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The Unbroken Sum

halo of cerulean sky burnt grasses of the Port Hills rows of poplars flutter their thousand silvered tongues along the Heathcote River rustle shadows where the noon sun hangs where standing on the bank you gaze at the steady sketch and erasure of rippled tree and sky water without memory rumination without thought or dream the stream vowelling softly only itself

and how did you arrive here each footstep the promise of a solitary interval in faint sepia a life not yours and all the remembrances will fade into white and all the names will recede to forget you as you linger at summer’s end in a distant foreign city

into those Heraclitean waters you won’t step again once is sufficient unrepeatable unalterable the unbroken sum murmured and murmuring into what remote future beyond what little margin of yours only a moment the Heathcote only an hour far flung from you now within which you were lost amid a quiet flow to listen to nimble counterpoint of a fugitive earth of love’s unsayable meaning

~ J.M. Sellers (2015, 2025)

The shift in the meaning and use of the word "real" reveals something akin to a geomagnetic reversal in the history of the West. For twelve centuries, the "real" pointed not to the material world, but to spiritual realities in which the world of physical appearances was rooted. Beginning in the 13th century a series of gradual changes emerged culminating in the 16th century, driven in part by the theological debates regarding the Eucharist with the Reformation. But the debate extended into science and the eventual extrapolation of science into modern day "realism."

For Christianity, this reversal in the ontological priority would lead to God being reduced to a empirical, spatio-temporal being and to the erasure of the metaphysical participation in Being. Little surprise that US culture, with its predominantly Calvinist beginnings, gave rise to some of the most virulent forms of fundamentalism. The premise that what we call “reality” as solely physical (and, by extension, meaningless) inevitably results in a theology strangely anti-metaphysical, and driven by fear.

Fundamentalism involves a tacit refusal of metaphysics, and so, by extension, a refusal of grace. Even when the fundamentalist makes what sounds like a metaphysical claim, it is embedded in the profoundly anti-metaphysical framework of literalism. The faith that fundamentalism demands is a small, cramped faith because it is inherently incapable of recognizing anything except in materialist terms, even while claiming to deny materialism.

This is not a faith rooted in awe of the Divine (with a corresponding humility) but rooted rather in the vulgar pride of being ideologically justified in judging others. For example: To recognize the image of God in others should not be understood literally, but neither is the Imago Dei a mere figure of speech. Metaphysically speaking, the image of God is not any less real — it is, in fact, more real than any materialist can conceive.

Five centuries of hacking away at metaphysical literacy (from the inside no less!) has had a negative effect not only in terms of fundamentalism but for western Christianity in general. Just look at how the word "ritual" has accumulated more pejorative connotations within that short span of time. Metaphysical participation is not an optional add-on to the Christian faith, but the very soil which nurtures it, not just theoretically, but morally — "morally" as in, a life in-formed by prayer as a practice (in all its sacramental varieties) which circumvents the deliberating, discursive mind so that one can learn to see (by grace, ever so gradually) that image of God in others.

"We must be careful about the level on which we place the infinite. If we place it on the level which is only suitable for the finite it will matter very little what name we give it." ~ Simone Weil

At its root, literalism is anti-spiritual: it can only comprehend scripture through a strictly materialist lens, substituting intrinsic truth with extrinsic fact. We mistakenly grasp for certainty rather than faith, as if assenting to a series of propositions were a suitable replacement for trust. We don't want a living truth with which to engage, but settled facts. And facts can only be understood literally.

Literalism, then, is indicative of a greater spiritual impoverishment, of the loss of our ability to recognize the ontological precedence of spiritual realities which emerge into the material (not a negation of the material but its proper integration with the spiritual). While we cannot be wholly cut off from interiority itself, we can be cut off from articulating it, making sense of it, and growing in it. Literalism keeps to the surface, and insists that the surface is all that matters.

It becomes incredibly difficult to comprehend spirituality except as something transposed downward, flattened, understood in a materialist terms, because we forgotten how to apprehend spiritual realities. This is far more insidious than the mere deliberate belief in materialism: when it becomes the default (anti-)metaphysical assumption (even among would-be believers), and so we cannot imagine anything otherwise. It is the negation participation in greater reality itself, an anti-poetry, the collapse of the metaphysical into "Single vision & Newton's sleep."

