I'm not the first...

I'm preparing for the annual Evangelical Covenant Church Midwinter conference. It's a conference for pastors. They can connect with each other and hopeful be refreshed by the speakers and workshops put on by our denomination. They also run their orientation courses during this time for pastors who didn't attend North Park Seminary, the denomination's seminary. Since I didn't attend North Park, I'm taking an orientation course this upcoming February called, The Theology of the ECC.

I have completed some of the required reading for the course, and I've been surprised by how much I've enjoyed it. They have us reading articles and sermons from pastors and scholars who served in the ECC over the last 150 years. What I've found surprising is how relevant the content is. I'm shocked to find 120-year-old sermons in which these pastors masterfully articulate issues that I assumed where new to our cultural milieu.

This highlighted the issue of what I'll call era-ism. It's a sort of prejudice against older eras that have gone before us--a form of bigotry that discriminates against those not found in our own generation or era. We (or at least I) at times have assumed that our technological advancements and wealth of historical resources guarantees we are constantly progressing in the ideological conversation. This means the books written this year on Jesus must be of greater erudition and therefore greater value to me than books written 100 years ago on Jesus. Or, so the reasoning would go.

But it's been refreshing to see that this is not the case. These devoted Christians writing many years ago have provided wonderfully relevant insights into my present day spiritual walk. I'm glad to have been challenged by something old. :)

Saving Our Jobs

A common Christian misconception that I’ve been fighting to overcome in my life has to do with the importance of ordinary, secular work. Over that past few years I’ve been working as a web developer, and before that I’ve worked as a computer engineer, IT helpdesk technician, and a 7th grade teacher. I wanted to know if there is and was any intrinsic value to my work. I had been taught by the church, either explicitly or implicitly, that secular work--work done outside the realm of vocational ministry--is important only insofar as it provides the worker with income that can be donated to charity or given in support of the person who works for God as a missionary or pastor. This work was prioritized because it was the work that facilitated individuals’ spiritual salvation. It was the work that brought people to a place of accepting Jesus into their heart and therefore this work had enduring, eternal significance.

I knew this wasn’t quite right. I knew this left a lot of people in the lurch. The majority of the Christian population was then left with jobs that were only indirectly meaningful as they supported the work of others. Beyond that, the only purpose of their work was to act as a witness to God in the workplace. Those of us engaged in secular work could do little more than act as happy representatives of Christianity that would pique the interest of our co-workers, and hopefully provide an avenue where we could invite these people to church. Then in the presence of trained ministry professionals, our co-workers would hear a message describing a metaphysical transaction accomplished on the cross by Jesus Christ, which would allow them to be saved from their sins if they would acknowledge him as Lord and say a certain prayer. The goal of our work was to make money to give to support professional Christians and to invite our co-workers to come to church so they could meet these professional Christians. Beyond that, our work had little, if any, intrinsic worth.

In an intentional effort to correct this thinking and save my misguided thoughts about work, I read Darrell Cosden’s book: The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work. He articulates a theology of work by looking back to creation and forward to the resurrection. He suggests that our calling to work originates in God’s original plan for humans in creation (because it is only after the Fall that work became toilsome). From the beginning God planned for us to join with him in working. When we work, we become co-creators of culture and co-rulers over the earth with God. Looking forward, Cosden states that our work is not just for the here and now but it will endure into Heaven. He argues for a theological understanding of the resurrection that accounts for God’s promise to redeem all of creation. God won’t trash the earth and start over from scratch. God’s salvation of the earth includes the resurrection and transformation of not just humans but all of creation (Rev. 21-22, Rom. 8, 1 Cor. 15). This means that the programming work that I’ve done, along with the paper filing, technical testing, and management supervisory work that others have done will have an eternal impact on the life we live beyond the grave. Because God will redeem all of creation, our work, which is a part of creation, will be wrapped up in its redemption.

