The first time Andrew and I heard about the church history job at Japan Lutheran College and Seminary, we laughed. “Tokyo—ho ho ho!” It was too far away, the language was too hard, the time was not right. I estimate that milliseconds after (if not exactly before the foundation of the world) God responded, “Sarah and Andrew—ho ho ho!” and set in motion the process that would lead to our being called there, Andrew to the church history job and me to pastor an English-language congregation in Tokyo.
Now I have always been a bit obsessed with discerning the narrative structure of my own life. Things have to have a reason, a logical connectedness, a foreshadowing and fulfillment. Maybe this is the psychological impact of moving a lot when I was a little kid, or maybe it’s my particular story-shaped brain being overdeveloped by lots of novels with little in the way of postmodern metafiction to beat it back. I often discerned wrongly in the forward direction—trying to force my story one way when it was really meant to go elsewhere, a fact I could figure out only in hindsight. But, for example, when our family moved to Slovakia when I was seventeen, that made sense. My dad’s family was all Slovak, I’d grown up thinking of myself as a Slovak and eating Slovak food, of course we would go there! Or when I got offered the job in Strasbourg at age thirty-two: in fact I’d been there once before, when I was nineteen, even staying at the very Institute that offered me the job, and already then I thought it was the most beautiful city in the world. Added bonus, it was the hometown of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, the Orthodox theologian on whom I’d written my dissertation, and I was going there to work on Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue. See? It all adds up!
Then comes… Japan.
I am scrambling for clues planted in my past. I can remember the first time I ate at a Japanese restaurant; it was with my mom, in my early teens, and I think in New York City, though I’m not absolutely sure. My response could not have been more typical: seaweed? green tea ice cream? raw fish?! At least I loved all that weird food, and even now every time I bite into nori I have a powerful sensory recall to that first taste. (And you'd better believe I'm already collecting Japanese cookbooks.)
Then… let’s see… I think there was a Japanese kid in my kindergarten class? I think I went through an origami and kirigami phase? Zeke read a manga series called Dragonball? Last year we got a real futon direct from Japan? I have a friend who used to be married to a Japanese man and makes the best homemade green tea ice cream? When I worked at First Things years ago I read this amazing article about Bach in Japan? I like decorative minimalism? I used to play a lot of Nintendo? Do you get the feeling I’m grasping at straws here? (Or maybe chopsticks?)
No wait, I’ve got it. Pulled back from the brink of narrative disunity by a Japanese Lutheran theologian! Whew! Here’s the story.
A few years ago I stumbled across The Theology of the Pain of God by Kazoh Kitamori. Asian Christian theology is, for obvious reasons, not exactly vast in quantity at this point in time, and Asian Lutheranism a smaller domain still. So I was pretty excited to find a Japanese Lutheran theologian at all. I was even more excited when I read the book, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is extraordinary. Here’s someone who knew the currents of Reformation and twentieth-century German theology so well he could analyze and critique them, and at the same time could contribute to both from a culturally distinctive Japanese background, offering a powerful reading of the theology of the cross and God’s love for sinners and enemies. I included his book in the Theological Reading Challenge I ran for a few years for Lutheran Forum, and that in turn led some folks at the WCC to ask me to write an essay about him for a collection they were doing on Asian theology. I wrote the essay, sent it in, and never heard back from them again. Oh well. On the bright side, I’m free to share this essay with you—my one personal link to Japanese Lutheranism up till now!
And in the meanwhile I’ll proceed on the assumption that even if I didn’t get much advance warning, this call is a genuine one to be embraced, naturally with some fear and trembling—but with even more joy and excitement. Come visit!
