While You Read This, I Am In Retreat. Amazing!
10 Comments Published January 21st, 2009 in Uncategorized.The superb Inhabitatio Dei reminds us that although we woke up today with a new President of the USA, we still live in Empire. And Christians need to continue to strive to re-imagine a life that is counter cultural and redemptive and gracious in the context of a social structure that is profoundly flawed.
My boss and I talk a lot. I mean, you can’t shut us up once we get going but it’s even worse when we’re on our own. We discuss and debate and argue about just what it means to be a follower of Jesus and no matter what way we spin it and regardless of the different emphases each of us have, we keep getting drawn back to what I choose to call Catholicity. Go ask him what he calls it.
But what that means is that we are struggling, as passionate reformed evangelical Christians, with the fact that our Reformed, evangelical and even Presbyterian identities border on the idolatrous. Do I follow Apollos? Or Paul? Calvin? Or John Stott? If we are Christians then we are Christians and if we are Christians then we are in the same boat as everyone else- ever. Augustine and Oliver Cromwell, George W. Bush and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. All of us discovered we need not be alienated by God and all of us were reconciled to God… by God.
So it was with dismay that I read the renowned Jim Wallis on American Empire. Speaking of Bush’s conversion to Christianity (which involved joining his wife’s church, the Methodists), Walls has this to say:
he real theological question about George W. Bush was whether he would make a pilgrimage from being essentially a self-help Methodist to a social reform Methodist.
Excuse me? Mr. Wallis, it’s the Galatians calling. How is social reform Methodist better than self-help Methodist? I am no fan of Dubya but I know he’d call time on this conversation by pointing out that he is a Christian, not a Methodist. But beyond that, Christians are not called to be “social reform” Christians anymore than they are called to be “Gospel proclamation” Christians or “environmentally responsible” Christians. All these things are part and parcel to what faith is. Living it out means fighting for social reform, verbally sharing the terms of the Gospel and making sure you turn your freaking lights off when you leave the room.
By highlighting “social reform” over other things (and cheaply connecting it to “self help” without basis), Wallis is in as preposterous a position as if I declared myself “one of those childhood literacy Presbyterians”. We are saved by faith and kept right by… writing letters to our local representatives?
I totally agree with Wallis in his closing comments that the early Christians were not loyal to Rome but to the Kingdom of God. Which Kingdom are we loyal to? As I drink my single malt whiskey and digest the meal I just ate at a fancy restaurant, I probably don’t look much like Oscar Romero right now. But we’re damn hell ass fools if we let our stance of subversion towards the principalities and the powers of the world be co-opted into support for the opposition party. They get to power, as they have done in America. And guess what? They end up making the same mistakes. Blair’s Labour did it. Gormley’s Greens are doing it. And Obama’s Democrats will do the same. Not because they are evil. Bush wasn’t either. But power has that awful habit of corrupting the corruptible. So until we can elect Jesus for President, let’s not let our holy discontent become politicking for the other boys.
Your Correspondent, Asked people to call him Johnny Rotten. They’ve been calling him Freddie Fresh
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Bush wasn’t evil? I’m pretty sure he is as evil as the rest of us.
I didn’t read Wallis’ post because I couldn’t seem to open the web page so maybe I’m taking his comment out of context, but when Jesus said to give to Caeser what is Caeser’s and to God what is God’s, was he not advocating loyalty to Rome? I don’t for a moment think that Jesus was advocating loyalty to Rome’s evils because our spirituality belongs to God and not the principalities, but surely there is no harm in loyalty to any power apart from on the battlefield between it and heaven?
Anyway I know you aren’t advocating an overthrow of all of the good things in global society. I’m just wondering who this Wallis is and where he is coming from, because when the bible talks of not loving the world and being apart from it, the attributes of the world are selfishness etc, whereas when it talks of loving the world, the attributes of the world are what God is saving it for, what he is changing it into and what he created it as. I think it is always important to stress that context when talking of being against the world (as you have done in your first paragraph here). Otherwise we tend to mention it only when we are thinking about our personal bias, subtly introducing another context, our political opinion, rather than God’s Kingdom of heaven.
