Fear and (the lack of) Generosity

Williams’ answer is deceptively simple, but it is not deceitful. It reminds me of a line from the Jungel prayer I posted last week; it has been haunting me ever since: “we are afraid to share with others what you have given us”. Generosity is suffocated, squeezed out, by fear. 

So, what is it I’m afraid of? Why am I afraid to share? Admittedly, these can be trite questions, if they are asked in the wrong way or at the wrong time. But perhaps they have to be asked at some point. What do you think?

Memory and Violence

Remembering, like any human act, can be done rightly or wrongly; that is faithfully or faithlessly. In Psalm 137, we hear the lament of exiles wrongly remembering.

 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept 
       when we remembered Zion. 

 There on the poplars 
       we hung our harps,

 for there our captors asked us for songs, 
       our tormentors demanded songs of joy; 
       they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

 How can we sing the songs of the LORD 
       while in a foreign land?

Of course, it isn’t wrong to remember Zion or to weep for it. They should weep for it. But remembering Zion rightly would give them the power to sing their song, even in Babylon, for the LORD they had known in Jerusalem is present with them here, even in exile.

This is the difference, I think. Faithful remembering readies us to live today, to face the present reality. Faithless remembering, conversely, dispirits us so we cannot really be here and now. Remembering wrongly, we cannot say “This is the day the Lord has made” or “Today is the day of salvation.” Without faith and hope, we can only fear, and this means we become violent. For if memory isn’t transfigured by hope in God’s saving intervention, it leaves us to devise a future of our own making, which is always a future in which our enemies are once-for-all destroyed in the fires of our vengeance.  

 Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did 

       on the day Jerusalem fell. 
       “Tear it down,” they cried, 
       “tear it down to its foundations!”

  O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, 
       happy is he who repays you 
       for what you have done to us-

