Review and Discussion of 'The God I Don't Understand': Part 3, The Conquest of Canaan

Review

Within the second major section of The God I Don’t Understand, Christopher Wright focuses upon the Hebrew conquest of Canaan in order to explore issues related to portrayals of divine acts and approval of violence within the Old Testament. He notes that for many ‘the God I don’t understand’ is the violent God of the Old Testament and, given the scale of the violence involved in the conquest of Canaan, it seems that this is an appropriate place to turn to explore this God.

Wright begins with a chapter describing three dead ends – three ways not to approach this issue – and then, in the subsequent chapter, turns to three frameworks that Christians might find helpful when they turn to the conquest.

Beginning with the dead ends, Wright first rejects the position of those who argue that the unpleasant parts of the Old Testament (OT) – notably the parts involved divine acts of mass violence – are rejected and corrected by the New Testament (NT). Wright notes that such a position requires an highly selective reading of both Testaments. It neglects the large amount of OT teachings focused upon God’s love and grace, and it neglects the large amount of NT teachings focused upon God’s wrath and terrifying acts of judgment (indeed, NT expressions of judgment are, according to Wright, even more terrifying that OT acts, for while judgment in the OT is harsh, it is temporal and limited; however, in the NT, the torment of the condemned is made eternal).

The second dead end rejected by Wright is the position taken by those who argue that the Israelites thought that they were doing God’s will but were mistaken. According to Wright, this view fails because the bible never records God correcting this so-called misinterpretation. Indeed, both the OT and the NT consistently affirms the conquest and sees it “placed firmly within the whole unfolding plan of God” (83).

The third dead end rejected by Wright is the view that the conquest is only intended to be read as an allegory for spiritual warfare. Obviously this view does not take any account of the genre of the text at hand, and fails to recognize that the primary form of the recital of the conquest is historical narrative and not allegory.

Having noted these dead ends, Wright then emphasizes that there is really no satisfying solution to our exploration of this issue. However, he goes on to say that, by putting these events into the framework of the whole bible, we can speak of these things in a way that is helpful to the Christian faith (even if it doesn’t resolve the problem).

The first framework Wright employs is the framework of the OT story itself, placed within the context of Ancient Near Eastern culture at a particular moment within history. At this time, holy wars, wherein all the plunder was reserved for the deity, were not unique to Israel. Such wars are not waged for profit, by efficient war-machines wreaking havoc upon their personal enemies. Rather, they presupposed the deity as the one waging the war upon that deity’s enemies, and no plunder is allowed as total destruction is required. Therefore, by waging such a war, Wright wonders if God may have accommodated Godself to the fallen human reality of that day: “In view of [God’s] long-term goal of ultimately bringing blessing to the nations through the people of Israel, the gift of land necessitated this horrific historical action within the fallen world of nations at the time” (89).

However, having said that, Wright quickly notes his own discomfort with this answer, but adds that although he feels uncomfortable with God’s accommodation to any harmful action (divorce, slavery, etc.) real accommodation does seem to be portrayed in the bible.

Thus, Wright seeks comfort in pointing out that, even within the OT, the conquest of Canaan is a limited event – a single event pertaining to a single generation – and it must neither be seen as an archetypal OT war, nor as a model for future generations. Which, Wright goes on to say, is why Jesus can prohibit violence while not condemning the OT stories.

Finally, while still taking into account the Ancient Near Eastern context of the conquest narrative, Wright notes how conventional Ancient Near Eastern rhetoric regularly exceeds reality. Perhaps, he suggests, there is a little comfort to be found in this observation.

The second framework Wright employs for understanding this event is the framework of God’s sovereign international justice. In this regard, Wright objects to the application of the word ‘genocide’ to the event under discussion but the word carries overtones of vicious self-interest, ethnic cleansing, and oppression. According to his narrative portrayal, the conquest is none of these things but is ‘divine punishment operating through human agency’ (92). Specifically, it is the coming to full fruition of God’s judgment upon moral and social degradation. According to Wright, this understanding of the conquest as an expression of God’s sovereign international justice:

does not make [the conquest] less violent. Nor does it suddenly become “nice” or “OK”. But it does make a difference… Punishment changes the moral context of violence… There is a huge moral difference between violence that is arbitrary or selfish and violence that is inflicted under strict control within the moral framework of punishment (93).

Thus, Wright argues, there is a fundamental difference between a spanking a child and abusing a child, or, to switch analogies, between imprisoning a criminal and taking a person hostage. Of course, using violence at all ‘may be problematic’ but we must distinguish between these forms (94).

Therefore, understanding the conquest within this framework, means that it must not be taken as a sign of the Israelites’ righteousness as there is no correlation between triumph and the goodness of the victors. Thus, military success cannot be taken as a sign of God’s favouritism; nor must being defeated in a conquest – even the conquest of Canaan – be confused with what is to come at God’s final judgment.

Finally, given that we are so unsettled by placing the conquest within this framework, Wright questions if we would be less upset if the conquest had occurred but had not been commanded by God. After all, if God is sovereign over all nations, and if all things happen in some way in accordance with his will then we should not create such a sharp distinction between what God decrees and what God permits.

The third and final framework Wright brings to the matter at hand is the framework of God’s plan of salvation. He stresses that we need to read the conquest as a part of God’s plan – evident in both Testaments – of bringing peace, blessing and salvation to all the nations. In this regard, Wright highlights how the bible sees no contradiction between God’s general plan and his specific actions in Canaan.

In the end, however, Wright returns to the point that none of these frameworks offers a full, adequate or satisfactory resolution to the problems presented by the conquest of Canaan. This, then, leads him to conclude with these words:

I may not understand why it had to be this way. I certainly do not like it. I may deplore the violence and suffering involved… But at some point I have to stand back from my questions, criticism, or complaint and receive the Bible own word on that matter. What the Bible unequivocally tells me is that this was an act of God that took place within an overarching narrative through which the only hope for the world’s salvation was constituted (107).

