Keepers and Fulfillers

God does not choose the same men to keep his word as to fulfill it.
~ George Bernanos [as quoted by Gustavo Gutierrez in Theology of Liberation]
Of course, Bernanos does not see this as a good thing. His comment is a rather acerbic reflection on the fact that so many contemporary theologians (who are safeguarding the doctrines of the Church) are far removed from the day to day realities and responsibilities of faith. He is criticising those who do theology from an “ivory tower”. To Bernanos and Guiterrez, it is exceedingly odd that one could be a doctor of the Word, and not also be in solidarity with the poor.
For if our theology truly is faith seeking understanding, that means that we should also be seeking the lost sheep, journeying alongside of the abandoned, weeping with those who weep, and carrying a very real, very tangible, very painful, and very shameful cross.
Unfortunately it seems that theologians are for more concerned with gaining credibility, respect, and prestige instead of embracing vulnerability, powerlessness, and shame. Thus, as Bernanos suggests, it is often a very different group of people who end up fulfilling God's word.
Of course, this dichotomy need not exist and both sides suffer where it does exist. What we need are theologians on the margins, theologians in the alleyways. I wonder what sort of transformation would occur if the keepers of the Word would unite with the fulfillers of the Word?

Recommended Reading

Well, I rarely plug other blogs. Not because I don't read several other blogs but because I have a few rules that I made for myself when I started to write online.
That said, I want to recommend a post on my little brother's blog. His name is Abe, he's a pretty smart cookie (he's 24 and he is doing a PhD in nursing, presenting at conferences, writing articles, and working at a health centre for homeless people) and I enjoy reading what he writes. His latest post is a bit of web research entitled “Bruce Wilkinson and Colonialism” (yes, that is the Bruce Wilkinson who wrote The Prayer of Jabez). I highly recommend you take a look at it and follow through on the links he provides.
His blog can be found here: http://www.nurseabe.blogspot.com.
Love you, Abe!

A Prayer for my Abandoned Friends in Hamilton

“Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it… It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know. You know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy? Don’t you see, Lord? You own son couldn’t carry it. If it killed Him, what You think it’s gonna do to me? Huh? Huh?”
~ From Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
And what we mean when we pray for hate, Lord, is not that others would hate us. We’re used to that already. Of course, if you want to make others hate us more that’s okay, too. But what we really mean, Lord, is that we want you to teach us to hate others. This love is just too much. It’s fucking heavy, if you’ll pardon our French, Lord. It’s more than we can bear.
Because this love isolates us. And, Lord, isn’t love supposed to be something that brings us all together? But it doesn’t. It just drives us further and further away from our friends and families. And we can’t handle this kind of love on our own. So, give us hate. If we could learn to be a little more hateful than we’ll be a whole lot more comfortable. We’ll have a lot more friends too, Lord, and we’re tired of being alone.
And don’t you promise us new life, Lord? If you do then why is it that this love is killing us? What happened to the easy yoke, Lord? This one is more than we can bear.

The Heart of Darkness

In this month's issue of Harper's there is an heart-rending article about Congo's ongoing genocide (“Congo's Daily Blood: Ruminations from a failed state” by Bryan Mealer). In the last five years, over 4,000,000 people have died there, and approximately 1,200 continue to die there every day.
What is described is far beyond what I can comprehend. I can read the stories, I can follow the words, but I've realised that even my experiences with violence and sorrow at the margins of North America have not put me in a place where I'm even close to imagining what it is to be in the midst of such experiences. The brutality defies comprehension. The stories are too horrible — “all blood, rape, and gore” — and I can't even bring myself to repeat them here. I don't understand how people can do the things they do to each other.
Likewise, I absolutely cannot understand how we stand by and do nothing about such events. Because such horrors do not stop with Congo — Sudan and Somalia come instantly to mind. Our apathy staggers me. And we are not just apathetic. We've have found a way to make money off of genocide. Thus, we live comfortably in Canada (in part) because of what we have done with oil in Sudan, what we have done with telecommunications in Somalia, and what we have done with mining in Congo. Their blood is on our hands. It's in our clothes, it stains our daily bread.
So where, oh where, is the Church in all of this? Where is the mass of Western Christians committed to journeying with those in Congo, Sudan, Somalia? The fact is that it seems like an utter fantasy to suggest that there would be a large number of Christians committed to going to a place like Congo. We can't even get Christians to move into shitty downtown neighbourhoods, what hope is there that they might consider moving into “the horror, the horror” that exists in Congo? Christians think I'm crazy when I tell them they should live in a neighbourhood where *gasp* they might be robbed. How in the world will they be convinced to go and live in a place where they might be tortured and eaten?
Instead, we putter away at our little lives, we try to make a little bit of a difference where we are. Yet most of these puny acts of piety and service are done to ease our own consciences. And all the while the blood, the rape, and the gore, continue unabated.

