New York Approves Same Gender Marriage

On the evening of Friday, June 24, 2011, the New York State Senate passed a bill legalizing same gender marriage.  When I heard the news I wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper.  This is what I wrote:

Late in the evening of June 24, 2011, the New York State Senate approved a bill legalizing same gender marriage.  The bill will become law when signed by the Governor.  The movement for marriage equality has scored a significant victory.  That movement is unstoppable in the long run.  Equality and the equal dignity of all of God's people cannot be denied forever.  I pray for the day when our state will end its discriminatory policy of denying the benefits and obligations of marriage to same gender couples and recognize the right of all people to be who God made them to be and to make their own decisions about their lives and about whom they love.

The Symbol of the Trinity

I recently added a post to this blog that has the title The Symbol of the Incarnation.  You'll find it immediately below this one.  I was prompted to write that piece (and an earlier blog post that also deals with the Incarnation) because as a member of the Pacific Northwest Conference, UCC, Committee on Ministry I regularly read ordination papers by recent seminary graduates that express a humanistic or unitarian Christology.  They see Jesus Christ as a great man, but only as a great man, not more.  The ordination candidates, and anyone else for that matter, who have a humanistic Christology that rejects the Incarnation also usually reject the other foundational symbol of the Christian faith, the Trinity.  That a denial of these two central Christian doctrines, Incarnation and Trinity, go together is not surprising.  They are closely related both historically and theologically, and they present us both with some of the same obstacles to faith and some of the same spiritual virtues.  My discussion of the need to retain and reclaim the Incarnation through a symbolic understanding of it will be incomplete unless it is complimented by a discussion of the Trinity and of the symbolic nature of Trinitarian language.  The purpose of this post is to provide that discussion.

The traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity states that God has a triune nature.  The doctrine says that God is Three in One, that God is at the same time three “persons” and one God.  The traditional names of the three persons are, of course, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Each of them is fully God and doesn’t need the others to be completely God, and God is not complete without all three of them.  There is one God, and God is three.  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the same, and they are different.  All three are uncreated; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (or from the Father and the Son if, like most western Christians and unlike any eastern Orthodox Christians, you accept the insertion of the word “filioque” into the creed that occurred in western Europe in the late first millennium CE).

One thing to keep in mind during any discussion of the Trinity is that it is almost impossible to say anything about the Trinity that the Christian tradition has not at some point declared to be a heresy.  The Persons of the Trinity are not three separate Gods, nor are they one undifferentiated God.  They are not three modes of God’s being.  They are not three ways in which a unified God relates to creation.  The Father is not superior to the Son or to the Holy Spirit.  That is, the Father is not a sort of supreme God over two lesser Gods.  The Holy Spirit is not a sort of lesser deity, even though a lot of Christians seem to think of the Holy Spirit that way.  God is not sometimes one of the Persons, at other times a second Person, and at other times a third Person.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard a member of my church say anything about the Trinity that wasn’t some sort of heresy or other.  I always assure them that that’s OK.  Heretics tend to be more interesting than people who strictly toe the orthodox line.  Still, it is truly almost impossible to say anything about the Trinity that isn’t a heresy.  And yet, with that truth in mind, I will now say more about the Trinity.

The classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity says that two totally incompatible things are both true at the same time.  God is One, and God is Three, which in ordinary worldly terms makes no sense.  So why would Christianity develop such an apparently nonsensical doctrine and make it a cornerstone of the Christian faith?  The answer, both historically and theologically, lies in the doctrine of the Incarnation.  For Christianity the experience of Jesus Christ as a human being who represented the presence of God in a unique way is foundational.  It came, and comes, first.  It led to the doctrine of the Incarnation.  For more on that development see my post “The Symbol of the Incarnation.” 

The doctrine of the Incarnation creates a problem for our understanding of God.  It says that God was fully present in Jesus Christ.  It says that, while Jesus was also fully human, he was fully God.  During the lifetime of the human being Jesus of Nazareth God was present on earth in him, which raises some significant questions.  If, during Jesus’ lifetime, God was on earth in him, does that mean that God wasn’t anywhere else during those thirty plus years at the beginning of the Christian era?  Jesus died of course.  Does that mean that God died?  (Yes, although I won’t spend much time on that particular question in this post.  For my thinking on the subject see Chapter 9 of Liberating Christianity.)  Jesus left the earth after his resurrection.  Does that mean that God has left the earth?  There was a lot of human history before Jesus was born.  Does that mean that God wasn’t present on earth in any way before Jesus was born?  The Trinity is Christianity’s way of dealing with these questions.

It deals with those questions quite brilliantly.  It says:  God was fully present on earth in Jesus Christ and was not fully present on earth in Jesus Christ at the same time.  It says that God left the earth with Jesus Christ and did not leave the earth in Jesus Christ at the same time.  It says God was present on earth in Jesus Christ, but also present on earth in other ways at other times.  As Trinity God can be completely in one place and in other places at the same time.  The Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, can be incarnate in Jesus, which means that God is fully incarnate in Jesus.  Yet the Father and the Holy Spirit, the First and Third Persons of the Trinity, can not be incarnate in Jesus while the Son is, even though they are one God.  The Incarnation drove Christianity to develop the Trinitarian understanding of God.  The Incarnation is impossible without it.

