God has not ever, no not ever

I realize that my theological limitations and my close identity with the social conditions of black people could blind me to the truth of the gospel. And maybe our white theologians are right when they insist that I have overlooked the universal significance of Jesus’ message. But I contend that there is no universalism that is not particular. Indeed their insistence upon the universal note of the gospel arises out of their own particular political and social interests. As long as they can be sure the gospel is for everybody, ignoring that God liberated a particular people from Egypt, came in a particular man called Jesus, and for the particular purpose of liberating the oppressed, then they can continue to talk in theological abstractions, failing to recognize that such talk is not the gospel unless it is related to the concrete freedom of the little ones. My point is that God came, and continues to come, to those who are poor and helpless, for the purpose of setting them free. And since the people of color are his elected poor in America, any interpretation of God that ignores black oppression cannot be Christian theology. The ‘blackness of Christ,’ therefore, is not simply a statement about skin color, but rather, the transcendent affirmation that God has not ever, no not ever, left the oppressed alone in struggle. He was with them in Pharaoh’s Egypt, is with them in America, Africa, and Latin America, and will come in the end of time to consummate fully their human freedom.

James Cone, God of the Oppressed, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997) 126.

Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses

by Nathan R. Kerr, Ry O. Siggelkow, and Halden Doerge

In a recent conversation on this blog regarding an important review, by Ry Siggelkow, I (Nate Kerr) suggested in the comments that to think rightly what it means to say that “mission makes the church,” that mission as lived proclamation of and witness to Christ’s Lordship is indeed constitutive of the church’s existence in the world, we will need to engage in a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the church’s relation to the world in light of the apocalyptic inbreaking of the Kingdom of God that happens in the historicity of Jesus Christ. In the course of those comments I offered to write a “guest post” in which I gave some indication of what I think those reconsiderations might entail. This is that post—which has come together with more than just a little help from my friends, Halden and Ry. Together we offer these reflections in hope that they may contribute to the task of theology in the service of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We should like to begin these brief reflections with an oft-quoted passage from the conclusion of John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics:

The believing body is the image that the new world—which in light of the ascension and Pentecost is on the way—casts ahead of itself. The believing body of Christ is the world on the way to its renewal; the church is the part of the world that confesses the renewal to which all the world is called. (Yoder, Body Politics, 78)

This passage and others like it from Yoder’s oeuvre have been the impetus for a number of contemporary modes of “ecclesiocentric” construals of the kingdom of God in relation to the world. The church’s missionary thinking, so the argument goes, is ecclesiocentric just to the extent that the church ontologically precedes the world and, ultimately, supercedes the world with respect to the kingdom’s eschatological fulfillment. As the late twentieth-century theologian and missiologist J.C. Hoekendijk has argued, however, such “church-centric missionary thinking” is itself a false start. For from within such ecclesiocentric thinking, Hoekendijk claims, the call to mission, or evangelism—that is, the call to proclaim and to embody “the gospel”—often turns out to be “little else than a call to restore ‘Christendom,’ the ‘Corpus Christianum,’ as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church” (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 15). That is to say, the church aligns itself with the Kingdom and against the world by way of the production of its own alternative, habitable culture. As John Flett has convincingly argued, mission thereby becomes tied inextricably to the extension of this “culture”; this culture, this particular way of life, just is the gospel that is proclaimed, and the church’s missionary relation to the world cannot but be a function of its own culture—gospel proclamation turns out to be a matter of the church’s propagation of its own way of life, and evangelism a mode of integrating the world into this particular habitable culture.[1] Thus, on such an ecclesiocentric reading of the Church-world relationship, the church is most missionary precisely at that point at which the church is most intentionally “self-regarding” (Hauerwas). And herein lies the reason why we must insist upon resisting such an understanding of the church as ontologically “prior” to the world as such, in relation to the kingdom: viz., it presents us with not only an ecclesiologically but missiologically idealist logic—such an intentionally self-regarding conception of mission requires the construction of another (“the world”) as productive and reflective of its own identity.

The problem with such an ecclesio-concentric understanding of the church’s relation to the Kingdom and the world, says Hoekendijk, is that it misconstrues the basic Scriptural sense in which the kingdom of God is first and foremost the kingdom for the world. The kingdom is oriented from beginning to end towards the oikoumene—the whole world.

For this oikoumene the Kingdom is destined; world (kosmos/oikoumene) and Kingdom are correlated to each other; the world is conceived as a unity, the scene of God’s great acts: it is the world which has been reconciled (II Cor. 5:19), the world which God loves (John 3:16) and which he has overcome in his love (John (16:33); the world is the field in which the seeds of the Kingdom are sown (Matt. 13:38)—the world is consequently the scene for the proclamation of the Kingdom. (Hoekendijk, Church Inside Out, 41)

In short: “Kingdom and world belong together.” The order of God’s economy is thus “God-World-Church, not God-Church-World” (71). This is the order of God’s own missionary existence in Christ. And by participation in this missionary existence of God, we must give new expression to the church’s own missionary existence: the order of this existence must be that of Kingdom-World-Church, not Kingdom-Church-World.

