Sinclair B. Ferguson: Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification. Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2016.

 

Ferguson knows his audience: Americans, who pride themselves on their practicality—American Christians no less than any others. Hence such locutions as “blueprints for sanctification”—designs for “building an entire life of holiness” with the aid of this “manual of biblical teaching on holiness.” And the Bible does indeed insist on right human practice. God issues commands, telling his creatures what to do and what not to do. But Ferguson is much more interested in teaching what sanctification is and why we should want it. “This is not so much a ‘how to’ book as it is a ‘how God does it’ one.” A ‘pragmatic’ people may incline to insist on taking their own way, becoming do-it-yourselfers of life. But for Christians, only by first understanding God’s purposes and God’s ways of achieving those purposes can we rationally address the question of what we should do. Putting human action, human ‘methods’ and ‘techniques’ at the forefront inclines us to exaggerate our already ample desire to serve ourselves. “Many modern Christians are often too interested in the development of the self but little interested in the development of their understanding of the triune God.”

Understanding God’s holiness and human sanctification may also clarify modern minds confused by the philosophic doctrine of historicism. In Hegel, preeminently, ‘God’ means the ‘Absolute Spirit.’ He describes the Absolute Spirit as being “immanent” in all things, going so far as to compare all of Being as symbolized by Christ, by God-become-man. But the God of the Bible is a Creator-God, not an immanent force— a holy God, separate from His creation. Sanctification means holiness or becoming-holy; the main difference between the two words is ‘merely verbal,’ as the “sanctification” derives from a Latin root, “holiness” from an Anglo-Saxon root. One aspect of God’s holiness is His separateness from sin; another is devotion, “the intensity of the love that flows within the very being of God, among and between each of the three persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Love is a desire for someone or some thing; one cannot love something that is not in some way separate from ourselves. At the same time, love aims at uniting what is separate or distinct, whether these are the Persons God manifests within Himself or, more surprisingly, the creatures separated from their Creator, first by the fact of their creation itself, then compounded by their sin, which has altered their original nature. Holiness in such profoundly flawed creatures means devotion to Him, “being entirely his, so that all we do and possess are his”—still separate in the original sense, in their status of creatureliness, but redeemed from the further separation of sinfulness, even as they cannot claim to be sinless. Agapic love reunites God and human beings; it also provides the basis for uniting human beings with one another, under God, animated by His Holy Spirit.

Ferguson begins his exposition of these points with I Peter 1:1-7. The churches in Turkey were having their faith tested; Peter writes his letter to strengthen their understanding of what faith entails. As Ferguson summarizes the passage, these Christians “have been chosen (elect) through the love God had set upon them (foreknowledge) in order to be reserved by the Spirit (sanctification) with a view to their devotion to Christ (obedience) and the enjoyment of a life of covenant fellowship with him (sprinkled with his blood).” To know how to live, what way of life to walk, you must know, first, “whose you are,” then “who you are,” and finally “what you are for.” Similarly, when Moses meets God manifested in the burning bush he wants to know who God is and who he, Moses, is, to have been chosen by God for the mission God commands him to undertake.

Martin Luther wrote that “this little letter,” I Peter, “contains virtually everything a Christian needs to know.” And while Ferguson rightly allows that “the German reformer had a fine line in hyperbole,” he agrees that “Peter’s opening words constitute one of the New Testament’s most comprehensive descriptions of what it means to be a Christian.” Without holiness or sanctification, “no one will see the Lord,” the Apostle Paul writes, in concurrence. Although ‘belief in’ God is a gift delivered by the Holy Spirit, holiness is not a gift. It is “worked into us” over time: “We actually become holy.” In so becoming, we are ‘justified’ in the root meaning of the word: aligned with the will of God, the source of the good, the right. “Justification never takes place apart from regeneration which is the inauguration of sanctification.” Sanctification occurs as we obey the rule of God; it is the result of that obedience. “We are not justified on the basis of our sanctification” because only God can realign us, straighten us out. “Yet justification never takes place without sanctification.” Even the thief crucified with Jesus, who had only a short time left to live, undertook sanctification by “confess[ing] his own sinfulness,” “recogniz[ing] Jesus’ lordship,” manifesting respect for Jesus, and praying—even “rebuk[ing] his companion,” the other criminal, “for the vitriol he heaped on his new-found Master.”

In acting to sanctify Christians, “God is restoring in our lives the image which we were created to reflect,” “changing you from what you were to what he means you to be—making you more and more like himself.” Holy or separate from sin Himself, He makes you more nearly separate from it. Ferguson identifies six “foundations” of this new life.

The first foundation is God’s purpose. “God chose us in order to sanctify us.” That is, “everything depends on God taking the initiative.” All three Persons of the Trinity contribute to this sanctification: as Father, God chooses or ‘elects’ us to citizenship in His kingdom; as the Holy Spirit, God sanctifies us, guiding us along the way of life that characterizes His regime; as the Son, God provides the ruler of his regime, the one whom we shall emulate and obey. “Every Christian’s experience, wherever it begins, has its ultimate origin before the dawn of time in the heart, mind, and heavenly love and purpose of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and “the whole Trinity co-operates in bringing me to the goal,” cooperating among themselves and with me “in order to make me more like Christ.” “God has in the past destined us, and in the present is transforming us, so that in the future we will ‘be conformed to the image of his Son.'”

The second foundation of the Christian regime is a command, “the commandment of God to be holy,” as seen in Leviticus 19 and I Peter1;15-16: “Be holy, as I am holy.” In obeying this command, we open ourselves to God’s agapic love. “Sanctification is growing in holy-love; love is growing in holiness.” Ferguson rejects the claim sometimes heard in churches, that the Old Testament is ‘legalistic’—requiring merely “outward obedience to the Ten Commandments.” The prophet Isaiah, for example, “realized that he was a sinner, not just someone who had committed various sinful act contrary to the divine standards”; “sin infected his own lip and came to expression whenever he preached.” This is the meaning of the purification of his lips with the “searing heat” of the coal the angel pressed on his lips. His wrong acts had issued from his own ‘being,’ and it was his ‘being’ that needed purification. Be holy, as I am holy “now means, ‘Become like Jesus.”

Thirdly, Christians should understand themselves as the Israelites understood themselves when they left Egypt—as exiles. When Augustine called Christians a “third race” of men, he meant they were a new nation, neither Greeks nor Jews. This nation had been founded at great cost. Jesus was a sacrifice, redeeming His chosen people “not with silver and gold”—as most debtors are redeemed—”but with his own blood,” the matter that animates the living body. Fourth, having been so redeemed, so liberated from debt, Christians then find themselves ‘ministered to,’ brought to the new way of life, by the Holy Spirit. In terms of the family, the Holy Spirit guides us in “a real transformation of our lives so that we begin to develop the characteristics of our adoptive family” as “the children of God.” Nation derives from natio or ‘birth.’ In antiquity, the Israelites were the sons of Israel, Moabites the sons of Moab, and so on. Nations often were named for their ‘founding father,’ and they share some of the characteristics of that father, certain family resemblances. For Christians this means that “we love what we once despised, and despise much that we once loved,” inasmuch as Christ, the founding father of the Christian family and nation, Himself manifests the agapic love which animates the Persons of the Trinity for one another, and for creation.

