Architectures of Shalom: From Epistemological Passivity to the Sanctifying Heart that Houses Eternalizing Virtue

Rev. Douglas Olds

6 November 2024

Sanctification is not a passive, future-oriented theological epistemic recipe but an active, here-and-now ethical imperative grounded in history and the ontogenetic (individually developing), Spiritually activated, practical leading of the heart to meet contemporary challenges. By this, one takes on the responsibility to love and serve the creator and the creation that has sustained and served you, thereby growing into conformity and union with God's Son.

On this past Election Day, from his perch in cyberspace, an evangelical authority on the Trinity posted on X (Twitter) a remarkably plaintive question:

“I got some good questions after on Dante's Purgatorio recently. One question goes something like: If we don't buy Dante's view of purgatory after death, what is the plan for straightening our bent souls, taking on virtues, & being formed fit for heaven?”

Followed immediately by a remarkably irresponsible solution to what he calls the “sanctification gap”—to remain ignorant and passively stuck waiting for God to take this on in God’s own way:

“My main answer, and I'm sticking to it, is that it's a fine question that takes transformation seriously, but that God has not given us a direct or detailed answer to it. The desire for that information is a desire we should not expect to satisfy, but should rather extinguish.”

https://x.com/FredFredSanders/status/1853930423702708582

The rediscovery of Aristotle’s work on virtue in the Middle Ages led the church under the tutelage of Thomas Aquinas to adapt Aristotle’s understanding that virtue required active “participation” to habituate the practices that “straighten the soul.” For both men, virtues were instrumental: they clarified the path we were to take to achieve some better spiritual state of awareness: for Aristotle, eudaimonia usually translated as “happiness.” For Thomas, virtue tends toward instrumental awareness: to take on the character of Christ to advance along the road of mission to sanctification.

Sanders' answer to his own plaint is thus troubling: there have indeed been many attempts to chart the course of virtue attainment and habituation. Moreover, because he cannot locate a recipe—a systematic theology-- for such in the Bible, he makes the astonishing statement that it follows that we must “extinguish” the very question and its desire for an answer! This kind of mediocrity, its brute Transcendence-seeking quietism resulting from an inability and unwillingness to read the Bible contextually (contingent to personal character and archived history) serves nothing: nobody or no sanctifying principle of self- or other-caring.

But is it factual that the Bible does not address virtue? No! Christ’s virtues are foreshadowed in OT figures and specified piecemeal in the Pauline and General Epistles. It takes some diligence—ever necessary and accountable for Christians--to detail Christian virtues. I have done such in my book, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft ofTheology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism (Wipf and Stock 2023) 

Thus, when accounting for ones “participation” in sanctification, claiming a “gap” in Biblical presentation is not responsibly sufficient or diligent, nor passivity grounding a norm of ignorance of the character of Christian virtue is no excuse. There is for Christians the virtue of accountability, which is a necessity like a virtues.

And while I am sorry to discover more inconsistencies in Sanders’ impious logic, but the man is an authority on the Trinity! What is the discoverable Trinitarian essence other than shared conation—the metaphysics of will to providing for and sustaining the Creation and coming now to repair the creation’s essence of renewability for eternalization? Where the human being is the essential bridge of the earth essence of renewing and the divine essence of conation that wills eternalization: the infinite continuance of the divinely created and now reshaped and pacified! For more systematics on the conative essence grounding virtue, see Appendix I of Ibid.

