Thoughts on Russia Prompted in Part by a Book by Masha Gessen

 

Thoughts on Russia Prompted in Part by a Book by Masha Gessen.

March 27, 2022

 

I just finished reading the book The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen.[1] It is a very impressive book about how Russia developed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gessen’s book prompted some of the comments I make here. Others are only mine. Given the crisis the current Russian invasion of Ukraine has created, I hope you will find my comments interesting and helpful.

Gessen contends that after the Soviet Union began to fall apart in the late 1980s and was gone late in 1991, the Russian people lost the only identity they had been permitted to have through the seventy-four years of Soviet communism. They no longer knew who they were or what Russia was. Gessen explains that development in part by making a distinction between two types of freedom. There is ”freedom to” and “freedom from.” Both types of freedom probably sound positive to those of us from the West, but the Russian people experienced them differently. “Freedom from” sounds to me at least like freedom from all of repression of the Soviet years, but “freedom from” played differently in Russia. To the Russians, it was freedom from the security and stability of life in the USSR. In that system everyone at least knew what their place was in the tightly controlled, hierarchical structure of rule by the Communist Party. Gessen says that after Stalin’s death in 1953 the Party used infrequent bits of random terror to keep everyone slightly off balance, slightly apprehensive. In that state of affairs, the last thing most of the people wanted to do was upset the system that ordered their lives and gave them meaning as citizens of a world power engaged in the supposedly great socialist experiment of building communism. Gessen cites research that shows that in the three decades (a few years less than that when she wrote the book) since the end of the USSR, what the Russian people have wanted most is a return to the stability of the Soviet system. They also believe that only a strong leader can give them that stability. They have developed a nostalgia for Josef Stalin. He became for them a great hero because he had established a stable order and had defeated the Germans in the Great Patriotic War (which we call World War II). They either don’t know or just overlook the fact that he was one of the great monsters of human history.

Gessen says that in the first years after 1991 it looked like Russia was developing at least in the direction of a Western style liberal democracy. Gessen posits however that liberal democracy never had a chance in Russia. She says it didn’t because the people were more interested in stability and security than in Western style democratic freedoms. I think she’s right about that, but I would add another element to the dynamic that made it extremely unlikely that Russia would become a bigger version of today’s Germany or France. That factor is Russian history going back long before the Soviet communists arrived on the scene. There has never been in Russia anything at all like the democratic systems of western Europe and the United States in which the people actually elect their leaders and the law protects their individual rights. After the revolution of 1905 there was something called the Duma that looked like a parliament, but the tsar was free to veto or just disregard anything the Duma did. After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, there was for a while the Provisional Government that was made up mostly of people committed to western style democracy. They were however utterly ineffective is doing anything that Russia really needed at the time. Most of all, they didn’t get Russia out of World War I, where the Russians were taking a licking from the Germans. The Bolshevik coup of November 1917, (October in the calendar Russia was using at the time) put an end to the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks won the civil war that followed. In 1922 they created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which became one of the least democratic, most oppressive state systems the world has ever known.

Gessen argues that President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has created a political system that has in common with the Soviet Union that it has a patina of democracy superimposed over a totalitarian regime.[2] The system looks like a democracy. Putin’s regime is not as repressive as the Soviets had been. There are elections for the president and a few other positions. Yet on the inside the system functions in much the same way that the Soviet system did. The state has concentrated essentially all political power in the office of the president. It has concentrated economic power in a few people who are loyal to it. Owners of large businesses who criticize the government are likely to have the state take their businesses away from them and give them to people more loyal to Putin. Those former owners may also face imprisonment on false charges (usually of financial wrongdoing), expulsion from the country, or even murder. Political and economic power in Putin’s Russia are highly centralized and controlled by the government.

Gessen says that the post-Soviet regime in Russia uses warfare as a way of looking like the strong state the people want. Her examples are Russia’s war in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008 and the Russian takeover of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. She also mentions the secessionist movements in the eastern part of Ukraine called the Donbas, movements Russia has supported with military aid. She wrote this book several years before Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, so she doesn’t mention it. It does however fit the pattern she describes perfectly.

In each of the instances of war Gessen mentions, and in the current invasion of Ukraine, Putin has copied the example of Adolf Hitler. In 1938, after getting Great Britain and France to let him do it, Hitler invaded and occupied the border regions of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland after the Sudeten mountains. The population of the Sudetenland was predominantly German. Hitler claimed that he did it to defend the Germans of the region who, he said, the Czechs were oppressing. He said those Germans should never have been included in Czechoslovakia when that country was created after World War I but should always have been part of the German homeland.

Putin says exactly the same thing about people who are linguistically and culturally Russian but who live in former Soviet republics other than Russia. There are significant numbers of such people in all of the former Soviet republics, but this demographic circumstance is particularly apparent in Ukraine. There are areas within the independent nation of Ukraine where the population is majority Russian not Ukrainian. These areas include Crimea, the Donbas, and the city the Ukrainians call Kharkiv, and the Russians call Kharkov, located in northeast Ukraine near the Russian border. There are many Russians elsewhere in Ukraine too. There are also many Ukrainians living in Russia, but they don’t seem to be an issue for Putin.

Putin presents himself as the protector of the Russians in Ukraine against Ukrainian oppression. He has even accused the Ukrainians of genocide against those Russians, never mind that there isn’t a shred of evidence that the Ukrainians have ever done any such thing. He says the majority Russian parts of Ukraine should never have been in Ukraine in the first place. Ukraine’s current border with Russia is the border of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic when the Soviet Union dissolved. Except in the far west of Ukraine where the border between the USSR and the nations of eastern Europe was changed after World War II, most of the border between Russia and Ukraine was set by communist bureaucrats in Moscow back in the 1920s. Putin says Russia accepted that border when the USSR broke up only because Russia was so weak at the time that it could not accomplish any revision of the border. He speaks of Russia having “lost” the Russians of Ukraine and elsewhere when the Soviet Union dissolved and each of the fifteen constituent republics of the country became independent states.

There is another aspect of Putin’s understanding of Ukraine that Gessen mentions briefly. There are today three nations in which the majority population is east Slavic. They are Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Linguists say there are three east Slavic languages—Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian. In the days of the Russian Empire the Russians considered Ukrainian and Belorussian to be only dialects of Russian not separate languages. No reputable linguist today agrees with that assertion. Putin does. He says that the three east Slavic peoples are actually only one people, some of whom speak a rather difficult to understand dialect of Russian. I am sure virtually no Ukrainian or Belorussian person agrees with him. Yet Putin makes that assertion in support of his desire to unite all east Slavic people in one restored Russian empire. The leader of Belorussia today is a close ally of Putin’s, so we hear of no trouble between those two nations. Most Ukrainians, however, want their country to align itself with NATO and the European Union not with Russia. It may well be that Putin thought that by invading Ukraine he could oust the current government and put in one that would bring Ukraine into Russia’s orbit. If so, so far that effort has failed.

There are many other interesting parts of Gessen’s book. Here’s one of them. I knew that several years ago the Russian government enacted a law that prohibits what it calls “homosexual propaganda.” No one in Russia may advocate gay rights or do much of anything in defense of LGBTQ+ people without violating that law. I didn’t know just how that law came about. As Gessen tells it, anti-gay propagandists, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Putin’s government made a direct connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. We know that there is not such connection. Most of the men who sexually molest boys are straight. Still, anti-gay bigots in Russia whipped the Russian people into an anti-gay frenzy. Innocent men were accused of sexually abusing boys. The advocates of the law shouted, “We must protect the children!” Predictably, violence against men who were gay or who someone only thought were gay increased. LGBTQ+ people in Russia have been driven back into the closet where they had been under the Soviets. As Gessen tells it, the cultural conditions which produced that terrible law have made life for sexual minorities in Russia extremely difficult.

