Not Fooled by Infatuation

Bette and I went to see a one-man show of The Screwtape Letters (TSL) last week. Well…one devil and an imp. It was pretty good, considering that Screwtape himself has the only speaking part and that his correspondent, Wormwood, is only a red flash in a tube, coming down (from Earth) and the reply going back up. It was good to see, though. Screwtape was so polished and urbane, yet he let you see what a voracious chaos lay beneath that surface.


It reminded me of my plan, once I got really retired—that was in 1997—to spend some time on Screwtape and play around a little with ideas that have become more important to me since I first read it, probably at college in the 1950s. I have come to care a lot about causal attribution, for instance. Screwtape cares about it too, but I didn’t have it firmly in mind when I first read it. I’d like to make a project out of this reconsideration of TSL


But not today. Today, I want to think a little about Letter 26, which you can see here. Since most of the people I write to are old, I am often the person in the discussion who has dated most recently and married most recently. So it hasn’t been as long for me as it probably has for you that these ideas really needed to be considered.


I won’t stop here to sketch in much background. Wormwood’s “patient” is a human being who has recently become a Christian. That was bad, from the elder tempter’s (Screwtape’s) point of view and confusing from the younger tempter’s (Wormwood’s) point of view. Worst, the man has just met a Christian girl and all kinds of bad things—deference, charity, patience—are going on between them. But Screwtape is an opportunist and gives Wormwood some instruction on how the present situation might be turned to their advantage. Here is the passage I’ve been thinking about.


Yes; courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity. Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word ‘Love’: let them think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or postponed under the influence of the enchantment. While it lasts you have your chance to foment the problems in secret and render them chronic.

There is between this man and this woman an attraction that Screwtape calls “enchantment.” I would call it infatuation, meaning nothing bad by the word. I’m going to abuse it fearfully in a little while, but I’m fine with it for right now. They call this infatuation “love,” and conclude from their present concord that they have solved problems that they have only postponed. It is this conclusion that reminds me that the English word comes from the Latin fatuus, “foolish.”

It gets worse. Here’s another passage from the same letter.

The erotic enchantment produces a mutual complaisance in which each is really pleased to give in to the wishes of the other. They also know that the Enemy demands of them a degree of charity which, if attained, would result in similar actions. You must make them establish as a Law for their whole married life that degree of mutual self-sacrifice which is at present sprouting naturally out of the enchantment, but which, when the enchantment dies away, they will not have charity enough to enable them to perform.

Screwtape is evil, of course, but he isn’t careless. This couple, being infatuated with each other, treat each other extraordinarily well and are happy together. So far, so good. But two crucial mistakes have already been made. The first is that they have mistaken their infatuation for love, a state which is far into their future and which will be secured only by their mutual intention, discipline, and willingness to laugh at themselves. The second is that they conclude that their present state, in which “each is really pleased to give in to the wishes of the other,” is evidence of their love. And a third mistake is just over their horizon. It is that they expect to be able to continue, when stone cold sober, the quality of relationship only their present intoxication allows.
What to do? What to do?

I have some suggestions. All these are grounded in my own experience and a few of them are treasured memories from those few moments when I actually did what I was trying to do.

First, enjoy infatuation. It is glorious and it is real. It isn’t representative, however. It is not a good clue to how things will be when you have sobered up. It is not, for that reason, a good time to make binding commitments that are based on the notion that these feeling will continue forever. The promises you make feel absolute when you make them, but turn out to have been contingent when you try to keep them. So I think the smart thing to do is to enjoy every moment of the mutual infatuation, but plan for the life you will live together after it has receded.

Second, use the early times to put in place a set of understandings that will serve you in the later times. The state you are in is euphoric and transitory. Promising to feel that way forever is naïve. But using all that good will to lay out realistic common goals and common procedures for handling conflict isn't naive at all; it's nearly sophisticated.

Some things you can do, by using this approach, and some you can’t. You can’t lay out a way to be loving when you are angry at each other; you can lay out a way to limit the damage when you are angry with each other. You can establish routines that require only good will, not positive emotions. You can talk, at least, about what the first steps back toward intimacy will look like. You can do that when your intimacy reigns supreme—it’s a good use of that time—but only when you know it will not always reign supreme.

