Judging the Church in History: the Real Criteria of Christian Success in the World

Churches are very good at counting things.

Attendance. Membership. Giving units. Budgets. Endowments. Square footage. Construction. Programs. Clergy. Staff. Influence. Institutional longevity.

None of these things is necessarily bad. Most are necessary if an institution is going to function.

But none of them appears in the readings for Proper 22 as the criterion by which God judges the success of God’s people.

Isaiah gives us a vineyard.

Yahweh’s beloved has planted it carefully: fertile hill, cleared stones, choice vines, watchtower, wine vat. Everything has been done for its flourishing. And then comes the terrible disappointment:

“He expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded rotten grapes.”

At the end of the song Isaiah tells us exactly what those grapes were supposed to be. The vineyard is Israel and Judah; Yahweh expected justice, but found bloodshed; expected righteousness, but heard a cry.

That is God’s annual report.

Not attendance.

Not income.

Not construction.

Not political access.

Not institutional prestige.

Justice. Righteousness. And whether suffering people are crying out beneath the structure we have built.

The Gospel takes up Isaiah’s vineyard and turns the question toward stewardship. A landowner plants a vineyard, fences it, constructs the winepress and watchtower, and leases it to tenants. At harvest time he sends servants to receive the fruit that belongs to him. The tenants beat one servant, kill another, stone another. Finally the owner sends his son. The tenants see the heir and reveal the fantasy at the center of their violence:

“This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.”

They have forgotten that they are but tenants.

They think the vineyard belongs to them.

That may be one of the Church’s oldest and most persistent temptations.

When Gift Becomes Possession

Matthew’s parable has a dreadful history of Christian interpretation. “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits” has repeatedly been heard as though Jesus were announcing the divine cancellation of Judaism and transferring Israel’s property deed to Christianity.

We should refuse that reading.

Jesus is a Jew speaking within Israel’s prophetic tradition. Matthew even tells us that the chief priests and Pharisees understand that this particular indictment is directed toward them. The issue is corrupt stewardship, not the racial or theological replacement of the Jewish people.

Indeed, the vineyard itself is not discarded. The tenants are judged precisely because the vineyard remains precious to its owner.

That distinction matters terribly, because Christians have often done exactly what the tenants do: mistaken stewardship for possession.

The history of Christian antisemitism should make preachers extraordinarily cautious here.

Christians have often read this parable as though Jesus were issuing an eviction notice to Judaism: the Jews killed the prophets and the Son; therefore God took the vineyard from them and gave it to the Christian Church. In nineteenth-century preaching, the tenants could become “the Jewish nation,” collectively guilty of ingratitude and treachery. In twentieth-century Germany, theologians of the German Christian movement went further, reconstructing Jesus himself as an Aryan opponent of Judaism and using New Testament polemic to sanctify racial antisemitism. The road from exegesis to atrocity was neither straight nor inevitable. But Christian theology had spent centuries laying some of its paving stones.

The habit did not disappear with nineteenth-century preaching. John of Kronstadt offers a particularly grim modern example. After initially condemning the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, he later apologized to the Christians of Kishinev and wrote that “the Jews themselves were primarily to blame for the pogrom.” He later became closely aligned with the monarchist far right and an honorary member of the Union of the Russian People, one of the principal Black Hundred organizations, part of the ultranationalist, monarchist far right in early twentieth-century Russia. The old theological habit of treating Jews as the rejected people could thus mingle easily with nationalist politics and conspiratorial antisemitism.

Nor is the supersessionist reading of this parable merely historical. In a 2026 sermon from Holy Cross Monastery, the preacher identifies Christians as the “other husbandmen” to whom God gave the vineyard after “the nation of the Jews proved themselves unworthy by their rejection of Christ.” The interpretive move is unmistakable: Israel failed; therefore the vineyard is now ours.

Which makes Matthew’s own ending rather inconvenient for Christian triumphalism. Jesus’ hearers do not say, “Destroy the vineyard.” They say, in effect, entrust it to tenants who will produce its fruit. The vineyard remains God’s. The warning is aimed not at an ethnicity but at unfaithful stewards. The moment the Church reads the parable as proof that it now owns what Jews lost, it begins behaving remarkably like the tenants Jesus condemns.

The irony is almost unbearable.

Christians took a Jewish Jesus, preaching a Jewish prophetic warning to Jewish leaders about the fruits God requires, and turned that warning into a weapon against Jews.

The tenants seized the vineyard again.

The Church Is Not the Owner

The appointed Psalm reinforces the point. God brought the vine out of Egypt, prepared the ground, planted it, and caused it to fill the land.

The vine belongs to God.

The vineyard belongs to God.

The Kingdom belongs to God.

And therefore the Church belongs to God too.

The Church does not own Christ.

The Church does not own salvation.

Neither does it own Scripture, the poor, the nation, not even itself.

It is entrusted with something. It is entrusted with stewardship, not ownership.

And entrusted things are judged by what we do with them.

That is where Christian history becomes an uncomfortable homiletical text.

The question is not whether Christianity succeeded institutionally. By many ordinary measurements, it succeeded spectacularly. It accumulated buildings, land, political influence, cultural authority, universities, seminaries, governments, cathedrals, publishing houses and wealth.

Here’s the difficult issue. Much of that institutional success was aided and abetted by collusion with the state, with the wealthy and powerful.

The question Isaiah asks is different, and it forces us to ask whether Christianity’s institutional success has sometimes depended upon advantages the Gospel itself should have judged.

What fruit did it bear?

That question does not permit easy self-congratulation.

When Providence Blesses the Powerful

The history of American slavery gives us one of the starkest examples of what happens when the Church mistakes an existing social order for God’s order.

Southern Christianity did not merely tolerate slavery as an unfortunate feature of society. Some of its leading theologians and preachers developed elaborate biblical and providential defenses of it.

Jerome Copulsky’s discussion of the proslavery theologians in American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order is particularly useful here because he shows how thoroughly slavery could be absorbed into a Christian account of nation, Providence and social order.

Benjamin Morgan Palmer, the celebrated Presbyterian minister of First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, argued shortly after Lincoln’s election that the South had received a providential trust “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing.” Palmer declared that Southerners should proclaim that they held this trust from God and were prepared to “stand or fall” with it.

This was not merely theological abstraction. Palmer urged his hearers to bind themselves in “sacred covenant,” pursue “separate and independent existence,” and build a new Confederacy in defense of that order.

In other words, at least some leading Southern clergy did not simply defend slavery after secession. They helped provide theological arguments for secession itself in order to preserve a slaveholding order they believed God had entrusted to them.

James Henley Thornwell, one of the most formidable Presbyterian theologians of the South, gave the same structure an even more elaborate theological justification. Copulsky quotes him defining slavery as “the obligation to labour for another, determined by the Providence of God,” and construing the master-slave relation as a morally legitimate social arrangement providentially established for mutual benefit.

Thornwell could even distinguish Christian freedom from earthly freedom so sharply that the enslaved person might, in his account, be spiritually free while remaining socially enslaved. The enslaved Christian could become one of the Lord’s freedmen while still “honor[ing] their masters on earth.”

And when the institution itself came under judgment, Thornwell’s theology made room for its preservation. Slavery, he argued, belonged to the fallen order, but Providence could extract blessing from it. The Church’s task was not “to change their social condition,” not to make enslaved persons citizens or freemen, but “to save them.”

That is the point at which Isaiah 5 becomes almost unbearably relevant.

Yahweh expects justice and hears a cry.

The theologian hears the cry and develops a theology explaining why the structure producing it should remain.

This is one of the great dangers of Christian theology: not merely that it can fail to hear suffering, but that it can hear suffering clearly and then explain why the suffering is providentially necessary.

