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The bulk of his paper focused on two themes associated with Satan throughout the Bible. References to Satan signal the universal or cosmic dimensions of a local event; and references to the devil, especially in Genesis 3, serve the purposes of theodicy.

Following Augustine, Reno suggested that free human actions are motivated actions, and that motivations arise from the perception of the world. The process Augustine has in mind seems to be this: We perceive a good thing in the world, our desires are aroused, and we act according to our desires. Reno suggested that angels, being spiritual, do not act out of this kind of interaction with the creation. Rather, angels make choices, for good or ill, as a pure choice.

Now, if Adam and Eve sinned without Satan tempting, that would suggest that sin arises from the interaction with of human beings with the world, which of course casts doubt on the very-goodness of the creation. Because their sin is not a response to the world but a response to a previously fallen angel. God's goodness and the goodness of His creation is preserved.

But, Reno asks, doesn't this undo human responsibility? No, because, as reno says, all human freedom is led. We are created with a natural inclination to obedience service - to something. That something may be God or may be the devil or may be sin. We are never leaderless. That something is never ourselves, however much we might think so. We may act out of fantasies of self-making, but these fantasies come from elsewhere.

Along the way, Middleton made some good observations on the text.

Another pun, on "nude" and "shrewd" (as Everett Fox translates), points to another dimension of the effect of sin. Though the Hebrew words are similar, Middleton suggested that in meaning the two words are virtually antonyms. Adam and Eve are initially naked and open, but when they have sinned they need coverings and protections, and become not naked and transparent but "shrewd," like the sly serpent.

During questioning, Middleton made a couple of other interesting points. He argued that the tree of knowledge would eventually have been offered to man, citing passages in Samuel and Kings where humans receive the knowledge of good and evil. The reason they didn't receive access to the tree immediately was that they weren't prepared; they needed to grow up.

He also suggested, intriguingly, that "original sin" in the sense of the systematic dominance of sin, doesn't come directly from Adam but develops through the events of Genesis 4-6. Cain still has the capacity to resist and triumph over sin. But by the time of the sons of God, sin has become so endemic that Yahweh destroys the earth and starts over. Systematic sin develops in time, not all at once in the garden.

"Max Weber's fragmentary writings on social status suggest that differentiation on this basis should disappear as capitalism develops. However, many of Weber's examples of status refer to the United States, which Weber held to be the epitome of capitalist development. Weber hints at a second form of status, one generated by capitalism, which might reconcile this contradiction, and later theorists emphasize the continuing importance of status hierarchies. This article argues that such theories have missed one of the most important forms of contemporary status: celebrity. Celebrity is an omnipresent feature of contemporary society, blazing lasting impressions in the memories of all who cross its path. In keeping with Weber's conception of status, celebrity has come to dominate status 'honor,' generate enormous economic benefits, and lay claim to certain legal privileges. Compared with other types of status, however, celebrity is status on speed. It confers honor in days, not generations; it decays over time, rather than accumulating; and it demands a constant supply of new recruits, rather than erecting barriers to entry."

Later, he walked the aisle to "affirm my Christian faith." His skepticism and questions remain, but "kneeling beneath the cross on the South Side, I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works."

In another article in the same issue of The Atlantic Marc Ambinder says that his run for President is a response to that same call: "Obama's friends speak of this process as his 'calling.'" And the realization that he might be president goes back to a December 2006 visit to Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, where Obama reportedly received a standing ovation for a talk about AIDS in Africa.

Jordan notes that the term for "plague" used in Leviticus 13 is actually "touch," and suggests that the leper is "touched" by Yahweh, sometimes in response to sacrilege, a violation of God's holiness. Touch Yahweh's stuff; Yahweh touches you.

This touch communicates holiness, in part or in whole. When the "leper" becomes completely covered with white skin, he is pronounced clean; he is wholly holy, and is able to function in the sanctuary without fear. In other words, the complete "leper" is analogous to the high priest, clothed in skin of glorious white.

Now apply this to Numbers 12: Aaron is already holy, already touched by Yahweh. He and Miriam both lay a finger on Yahweh's designated leader. But Aaron is already "white" with priestly garments; so only Miriam is touched with leprosy.