Third, you can work together to establish a "canary," whose death will alert you to bad things to come. I think of it as a dashboard light that comes on when things are not on course. The light doesn’t come on when things are bad and go off when things are good. Good times and bad times happen in a marriage, which is why they feature those very engaging antitheses in the marriage ceremony. The light comes on when the things that sustain the intimacy are not being done or are not being done with generosity and enthusiasm. When we are not doing, with all our hearts, the things you can do whether you feel cuddly loving or not, the light comes on.

You have to talk about it because the list of “those things you can do” is a different list for Bette and me. And doing those things “with enthusiasm and generosity” looks and feels different for Bette and me. That means when I feel I have been treated thoughtlessly, I have to be willing to say so and Bette has to be willing not to feel as if she has been charged with something. I have to treat my feeling as if it were an indicator that “we are no longer doing what we said we wanted to do.” It really isn’t about me. And Bette has to treat what I say to her not as a complaint, but as a signal that “we are no longer doing what we said we wanted to do.” So it isn’t about her either.

Those things will always be hard to do, but I really believe that the alternative is the gradual taking for granted of the gifts that were once both dazzling and empowering. Learning to do those things will take discipline, good sense, good manners, and a sense of humor. And a long time. But deciding to do those things is best done at the beginning.

Doing this work when we can will mean that our prospects are very good. Screwtape's prospects remain abysmal.

What is a mandate?

In the most often used setting, it is really hard to tell. Every party with a majority in one house of the legislature says it has a “mandate” to do what at least some of the candidates promised to do in their most recent campaigns. President Obama claimed he has a mandate to deal with the nation’s healthcare woes as a result of his victory in 2008.

That isn’t the clearest meaning of the term, certainly. The handily available Latin source is the verb mando, “to command.” The Congress, for instance, “commands the Environmental Protection Agency to start obeying the law and the EPA fights back, saying the Congress does not have the right to mandate such an action.[1] The Congress demands that certain states where minority voting has been suspiciously low actually register minority citizens and allow them to vote. The demand was specific and was backed up by the kind of penalties that catch the imagination. Those are mandates.

What do the voters “demand?” That’s harder. The EPA decision was 5-4. You could say that five justices demanded that the law be obeyed and four demanded that it not be obeyed. Both are mandates; one carries the prestige and power of the Court and the other does not.

Command, connotes, at the very least, that only one thing is being demanded, but in popular votes, contrary things are being demanded. The voters are apparently not of one mind.
But if they were of one mind, what would they be saying? One of the simplest divisions of the popular vote is among those who vote for a candidate, those who vote for a party, and those who vote for the candidate closest to the voter’s stand on some issue. Imagine, in that case, a unanimous vote for Barak Obama in 2008. That would be 69, 484,215 votes for Obama. Now imagine that 23 million voted for him because he was black (a candidate-oriented vote); 23 million voted for him because he was a Democrat (a party-oriented vote); and 23 million voted for him because he promised to end the war in Iraq promptly. What is his mandate? Keep on being black? Continue being a Democrat?

In fact, I think things are more confusing than that. Many voters have a sense that there ought to be a balance in public policies and they feel, sometimes, that “things have gone too far.” I don’t want to have to be the one to say that things could not go too far, but it seems to me that “too far” requires a single policy axis. Most often, the political arguments are not made on a single policy axis. Take the current wariness about the necessary budget reductions, for instance. If the policy axis is “live within our means,” then people are overwhelmingly in favor of it. If the policy axis is “do without crucially important government services,” then people are overwhelmingly opposed to it. If the policy in question does both, how shall we determine a “mandate?”

I think this sense of “too far” is a little like the thermostat. We get to “too cold” and the thermostat kicks the furnace on. We get to “too warm” and it kicks the furnace off—or, in some homes, kicks the furnace off and the AC on. The thermostat works on what I call a single policy axis. It doesn’t have a setting for “using too much of the world’s resources.” It doesn’t have a setting that says, “Conservation is the same as a reduction in the demand for energy; get a sweater.” It’s just on and off.