The temptation is hardly confined to American Christianity. A saying widely attributed to John of Kronstadt declares: «Демократия — в аду, а на небе — Царство.» (“Democracy is in hell; in heaven there is a Kingdom”). The precise primary-source origin of the aphorism is difficult to establish, and it should therefore be quoted cautiously. But its popularity in monarchist Orthodox circles is itself revealing.

The theological move is familiar. Because the reign of God is called a kingdom, monarchy is treated as somehow more congruent with divine order than democracy. But basileia tou Theou is not a constitutional blueprint. The New Testament’s language of divine kingship tells us who ultimately reigns; it does not tell us whether human political societies should be governed by emperors, hereditary monarchs, constitutional republics, parliaments or town meetings.

The danger is the same one we have already seen: a contingent political arrangement becomes identified with God’s order, and resistance to that arrangement can then be portrayed as resistance to God. Whether the structure being defended is a slaveholding Confederacy or an autocratic empire, theology becomes most dangerous when it stops judging power and begins explaining why power is sacred.

Scripture Can Be Used Against the Gait of Jesus

Copulsky notes that proslavery theologians did not imagine themselves departing from Christianity. Quite the opposite. They believed they were defending biblical orthodoxy against abolitionists whom they accused of placing conscience, sentiment and modern notions of equality above Scripture. They drew on patriarchal narratives, legal texts, Pauline household codes, providence, anthropology and social theory to make slavery appear orthodox and morally intelligible.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Southern ministers could present slavery as a providentially ordained social institution and sanctify the political and economic order of the planter class.

Even more strikingly, Thornwell could portray the conflict over slavery as nothing less than a battle between Christianity and atheism. Those who sought to reform the inherited social order became enemies of Providence; those who defended hierarchy became defenders of God.

There is a recurring mechanism here.

First, identify your social order with God’s order.

Then identify criticism of that order with rebellion against God.

Finally, call the defense of your own privilege fidelity to Christianity.

Perhaps the most grotesque example in Copulsky’s chapter is Palmer’s use of Exodus imagery. Preaching on a Confederate fast day in 1861, Palmer likened the slaveholding Confederacy to Israel escaping bondage and described the United States as a modern Pharaoh refusing to let them go.

A preacher can know the Exodus story intimately and still manage to place the slaveholders among the liberated Israelites.

That should make every preacher humble about claims to possess the “plain meaning” of Scripture.

The question cannot merely be:

Can we find a text for it?

Palmer and Thornwell certainly could.

The question has to become:

Does this interpretation move with the gait of Jesus?

Paul Gives Up His Religious Capital

Philippians gives us another version of the temptation, this time within the self.

Paul lists the credentials that might give him religious confidence: circumcised on the eighth day, Israelite, Benjaminite, Hebrew, Pharisee, zealous, righteous according to the law.

Then comes the astonishing relinquishment:

“Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.”

This passage has sometimes been mishandled as though Paul were declaring Judaism worthless.

He is doing something far more searching.

He is abandoning the use of religious identity as capital.

His pedigree cannot become property.

His righteousness cannot become leverage.

His zeal cannot become superiority.

Even good things become spiritually dangerous when the self says, “Mine.”

Paul wants instead “to know Christ”—and not merely resurrection power. He wants participation in Christ’s suffering and conformity to Christ’s death.

There is no theosis without kenosis.

The Christian life is not accumulation upward.

It is participation in the downward movement of Christ.

Francis and the Gait of Jesus

And that brings us, on the Sunday nearest his feast, to Francis of Assisi.

Francis is useful here not because everything that later bore the Franciscan name perfectly preserved his vision. Charisms become movements; movements become institutions; institutions acquire property, regulations, survival instincts and arguments about who properly owns the founder’s memory.

But Francis himself gives us one unusually vivid historical example of another way to measure Christian success.

He relinquishes status.

He moves toward the poor.

He embraces the leper whom respectable society avoids.

He refuses accumulation.

He seeks peace rather than domination.

He addresses the creaturely world not merely as material available for human consumption but as a fraternity of beings sharing creaturehood before God.

The direction of the life is unmistakable.

He moves downward.

He walks the gait of Jesus.

If Matthew asks whether the tenants will return the fruit of the vineyard, Francis helps us imagine what that fruit might look like embodied in a human life.

Not triumph.

Not possession.

Not power.

Kenosis.

Judging the Church in History

The history of Christianity contains extraordinary beauty.

Hospitals and schools.

Abolitionists and martyrs.

Monasteries preserving learning.

Congregations feeding their neighbors.

Christians resisting tyranny.

Women and men tending plague victims.

Peacemakers.

Mystics.

Teachers.

Communities practicing reconciliation.

But the same history contains antisemitism, slavery, patriarchy, colonial domination, racism, economic exploitation, nationalism and enthusiastic alliances with political power.

How do we tell which is Christian success?

Not by asking which side had the larger institution.

Not by asking which survived longest.

Not by asking which had the most bishops, the finest liturgy, the purest confession, the richest donors, the largest membership, or the closest access to the ruler.

Isaiah offers the harder measure:

Justice. Righteousness. Listen for the cry.

Jesus offers another: Where is the fruit?

Paul offers another: What are you willing to relinquish in order to know Christ?

Francis offers another: Which direction are you walking?

Perhaps every Christian institution needs periodically to stand before those questions.

Does our theology protect the vulnerable, or explain why their vulnerability is necessary?

Does our preaching disturb unjust arrangements, or baptize them?

Does our wealth become generosity, or does generosity become the justification for retaining our wealth?

Does our political influence serve those without power, or merely increase our own?

Does our tradition help us follow Jesus, or become another possession by which we declare ourselves superior to others?

Does the Church still move in the Way of Yahweh, the gait of Jesus, and the kenotic dance of the Spirit?

Because apostasy does not always look like abandoning Christianity.

Sometimes it looks like Christianity retaining its creeds, vestments, Scriptures, bishops, pulpits, buildings and hymns while losing the gait of Jesus.

The tenants in Matthew are not condemned because the vineyard failed.

They are condemned because they forgot whose vineyard it was.

And perhaps the most dangerous moment in the life of any church comes when it mistakes possession of the vineyard for the fruit the Owner desires.

The Church has repeatedly called itself successful when it possessed the vineyard.

Jesus asks whether it bore the fruit.

No Hidden Reasons: God and the Suffering of Children

When a child suffers, Christians are tempted to say that God must have his reasons, perhaps reasons we cannot see, but reasons still. My essay “Returning the Ticket” argues the opposite, and two thoughtful readers Tuppy and Elliot from the Examined Faith podcast have recorded a sustained discussion of it that I can commend to you.

The video is below, and their own post on it is here.

It’s a generous and careful reading. They go through the argument patiently, read the comment section, and take up Job, lament, and Ivan Karamazov with great seriousness and empathy. I’m grateful to them. Their conversation also raises a few questions you may share.

No hidden reasons. I do not claim that God has reasons we can’t access. That position is skeptical theism, and it keeps the manager-God: the suffering child is still spent on something, presumably a greater good, and we simply aren’t shown the accounts. Apophasis is not a veil over God’s reasons. I hold that there is no ledger at all, no reckoning in which the child’s suffering is used for anything. It buys nothing and answers to nothing. That is why Ivan is right about the God he rejects.

Direction, not quantity. They ask whether speaking of God through Christ is cataphatic, positive speech, after all. Yes, and it has to be. Apophasis doesn’t ration how much we may say of God. It governs which way the inference runs. We reason forward from what God has shown in Christ. The theodicist reasons upward from what a good manager would permit. That requires a God behind Christ with a different calculus, and the homoousion rules that out. There is no Father who keeps books the Son doesn’t.