The Incarnation explains why Trinity, but the Trinitarian understanding of God turns out to have a great many more virtues than merely making the Incarnation possible.  One of the Trinity’s great virtues is that it makes God dynamic and relational.  A central concept in Trinitarian theology is perichoresis.  Perichoresis is a combination of two Greek roots.  Peri means around.  Choresis means to dance.  It is the root of our word choreography.  Perichoresis is, then, dancing around.  The persons of the Trinity engage in a perpetual, cosmic dance.  They move around, in, out, and through each other.  Perichoresis is a constant movement of the Persons of the Trinity.  They never stop.  They are never still.  They are dynamic, always moving.  They are never alone.  They move in constant relationship with one another.  Trinitarian theology says that it is in God’s very nature to be in movement and to be in relationship.  God relates to Godself in the Trinity.  God’s relational nature pours out of the Godhead and into relationship with creation.  To Christians immersed in Trinitarian thinking, which of course most Christians really aren’t, the monistic God of Judaism and the even more statically unified God of Islam seem inert, unmoving, un-relational.  That is not to deny that there is truth in those two great religious traditions.  I never deny that there is truth in other religions.  It is only to say that for Christians Trinity is important in part because it is not static.  The Trinitarian God of Christianity is dynamic and relational, characteristics that make God more accessible, more approachable, more intimate.

The other great virtue of the doctrine of the Trinity is precisely that it is incomprehensible.  How can incomprehensibility be a virtue?  It is a virtue because the one thing that we know about God with relative certainty is that God is and always will remain a profound, divine mystery to us humans.  Anyone who thinks that she knows what or who God is in God’s essence is wrong.  God is immanent in creation to be sure, but God also transcends creation absolutely.  God is totally other (totaliter aliter, the theologians say) from creation.  Humans are part of creation.  Humans therefore never can and never will know the true essence of God.  Any statement we make about God must immediately be followed by the negation of that statement.  God is love, for example, must be followed by God is not love in any way we humans can understand love.  The negation is necessary to preserve the mystery of God.

The orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity meets this standard for statements about God because it contains its own negation of anything it says about God.  God is one, it says; and God is not one.  God is three, it says; and God is not three.  God is the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, and God is not the Father, the First Person of the Trinity.  God is the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, and God is not the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity.  God is the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, and God is not the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity.  (By the way, we number the Persons of the Trinity only because we humans can’t say three things at once.  We have to put them in some kind of order.  God of course can say three things at once, so there is no hierarchy within the Trinity even though our human language makes it sound like there is.)  Any understanding of the Trinity that forgets the inherent self-contradiction in any statement about the Trinity is heresy.  It is heresy because it takes away the paradoxical nature of the Trinitarian understanding of God.

The notion that incomprehensibility can be a virtue is foreign to most of us in the western cultural tradition.  We want clarity.  We want firm answers.  As I mention in Liberating Christianity, I once heard the great historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin say that the western mind is characterized by three fundamental beliefs:  There is an answer to every question, there is only one correct answer to every question, and it is possible to know that answer.  Science, our culture’s primary epistemology, our primary way of knowing and discovering truth, is extremely uncomfortable with unanswerable questions.  The scientist keep searching for answers.  Classic examples today are the search for a unified theory that would explain all aspects of physical reality the way Einstein’s famous E=mc² and his general theory of relativity explain some aspects of physical reality, and the search to understand what happened during the tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang that our current theories cannot explain.  We don’t like unanswered questions.  We don’t like even to concede that there are unanswerable questions.  The essence of God is, however, an unanswerable question.  The Trinity preserves that unanswerability precisely because it doesn’t make any sense.

I have found it helpful to think of the Trinity as a Zen koan.  A Zen koan is an unanswerable question used in meditation to take the mind off of ordinary things.  The most famous is “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”  Another I heard recently is “what is the speed of dark?”   The Trinity asks:  What is One when it is Three?  What are Three when they are One?  You can’t answer those questions.  You can only meditate on them and see their incomprehensibility as pointing to and preserving the mystery of God.

It should be obvious by now that Trinitarian language is symbolic not factual.  That truth seems so obvious to me that I’m finding it difficult to come up with anything else to say about it.  Trinitarian language can’t be factual.  It simply makes no sense to try to understand the Trinity rationally, to try to understand it as fact.  It has those virtues I talked about above only when we are willing to understand it as symbol.  Like the Incarnation with which it is so closely related, the symbol of the Trinity powerfully connects us with God, but only if we can get over trying to understand it literally. 

As in the case of the Incarnation, I believe that the reason so many people today, including graduates from our mainline seminaries, have trouble accepting the Trinity is because, being creatures of their culture as we all are, they hear the doctrine literally, factually; and they can’t make sense out of it.  So they reject it, which really is a pity.  When we reject the Trinitarian understanding of God we reject something that is at the very heart of traditional Christianity.  We lose all of the virtues of the Trinitarian way of thinking about God.  Thinking of the Trinity as symbol rather than fact preserves it and all of its virtues.  As symbol, like any true religious symbol, we find our connection to God in it.  God reaches out to us through it.  The Trinity is definitely worth saving.  Symbol is the way to save it.  

