Give Trust a Chance

Ha, ha! what a fool Honesty is!
and Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman!
---Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale. IV, iv, 605

In mid-June the 217th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), my denomination, came into Birmingham, AL, my town. Not exactly on little cat’s feet did it come; nor did it arrive as a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Gee-AY, as we like to call it, came into town more like Barnum and Bailey—that is, an act that, a few decades ago, drew serious, big-time attention, but today, though not completely ignored, pales in comparison to, say, Cirque du Soleil (read: the productions of Joel Osteen, James Dobson, T. D. Jakes, etc.).

Thankfully, though, the G.A.’s task isn’t so much to splash big as it is to emulate Christ. So how well did it acquit itself over the course of its eight-day performance in my town? Probably, it’s too early to tell.

Perhaps you’ve heard of some its actions, the most controversial of which was a decision to trust the church’s various ordaining bodies [congregations in the ordaining of elders and deacons; presbyteries in the ordaining of ministers] to discern, on a case-by-case basis, which ordination standards are essential, and which may be “scrupled” or overlooked.

Truth be known, this sort of selectivity has been a Presbyterian practice for decades. For example, in the case of ministerial candidates who, gosh-darnit, just can’t seem to wrap their heads around Greek or Hebrew or—as in several cases in Mississippi with which I’m familiar—just never quite got that college degree, presbyteries have for years found ways to overlook these “deficiencies.”

Well, this General Assembly decided that, even in the case of candidates whose sexual orientation and/or practice don’t sync perfectly with “chastity in singleness” and “fidelity in marriage” [between a man and a woman, we may presume], the ordaining body may adjudicate whether this standard—and others, for that matter—is essential to ordination.

Of course, the media—that amoral booger-bear—across the country trumpeted headlines and news leads like “Presbyterians Give Leeway to Gay Ordination.” I understand how they got it that way. But, frankly, I don’t see it quite the same.

For me, a better headline may have been “Presbyterians Give Trust a Chance.” For it seems that the Assembly made a decision to relinquish centralized control and, instead, trust those more likely to really know ordination candidates—i.e., the locals who will be doing the ordaining—to discern God’s will in the matter.

If there can be such thing as a subtle sea change, this may be it. For nearly half a decade, my denomination, like my nation, ventured further and further from an ethos of mutual trust to one of suspicion and mistrust. As a result, our rule book, the Book of Order, which was once the thickness of The Old Man and the Sea began to approach the size of the Cincinnati Yellow Pages. We were reaching our Pharisaical rhythm: we trusted nobody; we yearned for a centralized rule for everything.

Then, this Assembly came into my town and said, “Enough! What do we, the Assembly, know about who should and shouldn’t be ordained?” This Assembly's commissioners looked around at the Sessions and the Presbyteries throughout the denomination and said, “You’ve got faith, you’ve got brains, and furthermore, you’re living among those who come to you for ordination. YOU decide!”

Look for the Pharisees to raise hell in the aftermath of this decision. They’ll carp about biblical standards, about moral imperatives and such. I don’t know. Maybe those are their real concerns. But I think what most plagues them is their inability to trust, their inability to accept that, in some situations, others are better equipped than they to make decisions.

As I said, it’s too early to tell how well or poorly this Assembly emulated Christ. But insofar as he drove the Pharisees nuts and had an annoying knack for reducing their 600-plus rules to two or fewer, I’m thinking this Assembly didn’t do so bad.

Gerald Stephens Jr.

Pacifism by the Rules

Dear Rick,

I know we’re playing by playground rules and all, but I gotta ask for a little mercy here. I’m slow. Remember, I’m from Kentucky. Can you help a brother out?

If there are no rules—playground or otherwise—can we even have a conversation? I meant rule in the sense of a standard, a yardstick, a general definition, a canon. As regards pacifism, I mean that to be the rule of non violence. You don’t kill someone on purpose. Maybe by accident, but not by design. If you kill someone by raising your hand in anger, then you are not a pacifist. That’s the rule that the conspiracy against Hitler may “prove,” or it may “break.”

According to Larry Rasmussen, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance, some people argue that going to war and killing the tyrant that leads you into war are too very different things. That Bonhoeffer’s form of pacifism was so broad that it could include killing Hitler. “With the kind of rule by the dictator in the 1940’s, the time of necessita had arrived; thus the ‘Christian pacifist’ reached the terrible, highly unlikely, but very real point of approving the death of the tyrant by violent means. This is the theory held by some of Bonhoeffer’s friends, reflected in the comment of one of them: ‘To understand the extremes which pacifism went in Nazi Germany, you have to understand the degrees of hell in that land.’” (p. 117)

But Rasmussen is not so convinced. He thinks that Bonhoeffer moved from the pacifism of his great Cost of Discipleship to an “agonized participation” in the plot against Hitler. He cites the letter Dietrich wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge on July 21, 1944, one day after the bombing attack against Hitler failed to kill him, though some in his party were fatally wounded, as an example of Bonhoeffer’s change of heart. Bonhoeffer knew of this failed attempt, and he also knew that it meant that his cover as a co-conspirator would probably be discovered and therefore death was imminent for him. The second paragraph reminds me of some of the argument in your last posting.

