Alien hand syndrome

Christian teaching on salvation was vague and ambiguous from the very beginning. Resurrection, immortality, and abiding or dwelling in God appear in various apostles' writings, but there is no discussion of salvation as a uniquely Christian teaching. The Apostles' Creed does not specifically mention salvation, and an elaboration of its second article in the Nicene Creed added only, "for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven." Even if our vision of truth leads us to think that it is possible or necessary to get the meaning of salvation "right" finally, once and for all, Christian theology cannot oblige. Our Scripture and creeds offer no settled view of salvation-probably because there is no single image, but rather a collection of images predominating in the tradition. This gives a broad parameter for soteriological reflection.

The diversity of Christian soteriological language, metaphors, and concepts is advantageous for a culture that is simultaneously hungry for and neuralgic about God. Some are spiritually burned, some depleted, and others despairing after long searches for meaning and spiritual courage that yielded little fruit. Fortunately, the ambiguity of Scripture and creeds invites us to scour the tradition to see where nourishing spiritual food lies. If salvation is nourishing spiritual food, or, to use more Protestant vocabulary, good news, talking about it persuasively today requires reflecting on the cultural context in which we are located. Since Christian discourse is alien to the present culture, to speak persuasively of salvation we must first analyze it adequately in Christian terms and then speak its word in contemporary discourse. Christian theology must translate itself into language that can be heard by those who need to hear it. We will try to do that here in talking about salvation.

OUR SPIRITUAL NEED

Selecting a cultural standpoint for soteriological reflection will inevitably appear arbitrary. Still, Theology Today is a North American publication, and this author is a North American. Those facts alone, however, do not justify identifying soteriological needs from a North American vantage point. A stronger argument, I think, is the fact that North American culture, particularly U.S. culture, seeds the world, as the sun irradiates the globe. The U.S. is the only cultural superpower, so even though the analysis that follows can be accused of being hopelessly American, the response is that it is only a matter of time before American multinational corporations invade other cultural settings, take root in them, and both transform them and are transformed by them. Indeed, the Arab Muslim resistance to America and its allies is an attempt by some to repudiate Arab culture's experiences of the American way of life. This being the case, we shall offer an analysis of some features of American culture as a perspective from which we might think about salvation at this time in history.

The overwhelming feature of American society is its wealth and the culture that wealth creates. The fact that some, perhaps even many, remain outside the culture of wealth does not mean that they are unaffected by it. Our universal dependence on it touches everyone psychologically, socially, and intellectually, including those who participate in it only minimally or vicariously. This influence extends to nations around the world that remain materially poor and technologically simple as well. Resistance to the psychological power of American wealth and its uses seems futile. The fierceness of anti-Americanism in the Arab Muslim world testifies to the fear and hatred of American inevitability. For better or worse, the American culture of wealth seems indefatigable.

Ironically, one feature of the American culture of wealth is a sense of restless alienation from institutional structures and a vague, angry dissatisfaction with life, a general spiritual ennui standing in a matrix of complaint. We dislike being so dependent on it. As an old Yiddish aphorism puts it, "He sits in honey and calls it horseradish." Although wealth is often inversely related to religious piety, the dissatisfaction amidst great wealth reveals a spiritual void that wealth cannot fill. As a culture we are looking for God, but suspect religion because it seems incompatible with the freedom of (consumer) choice that we have been taught to call liberty-perhaps the most powerful feature of the culture of wealth. Religion honors leadership, authority, and tradition; from the perspective of the freedom of choice that wealth can buy, these are thought to unjustly stifle rather than rightly channel individuality and imagination.

It is perhaps noteworthy that the culture of wealth is saturated with violence at every level. This is one indicator of its spiritual failure. Ancient Rome was no different. While wealth and dissatisfaction would seem to be opposites, in fact the latter is related to the former. The dissatisfaction and violence wrought by the culture of wealth indicate our enduring need of salvation. The question is whether salvation can be offered adroitly enough to become a real possibility for those alienated from religion today. In the context of the culture of wealth, theological adroitness will require pinpointing where wealth fails us. Let us turn to its core idea: consumerism.