The Symbol of the Incarnation

I have written in this blog before about the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.  Below you will find my post “On the Incarnation of Christ.”  That post states a good deal about my beliefs concerning the Incarnation.  Yet the matter seems to me so important, so central to a proper understanding of Christianity, and so widely misunderstood that I must say more about it.  That is what I intend to do here.

What is the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation?  It is the claim that Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians confess to be the Christ, God’s Anointed One, is at the same time fully human and fully divine.  It claims the impossible.  It claims that God, Creator of all that is, who infinitely transcends anything in creation, who is beyond all human comprehension, came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, lived a human life as Jesus of Nazareth, and died a human death in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. 

It is true that the earliest Christian documents that we have do not contain an incarnational understanding of Jesus Christ.  The earliest Christian documents that we have are the authentic letters of Paul.  For Paul Jesus is a human being whom God raised from the dead and made Lord, that is, ruler, of the world.  He is not himself precisely divine.  Paul is not entirely consistent on the point, for in the kenosis hymn of Philippians he does seem to describe Jesus as divine in origin and as having given up divinity by becoming human.  On the whole, however, for Paul Jesus is Lord and Savior without himself being or ever having been fully divine.  Neither is Jesus clearly and consistently divine in the Synoptic Gospels.  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus is the Christ, but that doesn’t make him divine.

The clearest biblical foundation for the doctrine of the Incarnation is found in the Gospel of John.  In the opening verses of John we read “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  Then, a few verses later, John says:  “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  He is referring to Jesus of course.  In the Gospel of John Jesus is identical with “the Father” throughout.  John is the incarnational Gospel.  John is also the latest Gospel.  When we read the New Testament documents for what they actually say rather than what we have been told they say, and when we read them in chronological order rather than in their traditional canonical order, we see that a fully incarnational understanding of Jesus Christ, or at least a fully incarnational language about Jesus Christ, arose late in the New Testament period.

The clear fact that the earliest Christians did not use fully incarnational language when talking about Jesus but later Christians did raises the question of why.  Why did the early Christian tradition develop the language of incarnation but do so only late in the New Testament period?  The answer to those questions lies, I am convinced, in the experience of the earliest Christians of Jesus.  Readers of Liberating Christianity, my book that was published in 2008, know that I believe that all human knowledge and all human truth is ultimately grounded in human experience.  It is no different with the earliest Christians' experience of Jesus.  It seems clear that those Christians who knew Jesus during his earthly life as well as those Christians who learned about him and experienced his spiritual presence after his death experienced in him the presence and the power of God in a unique way, a way unlike anything they had ever experienced before.  They experienced God in a new way in Jesus, and they learned about God’s nature from him in a new way as well. 

The earliest Christians were Jews, and Judaism wasn’t, and isn’t, at all comfortable with the idea that a human being could be God.  To them incarnation sounds like blasphemy, so the earliest Christians did not jump immediately to the language of incarnation to talk about their experience of Jesus. They did mine the Hebrew Scriptures for language and images with which to express their experience of Jesus.  They found the concept Messiah, and they called Jesus the Messiah or the Christ, the Greek equivalent of Messiah.  They found the suffering servant songs of Isaiah, and they saw such parallels between Isaiah’s suffering servant and Jesus that they called those passages a prediction of Jesus.  They took words from their religious tradition, their social milieu, and the political realm of the day, words like Lord (which means master, the one to whom one owes allegiance) and applied them to Jesus.  They took terms that the Romans applied to the emperor, including the terms savior and son of a god or of a divine one, and applied them to Jesus as well.  The early Christians clearly were searching for words and images to express their experience of Jesus.

They were struggling to understand where the intimate presence of God that they experienced in Jesus came from—and when it arose.  As the decades of the first Christian century passed they kept pushing the beginning of Jesus’ unique, intimate relationship with God farther and farther back in Jesus' life, and beyond.  For Paul that relationship arose only with Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.  For Mark, the earliest of the Gospels but written after Paul, Jesus’ special relationship with God arose at his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptizer.  For Luke and Matthew it arose at Jesus’ conception in Mary’s womb.  For John, the last of the Gospels to be written, it arose, as we have seen, before the creation of the world.  Once again we see the early Christians struggling to find words and images to express the experience they had of the powerful presence of God in Jesus.  We see their language moving more and more toward an expression of Jesus as divine.

In the end the image that they settled on was Incarnation.  Grounded in the Gospel of John, the doctrine of the Incarnation received its classical formulation in the symbol crafted by the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 CE.  By then Christianity had separated completely and finally from Judaism.  It had taken root in the Greek world, the Greek culture, of the eastern Roman Empire.  The bishops who gathered at Nicaea, under the watchful eye of the Emperor, who had a strong political interest in a unified Christianity, were, mostly at least, Greek.  It is therefore hardly surprising that they used the language of the Greek culture, of the Greek philosophy, of their time to express their understanding of who Jesus was and is.  They were dealing with two undeniable but seemingly incompatible realities.  Jesus had been a human being, a man, born of a woman and killed as a threat to the Empire.  Like every human being his life had a distinct beginning and a distinct ending.  He was human. Fully, completely, undeniably human.  Yet they also experienced the very presence of God in him.   It was the same experience Jesus’ followers had had since the time when he walked with them on earth.  There was a significant theological dispute at Nicaea, the dispute between the followers of Arius and the followers of Athanasius over the ontological status of Jesus.  It seems clear, however, that both sides were struggling to find appropriate and convincing language to express the two natures of the Christian experience of Jesus, the experience of him as human and as nonetheless somehow representing the presence of God.