There's a common notion from evangelical and "nondenominational" circles that if you belong to a church where parishioners don't bring a Bible to worship services, this is taken to mean that these people aren't "Bible-believing," or, at any rate, the Bible is not an important priority to their faith. But if you attend, for example, an Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, or Methodist churches on a regular basis, you are in fact more exposed to more scripture in a thorough way. The liturgical calendar and lectionary serve as guides for the congregation selected according to meaningful themes in passages of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the rest of the New Testament (but especially the Gospels).

None of these readings are necessarily in an historically chronological sequence because the calendar provides a thematic context for the community of the church. To read the Bible "from cover to cover" is a modern approach to reading a text which removed it from the day to day living story that unfolds as if we were in the midst of the original events of Christ's birth, life, death, or resurrection. This is what evangelicals and "nondenominational" churches completely miss — the living context of the Bible among the members of a community. The Bible isn't just a typical book one can pick up and start reading with a modern day individualistic mindset — because understanding can get easily skewed, and inevitably it does. The mere capacity to read words alone is not the same as reading comprehension — especially ancient texts involving a history, culture, and evolving theological contexts bound up with a community that spans thousands of years, being a text with diverse layers of meaning and rich symbolism.

The early history of the church is sometimes framed as the clergy conspiring to keep the Bible out of the hands of ordinary people, though this overlooks many important facts — just to start: (1) that the Bible was not a book as we understand it today, but rather a collection of books, (2) what was deemed canonical remained an unsettled question for centuries and varies in some traditions, (3) that the books of the Bible were slowly copied by hand prior to the printing press, (4) that the congregations were illiterate, (5) the church's engagement with scripture was primarily an oral (auditory) one, modeled on the Jewish synagogue, and involves a different kind of relationship than reading the written word with individualistic assumptions.

A Christianity which places weight solely upon the Bible in a discursive way, abstracted from the living community, removed from its tradition of symbolic understandings, stripped of its sacramental and liturgical life sharply narrows the Bible of its living, communal significance. What remains is a crude, two-dimensional literalism, deaf to its metaphysical depths. This anti-metaphysical assumption is, ironically, what fundamentalists and atheists share in common.

A caveat: Just because a church adheres to a liturgical calendar and lectionary is no solid guarantee that things can still go awry (they do), but without those elements in place, it is almost always guaranteed to go awry. The metaphysical dimension is the backdrop of the Christian faith, and that dimension is embodied in the sacraments, in the rites, the "mystical body of Christ," and its entire Incarnational basis. Approaching the Bible with the default (anti)-metaphysical assumptions strips Christian theology of it meaning and coherence.

Centuries of so many schisms and the violence resulting from those schisms… but when you look at the older churches (Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, etc.) in contrast to what passes for Christianity in the younger, evangelical, "nondenominational," and Calvinist-influenced churches, the older ones share much more in common in terms of the sacramental dimension.

With modern Christianity, the increasing loss of sacramental depth (the metaphysical framework in which Christianity arose and gave expression to the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the Trinity, the church as the "mystical Body of Christ," the very notion of "participation," etc.) gives rise to a paltry faith blind to truth beyond the confines of discursive reason, and, ironically, a profoundly anti-metaphysical outlook.

John 14:6: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." ‎ Understood relationally, this means: No one comes to the Father except through entering the direct and reciprocal relation by way of Sonship. There is no Father without Son (or Child); there is no Son (Child) without Father. ‎ The importance then lies not in defining the essence of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, but rather in participating in the relations into which we are invited, into the circulation of divine love, even if it is only two or three involved (or four, in the case of this diagram) who are "gathered in my Name." Anything less than this reciprocal relationship is reduced to an abstract ideological belief in "God," based wholly on discursive reason, and which doesn't participate in the love that God is (in contrast with faith, i.e. "trust," which implies relation-with). ‎ This is the way into not only the church itself but into the life of the Trinity, where it is "Not I that lives [or loves!], but Christ in me." In the same spirit of "Not I, but Christ in me," Simone Weil: "We must not help our neighbor for Christ, but in Christ… In general, the expression ‘for God’ is a bad one. God ought not to be put in the dative [case]. We should not go to our neighbor for the sake of God, but we should be impelled towards our neighbor by God, as the arrow is driven towards its target by the archer" [emphases mine]. ‎ Anything less reduces the church to membership in an organization like any other with a set of extrinsic propositions to assent to (many churches do just this — and the more toxic they are, the more likely they resort to this discursive notion of "faith"). This is not to say that Nicene Creed has no value — rather it reveals the underlying erroneous assumption is the Creed is a set of propositions like any other, and so we, living in a profoundly anti-metaphysical age, can't make sense of it any other way. And this limitation is true of worship in general, and of prayer, and of the sacraments. It is in this sense that Nietzsche said "God is dead, and we have killed him." The church is either the “mystical Body of Christ" or it is nothing at all. ‎ One may certainly have to enter into the desert, so to speak, when when there appear to be no available options (and there are not many, espially in the US), but faith is not an individualistic enterprise (which cannot thrive), but a communal sharing which comes by grace, in participation in the life of the Trinity. The Trinity is not mere theological abstraction, but the very life of the church itself.