But I think it’s worse than that. The thermostat doesn’t have a minority vote, so that it can kick the furnace on by 5-4 but the minority is large enough to keep the AC on as well. The thermostat doesn’t take reaching the “send a message to the furnace” temperature, decide enough is enough, and send a crew down to rip out the furnace. The public, operating as it does on multiple policy axes, doesn’t so much turn on and off the furnace, as send a crew down to tear out the furnace; then another crew to install a furnace, when it gets cold.

Of course, that would be more expensive, but the Framers didn’t give us democracy because it was efficient. They gave us a democracy because they had just fought a war against “efficient” and wanted to see how “inefficient” would suit us. I think they really nailed it. The government they designed was just perfect—for the 18th Century.

[1] The EPA lost at the Supreme Court level where the justices opined that it would be a good idea if the EPA obeyed the law.

Potato, Pototo(e)

I’ve been thinking about how people hear sounds. I’ve been thinking about it for a while because if you have a class that hears sounds, discrepancies especially, you need to teach them differently than you teach a class that does not. I say status with a long A, (like state) for instance. It isn’t more correct than status with a short a (like game stats), but I like it better. So, for fear that some will think, as I pronounce it differently in answering a question than they did in asking it and that I am “correcting” their pronunciation, I tell my classes that both are correct and that I have chosen this one. I now know that for a lot of my classes, probably most of them, that distinction is a waste of time. They don’t hear the difference.

Then this morning on the way to Starbucks, Bette was reading me a piece from The Oregonian about people who are fluent in more than one language. They have better “executive function,” the article said, meaning that they are able to disattend from one language to focus entirely (at the moment) on the other one. They found a five year delay in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, too, for multilingual oldsters. Warum ist das?

Then, this afternoon, on the way home from the office, I heard a broadcast of Radio Lab, featuring Walter Mischel. Oh good, I said, now I will still the lingering doubt about how to pronounce his name. I remember mis-SHELL from my grad school days, but all the people narrating the show and talking to him were saying MISH-ell. Well, I said to myself, it’s been a long time since grad school. I guess I got it wrong. Then in the signoff—one of the really cute things about Radio Lab is that they get all their guests to record the signoff for them—part of the script was read by the man himself and he said Mis-SHELL. He was the one person on the show who pronounced his name that way.

So I am imagining that something like this must have happened in developing the show. “So, we are thinking about doing a show on your famous marshmallow experiment, Dr. MISH-ell.” And the grad student who works with him every day says, “Oh good. Dr. Mis-SHELL will be pleased. The data on those four –year olds, now 45 year-olds—has just come in. So he passes the phone along and the man himself says, “This is Dr. Mis-SHELL.” The host or the scheduler says, “Ah, Dr. MISH-ell, what a pleasure to talk with you. I have been a fan of your marshmallow experiment for a long time.”

It must have been like that. No one hears it. You don’t hear conversations about Cuba and environs where one of the speakers says car-RIB-ean and the other ca-rib-BEE-un. At least, they don’t say it for very long. One of them says, “Um…it’s ‘car-RIB-ean.” Then follows a discussion about which authority says it one way and which the other; or one about whether the Carib people will be offended by having their name muffled by one pronunciation; or what kind of gall it takes to “correct” the person you are talking to and do you really want to have this conversation or not. I’ve heard all those.

What you don’t hear is the conversation going on with both pronunciations being used. The same for him-a-LAY-un mountains and him-ALL-yun mountains. The conversation doesn’t go on. It’s not, as in the old song, “You say po-TA-to and I say po-TAHT-to (e).”

The least generous part of me gets irritated that someone—that would be other person, he said to himself—is saying it wrong. -ly. A more recent and more generous layer says, when a lull arrives in the conversation, I noticed that you say X; I’ve mostly heard it pronounced Y. What even the most placid part of me seems unable to do is just hang with the conversation, allowing the two forms to coexist and for neither speaker, apparently to hear that there are two forms. After while it starts to feel like I’ve lost a filling and can’t keep my tongue out of the cavity and I just need to find a way to talk about something else.

