August 28, 2025

Artificial Intelligence, Neural Transformation, and Your Own Unique Voice: an open letter to my students

Dear Students,

Please read this letter carefully. I am writing from my heart.

Writing makes you smarter. Researching, gathering facts, organizing those facts, forming an opinion about them, turning that opinion into a thesis, and then creating a reasoned argument in support of that thesis is a difficult yet rewarding task. It is also an essential skill for any professional. Professionals make recommendations and decisions. When they do so, they must explain why they made that recommendation or decision. That involves making an argument. Making an argument involves writing, in one form or another.

Problematically, we live in an age in which many students are depriving themselves of this intellectually formative process. They let AI do the writing and thinking for them, depriving their brain of the opportunity to be transformed by hard work. They are cheating themselves of the opportunity to become smarter, more capable, and more confident. Many students are outsourcing their personal growth to AI, when they need to be growing beyond AI.

AI writes competently but lacks personality. It can generate an abstract opinion but can’t provide human insight into a particular problem. We all have different lives, hence different experiences, so we all approach problems in different ways. On a team, different persons come up with different solutions and debate the helpfulness of those different solutions. Then, the team chooses the one that they think will work best.

Or, within a community, we can simply learn from each other about what it is like to be us—what is it like to be from the city, from the country, to be male, to be female, to be nonbinary, to be an immigrant, to be native born? We can share these perspectives with one another and grow as individuals, which is to grow as a society.

AI can’t do any of this. It writes from one place: the internet. It generalizes, taking all the specificity of the different locations on the internet and turning that specificity into one generic piece of writing. It doesn’t grow as a person through this experience, it can’t empathize with anyone’s experience, it cannot become more compassionate or wise. It just takes words and rearranges them into new sentences, without understanding what it has done. It cannot feel what its own writing means.

But you can. The process of reading, writing, debating, and pondering (the process of a liberal arts education), will change you. It will make you a more capable professional, a more critical citizen, and (possibly) a deeper person.

But not if you have AI do all your thinking for you. If you do that, then you will remain unchanged and all the time and money you have spent will be wasted.

Development of your own unique writing voice is not a waste; it is professionally necessary. Graduate schools do not want to read application essays that sound like AI; they want to hear about you. Managers don’t want reports from you that they could have completed themselves with an AI prompt; they want your expertise. Journals simply can’t have every essay sound the same, like they were all written by AI; journals need you.

For the above reasons, I do not want AI to become your voice. I want you to develop your own voice, because the world needs your voice. It needs you and everything that you have to offer the world as a unique person.

You cannot be replaced by AI. But if you overuse AI, so that you are indistinguishable from AI, then you will be replaceable by AI. I don’t want that to happen.

To be clear, you will use AI throughout your life. I realize this. I use AI when I need a quick answer to a question. It saves me the time of scouring the internet for the information that I need. I use it to find good movies to watch in a particular genre on a certain platform. AI will save us a lot of tedious work, performing simple tasks that take a lot of time. It will also survey vast amounts of data to discover patterns that no human could. Those are good things and, in the field of medical science, will save lives, thank God.

At the same time, AI is currently limited in its abilities, and may be permanently so. It is unoriginal, regurgitating (in a reworked fashion) what people have already thought. It does pretty well writing short essays, but the longer the assignment, the more discombobulated it gets, repeating itself and/or leaving huge gaps in its argument. AI does not know that there are important facts it does not know. In other words, it has a hard time accounting for “unknown unknowns,” which can make for bad decisions. It cannot write a compelling novel in a distinct voice (read Demon Copperhead). Quite possibly, it will never be able to, because it’s not human.

Nevertheless, AI is here to stay. But I want you to live with AI, not under AI—intellectually or emotionally. For this reason, I do not allow any AI use for writing in any of my classes. The work you turn in must be the product of your brain, so that it will have changed your brain, so that you have become smarter.

For the above reasons, one aspect of your paper grade will be the uniqueness, originality, and humanity of your writing. This aspect of your grade will be subjective (qualitative, opinion, subject to interpretation) not objective (quantitative, fact, demonstrable to all). But some subjectivity in grading is unavoidable, since we are all subjects (persons with a deep internal life) writing to other subjects.

I am not naive; I know that some students will slip AI writing by me. By submitting AI work as their own, they will have cheated their fellow students and lied to me. More importantly, they will have impeded their own development, to their own eventual harm.

Consider this essay: Do you think that AI wrote it, or do you think that I wrote it? Does it have the ring of technology or the ring of humanity? Like you, human beings can distinguish artificial and authentic voices, and they want to read an authentic voice. Your voice is one of them.

I hope that this letter encourages you to develop your own, unique voice, a voice distinct from AI, which is the only voice that the world needs. I look forward to reading your writing.

Thank you,

Jon Paul

*****

Jon Paul Sydnor teaches World Religions at Emmanuel College in Boston.

August 25, 2025

My mom died: I have some thoughts about God

I apologize for being away for a while. I got the call in early August that my mom had terminal cancer and would die soon. This situation wasn’t tragic. My mom was 87 years old. She terribly missed my dad, who had died five years earlier, after 60 years of marriage. She had dementia and was probably destined for the memory care unit at her CCRC (Continuing Care Retirement Community). But she really, really didn’t want to move out of her independent living apartment, the one she had shared with my dad, the one that was full of the familiar furniture she had lived with her whole life, the one where her children and grandchildren could visit and spend the night.

My mom had been ready to go and was relieved by her diagnosis. She was very lucid her final few days, full of joy and gratitude for the life she had lived. Surrounded by her children, children-in-law, and grandchildren, amidst laughter and tears, she repeatedly expressed her love for us and her peace with passing. Her death was perfectly gentle. My siblings and I were around her, chatting, then realized that she was gone.

I would like to share a few thoughts with you about these events. I’m a theologian, and I can’t help but to theologize. Recognizing that my mom’s death was natural, not tragic, this won’t be a theodicy, or explanation for why bad things happen to good people. Instead, this will be more of a reflection on life and faith, death and God, love and loss. Maybe these thoughts will prove helpful to you, if only a little bit.

Thought one: God is a good mother.

When my mom died, I lost the person on earth who loved me most unconditionally. Please don’t get me wrong: I was blessed to have two good, kind, skillful parents. My dad was a loving dad. But your mom—if she’s a good mom—is, well, your mom. She bore you, nursed you, raised you, and loves you. She’s got your back, tenderly, affectionately, and fiercely.

The writers of scripture recognize this and provide numerous maternal metaphors for God. Today, these metaphors help heal those who have good moms. They’re especially helpful to those with bad dads.