What we should like to propose, then, is that the quote from Yoder with which we began these reflections should be read through the perspective of this alternative Kingdom-World-Church order. Precisely as such, we might better come to understand the implications of Yoder’s insight that mission has to do with coming to “see the church in relationship to the world rather than defining ecclesial existence ‘by definition’ or ‘as such’” (Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 78). The church only exists as “living from and toward the promise of the whole world’s salvation.” (Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 12).

As such, the church thereby exists as one dimension of a thoroughgoing apocalyptic realism. That is to say, the church exists insofar as it is constituted by the manner in which, in the apocalypse of Jesus Christ, “the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world,” proving victorious over the fallen powers of this world for the sake of this world’s salvation (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 54). What really matters, then, for the church, is its mode of participation “in the reality of God and the world in Jesus Christ today” (55).[2] And that reality is without reserve that of the apocalyptic rectification of all things to God in Christ. That event of apocalyptic rectification is constitutive of reality itself; and the event of the church takes place firmly within that reality of the reconciled world “that is real only through the reality of God” disclosed in Jesus Christ (54).[3] The church thus exists as an ergon Kyriou (a work of the Lord), which means to say that the church exists for the sake of the unique and special share that it is given in the cosmic meaning of the sovereignty of this world’s living Lord. But precisely as such the church does exist, and its existence is precisely that of a special function and task. As to the nature of that special existence, function, and task, we should like to conclude these reflections. We shall do so by putting forward some provisional theses on the existence, nature, and task of the church. There could be more, of course, and these could be articulated with more depth and precision. But these are, after all, mere theses—and provisional at that.

Thesis 1: The church is an event within the event of this world’s apocalyptic transfiguration. This is a midrash on Robert Jenson’s insight that “the church is neither a realization of the new age nor an item of the old age. She is precisely an event within the event of the new age’s advent” (Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:171). The church is an apocalyptic event just to the extent that she lives from the Ascension and Pentecost, and so towards the second advent of Jesus Christ. Thus the church can never fail to see itself as inhabiting this apocalyptic space. Or rather, the church’s whole mode of being is “timed” by God’s own apocalyptic act of invading the world, transforming it, and redeeming it. As such the church, in every aspect of its life, abides at the intersection of the old age and the age to come. The church lives in saecula saeculorum precisely and only at this indissoluble interstice of God’s redemptive and life-giving invasion of the world of sin, suffering, and death.

Thesis 2: The church’s primary task is apostolic. The church exists as a function of Christ’s own singular apostolicity; that is, its existence is a matter of its participation in Christ as the “sent one” (Heb 3:1). “The church has no other existence than in actu Christi, that is, in actu Apostoli” (Hoekendijk). The church thereby exists to serve the ministerium Verbi incarnati (Barth)—the church’s share in the apostolicity of Christ consists in its being sent out by the power of the Spirit to proclaim the euangelion of Jesus Christ to the world. In this sense, the church’s “priority” with regards to the world is that of a distinctively apostolic precedence.

Thesis 3: The euangelion of Jesus Christ, as Yoder puts it, is “not a religious or a personal term at all, but a secular one: ‘good news.’” As heralds and witnesses to this gospel the church’s visibility is thus “not a cultic or ritual separation, but rather a nonconformed quality of (“secular”) involvement in the life of the world” (Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 39). The apostolic mission of the church is secular because God’s apocalyptic act in Jesus Christ abolishes religion. The proper starting point for Christian reflection lies not with the nostalgic lament that “once there was no secular” (Milbank), but in the genuinely liberative good news that in Christ “there is no longer religion.” From the standpoint of God’s apocalyptic act in Christ religion is “unbelief” (Barth). Religion is “the attempted replacement of the divine work by a human manufacture.”[4] The apocalyptic inbreaking of God in Christ does not affirm the “world-in-itself,” but rather ruptures and suspends the religious distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane” (and between “church” and “world,” as such). The new antinomy created in the coming of Christ is not between the “secular” and the “religious” but between apocalypse and religion. It is God who apocalyptically comes to the world in the sending of his Son and his Spirit to liberate the church, and indeed, the world, from enslavement to religion. And so Paul can confidently proclaim: “It was to bring us into the realm of freedom that Christ set us free” (Gal 5:1).[5]

Thesis 4: Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion. To seek a direct correspondence between leitourgia (“the work of the people”) and divine action is to forget that worship itself is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Calvin). Furthermore, such easy correspondence risks fetishizing and instrumentalizing worship. The problem is structural and runs deep; in truth, the very discipline of “ecclesiology” is prone to idolatrous self-aggrandizement. Thus the critique of religio strikes at the very heart of Christian worship.[6] The occasion for sin occurs preeminently as leitourgia—the “work of the people” to self-justify, to strive to stand aright before God. Indeed, worship is the site marking our deepest estrangement from God. But this is not the final word! In Jesus Christ, God decisively wills to be God-for-us and so our idolatrous “work” becomes the site of our reconciliation with God. Reconciliation occurs not as exchange or production, but as a gratuitous event of grace. In this event the Spirit “takes up” our “work” to stand aright before God and transforms and transfigures our prideful attempts to “make a name for ourselves.” Our worship only becomes true praise, then, as our “work” loses track of itself under the great pressure of God’s own doxa. Such doxa happens as the event of God’s grace evokes gratitude “like the voice an echo.” Indeed, “Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightening” (Barth, CD IV/1, 41).