 he who seizes your infants 
       and dashes them against the rocks

~~~

As Christians, the celebration of the Eucharist teaches us to remember rightly. For in coming to the Lord’s Table, we recall what it is God has done for us then and there in the career of this man Jesus. But we also remind ourselves of the future guaranteed for us by God’s work in Christ. So our present is illuminated by light cast from the future reflected by the past. Our remembering is done in hope of what God has promised to do not only for us but for all created reality. Therefore, we never need recourse to violence. We know we do not need to avenge ourselves, for in the end, God shall put all things to rights.  

 

A Pentecostal Confession of Faith

 

WITHOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT, God is far away, 
Christ stays in the past, 
the Gospel is a dead letter, 
the Church is simply an organisation, 
authority a matter of domination, 
mission a matter of propaganda, 
the liturgical services no more than a reminder of the past, 
Christian living a slave morality.

BUT WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT, God is with us, 
the universe is resurrected 
and groans with the birth pangs of the kingdom, 
the risen Christ is here, 
the Gospel is the power of life, 
the Church is the organism, the Body of the living Christ, 
authority is service, 
mission is Pentecost, 
the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation, 
human action is God at work in this world.

-Patriarch Ignatius IV

Christian Political Responsibility: Some Reflections on the Torture Debate

In the so-called “Post-9/11 world,” torture has become a hot-button issue, with Christians lining up on both sides of the debate.  A recent poll found that “a majority of Southern evangelicals” support torture – at least until they are reminded of the Golden Rule! A Pew Forum research survey, published in 2005, found that more than 50% of Catholics and white Protestants believe the use of torture against suspected terrorists is at least sometimes, if not often, justifiable.

On the other side of the issue, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), which claims membership from “Roman Catholic, evangelical Christian, mainline Protestant,  Unitarian, Quaker, Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh communities,” began calling for the President to issue an executive order banning torture. They issued a “declaration of principles” they believe provides compelling reasons for the ban. Early in ‘07, the National Association of Evangelicals published a statement clearly and unequivocally condemning torture in any form. They even called for the ban to extend to the intelligence organizations, which John McCain, who has led the charge in the Senate against the pro-torture policies of the Bush administration, has (so far) been unwilling to do.

Here’s my concern: Even those evangelicals opposing torture are failing to do so on solid theological ground. The first principle cited by the “declaration” is the Golden Rule; “We will not authorize or use any methods of interrogation that we would not find acceptable if used against Americans, be they civilians or soldiers.” Surely this is better than what we have now, and it is apparently effective in swaying opinion. But is it Christian?

The NAE’s statement, needed as it was, argues from the assumption that all “life is sacred.” But this, too, is only quasi-Christian, at best. Hauerwas has it exactly right:

As a matter of fact, Christians do not believe that life is sacred. I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in and of itself. Of course our desire to protect human life is part of our seeing each human being as God’s creature. But that does not mean that we believe that life is an overriding good…

To say that life is an overriding good is to underwrite the modern sentimentality that there is absolutely nothing in this world worthy dying for.

The problem is, as Richard Hays says so clearly, “On the question of violence, the church [in the U.S.] is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry.” By comparison, he insists, “our problems with sexual sin are trivial.” 21st century Evangelicalism, like the liberal Christianity of the mid-20th century, is an “establishment Christianity” that “plays chaplain to the military-industrial complex” (Hays, The Moral Vision of the NT, 343.)

We are suffering from a theological crisis. The Faith in Public Life and Mercer University poll mentioned above found that almost half of white Evangelicals rely upon personal experience and “common sense” to determine their views on torture. Fewer than 3 in 10 rely upon Christian teachings. The fact is a majority – I would bet it is a significant majority – of white Evangelicals are reasoning from half-Christian, if not out-and-out anti-Christian presuppositions. This is evidenced by Evangelicals on both sides of the debate.

In the end, appeals to the Golden Rule and the sanctity of life simply will not work. I’m not saying they won’t be effective; they very well may work in that sense. But they will fail to convey our distinctively Christian values, and so will irreperably compromise our witness to the state and our work in the world. If we’re going to be Christian, we’re going to have to -  love our enemies. And, perhaps more importantly, we’re going to have define “our” along creaturely and not national lines! It isn’t enough not to do to “them” what “we” wouldn’t want done to “us”! We have to do for them what God in Christ has done for us! Otherwise, we fail in our vocation altogether.

But what do you think?

On Christian Joy §5

Christian joy contradicts the world’s joy.

There is a joy that distracts us from reality – especially the reality of death. This joy is better called amusement, which, according to the OED, once meant:

Distraction or diversion of the attention from the point at issue; beguiling, deception. esp. in military tactics, diversion of the enemy’s attention from the real aims of the other side.

Amusement deadens us to death. It flattens our senses so we can’t hear or  see the world-as-it-is. We fiddle while Rome burns.

Christian joy – by which I mean not the joy Christians do have, but the kind of joy they should have – enlivens us to life. We see the world-as-it-is and we say of that world, “This is our Father’s world!” We see it this way because we see it in and through Jesus, in the light cast from the darkness of his empty tomb. Because of the resurrection, we know what this world is for and we know what history is about. How could we not rejoice?

Because we know this as our Father’s world – and because we know our Father and His love for this world – we enjoy this world and its pleasures while we await its future redemption. As David Milch says, we know the shadow in which we live is cast by the sheltering hand of God.

Some Christians have (foolishly) thought that Christians shouldn’t laugh. They’ve insisted that too much is wrong with the world for us to waste our time in “worldly pleasures.” Too much is wrong with this world. And we must not forget it. But our awareness of this truth does not keep us from enjoying this world. Paul says, we do not mourn as those who have no hope. He also could have said we do not laugh as those who have no hope. The existentialist or nihilist has no reason to laugh, except ironically or cynically. The Christian can laugh heartily, because she hopes.

~~~

“I do not give as the world gives” (Jn 14.27). This is the saving promise of Jesus.  He neither gives what the world nor in the way the world gives. (In the final analysis, to say the one is to say the other, because a joy won a certain way necessarily means it is a joy of a certain quality.) Jesus’ joy, as I said before, is a joy that comes only through obedience – the long and hard obedience of the via dolorosa. But being hardly won, it is all the more delightful. If we’re going to understand what joy it is that he offers us, we shall have to keep this in mind.

~~~

Worldly joy comes in the pursuit of satisfaction, in the ongoing attempt to possess, to have, to consume. Christian joy, conversely, is in desiring not in the attaining. “All the best havings are wantings,” says Lewis. And he’s right. We can’t “have” Jesus – he says to us as he said to Mary, “Do not grasp me!”  But we can love him, encounter him, enjoy him, want him. And in his being different from us, we are nonetheless at-oned with him. Because this is true of Jesus, it is true of all reality.