Ontological Foundations: Incarnation, Participation, and Gift
A Theological-Philosophical Appendix to "The Only Manna We Keep"
Dear friends—
Here’s the short version: this appendix argues that being is gift, scarcity is lie, and manna economics isn’t sentimental nostalgia but metaphysical truth. If those claims sound like assertions that need defending, you’re the reader I wrote this for.
This piece accompanies my Christmas reflection, “The Only Manna We Keep”—but you don’t need to have read that essay to enter here. And if you start here and find yourself in over your head, the essay itself floats without this scaffolding. Come back when you’re ready, or don’t. The table is set either way.
Both pieces trace the same question from different angles: why the Christianity I inherited sings about God filling the hungry and emptying the rich, then blesses an economy that does the opposite. The essay follows that tension through Luke’s Gospel and the wilderness catechism. This appendix digs underneath—into the philosophical grammar of participation, gift, and presence that distinguishes incarnational theology from its counterfeits. It engages classical theism, affect neuroscience, and the work of Samuel Wells, David Bentley Hart, and Douglas Campbell.
I should be direct about what I’m doing here. These aren’t decorative additions to a pastoral essay. They’re load-bearing assumptions. If they fail, the argument fails. What follows is my attempt to show why the bet on abundance is rational.
1. Ontological Abundance
“Creation provides enough for everyone if everyone takes only what they need.” I wrote that sentence in the main essay and immediately heard the objection: naive optimism, ignorant of Malthus, blind to genuine scarcity.
The objection assumes what it needs to prove. It assumes that being is competitive—that existence runs on lack. Classical theism says otherwise. And if classical theism is right, the objection isn’t just wrong. It’s a category error dressed as realism.
The manna story isn’t teaching us that this particular resource happens to be sufficient. It’s teaching us that being itself is gift.
Pharaoh’s economy presupposes ontological scarcity—that existence is zero-sum competition, that my flourishing comes at the cost of yours, that the universe runs on lack. This is nihilism dressed as prudence. It assumes the void is the fundamental truth, and all our accumulation is defense against the darkness.
I find I cannot square this with the doctrine of God I inherited. God is not a being among beings who might run out of resources. God is Being itself—ipsum esse subsistens, the sheer act of existing from which all existence participates.1 There is no scarcity in God because God is not composed of parts that could be depleted. The manna that falls daily is icon of this metaphysical truth: being flows from an inexhaustible source.
The Neoplatonic tradition called this “the Good beyond being”—a Source that gives without losing, an overflow that doesn’t diminish what overflows.2 Christian theology distinguishes its account from necessary emanation by insisting that creation is free gift—but the nature of this freedom requires care. If divine freedom means God could have not created, we face the strange conclusion that love is accidental to God’s nature. If, however, divine freedom means God’s giving flows from who God eternally is—self-giving love that cannot not give, because giving is what God is—then “free” and “necessary” cease to be simple opposites. God doesn’t create under external compulsion; God creates because creation is the eternal expression of the love God is. The Source cannot be exhausted, and the giving cannot be constrained.
This is the ancient insight captured in the phrase bonum est diffusivum sui—the Good diffuses itself.3 But the diffusion is not compulsion. God does not give because forced to by some external necessity; God gives because giving is what Goodness is. The apparent tension between divine freedom and divine necessity dissolves: there is no God “behind” the giving who might have chosen otherwise. Self-giving is not a decision God makes but the character God has—eternally, without constraint.
This means Pharaoh’s economy isn’t just bad policy. It’s metaphysical error. Every store-city is a temple to a god that doesn’t exist. We’ve been tithing to the void. Every border we enforce, every division between “deserving” and “undeserving”—these aren’t just ethical failures. They’re reality-denials, attempts to live as if scarcity were true when every morning’s manna declares otherwise.
The Incarnation extends this logic. God “empties himself” (Philippians 2:7) not because kenosis diminishes divinity but because divinity is self-giving love that doesn’t cling. The baby in the manger doesn’t represent God giving up something precious and limited. It represents God being most fully God—abundant, excessive, poured out without remainder or reserve.
Manna economics is simply being consistent with being.
2. Three Registers of Scarcity
The main essay uses “scarcity” to do considerable work. But the word operates on at least three distinct levels, and collapsing them produces confusion.4
Psychological scarcity is the subjective experience of not-enough—the anxiety that drives hoarding regardless of actual resources. This is Pharaoh’s voice internalized, the formation that makes one clutch even when one has more than enough. My confession in the main essay about retirement accounts that never reach “enough” describes this register. Psychological scarcity is real in its effects even when materially unfounded.
Material scarcity is the empirical question of whether sufficient resources exist to meet needs. The main essay claims that material abundance exists—”we are the richest society in human history”—and that our problem is distribution rather than production. This is a factual claim subject to economic analysis. Economists will quarrel with it, and they should. But material scarcity, where it genuinely exists, is not the same as ontological scarcity. Genuine poverty doesn’t prove the universe is zero-sum.
Ontological scarcity is the metaphysical assumption that being itself is competitive—that existence runs on lack, that the cosmos is fundamentally a system of limited supply. This is the deepest register, usually unexamined, shaping how we perceive before we consciously think. Pharaoh’s economy doesn’t just create material scarcity or induce psychological scarcity; it forms subjects who assume ontological scarcity as the nature of things.
The manna story addresses all three. It provides material sufficiency (”those who gathered much had nothing over”). It counters psychological scarcity through daily practice of receiving. And it reveals ontological abundance—the God who provides inexhaustibly, whose giving doesn’t deplete the Giver.
