What Does Yahweh Ask Of You? The Five Infinitives Of Deuteronomy 10:12–13

By James W. Knox

[James W. Knox is an adjunct professor of Old Testament at Criswell College in Dallas, Texas.]

[This is a revised and expanded version of the section “How Wisdom’s יראת יהוה Compares to Deuteronomy’s ‘Fear of God’” in chapter 3 of James W. Knox, “God’s in His Heaven—All’s Right with the World! The Concept of ‘Fearing God’ in Ecclesiastes” (PhD diss., Dallas Theological Seminary, 2022), 112–20.]

Abstract

Deuteronomy 10:12–13 is a fascinating passage since it is the only time in Scripture where the five verbs “to fear,” “to walk,” “to love,” “to serve,” and “to keep” appear together. This raises a question that has not received much consideration in commentaries: How do they function together? To address this question, this article surveys proposed meanings for the five terms within Deuteronomy, examines scholarly explanations of their relationship, and offers an interpretation of the passage’s structure.

* * *

Micah 6:8 states, “What does Yahweh require of you but to enact justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”[1] This well-known verse, providing the basis for many songs and hymns, is one of the most succinct descriptions of God’s expectations for his people in the Old Testament. A passage in Deuteronomy serves a similar function:[2]

Now, O Israel, what does Yahweh your God ask of you but to fear Yahweh your God, to walk in all of his ways, to love him, to serve Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul, [and] to keep Yahweh’s commandments and statutes that I am giving you today for your own good? (10:12–13)

While Micah presents three complex ideas with qualifications “enact justice,” “love mercy,” and “walk humbly,” Deuteronomy contains five simple verbs in the form of infinitives: “to fear,” “to walk,” “to love,” “to serve,” and “to keep.” All five verbs are common throughout the Old Testament, yet each is loaded with significance both outside and within Deuteronomy. Furthermore, this is the only time in Scripture where all five verbs occur together as well as the only time that “fear” (ירא) and “love” (אהב) appear together in the Old Testament, which makes this text unique. To better understand this passage, this article explores the meaning of these verbs within Deuteronomy and how they work together in 10:12–13.

The Five Infinitives

Even though the five verbs stated in 10:12–13 are mundane activities—fearing (ירא), walking (הלך), loving (אהב), serving (עבד), and keeping (שׁמר)—each can express acts performed in obedience to Yahweh. This has generated additional interpretive options and glosses for most of these terms. This section examines the meaning of each verb within Deuteronomy to provide context for the investigation into how they function together.

To Fear (ירא)

The root ירא occurs forty-four times throughout Deuteronomy.[3] It occurs four times as a noun (מורא),[4] six times as a participial modifier (נורא),[5] ten times as a negated expression “do not be afraid,”[6] and seven times as a typical response to danger.[7] Of the remaining seventeen cases, three refer to the other nations’ “fear” toward Israel,[8] while the remaining fourteen refer to Israel’s “fear” directed toward Yahweh.[9] The ירא in 10:12 falls into this last category.

Scholars have been investigating the emotional and psychological bases for ירא since the middle of the twentieth century.[10] In particular, they have focused on cultic passages where God is the object of ירא; here the underlying sense of shame or anxiety tends to shift toward behavior.[11] This is believed to be pertinent in the Deuteronomic literature where ירא is regularly used in the context of obedience.[12] Some scholars have responded to this by arguing that ירא is better understood in Deuteronomy as an expression of worship (i.e., reverence or awe).[13] Both views—ירא as an expression of covenant loyalty and of cultic worship—are used by commentaries today and are discussed further below.

To Walk (הלך)

The root הלך occurs fifty-three times throughout Deuteronomy, and these occurrences can be loosely grouped into three categories: the mundane task of coming and going (25x);[14] describing Yahweh as the instigator of said coming and going (4x);[15] and performative obedience (24x).[16] In this third category, “walk” (הלך) is used ten times with “way(s)” (דֶּרֶךְ), which seems to either qualify or clarify the meaning of “walk.”[17]

“Walk” can convey the idea of “lifestyle.”[18] Merrill expounded on this, explaining that “walk” often refers to a “life lived in obedience or disobedience . . . with reference to covenant standards.”[19] This can help us understand the NLT’s idiomatic translation of the phrase ללכת בכל־דרכיו as “[to] live in a way that pleases him” while a more literal reading would be “to walk in all his ways” (reflected in the ESV, KJV, NASB, NRSV). Helfmeyer provided further clarification, explaining that in the J and E sources, “walking” before Yahweh means experiencing “God’s benevolent presence,” whereas in the D and P sources “walking” includes “ethical and religious integrity” conveying compliance to Yahweh’s ordinances.[20] Helfmeyer’s view sheds light on the NET’s translation of the same phrase as “to obey all his commandments.”[21] If he is correct, the next question is whether “walking in his ways” is equatable to “keep his commandments.” This is germane to passages like 10:12–13 where they occur together.

To Love (אהב)

The root אהב occurs twenty-three times throughout Deuteronomy, and these occurrences can also be grouped into three categories: Yahweh’s affection toward Israel (6x);[22] Israel’s (expected) devotion to Yahweh (12x);[23] and humanity’s affection for each other (5x).[24]

The use of “love” (אהב) in 10:12 falls within the second category. Just like “fear” (ירא) discussed above, “love” is initially understood as an emotional state or response, as with typical use of the terms “love/fear” in English. However, this opens the debate concerning how God can demand an emotion in Deuteronomy. As Els commented, “The fact that love could be commanded indicates that אָהַב in Deut 6:5; 10:12; 11:1, 13, 22; 19:9; 30:15, 16, 19–20; Josh 22:5; 23:10–11 expresses not primarily feeling, but rather a certain behavioral pattern, i.e., obedience (in gratitude) to Yahweh’s covenantal commandments and faithful and total commitment to him.”[25] The notion that “love” reflects covenant obedience to God’s commands stems from studies that compared the love language from Deuteronomy with similar language in ancient Near Eastern treaties.[26] This provides the background for understanding Wallis’s assessment, “If love is not merely an emotional feeling for a person or a thing, but also involves a behavior that is becoming to love, then it is possible for Deuteronomy to elevate this behavior to the level of a commandment.”[27] Jenni offered a similar explanation that love is best understood as the appropriate response “to the love of Yahweh, in faithfulness and obedience within the Yahweh covenant.”[28]

This idea that Deuteronomy’s use of “love” should be understood within a covenant-treaty context has become standard for many studies. However, there are alternatives. For example, McKay suggested that “love” is not based on ancient Near Eastern treaties but on the father-son relationship found in Old Testament wisdom.[29] Not taking it quite as far as McKay, other scholars (e.g., Spero, Moberly, Brueggemann, Spieckermann) have argued for a more emotional/affective underpinning for “love” than a purely cognitive/legal one.[30] In his eloquent summary, Arnold proposed a compromise:

Love for YHWH in Deut 5–11 is central for developing that value system for Israel. Its use here and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible reflects two nuances in its lexical field. First, an unfettered “pure” affection, usually parental or romantic, which may or may not contribute to an ethical value system, and has little to do prima facie with obedience; and second, a covenant-centered, value-building commitment to another, yielding loyalty and obedience as a by-product. . . . In nuce, the love commanded in Deuteronomy is not simply a covenantal fidelity, but also denotes an emotional or affective nuance as well.[31]

Arnold’s compromise does not fully remove the tension with most modern discussions tending to lean toward one side or the other.

To Serve (עבד)

The root עבד occurs sixty-five times throughout Deuteronomy. It can describe both manual labor (39x)32 and service to a deity (26x).33 However, the occurrence of “serve” in 10:12 is unique since it contains the qualification: “serve” [Yahweh] with all your “heart/mind” (לֵבָב)34 and “soul/being” (נֶפֶשׁ).35 The only other times we see this precise phrasing is in 11:13 and Joshua 22:5.36 As Westermann explained,

The primary connotation of the word [עבד] is not subordination but belonging to the Lord and security with the Lord. . . . The only essential difference in the [עבד] relationship between people and that between people and God consists of the fact that being [עבד] to a person can also signify the harshest limitation of existence, but being God’s [עבד] always means having a good Lord. It can never mean servitude in the negative sense.[37]

So, “to serve” God in Deuteronomy implies cultic service.[38] However, because “to serve” occurs alongside other cultic terms and qualifiers (as it does in 10:12–13), its use “far transcends any specifically cultic context.”[39] Riesener clarified that in 10:12 serving God consists of “keeping the commandments,” whereas in 11:13 serving is the content of “keeping the commandments.”[40] The problem with most current discussions is that they are content to interpret “serve” as contextually dependent on the terms that surround it, as opposed to supplying its own content to the passage. The significance of this will become apparent later.

To Keep (שׁמר)

The root שׁמר occurs seventy-four times throughout Deuteronomy. Most often it describes the act of “keeping,” “watching,” or guarding” something, with the object either explicitly or implicitly stated. Three times it describes God “keeping” his promises.[41] Fifty-five times it describes people “keeping” something.[42] It can also describe watching oneself (14x)[43] and be used for emphasis as an infinitive absolute (2x).[44]

As Sauer described, שׁמר “has the same semantic scope in religious statements. . . . In a fig[urative] sense, the pious preserve and keep . . . the commandments, statutes, and instructions of God. . . . Deut[eronomy] differs in that keeping the commandments is the concern of [everyone].”[45] Unlike the previous words discussed, there seems to be a broader agreement for the meaning of “keep” in 10:13 since it has “commandments” as its object. Any deviation tends to be in how the meaning is expressed. For example, López explained that “keep” means obedience in fulfilling the obligations of the commandments and covenant.[46] His explanation assumes an expectation of action on the part of the “keepers.” On the other hand, Schoville described “keep” as “pay careful attention to.”[47] This does not rule out obedience tied to action, but it does render it less explicit.

In summary, each of the five verbs is important for the interpretation of Deuteronomy. In addition, there is debate surrounding the meaning of each term. The underlying debates tend to gravitate toward whether these terms should be understood within a legal-treaty context or a cultic one. Therefore, in a passage like 10:12–13, how people understand the relationship between the five verbs affects how they interpret the verbs themselves.

