Why Does God Side with the Outcast? Part IV: The Form of a Slave
By Austin
In the last three posts (here, here, and here) I’ve argued that in order to understand why God seems to partisan for the oppressed – the orphan, the widow, the alien – we need to understand that we are fully what we are when we are dependent (God as sole creator of all things), and that God’s authority relativizes all political, earthly authority (God as sole ruler of all things).
These two doctrines meet in the one place most people would not have expected to find them – in a man from the redneck hillside of Galilee. The confession that “Jesus is Lord” melds these views together, so that the identity of God and the identity of Jesus are the same. If Jesus is Lord, the highest good, our greatest desire, our real hope, tends toward what he reveils in his life, death, and resurrection. Today, we’ll think about his life.
His life shows us two things: what true power is, and what type of soceity is desireable.
a. True power: the text most relevant for this is Luke 22.24-27 (also in Matt 20.20-28 or Mark 10.35-52). The text explains how we typically see power – as a benefactor and a patron, which was the basic system of the Romans. This assumes a certain status relationship – the one with more status rules over the one with less. No matter how status is established, this is a pretty accurate representation of things. It’s certainly different now - we don’t have the same patronage/benefactor system. But clearly this is the way it works.
Jesus then asks a rhetorical question (they’re all at the last supper here): who’s greater? The server or the one being served? Clearly it’s the one being served, since they have the status. Then Jesus hits them – “I am among you as the one who serves.” In other words, if you think I am great and powerful, then you should know how my power works. It turns everything upside down…
b. A new soceity: The early Christians took this to heart, and there is perhaps no better way to see this than in that wonderful passage in Phil 2.1-11. The text is really of two parts: the first 5 verses show how our community life should be, and the second (more famous) 5 verses grounds this community life in the fact that Jesus came to us in the form a slave, and because of this condescension is exalted. The community that Jesus expected was enacted by Jesus himself, and when Paul tells us to “have this mind” – after he has told us concrete steps toward this – we recognize that Jesus, through upending our expectation of what power is, has established a new way of being a society, a whole new world.
Paul’s point is that the confession that Jesus is Lord gives full weight to the type of community that Jesus formed around himself. John Howard Yoder gives probably the best description of what this community was:
When He called His society together Jesus gave its members a new way of life to live. He gave them a new way to deal with offenders – by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence – by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money – by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with problems of leadership – by drawing upon the gifts of every member, even the most humble. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society – by building a new order, not smashing the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, between parent and child, between master and slave, in which was made concrete a radical new vision of what it means to be a human person. He gave them a new attitude toward the state and toward the “enemy nation.” (The Original Revolution, 29)
The type of society Yoder points to is a society in the form of Jesus’ life: forgiving, sharing, suffering, building, re-defining. This is a society we should be desiring because this was the mind of Christ.
In summary: the confession Jesus is Lord, bringning together two sides of Christian belief, means that true power happens in the form of Jesus – in the form of a “slave” – and true society happens in the way Jesus constituted it.
But this is not all. Jesus’ life certainly affirms this new way of power and society, but the capstone of his life was not a triumphant march to the halls of power in Jerusalem or Rome, but rather a march of shame to a death that fit his life in Rome’s eyes, a death fit only for slaves – crucifixion. More of that in the next installment.
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.
The Politics of In-Between
By Austin,
Lately I’ve been trying to decide for myself what type of politics makes sense for someone committed to the gospel. I’ve not really come up with an answer, but something in Herbert McCabe has pushed my thinking a bit more down the road to an answer.
In one of his essays he coins a very silly word, “sesquiguous,” opposing it to two others, “plonking” and “ambiguous.” Plonking is a great British archaism (now it is “plump for”) which means to come out in decision for. McCabe says it’s “one-dimensional, clear, unarguable and unimportant” (God Matters, 176). This is the phrase “I mean what I say and I say what I mean.” Of course, as we all know, we can only be this clear in situations that don’t matter. No one, when they are attempting to negotiate the complex world we live in, can actually get away with this because this type of thinking doesn’t really get to the heart of the complex world. 
Ambiguous of course means that there are two meanings to a word. This is a typically liberal position, and it is found in the church’s ecumenical documents. It recognizes the complexity of the world and does it’s best to negotiate between these complexities. Unfortunately it ends up merely affirming two different things, instead of coming to a decision. If you’ve ever read the gerrymandering around ideas like “justification” in the Catholic-Protestant ecumenical circles you’ll get a sense of what I mean.