“I remember a conversation that I had in America thirteen years ago with a young French pastor. We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it is quite likely that he did become one). At the time, I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast. I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life, or something like it. I suppose I wrote The Cost of Discipleship as the end of that path. Today I can see the dangers of the book, though I still stand by what I wrote.

“I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian (cf Jer. 454-5!). How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?

“I think you see what I mean, even though I put it so briefly. I’m glad to have been able to learn this, and I know I’ve been able to do so only along the road I’ve traveled. So I’m grateful for the past and the present, and content with them.”

Again, my main thesis. Pacifism ought to be (is!) the Christian’s first move, his or her first impulse. But there are times when resistance to evil, or the evil doer, becomes the responsible action of a Christian, who, with Christ, bears the sin and guilt of the world. Most of the time resistance is passive. But in a few, very sad, unfortunate cases, the resistance can only be violent. The violence is always sinful. But the sermon on the mount is not being disregarded. It is still stands seriously over and against the Christian.

Pacifism as a principle is, however, violated. A line has been crossed. A rule has been broken, though maybe (and this is where I’m trying to give you some light, my friend) the rule is thereby tested and proven. Unless there are no rules at all, including the rule of pacifism. In which case, what are we talking about?

Faithfully, Your Dee

Why You Can't Tell Me Why

Oh, my friend, my friend,

If I can get around Hitler, the Final Solution, and World War Two, then I’ll be a pacifist. But they are the great exception that proves the rule, unless it breaks it.

What rule?

The Latin is, you’re right: “the exception tests the rule,” if it does not break it as well. But you go wrong as soon as you suggest that there is a rule, as if we had run a controlled experiment, tested the various possibilities. Only there is no experiment, only experience, and no various possibilities, only what happened.

What happened is World War II, which our experience sees this way—often as if it were the only way: World War II “succeeded”; so it must have been “true.” At least, it was right.

Was it?

How do we know?

We do not, because we don’t have any control by which to measure. We only have a result, which we cannot change. Thus, we don’t know, nor can we know, that a different, perhaps even better, result might have been achieved—without violence.

We cannot know that prayer—or some other form of nonviolence—might not have worked as well in the circumstances, better. We don’t know, because we didn’t try it. Indeed, we’ve never tried it—in any circumstance. We’ve only tried violence, but not because it produces the best results. We don’t know any other results.

So, we try it again and again, and we justify the results. What else can we do? We don’t have anything else in the bag. Or we do, but we're unwilling—face it: we're afraid—to try it.

So, I say: give it another 40 years, and there will be no reason to think that you won’t be claiming that the Vietnam War wasn’t as successful as World War II. (We’re already well into the process of rehabilitating it.)

It would be nice to say that this isn’t a theological mistake, only a historical mistake, thinking of history as a scientific experiment whose results we can measure. But in a tradition where theology has to do with history, because God is God of history as well as creation (and weeping over both), it is a theological mistake as well, not to mention a logical one—of the first order!

Let’s look at it one more way, in case you’re not yet convinced. Oddly, at the same time you are trying to appeal to experience—I cannot be a pacifist because of this instance—at that same time, you admit that Hitler was unique, the ultimate evildoer or something like that. But if he is unique, then he can’t be an example, can he? You’re right: the exception does break the rule.

Or it would, if there were a rule. But we can't make one.

In its absence, I'm willing to bet—knowing that horse races are also unique, as are spins of the wheel—that Jesus knew what he was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. On this one, I'm still over here with my anabaptist friends.

Yours,

Rick

In the Boat

My name is Lynn. I am a General Assembly –aholic

Hi, Lynn.

Now that I realize it is Thursday, and my day to post is Wednesday, I ask myself what happened to yesterday. I could make excuses. I am preparing for two weddings and now a funeral next week. Two of my colleagues here are in the process of losing their jobs and one’s wife is dying.

The real reason is that I have been obsessed with watching the meetings of the General Assembly via live, streaming video on the Internet. After each afternoon’s “bender,” (I’ve been watching since Monday), I emerge tired and cranky even though most everything I wanted to be approved was approved. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a commissioner, except commissioners have all the information before them so they probably know what’s going on. I watch and try to guess.

