, §49.4). Here, as elsewhere, one must understand that theologia habitus practicus est (“theology is a practical discipline”).53

Prior to elaborating these claims, incomplete and tentative as they are, two broader issues merit further attention. The first bears on the dispensability of the concept of causality for accounts of providence; the second has to do with God’s identity.

Philip Jacob Spener, of course, made important use of this adage. See esp. Pia Desideria, trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002).

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(a) Interlude: On divine causality and God’s identity As I have noted on several occasions, the value of “causality” for thinking about divine and creaturely action is a matter of debate. Few would deny that this concept has a proud and instructive history, and it is possible to view that as reason enough for the concept’s continued deployment and refinement. The study of Aquinas is a case in point: an Aristotle-inspired delineation of distinct modes of causality lends texture to a powerful account of the relationship between God and creatures, with diverse forms of creaturely action sustained by and ordered to God’s providential purposes.54 Schleiermacher’s reliance on causality in the Glaubenslehre is also noteworthy. Although nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-firstcentury readers might readily associate this conceptuality with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Newtonian physics, and/or empirical science, Schleiermacher tethers it to an expansive account of God’s livingness, so that it forms the leading edge of a distinctively Reformed statement about sovereignty and grace. And as the “First Part of the System of Doctrine” gives way to the second, it becomes well-nigh impossible to think about causality apart from a piety whose center of gravity is God’s election of humankind, mediated through Christ’s redemptive history and the community-forming activity of the Spirit. Schleiermacher’s initially formalistic account of God’s act of creation and preservation is thus enveloped in a distinctively Christian account of the irresistible outworking of God’s saving purposes.55 I am aware that this is an exceedingly general statement. For more detail, see David Burrell, “Providence,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae, ed. Phillip McCosker and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) 156–67; and, in a more focused vein, Corey L. Barnes, “Natural Final Causality and Providence in Aquinas,” NB 95, no. 1057 (2014): 349–61. With respect to constructive possibilities, two useful statements are Michal Paluch, “Recovering a Doctrine of Providence: A Report,” NovVet 12, no. 4 (2014): 1159–72; and Ignacio Silva, “Revisiting Aquinas on Providence and Rising to the Challenge of Divine Action in Nature,” JR 93, no. 3 (2014): 277–91. 55 This “backwards” reading of the Glaubenslehre, which supposes that the second part of the system of doctrine ought to set the terms for reading the first, has received powerful exposition in Shelli M. Poe, Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as Trinitarian Theologian (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). For more on 54

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In some quarters, however, there is a good deal of wariness. One finds the claim, for instance, that this concept risks injecting a degree of “impersonalism” into accounts of God’s relationship with the world, thereby undermining an affirmation of God’s personal agency.56 Or that talk of causality has become unduly cumbersome, in part because of the too-close association of divine power and efficient causality in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre—and that what is most needful is the development of a “noncausal account of Divine power.”57 Or that such talk must be qualified, so that contingencies and indeterminacies immanent to the world are nested within a scientifically plausible and dogmatically intelligible account of God’s providing—one now construed in terms of “the top-down input of information.”58 A broader indicator of wariness the related issues of divine causality and God’s “livingness,” see Paul DeHart, “Ter mundus accipit infinitum: The Dogmatic Coordinates of Schleiermacher’s Trinitarian Treatise,” NZSTR 52 (2010): 17–39; Francis Fiorenza, “Schleiermacher’s Understanding of God as Triune,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 171–88; Kevin Hector, “Actualism and Incarnation: The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” IJST 8, no. 3 (2006): 307–22; and Julia A. Lamm, The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park: The Pennsylvanian State University Press, 1996). Although I take issue with some critical claims, Paul D. Janz’s treatment of Schleiermacher’s account of causality is also instructive; see “Divine Causality and the Nature of Theological Questioning,” MT 23, no. 3 (2007): 317–48. 56 Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 129–50. 57 Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 177; see also Sonderegger, “The Doctrine of Providence,” in The Providence of God, 144–57. As my earlier comments perhaps indicate, I do not find Schleiermacher’s treatment of causality as worrisome as Sonderegger does. I agree that he overrates efficient causality at points, but doubt that the Christological claims of §§100–102 represent a deviation from Schleiermacher’s abiding fascination with God as Absolute Cause. In fact, I would be inclined to turn Sonderegger’s interpretation upside-down. In that the Christology of the Glaubenslehre “radiates” across the entirety of the text, talk of divine causality ultimately lacks for meaning apart from Schleiermacher’s account of the redemptive activity of God. 58 For general remarks, see Philip D. Clayton, God and Contemporary Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), esp. 188–231. A “top-down input of information” as central to God’s providential activity is commended by John Polkinghorne; see Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 72. Emphasis added.

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is the simple fact that some major expositions of providence make conspicuously little use of this conceptuality. Whatever one makes of, say, the evolutionary logos mysticism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the appropriation of theatrical theory by Tim Gorringe, the commendation of corporeal participation in God’s relational transcendence with Mayra Rivera, or the recent programmatic statement by David Fergusson, it is striking that each exhibits a striking lack of interest in causality.59 An important antecedent to contemporary worries about (or contemporary disregard for) causality is an important excursus in Church Dogmatics III/3 (94–107). On one hand, Barth challenges the swiftness with which Ritschl and Troeltsch dismiss talk of causality,60 and offers qualified praise for the way that Aquinas and some Protestant thinkers described the relationship between God as causa prima and the causae secundae of the created order. On the other hand, Barth worries about abstraction. With respect to the Protestant scholastics, he discerns a tendency to look away from the covenant of grace and, correspondingly, a drift toward accounts of providence indexed in “a general and in some sense neutral and featureless God, an absolute” (CD III/3, 100). With a view to righting the ship, Barth then offers a series of ground rules. The concept of causality may be used if the following conditions are satisfied: (i) it is disaggregated from modern natural scientific accounts of cause and effect; (ii) there is no suggestion that God and creature amount to “forces” or “things” that are plotted along the same ontological plane; (iii) God and creatures are not subordinated to causality as a “master-concept” (CD III/3, 102); (iv) it does not gain such prominence that the doctrine of providence becomes a philosophical, unscriptural affair; and (v) it is governed by Christological considerations.

The constructive portions of this book also make slight use of causality. And it is useful again to explain why that is the case. In line with some other thinkers, I share the sense that this concept carries some unhelpful baggage, primarily because

See Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1976); Gorringe, God’s Theatre; Maya Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); and David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 60 See here Albrecht Ritschl, Instruction in Christian Religion, in Three Essays, trans. Philip Hefner (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 226 (§15) and 269 (fn. 37); and Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, ed. Gertrud von le Fort, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 206 (§17, dictation). 59

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an assumed point of reference is an understanding of lawlike processes: a nexus of regularized and predictable causes and effects, the functioning of which is amenable to empirical investigation. No doubt, a reductionist mindset needn’t conclusively fix the meaning of causality. Scientific inquiry does not consistently beget scientism. In fact, if one supposes that the terms in which causality is understood (along with, perhaps, an inflation of “instrumental rationality”) have narrowed, one might welcome the disruptive effects of its deployment in Christian theology—a discourse in which concepts are not defined in terms of the Sprachspiele that play across a wayward quotidian but are instead put in service of a far-reaching account of God’s ways and works. But an awareness of the (potential) viability of any term of art does not, in and of itself, make that term dogmatically desirable; one must make prudential judgments about the amount of intellectual labor needed to render any given idiom “usable.” And on this front, my stance is likely already clear. Just as Barth thought it apt to jettison talk of “personhood” when describing God’s three ways of being, adjudging it overladen with individualistic connotations, so I find it apt to set aside talk of causality. Its entanglement with mechanistic and instrumentalist modes of reflection has made it more troublesome than worthwhile. The decision to sideline causality can also be justified, in a post hoc fashion, in view of the fact that an alternative vocabulary has begun to prove its worth. Recall one of Barth’s summary statements about the doctrine of providence: “the superior dealings of the Creator with His creation, the wisdom, omnipotence and goodness with which He maintains and governs in time this distinct reality according to the counsel of His own will” (CD III/3, 3). Assuming this claim as a starting point, a theologian’s task is to identify themes, motifs, and/or concepts that are suitable for describing God’s act of Weltregierung. And such themes, motifs, and/or concepts will prove their worth if they show themselves suited to (i) describing the primacy (or “superiority”) of God’s activity with respect to the creation, preservation, and governance of the world; (ii) doing justice to the integrity, meaning, and consequentiality of creaturely life and activity as it is enabled, supported, and directed by God (this being the “distinct reality” of God’s “creation”); and then connecting (i) and (ii) in such a way that (iii) talk of God’s “wisdom, omnipotence and goodness” is honored. If all that be accepted, one can viably

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say that patience and related terms have acquitted themselves well. The primacy of God’s activity has been described in terms of the precedence of divine patience; talk of “letting be,” “letting happen,” as well as claims about rewarding and responding to God’s patience, have supported an account of the integrity, meaning, and consequentiality of creaturely life; and descriptions of God’s persistence in blessing, longsuffering, and steadfastness support a robust sense of God’s wisdom, omnipotence, and goodness, as God steers events in this and that direction. I am hopeful, too, that all of this has occurred without courting the errors noted at the outset of the previous chapter: on one hand, crass determinism (an overemphasis on [i] without the dialectical counterpoint of [ii]); on the other, woolly demurrals about the specifics of God’s engagement with events in the quotidian (an overemphasis on [ii] and an underdevelopment of [iii]). In addition—and this is a crucial bonus—making patience central to the explication of providence has underscored the central place of ancient Israel in theological reflection. But isn’t there a dogmatic loss here? Might not one say, for instance, that a marginalization of this conceptuality forfeits the kind of precision enabled by a differentiation of causality as formal, material, efficient, and final (with God, of course, being the “exemplar cause of all things” [ST I.44.3])? Well, if Aquinas is presented as the standard according to which constructive work is measured, it would be churlish to deny some manner of loss. A Thomist perspective does far more than signal that “efficient” causality is only one part of God’s ruling (an achievement in itself); it provides a theologian with a reliable and usable dogmatic technology—one that has consistently proven its worth when it comes to “plotting” how it is that this or that creature acts in the quotidian. It might even be that this particular Thomist technology is well-placed to take stock of late modern scientific paradigms (“emergence,” quantum mechanics, neo-Darwinism, etc.), and to underscore how a “univocal understanding of [efficient] causality no longer seems adequate to the scientific enterprise.”61 So the question recurs. Ought the concept of causality really be sidelined? Are

Michael Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2012), 96.