Thesis 5: Dispersion, or diaspora, names “the truly ecumenical reality of the church in this world” (Stringfellow). The church’s first ecumenical reality is to exist as a priest among the nations. Here mission and ecumenics are shown to be inseparable. True Christian unity is inseparable from the realization of the koinonia of the whole world with God that Jesus Christ has actualized. It is for this reason that the church cannot itself be considered a “home” or as constitutive of an alternatively “habitable world” (Hauerwas), for the Christian vocation is to be in the world, without reserve—that is, in the one whole world whose true reality is to be reconciled to God in the one whole Christ. It is as such that the church realizes the truth of its “catholicity”—the fullness of koinonia in the apocalypsis Iesou Christou.

Thesis 6: It is as Lord of all humanity that Christ is rightly to be understood as Head of his body, the church. The true body of Christ (corpus verum) is thus in reality all of humanity crucified and resurrected with Christ, and so reconciled to God in him (Aquinas; Barth). The church in via is thus “but a part of the larger Body of Christ” (Nicholas Healy).[7] So the church “is” the body of Christ as precisely and paradoxically what it “is not,” in itself. And so to make use of the image of soma Christou for the church is not ontologically to prescribe what the church is, but rather to remind the church continually that precisely as such it is not an end in itself.

Thesis 7: Jesus Christ alone is constitutive of the church’s sacramental existence. And Christ is so constitutive as in his priestly office he himself is sacramentally given for the whole world’s transfiguration in the singular event of his cross and resurrection. The ultimate reality (res) of which the church is a sign and for which she is given, then, is nothing other than the mystery of the world reconciled to God in Christ. “Sacrament” is thereby the language by which the church is given to communicate that for which she exists, as also the praxis whereby the church is plunged into the heart of the world and given to live for that reality—the coming kingdom of God—which she is not in-itself (McCabe). The sacraments are neither constitutive of an alternative social program—a polis, as such—nor are they constitutive of an alternative mode of production, or the expression of an alternative “technology of desire.” Rather, the sacraments are but ways by which Christ gives the church over to a dispossessed readiness for service (disponibilité) in the world. As such, the language and practice of the church are sacramental to the extent that they are utterly dependent upon the active presence, by the Spirit, of Christ’s ongoing reconciling and transfiguring presence in the world, which must continually be received afresh by the church from the world (as from without), as both judgment upon and justification of its existence. To affirm the church’s sacramental existence as such is thus to affirm that “the Church would be lost if it had no counterpart in the world” (Barth). Or, to put it another way, the language of sacrament is but the difficult work of learning “all that is involved in refusing to say that the dominion of God over his world is manifested here but not there” (MacKinnon).

Thesis 8: At the heart of the church’s existence is the claim that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). This world reconciled to God in Christ is the “new humanity” for which the church is sacramentally given. Our baptism is baptism into this new humanity precisely insofar as it is a baptism into the reality of this world’s transfiguration. It is this transfigured world, moreover, that provides the context for the practice of the Lord’s Supper. The eucharist, then, is not the ritual means of “inhabiting the church,” but rather the way by which the church inhabits the whole world (oikoumene) in grace, joy, and hospitality. It is the whole world reconciled to God in Christ to which we are opened in communion. And so it is the sacrament of baptism, as entrance into this world, that carries with it the imperative of open communion—without conditions! “With the gospel goes an open door” (Hoekendijk).[8]

Thesis 9: If the world reconciled to God in Christ is that for which the church exists, then the church is visible precisely at the point of such reconciliation—the church is visible as an event of this world’s apocalyptic transfiguration. This is a “very special visibility” indeed (Barth). For according to such visibility what one sees is a liberation of this world from the old age of sin and destruction and a liberation for participation in the new age inaugurated in Christ. The visibility of the church then occurs precisely in the reconciling and liberating event in which “we no longer regard one another from a human point of view” (2 Cor 5:16). The church is thus made to be a visible sign of reconciliation in the world precisely in the event of being conformed, given over by the Spirit, to God’s new creation brought about in Christ. But one only sees this transfiguration and liberation of the world by believing the church—that is, by way of faith in the gospel of the kingdom which she proclaims for the whole world.

Thesis 10: As such, the church is visible not by way of its ritual or cultic separation from the world, but by way of is kenotic solidarity with the world. Such solidarity with the world happens as a matter of concrete kenotic, cruciform obedience to the way of its Lord in this world. To be in such solidarity with this world is to struggle with the oppressive and sinful powers of this world by being given over to a mode of living and suffering and dying with the victims of these powers that embodies and proclaims in its very living and suffering and dying a hope and a joy and a celebration that these powers can neither produce nor control. Sent out in the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ the church stands in concrete solidarity with the oppressed peoples of this world.

Thesis 11: Such kenotic, cruciform solidarity in obedience to the way of the cross leaves no room for the church to be anything other than the “church of the poor.” The church’s kenotic solidarity with the world thus occurs as solidarity with the poor. As Jon Sobrino reminds us, “The mystery of the poor is prior to the ecclesial mission, and that mission is logically prior to an established church” (Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor, 21). Or as Moltmann puts it, “It is not the Church that ‘has’ a mission, but the reverse; Christ’s mission creates itself a Church. The mission should not be understood from the perspective of the Church, but the other way round.”(Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, 10). With the Catholic bishops at Medellin, the church must reaffirm and exercise the “preferential option for the poor.” This “preferential option” is not simply one of many tasks of the church—it lies at the center and heart of its mission. In fact, it is its mission, because this is Christ’s mission.