These ideas feel natural to me because I grew up with the concept of an omnigendered God. In the 1980s, my minister referred to God as our Parent in all cases excepting the Lord’s Prayer. When I asked him why, he explained that many people in his generation had fathers who were emotionally distant and interpersonally authoritarian. They provided order but not warmth, discipline but not nurture. Since he wanted his male parishioners to have an emotional relationship with God, he referred to God as Parent whenever possible and preached on the maternal aspects of God found in the Bible.

To this day, most churches refer to God with exclusively male language. These same churches lift up an exclusively male hierarchy to represent God and govern God’s church. These hierarchies, which are of course patriarchies, have little interest in maternal metaphors for God. They don’t see such metaphors as a pastoral opportunity; they see them as a political threat.

I contend, quite simply, that denying parishioners the opportunity to think of God as mother is pastoral malpractice. Suppose someone had an abusive father, either physically, emotionally, verbally, or sexually. Should that person be consigned to thinking of God exclusively as father for the rest of their lives? Supposing that same person had a kind mother who did her best to protect them from their father’s abuse. Should that person be prevented from thinking of God as mother? How much would this limited concept of an unlimited God harm that person’s faith life?

If someone thinks of God as father, and that works for them, then fine. But they shouldn’t prevent others, who need to think of God as mother (or as nonbinary, or as both, for that matter), from using the concept of God that produces spiritual flourishing for them. And they shouldn’t make that concept unavailable.

Since churches host a variety of parishioners, with a variety of spiritual needs, churches should offer an array of theological concepts and divine genders to meet each parishioner’s needs. Denying parishioners a concept of God that facilitates deep spirituality is negligent.

Thought two: Everything on earth is mixed together and can’t be separated.

At the end of the summer, before our oldest child returned to college, my wife and I took our children out for breakfast. We asked them to share their high points of the summer and got some standard responses—camping, boating on Lake George, going to Six Flags, riding the ferris wheel in Montreal, etc. But then all three children agreed that saying goodbye to their beloved Nana was a treasured moment.

How can sitting around a hospice bed in an old folks home with your terminally ill grandmother be a treasured moment? You don’t find it on a lot of people’s bucket list.

But maybe it should be, because we are made for more than fleeting happiness; we are made for abiding joy. Only love produces abiding joy, and love was very much present in that room. We shared memories, laughed, and supported one another.

And we cried, because love doesn’t come alone. Love comes, inevitably, with loss. Love and grief are as entwined as birth and death. If we love deeply, then we will also grieve deeply. But love is worth the cost of grief, because only a life of love is sacred.

God is love, so surely God grieves. The living God deeply participates in humankind, a participation expressed through incarnation, through Emmanuel, or “God with us”. But participation also expresses vulnerability. Our divine Parent must weep over our cruelty to one another, just as they rejoice over our kindness to one another. The bloody cross and empty tomb reside together in the heart of God, side by side, always and forever.

The Christian story expresses these truths through the church calendar, which runs the gamut of emotional life. We celebrate birth at Christmas, mourn death on Bad Friday, and proclaim resurrection at Easter. Death is an ever-present reality that seems to threaten love. But resurrection assures us that a loving life is sacred life, and death cannot defeat sacred life. Death may appear victorious, and grief may appear to have the last word, but in the end God grants victory to life because God is love.

In that room with my mom, over her final few days, we embraced the combinations: laughter and tears, joy and sadness, gift and loss. The good life does not try to separate these blessings from one another, preferring one over against the other. The good life recognizes that they are inseparable. To be thankful for one, we must be thankful for all.

The contrasts within life produce a beautiful tapestry. If you lose one color in a tapestry, all the other colors are dulled by that loss. And if you lose an affect in life, then all the other affects will be dulled as well. Spiritual wealth relies on both the light and the darkness.

I hope that you, too, have or had a good mother. If so, then you can learn something about God from her. As you negotiate your own life, I pray that you will rejoice much, and grieve much, because that means that you will have loved much. Godspeed you.

July 31, 2025

God in Christ risks everything for us (perhaps we're worth it)

Jesus’s healing powers threaten the world’s political powers. After the exodus from Egypt, when the Jews were threatened in the wilderness, God declared to them, “I am YHWH, who heals you” (Exodus 15:26b). Based on this divine self-description, the Jews gave a new name to God: YHWH Rapha, the Lord who heals. God’s healing activity occurs throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, both as promise and as activity: God heals infertility (Genesis 21:1–7), diseases (Psalm 103:3), wounds (Jeremiah 30:17), and broken hearts (Psalm 147:3). God heals Zion specifically because they are outcast (Jeremiah 30:17 again).

Jesus, as a tactile manifestation of God, does all these things, so “the people all tried to touch Jesus, because power was coming out of him and healing them all” (Luke 6:19). But problems arise when Jesus tries to heal society. Many people don’t want healing, even of physical illness. We can grow comfortable with the way things are. This truth especially applies to social ills, to which we can become addicted.

The Roman occupiers of Judea didn’t like charismatic healers out in the countryside attracting followers. This tension came to a head when Jesus visited the temple. Like many from the countryside, he may have had an idealized image of the temple’s function. When Jesus confronted the reality of temple life, its hawkers and mongers and lenders and commerce and barter, he was deeply offended, for he had expected the house of prayer promised by Isaiah (56 ), without traders as promised by Zechariah (14:21). Instead, he saw firsthand the den of thieves condemned by Jeremiah (7:11). Zeal for God consumed him, so he began to flip tables, spilling money on the ground, driving out the money lenders, and driving out the sacrificial animals for sale, so that people could finally make offerings in righteousness (Mal 3:3b).

“Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies,” writes Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian political activist imprisoned for her work. Jesus disturbed the economic, political, and religious power that had aligned in occupied Judea. The Galilean carpenter became a revolutionary agitator—and undesirable citizen.

Given the appearance of love in a world of hate, crucifixion was inevitable. In the end, the rejection of Christ by humankind symbolizes the rejection of God by humankind. We prefer the miserable and familiar to the promising and new. And so, very soon after Jesus’s visit to the temple, disturbed power conspired to put down its disturbance.

The crucifixion reveals God’s self-risk for us. At great risk, truth became enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus went to Jerusalem in the service of life, knowing he would die:

Christ, though in the image of God, didn’t deem equality with God something to be clung to—but instead became completely empty and took on the image of oppressed humankind: born into the human condition, found in the likeness of a human being. Jesus was thus humbled—obediently accepting death, even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:6–8 The Inclusive Bible)

As the Author of Life, Abba determines that intensity depends on contrast. Light has more existence in relationship to darkness; warmth has more existence in relationship to cold. Recognizing this, Abba creates a universe of contrasts, including the contrasts of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, celebration and grief. Christ, emissary of the Trinity, then ratifies this decision and expresses sympathy for the world by entering the human situation, as Jesus of Nazareth.