Families and nations typically undergo severe trials, and not only in the ‘founding period.’ Four score and seven years after the American founding, Abraham Lincoln called the Civil War a test of the endurance of the American regime “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” No less do the trials God sends to His people or allows them to suffer test the genuineness of their devotion to Himself, their ruler, and to propositions (and more) the commands He has set down for them. God “knows he can rely on and test his own work.” “Why does he do this?” Christians ask. “To build Christian character, making us more like Christ.” “The Christian character is strengthened by stress.”

Finally, the sixth foundation of God’s way of life for His nation is the reward of faithful obedience, “the glory to come.” “The New Testament teaches us to live in the light of a future reality that is far more substantial than the present.” So enlightened, His subjects have reason to live now in a way that will enhance their lives then. “This final salvation will be holiness completed,” as Christians “will see the face of Jesus Christ and be transformed into his likeness.” All regimes have this characteristic, holding up models of persons deemed worthy of emulation. For Christians, living in God’s regime as exiles from all others, “those who will enjoy holiness there and then are those who want to pursue holiness here and now.”

Wanting to pursue holiness is one thing, knowing how to do so another. Ferguson is quite fond of lists; sure enough, as there are six “foundations” of the Christian’s new life, so there are four “principles” by which it should be guided. The first is that “sanctification flows from the gospel,” which centers on the depiction of “God’s character and grace.” More specifically, “divine indicatives (statements about what God has done, is doing, or will do) logically precede and ground divine imperatives (statements about what we are to do in response),” faithfully and obediently. God’s grace “effects”—does not merely affect—”our faithfulness.” “This is the logic that explains the power of the gospel.” This is very different from thinking, “If I do this then God will do that.” Such a belief “stands the gospel on its head.” God’s actions always come first, whether it is the initial act of salvation in Christ or “what the Spirit is now doing in me.” Obedience means “we should no longer live for ourselves but for Christ,” even as a true patriot lives not himself but for his country and, if subject to a king, ready to sacrifice his life for his king.

The second principle follows from the first; “Sanctification is expressed physically.” “We express ourselves only by means of our body. In that sense we are our bodies.” Sin makes us aliens in God’s country—more than aliens, witting or unwitting enemies of God. Each day our bodies, through our senses, are tempted or tested by sin at the hands of the rival ruler, Satan, the anti-Christ, “but we can face it well-armed if the eye, or ear, or mouth, or hand, or foot has already been devoted as a living sacrifice to the Lord Jesus Christ.” What we do with our bodies today reveals our allegiance. “For all our sophistication (not to say riches) the western world may not have seen so many tattoos since the days of paganism.” The rule of atheism causes men to abandon “the biblical teaching that we have been made as the image of God,” reducing the body to a billboard for the passions and thus “reduc[ing] man to biological functions.” “Now the body is everything, whether it be the human body, animal bodies, or the earth body.” Paganism induces men to worship earth as a goddess.

The third principle, “mind renewal,” counteracts this materialism. Who will rule your mind? The regime or way of life informed by materialism (especially if matter is said to have divinity immanent within it) “gradually” and “imperceptibly” forms our mind, as any regime will do to those who live under it. But if human beings do not consist only of matter in motion, then that way of life, the habits of mind and heart that it inculcates, will not satisfy. “Knowing who we are will shape how we live”; Ferguson deploys the contemporary term ‘lifestyle,’ but the Bible offers the less frivolous term used also by classical political philosophers, the way. God consistently speaks of “My way.” He opposes ‘our’ way, the human-all-too-human way. He commands from us a metanoia, a change of mind. God’s instrument in mind-changing is the Gospel. “In receiving it we are actively passive,” by which Ferguson means it is a message from God to us, not the other way around, but a message we must act on, after receiving it.

By so acting, Christians test the will of God, coming “to see it as ‘good and acceptable and perfect.'” “Faith in Christ involves an experiment—we trust him, but we cannot second-guess what the consequences will be in our lives.” In other words, we are not putting God to the test; He is testing us. “We learn to discover what God’s will is in each situation only as we find ourselves in it and as his providence slowly unfolds his purposes.” This is what Jesus means by telling His disciples to be prudent as serpents; prudence, practical wisdom, is the characteristic of the good ruler, who knows what to do in each circumstance, what speech or action will advance his regime. Here, God is the ruler, and it is up to His subjects to guide their own actions by His spirit. “When we thus yield our lives to the Lord, and our thinking is renewed by his word, we also begin to find God’s will is acceptable—it becomes a delight to us.” To those who refuse God’s rule, “God’s will is inevitably unpleasant, simply because it is his will and not their will.”

How then to discern God’s will? To do so unassisted by God is obviously impossible. “What does God do in order to bring us to the Christlikeness which is his ultimate goal?” Ferguson cites Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” The ‘I’ who has been crucified is a body, but even more a way of life. The gospel does not denigrate the body. “Rather it changes the kind of life we live in the body.” God has shown what kind of life might be lived in a human body by “taking and sharing our human nature”; “his union with us in our flesh, and not our faith union with him, is the foundation of our fellowship with him.” Having lived a life ‘within’ human nature, “in all its frailty and poverty,” but at the same time being God, and therefore capable of rejecting every temptation, every Satanic testing, and of ruling that nature instead of being ruled by it, and moreover having “died for our sins,” sacrificing that human physicality for the sake of all those still stuck in and with it, having been “raised into new life, and ascended to his Father in the nature he assumed,” Jesus as Christ has given the Holy Spirit the “resources” which can justify, sanctify, and “indeed even… glorify us.” Sin’s wages are death, but Jesus broke “the power of death in his resurrection.” In the letter to the Hebrews Paul calls Jesus “the founder” of Christians’ salvation, a salvation made “perfect through suffering.” The Greek word for founder, archēgos, means the one who embodies the archē—which means both ‘beginning’ and ‘form’ or framework, as in our word, ‘architect.’ The word “is used only four times in the new Testament, always of Jesus.” Aristotle calls politics the “architectonic art,” the art of beginning or ‘founding’ the forms or institutions of rule which direct the pathways on which human beings live their lives. His word ‘regime’ refers to rulers (especially the founding rulers), the forms or institutions they devise as means of ruling, the way of life of those who live within the framework of institutions, and, finally, the end or purpose set by those rulers, reinforced by those forms, and pursued by citizens or subjects according to that way. For Christians, the Ruler, Who is holy and His subjects, the faithful, all have one archē, the same nature: “The Sanctifier must share the same nature, and in that sense be one flesh, with those he sanctifies.” “By coming into the family of flesh and sanctifying his whole life, then by dying our death and being declared righteous or justified in his resurrection,” Jesus became the archēgos “of both justification and sanctification.” It is the Holy Spirit who connects us with the Founder, and who strengthens our connection or bond, our ‘political’ union with Him, our rightful ruler.

