A reader asked after the first piece: should we include not only the question of how one can be saved, but the “medium” through which God now pursues his mission? Does the church supersede “blood” Israel as the spearhead of God’s redemptive activity as the witness-bearer to the inbreaking of the kingdom?

I think that the answer is yes and no. Yes, the church is now the medium through which God pursues his plan of salvation in the world and is the witness-bearer of that plan of salvation. It’s hard to see how Christians could claim otherwise. Christ is the full revelation of the Father (John 1:14-18; 12:45; 14:9; Heb. 1:1-4; 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15). Christ is the one who atones for our sin (2 Cor. 5:21; Isa. 52:4-12; Rom. 5:6-8; 1 Cor. 15:3), Christ is the one who will come again in great power and glory (Matt. 24:26-27; Matt. 25:13; Luke 21:25-28; Rev. 1:7). So, yes, the church is the medium for God’s plan of salvation, but the plan of salvation is thoroughly Jewish, because of who and even what Jesus is. Salvation is Jewish, the medium is the mostly Gentile church. This connotes some sort of mysterious cooperation between Israel and the nations.

There is a mystical union, one prophesied in Isaiah 2:2, between the nations and Israel: that “in the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.” Or further in Isaiah 56:7: “even them [the sons of the foreigners] I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar.”

There is no Levite mentioned, there is no priest of Holy Israel, there are only the Gentile and the eunuch who will perform the rites and ceremonies of Israel. And this was always the plan. Israel was a people set apart for a purpose: to be a light to the nations, to be a city on a hill, to be a witness of God to the nations. The point of Israel was both evangelistic and sacrificial — to witness and to make sacrifice, and this was to be done through obedience. The eyes of the Gentiles would behold the glory of Israel, the splendor of her temple, and the richness of her land, and would see that all that great spiritual and material wealth flowed from the God of Israel. Israel was to be a sign to the nations that their false idols, their Baals, had failed them, and only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could truly provide.

The one Israelite “in whom there was no guile” was Jesus, and Jesus fulfilled all the promises of Israel, for Israel, for God. This is all elementary, but it is important for understanding what exactly God is doing now.

God has not cast off “blood” Israel. He has not forgotten his promise to Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. He will not be proved faithless, even amid faithlessness (Rom 11:1-2). But the promise made to Abraham has been fulfilled in Jesus and his children, who are as many as the stars (Gen. 15:5; 22:17; 26:4), are both Jew and Greek (Rom. 4:17-18).

Scripture by no means points to Israel as a husk that will be cast off, out of which Christianity sprung and needs no longer. The Scriptures point to a mysterious cooperation. The church points to this cooperation. The very center of the church, the nexus, the star around which should orbit everything in our spiritual lives, is the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. The Body and Blood of our Lord, presented weekly to the faithful flock of Christ, is the center of our lives, whether priest or lay. That sacrament, the host and the cup, are Jewish.

Lifted from hundreds of thousands of altars around the world, our Jewish Lord’s body is offered. Elevated in the anointed hands of (mostly) Gentile priests is the sacrament of Jewish flesh. The Eucharist is the body of Christ who was born of a Jewish mother. It is the body of Christ who defeated death. It is the body of Christ who rose from a grave which could not be fully prepared on Friday because of the Jewish sabbath. That risen body, that ascended and glorified body, is Jewish. The same body that received circumcision, the same body presented by his most blessed mother in the Temple, the same body that did miracles and celebrated Passover, is that body elevated and reserved and distributed in our churches.

So then how could God’s plan of salvation be anything other than cooperative, at least in this mystical and sacramental sense? Yes, it is true that the church is the witness-bearer; it is we who have seen “what no eye has seen” through Jesus Christ, but we do not deal in typologies only; we deal in sacramental realities. At the altar is the consummation of Israel and the nations, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world, and a salvation that comes to us of the House of David.