March Books

Well, not as many books this month, but that’s to be expected since the term is winding down.
1. Contagious Holiness: Jesus’ meals with sinners by Craig Blomberg. After completing my major paper on the Lord’s Supper last term, I sent a copy to Scot McKnight and he was kind enough to dialogue with me about the paper (William Cavanaugh also read my paper and gave me some helpful feedback). Scot pointed to Blomberg’s book and so I finally got around to finishing it. This book is an excellent study that examines table fellowship in the Old Testament, in the intertestamental period, and in the Greco-Roman world of the first century. Blomberg argues that Jesus is well-rooted in the Jewish practice of table fellowship, but what is radically new with Jesus is that he eats with the impure, the unclean, and the sinners because he believes that it is holiness, not sinfulness, that is contagious. Blomberg then concludes with a reflection on the importance of Christians recovering the practice of this type of contagious holiness through table fellowship. This is an excellent book.
2. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright. This is the new Mere Christianity, a top-notch reflection on Christian living today. I hope the folks back in Ontario that read this blog go out and buy this book. Wright breaks the book into three parts. The first part is a description of the contemporary situation defined by the cry for justice, the hunger for spirituality, the longing for relationships, and the quest for beauty. We desire these four things and yet they continually elude us, like echoes of a voice that spoke while we were sleeping. The second part is a description of the Christian story from God to Israel, to Jesus, to Pentecost, and the Church. The third part brings the first two parts together and focuses on worship, prayer, the bible, the Church, and the new creation.
3. The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform by Roger E. Olson. This book covers a lot of ground very quickly, as twenty centuries of Christianity are packed into 600 pages. However, it was a useful refresher, and a good one volume work on the history of the Church, the various movements in theology and the great thinkers from our past. The author’s biases do come through here and there (an Anabaptist bias, and one that is highly critical of any Greek influences on Christianity) but I suppose that that sort of thing is inescapable when it comes to writing history. Besides my own biases are fairly similar to Olson’s, so no harm done.
4. Kicking the Post out of Ultra-Modernity by Thomas C. Oden. This doesn’t really count as a book per se. It is a short encyclical that was originally given as a plenary address to the Evangelical Theological Society. As the title suggests, Oden is arguing that postmodernity is just a thinly disguised hypermodernity (a notion that is well inline with Lyotard’s definition of postmodernity), and thus contemporary Christians are faced with a deepening of the challenges modernity posed against Christianity. In response to these challenges Oden argues for a return to Scripture that recovers something of the broader tradition of exegesis. He also argues for a return to a “Christian world” in the sense that the world be understood at God’s world. Furthermore, in the section that I enjoyed the most, he argues that a willingness to suffer for truth is intrinsic to a Christian understanding of truth. Finally, he concludes by affirming the hope that God will continue to ensure the existence of his Church.
5. Growing in the Prophetic by Mike Bickle. Finally I find a half decent book written by a member of the recent charismatic movement. Bickle desires to bring together a serious study of Scripture and a commitment to the contemporary prophetic movement. He writes with humility, and is not afraid to illustrate his points with mistakes made by his congregation as they have journeyed through this. I don’t always agree with Bickle, but at least I didn’t get to the end of this book and want to throw it out.
6. The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger. In this work, Heidegger’s thesis is that the essence of technology is best described as a non-technological enframing that challenges humanity to reveal the actual as standing-reserve. Technology is essentially a way of revealing. It brings-forth (i.e. presences) nature as if everything is merely a supply of energy that can be unlocked, exposed, and stored. Heidegger’s definition counters the prevalent instrumental-anthropological definition of technology. His definition reveals the danger inherent to technology, for technology (as an enframing that challenges forth) blocks poesis, which is also a revealing that brings forth. Yet the discovery of the essence of technology also points the way to salvation. Thus, the question concerning technology is a question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, and the essential unfolding of truth propriates. Consequently, Heidegger urges the reader to focus upon poesis as the techne which most fully reveals truth, in order to break free from the hold that technology’s enframing has upon actuality. This is a great essay, and one that has left a permanent mark on all discussions about the relationship between technology and culture.
7. Down to This: squalor and splendour in a big-city shantytown by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. This book was a birthday gift from a friend, and it was an excellent gift. The author writes about his experience living for ten months in what was the largest hobo town in North America — Toronto’s very own Tent City. It was interesting to read this book since I know most of the neighbourhoods, places, and agencies that the author describes. He does an excellent job of providing an honest glimpse of what homelessness does to people. This is a fine example of truth-telling that does not romanticise, or villianise, the people described. Recommended reading.
8. Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut. My old tree-planting foreman has been telling me to read Vonnegut for years. I finally got around to reading this classic story about the bombing of Dresden at the end of WWII (Vonnegut was actually in Dresden as a P.O.W. when the bombing occurred — a bombing that killed more civilians than those killed at Hiroshima or Nagasaki). It’s hard to describe the feelings one gets from this book — sorrow, and laughter, and anger, and resignation. I guess the book does a pretty good job of reflecting what it’s like to live as broken people in a broken world. And so it goes.