Prayer isn't really an action that one performs; it is a process which one consents to undergo, led on by divine desire.

“If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.” ~ R.C. Sproul

When "sovereignty" is reduced to the controlling of every event in the universe, we end up with a terribly impoverished understanding of divine sovereignty. Omnipotence is not mere license over and against something other, involving the exertion of force (even "infinite" force). This is just crude and unimaginative literalism.

The problem in this "logic," is that God is merely quantitatively different from worldly power and misses the radical qualitative gulf between Being and beings. It is wholly blind to the ontological dimension of existence in which we participate. God didn't just fashion beings out of other material substances, He created Being itself: "In him we live and move and have our being."

The absence of any analogical understanding inevitably leads to theological dead ends.

Lectio

Reading again the Apostle's letter, his name written in dust just where time erodes, its edge falling off into anonymous shadow. Today, in the window, dustmotes drift, silent in a sheaf of sunlight. The light floods the page, floods its Word, floods the eyes that were once blind, but now — at last — they see. God is light.

~ J.M. Sellers, 05.25.26

What is commonly referred to by the world as "conservative Christianity" is a misnomer. What is often called "conservative" in a Christian context turns out to be novelty, often accompanied by the erosion (if not total total loss) of the liturgical, sacramental, incarnational, christological, and trinitarian dimensions of the church which is the context of a life of Christian faith. What is more, what is truly conservative theologically in those dimensions will inevitably leads to social concerns which will appear to the world to be what is usually referred to as "progressive." "Conservative Christianity" (as commonly understood) is self-contradictory, while "progressive Christianity" (as commonly understood) is redundant.

Is, then, Christianity "political"? It turns out that the question isn't a straightforward one, and we should be wary of any temptation to conflate the Christian faith with politics. The basis for the Christian faith isn't political as such, but rather a spiritual one, of the Kingdom of God which is "not of this world": not an otherworldly passivity but a deep recognition of the image of God universally found in all without exception.

This does not mean that there may be some provisional use in a Christian's involvement with politics, but politics alone can never serve as a substitute for the Kingdom of God. There is a clear distinction between the two. The Christian faith may provide the impetus for active political involvement, but the faith and politics should not be confused either. And, of course, a politics of resentment of any kind is antithetical to the Christian faith.

The way we erroneously foist worldly political categories onto the faith of the Church and onto the morals of the Church reveals a profound disalignment between faith (when reduced to mere ideology) and the kenotic love of Christ — it is the fault line which made the rise of US Christian nationalism possible.

"Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, 'All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.'" (Matthew 4:8-9)

"My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus told Pilate, a representative of the largest empire of the western world at the time. "World" being the Greek kosmos, order. Jesus isn't making an otherworldly statement, but underscoring that the Kingdom of God does not operate how worldly kingdoms do, with coercion, force, and violence — this is mere counterfeit "power." The Christian language of kingship is a language of analogy and paradox, pointing toward something that, in some respects, bears a certain resemblance to a kingdom, but cannot be taken literally — otherwise we would only superimpose all worldly examples onto Christ.

Jesus use of worldly images such as "kingdom" point, perhaps not without some subversive irony, to an community in which what the world calls "power" is inverted, or rather it is reverted and restored to its proper place. It turns out that worldly "power" is entirely impotent. To outsiders such as Pilate, none of this makes sense. The Kingdom of God was not a mere counterforce at war with the Roman Empire or any other worldly power. Instead, the Kingdom of God operates in a completely different way ("not of this world"), in which the meanings of words were transposed into a new, sacramental dimension of life, through which genuine love, compassion and justice could become a living reality.