If God can raise and transform the dead...he can raise and transform all present and even past (decayed and gone) earthly realities.
Yet, rather than limiting our thinking to individual products of work, it may also help us to think about the cumulative nature and impact of our work on this earth and on the whole of humanity. Think about how different our world would be had someone not invented the wheel. God’s judgment about the “goodness” or otherwise of the wheel we invented does not apply only to the “original” wheel. It involves a judgment of all that has resulted from there being wheels--all that we have built upon, from, and with this invention.
Today we live with the results, good and bad, of what previous generations did through their work. Every product of work, and every way of working, in some way preserves and develops what has come before. Human beings stand on one another’s shoulders all the way back to Adam. Rather than thinking individualistically about the salvation of unrelated separate entities, it might help us to see our work interdependently as part of the “fabric of this world” (as Lee Hardy calls it) that God will preserve and transform into the fabric of the new earth.
Cosden, pg. 114-115

This being the case, our work clearly has important eternal significance, and furthermore it means we ought to be thoughtful about what sort of work we engage in. With the caveat that there is no perfect job, we should engage in work that is not explicitly damaging to creation--whether it be environmentally dangerous, hurtful to humans, or relationally destructive. For example, if our job was to sell crack on the street or required us to dump environmentally harmful chemicals into a river, as Christians, it wouldn’t do to justify this as a well paying job that can support the vocational ministry of many a minister. Our vocation would be eternally destructive and we should switch jobs immediately. Other jobs, like a technology job that produces software for a military contractor, may fall into more of a grey area. Our continued work at that company should be reflected on with other Christians around us so as to discern the appropriateness of our vocation.

In fact, Cosden suggests that we should all engage in regular Sabbath reflection on the value of our work. This reflection should gauge the appropriateness of our current occupation based on its impact on creation and on the gifting and skill sets we possess. He provides some questions to be answered personally as well as in the context of community to help us reflect on our current vocation.

1) Does or can, this or that occupation allow me to work as God’s apprentice according to his purpose for this creation?
2) Given the ambiguities and ambivalence in this specific work, does it (or how can it) in some measure promote and build harmonious relationships between God and humanity, between people, and between people and nature?
3) Does this work promote or contribute to the psychological wholeness and flourishing of people in themselves?
4) Is this work suited to who I am and am becoming with my gifts and talents?
5) Does (or how can) this work and its results allow me and others to flourish as God’s apprentices?
6) How can we together, with the help of God’s Spirit, minimize or even eliminate its hindering us from this purpose?
Cosden, 117-118

The goal of our Sabbath reflection is to arrive at a place of conviction about our jobs. We want to work in vocations that allow us to participate with God in his work in the world. Cosden calls this “work in the Spirit,” which he defines (with help from Miroslav Volf’s book, Work in the Spirit) as:

1) Work that preserves and maintains what is good in creation, both God-given and made by humanity.
2) Work that clears away, as much as possible, those things that seek to confound the purposes of God and threaten to destroy his kingdom.
3) Work that produces new things that promote personal, communal, cultural, and environmental harmony and well-being--all in a restored relationship with God in Jesus Christ.
Cosden, pg. 145-146

As you and I engage in work in the Spirit, we do more than just earn a paycheck or pass our time. We participate in producing products and culture that will last beyond our days. We engage in work within this created order in partnership with God. We join God in his mission of salvation and transformation of the entire world. We engage with God, who is said to be working even to this day (John 5:17), in accomplishing his purposes for this world. I found this a refreshing take on work that has the power to transform our attitude and save our jobs from the daily grind of the 9-5 work week.

Religulous, point taken

Bill Maher's new movie Religulous has just come out. I have seen him on a number of TV promotional spots like the Daily Show. He challenges the simplistic unscientific beliefs that so many religious people fervently hold to. He is shocked that people believe in a literal flood, a very real Satan figure, or the theology of atonement that is said to give meaning to Jesus' death on the cross. He frames the faith of these religious people as worse than pitiable. One line of reasoning he repeats throughout his interviews goes something like this: We live the 21st century and we should have moved beyond this as a society. Religion is a blight on society--look at all the wars that are to blame or the bigotry that's resulted from people holding misguided religious beliefs. He asserts that religion is ridiculous (hence the title) and even dangerous to society and we must move past it as a civilized country if we want to evolve. He has made it his crusade to embolden people to stand up for their agnostic beliefs and push for a more secular society.