In the end the Council of Nicaea sided with Athanasius and adopted what has become the classic formulation of orthodox Christian Christology.  Using philosophical categories with which the people of their time were generally familiar (and with which the people of our time are not familiar at all) they said that Jesus Christ was of one substance (homoousious) with God the Father.  They said that he had two natures (physis) in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis, an essentially untranslatable Greek word that means the essence or underlying reality of something.  This language is mostly incomprehensible today, and the fact that millions upon millions of Christians speak it every week in worship doesn’t change that fact.  Yet the experience that it seeks to express is not incomprehensible at all.  It is the experience of the mysteriously powerful presence of God in the human being Jesus of Nazareth.  It is the experience of the Incarnation.

The insight that what the New Testament writers and the bishops who formulated the classical statement of the Incarnation at Nicaea were struggling to find language with which to communicate an underlying experience of the presence of God in the human being Jesus suggests how we are to understand the language they chose.  They weren’t trying to state facts.  They were trying to express an experience.  They were trying to express an experience that transcended ordinary human experience.  On the one hand it was an experience of a human being like other human beings, but on the other hand it was an experience of God.  Human language about humans can be factual, can be understood literally.  Human language about God, however, can never be factual, can never be understood literally.  God utterly transcends our finite human language.  Language about God can only be symbolic and mythic.  I discuss the symbolic and mythic nature of religious language more fully in Liberating Christianity.  If the idea that language about God must necessarily be symbolic and mythic is new or foreign to you, I urge you to read my discussion of that issue in the book.  It is widely available on line or from the publisher, Wipf and Stock, at wipfandstock.com. 

The language of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is symbolic language, not literal, factual language.  I am convinced that the difficulty many people have with the Incarnational understanding of Jesus Christ stems from the fact that we hear the language of the Incarnation literally.  We hear it as a statement of alleged fact.  Hearing the language of Incarnation as a statement of a fact, however, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of that language. It is not factual.  It is symbolic.

The understanding of Incarnational language as symbolic rather than factual matters.  It matters because it makes the Incarnation accessible and believable to people whose factual understanding of that language has led them to reject the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.  It simply is true that the Incarnation makes no sense when it is understood literally.  No one can literally be God.  Certainly no one can be fully God and fully human at the same time if that claim is understood factually.  However, it makes perfect sense when it is understood as a symbolic statement.  As a symbolic statement it is grounded in the human experience of Jesus, but it points beyond its literal meaning to a transcendent, spiritual meaning.  It  becomes a means through which we find our connection with God.  It allows us to see the reality of God in the life, teachings, and death of Jesus Christ.  It gives us something we can understand, a human life, that points us toward, tells us about, and connects us with something we cannot otherwise understand, the nature and will of God.  In the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ God becomes accessible to us.  God becomes alive to us.  God reaches out to us, touches us, and claims us as God’s own. 

The symbolic understanding of the Incarnation makes it possible for us to retain and to preserve the basic Christian understanding that makes Christianity different from any other great religion.  The Incarnation is that traditional Christian doctrine that, along with the Trinitarian understanding of the nature of God, makes Christianity unique among the world’s religions.  When we lose the Incarnation, we lose the heart of what Christianity has always been.  Understanding the Incarnation symbolically allows us to embrace it despite its factual impossibility.

More than that, the symbolic understanding of the Incarnation allows us to embrace it precisely because of its factual impossibility.  The Incarnation is about God.  It is also about humanity, but mostly it is about God.  God so transcends our finite human cognitive capacities that God must always remain ultimately a mystery to us.  Like the closely related symbol of the Trinity, the symbol of the Incarnation preserves the mystery of God through paradox.  It says that two utterly incompatible things are both true at the same time.  It says that the infinite was fully present in the finite.  One of the great losses we experience when we lose the Incarnation is the loss of paradox.  All profound truth about God is paradoxical.  God is transcendent and imminent.  God is three and one.  God is infinite and present in finite creation.  The symbol of the Incarnation is paradox, and its paradoxical nature makes it more true, not less true.

The symbol of the Incarnation makes Jesus’ death meaningful.  I won’t restate here the theology of the cross that I set out in Liberating Christianity.  If you are not familiar with theology of the cross and how it offers an understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ death far superior to that given by the classical theory of atonement, that is, the theory of Jesus’ death understood as a substitutionary sacrificial atonement for human sin, I urge you to read chapters 8 and 9 of Liberating Christianity.  The point I want to make here is only that without the Incarnation Jesus’ death has no more meaning than the death of any other human being whom the powers killed because they could not stand his or her truth telling.  That the powers killed him and that they did so because they could not stand his truth telling certainly is true of Jesus, but it is also true of a great many other saints of the Christian tradition and of other great religious traditions.  In our times it was true of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example.  Christianity has always seen more meaning than that in Jesus’ death.  True, the meaning that Christianity has seen in Jesus’ death has mostly been expressed in terms of substitutionary sacrificial atonement, a brutal theory that makes God a cosmic child abuser more concerned with God’s own honor than with saving humankind.  Once again I urge you to read chapters 8 and 9 of Liberating Christianity if that statement puzzles or shocks you.  Classical atonement theory is not, however, the only way in which Christianity has understood the meaning of Jesus’ death.  The Incarnation is essential if that death, however it is understood,  is to have more meaning than does the death of a merely human martyr.  That theology of the cross requires Incarnation is indeed one of the primary reasons that I hold to the Incarnation.

