Chinglican Christianity: Sanctorum Communio

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Alastair Sterne, classical Christian, communion, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Zizioulas, liberal, mass, N. T. Wright, orthodox, resurrection, Roger Revell, saints, Stanley Hauerwas, veneration

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. Go forth 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.

The people always respond: Thanks be to God.

Chinglican Christianity: Race and the Knowledge of Good and Evil

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Brian Bantum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Douglas Todd, Hannah Arendt, J. Kameron Carter, Jewish studies, Jewish-Christian relations, Mike Chase, New Testament, psychology, race, Sin, St. Peter's Fireside, Theology, Willie Jennings

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.

Ian Young in The Province

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.

I’m serious. You’ve got to read this book.

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.

Read this book.

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.

Organizational Chaos and Original Sin

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Christian, church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Education, organization, organizational theory, pastoral theology, politics, René Girard, secular, social relations, social science, social theory, sociality, Theology

I preached yesterday on the Sunday Gospel lectionary text, Luke 10:1-11, 16-20.  The passage concerns Jesus’ sending of the seventy-two into the various towns into which he intended to go.  While seeming to give them power to heal and exorcise, Jesus in fact sends them in total, vulnerable weakness, completely dependent on the mercy of the hospitality of the towns as they preach, ‘The kingdom of God has come near.’ At these towns (especially as Gerhard Lohfink has so perceptively pointed out), the seventy-two start in each town what comes to be known as the ekklesia, a healed and exorcised people assembled in the name of Jesus, gatherings that eventually became known as ‘the church.’ Because these gatherings bear witness to the fraudulent mode of existence prescribed by Satan that is premised on the taking of one’s own sovereignty in the knowledge of good and evil, the church’s formation in weakness, vulnerability, humility, and charity is itself an exorcism of Satan from the world. This ‘crisis’ of the powers, as theologian Karl Barth would have it, is in turn confirmed by the death of Jesus at the hands of the powers and in his vindication when he rises from the dead and offers his risen life in the sacraments to the church for the life of the world.

After I preached, a very perceptive leader in the congregation asked: why is it that most organizations in which I work, including churches, are plagued with power struggles? Not only was he affirming my exegesis, but he was also resonating with the experiences of ministry failure that I shared, in which I had illegitimately taken power in some ministry contexts, resulting in a series of debacles for my life and work. These (dy)catastrophes took place within Chinese Canadian evangelical churches, similar contexts from which my brother in Christ had also emerged. In other words, though he is older than me, we share similar backgrounds.

I answered along the lines of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, original sin, and how contemporary churches may have forgotten our ontological constitution by charitable communion. But I did not feel that my spur-of-the-moment answer was very satisfying, so I’d like to write a more sustained answer in the hope of being able to spur more conversation. This is largely because I feel that we may have been talking past each other, for my initial response was: ‘This question gets very close to the heart of what we call original sin.’ The Christian brother who had asked this question furrowed his brow; as it seemed to me, he was wondering whether this answer were a cop-out.  I’m sure that my later connection to Bonhoeffer may have also gotten lost in translation.

And thus, because I was very dissatisfied with my own answer, here’s another try:

The answer to this question really does get to the heart of what we call original sin. The trouble is, especially within the Chinese evangelical churches from which we emerge, the question of original sin is indeed a bit of a cop-out. For some strange reason that is worth further theological and historical reflection, we often read original sin in a similar way as American Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. For Niebuhr, a good look at what’s called our theological anthropology, that is, the way we exist before God as human beings, is also constituted by original sin. This means that we have to know that we are deeply flawed and that we can’t help our flaws. This conviction led Niebuhr to argue that in Christian ethics, we should only seek proximate justice, that is, that you can’t ever expect to be perfect or to have a perfect organization. So don’t try. Instead of being idealistic, we should instead be realistic, showing people grace when we see their flaws and expecting that every organization will just have to be imperfect. This, in a nutshell, is a view of Christian ethics that Niebuhr called Christian realism.