Transfiguration is not settlement. Paul says present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory to come. But glory is not the ledger balanced at the end. A glory that needed the horror would just be compensation with better accounting. See The Unnecessary Child where I take up Jordan Wood’s position.

Universalism belongs to the package, as they rightly saw. An evil that was unnecessary in its origin but is sustained forever hasn’t been overcome. It has been made permanent. The companion essay, Giving is the Whole of Our Story (third in the series) takes this up.

Tuppy and Elliot close by asking how Ivan becomes Job. I would say he won’t become Job by a better argument. Ivan needs a different God to look at: the one weeping at Bethany and crying out from the cross.

The Most Important Word in the World: East of Eden, Cathy Trask, and the Mystery of Evil

By John Stamps

At least once a month, Shelly and I make a pilgrimage to Steinbeck country. We have the perfect excuse: Shelly’s brother Jeff lives in Carmel. So when we cross the Salinas River near Watsonville, we say hi to Lennie and George hiding in the brush. We all wish we were “living off the fatta the lan’”—with flourishing crops, a beautiful house, thriving farm animals, and of course, rabbits. Down on Cannery Row, Mack and the boys greet us. So do Flo and the girls. Doc tells us hello. When we drive through the fertile fields of King City and past the dry, hardscrabble hills near San Lucas on our way to Pismo Beach, the Steinbecks, Trasks, and Hamiltons remind us to cherish and protect God’s creation. We promise that we will.¹

But when we drive through Salinas, I am extra, extra careful. Cathy Trask (aka Cathy Ames when we first meet her) scares the bejeebers out of me. 

What? Don’t you know who Cathy Trask is? She is arguably the most central character in East of Eden. I don’t say that lightly. Cathy sets the tragedy of the novel into motion, and long after she has checked out, what she has done refuses to stay in the past. Here is how the omniscient narrator describes her:

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. . . . As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience… It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life… She was not like other people, never was from birth.

That is a disturbing description. Steinbeck does not merely tell us that Cathy does evil things. He asks us to imagine that something is missing in her from birth: kindness, conscience, even something he is willing to call a soul. Cathy is his monster.

More specifically, Cathy Trask is a she-devil. God forgive me. That is a horrible thing to call any woman, and it carries a long and ugly history. Women have too often been made into monsters, witches, temptresses, and convenient explanations for the presence of evil in the world.²

The title of Steinbeck’s novel tells us where his tragedy unfolds. East of Eden reaches back to the Bible’s first great tragedy. Cain murders his brother. Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. God judges Cain but does not surrender him to vengeance; he marks Cain so that no one will kill him. And then comes one of the saddest sentences in Genesis:

And Cain left the presence of Adonai and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. (Gen 4:16)³

Cain goes into self-exile. But his exile is more than geographical: he goes out from the presence of Adonai. He goes east of Eden. That is where Steinbeck locates the Trasks and Hamiltons—and us. He takes the ancient tragedy of Cain and Abel and relocates it to nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. The biblical tragedy is our own. We too go out from the presence of God. Yea, verily, unto this very day.

Which brings me back to Cathy. I am intrigued by the new Netflix East of Eden series hitting our screens on October 1. Zoe Kazan created it and serves as co-showrunner, writer, and executive producer. Her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the classic-but-flawed 1955 James Dean film. Kazan has placed Cathy Trask front and center in her retelling. At seven episodes, the new series should give us a fuller treatment of Steinbeck’s sprawling novel than we got from that film—or from the more comprehensive but currently unavailable 1981 miniseries starring Jane Seymour and Timothy Bottoms.

Still, I harbor a few misgivings about what Zoe Kazan is trying to do with Cathy. Kazan wants to recover her as a human being rather than leave her as the monster Steinbeck announces at the novel’s beginning. Fair enough. But I hope she does not make Cathy’s evil too intelligible. I do not want to discover the childhood wound, trauma, or social circumstance that finally explains why Cathy became Cathy. Part of what makes Steinbeck’s Cathy so terrifying is precisely that she resists explanation.⁴

And yet Kazan may be onto something. Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem expecting to encounter one of the architects of the Holocaust and found in Adolf Eichmann something far less impressive and, for that reason, even more disturbing. She famously called it “the banality of evil.” Eichmann did not possess the satanic grandeur we might expect of monstrous evil. He was frighteningly ordinary.

This marks the difference between imaginary evil and the evil we actually encounter in the world. Simone Weil put the matter counter-intuitively and memorably:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

Maybe Steinbeck himself fell into precisely that trap. He wanted Cathy to be a monster, and he made her magnificently, fascinatingly monstrous. But real evil may be considerably less interesting. And perhaps that is what Zoe Kazan sees in Cathy that I do not, yet.

Cathy is not another fallen Eve. Cathy is not another Lilith. She is closer to John Milton’s Lucifer in a female body:

Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good.
(Paradise Lost IV.109–110) 

Her womanhood does not explain her evil. Nothing in Cathy’s history finally explains her evil. That is precisely what makes her so terrifying, and so bewildering. We keep looking for some wound, injury, or circumstance that will make Cathy finally make sense. But that is our mistake.

Steinbeck even gives us a clue to Cathy’s devilish character. Her feet are “small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs.” Otherwise, however, Cathy is beautiful. And that too belongs to Steinbeck’s portrayal of evil. Evil rarely unmasks itself as sheer evil. It deceives by appearing desirable, attractive, even good. Cathy’s beauty does not make beauty suspect; it makes Cathy more dangerous because she can exploit our natural attraction to what appears good. The little hoofs may give the game away, but everything else invites us to trust what we see.

The devil, St Paul reminds us, does not necessarily look like the devil. “For Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14).

But Cathy’s evil still confronts us with the question we cannot stop asking: Why is she evil? St Augustine knew something about that temptation. Looking back upon his own attempt to discover the origin of evil, he confessed:

I searched for the origin of evil, but I searched in a flawed way and did not see the flaw in my very search. (Confessions VII.5.7)

The mistake lies in treating evil as a problem we might eventually solve with sufficient information and intelligence. Gabriel Marcel famously distinguished a problem from a mystery. A problem stands before me as something I can examine objectively and solve. A mystery is different: I am implicated in it. I cannot stand outside it as a disinterested observer.⁵

Our mistake is thinking that Cathy must finally make sense. Evil may have causes, occasions, and histories without possessing an intelligibility of its own. We can ask endlessly why Cathy is Cathy without ever arriving at an explanation adequate to the evil we encounter in her. Evil is irrational and absurd.

That distinction matters enormously when we encounter Cathy Trask. So long as Cathy is a problem to solve, evil conveniently belongs to someone else. We stare at this terrifying woman and ask, How could anyone become like that? But Genesis will not permit us to keep evil at such a comfortable distance. Sin does not crouch only at Cathy’s door. It crouches at Cain’s door. It crouches at Cal’s door. It crouches at mine. East of Eden is not merely where Cathy lives. It is where I live whenever I go out from the presence of God.

Cain and Abel provide the biblical story that East of Eden endlessly retells—in the two generations of Trask brothers, Charles and Adam, and Caleb and Aron:

And it happened at the end of some days that Cain brought from the fruit of the ground an offering to Adonai. And Abel—he too, for his part—brought from the firstborn of his flock and from their fat portions. And Adonai paid heed to Abel and his offering. But to Cain and his offering he did not pay heed. And Cain became exceedingly angry, and his face fell. (Genesis 4:3–5)

And already the story refuses to explain as much as we would like it to explain. Cain brings an offering. Abel brings an offering. Adonai pays heed to Abel and his offering but not to Cain and his. Why? Genesis does not tell us. Later interpreters have supplied answers, but the narrator leaves us with the disturbing asymmetry. What Genesis does tell us is what happens next. Cain becomes exceedingly angry. His face falls. And God speaks to him:

And Adonai said to Cain:
“Why are you angry?
And why has your face fallen?
If you do good, there is acceptance, isn’t there?
But if you do not do good,
sin is crouching at the door.” (Genesis 4:6–7a)

What a bizarre image. Sin has suddenly become a wild and dangerous animal. It crouches outside the door, waiting. Genesis does not explain where this beast came from or why it is there. It simply tells Cain: the beast is there.