Having been a pastor now for more than 18 years and almost as many General Assemblies, I know enough to wonder what the fallout from this Assembly will be. The brief articles in the paper here on the Trinity statement and the so-called definitive guidance from the PUP report have generated a bit of comment, but so far, no rancor. My guess is that the waves will be a bit higher in another part of the church. As I heard one commissioner ask the Office of the General Assembly after the PUP recommendations were accepted, “Are you prepared for the financial implications of this?” Nothing like a little blackmail and hostage-taking to spice things up!

Scrambling to find a sermon for Sunday, I found in the file folders numerous sermons on Sunday’s text, Mark’s account of Jesus stilling the storm. In several of those sermons, I make reference to recent actions of a General Assembly. The references are not specific, and I have been too busy watching this General Assembly to do any research. What has become clear to me is that the text paints a picture of the church in the midst of chaos. Even in the first centuries, there was controversy and difficulty. Yet Jesus invites the disciples into the boat, Jesus is in the boat with them, and Jesus commands the wind and the waves to “be still.” Jesus overcomes that which threatens to overcome the disciples.

That will “preach” although I doubt that I will make much reference to the General Assembly. There are two weddings and a funeral and two colleagues in the process of losing their jobs and one whose wife is dying. There are enough storms, not to still, for that is not in my power. I am powerless. God is not. And God is in the boat.

Lynn (who does not have a dog in the fight between Rick and Dee)

I’ll Tell You Why

Dear Rick,

You’re on, big boy. We’ve finally got something going here: engagement. As long as playground rules are in effect, I’m proud to participate.

We are not pacifists because of Adolph Hitler, Nazism, and World War II. That was a “Christian” war; Christians started it, and Christians needed to finish it. Okay; cultural Christians. But Hitler was baptized, was he not? As were his minions.

It’s the whole “never again” thing. It is a sin to kill another human being. Always has been; ever shall be. And (not “but” this time: and) if one has the ability and opportunity, then it is a sin to stand by and take no effective action or support no effective action—action that includes everything up and to raising one’s hand in anger—while an entire people are being slaughtered. Either way it’s a sin, and life makes you choose, and you don’t get an indulgence slip first. You just act, one way or the other, without a guarantee, and you throw yourself on the mercy of God. Like off the high dive backwards blindfolded and there might be water in the pool and then again there might not be, neither.

It’s sin boldly time but believe more boldly still. Sin: you don’t have to; you just can’t help it (Faulkner and Guthrie). The grace of God is not to be presumed upon; it can only be received as a free gift each time it is inevitably and inexorably given.

Or maybe it’s one way to answer the old ordination question so popular, legend has it, among Southern Presbyterians: are you willing to suffer the tortures of hell for the glory of God?

If you decide to shoot that paper hangin’ son of a bitch, then you are not a pacifist. If they kill you for trying to kill him, then you might or you might be a martyr to a holy cause, but you will not be a pacifist. Maybe you can plead temporary heterodoxy, but that frees you only in the doctrinal eyes of the law. The Spirit of the thing convicts you. Because you’ve crossed a line. A clear one. You have resisted the evil doer in an ultimate way. At least relative to his life, the only one he’ll ever get. You’ve taken him out, and pacifists do a lot of wonderful things, but they don’t do that.

So. If you can get around Hitler, Nazism, the Final Solution, and World War Two, then you’ll be a pacifist, my son. But not before. Hitler, et alia are the great exception. But does it prove the rule? Or break it? You tell me.

As Ever,

Dee

And Why Not?

Dee,

Let’s start an argument. Not a discussion, certainly not a debate—that suggests rules, fair play. No, let’s start an argument; that way I won’t have to fight fair.

We’re not pacifists. But we ought to be. Even now. Shirley Guthrie once said that the problem with the radical wing of the Reformation, the Mennonites, the Brethren, the Quakers—the peace churches—was that they took the gospel seriously. Do we?

We do swim, I agree, quite happily in the stream of Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Barth, and who am I to argue that they didn’t take the gospel seriously? But I can wonder if they didn’t take western culture more seriously still. There is no doubt, from the point of view of western culture, that we live in a sin-soaked world. But is that the truth of the world? “Maybe not the final truth,” you may want to say, “but it is the truth now.” Is it?

We do not, I agree again, take Matthew 5:39 literally, nor Matthew 5:44, or 45 or 46, for that matter, or much of the Sermon on the Mount at all. (We leave that to our radical wing.) But do we even take them seriously? I also preached the Sunday after 9-11, and after that, I moderated a “town meeting” at Chapel in the Pine in Birmingham. And I listened to the doves, and then—because they waited, because they knew they were right; you’ll agree: they were—I listened to those who said, “Sure, sure. We can pray all we want for our enemies, but sooner or later, we’re going to have to do something,” meaning something military, something violent, because this enemy needs killin’, as you put it. Prayer is all well and good, but by itself it doesn’t work in these kinds of situations. And I wondered (and I wonder): How do we know? Have we ever tried it?