This means that a Christian lives in faith in the Son of God, “transfer[ring] trust from self to Christ, all the while recognizing that I cannot carry the heavy load of my sin and guilt, but he can,” being divine not human, all-powerful not frail. Ferguson points especially to Paul’s eschewal of the word ‘Christian.’ “We never find him describing believers as ‘Christians.'” “He speaks only of believing in Christ” and indeed about “believing into Jesus Christ.” By this Paul means that “faith brings us into a person-to-person union and communion with Jesus Christ so that what is ours becomes his and what is his becomes ours.” All regimes need union; the American Founders were obsessed with it, Lincoln defended it. But the Christian “union and communion” is more intimate, and stronger, than any merely human union can be. Ferguson calls this “the deep melody of grace.” Aristotle compares political union with a harmonic scale, warning against reducing this to “a single beat,” as he accuses Socrates of having done in his simply-ordered ‘ideal regime.’ For those ‘in Christ,’ there is no such danger, as in Christ there is “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

Every regime includes certain habits of mind and heart, excludes others as enemies to its structure and its way of life. The Christian, the one who lives in Christ, believing into Him, asks the Holy Spirit to guide him in crucifying, killing, making war against his ‘old’ or sinful nature, his membership in “the family of Adam,” who disobeyed and was expelled from the homeland God made for him. Since “the crucified Christ to whom I am now united is also the risen Christ,” “I cannot be united to him in his crucifixion without being united to him in his resurrection as well.” The sacrifice of our old ‘self’ will be for the sake of a supremely good and joyful purpose: life beneath the new Heaven and on the new Earth, in our new, resurrected bodies, under the perfect Ruler. Therefore, “I no longer live, but Christ lives IN me,” dwelling in us “through the Holy Spirit.” This means that we not only enjoy an intimate union with God, but an intimate union with fellow-members of His regime. The sum of the Law is to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This becomes possible among Christians, imperfectly, in their lives in the Christian ecclesia, assembly, ‘church’ on this earth, and will become our way of life perfectly in the world to come. “It is a truism that we become like the people with whom we live” because “the intimacy of life and love together has brought” us “to think, act, and react, as one.” As in the family, as in the city, so in the City of God—only more so and better so.

Union with Christ has three dimensions: an eternal dimension, inasmuch as God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world”; a covenantal and incarnational dimension, “since in his incarnation Christ was obedient as the second man and last Adam”; and an existential dimension, “since the Holy Spirit brings us into a real spiritual bonding with the risen and ascended Lord.” Although baptism is something we do in the sense of ‘going through the motions,’ it symbolizes what God has done for us, our baptism “into Jesus Christ”—rather like the formalizing of a resident alien’s citizenship or, to use Ferguson’s analogy, the naming of a child, who integrates the name into his own identity later on. In being “named for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” you join the family of God, the Kingdom of God. “As believers we possess an permanent and irreversible new citizenship.” As in all families and regimes, you will then be taught what it is to be a member. In this case, the Gospel amounts to a comprehensive citizenship lesson: “Thinking through the logic of the gospel corrects, cleanses, recalibrates, transforms, and sanctifies us emotionally as well as intellectually.” Your soul turns its attention away from the principles and habits of your former ‘family’ or ‘country,’ In entering the new regime you put aside the habits of mind and heart you once had. “How can we who died to sin still live in it? You cannot both have died to something and still be living in it. There is a law of non-contradiction: you cannot be in one and the same sense, at one and the same time, in both and the same realm, both dead and alive.” “This is gospel logic,” and the conclusion of the syllogism is that we have, in Paul’s words, “died to the reign, the dominion, the authority, and the rule of sin.” “We are no longer sin’s citizens” or, more accurately, its slaves. Christian freedom means freedom from sin, in Christ; as with any regime change, freedom from one regime entails entering another. Not all revolutions or regime changes are for the better, but in this case, “by nature we were in Adam, but now we are in Christ”—“transferred from Adam-Land to Christ-Land,” a substantial improvement. Baptism thus “means fellowship with the Trinity through union with Christ in his death and resurrection.”

Any regime requires a certain way of life. “Know your new identity,” your new family name, your new citizenship, “and it will determine how you live.” It is the responsibility of the Holy Spirit, and also of the human rulers of the Christian ecclesia, to teach that way of life through action or example and through rhetoric and logic. This will be necessary because (again like any regime) this one will face conflict, ‘civil’ and ‘foreign.’ “We are now involved in a Spirit-against-flesh war.” This war differs from the wars we fought in the previous regime. “We may have experienced inner conflict before we became Christ’s. But any conflict we experienced then with the flesh was in the flesh—instances of “simply battling with ourselves.” The rule of reason over thumos, the rule of reason-directed thumos over the appetites seen in (for example) Plato’s Republic, is a triumph of natural morality. But it isn’t Gospel morality. Paul maintains that “only if we live by the Spirit can we avoid gratifying the desires of the flesh”—philosophy, the love of wisdom, being a naturally better rule of flesh over flesh. “Flesh” means not only our bodies but our minds and hearts. We can defeat sin “only by refusing the desires of the flesh and simultaneously living in the power of the Spirit.” In this we model Jesus in His crucifixion (“the ultimate negativity”) and His resurrection (“the ultimate positivity”). When Augustine writes that Christians live as captives and strangers in the earthly city, he means we have become aliens to our former regime by rejecting its way of life, members of the regime of the Spirit. “I used to be a citizen of the first. I have become a citizens of the second.” To be sure, the “flesh” is still in you. It is impossible for a human being to emigrate from one country to another, or to undergo a change of regimes in his own country, without carrying with him some of the habits of mind and heart he absorbed when living that way of life of the old regime. You will always speak the new language with a trace of the old accent. But you can be progressively sanctified, be made more and more separate from the way of life of the old regime and more attuned to the way of life of the new regime.

Therefore, to advance in sanctification, to ‘naturalize’ ourselves in the new regime, the new citizen should ask himself: Does this thought, sentiment, action “enable me to overcome the influence of sin, not simply in my outward actions but in my inner motivations? Does it increase my trust in and love for the Lord Jesus Christ,” the Ruler of the new regime? Since sin’s “root cause is the worship of self,” how does a given thought, sentiment, or action turn my soul away from myself, and toward God? Ferguson calls attention to Paul’s command to “put away orgē,” usually translated as wrath but more precisely as exasperation or impatience.” “The root cause of impatience and exasperation lies in our response to the providence by which God superintends our lives,” a passion which “at its heart is a self-exaltation over others, and a dissatisfaction with the way God is ordering and orchestrating the events of our lives.” When Christ “comes by his Spirit to dwell in each of the members” of His regime, he gives them the authority to rule the passions, even the thoughts, that disoriented us in the past, and threaten to disorient us again. “Expulsion” of in and “infilling” of the Holy Spirit “must accompany each other” if sanctification is to occur.

The Gospel amounts to a sort of Declaration of Independence. “The Spirit does not bypass our minds and work directly on our emotions or affections” but instead “addresses our minds through the word of God, simply because we are created as rational, thinking beings. How and what we think determines how we feel, will, and live.” As with the Declaration of Independence, this means war, an “inevitable” war because, like the Americans of 1776-1781, “we have not yet been fully and finally delivered” from the grip of the tyrant. Like the Signers of the Declaration, we are personally responsible for acting on our declaration, enabled to resist by the Spirit but acting in self-defense. And we must will ourselves to fight. The reasons so to will are the rewards we will gain, justice, and gratitude. That is, we will gain the better way of life, forever; we will fulfil our obligations to the God Who created us; and we will acknowledge the sacrifice God made to redeem us. And ‘we’ is the correct term. The church is indeed an assembly, an association or fellowship. For all the French revolutionaries’ exaltation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, “where you deny the place and role of God the Father you cannot maintain the family concept beyond its genetic and nuclear context”; soon the Terror commenced, and so it has done in many subsequent, far worse, regimes that have purported to uphold communitarian principles.