I was ordained deacon and priest by a Gentile from Massachusetts, my Jewish hands anointed by a man with a “goyish” last name. I was baptized, confirmed, and fed by Gentiles, all in the name of our Jewish God. There is something fitting about this fact, the divine cooperation between Jew and Greek coming to its fulfillment in the Church Catholic. Types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here, and the newer rite is a more perfect rite than the old. I can think of no more Jewish an act that I can do than to stand and make an offering to the God of Israel at his altar on behalf of the nations.

Surely it is much to be preferred that “blood” Israel herself would accept the risen Lord, would accept her messiah, and ours. Until that time, probably to be seen in the eschaton, this mystical union, made manifest at our altars, is the pinnacle of the soteriological cooperation that was foretold to us by the prophets. It is beautiful, yet we must have eyes to see it.

In this age of antisemitism ascendant, the recentering of our focus, the remembrance of the Jewishness of our salvation, even amid the Gentilic medium, must find its way back into our hearts. Our salvation flows from Abraham, and Jew and Gentile alike share a common father through the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. There is bris and there is baptism. There is seder and there is Eucharist. There is the Law of Sinai and the Law of the Beatitudes. All of these are given by the same Holy One of God. This is not to equate these acts with one another: circumcision always pointed to baptism, Passover always pointed to the Cross, the Law of Sinai always pointed to Jesus. Those typological acts always pointed to the sacramental: the Incarnation was always part of the plan. It is to say that for Jews and Christians, something is shared that is deeper than an unfulfilled teleology. We share in the promises of the Father, we share in our being covenanted to him, though differently. Through the body and blood of Jesus, we share in blood as well.

Types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here, yet due to the historic sin of the church, the pogroms and oppression inflicted by the church on Jews, it seems that types and shadows will persist until the earth is remade. We do not deal with types and shadows. We deal with sacramental realities, we deal with God condescended, we deal with Jesus Christ, and our witness of the sole sufficiency of Christ must be at the fore of our work. Though mysterious cooperation is our current reality, we look toward the holy hope of visible unity — not only between Jew and Greek, but between all peoples, for all people are under the kingship of Christ. Despite their rebellion, they cannot deny his sovereignty.

“Blood” Israel has not been cast off, but like the Gentiles has been transfigured, with the eyes of all of us looking toward the eschaton, toward a fuller consummation. This does not mean we cease our work of witness to all nations. Our mission is visible unity. Yet, until that day, we hold onto our hope that our unity is knit together through and by Christ.

Gentiles have, as foretold in Zechariah 8:23, grabbed hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and said, “Let us go with you because we have heard that God is with you.” Christians, whether Jew or Greek, do the same. We recognize our salvation as coming from the root of Jesse. Our salvation is from Israel, our salvation is Jewish, yet the medium for that salvation is now almost fully Gentilic. It is a mystical cooperation, a union, that will exist until the eschaton, when cooperation will be visible, and God’s people will fully be made one.

Therefore we, before him bending, this great sacrament revere: types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here; faith, our outward sense befriending, makes our inward vision clear.

While we should be ever mindful of the historic and contemporary sin of antisemitism in the church, we should also agree on a shared theological language in discussing these issues. There are ways that we can be sensitive to other religions and ethnicities, while still engaging in the unique theological language and tools of the Christian church. As a Jewish Christian, I hope that my voice on this issue can be heard as it is meant: with charity and love to my blood kin, with no hate or enmity, but all with welcome and grace.

If you go into a room of zealous Christians and ask them if we should evangelize Muslims, the answer will be a rousing “yes!” If you ask the same group if we should evangelize Jews, you’ll see a lot of shoe-gazing and looking around the room nervously. I get it; this is a post-Holocaust world with post-Holocaust Christians. There is understandable anxiety about the discussion. I will give some concession to those schools of thought on this matter that hold to the idea of covenant irrevocability and the possibility of a Jewish Sonderweg. Though, by my very being a Jewish Christian, thoroughly convinced of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and my giving my whole life and work to this gospel as a priest, it should be plain that I remain unconvinced of the efficacy of the law for any person, both in light of the person of Jesus and as revealed to us by the corporate and consistent failure to abide by the law as revealed to us in the Old Testament.