This in turn is why this brother in Christ furrowed his brow.  As soon as I brought up original sin, he was thinking that I was completely copping out of his question.  You’re an idealist, he heard. Be more realistic. We all have original sin. Get real.

The trouble is, Niebuhr is not my starting point for understanding original sin.

Instead, my take-off point for ‘original sin’ is heavily influenced by the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Of course, there are lots of traps by simply invoking the name ‘Bonhoeffer.’ For one thing, most of my evangelical brothers and sisters only know Bonhoeffer because he joined a plot to kill Hitler, got caught, and then was martyred way too young in life.

It’s nice that this is what Bonhoeffer is known for, but that says nothing about Bonhoeffer’s theology. Of course, lots of people have various takes on Bonhoeffer’s theology. For the evangelicals who have read Bonhoeffer, most enjoy his book Discipleship, which calls people to cast off ‘cheap grace’ in favour of a ‘costly grace’ that calls Christians to radical practices in Jesus Christ, and his short work Life Together, which makes a strong case for Christian community. In turn, most liberal theologians are fascinated by Bonhoeffer’s tantalizing description of ‘religionless Christianity’ in Letters and Papers from Prison, where Bonhoeffer hints that because Christ should be thought of as ‘the Man for Others,’ the church also exists for the sake of ‘others,’ which in turn means that the church should cast off its ritualistic trappings and actually engage the world in service. In this vein, liberal theologian Harvey Cox most famously argued that the church should be ‘the vanguard of secularization’ in his book The Secular City.

As theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas points out, both of these readings miss the point that Bonhoeffer’s major theological statement came from his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio: a theological study of the sociology of the church. Bonhoeffer was attempting to deal with three things in this dissertation: social theory, sociology, and a sociology of the church. What he argues is that the sanctorum communio–the communion of saints–is a mode of social relations in which people are called out of their secular social relations which are focused on themselves and into the I-and-Thou of real human interaction. As Bonhoeffer contends, the church thus becomes quite literally Christ in the world, especially if Christ is understood as the one who perfectly lived his life for the ‘other’ in radically humble service. Bonhoeffer later develops these points in Creation and Fall, Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison where he argues that this self-giving service and love for the other becomes distorted whenever we try to appropriate for ourselves the knowledge of good and evil. This is sin because it re-orients us from the way that we were made–for a sociality based on love and service toward the other–toward a distorted mode of social relations, a sociality where we try to control and dominate the other based on our ideological vision of what is good and evil.

That’s what I mean by original sin, and it has devastating consequences for social relations, especially within organizations. But unlike Niebuhr’s reading of original sin, this is not the way that it’s supposed to be at an existential level. This appropriation of power is actually a distortion of our real ontological reality. As theologian James Alison puts it in his treatment of original sin, The Joy of Being Wrong, it’s really a mistake to think that there’s something ontological about sin. Instead, it’s really a distortion of how social relations should be conceived, but it’s such a serious distortion that it requires a conversion to be able to see social relations rightly. Alison draws from another theorist, René Girard, to make his point. Girard says that if you observe the myths and stories we tell ourselves and the rituals that we practice, they are often about what he calls mimetic rivalry, that is, they presuppose that our desire as human beings is always shaped by the other, wanting always what we see other people wanting. This cycle of envy breeds tension in our social relations, until we have to release that tension by scapegoating someone arbitrarily. This is often called an original murder that is at the heart of most civilizational founding myths: someone kills someone else, releasing social tension, and a whole society is founded in honour of that murder and ritualized in religious myths and liturgies. In Girard’s book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard argues that the Christian Gospel story exposes this whole cycle of mimetic rivalry when Jesus is scapegoated and then resurrected, throwing the whole system into crisis and marking societies influenced by Christianity by a concern for victims and scapegoats instead of premising social creation on scapegoating and victimizing someone. Jesus is thus a point of conversion: he draws us into true social relations founded on care for victims and away from the original sin of scapegoating our rivals.