All this talk of the Spirit and of God’s love might suggest that spirituality and agapic love, the powers that unite the new Christian regime, have displaced the laws of God detailed in the Torah. Ferguson rejects the sentimentality of love, even agapic love, unstructured by law. Hence the denigration of the ‘legalism’ many Christians charge against the Israelites, and often against modern Orthodox Jews, as well.

But “the role of the sanctification of the Christian cannot be quite as simplistic as a radical love or law antithesis might suggest.” As the ‘Old’ Testament makes clear, “love was always at the heart of God’s law,” which He gave “by love to be received in love and obeyed through love.” Although we now live in “an antinomian world in which the law of God is regarded as the enemy even if human laws are still necessary,” “Jesus himself teaches that if we love him we will keep his commandments.” Indeed “not only does love not abolish law, but law commands love,” as seen in the double command to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. “Love provide motivation for obedience, while law provides direction for love.” God wants his creatures to love Him, but not in any way they choose. He sets the terms and conditions of rightly-offered human love, whether it is directed toward Himself or toward human beings. He has also set conditions on His own love for us, as seen in His covenants.

Ferguson points to changes in God’s regime and therefore His laws. The law governing Adam and Eve differed from the law delivered to Moses, and both of these differed from the Noachide Commandments. Like all wise founders, God laid down laws suitable to the people for whom He legislated, living in the circumstances of their time and place. For example, “the Ten Commandments… expressed, largely in negative terms, what God originally willed I a positive way for Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden.” The law again “takes on a new context and shape after Pentecost—Jesus is now the model of obedience. Yet it is, in essence, one and the same law of God.” It aims at the human good as defined by the Creator of human beings, not as human beings define or misdefine the human good. After the Fall, “major distortions and malfunctions have affected our instincts.” “Were that hard-wiring totally destroyed we would cease to be distinctly human,” but “relics” or “fragments” of it remain, and all of God’s postlapsarian regimes, and all of His postlapsarian legal systems, build on that.

Jesus’ own life on earth showed “what perfect obedience to the law looks like.” “In him we see God’s law in human form.” Further, Jesus teaches ‘the spirit of the law’—its meaning. He condemns the scribes and Pharisees not for their legalism but for what Ferguson calls their “externalism,” their failure to understand and live by the law’s purpose. “By contrast,” Jesus “shows the spiritual significance of the law” insofar as it “deals with inward thoughts and not simply outward actions.” The law commands men not to commit adultery by their actions, but its intent, its spirit, is to rectify their minds and hearts, to curb their sexual passions.

With respect to the structure of the Mosaic law, Ferguson finds in it three divisions. The moral law, the Decalogue, “was foundational.” The Decalogue “was then applied to the life of the community in the land in civil legislation and a penal code.” Additionally, some of the laws were ceremonial, “directives given for the restoration to sinners of a way of access to and fellowship with God.” Because the Decalogue underlies the others, they alone were “spoken to the whole congregation”; they alone “were written on stone tablets”; they alone “were written by the finger of God”; and they alone were kept in the Ark of the Covenant. The civil laws, by contrast, were not directly written by God and were “to be kept while the people were ‘in the land'” of Israel. Unlike the moral laws, the civil and ceremonial laws “possessed no inbuilt permanence” but were “in place only until the coming of the promised Messiah.” It is of course the status of Jesus as Messiah, and as God, which divides Jews from Christians to this day. In maintaining that Jesus is Messiah, that Jesus is one person of the Trinity, Christians maintain that “the final sacrifice” has been made, thus abrogating the ceremonial law, and that the international ecclesia of the faithful has been founded, making the civil laws of ancient Israel no longer necessary. The law now exists “in the hearts of God’s people through the indwelling of the Spirit.”

With respect to “the moral dimensions of the law,” Jesus fulfilled them by obeying the law and “also by paying the penalty for our breach of it.” “The law-maker became the law-keeper, but then took our place and condemnation as though he were the law-breaker.” His death and resurrection fulfilled the law’s ceremonial dimension because Jesus acted as High Priest, “offering himself as the real sacrifice that would take away sins once for all.” There would subsequently be no need for repetitive sacrifices, except in the sense that Christians sacrifice not themselves but their sins in their Holy Spirit-guided and empowered efforts at sanctification, at aligning their hearts, minds, and actions with God’s regime. And finally, Jesus fulfilled the civil dimensions of the law by founding a kingdom “not limited by either geography or a distinct ethnicity.” “We can still learn important principles from the way in which the Decalogue was applied in the sphere of civil law, but we are no longer ethnic Israel.” The Christian equivalent of the exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land is the exodus from the human regimes, ‘the world,’ to God’s regime, His ecclesia. Ferguson quotes the Book of Jeremiah 31:31-34 as the prefiguration of this: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”

Sanctification therefore means the imitatio Christi. All regimes aim at some conception of ‘the good’ for those who live within it. Paul “defines ‘good’ in terms of God,” saying “that the ultimate ‘good’ towards which all things work together is our conformity to Christ.” As Ferguson puts it, “only those who are like him will be able to see him as he is”; “only what is Christlike can survive in his presence.” This regime end or purpose and the means by which the laws of God direct us to reach it draw “a demarcation line between Christians and non-Christians”—not the physical borderline seen on maps and enforced by armed guards and walls but a spiritual borderline that may or may not be respected by ordinary ‘worldly’ regimes in their dealings with Christians.

Why does God love us enough to grant grace to us? After all, we aren’t all that loveable. “God does everything for his own glory.” This makes sense if it means that God requires the beings He has created and redeemed to glorify Him. This is the basis of man’s agapic love for God as a command, as a law. In describing the way God’s love for man works in this world, Ferguson carefully translates the phrase in Romans 8:28, panta sunergei eis agathon. Translators often render this, “All things work for good.” Looking at the context of the passage in the argument Paul is making in chapter 8, Ferguson prefers the meaning, He works all things for the good. “God himself is the worker, perhaps more specifically the Holy Spirit whose ministry Paul has been particularly expounding in the preceding verses.” This is the holy God, not the immanent Absolute Spirit of Hegel. His human creatures are sanctified or made more nearly like Him by the working of the Holy Spirit, “the executive of the Trinity.” “Likeness to Christ”—in suffering, death, and resurrection—”is the ultimate goal of sanctification. It is holiness. It is therefore also the ultimate fruit of being devoted to God.”

 

Hujjat al-Islam Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazali Tusi: On Knowing Yourself and God. Muhammad Nur Abdus Salam translation. Great Books of the Islamic World, 2010 [2002].

 

Born in Tus, Persia around 1056, al-Ghazali saw several regimes and nations, living in Baghdad in the 1080s, then Damascus beyond the turn of the century, before returning to his native town of Tus in 1106, five years before his death. Some accounts claim he also visited Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina. Sufi Islam often finds itself classified as a form of mysticism, but al-Ghazali—frequently cited as a major contributor to the development of that sect—uses no such term. Why is Sufism nonetheless so classified, and is the classification correct? How does Sufism differ from other forms of Islam, according to a leading Sufi or proto-Sufi?