Response

Throughout this section, Wright rejects the views of those who, in one way or another, appeal to the OT conquest of Canaan in order to engage in acts of conquest and violence today. In particular, he seems to be implicitly refuting contemporary Christians who support the tyrannical use of force exercised by both the United States and by the State of Israel. This is an important point to make – we cannot appeal to the OT in order to engage in violence today, we cannot mistake victory for righteousness or loss for damnation – and I am in complete agreement with Wright on this matter.

Furthermore, while struggling with the conquest narrative, I think that Wright is correct to draw attention to some of the broader frameworks operating within the biblical narrative – this is a key element of any responsible reading of the bible. However, unlike Wright, I do not think that an awareness of these frameworks assists the reader in resolving questions related to stories of divine violence. Far from it, I think that it is these frameworks that create the problem for us in the first place – remembering God’s overarching goals of bringing peace, justice, blessing, and salvation to all is precisely that which makes us question the conquest. After all, if the God of the bible was simply another tribal, nationalistic God, then the conquest would make good sense. It’s only the prior affirmation that God is actually committed to caring for the well-being of all of creation that makes the conquest a problem for Christians. Thus, Wright offers that which creates the problem at hand as (partial) solutions to that problem! No wonder, then, that I found this section to be the most disappointing part of the book.

My disappointment was only further deepened because of the way in which Wright uses the specificity of the conquest of Canaan in order to avoid addressing overarching questions related to biblical portrayals of God as extremely violent. Granted, the conquest of Canaan is just one particular event at one particular moment of history, but the OT is also full of other stories of God approving of violence and even acting violently – from the Flood, to calling the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish Israel, to allowing Elijah to summon bears to devour a street gang, and so on – and while Wright uses NT references to divine acts of violence (particularly, passages related to hell, which Wright seems to understand as a place of eternal torment) in order to blunt the edge of OT descriptions of divine violence, he never addresses the fact that this then leaves us with a God who appears to be brutal, vindictive, and willing to torture people forever. So, while Wright seems to say, “Hey, let’s not get overly focused on this conquest, since it is just one (violent) moment within an overarching plan of salvific love,” he seems to forget that the bible contains many other problematical portrayals of God’s relation to violence.

Indeed, the question of how a supposedly loving God, committed to rescuing creation and all creatures from the violent power of Death, can engage in any sort of violence or death-dealing, lies at the heart of this problem. Wright tries to dance around this issue in a few others ways… all of which I find equally unsatisfactory.

For example, he suggests that the observation that the conquest is performed as a type of punishment for evil and oppressive behaviour “changes the moral context of violence” but I would contest that this is so. First of all, it is impossible to make the case that all of the men, women, children, infants, and animals that were slaughtered in the conquest are actually guilty and deserving of any sort of punishment (let alone a death sentence). Secondly, I am not convinced that violent punishment is fundamentally or morally different than any other violent action. I find Wright’s examples in this regard to be unconvincing. Granted, punishing a child through spanking is a different sort of action than arbitrarily hitting a child, but that does not make spanking a good moral action. In both cases, a child is being struck violently and frequently, from the child’s perspective, there is no discernible difference between the two acts (I write this as a person who was both spanked and physically abused as a child). Allow me to provide a counter-example: consider a man who rapes his partner because his partner was unfaithful to him, and a man who rapes a stranger. In the first case, the violent act is performed as a form of punishment, in the second case it is performed arbitrarily, but in both cases the violent act is morally wrong. The same, I think, goes for hitting children or any form of violence exercised as punishment.

To take a second example, Wright reminds us that the rhetoric involved in the narrative of the conquest is likely over-inflated and exagerated. Now, this is a fine point to make in order to establish a proper reading of the story, but to suggest that this observation somehow blunts the edge of the challenge that this genocide presents to the Christian faith is absurd – it makes no difference if God was involved in slaughtering thousands, rather than tens of thousands, of children. The same fundamental objection remains, and to even make this point within this context suggests to the reader that the author doesn’t really understand the matter at hand.

Now speaking of rhetoric, and having employed the term ‘genocide’ in the last paragraph, it is interesting to note the rhetorical game that Wright plays with that word. As I noted above, Wright admits the technical accuracy of applying the term ‘genocide’ to the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, but he then chooses to marginalise and not apply the term because of other connotations that it carries within our contemporary context (those of ethnic cleansing, and so on). Now, to me, this looks like a word game employed to try to downplay the gravity of the situation. It seems to be part of a strategy of avoiding a full and honest confrontation with the matter at hand.

Finally, the third and most unsatisfactory way in which Wright dances around this issue is by arguing that God may be constrained to accommodate himself [sic] to some less than ideal short-term goals in order to accomplish his [sic] long-term goals. To once again cite the passage quoted above: “ In view of [God’s] long-term goal of ultimately bringing blessing to the nations through the people of Israel, the gift of land necessitated this horrific historical action within the fallen world of nations at the time”(89; emphasis added). What Wright appears to be arguing here is that there is only one plan of salvation available to God and so God must follow that plan, no matter the cost at any given moment of history. Thus, God’s plan ends up standing over and above God, trapping God within a deterministic framework that requires divine accommodations to (a more pleasant expression than other available terms like ‘compromise’ or ‘complicity with’ or ‘responsibility for’) fallen human realities like divorce, slavery and, in this case, genocide.

Now this is a decidedly odd point to make because it places severe contraints upon God’s sovereignty – an attribute of God that Wright defends at length in this book. If God is constrained to act within history in this way, and in this way only, then I wonder how exactly God can be said to be sovereign.

