I’ve recently begun seeing a Jesuit spiritual director. In light of the big Catholic Twitter blowup between the New YorkTimes‘s token conservativecolumnist Ross Douthat and the so-called ‘liberal’ Catholic academy (whose only qualifications for liberalism seem to be derived less from their credentials and more from having read Gaudium et spes and liked it), I guess I have an ‘in’ on this ‘big Jesuit plot’ of which Douthat speaks, even though I, like Douthat, do not have a theology degree.
To be sure, I’m still an Anglican – a Chinglican, rather – which makes me the least qualified to speak about a debate among Catholics in which the word ‘heresy‘ is being thrown around and made to sound synonymous with ‘liberal Protestantism’ or (Cranmer forbid) the ‘Anglican Communion.’ That I, who am still a canonical schismatic, am seeing a Jesuit spiritual director probably doesn’t make the Society of Jesus look any better than the non-so-subtle jabs Douthat has been throwing around, including columns about Pope Francis’s ‘ostentatious humility’ and ‘plot to change Catholicism,’ tweets about La Cività Cattolica‘s Antonio Spadaro’s ‘moustache-twirling cartoon villain‘ with a last name synonymous with ‘sophist,’ and a First Things lecture lamenting the continued success of Jesuit universities among the Catholic faithful. Even America Magazine‘s Jim Martin’s name seems to have been ‘dragged through the mud.’
This is a little tempest in a teapot, really – as numerous friends and colleagues have pointed out to me, no posts have been lost, no excommunications have been issued, no one’s been tortured, and no heads have rolled. But if the stakes are this low, it means that we can have a little bit of fun.
As far as I can tell from the spiritual direction sessions I’ve had so far, the big Jesuit plot to take over the world has to do with convincing the ‘subject’ – as in, my selfhood – that subjective experience has something to do with the supernatural. Because of this, most lovers of religious orders of the Dominican and Benedictine variety seem to think of Jesuits as floozies, which is really too bad because, having also gotten spiritual counselling from the Dominicans of the Polish variety (which means they’re truly legit), I’d say that Jesuits, Dominicans, and Benedictines believe pretty much the same thing about the supernatural.
I came to this conclusion because, as I’ve worked through things with my spiritual director, I’ve come to the conclusion that prior to really getting to know the Jesuits, I’ve been thinking about spiritual direction all wrong. This is probably because my Anglicanism is, for better or worse, heavily influenced by Susan Howatch’s Church of England series, where the Anglican monk serving as the spiritual director is like really into Carl Jung. I’m not dissing Jung, per se, but I am saying that I’ve discovered that I’ve often thought of spiritual direction more like psychotherapy, in which (as one of my friends who is way too influenced by the Franciscans used to make fun of me) the task is more or less an ‘exegesis of the self.’
For all the Ignatian talk about subjectivity, Jesuit spiritual direction isn’t really an exegesis of the self, per se. It feels (hahaha) more like an exegesis of the effect of the supernatural on the self. As I understand it from my spiritual director, there are consolations (the effects of supernatural grace that give life to the self) and desolations (the effects of supernatural attacks that demoralize the self).
This means that if we’re going to talk about a big Jesuit plot, it’s something along the lines of actually having to believe in a reality called the supernatural, or what one French Jesuit who has had no small impact on post-Vatican II Catholicism, Henri de Lubac, calls le surnaturel, the ‘suspended middle’ (as, hehe, Anglican theologian John Milbank calls it) between nature and grace. If we’re going to talk about ‘consolations’ and ‘desolations’ as ‘grace’ and ‘attacks,’ it means (God forbid) that we actually have to believe in the personal existence of angels, demons, and (good heavens!) God himself.
I don’t have a theology degree, and I’m really just a beginner at this Jesuit thing (I haven’t even made the Exercises!), but forgive me if it sounds like this big Jesuit plot to take over the world is fairly orthodox, even conservative. Of course, I understand that what some self-professing ‘conservatives’ are allergic to may be all this talk about the ‘subjective’ – I suppose the word ‘heresy’ is being floated when people are talking about, say, the consolations and desolations that befall persons in divorce-and-remarriage situations when they can’t receive the Eucharist. But the point here, I claim, is not ‘heresy’ versus ‘orthodoxy’; heavens, if we’re talking about le surnaturel, how far can we even fall from the faith passed on through Holy Mother Church? It might rather be that these Protestant categories of ‘liberal = subjective’ and ‘conservative = objective’ don’t really play well in Catholic circles because the objective Dominicans and the subjective Jesuits will all likely agree that a) the supernatural objectively exists, b) it can objectively do something to your subjectivity, and c) it’s therefore worth probing the subject as a window into the objective supernatural. Duh.
Come to think of it, maybe demolishing these ideological categories will turn out to be one of the greatest contributions of this Jesuit pope’s magisterium.
But what do I know? I’m a Chinglican without a theology degree receiving Jesuit spiritual direction while having Dominican friends, so for all intents and purposes, I may well have fallen victim to the big Jesuit plot and ended up thinking with the church and her magisterium while still being canonically linked to the See of Canterbury. Oops.
In the Gospel text (Mark 13.24-37), Jesus instructs his disciples, ‘Keep awake.’ Keep awake, he says. Pay attention to the signs: ‘The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.’
Though we may not seem like it, we are awake. Our founder Churl started A Christian Thing to be a Thing. Like the Ents in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a Thing is not an object – a Thing is a Moot, an Entmoot, a meeting of the wise. We do not profess to be wise, Churl wisely said. We only profess to have a Thing.
And suddenly, quiet. Maidan. Ferguson. The Umbrella Movement. Ayotzinapa. Burnaby Mountain. Silence.
Have we fallen asleep?
Before we started A Christian Thing, we Christians, most of us Protestant moving up the sacramental ladder in fits and starts, had about a year of very intense dialogue at a very secular university in a fairly secular nation-state north of the one that most people think about in North America. We talked up a storm about Charles Taylor, we had Baylor University’s Ralph Wood deliver some mind-blowing lectures on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor, we debated how Christians in secular universities should be doing theology, we created friendships that have lasted till even now when we are scattered over the four corners of these two aforementioned nation-states.
Around this time, we came across a book written by John Henry Newman, which for most of us climbing the sacramental ladder was a bit of an unapologetic inspiration. This book was The Idea of a University. I got myself a copy and found something in there I didn’t expect. In the preface, Newman lambastes people who feel compelled to have an opinion about everything on the news. It’s not the point of academia, he says. Academic reflection is – in the wise words of a reviewer of an academic article that I just got notice to revise – about ‘digging deeper, wondering, and digging deeper still.’
Indeed, the truth is that more of our writing is likely moving away from the blog into places with our real names on them, including in peer-reviewed journal articles. That’s not to say that we’re done with this blog – far from it. But in talking with some of those of us on this Thing, I think having this Thing has helped us appreciate what this Thing is about – digging, wondering, and digging deeper still. The character of that Thing has permeated our work, academic, popular, and whatever.
That contemplative work is Marian in character. It’s no surprise, then, that the figure who haunts this thing is the Blessed Virgin.
Here’s the Thing. Our Lord Jesus Christ instructs us to stay awake, to pay attention to the signs that the kingdom of God is breaking into the world, that the end is collapsing into the now. We have detected the movement of the Spirit: breaking from our criticism of the New Calvinism and the gospels of boundary-making isolations, we continue to see that the Lord knew what he was doing when he put Francis in Rome, Justin Welby in Canterbury, Tawadros II in Egypt, and Bartholomew in Constantinople. We watch as the hovering the Spirit yields new ecumenisms we have never imagined, ecumenisms that are ecclesial like Francis bowing his head for a blessing from Bartholomew, as well as ecumenisms that seek to establish a true ecumene in the midst of a world still plagued by colonial capitalist racialization and the attempted silencing of the poor. We are awake, pondering these things in our hearts because even while those whom Cornel West calls the ‘oligarchs and plutocrats’ seem to be tightening their grip on our institutions and our lands, the dignity of the human person has been asserted in more ways than one over this last year.
But who is the one who taught us to see these signs? Is it not the Blessed Virgin? Is it not she who has gone ahead of the Pilgrim Church, she who undoes the knots that our sin has tied, she who displays for us what the fusion of nature and grace is? Is she not the one whom we ask in every Rosary and Angelus, ‘Mary, what do you see? What is the mystery you behold? What are the things that you ponder in your heart?’
Our Lord Jesus Christ has instructed us to stay awake. We, with the Virgin Mother, are awake. And we still profess to have a Thing.
In the spirit of more ancient texts that Churl will appreciate more than the average reader, I will simply say that I forbid you to read this post before you read Part 1.
In the previous post, I ended with a suggestion that Vicky Beeching’s gift to the church catholic by coming out brings enormous clarity to what is going on in the Anglican Communion, especially around the realignment that happened in the late 1990s and 2000s. For those who need a quick definition of what the realignment is, it’s a euphemism that refers to how Anglican and Episcopal parishes in the United States and Canada pulled out of their home dioceses because of North American Anglican moves to bless same-sex unions, ordain gay clergy, and elect gay bishops. Because they took cover in Anglican provinces mostly in Africa (though some in Asia, Australia, and the Southern Cone also took part), the narrative that took shape suggested that those who were historically the ones being evangelized were now re-evangelizing the evangelizers. This narrative usually flies under the header of Global South Anglicanism. For an academic version of this story, see Phil Jenkins’s The Next Christendom. For a popular version, Thad Barnum’s Never Silent is a fairly engaging account. For those who need all of the sordid details, please read my account of ‘Anne Hathaway Anglicanism.’
The reason I forbid readers to read this post before reading the previous post is because over in the other post, I’ve made all the necessary connections for why Beeching is an Anglican to whom we should pay attention — she’s an evangelical Anglican, her worship music has evangelical Anglican sources, she lived in Nashville and San Diego making contemporary Christian music so that her American evangelical connections are impeccable, and one of the privileged few to whom she had come out privately is the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Unwilling to rehearse of that here, I simply forbid you to read this post until you’ve done your due diligence with the previous post.
Vicky Beeching is an Anglican. This is very significant. That’s because of the person to whom Beeching would most likely be compared: Jennifer Knapp.