Tragically, God has granted us the freedom to reject truth. Thus, Jesus’s ministry leads to the passion and crucifixion. By defining Jesus as truth (John 1:14), the Bible denies truth any heavy, inert characteristics. Like a good cut that a carpenter would call true, Jesus is perfectly plumb with reality. He is truth, so truth becomes a way of being in the world rather than an unchanging thing to possess. Truth is more verb than noun: “They who do the truth come to the light, that their works may be revealed, that their works have been done in God” (John 3:21 WEB [emphasis added]).

Faith is a practice. Recognizing that truth is an activity, early Christians sometimes referred to their faith as the Way (Acts 19 ). This reference made sense, because the first Christians were Jews and practitioners of halakah, the totality of laws, ordinances, customs, and practices that structure Jewish life to this day. The term halakah derives from the root halakh, which means “to walk” or “to go.” For this reason, halakah is usually translated as “the Way.” It is not an inert mass of unchanging rules. It is a way to go through life well, as community.

The way we go through life must constantly adapt to the way things are. In Judaism, this need has produced a long tradition of debate and argumentation. Jesus participated in these debates, producing his own interpretation of halakah, which his followers eventually came to call the evangelion, gospel, or “good news.” According to Jesus, the Way expresses itself through time as loving activity. In this view, an act of kindness is just as true as a skilled carpenter’s cut, balanced mathematical equation, or logically demonstrated argument.

Alas, being the Way is dangerous. Prophets are always in danger: to the patriots, they seem pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to those in authority, seditious. According to the Gospel of Luke, after a last supper with his disciples Jesus retreated to the Mount of Olives and prayed, “Abba, if it’s your will, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

God’s participation in humanity is absolute. The cup would not be removed. Later in the night a crowd, led by Jesus’s disciple Judas, approached Jesus to arrest him. Infuriated, one disciple swung a sword and cut off a man’s ear, but Jesus rebuked him and healed the man (Luke 22:51). Then Jesus was led away to die. Over the next few days, Jesus was mocked, beaten, crowned with thorns, and flogged. The Romans drove nails into his hands and feet and hung him on a cross, naked and humiliated before the world, until he suffocated to death. As he was dying, Jesus prayed, “Abba, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34a).

Crucifixion is an incomprehensibly “grotesque and gratuitous” act invented by the Romans to terrorize subjugated peoples. This torturous execution was public, political, and prolonged, reducing the victim to a scarred sign of the Empire’s power. In this instance, it also reveals the absolute participation of God in human history, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus, God’s fleshly form, is meek. Jesus is not the master of embodied life; he is subject to embodied life. He inhabits what we inhabit—the plain fact of human suffering, the mysterious joy of religious community, and the intimated assurance of a loving God. He symbolizes divine openness to the agony and the ecstasy, but also to the unresolvable paradox of faith: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries from the cross (Mark 15:34). He simultaneously acknowledges the presence of God and the absence of God. He accuses God of abandonment, demands of God a defense, yet dies before receiving one. Perhaps God has no adequate answer.

Theologically, the crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the unholy within the universe, useless suffering that freedom produces but God abhors. From the gift of freedom, something emerges in creation that is alien to Godself. God did not intend the unholy, but God allows it out of respect for our autonomy and moral consequence. Crucially, God suffers from this demonic fault in reality. God in Christ undergoes alienation from God through crucifixion.

In other words, freedom is of God, but the results of freedom may not be. Faced with a choice between freedom and insignificance, God has chosen to preserve freedom and allow suffering. We may wish it otherwise, but God prioritizes vitality over security.

Yet, God does not make these choices at a distance. In the incarnation, we see that God has entered creation as unconditional celebrant. On the cross, we see that God has entered creation as absolute participant. No part of the divine person is protected from the dangers of embodiment. God in Jesus is perfectly open to the mutually amplifying contrasts of embodied life, and God is perfectly subject to the grotesque and gratuitous suffering that God rejects but freedom allows. God is completely here; God is fully human, even unto death.

For the cosmic Artist in a position of creative responsibility, authentic love necessarily results in vulnerable suffering. Creation necessitates incarnation, and incarnation results in crucifixion. But crucifixion is not the end of the story, thank God, as we shall see in future posts. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 140-144)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Heschel, Abraham J.. The Prophets. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2023.

Moltmann, Jurgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.

Saʻdāwī, Nawāl. Memoirs from the Women's Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Sanders, John. The God Who Risks. Illinois: IVP Academic, 2010.

July 14, 2025

The Kingdom of God is the Reign of Love (and love changes everything)

The Kingdom of God is the Reign of Love: and love changes everything


Jesus preaches the real possibility of the Kingdom of God. “Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread,” observes Judith Butler. The Bible agrees: “Without a vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). We tend to call artists, musicians, and poets “creatives,” and limit “creativity” to this category of persons. In fact, we are all creators in every moment of our lives, by both what we do and don’t do, by both how we conceptualize ourselves and how we conceptualize others.

We may not be able to draw, but every time we interact with a stranger we create emotions in that stranger by treating them respectfully or disrespectfully. We may not be able to sing, but our decision to feed hungry children creates one world and our decision not to creates another. We may not be able to write poetry, but whether we let the other driver in or crowd them out affects that driver as well as the overall traffic pattern on that day. Because we exist through time, to be is to become, and to become is to create. The Creator created us in the image of God, to be creative. Thus, we are homo creator, the species that creates and is free in what it creates. As creativity involves risk, it is an act of courage, like unto God.

For our creativity to be constructive, for it to go somewhere, it needs a goal. This goal interprets our times, directs our decisions, and energizes our activity. If freely chosen, it turns an aimless life into a purposeful journey. And with this purpose comes meaning, because inspiration accompanies aspiration.

Jesus received from his Jewish tradition a vision in which “the Lord will become king over all the earth” (Zechariah 14 a). This kingdom is good news for the generous but bad news for the greedy. Isaiah writes: “Woe to you who make unjust policies and draft oppressive legislation, who deprive the powerless of justice and rob poor people—my people—of their rights, who prey upon the widowed and rob orphans!” (Isaiah 10:1–2)

Isaiah’s God is not warm and fuzzy. Isaiah’s God cares deeply for the downtrodden. Their oppression—and their oppressors—anger God. This anger is resolute and consequential, provoking God to act. Speaking for God, Isaiah issues a threat: God will subject Judah to conquest and captivity for breaking the divine covenant through their dismissive cruelty toward the poor. But Isaiah also issues a promise, a road map to redemption. Judah’s repentance, expressed as care for all and neglect of none, will avert God’s punishment. After criticizing his fellow Jews for religious fasting even as they oppress their workers (Isaiah 58:3b), Isaiah continues:

This is the sort of fast that pleases me: Remove the chains of injustice! Undo the ropes of the yoke! Let those who are oppressed go free, and break every yoke you encounter! Share your bread with those who are hungry,. and shelter homeless poor people! Clothe those who are naked, and don’t ignore the needs of your own flesh and blood! (Isa 58:6–7)

To this day, Isaiah 58 is the haftarah, the liturgical reading from the Prophets on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. God’s blessing, according to Isaiah, does not result from individual virtue, rigorous legalism, or ritual purity. God’s blessing arises from the practice of charity as you work for justice. Religiosity that neglects mercy only angers God.