Dear Right Said Fred,
We have indeed been bewitched, we fools!
Freddie Knuckles
The theology of empire? Empire and the success of specific theologies have always been intertwined… If you believe that the spread of Christianity is sanctioned and helped on its way by an actual deity then empire and conquest is its most impressive evangelist. From Constantine to Victoria to Uncle Sam. Nothing has done more to spread belief in the Christian god than war and colonial rule – ‘look at us, we’re great and were strong enough to rule over you, we have all this impressive culture, civilization, medicine and tech … our god helps us with that, while Umba Wumba Mountian God don’t do squat! See you Sunday morning for a bible study?”
Simplifications? Moi!?
this makes me think of the Colossians Remixed book – this idea of ’subverting the empire’ and striving for a different looking community of people… not that i necessarily agree with all the conclusions the book makes as to what that looks like. anyway, good post to get a bit of perspective this week. as far wallis/sojourners, sometimes seems like they’ve just jumped on the ‘God’s not a republican (but he’s definitely a democrat)’ bandwagon…
um .. Kevin, going only from your comments methinks thou protesteth too much. Saying that our understanding and expression of Christian faith is too individualistic and needs to broaden to include loving others could simply be an example of ongoing critical reflection of what it means to follow Jesus.
Whether Wallis is right to judge Bush publicly is another matter … sounds arrogant and such critical reflection is always better aimed at the self rather than others (or done in private) ..
But the point being that to say that our understanding of the gospel is deficient in some way is not the same as adding to the cross and saying what the Triune God accomplished there is inadequate. And to say that all Christians are reconciled to God by grace is not, i think, incompatible with passionately contending for what we understand the Bible actually teaches (which will inevitably involve disagreement with other positions) … as long as that passion is tempered with a fair degree of humility, a willingness to learn and an acknowlegement that our own ’system’ of belief (whether reformed, evangelical, Catholic or Orthodox etc) needs reform and correction …
QM – sadly a huge amount of truth in what you say. We don’t have to look too far in this island to see the damage the fusion of faith and politics can do. The greatest damage done to Christianity is when it gets into positions of power. But for some balance, many many Christians are suffering and dying for their faith today just as the first Christians did. Christians after all follow a crucified Lord who rejected doing violence and chose to receive it instead. And it is a Christian world-view that has shaped Western culture’s notions of justice and freedom and equality. If you get time have a look at what Matthew Parris has said recently about Christianity in Africa ‘As an atheist I truly believe Africa needs God’ … brilliant provocative article.
I’ll stop hogging comments now or Kevin will block me …
Jim, Wallis is a major voice in the American church and a good guy by all accounts. I think Anna may be on to something when she says (and she knows such things) that he ends up being a mirror image of the bad old boys from the Religious right. I guess that was the point I was trying to make in the ad break with this post. We need to be wary of Empire, as QM points out, it tends to abuse everything it touches. But we also need to be wary that we don’t just oppose Empire by siding with the opposition…
And Patrick, if I was writing this again I would try and do it differently. Well, I just wouldn’t write it. But my main point is that our critique of the structures that encode tyranny has to be more profound than attacks on Bush’s faith under imaginary concepts like “self-help Methodist” and “social reform Methodist”.
The lesson we learn here folks is to make sure that when you challenge people to not settle for too shallow a message, first do the work to pull your views out of shallow banality.
With you 100% … thanks for stirring up important stuff so regularly and so well … the blogoshere is all the richer for Zoomantics … !
To me, a person who would call herself a ‘chrisitan’ denominations and labels mean nothing to me.
And I’m kinda glad.
Because I’m pretty sure they mean nothing to God either.
great post!