Some time back I decided that my distaste for olives must mean that something was wrong with my palate, not with olives. There are many fine people who seem to know something about how things should taste, I reasoned, who are quite enthusiastic about a well-prepared olive. So, in protest to my uncultured palate, I began to eat olives. Now I’m quite enthusiastic about a well-prepared olive myself.

And the exact same thing happened with classical music, art, philosophy, poetry, literature, beer, and coffee—black. I guess I just assumed that there really are some things that are objectively better than others and that some “tastes” are, well, uninformed. My suspicion arose out of an observation of American culture at large, namely, that ours is a culture driven more by its brute appetites than ‘informed’ tastes. The fact that “dollar menu” is synonymous with “value menu” should give us pause, should it not? Call me pretentious, but I really do think $10 spent at the olive bar is more valuable than $10 spent at any value menu. I would go so far to say that I think God doesn’t only look at the heart of the artist (though he surely does), and that he has his own tastes in our music—I think God likes Mozart more than Nickelback. There, I said it. If Nickelback makes it to heaven, God forbid, I’ll bet my salvation they will not be invited to join the choir.

I don’t know that I have much of a point here, only to suggest that if you like Nickelback over Bach, Tim LaHaye over T.S. Eliot, Thomas Kinkade over Claude Monet, Bud Light over almost any beer that doesn’t taste like Bud Light, then you may be well on your way to getting “Left Behind.”

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The psalmist said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8). I must say, as a Christian formed by a particular brand of American Christian culture, for a number of years “the Lord” put a bad taste in my mouth. I liked salvation, heaven, resurrection, and I really liked grace, and (or because) all these are made widely available, or at least advertised, on the “value menu” found at your average  grab-and-go Sunday morning drive through. Without “the Lord,” I could smear all these items like icing over ongoing habits without having to have a conversion of palate—I could have my cheap grace and eat it too. But “the Lord” isn’t always easy to find at church, not because he’s not there but because, as far as consumers are concerned, “the Lord” ain’t really in high demand.

I wonder if we should consider that our distaste for “the Lord” means that something is wrong with our wills and our hearts, not with the Lord. Maybe if we just assumed that there is a better Lord for our lives than we are, we would discover something worth getting enthusiastic about. And maybe if churches would stop serving up the gospel in the most palatable, convenient, economic package they can devise, according to the felt-needs of a culture that feels no need for a Lord, they wouldn’t be preparing so many people to be disappointed by “the rapture.”

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“After this I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’ At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne” (Rev. 4:1-2).

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not the tree of evil, nor is it the tree of good and evil, nor is it the tree of knowledge, nor is it merely the fact of the knowledge of good and evil and that whole breakdown—it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil was not about information the couple was otherwise not privy to. God’s world was very good. The only thing we know that was not good was the lone man, before the woman was created, and besides that evil is by definition merely a privation of the good. God did not create evil. The only conceivable evil is thus the possibility of a lone way, and the freedom which makes love possible—the man’s love for God and the man’s love for his wife—is the same which makes the lone way possible. Love is free to love and therefore free not to. Freedom can turn away to the lone way and God’s good world can turn evil. But the lone way wither?

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food…” (Gen. 3:5). The great irony is, of course, that the serpent should tempt the couple to be something they already are: like God. Indeed, God declared that he made them “in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). The image of God and the image of themselves were already visible in the eyes of the other. Everyone one shared subjective space, although they were all truly ‘others’. Empathy was a matter of fact, like DNA or like joy or like autumn. “Us” did not really mean “them” under their breath. “Bear one another’s burdens” and “rejoice with those who rejoice” were not only not ignored in Church, they were the reason Church didn’t yet need to exist.

But the temptation to become like God by means of the knowledge of good and evil is the temptation to inhabit God’s subjective space by sitting on God’s throne. God gave the couple dominion over the whole earth, unlimited salads, every tree minus one, to say: “Though you’ve been give dominion over all creation, you have not been given dominion over your Creator.” It was simply a command that kept the couple sane and sober. No one who has ever attempted to become God suffered because God wouldn’t them. They suffered from exhaustion. God did the best he could. David said “He made us a little lower than God” (Ps. 8). But unfortunately we we continually fall into the deception that being made a little lower means we can reach a little higher. And we do that every time we think we can determine what is good and what is evil, eating from the tree that same old God-damned fruit..

