But this past spring, I heard a talk given at our college by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, an accomplished MacDonald scholar, and a passionate advocate for the man and his work. She noted that some readers rate MacDonald more highly for his poetry than for his fiction—perhaps because the poetic form requires a particular kind of concentrated thought—and singled out The Diary of an Old Soul for special praise. Intrigued, I ordered a copy, in the handsome edition recently published by InterVarsity Press, with helpful notes by Timothy Larsen.

The Diary is essentially one long poem, consisting of 366 seven-line stanzas, recording the author’s day-to-day wrestling with the things of faith.^⁠ The full title of the work, in fact, is A Book of Strife, in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul. The element of “strife” is a large part of what makes the poem so valuable. This is no feel-good spirituality, but a remarkable record of a serious Christian’s good days and bad, times of exaltation and times of despondency (what the desert fathers would have called acedia). MacDonald clearly intended his diary for devotional use: early editions were printed with a blank page facing each page of text, so that the reader might record her own spiritual struggles and insights. The InterVarsity edition revives this salutary practice.

Like Augustine’s Confessions, MacDonald’s Old Soul allows the reader to listen in on the author’s conversation with God. And as with the Confessions, both the human “I” and the divine “Thou” are set in strong relief. Consider the lines for May 19:

O Christ, my life, possess me utterly. / Take me and make a little Christ of me.

If I am anything but thy father’s son, / ’Tis something not yet from the darkness won.

Oh, give me light to live with open eyes. / Oh, give me life to hope above all skies.

Give me thy spirit to haunt the Father with my cries.

Haunting the Father! As a friend of mine noted, the only possible improvement to these lines would be capitalizing the word Spirit. In seven lines, MacDonald offers a trinitarian conception of the Christian life as union with Christ, animated by the Spirit, and issuing in stubbornly persistent prayer to the Father. As a “book of strife,” the work also powerfully evokes the power of evil, both inward and outward. This comes to expression in a particularly harrowing sequence in late June and early July. The sequence begins innocently enough: on June 29, the author pictures himself sheltered beneath “Beauty’s tent,” ministered to by the “doves” of Art, Knowledge, Will, Conscience, and Reason. These doves are perceived by Fancy, referring to the human faculty of imagination, which plays such an important role in MacDonald’s anthropology.

But imagination alone will not save us. In the entries for the next two days, the vision is disrupted by the intrusion by evil:

ALAS, my tent! see through it a whirlwind sweep! / Moaning, poor Fancy’s doves are swept away. /

I sit alone, a sorrow half asleep, / My consciousness the blackness all astir. /

No pilgrim I, a homeless wanderer— / For how canst Thou be in the darkness deep, /

Who dwellest only in the living day? /

It must be, somewhere in my fluttering tent, / Strange creatures, half tamed only yet, are pent— /

Dragons, lop-winged birds, and large-eyed snakes! / Hark! through the storm the saddest howling breaks! /

Or are they loose, roaming about the bent, / The darkness dire deepening with moan and scream?— /

My Morning, rise, and all shall be a dream.

Notice how the sense of God’s presence — normally so vivid throughout Old Soul — recedes, in favor of a fantastical picturing of evil powers. The“dragons, lop-winged birds, and large-eyed snakes” sounds like something out of Tolkien’s Mordor. Or we might think of Luther’s assaults by the demonic, his Anfechtungen. But as the dream is dispelled, the sense of divine presence returns:

Not thine, my Lord, the darkness all is mine— / Save that, as mine, my darkness too is thine: /

All things are thine to save or to destroy— / Destroy my darkness, rise my perfect joy; /

Love primal, the live coal of every night, / Flame out, scare the ill things with radiant fright, /

And fill my tent with laughing morn’s delight.