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there not good reasons to import causality, as a multidimensional conceptuality, into an account of God’s providential exercise of patience? Good reasons, yes; sufficient reasons, no. On one level—and while I have made this point repeatedly, it is worth belaboring—a well-ordered doctrine of providence should have a deflationary character. Were a vivid sense of God’s patience vis-à-vis ancient Israel to be leveraged in ways that suggest that history at large could become transparent to thought, dogmatic defeat would risk being snatched from the jaws of victory. And while Aquinas’ favored dogmatic technology does not come anywhere close to the epistemological grandiosity evoked by, say, crude forms of German idealism, it does risk assimilating creaturely events to a tightly defined scheme. One is hard-pressed to concede surd-like moments in history, for one is pushed constantly to think about the discrete “purpose” of this or that creature, or this or that turn of events. One is therefore drawn away from aptly vague and fuzzy statements about how God exercises patience, outside and beyond the scriptural witness to ancient Israel, and outside and beyond the early church. But vagueness and fuzziness are exactly what should be preserved as one thinks about God’s action in history at large. While one can and should be assured that God is working, patiently, to achieve God’s purposes, and while there is no need to repress tentative “stretches” at certain moments (“maybe … x, y, z are comprehensible in terms of God doing this and that”), it is vital that every “stretch” has a recollection of abiding epistemological limits as its dialectical counterpoint. An avoidance of the conceptuality of causality helps with that. Bereft of the opportunity to say that God causes this or that (or, for that matter, that some creature is “naturally” inclined to behave in this or that way), the doctrine of providence is valuably chastened. This brings me to a second issue. Although the preceding pages have sought to check speculation about what exactly God is doing in this or that patch of space and time, an expansive statement about the patience of God the provider, like a statement about the patience of God the creator, does allow one to wonder about God’s own life as involving an exercise of patience. Which is to say: a farreaching account of a providential economy, defined by patience, both permits and encourages reflection on the patience of God’s immanent, trinitarian life as its antecedent condition—patience

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being that dimension of God’s eternal being wherein the divine persons, who are constitutive of God’s essence, engage in “letting be” and “letting happen”; patience being a mode of relationship in which blessing, steadfastness, and longsuffering are not just a matter of what God does ad extra, but a matter of who God is, in se. As is likely evident, I am in no rush to offer a detailed statement about God’s immanent life. True, an Anselmian approach to reflection allows for it. Barth wagered that the knowledge of God’s triunity, ingredient to faith, could be correlated with an analysis of the threefold shape of revelation (God being “precisely the One He is in showing and giving Himself” [CD I/1, 382]); and, more generally, supposed that a well-ordered account of God’s triunity supplied the foundation upon which subsequent claims about God’s creative, providential, reconciliatory, and redemptive work could be built. But my modus operandi, at least on this point, owes more to Schleiermacher than Barth. While I consider it vital to explain what it means to say that patience is “the very nature of God (esse naturam)” (De pat. 3.11)—for one must not demur from saying who the God of ancient Israel, Jesus Christ, and the Spirit is, even as one’s claims ought always to be paired with an apophatic unsaying—this project intends to offer such an explanation subsequent to, and in light of, its analyses of God’s creative, reconciling, and redemptive activity. Thus it is that a full statement about patience as a divine attribute (or, as Barth would say, “perfection”), which is by necessity a statement about how the triune God exercises patience toward Godself, waits on the Christological and pneumatological claims of this volume’s successor. Even so, it is perhaps becoming clear that an account of God’s patient providing is already pointing toward the patience of God in se. On one level, we have moved a good distance from a debased construal of God as a coercive overlord, prone to micromanagement and obsessed with flaunting “his” glory through the passage of historical events—a description of God that, while hardly the preserve of any creditable theologian, has been invoked by many critics of the Reformed tradition, and a description of God that is always something of a risk, in some way, whenever emphasis is repeatedly (and aptly) laid on God’s unconditional grace. While charting its own path, this book has endeavored to think in continuity with Barth’s description of God as the “one who loves in

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freedom” with an eye to establishing “fellowship between himself and us” (CD II/1, §27). Although God can and does act sovereignly, freely, and non-cooperatively—that, after all, is the condition of possibility for the act of creatio ex nihilo, for God’s disbursement of blessings, and for creaturely activity that is not wholly in thrall to waywardness—such action is always in service of a covenantal relationship. Fellowship, in fact, is both the means and end of God’s Weltregierung. It is only because God exercises patience, blessing creatures, suffering with them, and remaining steadfast in God’s preservative and governmental work, that some number of creatures come to reward God’s patience. On another level, it is reasonable to reflect on how God’s exercise of patience toward the world might have the richness of God’s exercise of patience toward Godself as its presupposition. God’s own life, one might say, is distinguished by a singular kind of “letting be” and “letting happen,” as God’s three ways of being grant (divine) time and (divine) space to each other—the eternal perichoresis of God’s three persons being complemented by each person’s determination to maintain the distinctions that are ingredient to God’s triune life. God’s own life, equally, involves an incessant disbursement of blessings, with God’s three ways of being comprising a unified essence that is always-already a koinonia. And God’s own life involves distinctive modes of steadfastness: the Spirit being the abyssal and unyielding “ground” who upholds the eternal act of begetting that is proper to God in God’s first way of being, as God eternally births the Word; the Spirit being the abyssal and unyielding “ground” who surrounds and supports the Word, as the Word embraces the status of one who is begotten by and responsive to the Father, impatient for and longsuffering in the pursuit of creaturely liberation. Indeed, if we are now reaching the point at which we are positing “richer, more complicated patterns of personconstitution” than are found in some dogmatic discourses, that is perhaps a sign that we are on the right track.62 That is precisely what emerges from, and what is needed to lend support to, an account of God that prizes an exploratory and imaginative approach to the age-old task of faith seeking understanding. That is precisely what is

Linn Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (New York: Routledge, 2016), 147.

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needed for Christian theology to disburden patience of problematic connotations, and thus to ensure that new thinking about God goes hand in hand with new thinking about what it means to live before and with God.63

(­ b) “If we hope for what we do not see … ”: On Romans 8:14–25 At long last, then, a statement about how God relates to history at large. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (8:14). Immediately, Paul moves us beyond the Hebrew Bible. The Spirit is none other than the Spirit of Christ, and our being “children,” led by Christ’s Spirit, presupposes Christ’s proclamation and enactment of the Kingdom: an entirely new divine reality, tied to a history that passes from cradle to cross to resurrection, articulated in a geopolitical context unforeseen by the vast majority of Christ’s forebears. And it is because of the actions of the Spirit that Christians relate to God in a new way, knowing themselves to be Christ’s brothers and sisters and calling upon God with unprecedented fearlessness and joy (“Abba! Father!”: 8:15), pairing an apprehension of suffering with the expectation of glory (8:17). Given this, Calvin is quite right to frame this verse in terms of believers who are “aroused to undoubted confidence in their salvation” (Comm. Rom. 8:15 and 14). He is also right to notice the trinitarian frame of Paul’s contentions. Sanctification depends on the eternal relationship between God’s second and third persons gaining a new kind of economic expression, after the fall, such that justified creatures are caught up in the flow of love that passes between the Word and the Spirit, with that same flow enabling our apprehension of God’s first way of being and God’s predestinating decree (for “the Lord favors none but his elect, while He sets them apart for Himself as His sons” [Comm. Rom. 8:14]). With that said, it is vital that the process of sanctification not be disassociated from God’s earlier acts of providing. What Calvin underplays, at least in this commentary, is an awareness that the sanctifying action of For more on this issue, in close conversation with Barth’s theology, see Paul Dafydd Jones, “Patience and the Trinity,” MT 34, no. 3 (2018): 386–402.

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Christ and Spirit reprises what God did to and for ancient Israel. The future-oriented time and space that Christ and his Spirit create, sustain, and govern, in other words, is not exclusive of but materially dependent on the history of God and ancient Israel, and in such a way that the patience of God toward ancient Israel “back then” is always being folded into the Christ- and Spirit-shaped time and space that God gives to creatures in the here-and-now. It follows, too, that the basic characteristics of God’s exercise of patience toward ancient Israel—persistence in blessing, longsuffering in face of waywardness, a steadfast preservation and bending of history, the eliciting of creaturely responses to God’s merciful exercise of patience—should be read into Paul’s declarations about the liberation of those who are “in Christ,” those who are emboldened to call upon God and to live as her adopted children. There is no Christian liberation that is unrelated to God’s provision for ancient Israel; there is only a liberation that is inclusive of and continuous with God’s provision for ancient Israel, as believers are drawn into a covenantal history that stretches back to the calling of Abram, Sarai, and Lot and forward into the Kingdom that is dawning. But all that sounds a bit formal. How, concretely, does this account of God’s providing and sanctifying relate to history at large, with God’s patience toward ancient Israel reprised in the activity of Christ and the Spirit? When I reckon with the context in which I am placed, thinking seems to misfire. Talk of “undoubted confidence in … salvation” can perhaps take hold, at least for a while, especially if I follow Calvin and treat my experience of justification and sanctification as a proleptic taste of a blissful postmortem existence. Christ’s ongoing act of intercession, combined with the forwardmovement of the Spirit, allows the hope that I will be delivered into the loving arms of the Father, and that a “spirit of slavery” will be displaced by a “spirit of adoption” (8:15). But when I try to combine this hope with confidence in God’s sovereign, loving, and patient governance of history at large, I lose my footing. To put it personally (and a bit melodramatically): how can I credibly suppose that this patch of time and space is being guided and shaped by God’s patience, given that the two countries that I view as “home” lurch toward new forms of ethnonationalism and political malfeasance (and, concomitantly, move farther away from the promise of democratic socialism)? When the juggernaut of late modern capitalism benefits precious few, while impoverishing and