Whenever I hear someone who self-identifies as a Christian deny the Incarnation and characterize Jesus as only human, albeit perhaps a very great and inspiring human, I want to ask at least a couple of pretty important questions.  If Jesus is only human, why should we follow him and not another of the many men and women throughout history who have been great moral teachers and who have died as martyrs?  If we understand Jesus as only human how does he reveal to us anything about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation?  If Jesus is merely human how do we know that God is nonviolent, compassionate, forgiving?  If Jesus is merely human how do we know that God is a God of justice, not justice for God but justice for God’s people, especially for the poor, the marginalized, and the outcast?  Perhaps some Christians with a humanist Christology can give some kind of answer to these and other important questions, but I have never heard a convincing answer to them.  To me these questions remain unanswerable.

Some Christians with what is essentially a Unitarian understanding of Jesus try to preserve a notion of divinity present in Jesus by saying that all humans contain a spark of the divine.  That may be true.  I will concede for our purposes here at least that it is.  Yet I know that there is a vast difference between the way God was present in Jesus and the way God may be present in me or any other human being other than Jesus.  Some may say that it is only a  difference in degree, but differences in degree can become so great that they become a difference in kind.  I believe that to be true of the difference between how God may be present in me and was present in Jesus.  The doctrine of the Incarnation preserves that difference in kind, a difference without which Jesus becomes just another human being, one whom there is no particular reason for us to follow.

To me the Incarnation is indispensible for true Christianity, and to me a symbolic understanding of the Incarnation is indispensible to Christianity’s preservation of the Incarnation.  Without the Incarnation Jesus has no more meaning than do a great many other great men and women.  Without a symbolic understanding the Incarnation is incomprehensible and cannot be maintained.  So let us cling to the Incarnation as essential to our Christian faith, and let us understand it symbolically so that it can be for us alive and life-giving, can be our very connection with God.

Why Won't Progressive Christians Claim Nonviolence as a Core Value?

There simply is no doubt that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence.  Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence in the Gospels is so well documented that it truly is not necessary for me to rehearse the evidence here.  Jesus believed in nonviolence.  Jesus taught nonviolence.  Jesus lived nonviolence.  Jesus showed us that nonviolence must be humanity’s way because it is God’s way.  Beginning in the fourth century CE the Christian church largely turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence, but that betrayal of Jesus does nothing to disprove the undeniable truth that nonviolence was a core value for Jesus and must be a core value for Christians.

So why won’t two of the leading expressions of progressive Christianity today expressly claim nonviolence as a core value?  I refer to the 8 Points of progressivechristianity.org (previously known as The Center for Progressive Christianity) and the Phoenix Affirmations.  The 8 Points of progressivechristianity.org and the Phoenix Affirmations are two of the most widely known and adopted statements of the core values of progressive Christianity, and neither of them expressly claims nonviolence as a core value.

I’ll start with progressivechristianity.org.  The closest that organization comes in its 8 Points to claiming nonviolence as a core value comes in Point 6.  That point states:  “By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who strive for peace and justice among all people.”  The web site tcpc.org shows a link to a study guide for this Point, but there is in fact no study guide.  The site says the study guide will be updated soon.  So we are left only with the few words of Point 6 itself.  It says progressive Christians strive for peace and justice among all people.  Fair enough.  So did Jesus.  Point 6, however, says nothing about how Jesus did that or how Jesus calls us to do that.  Most importantly, it simply contains no commitment to nonviolence, no recognition that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence, no statement that nonviolence must be the way of the Christian, and no call for nonviolence as a means of combating injustice in the world.  Nonviolence is so central to Jesus that I can’t help but wonder why.

The Phoenix Affirmations are a set of twelve “affirmations” put together by a group of progressive clergy in the Phoenix, Arizona, area.  They have been widely propagated by Rev. Eric Elnes through his book The Phoenix Affirmations:  A New Vision for the Future of Christianity.  The twelve Phoenix Affirmations don’t come even as close to a statement of the value of nonviolence as do the 8 Points of progressivechristianity.org.  The closest they come even to naming peace and justice as core values as progressivechristianity.org does is a statement that “Christian love of neighbors includes being advocates for the oppressed.”  That’s a long, long way from stating a commitment to nonviolence.  Again, nonviolence is so central to Jesus that I can’t help but wonder why.

I of course do not know why progressivechristianity.org and the Phoenix Affirmations do not claim nonviolence as a core value.  I have never met Eric Elnes, so have never asked him that question.  I did once ask Fred Plummer, the main figure in what at the time was The Center for Progressive Christianity, why the 8 Points do not mention nonviolence, but I got no meaningful reply.  I got the sense that the question had never occurred to him before.  So I cannot answer my question of why these organizations do not claim nonviolence as a core value of progressive Christianity in their Points or Affirmations.  I can only speculate.  I can only examine some of the dynamics of American and Christian history and culture than may explain why these two otherwise praiseworthy statements of the basics of progressive Christianity shy away from an explicit commitment to nonviolence.  That is what I now propose to do.

