Well. I've been away from here for a couple of days. There were things in the real world that needed handling. Some serious. Some funny. Some confusing. And many joyful.
Several of you wrote, some of you worried, asking whether something was wrong.
Nothing is. When I pull back from this place, like these last few days, it's usually only to reconnoitre the terrain. To understand what has worked and what hasn't. Where I press too hard, and where I don't push nearly hard enough. That can be hard to see and feel when, day after day, you follow whatever is running through you and put words to it without giving it much thought.
And every time I do it, every time I take a few steps back and look at the whole thing from a distance, I see the same thing.
I write about a lot of things here. Islam and the West. The left. Rasmus. Mette. The Church. The Jews. All the cases that come by and that I can't leave alone. And from a distance it can certainly look like a man with a lot of opinions about a lot of things - and that's also what some of those you might call "my critics" see. And that's fair enough, because that is how it looks if you only look at the surface.
But that's not what it is.
It is one question, asked again and again of different cases. And I've spent the last few days finding out whether I have ever asked that question completely clean, without a case in front of it, without a news story to hang it on, without Rasmus or Mette, an idiotic proposal down in Brussels or a council decision in Birmingham as the occasion.
I don't think I have. I've asked it sideways in hundreds of posts. I have never asked it straight.
The question is - what is True.
Not what I think. Not what I believe. But what IS, before any of us has said anything about it. And what happens to a Human Being and to a people when they move away from it, however good their reasons.
So that is what's coming now. It's long, longer than anything I've written here before, and that's deliberate, because it's what everything else I write stands on. So if you've been reading along for a while and have sometimes thought, WHERE THE H*** is he actually going with all this, then this is the answer. If you're new here, this is the right place to begin.
And if you don't have time today, save it. It isn't going anywhere. That's actually the whole point.
Stay with me.
....
A man stands in a room in Jerusalem on a Friday morning some two thousand years ago, and he asks the question the whole West is still asking.
The man's name is Pontius Pilate. He is the Roman governor, he holds power over life and death in the province, and he has had a prisoner brought in whom the priests want executed. He questions him. The prisoner says that he came into the world to bear witness to the Truth, and that everyone who is of the Truth hears his voice.
And Pilate answers - What is Truth?
Then he walks out.
Try standing in that for a moment. He isn't asking in order to get an answer. John writes it completely dry - he said it, and then he went out to those who were standing outside. The question hangs in the room, and the man who asked it is already on his way out the door. He has the Truth standing in front of him, bound, in a borrowed room, and he asks what it is, and doesn't wait for the answer.
I know of no better description of where we stand today.
We ask the question all the time. What is Truth, who owns it, isn't it just your truth and my truth, isn't it a position of power, a construction, a privilege? We ask it in the classrooms and on the debate shows and in every single comment thread, and we ask it exactly Pilate's way. As a goodbye. As a way of leaving the room before anything in the room is allowed to bind us.
This post is an attempt to stay standing instead.
It's going to be long. That's deliberate. I often write Truth with a capital T, and several of you have asked what it is I actually mean by that. Whether it's an opinion. Whether it's something Christian I'm trying to sneak in through the back door. Some find it ridiculous. Or think it's a trick or a trap. It isn't.
It's the front door.
So let's walk in through it.
....
Let's start with the word, because it's more interesting than you'd think.
In Danish we say sand. Sandt. Sandheden. We use it as if it means correct, as in an audit - an Excel sheet - does it add up or doesn't it. But the word is much older than accounts, and it meant something else. Sand comes from the Old Norse 'sannr', and that word goes back to the same root as the verb 'to be'. True originally means that which is. That which exists. What is there, whether anyone says it or not.
Notice what that does to the sentence. When we ask what is true, we aren't asking who is right. We're asking what is. Because Truth is not a claim about Reality that has managed to win a majority. Truth is Reality itself, before anyone has said anything about it.
The same thing happens if you go to Hebrew, the language the Old Testament is written in. The word there is 'emet', and it comes from a root meaning firm, load-bearing, something you can lean on. It's the root we still say out loud every time we say 'amen'. Amen doesn't mean "end of prayer". It means - 'this stands firm'. It holds.
Truth in Hebrew is not something that is correct. It is something that bears weight.
And in Greek, the language the gospels are written in, Truth is 'aletheia', and that word is built from a negation in front of the word for forgetting and hiddenness. Truth is 'the un-hidden'. What has come out into the light. The Greeks didn't imagine Truth as something you invent. They imagined it as something that lies there and gets uncovered.
Three languages, three different peoples, and they point to the same place. Truth is what IS. What bears. What comes out when you remove what covers it.
Hold on to that. It's the whole rest of this text in three sentences.
Because now notice what it does to the sentence we've all learned to say over the last couple of decades.
My Truth. Your Truth.
It sounds generous, and it's kindly meant, but try putting the old meaning in. 'My that-which-is'. 'Your that-which-is'. It doesn't work.