First, I’d like to give a definition of terms, and trace some of this history of thinking on the issue. I’ll do this through encyclicals and pastoral letters of the Roman Catholic Church. This is not to say that Vatican thinking is definitive on this issue, but rather that Protestant thinking is far more scattered and harder to nail down.

There are degrees of supersessionism. One type says that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s covenant people. We’ll call this hard supersessionism, to use the term coined by David Novak, a scholar of antisemitism in the Catholic Church. There is another, one adopted more widely post-Vatican II, and more importantly, post-Holocaust, which we’ll call “soft” supersessionism.

Hard supersessionism is what we probably find most familiar. It’s the kind that makes our skin crawl. This would be the stereotypical Chrystostomian understanding of the place of Israel — a sort of husk from which the newer rite of the Christian religion emerged more fully fledged, grown, and developed. This is the “replacement” idea of supersessionism, more in line with the literal etymology of the word rooted in the term supercede, or “to take the seat of.”

This idea held on for a very long time, especially in Roman Catholicism. As recently as 1943 Pope Pius XII promulgated his encyclical Mystici corporis Christi, which fleshes out the classic proof text of supersessionist theology in Hebrews 8:13: “In speaking of a new covenant he treats the first as obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (RSV). Pope Pius expounds on this passage:

By the death of our Redeemer, the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished; then the Law of Christ together with its mysteries, enactments, institutions, and sacred rites was ratified for the whole world in the blood of Jesus Christ … on the gibbet of His death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees and fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race.

The timing for the promulgation of that encyclical was unfortunate, with 1943 being the height of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II. The language is difficult to swallow.

A little less than 20 years after this encyclical, Vatican II was convened, and we see a monumental shift in the Roman Church’s understanding of Jews and Judaism. With the promulgation in 1965 of Nostra aetate, Rome took a step away from hard supersessionism, shifting toward the soft approach. Here is a portion of a letter written by Pope John XXIII just before his death and only a few months before the promulgation of Nostra aetate:

We are conscious today that many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer either see the beauty of Thy Chosen People nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren. We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in the blood which we drew or shed the tears we caused by forgetting Thy Love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.

Nostra Aetate acknowledges a “certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history,“ referencing a sort of general revelation received in other world religions, but later asserts plainly:

This She [the church] regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself. (Emphasis added.)

This soft supersessionism as promulgated by Rome has ebbed and flowed. Pope St. John Paul II heartily affirmed the statements of his predecessors. Pope Benedict XVI seemed to reaffirm the hard supersessionism of his pre-conciliar predecessors stating that ““the Mosaic Covenant is indeed superseded”, and the current Catechism of the Roman Church still includes a section referring to a future repentance of the Jews for their unbelief in the risen Lord.

In the Protestant tradition, the approach is a little more scattershot, with a less clear throughline pointing us to some of our modern thinking on the issue. We see contrasting ideas: the covenantal theology of the continental reformed traditions, more often attached with supersessionist theology, as well as dispensationalism, typically opposed to supersessionism. Your average liberal Protestant thinker opposes the very idea of supersessionism, typically on the grounds that it is racist or anti-semitic.

Some supersessionist theologies are racist and anti-semitic. Yet depending on what we mean by the term, the core affirmation is not necessarily racist or anti-semitic. When thought of rightly, guided by Scripture and eschewing racial hatred, it is just Christianity. Can one be saved outside of the work of Jesus Christ? Surely not. Can one ever be justified under the law? Paul seems to not think so. Do our Scriptures leave another door, another advocate, another way to the Godhead, other than through the person of Jesus Christ? No. Does that minimize or abrogate the Jewish flesh of Jesus Christ? No. Do the sons of Gentiles need to receive circumcision to share in the promises of God? No. Does this mean the Jews are no longer a chosen people of God? No. For the gifts and call of God are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29).