Speaking of this attribute, Wright makes another odd point when he explicitly relates the conquest narrative to the proclamation of God’s sovereignty. Because he understands God’s sovereignty to mean that he is somehow involved in every single event that occurs in history (permitting everything to occur, working everything into God’s greater plan, and so on), Wright downplays the difference between ‘God’s decretive will’ (when God decrees something – like the conquest of Canaan) and ‘God’s permissive will’ (when God simply permits one nation to conquer another by not intervening or whatever). Of course, even operating within Wright’s understanding of God’s Sovereignty it is easy to see the difference between, on the one hand, how God might limit God’s interaction with the world’s violence out of respect for human freedom and, on the other hand, God actually initiating violence. Yet Wright fails to see any significant difference between these two things – the decretive and the permissive. Therefore, what this point highlights, to me at least, is not that the conquest wasn’t as troubling as we might first imagine (which is the point that Wright is trying to make) but that Wright’s notion of divine sovereignty is terribly problematical.

In this response to Wright I hope that I have simply applied the same standard to Wright’s work that he applies to others who offer us dead-end solutions to these problems being explored. To be honest, given Wright’s commitment to counter superficial and self-serving solutions, I was surprised that a number of the points he made were so facile and easily countered. I cannot help but wonder if Wright’s self-proclaimed pastoral intent (which I mentioned in my initial post in this series) is getting in the way of honest engagement with these issues.

Review and Discussion of 'The God I Don't Understand': Part 2, Evil and Suffering

[Some time back in January, I began a review and discussion of Christopher J. H. Wright’s book, The God I Don’t Understand (see here for Part 1). At that time, I was discussing the book with my brother Judah, who espouses a different faith than I do. Since then, posting has been delayed because of my brother’s schedule which has how, unfortunately, led him to pull out of this discussion. I will, therefore, continue this review on my own. Here is Part 2.]

Summary: What about Evil and Suffering?

After his introductory remarks, Christopher Wright turns to the intertwined topics of evil and suffering and the ways in which these things present a challenge to faith in the Christian God. Once again, as throughout the rest of this book, the humility of Wright’s tone is notable. He rejects easy answers and asserts that there really are no answers, at least for now, to this challenge. Simply stated, one cannot make sense of evil and suffering. However, having affirmed this, Wright goes on to emphasise three things: the mystery, the offence, and the defeat of evil (he devotes a chapter to each).

Beginning with the mystery of evil, Wright explores the question of how evil could have come into existence in light of the biblical narrative and the affirmation that the God of the bible is both loving and sovereign. Ultimately, despite various digressions, he argues that the bible provides us with no answer to questions of evil’s origins. Thus, Wright argues that the bible compels us to accept the mystery of evil.

Yet accepting evil as a mystery is not the same thing as accepting evil. Indeed, Wright implies that labeling evil as a mystery is a way of rejecting evil, for we cannot allow evil to make sense. Thus, he writes:

Evil has no proper place within creation. It has no validity, no truth, no integrity. It does not intrinsically belong to the creation as God will ultimately redeem it. It cannot and must not be integrated into the universe as a rational, legitimated, justified part of reality. Evil is not there to be understood, but to be resisted and ultimately expelled (42).

Further, Wright stresses that, although we may not know anything about the ultimate origins of evil, we do know that the vast majority of evil and suffering is the result of human actions. Consequently, he concludes that ‘the suffering of the human race as a whole is to a large extent attributable to the sin of the human race as a whole’ (32). Therefore, Wright has little patience for those who ‘like to accuse the God they don’t believe in’ of failing to address evil when they themselves are frequently doing nothing about the fact that, for example, thousands of children are dying every minute of preventable diseases (31). Thus, to those who reject God because God appears to be doing nothing about such things, Wright responds by saying, ‘What are you doing about those things?’

However, Wright does not raise this point in order to shut down all protests against God. Far from it, in the second chapter of this section, devoted to exploring the offence of evil, Wright argues that the bible encourages us to respond to evil and suffering with lamentations, protests, and anger. Indeed, this type of response is precisely the sort of reaction we see displayed in the biblical characters who ‘loved and trusted [God] the most’ (51; emphasis removed). Thus, Wright is hoping to see the language of lament and protest restored to its proper place within the church

Wright views this response of grief and anger as one especially suited to our encounters with what he calls ‘natural evil’ – disastrous non-human, natural events, like hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, that occur and cause great suffering. Further, while exploring ‘natural evil’, Wright emphasizes that there are two answers to this problem that Christians must reject. First, they must reject the notion that such events occur as an ongoing expression of God’s curse on the ground in Gen 3. Wright argues that God’s curse refers to a fundamental functional breakdown in the relationship between humanity and the soil, resulting in toil in labour, and that the curse does not refer to any sort of ontological altering of creation (after all, affirming the perspective of evolutionary science, Wright notes that things like natural disasters, meteors, death and predation, existed in the natural order long before humans did). Second, Wright argues that Christians must reject any understanding of these natural disasters as some sort of divine judgment upon sin – as though those who suffer in these events are being punished by God. Here Wright is adamant that we must refuse to cast this sort of judgment upon others for, even though the bible speaks of some natural disasters as acts of judgment, it does not speak of all disasters in this way, and no one among us has access to a divine perspective that would allow us to make this judgment call about any particular disaster that occurs in our time.

Finally, in the third chapter of this section, Wright speaks of the defeat of evil and notes that ‘theologians try to explain evil, while God’s plan is to destroy it’ (56). Thus, rather than dealing with evil and suffering as an intellectual puzzle, Christians are called to rejoice in the coming total victory of God over evil, while holding onto three key affirmations: (1) the utter evilness of evil; (2) the utter goodness of God; and (3) the utter sovereignty of God. Of course, it is here that we arrive at the crux of the challenge of evil – how can we affirm all three of these statements without, in some way or another, comprising one or more of them? Wright argues that it is the cross, and the understanding of Jesus as both the slain lamb and the Lord of history, that points the way forward. Drawing on a study of Revelation 4-7 (which he sees as describing constant realities of human life – war, famine, sickness, death, etc. – and not some sort of ‘end times’ cataclysm), Wright argues that Jesus is sovereign over all of these powers but the ‘absolutely pivotal, vital point to grasp’ is that ‘Christ’s power to control these evil forces is the same power as he exercised on the cross’ (67). Specifically, God’s sovereignty over evil is shown in God’s ability to simultaneously absorb and defeat it, or, as Wright says, ‘[t]he cross shows us that God can take the worst possible evil and through it accomplish the greatest possible good – the destruction of evil itself’ (69). Thus, we live now with hope and joyful expectation.