Mile Posts

I will write my 100th post later this month. I haven’t been counting, but the page keeps track. And then it occurred to me that I have been marking my own notes on these posts as Pn as P-1, P-2 and so on. I think it was something familiar about the P and number designation that made me remember that the biggest event of my childhood was World War II. I was nearly eight years old when it ended and, as peaceful in intent as my family was, we played war games the same way all the other children in the neighborhood played war games.

The one I remember best was Spot A Plane, a series of flash cards featuring “enemy aircraft.” That would be Germany and Japan, so we saw our share of Messerschmitts and Mitsubishis. As I remember, they were on blue cards and the aircraft was a black silhouette against a white circle, as if we were seeing it at night in a spotlight.

The U. S. called our fighter aircraft “pursuit planes” back in those days, hence the P designation. I grew up with planes like the P 39 Airacobra and the P 40 Warhawk and the P 41 Lightening and the P 47 Thunderbolt and the P 51 Mustang. And that was just the European theater.
Having gone that far, I wondered what my own P 39, 40, 41, 47, and 51 were. The site keeps track so it wasn’t that hard. Let’s see. P-39 was a little riff on “The Star-spangled Banner.” I remember being completely dazzled by the third stanza, vicious and celebratory. P-40 was a reflection on the Reverend Terry Jones, the would-be burner of Korans. P-41 was my magnum opus on language. It was called “Conservative and Proud.” P-47 was a little ditty on political prognostication called “What Will Happen in November,” which was just a little gutsy on September 17th. And finally, P-51 was the first of a promised two-part series with the title, “The Politics of Self-respect—1.” I haven’t written the second one yet because I haven’t figured out what to say. I know what I have to say; I just don’t know how to say it.

So P 100 will be coming up shortly. It will by my centipost, which, if you think of it, is not a bad price.

Redemption 4

Gordon Kaufman, in a chapter about what theological language should do, made a distinction that has been important to me for a long time. He said that the words ought to mean what the Church has said they meant, or we won’t know how to fit them together. But they ought, also, to mean what they feel like, or we won’t know why we should pay attention to them.[1] Here is that passage.

All of this project about redemption, beginning when I learned that his parents had taken Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem to redeem him back from God, has begun at the first of Kaufman’s poles. I have devised a simple physical and temporal model of “redemption” in Israel and have kept as many of the five categories alive as I could while pushing the model toward more metaphorical New Testament uses.

It’s time now to start at the other pole. If redemption is the explanation of an experience I have had, just how should the experience be described? Does “I once was blind but now I see” do the job? Should we say that we were living in the dark and then the light came? Should we say we were living a life we though was pretty good and then discovered Joy and the desire for Joy and everything was transformed? Should we say we were anxious and alone and then a Friend came—or maybe just a friend—and the anxiety went away and the aloneness with it.[2] Should we say we were living lives without meaning, then found out we were intended for something both significant and wonderful?

I could go on. But, so could you. Anyone who has read about the dramatic changes some a person’s life is familiar with the fact of change on this scale. On February 7, Bette and I heard a lecture on depression and the brain by a psychiatrist/neurologist who employs “deep brain stimulation.” She reported that once the surgeon had the probe placed just right, the patient said she felt she had been living for many years in a locked house with ten screaming children and “you just made the children leave the building.” Her life had been redeemed.

It wouldn’t be hard, either, to say that she had been “saved,” provided we remembered to “saved from what?” Looking at the list above, we could say saved from darkness or from Joylessness or anxiety and aloneness. Those all sound like human experiences to me. But once we place “saved” into the religious context, its meaning suddenly becomes clear—we know for sure what the speaker means—and at the same time, abstract and difficult. That’s why it is interesting, and might even be worthwhile, to start at the experiential end of the question.