Like Vicky Beeching, Jennifer Knapp is also a popular contemporary Christian music personality who very publicly came out as a lesbian. Just as Vicky Beeching was confronted by outspoken anti-gay pastor-activist Scott Lively on live television when she came out, Knapp was also confronted by Pastor Bob Botsford on Larry King Live. Like Lively, Botsford told Knapp that his heart broke for her because she was living a lie that contradicted Scripture. Knapp’s response was that Botsford was not her pastor. If Botsford had been her pastor, Knapp reasoned, then it would have been fair to exercise pastoral jurisdiction over her as a church member. But she wasn’t. She was part of another congregation with other pastors who affirmed her, and her bottom line was that Botsford’s attempt to exercise pastoral authority over her was illegitimate because it violated the boundaries between his congregation and hers.
It would be tempting to compare Beeching to Knapp because almost the exact same thing happened to Beeching on live television. As I said, Beeching was called out almost exactly like Knapp because the more conservative evangelical man standing in for the Christian Right accused Beeching (like Knapp) of living a lie contrary to Scripture.
It’s what follows next that makes everything about Beeching different from Knapp. That’s because Beeching is an Anglican.
Beeching can’t make the congregational autonomy argument that Knapp makes. This is because, as I said, Beeching is an Anglican. Anglicans don’t believe in congregational autonomy; our polities are parishes in dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops that are in communion with each other and who all trace their succession through Canterbury to the apostles. Beeching can’t say to Lively like Knapp says to Botsford, ‘You are not my pastor,’ because congregational autonomy is not going to cut it for Beeching. Lively is thus not in a different ecclesial category for Beeching (as Botsford is for Knapp); he is in the sameecclesial category. He is a pastor, so Beeching merely says to him that it’s people like him who have caused her psychological damage. Observe well, then, the effects of this disagreement. The contention rests on Lively’s repetition that Beeching’s lifestyle is not ‘biblical,’ for Beeching argues that that there are multiple ways of reading Scripture and that the passages that he cites to condemn her sexual orientation have contested meanings.
Yet Beeching does not disown Lively the way that Knapp disowns Botsford. She knows that they’re stuck together in communion, terrible as that may sound, because as much as she may wish that she were ecclesially autonomous from him, the truth of the Anglican charism means that they cannot be sundered at an ontological level. Indeed, this raises the emotional stakes for her contention against Lively: if people like Lively have inflicted psychological damage on her and those whose sexual orientations are non-heteronormative and if they are ontologically stuck together, then it is an imperative for Beeching to demand that Lively stop oppressing her and hear her out on the multiplicity of hermeneutics, a demand that is in fact not unreasonable considering St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, where Augustine allows in the preface for all sorts of biblical interpretations if they are governed by the rule of faith, which is charity.
In short, as an Anglican, Beeching understands what Knapp does not: there is no such thing as total ecclesial autonomy, and the more that one understands that, the more one works to make ecclesial co-existence at least bearable.
Dig deeper, though, and one finds that this ecclesial ontology has implications that drag that construct called ‘Global South Anglicanism’ into the fray. That’s because, as the BBC program itself mentions, Lively is close to the leaders of a nation-state called Uganda. Deny as he may that he had a hand in the draconinan Anti-Homosexuality Bill that threatened to execute queer persons in Uganda, Beeching herself recently shared a link that an American federal judge has ordered Lively to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
This is significant because Lively’s actions in the mid-2000s in Uganda disturbs the larger narrative of the Anglican realignment. Provinces such as Rwanda, Nigeria, Kenya, the Southern Cone, and yes, Uganda, took in some of these ‘realigned’ Anglican churches. As I related in my definition of the Anglican realignment (see above, scroll past the Gandalf GIF), this was the story of how the Global South Anglicans, especially from Africa, were re-evangelizing North America, especially from its capitulation to what might be chalked up to (in Southern Baptist terms) a ‘gay agenda.’ In other words, Anglicans in African nation-states were going to save Anglicans in the West.
The problem is that Lively’s actions suggest that this Global South Anglican narrative may not be as ‘Global South’ as meets the eye. If Lively was moving around Uganda around the same time that the Anglican realignment was going on, how many other Americans were invested in making the realignment happen?
Let’s dig further.
In the lead-up to the Scott Lively confrontation, Beeching recounts that one of the more harrowing experiences in her journey as a gay person was when she had an exorcism performed on her at a British evangelical camp. This also messes up the Global South Anglican narrative. After all, one of the more celebrated stories of the 1998 Lambeth Conference was of an African archbishop attempting an exorcism on a gay rights activist. Certainly, analyses at the time noted that African and Asian primates, bishops, priests, and deacons had mostly attended the same seminaries as their Global North counterparts. Yet according to the narrative of Global South Anglicanism, this phenomenon could also very well be explained via the African archbishop’s Global South conditions, where spirits are real and demons prowl and exorcisms happen regularly because priests have the same status as witchdoctors. Certainly, that’s how Phil Jenkins explains why Southeast Asian primate, Archbishop Moses Tay, attempted to exorcise the City of Vancouver because of the totem poles in its urban park, Stanley Park (The Next Christendom, p. 130).
The question is, how does that exoticized Global South Anglican narrative explain Beeching’s story of British evangelicals trying to exorcise her? Might the explanation that those Global South Anglicans attended the same schools in the Global North and were in collaboration with conservative Anglican, evangelical, and charismatic groups in the Global North hold more water, in light of Beeching’s experience?
Let’s keep digging.
The impression that one gets about the Anglican realignment is that the parishes that broke away were mostly evangelical Anglican. Though this group certainly included charismatic and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, that the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) was heavily dominated by Sydney Anglicans (who apparently have to debate over whether their archbishop is ‘Reformed’ enough to hold office), as well as African and Asian Anglicans who emphasized the Bebbington Quadrilateral of evangelical distinctives (biblicism, conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism), who held an after-gathering at All Souls’ Church in London seems to confirm this image. Certainly also, some of the charismatics would technically fit into an ‘evangelical Anglican’ stream — ‘evangelical’ here defined in Anglican terms as those in the English church who understand authority as primarily derived from Scripture, not, say, apostolic succession (like the Anglo-Catholics) or scientific progress (like the latitudinarians).
Well, like it or not, Vicky Beeching is an evangelical Anglican. Despite the image of those who push what Beeching calls ‘LGBT theology‘ tends to be from the more liberal wings of Anglicanism — James Pike, Jack Spong, Gene Robinson, Mary Glasspool, Marc Andrus, Patrick Cheng — how much of a shock to the system is it that Beeching continues to identify as an evangelical Anglican who takes the Bible so seriously that her post defending her theological views is based on the Bible?
What’s the point?
The point, then, is that Vicky Beeching embodies what the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, calls ‘the body’s grace.’ For Williams, the fact of same-sex attraction and even unions are a gift to the church because they help Christians think about how love is expressed corporeally. Certainly, when his successor, Justin Cantuar, expresses that same-sex couples often put opposite-sex married couples to shame in their care for each other, Welby is also referencing Williams.
But Beeching takes that one step further. Beeching’s body’s grace is an open sign of contradiction to the Global South Anglican realignment narrative. She is an evangelical Anglican theologian: she cannot afford to endorse congregational autonomy. Her interlocutor is Scott Lively, a person whose physical presence in Uganda also flat out contradicts the Global South Anglican narrative because he casts suspicion on whether homophobic prejudices in fact originated in what might be derisively regarded as the ‘primitive’ cultures of the Global South. Beeching’s exorcism flat-out contradicts the understanding of the Global South as ‘primitive,’ for if exorcism is a sign of prmitiveness, then the Global North evangelicals who tried to exorcise her would also be primitive. Her evangelicalism — rooted in a theological orientation based on Scriptural authority — flat-out contradicts accusations of latitudinarian liberalism.
In short, Beeching reveals where the Anglican Communion fault lines actually lie. The truth, as Beeching reveals it, is that the Global North-Global South imagined geography is a smokescreen. If there is anything that Beeching’s body’s grace illustrates clearly, the realignment has never really ever been about Global South, postcolonial agency, and Anglicans of colour. Postcolonial Anglicans, as Kwok Pui-lan and Ian Douglas have called people like me, have never really been addressed here — we have merely been spoken for and over.
Beeching’s closeness to the Archbishop of Canterbury is thus the ultimate gift. After all, one of Justin Cantuar’s major tasks is to reconcile this fragmented Anglican Communion. With Beeching coming out, the mist has evaporated, and the real fault lines finally have become crystal clear. As an Anglican of colour observing Welby’s talent for deep listening, his knowledge of the actual on-the-ground political realities in Africa, and his almost overflowing glee at welcoming those who regularly disrupt his own evangelical Anglican narrative, I expect great things out of this Archbishop of Canterbury for the Anglican Communion. After all, precisely because of Vicky Beeching’s body’s grace, we might see an Anglican Communion finally ready to tackle the deep-seated corporeal issues of race that have plagued us since the dawn of modernity.
This post was inspired by evangelical Anglican theologian and worship leader Vicky Beeching’s coming out story in The Independent. Read that first. Also, for a smart analysis of the reception of Beeching’s coming-out, read my buddy Ryan Cook’s post. For a roundup, Beeching has done it herself.
Those who knew me when I was on ordination track will know that I have admired Vicky Beeching’s work from the beginning. I was an intern at an evangelical Anglican church, although I think that’s a bit of a misnomer because while certain quarters of the parish espoused an evangelical theology (including the rector, at least publicly), the rector had been trained at Nashotah House and couldn’t exactly shake his Anglo-Catholicism. Those who worked with me at the youth group and second-generation ministry — why, yes, it was an Asian Canadian parish — joked at the time that I had a huge crush on Beeching. I was single, and I suppose when the worship leader played ‘Yesterday, Today, and Forever‘ for the first time, I was hooked. I bought her cd, I played it at odd hours at the church through its self-described world-class sound system, I learned how to play a ton of her songs on the piano, I followed her blog, and I may even have put some of the members of the youth group through my Beeching craze. I also told the worship leader at the time that when I was ordained, I’d like ‘Call to Worship’ to be played as the processional.
I also discovered that she had not one, but two, degrees from Oxford in theology. It made me wonder what on earth a theologian — yes, if you have an MA in theology, you are a master, and therefore an academic theologian — was doing in the buckle of the Bible belt in Nashville, a place that my father and I had visited as a sort of pilgrimage before I started grad school so that he could teach me how to drink beer before anyone else in grad school could. When we were there, we went to the Grand Ole Opry, ate fried catfish, and learned so much about country music that I bought the discs containing the ‘Bristol Sessions,’ the first music ever to be recorded that were considered within the genre of ‘country’ (although ‘gospel’ was probably a better description).