In other words—your words—have we ever had the guts to stick to our “first impulse,” which is peace. Here is where I’m going to ask you about “instinct.” Sometimes, you say, and last week you cited Bonhoeffer as an example: “Sometimes the body has to act instinctively . . . outside the boundaries set by the mind. Sometimes feelings, both intuitive and visceral, must take the lead.” But if our “first impulse” is peace, why would our instinct lead us to violence? In fact, we don’t wage war “outside the boundaries set by the mind,” not at all; the reasons we give for war are always of the utmost ingenuity. What we do instead: we act outside the boundaries set by the heart.

I have been thinking more than a little about patriotism these days, partly because in a weak moment I agreed to preach in the July 4th service (July 2nd) in the park. I say I agreed at a weak moment, but I’m not sure that’s entirely truthful. I believe our nationalities are, or at least can be, instances of secondary grace. We can love wholeheartedly—and still not idolatrously—the place we are born to, or that we choose to come to. But you are right, we cannot impose these secondary things we love on others that are born to or come to a different place. That is a form of idolatry.

And we can’t countenance striking another’s cheek first, even if we can’t quite turn our own. You’re right about pre-emptive war as well. But then . . . here is where, I think, the heirs of Barth and Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer fall victim to culture . . . then you say, “If we thought a war were just and necessary, then we would gladly join in and send our sons and daughters . . . .” And I will ask, “What would make—what could possibly make—a war ‘just’ or ‘necessary’?” I know you have answers to that question, and they come from the tradition we swim in; we have contributed significantly to that conversation. But do they come from the gospel?

Peace to you, too. I mean that.
Rick

We Are Not Pacifists

Not purely so. But we ought to be close, and grow closer and closer to the sacred principle of “love your enemy” with every breath of the Spirit.

We are not pacifists. Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr and Barth, in whose intellectually faithful stream we happily swim, will not let us be, though they and we wish for a world a little less sin-soaked and suicidal so that the pacific way might become both right and possible for us to live. For now, we have to admit that violence, or its threat, is sometimes helpful for living, as in stopping a rapist with whatever force is necessary, or calling the police when one sees a neighbor under attack.

We are not pacifists. We have to admit that the taking up of arms to halt the advance of genocide or murderous aggression or naked totalitarianism may be the faithful choice, though in recent history, only World War II, the fight against Hitler's Nazism, impresses us as a just war. We’ve already let the Rwanda tragedy pass us by. But the situation in Darfur may yet become a proper cause for even Jesus-followers to take violent action in order that people may live who otherwise wouldn’t. But we don’t know that yet.

We are not pacifists. We do not take Matthew 5:39 literally—But I (Jesus) say to you, Do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also—literally. Neither do we take the even more problematic Matthew 5:44 literally: But I (guess Who again) say to you, Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. We do not take these commands from the Lord of our lives literally, but we do take them seriously. If an enemy needs killin’ (and who needed killing more than Adolph Hitler?), then one has to meditate night and day on the proposition that in some cases, killing an enemy is an act of loving the enemy (putting Hitler out of the misery his soul must have been writhing in?) and, beyond that, an act of prayer. It is to act in ways literally contrary to the expressed will of the Son of God, and, nonetheless, throwing oneself wholly upon God’s mercy.

We are not pacifists. But pacifism is the first impulse of Christians—that is, those who follow Jesus—when it comes to issues related to war and peace. Pacifism is the general rule for sincere Jesus students. Every now and then, there are exceptions to the rule. But the rule still holds.

We are not pacifists. It is nice to have principles and nicer to live by them. But, just as the weapons of war change at rates faster than the tactics of fighting a war can adjust to, and just as our technology is usually ahead of our ethics, principles have effectual limits. We can only live the truths of peacemaking and peaceableness. We cannot state them in ways that genuinely satisfy, that cover every extremity. Sometimes the body has to act (instinctively? Can we still call it that?) outside the boundaries set by the mind. Sometimes feelings, both intuitive and visceral, must take the lead. Maybe this is the clearest illustration of a lived dialectic. The truth is dynamic, living, active, growing, moving, developing, revealing itself in new and ever changing ways. It has a heart beat. To try to make it lie there, confined to paper, is to practice another form of violence. We tend to kill what we want to nail down. Ossify what we first admired as lively. Right wing politicos and doctrinophiles call this relativism, but they are idiots. Blithering idiots, I meant to say.