Good and evil are judgments, the good itself being the absolute by which evil is measured via negativa. Thus, when the rich young ruler addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher,” Jesus retorts, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mk. 10:17-18). It’s not that Jesus isn’t good—Jesus is God. The problem was that this man saw himself fit to judge whether Jesus is good or not, as though he were himself the standard by which such judgments could be made. Every man in Adam, Adam in every man.

The problem with the knowledge of good evil is not that it exposes us to evil that we are then disposed to pursue. It is that it presumes to determine judgments of good and evil by excluding God from the equation. It is calling universal peace anything other than Babel, as though universal peace is possible apart from God and as though all towers built by human cooperation within an economy of peace do not, at bottom, stand on a foundation of violence. As though all towers of trade were not made to fall.

To attain the knowledge of good and evil is to “place” God, the Infinite Subject of Absolute goodness, exterior to oneself and oneself exterior to God. (It is to create a distance that only God himself can create; only the Infinite Subject can create subjects by delineating finitude around a name; and only He can do so and withdraw himself in order to create true freedom and the possibility of encounter, the true structure of personhood, and hence the true Trinitarian structure of humankind.) And hence now they can “hear God walking,” which is itself a pretty good reason to hide (Gen. 3:8). But hiding was now a way of life—it was the first thing they did with their new knowledge, using fig leaves to try to separate. The naked and not ashamed couple were now just naked like the rest of us, pointing out how strange everyone else looks naked but only because we’re growing old and insecure about our own bodies—there’s nothing much to brag about on a body that’s growing old.

They had attempted to become like God by replacing God, which required objectifying God, in whose space (subjectivity) human life as human life subsists. Subjectivity is the realm of consciousness. “I think” may be “I am” but it is always standing in Someone Else’s shoes. Maybe that’s why Moses took off his shoes the day his Consciousness starting talking back. Consciousness wouldn’t be such a burden if we could get rid of its Conscience. But the couple confused the formula. “I think, therefore I AM” is precisely the logic of the fall, the idea that Being is predicated on my being. The net effect is that the intersubjective immediacy of the image-bearing one flesh couple, whatever that was like, has now been divided. It was the great divorce. The capacity for empathy is strained, if not destroyed, and they had liberated the will from its proper aim toward love. They lived now in perfect freedom to exercise power according to their own judgments. It was the negation of love, the beginning of long road along the lone way.

And thus, the same potency that can fruitfully multiply and fill the earth began to rapidly divide and kill the earth. It began with fig leaves, Men would become the most vicious beasts of the field with this kind of freedom. And such is the world east of Eden. That thin line has torn an infinite chasm. The great divide that runs from the center of creation runs straight through the heart of every man. Every man is split at his nucleus, a sort of Adam bomb waiting to explode. Freedom has become our greatest resource for slavery. Sex has become the decisive parody of love. Indeed, when sin got ahold of the mutual freedom of our primal parents it quickly turned their egalitarian rule into a tyrannical patriarchy: “Your desire will be husband, and he will rule over you” (Gen. 3:16). The very good image-bearing couple created to rule as one has now become two. It is survival of the fittest, and the crown of creation will now have to await her liberation by the only true Man, the one who writes the truth in the sand, the one who will bear the burden of all “Us” all, the one who will take up a tree and call it the evil that it is, the one who will weep in our tears so we can rejoice in his joy. For he will pour out his Subject, his Spirit, on all flesh—all flesh—because he has interred into the the subjective sphere of humankind in a quite Personal, quite amazing, way, called grace.

.

In the beginning…

Genesis 1, bird’s eye-view: the divine community creates an image-bearing community. “Very good.”

Genesis 2, worm’s eye-view: God creates Adam. “Not good.”

“It is not good for man to be alone.” This is a remarkable claim–that God created something not-good. Surely this not-good man of Genesis 2 cannot be said to be the same very good image-bearing creation of Genesis 1.