But that only deepens the mystery. How did this beast find its way into God’s good creation in the first place? St Augustine gives voice in the Confessions (VII.5.7) to the question lurking behind this entire essay:

Unde malum?—Whence is evil?

It is a question we desperately want Genesis to answer. But Genesis never finally tells us.⁶

The light and the darkness, the sun, moon, and stars, the seas and the dry land, the vegetation, the great sea monsters and the swarming creatures, the winged birds and the beasts of the earth—these all belong to the creation Genesis pronounces “good.” And when God has finished creating humankind in the divine image, Genesis pronounces its highest verdict: וְהִנֵּה־טוֹב מְאֹד (wĕhinnēh-ṭôb mĕʾōd). “And behold! Very good!”

But “very good” does not mean incapable of going very wrong indeed. Evil was not God’s intention for creation, yet the possibility of rebellion, misery, and death is there. Genesis does not explain that possibility. It tells us how human beings succumb to evil; it does not tell us where evil itself ultimately comes from. The narrative itself dramatizes the point. When the serpent suddenly appears in the garden, the narrator offers no account of the origin of its malice. The serpent is simply there. And in the very next chapter, sin is already crouching outside Cain’s door.

The Bible certainly wrestles with God’s justice in the face of evil and suffering. Job does. The Psalms do. The prophets do. But it never gives a comprehensive explanation of evil that “justifies the ways of God to men,” as Milton famously announces in Paradise Lost. Genesis declares creation “very good”; it does not declare it “the best of all possible worlds.” There is no biblical equivalent of Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophical theodicy. Scripture does not explain evil away; it does not explain its origins or demonstrate why its existence was necessary. It names evil as evil and laments the suffering it causes.

Instead, Scripture repeatedly insists that evil is not ultimate. We can resist evil—and we must resist evil—even unto death. God’s good creation is real, but disorder, violence, suffering, and death remain frighteningly real within it. Their persistence does not make them sovereign. Things do not have to be this way. There is no necessity to evil.

And that brings us back to the beast crouching outside Cain’s door.

Its desire is for you.
But you—תִּמְשָׁל־בּוֹ (tîmšol-bô)—you can master it! (Genesis 4:7b)

Genesis does not explain the beast. It tells Cain that the beast need not conquer him.

Steinbeck hangs the meaning of East of Eden on a single Hebrew word from the story of Cain and Abel: timshol. After warning Cain that sin is crouching at the door and that its desire is for him, God tells him: “but you timshol over it” (Gen 4:7).

Steinbeck may have asked a single Hebrew verb to do some very heavy lifting, but he understood perfectly well what he wanted timshel to mean. Lee—the Trask family’s Chinese servant and confidant, a native Californian with several years at UC Berkeley under his belt, and probably everybody’s favorite character in the novel—can barely contain himself when he explains his discovery to Samuel and Adam:

Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—’Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?

In the novel, Lee discovers three ways the crucial verb has been translated. “Thou shalt rule over him” sounds like a promise: you will master sin. “Do thou rule over him” sounds like a command: you must master sin. But Lee becomes enthralled by a third possibility: “Thou mayest rule over him.” Timshel. “Thou mayest.” The future remains open.

Lee disclaims:

This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul.

Methinks Lee doth protest too much. Of course this is theology. He has just made a claim about what it means to be human in a world created by God, confronted by sin, and yet not determined by it. Timshel is not merely a declaration of human freedom. It is a declaration about the limits of evil.

Please indulge me with a brief grammatical excursus. Steinbeck gets the Hebrew spelling and pronunciation wrong. Timshel misreads the vowel pointing. The qamatz under the שׁ in תִּמְשָׁל is a qamatz qatan. It should be transliterated timshol, not timshal, and certainly not timshel. Timshol/תִּמְשָׁל is simply the Qal imperfect of משׁל, “to rule” or “to master.” It does not literally mean “thou mayest.”⁷

But Steinbeck stumbled onto something real. The imperfect can have modal force: depending upon context, it can express what may, can, should, will, or must happen. Hence timshol can be heard not simply as a prediction—“you will master it”—but as possibility and exhortation: “you can master it.” But I won’t begrudge Steinbeck his grammatical error. What he does with timshel is sheer literary genius. So let’s stipulate that timshel means “thou mayest” for the remainder of the essay.⁸

And now the question has changed. Steinbeck eventually turns it upon Cal, Cathy’s son—and upon us. The question is no longer simply, Why is Cathy evil? That question allows me to remain outside the mystery, examining Cathy as though she were some strange specimen under glass. Genesis asks the far more uncomfortable question: What will I do about the evil crouching at my own door?

Cal fears that Cathy has determined what he is. His great terror is essentially this: I am my mother’s son; therefore her evil is in me. And timshel says no. Inheritance is not destiny.

But that leaves one disturbing question. Perhaps the biblical character Cathy most resembles is neither Eve nor even the devil, but Judas Iscariot, “the son of perdition” (John 17:12), who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver and whose betrayal, the Gospels tell us, fulfilled Scripture. Steinbeck has assigned her a role from which she seemingly cannot escape. Everybody else gets timshel. Does Cathy? Does Judas?

St Thomas Aquinas (ST I, q. 2, a. 3, ad 1) confronts the intellectual problem of evil as well as anyone. Responding to the objection that an infinitely good God should permit no evil whatsoever, he appeals to St Augustine:

Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.

St Thomas then adds: 

This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.

I want to add just one word to his conclusion. Out of evil, God produces infinite good.

Perhaps that is where we should leave Cathy Trask—and Judas Iscariot too. We need not solve the problem of evil. Scripture itself speaks of “the mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess 2:7). Evil is indeed a great mystery, but God’s steadfast love and mercy are greater still. We certainly need not pretend that we can see how every evil will finally be overcome. Timshel does not explain evil. It does something more modest but perhaps more important: it tells us that the beast need not master us.

And industrial-strength Christian hope dares to say something more. Evil will not master God. We trust the goodness, mercy, and love of God. St Paul gives this unashamed boldness its fullest expression at the conclusion of Romans 8:

But in all these things we are super-conquerors through him who loved us. For I am certain that neither Death, nor Life, nor Angels, nor Principalities, nor Existing Things, nor Coming Things, nor Powers, nor Height, nor Depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Messiah Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39)

