MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

The problem of the moderates

Fifty years ago this June The Christian Century published Martin Luther King Jr.'s The Letter from Birmingham Jail.  The April 17 issue focused on this anniversary, reviewing a new book out on the letter and publishing a cover article by Robert Westbrook entitled "MLK's Manifesto."  It is a good article, with much good material in it.  But I was specifically drawn to its discussion of moderates.

In a Century article on the silence of the southern churches, a quotation from one Alabama Baptist minister acutely summed up the moderates' dilemma: "The problem is how to lead without being appropriated by one or the other extremes which immediately destroys the effectiveness of your leadership.  When thus appropriated, you are effective only with the one faction.  Neither the opposite one nor the moderate group will listen to you any longer."  This politics of appropriation was a pivotal feature of the racial politics of the early 1960s. . . .  [King] did set out to convert or, failing that, to pressure or to neutralize white moderates by demolishing their arguments, shaming their consciences, and, not least, threatening their interests.

The letter undertook the task of demolishing the arguments of the moderates. . . .  King strikes a number of poses in it, swinging between "diplomatic" and "prophetic" modes of address.  But his overriding posture might, I think, be termed one of mock moderation, that is, a stance that put pay to the thinking of moderates by arguing against them in the very "patient and reasonable terms" that they fetishized.  Here and there ironic barbs and flashes of overt indignation suggest the difficulties that King had in maintaining his stance.  Yet it was one well chosen for the audience he imagined, hoisting them with their own petard.

Oh how the LGBT community has struggled with moderates.  Finally in the last couple of years, the moderates do seem to have joined our side mostly.  There are now new voices of caution and gradualism -- people who were once opposed to us who now realize they are losing and want to slow things down.  How frustrating this class of citizens can be.  I liked seeing King's strategy discussed.  It was direct and challenging.

Beginning The City of God: Augustine would make us worms

Yesterday I finished blogging about Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and in the afternoon, I began reading Augustine's The City of God.  I read Confessions in college, and it had a powerful impact on me.  I've never read the larger work and the copy I own (and have owned since college), in a two volume set of Augustine's writings, is actually abridged, though it still runs close to 700 pages.  This is going to take some time.

And immediately upon beginning Book One the tone, of course, is different from everything I've read so far since I began reading back through the philosophical canon in late autumn 2011.  Back then I commented how refreshing the ancient Greeks were and the modernity of concerns continued with the Latin authors.  Now we begin a noticeable shift.  

The first few chapters are spent complaining and attacking.  Sigh.  Pagans are denouncing Christians for the collapse of Rome, yet those very pagans took refuge in Christian churches where they were protected as the Germanic hordes were somehow awed into not attacking the churches, which is unlike every other marauder in the past and even contrary to Roman tradition, which did not respect holy sites.

In chapter IX (these are very short chapters) there was finally something of interest.  But first, the close of chapter VIII contained an influence of the Stoic.  Augustine writes that during affliction pagans detest and blashpeme God, while Christians pray and praise.  I'd rather rebel like the pagans then practice the resignation and acceptance of these Christians.  But, maybe this isn't Stoic acceptance?  Could it be some weird masochistic pleasure derived from the pain and suffering?  Even if that isn't Augustine's teaching, it is where this line of thought is headed.  It is a sort of Bizarro Epicureanism.

But the Stoicism is clearly rejected in chapter IX.  While suffering from the evils and violence of this world, the godly "do not judge themselves so completely removed from all faults as to be too good to suffer for these temporal ills.  For every man, however laudably he lives, yet yields in some points to the lust of the flesh."  Marcus Aurelius believed it was possible to live free of lust and desire, which Augustine clearly rejects (I agree with the saint over the emperor).  Marcus would have said that you must endure the troubles of this world, but that you can choose not to suffer from them.  I don't think I agree, but that worldview is in some ways more encouraging than Augustine's, for Marcus only encourages acceptance and resignation, whereas Augustine, again, seems to encourage some sort of masochism.

A couple of other points arise in chapter IX.  He encourages celibacy by describing those "who are not entangled in the meshes of married life" as living "at a higher level."  This obnoxious idea continues to plague the world in the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.  One of Martin Luther's great advances was that everyone can live the good and righteous life -- there is nothing special about celibacy.  In fact, we know now that it, instead, has shrouded centuries of abuse.   Rather than being a higher state, institutionalized, it is riddled with corruption.

Should I take this advice to pastors?  "For watchmen or overseers of the people are appointed in churches, that they may unsparingly rebuke sin."  I think not.  Again, this idea led to great corruption and many of the evils that still haunt us.  Sigh.

The chapter ends with a brief reference to Job:

Then, lastly, there is another reason why the good are afflicted with temporal calamities--the reason which Job's case exemplifies: that the human spirit may be proved, and that it may be manifested with what fortitude of pious trust, and with how unmercenary a love, it cleaves to God.

Pure hogwash.  We studied the biblical book of Job last autumn, and you'll remember that this is not the point of the biblical book, though it does seem to be the point of the ancient folktale which appears in other sources and which the biblical book uses in order to subvert.  

