It's funny how people can impact our lives and we can completely forget them or even the fact that they transformed us.
My mom was emailing me a recipe for Rhubarb Rolls and she tells me this story.
“When you were young, around nine months old, a couple from the States came to London because the husband needed brain surgery. They needed a place to stay and contacted our church so Pa said they could stay with us. The wife spent most of her time at the hospital with her husband but his parents had come up as well. They were an old country couple and had a bunch of kids of their own. He just loved babies and spent hours with you on the living room floor. Holding your hands and walking you back and forth, back and forth. Really, he taught you how to walk. At nine months too. That's a pretty young age.”
I imagine an old man with rough knotted fingers and cheeks that feel like sandpaper. A body that bears the marks of years of hard labour coupled with a gentle eyes and a gentle touch.
Of course, I really don't remember anything about him at all. He came and went. And I've been walking ever since.
Thanks, old man.

I've been doing a lot of thinking in Galatians 2. Ever since the ground breaking work of those belonging to the “New Perspectives on Paul” New Testament scholarship has become dominated by a line of thinking that justification is not the result of faith in Christ, but by the faith of Christ.
Since Luther Protestants have understood justification to be the means by which an individual appropriates salvation. Paul, it was argued, was talking about being justified by faith, not by works – which was the route taken by Judaism. However, in the revolution that's been taking place in Pauline scholarship over the last thirty years justification has come to be seen in a new light. This is largely due to the fact that first-century Judaism(s) is (are) starting to be respected for what it truly was instead of being seen through the lens of Luther's critique of the medieval Catholic church. In Judaism at the time of Paul justification was never about how one appropriates salvation. Rather, it was about badges of membership. Instead of being about how one enters the people of God it is about how one can tell who already is a member of God's people. This resolves the problem that often comes with the old approach to justification: that of faith just being another work one does to earn salvation. No, according to Paul, faith is a badge of membership not another surrogate work. Therefore Paul's argument with the trouble-makers in Galatia was about what defines God's people. Paul emphatically argues that works of the Law (understood as circumcision, food-laws, and observance of Sabbath) are no longer the badges of membership. Those who are in Christ are marked by the faith of Christ.
Of course this has already been said before by the likes of Wright and Hays and Dunn.
Now here's where it could get interesting…
I am IN Christ because of the faith OF Christ. In fact, I am so much in Christ that I have been crucified with him and it is now he who lives through me (Galatians 2). That means that the faith I possess is also the faith OF Christ. However, if I was justified by Christ's faith, and I now embody Christ's faith are not those around me justified by my faith?

I disagree with the general Christian approach to the doctrine of original sin. We are NOT born as sinful beings. Original sin is not a metaphysical doctrine, it is a social one. We are not born sinful, but we are born into systems of sin.
Of course this quickly resolves the whole dilemma about what happens when innocent children die, etc.
However, as we grow-up in our societies we blindly participate in systems of sin, oppression and death, and as such we become sinful. At this point ignorance is no excuse. I may not have realised my money was supporting child-labour but it was. I may not have realised I was treating women as objects, but I was.
So, although I was once born innocent, I am born into a sinful world and thereby become sinful.
That's why Paul keeps saying that our battle is not with flesh and blood but with powers and principalities. Some charismatics have taken this way out on a tangent and developed intricate diagrams of spiritual beings and their ranks, etc, etc. Really Paul is attacking the social structures of the Roman Empire when he writes this way.
The powers and principalities are sin and death. And it is these that Jesus defeated on the cross. They are ideologies. They are all the things that claim the place of God in our lives yet destroy right relationship in doing so. Racism, Sexism, Capitalism, Patriotism… They are also corporations and businesses. Nike, The Gap, Shell, MicroSoft… These are the structures of sin that exist in our society.
And it is these, I would like to suggest, that are damned to hell, it is these that are damned to annihilation. God is in the process of saving the world, of making all things new. These structures of sin and death and the only things that will not be redeemed. All else will be ushered in. Death after all is not a presence but an absence. When God is fully present there is no room for death.
And this is why Christians are now called to announce the forgiveness of sins. Somewhere along the way we've gotten it all wrong. We've been announcing judgment when we should be announcing grace. No, you are not damned, you are beloved! No, you are not tainted, you are beautiful! No, you are not being cast out, you are being welcomed home! What Christ has accomplished has been achieved for all.
The thing is that Christians also need to be living in a way that signals that the powers and principalities have been defeated if their message is to be heard. “It is by the church living as the one believing community, in which barriers of race, class, gender and so forth are irrelevant for membership, and to holding of office that the principalities and powers are informed in no uncertain terms that their time is up, that there is a new way of being human” (Wright). That's why John says that they will know we are Christians by our love.
Of course we can announce the forgiveness of sins. Israel wasn't called to be God's people so that they could be saved while the rest of the world wasn't. No, election was all about saving the world. Abraham was called so that all the earth would be blessed. So, now, after Jesus, it just doesn't makes sense to say God has called a different group of people while the rest of the world is damned. No, God, in his love, is saving the world and making us all new.

