PRODUCCIÓN NARRATIVA

In the garden, God could have been grasped ‘‘in the things that have been made,’’ and having been grasped there would indeed have been a loving heavenly Father who gives all that is needed for life. Had Adam and Eve not been revolted by being creatures of a Creator, we would know God today in the peach, and so we would also be divinely known by eating the peach, but we did not want him there. We wanted God ‘‘above,’’ which is a metaphor for in himself, without his words, in the purest form of mathematical law, and thus the Fall is ‘‘upward,’’ not downward into sin. Sin in its original, and only, form eschews God’s word/things and pursues idols instead. In its briefest form sin is seeking to have God with-out a preacher, and so to have God immediately, apart from created things. So God is sought where he does not want to be found, and is not found in the created things he gives for life: ‘‘When a greedy man, who worships his belly, hears that ‘man does not live by

bread alone . . .’ he eats the bread but fails to see God in the bread;

for he sees, admires, and adores only the mask.’’¹⁷ That is where Stoics end up, after all, with the grandiose natural theology in the grand, ecumenical, catholic law (nomos) by following the inner eye (looking through created things as through a mirror, and upward to the divinity beyond the world). The Stoics found the law in nature, which they believed drew God, cosmos, and self together in one ‘‘ecumenical’’ whole.¹⁸ However, the attempt to see through things to the higher power of God fails to transcend creation and gain access to the mind of God; instead it pulls God down into idols made of images of things: ‘‘analogies of mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles’’ (Romans 1:23 translation altered). Seeking to transcend through created things, Greeks only succeeded in making perfectly good, earthly things like wood or stone into idols shaped to look like a created thing—by analogy. They made an image of the peach rather than eating it. Then they tried to secure themselves against anthropomorphism (lest they be the creators of God) by distancing God from created things. They thought that ‘‘to give God his due’’ meant to elevate God beyond time and space. If we failed to find him in the peach, perhaps he wants us to search for him outside all created things in highest heaven? So even Jews in Diaspora like Philo learned to approach God this way: ‘‘they have advanced from down to up by a sort of heavenly ladder and by a reasonable calculation happily inferred the creator from his works.’’¹⁹ Created things became a ladder to the distant God. Yet, God is not thanked and worshiped by pro-jecting him infinitely above creation and so as ‘‘wholly other,’’ as we find in those anagogical Lutherans of the twentieth century like Gogarten (1887–1968) and Bultmann—along with Karl Barth—who tried to follow a line from Soren Kierkegaard in this matter.

But certainly the other side of idolatry is also untenable. God is in the things, true enough, but when you make images of the things and then try to use this abstraction as worthy of the glory that belongs to God alone, you have withdrawn God from being-in-the-thing, and now dwell in a symbolic world separate from God and his creation at the same time. We could say that once we refused God-in-things-for-us (Creator) one could either become a negative idolater that infinitely separates God and creation, or

a positive one that tries to get back into God’s good graces by manipulating the created things as a sorcerer. Luther was attuned to the demonic magic that attracts religious people to use things as symbols of God. He warns of this in the Small Catechism:

‘‘You are not to misuse the name of your God. What is this?

Answer: We are to fear and love God, so that we do not curse, swear, practice magic, lie, or deceive using God’s name, but instead use that very name in every time of need to call on, pray to, praise, and give thanks to God.’’²⁰ This is one reason why Luther refused sacrifice in worship, even in the form of the historical, eucharistic prayer (canon of the mass). Sacrifice and idolatry misuse created things as if their priests are vicars (stand-ins) that can present an appeasing victim, burned up for the sake of an absent God to assuage his wrath, but God intended to make the gifts to creatures in daily life, not the reverse.

Paul says they have ‘‘exchanged’’ the truth for a lie. Idolatry is an ‘‘exchange’’ or commerce that takes the things God made for intercourse with his creatures, and turns those ‘‘things’’ into images.