It is possible to hold that the Jewish people remain a covenant people with God, but we also must accept that the Gentile Christian is also included in the chosen covenant people with God by engrafting, “contrary to nature” into the olive tree of Israel. God has not abrogated his word to Abraham, but has fulfilled his plan for salvation in the person of Jesus that through Israel all nations will be brought to the knowledge, love, and fear of the Lord of Sinai. The Jewish people remain “beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Rom. 11:28b).

It is only through Israel that the promises of Israel are opened to the nations. The sons and daughters of Abraham are the roots, the Gentiles have been grafted in (Rom. 11:17-24), and can make the same claim on those Abrahamic promises as a Hebrew born of Hebrews, albeit by adoption. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the historical Christian role in anti-semitism, supersessionism understandably makes us uncomfortable, but it doesn’t mean that it is wrong — not properly understood.

There are degrees of supersessionism, some of which are incompatible with Christianity. The blood libel’s accusation of a Jewish deicide that brought upon their nation a curse and severed their covenant with God is bad theology and is antisemitic. This medieval antisemitism still rears its ugly head in our modern world.

However, we cannot affirm, even in our discomfort with the idea, that there is a way other than Jesus. The temple of Solomon is torn down, her altar rubble, so where can a person now make propitiation and satisfaction to God for sins? Only upon the altars of the church Catholic, still offering that fragrant incense of offering and praise to the God of Israel, the all-consuming fire of Moses, the wrathful God of the waters of Meribah, the God of the cross, and God incarnate.

Having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him. (Col. 2:14-15)

In speaking of a new covenant he treats the first as obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. (Heb. 8:13)

If we believe the Bible to be true (and I pray that we do, and that we will repent daily and return to God’s word to renew, refresh, and reform our lives, both private and corporate), then we will be left with a difficult conclusion: the new covenant has superseded the old. Not only that, but this supersession was necessary to our perfection. For “If perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law), what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron?” (Heb. 7:11).

The Gentile has been grafted into the tree. This means the limb that is grafted is part of the tree, taking nutrients from the same roots, from the same soil and water. This means the Gentiles can take their claim on the promises of Israel, for those promises are theirs too, and were always meant to be theirs. The Gentile is called son and daughter, as much as the Jew is called son and daughter. And so we seek our Lord in the Old Testament, searching for him where he is hidden among the types and shadows, whispering to us between the lines of our psalters, prefigured for us in Adam, Abraham, Moses, and David.

The difficult and uncomfortable conclusion that the new covenant has superseded the old, that we are people under grace, no longer under the law, through which no one can be made perfect, means that evangelism to all people is our obligation. This means, for the Gentile Christian, taking a full share in God’s kingdom and in the ceremonies and sacraments of God, there is no shame in a full-throated amen to the evangelism of all peoples. Further, I would urge gentile Christian thinkers to lay aside their discomfort and lay a solid claim on the promises of Israel, whether you are grafted in or have grown from the root. There is not a unique claim on the God of Israel for a specific people anymore. The God of Israel is in Jewish flesh, but has done this so that he can fulfill his promises in Isaiah 2:2 that all nations will draw near before him.

^[1]  John XXIII, “Our Eyes Have Been Cloaked,” Catholic Herald, May 14, 1965.

^[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 674.

I now look out an altogether different window, the old leaden glass of my downtown parish office. Just above my monitor juts the modest skyline of Wausau and below is the relative hustle of the city’s 3rd Street. The message from this window is the same as the one at the House: “The Glory of God is the Living Man, and the Life of Man is the Vision of God.”

I’m approached on the street or in the local diner with some regularity by people needing to bear out their grief or their struggles or to ask for prayers for illness. I listen and I pray for them, of course, but in the end I recommend that they find a church. It doesn’t have to be mine, but I tell them that the burdens we all carry are too much for each of us to bear alone. I tell them to share the weight, shift the weight, bring the weight to the community of Jesus Christ and let him, and us, help them bear it. Usually the reply is, “Well, this will pass,” or “I just don’t believe in organized religion,” or “I’m not a Christian; I’m just struggling.”