What is, is not mine or yours, any more than the weather is. What is mine is my layer on top. My experience of it. My story about it. And that's real enough, and of course it deserves, to some degree, to be respected, but it isn't the Truth about anything. It's the Truth about me. When we say 'my Truth', what we really mean is 'my view'. And a view is not the landscape.
....
So we have to go ALL the way back. To BEFORE.
Genesis doesn't begin with Man. It begins with a deep. The earth was without form and void, it says, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. It isn't nothing that is being described. It's something unordered. Chaos, the Greeks would say. A place where nothing is yet separated from anything else, where light and dark, sea and land, up and down aren't anything, because they haven't been divided.
And then it happens. God speaks. Let there be light. And there was light.
Try noticing what isn't written. It doesn't say God fought the deep. It doesn't say he persuaded it or explained it or put it to a vote.
He spoke, and what he spoke, was.
And then notice what it is he does with the word, day after day. He separates. Light from darkness, the waters above from the waters below, sea from land, day from night, kind from kind. And every time he has separated something out, he gives it a name. Day. Night. Heaven. Earth. Sea. Creation in the Bible is not something coming out of nothing by a magic trick. Creation is what lay in one unordered deep being separated and named, so it can be what it is. And all of it happens by a word.
That is what I mean when I write that Reality is created. I don't just mean that it has a beginning. I mean that it has an order, and that the order was there before us. Before you were born, before your parents, before your language, before your culture, before the first ideology, before the first religion, before anyone had an opinion about anything - Reality was already there, and it was ordered, and it was running.
That's what I call that which lies there and runs before everything else.
Think of it like this. You can take everything you think you know and put it in a pile. What you were told at school. What your mother said. What you've read, seen, heard, argued about. Your hunches. Your wounds. What you'd like to be true, because it would make life easier. What you're afraid is true, because it would make it harder. All the layers. And then you can ask - What's left if you lift all the layers off?
The answer is not nothing.
The answer is Reality.
It was there before the layers went on, and it's there when they're lifted off. It's what the layers lie on top of. It's what they hide.
And that is what is true. Not the layers. It.
I know that sounds abstract, so let me give you a picture I'll be using the rest of the way, because it's the only one that has ever been good enough for me.
The plumb line.
A bricklayer always has a plumb line with him. It's a string with a weight at the end, a piece of metal, and it's probably the most primitive tool there is.
You hold it up, and it hangs. Plumb.
That's all. It doesn't argue. It has no opinion about the wall. It has no aesthetics, no politics, no feeling for whether the bricklayer has had a hard day. It just hangs straight, because something in Reality pulls it downward, and 'that something' has been pulling downward since before the first wall was built.
The bricklayer doesn't build the plumb line. He finds it. Or rather, he finds what the plumb line shows - the direction that was already there. And his whole craft consists of building so that what he builds lines up with what was already there.
He can choose not to. That's the crucial thing. He can build crooked. Nobody stops him. The plumb line doesn't shout. It just hangs, and he can choose to look at it or not. But if he builds crooked, there comes a point where the wall itself tells him he did. Not in words. It falls.
Boom
"You didn't build by Reality's rules."
That's what Reality is like. It is the plumb line. It's what hangs straight, whatever we build. And everything we build - our ideas, our societies, our self-images, our explanations - stands or falls by one measure - whether it lines up with what was there before.
....
And then comes what makes Christianity something other than a philosophy.
John begins his gospel by going back to the same place as Genesis. In the beginning. But he writes it differently.
In the beginning was the Word, he writes, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through it.
The Greek word he uses is Logos.
Logos was a word the Greeks had already been using for five hundred years when John took hold of it. It meant word, but it also meant reason, order, principle, the coherence that makes the world hold together instead of falling apart. The philosophers had been looking for it for generations. That which orders. That which makes there be laws in nature and not just chance. That which makes two and two four in Athens and in Babylon alike.
And John says - Yes. Yes, it exists. It's what created. And then he says what no Greek philosopher had dared to say.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
That is what is happening in that room in Jerusalem on the Friday morning where we started. What ordered the deep stands bound in front of an official. What was there before everything else has been given a face, a body, a voice, and it is being asked what Truth is.
And four chapters earlier, in the same gospel, he has answered the question himself, before it was asked.
I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say - I know the Truth. He doesn't say - I have a teaching that is true.
He says - I am it. The Truth.
It's the most radical thing that has ever been said about what Truth is, and it's the reason I write it with a capital T. Because if Truth is a person, then it isn't something you can own. You can't patent a person. You can't calculate your way to a person. You can't vote on a person. You can meet a person. You can recognize a person. You can turn toward a person or away from one.
Augustine, whom we'll come back to, opens his Confessions with a sentence that has been read aloud for sixteen hundred years, because nobody has managed to say it better.
"You have made us for yourself," he writes, addressing God, "and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
That's a sentence you can only write about a person. You don't rest in an equation. You don't rest in a correct statement. You rest in someone.
