Powerful

Thus the specific morality of the gospel is not a mater of “laws.” The gospel’s moral discourse does not say “Do this and do that because you ought/must/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” It does not have the “if . . . then . . .” form. It imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all. It does not say “Do . . . , because otherwise you won’t get into heaven.” It does not say—with a bit more religious sophistication: “Do . . . , because, although of course God will accept you anyway, that is what good Christians do.” It does not even say: “Do . . . , because virtue is its own reward.” The moral discourse of the gospel says only: “You may do . . . , because Jesus lives” (Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81, 82).Inhabitio Dei

Nothing New Under the Sun with Foucault

For NT we’ve been reading some of Glancy’s Slavery in Early Christianity along with Howard Thurman’s Disinherited. You might imagine, and you’d be correct, that this produces a good platform for discussing the topic. I have to admit the topic of slavery does not stir me, yet I have a lot of thoughts about it. For one, I am surprised by those who fall into the trap by thinking that our society has transcended the injustices present in ancient slavery. And that statement is going to need some qualification.

In the ancient world slavery was not racial. In our country’s history it unfortunately was and its emanations are still being worked out today. The institution of slavery itself is over. Yet slavery in the ancient world was merely the solution to a number of systematic problems; the system being worked on was the social, cultural, and economic order of the entire empire (be it Persia, Greece, Rome, or what-have-you). What were these problems? How to check power holders without destroying them? Power-vacuums are bad, see Middle East wars over the last twenty years. You would punish or imprison the slave, the master lost those abilities and service. Another problem, how to protect myself from consequences? Have the slaves do it, they take the fall.

My point is this: all these social contracts still exist today. Sure they might under different names and slightly different structures. Yet the same de-humanizing effects occur in the name of power. If you don’t think limited liability, shareholders, boards, NDA contracts, negotiating tactics, and employer-pressuring are all contemporary “solutions” to the same eternal problems, what do you think they are? I swear Foucault got something right – ok I think he was close. Really close. Let’s not bash on Paul “Why couldn’t he just see the light and fight against slavery?” Let’s not proclaim that our time is inherently better than his. If you want to do one better than St. Paul see our situation for what it is and fight that dehumanization.

On God’s Power

Violent suffering is the product of excessive power.

But by his life and teachings, Jesus makes perfectly clear that the divinity active through him is not Absolute Power.

Thus, when God moves toward his creatures, he does not exercise his powerfulness by subjecting them to his domination, or by shattering them with his superior force so as to demonstrate their helplessness before him.

Therefore, should God will that certain creatures dry and shrivel up, losing their vigor and life, he does not attain this by acting upon them positively with violent force, for “force is no attribute of God.”[The Epistle to Diognetus]

This leads us to a judgment about the behavior of creatures. When they use force to exploit the weakness of others and by this means establish their superiority and domination over others, they are not then acting by the power of God, they are not then being vitalized by the life of God, and they are not then proceeding in accord with the will of God. In short, they belong to the realm of evil.

The Power Of God

On Power

We are more than conquerors

HT: Naked Pastor

Silence and Nonsense

Scott Stephens reflecting on Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man and the Jesus’ trial:

It is in control of his life, and it couldn’t care less. And that’s the obscenity of the entire ordeal. There is no slick dialogue or high courtroom drama in The Wrong Man – just the brutal enactment of an insane system that is convinced of its own rectitude.

And of course the parallel:

The Gospel narratives depict Jesus as being paraded, like some freak at a carnival, before Pilate and then Herod, both of whom taunt and goad Jesus to accept their supposed power over him and thus to join in their insanity. They want Jesus to be part of their world, to quiver before them, or at least to rage against them. But instead, Jesus remains silent.

This is why “turn the cheek” is so powerful. It exposes the schemes of the world for what they truly are. Silence in the face of nonsense, a refusal to play the power games of the world is where God’s power lies in the Church. We are in the world, but not of the world. We refuse to play by their rules. We have new rules that belong to the coming Kingdom age. The values of the God’s Kingdom inform our behavior here and now. This is not about some ethereal ethic reached by the common reasoning of all peoples. This is about belonging to the story of Israel, God’s story about redeeming creation. Being faithful to that story is what counts, not being faithful to a list of things you will or won’t do.

Stephen’s concludes nicely:

Like Jesus’ silence, the Church’s refusal to participate in the state’s normalized madness would go a long way toward removing the quasi-moral veneer, the unquestioned confidence in its own rectitude, whereby the state confers upon itself and its functionaries the power to pronounce any alternative as ‘mad’, abusive, extreme, impractical, or (worst of all) not conforming to ‘best practice’.

I hope any Christians in the political world can grab a hold of this concept. For that is the only way they will be have an impact on the world – by not being of the world. Refuse to play to that tune, play to God’s.

High Places and Institutions

When I talk about fighting the power of evil in high places, and fighting institutions with a Gospel message, this is what I’m talking about.

Team Behavior

For nearly all of my life I’ve been involved in organized sports. I’ve played baseball, basketball, and ultimate in more formal settings, and soccer and football in informal ones. And now, in my short life, I’ve been fortunate to work for several, diverse, employers. Being the observant fool that I am, I cannot help but make a big correlation between the behavior of sports and management teams.

Imitation

Whoever takes a position of leadership, de jure or de facto gets imitated. If they are nit-picky, verbose, and overly analytical your entire team will become that. If they are engaged, calculated, and careful how they speak your entire team will become that. The same goes for companies. The most influential culture gets created by the leaders. If they work with one another in personal attacks and silly arguments – that will be your company culture. If they work with ad-hoc, loose, and overlapping responsibilities – that will be your company culture. If there are clear, and refined boundaries for ownership, responsibility, in the management team the rest of your company will imitate it.