Given his travels, al-Ghazzali had firsthand knowledge of the ways of life followed by several of those forms. He had the foundation for being what we would call a ‘comparativist,’ no hidebound dweller within one religio-political regime.

A Sunni not a Shi’ite (as most contemporary Iranians are) Al-Ghazali is also associated with the Asharite school of Islam, which points to the authority of clerical interpretation of the Qu’ran, as distinguished from the Mu’tazillite school, with its emphasis on logical analysis of that scripture. To what extent does al-Ghazali reject ratiocination, thus further contributing to the reputation of Sufism as a form of mysticism?

This book contains two of al-Ghazali’s writings, one on human nature (The Alchemy of Happiness), one on God (On Knowing God). Al-Ghazali emphasizes the exoteric character of these works, identifying places at which he deliberately fails to elaborate or deepen his argument. His orientation thus shares at least one quality commonly associated with mysticism, namely, the protection of a secret teaching. In explicitly pointing to the existence of such a teaching, he evidently intends to whet the appetite of at least some readers to undertake the effort of discovering them.

Al-Ghazali divides The Alchemy of Happiness into eighteen sections. He begins by indicating that this work is a prolegomena to On Knowing God. “The key to the knowledge of God” is self-knowledge because it is the key to all knowledge: “There is nothing closer to you than you. If you do not know yourself, how can you know anything else?” In this Socratic task seven questions arise:

1. “What sort of thing are you?” What is your nature insofar as you can be ‘classified’ within the natural order?
2. “Where did you come from?” What is your origin or genetic cause?
3. “Where are you going?” Where will your current path, your current way of life, take you?
4. “Why have you come to this stopping place?” What is the reason you have now paused to reflect on yourself, and more broadly to seek knowledge?
5. “For what purpose were you created?” What is your natural telos? This will provide a standard by which you can judge your way of life.
6. “What is your happiness and in what does it lie?”
7. “What is your misery and in what does that lie?”

The fourth, central question forms a sort of hinge in the overall structure of the list, which moves from the ‘given’ to incentives for action, change. The question asking you to classify yourself requires self-examination. Self-examination will show you that four “attributes” exist “inside you”: those of beasts of burden; those of predatory animals; those of demons; those of angels. Beasts of burden find their “nourishment and happiness” in “eating, sleeping, and copulating.” Predators find their “nourishment and happiness” in “giving free rein to tearing apart, killing, and rage.” Demons by nature encourage “evil, treachery, and deceit.” Angels “find their nourishment and their happiness in the contemplation of the Divine Presence.”

Given the decidedly mixed nature my self-examination reveals, what then? Al-Ghazali distinguishes the “external form” of a human being, its body, from the “internal spirit,” “vital principle” (jan), soul (nafs), or heart (dil). Among these terms, he chooses “heart,” which is very often the term seen in the Old Testament. The heart is “not the lump of flesh which is found in the left side of the chest,” which is visible and can be seen in many beasts, as well as the dead. With Augustinian language, he maintains that “the true nature of the heart is not of this world”; “it has come into this world as a stranger and a wayfarer.” It nonetheless rules the body as its rightful monarch, as it alone among the human attributes can know God and witness “the beauty of His Presence.” It is the attribute that distinguishes human beings from beasts.

How to cultivate this distinctively human trait? “If a person closes his eyes and forgets about his body and forgets the heavens and the earth and all else that the external eye can see, he will come to know his own existence out of necessity and become aware of himself, even though he is unaware of his form and the earth and the sky and all that is in them.” In performing what we today might call a thought-experiment, he will “perceive that his physical shape will be taken away from him, yet he will remain in place and not be annihilated.” There is something about ‘me’ that can be so-to-speak abstracted from my body and all bodily surroundings. That something is the core of my nature.

This leads me to the discovery of two “worlds.” The “world of creation” is subject to “linear measurement, amount, and quantity.” “The root meaning of ‘creation’ is ‘calculation, estimation.'” But the “world of command,” the human spirit, “has no amount or quantity, and for this reason cannot be divided.” It is creative, partaking of the world of creation by commanding it. It is “the essence of a person, and all form is subject to it.” “Its true nature is very difficult to comprehend,” and “it is not permissible to expand upon this.” Here the esoteric teaching would begin, but esoteric teachings by definition do not get committed to writing in any explicit way. Al-Ghazali will give some hints, however, later on.

What can be elaborated upon is the heart/spirit’s status as “the monarch of the body.” The heart’s “work is the seeking of happiness; and its happiness is in the gnosis (marifat) of God Most High.” “It acquires this knowledge of God Most High through the knowledge of His handiwork, and this is the totality of the universe.” The human senses are the initial means of such knowledge. “Knowledge is [the heart’s] prey; the senses are its net.” That is why human beings need their bodies, as the senses are bodily. Once the net captures the elements of nature, the internal powers of perception go to work on them. Just as there are five senses, so there are five such internal or heart-powers: imagination, thought, memory, recall, and conjecture. Taken together, these are the ten “armies” at the command of the heart.

Al-Ghazali elaborates on the metaphor of human nature as a regime, to be classified as a kingdom. The body is the “nation”; lust is the “tax collector”; anger is the “policeman”; reason is the king’s “chief minister”; the heart is the “king.” Al-Ghazali doesn’t like tax collectors any more than you do: bodily appetite or lust “is a liar, a babbler, and a confuser,” “always desir[ing] to confiscate whatever wealth there is in the kingdom under the pretext of taxation.” He doesn’t like cops, either. Anger, “the policeman of the state,” is “wicked and very hot-tempered”; “it always loves killing, breaking, and overthrowing.” The only defense against these malefactors is the king, who must “always… consult the minister of reason,” ignoring the corrupt blandishments of the tax collector and “tightly” controlling the policeman. If the king governs with reason, “the kingdom will be well-ordered.”

If the “kingdom” that is the individual human being is well-ordered, the passions of lust and anger serve the body by nourishing and defending it; the body exists to “bear the senses,” to be their servant; the senses serve “for the intelligence-gathering of reason,” “spies” for the king’s minister; reason then advises the king, which is the spirit of command or, as we ‘moderns’ would say, the will, which issues commands. “Reason has been created for the heart, to be its candle and lamp. By its light, the heart may see the Divine Presence which is its Paradise.” In so seeing, the heart “becomes the slave and servant of the Divine Presence.” Al-Ghazali quotes God as reported by the Quran: “I created the jinn [angels] and mankind only that they might worship Me.” That is, the human will, the ‘king’ of the human person, serves as the commanding executive of God’s commands.

How do the other internal powers of perception fit in? Imagination serves as a postmaster, collecting the ‘mail’ or impressions the senses bring in. Memory is the “mailbag and repository” for these impressions. “At the appropriate time, the information will be presented to Minister Reason,” who “will arrange [the kingdom’s] affairs and the journeys of the king,” “tak[ing] the necessary steps if he finds that one of the armies, such as lust or anger… is in rebellion against the king, and has acted in disobedience, intending to kill him” and to usurp the rule of the human being’s rightful monarch, itself the rightful slave of the King of kings.