This three-level analysis explains why “knowing better” so often fails to produce “doing better.” Information operates at the cognitive level. Psychological formation operates in the nervous system. Ontological assumptions operate in the pre-reflective structures of perception. You can intellectually affirm abundance while your body remains formed for scarcity and your perception remains structured by lack.
The logical relationship between these registers matters. Ontological abundance doesn’t automatically produce material sufficiency—if it did, no one would be hungry. The claim is more modest: ontological scarcity would make material sufficiency impossible in principle, while ontological abundance makes it possible in practice. The gap between possible and actual is where human agency, political arrangement, and sinful refusal operate. Pharaoh’s economy doesn’t just hoard grain; it forms subjects who believe hoarding is the only rational response to a universe of lack. Manna economics doesn’t magically fill every belly; it forms subjects capable of the trust and release that could fill every belly if practiced communally. The metaphysics underwrites the possibility; it doesn’t guarantee the outcome.
Transformation requires addressing all three levels—which is precisely what forty years of wilderness catechism, or a lifetime at the Eucharistic table, might accomplish.
3. Formation as Co-Regulation
Paul’s language for Christian formation is strikingly physical. “My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). The Greek morphoō means to shape or pattern—not cognitive instruction but embodied formation through sustained relational presence.
I’ve become convinced that we cannot understand what Paul means without the neuroscience we now have available. This isn’t reduction of theology to biology. It’s recognition that the tradition knew something about bodies that modernity forgot and that neuroscience is now recovering.
A methodological note is warranted here. The relationship between neuroscience and theology in this analysis is not one of validation—as if theological claims needed scientific confirmation to be credible, or as if neuroscience could adjudicate theological disputes. The relationship is better described as co-reference: both disciplines attend to the same embodied reality from different angles, using different vocabularies, asking different questions.5 Neither validates the other; both point to the same truth about how human beings are formed and malformed, constricted and opened. The convergence is not proof but resonance—the kind of resonance we should expect when two disciplines are genuinely tracking what is real.
Susan Eastman’s work on Paul makes this explicit: Paul’s maternal imagery emphasizes that “Christ is not an idea to be grasped but a life to be formed.”6 Formation happens the way a child is formed in the womb—through sustained presence, shared physiology, the slow work of one life taking shape within the environment of another.
Allan Schore’s research on affect regulation provides the neurobiological substrate for what Paul describes theologically. Right-brain-to-right-brain attunement—the process by which one regulated nervous system helps another regulate—isn’t metaphor. It’s measurable. The infant’s developing brain literally takes shape through interaction with the caregiver’s regulated presence. The neural architecture of self-regulation is built relationally, not autonomously.7
This has direct implications for the Emmaus encounter. The disciples had received excellent theological instruction. Their hearts burned during the Bible study. But recognition required presence, not proposition. The risen Jesus became known not in the teaching but in the breaking of bread—embodied practice, shared table, the physicality of gifts received and released.
Paul’s “renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2) uses nous—not detached intellect but the perceiving, interpreting self. English translations that render this as “mind” in the Cartesian sense miss Paul’s meaning. The nous isn’t a faculty that processes information. It’s the whole interpretive apparatus through which reality appears—what phenomenologists might call the “lifeworld” and what neuroscientists map as the predictive brain’s prior assumptions.
Daniel Siegel’s work shows how this interpretive apparatus forms. The brain doesn’t passively receive sensory data and then interpret it. The brain actively constructs perceptual reality based on prior experience—implicit memory shaping what we can see before we consciously look.8 A nervous system formed by Pharaoh’s anxiety literally cannot perceive the abundance that’s there. The predictive architecture filters it out as implausible.
This is why forty years of wilderness catechism were necessary. You cannot update firmware with software patches. The body that learned scarcity in Egypt needed daily practice of receiving to build new predictive models. Information—”God will provide”—wasn’t enough. The nous formed by Pharaoh’s store-cities required embodied counter-formation: manna every morning, Sabbath every week, the slow retraining of a nervous system that had learned to hoard.
The church’s Eucharistic practice isn’t merely commemorative. It’s formative in the neurobiological sense. Week after week, bodies gather. Bread is taken, blessed, broken, given. Nervous systems co-regulate in shared ritual. The renewal Paul commends isn’t cognitive reprogramming. It’s the slow reshaping of neural pathways through sustained community practice—implicit memory reformed by embodied repetition.
Hauerwas has spent a career insisting that Christianity is not beliefs to be held but practices to be inhabited. The neuroscience confirms what he intuited: you cannot think your way into a new way of living. You can only live your way into a new way of thinking.
4. Capital as Counter-Manna
Jonathan Levy’s Ages of American Capitalism offers a reframing I’ve found indispensable.9 Capital, Levy argues, is not accumulated wealth but a psychologically-mediated, future-oriented process—wealth deployed speculatively in expectation of future return.
This definition matters because capital so understood has an inherent “liquidity preference”: a structural drive toward optionality and exit rather than commitment and fixity. Capital wants to remain liquid—easily moved—rather than illiquid—bound to particular places, peoples, or purposes. This preference isn’t incidental. It’s constitutive. Capital that can’t exit isn’t fully capital; it’s just property.
The formation this produces is precisely counter-manna. Where manna economics teaches daily receiving and trust in tomorrow’s provision, capital’s liquidity preference teaches perpetual optionality and suspicion of commitment. Where manna forms subjects who can rest because provision is assured, capital forms subjects who cannot rest because exit must always remain possible. Where manna binds people to place and community through shared dependence, capital’s liquidity corrodes every bond that might impede mobility.
