A Change

For those who don’t know, I’ve moved! Please come on over.

A Rule of Prayer

“The principle thing is to stand before God with the mind in the heart, and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day and night, until the end of life.”

St Theopan the Reculse

The Irreconcilability of the Life of Faith and Consumerism

“People who rest their lives in promise do not make good consumers.”

Walter Brueggemann bases this claim on his reading of Israel’s – and by extension, the church’s – stories, which he loosely groups as stories of promise (e.g., the blessing of Abraham), deliverance (e.g. the Exodus) and sustenance (e.g., the provision of manna in the wilderness). In brief, the people of the God of Abraham are people who obey - i.e., they completely subject all of their desires and actions to God’s covenantal stipulations – in hope – i.e., they confidently expect that God will soon make sense of this world and bring creation to some good end and that until then God will sustain them with plenty.

Consumerism, also, is carried along by stories. But instead of stories of promise and deliverance and sustenance, it tells stories acquisition and resignation and scarcity. For those who buy into these stories, obedience is impossible because hope is dead. Instead of hope, they are possessed only by fear.

What do you make of Brueggemann’s claim? If he’s right, what are we to do about it?

Was Jesus A-Political?

I was taught to believe that Jesus was an a-political figure, and that Christians, therefore, could be good Christians and still retain their right to belong to this or that political party. The logic strikes me as faulty; it would seem to me if Jesus were a-political, then his followers ought to be, too. But that is beside the point, because Jesus most certainly was not a-political. In truth, he was the embodiment of God’s politics, and, as such, stands in judgment of all other ways of being political.

No one has argued this more effectively than Yoder: 

Because Jesus’ way of rejecting the sword and at the same time condemning those who wielded it was politically relevant, both the Sanhedrin and the Procurator had to deny him the right to live, in the name of both of their forms of political responsibility. His alternative was so relevant, so much a threat, that Pilate could afford to free, in exchange for Jesus, the ordinary Guevara-type insurrectionist Barabbas. Jesus’ way is not less but more relevant to the question of how society moves than is the struggle for possession of the levers of command; to this Pilate and Caiaphas testify by their judgment on him….

Jesus refused to concede that those in power represent an ideal, a logically proper, or even an empirically acceptable definition of what it means to be political. He did not say…’you can have your politics and I shall do something else more important,’ he said, ‘your definition of polis, of the social, of the wholeness of being human socially is perverted.’ 

The Politics of Jesus, 107 

Christian Political Responsibility: Voting

Halden led me to N. Dan Smith’s chapter-by-chapter review of Electing not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for not Voting; the book is comprised of essays by nine contributors of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds from several Christian traditions, including Pentecostals! (One of the contributors, Paul Alexander, was a professor of mine at SAGU.)  I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, but Smith thoroughly reviews the chapters, so you can get at least a basic idea of the arguments.