Three Traps

Three Traps

For the past several years, with one year off as required by the Conference’s bylaws, I have served on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. One of the things we do on that Committee is examine candidates for ordination in the UCC and either approve them or not. Part of the ordination process is for the candidate to write an ordination paper that sets out her beliefs and understandings of theology, church history, the UCC, the practice of ministry, and other matters. I just finished reading one such paper. It is a very good one, far better than most. Yet as I read it I noticed that this well qualified candidate fell into or just skirted around three traps that far too many progressive Christians fall into. I’d like to explore those traps here. They are:

1.       The assertion that all are welcome in church.

2.       The assertion that the Bible is somehow divine or divinely inspired.

3.       The assertion that we progressive Christians are always to be nonjudgmental.

I’ll consider them in that order.

1. All are welcome in church. That is something that almost every church asserts. The non-UCC Congregational church from which I resigned at the end of 2017 says “All are welcome” on its sign on the street in front of the church building. In the UCC we tend to wear a universal welcome on our sleeve as some sort of badge of honor. A great many UCC churches, including the one to which I belong and now attend, say either out loud or in their weekly worship bulletin “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” Those words have practically become the mantra of the UCC. On one level that mantra serves a good and necessary purpose. For far too long most Christian churches have excluded certain people. They have excluded LGBT people. Some of them have excluded divorced people. If what we mean by “all are welcome” is that we do not discriminate against people on improper grounds, fine. We shouldn’t discriminate like that, and more and more churches today are doing less and less of that kind of discrimination. The problem is, that’s not what our signs say. They say all are welcome. They say “no matter who you are” you are welcome here. I object to that notion on a variety of grounds.

First, it almost certainly isn’t true. One problem is that while many churches say they welcome LGBT people they really don’t. It makes us all feel warm and fuzzy to say all are welcome, but church people are like people everywhere. There are those of us who have not gotten over the prejudices we all grew up with, or at least those of us of a certain age grew up with. I know, for example, that while that church I recently resigned from says all are welcome there are all kinds of people who actually are not welcome there. I suppose that’s one reason I resigned. At least some of the people of that church cling to prejudices against gay people. I could never convince myself that an openly gay or lesbian person really would be welcome there.

There are other reasons why a claim that all are welcome isn’t true too. I’ll cite that church I resigned from again as an example. Before I became their pastor that church had to ask the son of one of the members not to attend because he is a person with mental illness who would not control his behavior at church. He made people uncomfortable or even made them feel threatened. Is anyone who disrupts the life of a church really welcome in it? Is anyone who makes people feel unsafe at church welcome? Probably not. People come to church for a variety of reasons, but everyone who comes to church expects it to be a safe place. If a person makes it an unsafe place, that person is not welcome.

Nor should that person be welcome. It simply isn’t true that a church should in fact welcome all people. Someone who constantly disrupts the worship service isn’t and shouldn’t be welcome. Yes, perhaps the pastor and/or others of the church could work that person to help them change their behavior so that they would be welcome. That would be a good and worthwhile thing. But sometimes it just isn’t possible. Mental illness and personality disorders are realities, and sometimes people suffering from them just can’t control themselves. In that case a church may, indeed must, exclude that person from some or all of its activities.

Here’s another example of someone who shouldn’t be welcome in a church. For years I served a church that became what we call Open and Affirming shortly after I joined them as their pastor. Open and Affirming means that that church claimed to accept and affirm LGBT people, people so often excluded from church life. The church I served actually did welcome such people. Being Open and Affirming became a big part of that church’s identity in a town in which no other church openly welcomed LGBT folks at the time. Now say someone who opposed the acceptance and full equality of LGBT people came to that church for the express purpose of making LGBT people uncomfortable and working to get the church to repeal its Open and Affirming commitment. Would that person be welcome? No. Should that person be welcome? No. Becoming part of any institution requires accepting what the institution is and what it stands for. That doesn’t mean we don’t work to transform the institutions of which we are a part. Not at all. It does mean that we work to make our institutions, including our churches, more fully and authentically who they really are. It doesn’t mean we come in expressly to turn back who they have become.

Every institution or organization must have a boundary of some kind. Boundaries define identity. An organization with no boundary is no organization at all. Oh, I suppose you could form an club for example that said we are a club of whoever shows up. Yet such a club would have no purpose other than as a place for people to show up. A church certainly has more purpose than that. Church’s have identity. There are a great many churches and a great many church identities. A church’s identity shouldn’t be static. It should be something the church is aware of and always working on improving. Yet no organization can remain what it is at it most basic level if it welcomes people who want to change it at that basic level. Should a Christian church welcome people into the life and membership of the church who want to turn it into a church that worships the devil? Of course not. Like all institutions churches have boundaries. Boundaries create identity. Boundaries are necessary, and they are good when they are appropriate for the institution that has them.

“Christian” is itself a boundary. It doesn’t mean that the people of the church condemn or even dislike people of other faiths. Today many of us Christians fully accept the validity of other faiths for the people who live their connection with ultimate reality within those faiths. It does mean that this particular institution places itself within a particular faith tradition, the Christian one. It means this organization is a Christian church and not a Jewish synagogue, not a Muslim mosque, not any other kind of place of worship and any place other than a place of Christian worship. Most churches have other kinds of boundaries too. A UCC church is not a Roman Catholic church. That doesn’t mean UCC people necessarily have anything against Roman Catholic people or the Roman Catholic church. It does mean that someone who wants to come into the UCC church for the purpose of trying to turn it into a Catholic church isn’t and shouldn’t be all that welcome. A church has to have a boundary; and as much as it may proclaim that all or welcome, that boundary means that some people aren’t.