Putin’s regime’s assault on gays is actually part of a larger aspect of Putin’s agenda. He is trying to recreate the Soviet Union, or perhaps more accurately the Russian Empire, as closely as he can. He wants Russia again to have the dominance it once had over all of the former Soviet/Russian empire. He knows of course that there was a sharp ideological divide between the USSR and the West during the Cold War. The Soviet Union represented totalitarian communism. The West, including primarily the United States, represented free market economics and political democracy which protected individual rights. Now Putin, as far as he’s concerned, has created a divide between western social liberalism and Russian social conservatism. He sounds much like our American evangelical bigots. He says Western liberal values are destroying the family, and he claims to be the guardian of traditional family values. He sees Russia as the protector of what he considers to be collective social wellbeing whereas the West puts too much emphasis on the individual. He claims to be defending traditional Christian values against Western secularism.

In this regard he has an ally in the Russian Orthodox Church. There is much that is wonderful about Orthodox Christianity. Its liturgy is powerful even if you don’t understand the words the priests are saying. The Orthodox churches’ position on social issues is definitely not one of the wonderful things about them. Those churches, of which the Russian Orthodox Church is by far the largest, are and always has been radically conservative in their views on social and moral issues. The Orthodox churches also have a long tradition of supporting the government and the ruling elites of the countries of which they are a part regardless of what those governments and elites actually stand for. That tradition goes all the way back to the fourth century CE when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire. The patriarch of Moscow openly campaigns for Putin in Russia’s rigged presidential elections. The Russian Orthodox Church enthusiastically supports Putin’s social bigotry and is in no way a moral counterweight to it.

Does Putin really believe the things he says about LGBTQ+ people being a threat to the family? Does he really think male homosexuality and pedophilia go together? There’s no way to know, but it really doesn’t matter. What matters is the way he uses social conservatism to whip up political support for himself and his political allies. He uses it to give Russia a new identity to replace the old communist one Russia lost when the Soviet Union folded. He uses it to generate support for him and his policies by making a distinction between Russia and West much as one existed in what he considers to have been the good old days of the USSR.

Putin’s ideology and personality cause him to take some positions that are fanciful but dangerous. He tells the Russian people that the United States is working to extend its political and economic domination over all the earth. He may be right about that, but he also says that the United States instigates and finances things like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine of late 2004 and early 2005 that drove a pro-Russian (and horribly corrupt) president of Ukraine out of the country. He seems to believe, or at least he says he believes, that the US is out to bring about regime change in Russia. President Biden’s recent statement that Putin cannot remain in power plays directly into this narrative of Putin’s. It gives him strong evidence to support his claim and to generate support among the Russian people.

As the subtitle of her book states, Gessen believes that Russia is once again a totalitarian state of the kind it was under the Soviet communists. Putin’s government doesn’t look like the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the outside, but under a cover of democracy it operates in essentially the same way. Putin has condemned the communist ideology of the USSR, but he wants to recreate the USSR in every other respect. His passion to reestablish Russian dominance over what was the USSR makes him a continuing threat to peace in that part of the world. He will remain a threat regardless of how his invasion of Ukraine works out. I hope and pray that he will not do in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, each of them like Ukraine a former Soviet Socialist Republic, what he has done in Ukraine. Unlike Ukraine, each of them is a member of NATO. Each is covered by Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says that an attack on any NATO member is an attack on all NATO members. The last thing in the world NATO needs is a war with Russia, one of the world’s major nuclear powers. I hope that Putin realizes that the last thing Russia needs is a war with NATO.

---

[1] Gessen, Masha, The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, (Riverhead Books, New York, 2017).

[2] The various constitutions of the USSR over the course of its existence did things like establish free elections and guarantee rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. Those constitutions were merely window dressing. No Soviet citizen was allowed to raise the guarantee of rights in the constitution as a defense when charged with having said or written the wrong thing.

Grace Universal, Unconditional, and Irrevocable

 

Grace Universal, Unconditional, and Irrevocable

A Personal Confession of Faith

March 23, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

 

Here’s a truth we all need to think about. Both major types of western Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, are grounded in a negative theological and anthropological concept. They both posit that there is something radically wrong with the relationship between God and us human beings. Whether they accept the hoary concept of original sin or not, they both begin with the understanding that there is something radically wrong with us from which we need to be saved. Most Christians believe that there is something we must do in order to be saved, though doing something includes not doing some things. Some think we must obey the dictates of some ecclesial institution. Others think we must believe the right things. Those Christians may not see believing the right things as a work that we must do to be saved, but it is. Christianity starts with the notion that there is something existentially wrong with us humans, and we’d sure better do something about it.

But what if we upend our Christian faith and begin not from a place of need but from a place of grace? I am convinced that God’s universal, unconditional, and irrevocable grace is indeed our starting point as human beings. So much of Christianity grounds its understanding of the relationship between God and humanity in the second creation story in the biblical book of Genesis not with the first one. In that second one the first two humans disobey God and are expelled from a paradise called the Garden of Eden. They are exiled into a life of hard toil and painful childbirth. We say they have “fallen.” They are expelled from the immediate presence of God. Then we say that because of them we’re all “fallen.” We’ve supposedly fallen from God’s grace and must do something to get ourselves back into it.

What does human existence and our relationship with God look like if we start not from the second biblical creation story but from the first one? In that story God creates woman and man together, not separately as in the second story. In the first story God places no restrictions on God’s people (other perhaps than making them vegetarians—see Genesis 1:29-30). There’s nothing in the first story about people being expelled from the immediate presence of God. Instead, God blesses God’s people. Genesis 1:28a. Then God sees everything that God has made, including human beings, and finds that “indeed, it was very good.” Genesis 1:31a. The Bible begins not with sin and alienation but with blessing. God does nothing to God’s humans other than create and bless them; and God finds not that the humans have done something bad and become existentially bad in themselves but that they are very good. So let us begin our analysis here not with sinful people and alienation from God but with very good people blessed by God.

Now, we all know of course that we humans aren’t just good, moral people. We all know that humans bring much evil into God’s good world. We seem to be incorrigibly violent, greedy, and selfish. We cause much avoidable suffering among God’s people. We inflict much avoidable damage on God’s good creation. We all experience pain in our lives. We are all mortal. We are limited, finite creatures. Though God created us, we are neither God nor gods. We are therefore far from perfect.

What does our being far from perfect say about our relationship with God? Our faith mostly says it creates an existential crisis in that relationship. Yet it seems to me that the answer to this question depends on from which side of the God-human relationship we are looking at that relationship. From our human side of the relationship with God we have to be honest. We damage our relationship with God all the time. As Paul says, we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. Our sin essentially boils down to the myriad ways we push God away. We find it difficult if not impossible consistently to live the way we know God wants us to live.

We don’t like living with difficult or impossible things. So we relieve our discomfort over those things in various ways. Some of us relieve it by doing, or attempting to do, the things that some variety of Christianity tells them they have to do to get right with God. Some relieve it by convincing themselves that God doesn’t care how they live. Some relieve the pain by ignoring a God they may reluctantly concede is real but they more or less wish wasn’t. Others do it by denying the reality of God altogether. Many people of course don’t relieve the discomfort at all. They just live with the comfort of knowing that they are not perfect, though just living with the discomfort is neither psychologically nor spiritually healthy, which doesn’t stop a lot of people from doing it. I want here to suggest a way of dealing with our knowledge that we sin and fall short of the glory of God that I am convinced is more psychologically, spiritually, and theologically sound and healthy than any of these other ways of dealing with our existential pain around our relationship with God.