Indeed, Adam is not yet fully human, at least not in the way that God is fully God.

So God killed him.

He ripped open Adam’s chest. He broke off one of his ribs, that place that guards the heart, and then raised him from the dead–and with him his beloved: “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). It was the first hypostatic union. [One might even say it was kenosis as an invitation into perichoresis!]:

Now I don’t want to press the point, because I really don’t know what happened, but I do know the imagery is less than idyllic (although, if I would entrust my death to anyone to bring from it fullness of life, it would be God). Adam had been formed from red mud, a perfectly cooperative impress of his maker’s hands, before being thrust into the kiln. But Adam was not complete, because it takes at least two+love to make something like the image of the One God who is Three. No man is an island, because no God is an island. So God took from the heart of this red-mud man and formed the woman out of his red bones:
“The body of Adam broken for Eve, the blood of Adam shed for Eve.”

Adam had found a companion fit for him and God had founded a couple fit for love.

And now: very good.

#theFirstAdaminlightoftheLastAdam

Every particular sin, no matter the color, has the same genealogy. Sin is aways the product of (a) a desire (b) based on a deception (c) organized against love. All desires based on deceptions organized against love (i.e., ultimately displaced desires) can be called temptations. Temptations are experienced as an appeal to freedom, but they are precisely the opposite because they ultimately function to enslave freedom to desire, not to satisfy desire through freedom. Such temptations are not an appeal to freedom but an appeal to pride. Pride always feels like the freedom because pride always gets to say, “My will be done.” But human freedom is not simply the power of the will to act; it is the power of the will to love, because love is the ultimate and essential human desire. With the will not oriented toward its proper end the power of the will to act is nothing more than the will to power, the drive of life toward infinite desire rather than infinite satisfaction. It attends to an indefinite future without ever reaching the present moment; it is the urgent now, not the eternal now. It is about survival, not life, the will’s appetite for more, not the will’s concern for you. Pride may draw a crowd, but it struggles to make eye-contact.

The awareness of death gives occasion for freedom to be confused with pride. Despite the intuitive reflex of this awareness to open us up toward others in longing, and ultimately to open us up to that longing into which God can breath hope against hope in order to make a space into which he can breath faith, it also closes us up in fear. Life exists in oscillations—expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting, trusting and giving, closing up and self-preserving. It is always in process, but in the final analysis life in the face of death is bent toward pride, mistrust, self-preservation. Fear of death has more gravity than fear of God. Indeed, it is “through fear of death” that we are “subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:15).

And thus, pride is the counterfeit of freedom and the antithesis of love. Its essential structure is pure inwardness. It operates on a disordered appetite for power without aim according to a primal mistrust and withdraw. Its goal is isolation—by way of either retreat or triumph. It can be felt as hollowing shame or gasoline powers, but both are pride.

Pride can wear crowns at the top of towers, but shame is merely pride in sheep’s clothing.

The eyes of the couple were opened and they are now naked and very ashamed. So they hide from one another. Bone of Adam’s bone is now just plain ol’ flesh of Eve’s flesh. No longer are they one flesh–it was nuclear fission in the nuclear family. They hear God-sized footsteps. They hide. God confronts Adam. He points away, to the woman, as if God would be judge at divorce court?! But Adam tries, as we all try, to distance himself from the greater guilt—as though human guilt can be separated; as though the two weren’t a hypostatic union; as though Eve were not bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; as though we are not all the seed of Adam’s loin; as though it weren’t through one man’s disobedience that sin enters the world and death through sin; as though it weren’t through one man’s obedience that the many will be made righteous.

But God does not simply put the blame on Eve, nor does he simply put the blame on the serpent. Nor does he simply put the blame on all three, although he does condemn all three, because all three are guilty. But he finds a place to put the blame, a willing party.

Looking down at the pitiful couple, hiding behind tattered fig leaves barely able to withstand the Garden breeze, he calls forth a lamb—the whitest lamb in the garden, a lamb without spot or blemish. It obeys. It comes in silence. They want to look away, but he does not let them look away. They need to see the cost of grace. “A Lamb of Sorrows: your transgressions, his wounds; his chastisement, your peace; his stripes, your healing. You have strayed, but he has come to be slaughtered for your iniquities; innocent, but numbered among sinners.”