As Timothy Larsen notes, MacDonald has often been called a “mystic.”^⁠ The term may be allowed, so long as we do not make the mistake of reducing mysticism to the psychology of religious experience. Thus, MacDonald ponders the presence of God with him precisely in those moments when he, the human subject, is least aware. So the entry for July 18:

How do I live when thou art far away?— / When I am sunk, and lost, and dead in sleep, /

Or in some dream with no sense in its play? / When weary-dull, or drowned in study deep?— /

O Lord, I live so utterly on thee, / I live when I forget thee utterly—

Not that thou thinkest of, but thinkest me.

God, our Creator, does not think “of” us, as though we enjoyed an independent reality that God — passively — happens to notice. Rather, God thinks us. If one were to press this point in an explicitly metaphysical direction (MacDonald does not), we might arrive at a Berkeley-like occasionalism, in which created things are nothing more — but also nothing less! — than God’s ideas. As God thinks us, so we are. As God loves us, our love inevitably seeks him, the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.”^⁠

These verses are but a sampling of the riches to be found in Old Soul. To be sure, not all the stanzas are equally compelling. Sometimes I find myself skimming the lines for a given day, and finding that they don’t especially speak to me; perhaps next year it will be different. Moreover, since spiritual tempers differ, I’m sure not everyone will find the poem helpful. But in the short time I’ve spent with Old Soul, I’ve found it to be a remarkably fruitful aid to devotion. It has also sent me back to some of the author’s other works, such as The Princess and Curdie, with fresh eyes.

MacDonald’s personal address to God has a way of rendering God startlingly real, a loving Father who wants us to “haunt” him with our cries. The Diary of an Old Soul has a place among the Christian spiritual classics. Take and read.

“The Holy Spirit is the neglected member of the Trinity.” After hearing that cliché in a sermon recently, I told my wife that it made me think of Robert Jenson’s classic essay “You Wonder Where the Spirit Went.”[1] Without missing a beat, she recited the lines: “You’ll wonder where the yellow went/when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” I must confess that the great theologian’s allusion to a 1950s toothpaste ad went over my head.[2] It was one of those references that you either get or you don’t, and Jenson wasn’t going to call attention to his little joke.

When homilists say the Spirit has gone into eclipse, I doubt very much that what they have in mind is a Jensonian call for a revisionary metaphysics, centered on the radical timefulness of the gospel’s God. It’s much simpler than that — an intuition that something vital has gone missing in the church’s life, and that we need to recover it. The missing element may be personal conversion, or the experience of the new birth. It may be seriousness about the life of holiness, or advocacy for people on the margins. Any or all of these may be taken as symptoms of the church’s amnesia concerning the Spirit. Conversely, a robust pneumatic life is offered as the sure remedy for whatever ails us.

But has the Spirit really been forgotten? When we arrive at pneumatology in my first-year theology course, students often express frustration at the standard Western  answers: the Spirit as the vinculum or bond of unity between the Father and the Son. The Spirit as Love, or Gift. These Augustinian and Thomist formulas seem to them suspiciously abstract, regarding the Spirit more as principle than as agent, a something rather than a someone. Not unlike Jenson, they are tempted to look East, casting off the filioque, and embracing what seems like the more adventuresome trinitarianism of Orthodoxy.

Reader, fear not! I am not going to try to resolve the filioque controversy in the space of a single essay. I will, however, repeat what I tell my students: that at least part of our frustrations about the Spirit can be traced back to Scripture, with its very different metaphorical fields for denominating the persons. The language of “Father” and “Son,” after all, is drawn from the realm of human social relations. Whatever apophatic adjustments we may need to make — e.g., “Father” does not mean “male,” and “begetting” does not mean “preceding in time” — we still feel we have an inkling of what the language is gesturing toward.