We are not pacifists. But we are patriots. As patriots, we work for the improvement of our country, and part of that responsibility is to call a bad war when we see one. We oppose wars fought for political purposes, that is, ones waged in order to impose a political system, even a good one like democracy, upon a nation. Those wars can’t work. Won’t never work nowhere nohow. They aren’t worth killing people over. We can’t even make our children behave. What makes us think we can make people from a culture that varies widely from ours sit up and act right?

We are not pacifists. But we don’t like “preemptive” wars the least little bit. Followers of Jesus understand that sometimes we might need to finish a war here and there. But we are not the kind of people who start wars. The only kind of war worth fighting, worth all the physical and spiritual risks every war (even “good” ones) involve, is a war forced on us, a war that we cannot avoid and would never choose.

We are not pacifists. But we haven’t seen a war we “like,” as in support, for a long, long time. If we thought a war were just and necessary, then we would gladly join it and/or send our sons and daughters into it and advise others to do likewise because it is a matter of life and death. But no such war exists. This is not just our opinion. We believe that God is tired of all this unnecessary killing, too. We believe that peace occupies the heart of Jesus, and that Jesus’ peaceful center reveals the heart of God.

We are not pacifists. But someday—and we hope that day arrives soon—when the kingdom of God comes, when God’s will is freely done, not just in heaven, but on earth, we shall become as God desires, transformed into the likeness of Christ. We shall become pacifists. Peacemakers. Cheek turners. Enemy lovers. Prayer warriors for the people who hate us. People whose most deadly weapon is kindness. Those who live peaceably with all. And if we truly mean all, and if we trust that God can make that happen, then what hinders us from getting started a little personal peace process now?

Pax vobiscum,
Dee

No Humidity and No Bugs

It’s been hot here for two weeks. What was green is now quickly browning. Since my husband believes that watering grass in a desert is 1) wasteful of resources, 2) silly, and 3) “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” (I say that’s what Jesus wants us to do), lawn mowing season was as brief as the three-week spring.

Since this is where I came in a year ago, I know a little about Wyoming summers. The sun is intense, but there is almost no humidity, so the heat isn’t too bad. It cools off late in the afternoon. And there are—relative to Kentucky anyway—very few bugs. The thunderstorms are spectacular in this thin air—lots of lightning and brief, hard rain. Tomorrow night, we’ll carry our folding chairs to a nearby park for the weekly municipal band concert. Last week, we missed the opening of the concert series because we were visiting friends who live on a ranch on the Oregon Trail and listening to live bluegrass.

For some reason the meeting of the General Assembly has been on my mind. I’ve followed the issues a little more closely than I have in years, possibly because for the first time since 1992, I am far away from the “ground zero” of Louisville and the headlines that appeared regularly before, during, and after the Assembly meeting. I’m waiting to see if the Saturday religion page in the Casper Star Tribune will feature any news from Birmingham. Among the notices about church activities, there is usually each Saturday one religion feature. Last Saturday it was about the Episcopalians and not about Episcopalians and gay priests and bishops. There was a article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly that claimed that the Republican agenda of “gays, guns, and God” that plays well in the South does not play well here in what the article called the mountain inter-west. That has been my experience here in Wyoming, brief as it has been. It’s live and let live.

Far away as I am from the heat and humidity of the Birmingham summer and the intensity of all those Presbyterians at work discerning Christ’s will, I feel a bit ambivalent about the region and the church of my birth. I think it’s in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom that Quentin Compson, away from Mississippi at Harvard says, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t.” I understand what he means now.

Lynn

The Daughters’ Propositions Revisited

i
“The church is up to its steeple in politics.” Either way. We take a stand by speaking out, or we fail to take a stand by remaining silent. Or we may fast and pray. See also vi – ix below.

ii
“What would Jesus do?” We may disdain such simplemindedness, but . . . . There is a “but”; and it is legitimate. If Jesus is our Lord—that is, the one by which we would be ruled—then asking after his expectations is a reasonable thing to do. Asking must recognize, however, that his expectations of his followers may not be the same as his expectations of himself. He does not, for example, ask us to take up his cross; he asks us to take up our own.

iii
What about Jesus? What were his stands on the issues of the day? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. The answer is clear.

iv
We don’t know. We may pretend to know. But if we do, we are doing just that—we are pretending.

v
So how can we—any of us!—have any true confidence with regard to his stands on the issues of our day. We can’t, but that does not mean that we don’t ask, as Bonhoeffer did: What stand do I take, as a follower of Jesus?

vi
. . . we do have to live in our day. We can escape geography—to an extent—move from Biloxi to Buenos Aires, Bergen, Beirut, or Bombay—but we cannot escape chronology. Whatever the mystics may say, even when we fast and pray, we do not escape chronology. We may, however, take a stand over and against the age.

