Just a Thought from Fr. McCabe
By Austin
I don’t often do this, but this is a great paragraph. It is also, politically, something to think about. He’s discussing belief in God on the analogy of a child’s belief in their parents. They assume their parents are going to give them love, and it’s just granted for a child:
The child doesn’t arrive at or acheive her belief that she is loved. It is a precious gift which is just there, like the gift of life itself. But it can, of course, be destroyed. It is notoriously possible for adults, and especially parents, to erode a child’s faith, to leave the child insecure and uncertain that she is loved, uncertain therefore of her own value, uncertain that she matters. The love of parents, and later of other friends, may fail; they may betray us.
This, in itself, is a common thing people think about. Of course, when you see a family doing this, it is terrible, and blameworthy. When people grow up in this situation we think that even when they do things wrong, we should be careful about how we assign blame to them. But McCabe goes on:
Indeed, I think we have a whole society (known as the Free World) which is so structured as to destroy belief in love, to eat away at the confidence people have in each other, to replace friendship by competitiveness, generosity by domination and submission, community by national security, love by fear. (Faith Within Reason, 34)
As Christians I think it really behooves us to always recognize this – that our wonderful free world, the liberty we have to worship and to make as much money as possible, comes at a cost that is pretty much at odds with our foundational Christian beliefs.
Just a thought…
Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part V: Becoming an Outcast
By Austin
I opened this series by asking what is the theological justification for God’s concern for the outcast. First I argued that because God is our creator, we are absolutely dependent on God. Second I argued that because God is the sole ruler of all things, he relativizes any claims to authority. Third I argued that we can see the form of power and the society we ought to desire in the person and work of Jesus: the form of a servant, and the community – for lack of a better term – of love.
These three points are just a background for the next two essential aspects of Jesus’ life: his death and resurrection.
Why did Jesus die? What did he do to get himself killed? To understand the answer, you need to understand the purpose of crucifixion.
Crucifixion was the basic Roman instrument of colonial control. The Romans had lots of techniques for keeping their colonies in order, but because of the distance and difficulty of travel in the ancient world, they tended to use techniques that were spectacular – and horrifying. Crucifixion was the bedrock of their techniques, and it was really reserved for two types of people: disobedient slaves and rebellious colonies, the outcasts of the Roman world.
The question is now: what was Jesus crucified for? Christians often give this a metaphorical or spiritual interpretation – as if historically we can explain this by reference to the theory of substitutionary atonement. The fact of the matter is the Romans crucified Jesus for being a part of the latter category – a perceived threat of rebellion.
And Jesus was this perceived threat of rebellion, at least in the Roman eyes (he wasn’t all that different for the Jewish authorities – look at Caiaphas’ discussion in John 11.45-57). But what was this threat? The fact that this man built a non-violent community around the himself, a community that healed the sick, exorcised demons, and feed the poor? What is threatening about this?
Everything. Jesus was being something that most of us never dare to be: fully human.
In other words, the crucifixion is simply the outcome of Jesus being what God created us to be: a human. Jesus was sent to show us what it means to be human. It just so happens that when we and the powers of this world see a real human, someone who loves fully, who fully reflects who God is (is an “imago dei”) we cannot help but destroy this person. This person does not fit in this world as we’ve made it – and they become especially annoying when they gather a big crowd around them (usually the poor and marginalized).
The crucifixion of Jesus happened because Jesus showed what it means to be a fully open, loving, and real human being.
I should just point out, for my purposes, that this also meant that Jesus became to be the most marginalized as well. In fact, this seems to be a common theme in the Bible. If you are fully being human (whether like Israel, when it is following the law, Jesus when showing love, or the early church, when imitating Jesus) you are likely to be marginalized, considered a fool, or just ignorant. When Christians are fully being human, when they are fully imitating Jesus, then they inevitably will be treated as an outcast – just as Jesus was.
The crucifixion, in sum, shows us that not only does God care for the outcast, God became an outcast. Of course, this would be no comfort if it ended here. Next time, we’ll look at the answer to the prayer Jesus’ crucifixion was: resurrection.
Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part III: My People, Their God
By Austin
Last week I continued this series by looking at the fact that God is the sole creator of all things. The conclusion I came to was that we as humans are being fully what we are, and hence fully free, when we are fully dependent on God. There is no contradiction between our freedom and God’s, because God is not a “thing,” and hence there is no paradox between the human and the divine. I mentioned that for post-Enlightenment humanisms this is a problem. Kant called such an idea “heteronomy” (law from outside) and opposed it to “autonomy” (law from the self).