This is a typical sort of worldview for the Wisconsinite. Those of you in other places populated by the children of Germans and Finns will certainly understand. There is something beautiful about it, in a patriotic sort of way: the rugged independence of the American, the John Wayne type, stoic, and — in these parts — often dressed in wool plaid. The beauty of this independence is quickly eclipsed by the sadness of it all. In this all-American worldview, the person must be all things to himself, must be his own friend, confidant, confessor, doctor, and ultimately tyrant.

It reminds me of a joke told by the character Rorschach in the graphic novel Watchmen:

Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor, I am Pagliacci.”

For the evangelist, in the parish and on the streets, it seems plain that what is offered by the church is the escape from this hamster wheel. From the insanity of the spirit of the world we can be freed, because there is another, One other who can be for us the true other to the incessant sameness that we find inside of ourselves. God is self-sufficient and is whole within himself. We are not self-sufficient and are made whole by something outside ourselves, something that is other than us, because “The Glory of God is the Living Man, and the Life of Man is the Vision of God.”

Evangelism shouldn’t be so crass as to hustle some self-help method to alleviate the depression and boredom of the modern person, but it offers Pagliacci something to see other than his own show. Evangelism offers the vision of God that is the very life of the person. Perhaps Pagliacci enjoys his own show, at least for now. Perhaps he has found within himself some facsimile of being fully alive; even within his own struggles, his cornfed strength and American moxie and grit have made him steely enough to pull the old yoke a few more yards.

Ultimately, Pagliacci will find the old yoke is too burdensome to bear. The burden will become intolerable, the same old show unfulfilling and meaningless, the jokes falling flat, and he will burst into tears and say, “But doctor, I am Pagliacci” when invited to one more go on the merry-go-round. He will find himself, as we all well should find ourselves, a poor master of himself, a poor friend to himself, a poor doctor of himself. Because the life of man is not the vision of man, but is the vision of God. He finds himself, in the words of the great theologian John Prine, “wrapped up in his very own chain of sorrow.”

There the evangelist or priest differs from the doctor of the joke, and points, as Karl Barth taught us to point — like John the Baptist in the Isenheim Altarpiece — with our long finger toward the crucified Lord. We point and we say,

Beloved, look here, this is your life and your meaning and purpose: the crucified one who is risen! Here your struggles and pain will transform into everlasting joy. You no longer need to be all things to yourself, but this one, who is one in three and three in one, can be all things to you now! Rejoice, O sinner, for God has called you to his table!

If this is the mission that we hold, if this is our Great Commission, and if this is the alternative that we offer — life instead of death, the vision of God, “man fully alive” — how could we not look out our windows and be zealous in our proclamations? If we believe that this is true and that Christ is Lord and God, how can we stay quiet behind our office windows? If we look outside our leaden windows and see that the Glory of God is indeed the Living Man and the Life of Man is the Vision of God, and the street is full of Pagliaccis, full of cowboys trying to ride alone, we must go out as abolitionists and tell them of the One who can break the chains that they have forged for themselves.

Our aim is to convince Pagliacci the clown, with the help of the Holy Spirit, that the grand drama of God’s salvation is far better than their penny ante vaudeville act. The Christ who has come into the world knocks even now at their hearts, welcoming them, calling them, beckoning them out of themselves, out of their own show, and bringing them into the narrative of the New Testament, which is and always has been the greatest show on earth.

I now look out an altogether different window, the old leaden glass of my downtown parish office. Just above my monitor juts the modest skyline of Wausau and below is the relative hustle of the city’s 3rd Street. The message from this window is the same as the one at the House: “The Glory of God is the Living Man, and the Life of Man is the Vision of God.”

I’m approached on the street or in the local diner with some regularity by people needing to bear out their grief or their struggles or to ask for prayers for illness. I listen and I pray for them, of course, but in the end I recommend that they find a church. It doesn’t have to be mine, but I tell them that the burdens we all carry are too much for each of us to bear alone. I tell them to share the weight, shift the weight, bring the weight to the community of Jesus Christ and let him, and us, help them bear it. Usually the reply is, “Well, this will pass,” or “I just don’t believe in organized religion,” or “I’m not a Christian; I’m just struggling.”