* * *
Kazoh Kitamori (1916–1998) was an extraordinarily prolific Japanese Protestant theologian, with more than forty books[i] published during his long tenure as professor at Tokyo Union Theological Seminary and pastor at the congregation of which he was the founder, yet his international reputation rests on a single book, the only one to be translated into English,[ii] The Theology of the Pain of God (1946).[iii] This fifth edition of the Japanese original made a splash when it first appeared in an anglophone setting in 1958, then went through a kind of revival when Jürgen Moltmann brought attention to it again in his 1987 The Crucified God. It was hailed as “the most self-consciously Japanese of the current theological tendencies in Japan. Yet it seems the most likely to interest and appeal to the theologians of the West, especially to Americans.”[iv]
This remark ironically heralded the mixed reception that Kitamori’s book has enjoyed ever since. Diametrically opposing claims are regularly made about it. Some, like Hashimoto, have argued that Kitamori did successfully inculturate the gospel into Japanese terms, drawing on the local tradition of the Amida Buddha, whose “compassion and sympathetic sorrow for human beings” makes the pain of God motif in Christianity readily accessible to a Japanese audience.[v] Meyer, while basically appreciative of Kitamori’s indigenizing efforts, asserts that “[i]t is especially dangerous when one seeks to communicate the Gospel to people far removed from the traditions of the Western church in time, distance, and culture,” implying the normativity of Western Christianity.[vi] Otto, at the far extreme, has accused Kitamori of inculturating the gospel too well, with “a recasting of the Christian religion in Buddhist terms”[vii] and fatally betraying Christianity in the process.
But others question whether Kitamori is really very Japanese at all. Sánchez opines that “…Kitamori falls somewhere between the older and younger generations in that he does not merely borrow ideas from the West to dress them in Japanese garb nor does he entirely dismiss the Western heritage to give us a purely Japanese product.”[viii] McWilliams wonders aloud, “How successful Kitamori is in producing a truly Japanese theology is not clear. Certainly he draws on his culture to a great extent for his basic orientation, but his reliance on Luther’s theology is also strong.”[ix] Accordingly, some see Kitamori’s work primarily as entry into longstanding intra-Western arguments. Certainly far more of Theology of the Pain of God has to do with critiques of liberalism and Barthianism, invoking Luther more than any other theologian, than with specifically Japanese elements.[x]
This does accurately reflect, though, the context of Kitamori’s church situation. Hashimoto notes the dominance of a certain wing of Barthianism in postwar Japan that, while offering an alternative to what was seen as fatally compromised Japanese culture, also negatively disposed other Japanese theologians toward Kitamori’s Lutheran ideas, calling his work “Lutheranism in kimono” and accusing him of patripassianism.[xi] Yet Japanese Lutherans do not necessarily recognize Kitamori as one of their own[xii]—despite his avowed theological commitments to Lutheran rather than Reformed or Barthian teaching—because he stayed in the United Church of Christ in Japan, a union of Protestant denominations mandated by the government in 1941, and even authored its (not specifically Lutheran) Kyodan Confession of Faith.[xiii]
Yet another set of objections to Kitamori come from other Asian theologians, especially Minjung theologians in Korea, who take issue with an over-focusing on the sufferings of Japan in and after the Second World War, given Japan’s own terrible crimes against other nations.[xiv] Anri Morimoto, author of the foreword to the Wipf and Stock edition of Theology of the Pain of God, acknowledges these concerns and observes, “It would be unrealistic to assume that ordinary Japanese citizens had any substantial knowledge of what was going on outside the country when news and reports were tightly controlled by the military regime.”[xv] He further notes that Kitamori’s ideas were already well developed by the late 1930s, before the war-induced suffering in Japan took hold of national consciousness. Historical circumstances may have aided the reception of Kitamori’s work, but not necessarily its genesis. Tang similarly gives a reason for the tight focus on Japan to the exclusion of other parts of Asia in Kitamori’s work: Japanese theologians thus far have tended to write in Japanese and for Japanese audiences with little attention or concern for elsewhere, perhaps reflecting an overall tendency of Japanese culture.[xvi] Yet the fact remains that, even within Japan, Kitamori’s is a relatively neglected voice, not especially prominent or valued, subject to “more or less cold criticism.”[xvii]
Given the diversity of judgment, one begins to suspect that Kitamori functions as a kind of inkblot test: what theologians see in him is what they are disposed to see, more than what he actually is. If anything, this points out how immensely complex the inculturation process remains and how inadequately, even now, theories and principles are able to deal with it. How indeed to remain faithful to the biblical witness that is set in a particular time, place, and people? How indeed to take that witness into radically different times, places, and people? Kitamori weighed in on the debate himself, arguing that “ecumenical theology” is always “the universal mediated by the particular.”[xviii] He saw chiefly a pattern of exchange between the different times and locations of the church:
[I]s it not legitimate for Japanese theology, as a non-Western theology freed from the particularity of Greek theology, to approach the Bible from a fresh point of view? At the same time, this non-Western theology definitely must be mediated through Greek theology as theology of the West. To the extent that it is mediated by the tradition of orthodox (Western) dogma, it tries to renew that tradition even as it seeks to approach the very message of the Bible.[xix]
At risk of adding to the cacophony, I would suggest that Kitamori’s example forbids any further search for purity or essentialism in the inculturation process. There can neither be a “purely” Japanese theology (if there was, there would be no room for the Jewish Scripture) nor a “purely” biblical church (if there was, there would be no room for Japan). Christianity is in the business of cross-fertilization, hybrids, chimeras: notably, a domain reserved in Leviticus to divine activity alone, which sees its costly fulfillment in the divine-human person of Jesus Christ, whose death on the cross allowed the ingrafting of the nations into Israel.[xx] Thus, this essay proceeds on the assumption that Kazoh Kitamori was really Japanese, really Christian, really a member of the whole church catholic, and as entitled to draw on Pure Land Buddhism as to weigh in on German philosophical debates in the course of his articulation of the gospel.