Response

Once again, there is much that I appreciated about how Wright approaches the topic at hand. I appreciated his tone, his honesty regarding a lack of understanding, and his ability to see through many of the false alternatives that have been offered by Christians in their efforts to cling to certainty. I also appreciated Wright’s emphasis upon protest and lament and his desire to see these things retored to the church Further, I found Wright’s argument that evil cannot make sense because it cuts so deeply against the grain of the universe to be both useful and interesting – a suggestion I don’t remember encountering before.

However, without going overboard (as this is, in my opinion, the most significant challenge to faith in the Christian God), there are a few things that I would like to respond to in a little more detail. First, I wish that Wright had continued his thinking regarding the greatest cause of suffering – human actions – and pressed the same point in his chapter on the defeat of evil. If it is human activity that causes the great majority of suffering in our world, then surely it is human activity that also has the greatest potential to bring about healing, reconciliation, and peace in our world. Furthermore, I found it odd that Wright so strongly emphasises that God will defeat evil, while neglecting the Christian belief that, because evil has already been defeated at the cross of Jesus, it can now continue to be defeated in the human actions taken by (amongst others) those in the Christian community. So, while Wright talks about God’s triumph over evil at the cross, he neglects to mention how the community of those who follow a crucified Lord can proleptically embody the defeat of evil in the present moment… until the day when death and hell are finally destroyed once and for all.

Secondly, I’m not entirely sure what to make of Wright’s impatience with atheists or agnostics who scorn the Christian God because of the presence of evil and suffering in the world. On the one hand, this impatience makes sense if those who claim the moral high ground over against a seemingly inactive or apathetic God, do not then go on to actively address evil and suffering. However, on the other hand, Wright’s impatience, even in this regard, doesn’t have to make sense or be reasonable to those who do not adopt a Christian paradigm. For people with other paradigms, it might be perfectly consistent to scorn God and ignore the suffering of strangers, or even scorn God and further the suffering of others, or whatever. Furthermore, Wright uses this particular focus (those who scorn God but who are also inactive) to handily sidestep addressing the fact that many of those who reject the Christian God are precisely those who are actively working to address issues related to justice and suffering within our world. Consequently, Wright seems to miss the point that evil and suffering are actually a very, very good reason to reject the affirmation of any God who is said to be both good and sovereign. Indeed, I myself would probably reject faith in God for precisely this reason… were it not for experiences that I believe to be experiences of God in Jesus Christ. Thus, my basis for faith is entirely experiential and, although this may dismay a good many Christian apologist, I tend to think that experience is the only valid basis for faith (at least it’s the only valid basis I’ve found). In other words, while encounters with the massive presence of evil and suffering might compel me to not believe in any sort of loving and powerful God, other encounters do not allow me to not believe. So it goes.

Finally, the aspect of Wright’s argument that strikes me as the most difficult to understand (or, perhaps, accept) is in his assertion that all the evil forces in history are still subject to God’s sovereignty and are only able to act with God’s express permission (and even assistance!). Now, to be clear, I do agree with what Wright says about God being able to absorb and conquer evil (by even creating new life out of events that would otherwise have simply been death-dealing), but I think that one can affirm this without pressing this point as far as Wright does. It seems to me that Wright’s argument ends up making God too complicit with evil (although he himself argues that we cannot view God in this way). In essence, it seems to me that Wright tries to say too much on this point and oversteps his initial acknowledgment regarding the mystery of evil. Granted, I believe that the cruciform life and death of Jesus point us towards some sort of resolution of the interaction between God’s goodness and sovereignty, and the evilness of evil, but I don’t think we can go so far as to say that Jesus, as the risen Lord, is now directing and arming the powers of pestilence, war, and famine in our world (which is what Wright says in his exegesis of Rev 4-7). In my opinion, it is better to say nothing than to affirm this suggestion.

legends of the fall: the alternate title of my thesis

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you know, a lot of people have told me that i look like brad pitt in legends of the fall. so this is a very accurate representation of what it looks like as i work on my thesis. in case any of you were wondering.
p.s. i would like to take the time to acknowledge that audrey molina is my intellectual superior. and that it would be wise not to leave myself signed in on my blog on her computer.
[NB: this post was not written by me, Dan, it was written by my friend Audrey, who has hacked into my blog.]

Book Giveaway — Philosophy

Well, congrats to Gideon who won the last draw. This time around I’ll be giving away a set of books related to philosophy. There are some pretty big shooters in this round so don’t miss out. As usual, all you need to do is leave a comment expressing interest and I’ll randomly draw a winner. Also as usual, you need to want all the books (and some or all of the books are used). Here are the books:
1. A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by Robert Bretall;
2. Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments edited by Yvonne Sherwood & Kevin Hart;
3. Wittgenstein by G. H. von Wright;
4. Philosophical Writings of Peirce edited by Justus Buchler;
5. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn;
6. Science of Knowledge by J. G. Fichte.

Paul and the Uprising of the Dead

[Well, what little time I get to write these days has been devoted to working on my thesis. However, for those who might be interested, I thought I would provide a glimpse of what I’ve been working on.]