Consumerism is successful in part because it has developed techniques to insure our dependence on it. First, of course, it is obvious that we cannot survive apart from it. There is no opting out. It is the air we breathe. Still, its power to construct our identities is more than straightforward; it is also manipulative. Here we will briefly consider five manipulative strategies that keep the system going: calculated dissatisfaction, the illusion of personal power, the invention of self-perpetuating need, impulse buying, and the craving for success. These strategies appeal to and then exacerbate greed and vanity to enhance the sense of self-importance.

One manipulative technique of consumer capitalism is the breeding of calculated dissatisfaction and alienation among the consumers who keep production humming. Perhaps this began with the automobile industry in the 1950s, when research and development arms of the business began regularly phasing in new features to stimulate additional consumer desire. Advertising, which first had been used to assist those already seeking a product by providing useful information, now was applied to making everyone into a customer in order to boost corporate sales. It was just at the moment that psychology was infiltrating the culture. Advertising switched from informing buyers to psychologically manipulating individual vanities, and "keeping up with the Jones's" was born. Trading your car in every two years to have the latest model with the latest jimjicks is far more prestigious than piling up 150,000 miles until your buggy collapses. I recall being quite taken aback when someone at a social gathering asked my father, "Hey, Ben, what are you driving?" Cars, gold, "drop dead" houses, fashionable clothing, and so on, enable us to be noticed and admired by others. There is, of course, nothing new about this. Lavish funerals, weddings, and other social occasions have always served multiple purposes. Spending enables us to be regarded as successful, a person of note. Displaying wealth soothes the ego.

Psychological insecurity is not the only weakness that advertising plays upon. Freedom of choice is another illusion of personal power invented by advertisers to flatter the vain. One has to spend fully five minutes in front of the deodorant shelves and three in front of the furniture polish in order to select the best perfumes for one's lifestyle. A perfume-free life is virtually impossible. Products marketed to women are the worst offenders. Shopping takes longer and longer, sapping more and more energy.

One of the cleverer moves was the invention of self-perpetuating need. Pepsico, for example, started as a soft drink manufacturer. More recently it opened a salty snacks side of the business. The stimulus behind this expansion is that salt induces thirst, and pairing salty foods with sugary drinks creates a self-perpetuating cycle of empty calories and bad carbs that snaps the company's trap on consumers. Pairing chips and beer, fries and cola, and locating the salty snacks vending machine next to the soda machine in the staff lounge assures that these staples of the American diet will be at hand on the job or off. The salt-sugar syndrome is now so pervasive that many children, and now their parents, are never exposed to a balanced diet, and the obesity rate in America-with all its attendant health risks and healthcare costs-continues to soar.

One other manipulative psychological invention of consumerism is impulse buying, stimulated by labyrinthine store layouts. Suburban shopping invited first the supermarket, then the megastore. Just to go in can be bewildering. Some are laid out like the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence, in a serpentine maze with only one entrance and one exit. The fifty or sixty galleries snake through the building with no way to go directly to a particular gallery. It is an all-or-nothing visit. Stores are following suit to encourage impulse buying. While the floor plan has expanded, signage has not always followed suit, and informed store personnel are ever harder to find. Although one may come in for only a specific item or two, having to plow though many aisles of merchandise to get to the product one is searching for exposes shoppers to many other possible purchases along the way. The idea here is that the more you see, the more you will buy. We return home exhausted and repair to the salt-sugar syndrome for energy to face the next task. Those who have ambulatory difficulties cannot even attempt it.

Another feature of the culture of wealth is that it sucks us up into itself, driving us to define success as climbing the corporate ladder. Perhaps this is the economic twist on John Climacus's Ladder of Divine Ascent and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Perseverance is needed in both cases. Social mobility was one important result of the destruction of feudalism. Yet every advance has a price. As wonderful as it is to be rid of feudalism, now there can be no rest from the upward climb toward more authority, influence, and opportunity. In its economic form, a furlough from the climb may be risky because someone else may get the promotion we are looking for in the meantime. Indeed, this is the problem of the "mommy syndrome." Having children takes so much time and energy that mothers cannot make it to the top.

