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BOOK DISCUSSION & REFLECTIONMichael. J. Gorman,
Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, andTheosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology
. Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B.Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. 194-pp.
ISBN-10: 0802862659;ISBN-13: 978-0802862655 (pbk), $24.00 (U.S.)
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace....Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ
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 SCRIPTURAL BASIS FOR RESTORATIVE JUSTICE & PEACEMAKINGMarcus Barth, the son of the great German Christian theologian, Karl Barth, onceclaimed that “To say, ‘Christ’ means to say ‘reconciliation’ or to say ‘peace.’”
2
WhatBarth alludes to is a physical, materialist in-time embodiment of reconciliation andpeace. This is far from an emasculated, pietistic peace-of-mind or out-of-time indi-vidual ‘spiritual’ experience reading the Psalms in the comfort of one’s own home orattending church liturgy on Sunday morning.
3
For Saint Paul, Christianity is, if nothing else,atimeful community of revolutionaryGod-seekers. But, revolutionaries of a sort that are so radical and counter-culturalthat their
modus operandi
to achieve an overturn of the established order is throughnonviolence and restorative justice towards their enemies (those who oppress them).If anyone can conjure up a more unlikely and unbelievable premise in the history of humankind for achieving safety and liberation of the human spirit, please come for-ward. Recent real-life practitioners of this political theology were Ghandi, Martin
AMBASSADORS OF RECONCILIATION
LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH --- Saturday, November 7, 2009 Page 1 of 10
1
Gorman makes the point that Bonheoffer “recognizes at the end of the day that discipleship is not about imitation or even obedience to an external call or norm. It is about transformation,theosis” (170). See Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Discipleship
 , Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 4, BarbaraGreen and Reinhard Krauss, trans. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2001) discussed in Gorman2009, 168-173..
2
Marcus Barth,
The Broken Wall: A Study of the Epistle to the Ephesians
(Valley Forge: Judson,1959), 44 quoted in Ched Myers & Elaine Enns,
Ambassadors of Reconciliation, vol 1 New Testa-ment Reflections on Restorative Justice and Peacemaking
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), xi.
3
Christian spirituality is only genuinely personal when
practiced
communally. “It is recogniz-able and intelligible only when it relates fully to one’s neighbor.” “It is not enough to ‘do relig-ious things’ regularly.” See Michael Battle,
Ubuntu: I in You and You in Me
(New York: SeaburyBooks, 2009), 87-9.
 
Luther King Jr., and the Living in the Truth movement in Eastern Europe that brought down the Soviet Union peacefully between 1989-91.
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Today, the practice of Christianity is so far from this vision of Saint Paul that adipho-rization (the suspension of the ethical and moral from everyday decision-making)and nationalistic quietism (whatever the state says or does is fine by us - thus, sup-port for lingering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a health system that disenfranchisesthe poor, etc.) characterize many of the mainline churches. A false form of secular,conservative humanism that is actually anti-Christian often characterizes the non-denominational ‘Christian’ (in name only) churches of America. How are we to re-claim Saint Paul’s vision of 
ekklesia -
a community of countercultural God-seekers?That is where Mike Gorman’s
Inhabiting the Cruciform God
offers important insights.POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH KENOSISWhat Dr. Gorman claims is that the central Master Story of Saint Paul is Philippians2:6-11. In this passage, Paul is developing a political theology in direct contrast withthe imperial ideology of Rome. Christ, instead of buying into the ideology of powerand violence to exploit others for his own advantage, relinquishes this power (“emp-tied himself”) and humbles himself “by becoming obedient to death - even on across.” This is Christ’s kenotic act. An
event
in time that changes the world from hereon out.
5
The hermeneutical turn that Dr. Gorman makes is that not only is Christ’s kenosis themodel for humans going forward, but that through Christ, God is telling us some-
AMBASSADORS OF RECONCILIATION
LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009 Page 2 of 10
4
For a description of a “Living in the Truth” manifest, see Vaclav Havel, “Spirit of the Earth,”
Resurgence
 , November-December 1998, 30.
5
For Badiou, an
event
is that moment of being confronted by (and overwhelmed by) a truth.But, this truth is better defined as a wager than a fact. A decision to accept something that isneither fully calculable, knowable or demonstrable, “and for which the results [consequences]cannot be known [fully] in advance, but to which the subject declares his faith.” See Alain Ba-diou,
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
 , trans. R. Brassier (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2003), 45 discussed in Marcus Pound,
Zizek: a (very) critical introduction
(Grand Rapids &Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), 78.
 
thing about his self-identity. That is, that kenosis = theosis. What defines God is hisimmanence and self-limitation, not primarily his power and transcendence.
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By taking this stance on kenosis of Christ/God as self-revelatory, Gorman is makinga wager on a temporal world defined by an unfolding, non-humanocentric universe
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 (“open theology”) rather than the block universe of classical theology (e.g. Boethius,Augustine, Aquinas). In the block universe physical view of temporality, there is noontological difference between past, present, and future. A transcendent God standsoutside the temporal realm with His divine gaze,
totum simul
 , the ultimate final causeof all things. Open theology, on the other hand, pictures a kenotic God (divine conde-scension and self-limitation) whose absolute nature is qualified by: (a) temporality isoperative (i.e. the four arrows of time exist in reality);
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(b) the process of natural evo-lution (the history of creation is unfolding); and (c) God exhibits current omnisciencerather than absolute omniscience (God condescends to act providentially as a causeamong causes).
9
Where both the classical non-kenotic God and open, kenotic-God theology encountera difficult philosophical conundrum is how to treat indeterminacy. Physicists havetwo choices. The first is to accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (a physicallydetermined epistemological limitation on what can be measured and known aboutreality) as an ontological principle of indeterminacy. The second choice is to acceptDavid Bohm’s proposal that indeterminacy arises essentially from a deterministic
AMBASSADORS OF RECONCILIATION
LYLE A. BRECHT 410.963.8680 DRAFT 1.6 CAPITAL MARKETS RESEARCH ---Saturday, November 7, 2009 Page 3 of 10
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God’s
kenosis
might be thought of as God’s
love
through which creation comes to being andthrough which He “redeems creation through the outpouring of the divine life made known inChrist” (Battle, 45-7).
7
 
Non-humanocentric
in that
all
of God’s good creation is taken account of, not just the presentdesires of humankind. This also opens up a theology capable of handing non-terrestrial lifeand even the discovery and acceptance of non-human intelligent life-forms within a common,universal theology.
8
The four arrows of time include: (a) the arrow of deep time - cosmic history from the big bangto the present; (b) the thermodynamic arrow of time that points towards increasing entropy(disorder) of natural systems; (c) biologic arrow of time that tends toward systems of evergreater complexity (i.e. the evolution of life); and (d) the “the psychological arrow, pointingfrom a past that we can remember towards a future that we do not yet know.” See John Polk-inghorne,
Theology in the Context of Science
(New Haven & London: Yale University Press,2009), 65.
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Polkinghorne, 58, 60, 62-63.
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11 / 07 / 2009
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