vii
And we live, wherever we live (within reason), after the Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. We live after the Great War, and the Second World War, and the Vietnam War. We live with automobiles and airplanes. We live with nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. We live with cell phones (which Jesus clearly abhors).

vii-a
(What, though, if we don’t live within reason?) What if we live a life of fasting and prayer? In particular, what if we fast not from food or drink but from chronology? I am not sure how we go about doing that. I am not, for example, advocating a movement “back to the land” with the nineteenth century overtones that has. Oh, life was simpler then. I doubt it. But we could live not only more simply now; we could live against the age. We don’t have to be reasonable. Indeed, we shouldn’t hope to be, or plan to be, reasonable. Instead we may be patient, for example, as Bonhoeffer advises in The Cost of the Discipleship. (See below.)

ix
We also live—as we always have—with wealth and poverty, both gentle wealth and genteel poverty and obscene wealth and grinding poverty. We live as always with power and weakness, both power used for good and power used for ill, power used to help the weak and power used to destroy them. So how we act foolishly . . . again, I am not sure. And I’m not sure that Bonhoeffer’s work or life offers us considerable help, though that does not mean I don’t think it worth studying. . . closely! as we live in and among, entangled with the powers and principalities . . . What are the choices? We can live in “patient endurance”; or we can participate in plots that will inevitably fail. (What, precisely, is the practical difference?) We live in and among, entangled with the powers and principalities, because the principalities and powers live in us.

x
Even if we seek to live in Christ.

xi
Because we fail. We do sin as much in the best of our acts as in the worst of them.

xii
But our failure is not the last word.

xii
“Behold, the days are coming,” saith the LORD . . . (Jeremiah 23:5-6). Perhaps I should have quoted these verses in full, or at least provided a link. Here’s the rest of it (from the old KJV behind the bar, the one I got for Christmas in 1959 “from Mom & Dad”): “Behold, the days come . . . that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and A king shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved and Israel shall dwell safely; and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.”

Dee knows much more about Bonhoeffer than I do, but I’m not convinced that his (Bonhoeffer’s) heart is changed by “incarnational wisdom.” I’m inclined to believe that it is changed by a changing vision of the future, and particularly what may or may not be possible in it. The Bonhoeffer that calls for patient endurance and believes that patient endurance will draw evil’s sting is moved by a vision like that of Jeremiah—though not a national one (“ the Church is not to be a national community like the old Israel, but a community of believers without political and national ties. . .”). Still, that Bonhoeffer has a hope both visionary and real that people will someday dwell in safety under a righteous and just “judge.” But the Hitler regime continues. Where is the end of it? Bonhoeffer and others can see none unless . . . . Let’s put it bluntly: If divine love is to be victorious over the powers of evil (and the possibilities the prophet mentions are to come to pass), it’s going to need some help.

Fortunately, the failure of the help is not the last word either. We know that already.

And not yet.

—Rick

Back to Bonhoeffer

Speaking of political theology, as we were, the question of courage must be addressed. We are wondering if we have any. If we have the kind of courage it takes to bring our faith into the world of politics. We aren’t talking about electoral politics of course, but the more fundamental issue. How does our faith as Christians affect the way we live as citizens?

We recently read an article in a current New Yorker by Margaret Talbot about Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist famous for taking off her chador while interviewing the late Ayatollah Khomeini to make a point about freedom. Fallaci is a woman with opinions. She doesn’t like Islamic radicals one bit, and she is particularly perturbed about the invasion—as she puts it—of Europe by immigrants from Islamic countries who have no intention of assimilating into European culture. This atheist (from the Christian tradition, she hastens to point out) helped the Italian resistance against Mussolini’s Fascists when she was a little girl. “Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism,” she insists. “With Nazi-Fascisim, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

We mention her because she has some thoughts on courage. Although she has been quite critical of American policies, such as during the Vietnam War, she does seem to compliment Americans for what she perceives as their “physical” courage. “Those who have physical courage also have moral courage,“ she says. “Physical courage is a great test.”

A group within our congregation has just begun a summer study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Sermon on the Mount. In preparing for that course, we are impressed with how incarnational Bonhoeffer’s theological life was. He demonstrated a particularly vigorous form of physical courage, of flesh-and-blood courage. He put his body, his welfare, and the natural loves of his life on the line for a principle, a cause, his Lord and Savior. He did not whine about it or try to bargain for a better deal. He just responded to the call of Jesus to take up his (Bonhoeffer’s) cross and follow Jesus into controversy. Into prison. Into death. Into hell. As he famously said “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Bonhoeffer broke out of the gate from doctoral studies at Berlin University and quickly moved to the front of the pack among theologians of his day. He was brilliant. The pattern of his thought has been poured over and scrutinized and debated more, perhaps, than any modern thinker. That’s because he left behind a relatively small body of written work—though a heap more than most of us publish before we turn 39, which was his age when the Nazis hung him for treason on April 9, 1945.