Jesus wants us to experience the joy that love offers. The Hebrew Scriptures demand kindness toward the outcast and reveal God’s active concern that this kindness be shown. Jesus intensifies this urgent concern for justice in his preaching of the imminent kingdom of God, also known as the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is God’s disruption of human history, redirecting it from injustice toward justice. Jesus, the herald of this new way of living, begins his ministry by declaring, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15).

Jesus’s characterization of his preaching as “good news” (euangelion) seems a bit exclusive, because it does not sound like good news for everyone. The New Testament records Jesus’s Beatitudes (“Blessings”) in both Matthew (the Sermon on the Mount) and Luke (the Sermon on the Plain). Most Christians have heard of the Sermon on the Mount, but fewer have heard of the Sermon on the Plain, and not without reason. The Sermon on the Plain is explicitly economic: while Luke declares, “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20a), Matthew hedges, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3a). Moreover, Luke couples each of Matthew’s blessings with a corresponding woe, a move that most likely gave rise to the church’s preference for Matthew over Luke:



Why does Jesus characterize a preaching that explicitly threatens the rich and powerful as “good news”? Perhaps because they (at least some of them, I hedge, because Jesus didn’t qualify his statements) need to be rescued from themselves . . . Perhaps because I (from a global perspective, I am quite wealthy) need to be rescued from myself.

Self-satisfaction in a world of poverty demands hardness of heart. To waste what others need, to consume ostentatiously while others starve, distorts the soul and diminishes our capacity for joy. It requires removing ourselves from the human family, separating ourselves from those with whom God created us to be in communion. God, who is relationship, creates us in the image of God, to be in relationship, not with some but with all, because all are God’s creatures. God is joy because God is love, and we (who are made in the image of God) shall become joy to the extent that we become love.

This world of suffering needs to become a world of love. May it be so. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 135-138)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Walter Brueggemann. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

Judith Butler. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004.

July 10, 2025

Jesus doesn't like oligarchs either: Christianity is an equality Gospel, not a prosperity Gospel

Jesus doesn’t like oligarchs, either: Christianity is an equality Gospel

Jesus overturns the social hierarchy. Humans aren’t particularly secure about ourselves, collectively, so we compete for pride of place. We struggle to acquire more power so we can acquire more money so we can consume more resources so we will have higher self-esteem. The origin and outcome of this competition is ceaseless comparison that produces either envy or pride, both of which are inherently painful.

Jesus saves us from ourselves by preaching and practicing a celebratory egalitarianism, a recognition that all are equally loved in the eyes of God. No one can be worth more than anyone else because all possess infinite value.

Those at the center often deny the value of those at the margins, but God prefers to work through the margins, in a divine challenge to the perceived center. Jesus himself comes from the margins—poverty, Judaism, Galilee—and propagates the truth of their value until he is killed by those at the center. His genealogy anticipates his marginalization (Matthew 1:1–17). It lists Tamar, who had to disguise herself as a prostitute to become impregnated by her reluctant patron, Judah (Genesis 38). It lists Rahab, an actual prostitute who helped the Israelites conquer Jericho (Joshua 2). It lists Ruth, a Moabite widow who chooses to join an Israelite family (book of Ruth). And it lists Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, who was “seduced” and impregnated by King David, who then had her husband killed in battle (2 Samuel 11). We may look to the center for salvation, but God sends it from the margins.

As the revelation of God, Jesus becomes the new, “decentering center,” the center who denies us any boundary. The margins have the clearest perspective. The margins see the hypocrisy in hierarchy and realize that “what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15a). If God loves us all equally, which is absolutely, then there is no need to claw for priority of place. Christianity is an equality gospel, not a prosperity gospel.

Jesus sees through the deceitfulness and pretense of those who cherish places of honor in public while “devouring widow’s houses” behind the scenes (Luke 20:47). He condemns those who give ostentatiously, out of their abundance, praising instead the poor widow who gives even out of her poverty (Luke 21:1–4).

Egalitarian community is salvation. We seek eminence, but God wants charity; we seek gain, but God wants justice. For this reason, Jesus warns his disciples, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 14:11). Jesus inverts the social order in his practice as well as his preaching. When the disciples argue about who among them is the most important, Jesus reprimands them, pointing out that “I am among you as the one who serves you” (Luke 22:27b).

In the Gospel of John, Jesus emphasizes this life of service by washing his disciples’ feet. Travelers’ feet were dirty and sore and always in need of attention, but only servants washed other people’s feet. It was a job for the lowly. Peter was so uncomfortable with this awkward act of intimacy that he protested and initially refused Jesus’s ministrations, but Jesus prevailed:

After washing their feet, Jesus put his clothes back on and returned to the table. He said to them, “Do you understand what I have done for you? You call me “Teacher,” and “Sovereign”—and rightly, for so I am. If I, then—your Teacher and Sovereign—have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done for you. (John 13:12–15)

Oddly, although Jesus explicitly commands his disciples to “do as I have done for you,” foot washing never became a sacrament in the mainstream Christian denominations, perhaps because it was just too upside down and intimate for any institution to bear, especially hierarchical ones.

Today, we live in an increasingly stratified world, full of hierarchs and oligarchs and plutocrats and autocrats. Jesus weeps over the cruelty of it all. Too often, those at the margins want to join the oligarchs rather than help their neighbors. Infused with envy by the media and its romanticized depictions of wealth, we seek pride by imitating those who keep us down. But wouldn’t we all be better off—politically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually—if we all helped each other up? (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 134-135)

*****

For more reading, please see:

Cobb, John B. Jesus' Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.

Padilla, Elaine. Divine Enjoyment: A Theology of Passion and Exuberance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

July 5, 2025

Jesus reveals the universal, unconditional love of God

God loves outcasts. Through his teaching and actions, Jesus reveals the universal love of God for all humankind. According to the psalmist, Abba knits together each person in their mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139:13), hence is the Creator and Sustainer of all. Since each person is beloved by Abba, each person should be beloved by us, including those whom society deems vile.

This religious insight appears early in the Jewish Scriptures. Roman philosophers like Tacitus believed that “the gods are on the side of the stronger.” In contrast, Exodus proclaims that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker—the powerless, oppressed, enslaved Israelites who are struggling to obtain their freedom.

God’s special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the orphan. The most defenseless people in the ancient world were those who did not have a powerful community to protect them. With no effective justice system, safety derived from family or tribe, which would punish anyone who harmed a member. Hence, to be without family or tribe was dangerous. For this reason, the Jewish law expressed special concern for the orphan, widow, foreigner, and poor, none of whom had the protection of community.