This is a typical sort of worldview for the Wisconsinite. Those of you in other places populated by the children of Germans and Finns will certainly understand. There is something beautiful about it, in a patriotic sort of way: the rugged independence of the American, the John Wayne type, stoic, and — in these parts — often dressed in wool plaid. The beauty of this independence is quickly eclipsed by the sadness of it all. In this all-American worldview, the person must be all things to himself, must be his own friend, confidant, confessor, doctor, and ultimately tyrant.

It reminds me of a joke told by the character Rorschach in the graphic novel Watchmen:

Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor, I am Pagliacci.”

For the evangelist, in the parish and on the streets, it seems plain that what is offered by the church is the escape from this hamster wheel. From the insanity of the spirit of the world we can be freed, because there is another, One other who can be for us the true other to the incessant sameness that we find inside of ourselves. God is self-sufficient and is whole within himself. We are not self-sufficient and are made whole by something outside ourselves, something that is other than us, because “The Glory of God is the Living Man, and the Life of Man is the Vision of God.”

Evangelism shouldn’t be so crass as to hustle some self-help method to alleviate the depression and boredom of the modern person, but it offers Pagliacci something to see other than his own show. Evangelism offers the vision of God that is the very life of the person. Perhaps Pagliacci enjoys his own show, at least for now. Perhaps he has found within himself some facsimile of being fully alive; even within his own struggles, his cornfed strength and American moxie and grit have made him steely enough to pull the old yoke a few more yards.

Ultimately, Pagliacci will find the old yoke is too burdensome to bear. The burden will become intolerable, the same old show unfulfilling and meaningless, the jokes falling flat, and he will burst into tears and say, “But doctor, I am Pagliacci” when invited to one more go on the merry-go-round. He will find himself, as we all well should find ourselves, a poor master of himself, a poor friend to himself, a poor doctor of himself. Because the life of man is not the vision of man, but is the vision of God. He finds himself, in the words of the great theologian John Prine, “wrapped up in his very own chain of sorrow.”

There the evangelist or priest differs from the doctor of the joke, and points, as Karl Barth taught us to point — like John the Baptist in the Isenheim Altarpiece — with our long finger toward the crucified Lord. We point and we say,

Beloved, look here, this is your life and your meaning and purpose: the crucified one who is risen! Here your struggles and pain will transform into everlasting joy. You no longer need to be all things to yourself, but this one, who is one in three and three in one, can be all things to you now! Rejoice, O sinner, for God has called you to his table!

If this is the mission that we hold, if this is our Great Commission, and if this is the alternative that we offer — life instead of death, the vision of God, “man fully alive” — how could we not look out our windows and be zealous in our proclamations? If we believe that this is true and that Christ is Lord and God, how can we stay quiet behind our office windows? If we look outside our leaden windows and see that the Glory of God is indeed the Living Man and the Life of Man is the Vision of God, and the street is full of Pagliaccis, full of cowboys trying to ride alone, we must go out as abolitionists and tell them of the One who can break the chains that they have forged for themselves.

Our aim is to convince Pagliacci the clown, with the help of the Holy Spirit, that the grand drama of God’s salvation is far better than their penny ante vaudeville act. The Christ who has come into the world knocks even now at their hearts, welcoming them, calling them, beckoning them out of themselves, out of their own show, and bringing them into the narrative of the New Testament, which is and always has been the greatest show on earth.

The whole system sits atop a mahogany veneer desk that is over a century old. It was my great-grandfather’s desk, shipped to me by family a few years after he died along with a matching bookcase, a six-generation bedroom suite, and his collection of mostly obsolete firearms.

The PC and the desk couldn’t clash more: the desk, an edifice to my family’s coal-mining heritage bearing the furniture maker’s mark from the mining town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, the PC a symbol of technological excess and bourgeois sentiment. A generational mishmash, and both symbols of a danger that goes back to the Fall of Adam. Both represent the development and depth of technique in the Western world.