What on earth was an Oxford theologian doing there?
And on top of that, what was an Oxford theologian doing taking lunch pictures with Melody Green, calling Green her mentor, and claiming to have written several of the songs on Painting the Invisible on Keith Green’s old piano? I mean, of course, you could ask what the heck I was doing listening to Keith Green at the time as well — I do, for example, proudly own both the Silver and Gold volumes of The Ministry Years, Green’s complete oeuvre. It’s because at the tail end of high school, I attended a pastor’s conference at Focus on the Family — yes, the one of right-wing fame — where I met Dennis Jernigan, an ex-gay worship leader of ‘You Are My All in All’ fame (even though he wouldn’t identify as ‘ex-gay’). We didn’t talk long, but because I had zero experience chording on the piano, he advised me to listen to Keith Green to get ideas. I did, but apparently, Beeching got the real deal — she got to flesh out her ideas on Green’s piano.
Since then, I followed her blog, reading when she moved to San Diego and then had a mysterious sickness and then, ta da! right when I was starting my doctorate, she also became a doctoral student at Durham University. I remember the pictures she used to post of her very organized workstation — a stark contrast to my situation, I must say — and I’d read her blog where she boldly put up exactly what she was studying with regards to theology and the media, which is in stark contrast to how I operate as a blogger (seldom does my actual academic work make it onto my blogging). I remember the posts were thoughtful, especially when she said things contrary to what I’d hear all my other pious evangelical friends saying about taking sabbaths from social media — she rejected that, and defended her rejection like an academic boss. I saw less of her leading worship, although there was a fascinating promotional video for Eternity Invades put up where she took viewers on an urban tour of London, but I watched as she made it onto SkyNews, and then the BBC, and then was a contributor to the Guardian. I remember thinking — if she can do that as a doctoral student, then I’d better get my public act together as well.
I’d thought about writing her emails from time to time just to connect as colleagues because God knows she was affecting some of my career decisions as well; moreover, our career paths from popular evangelical ministry (hers far more large-scale, of course) to the academy would have made for good conversation. But I never did, and I suspect that’s because I didn’t have time. I’d click through the blogs, read her occasional Twitter and Facebook updates, but after a while, I suppose other things came up and her posts got buried, and I didn’t keep up, although I did read some time last year that she had come out in favour of same-sex marriage. I remember thinking, Hm. Theological studies can do that to you. I also did a happy dance when she wrote an acerbic reply to former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, on his loose usage of Christian ‘persecution’; I think that post seriously affected my reading of Carey’s Gate of Glory, not to mention shaping my perception of Carey’s tenure in Lambeth Palace.
Fast-forward, then. Justin Welby has become Archbishop of Canterbury; he was previously Bishop of Durham, which would have put him in the same diocese where Beeching was studying. I didn’t make the connection directly to Beeching, although I suspected that someone of Beeching’s intelligence, evangelical fervour, and public media participation would probably be on speaking terms with Welby. But I did know that Welby, having had much of his ministry formation at Holy Trinity Brompton and Alpha, would have had some familiarity with the same worship leaders who had formed Beeching: Andy Piercy, Matt Redman, Tim Hughes. I also suspected, listening to Welby’s opposition to same-sex marriage alongside his insistence on having ‘no track with homophobia’ (which, by the way, provides a fascinating lens through which to read Welby’s House of Lords speech against the marriage bill and his Synod speech soon afterward reflecting on ‘revolutions’), that he personally knew someone — and someone with evangelical weight — who was gay. He had said as much, relating his admiration for same-sex couples whose care for each other would put opposite-sex couples to shame (and thus revealing that he had not only read, but digested, his predecessor’s essay, The Body’s Grace). But there was something about the way he said it that made it sound like he had a secret to keep.
Well, it turns out that Beeching is gay and that Welby was one of the privileged few who knew about it. I’ll be damned.
As Zach Hoag notes on the Patheos Progressive Channel, this is huge for the Anglican Communion. It would, as he say, provide for a third way, precisely the sort of thing Welby has been talking about, between Christians whose theological articulations might either be ‘affirming’ or ‘non-affirming’ but love each other all the same.
But there is more: it means that there is a very real gift that evangelical Anglicanism can now bring to the church catholic. In particular, her coming out helps to clear the waters in this murky Anglican situation we have come to call the ‘realignment,’ in which certain parishes and dioceses in the United States and Canada pulled out of their dioceses and provinces over sexuality issues to realign themselves with ‘Global South Anglicanism.’
This post is getting too long. I’ll carry that over to the next post. I promise that it actually matters.
The news cycle this week has been nuts. From the militarized police action and racialization in Ferguson to evangelical media theologian Vicky Beeching coming out as gay, from the mixed-up reports about the Islamic State to the unresolved crisis in Gaza, these ‘wars and rumors of wars’ have rung with apocalyptic tones.
The problem with even having a conversation about these things is that they are layered with assumptions.
My friend Sam Rocha over at Patheos Catholic has experienced this layering in quite a visceral way this week. After posting a rebuttal to conservative Catholics who accuse the Muslim ummah of not speaking out about the Islamic State, Rocha found himself in the midst of a maelstrom of misunderstanding. He had ended his post with a call to Patheos’s Muslim channel to cover the Islamic State news more, precisely as a way to disengage the channel from the atrocities in Iraq and beyond:
My question to my Abrahamic brothers and sisters at the Patheos Muslim channel is, why are you not reporting on — and joining — the predominant voices of your religious community (and your channel editor)?
Rocha found himself quickly rearticulated by some on his channel who saw this as their opportunity to insinuate that the Muslim channel had insidious ulterior motives for their silence. Thankfully, there were those on the Muslim channel who responded graciously and informatively. But in all of these testy exchanges, Rocha’s conciliatory attempt to invite both the Catholic and Muslim channels to a conversation were rearticulated through the assumption that a question like the one Rocha posed needs to be interpreted through the lens of a holy war that had to be de-escalated. This is far from the case, of course — Rocha calls the Muslim channel his ‘Abrahamic brothers and sisters’ and promises to practice more fully what Pope Francis calls a ‘culture of encounter.’ But it was difficult to be heard. That was because Rocha was speaking into fora layered with assumptions.
Or take the example of Vicky Beeching coming out. The Independent‘s report on the matter confirms that the trusted sources who knew about her sexuality were Katherine Welby, her father Justin Cantuar, and her parents, some of whom have different theological understandings of the sexuality debates than her strong, earlier-acknowledged stance on LGBT theology. In an interview with Channel 4 News, though, Beeching’s story was paired with longtime anti-gay activist Scott Lively, who dragged her over the coals for living a ‘lie’ that denied the ‘biblical’ teaching on sexuality in Genesis. When Beeching clarified that there were multiple possible readings of the biblical text — a point that even St. Augustine acknowledges in De Doctrina Christiana — Lively spoke over her to charge that she was not giving him the chance to speak and express his ‘biblical’ view. But therein lay the dilemma. He had been speaking, expressing, articulating, and when Beeching asked to deconstruct some of his assumptions about being ‘biblical’ — especially because she had studied the Bible and tradition at a graduate level — he wouldn’t hear it. His assumptions led to a train of accusations that here was a major Christian leader who had now fallen.
Or take the convoluted stories we are now hearing about both Ferguson and Gaza, which are apparently linked because the militarization of the police in Ferguson took direct cues from the Israeli Defence Forces. What is even more confusing now, though, is that for all of the talk of Ferguson appearing like a war zone, the death of Michael Brown was passed off today as a botched attempt to arrest him for a convenience store strong-arm robbery, only now to have to backtrack on that when the public learned that the robbery was not connected to the actual reason Brown was stopped, which is apparently now jaywalking. These twists and turns also reflect the confusion around the Gaza story — who kidnapped whom? who shot first? how many civilians are dying? who’s really committing atrocities? The result is that the public is left to our own assumptions about what is actually happening, which means that what is really being allowed to control these stories is not what is actually happening — it’s one’s own knowledge of good and evil on race, militarization, Israel/Palestine, and the police state.
All of this arrives at the doorstep of the church catholic today on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. I’m sure that jokes could be made about this Protestant author talking about how Catholics assume that Mary was assumed into heaven.
But to simply stop at that corny punchline would be to miss the point.
The Assumption matters, even for Protestants. If indeed Mary has been assumed ahead of the pilgrim church into her full risen life, then the apparitions that she has made — and that Protestants doubt actually happened — take on much more powerful significance, for it would mean that the Blessed Virgin is living out her risen life by preaching to a world wracked by the conflict around its ideological assumptions — its continual eating in the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, as Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer would say — instead of dealing with the concrete historical and ethnographic realities before us.
In this sense, Mary remains a political figure in modernity. From race relations at Guadalupe to her protest against secularization at Lourdes to her interpretation of twentieth-century geopolitcs at Fatima — among her other apparitions — Mary says to us that when we allow ideological fictions to rewrite history and rearticulate reality, we are not encountering each other as human persons. We may encounter each other as racial projects, states of exception, theological heretics, and agents of the police state, but to do that is to reduce the human person to a set of disembodied ideas. No, Mary says. I am here. I have physically appeared to you. I am the Lady who is speaking to you. She will not let us exist as ideas. Her Assumption forces us to encounter each other as bodily persons. This is what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, means when he calls on us to a graciousness in ‘deep disagreement’ where one assumes the best about one’s ideological opponents, precisely what he has shown toward Vicky Beeching in her journey. As a practitioner of Catholic social teaching, Welby knows that he is channeling Paul VI’s ‘civilization of love‘ from his 1970 Regina Coeli speech. And thus he would have no problem with me, a Chinglican, saying that the Assumption of Mary is the krisis of our assumptions.
Hail, star of the sea, Nurturing Mother of God, And ever Virgin Happy gate of heaven.
Receiving that ‘Ave’ From the mouth of Gabriel Establish us in peace, Transforming the name of ‘Eve.’
Loosen the chains of the guilty, Send forth light to the blind Our evil do thou dispel, Entreat for us all good things.
Show thyself to be a Mother: Through thee may he receive prayer Who, being born for us, Undertook to be thine own.
O unique Virgin, Meek above all others, Make us, set free from our sins Meek and chaste.