To move now to the heart of Kitamori’s theology, which he argued was the heart of the gospel itself—namely, the pain of God—it helps to situate him between the two opposite poles that he rejected. On the one hand, he felt that liberal Protestant theology had sentimentally gutted all meaning from the wrath of God. It spoke blandly of the love of God, “nothing but the ‘soprano’ of these happy people,”[xxi] painting a dishonest portrait of the severity of sin as well as the severity of God’s response to it. On the other hand, while he could appreciate the efforts of Karl Barth to recapture the wrath of God while putting it in service of God’s ultimate saving intention, Kitamori still suspected that Barth was not actually able to speak the gospel. Barth’s account of God’s standing totally against and above all human idolatry ended up simply promulgating a new law—admittedly a better law, but in any event not yet the gospel.[xxii]
Kitamori instead took his cues from Jeremiah 31:20, “Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord,” and Isaiah 63:15, “Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory: where is thy zeal and thy strength, the sounding of thy bowels and of thy mercies toward me? are they restrained?”[xxiii] Both verses employ the Hebrew word hamah, “bowel,” which corresponds to the Euro-American usage of the term “heart,” but not in a sentimental way. All other uses of the term in the Old Testament refer to human beings, and all have connotations of anguish, turmoil, and moaning (cf. Jeremiah 4:19, Psalm 55:17, Isaiah 16:11, among others). Pain is at the heart of its meaning; which means that pain has been attributed to God Himself[xxiv] by the prophets.
Kitamori interprets this pain of God by taking up a theme from Luther: “God against God.” It is the equally powerful love of God for His creatures and His wrath against them as sinners that causes the almighty struggle within God’s own being. How can He love the unlovable—not just the socially or ritually or legally unlovable, but the ontologically unlovable, the ones who embrace evil and reject God as their source? Such love can only take place via pain; more precisely, through the cross, not a mere unfortunate ending to a religious idealist’s life but the very heart of the triune God. Gospel love is the love of enemies. “God himself was broken, was wounded, and suffered, because he embraced those who should not be embraced.”[xxv]
Although Kitamori devoted much time to thinkers in the German tradition—not only Luther and Barth but also Hegel, Schelling, and Kant, to name a few—he believed that giving expression to the pain of God was the particular task of the Japanese.[xxvi] Much like the way the early church fathers detected a foreknowledge of the gospel in ancient Greek philosophy and religion, Kitamori found the same intimation of the grieving love of Abraham and of God the Father for their sons in the traditional Kabuki theater of Japan. Both know that “the bitterest pain man can suffer is to cause the death of his beloved son.”[xxvii] Kitamori discusses the particular quality of tsurasa found in Japanese tragedies, the emotion that comes “when one suffers and dies, or makes his beloved son suffer and die, for the sake of loving and making others live.”[xxviii] He also finds a “protoevangelion” in Crown Prince Shotoku’s writings on the Buddha: “Man’s real sickness springs from foolish love; Buddha’s responding sickness arises from great mercy… The sickness of the great mercy [of Buddha] saves people by absorbing their sickness. Sickness is saved by sickness.”[xxix] Kitamori sees in this an analogy to “with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5, ESV). In this way, Japanese culture had already intimated the suffering of the divine that comes of the effort to rescue humanity from itself.