Four Views On Deuteronomy 10:12–13

Since the mid-nineteenth century, four different approaches have been proposed for Deuteronomy 10:12–13. These involve distinct ways to interpret the terms’ respective meaning and their relationship to each other.

Progression View

This approach understands the series of verbs as steps in a process. This argument goes back at least to Keil in 1862, who suggested,

The fear of the Lord, which springs from the knowledge of one’s own unholiness in the presence of the holy God, ought to form the one leading emotion in the heart prompting to walk in all the ways of the Lord, and to maintain morality of conduct in its strictest form. This fear, which first enables us to comprehend the mercy of God, awakens love, the fruit of which is manifested in serving God with all the heart and all the soul.[48]

In 1866 Schröeder made a more developed case:

Fear the beginning, to walk . . . is the progress, and love . . . as it reveals itself . . . is the completion. Connected with fear and love through . . . the service of God with all the heart and with all the soul, is added as is entirely fitting to the second command. As the walk is subordinated to the fear, so the keeping the commandments . . . appears to be subordinated to the serving of God.[49]

This sort of rationale was fully realized by Dillman in 1886:

What was required individually in [Deut] 6:5, 13 is combined here [10:12–13]. Indeed fear precedes as the underlying-mood [Grundstimmung] from which naturally succeeds the reluctance to act against God’s will or to walk in his ways (8:6). Then is added the love of God with [your] whole soul (4:29), which springs from the experience of undeserved pardon (vv. 15, 22) and the service of God in prayer, sacrifice, offering, celebration, etc. This results in (v. 13) the willing fulfillment of the individual commandments and statutes.[50]

While this view fell out of vogue for most of the twentieth century, it does appear in a few commentaries, notably, Woods’s commentary in 2011:

The Lord asks for five things which are frequently addressed throughout the book. The first is fear (reverence), which importantly sets the foundation for all the other attitudes that follow (4:10; 5:29). Fear of the Lord then logically leads to the travel metaphor of walking in all his ways (5:33; 10:12; 11:22; 19:9; 26:17; 28:9; 30:16). . . . At the centre of the unit is the command to love God which illustrates its importance from the Shema (6:4–5). . . . Following this, Israel was to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul (v. 12b), which is the first occasion since 6:5 in which this language is used for some attitude other than love. This would begin to indicate that each of these responses represents interrelated attitudes, first worked out for each of the five responses at 6:13–19 following the Shema at 6:4–5. The fifth response of obeying the Lord’s commands and decrees for your own good (v. 13) indicates that the law was not a burden to be borne, but was Israel’s life in all its fullness (32:47).[51]

While the progression view can be summarized in a few ways, the common thread is that the individual commands work together to describe a process. Yahweh expects his devotees to initially come to him in “fear” (ירא). This “fear” functions as the foundational state of being (whether it is emotional, mental, or something else). Fear is the initial step in other biblical passages, both in the Old Testament (e.g., Prov 9:10) and New Testament (e.g., Phil 2:12). While in this state, an individual is to pursue a relationship with Yahweh by “walking” (הלך) with him. This relationship will eventually blossom into a deep devotion or “love” (אהב) for God. This affection will generate an authentic desire to “serve” (עבד), which will culminate in the practice of “keeping” (שׁמר) God’s commandments.

There are two problems with this view: (1) it assumes that the individual verbs are conveying and thus contributing something unique to the cultic process; (2) thus, it places heavy emphasis on the order of the verbs. The main objection to the progression view is that this order is not repeated elsewhere in Deuteronomy.

Fear View

Driver offered his own interpretation in 1895:

The foundation of the religious temper is the fear of God; this brings with it a natural disposition to walk in all his ways (8:6), and ends with the devotion of the entire being to His love and service. . . . To keep . . . this is the ultimate scope of the duties imposed by Jehovah upon Israel. . . . The fear of God should be promoted by the thought that He is the Sovereign of heaven and earth.[52]

Driver put emphasis on the initial command to “fear” (ירא), from which the subsequent acts—”walk” (הלך), “love” (אהב), “serve” (עבד), and “keep” (שׁמר)—emerge. According to this view, “fear” is the command. Yahweh himself demands that his people maintain a relationship with him characterized by “fear.” The remaining verbs are either natural byproducts of the “fear” or illustrative of its characteristics. While hardly any modern commentaries adopt Driver’s view, additional scholars (particularly in technical studies) seem to have recognized the significance of “fear” as the primary command, with the other verbs in grammatical and contextual subordination.[53]

The main issue with this view is that it places a different syntactical function on the first infinitive. “To fear” (ליראה) is the object of the question, with the remaining four infinitives functioning in an explanatory or epexegetical manner, even though nothing in the text singles out “fear” other than that it occurs first. A more ideological and contextual objection is why is “fear” elevated over “love,” especially since “love” is emphasized in key places like the Shema (6:4–5).

Holistic View

Sander planted the seeds for this view in 1935 when he made the connection that words like “fear” (ירא), “walk” (הלך), “love” (אהב), “serve” (עבד), “keep” (שׁמר), in addition to others, are practically interchangeable terms for cultic observance in Deuteronomy. The only discernable difference is between terms for emotion (e.g., “fear” and “love”) and action (e.g., “serve” and “keep”).[54] This logic resonated throughout the scholarly community, leading Eichrodt to later claim,

To fear Yahweh, to keep his commandments, or to walk in his ways, have here almost become synonyms. Therefore fear and love can be used in the same breath, as descriptions of right conduct toward God, conduct which includes the loyal worship of Yahweh in compliance with his will for the cult.[55]

The holistic view can be explained in two ways. First, the terms are so analogous that they are practically synonymous: five words restating the same idea. Second, the terms merge to create a unified meaning like a complex hendiadys (a hendiapente). Either way, the result is practically the same. This has become the default view in many modern commentaries. However, there is debate over how to classify the terms: treaty or cultic. It is difficult to determine which view came first and whether one is reacting to the other or if they were formed independently.

Holistic-treaty view. This view was first fully proposed by Weinfeld in 1972. He argued that the terms for cultic obedience, commonly found throughout Deuteronomy, correlate to similar terms in ancient Near Eastern treaties (similar to Sander).

We find that Deuteronomy and deuteronomic literature abound with terms originating in the diplomatic vocabulary of the Near East . . . [e.g., ‘to go after’ הלך, ‘to serve’ עבד, ‘to love’ אהב, ‘to fear’ ירא, etc.] all of which are encountered in the diplomatic letters and state treaties of the second and first millennia B.C. . . . in which they have particular political significance, found their way into Deuteronomy . . . as terms expressing religious loyalty.[56]

His basic conclusion is that these terms are functionally analogous (if not synonymous) terms for covenant loyalty.[57] Thus in 10:12–13, the verbs themselves are less relevant than the reality that Moses called the Hebrews to devote themselves to covenant obedience.

Holistic-cultic view. Thompson in 1974 seems to be the first to articulate this view. Rather than interpreting the terms within a legal/treaty context, he understood them within a broader religious/worship context. The main difference is that the previous view relied on ancient Near Eastern treaties as the background for this terminology (specifically in the Deuteronomic literature), whereas this view does not. This view embraces the theory that the terms should be interpreted together but argues for it contextually. In this case, the individual terms blend together to broadly express cultic worship.[58] As McConville explained, “The connection between loving God, obedience to his commands and enjoying prosperity cannot be strictly rationalized, here any more than elsewhere in the book. They are all parts of a unified picture.”[59]

The problem with the holistic view is that it minimizes (if not outright dismisses) any specific nuance each word might convey. This logic could theoretically apply to any passage in Deuteronomy where two or more of these words appear together.

Love-Centric View

In 1975 Floss laid the foundation for this view. He argued that “fear” (ירא), “love” (אהב), and “serve” (עבד) are each paratactic phrases, which are functionally synonymous. “Walk” (הלך) and “keep” (שׁמר) are hypotactic interpretations of their main phrase.[60] Thus, “walk” clarifies “fear,” while “keep” clarifies “serve.” That all of these terms occur together in 10:12–13 indicates some evolution of thought within the composition of Deuteronomy.

The first commentary to argue along these lines was Christensen’s originally in 1991. He argued, based on prosodic analysis, that “fear,” “love,” and “serve” are the main commands, with “love” emphasized as the central idea.[61] Presumably, “walk” and “keep” are dependent phrases that clarify what precedes them. A similar view was defended by Merrill in 1994, who suggested that “fear” and “walk” formed a first unit with “love,” “serve,” and “keep” comprising a second unit. However, “love” functions as both the fulfillment of the “fear” while also being fulfilled through “serve.”[62] “Love” is emphasized because it is the central idea and does not need qualification like “fear” and “serve.”

This view assumes the central importance of “love” while subordinating “walk” and “keep.” The problem is that this seems like an arbitrary means of assigning infinitives based on the presumed supremacy of “love.”

These views are summarized and outlined in Table 1.

Table 1: Interpretive Models for Deuteronomy 10:12–13

These views can also be expressed by the following translations in Table 2.

	What does Yahweh your God ask of you but . . .
Progression	to fear Yahweh your God, [which leads] to walking in all of his ways, [which leads] to loving him, [which leads] to serving Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul, [and which culminates in] keeping Yahweh’s commandments.
Fear	to fear Yahweh your God, by walking in all of his ways, by loving him, by serving Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul, [and] by keeping Yahweh’s commandments.
Holistic	[to demonstrate your obedience] by fearing Yahweh your God, by walking in all of his ways, by loving him, by serving Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul, [and] by keeping Yahweh’s commandments.
Love-Centric	to fear Yahweh your God by walking in all of his ways; also to love him; also to serve Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul by keeping Yahweh’s commandments.

 Table 2: Interpretative Translations for the Four Views

Chiasm

However, there is another option that has been overlooked by modern commentaries: the chiasm.