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immiserating the vast majority? When there are vanishingly long odds of concerted activity to address the compounding crises of global heating, nonhuman animal and plant extinction, and the despoliation of lands, rivers, lakes, and seas? When—and yes, this is all terribly broad, but still—I cannot shake the sense that my children will grow up in societies that often cannot be bothered, really, with the fuss of democratic deliberation, preferring the jouissance of outrage and indignation, and that this turn of events is the direct result of my generation failing to salvage anything of value after the end of the Cold War? While I might want to pair the biblical witness to God’s patient providing for ancient Israel with the Christological and pneumatological soteriology of Rom. 8:14, perhaps with the Kingdom as an “inchoative historical reality” serving as a point of convergence, can I do so without a sacrificium intellectus?64 Even as these fears betray an obviously affluent, privileged context—they are broad in import and exhibit little sense of the terrifying precariousness that haunts the lives of most human beings today—they are not illegitimate. Those who believe in God’s all-encompassing governance of history cannot credibly suppress questions about what God’s providing means in the here and now. But both the questions and the fears again demonstrate the need to maintain a deflationary vision of providence, ingredient to which is a refusal to view it as an interpretative key that could be used to unlock the meaning of the quotidian (and, for that matter, assuage the gnawing worries of a relatively affluent white parent). Granted that the scriptural witness presents itself as a “new world” that projects itself into each and every patch of space and time, precisely because there is no “second revelation of the divine world-governance, no second Bible,” one must always accept that the “plan of God” is “concealed from us even when we venture to acknowledge [God] as Lord” (CD III/3, 198) of history. The doctrine of providence cannot be used to subdue one’s perception of the world, in all of its ambiguity, as it exists right now. It can only support “a patience which can wait for the bestowing of God’s free grace and endure ‘in adversity,’ which holds fast to the fact that God will act in

64 Gustavo Gutiérrez, The God of Life, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis: 1991), 103.

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his good time, which does not despair when it sees no parallels to the kingdom of heaven”; and it can only have as its “goal … not conceptual clarity but affective reorientation” of the self.65 So, while accepting the desire to ascertain the particular character of God’s governing with respect to any given horror and tragedy (or, for that matter, delight and triumph, tedium or thrill, or ambiguity and clarity), a sensibility keyed to God’s providential exercise of patience will not be thrown off course when the understanding ingredient to faith struggles to gain purchase in the quotidian. It will honor bafflement and frustration as they arise, recalling God’s longsuffering while trusting that God’s persistence in blessing and God’s steadfast bending of events will—somehow and somewhen— make a material difference, now and in the future. It will hold fast to a difficult dialectic (which is likely not best described, pace Calvin, as a “state of tranquility” [Comm. Rom. 8:15]): on one side, refusing to look away from potentially surd-like elements of the quotidian, acknowledging that those elements might be the result of a mysterious non-impedito peccati—a function of God’s sovereign “letting be” and “letting happen”; on the other, as God wills it, nourishing the hope that God is working to ensure that this “present darkness” (Eph. 6:10) will subserve God’s broader purposes, and in such a way that—were we only able to see as God does!—God’s loving exercise of patience prevails over waywardness. Perhaps demurrals with respect to the application of a providential sensibility might give way to clarity at a later date? For example, might one not look back on the “vast hominid period, lasting between five and six million years, and covering up to twenty branching hominid species,”66 and say: here is an instance of the slow, patient work of God, with travail and waste and any number of evolutionary dead-ends being preparatory to the emergence of homo sapiens? While one cannot foreclose such

Karl Barth, Learning Jesus Christ through the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 63; and Michelle Chaplain Sanchez, Calvin and the Resignification of the World: Creation, Incarnation, and the Problem of Political Theology in the 1559 Institutes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 138 (emphasis added). Granted that Chaplain advances this judgment in an interpretative setting, it captures a key dimension of the constructive proposal of this subsection. 66 Nicola Hoggard Creegan, “The Salvation of Creatures,” in Ivor J. Davidson and Murray A. Rae, God of Salvation: Soteriology in Theological Perspective (London: Routledge, 2016), 80.

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lines of inquiry, I am rather uneasy about them. The slope seems to be a slippery one: conjectures about “progress” over millennia soon being complemented with conjectures about centuries, about decades, about years. The fact remains that no passage of time (and, for that matter, no extension of space), external to the biblical witness, renders God’s act of world-governance any more or any less hidden.

“The creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it” (8:20). The next set of claims pulls on a thread in the reading of Rom. 8:14 above. It reckons with the hard truth that God, and God alone, bears responsibility for the entire world that God creates, preserves, and governs. Given that God creates ex nihilo, motivated by nothing other than God’s sovereign good-pleasure; given that God preserves the world, “letting be” and “letting happen” while empowering creatures to act with integrity, meaning, and consequence; and given that God’s patience is disclosed in God’s being “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6) in God’s relationship with ancient Israel, it is impossible to say that God approves waywardness. Concomitantly, it is impossible to say that the ματαιότητι (futility, emptiness, transitoriness) of historical existence, so characteristic of life after the fall, accords with God’s intentions. Counterfactual though it may be, Gen. 1:1–2:4b tells of the world God wants: one in which creatures spontaneously reward God’s patience, making use of God’s permission, delegation, and empowerment to render the cosmos ever more rich, complex, and diverse. At the same time, and granted that the agent of the aorist (ὑποτάξαντα) is unspecified (it seems best to regard God as the one who “subjected” creation to futility—who else has this power?—but the text seems to allow the insinuation of creaturely sin carrying a deadly, cosmic “reward” in its wake [cf. Rom. 6:23]), Rom. 8:20 is forthright when it comes to the condition in which creatures are placed. “Futility” is a blunt appraisal of the distorted, confusing, painful, and sometimes traumatic context in which life “according to the flesh” and the “spirit” (κατὰ σάρκα, κατὰ πνεῦμα) takes place (so 8:5). Waywardness continues to devastate time and space; it remains a vital power that haunts the life of every creature. Yes, of course, futility is not the “final word.” Christ’s death and resurrection assures us of being “set … free from the law of sin and of death” (8:2) as God moves creation toward a future defined by “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (8:21). That much is

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evident. But it does not render the tribulations of creaturely life any less real. No matter the (counterfactual) perfection of our world’s beginning and the (mythologically described) end vouchsafed to us, futility is an abiding feature of history. At the risk of overstatement, let me make the same point in a different way. Although Rom. 8 opens with the avowal that there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” and ends with the conviction that nothing can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” (8:1 and 8:39), the chapter’s twentieth verse can and should be read in light of the witness of the Hebrew Bible. As gentiles are progressively grafted into the history of ancient Israel, equipped with a delighted sense of the sufficiency of the salvation wrought by Israel’s Messiah, they begin to share in the difficult knowledge that God’s providential activity continues to be frustrated by creaturely waywardness. That is the case now, in the time of the Spirit, just as it was then, during the Spirit’s superintendence of ancient Israel’s history. Indeed, with ancient Israel’s history in view, one cannot suppress the sense that the pace of God’s saving “recovery” of the world continues to be slower than God (and creatures) would like. The rape of Dinah and the anguish of those abandoned in Jerusalem; the violence visited on an eager lover by those charged with protecting a city’s inhabitants (Song 5:7); the difficult seesaw between sobriety and despondency in Ecclesiastes: all this continues, in various shapes and forms. Yes, the victory of God’s saving grace, proleptically manifest in the resurrection of Christ, outmatches futility. Yes, Christ’s fulfillment of the covenant of grace is fulfillment in the strongest sense: creatures can know that there is no possible supplement to God’s justification. Julian is right, in this sense: all shall be well. But belief in God’s victory over sin does not have as a corollary belief in a fully “ordered” act of divine providing. The outmatching of futility is not a nullification of futility. And it is precisely the witness of the Hebrew Bible that prompts one to accept futility, knowing that history is likely inclusive of moments of irreducible tragedy and trauma. It is precisely the witness of the Hebrew Bible, one might say, that checks the delighted anticipation of the eschaton that courses through the New Testament, asking us to balance anticipation with a due sense of wariness and irony. Still more—a hard truth now becomes harder—the logic of a Christian acclamation of God as creator and provider, worked up by way of

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the witness of the Hebrew Bible, requires that God not be exempted of responsibility for the state of the world. While creation being subjected to futility (ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη; the relevant verb now an aorist passive indicative) cannot be dissociated from sin, and while God may not be adjudged the author of waywardness, God is never not responsible for the waywardness that ravages creation. Our testing of God’s patience continues to have as its condition of possibility the mysterious fact of God’s non-impeditio peccati, with God’s permissive act of “letting be” and “letting happen” being coextensive with God’s empowerment of creaturely sin and God’s maintenance of the (often maldistributed) consequences that ensue. Neither Paul nor Calvin shrink from this point, the latter being helpfully blunt: “it has been his pleasure to make them subject to vanity” (Comm. Rom. 8:20). God’s providential rule, characterized by the loving exercise of patience, includes futility. Can one pinpoint moments of meaninglessness? Can one say, definitively, that event x, y, or z is a surd-like dimension of history, a tragedy that does not “fit” with God’s gracious and patient providing? I am reluctant to answer such questions with a confident yes. While late modernity throws up a number of seemingly obvious candidates—the near-unimaginable atrocity of the Shoah; an acceleration of the degradation of the nonhuman world, with astonishing rates of extinction and the likelihood of radical change to the Earth’s ecosystem; the toxic legacy of exploitative colonialism, mass enslavement, and racial hierarchies; the continuing horror that is the possession and/or development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry; and so much more—it is important to avoid epistemological overreach here, as elsewhere. Painful and disquieting as it is to say, while I cannot imagine how such events can be understood other than as unmitigated (and unmitigate-able) tragedies, and I revolt at the idea that they could be otherwise than surd-like events, I cannot conclusively know that God will not “bend” history in ways that fold these events into God’s governmental purposes.

What does this mean for a Christian sensibility with respect to God’s providing? Recall now that the witness of the Hebrew Bible includes protest against diverse forms of creaturely suffering, even as that is sometimes cut across with the claim that suffering is (in some way) deserved. Recall also that God’s non-impeditio peccati goes hand in hand with God’s non-impeditio accusationis, as God’s patience elicits and waits on forms of creaturely expression that parallel those found in the Psalter, in Job, and in Lamentations.