I want to be precise about what kind of claim I’m making. This isn’t mere analogy—noticing surface similarities between ancient grain-hoarding and modern capital. It’s a genus-species claim: both Pharaoh’s store-cities and capital’s liquidity preference are instances of the same underlying logic—the formation of subjects for scarcity-anxiety who seek security through accumulation and the preservation of exit options. They differ in mechanism (grain vs. liquidity, forced labor vs. wage labor) but share the same formational grammar. To use Aristotelian language: they are different species of the genus “scarcity-formation economy.” The connection is taxonomic, not merely illustrative.
The manna economy’s “daily bread” directly counters this formation: receive today, trust tomorrow’s provision, resist the anxiety that drives accumulation and exit. But this counter-formation requires what capital structurally prevents—communities stable enough to practice trust across time, relationships secure enough to bear the vulnerability of commitment, a horizon long enough to discover that tomorrow’s bread actually comes.
Capital doesn’t just create material precarity. It creates the ontological conditions under which manna economics becomes unthinkable. When every relationship is potentially temporary and every commitment potentially negotiable, daily bread sounds like dangerous naïveté. Pharaoh wins not by arguing but by forming subjects for whom his economy feels like the only realistic option.
This is what makes the church’s counter-formation so difficult and so necessary. We are not offering a competing investment strategy. We are offering a different ontology—one in which being is gift, provision is daily, and the liquidity that capital prizes is revealed as the restless anxiety of those who cannot trust.
But the difference goes deeper than ontology. Manna economics reconstitutes economic logic at its root.
In Pharaoh’s economy, receiving creates debt. When you receive from a finite supply, you are diminished—obligated, beholden, lesser than before. The gift carries a hook. Every favor must be repaid; every kindness creates leverage; every act of generosity positions the giver above the receiver. This is why capital’s liquidity preference makes perfect sense within Pharaoh’s formation: if receiving is always dangerous, the rational response is to preserve optionality, maintain exit capacity, never become too indebted to any particular relationship or place.
In manna economy, receiving creates capacity for gift. This inversion is possible only because the Source is inexhaustible. When you receive from infinite fullness, you are not diminished but enlarged—not obligated but freed for your own generosity. The gift carries no hook because there is always more where it came from. Wells observes that divine love “does not fundamentally lie in unequal gestures of sacrifice, but in mutual companionship and utter appreciation.”10 The love extended to creation is the same love the Trinity enjoys internally—non-competitive, generative, endless.
The difference is structural, not merely quantitative. Pharaoh’s economy forms subjects who experience every gift as potential trap, every generosity as subtle domination. Manna economy forms subjects who experience receiving as the condition of possibility for giving—not because they must repay, but because fullness naturally overflows. The widow’s mite and the boy’s loaves aren’t impressive sacrifices from scarcity; they’re natural offerings from those who have learned that giving doesn’t deplete.
This is why the church’s counter-formation must address all three registers simultaneously. It’s not enough to redistribute material resources if psychological scarcity still shapes perception. It’s not enough to cultivate feelings of abundance if ontological assumptions remain Pharaonic. The Eucharist works on all three levels at once: bread and wine are materially sufficient, shared practice rewires psychological formation, and the liturgy declares the ontological truth that being itself is gift from an inexhaustible Source.
5. The Fantasy of Belonging
David Bentley Hart’s recent analysis draws on Marx to illuminate something I’ve been trying to name for years: how national identity functions as what might be called a “fantasy of belonging.”11
The mechanism is psychological: shared ethnic or national identity creates the illusion of common interest between exploiter and exploited. Consider the poor white American Southerner who owned no slaves. He shared identity with planters—white, Southern, Christian—and this shared identity made the planter’s wealth feel like “our” prosperity, the planter’s enemies feel like “our” enemies. Material deprivation gets psychologically compensated by identity belonging.
The result, as Hart puts it, is that national identity fantasy “turns the hostility of the poor and of laborers away from those who actually exploit and oppress them, and against those who would naturally be their class allies around the world.” American workers see Mexican workers as competitors rather than fellow laborers with shared interests. The hostility that might challenge the system goes instead toward the foreign worker, and the system continues unchallenged.
Here’s where the shame-pride framework I’ve been developing across this series becomes essential. The fantasy of belonging isn’t merely ideological mystification—false consciousness that better information could dispel. It’s affective compensation for real wounds.
Toxic shame—the biological affect of relational rupture internalized as identity rather than heard as signal—seeks healing through pride-based compensation. Economic precarity generates shame. The worker who cannot provide, who fears the next layoff, who watches others accumulate what remains out of reach—this worker carries shame in the body, encoded as firmware, firing in milliseconds through subcortical systems.
The fantasy of shared ethnic identity offers hubristic pride as counterfeit remedy. “I may be struggling, but at least I’m one of us—not one of them.” This is the individual shame-to-disordered-pride dynamic operating at collective scale. The precarious worker who embraces national identity against immigrant “competitors” isn’t simply mistaken about economics. He’s found a way to manage unbearable shame through borrowed pride.
But the fantasy operates at a deeper level than affect regulation. National identity doesn’t just feel like belonging; it claims to be a form of genuine participation in something that transcends the individual. This is why nationalism has religious dimensions—it offers a counterfeit analogia entis, a false mediation between particular and universal. The poor white Southerner didn’t just feel connected to the planter; he believed he participated in something—whiteness, Southernness, “our way of life”—that transcended them both. This is the structural inversion of eucharistic participation. The Eucharist offers participation in Christ’s body across all borders; national identity offers participation in the nation-body against other nations. Both claim to connect particular to universal. Only one actually does. Nationalism is not merely bad politics or disordered affect. It is idolatrous participation in false transcendence—which is why it proves so resistant to mere argument.