O Israel, what does Yahweh your God ask of you but

(A) to fear Yahweh your God,

(B) to walk in all of his ways,

(C) to love him,

(B′) to serve Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul, [and]

(A′) to keep Yahweh’s commandments and statutes

According to this view, “love” (אהב) is emphasized as the center of the chiasm. “Walk” (הלך) is parallel with “serve” (עבד). This pairing makes sense considering that the two are regularly featured together in the almost formulaic expression “follow after . . . and serve” (always in that order).[63] Also, these two are the only two that include criteria: “to walk in all of his ways” and “to serve Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul.” “Fear” (ירא) would then be parallel with “keep” (שׁמר). Fearing (God) and keeping (his commandments) are also paired frequently inside and outside of Deuteronomy.[64] Furthermore, it allows for the possibility that fearing (God) and keeping (his commandments) are functioning like a merism. Fear being the innermost expression of devotion is contrasted by the outermost expression of obedience: keeping (acting out) the commandments. This may shed new light on other passages where these two concepts occur together.

Since this is mostly a syntactical argument, it does not impact interpretation or translation to the same extent as the previous views. One could agree that each term retains individual meaning (as Keil does) or that they are practically synonymous (like Weinfeld) and still argue for chiasm as the reason for this specific order. However, this view does conflict with the fear and love-centric views since they assume specific clausal dependencies.

Conclusion

Once a reasonable case is made for a chiasm, it is difficult to unsee it. This provides a more satisfying structure for these verses than most commentaries offer. It also reinforces the notion that the order is intentional and not arbitrary (as some have surmised). Now, this view is exclusive to the fear view and love-centric view, which proffer their own structures. However, it could be argued in tandem with the progression and holistic views since these are based more on the meaning of the words and their relationship to each other than on their order and syntactic functions. Personally, I am not convinced by the holistic arguments that these terms are practically synonymous or function as a complex hendiadys (hendiapente). Instead, I prefer the progression approach, but this assumes that each word retains a unique meaning that contributes to the process. The notion that a chiasm could simultaneously outline a complex process reveals a poetic intricacy that is staggering. This ought to prompt admiration for this passage as well as a renewed interest in how these terms are used elsewhere in Deuteronomy.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are the author’s own.
2. Multiple commentaries make similar connections between Micah 6:8 and Deuteronomy 10:12–13, e.g., John A. Thompson, Deuteronomy: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 5 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1974), 164–65; Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 435; Christopher J. H. Wright, Deuteronomy, New International Biblical Commentary, Old Testament 4 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 144–45; J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy, Apollos Old Testament Commentary 5 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 199; Edward J. Woods, Deuteronomy: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentary 5 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 171–72; and Eckart Otto, Deuteronomium 1–11, vol. 2, 4:44–11:32, Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2012), 1034–35.
3. Cf. H.-P. Stähli, “יראyr’ to fear,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 2:569–70.
4. The noun מורא refers either to acts of God (Deut 4:34; 26:8; 34:12) or Israel’s reputation (11:25).
5. In these instances it either describes God (Deut 7:21; 10:17), God’s deeds (10:21), some aspect of God (28:58), or the wilderness (1:19; 8:15).
6. In one instance, the phrase describes Amalek’s lack of fear toward Yahweh (Deut 25:18). In all other cases, the phrase is directed toward the daunting task of (re)claiming the promised land (1:21; 31:8) and opposing nations (1:29; 3:22; 7:18; 31:6) and their armies (3:2; 20:1, 3). Interestingly, the phrase is never used as a prohibition against worshiping foreign deities: “You will not fear their gods.” That such an act is taboo goes without saying, but the omission is nevertheless curious.
7. I.e., a fear-based apprehension toward a perceived threat: the fire at Horeb (Deut 5:5), Israel’s enemies (7:19; 20:8), and punitive retribution (13:12[11]; 17:13; 19:20; 21:21).
8. Deuteronomy 2:4, 25; 28:10.
9. Deuteronomy 4:10; 5:29; 6:2, 13, 24; 8:6; 10:12, 20; 13:5; 14:23; 17:19; 28:58; 31:12, 13.
10. E.g., Siegfried Plath, Furcht Gottes: Der Begriff Yāra̕ im Alten Testament, Arbeiten zur Theologie 2/2 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1963), 14; and Phillip Michael Lasater, “‘The Emotions’ in Biblical Anthropology? A Genealogy and Case Study with ירא,” Harvard Theological Review 110.4 (2017): 520–40.
11. E.g., Joachim Becker, Gottesfurcht im Alten Testament, Analecta Biblica 25 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965), 29–32.
12. Becker, 85; cf. Louis Derousseaux, La Crainte de Dieu dans l’Ancien Testament: Royauté, Alliance, Sagesse dans les Royaumes d’Israël et de Juda, Lectio Divina 63 (Paris: Cerf, 1970), 207–8; cf. H. F. Fuhs, “יָרֵאyārē’,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 6 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 306–8; and Stähli, “יראyr’ to fear,” 575.
13. E.g., Miles V. Van Pelt and Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “יָרֵא (yārē’ I),” in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, ed. Willem A. VanGemeren (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 2:529–30.
14. This can be further divided between the nineteen times where humans are the subject (Deut 1:19, 31, 33; 2:7, 14, 27; 5:30; 10:11; 14:25; 16:7; 20:5, 6, 7, 8; 24:2; 26:2; 28:41; 31:1, 14) and the six times Yahweh is the subject (1:30, 33; 20:4; 23:15; 31:6, 8).
15. Deuteronomy 8:2, 15; 28:36; 29:4.
16. Three times it describes a generic lifestyle (Deut 5:33; 13:5, 6); five times it means to “follow (אחרי) after” someone (4:3; 6:14; 8:19; 11:28; 13:3); twice it signifies doing something while “on the road (of life)” (6:7; 11:19); seven times it specifies “walking in [Yahweh’s] ways” (8:6; 10:12; 11:22; 19:9; 26:17; 28:9; 30:16); six times it is paired with “serving (עבד)” (13:7, 14; 17:3; 28:14; 29:17, 25); and once it specifies “walking with stubbornness of heart” (29:18).
17. Deuteronomy 5:33; 8:6; 10:12; 11:19, 22; 13:6; 19:9; 26:17; 28:9; 30:16. This does not include 11:28, which describes walking away from Yahweh’s way in pursuit of other gods.
18. See G. Sauer, “הלךhlk to go,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1:369
19. Eugene H. Merrill, “הָלַךְ (hālak),” in New International Dictionary, 1:1033.
20. F. J. Helfmeyer, “הָלַךְhālakh,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 403.
21. Helfmeyer, 3:396–97; cf. Friedrich Nötscher, Gotteswege und Menschenwege in der Bibel und in Qumran, Bonner Biblische Beiträge 15 (Bonn: Hanstein, 1958), 29.
22. Deuteronomy 4:37; 7:8, 13; 10:15; 15:16; 23:6.
23. Deuteronomy 5:10; 6:5; 7:9; 10:12; 11:1, 13, 22; 13:4; 19:9; 30:6, 16, 20.
24. This can be split between Israel’s care for foreigners (Deut 10:18–19 [2x]) and to describe a favored wife (21:15–16 [3x]).
25. P. J. J. S. Els, “אָהַב (‘āhab),” in New International Dictionary, 1:287.
26. A pioneering study of this was William L. Moran, “Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25.1 (1963): 77–84. For a brief overview of this discussion, see Bill T. Arnold, “The Love-Fear Antinomy in Deuteronomy 5–11, ” Vetus Testamentum 61.4 (2011): 552–56.
27. J. Bergman, A. O. Haldar, and Gerhard Wallis, “אָהַב‘āhabh,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 115. Cf. Jenni’s statement, “[אהב] means, therefore, something like ‘to exercise upright loyalty toward the covenant partner’; and, although the Old Testament uses it in a religious sense, it belongs to the language of the covenant idea.” E. Jenni, “אהב‘hb to love,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1:52–53.
28. Jenni, 52. Dennis J. McCarthy took the treaty language a step further, arguing that it is founded on the father-son relationship. “Notes on the Love of God in Deuteronomy and the Father-Son Relationship between Israel and Yahweh,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 27.2 (1965): 147.
29. See J. W. McKay’s concluding remarks in “Man’s Love for God in Deuteronomy and the Father/Teacher—Son/Pupil Relationship,” Vetus Testamentum 22.4 (1972): 434–35.
30. For a survey of alternative views, see Arnold, “Love-Fear Antinomy,” 556–57.
31. Arnold, 561–62.
32. Once it is a noun for “labor” (Deut 26:6); twenty-four times it describes laborers “slave/servant” (3:24; 5:14 [2x], 15, 21; 6:21; 9:27; 12:12, 18; 15:15, 17; 16:11, 12, 14; 20:11; 23:16; 24:18, 22; 28:68; 29:1; 32:36, 43; 34:5, 11); eight times it describes the act of labor “to work” (5:12, 13, 18, 19; 21:3, 4; 28:39, 48); and six times it describes a location as a “place of slavery (i.e., Egypt)” (5:6; 6:12; 7:8; 8:14; 13:6; 13:11).
33. Six times it describes Israel’s “service” to Yahweh (Deut 6:13; 10:12, 20; 11:13; 13:5; 28:47); eighteen times it expresses a prohibition against serving foreign deities (4:19, 28; 5:9; 7:4, 16; 8:19; 11:16; 13:3, 7, 14; 17:3; 28:14, 36, 64; 29:17, 25; 30:17; 31:20); and twice it describes foreign people serving their gods (12:2, 30).
34. There is debate over whether לבב, which physically corresponds to the heart organ, serves as the source of emotions in Hebrew thought (like it does in our contemporary culture) or rational thought. See Carolyn Leeb, “Translating the Hebrew Body into English Metaphor,” in The Social Sciences and Biblical Translation, ed. Dietmar Neufeld, Symposium Series 41 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 110–11; cf. Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), 40–55.
35. The modern definitive study on נֶפֶשׁ is Hans Walter Wolff, “nepeš—Needy Man,” in Anthropology of the Old Testament, 10–25. Wolff famously concluded that נֶפֶשׁ certainly does not mean “soul” but “is designed to be seen together with the whole form of man” (10). This view has become popular among Old Testament scholars, e.g., Ellis R. Brotzman, “Man and the Meaning of נֶפֶשׁ,” Bibliotheca Sacra 145.580 (1988): 409. However, contemporary objections to a holistic view of נֶפֶשׁ in the Old Testament do exist. See Richard C. Steiner, Disembodied Souls: The Nefesh in Israel and Kindred Spirits in the Ancient Near East, with an Appendix on the Katumuwa Inscription, Ancient Near East Monographs 11 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 124–27.
36. All three terms occur together in 1 Chronicles 28:9 but not in the same grammatical sense as Deuteronomy 10:12. Also, the phrasing of “serve (עבד) [Yahweh] with all your heart/mind (לֵבָב)” sans soul/being (נֶפֶשׁ) occurs in 1 Samuel 12:20, 24.
37. C. Westermann, “עֶבֶד‘ebed servant,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, 2:826.
38. Cf. Eugene Carpenter, “עָבָד (‘ābad),” in New International Dictionary, 3:305–6.
39. Helmer Ringgren, U. Rüterswörden, and H. Simian-Yofre, “עָבַד ‘ābad,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 10 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 386.
40. Ingrid Riesener, Der Stammעבדim Alten Testament: Eine Wortuntersuchung unter Berücksichtigung neuerer sprachwissenschaftlicher Methoden, Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 149 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 206.
41. In Deuteronomy 7:8 the object is “promises,” whereas in verses 9 and 12 it is “covenant” and “loyalty.”
42. Once it describes Yahweh’s commands (Deut 5:32); three times it is Moses’s commands (12:28; 13:1; 24:8); once it is the priests’ instructions (24:8); once it is the month of Abib (16:1); once it is the Sabbath (5:12); once it is a person’s word (33:9); once it is what you are taught (17:10); once it is a promise/vow (23:24); twenty times it is [Yahweh’s] commandments (מצות) (4:2; 5:10, 29; 6:17, 25; 7:9; 8:1, 2, 6; 11:8, 22; 13:5, 19; 15:5; 19:9; 26:18; 27:1; 28:1, 9, 13); once it is his statutes (חקים) (16:12); once it is his “judgments” (משׁפטים) (7:12); seven times it is his commandments and statutes (4:40; 6:2, 3; 10:13; 28:15, 45; 30:10), five times it is his statutes and judgments (4:6; 5:1; 11:32; 12:1; 26:16), four times it is his commandments, statutes, and judgments (7:11; 8:11; 26:17; 20:16), once it is “keep the keeping of the commandments, statutes, and judgments” (the phrase occurs 1x, but the root occurs 2x [see 11:1]); three times it is Torah (31:12; 32:46; it occurs once with a negation [see 28:58]); once it is Torah and statutes (17:19); and once it is “words of this covenant” (29:8).
43. This is expressed thirteen times through a passive form “watch [yourself]” (Deut 2:4; 4:9, 15, 23; 6:12; 8:11; 11:16; 12:13, 19, 30; 15:9; 23:10; 24:8) and once as an active imperative “watch your [soul]” (4:9).
44. Deuteronomy 6:17; 11:22.
45. G. Sauer, “שׁמרšmr to watch, guard, keep,” in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, 3:1382.
46. See García López, “שָׁמַרšāmar,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, trans. David E. Green and Douglas W. Stott, vol. 15 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 291–93.
47. Keith N. Schoville, “שָׁמַר (šāmar),” in New International Dictionary, 4:183.
48. Carl F. Keil, The Pentateuch, trans. James Martin, Commentary on the Old Testament, ed. Carl F. Keil and Franz Delitzsch, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1866; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 898–99.
49. Wilhelm Julius Schröeder, Deuteronomy; or, the Fifth Book of Moses, ed. and trans. Abraham Gosman, A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 3, ed. John Peter Lange and Philip Schaff (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1879), 114.
50. August Dillman, Die Bücher Numeri, Deuteronomium und Josua, 2nd ed., Kurz-gefasstes Exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament 13 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1886), 284 (my translation); cf. Otto, Deuteronomium 1–11, 2:1033–34.
51. Woods, Deuteronomy, 171–72.
52. Samuel R. Driver, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Deuteronomy, 3rd ed., International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1902), 124–25.
53. Cf. Becker, Gottesfurcht, 99–100; and Riesener, Der Stamm, 205–6.
54. Reinhold Sander, Furcht und Liebe im Palästinischen Judentum, Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament 4/16 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1935), 3–12. Other works made similar arguments. For example, in his seminal study of ירא, Plath acknowledged that “fearing God” is often used as a parallel expression to “keeping his commandments” and “walking in his ways.” He further explained that it is used in close parallel with specific verbs such as “love” and “serve” with “walk” in a subordinate position. Furcht Gottes, 33. Interestingly, he did not discuss “keep his commandments” in 10:13.
55. Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. A. Baker, 2 vols. Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, [1961] 1967), 2:299, italics original.
56. Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; repr., Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 83–84.
57. Cf. his Appendix A:V:a, Weinfeld, 332–34; cf. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11, 435. For additional commentaries that adopt this view, see Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 204; Richard D. Nelson, Deuteronomy: A Commentary, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 136; cf. Daniel I. Block, Deuteronomy, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 270.
58. Thompson, Deuteronomy, 164–65. See also Patrick D. Miller Jr., Deuteronomy, Interpretation: A Biblical Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 124–25; and Wright, Deuteronomy, 144–45.
59. McConville, Deuteronomy, 199.
60. Johannes Peter Floss, Jahwe dienen-Göttern dienen: Terminologische, literarische und semantische Untersuchung einer theologischen Aussage zum Gottesverhältnis im Alten Testament, Bonner Biblische Beiträge 45 (Köln-Bonn: Hanstein, 1975), 323–24.
61. Duane L. Christensen, Deuteronomy 1:1–21:9, rev. ed., Word Biblical Commentary 6A (Nashville: Nelson, 2001), 203–4.
62. Eugene H. Merrill, Deuteronomy, New American Commentary 4 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994), 201–2.
63. Deuteronomy 8:19; 13:3, 7, 13; 17:3; 28:14; 29:18, 25. Similar pairings are found outside of Deuteronomy (Exod 10:8, 11, 24; 12:31; Josh 23:16; Judg 2:19; 1 Sam 26:19; 1 Kgs 9:6; 2 Kgs 21:21; Jer 11:10; 13:10; 16:11; 44:3; Ezek 20:39).
64. Deuteronomy 5:29; 6:2; 8:6; 13:5 [4]; 17:19; 28:58; 31:12. Similar pairings are also found outside of Deuteronomy (Ps 119:63; Eccl 12:13). Other scholars have also noticed the significance of the pair; cf. Stähli, “יראyr’ to fear,” 575.