The primary dynamic that causes even otherwise progressive Christians to stay away from the nonviolence of Jesus as a core value is, I think, how far Christianity has strayed from Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE.  Shortly after establishment Christianity developed the doctrine of the “just war,” which was a way to justify Christians fighting to defend the now supposedly Christian Roman Empire.  That initial abandonment of the teachings of Jesus, that initial capitulation to the interests and values of empire, opened the door to Christian justification of violence.  It wasn’t long before Christians had abandoned Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence altogether.  Before long we had Christians fighting Christians in the political strife of Europe.  We had Christians using massive violence (by the standards of the time at least) against Muslims in the Crusades and against Jews in the pogroms of both western and eastern Europe.  All pretense  was gone, and in our own time (or shortly before it) we had European Christians slaughtering each other (not to mention the Jews and others) with reckless abandon, all of them convinced that God was on their side.  Here in the United States Christianity became the lapdog of American empire, blessing genocide against Americans Indians, the brutalizing of Africans, and engaging in religious imperialism in Hawaii and elsewhere that went hand in hand with cultural, economic, and political imperialism.  We simply forgot that Christians are supposed to be nonviolent.  Most of us still haven’t remembered.

Violence is so engrained in American culture, and Christianity has so participated in and blessed that violence, that opposing violence in the name of Jesus Christ carries great political risk in the United States today.  Raising nonviolence as an issue produces great tension and dissention even in our churches.  Most Christians see nothing un-Christian about violence as long as it is employed in a cause of which they approve.  Including an express commitment to nonviolence in statements like the 8 Points and the Phoenix Affirmations would produce significant opposition to those statements even in Christian churches where many people might agree with the other things contained in those statements.  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were disagreement over nonviolence even among the progressive Christians who drafted the 8 Points and the Phoenix Affirmations.  Perhaps those statements don’t include nonviolence because there was no consensus about it among their authors.

Progressive Christianity, as expressed in the 8 Points, the Phoenix Affirmations and elsewhere, goes a long way toward recapturing authentic Christianity, toward recapturing the actual teachings of Jesus on issues like justice and peace.  Yet the reluctance of many otherwise progressive Christians to embrace nonviolence the way Jesus embraced nonviolence weakens their witness and renders their commitment to authentic Christian values incomplete.  The absence of nonviolence from the 8 Points is the primary reason I have not urged my church to affiliate with The Center for Progressive Christianity, now progressivechristianity.org.  I plan soon to ask my adult education group to study the Phoenix Affirmations, but if we do I will certainly point out to them the absence of a commitment to Christian nonviolence in those affirmations.  Nonviolence is the way of Christ, it is the way of God, and it must be the way of the Christian.  I am profoundly disappointed when my progressive Christian sisters and brothers hold back from committing themselves to Christian nonviolence.

Superheroes of the Apocalypse

It’s getting to be summer movie time, and I’ve noticed something about this year’s movies.  Several of them are films based on comic book superheroes.  Examples include “X-men:  First Class” and “Green Lantern.”  Of course, we’ve had movies based on comic book superheroes for a long time now.  Batman, Superman, and Spiderman have become movie franchises, spawning numerous iterations of their heroic tales.  At the level of story these movies rarely if ever rise above the level of the comic books on which they are based.  Their characters are one dimensional and their plots simplistic and unbelievable.  Yet the genre never dies.  It seems we can’t get enough of superhuman heroes battling it out with and defeating really villainous villains who threaten the peace and good order of our cities.  As I have watched the trailers for this summer’s batch of superhero movies on television something has occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before.  I want here to explore the notion that superhero stories are our secular culture’s version of apocalyptic literature.

Apocalyptic literature is a recognized genre in theological and biblical studies.  “Apocalyptic” comes from a Greek word that simply means revelation, but literature designated as apocalyptic has some specific defining characteristics.  In apocalyptic literature God breaks into human history, violently, to destroy evil and those who perpetrate it and reward the faithful with justice and peace.  There are several examples of apocalyptic literature in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In the Hebrew Bible the book of Daniel is an example of apocalyptic literature.  It condemns the empires of the world as thoroughly corrupt and evil, then envisions “one as a Son of Man” coming from on high to destroy the evil empires of the world and make matters right.  The best example of apocalyptic literature in the New Testament is of course the book of Revelation.  In that book, by far the most violent book in the entire Bible, God sends plague after calamitous plague on the earth to destroy evil, specifically, to destroy the Roman Empire (which Revelation calls Babylon).  Then, after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have done their brutal work, God sends down from heaven a new Jerusalem, a city of peace in which there are no tears and no death and in which God resides in the midst of the people.  In all of this apocalyptic literature divine intervention is required to set matters right on earth.  Mere humanity is not up to the task.  In all of this apocalyptic literature the divine intervention is violent.  Violent divinity destroys violent humanity.

Apocalyptic literature tends to arise under specific historical circumstances.  It arises in times of persecution and great deprivation.  It arises when people lose hope.  The book of Daniel arose in a time of persecution of the Jewish faith by Greek rulers.  The book of Revelation arose in a time of persecution of nascent Christianity by Rome.  Apocalyptic literature appears when people feel overwhelmed by oppressive forces that they believe they are powerless to control or to defeat.