And that is exactly what Pilate doesn't do. He turns away. He doesn't have the Truth in front of him as a sentence he can dismiss with a better sentence. He has it as a Human Being, and he leaves.
I realize this is the point where many of you get off, and that's of course completely fine. I'm not asking you to believe it. I'm asking you to understand what is being claimed, because it's something other than what most people have heard about Christianity.
What's being claimed isn't that an old book is right. What's being claimed is that what ordered the universe is of such a kind that it can be met. That Reality, at its innermost, is not an equation but a face. That the plumb line, if you follow it all the way down, doesn't end in a piece of metal, but in someone who is looking at you.
You can call that whatever you like.
But that's what it says.
....
Now to the Lie. Because you only understand it once you've understood all of the above.
If Truth is what is, then the Lie isn't just the opposite of Truth. It's worse than that. The Lie is what is not, but is said to be.
Augustine, the bishop in North Africa around the year 400, probably one of the cleverest men who has ever lived, spent many years working out what Evil actually is. As a young man he was a Manichaean, a follower of a teaching that said there are two equally strong powers in the world, a good one and an evil one, and that they are at war. He gave that idea up, and what he landed on is still the clearest thing I've come across.
Evil, he said, is not a thing. It has no substance of its own. It's an absence, the way Darkness is the absence of Light and cold the absence of heat. You can't switch on the Darkness. You can only switch off the Light.
The Lie is like that. It has no reality of its own. It borrows all its reality from the Truth, because it can only exist as a claim about something that is. A lie about nothing isn't a lie, it's just noise. The Lie needs something real to lay itself over, otherwise it can't stand.
And that means something very practical, which anyone who has ever lied knows from their own body.
The Lie has to be held up.
The Truth doesn't. You can say something true once and walk on and forget it, and it's still true ten years later, because it wasn't you holding it up. It was Reality. But if you lie, from that moment on you've been hired. You have to remember what you said. You have to remember who you said it to. You have to watch whether anyone is getting too close. You have to make the next lie that covers the first, and the third that covers the two. You have to build a whole construction, and the construction has no foundation in anything that is, so you are the foundation. All the time. With your attention, your anxiety, your energy.
That's what I mean when I say the Lie moves a Human Being out of Reality. Not as a punishment. As a mechanism. The one who lies has to live in what he has built, because it falls if he walks away from it. And so he lives there, in the construction, instead of in Reality, and he grows more and more afraid of the place he came from - the Truth - because it's the only place that can bring him down.
And something happens inside him that is worse than the fear.
He becomes two inside.
One is the one who knows what is, because of course he knows, that's why he's able to lie about it. And then there's the other, who says something else.
The two can't live together in peace, so he builds a wall between them, and that wall has to be held up too. The Greek word for the devil, diabolos, means the one who throws apart. The one who splits. So it's no accident that that's the word that stuck. Because that's what the Lie does to a Human Being before it does anything at all to the world.
It divides it.
Between what it sees and what it says.
Between what it is and what it shows.
And a divided Human Being cannot rest, because there is ALWAYS one half standing guard over the other.
Orwell described it exactly in his book '1984'.
The ultimate in the Party's power isn't getting you to say that 2 + 2 = 5. It's getting you to believe it while you look at the four fingers. It's getting you to move into the construction so completely that you can no longer see the plumb line, even when it's hanging right in front of you.
Jesus says something about the Lie that is so hard most preachers walk around it. It's also in John, chapter eight, in an argument with some of the people listening to him.
He says, and notice the whole choice of words here, that they have the devil as their father. And then he describes the devil with two words in the same breath.
He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not stand in the Truth, for there is no Truth in him. When he lies, he speaks from his own, for he is a Liar and the Father of Lies.
Murderer and Liar. In the same verse. It's not a coincidence, and this is where I have to bring a man into the text who has meant more to my own understanding than almost anyone else. Yes, I know, that's a lot of names for a Friday. But try to hang on.
…
René Girard was French, a literary scholar, he lived in America most of his life and died in 2015. He - didn't - start out as a believer either. He started by reading novels, Cervantes, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and he discovered something about Man that the novelists had seen and no science had got hold of.
That we don't know what we want.
That we want what others want.
That our desire is borrowed, copied, caught.
And that when many people want the same thing, because they copy each other, they end up in conflict, and the conflict grows until it threatens to tear the whole group apart.
And then he found the mechanism that saves the group. It's always the same, in every culture, in every myth, from the Aztecs to the Greeks to the village. The group finds one. One who stands out. A stranger, a cripple, someone too beautiful or too ugly or too rich or who speaks wrong. And everyone who a moment ago was about to kill each other turns together against the one - and kills him instead. And peace comes back. And because peace comes back, he must have been guilty. He must have been the cause. And because he could bring peace by dying, he must have been something special. Sacred.
That, says Girard, is where religion comes from.
Archaic religion. The temple, the sacrifice, the ritual, the taboo. All of it is machinery that repeats the first murder in a controlled way, so the group can keep discharging its violence without falling apart. And the myth, the story told afterward, always has the same shape - The victim was guilty. The gods wanted it. "It was necessary."