Thesis 12: The “church of the poor” is in fact the one genuine “church for others” (Bonhoeffer), which lives, simply, by giving its property away. Such is the “ecclesieccentric” existence that the “Christeccentric” (R. Coles) relation of God’s kingdom to the World calls us to. It is precisely by way of such “ecclesi-eccentricity,” moreover, that the church happens as not only sign but also a foretaste of that new creation, that kingdom to come. If the way of God’s eternal life as revealed in Christ just is the way of an eternally outgoing, self-giving love, then it will have to be thus in the church. Only as the church throws its life away in love for the other, only as the church loses itself completely in the world for which God’s kingdom has come, might the church be given to happen as an event within the event of that world’s transfiguration. Only as such, in precisely this kind of solidarity with the world, might the church be given—in the event of this world’s transfiguration—to see and to taste that love by which alone she mysteriously lives, that love that shall reign forever when God will be all in all.

Thesis 13: Existing as we do in the “crater” of God’s own singular action in Christ (Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 36), the church lives utterly by prayer. The incursion of God into the world of sin and death breaks open our failed history, liberating the world from its bondage to death. As such, the church, which lives as a sign of this event, awaiting its consummation in the Parousia, can only be ultimately understood as a communal event of lived prayer that is created by the Spirit who bears us in our weaknesses, “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8: 26). God’s apocalyptic invasion of the world in the sending of Jesus and the Spirit does not create a stable, habitable place from which we as the church might grasp for ourselves a mode of intellectual or political coherence and control. Rather, this radical grace leaves us in the same place as the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58). And it is precisely in this being upended and unhanded that the church exists as prayer. “The true church is thus co-extensive with the community of true prayer” (Forsyth, Soul of Prayer, 54). As a people “timed” by the apocalypse of God in Jesus Christ, who live solely by the grace of the Spirit who conforms us to Christ, the church can embody its calling only by throwing itself in faith upon the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Thus we can finally only speak of the essence of the church in terms of lament, intercession, and doxology. To seek more than this is ultimately to seek another gospel altogether.

These theses are, quite clearly, only the rudiments of a beginning, the fragments of a hope that strains the bounds of theological articulation. The God with whom we have to do in Jesus is truly “exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we could ever ask or think” (Eph 3:20). These theses, such as they are, are here simply to be offered in the fullest sense of the word. Let anything in them that does not speak truly of the gospel of Christ perish and be forgotten forever. The three of us seek, in our discussion, prayer, and writing together to do nothing more than to become transparent to the liberating gospel of Christ, crucified and risen.

As such we hope that in the very doing of theology under the authority of the gospel that we may be given, by the Spirit to be conformed to Christ’s kenosis, his self-expending life given for us and for our salvation. We agree with the words of Donald MacKinnon: “To live as a Christian in the world today is necessarily to live an exposed life; it is to be stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows.” It is precisely this exposed life, a life which, in prayer, desires nothing more than transparency to the way of Jesus Christ, that we seek. It is our desire to move forward in the task of theology in the service of the gospel precisely in this mode of kenosis, prayer, and weakness. With MacKinnon “we can only hope that because a false dream has yielded or begun to yield to a temper more deeply perceptive of the mystery of kenosis, we will be a little better prepared to recognize our frailty, and that it is in genuine weakness that our strength is made perfect: in genuine weakness, not the simulated powerlessness of the spiritual poseur” (MacKinnon, Stripping of the Altars, 34, 39).

And so we move on together, praying without ceasing that God will have his way with us in the task of theology in the service of the gospel. At the heart of our common work is the passionate conviction that, in Christ, God has truly brought about a new creation which exceeds and transcends all our attempts to control, regulate, and manage our lives through the various configurations of the power of death. We offer all of this, then, in the spirit of doxology. With Paul, we can only end in praise of the One who has set us free:

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen. (Rom 11:33–36)

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[1] See John Flett, “Communion as Propaganda: Reinhard Hütter and the missionary witness of the ‘Church as Public,’” Scottish Journal of Theology 62 (2009) 457–76.

[2] On the apocalyptic nature of reality in Bohoeffer’s work, see Philip G. Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer—An Ethics of God’s Apocalypse?” Modern Theology 23/4 (2007) 579–94; see also Ry Owen Siggelkow, “The Lamb that Was Slain is Worthy to Receive Power: Christology, Apocalyptic, and Secularity in the Ecclesiologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder” (MA Thesis, St. Paul Seminary, University of St. Thomas, 2009).

[3] Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” 585–87.

[4] Karl Barth, CD I/2 302.

[5] See especially J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1997), and “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54/3 (2000) 246–66.

[6] See Matthew Myer Boulton, God Against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

[7] See Nicholas Healy, “Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5/3 (2003) 304.

[8] For more on the nature of the church’s life as being solely one of opened possibilities see Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 81–82.

Please direct your comments to the ongoing discussion at Inhabitatio Dei

Reflections on Good Friday with Herbert McCabe

Two years ago I wrote a number of reflections during Holy Week drawing from the late Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s sermons. You can find his sermons in God Matters. I’ve decided to re-post these (slightly revised) reflections once again here.