What this all means is that if we see organizational infighting and rivalry, we are looking at original sin, not in the sense that we have sin but can’t escape it as a mark of our existential being, but in the sense that we are still living within the one distorted mode of social relations that we know and have not yet been converted. Unfortunately, the sorry state of many organizations that my brother in Christ pointed out is in fact due to this sort of theology becoming a sort of minority report in churches and Christian organizations. Instead of looking at the level of this sort of theological anthropology and then practicing prayer as a way of living within Christ’s mode of social relations, many churches and organizations that I’ve encountered are much more interested in importing secular organizational theory, leadership solutions, and ways to form community without critically interrogating what existential mode of social relations on which those theories are based. This was the stuff that I was given when I was in ministry–how to be a good leader, how to build a great growing church, how to use your members’ talents and spiritual gifts to build up the church, how to organize the church so that the machine runs efficiently, etc.  I wonder how much of this stuff is in turn premised on what Bonhoeffer and Girard would call original sin.

In turn, I think this is precisely why theological education is an absolute necessity for contemporary church leaders. On the surface, the stuff on leadership and organizational theory looks great and appears so easily importable into the church. But if my brother in Christ is right in his observations, he has seen many churches and organizations crumble as a result. This is because most people within churches and organizations are simply incapable of evaluating theological sociology and anthropology. They have no idea that there are different modes of social relations and that the Christian church is really premised on a radically alternative sense of what social relations are. In turn, this might mean that seminaries need to be training pastors and church leaders to read the social sciences as theology, to be able to understand social relations theologically, and this in turn might train their discernment into how the congregations that they pastor should be ordered. Moreover, this calls for a great deal more spiritual formation in Christian practice, where prayer needs to be re-oriented from asking God to give us power to get our agendas done toward coming into the I-and-Thou of Christian social relations where we exist in self-giving service toward God, neighbour, and enemy.

So there’s a more drawn out answer. I hope that helps, and I hope to engage in further conversation on this very perceptive observation.

God Is Dead

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Anglican, apologetics, Billy Graham, Birth of Tragedy, Canterbury, crisis theology, death of God, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dionysius, ecumenism, Evangelical, GAFCON, God Is Dead, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Harvey Cox, hiatus, hidden God, Holy Saturday, John Dunne, Jurgen Moltmann, Karl Barth, Mysterium Paschale, neo-evangelical, Nietzsche, Paul Tillich, purgation, purgatory, Rowan Williams, saeculum, secular, Secular City, Time Magazine, Windsor Report

The T-shirt is tongue-in-cheek.  God is dead, it reads that Nietzsche says.  And as if in response to a versicle, God says: Nietzsche is dead.

Nietzsche first put those words into the mouth of the madman in The Gay Science, later to be further fleshed out in Thus Spake Zarathustra.  Pointing to the vacuous nominalism of architecturally-stunning churches and religious symbolism in Bismarck’s Germany, the madman shouts:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? (Aphorism 125)

For Nietzsche, the advent of an age where everything could be engineered through science, including the heroic history of a new German nation-state, had led to the death of God, particularly the god of European Christendom that was still preaching a glorious afterlife with no reference to life lived to the fullest in the here and now.

Nietzsche thus searched for a new ethics.  In his further work in Zarathustra and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche argued for a way of life embodied by the Ubermensch, the “overman,” operating with a “will-to-power”: you have to express yourself and live fully in the here and now without thinking about the airy-fairyness of an afterlife that might not happen. It was only idiots (like Christians) who believed in things like humility, hospitality, and sexual restraint; come on, Nietzsche was saying, wake up! your God is dead! look around! we have killed him! These ethics pointed back to his debut in The Birth of Tragedy, a neo-pagan apologetic that argued that European civilization had become overly rational, forgetting that in the Greek pantheon, there was also the orgiastic god Dionysius that drew the masses into non-rational self-expression, particularly when they watched Greek tragedy and were drawn together with the chorus into the unraveling of the masked actors’ rational worlds. Every day’s got to have a night, Nietzsche argued, so you had to have this liturgical disintegration to balance out the seeming integrity of everyday life. The problem with the modernity Nietzsche was protesting was that it was all rationally constructive–there wasn’t room for this sort of self-expression for the overman to get actualized–and in that constant constructiveness, the gods–never mind the Christian God–were written out of the picture.