The myth is the Lie about the Victim. That's the point. The murder and the Lie are not two things. The murder only works if everyone believes the Lie that the one killed deserved it. Remove the Lie, and the murder becomes visible as what it is, and then it can't make peace anymore. Then it can only make shame.
Murderer from the beginning. Father of Lies. Same verse.
And then Girard read the gospels, and he saw something that made him a Christian, even though he - hadn't - been looking for it either. He saw that the gospels tell exactly the same story as all the myths. A city in crisis. A man who stands out. A crowd that turns on him. The priests and the powers in agreement for once. The people shouting. An execution meant to bring calm.
But the gospels tell it from the wrong side. They tell it for the first time from the victim's side. And they say what no myth had ever said before -
He was innocent. The crowd was wrong. The peace that came afterward was a lie.
Girard said that changes everything. Because a mechanism that has been exposed no longer works. It only works as long as everyone believes the myth. From the moment there is a story in the world that insists the scapegoat was innocent, you can never again kill someone together with an entirely good conscience. There will always be someone who knows the other story.
That, in Girard's view, is the real reason the West is the place in the world that has become obsessed with victims. Where other cultures honour the victor, we have for two thousand years had an executed innocent man hanging on the wall of every room where decisions were made. It has done something to us. It has made it impossible for us to be entirely at peace when we strike someone down.
That isn't a weakness. It's the best thing we have.
But hold on to the Lie. Because Girard gives us something we don't otherwise have. He shows that the Lie isn't just something individuals do when they want to escape discomfort. The Lie is a social force. It's what holds a crowd together around a victim. It's what makes a hundred people feel righteous while they do something terrible.
And it's the same lie every time - that the one we turn against deserves it.
....
This is where it hurts, and this is where I have to write something some of you will take personally. I can't decide for you, but don't. What I'm writing isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at a mechanism you and I are both sitting inside.
The Lie doesn't have to be Evil to be a Lie.
That's one of the hardest things for a modern - so-called empathetic - Human Being to understand, because we've been raised to judge by intention. Did he mean well? Then it's good. Did it come from a warm place? Then it's true.
It comes from our having confused two things that have never had anything to do with each other - what we feel, and what is.
The feeling is real enough. That's not what I'm saying. Your anger is real, your compassion is real, your fear is real. But the feeling only tells you something true about YOU. It doesn't tell you anything about the world. And the moment you start using the feeling as the measure of what is true about the world, you've swapped the plumb line for your own pulse.
Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who was imprisoned under communism and ended up as his country's president, wrote an essay in 1978 that is still one of the best things I know on this.
He describes, in the communist years, a greengrocer. An entirely ordinary man with a shop in Prague. One day he puts a sign in the window between the onions and the carrots, and on the sign it says -
Workers of the world, unite.
Why does he do it? Does he believe it? Has he thought about what it means?
The answer is no. No. He does it because the sign came with the goods from the wholesaler, and because all the others have one too, and because he knows that if he doesn't put it up, somebody will notice. He does it to be left in peace.
And Havel says: Notice what the greengrocer is actually saying with the sign. He isn't saying anything about workers. He's saying: I'm afraid of the others, and I fall into line. But he can't say that out loud, because it would be humiliating. So he says it in the language of the ideology instead, and the ideology lets him believe he's doing something noble while he does something cowardly.
The same happened in Germany. Different signs. Different words.
That's what an ideology is for, says Havel. It's a bridge between the system and the individual Human Being that makes it possible to live in the lie and still feel all right. It lets you pay your contribution to the construction and call it conviction.
Try swapping the sign. Try putting a different slogan in the window, one from our time, one you have a relationship with yourself. It can be anything. The point isn't what it says. The point is that there are two questions you can ask of it, and we only ask one.
We ask: Does he mean well?
We almost never ask: Is it true?
And that's how a Well-Meaning Lie works. It isn't a Lie about a fact you can look up. It's a lie about where you stand.
The greengrocer thinks he's standing in his shop. He isn't. He's standing in the construction. He has moved out of Reality, a little, without noticing, for good reasons, for the sake of peace, and now he lives somewhere he has to hold up a sign that isn't his, so as not to be caught being who he is.
How many of those signs in shop counters, flags on town halls, marches and demonstrations have we had in rotation over the last five years? Ten years? Twenty?
Now multiply that by a people.
That's what an ideology does on a large scale.
It takes a real feeling - a sense of justice, compassion, anger at wrong, longing for belonging, all of it real, all of it good - and it builds a construction on top of it that doesn't line up with the plumb line. And because the feeling is real, those who live in the construction can't understand that the construction isn't. They feel the warmth, after all. They feel that they want the good. And every time Reality sticks its head in and says that what they're building is crooked, it isn't experienced as information.
It's experienced as an Attack on The Good.
That's why the great ideological catastrophes of the twentieth century were mostly not committed by people who wanted Evil.