Footnotes

1. David A. Laws, “‘Literary Landmarks’ of East of Eden,” in East of Eden: New and Recent Essays, Dialogue (2013), 25–58. Laws offers a delightful photographic tour of the actual Salinas Valley landscapes that inform Steinbeck’s novel, including the dry country around the Hamilton ranch east of King City and near San Lucas. Laws describes East of Eden as Steinbeck’s “most fully developed and ambitious” use of landscape, in which the physical contrasts of the valley become integral to the novel’s exploration of good and evil, birth and death, east and west, love and hate. ↩︎
2. Eleanor Johnson, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026). Johnson traces the long cultural history of the demonization of women, beginning with the Mesopotamian demoness Lamashtu and continuing through Medea, witches, vampiresses, and modern representations of female monstrosity. ↩︎
3. All translations from the Greek New Testament, the Greek Old Testament (LXX), and the Hebrew Bible are my own, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re curious about my translation choices, I always defer to Bauer-Danker-Ardnt-Gingrich (BDAG), Lust’s Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, and HALOT. When I don’t, it turns out to be a mistake. ↩︎
4. Hillary Busis, “East of Eden: Zoe Kazan on How She Made Steinbeck’s Masterpiece Her Own,” Vanity Fair, August 18, 2026. ↩︎
5. Diogenes Allen, Theology for a Troubled Believer: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010). Allen wrote the book in response to the questions of a thoughtful Christian struggling with suffering and the problem of evil. Rather than constructing a comprehensive theodicy, Allen situates these questions within the larger grammar of Christian faith: the nature and goodness of God, creation, human suffering, the life and sacrifice of Christ, resurrection, sin, evil, and Christian hope. His aim is not so much to “solve” the problem of evil as to show how Christians may think faithfully and intelligently about suffering without isolating it from everything else they confess about God and God’s purposes for creation. See especially part two, “Suffering,” and chapter 17, “Sin, Evil, and Hope for the Future.” ↩︎
6. Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 75, citing m. Ḥagigah 2.1. The Mishnah warns against speculation concerning “what is above, what is beneath, what was beforetime, and what will be hereafter.” It is extraordinarily difficult to observe such restraint. We want to know what lies above us and what lies below us, what happened before, and what will happen afterward. But Genesis 4 relentlessly returns Cain—and us—to the present: sin is crouching at the door. What will you do? ↩︎
7. Mark D. Futato, “Gen 4:7b,” Daily Dose of Hebrew, June 1, 2016, video. Futato offers a concise grammatical and syntactical analysis of Gen 4:7b and correctly pronounces תִּמְשָׁל (timshol), in contrast to Steinbeck’s timshel. But is timshol a modal of necessity? Not necessarily. The syntax permits more than Futato’s brief treatment allows. But what else can you do with a three-minute video? ↩︎
8. For the delightful and complicated story behind Steinbeck’s timshel, see Sheila Tuller Keiter, “The Most Important Word in the World,” Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2022). The Hebrew of Gen 4:7 is תִּמְשָׁל (timshol), the Qal imperfect, second-person masculine singular, of משׁל, “to rule, govern, master.” Hence Steinbeck’s timshel does not itself mean “thou mayest”; the verb means “you will/may/can rule.” Nevertheless, Steinbeck was onto a genuine feature of Biblical Hebrew. The imperfect can carry modal force, expressing what may or can happen rather than simply predicting what will happen. Keiter also reconstructs the curious history of Steinbeck’s timshel. Steinbeck asked his editor, Pascal Covici, to consult the eminent Jewish scholar Louis Ginzberg about Gen 4:7. Keiter plausibly suggests that Ginzberg’s Lithuanian (Litvish) pronunciation may have caused timshol to sound something like timsheyl to Steinbeck, thus giving us the famous nonword timshel. Steinbeck’s Hebrew may therefore be shaky, but his theological intuition is considerably better: Cain is not told that sin must conquer him. The future remains open. ↩︎

The Triune Good: From St Dionysius to St Bonaventure

When I concluded my original series on Dionysius the Areopagite back in 2018, I was left with a question: If God is the self-diffusive Good, what does this tell us about the eternal life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? As far as I could tell, Dionysius had not incorporated the doctrine of the Trinity into his compelling metaphysical vision. I don’t mean that it is absent in his theology. He identifies the hyperousios One as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and distinguishes the divine processions within the Godhead from the processions by which creatures come forth from God: 

We have been instructed by the sacred writings that the Father is the God-source and that Jesus and Spirit are god-growing and (as it were) full-blown off-shoots and, as it were, flowers of the theogonic divinity and lights beyond being. Yet, it is not possible either to speak or to think how these are. (DN II.7)

Dionysius “stops short,” as John Jones observes, “of developing a system of the transcendent Trinitarian relations.” The relations are real, even though “one cannot conceptually grasp” them.¹

And so I began to wonder whether the Areopagite’s radical apophaticism had introduced an unbridgeable gap between God’s immanent life and his self-revelation in the history of salvation. Karl Rahner, Thomas F. Torrance, and Robert W. Jenson had taught me decades ago the whole point of the doctrine of the Trinity is to assert the identity of the immanent and economic Trinities. In my reading of Dionysius, though, I felt as if the Triune God had disappeared into the cloud of unknowing. Yes, the One manifests himself in the theophany of creation, but where is the God who reveals himself in the biblical story? On the drama of Pascha, The Divine Names is silent.² As a priest I found myself confronted with a quandary. How do I preach the One’s ad extra processions as gospel? 

At the heart of Dionysius’s vision is the Good, ecstatically pouring itself forth into finitude, bestowing being, life, wisdom, and beauty upon creatures. Yet shouldn’t this diffusion of divine goodness also illuminate God’s own Trinitarian life? Shouldn’t his erotic manifestations bring us into the Love that is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

After my deep dive into the corpus Dionysiacum, I learned that St Bonaventure of Bagnoregio was, in the words of the French scholar Jacques Bougerol, “without doubt the most Dionysian mind of the Middle Ages.”³ So I purchased several of his books and downloaded a number of scholarly articles, fully intending to immerse myself in them. Alas, life intervened and my project was pushed to the back burner. Seven years later, I am finally reading the Seraphic Doctor!

Bonaventure receives from the Areopagite a strong apophatic construal of divine transcendence. God surpasses every concept by which the creaturely intellect seeks to comprehend him. Thus Bonaventure can appropriate the language of the Mystical Theology and speak of the ascent to the One who is above essence and knowledge. “And this Dionysius teaches,” he writes: “to dismiss the sensible, the intellectual, beings and non-beings … and so, to enter into a ray of darkness” (Hex. II.32). Yet in this appropriation, the “God beyond being” is altered. In his Itinerarium (“journey”), Bonaventure places side by side two ways of contemplating God: as Being, the primary name that directs us to the unity of the divine essence, and as Good, the primary name that opens upon the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What then becomes of divine superessentiality when he joins them as the terms that best reveal the mystery of divinity? “The second name is more true,” Adriaan Peperzak observes, “but being is included, not negated in goodness.”⁴ Rather than attempting to answer the question, I will simply allow Bonaventure to speak for himself. 

In the Itinerarium Bonaventure traces our journey into God, beginning with the world outside us, through the soul within us, and finally to God above us. We first contemplate material creatures as vestiges of God, discovering the divine power, wisdom, and goodness reflected throughout the sensible world. Turning inward, we contemplate the soul as the image of God in our natural powers of memory, intellect, and will, and ponder its restoration and elevation by grace. Creation and the soul thus become mirrors reflecting God and rungs of a ladder by which we ascend toward him. We are now prepared to rise above ourselves to behold divinity. Here we reach the summit of our speculative ascent. We enter the Holy of Holies and see before us the Ark of the Covenant and above it the two cherubim of glory facing each other, each gazing upon the Mercy Seat. The cherubim represent the two ways in which we may contemplate God directly—as Being and Good.

Being: He Who Is

We begin with the proper name God reveals to Moses in the Book of Exodus: He Who Is. God is Being (ipsum esse). Under this name, we attend to the divine essence in its absolute unity. Yet such contemplation is possible only because the mind itself is illuminated by “the light of Eternal Truth, for our mind itself is formed directly by Truth itself” (Itin. V.1). Bonaventure lays out his reflection on Being in three steps.