Nietzsche literally became the madman in the final years of his life.  Seeing the beating of a horse outside his home, he ran out, clutched the horse, and cried out, “You are beating Dionysius! You are beating Dionysius!”  From there on out, he signed his letters “Dionysius the Crucified,” and true to his protestations about the engineered invention of “German culture” in the mid-nineteenth century, he called for the dissolution of the Bismarck regime.

It was, as if the post-mortem T-shirt were to have its way, God had gotten his sweet revenge. It does misunderstand Nietzsche’s central point, though. It wasn’t Nietzsche who killed God, Nietzsche had argued throughout his work. It was the rest of us.

Fast-forward to the 1960s and the rise and fall of “death of God” theology in America. Arguably more of a publicity stunt from a struggling 1960s editor at Time Magazine to boost subscriptions, this vein of Protestant theology made the cover of the magazine on April 8, 1966 (though an article the year prior had already addressed the issue before). Using Nietzsche’s slogan, a loose group of Protestant theologians in America like Thomas Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, and William Hamilton (as well as a Jewish theologian, Richard Rubenstein, writing on the Holocaust) began to explore a combination of Paul Tillich’s cue to conceptualize the divine as “the ground of being” and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s call for Christians in a “world come of age” to articulate a “religionless Christianity” that would express theological concepts in a world where transcendence was meaningless.

To be sure, the group was never a coherent one.  The basic idea was that it was becoming impossible in the second half of the twentieth century to speak of a transcendent God.  You had to embrace secularization, embrace the here and now, and as Harvey Cox (who was actually critical of the movement known as “death of God”) put it in The Secular City, the Christian church has to be an urban exorcist, casting out the demons of pie-in-the-sky transcendence from the city to make room for a secular theology.

But what did this actually mean for theology? The 1966 article expressed the central quandary for the group:

There is no unanimity about how to solve this problem, although theologians seem to have four main options: stop talking about God for awhile, stick to what the Bible says, formulate a new image and concept of God using contemporary thought categories, or simply point the way to areas of human experience that indicate the presence of something beyond man in life.

Just like Nietzsche’s insanity and the T-shirt’s cheeky pronouncement, the ideas quickly seemed to unravel. By 1969, Time had a new article out: “Is God Dead Dead?” On the one hand, people weren’t buying into it for fear that it would lead to a new atheism. On the other, as Catholic theologian John Dunne put it, maybe “the death of God” was just a stage where (ever so characteristic of Dunne) we’ve passed over and now are coming back. When the “death of God” died, Dunne suggested, the stage of “waiting for God” was ushered in, qualifying the secularity we once celebrated with the cautious eye toward the possibility that the world may still be more religious than we once thought.

But as if the “death of God” theological movement weren’t dead enough, one could always rely on evangelicals to protest, and as they did then, they still are speaking and are not silent. Billy Graham pointed to his “personal experience” of God meeting him in prayer. Carl Henry defended the rationalism of The God Who Speaks and Shows through the infallibility of the Bible, and Francis Schaeffer articulated a Christian worldview that was able to compete with the humanistic philosophies of the world in The God Who Is There. And it hasn’t stopped since the 1960s and 1970s: as recently as 2008, William Lane Craig published in Christianity Today an article entitled “God Is Not Dead Yet,” calling for a return to forms of natural theology, readings of science and nature where you can logically reverse-engineer what God is like from the world he made, as an evangelical apologetic. God’s not dead, so the children’s song goes, he is alive; I feel him all over me–and I can prove it too.

After all, the evangelicals were saying, where do you get your hope if God is dead? Come to church, the solution goes, and we’ll offer you proof after rational proof that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter.

Or maybe you don’t want to come to church. That’s OK. We’ll meet you on your turf, on the college campuses where we hand out Josh McDowell’s More Than a Carpenter in hopes that you’ll read Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and we’ll host talks with Lee Strobel where you can learn all about why there is The Case for Christ as well as The Case for Faith and The Case for a Creator. Continuing to speak to what they suggest still remains a “death of God” generation, the idea is that you have to prove to them rationally and scientifically that God not only exists, but that God is not dead.