That way is to do the best we can to look at the relationship between God and us humans not from our human side of the relationship but from God’s side. Of course, God ultimately remains unknowable mystery, but we humans, or at least some of us, are driven to understand God anyway. There are, I believe, two closely related ways in which we can do it. One is to look at some of the passages from scripture, especially from the writings of St. Paul, that assure us we really are in right relationship with God despite the ways in which we always fall short of God’s will for us. The other is to stop projecting our human ways onto God. I’ll start with scripture.

In 2 Corinthians Paul deals with many different issues that he has heard are causing trouble among the Christians in Corinth. Whether this was an issue in Corinth or not, in chapter 5 of 2 Corinthians Paul directly addresses the question of our relationship with God in a very helpful way. These verses are foundational for my own faith and shed a great deal of light on the issue we are addressing here. We read:

 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled himself to us through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 2 Corinthians 5:17-19.

 

In these wonderful verses Paul tells us that God does not count our trespasses, that is, our sin, against us. Therefore, as far as God is concerned, we are already reconciled with God. It’s done. For all of us. Our problem is not that God is angry with us and is going to punish us. Our problem is that we do not know that God isn’t angry with us and is not going to punish us.

Then there’s this passage from Romans. It’s even more foundational for my faith and theology than are those great lines from 2 Corinthians that we just read. In chapter 8 of Romans Paul writes:

 

Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who is raised, who is the right hand of God, who intervenes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? .... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:34-39, with verse 36 omitted.

 

I have said many times that the last two verses here, the ones that begin “For I am convinced,” are the gospel of Jesus Christ in a nutshell. Paul’s questions—who will bring a charge against God’s elect, and who is to condemn—are clearly rhetorical.[1] The answer is, “no one.” Consider for a moment these amazing words: “nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” There’s God’s truth for all of us. Nothing does, ever has, or ever will separate us from the love of God. That’s what the God-human relationship looks like from God’s side.

Why is that divine truth so hard for people to understand? I believe that it is because we are forever projecting our human ways onto God. We get angry at evildoers. We project that human emotion onto God and assume that God gets powerfully angry with evildoers. We want evildoers punished. We project that human desire onto God and think that God will punish evildoers in a way far more punishing than anything we could ever do to them. We judge other people all the time, usually negatively. We project our judgmental nature onto God and believe that God will judge us and everybody else the way we would if we could. We fear that God’s judgment and punishment will be directed against us. At some level of our consciousness, we agree with Psalm 51 when it says, “Against you, you alone, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.” Psalm 51:4. That fear arises from our projecting our ways onto God.

Here’s the thing though. God’s ways are not human ways that we have projected onto God. Scripture tells us as much:

 

For my thoughts are not your

thoughts,

     nor are your ways my ways, says

the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than

the earth,

     so are my ways higher than your

ways,

     and my thoughts than your

thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9.

 

These verses point us to one of the best ways we have of discerning God’s ways and thoughts. It is to consider if something we’re attributing to God is merely something human writ large. If it is, it’s not God’s. Jesus turned his whole world upside down to tell us that God’s ways are not the world’s ways. This is true even of the good things we attribute to God. For example, we say that God is love, a characterization of God that we also find in scripture. See 1 John 4:8. Yet God’s love is not merely human love on a larger scale. God’s love is so much more vast than human love is or ever could be that it becomes something different from human love not merely in scope but n its very essence.

Now, you may say that that means that God’s anger and judgment are so much more vast than human anger and judgment that they become something different from human anger and judgment not merely in scope but in their very essence. Yet we know that that isn’t correct because we know Jesus Christ. We know that he condemned anger and judgment and lifted up love. We know that he demonstrated God’s love for the least and the lost. He demonstrated God’s love for everyone else too. God’s anger and judgment are different from human anger and judgment in essence because they simply aren’t real!

No, God is not angry with us. God does not judge us. God is not going to condemn and punish us. God has never judged or condemned anyone. God never will. Pope Paul VI once said that he believes that there is such a place as hell, but he’s not sure anyone is in it. That statement is true as far as it goes, but God’s love of humanity is so vast, so radical, that we must say not only is no one in hell but that hell doesn’t even exist. There is no physical place of fire and brimstone where sinners suffer agony for eternity. We create hell on earth for others and sometimes even for ourselves, but that’s our doing not God’s.

No, God is not anger and judgment. God is love in action, that is, God is grace. Unconditional, universal, irrevocable grace. Christians are forever making God’s grace conditional. We say whether or not we stand in God’s grace depends on whether we do what is necessary for us to earn it, as we noted above. Some Christians have said that it depends on who God has preordained to receive it. All of our attempts to limit God’s grace suffer from the same fault. They all make God too small, too human. We humans can’t imagine ourselves forgiving everyone unconditionally. We can’t imagine accepting everyone unconditionally. We can’t imagine loving everyone unconditionally. We can’t imagine God doing those things either.

But let me say it once again. God is not human. God is not humanity writ large. The only limitations on God are limitations God places on Godself. God has imposed on Godself a decision to be love not hate, grace not wrath and punishment. God transcends humanity absolutely. God transcends human limitations absolutely. We cannot imagine universal, conditional, irrevocable love. But God is universal, unconditional, irrevocable love. We cannot imagine universal, unconditional, irrevocable forgiveness. But God is universal, unconditional, irrevocable forgiveness. We will never reach the greatest understanding of God of which we humans are capable as long as we keep projecting our human limitations onto God.

There are more things we can’t imagine for ourselves. We cannot imagine ever dispensing universal, unconditional, irrevocable grace for anyone. We all acknowledge, I think, that what we call the grace of God is real, but we as we do with every other attribute of God, we make God’s grace particular and conditional. We say not everyone receives it. We say not everyone deserves it. We say that those who have it may lose it. We can’t imagine God bestowing universal, unconditional, irrevocable grace on all of God’s creation. Perhaps we can’t imagine it because at some deep level of our psyches we don’t believe that we ourselves deserve it. We can’t believe it also because we can’t imagine God other than as a bigger, more powerful, human being. Yet God is not a bigger, more powerful human being. God does not have human limitations.

Perhaps answering this question will help. What is grace? The online dictionary mirriam-webster.com gives as this as the primary meaning of grace in the sense in which we are using the word here: “unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration or sanctification.” The key word here is “unmerited.” In our earthly lives we understand that something positive received as a result of something we have done is a payment. Except perhaps rarely in extraordinary circumstances, no employer pays an employee wages the employee has not earned through her labor. That which we earn is a wage. It is not grace. Wages are particular and conditional. An employee earns only his own wages. His work is a condition of his receiving wages. We don’t earn grace as a payment or reward. If we’ve done something to earn it, it’s payment not grace.

A few other truths follow from the fact that grace is given as a gift not as a reward. The first is that grace is utterly unconditional. There is no if-then logic to grace. We may think we can’t possibly earn grace, but the far more important truth is that we don’t have to. Or we may think that we have earned it. The truth, however, is that God’s grace was already there all along. It was there before we did anything to earn it. It’s there when we do nothing to earn it. It’s there when we think we don’t deserve it or someone else doesn’t. For grace to be grace and not a reward it absolutely must be the free, unconditional gift of God.

It also follows from the nature of grace as unmerited that grace is and must be universal. For grace truly to be grace it must be there for everyone without condition. If it isn’t there for everyone there must be some distinction between those who have it and those who don’t. But introducing a distinction between people in the equation of grace necessarily introduces a condition for grace. Once we’ve done that, as we have already seen, what we have is not longer grace. It is a payment or reward.