First, Bonaventure establishes Being as the first object of the intellect. Whatever we understand, we understand it first as something that is. Yet Bonaventure means more than that being is simply the most universal concept under which everything falls. The finite can be recognized as finite only in relation to the infinite, the imperfect in relation to the perfect, being-in-potency in relation to being-in-act:

Therefore, let anyone wishing to contemplate the invisible things of God with respect to the unity of [His] essence, focus in the first place on being-itself. Let that person see that being-itself is so very certain that it cannot be thought not to be, for most pure being-itself occurs only in full flight from non-being just as nothingness occurs in full flight from being. On this account, just as absolute nothing has nothing of being or its attributes, so, by contrast, being-itself has nothing of non-being, either in act or in potency, either in objective truth or in our assessment of it. Because non-being is the lack of being, it does not enter our understanding except through being; Being, moreover, does not enter our understanding through something else, because everything that is understood is understood either as non-being, or as having being-in-potency, or as having being-in-act. If, therefore, non-being cannot be understood except through being. and if being-in-potency [cannot be understood] except through being-in-act; and [if] being denotes what is the pure act of being; then being is what first enters understanding. This being is “pure act.” (Itin. V.3)

Bonaventure brings to explicit contemplation what is implicitly present in every act of understanding: esse purissimum, Being utterly free from non-being and privation. Our understanding of created being therefore already points beyond itself toward the transcendent God who is the infinite fullness of being. As Christopher Cullen puts it, our apprehension of finite being presupposes an implicit apprehension of “infinite, perfect, most pure and absolute being.”⁵ Intellect knows being not only through abstraction from sensible things, “but also through an intuitive grasp of the Divine Being.”⁶ In the words of the psalmist, “In his light we see light” (Ps. 36:9). 

Yet as Bonaventure notes, we do not ordinarily attend to the divine Being. Like an eye intent upon colors while overlooking the light by which it sees them, the intellect attends to particular beings while neglecting the divine Being through which they become intelligible:

It appears most truly, then, that, “as the eye of a bat is to the blaze of the day, so is the eye of our mind to what is by nature most evident to all” [Aristotle]. Because the eye of our mind is accustomed to the murkiness of beings and to the imaginings of perceptions, when it does gaze upon that light of the highest being, it seems to see nothing. It does not understand that darkness itself is our mind’s brightest light, just as when the eye looks at pure light, it seems to see nothing. (Itin. V.4) 

Second, when we consider God as pure being, we discern his essential attributes (Itin. V.5):

• Being is absolutely first, because it does not receive being from another;
• Being is timeless, because it neither begins nor ceases;
• Being is simple, because does it possess anything other than being-itself and therefore lacks all composition; 
• Being is thoroughly realized and actual, because it contains no potency;
• Being is perfect, because it contains within itself all perfections and no defects;
• Being is supremely one, because it contains no diversity.

Each of these attributes mutually imply the others, for we cannot think of one without thinking of the others:

You have something here to lift you up in wonder! For being-itself is the first and the very last; is timeless and utterly in this moment; is utterly simple and the greatest; is utterly realized and utterly unwavering; is utterly perfect and boundless; is utterly one, yet all-inclusive. (Itin. V.7)

Third, Bonaventure then converts the attributes into paradoxical pairs. Paraphrase cannot capture the power and beauty of Bonaventure’s contemplation:

If you wonder at this with a pure mind, you will be completely imbued with a greater light, as you see further that because it is the very last, it is, therefore, the first. For, because it is first, it does all things for its own sake and must, of necessity, be the ultimate end: the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

Therefore it exists in this very moment, because it timeless. For, because it is timeless, it does not flow from another, it does not lose anything of itself, and it does not change its state from one state into another. Therefore, it has neither past nor future, but only being that is in this very moment.

Therefore it is the greatest, because it is utterly simple. For, because it is utterly simple in essence, it is, therefore, the greatest in strength, because the more strength is unified, the more it is infinite. Therefore it is totally unwavering, because it is fully realized.

For, because it is thoroughly realized, it is, therefore, pure act; and as such cannot acquire anything new; it loses nothing it already has and, for that reason, it cannot be changed.

Therefore it is boundless, because it is utterly perfect. For, because it is utterly perfect, nothing can be thought of beyond it better, nobler, worthier, and, for this reason, nothing greater; every such being is boundless!

Therefore it is all-inclusive, because it is supremely one. For what is supremely one is the universal principle of all multiplicity; and for this reason, it is the universal cause of all things, efficient, exemplary, and defining of all things, as it is “the cause of existence, the ground of understanding, and the pattern for living one’s life.” 

It is, therefore, all-inclusive, not as the essence of all things, but as the utterly most excellent, the utterly universal, and the utmost ample cause of all essences, whose strength, because it is supremely unified in its essence, is, therefore, utterly most infinite and most multiple in its efficacy. (Itin. V.7)

The Seraphic Doctor concludes his meditation on Being with these words: “To behold Him perfectly is to be blessed, as was said to Moses: I will spread all good out before you.” The final word is telling.

The Good: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

Having contemplated God under the name of Being, Bonaventure is ready to turn to the second cherub and the second proper name of God: the Good. That God is infinite goodness is revealed to us in the New Testament:

The second inspects the New, which establishes the plurality of Persons by baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Christ our Teacher, wanting to lift to Gospel perfection the youth who observed the Law, applied primarily and precisely the name of Goodness to God. No one, he says, is good but God alone. Damascene, following Moses, says that the first name of God is “He Who is;”Dionysius, following Christ, says that the first name of God is “Good.” (Itin. V.2)

Bonaventure thus announces himself as a disciple of the Areopagite: the Holy Trinity is the Good. He now invites us to reflect upon divinity through this name. And here he takes up and develops a creative adaptation of Dionysian thought already pioneered by the early Franciscan school. The Summa Halensis had located God’s self-diffusive Goodness within God himself, above all in the Father as the fontal source of the Son and Holy Spirit. Bonaventure receives this Franciscan inheritance and makes it his own:

See, then, and pay attention: “the best” is simply that than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought. It is such that it cannot rightly be thought not to be, since to be is in every way better than not to be. It is such that “[the best]” cannot rightly be thought of unless it is thought of as three and one. For “good is said to be self-diffusive.” The highest good is, therefore, the most highly self-diffusive.

But the highest diffusion cannot exist unless it is realized and inherent, substantial and hypostatic, innate and voluntary, unfettered and indispensable, inexhaustible and flawless. Unless there were timelessly within the highest good a bringing-about that is realized and con-substantial, and a hypostasis of equal nobility such as a bringing-about by way of begetting and of breathing-forth, so that there is a co-beginning belonging timelessly to a timeless beginning so that there is a beloved and a co-beloved, one begotten and one breathed-forth, that is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; if this were not so, there would never be the highest good because it would not be absolutely self-diffusive. (Itin. VI.2)

The word “consubstantial” is crucial. Why is God the highest expression of self-diffusiveness? Because the Father eternally generates two hypostases who equally possess his selfsame essence. In his love the Father gives himself totally. Whereas Dionysius spoke of God’s self-diffusion in terms of his creation of finite beings, Bonaventure identifies the Father as self-diffusive goodness through his begetting of the consubstantial Son and his spiration of the consubstantial Spirit. Each possesses the essence that properly belongs to the inascible Father. Each is equally divine; together they are the one God.

If God were only self-diffusive in his processions toward the cosmos, he would not be absolute Goodness, “for a diffusion in time and in creation is nothing but a speck or an instant compared to the boundless nature of the timeless goodness” (Itin. VI.2). We could then conceive, either in thought or reality, of a greater Good—namely, one that communicates to another his entire substance and nature. “You can see, then,” Bonaventure concludes “that through the utmost communicability of the good, it is necessary that there be a Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Itin. VI.2).