This is also the situation of Adam: He seeks glory before his time, the white crown of wisdom before he has grown up from fleshliness.

In a section of Given Time, Derrida discusses a text by Baudelaire, noting that it is a given "not only because we are first of all in a receptive position with regard to it but because it has been given to us." But is it a gift? Horner has already explained that for Derrida the conditions of the "possibility and impossibility" of the gift are "that it can have no decidable origin, cannot exist as such, and can have no decidable destination." By these standards, the text doesn't seem to be a gift. But Derrida wants to say it is.

Nor does the text have any decidable content. We don't receive simply what the author wrote, since we are always capable of finding things that Baudelaire did not intend, applying his texts to circumstances he never foresaw. The text always exceeds what the author intended, and this means that what Baudelaire gave is not the same as what the reader receives. Thus, "no exchange has taken place." The "gift" becomes something other than itself in being delivered to a recipient: "What is the content of the gift? It is the text. But what is the content of the text? Can it be specified? No, because all the contexts of the text could never be specified, and differance works in the text in such a way that one could never account for all its meanings." Thus, a text as gift bursts the boundaries of the text, and therefore has no content as a gift.

But, and here is one of the really intriguing turns of the argument, it is precisely in this excess, precisely in the "more-than-intendedness" of the text that the text is a gift at all. If the gift is not excess, then it returns to the circle of exchange and contract. This excess is a feature of the text itself, not a generous donation of the author. And this feature is what makes it gift. Yet, it is also the feature that dismantles it as gift, because it is this feature that makes it impossible to specific content in the gift.

Derrida puts these last two points this way: "The gift, if there is any, will always be without border. What does 'without' mean here? A gift that does not run over its borders, a gift that would let itself be contained in a determination and limited by the indivisibility of an identifiable trait would not be a gift. As soon as it delimits itself, a gift is prey to calculation,and measure. The gift, if there is any, should overrun the border, to be sure, towards the measureless and excessive; but it should also suspect its relation to the border and even its transgressive relation to the separable line or trait of a border."

Since it cannot be measured, it is not an object alongside other objects. It doesn't enter into the realm of economy. The text thus eludes presence, even though it appears to be present. The text-as-gift is known only by the "trace."

Derrida thus deletes the giver and the gift; he also deletes the recipient of the text, since the text leaves the author to go who knows where. Giving a text means giving it up, and giving it up means not having any specific recipient.

The text-as-gift exists only if it meets these criteria: The author must leave the text; the text must exceed itself; the text must have no specified recipients. Yet these conditions of the possibility of the text-as-gift are precisely the conditions of its impossibility: For without author there is no giver; a text without boundaries cannot be located and delimited as a gift; and the text as gift has no specified recipient.

Billings criticizes Milbank for employing only the anthropologically derived categories of "unilateral" (pure gift) v. "exchange," noting that Calvin derives a richer vocabulary from the Bible itself. One of these categories is "covenant," which Billings, citing Peter Lillback, says is both unilateral and yet also bilateral, and in fact neither simply speaking: "Calvin also makes extensive use of the language of a mutual, bilateral covenant, particualrly when he wants to emphasize human responsibility."

Milbank's privileging of "exchange" also tends to fix an "exteriority in divine-human relations that is foreign to Calvin." Justification and sanctification come to believers because they are "one life and substance" with Christ, and he cites Philip Butin's characterization of Calvin's theology of union with Christ as "perichoretic." Thus, "it is not a matter of 'recoprocity' or 'passivity,' but a differentiated union of identities in a trinitarian concept"

Billings also responds to the charge that Calvin leaves behind participationist categories, and any notion of deification. Milbank claims that Calvin and the other Reformers work with only a "negative anthropology" that assumes "created nature must be destroyed rather than fulfilled in the 'new creation' of regeneration." Not so, says Billings; summarizing Calvin's treatise Bondage and Liberation of the Will, he concludes that Calvin's anthropology is "christologically-conditioned": "it is only through the empowering, activating presence of God that a human can do a work that is 'good' . . . . humanity finds fullness through faith in Christ, in whom God and humanity are reconciled and fully united." Calvin affirms "that the primal human nature is fulfilled through union with God, by partaking of Christ through the Spirit." Billings says that Calvin includes both notions of participation and of deification in his theology (a point that Billings is expanding upon in a forthcoming Oxford Press book).