And it follows that for grace truly to be grace it must be irrevocable. Different Christian traditions have taken different positions on whether once a person has been “saved” that person can later on lose that salvation. The truth is that no one anywhere, at any time, loses grace. For grace to be revocable there would have to be conditions on grace. A person who had it would have to have violated some condition of keeping it. Once again, introducing that condition into the equation of grace makes it a payment not grace.

The unmerited universality and irrevocability of grace rules out Christian exclusivism. For nearly two millennia now most Christians have insisted that only Christians are saved. They have said that God’s grace extends only to those who accept the Christian faith. It is obvious that that belief makes being a Christian a condition of grace. Now I’ll say it again because it can’t be stressed too much. If there’s a condition on it, it isn’t grace. Moreover, given the enormous diversity of God’s people across time and space, it makes no sense to say that God created only one way to be right with God, and it just happens to be our way. A God who is love simply would never do that. The nature of grace shows that God hasn’t done that and never will, for in that scenario being Christian is a condition of grace. Christianity can be a powerful tradition within which to live one’s spiritual life. Christians however have no monopoly on God’s grace. We never have had such a monopoly, and we never will. People of other faith traditions, and people of no faith at all, stand as much in God’s grace as we Christians do.

Sadly, Christians have for millennia excluded some people from their churches not because of something about the excluded person’s faith but because of something about that person’s life or that person’s personhood. The churches to which most Christians belong still condemn homosexuality as a sin and exclude God’s LGBTQ+ people from the church. At the very least, they will not ordain those people as clergy. Many churches exclude people who have been divorced. They exclude people who have been convicted of a crime against a child rather than make arrangements for that person to be in church without being a threat to the church’s children. The truth is that churches, being human institutions not divine ones, can exclude people from the church, sinful as their doing so may be. What they cannot do is exclude anyone from God’s grace. If they could, then not being whatever a particular church condemns would be a condition of grace. So let’s repeat our mantra here: If there’s a condition on it, it’s not grace.

There is another issue about grace that we must address. It is the question of whether God’s grace was a reality for all people before the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Christianity has said from its beginning that Jesus Christ brought a forgiveness of sin and a salvation that was not there before those things had happened. Christians confess Jesus as their savior. Most of them mean by that confession that there is no salvation without Christ. To these Christians something new came into human life with and through Jesus that wasn’t there before. That something is God’s grace expressed as eternal salvation.

In their contention that Jesus Christ created a divine grace expressed as salvation that wasn’t there before, Christians are just wrong. Consider what that contention means. It means that at a particular point in time, for reasons known only to God, God decided to do for God’s people something God had never done for them before. God decided around the time we call 1 CE to save people God had never saved before. This scenario simply makes no sense. Why would God do that? Did God one day become a different God? Did God change from a God who didn’t save people into one who did?  Did God somehow morph into a God of love and grace when God had never been that before?

No, God never did any such thing. Process theologians disagree with this contention, but God is immutable. God has always been perfect. God has always been the source and ground of morality. Our human understanding of morality changes and develops over time. God’s morality doesn’t. Does it make any sense to you that God suddenly decided to save people from a particular time forward when God had not saved the people who came before that time? It sure doesn’t make any sense to me.

Some of the earliest Christians were aware of this problem that arises from the confession of Jesus Christ as savior. Some of them tried to solve the problem by saying that in the short time between Christ’s death on the cross and his resurrection he descended into hell and brough out of hell all the souls who deserved to be saved but hadn’t been because Jesus hadn’t come yet when they were alive. That notion is unbiblical. More importantly, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Those souls had supposedly been suffering in hell since the day of their person’s physical death. Some of them would have been in hell for tens or even a few hundred thousands years. This theory, sometimes called the harrowing of hell, gets us nowhere in dealing with the problem of the existence of grace or salvation before Jesus came. The only way around this problem is to confess that Jesus don’t create grace. He didn’t create divine forgiveness of sin. He didn’t make a salvation possible that hadn’t been possible before. God has always been a God of grace. God has always saved all people. God didn’t send Jesus to bring salvation because God didn’t need to. God’s grace and salvation have always been there.

Does that mean that Jesus is unimportant and we should forget about him? By no means! Jesus didn’t change God’s relationship with humanity. What he did was bring and reveal a new way for people to understand and enter into God’s grace. A new way, not the only way. When we confess Jesus to be the Word of God Incarnate, we see a new revelation of an eternal truth. We see God in the person of Jesus entering fully into human life. We see God in the person of Jesus entering into and suffering the worst that human sin can do to human beings. We see revealed anew the truth that God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening. Rather, God enters with us into whatever happens in our lives. We see that our God of love and grace never abandons us. In Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross — “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” — we seen paradox that God is present with us even when we are sure that God is not present with us. So, for us Christians Jesus is immensely important. His importance just isn’t that he created something that hadn’t existed before.

I have preached and taught God’s unconditional, universal, irrevocable grace for quite some time now. I have heard the objections to that theology that Christian people raise. One common objection is that it just can’t be that everyone is saved. This objection is often stated as, “Do you mean to tell me that Adolf Hitler is saved?” There is of course no question that Hitler committed enormous crimes and sins against humanity. I have lived in Germany. I find those gut-wrenching, heart breaking pictures of what Hitler and his agents did to God’s people, especially to God’s Jewish people, almost too painful to look at. I first saw them when I was living in Berlin when I was eleven years old. My family had a landlady whose late husband had been a member of the Nazi party. I was closer to what Hitler had done than most Americans ever have been. I get it about the Holocaust. It is simply impossible for us to believe that Adolf Hitler doesn’t deserve the most severe punishment for what he did.

It should be possible, however, for us not to project that human judgment onto God. No, it isn’t easy to do. But if grace is grace, we need to do it hard or not. Jesus told us not to judge. See Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37. He placed no limits on that directive. He didn’t say don’t judge unless the person you’re judging has done something monstrously bad. Any judgment that there is belongs to God not to us, not that I mean here to retract my claim that God doesn’t judge. One thing we can know is that however badly God may feel about Adolf Hitler and his crimes, however angry at Hitler God may have the right to be, nothing removes even Hitler or any other human monsters from God’s grace. Nothing can, for is something can, grace is not grace.

Another common objection to the theology of God’s universal, unconditional, irrevocable grace is that it takes away people’s incentive to be good. After all, this objection says, if God doesn’t punish bad behavior, why should I be good? Being bad can often be a lot of fun. As Billy Joel sings, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints,” not of course that saints never laugh. Being bad can be beneficial for us, though of course it is always beneficial for us at someone else’s expense. That’s why it’s bad. Yet if I steal money, I have more money. If I commit adultery, I have more sex. If I can get away with these things here on earth, and if God isn’t ever going to punish me for doing them, why shouldn’t I be as bad as I want?

The answer to this objection is actually quite simple. People raised the same objection to St. Paul’s theology of justification through grace not through the law. He replied: “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” Romans 6:1-2. The point is this. When we truly know that, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, God doesn’t hold our trespasses against us, when we really get the nature and extent of God’s grace, of God’s love, we know that we are compelled to respond to love with love. We cannot do otherwise. Truly moral behavior Is not behavior done to avoid punishment. That, after all, is selfish behavior. Truly moral behavior is doing good simply because it is good and not doing bad simply because it is bad. It is being good because we know how irrevocably good God is to us. We strive to live moral lives not to gain grace but in response to it.