Laughing, we were laughing. And in the midst of it all my brothers phoned to say they missed me and they loved me.
“I keep going to different get-togethers and expecting you to show up until I remember, 'Oh yeah, Dan's not coming.'”
Then I return to the laughter. The conversation has shifted and one of my friends is being teased about her fear of clowns. Somebody brings up an old episode from, of all things, 'Little House on the Prairie' in which a girl is kidnapped and raped by a clown. Now they tell her not just to watch out for clowns but to watch out for clowns because they might rape her.
“Ohhhh, that would be aweful!”
But she's not so much talking about being raped as being raped by a clown. And she's laughing as she says it. Everybody's laughing. And I… I guess I sort of shut down. I stopped laughing and couldn't really start again.
I once had a dear friend write me a poem that said this:
Joy for her in loving a friend
whose conscience burdens him with the crimes of others
not just his own.
A lucky chance to widen her heart.
But I don't think it's the crimes of others I carry. It's their wounds. It seems that all my personal wounds have healed. Yet always I am carrying the wounds of others and these – these have no time to heal. Everywhere I go, every circle I move in, they are ripped open again. How can people laugh at such a thing when I can hardly bring myself to write the word in my journal? These wounds will not heal until the other has been healed. And what chance do they have? If this is how it is for me, how is it for those who carry such wounds on their bodies?
Alas for situations like these. It seems hope has no place here. Not because it comes across as far-fetched, it's just that it feels inappropriate. Hope: nice idea, it just doesn't fit this context. There's no frame of reference to put it in, it just floats around without meaning.
but in the garden of simple
where all of us are nameless
you were never anything but beautiful to me
and, you know, they never really owned you
you just carried them around
and then one day you put 'em down
and found your hands were free
– Ani DiFranco

In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
– Philip Larkin
Not that long ago I was thinking about the creation of the heroic within narratives, biblical and otherwise (I think I was reading Dostoevski's The Idiot at the time; David James Duncan's The Brothers K would be a more recent example of what I'm talking about here).
In my journal (May 15, 2003) I wrote:
It is always the narrator who creates the heroic. It is the narrator who presents the ordinary in the extraordinary light. Therefore, any of us may yet be heroes were our stories only told. For this is how stories differ from our lives; in one we discover heroes, those we can admire; in the other we discover ourselves, in all our pettiness and malaise. We are neither strong enough to be heroes or villains. Rather we are poorly written secondary characters who appear for long enough to be slightly repulsive and quickly forgotten.
Or so it would seem if it were not for one thing – God. God is the master narrator. It is he who has crafted this world, it is he who will also one day recount the true and real story of our lives. There is yet hope that our lives will be far more significant than we can imagine.
Yet here's the thing. Our lives gain significance not in discovering that we were heroes all along. Our lives gain significance in discovering that, all along, we were Beloved. You see, the narrator is not some distant omniscient observer. The narrator is our Lover, himself entwined with the narrative.

I go into exile, not because I am forced into it but because I choose to enter, knowing that by doing so exile itself will be abolished.

I think that people who have suffered greatly often fall into two traps regarding self-identity and understanding. Not that that is their fault – it seems to be one of the inevitable results of trauma. Trauma leads to brokenness, one's world is shattered, and often, one's self is shattered along with it.
I find that people who have undergone trauma often:
(1) define themselves by the wrongs that have been committed against them.
and/or
(2) define themselves by the wrongs that they themselves have committed.
In both of these definitions there is a way in which the past maintains an iron grip over the individual. Something has happened in the past that is inescapable, the past is that which defines oneself and there's no getting out of it.
Now, I think the way in which we understand a seemingly abstract concept like the flow of time becomes surprisingly relevant in this regard.
I think that the common understanding of the flow of time is to see things moving from the past, into the present and then the future. We were, we are, we will be. The past moves into the present, the present moves into the future.
I would like to suggest (and here I am indebted to Moltmann… as always) that time actually flows the other direction. The future breaks into the present which then becomes the past. That which will be becomes that which is, and that which is becomes that which was.
So why is this significant?
This is hugely significant because if this is true then we are not defined by our past but by our future. If this is the case I can live a hopeful existence, not trapped within the realm of the wrongs committed against me, or the wrongs I myself have performed. Not only that but, because I have some sense of the nature of the hope that I hold, I am able to live a liberated existence in the present. Because it is this future that defines me and can start to live within it now.
And if this assured hope is one that consists of love relationship and an ever deeper movement into intimacy then I will not define myself by any type of wrongdoing, whether my own or somebody else's. Instead I will come to know myself as Beloved, with all the beauty, freedom and joy that that entails.