The Pastor After 2020

By Joel D. Lawrence

[Joel D. Lawrence is President of the Center for Pastor Theologians in Oak Park, Illinois.]

[This is the third article in the three-part series “The Pastor Theologian and the Pattern of the Age,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 1, 3, and 4, 2022.]

The Crisis Of Western Liberalism

We are living in a moment of crisis for Western liberalism. The year 2020 and its aftermath were not the beginning of the crisis but rather an accelerant of an already present weakness. On both the left and the right, people are questioning the premises of Western liberalism. On the right, we have calls for “illiberal democracy,” a philosophy pursued by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and approved by numerous pundits on the American right.[1] This notion claims that because liberalism promotes the selfish interests of individuals, it is not sufficient to serve the interest of and secure the tradition of the nation.[2] Therefore, we need more authoritarian leadership to protect the national interest. On the left, we have claims that Western liberalism is fundamentally racist because it was created by and aims to serve a powerful elite, leading to a rise in Americans who argue that the United States should embrace socialism.

Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism failed because liberalism succeeded. He writes, “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.”[3] What he means is that liberalism, founded on the self-interest of humans, will inevitably lead to a factionalized, disintegrating, self-protective society in which overarching goals of society that transcend individuals are lost as each person is trained by the liberal anthropology to be an autonomous individual—not connected in any essential way to a larger community. Liberalism, positing the self-actualization and self-definition of individuals, is a tradition-dissolving philosophy that views tradition as a barrier to the achievement of the self and so leads to ever-deepening factions of self-interested autonomy. Such a traditionless society cannot long endure. Barbara Walter, in her recent book How Civil Wars Start, having studied civil wars around the world since World War II, shows that the primary predictor of a civil war is when a political society turns from a shared ideology to an identity that is focused on the self or the in-group the self belongs to. Though Walter doesn’t make the same point about the logical conclusion of Western liberalism, her account of what creates instability in society aligns with Deneen’s account of the success-driven failure of liberalism.[4]

My goal in this lecture is not to solve the crisis of liberalism. I don’t know the course of the future of liberalism, though I do believe Western liberal societies are in for some difficult times ahead. I don’t see a clear path that leads to a unified American society, and so I believe that we will continue to experience fracturing in our civic society. Though Christianity on both the left and the right has often believed that the progress promised by Western liberalism is the advance of God’s rule,[5] there is no theological basis for believing that the Western liberal order will avoid the fate of all other ideologies, which do not last but are replaced by something else.

As a pastor theologian, my primary concern is with the health of the body of Christ. I believe that the apocalypse of 2020 is forcing the church to ask significant questions about how we understand our presence in the world and how that presence has been captured by the pattern of the age. My goal in this lecture is to encourage the church toward a faithful witness in the present and coming crisis by calling us to a nonconformed presence in the world—to be ambassadors who represent God’s political rule, even as the political rule of earthly kingdoms falters.

For the church to be faithful witnesses, to be citizens of the holy nation of God, we must have pastors prepared to shepherd the body of Christ through the challenging days ahead. To prepare pastors for this task, we must reclaim the pastor theologian as the primary identity of the pastor. The church needs a vanguard of pastor theologians who will shepherd God’s people by producing a robust ecclesial theology. A theology that is rooted in and aimed at the local church. A theology that is the living font of the church’s life in the world. A theology that shapes the church’s life together by centering the church on the common objects of love that are ours as followers of Jesus. A theology that forms the church’s theological imagination and so frees the church from that pattern of the age. Only then will the church be free to love and serve the world as those who are, through the Spirit, the presence of the crucified and resurrected Christ on earth.