But the language for the Spirit is very different. It frequently trades in nature metaphors, such as “wind” and “breath.” Like the Hebrew ruach, the Greek pneuma can mean both these things. The Son’s taking on of our human flesh makes him in a certain sense “picturable,” which is why one can write an icon of Christ. The invisible Father cannot be iconized,[3] indeed does not need to be iconized, having been fully imaged in the Son: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

But how does one iconize the Spirit? As a dove, perhaps, echoing the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism. Or as the tongues of flame that came to rest on the apostles at Pentecost. Note that we are back to nature metaphors: bird, fire, wind, breath. In John’s Gospel, Jesus also compares the Spirit to water, flowing either out of his own belly or that of the believer.[4] At the end of the gospel, he appears to the disciples and breathes on them, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”[5]

None of this means the Spirit isn’t also profoundly personal. In Scripture, the Spirit speaks and is spoken to, bears witness, groans, and can even be grieved. Impersonal objects and abstract principles do not grieve. Certainly the Spirit is a person, but we must resist the temptation to assume that we know just what “person” means when applied to God.

In trinitarian theology, hypostasis is a notoriously slippery term. We’d like to pin it down, and say not just that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all persons but that they are persons in exactly the same sense. But such univocal knowledge is not given to us. Nobody quite knows what a divine hypostasis is, and if we did know, we would have turned the mystery that is the Trinity into a puzzle and then solved it. The Spirit, in particular, seems to elude our well-intended efforts at theological definition, and so Jesus says to Nicodemus: “The pneuma blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of pneuma.” An astonished Nicodemus speaks for all of us when he asks, “How can these things be?”[6]

One of the more imaginative treatments of the Spirit in recent theology is The Breath of God, written by Etienne Vetö, a Roman Catholic priest associated with the Chemin Neuf community.[7] It’s a remarkable little book, combining sophisticated technical analysis with a winsomely meditative style. Rather than trying to evade the scriptural oddity of the Holy Spirit, Vetö leans into it. The Spirit, he maintains, is intrinsically dynamic, fluid, polyvalent, and resistant to easy definition. More fundamentally than either Augustine’s Love or Gift, Breath is Scripture’s most consistent way of naming the Spirit. God actually has a Breath.[8] The Father breathes, and the Breath by which he breathes is the Holy Spirit. While such language is inevitably metaphorical, Vetö is far from saying that it is “only a metaphor.”[9] On the contrary, Scripture’s language needs to be taken at face value: God’s Breath is God being God, no less than the Father’s act of Begetting and the Son’s act of Being Begotten. The Spirit is God indeed, but God differently.

Drawing on theologians as diverse as Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herbert Mühlen, and Sarah Coakley, Vetö argues that the Spirit should be considered not so much a substantial “self” as “a capacity for God of being outside of himself and inside another.”[10] It is this complex mix of stepping aside, dwelling within, and letting flourish that marks the Spirit’s distinctive profile:

In the Scriptures Ruah and Pneuma have shown themselves to be quite different from Father and Son: they are atmospheric and fluid, they act and exist in and through and around others. The more the Spirit is active in infusing wisdom, dynamism, life, and relationship in others, the more it pulls back. It is itself by making others become themselves. These characteristics flow together to give a typical, specific “personality” of the Spirit.[11]

On the one hand, the Spirit hides behind the Father and the Son, or (to alter the metaphor) is the “space” within which encounter with them occurs. On the other hand, the Spirit hides behind the material modes of his working; this is one reason the distinction between “created” and “uncreated” grace is finally artificial. The Spirit is not a creature, certainly, but aligns himself with creaturerly realities—bodies, voices, affections, singing, sacraments, prayers, memories, and “groanings too deep for words.”[12] Among the many virtues of Vetö’s account is that for all its impressive technical sophistication, it sticks close to the primary language and imagery of Holy Scripture.

All of which suggests that we do not best honor the Spirit by engaging in a great deal of Spirit talk, or by invoking the Spirit — much less spirits and “spirituality” — as a panacea for the ills that afflict church and world.[13] Trying to make the Spirit “do more” for us is exactly the wrong way of attending to this divine person. If the Spirit is God’s Breath, we should let him breathe in and through us. If the Spirit summons us to praise the Father or confess the Son, we should obey his promptings. Where did the Spirit go? Maybe he didn’t go anywhere. Maybe the miracle of Pentecost is that the dominus vivificans is simply and graciously present with us, bestowing gifts, animating our bodies, and sending the church out on mission.