The Jewish law did not simply insist on deference to the vulnerable; the Jewish law placed a special concern for the vulnerable into the vulnerable heart of God, who assumes the role of their father, hence protector (Psalm 68:5). Deuteronomy declares:



According to the prophets, the call to care for the poor is not a suggestion. It’s a command with consequences, and the consequences are brutal. The prophet Ezekiel interprets God’s destruction of Sodom as a direct consequence of their neglect for the poor: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant; they had abundant food and not a care in the world, but she refused to help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49–50). God is not an impassive observer of social structures; God condemns social stratification and advocates for those whom society ignores.
Jesus is a prophet of social justice. Jesus places himself within the tradition of the Jewish prophets. When he begins his ministry, he is selected to read the prophet Isaiah to his synagogue. Jesus reads:



Jesus then begins his ministry as includer of the excluded, enacting unifying love in a segregated world. His inclusion is so radical as to offend his listeners: “Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go two miles,” he instructs (Matthew 5:41b). Jesus’s audience would have known that this teaching referred to Roman soldiers, the hated occupiers, who could force any Jew to carry their gear for one standard mile. Jesus says to carry it for two, thereby fostering an audacious vision of reconciliation. But Jesus isn’t all talk; he expresses this love by healing the servant of a Roman centurion (Luke 7:1–10), showing love for the occupier, in imitation of the universal God who sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous.

Samaritans were loathed by many, accused of using the wrong Torah with the wrong tenth commandment, worshiping on the wrong mountain (Gerizim instead of Jerusalem), and intermixing with Greeks and Persians. Jesus visited and asked to stay in a Samaritan village, but they refused to host him since he was on his way to worship in Jerusalem. His disciples wanted to rain fire on the village, but Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:51–56). Then, he went on to make a Samaritan the hero of his most famous story (Luke 10:25–37).

When he did interact with the hated religious other, he did so charitably. Jesus met a Samaritan woman at a well. She had gone through five husbands and was currently living with another man out of wedlock. In the eyes of the ancient world, she was impure, of the wrong gender and the wrong religion with a stained past. So outcast was she that she was drawing water at noon, in the heat of the day. Most women drew water together, communally, in the morning and evening. This gathering was an important opportunity to talk, share news, and build community. If the woman was at the well alone, then she was shunned, and anyone interacting with her would be contaminated.

Exhausted from his labors, Jesus asked her to draw water for him. In a world of strict dietary laws, this request was a particularly intimate act of transgression, an invitation to the uninvited. In exchange for the well water, he offered her living water. In the Jewish tradition, Abba is the Source of living water (Jeremiah 2:13; 17:13), “Source” here being the Hebrew word maqor: fountain, spring, or womb (Leviticus 12 ; 20:18). Thus, in offering her living water, Jesus is offering her God.

For the Samaritan woman, was living water a symbol for inclusion, community, self-acceptance, respect, value? However she interpreted Jesus’s promise, she willingly accepted his offer of new life, to the great dismay of the disciples, who were still stuck in a purity mindset (John 4 –30). In a final display of compassion, Jesus never asked the troubled woman to leave her current partner because he knew that, in such a brutally patriarchal society, she would be defenseless without a man.

Jesus reveals the inclusive, celebratory love of God. Jesus also displays God’s universalism through his practice of table fellowship. Much like dinner tables today, dinner tables in Jesus’s day were segregated. Jew ate with Jew, Roman with Roman, rich with rich, poor with poor, healthy with healthy, and sick with sick. Some of these divisions were the result of social conventions, others were the result of religious strictures. All of them were designed to protect one group from contamination by another, especially during a meal, that most intimate of times when something that is outside of us enters us and becomes us. During a meal, we cannot allow those who are other to us to enter our household. We cannot allow them to pollute us.

Jesus preaches against this segregation: “Whenever you give a lunch or dinner, don’t invite your friends or colleagues or relatives or wealthy neighbors. They might invite you in return and thus repay you. No, when you have a reception, invite those who are poor or have physical infirmities or are blind” (Luke 14:12–13). In the ancient world, poverty and sickness were frequently considered divine punishment; hence, outcasts deserved to be cast out. Those who cast out the outcasts were simply enforcing the divine will.

By insisting on hospitality toward outcasts, Jesus is communicating the universal divine compassion. And he insists that God’s embrace of the rejected, as symbolized through Jesus’s inclusive ministry, will be consummated in the coming kingdom, in which “people will come from East and West, from North and South, and will take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God” (Luke 13:29). Over against any elitist conceits of purity and contamination, Jesus proposes the joy of open hospitality, joy that erases all social divisions and unites everyone into one family at one table sharing one meal.

In making this pronouncement, Jesus is not rejecting his religious tradition; Jesus is extolling the openness of his religious tradition. For example, Jose ben Jochanan, chief justice of the Sanhedrin in the second century BCE, had already declared, “Let your home be open wide and let the poor be members of your household.” We cannot know if Jesus encountered these specific teachings or not, but we can know that Jesus’s teaching was continuous with his tradition, even as he emphasized selected strains within it.

Jesus practices what he preaches by dining with the unclean, those whom his society hated, and not without reason. For instance, he eats with tax collectors such as Levi, Matthew, and Zacchaeus. Tax collectors were the quislings of their day, Jewish agents of the Roman Empire, backed by the violence of empire as they extorted money from their fellow Jews. Their greed sullied anyone associated with them, yet Jesus invites them into his new world in an intimate way.

God touches untouchables in the person of Jesus. Jesus dines in the house of Simon the leper (Matthew 26:6), breaking bread with the rejected. Asked to be healed by another leper, Jesus heals through touch, thereby returning him to the community, both physically and socially (Matthew 8:3). As Jesus is walking through a crowd, a woman with a twelve-year flow reaches out to touch the fringe of his cloak and is immediately healed. Jesus feels power flow out of him and demands to know who has touched him. The woman identifies herself, trembling in fear, undoubtedly aware of the taboo she has just violated, but Jesus simply responds, “My daughter, your faith has saved you; go in peace and be free of your affliction” (Mark 5:25–34).

Jesus endangers himself to reveal the agapic love of God. A crowd brought a woman “caught in the very act of committing adultery” before Jesus, asking him what they should do. They wanted to challenge his preference for mercy over punishment when almost every male present would have supported stoning her as well as, in all likelihood, anyone defending her.

The passage insists that she was “caught in the very act of committing adultery” to reassure readers that she had not been framed by a jealous husband who didn’t want the expense of divorce and saw a lynch mob as the most expedient solution to his problem. Still, it might have been a setup.
Or, it might not have been. Jesus doesn’t care. He goes on the rhetorical offensive, instructing the mob, “Let the person among you who is without sin throw the first stone.” After his challenge, the defeated men slowly shuffle away. Then Jesus says to the woman, “Where did they go? Has no one condemned you?” And she replies, “No one, Teacher.” To which Jesus replies, “I don’t condemn you either” (John 8:1–11a).