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That is a standing provocation in itself. At the least, it suggests that travail need not be borne with the patience that Calvin supposed befitting in the case of “poor women who are evilly and roughly treated by their husbands”—such treatment being viewed as a chastising cross “which God has seen fit to place” on victims.67 On the contrary, if “suffering is there: blind, tyrannical, and absurd” (Soelle) there is also another kind of empowering “letting be” and “letting happen”: an exercise of divine patience that elicits response to tragedy, and that allows—on occasion—for an excoriation of the God who lets this happen, for the anguished demand to know why God has so structured history that nonproductive suffering and pain checker the quotidian.68 A non-impeditio accusationis that continues into the present, then, stands in dialectical tension with the sincere belief that God’s providential patience wins out, time and again—in the history of ancient Israel, for sure, but also in the timing of the incarnation, given that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal. 4:4), and in a confidence regarding the continuing operations of Christ and the Spirit. It supports a sensibility that does not shrink from supporting protest as a way to make good on God’s exercise of patience. What should a theologian do in face of communities and individuals moved to disbelieve that “suffering is justified” on account of its (putatively) redemptive value? In face of communities and individuals who doubt that Christianity could be anything other than “an abusive theology”? In face of communities and individuals who wait for an account of God that supposes that “God’s grief is as ultimate as God’s love”?69 The theologian should entertain the possibility that the testimonies of such communities are contemporary analogues to the (authoritative) testimonies found in the Hebrew Bible, and thus deserve to be treated with a seriousness analogous to that

“Letter from Calvin to an unknown woman,” June 4, 1559; see The Register of the Company of Pastors of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, ed. and trans. Philip E. Hughes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), 344–5. 68 Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), 109. 69 Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, “For God So Loved the World?” in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989), 1, 26, and 27. I cite this famous (if now rather dated) essay as an exemplary instance of the kind of “accusation” that theologians must take on board. 67

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which characterizes one’s reception of biblical texts. Does it matter that such communities and individuals sometimes trade in broad-brush, intemperate, totalizing judgments? No. One cannot require that protest be rendered “respectable,” hedged with caveats and hesitations, before it gains expression. Just as it would be perverse to halt Job midstream and ask whether he is really being fair to his well-meaning interlocutors, theologians must take protest as it comes. Evasive nitpicking with respect to Christian thinkers (“that’s obviously not [exasperated sigh] what Luther meant”; “it was of course [palms upraised] … a different time”) should definitely be avoided. A doctrine of providence ought instead to support a sensibility confident enough to accept God’s non-impeditio peccati, and confident enough to reckon with the possibility that longstanding structures of oppression, which distribute suffering unevenly across the world, might be the seedbed of tragic, surd-like elements in God’s history—and that some of those elements stand firmly within the Christian tradition. What is needed is something comparable to the faith of those who presided over the formation of the Hebrew Bible, a faith that exercises patience in such a way that the most abject expressions of protest, against God and against other creatures, are maintained alongside a delighted apprehension of God’s sovereign ways and works.

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:22–23). While it is important to develop a sensibility attuned to the tension— sometimes a collision—between faith in God’s governmental patience and an acknowledgment of the irreducibility of tragedy, it is also important that the task of understanding faith not grind to a halt. A next step is to think again about divine patience as longsuffering. Granted that ancient Israel’s waywardness was often (but not always) deemed the cause of its suffering, the effects of suffering obviously extend beyond Israel. And just as God has sovereignly determined Godself as one who is open to the travails of ancient Israel, so God determines Godself to be the one who is open to the travails of the cosmos as such. Is God thereby beholden to or controlled by those travails? Is God’s identity on the brink of collapse, with dependence on the world replacing an affirmation of divine aseity? For a final time: no. Since the condition of possibility for God’s so opening herself is the incomparable and unconditioned fact of divine self-determination, an affirmation of longsuffering

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does not have the forfeiture of divine aseity as an entailment. An affirmation of longsuffering, rather, depends on God setting the terms by which God lives as the God that God is. At issue here is something different: understanding God’s patience with ancient Israel as the condition of possibility for God’s longsuffering in face of history at large. It is also important to understand that God’s longsuffering goes hand in hand with God waiting on the world—waiting on the world as it receives the steady impress of God’s blessing and steadfastness. If Barth’s claims in Church Dogmatics IV/1 are important here (as discussed in chapter 3), Jürgen Moltmann also writes in a way that proves helpful: “Waiting means expecting, expecting means inviting, inviting means attracting, alluring, and enticing. By doing this … one keeps an open space for the other, gives the other time, and creates possibilities of life for the other.”70 The first sentence is incautious: that sequence of gerunds risks depicting God as a slightly aloof bystander who offers “lures” that may (or may not) be acted upon. The scriptural witness speaks against such a stance: God knows how and when to exert interventional pressure, and God does so in a manner that discloses God’s almightiness. But the second sentence connects with my earlier analysis of Revelations of Divine Love. God’s exercise of patience is such that God waits on the world, accepting various kinds of futility as ingredient to God’s encompassment and animation of history and “enduring” the sight of that futility in such a way that it registers in God’s own life, even as God governs history in a fashion that enables creatures to respond to God’s patience in the right way. Divine longsuffering, in other words, is a relationship and disposition whereby God suffers the slow pace at which God’s history plays out—measuring out divine love, despite the “frustration” of God’s desire, for the sake of those whom God intends to save and waiting on a reward that will, somehow and somewhen, be offered to God by God’s creatures. “We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies … the Spirit helps us in our weakness … we do not know how to

Jürgen Moltmann, “God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 149.

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pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:23 and 26). Paul Tillich’s forthright declaration that the prayer here described is “humanly impossible” is entirely on target.71 Given the reality of waywardness, one cannot softpedal human beings’ incapacity to relate to God by dint of our own efforts. One can only accept that faithful “groaning,” within the covenant of grace, attests to God having reached across the absolutely qualitative divide, stirring us to “wait”—with God— for the consummation of God’s saving work.72 Thus Tillich, again: “It is God Himself who prayers [sic] through us: that is what the Spirit means. Spirit is another word for ‘God present,’ with shaking, inspiring, transforming power.”73 What must now be added is that the positive dimensions of “waiting” have no meaning apart from the divine providing that encompassed the life and times of ancient Israel, and that our “waiting,” in solidarity with Abram, Sarai, and Lot, requires us to occupy new times and places, receiving and enacting the identities made available to us by grace. In part, this is a matter of the faithful response to God’s patience that animated the formation of the Hebrew Bible being transposed into a Christological key. Christ’s absorption of waywardness into himself, which defines his suffering and death, ensures that God no longer needs to defer a reckoning with waywardness. This vicarious action ensures that God is given the opportunity to deny the mercy of “letting be” and “letting happen” to sin. It is a disclosure of divine longsuffering, narrowed to a singular, nearly unthinkable, null-point; it is the disclosure of God’s abyssal solidarity with creatures who have given themselves over to waywardness. And, thankfully, such solidarity opens the way to Christ’s resurrection from the dead. That resurrection announces a future defined by the counterintuitive possibility of lives that recall creation “in the beginning,” with God’s exercise of loving patience met with a wide array of creative initiatives. In view of the cross and the resurrection, then, one does not only believe, against the odds, in “the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation” (Mk 16:8). Just as God’s patience was rewarded through ancient

Paul Tillich, The New Being (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 137. Tillich, The New Being, 137. 73 Tillich, The New Being, 137. 71 72

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Israel, and just as God’s patience prevails as Christ is raised, there is now the additional expectation that Christ’s defeat of waywardness will ramify across the length and breadth of history, and that creatures will become the bearers of liberation. That is what belief in the “first fruits of the Spirit” means. The dynamic reality of God’s empowering action extends outwards, demanding to be associated with proleptic demonstrations of the “redemption of our bodies” that overpower—and, sometimes, make worthwhile—the “labor pains” over which we “groan.” Tillich, yet again: “Faith in providence is faith altogether. It is the courage to say yes to one’s own life and life in general, in spite of the driving forces of faith, in spite of the insecurities of daily existence, in spite of the catastrophes of existence and the breakdown of meaning.”74 While the language of courage lacks some of the resonances it had in the middle of the twentieth century, and must of course be stripped of individualistic connotations, the reasoning still holds good. “If God is for us”—if, that is, we are already in receipt of the justifying work of Christ, patience incarnate, and we are already the beneficiaries of the intercessory activity of Christ’s Spirit—then “who is against us” (Rom. 8:31)? But it is crucial to emphasize that faith in justification and faith in providence do not issue in quiescence. Some passages in one of Tillich’s best books, The Socialist Decision, bring into focus what is required. To wit: “That which is expected is that which will come to pass, and insofar as it will come, it is not dependent on human activity. But that which is expected is that which should come, that which is demanded, and insofar as it is demanded, it is realized only through human activity” (SD 104). Although a curious combination of political theory and romanticist philosophy holds sway over most of Tillich’s book, these words disclose the condition of the socialist decision. Grace alone—or, more precisely: the power of the future of the resurrected Christ that the Spirit applies now, amid the futility that surrounds us, in order to empower us—holds out the prospect of historical breakthrough. And this grace affords us a sense of what “sighs too deep for words” entails. To reward the patience of God in Christ is to be inducted into the turbulence of the Spirit, and to be called to hurry in the direction of the Kingdom

Tillich, The New Being, 59 and 53.

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of the future. It is not a matter of “passive waiting [warten]”; it is a matter of purposeful, embodied, outreaching “awaiting,” an “expectation” for the future redemption of bodies that “includes action” (SD 105). It is a matter of honoring the fulfillment of the covenant that is fulfilled but not temporally closed through the pursuit of justice and peace. “In God I am what I am; I cannot therefore wait to be what I am. Under grace, and aware of the message of Christ, I am exposed to the full and unavoidable earnestness of His demand, claim, and promise; I am subjected to a vast and vehement pressure. To be a Christian is to be under this pressure” (RII 229). Or, to draw directly from the New Testament: “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home” (2 Pet. 3:11–13).

“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24–25). Why can Christians hope, without fullness of sight, and why is it that Christians can “wait” in a fashion that—as God wills it—rewards God’s patience? Patient hope and patient waiting are possible because the Spirit of Christ holds history open, “letting be” and “letting happen” in a manner that enables us to reward God’s patience in new ways. As such, patience may not be narrowly framed as a matter of “bearing … the cross and tribulations” (Comm. Rom. 8:25); nor, even, as a matter of “enduring,” accepting that the quotidian can be only modestly transformed on this side of eternity. What we wait for— better: what we actively await—is that which has been revealed in Christ and that which cries out for our participation, in the context of God’s providing: the Kingdom of God as a time and space of blessings and steadfastness that reprises God’s covenantal relationship with ancient Israel; the Kingdom of God as a time and space that assures every creature of their union with Jesus Christ, patience incarnate, and that calls on each and every creature to live into the liberating turbulence of the Holy Spirit.