The whitest wool now forever stained in a dark crimson that would forever remain: the color of guilt and the color of grace, the color of the intersection—the intersection where God unites with sinners.

Love wears thorns at the top of the intersection–it is grace in sheep’s clothing.

Regarding the Kim Davis debacle.

As someone who believes in the traditional definition of Christian marriage, I would just like to remind Christians how our tradition, or at least our Bible, actually defines marriage. It does not define marriage by means of a triangulation between male, female, and a representative government; it defines marriage by means of a triangulation between male, female, and the living God.

I feel sorry for Kim Davis and her tormented conscience. It’s hard to know how to be an American Christian in a country that has for so long con-fused those two categories. In such a grey world it is hard to discern whether one’s conscience echoes the voice that issues from the throne of a King or the much louder voice of a crowd, a crowd that invariably defines itself as white and its opposition as black–with only shades of pretense. Conscience has a funny way of adapting to tribal affiliations, and American politics–more precisely, political rhetoric in America–has a funny way of speaking of everyone as belonging to one of two tribes. Of course, neither of these tribes are able, either historically or ideologically or constitutionally, to trace their steps back to a cross nor demand allegiance to a throne. And that shouldn’t matter in a country that affirms a separation between church and state. The reason it does matter, however, is because we do not live in such a country.

We live in a country that decided it wise to require a government signature on a religious covenant. And the moment we reduced the union ratified and sustained by the living God to a contract ratified by a disinterested representative and sustained by the consensual whims and wills of two supremely entitled individuals was the very moment we fundamentally changed the definition of marriage. From that foundation, the definition of marriage begins its inevitable (and perfectly self-consistent) evolution to whatever else the people of the republic want to make of it–from ’till death do us part’ to no fault divorce to gay marriage (curiously, the more explicitly antichrist concept of no fault divorce has not evoked the same moral outrage among Christians).

The real problem with this whole debacle is not that marriage has to be licensed by the state to be recognized by the state; it’s that marriage has to be licensed by the state to be recognized by the Church.

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If I can make an appeal to that great generation of Boomers who truly worked with remarkable fervor to shape a nation that we Millennials so often take for granted:

As it relates to the Church, the ‘good fight’ we have to fight for the Church is not going to be the same as the ‘good fight’ you fought. You fought for representation in a sociopolitical context in which it made perfect sense to do so. But that fight is becoming a more vacuous and wearying effort. The fight for us is not going to be the accurate representation of an American majority but an accurate reflection of the Christian minority. The fight for us is going to be learning how to fight without reference to power, learning how to be a Christian when being a Christian affords no materially measurable benefits, learning how to be a Christian when being a Christian looks increasingly like a cross. And, truly, we need your wisdom and your help. We lack a clarity of conviction and thus too the resolve to stand for much of anything truly–and distinctly–Christian. We need to be convinced there is something distinctly Christian worth standing for. We need to see a Church willing even to compromise its unnuanced, whitewashed tribal commitments (no matter the tribe) for its allegiance to a higher Government that calls all tribes, tongues, and nations to repentance, to grace, to the fellowship of Christ. We need more than anything for you to show us where to stand on earth as it is in heaven, and to call us to fight our fight with the same grit you fought yours–lest we shrivel up for lack of a backbone under the weight of hurt feelings in the namelessness of cynical indifference.

“In the beginning…”

~ Genesis 1:1

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”

~ Psalm 14:1

For as long as men have had eyes to see and ears to hear, the world has seemed a strange place. There is an interval between the seeing and hearing human and the seen and heard world—and only between the human and the world—in which many inexplicable things happen, things like: self-awareness, meaning-making, evaluating, self-evaluating, making judgments, intending actions, willing actions, keeping secrets, plotting lies, plotting stories, hoping, despairing, delighting, beholding, adoring, worshiping. There are occasions of jealousy, forgiveness, unforgiveness, hatred, love in all its reckless forms, the crushing loss of love, gasoline passions, moments of unprovoked bliss, and the downright insane experience of Déjà vu.