In this lecture, I want to offer a vision of the church’s non-conformed presence in the world. But before I do, let me offer a brief recap of where we have been so far in these lectures. In the first lecture, I suggested that the political anthropology of Western liberalism defines humans as self-interested, autonomous individuals. This anthropological vision brings with it a humanity enthralled by the enchantments of mammon, longing for the power to ensure its own self-defined identity. As this vision has expanded across the globe, it has become evident that Western liberalism’s promises cannot be universally granted, and so our age has become the age of anger, an anger deriving from the reality that billions have been promised a life of self-interested autonomy but have not had those promises kept.

In the second lecture, I traced the church’s conformity to this pattern, demonstrating how the church has adopted the Western liberal political anthropology as her own and so been captured by the enchantments of mammon that dominate our age, a capture seen in the church’s self-interested striving for worldly power to protect ourselves. This striving has also infected the church with anger, an anger that has burst forth in the past few years, born out of the sense that we are losing what we have been promised, having accepted Western liberalism’s promises as our own.

If, as I argue, the church is conformed to a particular anthropology and its effects that make up the pattern of the age, then what remains for me to do today is to propose an alternative anthropology that can enliven the church in our life and mission and free us from our conformity. So in this lecture, I turn from lament to hope, from the conformity of the church to the pattern of the age to the freedom of the church as those released from the pattern. I am proposing that the church is called to live as the Sabbath presence of God, an anthropological vision that frames the church’s life together, the church’s political life in the world by calling us to be the Sabbath people of God on earth.

In my previous lectures, we have gone back in history to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, to the Reformation, and the medieval world it sought to overturn. This morning we must go further back, way back, all the way to “in the beginning.”

Sabbath Politics: Genesis 1–2

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Gen 1:2–3).[6] So begins the story of God and his creation. We know it well: the origin story of the light that bursts forth, the stars that shine, the earth filled with fruit, and humanity created to dwell in the majestic world of God’s creative love. In my first lecture I stated that politics is anthropology, the ordering of society based on human nature. And that is true but not complete because, biblically, politics is not merely anthropology; politics is theology, the ordering of the world based on the nature of the creator God. As such, Genesis 1 should be understood as the political ordering of the heavens and the earth. If politics is about how to order life so that we can live together in society, then Genesis 1 is the foundational account of political order, the picture of God organizing the world under his rule. The six days of creation, the “And God said . . .” and “so it was . . . ,” describes the Lord God creating politics, that is, creating an ordered universe under the sovereign ruler of the cosmos. This political ordering is the shaping of the world that will prosper under God’s good rule. In his creation, the Lord demonstrates his heart and nature as the Triune God—the God who is love, who in God’s very self is ordered as Father, Son, and Spirit; united as one God in the perfection of love; the one who is holy, holy, holy; the very template of peace, prosperity, and mutual self-giving. And this God creates a world to live in his grace, in his care, under his truly benevolent rule.

On the sixth day of the political ordering of the universe, the Triune God establishes his image on earth—humanity as male and female, created to reflect the divine life. As male and female, shared inheritors of the life and promise of God, Adam and Eve are a template of humanity living under God’s political rule: fruitful and multiplying, truly free, not in self-interested, independent autonomy but in the self-giving love of God and neighbor as they dwell in life together in the presence of the Lord.

In Genesis 2:1–3 we come to the culmination of the political ordering of the heavens and the earth, the seventh-day Sabbath:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation (ESV).

There are many books on the Sabbath these days. Almost all of them are in the genre of spiritual formation, having to do with how individuals can find rest in a manic world by keeping the Sabbath. While I have benefitted from and appreciate the emphasis on Sabbath as a spiritual discipline, I don’t believe we understand the fullness of the biblical teaching on the Sabbath if we view it as a spiritual discipline of rest, because this misses the primary nature of Sabbath. Fundamentally, Sabbath is a political concept.[7]

The word used in Genesis 2:2 to state that God rests is שבת: “On the seventh day God rested” (i.e., sabbathed). What does it mean that God sabbathed? Commenting on these verses, biblical scholar Scott Hafemann writes, “God ‘rests’ not because he is exhausted, but as the sign that there is nothing more to provide. . . . The King's rest on the ‘Sabbath’ day of creation declares the good news that under his reign everything in his realm is as it should be.”[8] In the ancient world the notion of the king at rest is a declaration that the realm is secure, the people provided for, the peace of the nation assured. At the end of the sixth day, the world is ordered according to God’s loving, giving, peaceful nature, and all is as it should be. God has established a universe under his rule. The earth is productive through the Lord’s providential creation. Humans as the image of God are present on earth, not as sovereigns but as servants, not as self-interested, autonomous individuals but as a community of shared blessing, peace, love, and rest, called to live for God and neighbor. The Sabbath is the declaration of life intended by God. The creation is to live under his Sabbath rule and so live in his provision and protection. Genesis 2 reveals God providing for his creation through the fruit of the earth and shows a communion of humans living in the peace of God’s protection, secure in his loving political rule.

This is a vision of a world in which there is no war, violence, or competition for resources because God provides through the fruit of the earth and the labor of humans to bring in that fruit. This means a world in which there is no factionalism, no nationalism, no racism, no “us” versus “them,” because all are one under the Sabbath rule of the Lord. There is no injustice because there is no need to accumulate power to secure our own autonomous vision of life for ourselves, no need to amass resources for the sake of securing our own. There is no enchantment with mammon because we are secure, not in our own power but in God’s power. There is no anger because we are not striving to achieve our own vision of ourselves but living securely in God’s presence. There is Sabbath. There is rest. There is shalom. This is the Sabbath rest of the political order of the cosmos—the Creator King is at rest; the realm is secure; the people are provided for. All is as it should be.

This is Sabbath politics—the political life humanity was created to enjoy—and it is the life we lost when we rejected God’s political rule over us in order to exert our own. This, of course, is how the story continues in Genesis 3.

Politics East Of Eden: Genesis 3–4

At the beginning of these lectures, I said that the pattern of the age of Romans 12 is rooted in the rebellion of Genesis 3. I have described the pattern of the age as the structures and ideologies that dominate our age, the wisdom of the world, living according to the things that are seen rather than things that are unseen. These structures and ideologies arise from the human heart in rebellion against God, the rebellion depicted in Genesis 3.

If my reading of Genesis 1–2 as the political ordering of the cosmos is correct, then Genesis 3 is best understood as a political rebellion against the Sabbath politics of the Lord—a rebellion through which humans reject the ordering of the world under God’s rule, instead believing we can be our own rulers. This is the sinful condition, and it is a political condition. It is about who rules, who has authority, who has power. When the serpent tempts Adam and Eve, he does so by declaring to them that if they would take of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would become “like God,” a proposition that tempts Adam and Eve to believe there is a better way than God’s way. After they take the fruit, God declares that Adam and Eve have become “like us,” a condition with a specific definition: knowing good and evil. But what does it mean that we have become like God, knowing good and evil?

Bonhoeffer in Creation and Fall suggests that this means what it says: humanity was never intended to have the knowledge of good and evil.[9] If humanity didn’t know good and evil prior to ingesting the fruit, what did we know? We knew God. We were created to live in unbroken fellowship with the Lord, walking directly with him in his presence, an immediate life of communion with the Lord. In this we would live in utter dependence on God, trusting in every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord, confident that his word was our very life. But we were not intended to scrutinize that word, to sit in judgment over that word, to appeal to ourselves as the analytic center through which we determine whether or not the word of God is practical, beneficial, or effective. We were not intended to have the knowledge of good and evil because we were not intended to be our own gods, the center of our own lives. Instead, we were called to obey the Lord, trusting in God as our benevolent ruler, and in this obedience to God we were free to dwell with him and our neighbor in unbroken unity with hearts directed away from ourselves toward God and neighbor.

Because of this, we can see that it is the knowledge of good and evil that separates us from God. This is the content of our rebellion against God. In taking for themselves the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve break fellowship with God and neighbor by exercising autonomy. Autonomy derives from two Greek words, αὐτός (“self ”) and νόμος (“law”). In the rebellion of Genesis 3, Adam and Eve reject life under the rule of the Lord and instead choose a life of autonomy, of self-law, becoming a law unto themselves, becoming their own lords, their own gods. And in doing this, the human orientation to the world was turned from a God-referential life of obedience to a self-referential life as autonomous, independent individuals, separated from the fundamental community with God and neighbor that we were created to enjoy in the Sabbath politics of the Lord.

After the rebellion, God pronounces the curse that their sin brought to the world, declaring the implications of this new reality. Where there was to be Sabbath, there will now be striving. Where there was to be rest, there will now be struggle. Where there was to be love of God and neighbor, there will now be self-interest. Where there was to be obedience, there will now be autonomy. As a result, Adam and Eve are removed from God’s Sabbath presence, and an angel is set on the east side of the garden to guard the way to the tree of life. And here history East of Eden begins, and political organization, intended to be the ordering of the world under the Sabbath rule of God, begins to take shape as East of Eden politics. By East of Eden politics, I mean the ordering of the world by self-oriented, autonomous humanity, organizing the world according to our self-referential knowledge. According to Andrew Goddard, “The world today . . . is not God’s good creation of life, love, and freedom in which humans in communion with God mediate his presence in the world. It is the counter-creation of rebellious human beings and the powers bearing the marks of its rejection of the Creator.”[10]

This East of Eden political reality takes shape in Genesis 4, focused on the figure of Cain.[11] In this passage, Cain murders his brother, inaugurating the violence of self-assertion in history. God confronts Cain and pronounces a curse, declaring that Cain will be a “restless wanderer on the earth” (Gen 4:12), no longer dwelling under God’s Sabbath rule but now asserting his own self-rule over his own life. History becomes Cainite as Cain builds a city. This city, Enoch, built in the land of Nod east of Eden, is the symbol of the new political ordering of the world marked by the rebellion of humanity. Cain, knowing his vulnerability, now builds for himself a city for protection, secured by his own resources, power, and initiative.