The solution isn’t argument but alternative belonging—communities that offer genuine security without requiring the exclusion of others to maintain it. This is what manna economics provides, and what Pharaoh’s economy structurally prevents. At the wilderness table, belonging isn’t earned through productivity or maintained through exclusion. The manna falls on everyone. Your portion isn’t a function of your gathering. Identity comes from being fed, not from being better than those who aren’t.
Future essays will develop how attachment wounds that manifest in individuals as narrowed windows of tolerance and defensive pride structures also manifest at communal and peoplehood levels—how wounded communities generate the same compensatory patterns that wounded individuals do. For now, the point is this: the fantasy of belonging isn’t peripheral to capital’s functioning. It’s essential. Without identity formations that redirect class antagonism into ethnic competition, the solidarity that might challenge the system could emerge.
Borders aren’t just administrative conveniences. They’re shame-management infrastructure.
Wells offers language that crystallizes what I’m trying to describe. Sin, he argues, is not primarily transgressing a code but inhabiting a false story—”the misconstrual of a narrative such that a story of grace and abundance is distorted into one of resentment and scarcity.”12
This is exactly what the fantasy of national belonging does. It takes the true story—that being is gift, that provision flows from inexhaustible fullness, that we are made for communion across every boundary—and distorts it into a story of threat and competition. In the true story, the stranger is potential companion in the life of shared abundance. In the false story, the stranger is competitor for scarce resources, threat to precarious identity, enemy to be excluded.
Wells presses further: Sin is “a false story about God, that forgets or denies that God longs to be with us... Sin consequently is a false story about ourselves, that we do not belong in this story; about one another, that other people constitute threats to our being with rather than assets and companions; and about creation, that we can use it to create an alternative story rather than enjoy it as it belongs with us.”13
The fantasy of ethnic belonging is precisely such a false story. It tells the precarious worker that he belongs to “us” rather than “them”—that his identity is secured by exclusion rather than received as gift. It offers a counterfeit analogia entis, a false mediation between particular and universal: you matter because you’re white, or American, or Christian in the right way. But this belonging depends on others not belonging. It is secured by the border, maintained by the sort, sustained by the distinction between deserving and undeserving. The moment you extend the boundary, the belonging dissolves—which is why such formations are so ferociously defended.
The Eucharist offers the true story. At this table, belonging is not earned through productivity or maintained through exclusion. The bread falls on everyone. Your portion is not a function of your gathering. Identity comes from being fed, not from being better than those who aren’t. This is why Christian nationalism is not merely bad politics but theological error—it mistakes a false story for the true one, offers counterfeit participation in place of genuine communion, and manages shame through borrowed pride rather than receiving the only identity that cannot be taken away.
6. Borders as Ontological Convention
The main essay critiques borders that fragment human solidarity. But colleagues have pressed me: what is a border, ontologically considered? The question deserves a serious answer.
A border is the claim that being can be cleanly divided—that “mine” and “yours,” “us” and “them,” name real ruptures in existence. It presupposes that reality can be sliced into mutually exclusive territories, that identity is constituted by exclusion, that what I am depends on what I am not.
Classical metaphysics denies this. Being is not a genus divisible into species.14 The doctrine of divine simplicity means God cannot be divided; the doctrine of participation means creatures exist by sharing in what cannot be divided. You can draw lines on water, but water doesn’t take the ink. Borders are not ontologically fundamental.
But a further premise is needed to move from metaphysics to ethics: claims to ultimacy must be grounded in ontological reality. Administrative arrangements—practically necessary, historically contingent—can legitimately organize human life without claiming sacred status. What they cannot do is demand the kind of allegiance appropriate only to what is ontologically real. The nation-state that asks its citizens to kill and die for it claims ultimacy. The border that determines who eats and who starves claims ultimacy. These claims fail not because borders serve no purpose, but because the purpose they serve cannot justify the sacrifices they demand. Only what participates in Being itself warrants ultimate allegiance—and borders, however useful, do not.
A clarification on “contingent”: I am not arguing that borders are accidental in the sense of arbitrary or meaningless. Borders serve real functions in a world still marked by the Fall’s effects. What I am denying is their ultimacy—that they represent permanent features of being itself rather than provisional arrangements within creation’s current condition. The distinction is between “contingent as accidental” and “contingent as dependent.” Borders depend on conditions that will not persist into the eschaton. They are real but not final.
Hart’s recent work reveals the paradox at capitalism’s heart that makes this analysis urgent.15 Capital’s drive toward borderless mobility—goods, services, and money flowing wherever profit beckons—creates instability that only sovereign states can manage: legal frameworks, contract enforcement, currency systems, crisis intervention. But state sovereignty requires territorial boundaries.
The result: the most mobile capital paradoxically requires the most fixed borders. Each nation-state becomes what Hart calls an “area of absolute sovereignty, law, and coercive power, invested with a numinous aura of sacral inviolability.” This sacralization isn’t religious residue; it’s functional necessity. Capital needs bordered markets; bordered markets need the fiction of natural nations; natural nations need ethnic/cultural identity markers. The system that claims to liberate individuals actually requires the tribal identities it pretends to transcend.
This matters because it grounds the claim that fragmentation is not just unjust but confused. The system that sorts us into competing groups isn’t merely ethically problematic; it’s metaphysically mistaken. It treats as ontologically primary what is at best accidentally true. “American” and “Mexican” name administrative categories, not kinds of being. The sorting is violence against participation itself—a refusal of the communion that constitutes existence.