But there is so much more to the historical and anthropological development of virtue in the Bible: The Shema is Moses’ call to the people of Israel to re-straighten their nature with a sequential program that centers anthropological essence not in humanity's historical nature centered noetically in strategics and conflict (agon) but in the conative intent and centrality of the heart (twice repeated in Shema’s unfolding proem): to love God in the heart and by the heart—its totality [col], a totality yoked then through the expressive soul (nephesh) witnessed by effective craft (mo-ed).  And when the heart has thus prepared and restored personal wholeness, God sends Jeremiah to announce the covenant of the re-centered heart (Jer. 40-44), the in-tented will to love and serve others. So that only after, then Jesus by his ministry comes to add to the Shema’s anthropological reshaping “dianoia” (Matt. 22:37), the noetic insight that effects grace for others. NT Christian mission is effected by a people chosen to extend ethical awareness and alignment with grace by progress of individual sanctification to lead social shalom: the pacification and unity of incorporation of all as God’s conation becoming Christ in and for all, our sanctifying becoming Christ becoming all in all.

The anthropology of sanctification, then, is processive and sequential and covenantal. It is in plain sight in the Bible’s covenanting structure and historical unfolding dimensions of revelation, but yes, there is no recipe of systematized application. But make no mistake, sanctification is expected to advance and outreach to others. We are accountable to such. Its pursuit is grounds for every generation’s entry into a pietist search that works toward sanctification by virtues illustrated in the Sermon on the Mount rather than by some esoteric or blasphemous claim of knowledge of the Book of Revelation--to accord with an angelic ideology to bring its heavenly symbols to earth on the back of tanks and Christ returning bearing an AR-15!

No, the Sermon on the Mount is not vitiated or mooted, nor may it ever be.

But more can be said whether piety and virtue development involve an instrumental feature to motivate and activate: to bring about a certain hierarchy or authority, or to bring its practitioner to a higher state of blessedness. As in a certain piety of the Sermon on the Mount that finds a ladder of spiritual ascent (i.e. Jim Forest, some aspects of Thomas Merton). In other words, does virtue depend on a technical operation [efficient process or hedonic outcomes] or a juridical demand [deontological moral rightness or duty]? Is virtue egologically decided and self-concerned—a spiritual practice of ascent? Or is it an obligation—a duty to descend from the heights of self-asserted knowledge of the Transcendent--to abide finitely in such infinite being—or instead to serve God by serving God’s will to serve others, on the ground and street corners and back alleys in their need?

The answer can only establish virtue in the latter: the great commandment to love God and love neighbor that is initiated in the soul by the announcement of the Shema ("Heed, O Israel") and now modeled in Christ and his body. As we’ve seen, Christ’s supplements the Shema as the “whole law and the prophets” (Matt 22: 40) that emerges from this great commandment. So that the juridical and deontological structure of virtue is discovered through what we quaintly have come to term the “Golden Rule,” a moniker that so easily elides into an individuated “spiritual guideline.” It is not. It is an imperative. It is duty. It is the Golden Duty to love others in their extreme situations of privation and need, drawing upon our experience of such to create an effective remedy. And then, from our assay of the Golden Obligation/Imperative in specific situations and the learning of the our caregiving therefrom, wisdom and the role of virtues as habits that serve the needs of neighbor in communitarian shalom emerges. Such “deontological virtue” is a technique with emerging competence and not an epistemological system or presented or developed as such. Sanctification by virtue is practical theology. It requires practice, experience, and reflection to develop competence. In applied wisdom processes sanctification. It is not a recipe of knowledge, the search for which, not being found through epistemology or textual analysis, requires other methods: heart-discerning and -determining methods to serve the other! The search of and diligence through and application by the heart to attend to the metaphysics of creation in its conative process is required for sanctification. It may not be postponed to or sublimated by another plane of reality! This life on earth has meaning! Existentially crucial meaning. This life is where Destiny is formed. Such waste of opportunity hanging around "discerning," screening others as they suffer in body and ignorance while we ourselves wait to be raptured!

Sanctification requires the implications of “metanoia” (our repentant entry into the sheepfold by the gates Christ’s supplicatory sacrifice on the cross) to work through (dia) the history of God’s people and recover the OT virtues foreshadowed there and the meaning of the “new birth” in the covenant of the heart. To revisit again and again the Shema and embody it through the whole person (soul)—to bring the “changed awareness” of repentance as “meta-noia” into the NT anthropology of “dia-noia,” carrying through our changed heart, soul, and mind to align with the task of Christ. To attend to and align with grace in all things that provides, pacifies, and repairs estrangements from both earth and neighbors.