Of course, as many will point out, this is only part of the apologetic picture.  New questions, after all, are always being developed. Sure, we have to prove that God exists and is alive, but now we have to do a lot more than that.

A cursory look at this year’s Holy Week articles in Christianity Today can be a case in point.  Al Hsu wonders, for example, if God is good, if–taking the cue from both post-structural theologians and university students–the idea of Jesus’ death as penal substitution isn’t a case of cosmic child abuse. He contends that we’ve misheard the cry from the cross, that Jesus was actually quoting Psalm 22: he’s not saying that God has abandoned him, Hsu argues, but rather that he’s looking forward to his resurrection predicted at the end of the psalm. Mark Galli takes another approach: wondering if God is good, he argues that our speculative questions like, “What would happen if a Buddhist child dies?” are way too abstract for a theology as concrete as that articulated by the Nicene Creed: that Jesus Christ was a concrete person who lived in a concrete time, and that we must trust the historical Jesus concretely while leaving our speculations to rest. God is not only not dead, these writers argue–he is also good even when we don’t think so, and we simply have to trust him.

One of the troubles with evangelical apologetics of all of these sorts, however, is that it all ironically falls into precisely to what Karl Barth, arguably the leading theologian of the twentieth century, said a resounding NO in The Epistle to the Romans (p. 35): “Anxiety concerning the victory of the Gospel—that is, Christian Apologetics—is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome.” It’s us telling God that he’s irrelevant if he doesn’t meet the questions on their own terms. It’s as if without some good evangelical apologetic help, the “death of God” onslaught beginning with Nietzsche and on through radical theology has to be answered, continue our beating though the horse that Nietzsche is clutching while screaming for Dionysius is already dead. Strangely enough, all of this sounds eerily like the same impulse of the secular theology people: God–or perhaps, Protestant theology–has got to meet the world on terms relevant to it. We’ve got to make something out of this. If God is dead, we’ve got to have a new theology. If we insist that God isn’t dead, we’ve got to answer the challenge, prove that he’s alive, demonstrate that he’s good, and give people in this dying world some hope, for God’s sake.

Hans Urs von Balthasar says: EVERYBODY, STOP.  SHUT UP.  LISTEN.  WATCH.  There is a cry coming from the cross: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?  Can you hear it?  Do you really?

“It’s just Psalm 22…”

“Oh, but this has to happen because Jesus is taking God the Father’s wrath in our place…praise God!”

“There’s hope, though! There’s still the resurrection!”

No, shut up. Listen. It is a scream of despair, not a professorial footnote to Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And then: “It is finished!”  Jesus hangs his head and dies.  Silence. God is dead.

There’s a whole day for this eeriness of the death of God to set in. It’s called Holy Saturday. It’s the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  For that one day, God is dead, and you’ve got to swim in it.  That’s where you’ve got to do your theology, von Balthasar writes, because in this hiatus, the entire “logic of theology” is turned upside down (p. 79).

And yet, unlike the “death of God” theologians, von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale: the Mystery of Easter is a call to contemplate the death of God from a completely different angle. He isn’t celebrating it, telling us to come up with a Christian theology without a transcendent divinity. He’s saying that the death of God calls us to adjust our understandings of who God is to who God reveals himself to be. We assumed he was powerful and omnipotent, but he chose to reveal himself through a total kenosis, emptying himself of all sovereign power and omnipotence so that, paraphrasing von Balthasar, his sovereignty is revealed precisely in his lack of power and his vulnerability.

It’s no wonder von Balthasar and Barth were good friends. They weren’t saying simply that the silence of God means that he’s dead. They were saying that the revelation of God in the humble figure of Jesus Christ enacts a krisis in our theological understanding that is so maddening that we have to kill him, and he lets us do it.

That’s the God in the tomb on Holy Saturday.