He concludes that "there are important and perhaps surprising areas of commonality between Calvin's theology of grace and Milbank's emerging theology of the gift," including "the close connection between the receiving of grace and the active life of Christian self-giving and love; also, both seek to articulate the fulfillment of human nature in union with God, through the Spirit, by participation in Christ." Yet, Calvin's theology of grace is superior to Milbank's in the greater clarity he achieves with his notion of duplex gratia, and the greater variety and nuance he gains by using biblical categories.

Derrida works a contradiction into his very definition of gift: "For there to be a gift, il faut that the donee not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquit himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt." Recognition itself destroys the gift: "Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent." Again, "The link between morality and the arithmetic, economy, or calculation of pleasures imprints an equivocation on any praise of good intentions. In giving the reasons for giving, in saying the reason of the gift, it signs the end of the gift. The equivocal praise precipitates the gift towards its end and reveals it in its very apocalypse. The truth of the gift unveils only the non-truth of its end, the end of the gift." That is, the very appearance of a gift as gift, "the simple phenomenon of the gift, annuls it as gift, transforming the apparition into a phantom and the operations into a simulacrum." The contradiction can be stated this way: As soon as the gift is for the person receiving – as soon as it is recognized – it loses is character as gift. But if it is not recognized, then it is not a gift. Webb says, "The gift . . . cannot be a gift (or appear as a gift) in order for it to be (to really be) a gift, either to the donor or the donee." A real gift must be secret, unsigned, unnamed; but even then as soon as it is identified as a gift, it ceases to be one. Derrida's discussion is also haunted by a Levinasian worry: Derrida worries that if we make the effort to conceptualize the gift, we are reducing the other – the giver – to the Same, and thus introducing a kind of intellectual violence. The gift also cannot be anything specific. As soon as it is delimited as something or other, it loses its character as gift, because it then becomes calculable, measurable, and therefore collapses back into the system of exchange.

Derrida links up his discussion of gift with a treatment of time, and, as in all his other work, his discussion is motivated by a challenge to the metaphysics of presence (which here becomes a challenge to the metaphysics of presents). Gifts, he begins, are untimely, in the sense that they are "surprising and spontaneous." Such a gift breaks the circle of exchange, but this giving "is possible only at the instant of an effraction of the circle." But this moment is an elusive present, the elusive present that Augustine searched for and could not find. Webb says, "The gift, what is given in the present moment without thought of past or future, cannot give time." Or, as Derrida puts it, "If there is something that can in no case be given, it is time, since it is nothing and since in any case it does not properly belong to anyone; if certain persons or certain social classes have more time than others – and this is finally the most serious stake of political economy – it is certainly not time itself that they possess.

On the other hand, Derrida sometimes speaks as if the gift gives time: "The thing is not in time; it is or it has time, or rather it demands to have, to give, or to take time – and time as rhythm that does not befall a homogenous time but that structures it originally." Receiving a gift opens up a "rhythm of expectation and decision" (Webb), insofar as it obligates a return but a return that will not come immediately. This leads Derrida to wonder if the gift can be dealt with within a "poetics of narrative" rather than within a philosophical conceptuality. The gift begins a story "that continues through the middle of the reception and seeks an end, which is in turn another beginning."

Derrida intensifies the problematics of gifts by noting that his lecture is itself a kind of gift. That is, he questions gifts in the course of "giving" a discourse. As Derrida puts it, "This is an unsigned but effective contract between us, indispensable to what is happening here, namely, that you accord, lend, or give some attention and some meaning to what I myself am doing by giving, for example, a lecture. This whole presupposition will remain indispensable at least for the credit that we accord each other, the faith or good faith that we loan each other, even if in a little while we were to argue and disagree about everything."