Bestow a pure life, Prepare a safe way: That seeing Jesus, We may ever rejoice.
Praise be to God the Father, To the Most High Christ be glory To the Holy Spirit Be honour, to the Three equally. Amen.
It has come to my attention that I need to respond to Archbishop Paul Kwong’s recent comments opposing the mass democratic movement in Hong Kong known as Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) in a confirmation homily during St. Paul’s Church’s Theological Education Sunday. I am fully aware that by doing so, Kwong will say of me, ‘Whenever people see me or other church leaders, they will say, “We must speak up! Speak up at all times, on everything, understand? It is a must to fight.” For what do people have to speak up so much? [It appears] as if they wouldn’t have another chance, as if they were dumb otherwise.’
I suppose that ups the ante for my response.
For those who need to be caught up, OCLP is a non-violent movement that is attempting to bring deliberative democracy to Hong Kong. Tired of the Beijing central government’s repeated delays of universal suffrage for the election of the Special Administrative Region’s ‘Chief Executive,’ constitutional legal scholar Benny Tai, sociologist Chan Kin-man, and retired pastor Rev. Chu Yiuming have organized since January 2013 a series of events to have Hong Kong citizens deliberate over how they want to have elections, a constitutional guarantee in Article 45 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law. These events are known as ‘Deliberation Days,’ bringing together citizens from various aspects of civil society to put forward proposals for how candidates should be nominated and elected. These proposals were in turn put to vote recently on 22 to 29 June in an informal civil referendum. The idea is that the government — both Hong Kong’s government and the Beijing central government — should heed the voice of the people. If they do not heed the people, the idea of OCLP is to physically occupy the Central business district with acts of civil disobedience, forcing the government to hear the people. On 1 July 2014, some half million Hongkongers indeed hit the streets in protest that Beijing seems to be exerting a newfound authoritarianism over Hong Kong. Afterward, some 511 people occupied Central’s Chater Road in a rehearsal should OCLP have to happen; all were arrested, and the five organizers of the 7/1 Demonstration from the Civil Human Rights Front were detained the next day as well.
Archbishop Kwong has publicly opposed OCLP. Hong Kong’s left-leaning newspaper, Apple Daily, reports that Kwong has mocked the 7/1 Demonstrators and opposed OCLP because, simply put, it’s not what Jesus would do. The South China Morning Post attributes the change not so much to Christ, but to the fact that Kwong is currently a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a gathering that advises the Chinese central government on policy issues.
As the Primate of Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, that is, the Anglican Province of Hong Kong, Kwong certainly has a lot of power. That I am an Anglican as well seeking to abide by the three goals of the Archbishop of Canterbury — to be involved in the renewal of the church through the renewal of prayer and praying communities, to be an agent of reconciliation, and to be a practitioner of evangelism and witness — places the onus on me to respect Archbishop Kwong as one of the 38 primates who demonstrate (albeit very imperfectly, as the Anglican realignment will readily show) the visible unity of the Anglican Communion. My comments are, as all my comments are of many of the Christian leaders with whom I have found myself in disagreement, meant to be respectful. As Justin Cantuar is teaching me, it means that ‘we must find ways to disagree agreeably.’
I hope that this does not make me a ‘river crab.’ For those who aren’t in the know, the term ‘river crab’ is a play on the word ‘harmonious society,’ an ideology propagated by the Beijing central government to form a peaceful China with minimal conflict as a space conducive to business transactions. Because this ideology tends to stifle dissent and democratic deliberation, this ‘harmonious society’ is often mocked by pro-democratic activists as anti-democratic, and the agents of collaboration are designated derogatorily as ‘river crabs.’ Although I recognize my communion with Archbishop Kwong and others who agree with him, such as his provincial secretary Rev. Peter Koon, what I have to say should position me as far from being a river crab, not least because I ultimately disagree with Kwong on the question of Occupy Central.
One has to take seriously the genre in which Kwong made his remarks. This was a confirmation homily given on a Sunday in a parish celebrating what it called ‘Theological Education Sunday.’ In this way, Kwong is doing theology, trying to educate those whom he just confirmed as to how they should live their Christian lives in the current Hong Kong situation.
Let me first, then, give a more lengthy summary of Kwong’s fuller homiletical remarks:
Kwong’s theological understanding of confirmation is that those who have given their lives to faith in Jesus Christ have in fact been chosen by God, not the other way around. For Kwong, this is a clear contrast to the recent assertions of political agency in Hong Kong, with 7/1 Demonstrators and OCLP participants demanding that they be able to choose. Such an emphasis on choice, Kwong argues, is inimical to an understanding of Christian life because, as he argues, individual, autonomous choice does not articulate the truth of our existence — which is that what we have is chosen for us by virtue of our non-individualistic existence in community. ‘See the church that we are in how beautiful it is?’ Kwong illustrates. ‘This is a gift from God above.’ Scaling out from St. Paul’s parish, he argues that the parish building is only possible because of the offerings of parish members, and those parish members are part of a church in the Province of Hong Kong, and the Province of Hong Kong is part of an 8,000,000-strong Anglican Communion around the world.
Driving the point always back to Hong Kong’s ‘chaotic’ political situation, Kwong then emphasizes that to be a ‘Christian’ is to be a follower of Jesus Christ, which means that one must consider how Jesus Christ would himself respond to Hong Kong’s political situation. He jokes that while many people ask, ‘Archbishop, how should Christians respond to this current situation?’ he feels that if he knew the answer, maybe he should be the Chief Executive! But because he does not know all the answers out of this complicated scenario, he keeps on asking that Jesus give him the wisdom to do something for this city of Hong Kong. In other words, as he says to the recently confirmed, Christians are not to think that by receiving confirmation, all problems will be solved, again contrasting this mentality with what he determines to be the simplistic theory that universal suffrage in Hong Kong will in turn solve all the food and housing shortages in the city. It’s not simple, he says, and it’s exacerbated by what he sees as the political polarization of Hong Kong, for when (as he says) he speaks one word in favour of China, he’s declared to be a river crab, but if one word critical, then he’s dipped his hand into politics.
Here, he returns to the lectionary with St. Paul’s struggle between two opposing laws of the flesh and the spirit in Romans 7. How do Christians deal with the challenges and difficulties of life? Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in Jesus Christ. ‘How would Jesus think?’ Kwong asks. ‘If I were Jesus, what would he do?’
Turning to the Gospel, he emphasizes Jesus’ words to the disciples in Matthew 11: ‘Take my yoke and learn from me, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ ‘I do not think,’ Kwong declares, ‘that Jesus would be like certain legislators in the Legislative Council always throwing things [in reference to fellow Christian, Wong Yuk Man, a pro-democratic legislator, physically throwing bananas, papers, and a glass cup recently in chambers]. I do not think that Jesus would be like certain demonstrators on the street using all sorts of vulgarities and obscenities on the government officials. I do not think that Jesus would use this sort of irrational violence to get his way.’ Kwong then makes fun of those who keep saying to him that he must make a response and that he must protest Beijing. ‘It’s like if I don’t speak I’m mute!’ he jokes. ‘But this isn’t the way it always has to be done. Look at Jesus before Pilate, as a sheep before its shearers is silent. Sometimes you don’t have to speak, but be silent. Sometimes saying nothing is saying something.’
Here’s the controversial part, then, the part where Kwong allegedly mocks pro-democratic activists for being ‘completely brainless.’ The larger context here is this: Kwong is saying that many of the recent activism is spurred on by people who lack inner peace. As Kwong puts it, the people who hit the streets tend to live in irrational fear, like one youth who was interviewed at the 7/1 Demonstration who said that he was seizing his last chance to demonstrate because he had believed the reports that Beijing would crack down and next year there would be no democracy. ‘If that’s really the case,’ Kwong quips, ‘I would have been out there with my staff and mitre too!’ Ditto another person he talked to who opposed the New Territories’ new towns on the grounds that all of the new houses would go to mainlanders — ‘Is every single house going to the mainland?’ Kwong mocks. ‘People have to buy those houses!’ Ditto another person who thought that Hong Kong was about to lose its autonomy, or indeed, the 511 occupiers at Chater Road who indeed thought that — Kwong asks rhetorically, to loud laughter from the congregation, since when Hong Kong has in fact been totally autonomous. The ‘brainlessness’ that Kwong attributes to these people is that they are themselves living in inner turmoil, which means that their brains are wired to listen to any fear-mongering without any critical reflection. This is, Kwong suggests, unbecoming of a people called to follow Jesus, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.
The solution to this is to learn from Jesus’ gentleness and lowliness. Without this gentleness and lowliness, Kwong says, comes the brainlessness that he critiques in current Hong Kong politics. But with gentleness and lowliness comes the ability to discern the real situation. With this identity given to us in confirmation, Kwong argues that the response to the current Hong Kong situation is to learn from Jesus, who is gentle and lowly. This is the Christian difference, he says: we Christians are different and do things differently because Christians have a completely different identity. Practicing that kind of Christianity, Kwong concludes, is how to have inner peace.
Kwong’s theology is certainly an Anglican one. By saying that, I am counting on Kwong to be completely wrong about the ‘brainlessness’ of the public sphere. Though I have affirmed my communion with Kwong and my recognition of his theological method as akin to mine, I have not yet given any indication of my critical assessment of Kwong’s remarks. That will come later in the post, and as I indicated earlier, my assessment is severely critical.
For now, we are still trying to understand why Kwong said what he said, and I am simply trying to understand him as someone who, like me, practices Anglican theology. For that, we must turn to his recently authored doctoral dissertation, Identity in Community: Toward a Theological Agenda for the Hong Kong SAR.
Identity in Community is Kwong’s attempt to bring the work of theologian Miroslav Volf, especially in his award-winning Exclusion and Embrace, into conversation with post-handover Hong Kong politics. As those who have read Volf will remember, Volf attempts to move beyond a theology of liberation to one that frames exclusion as the cardinal sin (especially in a 1990s context of ethnic cleansing) and embrace as the Christian practice that resists exclusion. For Kwong, Volf’s theology sheds light on Hong Kong because it provides a theological framework that can make for full reconciliation with churches in China, if not China itself, in the political turmoil of developing a distinctive political identity for Hong Kong.