It's the most important lesson of that century, and we have REFUSED to learn it. They were committed by people who wanted The Good so badly that they stopped checking whether it was True. And when it then turned out not to be, when the fields lay empty and the camps were full, it wasn't the construction that came down. It was the ones pointing at the plumb line. Because the construction had to be held up. And the only thing threatening it was Reality. The Truth.
Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the camps, wrote afterward that the line between Good and Evil doesn't run between states or classes or parties. It runs right through every human heart. That's what makes his testimony so unbearable. He accuses no one he hasn't been himself. He had been a convinced young officer himself. He had had the sign in the window himself. And his conclusion when he came out wasn't political. It was the same as Havel's.
Live not by lies.
Not - Fight the system.
Just - Don't say what you know isn't true. Don't raise your hand for what you don't believe in. Don't hold the sign up.
It's less than you'd think, and it's more than most of us do.
And here Girard comes back with the last twist, the one that hurts most of all. In one of his late books, "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning", he writes about something he calls "the modern concern for victims".
He says - Look at what the gospels have done to us. We always take the victim's side now. We can't help it. It's the deepest Christian inheritance in the West, deeper than any church, and it's found even in those who have never set foot in one.
But then he says - And look at what we do with it. We use it to find new scapegoats. We find the one who has made someone a victim, and then we all turn on him together, and we feel completely righteous while we do it, because we're doing it for the victim's sake, after all.
The old mechanism is back. The crowd, the one, the unanimity, the peace afterward. Only with the victim's language in its mouth. It is, says Girard, the most sophisticated form of persecution that has ever existed, because it uses the very unmasking that should have made persecution impossible... as its alibi.
That's the Well-Meaning Lie in its purest form. It has borrowed all the most beautiful things from the Truth, Compassion, Justice, Care for The Weak, and it uses them to build precisely the construction the Truth came to topple.
And it has to be held up. Day and night. By all of us. With signs in the windows.
And then notice what happens to religion when it's thrown out the front door. It comes back in through the back door, without the one thing that made it bearable.
When a people leaves the one who tore the veil - I'll come back to the veil in a moment - it doesn't build a world without veils. It builds new ones. It needs somewhere to put its guilt, because guilt doesn't disappear when you stop believing in God, it just changes address. So we get sin again, under other names now - your footprint, your heritage, your skin colour, your sex, what you said in 2009.
We get purity rules again, about words you mustn't use and people you mustn't stand next to. We get public confession, where you have to say the right sentences in front of the others to stay in the crowd. We get judgement. We get expulsion. We get priests who don't call themselves priests, deciding who's in and who's out.
The only thing we don't get is forgiveness.
Because forgiveness was the only thing in the whole old package that wasn't Man's own invention. It came from above. Everything else, the guilt, the purity, the judgement, the sacrifice, Man can easily make himself, he's done it for thousands of years. But he can't forgive himself. He can only receive forgiveness. And when you throw out Him who gave it, you're left with a religion that has kept everything that binds and lost the only thing that set free.
Sin without forgiveness. Judgement without grace. Guilt with no one to carry it to. What the West is living through now is not Freedom from Religion. It's the West's relapse into the oldest religion there is, the one Girard described, the one that can only find peace by finding the next one.
And most of those gripped hardest by it… mean well.
....
So what is Christianity, then? If it isn't a sign you put up in the window to belong?
Jesus says it himself in that same chapter eight, just before the argument about the Father of Lies. If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.
The Truth will set you free.
We've heard that sentence so many times that we no longer hear how strange it is. Because it doesn't say the Truth will make you right. Or good. Or saved in some technical sense.
It says - Free.
And those he said it to were offended. "We are Abraham's descendants," they answered, "we have never been anyone's slaves, how can you say we will be made free?"
They didn't understand it, because they thought of slavery as something external. Chains. A foreign rule. And Jesus is talking about something else. He's talking about the unfreedom of having to hold something up. Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin, he says. Not because a punishment comes from outside. Because the one who has built crooked is bound to his wall. He can't walk away from it. He has to stand there and hold it.
And what Christianity is at its core - before anyone builds an institution around it - is the message that you can let go.
I want to say this as precisely as I can, because it's the place where believers and unbelievers alike tend to misunderstand me.
Christianity is a religion in everything outward. It has churches, priests, rituals, a creed, a calendar. I don't deny any of that, and I stand by the creed myself, all the way. But at its core, in what Jesus actually did and said…
… it is the abolition of what religion is for.
Because what is religion for?
Ask Girard, and he says - to manage violence through sacrifice.
Ask the anthropologist, and he says - to hold the group together.
Ask the ordinary Human Being in every culture at every time, and the answer is basically the same - Religion is what Man does to get up to God.
To stand well. To appease, to earn, to secure himself. You sacrifice, you fast, you observe, you purify yourself, you build. The Tower of Babel is the most honest religious act in the whole Bible. "Let us build a tower with its top in the heavens, and make a name for ourselves. Up. By our own strength. So we're safe."