Do not be misled by theologians who search ever for epistemically completed systems! Sanctification is ontogenetic--biographically attained--modeled phylogenetically--historically inside a chosen language group and its preserved archives of wisdom and guidance--but fitfully (as generations change and transition, losing some wisdom) and kairetically (at a chosen and opportune time in eternal processing) visited by young genius to recover lost wisdom and extend it. The habituation of virtues is not to be put off in the development of the heart for God and others. This is the work of sanctification. The cross initiated but did not complete that work! We are the Cross's telic agents--teleologically bringing historical progress by the Spirit manifest first in the Church, but also counter-indicated in false religiosity first.

And since one looks ever for theory, here’s one uncompleted--necessarily so!--to help guide one’s own search and solution:

Act leads and guides potential, as would be true in any family life. The ear is the tradent that transmits the language group’s archived breath to feed and reshape the heart to become the initiator of will, with the rational mind the supportive organ that organizes the impulses of the will in a way to make it both understandable to onlookers and mirroring, transmittable by them--to explain the faithful intention and heart. These grounds counter-cultural acts that suborn agonistic flesh and its inability and refusal to articulate intention. Instead a mutinous mind leads the soul where the anxious and ravenous body wills, to an order and hierarchy that is served rather than serves.  The marks of the experience of coercive service of such mutinous mind that Luther notes binds the will is borne in and by the body: the welts of slavery left by whips, the knots of tension that reveal a day’s effort, the musculature than reveals the texture of vocational commitments, the coordination of members and kinesthetics of genius, all combine to initiate the soul’s learning, by trial and error inside voluntary service to others, of what virtues promote flourishing, liberation, and shalom. These develop like muscle to guide the soul into its heart potentiality, its eternal childhood, that canalizes the development of the eternal, spiritual body. Lacking these virtues altogether and failing their expansion, the soul either fails to develop or its innate potentials atrophy. And in such a case, we squander our time on earth awaiting the pipe dream of purgatory to straighten our crooked and misspent soul as if virtue can be developed without commitment for the lives of others in the created realm. This life is not a test of simply enduring suffering or participating in Christ’s sacrifice but the actual participation in constructing a destiny, a house that can be shared by the being-ness of a house of sharing.

Christians in the Spirit aren’t destined to simply look around and survey others’ failures.  Doom's optimists luxuriating while waiting for heaven’s rapturing because that’s when life begins opened by the heavenly womb of Christ’s finally taking accountability for ALL our failures or accountability. No: we are tasked with guiding destinies in the encompassing will modeled by Christ heard from his Father. We have been internally healed by Christ. Now we are responsible to others in our awareness of his sacrificial and supplicatory grace in all things. To not only take the side of those who suffer against those who cause suffering: the powers of the established hegemony that coerce order through violence and systematic lies (Eph 6.12). Instead to embody the Golden Rule in all aspects of one’s life: a heart that takes sides, a soul that paints, dances, and speaks for healing, a dedication to the craft of virtue that calms anxieties and models grace, and finally, a mind that can be trusted because it can recognize the heartless and egotistical and grasping avarice laid by that system inside one’s conscience, and plans to suborn and redress those.

 In our active realization and ethical practice is Christ becoming-all-in-all. We are his awareness's extending agents, and we may not live by any pursuit or claim of ignorance if we claim we are 'justified [right-minded] through faith,' whether one translates pistis Jesou as the "faith of Jesus" or the "faith in Jesus." Either requires moving from awareness to active and dedicated alignment. Aligned on this earth with the agencies of grace and to provide for those of this earth--the arena of Jesus's "faith" exceedingly precious to Father, Son, and those sanctifying in the Spirit.