Outlining a view of Hong Kong’s history as a British colony that transitioned into a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Kwong notes that there are different ways that Christian churches have approached Hong Kong’s political sphere. There have been, he notes, collaborators with the colonial regime; there have also been pro-democracy activists. As the handover was taking place and Basic Law was being drafted, there were a number of different approaches to the PRC. There are, for example, still democratic ‘social justice’ activists, even as there are those who prefer a path of ‘disengagement.’ The one he spends the most time on, though, are what he calls the pragmatists, partly because he agrees with them and implicitly wants to suss out an Anglican theology for them. Pragmatists, Kwong argues, are those who are happy to work with the new handover government and even the central government for the common good, even if those governments are themselves imperfect.
For all the talk about Joseph Cardinal Zen’s pro-democratic activities, Kwong traces the theological framework for the pragmatic approach to a 1989 Catholic pastoral letter given by Zen’s predecessor, Jean-Baptist Cardinal Wu. Titled ‘March Into the Bright Decade,’ Wu sets out ‘reconciliation’ as the primary task of Christians in Hong Kong, especially as the PRC gets ready to take over sovereignty. Applying the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, Wu exhorts the faithful to start with reconciliation in ‘small communities’ by studying the Word of God, gathering regularly, and being pluralistic — and then scaling up from those small communities toward the parish, then to the diocese, and then to the full catholicity of churches within the PRC. As Kwong observes in his analysis, the point here applies for Anglicans as well, for both Anglicans and Catholics share catholic union with churches located within the PRC. In order to bring about reconciliation with those churches where geopolitical divisions have rendered them asunder, Kwong reads ‘March Into the Bright Decade’ as advocating a pragmatic approach with the mainland.
Herein lies my disagreement with Kwong, at least in the outworking of his pragmatic theological framework. While many would automatically conclude from this reading that Kwong was a ‘river crab’ even before joining the CPPCC, I would contend that Occupy Central can be read as an application of Identity in Communion because of deliberative democracy. To be honest, when I first saw that Kwong had opposed OCLP, I could hardly believe my ears. After reading Identity in Community, I had been certain that Kwong had provided OCLP with the theological framework with which it was running!
After all, couldn’t one say that the actions of Benny Tai, Chan Kin-man, and the Rev. Chu Yiuming in bringing together citizens for deliberation a practice of Volf’s embrace, as it resists exclusion by bringing together disagreeing citizens to come up with a common good? With the small groups that mark the ‘Deliberation Days’ that are then scaled up into proposals to be voted on by the general public, couldn’t it be said that OCLP is in fact putting the subsidiarity of ‘March Into the Bright Decade’ into practice? With the openness of deliberation, have not the events of the last year placed democratic activists as agents of reconciliation? In other words, Occupy Central works by Kwong’s own theological formulation.
In fact, one could argue that Kwong’s homily fails by Kwong’s own theological framework.While ostensibly putting forth a Christian identity shaped by communion with other Christians, the most serious flaw is Kwong’s failure to engage with fellow Christians who disagree with him, sometimes not only pretending that they do not exist, but portraying the situation as if those who are pro-democratic cannot in turn be Christian. When Kwong suggests that the ‘throwing of many objects’ in Legislative Council was performed by non-Christians who lack an understanding of a Christian identity, is he not excluding Wong Yuk Man from his baptismal identity as well as excluding Wong’s pastor, Senlok Christian Church’s Rev. Timothy Lam Kwok Cheung, from his ordination? When he finds that pro-democratic activists are individualistic and fail to live out their identity in community, what is he saying about the leadership of the Rev. Chu Yiuming, whose public work in Chai Wan by fighting bus fare and public utility hikes and advocating for an Eastern Hospital has always been ‘for the people’? When he says that it’s ‘brainless people’ with no inner peace who join these democracy movements, what is he implying about Joseph Cardinal Zen’s hunger strikes and democratic activism? Kwong may be exhorting the newly confirmed to find their identity in community. The problem is that if indeed all who disagree with Kwong are not only ‘brainless,’ but lack a ‘Christian identity,’ then this community is marked by the very exclusion that Kwong purports to resist.
The implications of these questions are serious for Kwong’s interaction with the rest of the Anglican Communion. Imagine, for example, a Desmond Tutu — then Primate of South Africa — who was silent in the face of apartheid. Imagine if anti-segregation activists in the Episcopal Church who read Martin Luther King, Jr’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ from the altar of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral had kept their peace. Imagine if William Temple had never written his treatise Christianity and Social Order to advocate for the working class and their right to collective bargaining and guaranteed employment in the mid-twentieth century. By calling pro-democracy activists ‘non-Christian’ by virtue of their putative individualism and ‘brainless’ fear, is Kwong disregarding his identity in communion with these Anglicans?
I can see the rebuttal a mile away, by the way: but are things as dire in Hong Kong as to invoke the legacies of King, Tutu, and Temple?
The answer is yes.
In a jab against the 511 young protesters who were arrested on Chater Road, Kwong quips about their complaint that they were denied food and timely access to toilets, ‘Why didn’t they bring along their Filipino maids to the march?’ Here, Kwong has played right into Benny Tai’s hands. In a lecture on ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, Tai makes clear that one of the very reasons why OCLP advocates for universal suffrage is because if quite literally every person in Hong Kong had a vote, the very marginalized ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, including these Filipino maids, would be given political agency. In fact, as Tai himself well knows, Basic Law’s Article 24 has been twisted in such a way as to deny temporary foreign workers and children of Chinese mothers not registered in Hong Kong their basic human right to right of abode in Hong Kong, even if they have lived in the region for seven years. The Filipino maids should indeed have come, then, precisely because universal suffrage is stop the exclusion of the least of these and embrace them as part of the theological-political community in Hong Kong. This would, after all, been the way of King, Tutu, and Temple.
This, then, gets to the deep theological point of OCLP: when the Hong Kong government and central government is found to exclude the voice of the people from its deliberations, the people will resist those exclusions by non-violent civil disobedience in order to provoke an embrace. This people, as Tai has made clear, are not only the ethnic Chinesepeople of Hong Kong, but the entire diverse community that composes the whole Special Administrative Region. This is why when those acts of civil disobedience happen, they will also be acts of love and peace. They are, after all, acts of reconciliation.
Given this, it is not only strange that Kwong presents himself as such a ‘river crab.’ It is absolutely bizarre that he does not lend his staff and mitre as OCLP’s front leader.
Roger Revell has hit the nail right on the head. There is nothing like full-bodied orthodox Christianity that elicits a rousing ‘Amen!’ from across the spectrum of those who are part of the diverse chorus of what St. Peter’s Fireside calls ‘classical Christianity.’
Revell’s brilliant response takes the wind right out of the sails of Douglas Todd’s suggestion that ‘conservative’ Christians are too heavenly minded for earthly good. Here’s Todd:
This might shock those who assume the main reason Christians become Christian, and embrace the Easter account of the resurrection of Jesus, is to be guaranteed a spot in heaven. But belief in heaven, or otherwise, is not a deal-breaker for entry into this camp. Some liberal Christians don’t think it is possible to have individual consciousness after death. That said, most liberal Christians appreciate how the story of Jesus’ resurrection exemplifies how “death is not the final word.” Even if they don’t believe Jesus physically rose from the grave, they buy into the metaphor. They accept Jesus’ followers had mystical visions of him after his death and that the love people show on earth lives on eternally after their body dies.
One might have expected that Revell’s ‘classically Christian’ answer would take us back to St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians where he castigates the Corinthian church for entertaining the idea that the bodily resurrection may not have happened. Certainly, within evangelical circles, a certain reading of this passage has yielded a cottage industry of apologetics (one thinks, for example, of Frank Morrison’s Who Moved the Stone?, Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ) seeking to demonstrate from putatively incontrovertible evidence that Jesus in fact was raised bodily from the dead and that classically orthodox Christianity must be believed. For these people, ‘belief in heaven’ and the physical resurrection are indeed ‘deal-breakers,’ and a response from this camp would have dragged Todd through the coals for a seeming denial of the necessity of Jesus’ resurrection.
Not so Revell. Quite obviously influenced not only by N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope (which he cites), as well as Wright’s tome The Resurrection of the Son of God (which he is too modest to cite), Revell’s first argument is that Christians who are too heavenly minded for earthly good are in fact shirking their Christian obligation to be present and alive as, in the words of St. Irenaeus, ‘human beings fully alive’ and that ‘liberal Christians’ (say, Rob Bell) as well as their secular counterparts (say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) are right to be disgusted at these freeloaders mooching off the rest of us who are working for the common good. As Revell explains, the only problem with applying this logic to all classically-oriented Christians is that that’s not how the logic classically works. Emphasizing that classically-oriented Christians are not completely agreed on what it means to share in the risen life (say, whether or not to venerate the saints who have fallen asleep but are still alive, or whether the Bible talks about only about life after death or a life after life after death), Revell suggests that one point of convergence is that, according to Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, the prize of eternal life is precisely what makes life in the present possible, exciting, and creative, making even prophetic statements in physical martyrdom (say, St. Perpetua or Dietrich Bonhoeffer) completely possible. Revell ends with a bang: life after life is not a ‘pleasant and fanciful idea’ but the path of full-bodied Christian discipleship.
Here, Revell is certainly influenced by orthodox theologian John Zizioulas’s Being as Communion. At the risk of oversimplification (I’m not going to deal with the whole hypostasis and ousios thing, for example, because it gave me a splitting headache), Zizioulas argues that human planes of existence can be divided between the ‘biological’ and the ‘ecclesial.’ At a basic ‘biological’ level of living, people tend to be concerned about their own survival, literally stayin’ alive (ah, ha, ha, ha, ha…sorry…). But what happens when one gets baptized is that one gets immersed into the risen life of Jesus Christ — one quite literally, and not just metaphorically, participates in the resurrection. Because the ‘death factor’ gets taken out of the equation, one’s existence is not merely biological and oriented toward survival; it is now ecclesial and eucharistic. In other words, one continues to participate in the risen life of Christ by sacramentally eating his flesh and drinking his blood. This doesn’t just happen at an individual level. It happens together with the whole church — the ekklesia — which makes one’s existence ecclesial, which means that one’s existence is not merely oriented toward biological survival, but toward communion with the other.