And the gospel is the exact opposite.
It isn't Man who goes up. It's God who comes down. Not to the temple. To a stable. Not to the priests. To fishermen and tax collectors and women with bad reputations. Not to demand a sacrifice. To be one.
The WHOLE movement is reversed.
And EVERYTHING religion was built to arrange - the sacrifice, the purity, the access, the distance between God and Man - is made superfluous in one movement.
Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who in the 1930s stood up against the German church's kneeling to Nazism, wrote a chapter in his great work that he called "The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion". And he chose the German word "Aufhebung" deliberately, because it means two things at once.
It means to abolish. And it means to lift up. Religion, Barth said, is Man's attempt to grasp God, and that attempt is at its innermost core unbelief, because it doesn't trust that God comes himself. Revelation abolishes that attempt. And lifts it up. Both.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was deeply shaped by Barth, and who was hanged by the Nazis in April 1945, a few weeks before the war ended, sat in Tegel prison writing letters in which he asked whether there could be a religionless Christianity.
Not a Christianity without God. But a Christianity without the scaffolding of piety and metaphysics and inner exercises that Man had built around Christ to make him his own. He saw that the world had come of age, that it no longer needed God as the explanation for what it didn't understand, and he said - Good. Because that was never what he was for.
God is not the stopgap in the holes of our knowledge. God is in the middle of life, where we are strong, not only where we are not.
And then read what Jesus actually does when he meets the religion of his own time.
He breaks it open. Again and again. The religious reproach him because his disciples pluck grain on the Sabbath, and he answers that the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. They reproach him for eating with sinners, and he says it's not the healthy who need a doctor. You load burdens onto people's shoulders that you won't touch with one finger yourselves, he tells them, and you have taken away the key of knowledge and locked it, so that neither you nor anyone else can get in. He calls them 'whitewashed tombs'. Fine on the outside. Dead inside.
And when he dies, Matthew writes that the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The veil was what separated the holy of holies from everyone else. Only the high priest could go in behind it, once a year, with blood. It was the very architecture of religion - a room, an access, a guard, a price. And it's torn through. From above. Not from Man's side.
That is what I mean by liberation from religion.
Not that there mustn't be churches. That there is no longer any veil. That there's no price. That what all religions have tried to achieve with sacrifices and rules and purity has been given by Him. Free. First. Before you've done anything.
And then think about what that does to a Human Being who receives it…
It no longer has to hold anything up. It doesn't have to earn its place in Reality. It doesn't have to be right to be loved. It doesn't have to find a scapegoat to feel clean. It doesn't have to build a tower. And a Human Being who doesn't have to hold anything up suddenly has both hands free for something else.
This isn't a theological nicety. It's the greatest liberation that has ever been offered to any human being, and it's still lying there, and most people walk past it, because it's called Christianity - and that word is one we, an idiotic navel-gazing culture, have been taught to read as the opposite of what it means.
....
And now the concession. Because it has to be there, and it has to be whole.
Everything I've just written has been used for the opposite. For two thousand years. By people who called themselves Christians, and who built new veils, new temples, new prices, new guards, and hung the cross over the whole thing as a sign in the window.
The trade in indulgences, where you could buy yourself free of guilt for money. The Inquisition, where Truth became something you could force out of people with iron. The Crusades, where the gospel of the innocent man who didn't strike back was painted on shields. State churches, where faith became a condition for office and citizenship. And all the small, daily veils that aren't in the history books - the priest who made himself the guard of the access. The congregation that became a place you had to earn your way into. God written into the penal code, so the neighbour could be forced into what he didn't believe. Everything Jesus broke open, built up again… with His name on it.
I'm not writing this to seem balanced. It's true, and it has to be said, because otherwise the rest doesn't hold.
Dostoevsky wrote it best. In The Brothers Karamazov he has one of the brothers tell a story he calls The Grand Inquisitor. Christ returns to earth, to Seville in the 1500s, in the middle of the Inquisition. People recognize him. He heals. And the Grand Inquisitor, the old cardinal, has him arrested and comes down to the cell at night to talk to him.
And what the cardinal says is the most honest thing any representative of religion has ever said.
You gave them Freedom, he says. That was your mistake. People don't want Freedom. They want Bread, they want someone to bow to, and they want someone to take the responsibility from them. You refused all of it in the desert when the Tempter offered it to you. We accepted it instead. We have corrected your work. We have given them what they wanted and taken their freedom from them, and they are happy. Go. Don't come again.
And Christ says not a word. He gets up and kisses the old man on the lips. And the cardinal goes over and opens the door and says - Go.
That's the whole tension between the gospels and the Church in one scene.
The institution that has understood that Freedom is what Christ brought, and has decided that Man can't bear it, and therefore builds the veil up again, out of care, out of realism, out of the Well-Meaning Lie. And the man in the cell, who doesn't argue, because Truth doesn't argue, but is simply there, and kisses.