The human looks at the unassuming world and finds nothing quite like himself. A man sits down for dinner in his apartment. An unsolicited image of the front porch of his boyhood home comes to mind. Unsolicited tears swell his eyes–he doesn’t know why this is happening. He looks down at his dog, wagging its tail. The phone rings.

—

Human beings are haunted by their own lives. Memory and anticipation are peculiar enough, but added to these are forms of longing—of what was or what might have been, what might be or may never be. We carry with us nostalgia and regret, hope and despair. We are somehow located at the center of a unified subjective experience in a physical body that has no objective unifying principle. What is man that we are mindful of him? A human being, say a neuroscientist, at one level of analysis reduces to physical elements and accidental biochemical processes but that same being, as a neuroscientist, has to suspend any such reduction in order to conceive of himself as such. At what juncture do those neurons rise up in a collective voice and begin speaking in the first person? Where is the hidden cellar in the physicalist’s brain where the metaphysical screen of the mind’s eye is ever before the mind’s ‘I’? Why am I a strange collection of matter that cannot help but think I am more than matter? I know my brain and mind are inextricably bound, but I also know that there is no causal narrative that could possibly bind the former to the latter, because the latter is always a metaphysical conclusion, and it seems axiomatic to recognize metaphysics is either the mere illusion of physics or its cause, never its effect or conclusion. It’s conceivable that a mind could shape an existing brain, but not that a brain could create a mind ex nihilo.

I am a finite subject and my subjectivity necessarily depends on my body and more than my body. And that is a terrible prospect, since I have no reason to assume that I am in good standing with whatever Other or Thou holds me together, and since human consciousness is held together only by death I have in fact good reason to assume that I am not in good standing with whatever it is upon which I am contingent. This is a description of human angst, that which gives birth to the will to power that, unlike all other creatures, must take a personal shape. We do not kill to survive. We kill to conquer. Only humans go to war.

This uniquely human impulse and its subsidiary appetites are more savage than any of those among the other beasts of the field. There are no beasts morally opposed to killing for survival, but there is only one beast inclined to kill for jealousy. Unlike the other beasts, humans alone use others of their species for “meat” only when they are alive. And when we do kill, we it is always a waste of meat. But this is truly unnatural. We are the most unnatural born killers, especially as regards the unborn. There is at least something to be said about that common moral impulse in the beastly kingdom that judges with sheer immediacy that no life is more precious than the potential life of the unborn–every mother in this kingdom is prepared to die to protect posterity (except my childhood pet hamster who ate her babies–I suppose some evolution leaked: Adam in God’s image, Seth in Adam’s…and hamsters in whom-/whatever’s). If we are going to transcend moral standards of mere humans, we must look either to the chimps or to the gods.

But humans are the most reckless and wasteful of beasts in this regard. We orient our lives in a rebellion against death, but we then give it a proper ceremony when it arrives. This truly is a pathetic, if precious, thing–insisting on decorating our deaths with meaning, marking the ground with immortal memories that attest merely to the futility of mortality.

–And that we cry. For no good reason, we cry.

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And thus consciousness is burdened with a conscience. But what is it that in my brain that transcends the flow of chemical impulses giving rise to the “I am” of yesterday and today and its hope for tomorrow? What is that cohesive identity of a past and a future chained in the interim of the eternal present with all its magical qualities and single relativizing plague–the infinite freedom of thought and its certain awareness of death?

—

Whatever it is, it is in all of this that we continually shape and discover, are shaped and are discovered, first with reference to other humans and then with everything else “out there.” We are objective bodies in time aware of the timelessness of subjective awareness.

This unavoidable interval, where the human subject exists, is the only thing that constitutes human existence uniquely as such. Beyond that, there is no substantial difference between the brain of a man and a monkey and a dodo. We are animals that are aware of ourselves and of a world as though from the outside, subjects who perceive ourselves as objects. We are somewhere but not merely there, and we are not everywhere but we are not merely here. Self-perception and self-transcendence are one identical moment. The human experience is always at once awareness and oblivion, revelation and mystery, the inescapable inside placed within the inescapable outside: “I am” is always also “I am not.”