Still, that was not quite yet the gospel. The love that suffers in tsurasa is for a worthy object, not for an enemy or unworthy person. And in the Buddhist understanding, pain remains somehow external to the divine, as sympathy at best; nor is there any real wrath condemning real sin. Kitamori, however, is quite determined that God’s pain is fully internal to His own being, the result of His righteous wrath and tender love. And this is why His incarnation is so important: it allows all the sin and sorrow of human history to be taken up into God’s own life.[xxx] “God has died! If this does not startle us, what will? The church must keep this astonishment alive. The church ceases to exist when she loses this astonishment.”[xxxi] The suffering in the body is the work of the Son, but suffering of another order touches also the Father:
It is because God continues to live in the person of the Father while dying in the person of the Son. The death of God the Son can be called the pain of God because the person of the Father lived. Pain can only be experienced by the living, not by the dead who are already freed from suffering… God the Father who hid himself in the death of God the Son is God in pain. Therefore the pain of God is neither merely the pain of God the Son, nor merely the pain of God the Father, but the pain of the two persons who are essentially one.[xxxii]
God’s pain therefore is twofold: first, the death of the worthy Son, and second, the embrace, which is to say the forgiveness, of the unworthy sinners.
Kitamori’s book is avowedly about God’s pain, not as a reflection of human experience but as a genuinely intradivine reality of the great cost of forgiving the sinning creation. Yet it does have implications for human experience. Kitamori observes, “Our human pain is by itself dark, meaningless, and barren.”[xxxiii] There is no satisfying theodicy to be offered; even Kitamori does not attempt to theorize about it. He only talks about what God does with human pain: “…God responded to this pain of ours in an astonishing way: he made it serve as testimony to his own pain.”[xxxiv] Through their own painful loves—including the often selfish love parents feel for their children—Christians can begin to give meaning and use to their pain. By contrast, “[u]nbelievers can never be united to God as long as they are in their natural condition. Believers, though they have already been freed from the wrath of God, must share the pain of unbelievers, and thus help them to accept their pain as a symbol for God’s pain in order to be united with God.”[xxxv]
This is exactly where Kitamori sees the mission work of the church to lie. Since the pain of God is rooted in His embrace of those who cannot or should not be embraced, Kitamori infers that “neighbor” in the Scripture means “enemy” as well as “friend.” Unbelievers are to be taken into the love and pain of the Christian believer as much as any fellow in Christ (cf. Luke 6:32–34). This is essential. “When the gospel lacks the pain of God, it changes into a ‘different gospel’ which loves only the lovable.”[xxxvi] In short, the church cannot be itself if it is not active in loving unbelievers. Kitamori explains:
If we must love both believers and unbelievers as sincerely as we love ourselves, and if this is what God commands us to do, we must see unbelievers as standing in the same “order of light” as believers. This means that unbelievers should not perish any more than believers. Usually we think that unbelievers, unlike believers, stand in the “order of darkness,” and we imagine that God does not love them as tenderly as he loves believers; but this position cannot be sustained.[xxxvii]
Such an affirmation of the pain of God for all—believers and unbelievers alike, since both groups consist of sinners—is the only real alternative to the “banal idea of universal salvation.”[xxxviii]
The corresponding spirituality of Kitamori’s doctrine of God is expressed in the “mysticism of pain.” Kitamori acknowledges up front the dangers: an attempt to encounter God apart from cross and pain; religious delusions that make mysticism “a hotbed for unsoundness.”[xxxix] Nevertheless, if it is truly “no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me,” then to be a Christian is to participate in Christ’s experience of crucified pain. Kitamori therefore asserts that a “doctrine of justification which does not develop into mysticism lacks power.”[xl] However, such cross-mysticism is not pure masochism, as it may sound. Mysticism also implies enjoyment of God, and Kitamori goes on to say that “[t]he pain of God demands that we hate ourselves, but love rooted in the pain of God envelops us so completely that we cannot even hate ourselves any longer.”[xli] Such mysticism “produces ethical energy” and will not sink into quietism. Kitamori does not grant Christians license to make martyrs of themselves or give others free range for oppression. Sin is still to be stopped, not indulged in the name of either pain or love: another reason why it is so dangerous to lose sight of the wrath of God.