Kierkegaard saw the same thing in Copenhagen and wrote himself to death over it in 1855. His word for it was Christendom. A whole population that was baptized, confirmed, married and buried by the state, and that called itself Christian because that's what you were if you were born in Denmark. The Christianity of the New Testament simply does not exist, he wrote. We have abolished it and put something else in its place that bears the same name.
But notice one thing most people overlook when they roll out that list.
Every time the Church has truly been judged for failing, it has been judged by the gospels. Not by something from outside. It wasn't the Enlightenment that came up with the idea that you mustn't sell forgiveness. It was Jesus who overturned the money changers' tables in the temple. It wasn't modern humanism that came up with the idea that you mustn't force faith on people. It was the man who said - Whoever wants to, may follow me. It wasn't secularism that came up with the idea that the priest is no better than the tax collector. It was already written there.
The Church has never been able to sin against the gospels without carrying the evidence against itself around in its own book. That's what makes Christianity different from every other power structure.
It has ITS OWN JUDGEMENT BUILT IN.
It can't become a sign in the window without carrying a text inside it that says signs in the window are a lie.
So when I write that I don't stand on the Church, but on the book, it isn't to distance myself from the churches. I'm fond of them. I go there. I'm grateful that they exist, for the good they do, for the beauty, for having carried the book to me through two thousand years, often in spite of themselves. But the plumb line doesn't hang in the church. It hangs in what the church was built to point at. And when the church has built crooked, it's the plumb line that has shown it.
EVERY TIME!
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And then the last great misunderstanding, and it's the most current one.
When you say liberation, a modern Human Being hears something specific. It hears -
Now I can do anything. Now there are no rules. Now I'm free from what bound me, and so I'm free to define myself, my body, my sex, my Truth, my reality, from scratch, without anything outside me having any say.
And that is The Last Lie, the sophisticated one, the one that sounds most of all like Freedom.
Try taking the picture completely literally. A man stands on the fourth floor and declares himself free of gravity. He's right in one sense. Nobody forces him to acknowledge it. There's no policeman at the window. He can believe what he likes, and he can step out. And for a second or two he really is free. He floats. He has defined his own reality, and it holds.
And then it doesn't anymore.
He was never liberated from gravity. He was liberated from Life. Gravity was there the whole time, as indifferent to his declaration as the plumb line is to the bricklayer's mood, and the only thing his freedom consisted of was the Freedom to find out too late.
That's what I mean when I say Man is not liberated from the Order of Reality.
Reality is not a set of rules someone has laid down over you. It's what you're made of. Its Laws aren't Laws in the sense that Parliament makes Laws, something that could have been different if the majority had wanted.
They're more like gravity. They describe how things are. How a Human Being works. What makes it whole and what tears it apart. What carries a marriage, a family, a town, a civilization, and what makes them fall. Nobody invented them. They were found. By people who built crooked and watched the wall fall, generation after generation, until someone wrote down what the plumb line had shown.
Here I have to be precise again, because Paul actually says something that sounds like the opposite. You are not under the law, he writes to the Galatians. For Freedom Christ has set you free. And that has made many believe that Christianity is a kind of lawlessness, a place where everything is forgiven in advance, and where order therefore doesn't matter.
But read what he means.
The law Paul is talking about is the Law of Moses as the way to become righteous. The commandments, the sacrificial system, the purity rules, the whole religious machine that was supposed to bring Man up to God through observance. That's what he says you're free from. Not because it was wrong. Because it never could do what it was meant to. Nobody becomes whole by observing. And now what it was supposed to give you has been given another way.
And in the same letter, a few verses later, he writes -
But don't use your Freedom as an opening for what drags you down. Serve one another in Love. And then he describes what happens to a Human Being who lives against its own order, and what happens to one who lives with it. Not as threats. As description. As someone who has seen the wall fall and the wall stand. And seen what it does.
And in the prophet Jeremiah, six hundred years before Christ, is what the whole movement points toward -
"The day will come," says God, "when I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts. Not on tablets. Not in a temple. Within."
That's what has happened, if you take the gospel seriously. The order hasn't been abolished. It has moved in. From being something that stood outside you and threatened you, to being something you can recognize from the inside, because you're made of the same thing it describes. That's what we call Conscience.
Not a set of rules. A resonance. Something in you that knows when you're building straight, because you yourself are built straight, deep down, under the layers.
And the body knows it too.
It's the last thing left of the plumb line in a Human Being who has lied his way far out. Because you can Lie to your boss, your spouse, your congregation and your Facebook wall, and you can Lie to yourself for years, but the body keeps the books.
It sleeps badly. It tightens. It gets sick in places the doctor can't explain. Not as punishment. As the last part of you that still lives in Reality and keeps reporting that the wall is leaning. The body isn't the most important thing about a human being. But it's the most honest. It can't put signs in the window.
And that's why the Order of Reality - the Truth - is not an enemy.