[1] Robert Jenson, “You Wonder Where the Spirit Went,” Pro Ecclesia, Winter 1993. I should say here that while I am in general a great admirer of Jenson’s theology, I find that in this essay he is working too hard to fit the Spirit into a particular conceptual mold.

[2] My wife knew this only because her grandmother, Helen Richardson Miller, won a contest for best answer to the question “Where did the yellow go?” For the record, her successful entry was: “It mingled with the blues, sirs, of other toothpaste users, And turned them green with envy of my winning Pepsodent smile!”

[3] I realize that there are many exceptions, especially in Western art, but even in Orthodox iconography under Western influence.

[4] The Greek syntax is confusing and allows of both meanings. The ambiguity is probably intentional.

[5] John 20:22.

[6] John 3:8-9.

[7] Etienne Vetö, The Breath of God: An Essay on the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, foreword by Ephraim Radner (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019).

[8] Vetö argues that the Spirit is the Father’s Breath, his personal act of “respiration,” even in the immanent Trinity. Exploring this would take us well beyond the bounds of the present essay.

[9] One of Vetö’s primary sources for the theology of metaphor is Janet Martin Soskice, for whom metaphor is precisely a vehicle for making reality claims.

[10] Vetö, The Breath of God, 17.

[11] Vetö, The Breath of God, 27-28.

[12] Romans 8:26.

[13] See Ephraim Radner’s A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and its Anti-Modern Redemption (Baylor, 2019), which impressively documents the ways in which pneumatology has been used to address an array of concerns about theodicy.

Everything within creation
Speaks of Jesus’ Incarnation.

Likewise too, his saving Passion
Is shown forth in all that’s fashioned.

The Word God spoke before all ages
Can be traced in Scripture’s pages.

The Bible tells one vast narration
from Genesis to Revelation.

Just don’t call it “salvation history,”
a recipe for taming mystery.[2]

But concrete images that foment
Our faithful living in the Moment.

The gospel-tale of Jesus Lord
is figured in the ancient Law.

And both together speak our world,[3]
As time’s scroll is unsealed, unfurled,

To form the fabric of our days:
We read the Word, and end in praise.

The church’s doctors knew this art,
from Augustine and Basil to Karl Barth.

With literal sense[4] did they begin
Then looked for hidden meaning within.

In figure, type, and allegory,
They sought for echoes of Jesus’ story.

God’s speech: not facts meant to inform us,
But utterance that would transform us.

In modern times, this art declined
in favor of the historical mind.[5]

The Bible, said Jowett, is worth a look.
But read it “like any other book.”[6]

No mysteries or figures gleaning:
The author’s intent just is the meaning.

A claim that even fails the test
Of poetry and novels best.

For when Jane Austen Emma wrought,
She surely said more than she thought.

And Dostoevsky’s Brothers K
Is more than any man can say.

Now God, who knows all things, is master
Of both the spirit and the letter.

Our human words of things do tell,
But God’s words are the things themselves —

The world of creatures, persons, stories,
An alphabet that leads to glory.

Thus every line of Scripture’s pregnant
With multiple senses, meanings fragrant.

As Thomas[7] in the Summa taught —
How Christ, who our redemption bought,

Is figured in the holy pages
Of Israel’s prophets, singers, sages.

The same is true, if more dramatic,
In Barth’s great Kirchliche Dogmatik.

Especially the print that’s tiny,
Excursuses that drip of honey,

A meditation on the Word,
The mind’s own service to the LORD.

But what’s the method? Where the fences?
If truly there are many senses,

Can texts mean anything we choose?
— so biblical scholars challenge those

Who tout patristic exegesis
And other readings of that species.