At this point, pausing at the lip of a question that would take a book, not a blog, to answer, I want to put a few limitations in place. All I want to do here is ask some questions and then tell a story. The questions all have to do with the fundamental or inevitable character of blood sacrifice. It is perhaps a cheap point that God could have done all this differently than He did. The argument I am making is that there is nothing about the nature of God that requires blood sacrifice. But God chose Abraham and Isaac and Israel and the Children of Israel and redeemed them from slavery in Egypt. Animal sacrifice as “pleasing to God” grew up in the context of the covenant with this particular people. Had God chosen farmers or hunter-gatherers or whale hunters, it is reasonable to think that the particularities would have been different.

I say this not to complain about God’s chosen people and the rich history of the Covenant, but only to say that when God intervened in our history, it was a particular history he intervened in and a different culture would have recognized and honored His intervention through other institutions.

So let’s imagine that redemption is what needs to get done. There must be an intervention that moves the focal person from a bad place to a good place. We don’t need all five of the Israelite categories for this—the condition of slavery and a redeemer and a ransom and a slave master and the condition of freedom. We need only one, two, and five.

The story I have in mind is Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. The full citation is on the excerpt. Nan is the focal person and she moves from something like slavery to something like freedom through the intervention of Miss Matheson. I have included the whole story about Nan’s release here, but I can give you the three steps. Here is Step 1.

Nell had reached the point where she could transcribe the old books all day long without actually absorbing a single word. During her first weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact, she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years. After the incident with Elizabeth, she became bored for many months, then furious for quite a while until she realized… that her anger was eating her up inside. So with a conscious effort, she went back to being bored again.

That will serve us as the condition of slavery. Now here is the intervention. Miss Matheson intervenes to change Nan’s condition in some way.

“Miss Stricken is not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. I would not hire her as a governess for my children. Her methods are not my methods. But people like her are indispensable. It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together,” Miss Matheson went on. “That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their imperfections. She is like an avatar—do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and well-defended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken.”

Nan understands and here is what happens as a result.

Nell could not bring herself to agree with what Miss Matheson had said; but she found that, after this conversation, everything became easy. She had the neo-Victorians all figured out now. The society had miraculously transmutated into an orderly system, like the simple computers they programmed in the school. Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted. “Joy” returned to its former position as a minor annoyance on the fringes of a wonderful schooldays. Miss Stricken got her with the ruler from time to time, but not nearly so often, even when she was, in fact, scratching or slumping.

So in this simple story, I see Nan’s misery and Miss Matheson’s intervention and Nan’s release from that toxic inner anger and they look to me like steps one, two, and five. Miss Matheson unquestionably effected a change. It doesn’t look like there was anything that could be called a ransom. It doesn’t look like it cost Miss Matheson anything personally. There is no vicarious benefit here. In short, it is clearly unlike the notion of atonement as it is developed in the New Testament on the basis of the sacrificial metaphors of Israel.

So let me come back to the point with which I began. If the language of theology is not rooted in our experience, it will be of no use to us whatever other virtues it may have. The transformation of Nell from a life dominated by anger and frustration to one of understanding and inner peace is a transformation that could easily be called religious in another story. We know what the experience felt like to Nell. We have what I would call “a choice of redemption narratives” available to us; some better, some worse. But all of them, both better and worse, begin with Nell’s experience. Without that experience, nothing needs to be explained.

It is the actual movement from slavery to freedom—the experience of that movement—that we are trying to explain when we talk about redemption.




[1] Gordon Kaufman, Systematic Theology, A Historicist Perspective. p. 75-76.
[2] The theological word atonement means that the alienated parts of a relationship become at-one (united) so atonement isn’t a bad vibration to get from this reported experience.

Unit Control

This is just a quickie. Every now and then, it feels good just to laugh at myself and when is it better to dy that than Saturday Evening?

My office at PSU is on the 6th floor of the Urban Center. Six floors is a lot of floors, so mostly, I have been taking the elevator. On the other hand, what are the alternatives, really? Six floors or the elevator? Why?