I have heard a lot of complaints about so-called penal substitutionary atonement. Now it is important to remember that there is not one way to understand “the atonement” or God’s saving work in Christ. Certainly, some ways of understanding the atonement are better than others. Nonetheless, I do suspect that penal substitutionary atonement is usually misrepresented and not all that well understood. There may very well be problems with this “theory,” but all theories of atonement are problematic precisely because they are always theories. God’s saving work in Christ is truly a mystery. This is not to say that we cannot reflect on it or attempt to articulate what it might be about, but we must understand that our language and our analogies will always fail.

To be sure, we can say that the Father in no way punishes his Son. The Father is nothing but “well pleased” with the Son. I think that we can also say that the Father is not interested in divine child abuse. Yet, the Father “knew” the Son would be killed because he knew his Son was entering a crucifying world, a world that rejects God. As Herbert McCabe noted, “The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human…And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human” (93). Thus, Jesus was crucified because he was human not because the Father planned to have him killed for some greater cause. We must always remember and never shy away from the fact that we crucified Jesus, not the Father. We have created a world that is characterized by suffering and death—by oppression, torture, and even crucifixion. We must not become confused on this point: God never causes suffering. God is always God for us, always for human flourishing, always for love.

Jesus was killed not because God wanted him to be killed but because we wanted him to be killed. He posed a challenge to the ruling powers, to the establishment, and to each individual and he continues to do so—and we continue to respond by crucifying him. The cross signifies humanity’s rejection of God and, indeed, of all humanness. It reveals the depth of our sin. Jesus pours his heart out and quite literally his blood for the sake of humanity. This is an invitation to love, to enter into a relationship with a person who is love.

The cross reveals that each of us rejects God; we reject love daily. This is what is meant by “original sin.” The rejection of God is built into the very structures of the society we have constructed. The cross of Christ reveals what we have made with God’s creation, what we have made with the world. We have a made this world a place, structured by fear and violence, in which it is dangerous, perhaps even fatal, to be human. The cross of Christ reveals to us that there is a basic wrong, persistent through history. This wrong is, as McCabe put it, “the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist” (97).

It is important to note that Jesus refuses to take up arms, to resort to violence in the building of his new society, the church, which is to be defined by self-giving love, forgiveness, and the sharing of life together. Instead, he trusts in the work of the Holy Spirit. Yet, he was killed. So, Jesus on the cross represents the failure of human life. The cross shows us the reality that all of our efforts to love, to struggle against the oppressors of this world, finally end in failure, even in death. We continue to struggle just as Jesus did out of obedience and love, but even despite some gains we continue to fall short. It is important to remember that whatever the political significance of Jesus’ death may be it did not transform the world—killers continue to kill and torturers continue to torture. The establishment continues to oppress the weak and marginalize the poor. Yet Jesus’ prayer to the Father is to work through his failure. As McCabe said, “Before his death Jesus had tried, but in the end failed, to bring the Spirit of love to a small group of disciples; now through him the Father pours the Spirit through the world; by this the world is to be transformed into a community of love, the Kingdom of God” (100). The Father’s response to the prayer of Jesus is the resurrection.

All quotes taken from Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987).

Reflections on Holy Thursday with Herbert McCabe

Two years ago I wrote a number of reflections during Holy Week drawing from the late Dominican priest Herbert McCabe’s sermons. You can find his sermons in God Matters. I’ve decided to re-post these (slightly revised) reflections once again here.

On Holy Thursday the church remembers Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples and so also the mystery of communion, or what the church has traditionally called the Eucharist. The Eucharist and indeed everything that the church is about points to the “mystery of unity,” that is, the being-together of people. The church proclaims that all of our efforts toward human unity find their apex and indeed culminate as we participate in the life of the triune God. As the late English Dominican Herbert McCabe pointed out, “The ultimate unity of people is only to be found in God, and the real God is only to be found in unity between people” (God Matters, 78). Needless to say, humanity has not reached a point of unity. Today, we solemnly remember our utter estrangement and alienation from one another. As a result of our persistent disunity our concepts of God constantly slip into idolatry. As McCabe put it, “God becomes for us the God of our class, our nation, our race or time, the tutelary deity, perhaps, of the ‘free world’” (78). When we recall the launching of an illegal U.S.-led war in Iraq seven years ago we still hear the voices of those who said, “God is on our side.” Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us, the church, for our complicity in this idolatry and our collusion with nationalist politics. To recognize the disunity of humanity and our own complicity in this is to recognize our role in the pervasiveness of sin, which is our continual denial of God’s loving grace.

In the church’s celebration of the Eucharist the Last Supper is made present, but we are also flung into the future, for the future of the world is nothing less than participation in the mystery and life of the triune God. It is the unity, the communion that we long for; it is being-together in freedom and truthfulness. Holy Thursday is the celebration of being together as people, as human beings, and so we also celebrate the unity that is to come with the Father, in the Son, and through the Holy Spirit. Yet, Holy Thursday, like all the church’s traditional sacraments, only exists because of sin, which is to say that these things are temporary and incomplete.