Paul and the Uprising of the Dead: Eschatology, Ethics, and Empires

1. Introduction

Paul and the Anastasis of the Dead

Of all the voices found within the Christian Scriptures, Paul’s is, perhaps, the most contested. Therefore, despite the observation that the presentation of Paul as a ‘Conservative’ and ‘Spiritual’ voice was dominant in much of Western scholarship for the latter two-thirds of the 20^th century, this understanding of Paul has always been challenged and is increasingly called into question today. Indeed, this recent emphasis upon Paul as ‘Conservative’ and ‘Spiritual’ was, in part, a reaction to Pauline scholarship in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which presented influential Marxist readings of Paul (which, in turn, were reacting against the reading of Paul that became dominant in post-Reformation Protestantism and Roman Catholicism).¹ Thus, over the last one hundred years, the pendulum has swung from viewing Paul as a leader of the revolutionary proletariat, to viewing Paul as the Apostle of bourgeois morals and respectability. Today, however, the pendulum is swinging back from a ‘Conservative’ extreme, and a presentation of Paul as an Apostle who embodied the proclamation of a counter-imperial and subversive way of structuring life together (under the ever watchful eye of the Empire) is gaining increasing prominence.

Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the ‘Conservative’ understanding of Paul was dominant while Christianity itself was a dominant (and Conservative – despite a brief popular flirtation with Marxism) political force in the West. However, now that the sociopolitical influence of Christianity has waned (as in most of Western Europe) or is rapidly waning (as in North America) it is interesting to note that Paul is being reread in more ‘counter-cultural’ ways. The question then is this: are we continually allowing our understanding of Paul to be shaped by our own sociopolitical contexts, or are we just now becoming resensitized to elements of Paul’s writings that we have previously overlooked, due to our rootedness within places of power and dominance? The answer, I suspect, contains at least a bit of both, although the emphasis of what follows will fall on the latter.

In this work, I will explore some of the diverse and contradictory ways in which Paul’s theopolitical actions and writings have been understood, and I will assert that Paul presents us with a particularly creative and subversive combination of eschatology and political ethics — one that explodes the eschatology and political ethics favoured by empires, both then and now. I believe that it is crucial to engage in a detailed exploration of Paul in this way, both because Paul is a valuable resource for countering the oppressive imperial ideologies of our day, and because Paul himself has so often been co-opted by these imperial ideologies. Too often Paul has been appropriated by oppressive Powers who have placed him, and his message, in the service of Death.² Therefore, I am hoping to contribute to the recovery of the Paul who anticipated the resurrection (Gk: anastasis) of the dead, and did so by leading an uprising (Gk: anastasis) amongst those who were left for dead within the society of his day.^³ Paul is the Apostle of Jesus – the crucified Lord who has triumphed over Death – and Paul spreads the good news of Jesus by developing communities of new life, whose corporate existence reveals that Death in all of its socioeconomic, political, and imperial manifestations, no longer holds sway. Behold, the dead are rising, Death is being swallowed up in victory, and the new creation of all things has begun – even here, even now!

——————————-

1Cf. Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World (New and Completely Revised Edition; translated by Lionel R. M. Strachan; Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978 [1910]); Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (Translated by Henry F. Mins; New York: S. A. Russell, 1953 [1908]). Of course, Deissmann is not a ‘Marxist’ scholar, but his conclusions fit well with Marxist analysis and objectives.

2Cf. Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994), 3-24.

3I am indebted to Alain Badiou for translating anastasis not simply as ‘resurrection’ but also as ‘uprising’ and using this with intentionally political overtones (cf. St. Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Trans. by Ray Brassier. Cultural Memory in the Present [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 68). However, what Badiou does not realize is that this translation of anastasis precisely captures the way in which eschatology and politics are intertwined, both in Paul’s writings and in the ideologies of empires (as we shall see in what follows).

On Being a Father: Grace upon Grace

Today my son Charles is four months old. This is him:
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He has been a colicy baby, so my wife and I have had little sleep and have spent most of our time either entertaining him or trying to soothe him.
But that’s quite alright. This was the sort of thing I expected when people told us that everything in life was going to change.
What I didn’t expect, was a very different change that Charles has created in me. In fact, this change was so unexpected, so unlooked for, that it took me a good couple of weeks to figure out what was different. I knew something radical had happened inside of me but I was unable to name it.
You see, for the last seven or eight years, I have felt like I was slowly shattering. I felt like my journey into broken places was slowly breaking me — breaking my heart, my strength, my spirit. With each new death, each new kid lost to drugs or mental illness or violence, each new rape, I felt like another piece inside of me broke off.
In recent years, I have felt that there were so many cracks and fissures running through me that I often wondered how long I would be able to hold myself together.
And then Charlie was born. And the first time I held him I felt as though all of my broken pieces fused back together again. That’s why it took me so long to figure out what I was feeling — I hadn’t felt that way in so many years. So it’s no wonder that it hit me like a ton of bricks a few weeks later when I finally realized what it was that I was feeling: “My God. I feel whole!” What a miraculous gift my son has given to me.
My wife and I weren’t planning on having a child when we did. Charlie came into our lives unexpectedly. But the timing ended up being perfect — far better than we could ever have known. He has been a gift from God to us. I look at him sleeping beside me and think, “Amazing grace!”
Of course, as I suggested in my opening paragraph, there is nothing ‘cheap’ about this grace. It is costly; it demands a lot of us. But all of that — the sleepless nights, the exhaustion, the sacrifice of other things — is immediately forgotten the minute Charlie smiles from ear to ear and giggles at me.
I reckon this is often how things stand with God’s gifts of grace — something unexpected, something unexpectedly wonderful, something life-transforming.
I also hope to participate in this economy of grace. I hope to give gifts to my son. In particular, I hope to give him a gift that I have never experienced — I hope to be a loving father to him.
My own father was often violent when I was young, and my childhood was dominated by feelings of fear. Even now, my father continues his efforts to emotionally manipulate and abuse the people close to him. So I have never known what it was like to have a loving father. This is not to say that my dad has never felt warm fuzzy feelings when he has thought of me; rather, it is simply to observe that his words and actions towards me (and his other sons) have usually been anything but loving.
Therefore, by committing to love my son, I am hoping to give him a gift that I have never received. It blows my mind to think that I can offer Charles a life so different than my own. It blows my mind to think that he will never have to know what it is like to have a father who is incapable of loving his children. It amazes me that I can give him an experience so far from anything I have ever known.
This, surely, is a glimpse of the abundant life we find in the company of God. This, surely, is the giving of grace upon grace.
Charles, my boy, I’ve never been so in love. May you ever only know the economics of grace and the giving and receiving of gifts.