Behind the veil there exists either an infinite quantity or an infinite quality, pure immanence or genuine transcendence, nothing or something, bricks forever or the face of God.

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“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

~ Ecclesiastes 3:11

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

A — Creation’s Beginning: Reflections of Glory (Gen. 1-2)
B —– Fall: Shadows of Glory (Gen. 3-11)
C ——– Israel: I AM in history – (Gen. 12-Malachi)
D ———– Christ: I AM in flesh – (Gospels)
C’ ——– Church: I AM in all flesh – (Acts-Rev. 3)
B’ —– Judgment: Shadows on Fire (Rev. 4-Rev. 20)
A’ — Creation’s Consummation: Sea of Glory (Rev. 21-22)

Do not weep for me
Though I am gone
It was a strange visit in a strange land
Do not weep for me
For I am home…
Save your tears for someone else
Don’t be caught in a slew of sorrow
I was caught up
In the twinkle of an eye
I was found
The twinkle in his eye – I was
He saw me – and I was stolen away
Do not weep for me
Imprison my tear
Hold it captive
It belongs with my memory
Shut your eyes and catch it
Swim with me in yesterday
Please – never lose this
Keep it – let it ease your mind
Hold a glare to the heavens
I can see me
In the reflection of your eye
Do not weep for me…

But weep…
Weep for beauty
For Glory
Cry out for tomorrow
When we meet again
Weep ye grieving
Weep all who remain
But not for me
Only for beauty
Let your tears roll like billows of the sea
Paint your face with tomorrow’s sunset
Flood your soul
Drown in your hope
Get lost in the horizon
Weep for love
But for me – hold your tears

The moon whispers softly – this light is not my own

____

[Found in old files I was sorting. Dated 2002.]

“It was for freedom that Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1).

Shame has muscle memory and the paths of the mind are well-trodden with lies. Besides that, there is nothing a fellow prisoner hates more than seeing his equal walk without chains.

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The greatest obstacle to the Gospel is not its enemies who seek to imprison it in silence–for “the Word of God is not bound!” (2 Tim. 2:9). It is rather its allies who volunteer their silence in a prison of shame. But many are we who find ourselves submitting again to that old shadowy yoke, and many are they who encourage the burden.

The opposition of the Church is flanked on both sides of its freedom. The religious side demands we be ashamed of our sin and the pagan side demands we be ashamed of our religion. How dare we be audacious enough to walk in freedom from both?! How dare we not hang our faces like lead when we fail to meet the righteous standard of some critic just waiting to witness such a failure? How dare we not walk in neck-bending shame for the atrocities committed in the name of our Lord by sinners no less righteous than we?!

So we just sit here looking at the floor and whimpering out apologies for who we are and who we’ve been–as though who we are and who we’ve been is in any sense unique, as though who we are and who we’ve been is not itself the very occasion for who Christ is and will forever be for us.

Go ahead: offend your anxious hands, your hissing pseudo-conscience, and your furrow-browed critics, both within the pews and without, because the first command of freedom comes in the indicative, not the imperative. The command of freedom is simply not to deny the truth of the claim. “It was for freedom that Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). You are commanded in virtue of the fact that you do not stand taller than Truth, that there is something eternal and essential upon which your fleeting and finite existence depends. That is why when the indicative becomes the imperative it comes in the form of a negation: “Do not submit again to the yoke of slavery” because “It was for freedom” that you were set free, not for you, and thus it does not depend on you to maintain it. This was a deal made between Lawyer and Judge, and neither really expect you to understand the technical aspects of the conversation. They expect, however, you comply with the sentence, despite its unexpected relation to the verdict: guilty, sentenced to freedom. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again because “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). Do not submit again because–and here is the only conditional clause worth considering–“If God is for us, who can be against us” (Rom. 8:31)?

Don’t let anyone enslave you to their hollow verdict of your life. You are indeed guilty. And you are indeed not condemned! “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!” (Rom. 8:1).

So accept, Beloved, that you are both guilty and free, and if you can’t, for God’s sake, find another god. There are plenty available that will be happy to conform to your god-damned guilty conscience.