So for the last couple of weeks, I have been walking up as many floors as I feel like walking and then taking the elevator the rest of the way. Every now and then, I walk all six because that is what feels good that day. Also, on those days, I’m not carrying a briefcase or a batch of books or anything. Other days, I walk up to the third floor or maybe the fourth (and once, the fifth) and take the elevator from there.

The one little sticky part is that if you think/feel that the options are “six or elevator” and you are standing at the bottom of the first flight, taking the stairs seems like a huge commitment. The trick is to know that it isn’t true. It does feel like six or none are your options, but it isn’t true. It still feels odd to start up the steps, but lately I’ve been having so much fun enjoying the incongruity of it all that I’m still laughing by the third floor.

The “unit” here is “the stairs.” There are lots of others. Would you like “a Coke?” When I was a kid, Coke came is 8 oz. glass bottles and “a Coke” wasn’t overwhelming. Now they come in 16 oz. and more and a reasonable person would say “I’d like to have some Coke.” “Some” takes the unit out and helps you see what your choices are.

My son Dan and I went to a place in Seattle one day where they make their own doughnuts in a huge array of machines. Dan said they were really good and wanted to buy me one. It turns out that they sell them by the dozen. “A dozen doughnuts” was the unit. Dan said fine and bought the dozen, took one, gave me one, and tossed the other ten in the trash. It was pretty dramatic as an action, but in principle, he just changed the unit “a dozen” to “some.”

It’s hard not to put on your toothbrush the amount of toothpaste they put on in the toothpaste ads, because that is “a serving” of toothpaste. But if you crack that “serving,” you can put on as much as you like. The same is true for cream cheese on bagels. When they cream up a bagel on TV, it looks like half an inch or so of cream cheese. It’s “the right amount.” But, of course, once you crack it, you can put on as much as you like. Or see as much of a movie as you like or read as much of a book.

The hard part is standing at the foot of six flights and feeling that even if you start, rather than taking the elevator, you don’t have to climb any more than you really want to. And that works pretty much all the time, except February 2nd in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania if you are Bill Murray.

Redemption 3

I have been working with a very early and very material Hebrew model of redemption. My two examples are land belonging to Israel, i.e., belonging to God, and members of the nation of Israel, who belong, by definition, to God as well. When land strays outside the nation by being bought by a Gentile, it must be “redeemed” because it belongs to God and it is not right that it “belong” to anyone outside the covenant community. This means it must be purchased and returned, by the way, not that it may be “taken” because it belongs to the wrong person. Similarly, a member of one of the tribes of Israel may not belong to another in perpetuity, because he belongs to God and whoever bought him “owns” God’s property.

Reflecting on this arrangement, I wrote a post called Redemption: It’s not about you” and in that post I said I was going to try to push that model as deep into the New Testament as I could. In that effort, I should say right here at the beginning, I have been aided in every way by Bill Teague, who has shared this project with me. We did, however, run into just the kind of trouble we expected in the New Testament.

Here’s one. In the first model, the payer, the payment, and the receiver of the payment are all nicely distinct. Not so in the New Testament. Following the sacrificial model of Israel, Jesus is the payment, the “lamb that was slain.” In one way of looking at it, we may say that Jesus is also the payer. We might say that he paid with his own life, the price that we were justly obligated to pay. That sounds right. On the other hand, it sounds right, too, to say that God was the payer, giving up “his only-begotten son.” This squares with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac who was the only apparent means by which God could make good on his promise to Abraham that Abraham’s descendants would be numerous beyond counting.

Since this sacrifice was vicarious, it was not a sacrifice that we would expect to achieve a change in the status of Jesus. And it was vicarious not only for a person—as Sydney Carton was for Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities—but vicarious for a category of persons, as if, for instance Carton’s death paid the debt of all French aristocrats.[1] For me, however theologically necessary it is, it is the application to a category of people that is most uncongenial. It is that use I need to work at.

So Jesus’ death would, following the model, achieve a change in status for us, those for whom the sacrifice was made. This doesn’t fit the “redeemed from slavery” model very well, I’m afraid. The nature of our “enslavement” is quite abstract, by comparison to the slavery of the Israelite who was to be redeemed. Similarly, the “freedom,” consequent on the payment is abstract by comparison. The hardest question would be who, in the New Testament model, receives the payment which frees the category of people who are thus “redeemed” from slavery? That is my next concern, but I want to touch on another matter first.