Drawing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian from a completely different theological tradition (and indeed, historical period!) from Zizioulas, this means that a Christian mode of social relations is marked by the sanctorum communio, the communion of saints. Indeed, Bonhoeffer goes as far as to say that the church is Christ literally and actually made manifest in the world: ‘Now the objective spirit of the church really has become the Holy Spirit, the experience of the “religious” community now really is the experience of the church, and the collective person of the church now really is “Christ existing as church-community”‘ (Sanctorum Communio, p. 288). As Revell suggests, a Christian is cut out to be the best kind of citizen, ‘the type who forgoes personal interest and entitlement because in due course, she will exist in a place devoid of want and lack.’ That’s because a Christian’s primary locus of existence is in the church, which is not a private voluntary association, but a public display of a new mode of social relations marked by always being for the other and not for one’s own survival.
Which brings us to that scandalous thing that Revell talks about halfway through his post: the veneration of the saints.Except that it’s not very scandalous…
In fact, that Revell seems almost unfazed by the scandal that his mentioning of this practice might cause indicates how central the veneration of the saints is to putting the resurrection to work. After all, when in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus defends the resurrection over against the Sadducees’ denial of it, he does it by saying that the reference to the God of the burning bush as the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ indicates that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not dead but alive, for God is God of the living, not the dead. What this means is that saints like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants as numerous as the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky, are not only alive, but can quite literally continue to intervene in the present world. A ‘classical Christian’ view, embraced by Catholic and Orthodox Christians especially, takes this radically catholic view, that the communion of saints not only comprises the living and the dead in Christ, but that all are in fact still alive by virtue of their participation in Christ’s risen life. That Jesus himself shows that this can be a validly Christian practice from the beginnings of the Scriptural tradition suggests that while Protestants may have historically found this practice problematic (idolatry! one hears them cry), every Christian should in fact find this practice relatively uncontroversial.
The beauty of politics called ‘church,’ as theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, is that not everyone has to agree with precisely how to articulate this sensibility. Indeed, Revell’s ‘classical Christianity’ makes room even for Todd’s liberal articulation of a spiritual resurrection, a rare feat in the currently polarized Christian theological landscape. If there is room in the Body for Protestants who cannot endorse the resurrection practice of venerating the saints, then there is certainly also room for those who may articulate the resurrection differently without actually denying its effects. After all, Todd does not deny the resurrection: even if some of Todd’s ‘liberal Christians’ do not believe in the resurrection, ‘they still buy into the metaphor’ and agree that ‘death is not the final word.’ While full-bodied ‘orthodox’ Christians might chafe at this, Revell is correct not to take Todd to task explicitly for this because he recognizes the reality that theology has never really only been about articulation — it’s about practice.
What Revell finally shows, then, is that ‘classical Christianity’ simply cannot be ideological. If indeed theology is about practice, then the comparisons between ‘classical’ and ‘liberal’ Christianity do not end with how Todd and St. Peter’s Fireside express their theology. What has happened over the course of our conversation, then, is that what started out as a debate between two polarized ends of the theological spectrum have been brought together by convergences in practice — the doing of justice, the doing of the contemplative life, the doing of confession, the doing of silent presence, the doing of the resurrection — have trumped whatever divisions we might have. As Pope Francis once declared, ‘ideological Christianity’ is a ‘disease.’ We must work together.
Now the theological discussion is at an end. We have come together more closely than we ever thought possible. We have discovered our unlikely affinities in the sanctorum communio. The liturgical formula from which we get the word ‘mass’ is Ite, missa est. After having partaken of the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood in a deep sharing in the risen life of the God who became human, the people are dismissed. Goforth in the name of Christ, the deacon sometimes says. Or, go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Or, go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. Or, let us bless the Lord.
I deeply appreciate how the conversation among Douglas Todd, the St. Peter’s Fireside staff, and I have been shaping each other’s discourse. As I said in yesterday’s post, these posts are not only for the theological entertainment of a niche group of readers. They are public deliberations, put on the public record, in a public sphere that has one of its major items of debate what the place and privilege of Christians is in our society. That we can model public theological conversation and debate is a joy that we should not take lightly. For all we know, it could reposition the monolithic image of a Christian Right nefariously trying to take over a secular public sphere into a diffuse kaleidoscope of moderate Christians working out in very public ways the ways that they disagree yet remain in loving communion.
It’s in that spirit that I want to remark on how remarkable Mike Chase must be as a pastor. The post that he has delivered as a response to Douglas Todd on how ‘classical Christians’ understand divine sovereignty and human suffering is classically pastoral in the sense as it provides guidance for the people of God in Jesus Christ to develop a fuller life participating in his life. Here’s what Todd said:
When bad things happen, atheists sometimes turn to Christians and rhetorically demand: “So where is your God now?” The question hinges on the incorrect assumption that progressive Christians believe God controls everything, like a supernatural dictator. Liberal Christians tend to believe life is a combination of chance and divine purpose. Given they have free will, humans can engage in moral evil, whether they’re Hitler, members of Boko Haram or wanton polluters. In a creativity-filled universe, chance also makes it possible for bad things to happen in nature, like a destructive avalanche. Liberal Christians believe that, out of suffering, God works to bring new order and healing.
What’s interesting about Todd’s account of liberal Christianity is that it has plenty of room for a ‘classical’ Christian understanding of divine sovereignty and human agency, as it should, particularly because ‘liberalism’ in one sense shouldn’t mean much more than the development of an overlapping consensus among disparate socio-theological imaginaries. Chase correctly sees his ‘in,’ pointing out that his view and Todd’s overlap quite a bit, both in an understanding of God’s sovereignty and human suffering. Disavowing the ‘Calvinism stricter than Calvin’ that plagues contemporary theological discourse among evangelicals in which some have emphasized divine sovereignty at the complete expense of human agency, Chase observes that a ‘classically Christian’ understanding of God’s relationship to the world has a lot of room for human response and responsibility (although I really wish that, as in the previous post on race, Chase would add a bit of a qualifier in his quote from St. Augustine about Jewish-Christian relations). While some may read Chase’s insistence that ‘God controls everything’ as a mere assertion without argument, it sounds to me like Chase is sufficiently aware of Yale theologian Kathryn Tanner’s God and Creation in Christian Theology because Chase chalks up the disconnection between divine sovereignty and human agency to a modern metaphysics. For Tanner — and thus, for Chase — there were different metaphysical rules governing the ‘classical’ conceptions of divine sovereignty, especially in the quotes Chase selects from St. Clement of Rome, and while a nominalist account of God’s sovereignty that argues that God can basically do whatever he wants has presented modern theologians with an ‘either/or’ of divine sovereignty or creaturely agency, the older Christian ‘grammar’ of God as a divine agent working in the world sees no need for this dichotomy.
In turn, Chase argues that this means that there is no need to engage in debates about God’s sovereignty when it comes to human suffering. Instead, a pastoral response would be that human suffering, like the example of St. John Paul II slowly deteriorating and showing the world how a Christian dies well, is a participation in the crucified suffering of Christ. In this way, classical Christians don’t engage in intellectual gymnastics when they encounter human suffering. They enter into the ‘suffering of the other and point them to Christ,’ suggesting that, plainly speaking, we’re all in this together.
Chase’s pastoral response reminds me of some time that I spent with some priests associated with the Congregation of Holy Cross. I had gone through a very difficult season of ministry — yes, before this academic thing and indeed, before even this Thing, I was discerning a call to pastoral ministry — and had gone to live with the priests to refuel. Much of it was spent with good food — candied kielbasa, slow-cooked chicken thighs, Sunday night pizza and movie — and great table conversation in which the priests often exchanged collegial jabs at each other to hilarious effect. One moment that I will never forget, though, was during one of the daily morning masses. The celebrating priest that morning had to preach from the Gospel passage where Jesus tells off the Sadducees for their hypothetical situation about the woman marrying seven brothers and being confused about her real husband at the resurrection. Going beyond criticizing the Temple establishment for not believing in the resurrection, this priest argued that the real problem was that they didn’t understand that God had come close to them and was living and working among them in powerful ways. He then ended the homily with a prayer to ‘Christ Our Brother.’
Christ Our Brother. I understood that theologically; after all, St. Paul has himself written of Christ as the firstborn of all who share in the risen life and of Christians as ‘co-heirs with Christ.’ But this priest actually believed it. I remember asking him about it later, and he just said matter-of-factly, ‘You know, I think a lot of Christians want to think of God as very distant from them. But I’m afraid that’s not Christianity. As a Christian, you don’t believe that God is distant. God is close to us, and we’re afraid of that.’
Years ago, this same priest had introduced me to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and when he heard that I was still interested, he asked, ‘Have you read Mysterium Paschale? It’s Balthasar’s most accessible work.’
I’m sure that Mysterium Paschale is hyped up to be ‘accessible,’ but that book took me a whole year to read. That’s because von Balthasar completely messed with me. Most will talk about von Balthasar’s development of the ‘hiatus’ on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter where God is really dead. But what struck me was a formulation in the first chapter where von Balthasar contextualizes his understanding of that pause with the kenosis, the self-emptying of God in Jesus Christ. For von Balthasar, God’s action in emptying himself in Jesus Christ is the supremely sovereign act that shows that divine sovereignty is fully expressed in being completely helpless as a human being who is completely obedient to the Father, freely accepting even death, death on a cross. To put it in all of its radical glory, God exercises his sovereignty by falling into the hiatus of Holy Saturday.
In this sense, there is really no need for Chase to separate the two parts of his post between the ‘theological’ and the ‘pastoral.’ If God’s expression of sovereignty is not that God can do whatever he wants (as the nominalists assert) but to love us so much as to fall into the abyss with us, then a ‘classically Christian’ theology is that Christ our brother suffers with us — that is simply who God is as a divine agent. In turn, it is an unclassical thing — indeed, a modern nominalist thing — to start with ‘God’ as an empty, characterless category with a terrifying, arbitrary sovereignty who can do whatever he wants and does nothing to stop the evil in the world, which means that it’s also an unclassically Christian thing to assume that God’s real job in exercising his sovereignty is to stop the evil in the world. No, in this sense, both Todd and Chase would affirm a suffering God, one who acts by coming close to us, even down to hell, to bring us back to life.