But rules aren’t lacking ’neath the sun.
The church’s rule of faith for one:

One God, Creator of earth and heaven,
One Lord, in whom salvation’s given,

Canon prophetic and apostolic —
So Irenaeus, anti-Gnostic.

Tradition, subordinate to the Word,
Which to ignore would be absurd.

Lastly, reason — not just smarts,
But reading with wit and grace and art,

Always tempered with humility,
And awareness of human fallibility.

History’s a helpful tool,
But use it lightly — not a rule,

Or iron law that all explains,
For that’s historicism’s bane,

The view that truth is what time gauges,
With God tucked in around the edges.

But God’s not limited by history:
The world of time’s enclosed in mystery.[8]

Reading Scripture is no buffer
To a world where people suffer.

It rather shows our mortal flesh
Held fast by God’s own tenderness.

We needn’t to the past take flight:
the Fathers were not always right,

Nor were Reformers always true
To Truth that they proclaimed, and knew.

By faith alone we’re justified,
An antidote to every pride

Of mind, and eye, and lust for treasure
That would trim God to suit our measure.

Even the keenest exegete
Must bow in worship, as is meet,

To Jesus Christ, of all things Lord,
Present as Bread, and Wine, and Word.[9]

Hear the author discuss this poem and the art of figural reading on The Living Church Podcast.

[1] See Auden, “Academic Graffiti,” Collected Poems, 1976. That I am no Auden will be painfully obvious. But perhaps this poem may provide a useful as well as amusing orientation to the world of figural exegesis of Scripture.

[2] A bit of an exaggeration. Heilsgeschichte has its uses. The caution here is against over-extension of the concept into a comprehensive framework for reading the Bible.

[3] A Christian version of the Jewish claim that “everything is in the Torah.” See Mishnah Pirkei Avot, 5:22: “Turn it over and over, for everything is in it.”

[4] A surprisingly slippery notion. For Thomas and the medievals, the sensus literalis basically meant the plain sense, the obvious sense of the words on the page — which could include such things as metaphor, or even Old Testament references to Christ. The term literal in modern use has a far narrower connotation.

[5] The story is told in Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 1974.

[6] Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, famously argued that the Bible should be read “like any other book,” strictly with an eye to the human author’s intention. Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” 1859.

[7] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a1ae, q. 1, aa. 9-10.

[8] On the question of Scripture’s relation to time, see Ephraim Radner, Time and the Word: Figural Reading of Christian Scripture (2016). This book is an indispensable guide to the larger landscape of figuralism, especially as it pertains to preaching.

[9] Thanks to the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, a master figural preacher, whose question over a post-Christmas brunch prompted these musings.

Which is part of why I welcome the yearly arrival of Advent. The great lectionary texts of Advent, whether that be the testimony of John the Baptist, or Isaiah’s glad tidings of Israel’s deliverance, or Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse in Mark 13 — all of these summon us to abandon our doomscrolling in favor of a proper Christian hope. Advent gives us permission to notice the darkness without giving in to it. Advent summons us to let our imaginations be shaped by our Lord Jesus Christ and his coming, rather than by the voracious 24-hour news cycle.

Advent offers us the good news that this world and its ills will be judged. One of my favorite sermons by that great contemporary interpreter of Advent, Fleming Rutledge, is titled “Loving the Dreadful Day of Judgment.”[1] Rutledge writes that the “purpose of this seven-week season [for her Advent includes the final three weeks of the Christian calendar] is to take an unflinching inventory of darkness.” Not only that, but Advent’s purpose is to brace us with the knowledge that God is coming to judge this world of ours, to hold the evildoers of history accountable for their wicked deeds.

Evildoers? That word rolls easily off our lips when it is applied to others; but Rutledge reminds us that a central theme of Advent is repentance. We are the ones whose lives will be laid bare by the judgment of Christ. In his apocalyptically charged letter to the Thessalonians, Paul addresses his readers as “children of the light and children of the day.” Rutledge comments:

As children of the day, we stand first in line at the bar of judgment by repenting of our sins and the sins of the whole church and the sins of the whole world. We are involved in each other because God was first involved in us. The wrath of God and the love of God are two faces of the same thing. The world will be purged of its iniquity in the consuming fire of the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the Advent theme.