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Epilogue: Retrospect and Prospect Given the final section of the previous chapter, and given that there is much more to come, I will not offer here a detailed summary of this book’s claims. I will limit myself to three broad remarks. First, I am acutely aware that this is a book of two halves. Subsequent to some exegetical analyses and an orientation to constructive theological work in an Anselmian mode, a cluster of interlocking interpretative exercises comprised this book’s first three chapters. Chapters  1 and 2 drew attention to the promise and precarity of patience as a theological concept. While I praised the ambition and insights of Tertullian and Cyprian and lauded the efforts of Julian of Norwich and John Calvin, I also suggested that patience was often too readily tied to human conduct and too infrequently associated with God’s being and activity. Augustine’s De patientia adverted to this point, and Aquinas’ Summa theologiae was particularly illustrative of it, as were works by the early Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt, and Michael Sattler. To be sure (and granted, of course, that additional study might complicate this interpretative picture), these chapters did not offer anything approaching a “history of patience” over a millennium and a half. Nor did they suggest that a lack of interest in patience in this or that writer exposed a grievous shortcoming in their theological work. My concern was primarily to provide readers with something of a backstory to patience in patristic, medieval, and early Protestant writing, and thereby to show that patience was typically—and, yes, regrettably—associated more with human life than God’s being and activity.

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Things change with Karl Barth, whose work I considered at length in Chapter 3. Building on Calvin’s suggestive treatment of the term, and alert to the fact that a number of Reformed theologians had maintained a place for patience in the description of God’s ways and works, a relatively brief statement about patience as a divine “perfection” in Church Dogmatics II/1 showed something of the benefits that follow when this term is made integral to an account of God’s ways and works. Well, more than just “integral.” The suggestiveness of Barth’s treatment of Geduld is such that it becomes possible to imagine patience taking on a leading role in a constructive theological proposal that encompasses creation, providence, salvation, and the Trinity, and that shows a particular interest in the integrity, meaning, and consequentiality of creaturely being and action. But—and the second half of Chapter  3 sought to emphasize the importance of this “but”—it is crucial to embark on constructive work with a high degree of wariness. While the Dogmatics opens up a range of vistas, it is imperative that one wrestle with the burdens of patience, understanding how it has been embedded in discourses that bolster longstanding patterns of oppression and discrimination. The term is not innocent, and its entanglement with all-too-human patterns of waywardness must not be casually discounted. An exploratory and imaginative embrace of patience as a term of theological art, then, must be paired with an awareness of its everyday (mis)uses and (mis)definitions, which runs alongside a commitment to dislodge the same. How does dislodgment happen? It happens slowly. Alongside a hermeneutic of wariness, there must be a steady (and, yes, patient) demonstration of how this term can be conceived von Gott aus, such that it can be set within an expansive, exploratory, and imaginative account of the understanding that is ingredient to Christian faith. Generally, it means developing the idea that patience is, first and foremost, a quality of God’s being and action—a way of describing who God is and what God does, and how it is that God stirs and empowers creatures of various kinds to inhabit and contribute to the covenant of grace, so that they might make good on God’s patience. More particularly, it means engaging in “regular dogmatics” (albeit without an aspiration of completeness, a willingness to accept a number of loose ends, and an appreciation for the fact that “regularity” stands in a welcome relationship with “irregularity”). To that end, the second half of this book has offered statements

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about creation and providence, while also tackling sin, the vexed question of divine suffering, the formation of scripture, and—rather gesturally—the work of Christ and Christ’s Spirit. These statements, it seems fair to say, covered a good deal of ground. I began with claims about God’s creatio ex nihilo and the process of creatio cooperativa, before turning to the patience of blessings, waywardness as an abuse of God’s patience, the notions of God’s non-impeditio peccati and God’s non-impeditio accusationis, divine longsuffering, divine steadfastness, the formation of scripture, and, at the tail-end of the last chapter, a glimpse of the affective and cognitive impact of the saving work of Jesus Christ, patience incarnate, as he acts in the power of the Spirit and enables an orientation to history at large. But while the meaning of patience has been filled out and redefined in diverse ways, there has perhaps been less engagement with some of the authors considered in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 than readers expected. Although Barth, Calvin, and Julian have been a constant presence, many authors considered in this book’s interpretative chapters have been referenced passingly, and sometimes not at all. For those frustrated with this lack of engagement, I can only say that these authors have not been forgotten, and that their relative neglect will be remedied in the next volume of this project. There, my account of the incarnation will develop Tertullian’s and Cyprian’s (and Augustine’s) sense of Christ’s “enduring” finitude and a context defined by waywardness. An accompanying description of Christ’s passion and death, understood in part with reference to God’s impatience with creaturely waywardness, will lean on Calvin’s suggestive remarks, while also coordinating insights from Luther, John McCleod Campbell, and Barth. A sketch of Christian life, focused particularly on the imperative of liberative action, will draw inspiration from Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the late James Cone. And the language of impatience will be engaged in a relatively novel way: I hope to show that there is a vital place for this term in theological inquiry that reflects on what it is that the Spirit of Christ calls creatures in general, and Christians in particular, to do in a covenant that has been fulfilled in Christ but remains temporally “open.” An accompanying description of the process of sanctification will also be offered: I will turn again to Calvin, while also drawing on queer theory and queer theology (and, in a more ad hoc way, the work of Catherine Keller), to show what a refashioned

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sense of human patience might entail: embracing lives that are defined by being-in-becoming, as the Spirit draws us ever more fully into Christ’s body; accepting that “patient waiting is necessary that we may fulfill what we have begun to be” (De bon. pat. 13). So for those who waited, in vain, for the insights of some earlier authors to be nested in my constructive proposal, I must ask that you bear with me a bit longer. Their time will come. If this is a book of two halves—and this is my second point— it is also a book marked by Christological and pneumatological reticence. Indeed, despite its indebtedness to Julian, Calvin, and Barth (and its less conspicuous, but nevertheless quite substantive, dependence on Anselm and Schleiermacher), it is a book that could raise the suspicion that its author has not fully understood that “the second article” of the Apostles’ Creed “does not just follow from the first, nor does it just precede the third; but it is the fountain of light by which the other two are lit” (DO 65). While I will not dwell on the reasons for this reticence—previous chapters have argued that it is quite legitimate to approach the Christological “center” slowly (Chapter  4); that there are compelling reasons to build up an account of God’s providing via the witness of the Hebrew Bible to God’s relationship with ancient Israel (Chapter 5); and that Christ sets the history of God with ancient Israel, and ancient Israel with God, in new, broader light (Chapter  6)—the next volume of this project will be more forthcoming. It will attempt to show that key elements of the preceding account of patience can be applied to Christ’s ways and works, thus supporting a theological integration of the witness of the Hebrew Bible to God’s life with ancient Israel, on the one side, with the witness of the New Testament to God’s life with us, on the other. Blessing, longsuffering, steadfastness: these terms will become central to my account of who Christ is and what Christ does. They will also feature in a more explicitly articulated pneumatology. And it will become increasingly clear that this project aims not just to balance an account of God’s creative and providential work with an account of God’s reconciling and redemptive work, but also supposes that Christians’ receipt of salvation casts a brilliant light over the entire endeavor of faith in pursuit of understanding— granted, of course, that this light does not (and will not) wash out the distinctiveness and particularity of God’s relationship with ancient Israel. Moreover, as patience gains additional meanings

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and uses in connection with salvation, it will become still more clear that the “burdens” of patience, as they relate to longstanding patterns of wrongdoing, are not just contested by the insistence that God exercises patience. They can also be contested by a vision of Christian life that commits itself to building up the Kingdom that is forever at hand—a Kingdom, proclaimed and enacted by Christ, defined by what Elsa Tamez calls “militant patience” and fired by an impatience that waits for and hastens “the coming of the day of God” (2 Pet. 3:12). Finally, what of the idea that God as such is patience? Is it possible to expand the claim that patience is “the very nature of God” (De pat. 3.11), moving from the economy of grace to God’s immanent life? While I have glanced at this issue in previous chapters, a fuller consideration will bring this project to a close. Atop claims about patience as it bears on creation, providence, incarnation, atonement, Christian life, and sanctification—my modus operandi here, evidently, being decidedly Schleiermacherian—the conclusion of the next volume will suggest that God’s own, triune existence is a matter of patience. God “lets be” and “lets happen” in God’s own life; God is steadfast in God’s communication of blessings; God is longsuffering, given God’s eternal embrace of a burdened Word, spoken out of the womb of ancient Israel, who is obedient unto death; and God waits on Godself, as God waits on us, as Spirit, as we bear the slow pressure of a redemptive process that insists that all must be made well.

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Appendix: The Classical, Medieval, and Modern Backdrop to Patience The Latin word patientia is derived from pati (to allow, to undergo, to suffer), which contrasts with agere or facere (to deliver, to conduct oneself; to make, build, work). Its meaning is quite similar to the meaning of patience in British and North American English today. It was used to describe those who endure hardships, who persevere and overcome difficulties, who exercise moderation and temperance, and who relate aptly to those of a different social status.1 The Greek term μακροθῦμία carries a similar charge. It identifies a disposition marked by forbearance, endurance, steadfastness, and perseverance, proximate to πῆμα (the suffering that follows a calamity); πάθος (suffering, feeling) and πάσχω (to suffer or undergo misfortune); ὑπομονή (endurance, steadfastness) and ὑπομένω (to endure, to remain steadfast). While more particular nuances need not detain us, it is important to recognize—this being a point made repeatedly in the forgoing pages—that ancient writing suggests that patience is an enacted disposition and posture. It is not a quality of the self that automatically arises in a particular situation. Nor is it a reflexive or unconscious pattern of activity, akin to a yelp of pain or the steady beating of a heart. It is a discrete performance of subjectivity that arises as an individual receives and responds purposefully to events that befall her. I draw here from Robert A. Kaster, “The Taxonomy of Patience, or When Is Patientia Not a Virtue,” CPhil 97 (2002): 133–44.