Derrida's whole discussion assumes that there is a radical difference between exchange and the excess of the gift, but when he tries to locate that difference, it eludes him. He admits that in trying to disentangle these two, he is departing from tradition: "Even though all the anthropologies, indeed the metaphysics of the gift have, quite rightly and justifiably, treated together, as a system, the gift and the debt, the gift and the cycle of restitution, the gift and the loan, the gift and the credit, the gift and the countergift, we are here departing, in a preemptory and distinct fashion, from this tradition. That is to say, from tradition itself." His lecture would cease to be gift if he did not do this; for then it would merely be a counter-exchange to the tradition itself. This means that Derrida must work from a structural ingratitude. Webb summarizes the point: "If the gift must be denied in order to be received, is it enough to unconsciously repress the memory of the gift? Indeed, could gratitude be the form of this repression, an unconscious ruse, a calculated noncalculation that feigns forgetting? Does gratitude say both 'thanks' and 'no thanks,' thus dismissing the debt that the gift intends to create? Derrida also rejects this solution: 'For there to be gift, not only must the donor or donee not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no consciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it right away and moreover this forgetting must be so radical that it exceeds even the psychoanalytic categorality of forgetting.'" Repression is not radical enough: "Derrida is after an absolute forgetting and the correlative giving that would make such a forgetting possible."

In an essay on Levinas, Derrida returns to the issue of gratitude, saying that even expressing his gratitude would negate the gift he's received: "Before any possible restitution, there would be need for my gesture to operate without debt, in absolute gratitude." He is in a double bind: As Webb says, "To return the gift is to violate the height of the transcendent face [a Levinas reference], yet not to show gratitude is to reject the gift altogether. . . . all commentary results in betrayal; all gifts must be denied if they are to be returned." Webb cites Simon Critchley, "Ingratitude does not arise like an accidental evil; it is a necessity or fatality within ethical Saying." Behind this is the austere Levinasian ethical demand. The Other, for Levinas, is transcendent, and infinite; if the Other is finite, it can be circumscribed and returned to the realm of the Same: "The being that presents himself in the face comes from a dimension of height, a dimension of transcendence whereby he can present himself as a stranger without opposing me as obstacle or enemy." This Other, the Other as asymmetrical gift, presents the possibility of ethics, an ethics "that is not determined by power or desire" (Webb).

Zizioulas begins with the question of the relation between being and personal identity: "It is all too often assumed that people 'have' personhood rather than 'being' persons," so that personhood "becomes a quality added, as it were to being." You have to be first, and then act as a person. This viewpoint rules out any possibility for an "ontology of personhood." Zizioulas, by contrast, argues that personhood "has the claim of absolute being, that is, a metaphysical claim, built into it." The answer to the question "Who am I?" can be "I am who I am," and that is a metaphysical statement. Not only "what" but "who" questions have ontological weight.

The "am" of the question is "a cry for security, for ground to be based on, for fixity." We ask the question of our being in the face of the fact that we have not always been here, and the fact that someday we won't be here again. It is a "triumphalistic cry," or "a doxological/Eucharistic one," because it expresses "a sort of victory over non-being." Zizioulas says that the sheer assertion of being implies transcendence, the "possibility or rather the actuality of a beyond," and thus the question/assertion of being implies a metaphysics.

The "I" or "You" or "He/She" of the question is a "cry for particularity, for otherness." To say "I" is to assert "a sort of uniqueness, a claim of being in a unique and unrepeatable way." This implies also a "cry for immortality," the desire not only to be in the unique way that I am, but to be me in the unique way I am forever. If the answer to "Who am I?" is "a mortal being," we have "removed the absoluteness from the ingredient 'I' and thus reduced it to something replaceable."

From this last point, it emerges that an ontology of personhood is an ontology of particularity, in which the particular rises to "primacy and ultimacy which transcends the changing world of coming and giving particularities." Greek metaphysics never arrived at this primacy of particularity, because the movement of Greek thought was always from beings to Being itself: "Particularity does not extinguish being. The latter goes on for ever, while the particular beings disappear." In a footnote, Zizioulas notes that this rules out any notion of metempsychosis, since on that theory "particular ceases to be absolute in a metaphysical sense, since it is implied that a particular being is replaceable by another one." For the Greeks "being . . . in the absolute, metaphysical sense cannot be attached to the particular except in so far as the latter is part of a totality."