In dealing with such rebellions, “the minister does not seek to kill the rebel.” The kingdom cannot be ruled without tax collectors and policemen. “Instead, he arranges to bring the rebel back within the boundaries of obedience,” to tame him, make him a friend; thus the former rebel “will receive a robe of honor in due time.” On the Day of Resurrection, all the qualities of each individual human being “will be revealed, and their forms will correspond to their natures.” Souls ruled by bodily desires will be revealed as pigs, as “impure” men; predators as wolves, “tyrannical” men. “Form follows nature, so that every one is seen in the same form that is inside him.” Shifting his metaphor, al-Ghazali compares the heart to a mirror, whereon “repugnant traits are like smoke and darkness,” preventing any reflection of the Divine presence.” If kept clean, however, the heart is “a shining mirror the displays the whole universe,” from whose order one intuits the presence of God.

In all of this, it is easy to see why many Muslims view the Sufi with suspicion. It isn’t that Sufis are mystics in the sense of being hazy-minded navel-gazers, hippies avant la lettre. It is that they resemble Platonic philosophers, albeit in Quranic apparel. Perhaps to forestall such accusations, al-Ghazali adopts a more emphatically ‘religious’ tone in his central and subsequent chapters.

He begins by addressing his question respecting the origin of the human being. After all, “How do we know that [man] has been created for angelicness and the moral nature [of the angels], so that he may acquire that, and not for the other [non-angelic] traits?” “Some”—the Hugh Hefners among us—”suppose that man has been created for eating, sleeping, copulating and taking pleasure.” Others, “like the Arabs, the Kurds, and the Turks”—here the Persian al-Ghazali’s ‘comparativist’ knowledge acquired in his travels comes in—”suppose that man was created for dominion, violence, and conquest.” “Both groups are in error” because carnal appetites are not distinctively human, and indeed man isn’t as good at satisfying them as some animals: “A camel can eat more than a man, and the copulation of sparrows is more frequent than that of mankind. So, how are humans superior to them” in that respect. And many animal species are more voracious and efficient predators than we humans are. Notice that al-Ghazali appeals not only to the philosophic mind, which intends to classify the elements of nature so as better to understand it. He also appeals to the political mind, interested in rule, in justifying a claim to rule founded upon some natural superiority. Sufism isn’t necessarily any more apolitical than it is mystical.

“The true nature of a human being is that his perfection and his nobility lie within him.” This sounds like Plato or Aristotle. But al-Ghazali adds a religious promise: “When he dies, neither anger nor lust remains. Either a bright, gleaming essence, adorned with the spiritual knowledge or gnosis of God Most High in the form of an angel” will be his now-revealed nature, or he will be “dark, gloomy with head bowed in shame,” gloomy because tarnished by sin and ashamed because he hasn’t lived up to what he could have been. The shameful soul “will be with Satan in Sijjin,” Hell.

Further tying his doctrine to a form of religiosity, al-Ghazali asserts that the “nobility” of the heart has two “degrees”: knowledge and power. Knowledge is also divided into two degrees: what the mass of mankind can know and what can be known only by the few. What can be known by the few has two degrees: dreaming and the inner voice of inspiration—both non-sensual. Non-sensual dreams are similar to the thoughts derived from the meditative practices al-Ghazali mentioned earlier, abstracting the heart from all bodily and worldly forms. He now adds another element to those meditative practices. More than only closing your eyes and “suspending the work of sensory organs,” the Sufi will call out to God (“Allah! Allah!”) “with the heart and not the tongue until one is unaware of one’s self and has no report of the entire world or of anything save God Most high; if it is thus, then the window of the heart will open even though one be awake and one will see while awake what others see in sleep,” namely, “the kingdoms of the earth and the heavens,” as revealed by “the prophets.” “Do not concern yourself with the arrangements of this world, for He will manage your affairs Himself,” acting as your “Protector.” “The way,” the regime, “of the saints is this, and it is the way of prophethood.” The scholar’s way of acquiring knowledge by learning is also “great,” but “it is trivial in comparison with the knowledge of the prophets and saints which came to their hearts from the Divine Presence without an intermediary or the instruction of human beings.” The prophet also differs from the saint. Both achieve gnosis of God, but the prophet is a messenger, one who takes God’s Word to others, whereas the saint does not, either because “when the Religious Law is new there is no need for another kind of invitation, or because public propagation of the faith needs certain qualities that the saint may not possess.”

But what about the “creative” dimension of the heart? Al-Ghazali explains that knowledge of God endows the prophet with “the power to subject some of the physical bodies of the world to itself”—to effect what are called “miracles,” contraventions of ordinary natural laws. “Some spirits—nobler and stronger, nearer to and more resembling the angelic essence—[are] obeyed by other bodies external to it so that should his awe affect a lion, it will become abject and obey him.” On the other side, “what is called ‘the evil eye’ and that which is called ‘sorcery’ are of this kind and are the effects of a person’s spirit on the bodies of others.” Persons with such powers have connected their hearts with the demonic powers. Weaker versions of such extraordinary powers for good or evil may be seen in everyday life, in what we now call ‘psychosomatic’ effects, as “when a sick person acquires hope [and improves],” or “when a sound person becomes anxious, [and] falls ill.”

A prophet, then, has three qualities: the knowledge others achieve in a dream state, when their bodies and bodily passions are passive, the prophet attains while awake; the prophet’s heart affects the bodies of others; he knows in his heart what others know by learning. It is in this that al-Ghazali’s Sufism invites the term ‘mysticism.’ Although rational, its rationality seems to be a matter of pure noesis. There is no suggestion that the prophet or the saint arrives at this noesis by the way of logical argument, of thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Indeed, “no truth has been disclosed to a person who learns the way of disputation in defense of belief.” A philosopher would concur in this judgment, if by disputation al-Ghazali means the sort of argumentation often heard in law courts or in political disputes—rhetoric in the pejorative sense of the work, polemic. A philosopher would balk if al-Ghazali means by disputation any argumentation at all.

That he cannot simply reject any rational argumentation at all may be seen in his more-or-less Aristotelian account of human happiness: “The pleasure of everything lies in that it is required by one’s nature.” As a Muslim, he of course goes beyond Aristotle by asserting, “no spectacle can be more pleasurable than the spectacle of the Divine Presence, and that is according to the demand of the spirit’s nature.” That is, he goes beyond Aristotle insofar as he understands the Divine Presence to be the Allah invoked in the Qu’ran rather than the Good posited by Aristotle. Al-Ghazali also upholds the doctrine of the immortality of the spirit of the individual human being more insistently than Aristotle does.

Al-Ghazali concludes with an argument anticipating that of Thomas Aquinas, finding in the design of the human being a sort of proof of God’s existence. (In this, it should be noted, he plays the scholar, not the prophet or the saint.) First, from “a droplet of fluid,” semen, a person develops. “There is no work in the world more wonderful than this”; resurrection after death “will be [much] easier!” Second, what being other than an all-knowing one could do such a thing? Finally, we learn from this act of creation that God’s “Grace, Mercy, and Care for His servants is limitless,” as body has exactly the parts it needs to live and function and more, “that which was not needed or necessary, but would improve [man’s] appearance,” “such as the blackness of the hair, the redness of the lips, the arch of the eyebrows, a straight posture.” And all of these physical attributes “are trivial in comparison with the knowledge of the heart.” If man “throws the alchemy of happiness upon the essence of the heart, he will travel from the degree of the beasts to the degree of the angels.”