Whether as workers, producers, or consumers (and most of us are all three), the spiritual crisis incited by economic prosperity reveals our soteriological need. Boredom and exhaustion merge. Even novelty is enervating, since things are designed to break down, wear out, or phase out in short order. Nothing seems much different from anything else, but may be packaged differently to appeal to different target markets (kitchen cleaner, bathroom cleaner, eco-friendly cleaner, glass cleaner, toilet-bowl cleaner, and so on-not all-purpose cleaner). The time between purchase and discard is too short to permit rest in our new finds or enjoyment of them. The system is designed to burn us out-and there is no escape. Even the economically disenfranchised do not escape. They may lack the skills and style to compete in the system, but they are not protected from its psychological ills of vanity, greed, and insecurity. It is inevitable that the culture of wealth should breed a culture of violence. The culture of wealth is psychologically harmful. To be safe or saved from these miseries requires a place apart, another person to be, an alternative source of well-being.

VIRTUAL IDENTITY

We live and move in consumerism. But we have our being there only if there is nowhere else to be. Being other than where we live and move is always difficult, but especially for moderns who have generally rejected the possibility that who we are can break free of where we are and what we do. The belief that reality is nothing but social construction cinches this idea. Although heavy lip-service is paid to "self construction and reconstruction, especially among the young and the restless, the middle-aged and the burnouts, in fact the power of the culture of wealth in setting our desires and feeding our vanities is so great that, unless there is another source of inspiration, we have little choice but to accept the cultural agenda. We cannot construct our selves from nothing.

Reality is not only socially, but also theologically constructed.

Christianity will here protest that there is another source of the self: God. Reality is not only socially, but also theologically constructed, and this is the way to escape a self defined by consumerism. The idea that reality is, and therefore we are, socioculturally constructed hints at a determinism inimical to the vaunted "freedom of choice" trumpeted in our culture. Yes, we are the products of our culture. The culture of wealth revels in precisely this phenomenon, and the anthropologists, sociologists, and social theorists play right into the system. Consumerism does not want us to be free of its power to construct us. Salvation is the freedom to live beyond being constructed by the culture of wealth, the culture of poverty, or by any other human culture for that matter, because it offers us an identity constructed by God, who is another source of the self. God gives us critical leverage on economically structured consumerism-another place to have our being, another identity.

Perhaps ironically, the technology that increasingly defines us as much as consumerism does may inadvertently also offer us a discourse for envisioning our salvation from a consumerist identity. "Virtual reality" is the recognition of a reality by virtue, power, or means of some other medium-or simply through another medium. It is the quintessential use of the dative case, the dative of means, grammatically speaking. In the case of the World Wide Web, computer technology is the power or means by which the world comes to us, and we can present ourselves to it with a totally different identity. It is ultimate instrumentality. Something concrete (internet technology) gives us the freedom to become, virtually, someone else-or to go somewhere else, or to do something new that we would not otherwise be able to do, without leaving where we are or ceasing to be who we have become. Virtuality enables us to be in more than one place at a time, and more than one self at a time. This is not new. It was born with the first library. That is, after all, the purpose of a library-to enable us to interact with experiences, thoughts, feelings, and places remote from our own time and place.

Although we live in Detroit, let us say, with internet access we can truly become a citizen of the world. We can roam the great art museums of Italy, the cathedrals of England, the African plains and deserts, the vast reaches of Siberia, and so on. Through this contact with different realities, we gain an identity that we could never have had, were we limited to Detroit alone. The internet's interactivity permits us to present ourselves as other than we usually are. Similarly, a theological identity enables us to have our being beyond the consumer culture that is so enervating. This may save us not only from becoming burned out by the market forces that we cannot escape, but from being defined by them as well. And that is good news. The reality may be virtual, but it is nonetheless real.

Virtual identity enables us to live in more than one world at a time.