I think he is onto something. The clips that he shows make clear that some religious people do hold ridiculous beliefs. For every religion out there, it isn't difficult to find some nut job who has distorted its meaning. There is the guy on the street corner who preaches condemnation and hell fire at people he doesn't even know. There is the co-worker who rigidly observes a set of Christian rules and judges everyone around him without an ounce of compassion, love, or forgiveness evident in any part of his life. There is the high school student who goes to youth group every Wednesday for prayer and praise, and then on Friday dives head first into the drunken debaucheries of the high school party scene. Christianity is a religion full of people who serve as bad examples, but that's the point. To say people are messed up is to engage in Christian theologizing.

One of the central doctrines of the Christian faith is the doctrine of sin. We were created blameless but we err. We were declared good but we execute evil. We were made to love but we're filled with hate. Every person on the face of the planet has felt the pangs of sin--trusts have been betrayed, confidences broken, and relationships destroyed because of sin. We all know sin like we know hunger because it's as much a part of our life as eating.

For Maher to point out the shortcomings of individual religious adherents is only to confirm the presence of sin in the world. There is no surprise that he can grab a random religious zealot on the street or a politician who has used religion to get elected and make their faith look stupid. He could have grabbed anyone. Everyone holds some set of beliefs that are crazy, and everyone lives an inconsistent lifestyle--in some people it's just more obvious.

Where Maher goes wrong is with his putative solution. He avers that we are smart enough to move past this. We are developed enough as a society that we ought to be able to move on to a more enlightened place. But I think this is terribly naive. I've seen no evidence that smarter, more cultured, or more educated people in any way behave better than those who are less educated. I could offer anecdotal evidence of the college students I've interacted with on the Harvard campus and the orphan children I worked with in Africa. I could suggest national or political examples of Nazi Germany or Watergate. I could offer corporate examples of Enron, Martha Stewart or most recently the sleazy practices that lead up to the mortgage crisis. Some of the smartest, most cultured people do things just as stupid and self-contradictory as the people Maher has interviewed.

And that's the Christian message: we are all messed up. Each and every single one of us is broken, hypocritical, judgmental, and selfish. We are sinners. We not only live at times embarrassingly inconsistent lives, but our sin often times seriously hurts other people. Lying isn't bad just because God arbitrarily says so; it's bad because relationships are built on the foundations of honesty. Raunchy anonymous sex isn't sinful because God is a prude. It's sinful because humans are vulnerable people who can best enjoy the riches of sex within the context of the covenant relationship of marriage. Sin afflicts us all, and it is in us all. We are all sinners. Being a Christian just means that we recognize our brokenness and are trying to move towards healing and salvation in the context of community.


History does not move forward without catastrophe, happiness is not guaranteed by the multiplication of physical comforts, social harmony is not easily created by more intelligence, and human nature is not as good or as harmless as had been supposed. We are thus living in a period in which either the optimism of yesterday has given way to despair, or in which some of the less sophisticated moderns try desperately to avoid the abyss of despair by holding to credos which all the facts have disproved.
Niebuhr, "Optimism, Pessimism, and Religious Faith," anthologized in Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 9.

Animals: Another Other to Love (Or, Why I'm a Vegetarian)

I'm a vegetarian. It's sort of a new thing for me. I've abstained from meat since the beginning of February. It's been surprisingly easy with the assortment of good vegetarian foods available, and my love affair with sweets. But a lot of people ask me why I'm a vegetarian, and so I thought I'd share a video that graphically portrays the essential reason behind it.

This is a video about a couple of guys who raised a baby lion, released it into the wild, and then sought it out a year later. Take a look:



For me, this video gives me a glimpse of how humans and animals have a potential to relate to one another. I believe that God's original plan for creation was devoid of death, and hence devoid of meat-eating. Animosity entered the animal-human relationship, and carnivores were born, but that wasn't they way it was supposed to be (Gen 1:29-30).

I believe that in the ultimate restoration of God's creation this human-animal relationship will be restored to something like we see in the video above. Humanity will have dominion over the animals just as God has dominion over us: we will graciously rule through sacrificial love and service. Instead of exploiting animals as meat-making-machines without feelings or lives of value, we will treasure them as important parts of God's creation.

Household pets can be good examples of proper human-animal relationships. Humans can rule over their pets in a loving affectionate way that demands sacrifice for the well-being of the pet. Pets are often considered parts of the family and the intimate tie that owners feel towards their cats and dogs is tangibly felt. Pet owners know that their pets have emotions--they feel anxiety, loyalty, hope, faith and love. I believe this is a reality for all animals, not just pets, and so I choose not to eat them.