Abandoning Certitude: Walking Humbly with God

As far as I can tell, being honest with ourselves requires us to confess that we now live in a world where it is impossible to recognize any infallible, completely trustworthy authorities. Or, even if we grant the existence of any such authority (as I actually do), we must confess that we have no unmediated access to that authority. What access we have is always mediated by that which is inevitably fallible and not completely trustworthy. Thus, we are all in the same boat, whether or not we affirm the existence of any infallible, completely trustworthy authorities.
So, for example, although I believe in a God who is, in my opinion, infallible and trustworthy (I’m willing to give God the benefit of the doubt!), I can never claim direct access to God, or knowledge of God, or God’s will, or whatever else. Access to God is always, in some way, mediated. Thus, things like Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience all function as mediators — but neither Scripture, nor tradition, nor reason, nor experience is completely infallible or completely trustworthy.
Let us explore this point.
Although Scripture functions as an authority for Christians, it cannot be treated in an overly simplistic or naive manner. Sometimes Scripture is inscrutable, sometimes it is contradictory, and sometimes it’s a crap shoot as to how we are to relate to the two or four thousand year old events contained therein. Besides, God didn’t write Scripture — people, with all of their foibles and limitations did, and no matter how fancy your exegetical footwork (Scripture in its original [but now lost] form was perfect, God actually dictated the original [but now lost] biblical texts to the authors verbatim, etc.) the point remains that, Scripture as we know it, cannot be treated as infallible. This does not mean we must then go on to refuse to recognize Scripture as an authority. Far from it, Christians can recognize Scripture as an authority — but it is an authority we must engage critically.
I think that the complexities involved in both understanding and applying Scripture are becoming increasingly obvious, even to those who have tried to remain rooted within premodern views of Scripture. This, in my opinion, partially explains why Evangelicals who previously had fairly loose ecclesiologies and little regard for Church history are now becoming increasingly fascinated with Roman Catholicism and the Christian Tradition (just note all of the contemporary Evangelicals who have taken to calling themselves ‘Augustinian’!). Thus, for various Christians, Tradition (capitalized and in the singular) is treated as an infallible and completely trustworthy authority. However, it is worth questioning if this is really the case. When we ask this question, it quickly becomes apparent that it is difficult to see how this could be true. First of all, an honest look at Christian history requires us to note that there is no single authoritative ‘Tradition’; rather, there are many different, often competing and contradictory, traditions. Consequently, any who propose a single authoritative ‘Tradition’ are engaging in a highly selective reading of history that ends up being (intentionally or not) rather dishonest.
However, the case could be made that, despite differences, there are some elements of Christianity that appear consistently throughout history. Therefore, one might wish to argue that these elements are the part of the Christian traditions that is authoritative and infallible. However, this cannot be the case as, for example, the oppressive use of power (in order to abuse, marginalize and oppress women, children, people with disabilities, and other minority populations) is a fairly consistent thread running through many Christian traditions over the last two thousand years. We cannot simply appeal to majority views, as majorities (yes, even majorities within the Church, and over the course of Church history) are often mistaken. Futhermore, the Bible itself teaches us that the majority of those who call themselves ‘the people of God’ have often lost their way. Thus, there are constantly minority movements arising to correct the majority (for example, schools of prophets in the Old Testament and the Jesus Movement in the New Testament).
However, this does not mean that majorities are always wrong and that minorities are always right. Indeed, I believe that the Spirit of God can move in such a way that a majority of people can — independently of one another — come to the same appropriate conclusion for any given situation. It also doesn’t mean that minorities are always right. Often minorities fracture off of groups and spiral into self- and other-destructive behavior.
Therefore, we are once again required to critically engage with the Christian traditions. What we cannot do is simply accept ‘Tradition’ as a single, infallible, completely trustworthy source.
This then leaves us with reason and experience. But neither of these can be treated as infallible, completely trustworthy authorities.
Reason, in my opinion, is the least trustworthy of all. More than any of the other authorities mentioned here, ‘reason’ is an almost entirely amorphous cultural construct. Simply stated, what is ‘reasonable’ is only reasonable to particular people, at a particular place, during a particular moment in history. At different places, in different moments of history, it was completely reasonable to think of the earth as flat, as created in seven days, or as existing on the back of a turtle. Nowadays, many people consider this sort of thinking unreasonable and find it reasonable to think of the earth as round, as coming into being over a very long amount of time, and as existing in time/space (which it is now reasonable to think of as a single ‘thing’).
Of course, by highlighting this I am not suggesting that we abandon reason as an authority. To do so would be next to impossible, given that all of us are culturally-conditioned people, and will remain culturally-conditioned, in one way or another, regardless of our best efforts. ‘Reason’ ends up being an authority, whether we like it or not. However, this line of thought does require us to critically engage reason (which, by the way, is what Wittgenstein does when he encourages us to talk non-sense).
We are then left with experience which, in my opinion, actually exists in something of a privileged place, especially when it comes to how we relate to God as an authority. After all, one may read about the God of the Scriptures, one may learn about the God revealed in the Christian traditions, and one may come to some positive conclusions about God based upon reason, but if one has no experience of God, then all of that reading, learning, and thinking, will likely be for naught. So, by saying experience exists in a ‘privileged place’ I am not saying that it is more authoritative than these other sources; rather, I am saying that it needs to be recognized as authoritative (at least in some way) before any of the other sources can be meaningfully engaged as authoritative.
However, just as with the other authorities mentioned above, experience cannot be treated as an infallible, completely trustworthy authority. No matter how dramatic (or traumatic!) our experiences of God, we must critically engage every experience. What if we are mistaking something for God that is not God? What if we are being emotionally manipulated by our environment? What if we are mentally ill (I’ve worked with many schizophrenic people who refused to take their medication because ‘God stopped talking’ when they were on the medication — but refusing to take the medication also led these people to be trapped in cycles of poverty, homelessness and violence)? What if we are just using ‘God’s still small voice’ to justify our preconceived notions or to allow us to indulge in harmful or selfish desires? And so on and so forth. Thus, although experience is an authority, it cannot be considered infallible.
Consequently, we remain stuck in the state I described at the opening of this post. We must confess that we no longer have any infallible authorities, and even if God is recognized as just that kind of authoritiy, we must confess that we have no infallible, unmediated access to God.
What then is the result of this? The loss of certitude. An honest confrontation with our situation requires us to confess that we can no longer be certain… about anything. Maybe we are eisegeting the Scriptures. Maybe we are highlighting the wrong parts of the Christian traditions. Maybe our reason is fatally flawed. Maybe we have misunderstood ourselves and our experiences. Maybe that which we have taken to be God, is not God at all. We must confess that any and all of the above is possible.
So we must abandon certainty, and we must flee from anyone who promises us certitude lest we become lured into false comforts and a world of illusions.
This, I think, is what it means for a person to ‘walk humbly with God’ (cf. Mic 6.8). Walking humbly with God means confessing that, hey, maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe, instead of being part of the solution, we’re part of the problem. Maybe we’re just making one giant mess of everything. So we pray: ‘Lord, have mercy’.
Finally, I have recently come to the conclusion that this movement into uncertainty is actually an expression of one’s maturation in one’s faith. This goes against what I was led to believe about faith when I was growing up. When I was younger, I though that uncertainty was a sign of ‘spiritual immaturity’ and that ‘spiritual maturity’ would be expressed in an increasing sense of certainty. Indeed, I think many Christians were led to believe that this is how ‘spiritual maturity’ is expressed. I no longer believe this. I now believe that it takes a great deal of maturity to confess that one is uncertain (about everything), and the reason why we have difficulty confessing this is because we remain in places of immaturity. This, at least, has been my own (neither infallible nor completely trustworthy!) experience: the more deeply rooted I have become in my faith, the more I have been able to abandon certitude in order to walk humbly with God — and with my neighbours as we, together, strive to do justice and love mercy (Mic 6.8, again).