Strangely enough, the theology that has passed through Holy Saturday is strangely this-worldly, “secular” on a whole new level. Von Balthasar knew what he was talking about. In 1950, he left the Jesuit order with his mystical spiritual directee Adrienne von Speyr to found the Community of St. John, a “secular institute” that was an experiment to see if their mystical-theological vision could be fused with everyday life where people living in the community would retain their secular jobs. He was immediately ostracized by Jesuits. Pope Pius XII condemned his work. He wasn’t invited to the Second Vatican Council. And when he was reinstated and a cardinal hat was about to be dropped off by John Paul II, he died the day before it arrived.

Von Balthasar’s dramatization of Holy Saturday in his own life was “secular” in that Holy Saturday related directly back into his life in the saeculum, his this-worldly existence.  His life was immersed in the dark night of abandonment by God and his marginality in the church.  His life was re-oriented when he interpreted the everyday through his mystical encounter with the God whose very life was marked by the hiatus of Holy Saturday. He lived the death of God.

This year’s Holy Week–and thus, Holy Saturday–comes on the heels of the resignation of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury. Incidentally, the one who wrote the chapter on Holy Saturday in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar was none other than Rowan Williams.  For Williams, von Balthasar’s reading of Jesus’ descent into hell is the ultimate revelation of the fullness of God:

God’s ‘hiding’ of God in the dereliction of the Cross and the silence of Holy Saturday is in fact the definitive revelation. ‘It is precisely the unsurpassable radicality of this concealment which turns our gaze to it and makes the eyes of faith take notice’ (MP, 52). This does not mean, as one kind of modern theology would have it, that Holy Saturday establishes that the transcendent God is dead, emptied out into the pathos of the crucified; quite the opposite. Transcendence, in the sense of radical liberty from the systems of the created world, is given definition by God’s enduring, as God, the depths of godlessness. Equally. this is not some privileging of human vulnerability over impassibility, as if, pace the German Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann, God can only become truly or fully God by incorporating human suffering into divine activity (MP, 65-6). The emptiness of Holy Saturday is precisely the fullness, the already actual fullness of God: God can only be in humanity’s hell, because of what God already and eternally is (MP, 137).

Williams has been widely criticized for his handling of the Anglican Communion.  The secular press has read him as trying to please all sides, personally favouring homosexual civil unions, ordinations, and episcopal consecrations, but blocking them to placate his conservative colleagues.  The conservatives who formed an alternative network known as the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in 2008 hold that under Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury as an “instrument of communion” has been broken because of what they see as his indecisive leadership in upholding the Windsor Report’s moratorium on homosexual consecrations in the Communion. Williams has thus worked toward forming an Anglican Covenant where a Steering Committee can be formed to deal with complaints among provinces; again, the conservatives don’t want anything short of flat-out condemnation of what they see as heresy, and the progressives don’t want a global Anglican theological police force to patrol their working for the progress of social liberation. Williams’s move back into academia as Master of Magdalen College at Cambridge has been interpreted as a retreat from public life into an irrelevant place where the conversations he wanted to have globally can now take place in the confines of a seminar room.

But what if what’s known as the Anglican Communion crisis could be read through the lens of Holy Saturday? It’s been one hell of a split, conservatives accusing progressives of forcing revisionism down their throats, progressives labeling conservatives as homophobic bigots. But for all the talk about the instruments of communion being broken, the most vitriol seems to have been directed at Rowan Williams for not saying anything worth hearing. Doesn’t this sound like the God that Williams describes? Doesn’t this sound like the “emptiness of Holy Saturday”? Can’t Williams be interpreted as suffering as the very instrument of communion, calling the rest of us into his Holy Saturday where the problem of the Anglican Communion isn’t simply right and wrong, but the agony of the violence that both sides are placing on each other? Rowan Williams has lived out the transcendence of God that he gets out of von Balthasar, enduring in the depths of godless violence among Anglicans as a witness to the re-oriented “logic of theology” through the hiatus. Like von Balthasar, Williams has been in hell, where the God who died also has been.