“We are involved in each other because God was first involved in us.” That is a lovely theological sentence. It echoes John the Elder’s assertion “We love, because he first loved us.”[2] We can even love the dreadful day of judgment, because we have been loved.

In a recent essay, Chris Holmes argues eloquently that there is no theological work in our day more important than that of being a Bible teacher, and no aspect of being a Bible teacher more important than loving God. Beyond all technical skills and resources, he writes, this is the teacher’s secret resource, the most important thing she can give to her students or congregants. Citing the Anglican Thomist Eric Mascall, who draws on the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, Holmes maintains that the theologian’s “primary need” is to “be in love with God.”

While it might seem more natural to associate Advent with hope, hope is empty apart from this primary need to love. The Christian hope is not just the expectation that something will occur, but anticipation of the coming of a Someone. Hence the bridal-nuptial imagery that punctuates the season; think of the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, a text that appears in the lectionary toward the very end of the church year (part of Rutledge’s “long Advent”). The text is paraphrased in Philip Nicolai’s hymn “Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns die Stimme,” which became the basis for one of Bach’s best-known cantatas, no. 40.[3] Longing can also be heard in the haunting strains of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” a paraphrase of the medieval “O” Antiphons set to the tune of a 15th-century French processional. These musical expressions give powerful voice to love for God, indeed longing for God, in the midst of the world’s darkness.

“We love because he first loved us.” Here is what these well-worn words look like in context:

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. (1 John 4:17-20)

Rutledge poses the question, “How shall we love the dreadful day of judgment?” We love it by loving the God who has first loved us. We love it by abandoning our hopeless doomscrolling, casting out fear in favor of the One who is our Doom itself, even the Lord Jesus Christ. (“Doom” is simply the Old English word for judgment.) We love it by loving our neighbor, in the daily apocalypse that is life in a world standing under the divine love and the divine promise of redemption. Nor do we need for our love to be perfect to begin. Even so come, Lord Jesus.

[1] The title refers to a story in Rutledge’s family concerning a New England cousin, who wished to use the marriage rite from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for her wedding. Her grandfather, a liberal Congregationalist pastor, proposed leaving out the minister’s admonition: “I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed.” But the bride-to-be would have none of it. “No,” she protested, “I love the dreadful day of judgment!” Rutledge, Advent, 172.

[2] 1 John 4:19, NRSV.

[3] Cantata no. 40. The hymn may be found in The Hymnal 1982 as #61, “Sleepers Wake! A Voice Astounds Us.” In the Canadian Common Praise it’s #110.

The other “sacred” text referenced in the film comes from a Christian source. Before the experiment, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the logistical manager of the Manhattan Project, asks Oppenheimer what the test should be called. The latter responds with a half-whispered: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” — the opening words of a sonnet by John Donne. Here, then, is his answer. He accordingly instructs Groves to dub the test blast “Trinity.”

There is a germ of truth to this story. In response to a query made by Groves in 1963, Oppenheimer wrote: “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.” That poem, however, is not “Batter My Heart,” but Donne’s “A Hymn to God, my God, in My Sickness,” an extraordinary meditation on mortality. Donne’s figural linking of Christ and Adam in that poem is justly famous:

We think that Paradise and Calvary,

         Christ’s cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place;

Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;

         As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,

         May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.[1]

Oppenheimer further tells Groves: “That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’ Beyond this, I have no clues whatever.”

It has been claimed that it was precisely Tatlock who introduced Oppenheimer to Donne’s work. The brilliant psychoanalyst (and ardent Communist) was the daughter of an English professor, and had studied literature at Vassar before entering medical school. Another possible influence is T.S. Eliot, a writer whom Oppenheimer admired deeply, and who played a key role in the 20th-century rediscovery of the Metaphysical poets.[2] It is no surprise that a man of Oppenheimer’s intellectual ambitions should be drawn to the polymathic and eloquent Donne.