That's what I most want you to leave here with. It isn't a father sitting and waiting for you to put a foot wrong. It's what lets you get up in the morning at all and count on the floor being there. It's arranged with the best intent for you, because it was arranged by someone who wanted you before you were there. When it says no to something, it isn't because it wants to take something from you. It's because it knows what falls.
A good father doesn't forbid his child to play in the road because he hates play. He does it because he knows something about cars that the child doesn't know yet. And the child who one day understands that understands at the same time something about the father that it couldn't understand while it stood there tugging at his hand.
That the No was Love all along. Just in a form the child couldn't read yet.
You are only freed FROM the Order if you leave life. You are freed TO the Order when you discover that it was on your side.
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And how do you get there?
Not by force.
It's the only thing I know for certain, and it's what this whole text has been circling, from Pilate and Home.
If Truth is what is, then it can't be Forced into anyone, because Force doesn't create Recognition of What Is. Force creates Adjustment. It creates greengrocers with signs in the window.
You may well be able to force a Human Being to say that two and two make five.
But you can't force it to see it.
You may be able to force a Human Being to kneel. But you can't force it to surrender.
Surrender is the thing that can't be forced, because the moment it's Forced, it's something else. Then it's defeat. And then you break something inside the Human Being's - your own - structure.
That's why God doesn't force. It isn't because he couldn't. It's because what he wants doesn't exist in forced form. He wants you to turn around. And a turning that's forced isn't a turning. It's someone being spun around by others, who turns back the moment they let go.
The Grand Inquisitor understood it. That was exactly what he reproached Christ for.
"You could have forced them," he said. "You could have taken the bread and the miracle and the power and given them a kneeling they couldn't say no to. You wanted them free. And they can't bear it."
And Christ kisses him and leaves. Because the cardinal is right about everything, except the conclusion.
Man CAN bear it.
He just hasn't been asked very often.
The turning is called conversion in the Bible, and that word has been ruined too, so let's take it back.
The Greek word is metanoia, and it doesn't mean to regret or to be ashamed or to sign up for something. It means to change your mind. To turn your head. That you were walking one way and saw something and now walk the other. That's what Pilate didn't do. He saw. And then he walked the same way he'd come, out the door, over to the crowd.
So don't do as he did.
Because what you turn toward isn't a set of rules. It's him in the cell. It's what Meister Eckhart, the Dominican monk in Germany around the year 1300, called "Gelassenheit", and that word can't really be translated, but it lies somewhere between "letting go" and "letting be and leaving it to". To stop holding. Eckhart said that God has to come into the Human Being who has made itself empty, because God can't help filling what is empty - that's how He is. It isn't an achievement. It's the opposite. It's putting down what you've been holding up, and finding that you yourself are being held.
I've written about Gethsemane before, so I'll keep it short. But that's where it stands clearest. The man who is Truth itself lies on the ground the night before his execution and asks to be spared. He doesn't want to. He asks that the cup may pass him by. And then he says - Yet not as I will, but as you will.
That is Surrender. Not Resignation, because he isn't passive, he walks freely to where he knows they're waiting. Not Submission, because nobody is forcing him, he could have gone the other way through the garden and been in Galilee in three days. It's a Will that CHOOSES to place itself under another will, because it trusts that the other sees further. It's the plumb line followed all the way down, even when what it shows is a cross.
And that's what Man is made for.
Not to bow to something that can grab it by the collar. But to bow FREELY to what Created it, and discover that in that very bowing it stands fully upright for the first time.
…
I'd like to write something personal here at the end, because otherwise it becomes a lecture, and that wasn't really the idea.
I've mentioned a handful of people in this text. John. Augustine. Eckhart. Dostoevsky. Kierkegaard. Barth. Bonhoeffer. Havel. Solzhenitsyn. Girard. And Jakob Böhme should have been there, the shoemaker from Görlitz who saw the light reflected in a pewter dish around the year 1600 and spent the rest of his life writing about what he had seen, but I couldn't get him in without it becoming too long, and it's already too long.
But I haven't come up with any of what I've written here.
That's what I want to say.
They aren't my thoughts in the sense that I've reasoned my way to them. It's something I've met, in those men and in that book and in my own life, and every time it has felt the same way. Not like learning something new. But like recognizing something. Like arriving somewhere you've never been and, strangely, knowing where the kitchen is.
I can't explain where the current comes from that runs through all of them and through me when I write. I just know it isn't mine. And that it always points the same way. And that it's the same way the plumb line hangs.
That's what has happened to me, and it's what I point at every time I write. Not to get you into church. And not to be right. To say that there is something that is, under all the layers, and that it is Good, and that it doesn't have to be held up.
Pilate asked what Truth is, and left before he got an answer.
The answer was still standing in the room.
It still is.
The Lie you have to hold up.
The Truth holds you up.
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good weekend, friends ☀️
I hope the text set thoughts going all the way through, and that along the way you caught sight of some of the lies we're living inside right now.
You don't need to write that it's too long. I know.
Maybe. I could probably have said it shorter.
But not more completely.