My convictions are rooted in scripture, but I wouldn't assert that vegetarianism is mandatory for all Christians. There are plenty of examples of meat-eating in the Bible. However, there are also plenty of examples that point us to the high worth of animals in God's eyes. So for Christians who choose to eat meat, I think a serious look at our food-producing system is in order. We are detached from the birth, growth, and slaughter of the meat we (as a culture) eat. Some of us would be mortified to see the way the animals we eat are treated.

I'm still trying to figure all of this out. At first I didn't eat eggs, but now I'm eating eggs from free-range chickens. Maybe next week I'll change my mind again. This is an evolving experiment that is rooted in my desire to life a more gracious life. Being a vegetarian is a personal calling that helps me enter into a more holistic life of compassion. It is one way I can practice a heavenly lifestyle here on earth now.

For further reading:
A great book on vegetarianism for Christians: Webb, Stephen On God and Dogs

A Pastors journey into vegetarianism: http://gregboyd.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-im-vegetarian.html

The Irony of Iron Man

I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago without Mary or my kids.  I took advantage of my free time to see the movie Iron Man.  Overall, this was probably my favorite superhero movie to date.  Robert Downey Jr. was wonderful.  He played the part well.  He was funny and winsome.

What I found ironic about the movie was the role of violence.  Robert Downey Jr. plays the part of a powerful CEO of a weapons manufacturing company.  He is an ultra smart playboy who is responsible for designing some of the most revolutionary weapons on the planet (think the modern day equivalent of the atom bomb: his weapons are supposed to be game-changers in a war).  Along the way, he has a change of heart.  He sees the havoc his weapons produce in the hands of the wrong people, and he commits his life to righting that wrong.  He sets out to develop a sort of super weapon (the Iron Man suit), so that he can annihilate any military cell that is using his weapons for 'evil'.  In a sense, he wants to eradicate violence by being violent.  He want to stop people from blowing things up by blowing those people up.  He wants to stop the use of his super weapon by creating an even greater and more powerful super weapon.

All this reminded me of the pernicious property of evil.  We all recognize evil in our lives.  We all want to remove it from the world.  But, we usually choose to do it in the wrong way.  We usually choose to combat evil with more evil.  We confront harsh words spoken to us with more harsh words.  We scold our kids for hitting another kid in their class with a spanking.  We respond to a friend's wrong doing with  gossip and slander spreading the evil further afoot.  We, like the Iron Man character, frequently respond to evil with more evil.

The message of Christianity is a call to respond in the opposite.  The way Christians are called to respond to evil is not through violence or more evil but through suffering sacrifice.  We are called to absorb evil.  Instead of being a tuning fork that reverberates the effects of evil throughout the world, we are called to be a pillow that evil sinks into never to return.

Christ did this fully on the cross.  The evil of the Roman Empire and the Pharisees sent him to his death.  Their jealous, envy, hatred, malice, loathing, and more was the root of Jesus crucifixion.  He was the subject of cruel and unusual punishment, injustice, and torture.  He was sentenced to be executed because of the evil in men's hearts.  And yet he did not respond with evil.  He did not raise up an army of violence.  He did not shout profanities or curses at his accusers.  He absorbed the evil, and he showed us the true way to defeat it: forgiveness. 

When we forgive our attacker, we neutralize the power of evil.  When we lay down our right to retribution we arrest evil in its tracks.  When we choose to love, to serve, to sacrifice, and to forgive we conquer the evil that confronts us.  Jesus defeated evil in a radically new way, and now you and I are invited to follow in his footsteps.  We are invited to live a similar life of forgiveness that absorbs evil as we encounter it.

"He was treated harshly and afflicted,
but he did not even open his mouth.
Like a lamb led to the slaughtering block,
like a sheep silent before her shearers,
he did not even open his mouth.
He was led away after an unjust trial –
but who even cared?
Indeed, he was cut off from the land of the living;
because of the rebellion of his own people he was wounded."
Isaiah 53:7-8

Heaven 3: Metaphors

Talking about heaven is a little like talking about your unborn child.  It's like talking about that vocation you want to be when you grow up.  It's like talking about the job you want when you graduate from college.  Talking about heaven is like talking about an unknown future, except it's unique in that the essence of the experience can't be paralleled by anything we have ever experienced before.  While I was awaiting the birth of my daughter, I could have talked about her with reasonably accurate predictive detail.  By looking at other infants or considering the type of child I was or my wife was, I could have set my expectations appropriately.  But to talk of heaven is to speak about things for which we have very little direct parallel.  So it's best for us to first confess that we cannot really speak of heaven.  It goes beyond the limits of words. 