What if American Christians were more like Christ?

(adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 129-133)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Boyarin, Daniel. “John’s Prologue as Midrash.” In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 688–91. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Falk, Harvey. Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus. 1985. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003.

Margalit, Natan. The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking. Boulder, CO: Albion Andalus, 2022.

June 27, 2025

God is compassionate and vulnerable to us (any other concept of God is unbiblical)

Jesus reveals that Abba is a personal God who loves us. For Jesus, Abba (our Creator and Sustainer) is a person who cares about us as persons, and this love is what really matters. God offers no promise that life will be easy, but an absolute promise that God will be with us in all things. Hence, there is nothing to fear, for nothing can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:31–39).

Some people reject the concept of a personal God as trivial. Certainly, it can become so. The personal God can become like Santa Claus, the gift giver who plays favorites. For those who place a high premium on social order, God can become lawgiver, police officer, prosecutor, judge, and jailer all in one, ensuring punishment of those we deem deserving. For the bigoted, God becomes a projection screen onto which we cast our biases, assigning them to God in a covert act of self-deification. For the tribal, those who bitterly demarcate an in-group and out-group, God hates who we hate and loves who we love.

But the capacity for a concept, such as that of a personal God, to be abused does not warrant its dismissal. Human cleverness can always turn good into evil. The majority can use democracy to oppress a minority, but that abuse incriminates the majority, not democracy itself. Political power uses beauty, in the form of propaganda and pageantry, to legitimate its rule, but that abuse incriminates power, not beauty. Prosperity preachers apprentice God to their greed, but that abuse incriminates the preacher, not God.

In such a crafty world, impersonal notions of God as first cause, ultimate reality, truth, or The One may seem more attractive than any analogy to our mercenary humanity. But the cost of such abstraction is too high. These concepts overlook the blessing of personality, the crowning achievement of the cosmos. Billions of years of cosmological evolution have produced us—thinking, feeling, conscious beings with agency who not only exist, but celebrate our existence. We are the universe coming to awareness of itself, and we exult in that awareness.

Science recognizes the source of this process as the physical laws governing the universe (or multiverse). But what is the source of those laws? Could it be a joyful community of persons who wish to produce joyful communities of persons? Faith trusts that our personal God invites us into the fullness of personality by means of a person-creating universe.

Jesus reveals that the personal God is a compassionate God. According to Jesus, Abba our Parent is compassionate. In the story of the prodigal son, the father runs to welcome the prodigal home, because he was filled with compassion (Greek: esplanchnisthē . Jesus himself, as a manifestation of God, displays the same care and concern for those he meets. When he sees the crowd of weary outcasts waiting to hear him preach, he is filled with compassion (Matt 9:36; Greek: esplanchnisthē . In another instance, noting the hunger of the crowd and their need for food, Jesus states, “I am moved with compassion” (Matthew 15:32; Greek: splagchnizomai).

The Greek word for compassion derives from splagchnon, which means bowels or gut. Compassion is not some abstract ethical demand; compassion is something you feel in your “heart” (which is a frequent translation of splagchnon into English).

For Jesus, our compassionate Parent is a unifying symbol. Following Jürgen Moltmann, we can contrast it with the image of lord. The lord is distinct from the servant, above the servant, of a different class and family from the servant. But a good Parent unites their children into one family. The lord may care for his servants but does not concern himself with the ups and downs of their daily lives, while Jesus’s Parent is emotionally vulnerable and unconditionally available. The lord’s estate is a hierarchy, but the family is a unit. Hence, the lord separates, but the Parent unites. Thus, in describing God as Parent, as both Mother and Father, Jesus is inviting his followers to become one household.

Given the omni-gendered Hebraic concept of God, and the Christian interpretation of Jesus as the Child of God, we shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus uses explicitly feminine metaphors for God, such as the story of the woman with the lost coin (Luke 15:8–10), in which the woman symbolizes God in her desire for reunion with the wayward. Jesus refers to himself as a mother hen, gathering her brood under her wings (Luke 13:34).

Jesus reveals the divine vulnerability. A good mother or father is emotionally vulnerable to their children, even the most wayward. The word vulnerable derives from the Lain vulnus, which means “wound.” In the incarnation, God risks woundedness.

We have already argued that the incarnation was planned from the beginning, prior to history, as a divine celebration and ratification of creaturely existence. But we have also noted the freedom that God grants us, freedom for kindness and freedom for cruelty. God’s perfect openness allows God to feel more deeply than we do, to participate fully in the life-producing contrasts of pain and pleasure, grief and celebration, sorrow and joy. Given this capacity, our cruelty must have tempted God to abandon the plan, to remain in the safety of heaven. But God has also chosen to be ḥesed, loving faithfulness, and ḥesed always fulfills its promises. So God draws close to us, close enough to be killed.

Infant Jesus reveals our inhospitality to divine vulnerability. He was not allowed to be born in his hometown; empire forced his parents to Bethlehem. Once there, he was not allowed to be born in a house; social strictures forced them into a barn. Once born, there was no crib for him to sleep in, so they laid him in a feeding trough. Then he was forced to flee from his homeland into Egypt, to escape the murderous soldiers of a mad king. The rejection of God in the birth narrative only foreshadows the rejection of God in the crucifixion, yet still God comes, revealing the danger that God hazards for us.

If God is to celebrate creation, then God must do so unconditionally. God must become fully human, open to the prodigious expanse of events, sensations, emotions, and thoughts that God loves into being. God, having chosen to amplify joy through suffering and pleasure through pain, affirms this decision by subjecting divinity to the very contrasts that divinity created. God must delight, and God must sorrow.

Crucially, the Hebrew Scriptures testify to Emmanuel, “God with us” (Isaiah 7:8; 8 ). The incarnation of God in Christ is the flawless consequence of this sentiment. Jesus acknowledges our exposure to the soaring and searing spectrum of experience that God sustains by subjecting himself to the same range of events and their resultant passions. Entirely open to the ebb and flow of earthly life, Jesus will turn water into wine at a wedding (John 2:1–11) and weep over the death of a friend (John 11:35). He participates fully, he commends full participation to his followers, and he laments the guardedness of his contemporaries: “We piped you a tune, but you wouldn’t dance. We sang you a dirge, but you wouldn’t mourn” (Matthew 11:17). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 127-129)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Charles Hartshorne. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

Jurgen Moltmann. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

June 21, 2025

God's love overflows all boundaries

Divine agape cannot be contained.