In the mid 1930’s, Bonhoeffer seemed to be the purest pacifist that a Lutheran could be. His The Cost of Discipleship comments on Matthew 5:38-42, a passage which contains the electric phrase: Resist not him who is evil. “This saying of Christ moves the Church from the sphere of politics and law. The Church is not to be a national community like the old Israel, but a community of believers without political and national ties… The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a standstill because it does not find the resistance it is looking for. Resistance merely creates further evil and adds to the flames. But when evil meets no opposition and encounters no obstacle but only patient endurance, its sting is drawn, and at last it meets an opponent which is more than its match… Violence stands condemned by its failure to evoke counter violence.”

Though a page or two later he reminds us that he is not an Anabaptist: “If we took the precept of non-resistance as an ethical blueprint for general application, we should indeed be indulging in idealistic dreams… of a utopia with laws which the world would never obey. To make nonresistance a principle for secular life is to deny God, by undermining his gracious ordinance for the preservation of the world.”

“But Jesus is a no draughtsman of political blueprints,” Bonhoeffer says. “The passion of Christ is the victory of divine love over the powers of evil, and therefore it is the only supportable basis for Christian obedience. Once again, Jesus calls those who follow him to share his passion. How can we convince the world by our preaching of the passion if we shrink form that passion in our own lives?” (The Cost of Discipleship, MacMillan, 1963, pp. 156ff.).

Those are clearly and strongly expressed words. But something happened to Bonhoeffer in his thinking—or maybe in his following of Jesus. Maybe in his understanding of the incarnational spiritual life. He took a turn. By the early 1940’s he was fully engaged in a conspiracy to kill Adolph Hitler. He was seeking to resist the evil doer of all evil doers by any means possible. A bomb might do the trick. Bonhoeffer remained a Christian—that is, a follower of Jesus—while doing so, obviously. He renounced not his deep and abiding faith.

The problem was that he couldn’t write about this transformation openly. He was theologically undercover, and wanted to hide his motives to increase the chances that his work and that of his host of co-conspirators would succeed. So we don’t get to read his thoughts as they evolve from that of a near-pacifist to a member of a hit-squad.

Books are published on the subject, of course, and we’ve already over-written our welcome. But in that last Bonhoeffer quote, we might look at his word “supportable.” Rationally supportable; grammatically supportable; biblically supportable; theologically supportable; intellectually supportable—these might be shades of meaning for Bonhoeffer’s word in context. So here’s one thought. One tiny burp of a thought, probably unworthy of the blog-space it requires:

Maybe sometimes in life, one can go as far as the intellect can go, as far as sound doctrine and rational argument can take a person, and still not be where one needs to be. One may still not have hit the bull’s eye of the truth, so to speak. In those extreme cases, does one trust his or her body to take the next necessary step, recognizing that there is wisdom in the body just as there is wisdom in the mind? And then the body is allowed to act on what it knows, on what it feels maybe, and like a doctor cutting out a malignant tumor on the human gut, this fully embodied person who is following Jesus attempts to cut out a malignancy on the human community, in this case a blood-thirsty tyrant. Could we call this incarnational wisdom? And would this action be God-blessed as well as God-forgiven?

If so—if our little trickle of a thought has any merit, then the gift of physical courage would greatly aid our being little incarnations of the Incarnate One. The discipline of the mind would still be necessary—working out its pathways of reason, intuition and received insight from the past—and would help the whole of the person follow Jesus as an integrated reality. But the body’s strength should be honored too, and trusted to support actions that the mind cannot.

Another blow is struck against the gnostics. The physical world is part of the arena that God loves. God loves the body. God is the body in Jesus Christ, as material and as contingent as humanity can be. But the body, and the created world of the senses, are not only redeemable by God. They are also agents of God’s redemption.

Courage: not the absence of fear, but bold action in spite of fear. Shrink not from the passion of Christ. Lift up your hearts, where courage resides. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

—Dee

Lott’s Daughters – and other propositions, numbering a baker’s dozen

i
“The church is up to its steeple in politics.” Either way. We take a stand by speaking out, or we fail to take a stand by remaining silent.

ii
“What would Jesus do?” We may disdain such simplemindedness, but . . . .

iii
What about Jesus? What were his stands on the issues of the day?

iv
We may pretend to know. If we do, we are doing just that—we are pretending.

v
So how can we—any of us!—have any true confidence with regard to Jesus' stands on the issues of our day.

vi
Nevertheless: we do have to live in our day. We can escape geography—to an extent—move from Biloxi to Buenos Aires, Bergen, Beirut, or Bombay—but we cannot escape chronology.