1

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Prudentius’ Psychomachia (c. 408–9ce), a Latin poem that combines Christian exhortation with a cultivated literary sensibility, illustrates something of this point. Arguably the “first full-scale personification allegory in the Western literary tradition,” Psychomachia describes the conflicts that rage within each soul.2 In the third battle of seven, the virtue of patientia is pitted against the vice of ira (anger). Understanding the futility of combat, patientia elects not to take the field; she simply holds her ground and waits for ira to overexert herself (and, eventually, take its own life). And this strategy pays off: patientia’s terse victory speech opens with a memorable bit of understatement, “uicimus,” inquit (“‘we have conquered,’ she said” [line 155]). If this victory is less dramatic than faith defeating pagan religiosity, chastity defeating lust, and reason/ good work defeating greed, it is nonetheless decisive. Patience is an unshowy and unassuming affair, but no less efficacious for it. An important alliterative poem from the late fourteenth century, Patience, shows a comparable range of meaning filtering into Middle English, albeit with less triumphalism and, arguably, a rather grittier sense of existence. Through a retelling of Jonah, patience is given “two broad senses: that of accepting misfortune and submitting to physical or mental suffering, and that of waiting, holding back, and exercising moderation and self-control.”3 Patience, again, is something that one does. The poem exhorts individuals to accept what befalls them without “gruchyng” (complaining) and declares that “pacience is a point (virtue), thagh hit displese ofte.”4 An interest in patience as a disposition especially required of women becomes particularly evident around this time, a range of antique precedents notwithstanding.5 The brutal and disquieting story of “Patient Griselda,” recounted at the end of Boccaccio’s Aaron Pelttari, The Psychomachia of Prudentius: Text, Commentary, and Glossary (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 19. The line numbers refer to the Latin text in this edition. 3 Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th edn (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 20. 4 “Patience,” in The Works of the Gawain Poet, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London: Penguin, 2014), 210 and 207 (lines 53 and 1). 5 On which, see the important and rich study of Robin Waugh, The Genre of Medieval Patience Literature: Development, Duplication, and Gender (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 2

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Decameron (X.10), was a source for the “Clerk’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales, wherein Chaucer extols his “Grisilde” as a “flour of wyfly pacience” (Clerkes Tale, line 919). Griselda’s story was also significant for The Winter’s Tale (1623), and perhaps also factored into the famous speech of Viola in Twelfth Night, which makes reference to one who “sat like patience on a monument/Smiling in grief” (2.4.114–15).6 Roughly contemporaneous to Shakespeare’s early plays, too, a new philosophical front was opened by Sir John Stradling’s translation of Justus Lipsius’ On Constancy in Times of Public Calamity (1584; trans. 1594)—a text that did much to shape the character of early modern Neostoicism. Lipsius contends that “constancy” is dependent on the prior quality of “Patience, and lowliness of mind, which is a voluntary sufferance without the grudging of all things whatsoever can happen to or in a man,” and offers passing remarks about God’s forbearance of the wicked.7 A more directly theological treatment is found in John Milton’s Treatise on Christian Doctrine (written some time before Milton’s death in 1674): patience is said to “consist … in the endurance of misfortunes and injuries,” being a virtue “exercised in the resistance to … or the endurance of evil.”8 (Milton’s poetry, incidentally, is more adventurous. In Paradise Lost, wayward angels are faulted for their immoderation and defiance of God’s rule—the “stubborn patience as with triple steel” of the rebel angels [II.569] being a precise parallel to Satan’s “Treble confusion, wrath, and vengeance” [I.220].9) And in Milton’s nineteenth sonnet (“When I consider how my light is spent …”), the poet checks his own, self-aggrandizing stream of thought with a reminder that God’s ways and works are God’s business, and adds: “patience to prevent / that murmur, soon replies, God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best / Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State / Is

A phrase found in many Victorian novels; see Melissa Tuckman, “Hopkins’s Impatience,” ModPhil 115, no. 3 (2018): 379. 7 Justus Lipsius, On Constancy (De Constantia), ed. John Sellars and trans. John Stradling (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006), 37 (I.4). 8 John Milton, Treatise on Christian Doctrine, trans. Charles R. Sumner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1825), 638 and 636. The dating and authorship of this text are contested. 9 See Gerald J. Schiffhorst, “Satan’s False Heroism in Paradise Lost as a Perversion of Patience,” CL 33, no. 2 (1984): 13–20. 6

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Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed / And post o’re land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.”10) The career of patience after the seventeenth century in English literature and letters need not be tackled here. My concern is simply to gesture toward a fairly stable backdrop to the connotations of the word in the present, and to show that the lion’s share of interest has been on patience as a human affair. And this very interest is exemplified, of course, in the familiar use of “patient” to identify someone who receives medical treatment. (Not a modern innovation: Chaucer refers to a “Douctour of Phisik” who “kept his pacient a ful greet deel” in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales [line 415].) Even this circumscribed usage indicates an interest in agency.11 Although those who receive care might be physically or psychologically disadvantaged, they are not viewed as passive material. “Good” patients receive and endure the labors of nurses, doctors, etc. without complaint. “Bad” patients do not. They gripe about their condition, object to therapy, and try to stymie the efforts of caregivers.12

See Russell M. Hillier, “The Patience to Prevent that Murmur: The Theodicy of John Milton’s Nineteenth Sonnet,” Ren 59, no. 4 (2007): 247–73; and Margaret Thickstun, “Resisting Patience in Milton’s Sonnet 19,” MQ 44, no. 3 (2010): 168–80. 11 Some have developed this point. Christopher P. Vogt argues that the ars moriendi (art of dying) tradition of the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries might benefit the terminally ill; see Patience, Compassion, Hope, and the Christian Art of Dying Well (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2004). Also instructive is Allen Verhey, The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), esp. 278–83. 12 For more on being a patient, see the trenchant essay by Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, “Practicing Patience: How Christians Should Be Sick,” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 348–66. 10

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22:8 22:17 25:27 26:6-11 ­28:16 28:17 28:21 34 35:11 45:4-8 49:1 49:5-7 49:18 49:25 50:20 Exodus 1:8–2:10 3:10 3:14 6:7 15:1-21 15:16 31:18 32:9-11 32:14 32:25-29 32:35–33:6 33:17-23 34:6-7

392 385 403 476 388 403 403 403–12 393 386 385 409 385 385 415 478–85 481 20 20 370 157 21 21, 501 21 21 21 22 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 33, 44, 70, 77, 302, 436, 489, 494, 527

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Leviticus 24:2

190

Numbers 14:18

19, 20, 436

Deuteronomy 1:31 6:4-5 6:6-7 7:7 7:13-14 8:19 25:5b-10b 32:1-3 32:20

462 383, 506 506 369 369 506 370 394 401

Judges 5:11

506

2 Samuel 2:1-10

368

­1 Kings 8:23

489

1 Chronicles 16:34 29:12

489 370

Ezra 3:2

487

Nehemiah 9:17

19

2 Maccabees 6:14-16 7:28

21 315

Job 38 315, 334

587

Psalms 1:2 487 8:2-4 315 13 23–4 25:5 40 25:21 40 33:6 315 33:20 40 37:17 31 42:10 34 44 422–3, 460–1 78:4 473, 487 78:38 143 86:15 19 86 25 88 25, 460 89 24, 475 90:4 34 103:8 19, 459 103 469 104  333, 469–71 105 469 145:8 19 Proverbs 1:7 2:13-15 14:29 15:18 16:28 ­16:32 19:11 25:15

429, 480 401 22 22 401 22 22 22

Ecclesiastes 1:8 1:15 7:8-9

105 435 22

Song of Songs 5:7

528

588

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Wisdom 11:23 20 Sirach 1:23 22 5:4-7 20 Isaiah 33:6 466 40:28 40:31 40–1 41:14 425 42:13-14 76 43:18 508 43:19 240 44:24 315 45:7-8 315, 435 45:18 315 49:9 190 54:7-8 448 59:12-14 402 65:17 395 Jeremiah 5:21 54 8:21–9:1 448 10:10 496 31:20 448 Lamentations 1:1 431 1:8 424 1:10 424 1:12-13 431, 460 1:18 424 2:8 424 3:1-3 425 3:17 441 ­3:22-24 425, 431 3:25-39 425 3:26 40 5:18 435 5:20 430

5:22 441 Daniel 12:12 40 Hosea 8:2 489 8:3 421, 489 8:5 489 11:1-9 439–42, 443, 445, 447, 448, 457, 482 Joel 2:13 20, 22, 70, 120 Amos 3:6 434 Jonah 4:2

20, 70

Micah 7:7 40 Nahum 1:3 20 Habbakuk 1:14 150 2:1-5 21 2:3 40 Zephaniah 3:8 40 Malachi 4:6 368 Matthew 1:1 368 5:45 70, 120, 190, 210, 358, 467 10:22 42

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18:23-34 22:1-14 24:13

37 30 42

Mark 1:2-3 8:23 8:31 9:19 ­9:31 10:33 14:21 14:24 14:42 16:8

368 264 43 43 264 264 264 264 265 533

Luke 1:32-33 1:46-55 6:20-26 8:15 18:1-8 21:19

368 368 30 42, 249 37–8 42

John 1:1-18 1:50 3:16 3:34 4:22

304, 500 368 219 55 367

Acts 2:24 26:3

267 25

Romans 2:4 2:6-8 3:4 4:17 5:3-5 5:20 6:23 7:23 8

33 33, 72, 74 6 304 42–3, 203 217, 413 413, 527 490 290, 372

589

8:14-25  12, 43, 84, 125, 202, 359, 465–6, 514, 523–35 8:26 127 9:22 33, 436 12:19 31 13:4-7 182 14:1-3 171 15:5 42 1 Corinthians 2:3 3:2 5:21 ­8:6 13:4 13:7 14:33

27 171 266 364 27 27, 42 183

2 Corinthians 5:17 6:4-10 10:5 11:1 11:19-20

74 26 61 43 43

Galatians 4:4-5 5:5 5:22

70, 145, 367, 530 43 26

Ephesians 1:9-10 2:14 4:1-5 6:10

364 145 181 526

Philippians 2:5-11

70, 75

Colossians 1:11 1:16-17

27 364, 372

590

1:18 1:24 2:3 2:6 2:8 2:9 2:20 3:3 3:12 3:13

SCRIPTURAL REFERENCES

129 27 27 27 27 55 27 56 26 28

1 Thessalonians 5:13-14

28, 171, 181

2 Thessalonians 3:5

41

1 Timothy 1:16-17 2:5 6:11

36 223, 228 42

2 Timothy ­2:11-13 2:24-25 3:10 4:2

41–3 43 26, 42 26

Titus 2:2 2:11-14

42 186

Philemon 3:20

43

Hebrews 1:1-3a 5:7-9 5:12-13 6:11-12 6:15 6:20 9:28

304 43, 163 171 28 28 28 43

11:1 11:13 12:2-3

28 304 41–2

James 1:2-12 28–9 1:15 413 1:17-18  31, 83, 183 1:22-23 31 1:27 31 4:13-17 30 5 29–32 5:7 117 5:11 117 1 Peter 2:2 2:20 2:21 3:20 4:1 4:7 5:1