That’s why our resident expert on suffering here on A Christian Thing, Churl, writes so publicly about his mental illness and his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism. When I read Churl’s posts, the raw honesty always stuns me into silence. I suppose that’s the point. See, Churl is also a scholar who knows Job and Ecclesiastes like the back of his hand. When he is that honest in public, it’s like he’s putting up a finger, warning us that even ‘pointing to Christ’ cheapens his suffering. Don’t be Job’s comforters, he is saying, just don’t say anything. Or, in the words of James Wellman, a ‘liberal’ Christian who says too many ‘classically Christian’ things, ‘grief is underrated,‘ a feeling that he knows intimately in the wake of his wife’s death and his very public mourning over the loss of his ‘home’ with her. If God himself can fall into the silence of the abyss, we should, to take Ecclesiastes’s Qoholet out of context, let our words be few. If we really believe that God is near and that Jesus is present as a brother to the suffering, then there’s no need for us to say anything. The ‘classical Christian’ practice of the ‘theological’ and the ‘pastoral’ in the face of suffering may well be silence. After all, when Christ our brother is present but silent, what right have we speak?
And because that’s a perfect segue into the next post on death and the beyond, I’ll stop here and wait for Roger Revell’s response to Todd’s account of the resurrection.
Let me begin this post by congratulating Alastair Sterne for finding common ground with Douglas Todd on the question of government. In the previous posts, I have chided Sterne for not realizing how much common ground his articulation of ‘classical Christianity’ had with Todd’s version of ‘liberal Christianity,’ and in this most recent post, he seems to be celebrating in their commonalities, so much that Sterne has written a ‘much shorter response’ for which we are supposed to ‘breathe a sigh of relief.’ In Todd’s words, here is the statement with which Sterne establishes ‘common ground’:
Along with Obama, Trudeau and Layton, B.C. Premier Christy Clark and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne would fall into the liberal Christian camp. Their political differences suggest just how diverse liberal Christians can be. But it’s fair to say most liberal Christians, from Martin Luther King to Tony Blair, are not anti-government activists like those in the American Tea Party. Liberal Christians generally believe governments can be a force for good, including for upholding human rights, providing social services and reducing the gap between the rich and the rest.
What Sterne finds so appealing about this statement is that the title statement – governments as a potential force for good — is the word ‘potential.’ Also eschewing the extreme neoliberal politics of the American Tea Party in which, as Ronald Reagan once said, ‘government is the problem,’ Sterne claims that classically Christian doctrine would hold that governments can potentially act as a force for good, though they could potentially abuse their power as well. Explaining that Jesus’ alternate vision of power seen through the matrix of death and resurrection would eschew the abuse of power for the common good, Sterne holds up Dutch Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper as the model for Christocentric politics, one in which the Lordship of Christ would ensure the goodness of the political system. In so doing, Christians may themselves be scattered across the political spectrum, but because they submit to a higher power that has redefined politics for the common good, they themselves work toward a common purpose of human flourishing through ‘the good functioning of government.’
Kuyper looking cheery.
In principle, Sterne’s simple political vision is relatively uncontestable in ‘classically Christian’ terms, although all the talk about the sovereignty and lordship of Jesus Christ over politics might have some, such as Globe and Mail journalist Marci McDonald, worried about a theocratic takeover of the Canadian government at various levels of governance. However, the question is whether Sterne’s simple vision of submitting to a higher power is workable in practice. That’s because — as both Todd and Sterne imply — the government in a democratic polity is not something that’s out there; it’s a governing force in which residents and citizens participate.
The word for that kind of participating polity is civil society.
The Pope Emeritus is there for added emphasis with regards to ‘classical Christianity.’
The classic text that’s used to understand civil society is critical theorist Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. In fact, I highly recommend it. That’s because Habermas gives a historical account of why the ‘public sphere’ of civil society, that is, the gathering of citizens to converse and deliberate about the workings of the state, is actually really important to the actual workings of the state. Once upon a time, what the ‘public’ meant was the state and its court, located out there from the citizenry as something to watch, sort of like a play. But as democratic sentiments developed and citizens were increasingly commenting on the workings of the state, these democratic deliberations — or what was known as public opinion — needed to be taken into account by the state. In this way, the state could be held accountable by its citizens, that is to say, the citizens never really banked on Sterne’s argument by ‘potential’ as to whether the state could work for the common good or abuse its power. Instead, they were going to make the state work for the common good by discussing it, criticizing it, deliberating about it, and participating in its policymaking. A democratic government is basically when this public opinion in this public sphere of civil society in effect runs the state.
And Canada is democratic.
This means that the real question that we should be asking isn’t whether government is a potential force for good and how they might hypothetically be turned for good. Even with Sterne’s theological answer that turns our gaze upon Jesus and looks full on his wonderful face, that the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of his glorious grace does not in fact somehow negate the way that governments are not simply out there, but are instead diffused among the citizenry, at least theoretically. (Practically, in Canada, this would mean that the citizenry needs to push back on the dismantling of the Canadian Broadcasting Company and in the United States, it means that they would need to work to overturn the Citizens United decision because, in the prophetic words of Elizabeth Warren, ‘No, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love and they die.) The question, then, is not whether governments are a potential force for good. It’s: how should the people of God participate in the civil society whose deliberations effectively run the state?
The great thing, though, is that there is a classically Christian approach to the civil society question. It’s called Catholic social teaching.
As I said in the very first post in this series, Catholic social teaching is a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century magisterial interpretation of how classical Christianity is to be lived in the politics of the contemporary world. It arguably dates back to Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, or less commonly, ‘On Capital and Labor.’ Speaking of a ‘middle way’ in the course of our conversation between ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ Christianity, Leo XIII proposes a middle way between two systems of governance that has dominated modern political imaginaries: capitalism and socialism. This means, of course, that much of what Catholic social teaching addresses is the state and its role in governing political economies.
What’s great about the argument in Rerum novarum is that the be-all-end-all isn’t the state, as much as the encyclical is about state governance. Leo XIII places a very high premium on civil society. Mirroring another argument that Todd has made about how ‘dignity’ is getting thrown around in public discourse with very vague definitions, Leo XIII defines the dignity of the human person as everyone’s right to flourish in a life filled with social relations marked by love, beginning with the family as the basic unit. While conservative Catholic debates of late have emphasized the family part of this whole thing, the point of Rerum novarum was that people made in the image and likeness of God have the right not to have their lives run completely by the state or the capitalist economy. That’s why Catholic social teaching ran a middle way between capitalism and socialism: it couldn’t be fully capitalist because treating workers with full human dignity is fundamentally incompatible with technocratic attempts to reduce everything to the profitable bottom line, and it couldn’t be fully socialist because the answer to the excesses of capitalist ownership could not be to transfer ownership of everything, including people, to the state. No, it was a bit of both. The people themselves have the right to an economic system that promotes human flourishing marked by love.
And when they don’t have that, they have the right to form labour unions and go on strike.
That’s why the British Columbian teachers’ strike is one of the perfect case studies for this kind of thing. Stretching the bounds of Rerum novarum, here we have a case of public sector employees — i.e. teachers who are employed by the government and who have formed a labour union called the BC Teachers’ Federation — who have gone on a full-fledged strike to publicly dispute their grievances with the BC Liberal government. For the sake of argument, we might ask, is there a classically Christian justification for this strike? Some might say that there isn’t. Given the New Testament injunctions to respect the governing authorities and for slaves to submit to masters, there is nothing justifiable about a strike that disrupts the educational system, places teachers’ interests at the front of the bargaining table, and subjects kids to hastily developed provincial exams and precarious uncertainty about their end-of-term marks.
But that’s just the thing: the teachers aren’t slaves. They are citizens in a deliberative democracy, and in classically Christian terms, they are made with the image and likeness of God and using that dignity to dispute the undignified conditions not only of stagnant wages, but classroom sizes that are unconducive to learning, a hopeless budget that doesn’t provide for basic classroom supplies, and a Liberal government that continues to ignore a Supreme Court case that grants the educational sector all of the dignified above. In this sense, the teachers, while secular and not Catholic, are putting the Catholic social teaching on civil society to work. That’s because in a deliberative democracy, citizens don’t submit to the government. They make the government work for the common good.
Or to take a transnational case, over 700,000 Hongkongers have now voted in a civil referendum on universal suffrage and civil nominations for Chief Executive elections, a move that has been condemned by Beijing’s central government. While seemingly unrelated to Vancouver, there is talk of Beijing’s imminent crackdown when these Hongkongers will make toward a movement called Occupy Central with Love and Peace to physically disrupt the Central district in Hong Kong with acts of civil disobedience. With such political nervousness, there is also talk of such activities triggering a new transnational migration wave to Vancouver. In other words, what is going on in a civil society across the Pacific is of deep public interest in Vancouver.
The question in Hong Kong is whether such ‘illegal’ acts of civil disobedience can be justified by classically Christian doctrine. After all, the major leaders of the Occupy Central movement are Christian academics and clergy, such as Professor Benny Tai Yiu-ting and the Rev. Chu Yiuming. Because of this, Christian theology has become central to the deliberations around Occupy Central. Just like with the BC teachers’ strike, these deliberations about the Christian praxis of civil society have been heavily contested. On the one hand stand megachurch pastors like the Rev. Daniel Ng Chung Man and the Anglican provincial secretary Rev. Peter Koon, who have disputed whether the planning of ‘illegal’ civil disobedience acts contradict a biblical injunction to submit to the governing authorities. But on the other hand are the Rev. Chu Yiuming, as well as the retired senior prelate Joseph Cardinal Zen, who argue that the people of Hong Kong have the human right to demand political agency from a state that is trying to tighten its authoritarian grip.
As Benny Tai has repeatedly emphasized, the point is not really whether all Hongkongers are on the same page with regards to civil disobedience, universal suffrage, and civil nominations. The point is that people in Hong Kong are talking, deliberating about precisely what the common good is. This is how a civil society ought to work. In a classically Christian sense, that’s because we all have the right to exercise our agency to build the common good together — and in so doing, to make the state work for the common good instead of passively hoping that it won’t abuse its power. In answer to that Douglas Todd piece on dignity, it’s that exercise of political agency that lies close to the heart of that vague word ‘dignity.’
This last point gets close to the real reason why these blog posts have been firing off the pages of St. Peter’s Fireside and my corner of this Thing. That’s because if indeed we do live in a deliberative democracy that is in turn deeply transnationally connected to another society that is having struggles with deliberative democracy, then what we are doing in this blog conversation is deliberation. That’s important because with Todd writing about liberal Christianity in the pages of the Vancouver Sun, as well as with news about Christians and Christian privilege circulating in Vancouver’s public sphere, one of the items for deliberation in our democratic civil society is the place of Christians — let’s be honest, as it’s not really about generic religion — in public life. As it is, these definitions and debates about ‘liberalism,’ ‘classical Christianity,’ and ‘catholicity’ are part of a wider public circulation about these items, which in turn has the potential to shape public discourse and government policy.