In superhero comics and the movies made from them superhuman heroes appear to defeat superhuman villains.  The setting of these stories is always a world in which the ordinary forces of human good are inadequate to defeat superhuman evil.  The Batman stories are a particularly good example.  Villains appear with superhuman powers, often as the result of some kind of mutation or mutilation by powers that not even they can control.  The Joker, Catwoman, and the Penguin are only partly human.  They have outsized evil ambitions and powers, or at least abilities, that create the possibility that they may indeed fulfill those ambitions.  Police Commissioner Gordon is at a loss.  He represents the normal human forces for good, for the rule of law and safety for the citizens of Gotham City.  All he can do it appeal to a superhero, Batman, to come to the rescue.  He shines the Bat Signal into the sky, that is, toward heaven, and the superhero appears.  Batman, who is human and yet somehow more than human, does what the ordinary humans in the story cannot.  He defeats the evil schemes of the super villain.  He restores order, then turns the city back over to the mere humans.

Note the similarities to apocalyptic literature..  In both types of literature the forces of evil and oppression are too strong for ordinary humans to overcome.  In both types of literature the humans turn to a superhuman force for help, in apocalyptic literature to God and in superhero literature to the superhero.  The power to whom the people have appealed intervenes, and intervenes violently.  In both types of literature evil is defeated through a liberal application of violence.  In neither type of literature does the transcendent power that intervenes, whether divine or mostly human, have any compunctions at all about using violence.  Through violence order, peace, and justice are restored.

The first superhero in American culture was Superman, who was created in the 1930s.  He gained wide recognition in American culture through a television series in the 1950s.  The Superman movie franchise began in the late 1970s.  Thus Superman appeared at a time when the world was indeed threatened by great evil.  The 1930s saw the rise of Nazi Germany and the growing strength of the Communist Soviet Union.  The world of the 1930s was a very scary place, and Superman appeared.  Most superheroes battle super villains.  Superman, somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t.  That characteristic of superhero literature would appear later.  Superman’s targets are merely human, but Superman clearly demonstrates another characteristic that superhero literature has in common with apocalyptic.  Not only does he have superhuman powers, he comes from beyond the earth.  He comes from the sky, the mythic location of heaven.  He isn’t divine exactly.  He is mortal, but he is no mere human mortal.  He has superhuman strength, x-ray vision, and he can fly.  He is a being from above who comes to smite those who plot evil, much like God in apocalyptic literature.

After World War II and the advent of atomic weapons the villains that superheroes battled came to have super powers themselves, and they were often the products of failed science experiments that at least sometimes involved radiation, so closely identified of course with nuclear weapons.  In the atomic age the threat to our wellbeing seemed to be more than human.  Nuclear weapons seemed to be a force unto themselves, dictating the policies of the superpowers in a seemingly endless arms race that threatened to annihilate life on earth.  The villains of the superhero comics can be seen, I think, as mythic representations of the power of death and destruction that seemed to be running unchecked through the world.  The superhuman superheroes of these stories were mythic representations of the human yearning for safety and for a way to control and defeat the powers of evil over which we seemed to have no control.

And that, after all, is what apocalyptic literature is all about.  The Book of Revelation isn’t a prediction of, much less a blueprint for, a coming end of the world.  It is a mythic expression of a yearning for peace and justice in the world that seemed beyond the power of mere humanity to effectuate.  Because the powers that were inflicting injury and perpetuating injustice used violence as their means of maintaining order and bringing about a kind of peace, and because the violence of the Roman Empire seemed so unstoppable, the mythic imagination of the author of the book was stuck in the paradigm of violence.  He imagined God as being as violent as Caesar, or more so.  He imagined God using divine violence to overcome imperial violence.  The violence he attributes to God is not a revelation from God, it is a projection of a limited human imagination onto God.

Today we are projecting the violence of the forces of evil onto our superheroes.  They use violence to defeat violence, just as in apocalyptic literature God uses violence to defeat violence.  The continued and even increased popularity of the superhero genre in our time is a symptom of our fear and our hopelessness in the face of systemic evil, the evil of empire, the evil of violence and injustice that the world never seems to overcome.  Their popularity tells us that people have lost hope in the ability of mere humanity ever to overcome evil and establish a world of peace and justice.  They are a mythic expression of our hope for a better world, but they are a mythic expression that, like apocalyptic, doesn’t rise above the violence that we see in those forces of evil at work in the world.

Christianity offers a different vision.  Although for reasons that pass understanding Revelation is in the Christian Bible, it is profoundly un-Christian in its depiction of God and Jesus Christ as violent.  It is profoundly un-Christian in its depiction of divine violence as the solution to earthly violence.  Jesus Christ gives us a different vision.  In him we have from God a vision of divine nonviolence as the solution to earthly violence.  We have a vision of divine justice as the antidote to earthly injustice.  Jesus makes a very bad superhero.  He doesn’t kill anyone.  He doesn’t even try to kill anyone.  Instead he condemns violence even in the face of his own violent death and calls us to lives of creative, active nonviolent resistance to evil.  The way of Jesus doesn’t work in a comic book.  It doesn’t work in a summer blockbuster movie.  Jesus doesn’t blow anything up.  He doesn’t zap anyone with a death ray.  He just shows us God’s way.  He shows us that our way must be nonviolent because God is nonviolent.  He’s no superhero of the Apocalypse.  He is Immanuel, God with us.  In him we find the wisdom and the strength to oppose the forces of evil with love, of violence with nonviolence, of oppression with justice.  It’s not the way of the superhero.  It is the way of God.