Nod means wandering, and so we have the irony: declared by God to be a wanderer, Cain rejects God’s judgment by refusing to accept the consequences of his rebellion and instead chooses to settle in the land of wandering. According to Jacques Ellul, Nod is the nowhere land, the counterfeit Eden.[12] Eden was to be a place of security, of peace, of settlement in the presence of the Lord, where humans are provided for by him in his Sabbath political realm. Nod and its city Enoch is the place of counterfeit settlement, of humanity endeavoring to secure peace and security for itself through its own autonomy. We see in this that the pattern of the age is the human attempt to mitigate the effects of human rebellion against God, to create for ourselves the conditions that we have lost by rejecting God as our Sabbath Lord.

And it is here, in the East of Eden attempts to create a secure social reality, that life becomes deeply insecure and history becomes Hobbesian, the war of all against all. Living outside the Sabbath rule of the Lord, humanity must build our own structures and consolidate our power to secure what we lost. Having lost the Sabbath presence of the Lord, we must now form the world through our autonomy. This is the tragedy of the world East of Eden—we have lost Sabbath because we have rejected God. But we long for Sabbath. We know in our souls that we are restless wanderers on the earth. We fear our vulnerability, and so we work to ensure our own security through our own efforts. However, we find in this another tragedy. In pursuing security, provision, and protection for ourselves, we create an insecure, unequal, and dangerous world. As Hobbes saw, we gather into associations for the sake of protection, but so does everyone else. These self-interested associations of protection create an unstable, unjust, violent, and perilous world. The great tragedy of life East of Eden is that the more we strive to secure our lives, the more insecure the world becomes.

One of the great strengths of Western liberalism is that it recognizes the reality of humanity in our fallen condition.[13] As those in rebellion against God, we are self-interested. As those in rebellion against God, we are autonomous. In our sinful condition in life East of Eden, we are individuals who pursue our own needs and work to secure them. In this Hobbes is, in my estimation, the most honest political philosopher of them all. He knew the human condition. He saw the inherent instability of life in a political world dominated by competition for power. His error was that he located this in the state of nature. But what we find in Genesis 1–4 is that there is no such thing as the state of nature. It is a fiction of the philosophers. Instead there is the state of creation (Sabbath politics) and the state of rebellion (East of Eden politics). Hobbes rightly saw that society was deeply competitive. Rousseau rightly saw that humans in society are prone to vanity and injustice. Locke saw rightly that we need to create laws to protect our property. They built a political system that recognized this vision of humanity.

The Church As Sabbath Presence

It may be that Western liberalism is the best system possible for organizing society East of Eden. It may be that this is the best we can do to keep the passions of the self-interested human heart in check. It may be that Western liberalism, which has brought wealth (mammon?) to many is the best we can hope for. It may be that, East of Eden, there is no better way. But what Western liberalism cannot do is describe for us the world of Genesis 1–2, the world of Sabbath as intended by God, as created by God. This means that Western liberalism cannot reveal humanity as created by the Lord; no East of Eden political ideology can. So who can? Who can be a demonstration of humanity as intended by God?

The church can. We are called by our Lord to be the unique community that is called through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit to represent the seventh day. Therefore, the church is called to be a nation that doesn’t share the common objects of love of the pattern of the age, that doesn’t give our hearts to the things of the age. We are called to be the Sabbath presence on earth, not engaged in the war of all against all but a holy people, living under the Sabbath reign of God, a people who by the Spirit are being freed from East of Eden striving.

We are called, not to protect our own self-interested autonomy, not to be divided by the worldly markers of Jew and gentile, slave and free, male and female, rich and poor, Black and White. We are called to be a just society because we are the Sabbath society who rests in God’s peace, who trusts in God’s provision, who shares in God’s bounty with all in our Sabbath community. We are called to be united not by national citizenship or the goals of fleeting nation states but by gathering around Jesus the Christ, the Sabbath one of God, who didn’t live as a self-interested autonomous individual but instead lived in obedience to his Father, who was the last Adam, who obeyed where the first Adam rebelled. He didn’t live according to the knowledge of good and evil but according to the word of his Father. He didn’t exercise his right to protect himself through the powers East of Eden but told his disciple to put away his sword.

We are the body of this Christ, called to be the Sabbath nation on earth, declaring to the world East of Eden that there is a different way, the way of the Lord and his Sabbath politics. We have this vocation. We have the word of God. We have his vision for humanity and the world. And we have the Spirit, who frees us from our conformity to the pattern of the age and makes us a light that shines in the darkness.

Conclusion: The Pastor Theologian And The Pattern Of The Age

And we have pastors, women and men called to shepherd the church to be faithful witnesses of the Sabbath rule of God. But we are too often failing in the calling. We have become conformed to the pattern of the age, given our hearts to the ideologies of the wisdom of the world, captured by a political vision that is not our own, by the enchantments of mammon that demonstrate our trust in ourselves, by the age of anger that reveals we are believing in promises not given to us.

There are no techniques that will lead us out of our conformity to the pattern of the age. There are no ready-made programs we can purchase that will free us from our capture. There are no marketing firms that can design a slick campaign that will guide the church through the tests of our time. We have become too dependent on these tools, too trusting in techniques and programs that promise to solve our problems and grow our churches.

So what is to be done? There is deep, fervent, and courageous theological work to be done, and this must be done by the shepherds of the church—by pastor theologians. The church needs pastors who minister out of the core identity of theologian, whose whole selves are given to the task of shepherding the church in her theological mission. The church needs pastor theologians whose imaginations are fired by a vision of God, allowing them to see through the pattern of the age. The church needs pastor theologians who will patiently and graciously shepherd teachers, plumbers, and doctors whose lives are shaped by the imaginative framework created by the pattern of the age to see instead the world that has been punctured by the cross. The church needs pastor theologians whose preaching reframes the world theologically and re-narrates for our people in ways that counter the vision that has shaped our visible world.

Will you be a pastor theologian? Will you be a servant of God’s church? Will you courageously and joyfully give yourself to the mission of shepherding the Sabbath people of God out of our conformity to the pattern of the age so that we might truly be the Sabbath presence of God on earth?

Notes

1. The list is long, but perhaps most prominent is Christian social commentator and author Rod Dreher, whose Twitter feed in mid-2022 was filled with praise for Orbán.
2. See Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made (New York: Random House, 2021).
3. Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 3.
4. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them (New York: Crown, 2021).
5. On the left, we see this confidence in God’s progress in the world in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, whose Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912) connected the advance of left-leaning causes to the inbreaking of the kingdom of God. On the right, we see this in the rise and influence of the Moral Majority, who believed it was the church’s job to utilize politics for the sake of moralizing society, which is the means of God’s advance in history.
6. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the NIV.
7. The book that comes closest to engaging this vision is Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017). In this work, Brueggemann outlines the economic implications of the Sabbath as a means of calling Western Christians to resist the formative effects of acquisitive capitalism. I am grateful for Brueggemann’s insight, as it takes us closer to the biblical theology of the Sabbath than do many of the spiritual formation works. However, I believe that we don’t fully grasp the biblical vision of the Sabbath unless we explore its political dimension and the implications of this for our discipleship.
8. Scott Hafemann, “Work as the Divine Curse: Toil and Grace East of Eden,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 2.1 (2015): 9.
9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 3, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 103–10.
10. Andrew Goddard, Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul (London: Paternoster, 1996), 86.
11. My understanding of Cain is indebted to Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, trans. Dennis Pardee (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 1–9.
12. Ellul, 3.
13. See Robert Tracy McKenzie, We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), who argues that the founders of America had a clear vision of human fallenness and built the United States governmental structures in view of the sinful condition of humanity.

The Church After 2020

By Joel D. Lawrence

[Joel D. Lawrence is President of the Center for Pastor Theologians in Oak Park, Illinois.]

[This is the second article in the three-part series “The Pastor Theologian and the Pattern of the Age,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 1, 3, and 4, 2022.]

The Church’s Conformity

At the end of World War II, living in the ruins of another apocalyptic time, a young French sociologist and theologian named Jacques Ellul set himself the project of looking at the world from amid the ashes of that great inferno. Ellul wanted to understand the ideological commitments that shaped the West, the society that proclaimed itself the most advanced in history but used that progress to build weapons that destroyed millions of lives. Why had the West taken this course? What were the ideological commitments that led to World War II? And how were those ideologies still structuring the pattern of his age?

But as a follower of Jesus, Ellul was also intent on understanding the way that the church has been conformed to the pattern of the age. In the introduction to his 1948 book, Presence in the Modern World, Ellul says, “I had to write a short and simple little book about the presence of the Christian in the world of today.”[1] Ellul pursued this joint sociological and theological project over the next forty years, writing over fifty books and one thousand articles on the social structures of the modern world, the underlying commitments of our time that shaped the world, and the church’s conformity to the modern world.

In these lectures, I am engaging in a mini-Ellulian project, sketching the pattern of our age and the church’s conformity to that pattern. We began this project by exploring three threads of the pattern that dominate our age: First, the political anthropology of Western liberalism, which defines humans as self-interested, autonomous individuals and shapes society based on the freedom of individuals to pursue their own self-determined ends. Second, the enchantments of mammon, the financial dominance of our age, created by the need for self-interested humans to acquire resources to secure their autonomous lives, a reality that reveals that mammon is, at its essence, power. Third, the age of anger, in which vast numbers of people in our world today are disillusioned by the fact that the promises of Western liberalism have not been delivered.

The task before us today is to reflect on the church’s conformity to the pattern of the age, investigating how these threads have captured the church, misshaping our presence in the world.

But before we turn to this task, I want to give a reminder of the overall context of these lectures: a call to a vision of the pastor theologian. It is my conviction that the key to the renewal of the church is a renewal of the identity of the pastor as pastor theologian. Over the past two centuries, a deep chasm has opened between the church and the academy. While I have no doubt that there must be a vibrant academy, I also have no doubt that the divide between church and academy has been unhealthy for both and that both are weakened when they are distant from, and even suspicious of, one another.