Rights

In its most extreme and universal form, our constitutional rights are reducible to the right not to have to love our neighbour.
~ Curtis White, “The Spirit of Disobedience”
And this is why it is high time that the Western Church moved beyond talking about “human rights” and began talking about forgiveness followed by repentance, and reconciliation paired with cruciformity.

Sapere Aude!

Immanuel Kant once wrote that the Enlightenment could perhaps be summarised by a single imperative: Sapere aude! Think for yourself!
A few hundred years later, we would do well to consider whether or not thinking for ourselves is all it is cracked up to be. We all think for ourselves, and, consequently, we refuse to recognise the thoughts of others as more truthful, valid, or persuasive, than our own.
Enlightened Western culture set out to liberate itself from religion and Nietzsche proclaimed this liberation to be so complete that we even managed to kill God. Yet, I don't think that this is the case. Our liberation, our commitment to thinking for ourselves, has not turned us into atheists. It has turned us into pantheists. We are all gods in our own minds. I am the sole authority in my life. God is not dead — I have replaced him.
Of course, a return to pre-Enlightenment forms of domination is hardly appealing (although post-Enlightenment forms of domination are just as lacking in appeal). Thinking for ourselves is not a completely worthless exercise. Therefore, I simply want to suggest that we continue to think for ourselves but that we don't take our own thoughts too seriously. This corrective is especially important for those of us who are pursuing Christianity within the academy. We need to heed Paul's injunction in Romans 12: “do not be wise in your own estimation.”
So, I'll think for myself, but, when push comes to shove, I'll submit my thoughts to other authorities and allow them to correct me.

See no evil? [Loving Enemies]

During my time journeying with people on the margins I have known many people who have done horrible things. I have known, and been known by, crack dealers, pimps, pedophiles, rapists, torturers, and murderers. That’s a pretty horrible string of actions and titles.
But here’s the catch — of all the people I have known I have not been able to hate any of them. That is to say, I have learned to love every person I have met. Not because I have turned a blind eye to the things that they have done, but because I have seen something worth loving in each person. I have found it impossible to not show compassion to any of them — even though I tried hard to hate some of them at first. In all of these people I have caught a glimpse of somebody loved by God — despite the life-shattering violence they have experienced and the life-shattering violence they have inflicted on others. I have met broken people who have done evil things, but in all these relationships I have not met a single evil person. It is easy to call these people evil from a distance, but I challenge you to journey with them face to face and come to the same conclusions.
Furthermore, I think that this compassionate love is the way that Christians should respond to these people. After all, we are called to love even our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us. And this is premised upon the very character and actions of the Christian God. Here is a God who transforms enemies into friends, who loves so deeply that he loves and forgives even those who rejected him, mocked him, striped him, and crucified him. It is this, perhaps more than anything else, that sets the Christian God apart from all other gods. What other God was willing to undergo this humiliation? What other God takes evil seriously and still loves in a way that extends beyond evil, making evil impotent? As worshipers of this God, Christians are called to love even these people.
This is one of the reasons why I tend towards a hopeful universalism. If I, in all my fallenness, can love these people in my small way, does not God love them far more? If I am called to journey with them, to commit myself to loving even my enemies, and the enemies of my loved ones, is not God even more committed to this? It makes no sense for God to call us to love our enemies (because he loves his enemies) and then for God to go on to damn his enemies. It especially makes no sense when we come face to face with our enemies, and the enemies of our loved ones, and discover that there is something lovely within them. If I can see that within them, surely God can see far more. I suspect that I am only giving them a small taste of a far greater love. A love that is still to come. A love that will come when God comes down and heals all wounds, dries all tears, and makes all things new.

Question

Can somebody explain to me how putting a “Make Poverty History” banner on your blog helps to make poverty history?

The Need for Authorities

Only those who follow the church have a sure guarantee for the fact that, in their obedience to Christ, they have not really followed just their own know-it-all wisdom.
~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The von Balthasar Reader
Or, to put it in a more Protestant manner:
It is better to submit to an authority that is sometimes wrong, than it is to submit to no authority whatsoever.