171 42 43 33 43 33 43

2 Peter 3:1-3 34 3:3-18 33–5, 45 3:9 120 3:11-13  116, 186, 355, 541 ­3:15 77 Jude 1:17-18

34

Revelation 1:9 2:2 2:19 3:10-11 21:1 21:4

41 41 41 41 358 358

INDEX

Abraham/Abram 377–86, 476–8 Adorno, Theodore 430 Ancrene Wisse 108, 115, 123 animism, Christian 351–3 Anselm of Canterbury 128–9, 442–3 Anselmianism “faith seeking understanding” 45–60, 109, 286–7, 293–4, 411, 500–1 Anselmianism 1 49–50, 52–3 Anselmianism 2 51–2 Anselmianism 3 52–60 Anthropocene, the 347–9 anthropocentrism 237–8, 328, 348, 349 Aristotle 283–4 apocalypse, apocalypticism 34–6, 72, 75–6, 188, 349, 496 Aquinas, Thomas 66–7, 93–106, 244–6, 323–4, 339–41, 438–9, 442, 515, 519–20 atonement 71, 128–9, 137, 159–64, 185, 191, 227, 257, 541 Augustine of Hippo 65–7, 81–93, 94–5, 101–3, 106, 107, 112, 114, 125, 130–4, 137–8, 147, 167, 235, 312–13, 316–18, 323, 326, 395–6, 413, 450 Aulén, Gustav 162

Baden, Joel 504 Barth, Karl 14–15, 53–6, 58–9, 76, 90, 125, 196–239, 251, 263, 282, 294–5, 300, 312, 341–2, 366–7, 388, 392, 394, 415, 442–6, 452–3, 458, 468–9, 471, 474, 511–12, 514, 517, 518, 521, 538–40 Bartky, Sandra Lee 287 de Beauvoir, Simone 247, 279, 280 Benjamin, Walter 430 “big bang” theory 334–5 Blumhardt, Christoph Friedrich 199–201, 202, 203, 224 ­Blumhardt, Johann Christoph 199, 224 Boccaccio, Giovanni 276, 544 Boff, Leonardo 390 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 317, 321 Bowlin, John 104 Brueggemann, Walter 24, 307, 313, 448, 460 Brunner, Emil 337, 410 Bultmann, Rudolf 253 Butler, Judith 262–3 Calvin, John 35, 55, 90, 135–9, 140–64, 165, 190–1, 214, 227, 235, 277, 299, 325, 343, 387, 412, 414–16, 421, 441, 464, 523–4, 526, 530, 537–9

592

INDEX

Campbell, John McCleod 257, 539 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) 276 cause, causality, causation 229–34, 258, 322–6, 339–41, 515–20 Chalcedon, Definition of 228 de Chardin, Teilhard 332–3 Chaucer, Geoffrey 545, 546 Childs, Brevard 343, 344 Chin, C. Michael 88–9 church; see also Christian community 51, 79–81, 141, 145, 167, 170–3, 180–1, 183, 225–6, 235–6, 358, 512 churchstateness 183, 187, 193, 201 civil rights movement; see also Martin Luther King, Jr. 273–6 civil war, US 270–2 “classical theism” 244, 245, 445, 447–8 Cloud of Unknowing, The 108, 117 Coakley, Sarah 265–6, 290–2, 295 compatibilism; see also noncompetitive relationship of God and world 228–9, 300–1, 325, 356–7, 381, 419, 421 Cone, James 236, 275, 539 contingency 227, 231–4, 516 counterworld 32, 44–5, 183, 333–9, 358, 359, 380, 381, 393, 395, 398 covenant 19–24, 143–4, 222–6, 234–5, 331, 381–2, 385–6, 409, 423–4, 432–3, 436, 441–2, 472–3, 475, 486–90

creation creatio cooperativa 316–26, 381, 393–4, 433, 456, 480–1, 500, 505, 511 creatio ex nihilo 249–51, 304–16, 317, 334, 379, 450, 472 distortion of; see also sin 400–2, 409, 411, 413, 421, 434 futility, subjected to 527–9, 532, 534 goodness of 235, 312, 318–19, 324, 355, 391–2, 471 heterogeneity within 300, 468–9 materia in habilis/materia prima 318–19 Naturzusammenhang (nature system) 229, 325, 357 ­rationes seminales 323–4 tehom, tehomophilia, tehomophobia 303, 307, 310, 333 tohu wabohu 250, 307, 310, 333 zimsum 251, 418–20, 474 Cyprian 72–6, 85–6, 92–4, 132–4, 137–8, 167, 204, 218, 219, 226–7, 464, 492–3, 537, 539 Darwin, Charles 357, 371, 421 David (biblical figure) 370, 402, 498–9, 503 desire, creaturely 110, 113, 115–19, 127–8, 134 desire, divine 115–17, 127–8, 130–1 Dinah (biblical figure) 403–12 dipolar theism 242–4 dogmatics; see theology

INDEX

domination, structures of 156–7, 244, 247–9, 278, 280, 284–7, 319–20, 389–92, 407, 446, 481 Dorner, Isaak 453 duplex cognitio domini 136, 147–8, 153, 191 Eckhart, Meister 106, 179 Edwards, Jonathan 237, 365 Eichrodt, Walther 21, 362 Ellacuría, Ignacio 488 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 260 Emery, Gilles 449 Enlightenment(s), European and North American 198, 259 environmental crisis 346–53, 525 Enuma Elish 302 èrèk appayîm (slowness to anger, longsuffering) 19–25, 32 eschaton, eschatology 28–34, 72, 74–7, 84, 87–9, 94–5, 102, 105–6, 107, 118, 122, 132–3, 185–6, 220, 223–5, 394–6, 492–3 evil 375, 411–12, 417, 420, 422 evenchristen (fellow Christians); see also Julian of Norwich 111, 118, 126 evolution, process of 326, 334–6, 526 Exum, J. Cheryl 480 faith 45, 46, 49, 51, 57, 82, 91, 151–6, 205, 220, 259, 335, 379, 465–6, 495–7, 501, 534 “faith seeking understanding”; see Anselmianism Farrer, Austin 234, 417, 466–7 Faust, Avraham 425 feminist philosophy, feminist theory 247, 268–9, 277–80, 283–7

593

Fergusson, David 360, 475, 517 Feuerbach, Ludwig 201, 245 Frei, Hans 49–50, 370, 490–2 Fretheim, Paul 447–8 ­Gavrilyuk, Paul 447, 450 Gawain Poet, the 108 Gelassenheit (yieldedness) 137, 175, 178–9, 180, 187, 189, 202 Gnostics, Gnosticism 68, 316 God actus purus/as “pure act” 438, 451 affectiones 437–40, 445, 456–7 anger; see wrath aseity 442–6, 450–1, 531–2 attributes 19, 69, 74, 80, 83, 165–6, 207–9 chastisement 136, 154–7, 164–5 commands of 177–8, 310–11, 321, 380–1, 501 compassion 127, 245–6, 445, 458–9, 486 courtesy 111–12 election 220, 221, 238, 365–6 forbearance; see patience, divine grief 435, 450–1, 458 haste 127, 131 heart 444–5, 458, 461 immanent life 205, 437, 451–2, 520–3, 540 impassibility and passibility 435–62 immutability and mutability 452–3 ipsum esse subsistens 442–3, 451 judgment 20, 142–6, 160–4, 214–17, 219 justice 142–5, 149, 154, 161–2

594

INDEX

kingdom; see Jesus Christ knowledge of 20, 55, 111, 147–8, 191, 204–7 longsuffering; see patience, divine love (also hesed) 20–1, 23–4, 44, 120, 261, 205–7, 311, 382, 442, 475–6 mercy 33–4, 76–7, 107, 120–1, 125–31, 143–5, 210–11, 215–17 mighty acts 362–3, 498, 501, 504–7 “no real relation” to world 438–9, 444 omnipotence 229, 300, 450, 474–5, 518 omniscience 233, 450 perfections of 206–10, 221, 253, 312, 437, 521 permission; see patience, divine patience; see patience, divine precedence 386–92, 414 punishment 20–1, 38, 44, 136, 154–6, 160–4, 165–6, 436, 442 revelation 18, 53–8, 200–3, 207–9, 444, 450, 449, 450, 465, 490, 494, 499 self-binding 443–4 self-determination 435, 442–6, 461 self-opening 449–50, 457–8 ­simplicity 448–9 slowness to anger; see patience, divine Son/Word; see Jesus Christ sovereignty 212, 230, 309–10, 340, 416–17 Spirit 26–7, 43, 296, 426–7, 523–4, 531–5, 540–1 steadfastness; see patience, divine

suffering; see also patience, divine 261, 435–62, 522 summons; see also patience, divine 314–15, 320–2 as Trinity 70–1, 74, 86, 182–3, 205, 244–6, 255, 282, 341–6, 520–3 Word of 170–3 wrath; see also anger 19, 23, 33, 143–4, 154, 158–9, 160–4, 165, 219, 441, 458, 493, 497 Gorringe, Timothy 476, 515 Gregory the Great 98, 104, 133 Gregory of Nazianzus 237 Griselda, story of 276–7, 544–5 Gunton, Colin 208, 258, 422 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 236, 346–7 Hadot, Pierre 39–40 Hall, Amy Laura 109 Hagar (biblical figure) 383–4, 402 Ham (biblical figure) 403 Hamor (biblical figure) 404–12 Harnack, Adolf von 6, 199, 447, 448 Hart, David Bentley 451–2 Hegel, G. W. F. 357, 430, 452–3, 461 Herman, Judith 428 Hezekiah (king of ancient Israel) 508 Hollaz, David 415–16 human being as agent 199, 223–5 creativity of 470–1, 499, 505 “dominion” over creation 322, 349–51 emergence of 326–34 fruitfulness and multiplication 331, 393–4 imago dei, imago mundi 326–34, 349–51