Does the universal, unconditional, irrevocable nature of God’s grace mean that God doesn’t care how we behave? By no means! There is no doubt that human sin hurts God. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, is full of stories about God getting angry and hurting God’s people for their misdeeds. I think of these ancient stories not as literal truth but as mythic expressions of the way human sin hunts God. God wants us to live according to God’s ways of love, justice, nonviolence, and care for the poor ant the marginalized. It hurts God when we don’t. God’s not going to lash out against us because we have failed and hurt God. Lashing out in pain is a human phenomenon not a divine one. Of course, God knows that we are fallible creatures not perfect gods. God knows that none of us will live the way God wants us to perfectly. God’s response to that existential human reality isn’t violent punishment. It is to keep calling us every minute of every day to do better. To come closer to God’s ways and away from the world’s ways. God cares. That just doesn’t mean that God punishes.

Finally, please understand this truth. That God’s grace, that is, God’s love for us in action, is universal, unconditional, and irrevocable is the best, most glorious, most joyful news there is or ever could be. Christianity has convinced people for two millennia that they are sinners whom God has every right to punish for all eternity. The leaders and institutions of our faith have convinced people that their relationship with God is broken and that they had better do what those leaders and institutions tell them to do to repair it. If they don’t, they say, a wrathful, vengeful God will make them pay a terrible price. Folks, it just isn’t true. It never has been true. Our faith has lived with a gross cognitive dissonance for most of its history. It says God is love, then it says that God is out to get us if we don’t shape up. If we don’t toe the line. We cannot continue to live with the conflict between these two assertions, and we know which one of them more truly characterizes God. We humans get angry, judgmental, and violent. Because those are human ways, we know that they are not God’s ways. Yes, significant numbers of us humans also love and care for others. But human love and care are always compromised by the way so many of us hate rather than love, condemn rather than care. God’s love is not and cannot be compromised by human failings the way ours is.

God’s grace is not compromised. It extends to and covers every person who lived in the past, every person alive today, and every person who will be alive in the future. God’s grace is unconditional. We cannot earn it. More importantly, we don’t have to. God’s grace is irrevocable. It’s there as a given throughout our lives, and nothing we ever do will cause God to take it from us. We can live in peace, knowing that God, who is universal truth, the ground of our being, and the power behind everything that is, loves us in a way so great that we can’t really comprehend it. What we can do is know that God’s love, God’s grace, is always there with us no matter what. We can be grateful to God with every fiber of our being. We can live free from fear, for we know God is with us always. We can rejoice that God, who is infinite and unconditional, is with and for us finite, conditional beings every moment of our lives. And that truth is the best news there is or ever could be. Thanks be to God!

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[1] There are a couple of theological difficulties in these verses that I won’t go into here. One is Paul’s use of term “God’s elect.” I believe that all people are God’s people, and I think the rest of the passage supports that understanding of the phrase.

On Vladimir Putin's Fascism

 

On Vladimir Putin’s Fascism

March 6, 2022

 

I first visited Russia, then the dominant part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in the summer of 1968 with a group of Russian language students from Indiana University. Especially during the one week that I spent in what was then Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) I began to learn of the horror that what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War and we call World War II had been for the Russian people. During that week I began to learn of the German siege of Leningrad. It was one of the most diabolical humanitarian disasters not just of that war but of all of human history. It lasted from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944. Up to 1,500,000 people died in the city during the siege. Another 1,400,000 were evacuated through the narrow corridor the Red Army was able to keep open across Lake Ladoga. Many of those people died as well. The leading cause of death was starvation. During that first visit I made to Leningrad our guide took us to the Piskaryovskoe Memorial Cemetery, where something like 500,000 civilians who died during the siege are buried. Most Americans have no idea of the disaster that the German siege of Leningrad was. For purposes of comparison, fewer than 500,000 Americans died in all of World War II, not that that number in itself doesn’t represent tragedy. It certainly does, but experts estimate that around 20,000,000 Soviets, most of them Russians or Ukrainians, died in that war.

From September, 1975, to June, 1976, I lived in Soviet Russia doing PhD dissertation research. I spent most of that time in Moscow with my wife and toddler son, and I also spent some time back in Leningrad. I continued to learn more about the catastrophe that the Great Patriotic War had been in Russia. Yes, the Soviet government used the war as an excuse for the sorry state of the Soviet civilian economy, but the government’s cynicism in no way reduced the very real national trauma of the war. There was no one in Russia who didn’t lose someone in that war. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s brother died in that war. In the 1960s and 1970s it seemed that the Russian nation, though justifiably proud that they had won the war, was still in a state of shock. That’s how bad the war had been for the Russians.

During my time in Russia I learned that the Russians usually don’t call the people who attacked them in 1941 the Nazis. Nor do they call them just the Germans. They call them “nemetskie fashisti,” German fascists. Fascist is about the worst thing a Russian can call anyone. The word immediately brings up what was perhaps the greatest trauma any nation has ever faced in all of human history. Once, when some minor bureaucratic functionary was giving me a hard time about something or other and saying that she was just doing her job, I wanted to say to her “That’s what the German fascists said!” Mercifully, if I remember correctly, I didn’t say it. To call a Russian a fascist is about the worst thing you could possibly call them.

On February 24, 2022, Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin sent the mighty Russian army into Ukraine. Putin’s attack against a peaceful neighboring country was utterly unprovoked. The nature of the Russians’ mission in Ukraine still is not entirely clear. We do know that as one of the specious justifications for that unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign nation Putin says that the Ukrainian government is “fascist.” He also spoke of “de-Nazification,” but his calling the Ukrainians fascists would have the greatest effect on the Russian people. Putin hurls the word fascist at most any non-Russians he doesn’t like. He intends fascist to be a word of radical condemnation. To most Russians that’s exactly what it is.

Which makes it particularly ironic that Putin is himself a Russian fascist. He doesn’t call himself a fascist of course, and he would be profoundly offended and would vigorously deny that charge if he heard someone make it against him. Yet fascist he is, and to understand why it is fully appropriate to call him a fascist we must begin by gaining an understanding of just what the word fascist means.

Historically speaking the word fascist comes from the name of the political party and movement Benito Mussolini led in Italy that began during World War I and grew in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The word comes from the Italian word “fascio,” the primary meaning of which is just “a bundle of rods.” Fascio comes in turn from the Latin word “fasces.” That word also meant a bundle of rods, but it also referred to a symbol of authority in ancient Rome. A fasces in this sense is a bundle of rods bound together by a cord with an axe head protruding from it to the viewer’s right. It became the symbol of Italian fascism. Mussolini’s fascism was the specifically Italian form of a much broader right-wing phenomenon in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. That phenomenon’s most powerful and demonic manifestation was Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Today’s definitions of fascism try to capture what the fascist regimes of Italy, Germany, and elsewhere stood for and how they operated. One online definition of fascism says that it is

 

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation…above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.[1]

 

This site’s second definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control….” Another online dictionary gives as its first definition of fascism “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.”[2] This site’s second definition of fascism is “(in general terms) extreme right-wing authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices.”

From this brief historical and linguistic overview we see that the word fascism has come to have both a specific meaning and more general one. In its most specific sense the word means the party and movement Mussolini headed in Italy in the early decades of the 20^th century. A more general meaning of the term is that it applies to any movement or regime that is more or less like Mussolini’s regime, that is, is a regime or movement characterized by nationalism, dictatorial control of society and economy, and forcible, often violent suppression of opposition. I would add to these definitions the truth that fascist regimes often initiate military attacks on other nations.