Our only hope for unity is in God. As the church, our effort toward this unity is nothing other than solidarity with “the poor and the exploited against their oppressors,” for “the only God we know is the God of the poor, the God who takes sides in the struggle, and that any God of consensus who is supposed to belong to both sides is an illusion and a dangerous one” (79). God takes sides. But we do not. And so we can never say “God is on our side.” Let me be clear, this is not because God is somehow neutral to injustice, but because we are, in fact, compromised. Because God is on the side of the poor, so the church if it is to be a sign of the kingdom must be the church of the poor.

What we experience in the United States is not freedom, peace, or unity primarily because it is born out of fear, indifference to truth, and based on violence. The unity that we have as citizens of a nation, that which constitutes the United States as a public, for instance, is a false unity because it is not grounded in the God who is love and truthfulness. The very structure of the United States and the false catholicity that “globalization” seems to offer is built on human antagonism and violence. The depth of human sin is so severe that all our efforts to dismantle structural violence will not finally bring about unity. Indeed, the human race is in need of a much greater transformation, a more radical revolution than the overthrow of systems of injustice: we are in need of forgiveness.

And so, when the local church gathers together on Holy Thursday, the whole church is present, just as the whole Christ is made present in the Eucharist. This gathering is never private. Whenever the church gathers it gathers as a public in its own right. There is no such thing as private worship. The Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, is thus a sign of the mystery of unity. The Eucharist as a meal is a sign of community and hospitality—the hospitality of God. Each and every human being is invited to the table to share in the food that is a sign of our present and future unity in God. And so we give thanks for the gift of life and nourishment, for God’s sustaining love and God’s Word made flesh in whom we were made and to whom we are destined to share in life together.

All quotes taken from Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987).

Index to Holy Week Series

Here is an index to my series of Holy Week reflections:

1. Holy Thursday
2. Good Friday
3. Holy Saturday
4. Easter Sunday

Thoughts on the future of Liberation Theology

Although the phenomenon commonly known as “liberation theology” is extremely diverse, there seems to be some common methodological threads running through the work of its proponents. What I want to highlight here is how self-proclaimed liberation theologians almost always identify experience as a highly appropriate methodological starting-point for theology. In particular, for many liberation theologians the experience of the poor, the suffering, the oppressed, is primary and methodologically fundamental. In much of the literature, the role of experience becomes such a priority that it is identified as the central criterion of adjudicating between good and bad theologies. If theology does not directly and explicitly address the plight of the poor and complicity of the rich in oppressive policies, than theology is seen as, ultimately, irrelevant to the poor, and irrelevant to politics. For much of liberation theology the emphasis is on the priority of praxis over theory. It does not assert that theory is unimportant, it is just simply accorded a secondary role. In the words of Jon Sobrino, “theology is a second act, within and in the presence of a reality.” Liberation theology is thus essentially reactive–it is a reaction, in the mode of reflection–on both the concrete experiences of an oppressed people and God’s revelation in Christ.

(Caveat: I am aware of the generalizations taking place in this post. Liberation theology is not univocal and I don’t want to treat it as such, but I’m trying to draw out some key elements that I’ve noticed in much of the literature).

Here’s my question: Doesn’t the role accorded to experience, as the primary theological category, appear deeply strange and problematic when liberation theologians watch it receive equally high status as it is employed to bolster the efforts of right-wing ideologues?

The debate, then, becomes centered on questions of experience–which quickly heads into who has the best evidence from the social sciences to prove, for instance, that collectivism works better than capitalism to relieve poverty, to create happiness and wealth, etc.

For those of us influenced by Barth, or more broadly what is some times referred to as “postliberalism” a la George Lindbeck, or for those influenced by MacIntyre or Milbank–even for those of us who have been influenced by Foucault and the geneaological tradition, we tend to find ourselves quite skeptical of appeals to experience to ground or frame theology. Interestingly, many of these thinkers also claim to stand firmly on the radical Left.

Let me be clear, when I say experience I do not mean to suggest that we really have a choice in the matter. I am not suggesting that we can somehow choose to not use experience in our theological reasoning. Of course, we are all shaped by and use our experience. It is totally absurd to think that we can reflect outside of our own particular history. What I am calling into question is something altogether different–it is the specific move made by much of liberation theology (a move which seems to me to owe more than a little to modern theological liberalism and therefore also to capitalism) that sees experience–or the natural–as more fundamental than revelation.

Again, I want to make clear that my concerns about liberation theology come from a very specific place. I am highly sympathetic to their concerns, but I am highly skeptical of their method at times. This became clear to me at this years AAR Consultation of Liberation Theology session. I’m not going to get into the details here, but I got the feeling that if this is the future of liberation theology it is doomed. If liberation theology works within a framework of modern theological liberalism it is finally a doomed enterprise. I say this because of my conviction that modern theological liberalism is disciplined by capitalist logic through and through, which is of course the very thing liberation theology seeks to resist.

Distilling the Obama and Jeremiah Wright Debacle

If you are flabbergasted by the whole media debacle over Obama and his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I highly recommend perusing D.W. Horstkoetter’s posts on the issue.