Gerald Janzen, who was a Professor at the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, interprets the Book of Job as rejecting the conventional view that there is a strict moral governance of the world.  In this view, good people receive blessings and bad people are cursed, and everything seems to follow this strict law.  Janzen believes, instead, that there is a felicity to the world, a freedom and a grace to it. 

When God speaks from the whirlwind he cannot vindicate Job in the way that Job wants to be vindicated because the world does not work that way.  Instead, God’s speaking to Job honors Job’s integrity and his humanity.  Humans are not presented as one creature among many, but as those whom God enters into conversation with.  The questions God poses, then, become challenges “to take up the divine image through engagement” with the world.  God is inviting us to explore the cosmos and pursue the answers to these questions.  God is inviting us to be responsible agents, not passive recipients, of this world.  For Janzen, the Book of Job is the creation of a new humanity.

Biblical Job encourages our integrity and humanity.  Augustine would make us worms.

 

The Grace of Sophia: A Korean North American Women's Christology

The Grace of Sophia: A Korean North American Women's Christology by Grace Ji-Sun Kim
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have drawn from this book a couple of different times when preparing sermons, because I like some of what she has to say about grace and its role in healing and transformation. I finally decided to read the entire book.

Much is familiar to anyone who has read any feminist or Asian theology, criticizing elements of patriarchy and racism in traditional Western theology. But there are some interesting elements.

One is her discussion of syncretism. Syncretism often has a bad name, but she discusses its appearance in the bible -- many elements of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, etc. cultures do appear. She believes that it is unavoidable, particularly in a multi-cultural, multi-faith environment.

Because of that she thinks that there are Asian wisdom traditions that can be drawn upon to find touchstones with Christian theology. Wisdom, Sophia, is particularly open to this, as she reveals the connections between Hebrew Hokmah and the Egyptian goddess Isis.

There are feminine, syncretistic elements to traditional images of God and Christ. Emphasizing these elements, and connecting them to elements of Korean culture, open up possibilities for liberation and healing of Korean North American women.

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Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power

Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power by Rita Nakashima Brock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finally read Brock's classic 1988 work. It has been referenced in so many other books I've read, I'm glad I've finally read the original.

When I started the other day I skimmed a lot at the beginning, as she was arguing for certain elements of feminist methodology that one doesn't have to argue for anymore but have become standard elements of theology without the "feminist" qualifier. It was good to realize how much we've improved the discipline.

Little that appears in the book is completely new to me, but her arguments were good to read, especially as she discussed anger, child abuse, and Jesus' exorcisms.

Her core message is that salvation comes through erotic power arising from the relationships of community built around Christ. Salvation is not in the person, life, or death of the historical Jesus. As with other feminists and womanists, her vision of salvation is more holistic than that traditionally promulgated by Christian theology.

Two paragraphs from the Epilogue will summarize her perspective:

The power that gives and sustains life does not flow from a dead and resurrected savior to his followers. Rather, the community sustains life-giving power by its memory of its own brokenheartedness and of those who have suffered and gone before and by its members being courageously and redemptively present to all. In doing so, the community remains Christa/Community and participates in the life-giving flow of erotic power. No one person or group exclusively reveals it or incarnates it. In thinking that a single person, a savior, or even one group can save us, we mistake the crest of a wave for the vast sea churning beneath it.

No one else can help us avoid our own pain. No one else can stop the suffering of brokenheartedness in our world but our own courage and willingness to act in the midst of the awareness of our own fragility. No one else can die for us or bring justice, liberation, and healing. The refusal to give up on ourselves and our willingness to struggle with brokenheartedness, involve us in healing the powers of destruction, which must be taken into our circle of remembrance and healing if we are to understand and love the whole of life. Our heartfelt action, not alone, but in the fragile, resilient interconnections we share with others, generates the power that makes and sustains life. There, in the erotic power of heart, we find the sacred mystery that binds us in loving each other fiercely in the face of suffering and pain and that empowers our witness against all powers of oppression and destruction.

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The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie James Jennings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the last year that I have read about the entanglement between Christian theology and racism. Each has provided a slightly different perspective. Each has been well-written, provocative, and original.

Much like Carter in his Race: A Theological Account, Jennings believes that the way toward racism directed against black people was paved by the church's supersessionist anti-semitism. The thesis is convincing in both accounts. For Jennings it is a fundamental flaw dating back to the early days of the Christian church that has stifled the central Christian message throughout our history and has inflicted deep wounds in the modern era.

The central Christian message should be communion -- relationships of belonging built across divides, as Gentiles are brought into relationship with Israel and Israel's God through Jesus Christ. This should have paved the way for the church to become what was enacted at Pentecost, a diverse, multi-lingual body wherein every person was treated with love, respect, and mutuality. Instead, it has become something very different.

Jennings seems to claim that the central theological symbol of Christianity in the modern age is the slave ship. And the slave ship is a terrifying distortion of Pentecost, as a cosmopolitan mix of people are brought together in a community built around violence and death, not communion and belonging.