The Folly of Afghanistan

I just heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton say with a perfectly straight face that in Afghanistan General Petraeus has always stressed that we must do everything we can to reduce civilian casualties.   Are they kidding?  Do they really not know?  There is one--and only one--surefire way to prevent all US-caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan.  Get out!  Stop shooting!  Stop bombing!  We kill civilians because we try to kill Taliban, or al Qaeda, or “insurgents,” or whoever.  In a country where, like Vietnam forty years ago, the supposed enemy is indistinguishable from noncombatant civilians, conducting military operations will inevitably lead to civilian casualties.  There is no way to avoid them.  Innocent people will mistakenly be identified as the enemy.  We will kill them.  It has happened before.  It will happen again.  Bombs aimed at supposed enemies will miss their target.  Innocent people will be killed.  It has happened before.  It will happen again.  People identified as enemy targets will be mingled in with innocent people.  We will shoot at them, we will bomb them, and the innocent people around the targets will be killed.  It has happened before.  It will happen again.  Do you really want to avoid civilian casualties?  Get out!  Stop shooting!  Stop bombing!  That will stop the US-caused civilian casualties.  It is the only thing that will stop the US-caused civilian casualties.

Stopping US-caused civilian casualties is only one of the myriad reasons for us to get out of Afghanistan.  For us to do it now.  For us to do it as quickly as is logistically possible.  There are a great many others.  For starters, no foreign power has ever successfully occupied and pacified Afghanistan for long.  The British couldn’t do even when they controlled neighboring Pakistan right next door, which we certainly do not.  The Soviets couldn't do it even though they were right next door.  When Bush invaded Afghanistan my immediate reaction was:  Did we learn nothing from the Soviets’ experience in Afghanistan?  But then I guess I forgot.  We’re different.  We’re America.  We’re the good guys.  We can do anything.  Other people’s experiences are irrelevant to us.  I forgot the lies of American exceptionalism, that reigning ideology of both of our major political parties. 

There is also the fact that Afghanistan is essentially ungovernable—by anyone!  Afghanistan is not a nation.  It never has been.  It is an area defined by the old European imperial powers (by Britain and Russia in particular) as a state, but it is not a nation.  It is basically a collection of different tribes.  In most of the country Kabul is irrelevant.  People answer not to a centralized government but to their local warlord.  Beyond that, such government as exists is incurably corrupt.  What we Americans call corruption is a way of life in much of the rest of the world, including Afghanistan.  The corruption of the Karzai government is obvious.  The President’s brother is at least rumored to be a major drug producer.  Corruption may be normative to the Afghans, but it means we can never create a centralized government that we will recognize as truly legitimate.  We may be trying to produce a stable, non-Islamist state in Afghanistan.  We say we are.  It can’t be done.  Afghanistan is ungovernable in any way that looks like effective government to us Americans.

We have no clear, attainable military objective in Afghanistan.  In that regard, as in so many others, Afghanistan is President Obama’s Vietnam.  I am committed to nonviolence, as readers of this blog know.  Yet even I know that it is basic military doctrine that you don’t engage in military action unless you have, among other things, a clear, attainable, measurable military objective and a clear, workable exit strategy.  In Afghanistan we don’t.  It’s obvious that we don’t.  We should get out now.

Our military adventure in Afghanistan is bankrupting us.  We are spending something like $2,000,000,000 a week in Afghanistan.  At least, that 's one figure I heard recently.  Afghanistan is a black hole militarily, but it is therefore also a black hole financially.  The US government hasn’t paid its way on anything in ages, largely because we won't force rich people to pay their fair share of the cost of government.  Our government certainly is not paying its way for the Afghan.  It looks like the absurdly ideological Republicans in Congress may refuse to raise the US debt limit, thereby causing a world-wide economic meltdown.  The Afghanistan war is a major factor, although certainly not the only one, in our need to keep borrowing more and more money. 

Afghanistan is Vietnam for our time.  It is certainly true that nowhere near as many Americans are being killed in that war as were killed in the significantly shorter Vietnam war.  That fact, combined with the fact that we have no military draft and that the war is therefore being fought by volunteers, is why we Americans aren’t out in the streets in our millions demanding an end to our military activity in Afghanistan.  With those differences, and I suppose a few others, Afghanistan is today’s Vietnam.  It is an unwinnable war with no clear or attainable military objectives in a hostile, foreign country where you can’t tell the enemy from the civilians. The only sensible thing for us to do is to get out, and to do it now. 

Because President Obama won’t do that, I am very unlikely to vote for him in next year’s election.  He is engaged in a folly, a murderous, vastly expensive folly.  Because the US won’t get out of Afghanistan our protestations about trying to avoid civilian casualties ring hollow and hypocritical.  We need to get out, and we need to do it now.