Images are imagined to be ‘‘seen’’ by an inner eye, not heard, and are used by creatures as the means of escaping communication with God by communing only with themselves. The external business that should be transacted between Creator and creature has become an inner business, and is no more than a personal Ponzi scheme. God’s true business is communication. From the beginning God has sought communication through his words that make things for the creature’s own benefit. The garden of Eden was bent entirely toward humans so that all creation served them and all communication was with their Creator—which Paul calls ‘‘God’s glory.’’ The true exchange begins with God making a thing by speaking it to his Man and Woman and hearing back the thanks and praise that makes for true worship. True worship is to receive all that is necessary from God, who withholds nothing—

even communicating his own self in the intercourse of the divine words as gifts—and humans having their mouths opened to speak the glory of God’s words in praise of this glory. This ‘‘dialogical’’

worship (true communion in words) that makes created things perfectly suited to the need and delight of the Man and Woman—

was exorcised in the world of shamans and magicians as if it were a demon: ‘‘they did not honor him or given him thanks’’

(Romans 1:21 NRS). God’s communion through the things of creation was treated like an evil spirit, sucked out, so that the word was given up for images, glory for darkness, truth for a lie, and wisdom for foolishness. God’s words were exchanged for images, and images emptied things of God in order to make an idol that told the maker God was not there, but could be sought and pla-cated elsewhere. Seeing with the inner eye then replaced hearing by faith and their stupid minds became clouded with darkness.

Now, what happens to idolaters in the real world?

Three times Paul repeats that God ‘‘gives up,’’ or ‘‘hands over’’

idolaters to their own fantasized idol (1:24, 26, 28). God gives his Spirit, and withdraws it as he desires. When he withdraws his Spirit, he hands over his creatures to the enemy, betraying them into exactly what they want—God hands them over to their own desires. Lutherans resist spiritualizing nature on this account; they do not look for the inner light; they do not seek a remaining image that can serve as a starting point to participate in the divine;

they do not ‘‘make themselves a gracious God,’’ as they imagine and desire their God to be.²¹ Any attempt to spiritualize nature ends up in destruction of creation. Not wanting their Creator, humans now meet their Judge instead. Rather than finding the world a friendly place, a garden, the world has become a minefield of forensic judgments. Created things are then ‘‘used’’ by a will desperately seeking to escape God’s judgment. Luther liked the distinction Augustine brought to theology between what ought to be ‘‘used’’ (and so is beneath us), and what is to be ‘‘enjoyed’’

(and is above us). When these are confused they are no longer gifts for creaturely life, but rungs on a ladder—or merely picture windows through which we look longing for a return of the dis-tant Creator. For this reason, ‘‘God gave them up . . .’’ (or ‘handed them over’ Romans 1:24 NRS). Let me make this clear: someone who hands you over is called a “traitor,” and so God has become the sinner’s Traitor.

Once God withdraws his Spirit, people without a preacher are left to trust images rather than divine words. Thus, the ungodly treat words as secondary to sight and humans become deaf to God altogether. Still the original impulse of faith remains, but with nowhere to put it, since the heart is a trusting factory, so the aban-doned, lonely creature makes something of his own (an image)

and puts his faith in it—a resemblance of a bird, or a reptile, or some animal. When faith has gone wrong nothing is left but the heart searching for something to love, and love becomes a driving desire that seeks an object worthy of replacing the Creator. In fact, their own love seems to idolaters as something divine itself, and the object they find most worthy of this ‘‘divine’’ love is ultimately themselves. Even their own bodies are made into an ‘‘image’’ and worshiped instead of the Creator, so that sin curves in upon itself in grotesque self-love. To this narcissus, ‘‘God gave them up to their shameful passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural and the men likewise gave up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with desire for one another, men committing shameless acts in men, and received the reward for their delusion (as was necessary), in their own persons’’

(Romans 1:26–27 translation altered). Idolatry eventually turns inward and seeks itself in the form of its desires, free will, or love.

Seeking the law in love paradoxically produces only hatred of God, since humans, it turns out, can love anything—except their own personal Traitor. Thus, God’s wrath at sin is revealed by giving the wicked free will, not taking it away. So if we were to ask how wrath feels, the answer would be: it feels like freedom of will.

God betrayed them into their own hands. Yet, God does not agree that they are righteous in doing what they desire; death stalks them, and they know their own personal death is finally God’s own ‘‘decree’’, or even more pointedly, ‘‘the justification of God’’

(Romans 1:32).

God knows that the pursuit of desire is neither freedom nor the true glory of God in this world; it never leads to happiness (eudaimonia), even when God is reputedly the goal of the desire.

Instead, the goal is death, since God refuses to let anyone have any other gods. So God cursed the ungodly with free will, withdrew his Spirit and bound us forever to ourselves. From then on love, not faith, makes us the kind of sinners we are. Whatever we love leads us around, Luther said, ‘‘like a ring in a cow’s nose’’ until death consumes us. Now we can understand why Luther calls sin incurvatus se, being curved back into the self, or simply ‘‘The Belly’’

when in fact creatures were originally fashioned to open like a flower toward the sun of their Creator.