Paul’s declaration in Galatians—”no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female”—isn’t social aspiration. It’s ontological recognition. In Christ, the conventional boundaries are revealed as contingent—they were never ontologically real. They were Pharaoh’s lines drawn on being, pretending to divide what cannot be divided. Baptism doesn’t create a new reality; it reveals the reality that was always true but obscured by the conventions we’d mistaken for nature.
None of this means borders serve no purpose. Administrative distinctions can be practically necessary. But borders become idolatrous when they claim ultimacy—when they pretend to name real divisions in being rather than contingent arrangements subject to revision. The nation-state that demands sacrifice as if it were sacred confuses administrative convenience with ontological necessity.
Manna economics exposes this confusion. The bread fell on all Israel—not on this tribe’s territory rather than that one’s. The Jubilee returned land to families without respect for the property lines that debt-default had drawn. Sabbath economics doesn’t recognize the borders that Pharaoh’s economy requires.
7. Transactional Atonement as Pharaoh’s God
Penal substitutionary atonement smuggles Pharaoh into the doctrine of God.
I don’t mean this as polemic—though Hart has done that work brilliantly and I’m happy to cite him.16 I mean it as analysis. The conceptual architecture of the theory requires a God who operates by scarcity logic.
Consider what the contractual model assumes: a God whose honor is a limited quantity that can be depleted by human offense. A God who operates by ledger, tracking debts and payments. A God whose economy runs on scarcity—there’s only so much divine favor, and we’ve overdrawn the account.
But this is Pharaoh’s god. This is the deity of store-cities, the divine accountant tallying what’s owed, the cosmic version of the economy that produces anxious subjects to serve its endless hunger. If God operates by scarcity logic, then Pharaoh was right all along—hoarding is rational because even the divine realm doesn’t have enough.
The doctrine of divine aseity—that God needs nothing from creatures—stands in direct tension with any atonement theory that requires God to receive satisfaction.17 If God truly needs nothing, then “satisfaction” must mean something other than replenishing what was depleted. The Incarnation becomes not God collecting payment but God entering our captivity to set us free—which is precisely the Exodus pattern, precisely what Luke narrates, precisely what manna economics embodies.
The God of the manna story doesn’t operate by ledger. The God who gives bread every morning without depleting anything doesn’t need satisfaction—God is satisfaction, the infinite fullness from which all being flows. What could we possibly owe a God who has everything? What could we pay a God who needs nothing? The very categories of debt and payment assume a scarcity that doesn’t exist in God.
Douglas Campbell’s apocalyptic reading of Paul has been essential for me here.18 The difference between contractual and apocalyptic frameworks is enormous: in the contractual model, God’s wrath is the problem requiring solution; in the apocalyptic model, God’s love is the solution invading the problem. The Incarnation isn’t God settling accounts. It’s God entering Pharaoh’s territory to bring captives home.
This doesn’t mean sin is unserious or that the cross accomplishes nothing. It means the accomplishment must be understood differently—as liberation rather than transaction, as presence rather than payment, as God entering the territory occupied by hostile powers to set prisoners free. The Incarnation is invasion, not invoice.
But how does presence liberate? If the powers that hold us captive have real force—and they do; Pharaoh’s economy genuinely binds—what does divine presence accomplish that mere information cannot? Here the neuroscience of co-regulation offers theological illumination. A dysregulated nervous system cannot regulate itself by trying harder. It requires the presence of a regulated other—a nervous system already at rest that can, through sustained proximity, invite the dysregulated system into its rhythm.19 The Incarnation is God entering the co-regulatory circuit. Emmanuel doesn’t argue us out of Pharaoh’s formation; Emmanuel holds us until our systems can reorganize around a different center. The powers are real—not as ontological substances competing with God, but as formations, patterns, grooves worn into neural pathways and social structures. They are privative in the sense that they represent the absence of right relation, but privation can nonetheless bind. What breaks their hold is not counter-force but counter-presence: the slow, patient work of a regulated love that doesn’t leave.
This pneumatological dimension requires explicit Trinitarian naming—something I’ve left implicit until now.
The Incarnation is the Son’s entrance into Pharaoh’s territory. Emmanuel doesn’t send a message or dispatch a representative. The second Person crosses the threshold, takes on flesh formed by Pharaoh’s anxiety, and begins the slow work of being with those whose nervous systems have been shaped for scarcity. This is the Son’s characteristic work: embodying the Trinity’s utter commitment to be with creation.
But the Son’s work in first-century Palestine, however decisive, requires continuation. This is where the Spirit enters—not as afterthought or auxiliary, but as the Person through whom the Son’s presence extends across time and space. Samuel Wells makes a distinction I’ve found clarifying: Jesus Christ names the Trinity’s defining purpose; the Holy Spirit names the Trinity’s unfolding purpose.20 The Son is what God has done decisively; the Spirit is how that continues.
The Spirit is the Person who maintains co-regulatory presence across the gap that sin and death create. What the neuroscience describes as right-brain-to-right-brain attunement—the process by which one regulated nervous system helps another regulate—theology names as the Spirit’s ongoing work. The Spirit makes Christ present, fosters ways human beings are with Christ, prepares the way for the communion that has no end. The wilderness catechism begun at Sinai continues at the Eucharistic table. Week after week, the Spirit draws dysregulated systems into the rhythm of a love that holds without grasping.
And the Father? The Father is the inexhaustible Source from whom this abundance flows—the one who begets and sends, whose voice at Jesus’ baptism announces not transaction but delight: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The manna that falls every morning is icon of the Father’s character: giving that doesn’t deplete, provision that doesn’t run out, abundance that makes Pharaoh’s store-cities look like the anxious hoarding they are.