The divine community is centrifugal, not centripetal. Because they abhor exclusion, they could never be satisfied with love curved in on itself, with love of like for like, of Parent for Son and Daughter. The divine community seeks out, by its chosen nature, love of other. According to medieval theologian John Duns Scotus, the creation of the world is the inevitable act of a divinity who loves yet always desires to love more. Participation in creation, vulnerability to it, is the inevitable expression of creative love. It was planned from the beginning, without reference to the history of the world, even as it makes that history sacred.

The incarnation, as a superabundant event, ratifies this-worldly existence in all its particularity. It testifies that we are unique because it is good to be unique. We are someone somewhere, not everyone everywhere, because it is better to be concrete than abstract. And Jesus testifies that life, even with its intense suffering, is worth its passion.

After the incarnation we need not ascend to God, because God has descended to us, expressing the divine preference for finite particularity over any infinite absolute. Given the above, the incarnation is not a remedy for sin, nor is it a judicious adjustment to an unintended fall. Instead, the incarnation is an unconditional celebration of creation as creation. Incarnation follows creation like celebration follows birth.

In other words, having created the cosmos, God couldn’t stay away from it. God doesn’t love at a distance, but as a presence, even if that presence involves great risk. We, who are made in the image of God, may not want to see that image in all its perfection, to see how we have missed the mark. Distorted humanity, craving and grasping and clinging, fears the perfecting mirror and may very well shatter it upon meeting.

American photographer Lewis Hine (1874–1940) held up one such mirror. Hine was a trained sociologist who left a teaching position to work for the National Child Labor Committee in 1908. The NCLC was working against the child labor practices of the day. At the time, children younger than ten years old were working, bleeding, and dying in factories across America. Initially hired to research and write about their conditions, Hine also began taking pictures. Their publication led to threats of violence against him by factories’ security forces, who didn’t want the world to see the truth of working children’s suffering. To get access to the factories, Hine had to sneak in, like a thief in the night (1 Thess 5:2), masquerading as a traveling salesman, public official, specialized mechanic, and others. Over time his images took over the movement. Hine noted, “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” Through the efforts of Hine and many more, the federal government outlawed child labor in 1938.

Hine’s images changed America because images transform us, more so than abstract ideas. Hence, God came to us as a person, so that we might see the divine image (Heb 1:3). Jesus, as the perfect image of God, reveals both our hidden suffering and our hidden potential. The nondual nature of the incarnation opens us to paradox. We tend to consider spiritual dualities as repelling one another, like two ends of magnets with the same charge. The closer they approach, the more intensely they resist. But Christ came to marry heaven and earth, God and humankind, spirit and matter, body and soul. As Mary Luti observes, in Jesus “God accepts limits to dissolve the limits that made it seem as if God and humans were opposites. The great wonder of the Incarnation is that we’re not.”

The great statement of this unification came at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE, which declared that Christ is fully human and fully divine, the reunion of false binaries, the one in whom matter is spirit and spirit is matter. Jesus expresses these paradoxes through the manner of his incarnation. God as Christ was born an impoverished Jew in an occupied land. At the nativity, the wealth of God comes to us in poverty, the power of God comes to us in powerlessness, and the help of God comes to us in helplessness.

Jesus reveals the intimacy of God.

“YHWH is close to the brokenhearted and rescues those whose spirits are crushed,” declares the psalmist (Psalm 34:18). Jesus is the fulfillment of this assurance. In Jesus, we see that love draws near. This divine intimacy refutes the traditional Christian doctrine of divine impassibility—the belief that God is incapable of feeling either pain or pleasure, suffering or joy. Impassibility argues that God’s being is unaffected by our lives.

This belief derives from philosophy, not Scripture. Plato, for example, notes that the healthiest body is the most resistant to disease, the strongest plant is the most resistant to drought, the sturdiest house stands strongest against the storm, and the wisest soul is the most impervious to events. Since excellent things resist external influence, and God is most excellent, God must resist all external influence. Therefore, we do not affect God. Moreover, anything that is perfectly excellent cannot be improved and has no need for change. Therefore, God is unchanging.

This concept of God was picked up by Christian theologians and became standard in Christian theology, but it never fit with the biblical portrayal of God. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is emotional: “YHWH saw the great wickedness of the people of the earth, that the thoughts in their hearts fashioned nothing but evil. YHWH was sorry that humankind had been created on earth; it pained God’s heart” (Genesis 6:5–6 [emphasis added]). The doctrine of impassibility ignores numerous biblical texts in which God is interactive, even conversational (Exodus 33:11). The Bible ascribes qualities to God that imply divine feeling, such as compassion (Exodus 22:27). God even changes God’s mind when presented with a convincing argument (Numbers 14:13–25; Amos 7:3, 6). Impassibility implies that God is a majestic citadel, but the Bible claims that God is an ocean of feeling, open to the breadth of experience that God continually sustains.

What does the adjective impassible do to our concept of God? The word impassible is closely related to its cousin, impassive. The thesaurus offers first-order synonyms for impassive such as emotionless, reticent, taciturn, and apathetic. More alarmingly, it offers second-order synonyms for impassive such as cold-blooded, hardened, heartless, and indifferent. None of these terms describe the biblical God, whom Jesus reveals to be a vulnerable God, one of forgiveness and mercy.

God’s openness opens us to God: “God is the most irresistible of influences precisely because he is himself the most open to influence,” states Charles Hartshorne. God is true relationship, and true relationship changes both poles of the relationship. There is no absolute beyond the related, no escape hatch into which the Creator retreats from creation. God is ḥesed, loving-kindness, hence always fully present—undistracted, undisturbed, and undismayed. (Adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 122-125)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Duns Scotus, John. Four Questions on Mary. Translated by Allan B. Wolter. New York: Franciscan Institute, 2000.

Luti, Mary. “Divinized.” United Church of Christ, Dec. 3, 2021. ucc.org/daily-devotional/divinized.

Plato. The Republic. Edited by G. R. F. Ferrari. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Sampsell-Willmann, Kate. Lewis Hine as Social Critic. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

June 7, 2025

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christa: Freeing salvation from gender

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christa: Freeing salvation from gender

No concept of Christ can cage the person of Jesus.

Edwina Sandys, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, sculpted Christa “to portray the suffering of women.” Christa was a statue of Christ crucified, but as a woman, femininity hanging naked on the cross.

Christa’s initial revelation, in 1984 at St. John the Divine in New York City, produced a theological storm. Those offended insisted that Jesus was a man and should stay a man and that involving Christ in gender play harmed the faith. Episcopalian Bishop Walter Dennis accused the cathedral dean, the Very Rev. James Park Morton, of “desecrating our symbols” and insisted that the display was “theologically and historically indefensible.” Apparently, we are saved not just by the Messiah, but by a male Messiah specifically. Hence, to toy with the masculinity of Christ was to toy with salvation, a dangerous and unnecessary game.