The goal of such mysticism is to move beyond both the willing loving of the lovable and also the unwilling loving of the unlovable to the point of becoming willing to love the unlovable—something that can only be done in and through the pain of God. Kitamori concludes, “All the efforts to bring peace in the world—‘the unity of the divisions’—will be in vain without being supported by a cornerstone, ‘God in pain.’”[xlii]
Kitamori fully expected his theology to remain marginal:
We must emphatically note here that the gospel, in making itself known to man, should retain its characteristic of being “outside the gate” (Heb. 13:2)… If the gospel loses its characteristic of being “outside” in our world, it is no longer the gospel and is not even worthy of our consideration. The theology of the pain of God, if true to itself, must retain this characteristic of being “outside.” It should never become a so-called “dominant” theology.[xliii]
Indeed, he was rather perplexed at his book’s brief surge in popularity, both as a pocket edition in Japanese eagerly read by non-Christians as well as its vogue among English and other European-language speakers. Ultimately, though, his expectations were fulfilled. His stark way will at best summon, as Tang puts it, only “a prophetic minority—Kitamori remains in the tradition of the No-Church Movement—living out a life of contradictions, embracing the opposites of society as well as the opposites of love and wrath, loving and at the same time condemning those undeserving of love, in order to be a living analogy of the ‘pain of God.’”[xliv]
So it is hardly surprising that it still strikes many ears as strange news, not good news, to hear of “God in pain.” But to Kitamori, God in pain is the one hope for a world truly created good and yet truly corrupted by, afflicted with, and complicit in sin. In God’s pain, His righteousness and His love meet one another, wrestle mightily on the cross, and through the pain of their collision issue in the unexpected embrace of the unembraceable. “It has been our sincere desire to see deeply into the heart of God, by following the example of Jeremiah [in 31:20]. This desire has been fulfilled by seeing the pain of God, as did Jeremiah. We were astonished to find the inner heart of God as pain.”[xlv]
Notes
[i] Meyer translates the titles of select books by Kitamori: The Lord of the Cross (1940); Theology and Creeds (1943); The Character of the Gospel (1948); Martin Luther (1951); The Logic of Salvation (1953); God (1953); Lectures on Pauline Letters (1955); Introduction to the Bible (1955); The Explanation of the Confession of Faith of the Church of Christ in Japan (1955); Theology Today (1956); God and Man (1956); Happiness (1957). Kitamori also contributed to: Christianity in Asia (1955); What Kind of Men Are We? (1958); and Human Freedom and Happiness (1958). See Richard Meyer, “Toward a Japanese Theology: Kitamori’s Theology of the Pain of God,” Concordia Theological Monthly 33 (1962): 261–272.
[ii] It was also translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Korean. I must openly acknowledge here my total dependence on the limited English language literature about Kitamori and his work, and as such I gladly invite the critiques of those who can read Kitamori and his critics in Japanese. Hashimoto issues a fitting warning: “An important question that arises from this Western appreciation of Kitamori’s theology is, however, whether theologians who take impulses from Kitamori’s theological thoughts have understood this Japanese theologian properly, or rather whether it has been possible for them to evaluate his theological ideas properly, particularly due to the scarcity of study material available. There is only one book, Kitamori’s main work, The Theology of the Pain of God, the single book of his which has been translated into a number of Western languages. If Kitamori’s theology is received as an epoch-making formulation of theology in a non-Western context, that may have depended partly on a misunderstanding of the proper intent of this theology and partly on a theological fascination with something exotic.” Akio Hashimoto, “Legacy of Kitamori in Contemporary Japanese Christian Thought,” Missio Apostolica 12/1 (2004): 14. To my knowledge, the most extensive study of Kitamori’s theology in a Western language is Bettina Oguro-Opitz, Analyse und Auseinandersetzung mit der Theologie des Schmerzes Gottes von Kazoh Kitamori (Frankfurt am Main: Peter D. Lang, 1980).
[iii] Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God (Richmond: John Knox, 1965; citations here taken from the reprint edition, Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005).
[iv] Carl Michalson, Japanese Contributions to Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 73. See also G. C. Oosthuizen, Theological Discussions and Confessional Developments in the Churches of Asia and Africa (Franeker: T. Wever, 1958), 149, who wrote that Kitamori Kitamori was “the first one who attempted to work intensively on an indigenous theology for Japan.”
[v] Hashimoto, 14.
[vi] Meyer, 271.