Virtual identity enables us to live in more than one world at a time. Salvation by God can become just as powerful. I will call this virtual salvation. This is simply to state the Christian's obvious claim that God is the instrument (means) of our salvation-but what was once obvious now needs to be restated in contemporary discourse. The analogy is: Technology is to virtual identity as God is to being saved. Salvation is an identity given by God just as any identity is given virtually by internet technology. We may have one identity constructed by society, but we also have another given by God. Our identity from God enables us to be in, but not of, our culture.

Recognizing parallel identities resolves some problems in understanding classic Christian discourse. Paul, for example, speaks of the "flesh" and the "spirit." Sometimes these realms are pitted against one another, and the model presented here is not devoid of such a reading. Still, the point here is that, having parallel identities, we have more resources to call upon in making decisions in any given situation. Parallel identities can foster an internal conversation within the person who must determine what to do, how to think, and perhaps how to speak at any given moment. One's consumer self and one's godly self will have to learn to live together.

A parallel view of identity addresses a problem of the monastic tradition, too. Monasticism began when people started seeking a more intense Christian life and fled the cities for the peace and quiet of the desert, just as people today seek out monastic retreat houses because there are no pagers, cell phones, palm pilots, radios, or televisions there. Complete silence may be necessary for psychological and spiritual repair. There are two problems with this solution that virtual salvation can help to address.

Virtual salvation gives us another source for the self than the one constructed by "the world. "

The first problem revealed itself in the early days of monasticism. Intense Christians sought the eremitical life to escape the equivalent of our culture of wealth-using their discourse, we might say: to escape from the forces that distract us from God and the sinful temptations that arise from being too much with others. Yet it soon became clear that human beings need social interaction and companionship, difficult as it is. Too much social isolation is psychologically dangerous. Hermits became depressed. This problem gave rise to cenobitic monasticism. Yet communal life in the cenobium brought "the world" into the monastery, which became its microcosm. The world is inescapable because we are the same person, whether in the city or the desert. Choosing the desert over the city was a change of venue but not necessarily of identity-though that was the hope. The advantage of virtual salvation is that it gives us another source for the self than the one constructed by "the world." We can repair to this self for strength and nourishment even in the midst of the hurly-burly-precisely where we need it most.

A second problem with the escape-to-the-desert model has specifically to do with contemporary culture. Most of us can escape to the retreat house only infrequently. Our culture does not look kindly on abandoning one's family and responsibilities in the world, as the Christian tradition often has advised. Even if we do manage to get away, most of us will have to return to the world all too soon. And so, like all vacations, the retreat house is but a tiny breathing space, a hiatus from stress. Our brief visits do not provide an alternative identity that we can carry home with us to defeat the restless alienation, exhaustion, and discontent stimulated by consumerism.

Even a simplified life cannot escape our psychological and literal dependence on the culture of wealth. We require an alternative source of being that accompanies us wherever we are. The theological point is that having only where we are and what we do to construct who we are cannot sufficiently protect us from untoward influences, the debilitating challenges and circumstances of life, or the pitfalls of our personality. Virtual theological identity is portable, sustaining us where we live and move, day in and day out. It does not define us utterly-that is heaven-but it is another self-concept by means of which we can step out of our immediate context and gain perspective on it and guidance for it.

THREE VIRTUAL IDENTITIES OF SALVATION

Virtual identity is central to many, perhaps most Christian visions of salvation. I will not attempt to mention them all, or even the most common, but will simply point to how the discourse of virtuality may enable these Christian visions to become live options for this age. Here I will discuss three different versions of a saving virtual identity: by virtue of the cross of Christ (as developed by St Paul), by virtue of our reflection of God's triune identity (as developed by St Augustine), and by virtue of the divine beauty, wisdom, and goodness (as developed by Pseudo-Dionysius).