Christendom, however, conflates these two different kingdoms, and subsequently co-ops the analogous language of the Kingdom of God in order to literalize it, and, in doing so, undermining its kenotic foundation in Christ. A "Christian nation" is an oxymoron. "The US is a Christian nation" is just an evasive way of saying "We have no king but Caesar," truly spoken in the spirit of antichrist.

The greater the lack of historical awareness, the greater the fanatical tendencies. The religious zealot may possess a great deal of historical facts and will nevertheless lack any historical context which provides the significance of those same facts. Historical awareness doesn't necessarily mean being thoroughly knowledgeable about raw history data, but being capable of recognizing that historical events do not arise from a void, and, in the absence of that recognition, we will inevitably view those events through an anachronistic lens. Historical awareness enables one to seek out the many contexts in which these events are embedded, and to trace the genealogy of our inherited ideas as they develop in history.

Without an historical awareness, our world begins and ends within the confines of our own collective narcissism, distorted by today's racial, national, religious, sexual, political, and cultural biases. We imagine that we, who have progressed beyond the prejudices of the past, have no prejudices of our own. This only makes us more susceptible to fundamentalism and jingoism, and they often end up being two sides of the same idolatrous coin. Consequently, the religious fanatic understands little about her own religion; the nationalist understands little about his own nation. It is this lack of historical awareness that makes such fanaticism possible.

Some kinds of instruction in prayer used to say, at the beginning, ‘Put yourself in the presence of God.’ But I often wonder whether it would be more helpful to say, ‘Put yourself in the place of Jesus.’ It sounds appallingly ambitious, even presumptuous, but that is actually what the New Testament suggests we do. Jesus speaks to God for us, but we speak to God in him. You may say what you want – but he is speaking to the Father, gazing into the depths of the Father’s love. And as you understand Jesus better, as you grow up a little in your faith, then what you want to say gradually shifts a bit more into alignment with what he is always saying to the Father, in his eternal love for the eternal love out of which his own life streams forth. That, in a nutshell, is prayer – letting Jesus pray in you, and beginning that lengthy and often very tough process by which our selfish thoughts and ideals and hopes are gradually aligned with his eternal action; just as, in his own earthly life, his human fears and hopes and desires and emotions are put into the context of his love for the Father, woven into his eternal relation with the Father – even in that moment of supreme pain and mental agony that he endures the night before his death.

~ Rowan Williams, Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (2014) [Emphasis mine]

Eucharistic bread and wine are not only symbolic or metaphorical, but neither are they literal, material things which require a physical change to take place. Rather the spiritual/eternal and physical/temporal realities are reconciled as one, no longer divided into two ontologically different "worlds," by virtue of the Incarnation and the culmination in Christ's crucifixion.

The Eucharist is itself a communal prayer, not simply an act of remembrance (though it may certainly include it). It must always involve the giving by one and the receiving by another. The presence of Christ is not physically in the bread and wine itself so much as it is within the incarnational event of communion itself, where both the vertical relation between believer and God and the horizontal relation between neighbor and neighbor meet.

This intersection forms a cross, where the believer's heart coincides with Christ's heart in the physical and spiritual act of receiving the Eucharist. It is indeed an comm-union with both God and with neighbor — religio in the fullest sense of the Latin word. It is in this communal prayer where we may truly real-ize that God is love, and to learn to engage (slowly, slowly) with the world sacramentally, with God working in and through our lives, so we can say, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Why worry about supposed extraterrestrials being "demons in disguise" when evil is operating quite openly, with many would-be "Christians" and other reactionaries gleefully going along? If only it were that simple — alien bad guys projected "out there," when in actuality, the the enemy has always been ourselves with the myriad evils that we consent to. For people that like to make claims about "personal responsibility," they sure like to place the blame for all our ills on "those" people — even imagined alien lizard people out of some schlocky Hollywood sci-fi flick.

Underlying all this behavior is the principle of constant blame on an external enemy, to pin all the world's ills upon us (who, of course, are the innocent protagonists in the story), which indicates an extreme lack of humility. The problem here then is not simply misinformation, or a lack of education (though these things, if addressed proactively might help). People desire this belief, which makes this a question of morality. These "Christians" aren't even asking themselves the crucial question: Why do I want ________________ to be true?

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