Bonaventure then unfolds the divine goodness as an effusion of love:

If you can, therefore, gaze intensely with the mind’s eye on pure goodness, which is the pure realization of a beginning, loving in a loving way with love, freely given and due, and a mixture of them both; which is its fullest diffusion innate and voluntary, which is a diffusion by way of the Word in which all things are spoken, and by way of the Gift in which all other gifts are given. (Itin. VI.2) 

Bonaventure’s language here is strikingly amatory. He describes pure goodness as actus purus principii caritative diligentis amore, which Regis Armstrong renders as “the pure realization of a beginning, loving [diligens] in a loving way [caritative] with love [amore].” Three different Latin expressions for love are crowded into a single phrase, and each carries its own nuance. Caritative, derived from caritas, gives the love its specifically theological character: as Armstrong observes, caritas is typically associated with God and the good, resonating especially with the Johannine declaration Deus caritas est. Diligens, from diligere, presents the principle itself as actively loving: goodness is here an act of a lover. Amor, finally, supplies the love with what Armstrong, following Michael Casey, describes as a greater “intensity and warmth” than the more deliberative dilectio. Amor connotes a passionate love involving the whole person. Bonaventure thus contemplates the supreme Good as the pure actuality of a principle whose very act is love—loving charitably and with the fullness of amor.⁷ And this densely amatory description immediately flowers into Trinitarian fecundity: this love is “freely given and due,” its diffusion is “fullest,” and it proceeds by way of the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian self-diffusion of the Good is, at its deepest, the self-communication of love.

(cont)

1. John N. Jones, “The Status of the Trinity in Dionysian Thought,” The Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 655. ↩︎
2. In his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius does interpret the sacrament of baptism as initiation into the death of Jesus, yet the resurrection of Jesus remains conspicuously absent. ↩︎
3. Jacques Guy Bougerol, Saint Bonaventure: Études sur les sources de sa pensée (Northampton: Variorum Reprints, 1989), Avant-propos. ↩︎
4. Adriaan T. Peperzak, “Bonaventure’s Contribution to the Twentieth Century Debate on Apophatic Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 25 (1998):189. ↩︎
5. Christopher Cullen, Bonaventure, 61. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 62. ↩︎
7. Regis J. Armstrong, “Commentary,” Into God, 317-318. ↩︎

Introducing St Britta

We thought it was time to make an icon of our beautiful Blue Merle Collie. Her name is Britta. She really is an infinitely sweet dog. And Jesus loves her! 😎

Heaven or Hell?

There Is Plenty Enough to Go Around for All: John Steinbeck and the Betrayal of God’s Promised Land

By John Stamps

“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it ’cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an’ maybe he’s disappointed that nothin’ he can do ‘ll make him feel rich.” (Jim Casy)

John Steinbeck is a stunning biblical theologian. Yes, yes, yes, he was a lapsed Episcopalian, agnostic at best. But nobody understands the American psyche better than he does. And he is one of the best readers of the Bible I know.

I recently reread The Grapes of Wrath. It is the perfect bookend to Steinbeck’s other great biblical opus, East of Eden. Once again California becomes the setting for a biblical drama. But this time California is not simply Eden. It is the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

The Joads leave Oklahoma and begin their grueling pilgrimage westward across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. They finally reach the Colorado River at Needles. A man swimming in the river warns them, but the bewildered Joads ignore him:

“Sure, nice to look at, but you can’t have none of it. They’s a grove of yella oranges–an’ a guy with a gun that got the right to kill you if you touch one.”

The Mojave Desert still has to be crossed. Unlike the children of Israel, the terrifying desert turns out to be no problem. The real danger is not the wilderness but the Promised Land.

Then they climb the Tehachapis. And behold! Eden!

They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind them, and then—suddenly they saw the great valley below them. Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, “Jesus Christ! Look!” he said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great. flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses.
Pa sighed, “I never knowed they was anything like her.” The peach trees and the walnut groves, and the dark green patches of oranges. And red roofs among the trees, and barns—rich barns. Ruthie whispered, “It’s California.”

It is a miracle. An epiphany. The Joads have reached the Promised Land. And they have no idea that their tragedy is about to reach epic proportions.

The Promised Land Betrayed

Because Steinbeck’s California—indeed, my own California—really does flow with milk and honey. That is the horror of it. There is plenty. The Promised Land produces an obscene superabundance. And people starve in the midst of it.

The Joads have been betrayed, but not by the land. California is everything they had been promised. The orchards really are heavy with fruit. The fields really do produce abundantly. The valleys really do flow with milk and honey. The Joads arrive in the Promised Land only to discover that the promise has been enclosed, fenced, owned, guarded, and monetized.

That is what makes their betrayal so terrible. They do not starve in a desert. They starve within sight of abundance.

And here Steinbeck becomes profoundly biblical. In the Torah, possessing the Promised Land never means simply owning fertile real estate. The gift carries obligations. Israel must not harvest to the very edges of the field; something must remain for the poor and the stranger. The landowner must not forget the landless. The stranger must be loved. The hungry must eat. The land itself must be allowed to rest. Israel receives the land as a gift and therefore cannot treat either the land or its abundance as though they existed solely for possession and profit. (Lev 19:9-10, 23:22; 25; Deut 24:19-22.)

Steinbeck gives us a California in which Torah logic has been reversed. The land produces more than enough, yet the hungry are forbidden to eat. Fruit is destroyed because feeding starving people would lower its price. Human beings become expendable for the sake of an economic system that everyone serves but that seemingly no one controls.

Steinbeck eventually drops the Promised Land storyline altogether and speaks with something approaching the voice of an Old Testament prophet:

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

The Joads have reached the Promised Land. But the Promised Land has been betrayed. Not because it has ceased to flow with milk and honey, but because those who control its abundance have forgotten what abundance is for.

Before Wendell Berry, There Was John Steinbeck

Before Wendell Berry, there was John Steinbeck. Both understood that how we treat the land and how we treat the people who live upon it are ultimately the same question. Early in The Grapes of Wrath, before the Joads ever set out for California, Steinbeck shows us what has happened to Oklahoma:

“You know the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.”

The tenant farmers know what the land needs:

“If they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land.”

The metaphor is telling. The land is alive. It can be wounded. It can be exhausted. Its blood can be sucked out of it. And the economic system that does this to the soil eventually does the same thing to the people who depend upon it.

Then comes Steinbeck’s monster: the banks, the tractors, the economic machinery that nobody seems to control and everybody claims merely to serve. St Paul and I would call them “the principalities and the powers” (Ephesians 6:12, Colossians 1:16). The land becomes a commodity, the farmer becomes expendable, and the tractor driver can destroy his neighbors’ homes while insisting that he, too, has no choice. Soil and people are consumed by the same logic.

Wendell Berry spent a lifetime making essentially the same argument. There is no separate agricultural question and human question: they are one question. How we treat the land cannot finally be separated from how we treat the people who live upon it. Or, as Berry memorably put it:

“No use talking about getting enlightened or saving your soul if you can’t keep the topsoil from washing away.”

Steinbeck understood that long before Berry began saying it. You cannot save the people while destroying the land, and you cannot destroy the land without eventually destroying the people.

Jim Casy Loses His Religion—But Maybe Finds God

And then there is Jim Casy, Steinbeck’s lapsed preacher and unmistakably Christ-haunted figure. Even his initials—J.C.—invite the comparison. Yet Casy’s path toward something resembling Christ begins with losing the Christianity he once knew.

Jim Casy used to be a preacher. By the time we meet him, however, he has lost his faith, or at least the Holiness religion he preached. Yet he has not lost his religious questions. If anything, the questions have become larger.

Sin. Holiness. Human solidarity. Poverty. Power. Why decent people get crushed. Why the people doing the crushing are not necessarily individually evil. What could salvation possibly mean when the problem is not simply what is wrong with me, but what is wrong with us.