Whatever form Greek metaphysics takes, this is a constant: "particularity is not ontologically absolute; the many are always ontologically derivative, not causative." As a result, there can be no personal ontology on Greek premises: "The truth of any particular thing was removed from its particularity and placed on a level of a universal form in which the particularity participated." For the same reason too, there can be no doctrine of personal immortality on Greek premises. What remains is Man, not the particular man, for the eternal is the absolute, and the absolute and eternal being must be universal rather than particular. Zizioulas sees this reflected in Greek tragedy, in which heroes are enslaved to moral order and rationality: "Man exists for the world, not the world for Man."

The reasons for this failure to reach an ontology of personhood are both logical and existential. Logically, we can conceive the particular only by categories, and this category is an "ousia itself which accounts at the same time for the being of the particular and of what transcends it." Existentially, death is a horizon prior to life. We have a "panoramic" view of things because there is a "horizon in which the particulars emerge," and this "'horizon' is a unifying principle conditioning the 'many' and hence prior to them." Death is ontologized, and death is universal; everyone dies. The many particular things are encompassed by something general, and particularity never emerges as absolute.

Turning to the "presuppositions" for an ontology of personhood, Zizioulas enumerates three. First, if particularity is to be ontologically ultimate, then being must be caused. Greeks knew of causation, of course, but causation always took place within being. The "world as a whole is not caused radically, i.e. in the absolute ontological sense, by anything else." Thus, necessity is built into the being of things: "Being is not a gift but a datum to be reckoned with by the particular beings." For the Bible, however, existence itself, the reality of the world as a whole, is "caused in a radical way by someone – a particular being." And this being that causes all things identifies Himself as "I am who I am," which is already "a step towards an ontology of personhood."

This applies not only to the world in general, but to human beings. What causes particular human beings to be? Not, as in Greek thought, some ousia, some general ideal of Man in which humans participate. Rather "what causes the particular human beings to be is Adam, i.e. a particular being." He appeals to what he describes as the Hebrew notion of a "corporate personality" in which a particular being includes man. And this same kind of thought applies to God. What is the "cause" of God? the Cappadocians ask. And they answer that it is not divine ousia, but a kind of divine Adam, the Father: "God's being, the Holy Trinity, is not caused by divine substance but by the Father, i.e. a particular being." Substance is indeed common to all persons, but "it is not ontologically primary until Augustine makes it so."

Here Zizioulas introduces the second presupposition of the ontology of personhood. He qualifies what he has said about Adam as the cause of humanity by saying that if Adam is to be the cause of all humans, then "he must be in a constant relationship with all the rest of human beings . . . directly, i.e. as a particular being carrying in himself the totality of human nature." This is not true of Adam. But here we have a disanalogy between divine and human persons: "In God it is possible for the particular to be ontologically ultimate because relationship is permanent and unbreakable." With God, relationship exists within substance, not as an add-on to substance. When we attempt to identify something, "we have to make it part of a relationship and not isolate it as an individual."

Particularity thus emerges as "being itself without depending for its identity on qualities borrowed from nature and thus applicable also to other beings." Each particular thing is constituted by relationship with other things, and this brings us to the "reality of communion in which each particular is affirmed as unique and irreplaceable by the others." Zizioulas claims that an ontology of personhood thus brings us to an ontology of love. This assertion of love is also an assertion of freedom: "God by being uncreated is not faced with given being: He, as a particular being (the Father) brings about His own being (the Trinity). The is thus free in an ontological sense."

Finally, Zizioulas introduces another qualification of the ontology of personhood. For God, being is communion; for God, the ontology of personhood is fully realized. But that is not true inherently for man. Man aspires to freedom but is not inevitably free. Zizioulas develops this point in four stages. First, "Man acquires personal identity and ontological particularity only by basing his being in the Father-Son relationship in which nature is not primary to the particular being." Second, what enables this is Christ, but not Christ in two natures but the fact that the two natures are "particularized in one person." Third, he says that a human being acquires this personhood only by taking "an attitude of freedom vis-à-vis his own nature." Biological birth "gives us a hypostasis dependent ontologically on nature," and so man must be born again to personhood. Baptism is this new birth, which gives "'sonship, the ontological significance of [which] is that Man's identity is not rooted in the relations provided by nature, but in the uncreated Father-Son relationship." Finally, he says that for humans to achieve personhood, for personal particularity to achieve ultimacy in human existence, human beings must overcome death.