In On Knowing God” al-Ghazali again indicates the esoteric character of his teaching on the heart. “It has two aspects”: one “more obscure,” which “cannot be explained to ordinary folks, or is telling it [to them] proper”; the other understandable “by everyone.” “A person knows from his own essence the existence of the essence of God, may He be praised and glorified!” He knows this because man couldn’t create one hair on his head, and this points to the existence of an intelligent creator. What Thomas calls the argument from design is an exoteric argument. God is the perfect version of our lesser, imperfect natures, which parallel but in no way approach His nature. And just as a person may come to know God by knowing himself (as argued in The Alchemy of Happiness) so he can know himself, his own “ineffability and inscrutability,” from “the ineffability and inscrutability of God.”

This leads to another instance of al-Ghazali’s much-favored arguments from analogy. Just as your heart rules your body and its passions through the “tenuous substance [that] physicians call ‘spirit,’ [which] carries the powers of perception and motion,” so God’s Will rules the universe. The natural scientist and the astrologer understand the universe through physical observations and measurements; this gives them correct but incomplete knowledge of Being. This may be why al-Ghazali distrusts disputation, whereby each participant “may have spoken the truth from one aspect of the truth, but they see some part and suppose that they have seen all.” Only “the ocean of knowledge of prophethood… encompasses all sides of the kingdom and all the agents, captains, and servants of the Lord.”

Those who appreciate the comprehensiveness of God’s wisdom, if only through trust in the prophets and arguments via analogy to human experience of the human soul, will readily glorify God. Al-Ghazali discusses four statements whereby a Muslim will glorify Him. These statements are not expressions of mere sentiment but, taken together, convey “knowledge of the Divine.”

The first is “Glory be to God.” It signifies the “absolute incomparability” of God contrasted with the partial “incomparability” of man. God, man, angels (and presumably fallen angels, demons) have heart, spirit, unlike all other beings. Human incomparability is only partial because human beings also have a physical nature, shared with animals.

The second statement is “Praise be to God.” It signifies that “your sovereignty is a particle of His sovereignty, that all causes and means are in its service as in a pen in the hands of a scribe.” Hence all praise and gratitude are rightly directed toward God, “as there is no benefactor other than He.”

Third, “There is no god but God.” It signifies that “there is no one other than He to command His own secret.” No form of polytheism is acceptable, and of course Muslims reject the Christian Trinity, the teaching that God has three ‘Persons,’ all of Whom partake in His knowledge and power. “No one knows God perfectly and truly save Himself.”

Finally, “God is greater.” This doesn’t mean that there is some scale of measurement by which God’s superiority can be weighed. “There is nothing with Him for Him to be greater than. All existing things exist through the light of His existence.” “He is greater than anything by which man can know Him by logical analogy.” This means that al-Ghazali’s can intend his arguments-by-analogy only as “illustrations,” not as real arguments. “All of these are illustrations so that a person, in accordance with human weakness, might in fact comprehend something of the beauty of the Divine Presence.” And even this level of comprehension can only be hinted at, here. “An explanation of the knowledge of God Most High is lengthy and cannot be put in a book like this as it would not be satisfying.” It must be experienced directly; “a person’s [spiritual] happiness is in gnosis and in the service to and worship of Him.”

To achieve this gnosis, which will impel the individual to such service and worship, there are two possible ways of proceeding. One is “through his own reasoning, desire, and independent judgment.” It is “impossible” to know God that way “because his desire will master him and always conceal the way to God from him. Whatever he desires will appear in the image of correctness.” The other way is “through another.” That s the right way. “But just anyone is not fit for this,” only “the wisest of people,” namely, the prophets. The Religious Law or Sharia enunciated by the prophets shows how right service and worship are to be undertaken. All else is transgression. As the Quran teaches, “He who transgresses God’s limit, verily he wrongs his soul.”

Al-Ghazali calls the transgressors “libertines.” Their ignorance takes seven forms. Some believe in no God at all. Seeking God “in the treasury of imagination and whim,” they fail to find Him, consequently looking to “the stars and physical nature” for guidance, in the manner of astrologers and some philosophers. Some believe in no afterlife, supposing that death is the end of human life, as it is for plants and animals. Others believe in God and the afterlife, but weakly. They are ignorant of Religious Law. Such ignorance weakens their souls because their failure to achieve the “gnosis and abstention from sin” that lead to “a sound heart,” one strong enough to deserve salvation.

Some know the Religious Law but doubt its effectiveness, claiming that it does not cleanse the heart of sin. These might be some Christians, who deprecate the Law in a misguided attempt to exalt spirituality. But the Religious Law “was enjoined [upon us] to control anger and lust or carnal passion, and to hold them in check so that they do not overcome the Law and reason.” We will likely still commit “minor sins,” which God can forgive, but obedience to the Law will guide us away from the major sins. Human beings are not free of lust and anger; they control their lust, and forgive those with whom they are angered.

Some do not know God’s attributes. They suppose that because God is merciful He will not punish libertines harshly. Eventually, they will learn otherwise. Some are ignorant “of their own pride.” They believe that they have overcome their sins. But only God is perfect. Indeed, He has no sins to overcome. Finally, there are those who know God and His Law but remain self-righteous, denying that their immoral behavior is immoral. “Dealing with such people is done better by the sword than by the argument of reason,” as they have already, as we now say, ‘rationalized’ their own conduct and passions.

In both of these works, al-Ghazali effectively identifies reason with revelation, not with thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction—or at least not primarily so. He centers his readers’ attention on noesis, not so much reasoning itself. Reasoning unassisted by Quranic study will fail to achieve noetic apprehension of God. His figure of the will, not reason, as the sovereign, and of the will as minister or adviser to the will, could easily lead to the assumption that he is a proto-Nietzschean of sorts, that even God is primarily the supreme Will and not the supreme Logos. This remains ambiguous, however, because the Will of God does, and the will of man should, listen to reason and be guided by it. The will is sovereign in the sense that it makes the decision, but it evidently can choose whether it follows reason, thumos, or appetite. For human beings, ‘reason’ means preeminently gnosis of God and His Law. What does Reason mean for God? Does God’s Reason submit itself to God’s Will, to some kind of creative Will to Power? But why would an omnipotent Being aim at more power? How could He, given His omnipotence? Or are God’s Reason and Will one? And His Law the expression of that perfect combination of His Will and His Reason? As al-Ghazali might say, these are questions beyond the scope of this book.

Much of the reasoning al-Ghazali does undertake is fairly loose, consisting mostly in analogies based on introspection. His emphasis on introspection is likely what has gained Sufism the reputation as a form of mysticism—this, along with his emphasis on meditation, staying still—its downplaying of action. This is a matter of degree, however. He ends with an adjuration to take forceful action (to the point of death) against some libertines. As for the principle of non-contradiction, it too has its place in al-Ghazali’s thought, as seen in his overall critique of the libertines, which depends upon seeing the contradiction between their beliefs and conduct and the beliefs and conduct of those who follow the Religious Law.