Casy’s old-time religion has no vocabulary adequate to what he sees around him. The “Jesus-lovers” know all too well how to talk about sexual sin, “clutch-an’-hug dancin’,” and other sins of the flesh. Jim Casy knows that vocabulary by heart.

But what do you call it when nobody intends the evil and yet the evil happens anyway? What do you call a bank that dispossesses families even though the men working for the bank insist that they have no choice? What do you call an economic order in which growers destroy food while children go hungry? The owner-men have an answer. They call it “the monster.”

The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.

Twentieth-century theologians, philosophers, and activists contemporary with Steinbeck had other names for it. Walter Rauschenbusch would have taught Casy to speak of social sin and the Kingdom of God. Reinhold Niebuhr would have warned him that discovering our common humanity does not make the growers put down their guns: love must reckon with power. John Dewey was dismantling the mythology of a self-sufficient American individual precisely when Steinbeck’s migrants were discovering how powerless isolated individuals could be before institutions they could neither see nor control.

And Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were already trying to live out the answer. They founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, combining the works of mercy—feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless—with a radical Christian critique of the economic order that produced hunger and homelessness in the first place. Casy was hardly alone in searching for a Christianity big enough for the world he was actually living in.

And the nineteenth-century Anglican F. D. Maurice might have helped Casy recognize that his strange new intuition—“maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of”—is not quite as far from Christianity as Casy imagines. His language is hardly orthodox, but the intuition behind it is deeply Christian: we belong to one another. No salvation is purely private because no human being is purely private.

But before putting any of those books into Casy’s hands, I would give him the Hebrew prophet Amos. And then I would implore him to read the Sermon on the Mount just one more time.

For what Casy is discovering on the road to California is something Israel’s prophets already knew. Sin can inhabit more than an individual human heart. It can become embodied in customary practices, institutions, arrangements of wealth and power—in entire ways of organizing a society. Amos does not merely ask whether the wealthy Israelites of his day are personally nice people. He asks what happens to the poor when the powerful sell “the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (Amos 2:6) 

Jim Casy did not need to abandon Christianity. Certainly he did not need to abandon Jesus. What he needed was a Christianity big enough for the world he was actually living in.

Saints Are Allowed to Be Grumpy

For all its righteous anger, The Grapes of Wrath is not, finally, a cynical book. Steinbeck sees what human beings do to one another at our worst. But he also sees the small, almost invisible acts by which we refuse to let the monster have the last word.

My favorite comes early in the novel. At a roadside diner in one of Steinbeck’s interludes, a poor man enters with his two young sons. He asks Mae, the waitress, whether she will sell him a loaf of bread. Grumpy Mae does not want to. This is a restaurant, not a grocery store. The bread is for making sandwiches.

The man explains that he has very little money and needs bread for his family. Mae grudgingly gives in. Then the boys notice the candy. They stare at the striped peppermint sticks in the display case. Their father asks what they cost.

“Oh—them. Well, no—them’s two for a penny,” the otherwise stingy Mae tells him. The father pulls a penny out of his greasy wallet, pays for the candy, and they leave. The two truck drivers witnessing grumpy Mae’s sudden generosity are incredulous.

Big Bill wheeled back. “Them wasn’t two-for-a-cent candy,” he said.
“What’s that to you?” Mae said fiercely.
“Them was nickel apiece candy,” said Bill.
“We got to get goin’,” said the other man. “We’re droppin’ time.”
They reached in their pockets. Bill put a coin on the counter and the other man looked at it and reached again and put down a coin. They swung around and walked to the door. “So long,” said Bill
Mae called, “Hey! Wait a minute. You got change.”
“You go to hell,” said Bill, and the screen door slammed.
Mae watched them get into the great truck, watched it lumber off in low gear, and heard the shift up the whining gears to cruising ratio.
“Al ” she said softly. He looked up from the hamburger he was patting thin and stacking between waxed papers.
“What ya want?
“Look there.” She pointed at the coins beside the cups—two half-dollars.

It is such a small thing. No manifesto. No revolution. No grand theory of justice. Mae simply sees two children who want candy and decides, for one moment, that the price of a piece of candy will not determine whether they get to taste something sweet.

And then something happens. Mercy becomes contagious. The truck drivers have seen what Mae has done, and they answer her gift with another gift, grace on top of grace. Nobody announces what is happening. Nobody needs to. For a few minutes in a roadside diner, the iron logic of exchange—you get what you can pay for—simply breaks down.

That is why I love the scene so much. Steinbeck has given us a world governed by calculation. What is the land worth? What is the crop worth? What is a day’s labor worth? How little can a desperate family be paid? When does fruit become worth more destroyed than eaten?

Mae interrupts the calculation. Ten cents’ worth of candy becomes one penny. Not because she has misunderstood the market price. She understands it perfectly well. She simply decides that, this once, the market will not have the final word. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

And that takes us back to the Promised Land. The tragedy of Steinbeck’s California is not that the land fails to flow with milk and honey. It does. The tragedy is that human beings can stand in the midst of astonishing superabundance and still refuse to let their neighbors eat.

But not always. Sometimes somebody gives you the bread. Sometimes two little boys get the candy. Sometimes, even in the country of the monster, grace slips through. And yes, saints are allowed to be grumpy.

Roberto De La Noval Takes on the Non-world

Dr Roberto De La Noval, who has contributed four articles to Eclectic Orthodoxy over the years, has recently published two journal articles which may be of interest to some of our readers. Both articles address, each in its own way, the claim that God might not have created the world.

1) “‘God Could Have Not Created’: Critiquing (a) Divine Counterfactual Predication,” Scottish Journal of Theology (2026).

That God could have not created the world is a commonplace of Christian theology, often invoked to articulate the meaning of divine freedom. This essay argues that this counterfactual predication cannot be made consistent with the classical doctrine of God and so cannot be an adequate way of characterising God’s freedom. Drawing on a critical realist account of coherent counterfactual predications, it is shown that every cogent counterfactual attribution implies that the subject of the attribution is located in time, possessed of potential, and knowable in its essence. These entailments of counterfactual predications render them formally incompatible with a classical theist doctrine of God, in which God is not temporally located, purely actual and unknowable in essence by humans in the status viatoris. If the counterfactual on divine predicating compromises the divine simplicity, divine perfection and divine pure actuality, it should be understood to be a metaphorical, not substantial divine predication.

2) “Free Willing in God: A Metaphor, Not Analogy, for Divine Creating,” Religious Studies (2026); coauthor: Matthew Vale.

Contemporary classical theists routinely argue that God’s creative act is a kind of divine free willing or free choosing. This article argues that ‘free willing’ or ‘free choosing’ (liberumarbitrium) cannot be a proper divine act on the terms of classical theism. To advance this claim about classical theism at large, we take as our test case Thomas Aquinas’ argument that God freely wills this world, since it is so conceptually comprehensive and representative of much Christian thinking on these matters. We deploy Thomas’ accounts of divine predication, divine attributes, and the nature of free willing to show that when we correctly apply Thomas’ classical theist doctrine of divine perfection to analogically purify the concept of finite free willing—and so render it capable of being properly attributed to God—none of the defining characteristics of free willing remain to be predicated substantially of God; the attribution becomes equivocal. But such equivocations, in Aquinas’ account of divine predication, can still function as religiously useful metaphors, which is what we argue ‘God freely wills creatures’ must be on classical theist terms. Thus, our argument invites classical theists to re-examine the ‘divine-creating-as-free-choosing’ analogy, and to search for other, more adequate ways of analogically conceiving divine creating.

Rob is Assistant Professor of the Practice at Boston College.