The universal perspective of the Enlightenment has furthered the problem (Carter makes a similar point) by ignoring the particular, especially the particularity of Jewish flesh in Jesus. For Jennings the major loss of the modern era is identity shaped by relationships with the land and environment. Instead, identity is now shaped by one's racial or ethnic group, as we have become displaced from the land. His vision is that a genuine Christian communion would enact a renewed doctrine of creation, restoring our relationships with the land and environment. I would love to hear a dialogue between him and Wendell Berry.

He argues that the methodology of Christian theology is fundamentally flawed because it has incorporated the hegemony of whiteness. It must expose this history and seek to be renewed. Theology should take as its aim the promotion of genuine communion and a restoration of creation.

Along the way, Jennings' book narrates elements of the history of theology that are often overlooked, focusing on figures like Gomes Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry the Navigator; Jose de Acosta, an early Jesuit missionary to Peru; John William Colenso, an Anglican bishop in the Natal; and Olaudah Equiano, who published his slave narrative in the 18th century. The first two help to construct a modern theology of race, the third works to move beyond it but reveals how one is trapped within it, and the fourth indicates possibilities for the path forward.

I thought in a handful of places the book resonated with the systematic theology of James McClendon -- the focus on bodies, the role of jazz, the importance of biography as theology, the ecstatic fellowship of all creation.

In its emphasis on how theology has abused Jewish and black bodies, I thought more attention should have been paid to other bodies. Native and aboriginal bodies did appear in the chapter on Acosta and were mentioned elsewhere, but could have had a little more development. Female and queer bodies were non-existent. Carter and Cone, in their books on race and Christian theology, devoted significant sections to women, and Monica Coleman's Making a Way Out of No Way focused almost exclusively on it. Queer bodies were noticeably absent from all except Coleman's book. I know it wasn't a focus of this book, but it could have been mentioned, especially when talking about the role of Jewish and African-American authors and artists in creating much of America's artistic culture and referencing James Baldwin as an example.

Despite these neglects, the book is a fascinating, thought-provoking read.

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Displacement, identity, and theology

I'm also reading The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie James Jennings.  I finished the first chapter yesterday.

That chapter begins with a narrative of the first African slaves returned to Portugal and sold, all this as part of the beginning of the colonial age with the adventures of Prince Henry the Navigator.  Jennings engages in interesting theological analyses of the writings at the time which gave Christian justifications for these new actions.  After that the chapter became very dense.

The thesis of the chapter is that prior to the modern age identified with the start of colonialism, human identity was largely shaped by the landscape in which one existed.  He cites numerous examples from a wide range of cultures.  What happened in colonialism was a displacement that changed how identity was structured.  Land became something you conquered and possesed rather than being shaped by and in.  He argues that the Christian doctrines of creation ex nihilo, incarnation, and of supersessionism paved the way for this new age.  The prince or pope who embodied Christ could replace pre-existing cultures and peoples and create a new Christian environment.

It was after this change in how identity was structured occured, that race as an identity category was created.  He does not complete this next step of the analysis in the first chapter.

Wendell Berry on Gay Marriage

Berry gives his most comprehensive statement yet on the topic, and it is powerfully done.

I particularly liked this line: 

“Heterosexual marriage does not need defending,” Berry said. “It only needs to be practiced, which is pretty hard to do just now.”

The reason it is hard to practice just now is "the values and priorities of our industrial capitalist system."  Here, here.

"The very shape of their stories"

Today I began reading The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie James Jennings.  This paragraph appears on the first page.  I really liked it.  After talking about the power of his parents as storytellers, he tells how there were common themes to their many stories:

Foremost was Jesus.  Ivory and Mary loved Jesus.  To say they were devout Christians is simply too pale a descriptor.  A far more accurate characterization would be, "There were Ivory, Mary, and Jesus."  Woven into the fabric of their lives was the God-man Jesus, who, rather than simply serving as an indicator of their orthodoxy, became the very shape of their stories.  The stories of Jesus and Israel were so tightly woven into the stories my parents told of themselves, their lives in the South and in the North and then with their youngest children in the North, that it took me years to separate the biblical figures from extended family members, biblical sinners from the sinners all around us, and biblical places of pain from their places of pain.  I was never able to separate biblical hopes from their real hopes.  They knew the Bible, but, far more important, they new the world through the Bible.

 

Divine Sorrow

Divine Sorrow from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Wildness

". . . it is upon wildness--of all things!--that domestication depends."  Michael Pollan makes this point in discussing apples in his book The Botany of Desire.

I was drawn to the thought because it may help to draw together two important theological themes.  Home (domestication?) is a key theological theme, particularly related to the theme of exile which runs throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition.  God as homemaker is a vivid and powerful pastoral image.

Yet, there is also wildness.  This was affirmed for me this year when I read Belden Lane and Catherine Keller and then reaffirmed in October when I was preaching about Job (resting upon the deep roots of Mr. Beaver's claim that "he is not a tame lion.").  The cosmos is not about us, not centered on us, and God is far more than our homemaker.

Even yesterday I was puzzling over this duality, this paradox.

Could Pollan's discussion of apples and their reliance upon both be helpful in uniting these theological themes?