Third, “sesquiguous” means words have one and a half meanings. McCabe puts it like this: “a sesquiguous utterance is one in which the speaker both commits himself to a position and is simultaneously aware of the inadequacy of what he is saying, and of his own position in saying it: it is as I say really a form of irony” (ibid). In other words, it is indeed willing to commit, like the plonking statement, but recognizes its ultimate inadequency, like the ambiguous statement. Irony of course is a nice word for this, if that word by now (McCabe wrote this in 1976) hadn’t come to mean a detached cynicism.
It’s clear that McCabe doesn’t see it that way. He brings up types of thinking about the kingdom of God: politics, theology, and sacraments. What I am really interested in is the first two. He says, “the sesquiguity of charity (with which liberation theology is concerned), and of faith, do not mean that Christians have to be either politically liberals or theologically woolly – that would be a sign not of sesquiguity but of ambiguity, not of irony but of confusion” (ibid, 177).
You can see where these thoughts might lead. Given the complexity of the world, plonking statements don’t work; ambiguous statements are too wishy-washy; but sesquiguous statements allow us to be committed (and in the Bible, the primary commitment politically is to the poor, orphan, and widow), while at the same time never allowing us to be self-satisfied or closed in our commitment. What this means is that we are able to listen better than the hard-core conservative or the hard-core liberal, that we have a humility that does not lessen our resolve, and that we can always consider the policies of the kingdom to be a goal we are working toward. These policies will use the best of current sociological, economic, and political thinking, without being captured by their assumptions, nor blinded by their seeming inevitability.
It’s this last part that concerns me most. Most Christians, liberal or conservative, become captured by an image of what life should be, an image very often not really based on the biblical image of peace. Whether you belive in the free market or socialism, it’s easy to take up their pictures of the world, and read those pictures into the Bible.
A sesquiguous thinking might be a way of thinking that allows one to speak in the political world we are in, while at the same time relativising that world’s belief in itself. A politics in-between the inauguration of the kingdom, and it’s consummation…
A call to action: Policy but not politics
My former youth pastor, Pastor Paul Allen ( I wouldn’t be who I am without him and Laurie!) commented on my post, How can Christians work to end poverty? His comment really gets to the heart of what I’m trying to wrestle with.
Here it is:
Sarah, the blog was great! As a Pastor I am constantly wondering how I can lead a church to become part of the solution. As you stated, the eventual outcome leads to politics and I feel that our mission to the lost is compromised when we (as an organization) become too political. I know others would disagree, but I feel compelled to keep politics as far from my pulpit as possible in order to reach everyone despite political ideologies.
So, how do we get to the heart of the problem when the most effective answer is our greatest roadblock? I only offer this as an intellectual spark, but don’t we need to encourage as many of our bright young Christian people to engage the culture in the political arena? We need to combat the issue on two fronts-the church must do it’s part today. In whatever capacity it can to relieve the immediate burden, while our Christian politicians need to be focused on solving the long-term issues.
Just one guys thoughts…let me know what you think!
My response:
Hey PP – I have been thinking about your response to my post.
I think the key difference here might be between policy and politics.
I agree that the church must work to relieve the immediate burden! But since we live in a society that has laws and policies, at the local, state, federal, and international level, that affect everyone’s daily lives. We participate in these policies, as well as an economic system that doesn’t “act ethically” or ensure that those God cares for have the opportunity to thrive. By not speaking against these policies, and enjoying benefits from these policies, we support and further injustice and oppression. {I will say it – I support injustice and oppression through choices I consciously make, and by choices I don’t make.}
That is one of the reasons I agree with you that it is important to wrestle with this. But even if we were somehow able to not participate in oppression, scripture shows that speaking out against oppression by others, and ending injustice at all levels of society, is part of working with God to build his Kingdom here on earth.
This implies, then, that as a church we need to participate in this work and not simply leave it up to politicians. In fact, as Christians we have handed over our responsibility, which is to work with God to build his Kingdom, to politics and politicians. We do this through Moral Majority, Christian right, religious right, etc. (and liberal groups as well, but they’re not quite as influential, not much of a force to be reckoned with!). Evangelicals became married to a party rather than married to building the Kingdom vision of Shalom that God gives us in scripture.