This Trinitarian specification matters because it prevents the manna story from becoming merely ethical exhortation. We’re not being told to try harder at generosity. We’re being invited into the life of a God whose very being is self-giving love—a God who cannot not give, because giving is what God eternally is.
8. Ontological Habitation
The main essay follows Sam Wells in speaking of sin as “living the wrong story.” But I’ve come to think “story” is too weak. The issue isn’t narrative preference, like choosing between novels. It’s ontological habitation—inhabiting differently structured universes.
To live Pharaoh’s story is to inhabit a universe structured by scarcity. In that universe, being runs out, accumulation is rational, borders are necessary to protect what little there is. Everything appears within a horizon of lack. The perceptual field itself is organized around threat, competition, and the struggle for limited goods.
To live the manna story is to inhabit a universe structured by gift. In that universe, being overflows, release makes sense because more is always coming, borders are fictions maintained against the truth. Everything appears within a horizon of abundance. The perceptual field is organized around trust, communion, and the reception of unlimited grace.
These are not merely different interpretations of a neutral, pre-given world. They are differently structured horizons of perception—what we might call different experienced worlds, while acknowledging that translation and transformation between them remains possible.21 The forty years of wilderness catechism presuppose precisely this: that the Pharaoh-formed can learn to inhabit manna-reality. If the worlds were strictly incommensurable, conversion would be impossible. But conversion is difficult precisely because it requires more than cognitive assent—it requires the slow reformation of the predictive apparatus through which reality appears.
The phenomenological tradition helps here: our “world” is not simply given to neutral observation but constituted by embodied practices and pre-reflective orientations. Different formations produce different worlds—not subjectively (as mere perspective) but constitutively (as the structured field within which anything can appear).
The neuroscience material developed earlier in this appendix supports this. The “window of tolerance” isn’t just psychological; it’s epistemic. A nervous system formed by Pharaoh’s anxiety literally cannot see the abundance that’s there. The predictive brain constructs perceptual reality based on prior formation.22 What we see depends on what we’ve been trained to expect. Pharaoh’s formation doesn’t just make us act as if scarcity were true. It makes scarcity true for us—the only world our constricted perception can access.
The formation I’ve been describing is not merely epistemic but aesthetic. To inhabit manna-world is to perceive beautywhere Pharaoh-formation sees only weakness.
Consider the infant in the manger. The Pharaoh-formed look at this scene and see vulnerability, exposure, lack of protection—all the markers of what capital’s liquidity preference would classify as “bad investment.” A deity worthy of worship would surely arrive with power, provision, security. This baby has none of those. The Pharaoh-formed cannot perceive it as beautiful. They see only deficit.
But the Trinity’s internal life is characterized by what Wells calls “delight”—perceiving abundance rather than scarcity, rejoicing in fecundity rather than pinpointing defects, celebrating new configurations rather than lamenting the loss of familiar patterns. And delight, Wells observes, “is inherently non-violent: instead of coercing or exploiting deficit, it appreciates and validates assets. It is not looking to outwit, or dominate, but to build up and enhance.”23
The Christmas event isn’t just true. It’s beautiful. God appearing as an infant in poverty is aesthetically revelatory—it discloses the form of divine self-giving that the scarcity-formed cannot recognize as glory. Only formation that comes from sustained exposure to this form—looking at the manger, looking at the cross, practicing the release of what cannot be kept—enables one to perceive beauty in apparent defeat. The wilderness catechism trains not just new perception but new capacity for joy.
This aesthetic dimension matters because beauty moves us when argument cannot. The Pharaoh-formed subject may intellectually grasp that abundance is true without being able to see it as beautiful—without being drawn toward it, delighted by it, changed in the perceiving. Formation requires not just updated beliefs but trained desires, redirected loves, the slow reshaping of what strikes us as worthy of pursuit. The manna story is beautiful in ways that Pharaoh’s store-cities cannot be. The cross is beautiful in ways that the empire’s power cannot approximate. Learning to perceive this beauty is part of what it means to be converted from scarcity to gift.
This means conversion isn’t agreeing to different ideas. It’s learning to inhabit a different universe. Forty years in the wilderness. A lifetime at the table. Enough practiced receiving that the nervous system finally trusts: there’s bread tomorrow. There’s always been bread. Being itself is bread.
9. Particularity and Solidarity
The main essay’s critique of borders and fragmentation requires nuance that the prophetic mode doesn’t easily accommodate. Borders aren’t simply evil. Boundaries enable identity, and identity enables agency.24
The manna community wasn’t a universal abstraction. It was a particular people, with a particular story, learning a particular practice. Christian universalism doesn’t dissolve that particularity; it relativizes it under a higher allegiance while honoring it as the place where formation actually happens. You don’t become a citizen of God’s kingdom by ceasing to be Guatemalan or Somali or American. You become someone for whom “American” is no longer the most important thing you are—which frees you to love America rightly, without idolatry, without ultimacy.
Ched Myers has helped me see how the manna story bears on this.25 In the wilderness catechism, your portion is explicitly not a function of your gathering. “Those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage” (Exodus 16:18). This directly contradicts the segmentation between “producers” and “takers” that pervades contemporary discourse.
The wilderness catechism teaches that provision comes from God’s abundance, not individual productivity; that sufficiency for all is possible when no one hoards; that the distinction between “makers” and “takers” is Pharaoh’s lie, not God’s truth.