Who is the True Neigbour? Discussing Sexuality with Evangelicals

In all my time within the GLBTQ community, I have never once felt rejected or discriminated against because of my (hetero)sexual orientation or my (Christian) religious beliefs. Even though most members of the GLBTQ community have had extremely negative, oppressive, or hurtful encounters with people who are (most often) straight, male Christians, I have never felt judged or discriminated against because of how others who look like me have acted. Far from it — I have always felt welcomed by members of the GLBTQ community, and have always felt as though I was respected for believing what I do.
Perhaps this was most evident during the time when I was volunteering at a drop-in centre for male and transgendered sex workers. In the ten year history of this centre, I was the only straight male volunteer and the only Christian volunteer as well. This was not because the centre discrimated against straight males or against Christians — far from it, many of the sex workers who came to the drop-in were both straight and Christian, and I was embraced with open arms by the other volunteers — rather, I suspect that this was because Christians tend to keep the hell away from the GLBTQ community in general, and from male and transgendered prostitutes in particular (because, you know, helping female prostitutes lets Christian men feel like macho/noble knights in shining armour and all that, whereas male prostitutes are just a bunch of ‘faggots’ or something like that).
In sum, even though I have my origins in an oppressive group that has deeply and personally wounded many people within the GLBTQ community, I have still been treated with respect, greeted with openness, and welcomed with love.
In contrast, when I have spoken of my respect for members of the GLBTQ community, and of my faith that these expressions of human sexuality are a part of God’s wonderful and ongoing creative activity within the world, I have been treated very differently by many who claim to be followers of Jesus. Far from being treated with any respect, I have had my words twisted beyond recognition, I have been called everything from a ‘heretic’ and a ‘schismatic’ to a ‘bully’ and a ‘dog’, and I have listened as those who have stated these things have compared my gay friends to pedophiles, murderers, rapists, and people who have sex with animals. There has been little to no respect shown here. No openness. No embrace. No love.
In all of this, recalling Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, it has become pretty obvious to me as to which group in my life has acted as a true neighbour to me. Members of the GLBTQ community are those who have acted as the ‘Good Samaritan’ — a person from an oppressed minority who shows Christlike love, even for a member of the oppressive majority. Unfortunately, members of Conservative Evangelicalism have acted, at best, like the Priest and Levite who pass by the wounded and, at worst, like the robbers who beat others and leave them for dead.