Reflections on Holy Thursday

On Holy Thursday the church remembers the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples and so also the mystery of the Eucharist.
Because I’m immersed in the work of Herbert McCabe right now this post primarily consists of my reflections on a Holy Thursday sermon he once delivered that was published in God Matters. For McCabe, the Eucharist and indeed everything that the church points to is about the “mystery of unity,” that is, the being together of people. The church proclaims that all our efforts toward unity culminate in God. “The ultimate unity of people is only to be found in God, and the real God is only to be found in unity between people” (God Matters, 78). Needless to say, humanity has not reached a point of unity. Today, we solemnly remember our utter estrangement and alienation from one another. As a result of our persistent disunity our concepts of God constantly slip into idolatry. As McCabe points out, “God becomes for us the God of our class, our nation, our race or time, the tutelary deity, perhaps, of the ‘free world’” (78). As we recall the launching of an illegal war in Iraq five years ago we still hear the sound of “God is on our side.” Lord Jesus forgive us, the church, for our complicity in this idolatry and our collusion with nationalist politics. To recognize the disunity of humanity and our own complicity in this is to recognize the pervasiveness of sin.

In the church’s celebration of the Eucharist the Last Supper is made present, but we are also flung into the future. The future of the world is nothing less than participation in the mystery of triune God. It is the unity, the communion that we long for; it is being-together in truthfulness and freedom. At the moment, as McCabe notes, “We can see humankind itself as one only in mystery, in the gesture towards the reality that is to come. We cannot see love except in hints and guesses of what is to come” (79). Holy Thursday is the celebration of being together as people, as humans, and so we also celebrate the unity that is to come. Yet, Holy Thursday like the sacraments only exist because of sin, which is to say that these things are temporary and incomplete. Sin is “the depth within our quarrels and disunity and dislikes. Sin is the seriousness within human injustice, where it becomes a matter of what God we serve.

Our only hope for unity is in God and our approach toward this unity is, as McCabe points out, to be in solidarity with “the poor and the exploited against their oppressors,” for “the only God we know is the God of the poor, the God who takes sides in the struggle, and that any God of consensus who is supposed to belong to both sides is an illusion and a dangerous one” (79). In McCabe’s view, though God takes sides we do not. And so we can never say that “God is on our side,” but this is not because God is neutral but because we are compromised. Because God is on the side of the poor, so the church if it is to be a sign of the kingdom must be the church of the poor. Despite the optimism of modernity “there is no real unity to the world, the only authentic unity is in the struggle, and it is because this is our real unity here and now that we can only express the Kingdom sacramentally” (79).

What we experience in the United States is not true peace or unity primarily because it is born out of fear and based on violence. The unity that we have as citizens of the U.S. is a false unity because it is not built on love. Indeed, this false unity is nothing but “concealed hatred, a hypocritical pretense of fellowship” (80). The entire structure of the United States and the false unity that we have through global capitalism is built on antagonism and violence. However important the dismantling of structural violence is it will not finally bring about unity. If we believe this, according to McCabe, we have not come to recognize the depth of human sin. The human race is in need of a greater transformation, a more radical revolution than the overthrow of systems of injustice: we are in need of forgiveness.

When the local church gathers together on Holy Thursday, the whole church is present, just as the whole Christ is made present in the Eucharist. This gathering is never private. Whenever the church gathers it gathers as a public in its own right. There is no such thing as a private mass. “Those who are actually enacting the liturgical sign of eating the Body of Christ and drinking his Blood are doing so not for their own private sakes, but for the whole community, just as actors are not acting just for their own private satisfaction but for the whole audience as well” (83).

The Eucharist is thus a sign of the mystery of unity and “Christ is present precisely as the sign of our unity and not in any other way” (84). The Eucharist as a meal is a sign of community and hospitality. Each and every human being is invited to the table to share in the food that is a sign of our unity in God. And so we give thanks for the gift of life and nourishment, for God’s sustaining love and his Word made flesh in whom we were made and to whom we are destined to share in life together.

Archbishop Oscar Romero On the Atheism of Capitalism

There is an “atheism” that is closer at hand and more dangerous to our church. It is the atheism of capitalism, in which material possessions are set up as idols and take God’s place. Here, in a capitalism that idolizes money and “human goods”, is a danger for us as serious as the other, and perhaps more than the other, which gets the blame for all evils. Which is more serious: to deny God out of a false idea of human liberation, or to deny him out of selfishness raised to the level of idolatry? Who are the greater hypocrites, those who believe in this world to the point of denying openly what is transcendent, or those who use what is transcendent and religious as a tool and justification for their idolatry of the earth? 

Liberation Theology And First World Christians

Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, especially those of you who hate me, you who have hands stained with murder, with torture, with atrocity, with injustice – be converted. I love you deeply. I am sorry for you because you go on the way to ruin.

I address those who have caused so many injustices and acts of violence, those who have brought tears to so many homes, those who have stained themselves with the blood of so many murders, those who have hands soiled with tortures, those who have calloused their consciences, who are unmoved to see under their boots a person abased, suffering, perhaps ready to die. To all them I say: no matter your crimes. They are ugly and horrible, and you have abased the highest dignity of a human person, but God calls you and forgives you. And here perhaps arises the aversion of those who feel they are laborers from the first hour. How can I be in heaven with those criminals? Brothers and sisters, in heaven there are no criminals. The greatest criminal, once he has repented of his sins, is now a child of God.