But speak of heaven we must; and speak of heaven Jesus did.  Literal description is rarely (if ever) used.  The literary category most frequently employed by Jesus, the authors of Scripture, and many Christians throughout history has been that of metaphor.  So let's consider a few biblical metaphors we find in the Bible that point us toward heavenly realities:

The Seed and the Plant
In 1 Cor. 15, Paul compares our earthly bodies with our heavenly ones.  He uses the metaphor of a seed and a plant to describe the transformation that will occur. 

15:37 And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare seed 23  – perhaps of wheat or something else. 15:38 But God gives it a body just as he planned, and to each of the seeds a body of its own.

Here Paul describes both the continuity and discontinuity between our bodies now and our bodies then.  A wheat seed is at the same time radically different from the final wheat plant and essentially the same. 

The King and the Kingdom
Heaven will include the dissolution of corrupt earthly rule.  Jesus, the one who suffers and serves even the most wretched (think washes Judas' feet), is the coming King who will rule with wisdom and justice.  This means the end of oppression and injustice. 

Colonizing the Earth (from N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope)
In Phil. Paul writes to Christians living in Philippi, a Roman Colony.  Augustus had settled his military veterans there after the battles of Philippi and Actium.  The purpose of these soldiers and the purpose of colonization generally is to infuse the colonized culture with the values and customs of the colonizers.  Paul uses this parallel to describe the role of the Christians in Philippi.  As Wright says:

"So when Paul says, 'We are citizens of heaven,' he doesn't at all mean that when we're done with this life we'll be going off to live in heaven.  What he means is that the savior, the Lord, Jesus the King...will come from heaven to earth, to change the present situation and state of his people." (pg. 100)

Heaven isn't a place we escape to, it's a culture, and even new reality, that overtakes earth.  It's a utopian dream that cannot be achieved apart from the return of Christ and the resurrection.

New Birth
In Romans 8, Paul describes the whole of creation waiting and longing to be reborn.  He uses the metaphor of labor to describe this longing for transformation:

"8:21 ... the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children. 8:22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now. "

Like the seed and the plant metaphor, this metaphor maintains both continuity and discontinuity between the world as we know it now and the world to come.  It also highlights the suffering and hardship creation endures as it awaits its new birth.

Marriage
The marriage of heaven and earth is described in Revelation 21-22.  Heaven comes down to earth and they are joined together in wedlock.  In this picture, heaven and earth aren't polar opposites.  Earth isn't the material bad and heaven the unchanging good.  Earth doesn't corrupt heaven, heaven transforms earth and they are united together. 

Conclusion
In all these metaphors, it is clear that heaven is a place or culture that is coming to earth.  Christians then are people who care deeply about the earth and about the well-being of its inhabitants.  We look forward to the future not as people who want to escape earth, but as a people who long for earth to be all that it is meant to be.  We are people who pray with Jesus, "May your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

Young Reformers and Emergent on Certainty

Tony Jones and Colin Hansen are having a blogging style dialog over at CT (here).  At the end of the first post, Tony asks the question:

"Where we probably differ is not so much on theology, but on epistemology....I wonder, do you think that some people are just more inclined to look for sure answers, and others are more comfortable with ambiguity?"

I also was recently looking through a series of videos that went up on Piper's desringGod site (here) where he explains and expounds at length on the Calvinistic doctrines of TULIP.  The first in this list is Total Depravity, and this reminded me of my seminary days and a cool seminary phrase, noetic effect of sin.  Which according to Theopedia means:

"The noetic effects of sin are the ways that sin negatively affects and undermines the human mind and intellect...sin's noetic effects are most prominent in our knowledge of God (our "sense of divinity") and less prominent in other domains."