Why Both the 'New Atheists' and Traditional Christian Apologists Get it Wrong

Recently, I’ve become increasingly fascinated with the theories and trajectories that are being expressed in contemporary physics. Now granted, I don’t understand much of the math and notation involved, but what I am able to grasp of astrophysics, quantem mechanics, Einstein’s reflections on space/time, and so on, is absolutely mind-blowing.
However, one of the things that has struck me as I have been digging into all of this is just how much science in general, and physics in particular, are misrepresented at the popular level. At the popular level, science is presented as though it is based upon universal laws, empirical evidence, irrefutable conclusions, and concrete ‘facts’. Often, this is then contrasted with religious faith, which is said to be counter-intuitive, counter-empirical, and insubstantial (or unsustainable). Science, in other words, is said to be entirely sensible, while faith is said to be entirely nonsensical.
In response to this charge many Christians, have engaged in a form of apologetics that has tried to demonstrate that faith is also a sensible enterprise based upon certain laws, proofs, empirical evidence, and other facts. Now, I’m not convinced that any apologist of this type has actually converted his or her opposition, but I think that these apologists have probably at least convinced a few people in the public that, at the very least, people of faith aren’t complete morons. I guess that’s something.
A more encouraging response (to me at least), is that taken by those who argue that many of these apologetic Christian approaches have allowed themselves to be dominated by the limitations and paradigms of ‘modern science’ (by that I mean science as it developed from the Enlightenment until the start of the 20th century). As a result of this many contemporary (or ‘postmodern’ if you prefer that term) Christians now feel like apologetics that persist in that paradigm are still reflecting a type of Christianity that was overly conditioned by a particular culture and moment in history (‘modernity’). And so, in many ways, contemporary Christianity has moved beyond this apologetic engagement with the laws, proofs, methods, and conclusions of modern science. Instead, they have tried to make Christianity credible by living more Christianly. I reckon this is a good step to take.
However, just as significantly, contemporary (or ‘postmodern’) science has also moved beyond the culturally conditioned reason, method, and certitude expressed within the science of modernity. At the moment, contemporary physics requires us to move beyond certitude, beyond laws, beyond empiricism (even, in a way, beyond logic) in order to grasp the workings of the universe. For example, the rules and conclusions of astrophysics (which works with bodies with large amounts of mass) cannot be applied in the realm of quantem mechanics (which works with bodies with tiny amounts of mass), and vice versa. These two areas of science cannot be brought together into a single system without contradicting each other, yet each in isolation seems to provide workable conclusions for their own areas of study. So much for universal truths or the law of non-contradiction. Or, to take a second example, in astrophysics it seems as though a vast amount of ‘dark matter’ is required to exist so that we can explain the movement of galaxies (amongst other things). However, the existence of ‘dark matter’ is taken on faith — we cannot (yet) prove its existence… but we can’t explain things without it. Similarly, quantem mechanics now requires us to speak of ‘probabilities’ and not ‘laws’, while also leading us to think that there maybe be a good deal many more dimensions (11+?) than we first imagined. Or, to provide a fourth example, Einstein’s theories require us to think of space and time as a single unit — space/time — thereby collapsing what empirically (and logically?) strike us as two distinct ‘things’. And on and on it goes. Examples like these could be multplied almost endlessly (string theory, anybody?).
Therefore, if many Christian apologists get it wrong because they still continue to think of Christianity in the terms established by a culturally-conditioned moment in Western history, many of those now classified as the ‘New Atheists’ get science wrong for precisely the same reason! Oddly enough then, members of both of these opposing parties are (perhaps unwittingly) simply longing for the world (or, um, the West) as was 150 or so years ago. Many Christian apologists seem to want to get back to a time when Christianity was in a more dominant position in our society, and many ‘New Atheists’ seem to want to get back to a time when science claimed to possess certitude.
However, probably for the best, that world has come and gone. So now, when we listen to this or that ‘New Atheist’ debate this or that Christian apologist, we can consider ourselves lucky to witness a reenactment of what it might have been like to discuss these matters if we lived 150 years ago. It is almost as if we get the chance to witness two dinosaurs who, unaware that they have become extinct, are putting on a spectacular show fighting each other.

Clinging to Tradition or Encountering God-as-Event

Sometimes I wonder if those who barricade themselves within certain interpretations of ‘Traditional’ or ‘Orthodox’ or ‘Conservative Evangelical’ Christianity are actually doing so because they are desperate to believe in God… but have never actually tangibly experienced God-as-Event (in Badiou’s sense of the word ‘Event’). When ‘Tradition’ is all that you have of God, then it is no wonder that challenges to ‘Tradition’ (or how that ‘Tradition’ is narrated and interpreted by this contingent) appear to be so threatening.
I sometimes wonder this, not because I think that these so-called ‘orthodox’ Christians are more closed to God than the rest of us, but because I spent 7 summers working with teens and young adults who came from Conservative Evangelical families. During those 7 summers, I discovered that, although Conservative Evangelical kids are taught to speak of having a ‘personal relationship with God’ almost all of them have never actually encountered God in any meaningful, transformative or concrete way. I remember when I first awakened to the observation that I was actually an oddity for believing I had actually had such experiences and this so surprised me that my first thought was: “Well, why the heck are you guys Christians then??”
Not surprisingly, it turned out that many of these people only identified as Christians because their parents had trained them to do so. Consequently, when they moved on to independence and to other environments, their Christian faith (sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually) disappeared.
However, others could not face the trauma of walking away from their faith and so, in the absence of a lived encounter with God, went on to immerse themselves in apologetics, and the history and doctrines of various (in this case, Reformed or Evangelical) Christian denominations.
Several of these people have ended up within the walls of the Christian Academy. Consequently, it does not surprise me that Christian academics often end up speaking condescendingly of those who talk of having a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus or, to provide another example, those who speak of the notion of exploring ‘God as a lover’. Thus, those who have never experienced God-as-Event end up building theological systems that downplay the significance of one’s personal encounter with God (i.e. one’s personal experiences are not to be trusted or treated as any sort of authority), and end up overemphasizing the history of Christian doctrine (although it should be noted that this narration of history is almost always fraught with value judgments and acts of exclusion in order to end up confirming previously established views).
However, those who have encountered God-as-Event cannot view this (fictional!) Tradition with the same urgency or authority. Granted, the various streams of Christianity, and the multiple traditions that trace their way throughout the last two thousand years, are an important witness to the activity of the Word of God in history… but one has now been freed from the need to desperately cling to one particular ideological interpretation of that history — in fact, one can even more critically engage with these things because, after the Event, one’s faith in God will remain regardless of what one discovers in the traditions or in Christianity’s many orthodoxies.
Thankfully, this at least was the experience of a minority of the people with whom I worked for those 7 summers. Awakening to the realization that God could be known as Event, these few were lucky enough to look for that experience, and to be found by it. Would that we were all so fortunate!