Abraham Lincoln found in the natural-right principles of the Declaration of Independence the moral foundation of the American Union, worth of defending. Any regime needs some purpose to hold it together, else why found a regime at all?

What, then, is the foundation of God’s regime, according to Christianity? Obviously, God is, understood Christianly as the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But how does God want his consenting subjects to understand their union under Him, with one another, in their ‘called out’ assembly, their church? The Apostle Paul addresses this question in his Epistle to the Colossians, chapter 3, verses 1-17.

Paul begins by lifting the Colossians’ sights to “those things that are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.” The Ruler of the Christian regime lives above not only human regimes, but above any intermediary beings such as angels, of which the Colossians reportedly were making much. “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” This is the command Machiavelli and his followers have persistently attempted to reverse, charging Christians with dangerous neglect of their own lives here, of politics on earth. But Christians, Paul insists, should be ‘dead’ to the earth; “your life is hid with Christ in God.” When Christ returns to earth, He will return as its ruler, and “then shall you also appear with him in glory.”

Being ‘dead’ on earth has a rational dimension, then, in the sense that Paul tells Christians to shift their attention to the true Ruler and the true ruling structure of ‘Being.’ But life-in-death also has a moral-psychological dimension. “Mortify”—literally “deaden”—”your members, which are upon the earth; fornication [the root word is the same as that for prostitution], uncleanness, inordinate affection [emotion or pathos], evil concupiscence [desire], and covetousness [“wanting more’], which is idolatry.” These are the elements of the soul Plato’s Socrates classifies generally under bodily desires, powerful but low. Reason or logos rightly rules them, and in Christianity Jesus himself is the Logos. Indeed, the reason to deaden the body’s “members” is to avoid the indignation of God, which “comes upon the children of stubbornness—literally “unpersuadableness.” To be unpersuadable is to refuse to listen to reason, to authoritative, contradiction-free logos, which is both a natural characteristic of human beings but, in its perfect, ‘clean’ form, embodied in the Logos, or Christ, ruling at God the Father’s “right hand.” Unchecked, the bodily desires render the soul stubborn, turn reasoning into rationalization.

You have “walked some time” with these desires, “liv[ing] in them.” “But now you also put off all these”—the image is taking off a garment—namely, indignation, fury [thumon, derived from thumos or spiritedness], malice, calumny, and obscenity.” To leave the walk-way or regime of the desires means more than to get rid of the desires themselves; it also means to abandon rule of the desires when they are fortified by another element of the soul, as Socrates describes it: spiritedness. In order really to rule, the desires must enter an alliance with the stronger passions, the passions that generate self-assertion, the desire for dominance. Souls gripped by the alliance of desires with spiritedness will generate logoi or words, speech, consisting of calumny and obscenity—calumny, because they desire to dominate others by defaming them; obscenity, because they express the low or bodily desires in the most spirited, angry way.

Such souls will also seek to deceive others in order to satisfy their desires. “Lie not one to another, seeing that you have put off the old man”—the thumoerotic soul, the soul of the postlapserian Adam—”with his deeds”—typically violent, domineering, acts that would override reasoning souls. Rather, “put on” (again, as one would a garment) the “new man,” who is “renewed in knowledge”—more literally, “re-cognized”—”after the image of him that created him.” Since God created man in his “image,” in reorienting himself to his Creator man is turning away from his corrupted nature, back to his reasoning, logical, logos-nature, made by God in imitation of himself, the Logos. 

This means re-entering God’s regime, because God did not make Adam a Greek, a Jew, a barbarian, a Scythian, a slave or a citizen. God’s regime, seen in His assembly, ‘called out’ from the regimes of this world, “neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” Christ is all, in the sense that He is the supreme object of the attention of renewed minds, by virtue of now being in all of those minds. Holy—separated, cleansed, transcendent—spirituality replaces spiritedness because God as Creator is separate from his creations. To renew our relationship with God is to partake, in some limited way, in that separation from the regimes of the world and our corrupted flesh with its thumoerotic passions, and then to unite with one another under His rule in His regime. “Put on, therefore, as the elect [the chosen] of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humility of mind, meekness, patience.” “Love” here means agapic love, the will to the good of the other person, from which those virtues flow. The old man is vengeful, not merciful, cruel, prideful of mind in rejecting logos and the Logos, self-assertive, and resentful. Christians forbear one another, forgive one another precisely because agapic love wants not to exact revenge but to help the other person achieve the good. Concretely, “If any man have a quarrel with against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do you.” Had Christ not forgiven you, you could not re-cognize Him, and therefore could not fulfill your God-given capacity to fulfill your nature as a rational person. Re-establishing the bond with Christ enables you to re-unite with others because you, like Him, are reanimated (literally re-souled) with the agapic love with which you were created and forgiven, the love that makes re-union as human, not as Greek, Jew, barbarian, Scythian, slave, citizen, both real and lasting.

“And above all these things put on”—again, the garment-image—”agape, which is the bond of perfectness.” The word translated as perfectness derives from telos, meaning the end of purpose of a thing. Human beings are ‘perfected,’ they achieve the purpose of the nature God intended them to have, in loving ‘agapically.’ This doesn’t mean they no longer experience thumoerotic desire or sin, but that through accepting the rule of Christ within their souls they become more nearly free from that desire, more fit to unify within their assembly, called out by the logoi, the words, of the Logos. That this is and must be a regime becomes clear in the following sentence: “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also you are called in one body; and be you thankful.” Agapic love ends or at least mitigates strife when it rules and forms the foundation of the unified ‘polis’ or assembly of subjects grateful to God for their liberation from the bondage and strife animating souls once ruled by thumoerotic desire.

Paul then returns to the mind, a mind now aligned with God, having re-cognized Him. “And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.” Although Jesus commends wisdom in its practical form, phronēsis, to His disciples, here Paul commends wisdom in its higher form, sophia. A philosopher by definition loves sophia, but a Christian has found it in the logos of the Logos. This is why Paul elsewhere derides philosophers as seeking wisdom but never finding it. Without the agapic love of God, a Person, the love of wisdom understood impersonally as ‘theory’ or comprehension of nature will never find the source of nature, its Creator. And without the agapic love of God for his human creations, that ‘way,’ that path to wisdom would be blocked. Why songs instead of dialectical conversations? Probably because songs are right for assemblies of men; dialogues are for pairs, or small groups. Homer’s songs united Greeks; David’s songs united Israelites; Christian songs unite Christians. Among His disciples, Jesus dialogued and more often ‘monologued,’ but never sang. The words of Christian songs present the doctrines of Christianity to the minds of Christians assembled, in their ‘political’ condition. They open each mind to the meaning of God’s word, although some may advance farther into the meaning of those words than others, and so make better teachers—like Paul.

“And whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father through Him.” Gratitude to the Creator-God is owed to Him by those He created, inasmuch as he fashioned their original parents after His image. His Son, who ‘died for our sins,’ is now the indispensable mediator between Creator and created because that obedient “mortification” or “deadening” of God’s Son in atonement for the human refusal of God’s regime shows the path back to the path, way, regime of God, a way followed in words and acts alike. Hence “through Him.”