We gave our job as God’s people to politicians.
As a church, I think we should be involved with policy, but not politics (though as individuals, it’s difficult to avoid politics). Nehemiah 5 shows that just policies are a necessity. And in fact, the Levitical laws were really policies. So I don’t think we need to stay away from influencing policies that are just, but from siding with a political party.
I agree that becoming political is a problem in a church. However, I think Isaiah 59 (check out my latest post!) shows that we need to “speak out against injustice.”
How we can become involved
These are some ways that I think are safe for the church (and churches) to become involved with “big picture” solutions, while staying away from politics:
- Get involved with international issues. Hopefully most Christians can agree that education for girls is a good thing, which is a major issue in many countries. Or that women should not be killed for “shaming their families” (check out the book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn). Thankfully, we view those in poverty globally with more compassion and kindness than we do those in poverty in the U.S.! Supporting an end to systemic injustice globally is pretty safe.
- Get involved with an issue like human trafficking and modern day slavery in the U.S. Thankfully, this is not too political yet. But there’s federal and CT state legislation around this issue right now to protect victims. Churches who entered the fight for civil rights were certainly acting in obedience to God.
- Supporting statements and petitions calling for justice. It may seem like small potatoes, but the National Association of Evangelicals signed the petition, Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (immigration policy should show “biblical grace to the stranger”), and passed a resolution on this as well. These types of petitions influence politicians, but in a non-partisan way (Repubs and Dems may come on board as a result), and doesn’t support a specific political party.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these! I’m also interested in how other churches and bodies of believers are doing to try to wrestle with this issue!
Do ‘Not Hide Yourself From Your Own Flesh’
By Austin
Sarah has a good challenge for us in her latest post: what is a theological response to this disparity in underemployment for people of color?
For two millenia, the Christian church has understood the four Gospels in terms of Isaiah. It is the most quoted book of the OT in the NT, and in particular, Isaiah 40-66 has provided the basic understanding of what Jesus has done. So it’s only appropriate to look at one particularly powerful passage, Isaiah 58, for a glimpse of a response. 
This chapter is really about worship. The prophet speaks of Israel’s sins, and responds to Israel’s attempted penance. The people ask, “‘Why have we fasted, and you see it not?” The response they get is
Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,
and oppress all your workers.
Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to hit with a wicked fist.
Fasting like yours this day
will not make your voice to be heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day for a person to humble himself?
Is it to bow down his head like a reed,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
Will you call this a fast,
and a day acceptable to the LORD? (vs. 3-5)
Yahweh sees this fasting as a self-serving justification, like when a politician stands with this wife after infidelity and apologizes, telling how he “hurt” lots of people. This contrition is false contrition because it is a lament for lost power – and as the prophet calls to the elite of Israel, the true nature of this lament is to hedge their power, to get back to that place where they can oppress their workers, compete and jocky for more power.
So what does a true fast look like?
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? (vs. 6-7)
The correct way to fast, the correct way to worship, is not to deny yourself in order to regain your power, but to deny yourself in order to give to another.
Think about this for a second. What does fasting have to do with breaking “every yoke?” Calvin said that the essence of the Christian life is to deny yourself. Why? For the sake of your neighbor. Right worship is not so much connected with right belief as with ethics, with breaking all oppression, with bringing the homeless into your house, with feeding the hungry, clothing the naked.
This phrase “hide yourself from your own flesh” is perhaps the most interesting phrase of the passage. Who is “your own flesh” here? The context makes it clear: the hungry, the homeless, the naked. So in not giving, not breaking yokes, not overcoming oppression, we are hiding ourselves from ourselves, those others who are us.
So what is an initial Biblical response to the underemployment of people of color? It appears that the first response is to realize they are our own flesh. What is happening to them is happening to us. Once we fully realize this – which means we change our practice -
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily;
your righteousness shall go before you;
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’
If you take away the yoke from your midst,
the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
if you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday. (vs 8-9)
The end of ”pointing of the finger” is a start (stop blaming the poor!), the end of speaking wickedness goes further, and healing springing up is the end.
So what does God think of these underemployed people of color (along with all people of course!)? Apparently he sees their welfare as a part of the worship due to him, and apparently only then will
your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to dwell in.
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