Paul’s baptismal vision extends this economic logic to ethnic identity. In Galatians 3:26-28, Paul argues that baptism creates a community where “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Baptism, for Paul, dissolves precisely the identity markers that bordered markets require and that “producer/taker” rhetoric reinforces.
The apostolic confession “Jesus is Lord” doesn’t merely relativize national loyalty; it renders the entire project of ethnic and economic segmentation theologically incoherent. This is why Christianity must be constantly domesticated into national religions and why dominative Christianism baptizes economic hierarchies as divine order—the gospel’s universalism threatens both the fragmentation that capitalism needs and the shame-based hierarchies that disordered pride constructs.
The problem isn’t particularity per se. It’s particularity weaponized against solidarity. The Hart/Levy analysis shows how capital requires this weaponization: bordered markets need competing identities, and competing identities prevent the cross-border solidarity that might challenge capital’s mobility. The sorting serves the system.
But the solution isn’t dissolving all particularity into abstract universalism. That’s its own kind of violence—the violence of the “view from nowhere” that pretends to transcend location while actually imposing one location’s perspective on all others. Real solidarity is built through particular communities learning to act together across their differences, not by pretending differences don’t exist.26
The question isn’t whether to have borders but whether borders become walls or windows—whether particular belonging enables coalition with others or prevents it. Pharaoh’s economy needs borders that divide and conquer. Manna economics can honor particular communities while refusing to let them become prisons. The church is both catholic (universal) and always concretely local (particular congregations in specific places). The tension is constitutive, not resolvable.
This has practical implications for how Christians engage questions of migration, nationalism, and identity politics. We cannot simply denounce all borders as evil without becoming complicit in the abstracting violence that erases concrete communities. But we cannot defend borders as sacred without making idols of administrative arrangements. The path runs between—particular enough to enable formation, porous enough to prevent idolatry, oriented always toward the broader communion that particularity serves rather than blocks.
Conclusion: What Remains Unresolved
The Christmas reflection in the main essay makes theological claims that rest on philosophical foundations. This appendix has attempted to make those foundations explicit: that being is gift rather than scarcity; that scarcity operates on psychological, material, and ontological registers requiring different responses; that formation happens through co-regulation before it happens through cognition; that capital’s liquidity preference is counter-manna; that the fantasy of belonging manages shame through borrowed pride and offers counterfeit participation in false transcendence; that borders are administratively useful but ontologically contingent—conventional arrangements that serve practical purposes without tracking real divisions in being; that transactional atonement smuggles Pharaoh’s god into Christian doctrine; that formation produces different experienced worlds rather than different interpretations of the same world, while preserving the possibility of translation and transformation; and that the relationship between particularity and universality is constitutive tension rather than simple opposition.
I’m aware of what I haven’t resolved.
The relationship between material scarcity and ontological abundance remains underdeveloped. Saying “genuine poverty doesn’t prove the universe is zero-sum” is true but insufficient. People are hungry. The manna isn’t falling on their tents. A fuller account would need to address theodicy, the problem of evil, and why ontological abundance doesn’t translate into material sufficiency for everyone. I don’t have that account yet.
The political implications are gestured at but not developed. If borders are ontologically contingent but practically necessary, what policy follows? I’ve diagnosed without prescribing, criticized without constructing. Bretherton and Cavanaugh have done more constructive work here than I have, and I’m still learning from them.
But I can at least gesture toward direction. Future essays will develop how manna economics funds a politics of participatory communion. Wells insists that the eschaton must be “participatory, interactive, dynamic and unfolding”—not static preservation of the saved but endless being-with, meals and conversation and communion without end. The Eucharist, he argues, is constitutive of heaven, not merely commemorative of rescue: “There would have been a Eucharist even without the fall, because it enacts God’s companionship with us, initiated in the incarnation.”27
If this is true—if the goal toward which formation tends is not escape from materiality but its transformation, not individual salvation but cosmic communion—then political economy cannot be afterthought or application. It’s part of what we’re being formed for. The wilderness catechism trained Israel for Canaan; the Eucharistic table trains us for a feast that has no end. A politics adequate to this formation would neither baptize Pharaoh’s economy with pious language nor retreat into spiritual otherworldliness. It would embody, here and now, the pattern of the coming abundance—not as utopian achievement but as anticipatory practice, the way manna anticipated Canaan even while the people were still in the desert.
What such a politics looks like in detail—how it navigates the tension between particular belonging and universal communion, how it resists both nationalism’s idolatry and cosmopolitanism’s abstraction—remains to be developed. But the direction is set by the formation itself: toward practices that train for abundance, communities that form for trust, tables where the bread falls on everyone.
The relationship between individual and collective shame-pride dynamics needs the fuller treatment I’ve promised in future essays. I’ve asserted that wounded communities generate compensatory patterns analogous to wounded individuals. I haven’t demonstrated it.
None of this replaces the main essay’s pastoral invitation. You don’t need to grasp these philosophical arguments to practice manna economics. The disciples at Emmaus recognized Jesus in the breaking of bread, not in metaphysical analysis. Formation happens at the table before it happens in the seminar.
But for those who want to understand why the invitation makes sense—why daily bread isn’t naive optimism, why release isn’t self-destruction, why borders don’t have the ultimacy they claim—these foundations matter.
The manna story isn’t just ancient wisdom or inspiring metaphor. It’s true. Being really is gift. Scarcity really is lie. And Christmas really is God showing us what that truth looks like in flesh.
I could be wrong about any of this. Push back where you see the argument failing. That’s what colleagues are for.
Craig
Christmas 2025
© 2025 Craig Geevarghese-Uffman. You’re welcome to share this with attribution.