INDEX

relationality 246–9, 253 idealism, German; see also Hegel, G. W. F. 53, 364, 452, 520 impatience, creaturely 71, 73, 117, 175–9, 273–6, 296, 462, 539 impatience, divine 76, 159–64, 191, 482, 492–4, 523, 539 Invocavit Sermons (of Martin Luther) 168–73, 174, 177, 188–9 Irenaeus of Lyons 162, 307, 414 Isaac (biblical figure) 385, 403, 478 ­Ishmael (biblical figure) 384, 385, 402 Israel, ancient 19–25, 143–8, 191, 295, 335–512, 523–4, 528 Jacob (biblical figure) 385, 393, 402, 403, 405–12, 478 Jenkins, Willis 324–5, 328 Jerusalem 423–5, 431–3, 434–5, 528 Jesus Christ; see also Christology blood 122–4, 128, 131, 341 messiah of Israel 368–9, 528 passion 70–1, 110–12, 115–18, 121–31, 151–2, 154, 160–4, 191, 217–20, 260–6, 341, 455, 459, 533, 539 patience of; see also patience 70–1, 75–6, 94, 132, 217–20, 227, 344–6, 539 union with (unio cum Christo) 26–7, 141, 151–5, 205, 220, 226, 534–5 Job (biblical figure) 67–8, 87, 334, 416, 531 Joerstad, Mari 320 Johnson, Elizabeth 197, 240, 244–6 Jonah (biblical figure) 544

595

Joseph (biblical figure) 386, 402 Josiah (king of ancient Israel) 502, 508 Julian of Norwich 66–7, 105, 106–35, 227, 435–6, 454–5, 532 Jüngel, Eberhard 195, 498, 452, 498 justification 56, 379–80, 524 Kant, Immanuel 254, 260, 375, 412, 515 Karlstadt, Andreas 135–40, 167–9, 171, 174–9, 180, 189, 537 Käsemann, Ernst 36 Kaufman, Gordon 61 Keller, Catherine 246–52, 318–20, 539 King, Jr., Martin Luther 178, 273–6, 539 Kreider, Alan 79–81, 86–7 Lactantius 81 Leah (biblical figure) 403, 408 Levinas, Immanuel 495–6 Lewis, John 195, 275 n.84 liberation 62, 496–7, 498, 534–5, 539 Lindbeck, George 49–50 Lot (biblical figure) 336, 378–86, 456, 460, 533 Luther, Martin 135–40, 168–75, 188–9, 310, 379–81, 394, 408, 539 Macquarrie, John 253–8, 301, 303 Manichaeanism 312 Manne, Kate 276–80 Marcus Aurelius 39–40 Maritain, Jacques 420–1 Marx, Karl 201, 357 McFarland, Ian 213–14, 398

596

INDEX

­Melanchthon, Philip 169, 176 Milton, John 545–6 misogyny 69, 278–80 Molnar, Paul 451–2 Moltmann, Jürgen 251, 258, 312, 418–19 Moses (biblical figure) 21–2, 480–4, 485, 498 Muers, Rachel 216–17 Muller, Richard 166 neoplatonism 67 Nietzsche, Friedrich 72, 75, 332, 362–3, 493 Noah (biblical figure) 376, 394, 480 noncompetitive and noncontrastive account of God and world; see compatibilism nonhuman/other-than-human creatures 236–9, 304–26, 348–53, 382, 396, 469–70 non-impeditio accusationis 12, 397, 423–35, 460–1, 529–30 non-impeditio peccati 12, 397, 413–23, 426, 435, 460–1, 465, 467, 472–3, 526, 529–31 Origen 81, 454, 459–61 passive righteousness 379–80 patience, creaturely as abiding 112–13, 115 as attention 111–12, 115, 250 “being-in-becoming” 540 and Christian identity 167, 168–74 and church reform 137, 167–73 and courage 248–9

as critique 89–90 endurance; see also ὑπομονή, ὑπομένω 29, 38–43, 44–5, 80, 89–93, 94, 152, 525–6, 543–5 as forbearance 27–8, 44, 271 and gender 279–80 and good works 91–3, 133 and hastening 35–6, 116, 186, 220 and interpretation 113–15 letting be, letting happen 350–1, 509 μακροθυμία, μακροθυμέω, μακροθύμως 25–32, 44 militant 32, 541 and passion 184, 260–2 and peace 181–2 perseverance 42, 44, 93, 393, 543 persistence 87 and protest 413–23, 428, 529–31 ­and prayer 291–2 and scripture 202 self-denial 148–51, 156, 185 steadfastness 83, 181, 186, 188, 203, 543 suffering 43, 114–31, 151–7, 184–5, 203, 259–64 receptivity and susceptibility to God 74, 84, 89, 93, 103 as transformative action 137, 186–8, 190, 192–3 waiting and awaiting 29, 40, 43, 44, 45, 69, 70, 83–4, 89–90, 93, 94, 110–19, 133, 201–3, 259–64, 271, 385, 544 patience, divine abuse of; see also sin 399, 509, 539

INDEX

as an attribute of God 69, 73–4, 82–3, 101, 164–6 and bending of history 467, 472–90 blessings; see also God 324–5, 374–86, 396–7, 399–400, 471–2 compassion 486–8 and creation 299–345 and creaturely agency and activity 20, 34–5, 211–13, 220, 223–6, 231–3, 301, 303–4, 316–25, 330–1, 377–86, 392–4, 433, 468–9, 504–12, 538 èrèk appayîm (slowness to anger, longsuffering) 19–25, 38, 44–5, 436 forbearance 142–8, 157–9, 164–6, 190 and grief 397, 435, 450–1 and judgment 71–2, 75–6, 141–64, 164–5, 214–17, 218–19 letting be, letting happen 211–16, 238–9, 246, 250–1, 252–8, 309–14, 350, 413–23, 427–33, 457–8, 462, 464, 468–9, 486, 521–2, 527–30, 541 longsuffering; see also suffering 19–23, 32–6, 65–6, 74, 120, 125–31, 141–6, 164–6, 215–17, 435–62, 473, 494, 521–3, 531–5 μακροθυμία, μακροθυμέω, μακροθύμως 32–6, 45 permission 210–14, 256, 413–23, 434 persistence 377–86 as persuasive “lure” 243–4, 251 preservation 215–17, 243, 455–6, 467–71

597

and providence; see also history 67–76, 87–93, 148–9, 157–9, 196, 210–20, 355–535 rewarded by creatures 239, 321–6, 330, 464, 496, 497–512, 532, 535 and scripture; see also scripture 497–512 slowness 127–31, 436, 453–62 steadfastness 466–97, 531, 535 and the Trinity 182, 188, 211, 520–3 waiting 34–5, 44–5, 74, 130, 219–20, 225–6, 261–7, 532, 541 patriarchy, patriarchalism 277–80, 319–20, 406–8 Pelagianism and neo-Pelagianism 81–2 pharaoh(s) of Egypt 477–82, 483–5 Plato 39, 316 ­pneumatology; see Holy Spirit Polanus, Amandus 165, 210 prayer 532–5 providence 94, 120, 124, 232–4, 271 and ancient Israel; see Israel, ancient cumulative story 486–90 and divine blessings; see patience, divine and divine longsuffering; see patience, divine epistemological overreach (danger of) 361–2, 416, 466, 513, 520, 525, 529 and the Hebrew Bible 358–72, 444 slow pace 453–7, 532 “surd-like” moments of history 232, 416–17, 526–7, 529, 530–1

598

INDEX

Rabbinic Judaism 146, 503 von Rad, Gerhard 302, 329, 336, 344, 362, 401 racism 272–6 Rambo, Shelly 426–7 salvation 107, 117–31, 242–3, 336–7, 496–7, 523, 528, 535, 540–1 Sanchez, Michelle Chaplin 185 sanctification 3, 56, 137, 148–57, 164, 165, 293–4, 462, 498, 523–35 Sarah/Sarai (biblical figure) 378–86, 476–8, 482–5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 253–4 Sattler, Michael 135–40, 180–8, 537 Schaff, Philip 270–2, 273, 274, 275 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 51–2, 229–30, 260, 294, 342, 357, 365–8, 399, 475, 515–16, 521 “Schleitheim Confession” 180–8 scripture authority of 13–14, 427–8, 445, 501, 510 canonical interpretation 343 Deuteronomic paradigm 423, 429, 431, 508 documentary hypothesis 301–2, 502–4 “domain of the Word” 14–18, 295 formation of 427–33, 497–512 Lamentations, book of 423–33 separation from world 180–8 sexism 278–9 sexual violence 403–12, 423–4, 432 Shechem (biblical figure) 403, 404–12

Shiphrah and Puah (biblical figures) 479–80 Simeon and Levi (biblical figures) 405, 408, 409 sin; see also waywardness 19–22, 33–6, 70, 73–4, 84–5, 87–95 117–19, 126–31, 132, 144–5, 148–55, 159–64, 214–19, 375–7, 396–463, 472–4, 527–9, 533 ­slavery, slaveholding 270–3, 529 socialism 199, 524, 534–5 Soelle, Dorothee 149, 336, 530 Sonderegger, Katherine 315, 323 Soskice, Janet Martin 119, 334 Spufford, Margaret 417–18 Stoicism and Neostocism 39–40, 68, 78–9, 132, 545 supersessionism 145, 368 Tamez, Elsa 32, 541 Tanner, Kathryn 371–2, 390 Tauler, Johannes 106, 179 Taylor, Charles 177, 189, 192 Tertullian 65–76, 77–9, 85–6, 132–4, 167, 204, 214, 218–19, 226–7, 341, 358, 464, 467–8, 492–3, 537, 539 Tessman, Lisa 283–7 theology, Christian; see also dogmatics exploration and imagination 58–61 von Gott aus 76, 199–201, 204 and language 1–7, 287–94 and studiousness 60 theopaschism 435–62 Tillich, Paul 16, 60, 230, 259–60, 347–8, 351, 375, 445, 533–5 trauma 426–30

INDEX

Vanstone, W. H. 259–67, 268–9 virtue(s) acquisition of 103–4 “burdened” 197–8 cardinal 98–100, 103–6 theological 99 Wallace, Mark I. 351–2 waywardness; see sin Webster, John 15–18, 60, 62, 212, 342, 427–8, 501–2 Weinandy, Thomas 450–1

599

Wellhausen, Julius 502–4 Westermann, Claus 308, 329, 337 Whitehead, Alfred North 241–52, 454 works righteousness 189, 201, 362, 513 Wright, G. Ernest 362–3, 378 X, Malcolm 276 Zwingli, Ulrich 176, 357, 475

600

601

602

603

604