St Paul and the Cross of Christ

Paul of Tarsus is the first Christian to restructure society on theological grounds. By baptism into the death of Christ one becomes, virtually, a new creation. This is the meaning of the cross, which from Paul's point of view looks like sheer evil, utterly devoid of value.1 Yet, surprisingly, Paul finds many ways to describe its value: It is the power of God and the wisdom of God; it is peace and reconciliation; the source of our life, righteousness, sanctification, redemption, and hope; and the riches of God's glory creating one new humanity to be a holy temple, a dwelling place for God (1 Cor 1:18, 24, 30; 2 Cor 5:17-18, 21; Eph 2:14-21; and Col 1:20-27). The cross is God's great instrument of cosmic reconciliation. Without their cooperation, or even their knowing about it, Christ's death made peace among enemies and reconciled all things to God. The cross is an event of immense proportion that changes everything, on the macro- as well as the micro-level, cosmically, socially, interpersonally, and psychologically.

Paul teaches that those who belong to Christ through baptism are dead to the power of sin and "alive to God" through their new life in Christ. (Rom 6:4-11). His phrase "you must also consider yourselves" is a direct acknowledgement of this virtual identity. Though you live and move in the sphere of hostility and enmity that pervades the world, you must consider yourselves as those for whom these features no longer define you. Your true identity is as one for whom hostility and the strife it causes are no longer the fundamental reality, for they have perished in Christ. They no longer claim you because your new identity in Christ's cross trumps them.

The power of this virtual identity runs so deep that Paul is able to say, "From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; ... we know him no longer in that way" (2 Cor 5:16). He realizes that having a virtual theological identity does not wipe out the memory of, and commitment to, the reasons for the hostilities that remain so fresh. The call to see and be seen from an entirely different perspective derives not from armistice treaties hammered out among earthly foes. Rather, the transformation of the world is wrought by the blood of Christ-by divine fiat. Apparently, God has had enough of enmity on earth and wants harmony, that he may be glorified thereby. Again, though one may continue to live and move from a human point of view, the baptized are reconciled reconcilers whose mission is to spread the new, theologically constructed reality.

Salvation is rocognizing that one belongs to the virtual reality that God has brought about with Christ's death.

Salvation is recognizing that one belongs to the virtual reality that God has brought about with Christ's death. Paul considers the socially constructed world of Rome and the legally constructed religion of the rabbis as breathing carbon dioxide. Breathing oxygen requires dying to these frameworks. Everyone is to consider their true being as located in "a resurrection like his" (Rom 6:5). He was not always very patient with those for whom this change of orientation was slow and difficult.

Christians often have interpreted the death of hostility in divine-human terms and ignored its social implications, which were central for Paul? The divinely engineered death of social and religious hostility must eventuate in the complete restructuring of society, for both those who govern the empire and those who govern religious purity are functioning on principles that no longer obtain. Applying the structural patterns of the Roman empire to the American empire is fairly straightforward. Translating the patterns of hostility among culturally, religiously, and economically alienated groups is also. What is daunting is discerning how our true virtual identity calls us to live and move in what has become, de jure, an alien environment. But the challenge is really no greater for us now than it was for them then.

St Augustine and Reflectilon on God's Triune Identity

Perhaps the boldest soteriology ever suggested is Augustine's definition of us as the image of God the Holy Trinity, in his great treatise on the Trinity. We are who we are by virtue of God's having created us in his own trinitarian likeness. Augustine knew full well that there are other senses in which we are defined by what we do and what happens to us. But these, he argued, distract us from who we truly arc-who we are in God. This is our true identity, "true" in the sense of "best." He saw the Christian life as the struggle to hold onto and live by our divine identity, because it alone provides the nobility and elegant dignity that are our God-ordained destiny. The concrete identities that form unselfconsciously from a culture like the culture of wealth orient us toward desires that lead us further away from, not closer to, God and each other. These misdirected desires oppose our godly identity and constantly threaten to overwhelm it. It is our theological self-concept that saves us, by imprinting itself on us as we slowly and dimly come to discern and participate in it. It alone is powerful enough to take hold of the lesser identities that the struggle of daily life creates. Growth in the spiritual life is advancing self-discovery and realization of the godly identity that is ours by virtue of God's having made us for himself and in his image. The self-actualization and self-realization language of mid-twentieth-century psychology is Christian psychology divorced from its foundation and grafted onto the root of the secular self. Returned to its proper Christian context, salvation is self-realization, that is, realization of our true identity in God-growing into it and using it fruitfully.