Endnotes
Classical theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity holds that God is not composed of parts and cannot be depleted. The God who creates ex nihilo—from nothing—gives being without losing anything. Creatures exist by participating in this inexhaustible fullness. See David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013), 127–152.
Augustine’s encounter with “the books of the Platonists” (Confessions VII) shaped his understanding of this overflow—the Good giving without losing, creating from fullness rather than need. See Augustine, Confessions VII.9–10 and City of God VIII.4–12; David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, 127–152.
The Neoplatonic axiom, mediated through Pseudo-Dionysius and appropriated by Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 4), though with important modifications to preserve divine freedom. The axiom does not mean God is compelled to create but that self-diffusion is intrinsic to Goodness itself—God gives because God is Gift.
Distinguishing these three registers of scarcity prevents several confusions. One can experience psychological scarcity amid material abundance; one can face material scarcity without embracing ontological scarcity; one can intellectually affirm ontological abundance while remaining psychologically formed for scarcity. Genuine transformation requires addressing all three levels.
T. F. Torrance develops this methodological principle throughout Part Three of Theological Science (Oxford University Press, 1969), 281–317. The relationship between theology and natural science is neither validation nor competition but co-reference—both disciplines investigate the same created reality, each with its own proper methods and vocabularies. Neither can adjudicate claims proper to the other, but genuine convergence provides mutual illumination.
Susan Eastman, Paul and the Person (Eerdmans, 2017), 145–152.
Allan Schore, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self (W. W. Norton, 2003), 201–246.
Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind, 3rd ed. (Guilford Press, 2020), 45–92. See also Eastman, Paul and the Person, 89–120, on the Pauline nous as relational and embodied.
Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism (Random House, 2021).
Samuel Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 181–182. Wells continues: “This love is already existent within the Trinity before creation: at a time when there is only being with, and no question of working for. Thus love should never become detached from this notion of enjoyment.”
David Bentley Hart, “Notes Toward a Polyphonic Politics—Part the Second,” Leaves in the Wind (Substack), December 15, 2025.
Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology, 283.
Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology, 273.
Classical metaphysics holds that being is not a genus divisible into species. Things exist by participating in Being itself (ipsum esse), which cannot be parceled into territories. See Augustine, Confessions VII.9–10; City of God VIII.4–12; Hart, The Experience of God, 127–152.
David Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo,” Pro Ecclesia 7, no. 3 (1998): 333–349.
The doctrine of divine aseity—that God is self-sufficient and needs nothing from creatures—stands in tension with atonement theories requiring God to receive satisfaction. If God truly needs nothing, “satisfaction” must be reconceived: not as replenishing something depleted in God, but as restoring something broken in us.
Douglas Campbell, Beyond Justification: Liberation, Participation, and Belonging in Paul’s Letters (Eerdmans, 2020), especially Part Two on the apocalyptic gospel versus contractual frameworks.
Stephen Porges's Polyvagal Theory provides the neurobiological foundation: the ventral vagal system, which enables social engagement and calm presence, is activated not through effort but through neuroception of safety—the nervous system's detection of a regulated other. See Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (W. W. Norton, 2011), 11–19, 51–73. On the interpersonal neurobiology of how one mind shapes another through sustained presence, see Siegel, The Developing Mind, 3rd ed. (Guilford Press, 2020), 45–92. On right-brain-to-right-brain attunement as the mechanism of co-regulation, see Schore, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self (W. W. Norton, 2003), 201–246. For fuller development of these dynamics and their theological implications, see Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, "When Pride Breaks: The Asymmetry Between Shame and Pride," Common Life Politics (Substack), 2025, https://www.commonlifepolitics.com/p/when-pride-breaks-the-asymmetry-between.
Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology, 216, 225; cf. 3–6 for the initial introduction of this distinction. Wells writes: "The Holy Spirit is that which anticipates (or later, imitates) Jesus in drawing people into relationships of being with God, one another and the wider creation, in covenant, community and communion."
I want to be precise here about what I’m not claiming. Donald Davidson’s critique of the scheme/content dualism rightly argues against the notion that incommensurable conceptual schemes could exist such that translation between them is impossible. I’m not claiming Pharaoh-world and manna-world are incommensurable in that strong sense. The wilderness catechism presupposes translatability—otherwise formation would be impossible. What I am claiming is that prior formation shapes what we can readily perceive, expect, and act upon, such that shifting between horizons requires sustained embodied practice, not merely cognitive assent. This is closer to Gadamer’s notion of horizon-fusion than to the conceptual relativism Davidson rightly rejects. See Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in The Essential Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 196–214; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Continuum, 2004), 301–307. On formation shaping perception, see Samuel Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 85–103; Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale University Press, 2009).
The "window of tolerance" is Siegel's term for the optimal zone of arousal within which the nervous system can process information, stay present, and remain relationally connected. Outside this window—in hyperarousal or hypoarousal—perception narrows and defensive responses dominate. See Siegel, The Developing Mind, 3rd ed. (Guilford Press, 2020), 281–286, 353–355; for the theological implications, see Geevarghese-Uffman, "When Pride Breaks."
Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology, 180.
Luke Bretherton’s work on broad-based community organizing is instructive here. Real political power is built through particular solidarities—congregations, unions, neighborhood associations—that learn to act together across their differences. See Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 73–120.
Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Cascade Books, 2025).
The tension between universalism and particularity runs through Christian theology from its origins. Paul’s baptismal formula (Galatians 3:28) relativizes ethnic, economic, and gender distinctions without abolishing them; the distinctions remain real but no longer determinative for belonging.
Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology, 135, 164, 208–209.