In the face of Holy Saturday, this whole thing about dealing with the death of God, whether by assuming that that’s the way things are or by proving it otherwise, completely misses the point because it assumes that this is all very new and we’ve got to be relevant to all the new things coming out, to be secular on secular terms.  The point of Holy Saturday is that the death of God, yes, does call us to a secular life, but secular on the terms of the God who reveals himself by descending into hell. The word that this speaks is that you’re not allowed to start thinking about hope until (as John Dunne would have it) you’ve passed over to and come back from hell with God.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. at the Qingming Festival

Tags

Asian American, Benedict XVI, China, Chinese, civil rights, class solidarity, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, dissident, Eucharist, exodus, Glenn Omatsu, Holy Week, Hoodie Sunday, human rights, I Have a Dream, Lent, liberation theology, Malcolm X, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, mountaintop, Promised Land, Qin Shihuang, Qingming Festival, radical, Sam Wells, Spring and Autumn Period, Third World Liberation Front, Tiananmen, Trayvon Martin

清明時節雨紛紛
路上行人欲斷魂
借問酒家何處有
牧童遙指杏花村

The drizzling rain at Qingming time
The rending flesh of the pedestrians
Where to find a pub to drink my sadness?
A cowherd points to Almond Flower Village.

–杜牧 Du Mu

Since before the days when Qin Shihuang conquered the various warring states that came to constitute the imperial Middle Kingdom, there has been the tradition of the Qingming Festival. Originally commemorated in memory of the accidental burning of a Spring and Autumn Period official’s servant, the festival has developed since the Tang Dynasty to be a day to honour the dead by sweeping the graves of ancestors, carrying willows and flowers to ward off evil spirits, and more recently, remembering the deaths of intellectual dissidents in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Typically, Qingming Festival falls on April 5.

But this year’s Qingming Festival falls on April 4.

And incidentally, April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this warrants some theological reflection, particularly from Chinese North American Christians, about our solidarity in the struggle for human rights.

On the night before he died, King preached at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His sermon came to be known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and his words that night foreshadowed his assassination the next day:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!  And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Incidentally, Sam Wells also has a great meditation on death and Steve Jobs through the Mountaintop speech as well.

Asian American scholar Glenn Omatsu protests the domestication of the Asian American participation in the civil rights movement. He points specifically to King and says that the invocation of his tradition of non-violence has overshadowed the radical actions taken by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 to found ethnic studies departments in California universities. For Omatsu, it’s not the legacy of King that needs to be reclaimed for our solidarity for rights, but that of Malcolm X.

I take issue with Omatsu.

When King said that he had been to the mountaintop, it would be right to think that he’s invoking Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look over into the Promised Land that he wouldn’t be able to enter with the beloved community. Most would remember his dream articulated at the March on Washington that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” For Omatsu, it’s precisely this that has led to a neo-conservatism among Asian Americans who believe themselves to have made it economically as “the model minority.” America is finally colour-blind, say the suburban dwellers; the dream has been realized. Omatsu is disgusted.

But a closer look at King’s sermon complicates things. Sure, King is a Moses figure, but the Promised Land of which King speaks does not refer to a colour-blind nation. Rather, it’s about a global human rights revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, a call to freedom just like Moses called on Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

King had been to the mountaintop. He had seen the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the Civil Rights Bill, the March on Washington, the March on Selma, and the action for which he was in Memphis. Like Moses, King had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the Promised Land of justice and equality for the least of these, the coloured colonized by white supremacy and the impoverished trampled by an economic oligarchy. Interpreting the story of Exodus through the lens of solidarity, he sees that Pharaoh’s tactic for keeping the slaves enslaved is to divide them among themselves, to keep the ministers only thinking about themselves and preaching irrelevant airy-fairy hopes of white robes, milk and honey, and streets of gold over yonder while people here go naked, live in slums, and stay hungry. “But whenever the slaves get together,” King preached, “something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