But whatever the intellectual and literary sources informing Oppenheimer’s decision, what shall we make of the link he posits between the bomb and the “three-person’d God” of Christian faith? Between “Trinity” and the Trinity?

From a Christian perspective, naming one’s death-dealing device after the God who both bestows life and is Life itself seems like an act of supreme blasphemy. The uranium and plutonium bombs developed at Los Alamos were designed to be used. And used they would be, to devastating effect, just a few weeks after the Trinity test. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; many as a result of the blasts, others as a result of radiation sickness in the weeks and months that followed. Oppenheimer’s line “I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” was in this sense prophetic, even if horribly so.

Nolan’s film accurately captures the flavor of the debates that swirled around the use of the devices among U.S. scientists and politicians. With a few notable exceptions, among them Oppenheimer’s friends Isidore Isaac Rabi and Leo Szilard, most of those involved in the discussions were concerned with not whether but how the bombs should be used.[3] Oppenheimer’s position was that the scientist’s proper role is to develop technology, while it is the statesman’s burden to figure out how to deploy it. In other words, means and ends are relatively detachable from one another. In testimony before the committee charged with reviewing his security clearance during the McCarthy era, a result of his leftist activities in the 1930s, Oppenheimer said:

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.[4]

Technical sweetness, in other words, creates an unstoppable momentum of its own. How could we curious, endlessly inventive beings possibly choose not to proceed with a technological development of such awesome power? Let the politicians (or let the public) decide what to do with it! If something can be done, it must and will be done. Alan Jacobs calls this the “Oppenheimer Principle”; his sagacious reflections on it are well worth reading.

The Principle combines great hubris with a touching naiveté. Oppenheimer’s technician assumes that tools are value-neutral, and that we simply need to “decide” how we’re going to use them. One only needs to read a few chapters of Ivan Illich or Marshall McLuhan to see that the reality is quite otherwise. Our tools shape us, as much or even more than we shape them. We are captive to principalities and powers that are much bigger than we are, and that will not hesitate to crush us if it suits them. One of the things Nolan conveys so well is a sense of Oppenheimer’s being swept up in a maelstrom of forces (cosmic, political, personal, sexual) that outstrip his powers of rational control.

Following his source material, a biography significantly titled American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nolan plays up the tragic elements in Oppenheimer’s story. The physicist is implicitly the Prometheus who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it on humankind, thereby incurring eternal torment.

Oppenheimer, however, implicitly frames the development of atomic weapons not in terms of Greek tragedy, but in relation to the Christian story.[5] As he confesses, it is hard to know exactly what his motives were for his choice of the name “Trinity,” aside from a certain fondness for the poetry of John Donne. And yet the Donne connection can be probed for meaning, quite apart from Oppenheimer’s unknowable intentions.

Consider the sonnet in full:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,

But am betroth’d unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Space does not permit the richly detailed reading this poem deserves. Let me simply make three observations that seem especially pertinent in this context.

First, the God who comes to expression in this poem is the addressable God. He is not sheer, untrammeled Power, a dark fate to which humans are subject. Precisely as the Trinity, the God of Christian faith is a God who invites human beings to call upon him.[6] To enter into such a relationship is already to acknowledge a fatal chink in the armor of one’s sinful pretensions. It means entering into a space of not being in control — the very opposite of technocratic or political mastery. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” because Your foolishness is greater than my wisdom, and Your weakness greater than my strength (1 Cor. 1:25).