[vii] Randall E. Otto, “Japanese Religion in Kazoh Kitamori’s Theology of the Pain of God," Encounter 52/1 (1991): 43. Otto’s thesis is unmistakably hostile: “This study will endeavor to show that Kitamori’s theology owes more to Japanese religious culture than to the Bible,” 33.
[viii] Leopoldo A. Sánchez M., “What Does Japan Have to Do with Either Latin America or U.S. Hispanics?: Reading Kazoh Kitamori’s ‘Theology of the Pain of God’ from a Latino Perspective,” Missio Apostolica 12/1 (2004): 38.
[ix] Warren McWilliams, “The Pain of God in the Theology of Kazoh Kitamori,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 8/3 (1981): 196.
[x] Meyer details Kitamori’s Lutheran commitments, 264.
[xi] Hashimoto, 12. Meyer, 268, n. 19, explains that Reformed theologians’ tendency to accuse Kitamori of patripassianism is rooted in their unfamiliarity with Luther’s christology and the communicatio idiomatum, which argues that suffering and death are taken into God’s life through the union of divine and human in the person of the Son (not the Father, hence not patripassianism).
[xii] For example, his name is entirely absent from Abundant Harvest: Stories of Asian Lutherans, eds. Edmond Yee and J. Paul Rajashekar (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2013).
[xiii] The Confession can be read online at <uccj-e.org/faith>.
[xiv] Sánchez, 38, fn. 10.
[xv] See “Foreword” in Theology of the Pain of God, n.p.
[xvi] Edmond Tang, “East Asia,” in An Introduction to Third World Theologies, ed. John Parratt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 90–93.
[xvii] Hashimoto, 11–13.
[xviii] Kitamori, 7.
[xix] Kitamori, 8.
[xx] See the discussion in Ephraim Radner, Leviticus (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008), 214–215.
[xxi] Kitamori, 24.
[xxii] Tang explains: “What distinguishes Kitamori’s theology of the cross from others is that he puts it at the heart of the Trinity. For him modern liberal theology has made the cross irrelevant, making it only an ‘accidental’ illustration of the love of God for humankind. As for the Barthian theology which dominated Japanese theology of his time, it made God so absolutely other that the cross was put entirely outside of the essential understanding of God as Trinity. God the Father did not only generate the Son, but also let the Son die, an act going out of God. The death of Christ is therefore at the centre of the Trinity,” 92.
[xxiii] I have chosen here to follow the King James Version, as used in the English translation of Kitamori’s book, as the terms “my bowels are troubled” and “the sounding of thy bowels” better captures the intensity that Kitamori sought to express than the more common language today of a “yearning heart.”
[xxiv] Following the biblical usage, I use grammatically masculine pronouns to refer to God. However, since the Bible also insists that God is neither male nor female as creatures are, I capitalize these and all other pronouns for God to signal the difference. In quotations I keep the author’s original usage.
[xxv] Kitamori, 22. Morimoto in the Foreword clarifies that where the English often says “embrace those who should not be embraced” the Japanese can also be translated as “embrace those who cannot be embraced.” It is not only a moral but more profoundly an ontological issue.
[xxvi] See especially his chapter “The Pain of God and Gospel History.”
[xxvii] Kitamori, 52.
[xxviii] Kitamori, 134–135. Meyer explains: “It should be noted that tsurasa is not the word Kitamori uses for the ‘pain’ of God. In the case of God’s pain he uses the word itami. The meanings are quite similar. Itami may also convey the meaning of emotional as well as physical suffering. But Kitamori emphasizes that there is still a very basic difference between human tsurasa and the itami of God,” 266.
[xxix] Kitamori, 26.
[xxx] Kitamori especially singles out the book of Revelation for its depiction of the Lamb of God “slain from the foundation of the world”; cf. Rev. 1:17–18; 2:8; 5:6, 12, 13; 13:8; noted in Kitamori, 45.
[xxxi] Kitamori, 44.
[xxxii] Kitamori, 115.
[xxxiii] Kitamori, 62.
[xxxiv] Kitamori, 62.
[xxxv] Kitamori, 62.
[xxxvi] Kitamori, 93.
[xxxvii] Kitamori, 89.
[xxxviii] Kitamori, 89.
[xxxix] Kitamori, 74.
[xl] Kitamori, 75.
[xli] Kitamori, 76.
[xlii] Kitamori, 12.
[xliii] Kitamori, 150.
[xliv] Tang, 92.
[xlv] Kitamori, 145.