But other followers of Jesus found the statue stimulating, even liberating. Did Jesus have to be a man? Or could a woman have gotten the job done? Or a nonbinary person? For some, Jesus’s male gender was necessary for salvation. For others, it was an accidental quality of the Christ, assigned at random. Or maybe it was a concession God made to our sexism; the Christ could have been a woman, but we just wouldn’t have listened to a woman back then. Would we listen to a woman now?

Certainly, the debates revealed much about the debaters. Some seemed to worship maleness as much as Christ, some saw themselves in the beaten woman, some seemed hungry for a female savior, and some wondered if nonbinary persons would ever be seen, if a still-binary Christa was causing this much of an uproar. Everyone saw Christa as unsettling. Either she was blasphemous, unsettling the ordained order; or she was empowering, unsettling an oppressive patriarchy. The difference lay in whether the viewer sought to be unsettled or not, whether they wanted to preserve the inherited or create the new.

“Who do you say that I am?” asks Jesus (Matt 16:15). Over two millennia, his followers have given many different answers to this question. The church has called councils to dispute Jesus’s identity, issued statements of faith providing definitive answers, and enforced those answers in sometimes brutal fashion. Yet Jesus always outwits our definition of him, like a trickster slipping his chains.

Although at times the Christian tradition has interpreted Jesus as a wrathful judge or tribal warlord, Jesus himself interprets his message as good news for all (Mark 13:10), rebuking his disciples: “You do not know what spirit you are of, for I have not come to destroy people’s lives but to save them” (Luke 9:56). According to Jesus, his appearance is an opportunity for divine joy to enter human hearts, that we might have abundant life (John 10:10; 15:11). For this reason, when he approaches the disciples Jesus assures them, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid” (Matthew 14:27 NRSV).

Accepting the appearance of Jesus as good news for all, in this chapter we will provide a life-giving interpretation of Jesus that accords with his own.

Jesus is the earthly expression of the heavenly Christ.

We have argued previously that creation is continuously sustained by the Trinity, three persons united through love into one God. Those three persons prefer cooperation to mere operation, so they divide their responsibilities between them, assigning priority even as they share responsibility. Of the three, one Sustains, one Participates, and one Celebrates. Jesus is the Participant, the one charged with coming to us concretely, in our time and our space. Hence, Jesus is the Christ.

To argue that Jesus expresses a divine person coheres with our Trinitarian position, which honors both relationality and particularity, both interpersonal love and the concrete world within which it acts. Jesus is a particular expression of a particular person of the Trinity, designated to relate directly to humankind. As such, he is Emmanuel, “God with us,” both fully human and fully divine.

This sentiment appears in the earliest biblical writings. Paul argues for the preexistence of Jesus as the Christ and the participation of Christ in creation:



In Paul’s understanding, Jesus of Nazareth is the Cosmic Christ, present at creation, grounding creation in communion, and then expressing that communion within creation. The cosmos itself groans for consummation, as do we (Romans 8:22–23), and Jesus is the image of this fulfillment. He is not just a wise teacher or inspired prophet; he is the human manifestation of Abba’s purpose for the universe.

Jesus’s resonance with the cosmos is so profound that, when the authorities insist his disciples quiet down, Jesus replies, “I tell you, if they were to keep silent, the very stones would cry out!” (Luke 19:40). Stones can sing because the appearance of Christ in the cosmos “christifies” all reality, revealing the interior illumination with which it has always been charged. As participants in the Christ event, we are now invited to see God shining through this diaphanous universe, to see the divine beauty within everything and everyone. (Adapted from The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology by Jon Paul Sydnor, pages 120-122)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Frank, Priscilla. “30 Years Later, a Sculpture of Jesus as a Nude Woman Finally Gets Its Due.” Huffington Post, Oct. 6, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christa-edwina-sandys-art

Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. London: Convergent, 2019.

Vasko, Elisabeth. “Redeeming Beauty? Christa and the Displacement of Women’s Bodies in Theological Aesthetic Discourses.” Feminist Theology 21 (2013) 195–208. DOI: 10.1177/0966735012464151.

June 1, 2025

We are co-creators with God: freedom is a gift, not to be rejected

Any flight from freedom denies our God-given personhood.

We fear freedom like the nestling fears flight. So, we flee from our God-given freedom in various ways. We have already discussed the temptation to declare every event the will of God, a declaration that is neither healthy nor biblical. Another way is to render ourselves automata by subjecting every decision to a divine mandate. In this way, we need not decide because God has already decided for us. The controlling God tells us how to worship, what to wear, what to eat, what to read, whom to marry, and where to live.

Such automaticity meets certain needs: fearing accountability, we avoid all decision. Fearing the expanse, we stay on the narrowest of narrow paths. The retreat into automatized activity frees us from the terrifying responsibility of choice, but this retreat is a tactical failure. No flow chart, no matter how ancient or intricate, can negotiate this infinite universe.

Our cosmos purposefully overflows all efforts at intellectual control. We cannot be an automaton within an algorithm, or a puppet under a puppeteer, because God doesn’t want us to. God wants us to think, choose, act, and accept responsibility for our actions. God wants us to be persons to whom our personal God can relate. And for us to be persons, God must deny us any automatic decision-making process within which we could hide our personhood. God must deny us certainty and grant us ambiguity.

Without complexity and freedom we would not possess consciousness.

The algorithm-defying infinity of the cosmos also forbids us any resort to pure instinct—reflexive, predetermined, unexamined responses to situations. Instinct works for ants but not for people. The world simply presents our brain with too much information to immediately know the most profitable course of action. Instead, we must deliberate: gather missing information, consider our principles, imagine different outcomes, evaluate which outcomes are desirable, solicit the advice and insight of others, and finally, always prematurely, decide.

So complex is this process that our brains have evolved the best tool for such analysis: consciousness. Recognizing the danger of simplistic instinct in a hypercomplex world, consciousness interrupts our automaticity. It allows us to survey an expanse of options and think before we act. Through this demanding process we can make the better decision, which is almost never the first instinct.

There is no freedom with certainty, and no freedom without ambiguity. The reflexive certainty provided by strict legalism or brute instinct may free us from self-doubt, but would deprive us of both freedom and consciousness. Tragically, our thirst for certainty is a thirst for escape from our God-given condition, the ability to create freely, which was always intended as a gift.

We find evidence for this gift in the very directability of the universe, our capacity to co-create the future, with God. The present is contingent—it need not be, it could have been otherwise, had persons in the past made different decisions. The worst historical tragedies could have been prevented by more noble human efforts. And the future is unwritten because we coauthor the cosmic drama with God. We are both the playwrights and the actors, and we perform best when we understand that God is love. (Adapted from The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology by Jon Paul Sydnor, pages 117-118)

For further reading, please see:

Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt, 1994.