And I got to thinking, doesn't the 'emergent' epistemology as explained by Tony do better justice to the reformed concept of the noetic effect of sin?  I mean doesn't having greater humility about our ability to know who God more accurately embody the concept of noetic effect of sin? 

Heaven 1: If you were to die tonight....

A few years back (8, I think), I went through an Evangelism Explosion training.  The training consisted of teaching you a packaged Evangelistic sales pitch that could be presented verbatim on demand.  The presentation always began with the question:

"If you were to die today and find yourself at the gates of heaven, what would you say?  What reason would you give for why you should be allowed to enter?"

Or something like that.  The rest of the presentation was pretty standard evangelical stuff: sin, separation from God, substitutionary atonement, reconciliation through Christ, salvation from hell by praying a prayer.  Once we learned the presentation, we would head out into the community, spread the presentation, and tally the results--count the number of people who prayed the prayer.  I happened to be in Africa at the time, and this presentation proved to be extremely effective.  Almost everyone who was willing to talk with me, would end up praying with me, often in tears.

Hundreds of us hit the streets.  When we reconvened later that evening, we calculated the total number of people who had been 'saved'.  The numbers were staggering.  Literally hundreds of tallies went up on the overhead projector.  Shouts of hallelujah and praise God rang out in the chapel as we celebrated the guaranteed future entrance of these souls into heaven. 

While I had some doubts about the methodology and some regret that there was really very little follow-up, I was mostly very pleased with the program.  Everyone seemed emboldened in the act of evangelism, and the results were plain to see.

But I wonder how biblical a promise we were selling?  As I reflect on this project now, it seems like we were selling a form of Platonism dressed up in Christian-ese language.  We were telling people that when they died, they would go to this 'heaven' place up in the sky where they would experience a perfect world.  They would leave this world behind and find a new and better disembodied spiritual world with God. 

As I've studied the New Testament over the last few years, one thing has come repeatedly to my attention: evangelicals consistently misunderstand heaven and life after death as described in the Bible.  Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to share some thoughts on heaven, and why I think it's important to have a more 'biblical' perspective on it.  I believe it has an important effect on the way we live our lives today.

Return to Relationality: Babies

Philosophy's and theology's recent return to emphasizing our human identity in relational categories makes a lot of sense. Here's an article that seems to support this way of thinking about humanity from the earliest days of our development:

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9757396-7.html?tag=nefd.only

We can't become better humans by ingesting more information. Development happens through human contact and interaction. Neat.

God forsakes God

"In the night before his arrest, Jesus went into the garden of Gethsemance. He took three disciples with him and 'began to be greatly distressed and troubled', writes Mark (14.33). 'He began to be sorrowful and fearful [troubled]' writes Matthew....Then he throws himself on the ground in horror and fear (Mark 14.35). Earlier too, he had often withdrawn at nights to the solitariness of some mountain in order to be united with his Father in the prayer of his heart. But in Gethsemane for the first time he does not want to be alone with his God. He is evidently afraid of him. That is why he seeks the protection of his friends. Then comes the prayer which in its original version sounds like a demand: 'Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me' (Mark 14.36) -- spare me this suffering....

In fear that laid hold of him and lacerated his soul, what he suffered from was God. Abandonment by God is the 'cup' which does not pass from him. The appalling silence of the Father in response to the Son's prayer in Gethsemane is more than the silence of death. Martin Buber called it the eclipse of God. It is echoed in 'the dark night of the soul' experienced by the mystics. The Father withdraws. God is silent. This is the experience of hell and judgment....

The Father forsook him and delivered him up to the fear of hell. The One who knew himself to be the Son is forsaken, rejected and cursed. And God is silent....

Finally, it is important to notice that it is only here on the cross that, for the first and only time in his life, the Son addresses God not as Father but as God (hebrew Eloheni, Aramaic Eloi). The prayer in Gethsemane was still addressed to 'the Father'. But the Father did not hear the prayer. On the cross the Father forsook the Son and hid his face from him, as the sun was hidden in the deepest darkness on Golgotha....It is precisely this that is the cross in Jesus' crucifixion; the being forsaken by the God whom he called 'my Father', and whose Son he knew himself to be. Here, in the relationship between the Father and the Son, a death was experienced which has been rightly described as 'eternal death', 'the death of God'. Here 'God is forsaken by 'God'. "

from Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, pg 77-80