Yet Kant’s autonomy, along with the modern individualism that it gives rise to, has been considered idolatry by the Christian tradition. Why? Because it refuses to acknowledge the second basic conviction of the Judeo-Christian tradition: God is the sole ruler of all things.
A little history. The Israelites began an experiment in the Ancient Near East. Scholars like Norman Gottwald and Paul Hanson have argued that the tribal confederacy represented in the book of Judges was a revolutionary pattern of governance in this world. The laws represented in the Torah were laws that governed a de-centralized, monarch-less group of peoples. This wasn’t democracy, but it was more formalized and orderly than other tribal societies. The three basic convictions of this community, as seen in later prophetic texts as well, was “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic 6.8).
This concern for justice did not come about by philosophical thought a la John Locke on the “rights of man,” nor through a post-colonialist desire for nationhood, but through “encounter with the God who delivered slaves from bondage. Israel understood community essentially as a response to God’s gracious act of salvation. Israel was called into existence as a people when it was called forth from bondage to be a nation of priests consecrated to God’s redemptive purposes” (Hanson).
What Hanson is arguing is that the idea of the law was a response to God. And what did this really mean? The act that it responded to was a gracious giving of freedom. More specifically, it was the giving of freedom to a group of slaves in order that they worship God, and create a just community.
These two things – worship and justice – always go hand in hand in the Torah, because the creation of Israel as a people happened in response to a king (Pharaoh) who had set himself up as god. Everything about the Exodus story points out that God is opposing himself to the gods of Egypt, as represented by Pharoah. The basic representation of Pharoah is his power to oppress a people simultaneous with this inability to protect his own, while God’s power is seen in his ability to unleash and then restrain chaos, while simultaneously protecting his own.
The power of Pharoah is emblematic of all political power, which ultimately makes a theological claim for its legitimacy, and its right to inflict violence. The Jewish and Christian belief that God is the sole ruler is the first step to relativizing this political theology, and making all kings and leaders of the world only a penultimate, not an ultimate, authority.
For Israel, and the church, this worked out most essential in the notion that God has a people – and the people have a God. That this God is also the sole creator of all things further intensifies the relativization of all earthly authority. As the history of Israel shows, the community was never fully reconciled to a king, and the anti-monarchial sentiment in parts of Deuteronomy, and the whole of Kings and Chronicles (not to mention the prophets!) shows this relativization in clear colors.
In summary, our status as dependent creatures makes most political sense when we recognize the basic fact that God is the sole ruler of all things. Next we’ll look at these two together when God becomes human, dies, raises, and is exalted - Jesus is this Lord.
Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part I
By Austin
In light of the recent issues surrounding Arizona and healthcare – the problem of immigration and universal coverage – I thought it might be useful to think a bit more theologically about the grounds for a Christian position on these things. It’s no secret that the God of the really cares about the dispossessed, in the form of the “alien, widow, and orphan.” From the founder of the faith, Abraham (who himself was called to become an immigrant, and became an immigrant in Egypt because of economic conditions where he was, Gen 12.10), to the Law at Sinai, to the fact that the prophets often judged Israel by how they worshiped, and how they dealt with the poor, orphans, widows, and aliens, Yahweh is concerned over and over with the care of the outcast.
The New Testament is just as concerned with this too. A text like James 2.6 (“But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you?”) is shocking to many Christians, as is the fact that most of the earliest Christian community outside Judea were immigrants. In Rome they even had their own ghetto, the Trastevere (where Jews, Christians, and other immigrants lived), across the Tiber – an area that didn’t burn during the famous fire during Nero’s reign, and for which Nero scapegoated the Christians.
In other words, the entire narrative of the Bible makes sense of a verse like this: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (Lev 19.34).
But why, theologically, is this the case? What is it about God that makes this something obvious to the Israelites and early Christians? Why did God choose, at the beginning, to call out Abraham to become an alien? Or, we could put it another way: what does this say about God? Who is this God that appears to really care about justice and the alien?
I want to suggest that the care God shows to the outcast and the dispossessed has something to do with the two fundamental beliefs that Christians have had from the beginning: that God is the sole creator of all things, and that God is the sole ruler of all things. For most Christians, creation is just a doctrine that is the opposite of evolution, and the phrase “Jesus is Lord” means “Lord of my life,” or “my special friend,” or other pietistic platitude. Yet these two doctrines are not what people think. They are powerful confessions that are world-altering. And they are the basis for all our thinking about what the world is, much less who God is.
In the upcoming posts, I hope to show that in the rubbish heap that we’ve made of the world, these two confessions can only be fully explicated in practice by concern for the outsider, the outcast, the poor and the immigrant.
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