These understandings of the word fascism fit Vladimir Putin like a glove. He has concentrated virtually all political power in Russia in himself. He has quashed nearly all opposition. He has jailed some of his opponents and killed others. He has confiscated or otherwise shut down television networks that didn’t toe the line. He has had his rubber stamp parliament, the Duma, tighten the laws on freedom of expression and enact draconian penalties for demonstrating against him or his policies. Perhaps the people of Russia still have a bit more personal freedom than they had under the Soviet communists, but Putin, a former KGB agent and former head of the FSB, the Russian successor of the KGB, seems to be working to control the Russian people as tightly as the communists did and oppress them just as much.

Fascism always elevates the nation above all else. There is a reason why the Nazis liked the first line of the German national anthem so much: “Deutschland, Deutschland, ὓber alles,” “Germany, Germany above all else.” This aspect of fascism fits Putin like a glove too. His thinking and his policies are thoroughly Russocentric. Putin says he has rejected the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology, but he has called the dissolution of the USSR the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. He means by that statement that Russia’s loss of empire and standing in the world that came when the USSR ended is the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century for Russia. It is simply stunning that he would make that claim. He didn’t experience the Great Patriotic War himself. He was born in 1952. But of course he knows how horrific that war was for his beloved Russia. He is from Leningrad, after all. That he considers Russia’s loss of empire and status after 1991 to be a greater tragedy than the Great Patriotic War in which something like twenty million Soviet people, most of them Russians, died shows how radically Russocentric his thinking has become. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him singing “Rossiya, Rossiya, ὓber alles.”

As I noted above, fascist countries often initiate wars of aggression against other countries. Mussolini’s Italy attacked Ethiopia and Greece. Hitler’s Germany attacked Czechoslovakia, Poland, the USSR, France, and other nations. Now Putin has followed suit by invading Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. He didn’t invade Ukraine for the purpose of exterminating all the Ukrainians to create Lebensraum for the Russians the way Hitler did for the Germans, thank God. Yet his motive was still completely Russocentric. He claims that there really is no such thing as Ukraine, and there are no Ukrainian people. He has reverted to the thinking and policies of the lost and unlamented Russian Empire. Like that empire, Putin says that Ukrainians really are just Russians who speak not the Ukrainian language but the Ukrainian dialect of Russian. He says the same thing about Russians living in Ukraine (of which there are millions) as Hitler said about Germans living in Czechoslovakia. And just as Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Putin has invaded Ukraine.

To call a Russian a fascist is a great insult. The German fascists who called themselves Nazis inflicted unspeakable horror upon the Russian people and others in the Soviet Union including the Ukrainians. Yet the facts about Vladimir Putin don’t lie. He fits all of the characteristics of a fascist. I have long maintained that Putin is a product of Russian history. He is, but he takes some of the unfortunate characteristics of that history to an extreme they haven’t reached since the days of Stalin. Putin rules Russia in large part as a Russian autocrat with fascism added onto the autocratic model. Putin, as brutal as he has been, is not yet as vicious as Stalin was, and he doesn’t claim to serve the proletariat the way Stalin did. Yet he is fully brutal and nationalistic enough to have earned the label fascist. That he has is a tragedy, but it’s true.

Does it matter that Putin has all the characteristics of a fascist? On one level, no, it doesn’t. Putting the label fascist on him is after all on a superficial level merely a linguistic exercise. Yet in other ways it does matter. It says to the Russian people that they are ruled by a man with many of the characteristics of their country’s worst enemy ever, Adolf Hitler. Perhaps if they would start to think of him as a fascist they would rise up at the polls or otherwise and remove him from office. Calling Putin a fascist may have a meaning beyond Russia too. Fascism didn’t arise in Russia, and the term has a broader reach than Russia only. People around the world have heard the word. Even if they don’t know the particulars of fascism, they know that it is a bad thing. If people hear Putin called a fascist often enough, the international community will apply pressure of various kinds on Russia beyond the sanctions already in place that will hasten his exit from public life.

So Vladimir Putin is truly a Russian fascist. He hasn’t set up genocide camps the way the German fascists did, thank God. But he rules Russia virtually as a dictator. He suppresses all dissent. He is nationalistic in the extreme. He wants more than anything else to make his Russia a major economic, political, and military player in world affairs. He wants the world to respect Russia the way he thinks it did when Russia controlled the USSR. The final proof that Putin is a true fascist is his immoral and illegal invasion of one of Russia’s peaceful neighbors. We can only hope that he will lose the power to do such fascistic things sooner rather than later.

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[1] merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism

[2] en.oxford. definition/fascism

More on Vladimir Putin's Illegal, Immoral Invasion of Ukraine

 

More on Vladimir Putin’s Illegal, Immoral Invasion of Ukraine

March 5, 2022

 

Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has had the Russian military invade Russia’s neighboring nation of Ukraine. His actual motivation for doing so is hard to discern. It certainly seems to me and to a great many more or less informed observers that while he can almost certainly defeat Ukraine militarily, he cannot rule it peacefully. The Ukrainian people will never docilly accept Russian domination again. Perhaps we can’t know why he really did it, but we can know why Putin says he did it. He says that Russians and Ukrainians are actually one people not two and that all he is doing is bringing some wayward Russians home. He also says he invaded to protect Russians living in Ukraine from the Ukrainians. These claims of his are simply absurd. They are absurd on two grounds. First, Russians and Ukrainians are not one people. They are clearly two related but different peoples. Second, even if they were one people, Putin would have no right to invade the Ukrainians’ country.

The Russians and the Ukrainians are not the same people or ethnic group. The first place where we see that they aren’t is in their languages. The Russian and Ukrainian languages are closely related, but they are not identical. Both of them are what the linguists call East Slavic languages. There are three such languages today, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian. In the past Russian rulers have insisted that Ukrainian is just a dialect of Russian, but no reputable linguist would say that today. I know they aren’t the same from personal experience. I can still read a fair amount of Russian. I cannot read Ukrainian. The two languages are not mutually comprehensible. I have witnessed people speaking Spanish and Italian more or less understanding each other. Russian and Ukrainian are not close enough to each other to make that possible with them.

Ukrainian people have asserted their separate identity from the Russians for at least the past two hundred years. Ukrainian literature is not Russian literature. Some prominent people identified as Russians have been born in Ukraine, but that doesn’t make them culturally or linguistically Ukrainian. Many Ukrainian citizens speak Russian as their native language and self-identify as Russian, but that fact does not make Ukrainians and Russians the same people. Linguistically and culturally Ukrainians and Russians are not the same people. Putin’s contention that they are just makes no linguistic or cultural sense.

It doesn’t make historical sense either. The histories of the Russians and the Ukrainians has at times been closely related, intertwined even, but they are not identical. The historical developments that led to both today’s Russia and Ukraine begin in the city the Ukrainians call Kyiv and the Russians call Kiev. Beginning in around the eighth century CE a political entity called Kievan Rus’ developed on the west bank of the Dnieper River. It came to be ruled by a person called the Grand Prince. In 988 CE Grand Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus’ converted to Orthodox Christianity. He probably did that because Kiev was located on and controlled an important trade route between Scandinavia and Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. The economic importance of Constantinople to Kievan Rus’ probably accounts for Vladimir’s acceptance of Constantinople’s type of Christianity. When Grand Prince Vladimir converted to Orthodox Christianity all of his people were converted as well. Mostly because he made the Rus’ Orthodox, today the Russians and Ukrainians both call him Vladimir the Great and even venerate him as Saint Vladimir. At the time of Kievan Rus’ there was no Russian and no Ukrainian language as we know them today. The people of Kievan Rus’ spoke a language called Old Slavonic or Old Church Slavonic. It is the language of the Russian Orthodox Church to this day. It is the mother tongue of today’s Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian, but it is not identical to an of them.