For King, at that moment, what was needed was direct action for the case at hand: justice for sanitation workers in Memphis wearing black T-shirts and holding signs that read, “I Am a Man”: “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he said. “The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”  Here, he fuses the Moses tradition with the Jericho Road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. As he puts it in the speech, just like the Samaritan stopping on the “Bloody Pass,” we too must realize that the plight of the sanitation worker in Memphis is our plight as well. He imagines the priest and the Levite passing up the bloodied robbed man because they fear that he might be bait to lure them to bandits, or worse, he might be a con artist himself. King speculates that they probably thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” He then interprets the Good Samaritan as asking: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King then continues:

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

It was for this that King knew that he was going to his death. He talks about getting on the plane from Atlanta that morning, of the pilot’s voice coming over the public address system saying that because King was on board, they had had to take extra security cautions because of the threats on King’s life coming from Memphis. He remembers that before what we now know as the Civil Rights Movement happened, he had been stabbed while signing books, and the blade had come so close to his aorta that The New York Times reported at the time that if he had just sneezed, he would have died. He knew this because what he was doing was radical because he wasn’t just calling for everybody just to get along in a colour-blind nation. (And by the way, as James Cone points out, King and Malcolm X need not be pitted against each other, but can rather be seen as complementary figures in the black liberation movement.)

He was calling for class solidarity as the rubric of racial reconciliation and social justice. He had protested the Vietnam War, particularly because African Americans were disproportionately drafted, and now he was marching on poverty, calling for economic action on the part of everyone listening to him: “If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school–be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.” He was calling for both marches and outright boycotts on unjust corporations, “bank-ins” to take money out of mainstream banks and put them in black banks, and “insurance-ins” where black people could buy insurance plans from black insurance companies. He was calling for an Occupy movement before there was an Occupy movement; he was advocating precautions for the beloved community before the idea of subprime mortgages targeting African American populations was even invented. And for him, this Memphis case of sanitation workers was the perfect case where the rubber met the road because for King, the measure of a society was how the sanitation workers were treated. Radical? Yes. It’s what got King killed.

Perhaps it’s only right that the anniversary of the assassination of King and the Qingming Festival fall this year within Holy Week in the liturgical calendar. Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable was offensive precisely because as Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in Letters and Papers from Prison, it focused Christian practice on being “the Man [sic] for Others.” It was told to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself for having fulfilled the commandment of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Jesus turned the lawyer’s world upside-down, telling him to go and do as a Samaritan would have done to go out of his way to help a bloodied stranger of the wrong geopolitical stripe on the Bloody Pass of the Jericho Road.

This was arguably what got Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and King killed. The offence was a radical view of the neighbour. Will we indeed love our neighbours as ourselves? What if the neighbour is of the wrong nationality? the wrong race? the wrong class? King’s words ring in our ears: The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

This is a question for reflection for Chinese North American Christians today. Qingming Festival is a day to honour the dead, yes. But to be Christian is not merely to honour our own dead, those within our own family or those within the diaspora that we call “Chinese.” King’s legacy–one that also garnered us civil liberties–begs us to come out of the convenient labels that we’ve constructed for ourselves–“Chinese,” “Asian,” “Asian American”–and realize that our solidarity with the poor for justice cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines. There is a saying among Chinese in the diaspora that we should only sweep beneath the awnings of our own homes. The irony of this year’s Qingming Festival is that it calls us precisely to repent of this notion.

Yes, we honour our ancestors today. Some of these, yes, are the Chinese political dissidents that we remember yearly. But one of these is also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Try that, friends, for much-needed reconciliation between Chinese American and African American communities today. Perhaps our Chinese churches should bring hoodies and a bag of skittles to church too. It is, after all, the Qingming Festival.

But more than that, as the Qingming Festival and King’s assassination anniversary both fall in Holy Week, we also remember as Christians the one who has gone before us from death to life, Jesus Christ. We have hope in King’s vision not because of King’s death, but because the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end of this Holy Week reminds us that King’s blessed hope is ours as well. Strangely enough, this has been precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying to the faithful regarding charity during this Lenten season:

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse.

Qingming Festival and the assassination of King are not the end of the story of solidarity–indeed, of communion–with the least of these. They are the beginning: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”