Jacques Ellul, perceived at the time as a radical Christian, which he certainly was, should be regarded today as a sort of prophet. In the iron age of communication technology, Ellul looked at the development of the radio and later the television as signs of a development that are as old as sin itself: technique. Ellul defines technique in his seminal work, The Technological Society, as “the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”

For my great-grandfather and his kinfolk, the Kentucky coal mines represented the totality of methods for efficiency. Men weren’t men but were means to extract as much coal as cheaply and as efficiently as possible. Whole towns were erected, with pools and movie theaters and schools, all toward the end of an efficient mine. These were self-sufficient communities where the greenback was seldom used, but rather company chit was issued; company money for use in company stores to furnish company houses with mahogany veneer desks. The whole of the town, all of its purposes — educational, recreational, and spiritual — was oriented toward efficiency. A satisfied man made an efficient worker, and a praying man was less worried about the risk of mine collapse.

With the rise of unions we saw the fall of company towns, but not the fall of the ageless spirit that encouraged their rise, the unstoppable and all-pervasive technique that has come to define both industrial and post-industrial life in America.

Today, the economic and spiritual structures of technique are less obvious than the company towns, but more omnipresent. Setting aside our professional lives, it is our personal lives that have become even more inculcated with technique, mostly without our knowledge.

Most people spend at least an hour a day online, whether on Facebook, Instagram, or The Washington Post or First Things. Regardless of how enriching your online experience is, the technique remains the same: it is all part of a terribly efficient method. As we’ve divorced more of our recreation and social lives from the tangible world and moved it to the digital, we’ve made it more efficient for ourselves and for those who create the structures of that experience.

In our sacred rest, established by God for our use, we still contribute without our knowledge and with only tacit consent. Each video watched on YouTube, each article read on the Post, each essay cited on JSTOR, all contribute to technique metastasizing. Each piece of content engages with feeds, computers, and artificial intelligence to make it more efficient in bringing you back for another ride on the carousel.

Technique has of course benefitted us in many ways. It has made our goods cheaper; it has helped us to bridge cultural gaps through the miracle of modern communication; it has opened new ways of sharing the gospel in difficult places through the internet. Like artificial intelligence, the latest child of technique, it is hard to make a moral claim on it, difficult to get your mind around the ethical dilemma it presents.

It is plain that the all-consuming drive for efficiency that moves our modern world was never the plan; an Adamic tool developed to spite the hardness of the postlapsarian earth with its thistles and thorns. Its presence is ubiquitous, its spirit felt everywhere the Western foot treads, and its one escape is through the Church of Jesus Christ, that great bastion of inefficiency and impracticality.

The Church in her beauty and century movement is the way out for those of our age — a way, even for a moment, to get one step off the stainless-steel carousel of technique. The liturgy takes as long as it takes, and it doesn’t stop once begun. Its motions and movements echo timelessness, its vestments ornate and impractical, the time of meeting unattractive. Its spaces are full of arcane symbols and the architecture ornate. The very Lord worshiped there took six days to build a world he could have built in one; his triune life is confounding and mysterious; his life and ministry not plainspoken and straight but rather filled with the words of parables and metaphor. It is, and he is, the anti-technique and the antidote to banal efficiency.

While technique is as ubiquitous as northern cold, the Church offers the needed fireside respite of warmth and eccentricity and mystery. It is the beauty of the impractical, a place that is eternally resistant to automation, a place that is inefficient by its nature, and foolish to those who are perishing.

Our spaces and rituals and beliefs allow us to step out for a moment, out of the mundanity of efficient contemporary life, and enter into the adventure of the impractical sacred. This is itself the mundane beauty of the Church, that the earthly walk with Jesus isn’t straight, but weaves through life’s holy meanders. We choose the impractical path, the difficult path, the sacred path, where the path of technique encourages that most efficient of philosophies, utilitarianism. The Church chooses and must continue to choose the less efficient philosophy of virtue and beauty.

Our way is more radical, more beautiful, and far more foolish.