Second, the triune God herein addressed is the God of grace. The speaker of the poem knows full well that he is in no position to save himself. The poem reflects the Pauline paradox of the divided self, in which the “I” is a radically shifting and unstable quantity. The speaker is both the occupied city in need of deliverance, and the all-too-willing collaborator with the occupying power. He is a creature defined by his God-given reason, and one whose reason has proved unreliable — is “captiv’d … weak or untrue.” Not only is the speaker occupied by the Enemy, he is actually betrothed to the latter. Under such dire conditions, salvation can only be effected by a radical intervention from outside the existing system of power. God needs to invade the city, take the sinner captive, and effect a bill of divorcement between him and the Evil One. Paradoxically, the speaker must be “ravish’d” by God in order to attain the chastity and wholeness he longs for.

Salvation, then, as an act of violence — even as rape? We might well draw this disturbing conclusion, were the deity addressed here other than the “three-person’d God”; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; the triune God of grace, whose power is made perfect in weakness. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If [anyone] hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:29, KJV). In the poem’s opening lines, such “knocking” is dismissed as weak and ineffectual. Yet by the end, it seems to have done the trick. The poem’s speaker eagerly opens himself to that union with Christ that, for St. Paul, constitutes the very reality of salvation.

This brings me to my third point, namely, that the poem as a whole reflects the working of the very grace it invokes. The speaker calls on God to invade the city that is his soul. But aren’t the city’s defenses already effectively undermined? Isn’t the bill of divorcement signed, sealed, and delivered? The mere fact that the sinner is calling on God suggests that something is going on, however mysterious and invisible, to bring about deliverance. Or to put it otherwise, the poet’s invocation is a sign of faith.

Human cleverness being what it is, there is no limit to the ways we can rationalize our choice of the tools that will advance our projects. Questions of ultimate ends can be bracketed — leave it to the politicians, or leave it to our future selves — while we explore that which is “technically sweet,” and therefore self-justifying and inevitable. Such is the Oppenheimer Principle. It may be seen as the sin of willful ignorance in its specifically technocratic form.

The answer to sin in any of its forms, however, is grace — the grace that Donne so eloquently captures in this powerful sonnet. Perhaps Oppenheimer’s attraction to Donne can be explained by the latter’s ability to evoke an end — the End, in the Christian view of things — that transcends all acts of human making. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, says the Psalmist (Psalm 111:10). The same might be said of the LORD’s grace, which summons us to a humble acknowledgment of our limits — but also to proper and discerning modes of resistance to the powers that would rule our lives.

The world of the late modern, defined by nuclear weapons (which are still very much with us, nearly 80 years after Hiroshima), the ubiquitous computer, and aggressive surveillance capitalism, is our condition. But it is not our fate. As creatures of the three-person’d God, we are privileged to be participants in a much more interesting and gracious story, one that passes through this world, but is not ultimately defined by it.

[1] Donne’s poem reflects the traditional identification of Golgotha with the Garden of Eden. Medieval paintings of the Crucifixion often depict Adam’s skull at the foot of the cross.

[2] In the May 15, 1963, issue of The Christian Century, Oppenheimer included Eliot’s The Waste Land on a list of the books that had influenced him most. The full list may be found in “Plutonium and Poetry: Where Trinity and Oppenheimer’s Reading Habits Met,” by Patty Templeton.

[3] Rabi, a close friend of Oppenheimer’s, declined to be directly involved in the Manhattan Project, citing moral opposition to weapons of mass destruction. Szilard tried in vain to convince President Truman not to bomb Japan — a remarkable irony, in that it was Szilard who, in 1939, had urged Franklin Roosevelt to initiate the U.S. atomic program. See American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

[4] The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 7th edition, 2009, ed. Elizabeth Knowles.

[5] To be clear, I am not claiming that Oppenheimer was in any sense a Christian. As the Christian Century reading list suggests, he was a modern intellectual with an eclectic array of religious and spiritual interests.

[6] As a proof text, see Psalm 50:15; but really, the whole of Scripture is predicated on this assumption. Barth organized his entire ethics of Reconciliation around the theme of “invocation.” See Barth, The Christian Life, especially 44 ff.