Augustine's virtual soteriological identity combined the doctrine of the Trinity with the astounding and tantalizing proclamation in Genesis that God created us in his own image. If God is triune, and we are made in the divine image, then we understand ourselves properly only through the triune identity itself. The spiritual struggle is to claim fully and personally that we are the triune image of God, when our natural inclinations and the desires instilled in us by our culture would take us elsewhere. Augustine's is perhaps the most invasive (in the medical sense) soteriological image ever created. Our very being is God-like.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the Divine Beauty, Wisdom, and Goodness

While Augustine's may be the most dramatic soteriological identity, others are also able to lift us up beyond where we live and move, defining us apart from the concrete realities that seek our face. Pseudo-Dionysius (Denys) offers us a virtual identity in his discussion of the attributes or names for God. As members of the creation, our identity is found in those characteristics of God that now characterize his creation. Whereas Augustine focuses on the trinitarian nature of God, Denys picks up the Johannine interest in the divine attributes. Christ is the light of the world (John 1:1-9). "God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them" (1 Jn 4:16b). "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all" (1 Jn 1:5). Denys's virtual soteriological identity, like Augustine's, depends upon the being or reality of God, but approaches it from the characteristics or attributes of God that tumble over one another in effervescent profusion.

His treatise on "The Divine Names" explains that the many names for God in Scripture (and tradition) give us language for the divine nature, which we can never fully comprehend. We need so many names because God's reality is so much more than we can tell one another in words and so uncontainable by any set of names that each helps us to see God a little bit better. Many names name one reality. Piling adjective upon adjective and title upon title expands our vision like a diamond with an infinite number of facets. More in keeping with Denys's language, we might say that the divine reality gleams with movement and life; the various names we offer-good, light, beauty, wisdom, power-bump up against one another, expanding and extending our gaze. God is more glorious than we can ever adequately say, but that ought not reduce us to utter silence.

Even if we eventually get lost in our own inarticulateness, our attempts to speak of God truly are not in vain, nor are they of purely academic interest. Denys has not scoured Scripture for all these names simply to determine the total number or to explain their sources. Denys is a theologian. His interest in the divine names is soteriological. Here is a bit of his explanation of the divine goodness:

The Good returns all things to itself and gathers together whatever may be seattered, for it is the divine Source and unifier of the sum total of things. Each being looks to it as a source, as the agent of cohesion, and as an objective. The Good, as scripture testifies, produced everything and it is the ultimately perfect Cause. It in, "all things hold together" [Col 1:7] and are maintained and preserved as if in some almighty receptacle. All things are returned to it as their own goal. All things desire it: Everything with mind and reason seeks to know it. Everything sentient yearns to perceive it, everything lacking perception has a living and instinctive longing for it, and everything lifeless and merely existent turns, in its own fashion, for a share of it.3

God's being is not a static reality from which we are disjoined, something we can admire only from afar like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. On the contrary, we can never sever ourselves from it because it pervades us. It dwells in us because we are part of the creation that the divine goodness holds together. God is everywhere and his goodness is everywhere with him, pulsing throughout the creation, animating the souls of those who know him and those who know him not. It draws us to itself, and "refurbishes and restores the image of God corrupted within [us]." Further, the divine goodness, while "at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity" is nevertheless "at the center of everything . . . and 'in it all things hold together.'"4 God's goodness glues all things to one another, even if they do not understand or notice it. It is the sacred thread that is the lightness of the universe, and it runs right through us too. All creatures are bound together in it like pearls knotted into a common string.