This works for both better and worse. It is why ‘groupthink’ can be such a systemic problem. The worldview in which decisions are made is never re-assessed. New data is simply slammed into the old view, resulting in poor decisions and frustration from everyone.

An Example

This past weekend we played at Bellcrack in Philadelphia. We played extremely well while losing. We were outmatched by many teams, but we kept our composure and made good decisions. But while we were winning some players started getting excited and very vocal. Once something went wrong, they took a leadership position by speaking out, and speaking out in areas they don’t know very much about. It really turned the team dynamic sour, and turned into arguments about fine points that just did not matter on the field one bit. People started imitating the vocal ones by being vocal themselves and taking the bait entering into arguments. Not because they were leaders, not because they were excellent players, only because they appeared to be leaders by being vocal. So the entire team got analytical and snippy, instead of letting the actual captain set the tone. Unfortunately our captain ended up getting sucked into the arguments as well and we would play worse and worse.

Subvert Success

I’m really liking this by Trevin Wax:

• We subvert the Caesar of Success whenever we, as a community of faith, reject the idea that bigger is necessarily better.
• We subvert Success when we go from riches to rags on behalf of the world’s poor rather than finding our hope in moving from rags to riches…
• We subvert Success when our churches partner with one another, not as competitors, but as co-workers in the kingdom…
• We subvert Success as businesspeople when we are willing to downsize, to take pay cuts to spend more time with family, to refuse a promotion that will sacrifice church and family ties.
• We subvert Success by praying for our competitors’ success, by thanking God for the success achieved by others, just as the early church prayed for the governing authorities who were persecuting them.

I think these very ideas of subversion are the key behind finding an alternative dream that we can have in this world. I think “doing theology” (even in the particular fashion that I’ve become accustomed to, through the history) is imperative for the Church. As I read tonight about some of the early Church fathers, theology equipped the Church how to think about the issues facing them. We desperately need that in our churches. We increasingly look like the world in our reasons and motivations.

Constantine’s Sword

I just finished watching Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll. It was not what I expected from a seminarian and ex-Catholic priest. I expected more of a documentary explaining theology behind the peace movements. Carroll, during his priesthood, while a chaplain at Boston University, was a big part of the Christian anti-war movement. What the move actually is was very different. Part of my expectations were based on a lecture I saw that Carroll gave during the Religion & Violence Conference given last February at Trinity Church in Wall St. New York City. In that lecture he gave a fantastic analysis of the American civil religion and violence, heavily based on biblical themes though in no way actually backed by it. I got a story about primarily about anti-Semitism throughout the Christian ages. On its way through that story was the interaction with state-backed religion, and a smart bit of theology about it. The stories were incredibly moving. One of the most moving images was seeing the erection of a Cross directly outside the walls of Auschwitz by the then Pope. It is unfathomable to me that the institution of the church could be so insensitive. I highly recommend this film for all to see.

When the theme first hit me, I immediately had an interesting thought. In reconstructing the history surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion we knows “the Jews” is a highly misleading construct. There is no single party, Jewish or Roman to blame. And any party that could ever be called “the Jews” would only ever contain the aristocratic conservative wing of those in power. In my mind, it would have been just as easy to write “the politicians” crucified him. Imagine what two thousand years of that thought would have done throughout history.

Carroll’s journey as a priest, backward in time finding the origins of Christianity peaceful led him to join the peace movement as a priest during the Vietnam era. It led him to leave the priestly order as well. He remarks an amazement to now find that religion is once again a driving force towards hatred and war in our time. All at the service of the state.

I want to leave with just one quote, from a current Catholic priest:

If you want to make religion a constructive force in society, religions must begin with an honest admission of those moments when they haven’t been a constructive force, but a destructive force. The thing that frustrates me [to] no end is when religious leaders get up and suggest that religious leaders have always been on the side of good and virtue. Let’s be honest.
Fr. John Pawlikowski

Jesus and Power

At community group tonight we were looking over the passage in Mark 1:

They went into Capernaum; and immediately on the Sabbath He entered the synagogue and {began} to teach. They were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as {one} having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, saying, “What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have You come to destroy us? I know who You are–the Holy One of God!” And Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet, and come out of him!” Throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him. They were all amazed, so that they debated among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey Him.”

And we got to talking about power and authority. One of the questions that we were asked is what would it look like if the Church acted with this authority. And another question that is always there week in and week out is how does this inform our faith and actions. We always leave that question to be pondered, without a definitive discussion on it.

Power was one of the big conclusions I talked about in my first paper on atonement. Jesus, as a figure in Mark’s story, is incredibly powerful. He is teaching with authority, and backing it up with his spiritual authority to heal and cast out demons. The surprising thing to me is not that Jesus is acting with authority or has authority – but rather how he uses that authority.

In reading through NT Wright’s historical work (starting the third volume now), along with others like Scot McKnight, Ben Witherington, and David Daube it seems plain that both John the Baptist and Jesus are specifically critiquing the way power is used. Jesus is not like King Herod trying to prove his greatness and worthiness while ruthlessly killing his brothers or the people. Or the Pharisees, laying down un-carriable burdens. Or the Shammites willing to die, to kill, and to sacrifice the lives of the Jewish people to stand up and fight against Rome. Or the priests, hopelessly intertwined in compromise with their pagan overlords. No, Jesus is doing something very different with the authority and power of God.

What would the Church look like with that authority?