Kievan Rus’ power began to wane in the couple of centuries after Grand Prince Vladimir. As it did the political center of the eastern Slavs shifted to the north northeast of Kyiv. In 1240 CE the Mongols sacked Kyiv, and Kievan Rus’ was no more. In time Moscow became the most powerful political entity of the eastern Slavs. There is a direct historical development from Moscow coming to dominate the eastern Slavs to Moscow as the capital of the Russian Empire (until Peter the Great moved it to his new city of St. Petersburg), then of the Soviet Union, then of today’s Russian Federation.

The most important historical fact here for our question of the distinct identity of the Ukrainians is that the territory today called Ukraine developed differently than did Russia. Over the centuries, as Moscow became a power to the north, the land we now call Ukraine was overrun and controlled by a succession of (except for the Poles) non-Slavic people. At different times local Turkic people, the Ottoman Turks, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Poles and Lithuanians together, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled all or at least some of what is now Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine thus developed along very different tracks from the thirteenth century CE to the eighteenth century CE. In those five hundred years Old Slavonic developed into today’s three distinct east Slavic languages of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian. For much of that time Ukraine was ruled by nations to its west or northwest. While Russia occasionally fought wars against western nations, it was rarely ruled for any time at all by western powers. Because it was so often ruled by nations to its west Ukraine developed a more western cultural orientation than Moscow did.

By the eighteenth century what had been the Grand Principality of Moscow had grown and morphed into the Russian Empire. That empire gradually expanded to the east and to the south. By the end of the eighteenth century most of what is now Ukraine had been absorbed into the Russian Empire. Through the remainder of the imperial period of Russian history the Russians considered the Ukrainians to be essentially Russians who spoke a regional dialect of Russian not a separate language. The empire forbade the use of Ukrainian in education and public administration. It even made publishing literature in Ukrainian a crime.

The name Ukraine arose in this period of history. It is a word build on the Russian root “krai.” Krai meant the border regions of the empire to the south. In Russian the word Ukrainian mans “the land on the border.” In contemporary Russian krai means brink or brim, but it can also mean land. When Russians speak of our “krai” they mean our “land.” The Russian claim to Ukraine as actually being Russian is reflected even in the name Ukraine, though that of course doesn’t make the claim correct. Ukrainian nationalism arose within the Russian Empire, but the Ukrainians were never able to break free from the empire or create any distinct state called Ukraine.

The Russian Empire ended in 1917. In November, 1917, The Bolsheviks, who were the Russian communists led by Vladimir Lenin, staged a coup in St. Petersburg against the Provisional Government that had replaced the autocracy earlier that year. There followed several years of civil war between the Bolsheviks and various anti-Bolshevik groups (that were never able to coordinate their efforts against the Bolsheviks). The Ukrainians mostly fought against the Bolsheviks both because they opposed communism and because they were trying to break Ukraine free from Russian domination. They succeeded neither in avoiding communism nor in establishing an independent Ukraine.

By 1922 the communists had conquered not quite all but most of what had been the Russian Empire. In early 1922 they created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Though there eventually came to be fifteen such “republics,” at the beginning there were only four, the Russian, Belarussian, Transcaucasian, and Ukrainian Republics. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was the first political entity of any significance called Ukraine. The borders of that republic were set not by the Ukrainians but by mostly Russian bureaucrats in Moscow. Each of the so-called republics was in theory autonomous, but they were all firmly under the thumb of the Russians in practice.

By 1989 the Soviet Union had begun to fall apart. Moscow lost control of the non-Russian republics. On August 24, 1991, the Supreme Soviet (the legislature) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic proclaimed that Ukraine would no longer obey the laws of the USSR but only those of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This declaration amounted to a de facto proclamation of Ukrainian independence. In a popular referendum held on December 1, 1991, 90% of the voters voted for Ukrainian independence. On December 25, 1991 (which is not that date in the old calendar the Russian Orthodox Church still uses and thus was not Christmas in Russia), the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. Ukraine then became officially its own independent nation free of foreign control in any significant way for the first time since the days of Kievan Rus’. Neither Ukrainian-Russian history nor the understanding and will of the Ukrainian people supports Putin’s claim that the Russians and the Ukrainians are one people.

Yet even if Russians and Ukrainians were the same people as Vladimir Putin claims, Russia would have no moral or legal right to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Putin claims that he has invaded Ukraine for, among other reasons, the protection of Russians living in Ukraine. I trust that he knows but is ignoring the fact that the history of nations made up of one dominant ethnic group making claims against other nations because members of that dominant ethnic group live there has a brutal history. Nazi Germany and the Sudetenland are the classic example. The victorious allies created the nation of Czechoslovakia after World War I. That new nation included something like three million ethnic Germans. Most though not all of them lived in parts of Czechoslovakia adjacent to Germany called the Sudetenland after the Sudeten Mountains. By 1938 Adolf Hitler had begun to claim that the Czechs were oppressing the Germans of the Sudetenland. He claimed the right to occupy the Sudetenland to protect the Germans there. Though Hitler had no such right under international law, at the Munich Conference of September, 1938, the British and the French, desperate to avoid another war with Germany, agreed to let Hitler occupy the Sudetenland in exchange for Hitler’s promise not to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia. Neither the Czechs nor the Slovaks had any say in the matter. Between October 1 and October 10, 1938, Hitler occupied the Sudetenland. Hitler was never a man of his word when it suited him not to be. On March 15, 1939, he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. On September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland, thereby plunging Europe into the unspeakable tragedy of World War II.

Today, Russian president Vladimir Putin makes claims about Russians living in Ukraine identical to those Hitler made about Germans living in Czechoslovakia. The population of Ukraine does in fact include many Russians. The major Ukrainian city of Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian) located near the Russian border is majority Russian. In the eastern part of Ukraine two breakaway provinces with majority Russian populations, Donetsk and Luhansk, have been fighting Ukraine (with military help from Russia)for years. Putin has made the outrageously absurd claim that Ukrainians in that part of the country are committing genocide against the Russians. Except for those two breakaway provinces, no Ukrainian Russians have asked Russia to invade Ukraine to protect them or for any other reason. Yet even if they had, Putin would have no moral or legal right to invade Ukraine. Putin doesn’t like this fact, but under international law Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation. It has as much right not to be invaded as any other independent, sovereign state does.

There simply is no moral or legal question about it. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal under international law. It is also grossly immoral. Putin has his Russian military inflicting death and destruction on Ukraine with no legal grounds for doing so and no moral grounds either. Russian and Ukrainians are closely related to each other linguistically, culturally, and historically, but they are not the same people. Putin’s claim that they are is just false. It has no support in fact whatsoever. Yet even if they were the same people Putin would have no right to invade, destroy, and kill in Ukraine the way he is doing today. Our response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine must be cautious and measured. Putin, after all, controls the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn’t use it if he thought it necessary. So we condemn. We sanction Russia and its oligarchs. We watch Putin pursue an unprovoked act of aggression against a peaceful neighbor. We are powerless to stop him. Perhaps we wish we could, but because of all those Russian nuclear weapons we can’t. We don’t like it, but sadly that’s how it is and how its going to be.