Two of Denys's favorite names are light and beauty, other ways of talking about the goodness of God, which is also the wisdom of God. "Light comes from the Good, light is an image of this archetypal Good. . . . It gives light to everything capable of receiving it; it creates them, keeps them alive, preserves and perfects them. Everything looks to it for measure, eternity, number, order. It is the power which embraces the universe. It is the Cause of the universe and its end."5 And the beauty of the divine nature

in itself and by itself . . . is the uniquely and the eternally beautiful. It is the superabundant source in itself of the beauty of every beautiful thing. In that simple but transcendent nature of all beautiful things, beauty and the beautiful uniquely preexisted in terms of their source. From this beauty comes the existence of everything, each being exhibiting its own way of beauty. For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community. Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.6

Our theological self-concept is as one who participates in the goodness, light, and beauty of God. It is at the intersection of God's being and his being Creator that our true identity lies. Our self-concept is from God's being, not from the identity that the culture of wealth would impose upon us. Divine beauty is its own lure to our self-identification with the truly good, truly beautiful order of things.

CONCLUSION

Paul used the cross, Augustine the Trinity and Scripture, and Denys the names of God and the created order. They used Christian doctrine not to explain its inner logic but to explain us to ourselves in light of who God is and what he does. Each theologian offers a Christian identity by virtue of which we can cease being identified exclusively by what we have done or ought not to have done, what we have bought or ought not to have bought, what we have tried or ought not to have tried. The use of "exclusively" in the last sentence is important. We cannot utterly resist cultural construction, nor should we; not everything in human cultures has proved destructive of our God-given identities. But we can and should take notice of our culture and examine it critically, as our virtual identity in God provides a vantage point for getting outside it.

Salvation is making our own the divinely constructed identity so that we can stand apart from the socially constructed ones that are so heavily influenced by the culture of wealth and the various subcultures within which we now live and move. Even if in some instances or to some degree we self-consciously choose aspects of the cultures and subcultures that shape us, we remain largely unselfconscious of the hold the dominant culture exercises on us. Fish are not aware that they live and breathe in water. Because Christian culture no longer has much authority in the culture at large, taking on a Christian self-concept must be an intentional act. Salvation is the skillful employment of an intentional Christian self-concept in shaping a life that is also deeply shaped by quite other forces.

One thinker works through the cross, another through the divine threeness, a third through the goodness and beauty of God. Although there is a real sense in which we are what we do, our virtual theological identity offers us a way to do what we are. It is an identity that we do not create and that we cannot destroy, even if we abandon it. Because these theological identities are where we have our most noble being, they can gather up and knit together the fragments of our tattered, socially constructed selves into a stronger, better fabric. The fragments battle for space and breath in the maze of pressures inherent in a culture bloated by wealth, technology, and power. Like Sisyphus, each day we must get up and do it all over again. It is only by virtue of our various theological identities that the tatters of our lives are rewoven into the splendid fabric of our proper beauty in God.

Now we can see how great a gift it is that there was no ecumenical council "defining" salvation. For, indeed, to maintain our equilibrium against the competing forces in the world, we need all of these various soteriological identities. The cross is our ballast in one setting, the triune image of God in another, and the divine beauty in another. If we had to choose among them, as if one were "true" and the others "false," we would be so much the poorer. Fortunately for us, all are true.

ABSTRACT

Fortunately, Christian salvation was never defined precisely. In a culture of wealth like consumer capitalism-that seeds global culture-one's self-concept is constructed by advertising and other market-driven ploys that fan vanity, insecurity, and greed leading to anger, violence, and ennui amidst plenty. Such a socially constructed self is met by a theologically constructed self, a virtual self created by God. Whether through the cross, the trinitarian image of God, or the beauty, wisdom, and goodness of God, having a virtual identity from God is Christian medicine for a spiritually enervating culture.

1 The Gospel of John is the only apostolic text that acknowledges the expediency of Christ's execution for the sake of the nation of Israel.

2 The social gospel and its heir, liberation theology, have not challenged this partial reading of Paul. The former exhorts the wealthy to care for the poor, while the latter counsels the poor to rise up against their oppressors. Neither of these is as radical as Paul's theology of the cross.

3 Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, ed. Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist, 1987), 75.

4 Ibid., 54.

5 Ibid., 74.

6 Ibid., 77.

Ellen T. Charry is Margaret W. Harmon Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author of By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (1997).

Copyright Theology Today Oct 2004
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