The primary problem is that this division has situated theology in the academy rather than in the church. In the mind of most Christians today, when they think of theology they think of the academic production of theology. I experienced this personally when I was leaving a full-time, tenured position as a professor of theology to become the senior pastor of a local church and was asked by a friend, “Are you sad that you’re no longer going to be a theologian?” This question makes the issue clear: pastors are not viewed as theologians, and because of this, theology is viewed not as the living font of ecclesial life but as a discipline for academic specialists. But for much of the church’s history, pastors were her primary theologians. Irenaeus and Augustine were bishops; Calvin and Luther, parish pastors. Barth’s theological revolution took shape as he pastored the people of Safenwil, Switzerland. Bonhoeffer’s theological vision of the church’s renewed relation to the modern world was formed as he pastored expats in Barcelona and children in Berlin. These great theologians engaged in the theological task that arose from and was intended for the church’s life in the world.

A key reason for the conformity of the church to the pattern of the age is that pastors are not the theologians of the church. To free the church from its capture, we need pastor theologians who will give their hearts and minds, and yes, even their lives to understanding our conformity and shaping the theological imagination of our congregations against the imaginative formation of the age. The year 2020 made it clear that the church is not immune to these ideologies but conformed to them. That the church looks little different from the world, that the church is divided along partisan political lines, that the anger of the age has infected the church, reveal our conformity to the pattern of the age.

The Pattern Of The Church’s Conformity

So let’s turn now to the work of understanding how the church has been conformed to the pattern of the age, beginning first with conformity to the political anthropology of Western liberalism.

Conformity To Liberal Political Anthropology

To see how the church’s conformity to liberal anthropology took hold, we need to again look at the roots of Western liberalism. In his book The Unintended Reformation, Brad Gregory writes about the historical process through which the church was brought under the control of the state. Prior to the Reformation and early Enlightenment, the idea that God ruled through the church and the state was agreed upon by all; the debate was around which power, the church or the state, had ultimate earthly authority, a debate symbolized by the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

But the post-Reformation period ended this debate. According to Gregory, following the doctrinal disagreements and societal upheavals of the Wars of Religion, political authorities seized the opportunity to exert power, evidenced in the legal principle of cuius regio, eius religio, established at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This phrase, which translates to “whose realm, their religion,” meant that the political ruler would determine the religion of a realm. While ostensibly keeping the notion of the church and state sharing authority, this settlement began the process by which the state would gain supremacy over the church.[2] It is in the context of the states’ assertion of priority that the Western liberal political anthropology developed. According to Gregory, “The ‘wars of religion’ prompted dramatic innovations in political thought that, beginning most clearly with Hobbes, rejected the idea that had been at the heart of politics for well over a millennium—that a ruler’s principal obligation was to protect and promote God’s truth as the foundation that made possible shared Christian life in fidelity to Jesus’s commands.”[3] These early liberal thinkers saw the political structures of Christendom descend into the chaos of war and so devised a new way to shape civil society that would not be susceptible to religious sectarian instability.

To do this, they built new political structures on the foundation of a new anthropology. In this vision of humanity, the government would protect the rights of all to worship as they choose in private but bracket the role religion plays in the public operations of the state. In this settlement, which Mark Lilla calls “The Great Separation,”[4] faith becomes not a comprehensive narrative of the world but a privatized affair in which individuals choose how to worship and who to associate with, making faith “one wedge in the pie of an individual life.”[5] The result of this, says Gregory, is that today, “Whether in Europe or North America, our respective sovereign states dictate what individuals and institutions can and cannot do in exercising religious faith,”[6] a situation that he calls, with a nod to Immanuel Kant, “religion . . . within the limits of the state alone.”[7] To keep the peace, the liberal tradition invested great power in the state with a clear program of placing the churches under the constraints of the state. In many ways, the Western church has benefitted from this: we are free to worship as we wish, free to gather as we choose. But there is a dark side of religious freedom, which is playing out today and reveals how the church is conformed to the Western liberal anthropology.

We can see this in how, in the modern state, Christianity is easily instrumentalized, viewed as a means of producing virtuous citizens for liberal states. The great separation means that Christianity must prove itself to be “useful” to the goals of the state by providing general virtues like loyalty, duty, and sacrifice. Generalizing morality, Christianity is seen as valuable insofar as it produces obedient citizens who support the efforts of the state.[8] By this, the church is easily turned to national ends, making the church a servant of the ideologies of the state.

Through this the Western liberal vision of the self-interested individual formed the church’s vision of freedom. Subtly the liberal ideal of the free autonomous self came to shape the church toward pursuing its own self-interest in society. The church made a bargain with the state: we will provide support to national aims, even declaring those aims to be divinely ordained, and the state will give us freedom. But this freedom was defined as the liberal vision of self-interest, leading the church to a factionalized and competitive posture toward society by becoming committed to protecting our own interests. Subtly the church becomes a faction of the democratic apparatus, pursuing our vision of society through the competitive practices of Western liberalism. In doing this, the church is shaped to pursue the power of the state for the sake of protecting our religious freedom and self-interest.

Perhaps a historical illustration will help me make the point. I’ve gone this far in these lectures without mentioning Dietrich Bonhoeffer; it’s time to remedy that. As a Bonhoeffer scholar, I am often asked what we can learn from Bonhoeffer’s life.[9] Usually this question is framed around his actions in the conspiracy against Hitler in the late 1930s and 40s when he served as a double agent in the Abwehr, the German Intelligence Agency, feeding information from the military conspirators to the British government. People ask: Did he do the moral thing? Is it ever ethical to lie? While these are interesting questions, I don’t believe that Bonhoeffer’s actions in the 1940s are most informative for us today. Instead, I believe that the most helpful part of Bonhoeffer’s story is found in the mid-1930s, prior to his involvement in the conspiracy to kill Hitler. During this time, as the Nazis rose to power, Hitler moved to appoint bishops who would be Nazi functionaries with the goal of unifying the Protestant churches as a single Pro-Nazi church. Many pastors rejected this move as a violation of the Lutheran tradition of the two kingdoms, in which the church and the state were viewed as the two hands of God, each with its own sphere of autonomous authority.

The pastors who resisted the Nazi takeover formed the Confessing Church. In 1935 this movement published the Barmen Declaration, a confessional statement of their resistance to Hitler’s pursuit of authority over the church. But many pastors who joined the Confessing Church were also members of the Nazi party. The Confessing Church resisted the Nazi takeover of the church, arguing for the freedom of the church vis-à-vis the state, but many were proponents of Nazi ideology. The Confessing Church’s goal was to maintain ecclesial freedom, but it did not condemn the falsehoods of Nazism. In fact, many Confessing Church pastors believed that Hitler was God’s instrument to restore the German nation to its proper place in the world order and so would serve the church by building a strong society that would, in turn, strengthen the church. The Confessing Church was focused on its own freedom, its own societal position, its own self-interested autonomy. But as Karl Barth put it in 1935, “For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.”[10]

For Bonhoeffer, the failure of the Confessing Church was deeply disturbing. It revealed a church accustomed to power, to its authority in society, and to the benefits of a social structure that privileged the church’s role in culture. The church’s failure to look beyond its own self-protection, to take up the cross of Christ through a costly discipleship, was a sign to Bonhoeffer of a deeply compromised church. Rather than serving the suffering, rather than inhabiting a cruciform position in the world, the Confessing Church was intent on protecting its position in society. This experience was the impulse for two of Bonhoeffer’s best-known works: Discipleship, which calls the church to follow Christ into the powerlessness of the cross, and Life Together, which calls the church to understand its unique way of being in the world, a way that must be freed from the triumphalism of a church protecting its own position.[11]

In invoking this example, I want to be clear: I don’t think the United States of 2022 is Germany of 1935. But there are lessons we can learn from the history of the Confessing Church. The Great Separation creates a pattern in which the church, adopting the liberal vision of humanity as self-interested, becomes focused on its own self-interest and defending its own societal position. Believing that its freedoms are God-given, the church turns to a protectionist mode, working to secure a culture in which we are free to live our faith without persecution, electing politicians who will protect us and advance our interests in society.

Over the past decade, many in the evangelical church have experienced the shock of a society moving further into post-Christianity and challenging the church’s sense of freedom. Many in the evangelical church have responded by doubling down on their demand for their own freedom and looking to defend their own position in society. This response is completely in line with the logic of the Western liberal political anthropology, in which self-interested autonomous individuals need power to secure their own freedom. The danger of the self-interested church can be seen more fully as we turn to her conformity to the second ideology of the pattern of the age, the enchantments of mammon.

Conformity To The Enchantments Of Mammon

Having defined humanity as self-interested autonomous individuals, the liberal anthropology ushered in an economic anthropology. If humans are to strive for self-fulfillment, then we must secure the resources for ensuring the future we envision for ourselves, leading to the enchantments of mammon. As the church has adopted the Western liberal vision of humanity, so has the church become enchanted with mammon.

Earlier I referenced Jacques Ellul and his project of understanding the ideologies that shape our world. One of the themes in Ellul’s work is to position the supposedly material things of the “secular” age in the context of the biblical teaching on the principalities and powers, the rebellious forces that stand behind the visible world. In his book Money and Power, Ellul offers an important treatment of mammon, beginning with a key observation: “Scripture seldom looks at money from a monetary standpoint.”[12] In saying this, Ellul wants to position money in its cosmic context, making the case that mammon is not merely money. He says that when we are talking about mammon, “we are talking about something that claims divinity . . . , [which] reveals something exceptional about money. . . . What Jesus is revealing is that money is a power.”[13] Notice he doesn’t say, as the old adage goes, “money is power.” He says that money is a power. Jesus is pointing to the reality that mammon, like all the powers, is a self-acting, autonomous agent working to entangle human souls. Ellul drives this point home by personifying mammon, capitalizing the word and using the pronoun “he” when referring to Mammon.

As a spiritual power, he (Mammon) competes against God for our worship. This isn’t simply a warning against misusing money. According to Ellul, when Jesus says that we can either serve God or Mammon, “[Jesus] is not using a rhetorical figure but pointing out a reality. God as a person and Mammon as a person find themselves in conflict.” Mammon is not neutral, material stuff; Mammon is a counterfeit god. Ellul goes on to say, “Jesus describes the relation between us and one or the other the same way: it is the relationship between servant and master. Mammon can be a master the same way God is; that is, Mammon can be a personal master.”[14]

As the church, we rightly warn against serving Mammon. But the danger of Mammon’s enchantment is his ability to ensnare, not merely through the material stuff of money but as a power—through the promise of power. As a counterfeit god Mammon works to capture the human heart, as did the serpent of old. In doing this Mammon makes us believe we can order our lives according to our own autonomous selves and can acquire the power necessary to secure the life we desire.[15] He tempts us to rely on ourselves while capturing us in the illusion of power. So while money is a danger to the church, the deeper means of our conformity is our enchantment with Mammon, our temptation to worldly power, by the powers of the age that create the pattern of the age.