vii
And we live, wherever we live (within reason), after the Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. We live after the Great War, and the Second World War, and the Vietnam War. We live with automobiles and airplanes. We live with nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

vii-a
What though if we don’t live (within reason)?

ix
We also live—as we always have—with wealth and poverty, both gentle wealth and genteel poverty and obscene wealth and grinding poverty. We live as always with power and weakness, both power used for good and power used for ill, power used to help the weak and power used to destroy them. We live in and among, entangled with the powers and principalities, because the principalities and powers live in us.

x
Even if we seek to live in Christ.

xi
Because we fail. We do sin as much in the best of our acts as in the worst of them.

xii
But our failure is not the last word.

xiii
“Behold, the days are coming,” saith the LORD . . . (Jeremiah 23:5-6).

- Rick

Trent’s Lot

It was an offhand comment made by a church member while giving a report about a mission trip to the Gulf Coast. She named a nationally known political figure affected by hurricane Katrina and described what was left of his house which overlooked the Gulf: nothing but a slab eight months out. Then she said that even she felt sorry for the Republican Senator from Mississippi who used to be Majority Leader. People laughed freely.

She went on, sharing how she felt as she witnessed Katrina’s wrath, so much of it still evident. She grew up in Jackson, and had spent summers on those narrow Mississippi beaches, traveling out to Ship Island and other barrier islands where the swimming was great. Now it was changed forever. She talked about the work our little mission team did, helping a couple of families restore some order to their houses and their lives. She was very well received.

Let me add that this mission team report was part of one of those over-stuffed but lively worship services we get to do every now and then. One sensed the Spirit; we had Church that day. There was a baptism in which the grandfather of the baby, a minister from Fairfax County, Virginia, performed the central rite. The sermon wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The children's’ choir joined the adult choir to sing a full bore rendition of “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” (I know, but it was really good).

During the “nice service, Dee” portion of the day, as people were filing out the door, a woman stopped traffic to lead a discussion about the quality of the worship. She is the grandmother of a stand-out children’s choir member, and a sweetheart, exuding the spiritual gift of encouragement. “Thank you, thank you,” she said. Others joined the chorus. Smiles all around; no one seemed to notice that the clock was dangerously close to twelve-thirty.

Then the bubble burst. Another member of the happy circle came up on my blind side and said, “But I’m going to say something mean.” She is not a mean person, so I said, “As if you could.” Her eyes told me she could darn well do as she pleased. “It’s politics that split the church,” she said, “and politics will split it again.” She registered a deeply felt and sharply worded complaint about the Trent Lott crack by her fellow church member from the pulpit. She didn’t like it one bit, was the jist of her remarks. It was a quite public remonstration; confused looks came from people who were sidestepping this bottleneck between them and Sunday dinner.

My parishioner finally rested her case and scooted out the vestibule and down the sun-splashed church steps. I could hardly comprehend what the remaining line of church members said to me. Afterwards, I made an uncustomary move toward mental health by sharing my hurt with my wife and a couple of other trustworthy women over lunch. That helped, but the complainer’s comments still stung. For those of us with tippy little egos, one negative word can wipe out a hundred positive ones. We are too easily controlled by disaffection.

By bedtime that night, after an afternoon and evening spent obsessing over a two minute tirade, I decided that the woman was right, though not for the reasons she might think. The church is too much of the world. We are entirely too enmeshed with the principalities and powers, and are all too willing to serve as their mouthpiece whenever asked. This not-usually-mean member of my church reminded me that political causes often as not divide the body of Christ, though we are quick to blame our political opponents with causing all the trouble.

To wit: when the American church supported slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries, it compromised the church’s ability to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. Later, when the American church defended the Jim Crow-style racism of the 20th century, whether by silence or by argument, the heart of the Gospel was broken. The European church’s cowardice before Adolph Hitler’s National Socialism dishonored our Lord because, among other horrors, it materially aided the killing of millions of our Lord’s people in the Holocaust. Twenty, thirty years later, when the American church supported the war in Vietnam, not only the Sermon on the Mount but also much of the Hebrew prophetic tradition were gutted. Other political entanglements with power strained the church’s integrity, as it fought against women’s equality, economic justice for the poor, care for the creation, and the like.

Will D. Campbell and the late James Y. Holloway were right. We are “up to our steeples in politics.” Maybe that comes with the territory. Did not Jesus send us into the world just as he was sent into it (John 17:18)? It might improve our discourse if we could be honest about the natural tension between politics and theology, and worry less about offhand partisan comments, even from the pulpit, especially when they come from someone who has just returned from doing acts of mercy with God’s people in need. Perhaps we should also worry less about the political motivation behind a nice-enough person who complains, however sharply, about politics in the church.

- Dee