 

What Jesus Brought

 

What Jesus Brought

March 3, 2022

 

We’ve all heard it. Jesus Christ died to save sinners. A price had to be paid before God could or would forgive human sin. Yet human sin was so powerful, pervasive, and evil that no mere human could pay the price for it. The price was simply too high. So God became incarnate in a man named Jesus of Nazareth. As both fully God and fully human Jesus could pay that price. That’s what he did when he suffered and died on the cross. That suffering and dying was what God became incarnate to do. Once he had done it his mission on earth was done, so he returned to heaven whence he came. The job was done. The price had been paid. Now God could and would forgive human sin. We’ve all heard it. We’ve probably heard it proclaimed in different ways over and over again. It’s what the Christian faith is all about, right?

Well no, not right. Yes, the very fallible humans who are and who lead the church pretty much turned Christianity into it. It is what most people both in the churches and outside them who think about Christianity at all think the faith is. I have written a good deal before about why I reject that soteriology, that is, that theory of salvation. I won’t go into all of my reasons for rejecting it. If you want to read about those reasons see Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” in my book Liberating Christianity either the original or the revised edition. Here I will try to refute that theory, which is known as the classical theory of atonement, in a way I didn’t when I wrote that book. I know full well that the theology I will present here is radical. It rejects what most Christians consider to be the bedrock of their faith and replaces it with something else. So here goes.

We start by uncovering a necessary implication of the classical theory of atonement. In saying forgiveness of sin and salvation came with the suffering and death of Jesus, conventional Christianity also necessarily says that forgiveness of sin and salvation were not present or available before the suffering and death of Jesus. This type of Christianity says that something new came into the world with and through Jesus Christ. That something is divine forgiveness of sin and salvation for us sinful mortals.

The classical theory of atonement we are considering here necessarily says something else happened when God came to us as one of us. It necessarily implies that God did something God had never done before, something like this. From the beginning of humanity God did not forgive human sin, and people weren’t saved. Then one day, after we humans had been around for a very long time, God said to Godself, you know, I could do a very good thing for those humans of mine. I could forgive their sin and grant them salvation. But I’m afraid it’s really not that simple. I can’t give salvation to them free of charge. Human sin is so wrong and has so affronted me all these years that those humans have to buy my forgiveness if they’re going to have it. They have to pay a price for it. But the offense of sin is so enormous, what could they possibly pay that would be enough? Really the most they can do is die, but they’re all going to do that anyway. So what is one human life? Could it possibly be a high enough payment to make up for sin? Not really. I mean, in the end they can’t avoid death. So if they died as the price of forgiveness they’d just be doing something they’re going to do anyway. Maybe they’d do it earlier in their life than they otherwise would, but that really isn’t much, is it.

What would be enough of a price? Maybe my suffering and dying in their stead would be enough, but how could I do that? I’m eternal spirit not some mortal being, but that truth gives me an idea. I could become a human being. Of course I’d still be God too, but that’s how I could die for them. I could die as a God-man. It wouldn’t be much fun of course. I imagine that as a God-man I’d want to avoid suffering and death as much as anyone. I imagine I’d suffer as much as they would if, say, the Romans crucified me. But that would do the trick. Then I could forgive human sin and thus give the people salvation. OK. That’s what I’ll do. And that, this classical theory of atonement says, is exactly what God did in Jesus of Nazareth.

Where does this scenario leave us? It leaves us with the understanding that for all the millennia before the year we call 1 CE millions upon millions of men, women, and children died unforgiven and unsaved. But would God really do that, leave all those people without salvation? Certainly not. At least some of the earliest Christians knew this problem, namely, that Jesus created salvation for us when it wasn’t there before. Some of them dealt with that problem by making up a story about Jesus that never made it into the Bible. They said that in the time between his death and his resurrection Jesus descended to the underworld and brought the souls of the righteous with him to heaven. This theory, however, solved only half of the theological problem these earliest Christians were wrestling with. It got the souls of the righteous dead to heaven, but it didn’t and couldn’t do away with the fact it assumes that righteous people hadn’t been saved before Jesus came and got them. Those Jesus took to heaven had been unforgiven and unsaved for a very long time. That problem was still there. It is a problem that conventional Christianity and its classical theory of atonement can never solve.

There is, I believe, only one valid way to solve the problem of salvation not being available before Jesus. It is, however, a very radical solution. It is to say that Jesus did not create anything that wasn’t there before him, at least not in terms of ultimate divine forgiveness and salvation. God has offered, and indeed has extended, forgiveness and salvation to every human being who has ever lived. Jesus did not reveal a new God to us except perhaps for his teaching that God is radically nonviolent. Ancient Israel knew of God’s salvation centuries before Jesus. Psalm 51, for example, knows of God’s salvation when it says “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” Psalm 51:12. That psalm also calls God the God “of my salvation.” Psalm 51:14b Many other examples of ancient Israel knowing God’s salvation could easily be found. Ancient Israel also knew that God is gracious to us and gentle in spirit. We read: “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing." Joel 2:13. This phrase about God also appears at Psalm 103:8, Psalm 145:8, and Jonah 4:2. The confession of God as gracious and merciful without the rest of the saying appears at 2 Chronicles 30:9, Psalm 111:4, and Psalm 116:5.

Yes, of course there are other, less appealing images of God in the New Testament. But there are images of God very different from the main one Jesus gives us in the New Testament too. Compare Matthew 5:38-39 on nonviolence with most of the book of Revelation. In other places Matthew has the wrong sort of people cast into the outer darkness, Matthew 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30, or into the furnace of fire, Matthew 13:14 and 13:50, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. No other New Testament writer uses those phrases. The important point here is that Jesus’ revelation of God as a God of grace wasn’t new. At least some of Jesus’ Jewish forbears knew that truth as well as he did.

So Jesus didn’t create forgiveness of sin. He didn’t bring a salvation that wasn’t there before. Except perhaps for his teaching of nonviolence, Jesus didn’t reveal God as a God of grace and forgiveness who had never been known before. He certainly expressed his view of God in new, powerful, and sometimes maddeningly puzzling ways. His view of God, however, did not originate with him. It had been around for centuries before Jesus came.

What then are we to say” That Jesus isn’t worth adoring and following? By no means! What Jesus did that is of immense value to us was to demonstrate how God actually relates to us and to all of creation. In Jesus Christ as God the Son Incarnate we see that God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening, not that that isn’t pretty obvious just from human life and human history. God didn’t stop a very bad thing from happening to God’s own Son. God certainly isn’t going to stop bad things from happening to mere mortals like us.

Instead, in Jesus as God the Son Incarnate we see that God is present with us in whatever happens to us in life. In Jesus on the cross God even entered into and experienced human death. All profound truths of faith are paradoxes. One of the great Christian paradoxes is that in dying on the cross bereft of hope and feeling abandoned by God—“My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46—we see that God is there even when we are unable to feel God’s presence with us. Though this understanding of how God relates to human suffering and death certainly feels new to us, in a way it isn’t. The psalmist of Psalm 23 knew this truth at least to some extent. He wrote: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me. Psalm 23:4.

So no, though virtually all of conventional Christianity insists that he is, Jesus isn’t important because he brought something new. Indeed, the notion that salvation came only with Jesus is radically inconsistent with a God of eternal forgiveness and grace. Jesus matters mostly because he picked up certain truths from his Jewish heritage, lived with them, died with them, and demonstrated them in new and powerful ways. Jesus didn’t and doesn’t save us. Rather, he demonstrates to us the truth that we already are and always have been saved even if we didn’t know it. He is our Savior not because there was no salvation before him. There most certainly was salvation before him. He is our Savior because it is in and through him that we know our God of grace who has already saved us and every other person who has ever lived and who ever will. This is a radical rethinking of the foundational elements of the Christian faith. It is, however, exceedingly good news. For that divine truth let all the people say, “Thanks be to God!”

 

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.