I propose that the church’s conformity to the enchantments of Mammon is most clearly seen in the quintessential American heresy: the prosperity gospel. When we hear “prosperity gospel,” we probably think of preachers on the Trinity Broadcasting Network who wear slick suits and have even slicker hair. In this version of the prosperity gospel, which we could call the financial prosperity gospel, people are promised bodily healing and financial success by means of “planting seeds,” giving money to preachers and ministries who will pray for our blessing. The financial prosperity gospel is crass and rejected by the great majority of theologians and pastors. But the financial prosperity gospel is merely one manifestation of the more deeply rooted American prosperity gospel.

The American prosperity gospel is the false theological idea that the church will dwell in a culture in which we are safe to live out our faith and that we won’t face persecution.[16] After all, the founders of America fled religious persecution to establish a place for the free exercise of religion. For 250 years, the majority church in America has been in a position of power and influence in the culture: our sexual ethic was reinforced by the culture, the history we learned was our history, and pastors were pillars of the community. The American prosperity gospel trained the church to expect the world to be a basically supportive place in which we will find favor. We’ve come to expect authority to shape the culture toward Christian moral ends so that the world would be safe for living out our faith.

The American prosperity gospel has trained us to pursue the power we need to secure our own vision of life in the world. It has trained the church to believe that persecution is a sign of something gone wrong and that God will protect us from maltreatment. Through the American prosperity gospel, the church has become enchanted with Mammon, enchanted with seizing the power we need to be free, to be authoritative in the broader culture, to have a world in which our ethic is affirmed, or at least not resisted by the culture around us.

Our belief in the American prosperity gospel is why the past decade has been so disorienting for many in the evangelical church. As the culture moves away from us, the church has been fighting to hold on to its power. Fearing the loss of what we believe is God’s promise to us, the church has grown increasingly defensive, turning more toward Mammon—power—as the means of our defense. Fearful of losing our position in society, fearful of losing our way of life, the church has become ensnared in the third thread in the pattern of the age: the age of anger.

Conformity To The Age Of Anger

The age of anger has not stopped at the church door. Social media has become the site of many an angry battle between Christian soldiers, marching as to war. Why is the church so angry?

A central component of the church’s conformity to the age of anger is rooted in our acceptance of the promises of Western liberalism. Having adopted the Western liberal political anthropology, the church has come to expect God’s blessing of prosperity, success, and authority. The anger in the church is a result of the fact that over the past two decades many in the church have come to feel that they are losing what they’ve been promised. We built churches that catered to self-interest and preached sermons that promised Western liberal life, but in so doing we failed to call people to take up the cross.

As the culture moves away from the church, many have responded with an angry defensiveness. The church is filled with anger because we have come to believe that our inheritance has been stolen, that the promises of God have been thwarted, that our claim on success and influence has been taken away. We are seeing churches seething with anger, anger directed toward brothers and sisters in Christ, anger directed toward the culture around us, because too many are convinced that the freedoms promised by Western liberalism are promises made to us.

The anger in the church is a sign that our expectations don’t belong to the promise of the gospel. In the rest of this lecture, I want to begin to lay the groundwork for a vision of a non-conformed church by reflecting on the church’s calling to be a unique culture. As the church, our mission to represent a different rule, our mission as ambassadors of another nation, centers on the fact that we are to have different common objects of love than does the pattern of the age.

Common Objects Of Love

In his book Common Objects of Love, British theologian Oliver O’Donovan suggests that communities are formed by shared commitments of love. O’Donovan borrowed this notion from Augustine, who defined a community as “an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.”[17] In other words, people become a “we” through a shared commitment to love certain common objects that shape the way we understand the world and our place in the world. O’Donovan writes, “What is holy in ancient Israel—the Sabbath, the temple, the land—at once organizes and structures the people as a political society and discloses the universal divine purpose for the world.”[18] The common objects of love are the “representative objects, representative persons, representative histories, and representative ideas [that] constitute the central core of the society’s common way of seeing the world and living in it.”[19]

O’Donovan’s description of common objects of love reveals a deep connection between tradition and identity. No community can endure without tradition. For O’Donovan, “the essential thing about tradition is that it creates social continuity.”[20] Tradition is the process through which the common objects are passed on over time, forming the necessary foundation for the perpetuation of a society. Without an agreed-upon tradition, it is impossible for a community to have shape, a sense of what makes us “us.” From this, the common objects of love also form the shared identity of a community. O’Donovan observes that “common objects of love generate common self-understanding.”[21] Who are “we”? What unites us as a social community? The common objects of love perform this function and set social groupings apart from one another. These objects are language, practices, moral customs, symbols, a shared historical narrative, and revered figures in that narrative. All of these, along with myriad other objects of love, give a community its identity and its understanding of its purpose in the world.[22]

O’Donovan’s vision of the common objects of love gives us insight into the church’s attachment to the pattern of the age. Having set our hearts on the common objects of Western liberalism, the church has become separated from the common objects of love that ought to unite us. Much of the division that we have seen in the church in the late-modern world is caused by our adoption of ideologies given to us by the structures of the Western liberal political, economic, and cultural order. Having adopted these structures as the means of our engagement with the world, and thinking that we can use them for the sake of the church’s mission, we end up shaped by them, and so the church, rather than offering a vision to the world of another way, a community shaped by the common objects of love of the kingdom, has become stuck in the unimaginative factional combat of a world-conformed Christianity, the trench warfare of a church captured by the pattern of the age.[23]

Conclusion

The year 2020 revealed our desperate need for a Spirit-renewed imaginative vision of the church’s presence in the world, a way of being engaged that is not dependent on the world’s common objects of love. This is where the joy-filled and theologically vibrant mission of the pastor theologian is critical. As those called to shepherd our people to a faithful witness to Christ and so out of conformity to the pattern of the age, pastor theologians are placed in a critical interpretive position. As congregations are divided, as this division creates anger toward other followers of Christ and toward the world, as political affiliation becomes a way of deciphering another’s salvation (“You can’t be a follower of Christ and vote for ___”), pastor theologians must confront our own and the church’s adoption of false common objects. We must clarify that the promises we have received as followers of Christ are not the promises the world around us has received. The common objects of love that have spread across the globe—autonomy, self-determination, liberal freedom—are not the common objects of love the church is called to share. As such, the common objects of our age have created a vision of what to expect from life that is at odds with the vision contained in the common objects of Christianity, which form the church into a society called to live with and for, but not be conformed to, the broader society.

To follow Jesus is not to be given the promise of individual autonomy. Christ doesn’t promise us a greater degree of control over our lives but instead promises us the loss of control as we are called to lay down our lives for him. Christ doesn’t promise us freedom as Western liberalism defines it—the freedom to define our own selves—but instead promises that if we seek to gain our life, we will lose it. Because of this, the church is called to embody the contrast between the promises that have created the pattern of the age and the promises inherent in our call to follow Jesus.

The age tells us that we will flourish as self-interested, autonomous individuals who have entered a social contract to protect our self-interest and exercise independent rule over our lives through the accumulation of resources that increase our worldly power. It declares that human freedom lies in pursuing our self-determined ends. But the gospel declares that we are created to be a self-surrendered, dependent community who lives under the rule of YHWH, and that human freedom lies in being radically dependent on YHWH as he reigns as Lord of our lives. The divergences between the vision of our age and the vision of the gospel of what it means to be human reveal fundamentally different common objects of love. As the church, the common objects of love that are to shape our identity should confront the affections, desires, and strivings of the political anthropology of Western liberalism, the enchantments of mammon, and the age of anger.

In my final lecture, I will conclude with an alternate vision of what it means to be human, rooted in the first four chapters of Genesis. Out of this vision arises a call to pastor theologians to courageously shepherd our flocks to live according to the fundamental common object of our faith, the cross of Christ. It is the calling of this generation of pastors to lead this work.

Notes

1. Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, trans. Lisa Richmond (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), xvii.
2. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012), 154.
3. Gregory, 162.
4. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 55.
5. Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 164.
6. Gregory, 131.
7. Gregory, 131.
8. We see this, as an example, in Robert Wuthnow, Why Religion is Good for American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
9. For those unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer but interested in pursuing more understanding of his life and thought, I recommend Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Vintage Books, 2015); and Joel Lawrence, Bonhoeffer: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2010).
10. Karl Barth, quoted in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 437.
11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
12. Jacques Ellul, Money and Power, trans. LaVonne Neff (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 74.
13. Ellul, 75.
14. Ellul, 76.
15. This reminds us of Hobbes’s definition of power that I cited in my first lecture: the ability to control the future.
16. I first developed this thinking on the American prosperity gospel in Joel D. Lawrence, “After Sapiens: Preparing the Church for the Evolutionary Future of Humanity,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 6.2 (2019): 13–22. Some of the material in this section is from that article.
17. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2017), 637.
18. Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community, Stob Lectures 2001 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 31.
19. O’Donovan, 32.
20. O’Donovan, 32.
21. O’Donovan, 28.
22. One reason that Western liberalism is in crisis is that it is fundamentally a tradition-dissolving ideology. If we are autonomous self-creators, then tradition is by its nature a barrier to self-fulfillment. Emphasizing the individual inexorably breaks down the shared beliefs that give meaning to a community. Union then becomes centered on shared affections and desires, nothing that ultimately transcends the self. American culture is experiencing this today: our society is losing agreed-upon common objects as each person is trained to be his or her own object of love.
23. This points to the theological-imaginative leap we need to make as followers of Jesus. The incarnation doesn’t take us out of the world; it calls us to be engaged in the world. But our calling to be engaged is not to be on the world’s terms, not to be according to the world’s common objects of love. We are stuck in political polarization because we have come to accept the pattern of the age, the cultural common objects of love, as the means of our engagement with the world.