The Israelite sacrificial model, by which a person brings an animal to be sacrificed as a way of dealing with his own guilt is more abstract than the slavery model. The wrongdoer has an obligation to the one he has wronged—I’m not going to deal with that here—and also a guilt before God, whom he has defrauded. The sacrifice annuls the guilt and puts him back in right relationship with God. The guilt of the wrongdoer and his full restoration to right standing with God are both abstract, but the other parts are all there. There is a payer and a price and a receiver of the price. And there is a condition before and a condition after, although they are established doctrinally, rather than socially, as slavery would be.

In the New Testament model, one of the really knotty questions is “Who receives the sacrifice?” The answer I would like to pursue here is, “The Strong Man.” To do this, you have to catch up a little to who the devil had become by the time of Jesus. He was no longer the prosecuting attorney of Job, but thoroughly evil and wholly antagonistic to God. He is “the Enemy” with a capital E. On the other hand, when testing Jesus, he takes Jesus up to a high place and shows him all the kingdoms of our world and offers them to Jesus. These kingdoms belong to the Devil so he can rightfully offer them.

And when Jesus is asked how he can do all the signs that marked his ministry, he said that if you have the strength first to bind the strong man, you can despoil his house at your leisure. All three synoptic gospels have that. See Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 11. The “despoiling” Jesus was talking about look pretty good to us: the blind see, the lame walk, the demon-possessed are freed, and so on. So the logic says that all those previous conditions—the blindness and the lameness and the possession—were things that were “owned” by the Devil and when Jesus overcame the Devil, he was free to distribute the Devil’s “goods.” So it looks as if a case can be made that “the strong man” is the Devil.

Further, Jesus acted with authority, not just with power. The demons Jesus cast out knew he outranked them and outranked their master as well so when he commanded them to come out, they came out. Underlying the gospel narratives is the idea that there is an evil “spirit” or an evil “presence” behind our troubles. We may think of the demon of our sickness or the demon of a violent storm, for instance. When Jesus healed the sick and when he commanded the storm, he was, again, distributing the loot from the mansion of “the Strong Man.”

Postulating an agent of this sort—active and identifiable in the synoptic tradition—gives us a candidate for “the recipient of the payment.” This is someone who, like the slaveholder of the first and most physical metaphor, can receive payment and allow the slave to go free. In Jesus ministry, we see that Jesus overcame this “Being” and distributed wholeness and health as a sign that the Kingdom of God was already beginning. Jesus dominance, in other words, insured vicarious benefits.

In Jesus's death, the Strong Man triumphs. Or, as we Christians would say, "appears to triumph." The payment is made and received. Again, the benefits are vicarious, but this time they have to do with establishing a vital and unending clearing of our guilt before God. It is fully in the Israelite sacrificial tradition, in which God receives the sacrifice and treats Israel as pure. In this scenario, the Strong Man receives the sacrifice, and God declares all “in him,” all those who trust that this sacrifice is effective and sufficient, are pure.

Let me note, in conclusion, that this is not entirely satisfying. My project was to push the physical model of redemption deep into the fundamental transaction that the New Testament presumes. That means, ultimately, finding someone who a) is capable of receiving the ransom and b) is forced, by receiving it to release his claim on us. So, as a result of the payment, we who were slaves, are freed.

The hardest part for me is conceiving of a Devil who can play this role. But I think it wasn’t all that hard for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I think it wasn’t that hard for Jesus. So maybe I just ought to work at it harder. Besides, you do get something for all this work. You may now look at a scripture as familiar as faded wallpaper—something like “God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him”—and say, “Look at that! That’s really intriguing. What can it mean?”

[1] I learned, in making sure I had the right meaning for vicarious, that it is the adjective form of vicar. So, in the sacrificial model, Christ is the vicar—representing us—and in Catholic theology, the Pope is the vicar, representing Christ.