So while much of what we have seemingly done here is to provide public theological entertainment for a niche of readers, the consequences of all of our materials circulating may be beyond what any of us have intended. In this sense, I do have an answer to the cynical question of why we even bother to have this conversation, as if there were better things to do than this. It’s: did you forget that we live in a deliberative democracy?
We look forward to this debate getting extremely personal when Mike Chase blogs about theodicy next.
The time has come. I wasn’t quite sure when we were going to talk about race and ‘classical Christianity’ in such a way as to upend the tacit assumption that ‘classical Christianity’ was the exclusive domain of white males. But Mike Chase has written quite the evangelical response to Douglas Todd on sin and hypocrisy, and I figure that this is as good a time as any to sketch some out some of the implications of what both Chase and Todd have written.
On the surface, neither Chase nor Todd have written anything to do with race. Todd’s bit is about psychology:
Jesus was a great psychologist. He had antennae for hypocrisy, especially among self-satisfied religious leaders. He challenged people who had a sense of moral superiority with admonitions about not “casting stones” and looking at the “log in one’s own eye.” Liberal Christians appreciate Jesus’ insight into the power of psychological projection, which leads judgmental people to fantasize others carry the bad traits they are denying in themselves. Jesus’ wisdom about hypocrisy relates today to self-righteous people who are quick to label others as “racist,” “competitive” or “greedy.”
As Todd would remind me, to use this snippet to talk about any kind of ‘unconscious racism‘ might be stretching the capabilities of this paragraph; indeed, in a quiet nod to South China Morning Post‘s Ian Young’s stories about ‘racism’ and Vancouver’s property market, his veiled reference to ‘self-righteous people who are quick to label others as “racist”‘ is directed to Young’s frighteningly competent investigative journalism into how wealthy condo developers use accusations of ‘racism’ in attempts to shut down discussion of offshore money in Vancouver’s property market. From the outset, I’ll write as a disclaimer that I am not calling anyone racist in this piece on the implications of what Todd has written for a conversation about race.
The same might be true of Chase’s post. On the surface, Chase’s response to Todd has nothing to do with race and everything to do with reinforcing a dialectic between humans and God. Much more than the other two on St. Peter’s Fireside’s staff (whose theologies seem to veer in more Catholic directions), Chase’s theological articulation seems to place a very (Protestant) differentiation between that which happens on a human plane and that which occurs on a divine axis. Within this theological framework, Chase reads those whom Jesus exposes as hypocrites as imputationally sinful in relation to God, that is, while a Jew identifying as a Pharisee (part of a first-century elite Torah-keeping sect) might not be personally an ‘extortioner, unjust, adulterer, and tax-collector,’ God might see him (to my knowledge, the sect wasn’t gender-inclusive — but I could be wrong!) as an extortioner, unjust, adulterer, and tax-collector on a different ‘frame of reference’ — a spiritual one in which the religious elite were taking advantage of the people of God and selling out to the powers that be. While such assertions might be an exegetical stretch in some places, the framework itself can be pieced together from parts of St. John’s Gospel and St. Paul’s letters, especially through a Calvinist reading in which the knowledge of God is the glorious light and mirror that exposes true human depravity. In other words, I may not agree with Chase’s exegesis in places, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t see where Chase is coming from. In turn, I’m very sure that Chase had no intention to write anything about race, and as a point of clarification, by writing about race in Chase’s theological framework, I am not calling Chase a racist — because he isn’t!
So if neither Todd nor Chase have written anything about race, then why write about race?
Easy. Because it’s hidden in plain sight.
When Todd and Chase write about Jesus’ exposure of the religious elite in first century Palestine, that establishment was Jewish. To be sure, I have read enough of philosopher Hannah Arendt to avoid the anachronistic stupidity of calling ‘the Jews’ a ‘race’ in first-century Palestine, especially when Arendt does such a brilliant analysis of how Jewishness became a ‘race’ in nineteenth-century Europe in The Origins of Totalitarianism (I am, of course, also keenly aware of Arendt’s contested status in Jewish studies because of her New Yorker articles, Eichmann in Jerusalem). But all things being equal with Arendt’s analysis, this doesn’t stop anyone from saying that the Jews and the Romans existed in — shall we say? — a colonial situation in first-century Palestine.
And that’s where a lot of the mess around anti-semitism in the modern West originated.
However one qualifies the notion that it was the religio-political establishment complex of first-century Palestine and not the Jews who killed Jesus (Benedict XVI is especially careful about this in his second installment in the Jesus of Nazareth series), the structuring power of the Roman occupation on the various political factions in first-century Palestine has to be taken into account. This is where my point about ‘race’ — or more properly, racialization, i.e. the process by which racial consciousness is formed — comes into play. As a diverse chorus of New Testament scholars observe, ‘Jewishness’ was a contested category in Jesus’ world, in large part because the Roman occupation produced a variety of political stances as to how the occupied people — the ‘Jews’ — should relate to this pagan empire. Should they cooperate with the occupation? Should they resist it? Should they resist violently? And how should they as a people be defined? Talk about psychology. Talk about the designs of the human heart. Yes, talk about it all because this context takes the framing outside of merely individual agency, personal corruption, and spiritual elitism to an entire colonial structure and its political fragmentation that structures personal agency.
By most accounts, that’s also the context in which Jesus was crucified. When Jesus proclaimed the ‘kingdom of God’ with the full implications of Hebrew Scripture, you could say that Jesus was wading into the political fray. As Todd and Chase would both affirm, one way to put it was that Jesus was killed because he exposed the powers that vied for political control over Palestine as just that: powers, often with a bent toward some kind of violence and exclusion. As each of the Gospel accounts detail in their own particular ways, these powers — including the Roman occupiers — while all in competition against each other — agree on one thing — kill that Galilean prophet. As St. Paul later writes in a letter to the Colossian church, this epic collusion to put Jesus on the cross unmasked the hidden violence of all of these powers, both colonizer and colonized.
And yet, as accounts of Jesus’ death were circulated through Jesus’ followers and as Jesus’ followers themselves refused to join in the increasingly hostile Jewish resistances against the Roman occupation, the fact that Jesus had himself waded into the Jewish debate as a Jewish rabbi became transformed into how Jesus had been killed by these people called ‘the Jews.’ As Christianity became the official Roman state religion, the category of ‘Christian’ became distinct from that of the ‘Jews’ — not that they had always been together, but Christianity was an inconvenient ‘Jewish sect’ because it was uncategorizable and thus unmanageable prior to Constantine — and as this happens, the ‘Jews’ become a problem. Where Christians were once the uncategorizable and unmanageable distinct people, this onus now fell to the Jews, who became victims of persecution often perpetrated by Christians in power. Fast-forwarding centuries and millennia of Jewish history, and this baggage adds up to the Jews becoming considered a distinct ‘race’ in Europe (see Arendt’s Origins for the brutal blow-by-blow details), leading fatefully to the events of anti-semitic fascist nation-building in Europe in which governments like Nazi Germany embarked on an increasingly violent campaign to exterminate the Jews.
Given our post-Shoah context, that’s why it’s superlatively important to not carelessly use the word ‘Pharisee’ or ‘Sadducee’ as convenient ideal types for ‘religious elites’ — that’s because, given the baggage of Christian history, they’re racially charged. In fact, this is the current that runs through theologian J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account. Although many have misread Jonathan Tran to say that Carter and his colleagues are proposing a ‘new black theology’ (while they are all African American, their work is more properly a ‘theology of race’ that transcends black experiences), Carter draws on Denise Kimber Buell’s work on ‘race’ in early Christianity. What happened, Carter and Buell both point out, is that the classical understanding of Jesus as embodied within a Jewish body fell victim to elitist heresies that proposed that secret spiritual practices could lead to the rise of a new, elite ‘race’ of humans. In other words, the rise of such race-thinking and anti-semitism is in fact an elitist betrayal of classical Christian teachings. For Carter, that kind of race-thinking that grew out of ancient heresies became planted in turn in modern European Christian consciousness, leading (as Carter’s colleague Willie Jennings outlines in The Christian Imagination) to the justification of the slave trade, the occupation of indigenous lands, and the orientalism-driven colonization of the ‘inferior’ races.
That brings us to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Whether one thinks his ‘religionless Christianity in a world come of age’ should be classified as ‘liberal’ (as Harvey Cox does) or ‘classical’ (as Stanley Hauerwas does), at the overlooked heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology is a brilliant analysis of ‘sin’ and ‘ethics’ that is classically rooted in the story of the Fall. From Sanctorum Communio to Creation and Fall to Discipleship to Life Together to Ethics to Letters and Papers from Prison, the beating heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology revolves around a meditation on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For Bonhoeffer, a Christian ethics that takes its beginning by defining what is good and evil has forgotten the real beginning, in which God exists in relation to his people and his people have a social life based on communion with the other. One of the concrete levels where Bonhoeffer saw this play out was in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Bonhoeffer witnessed how American attempts to define the color line led to segregation and all kinds of economic injustices and psychological damage. In other words, the very structuring categories of race and their everyday effects are themselves evidence of the fact that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil have been eaten. As theologian of race Brian Bantum argues, Bonhoeffer calls us back again to a classically Christian understanding of sin and discipleship, for ‘sin’ is simply having followed these invented definitions of good and evil while Christian discipleship is about returning to the beginning sociality based on relationality.
What I’m saying is that race is a window into understanding Jesus as both a psychologist and a physician for the human heart. That’s because there are the concrete political effects of sin — i.e. eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil by engaging in the politics of sovereign definition — are all on display. And as Todd and Chase would both agree, the church should examine her own hypocrisy and corruption. I’m just saying that when that examination takes place, this is likely a lot of what will be found. And when that church hears the voice of Jesus afresh, it will not simply be as a psychologist or a physician for the human heart, but as having spoken through the anti-racist prophets that the time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand, and that all things, including and especially the racializing structures of modernity, are about to be made new.
Having talked much about the rise of the state and tendencies toward political corruption, we look forward with great anticipation to an engagement with the question of whether governments are a force for good in the world.