The logic that captures. The Greek will not say whether the petition names a someone or a something, and the tradition has taken both readings. Both hand the one praying a scale. The petition asks to be delivered from the scale.
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Alla rhusai hēmas apo tou ponērou. But deliver us from the evil, and the Greek stops there. Tou ponērou is genitive, and in the genitive the masculine and the neuter are the same word. It can be the evil one, a person, the adversary. It can be the evil, a quality, the condition of wickedness. Nothing in the sentence decides it.
The tradition has taken both. Chrysostom heard the devil in it. The English prayer book and the King James Version pray from evil. Modern translations divide, some returning to the evil one, some keeping the neuter with the other reading in a note.
The two readings disagree about what evil is and agree about what the creature praying is to do with it: find it, weigh it, and stand on the other side of it.
[See WHAT IS EVIL · THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL · THE SCALE · WHAT ENGLISH CANNOT SAY]
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THE PERSON AND THE QUALITY
Made a person, evil can be located, over there and not here. It can be opposed, on whatever axis the one opposing is handed. It can be blamed for what the configuration generates. It can be cast out, and the casting out is then the whole of the work.
Made a quality, evil is the other pan. It is the weight on the far side of the good, and the life of the one praying becomes the task of outweighing it: more good placed on her side, the balance tipped, the verdict earned.
The serpent's offer in the garden was ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil, and the offer was kept. What was received was the balance, taken into the hand, the two pans and the weighing. Either reading of the petition, heard inside the offer, asks to be rescued by the instrument the offer installed, which is why both readings can be prayed daily for two thousand years and leave the instrument where it was.
[See THE NACHASH · DYS-ORDER · THE SCAPEGOAT MECHANISM]
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THE POWERS
Walter Wink spent the Powers trilogy (Naming the Powers, 1984; Unmasking the Powers, 1986; Engaging the Powers, 1992) on the New Testament's language of power, and on the line from Ephesians that carries it most plainly: we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers. His reading was that the enemy the line names is not a person or a group of persons at all.
Every institution, in Wink's account, has an outer form, its offices and rules and holdings, and an inner spirit, the driving force that animates it and makes it seem legitimate. When the institution comes to exist for its own continuance rather than for what it was made to serve, the Power is fallen. Not demonic in the supernatural sense. Captured. He called the whole interlocking set the Domination System, and he listed among its features the ranking of rich over poor, of race over race, of men over women, and the violence that keeps each ranking in place.
The personal reading of the petition has a use here, and it is the use that keeps it in service. A devil has a face. An institution has none. Every hour spent resisting an adversary with a face is an hour in which the thing without one goes unnamed, and goes on being staffed.
[See TURN THE OTHER CHEEK · THE VANISHING POINT · THE CONFIGURATION]
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THE PARTICIPATION
The Powers do not run without participants. Their offices are held by someone, their rules applied by someone, their rankings taught at a table by someone who learned them at another.
Opposition is one of the ways of participating. Attack what the scale names evil and the war body takes the attack as its own fuel; the hydra puts out two heads where one was cut, because the cutting is conducted on the axis it lives on. Defend the good and the defense is still conducted on the scale. Improve along the scale, become better by its measure, and the measure is what has been served.
Moral improvement cannot deliver anyone from the scale, because every gain it records is recorded on the scale.
What remains is withdrawal: the participation not supplied. Not the other side taken. The side-taking refused, and the office, the rule and the ranking left without the hands they require.
[See THE HYDRA · THE WAR BODY · CESSATION · THE CAPACITY TO REFUSE]
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THE WOMAN
I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. Genesis 3:15 is spoken to the serpent, and the enmity it sets is not with the man and not with humanity in general. It is with the woman.
The ranking of men over women is the one every other ranking in the Domination System is first learned from, because it is the one the household runs, at the table, before the child can read. A child taught that half the house exists to serve the other half has been handed the scale, and she carries it into every room that follows. The household is where the petition's instrument is issued, which is why the configuration spends so much of its force on what happens inside it.
The operation is completed when the one it was run on runs it. The mother who teaches the covering she was taught. The woman who polices the next woman's compliance and calls the policing tradition. The configuration has its enforcement carried by those it ranks lowest, and keeps its own hands clean.
The woman who refuses the covering refuses the first lesson. She shows in her own conduct that the ranking was installed and not found, and what was installed can be declined.
[See THE SEED THAT CRUSHES · COVERTURE · RITUALS - HOME · THE SMILE]
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WHAT DELIVERANCE IS NOT
Transcendence. Rising above good and evil to a place where neither applies leaves the ground, and the ground is where the heel is struck and where everyone else is still standing. An exit that leaves the configuration intact for others is an exit, not a deliverance.
Opposition. Fighting on the axis the configuration supplies. Each head cut is the hydra fed.
Reform. Teaching the Powers to rank more humanely. The Domination System absorbs any quantity of reform and keeps its ranking.
The right side. Still the scale. Still weighing. Still standing where the instrument has coordinates.
The petition does not ask to win the weighing, to leave it, or to improve it; it asks to be brought out from under it, and it asks, because the one inside cannot weigh her way out.
[See RELEASE (DELIVER US) · THE THREE DEATHS]
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THE FEET
Near the close of Romans, Paul writes: the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The feet are plural. The crushing is not a champion's. It is done by the many, by where they stand and what they will not carry.
And shortly has been nearly two thousand years, unless the crushing is not a future event awaited but a present one performed: wherever a community withdraws its hands from the Powers, wherever a household stops issuing the scale, wherever a woman names what was done instead of weighing herself for it. The deliverance the petition asks for does not arrive by combat, and it does not arrive without participants; it arrives as the participation withdrawn.
[See LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION · FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM]
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THE LAST PETITION
The earliest manuscripts of Matthew end the prayer here; the doxology came later. Each petition before it releases something the configuration would have accumulated. The name kept hollow, so no tribe holds it. Bread for the day, which cannot be stored. Debts released, which is the ledger zeroed. The last petition releases the instrument the ledger is kept with.
[See OUR FATHER · HALLOWED BE THY NAME · DAILY BREAD · FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS]
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The petition is prayed in the plural and it names no enemy the creature is to defeat.
She has been told for two thousand years that it asks for rescue from an adversary, and she has spent the two thousand years weighing herself against him. The scale is still in her hand. The petition asks for the hand to open.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