- Archbishop Oscar Romero

The attempt to relate the message of liberation theology to the middle-class church of the United States is replete with difficulties. The primary reason for this is that liberation theology is most fundamentally the cry of the poor and the oppressed, and the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world. Indeed, the United States has been the target of much criticism from the mouths of liberation theologians, not least for its unwavering support of oppressive regimes in Latin America, the birthplace of modern day liberation theology. For this reason, the church in the United States has not been free from the criticisms launched by liberation theology either. From the perspective of liberation theologians, the middle and upper classes of the United States have been complicit in the policies of oppression that have plagued Latin America and much of the developing world. In the eyes of liberationists, the church in the United States does not have a good record of resisting such policies. This paper will explore the challenge that liberation theology poses to the church in the United States and First World Christians in general.

To be fair, there is a significant, albeit small, portion of the middle-class church in the United States that supports efforts of liberation in Latin America and other impoverished parts of the world. Although there is still much work yet to be done by way of communicating the message of liberation theology to the First World, a concerted effort has been made to relay the present plight of much of the world’s population. For instance, on a number of occasions John Paul II addressed the need for Christians living in the First World to stand in solidarity with poor. As a result of the growing recognition of the phenomenon of globalization, recent Catholic social thought has also emphasized the need for solidarity and continues to advocate “the preferential option for the poor.” Indeed, the Catholic social tradition is filled with incisive social critiques. In many ways, Rerum novarum prefigured and set the stage for liberation theology. Eighty years later with the liberationists in mind Pope Paul VI addressed the “flagrant inequalities that exist in the economic, cultural, and political development of nations” and called for all Christians to be actively involved in social reform (Brady 2).

The official teaching of the Catholic church has also been quite critical of certain elements of liberation theology, particularly its dependence on Marxism. Drawing from Marx’s critique of capitalism, many liberationists have advocated the abolition of private property, which runs against much of the tradition of Catholic social thought. The Vatican has also been critical of support for violent modes of resistance, which has not always been absent from liberation theology. As Brady points out, “A key point for critics of Liberation Theology was its ambiguity on the question of violence and revolution” (Brady 15). In my estimation, there is no doubt that the magisterium’s sharp criticism of some elements of liberation theology has had the unfortunate effect of stifling communication of the core challenge that liberation theology poses to First World Christians. Although the magisterium’s criticisms are often theologically justified, they nonetheless tend to provide First World Christians with a convenient way out of any feeling of moral culpability.

In response to the accusation that liberation theology supports violence, Dom Helder Camara argues that people living in poverty suffer from systemic violence. He writes, “It is common knowledge that poverty kills just as surely as the most bloody war. . . Look closely at the injustices in the underdeveloped countries, in the relations between the developed world and the underdeveloped world. You will find that everywhere the injustices are a form of violence. One can and must say that they are everywhere the basic violence No. 1″(Brady 16). Camara’s argument has the effect of turning the question of violence onto the First World Christians. He laments, “The young are losing confidence in the churches, which affirm beautiful principles, great texts, remarkable conclusions, but without ever deciding, at least so far, to translate them into real life” (Brady 16). Camara refers to the resistance of “violence No. 1″ as “violence No. 2.” He writes, “Let us repeat fearlessly and ceaselessly: injustices bring revolt” (Brady 16). The common response of governments, in the name of public order and national security, is to respond with violent repression, “violence No. 3.” Camara concludes, “If violence is met by violence, the world will fall into a spiral of violence; the only true answer to violence is to have the courage to face the injustices that constitute violence No. 1″ (Brady 17).

Camara’s conclusion poses a challenge to First World Christians and especially middle-class Christians living in the United States. In response to liberation theology and the teachings of the Catholic social tradition, many First World Christians seek to live in solidarity with the poor in Latin America and around the world. Indeed, when First World Christians read stories from the liberationists about the plight of the Third World, we are moved and feel a sense of compassion. When we read the accounts of Archbishop Oscar Romero taking a stand against injustice, we admire his courage and there is a real sense in which we would like to stand with him. All of this is good, however, what we sometimes forget is that we are the oppressors! We, by virtue of being First World Christians play a part in the spiral of violence. The challenge of Camara’s argument to First World Christians is that we are violence No. 1.

For Christians in the United States it is crucial to remember that the neo-liberal economic models imposed on Latin America, the torture techniques of the counterinsurgency, and many of the weapons used to commit atrocities in the region, come from the United States. It would be disingenuous for us therefore to simply state that we are in solidarity with Latin Americans, without recognizing the part we play in the grave injustices. In his letter Paul condemns the Corinthians for worshipping idols (10:14-21) and eating while others go hungry (11:21-22), for “there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (10:17). William Cavanaugh reflects on what this might mean for First World Christians. He writes, “Discerning the body must mean being able to identify truthfully where the body is not whole, where divisions exist.” When the church discerns the body the divisions that exist are made clear. Fortunately, as Cavanaugh points out, “our eucharistic communion gives us hope that this is not the final word. Besides shining a light on the divisions that exist, discerning the body includes an exercise in dissolving those divisions, blurring the lines between ‘them’ and ‘us.’” The plight of the Latin Americans of which the liberationists speak also truly becomes the plight of the First World Christians. As Cavanaugh states, “Christ invites us to experience that suffering as our suffering, suffering that takes place in our very body. What a difference that would make in the tolerance we have for the outrages done in our name.”