Zizioulas concludes that the question of personal identity is thus a who rather than a what question. This has implications for the feminist movement, which stands against the reduction of women to a "what" instead of a who. He says that what and who questions are inseparable, but what makes a person unique is never the "whatness" but the whoness. Personhood is "not about qualities or capacities of any kind: biological, social or moral" but "about hypostasis, i.e. the claim to uniqueness in the absolute sense of the term." Uniqueness, further, arises from relationship that "constitutes by its unbrokenness the ontological ground of being for each person." If we follow the Cappadocian lead and identify the persons of the Trinity by their distinguishing personal properties, we can an insight into the nature of personhood: Someone "is and is himself and not someone else, and this is sufficient to identify him as a being in the true sense." He urges an "ethical apophaticism" that refuses to "give a positive qualitative content to a hypostasis," which would turn the person into a classifiable entity. We cannot determine the hypostasis of a person by some qualities they have, but simply from the fact that they are unique and irreplaceable.

The Old Testament, consistent with this, "distinguishes between Yahweh who dwells on Sinai or in heaven and Yahweh who dwells in Canaan, Shiloh, and later in Jerusalem, between Yahweh in His hiddenness and Yahweh in His historical form in which, as the fact that His name is given shows, He is known in Israel and has dealings with Israel." Yahweh is hidden; no one has seen God. Yet, this hidden God is manifested in the Name that dwells in the temple, and "all the predicates of the name are those of the hidden Yahweh Himself." Israel knows Yahweh twice, yet each time she knows Yahweh she knows Him differently: "And for Israel or the righteous everything depends on knowing Him thus, this second time in a very different way. For the Yahweh who exists this second time in a very different way, the name of Yahweh, is the form in which Yahweh comes to Israel, has dealings with it, is manifested to it." To know Yahweh's Name is to know Yahweh as the One who has made Israel His covenant partner, who has elected and chosen Israel to be His own.

The New Testament has the same "fundamental concern" to declare that God is known as second time in a different way, but in the New Testament He is known in this second way in a way "so much more direct that even the hypostases of the Old Testament are weak in comparison." Jesus comes "into the place, not of Yahweh on Sinai or in heaven, but of the name of the Lord which finally dwells very really in a house of stone in Jerusalem" but now in flesh.

The New Testament revelation rules out any "objectification of God in His revelation," Barth says. And God has revealed Himself in this second manner so fully in Jesus that this revelation demands a decision. And the Jews' rejection of Jesus forcefully shows that "it was possible to accept the God of the Old Testament in what seemed to be the most profound reverence and the most zealous faith and yet in fact to deny Him to the extent that His form, now become quite concrete, became an offence to the righteous." Condemning Jesus as a blasphemer of the Name housed in the temple, Israel "denies this very name, and thus separates itself from it and from its own Holy Scripture, which is one long witness to this name as God's real presence and action in the human sphere." The "whole point of Jesus" is to affirm not something new but "that which is first and primal," namely, the "God who wills to be God and to be known as God a second time in a different way, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who wills to be revealed in His name and hallowed in His name." The Jews' rejection of the prophets, and of Jesus, is religion's rejection of revelation.

But the rejection of Jesus is something more profound still: "just because Immanuel had been unconditionally fulfilled in Jesus the crucifixion of Jesus was bound to mean something different from the stoning of even the greatest prophets, namely, the end of the history of Israel as the special people of revelation, the destruction of the house of stone as a dwelling of the name of the Lord, the free proclamation, not of a new gospel, but of the one ancient Gospel to both Jews and Gentiles."

Barth ends this dense section with the note that Paul's battle was not one against the Old Testament, but "like the battle of Jesus Christ Himself, to whom he simply wished to testify, it was a battle for the Old Testament, i.e., for the one eternal covenant of God with men sealed in time, for acknowledgement of the perfect self-unveling of God."