Of course my Christian sisters and brothers who proclaim that all are welcome in their church mean well. They are on the whole good, decent people who want to overcome centuries of prejudice inside the church. I want to overcome it too, but “all are welcome” is a trap for so many of us. In that ordination paper I mentioned above our candidate says all should be welcome in the church, but then even she qualifies that statement. She says all should be free to have a voice in the church as long as they aren’t harming anyone else. Ah, there’s the rub, or there’s one rub out of several. We don’t want anyone coming into our churches and harming anyone there. That’s a boundary. That’s a limitation to all are welcome. We get so enthusiastic about being welcoming that we say things that aren’t true and that really we don’t and shouldn’t mean. That’s the trap. I wish more of my progressive Christian colleagues were more aware of it.

2. The assertion that the Bible is wholly or partially divine or divinely inspired. I have written at some length on this one, so I’ll just treat it briefly here. For a fuller discussion of the issue see Part One, Stop 11, titled “Inspired?,” in my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians.[1] We all grew up, I suspect, hearing the Bible called the word of God. I’ve heard lay people in very progressive Christian churches call it God’s word when they read a passage from it in worship. We’ve all heard it called divinely inspired. For most Christians the Bible has authority because, as they believe, it somehow comes from God. The very good ordination candidate who wrote the ordination paper I keep mentioning seems to understand the Bible quite well, but she too calls it both human and divine. Calling the Bible divine or divinely inspired is a trap because of the insurmountable difficulties that classic contention raises. God’s can’t have written or inspired everything in the Bible because it contains things that just can’t be true if we understand them literally, that is, factually. We know, for example, that the plant Earth has developed over several billion years, not that it was created in seven days as Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 says it was. We know that there is no dome in the sky holding back water as Genesis 1:6-8 says there is. We know that Joshua did not make the sun stand still in the sky as Joshua 10:12-13 says he did. We know as the author of the book of Joshua did not that the apparent movement of the sun across the sky results from the rotation of the earth, not from actual movement by the sun. There are of course a great many other things in the Bible that cannot be factually true though they sound to us like assertions of facts. Some of them are assertions of facts and some of them actually aren’t, but God would not have made the factual errors we find in the Bible. God didn’t write the Bible.

The Bible also contains numerous seemingly factual contradictions that, we assume, God would have avoided had God written the Bible. Did God create the world in seven days as in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 or in one day as at Genesis 2:4a? Did Noah take one pair of every animal into the ark as at Genesis 6:19, or did he take one pair of “unclean” animals and seven pair of “clean” animals as at Genesis 7:2? In neither of these cases can both passages be factually true. They plainly contradict each other. Did Jesus fall on the ground in agony in the Garden as at Mark 14:35, or did the armed band come to arrest him fall to their knees before his divine majesty as at John 18:6? It’s unlikely to have been both. Both of those accounts can be, and are, spiritually true; but they cannot both be factually true. Factually, they are just contradictions. So no, God didn’t write the Bible.

Saying that the human authors of the Bible were divinely inspired but that they included human error in their writings also raises insurmountable problems. If some things in the Bible are divinely inspired truth and other things are human error, how do we tell those two things apart? There simply is no objective way to do it. We may have criteria for making the distinction that work for us, but they are just our subjective criteria. We can’t impose them on anyone else. When we say the Bible is either wholly or partially divinely inspired as weave a tangled web that there is no getting out of.

That’s why it is a trap. It is so easy to say that the Bible is divine. It is so easy to say that it is divinely inspired. We’ve heard it so often. Perhaps we so want it to be true. The trap is that we say it without awareness of the insurmountable difficulties it raises. We say it uncritically, and when someone of a more critical bent raises questions about it we are surprised. The questions hadn’t occurred to us, and we are unprepared to answer them. We’re actually much better off admitting that the Bible is a wholly human document. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t true or that it doesn’t contain truth. It does, but not because it is divinely inspired. Here’s how I summarized what I think is the proper approach to the Bible and its human origins in Liberating the Bible:

Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.[2]

3. The assertion that progressive Christians must be nonjudgmental. I hear it all the time. Not long before I came to be their pastor the first church I served had adopted a “mission statement” that included the phrase “Being nonjudgmental….” The ordination candidate I mentioned at the beginning of this post said that she tries to be nonjudgmental in her pastoral relationships, or words to that effect. On one level these assertions of non-judgmentalism serve an important purpose. Over the course of its long history Christianity has been far too negatively judgmental of people, positions, and practices that in fact should not be negatively judged at all. The best example in our day is the way Christians have in the past and today far too many still do condemned LGBT people simply for being who they are. Moreover, the church has been far too eager to dictate to people how they should live rather than listening to people, their cares, and their concerns and to meet them where they are. It is so easy to judge others. It is so easy to condemn others, and we humans so often do it for all the wrong reasons. The church truly must repent of its past wrongful judgments against God’s people. To the extent that people who call us to be nonjudgmental seek to right that ancient wrong, God bless them. They are doing holy work.

Yet the claim that we are simply to be nonjudgmental without more is simply false, and it is a trap. It feels so good to say we’re nonjudgmental. It is part of our efforts to welcome into the faith and the church people who have been excluded for far too long for all the wrong reasons. Yet simply saying that we are nonjudgmental is still false, it is still a trap. The truth is that there are ways in which God calls us precisely to be judgmental. After all, we can hardly say that many of the leading figures in the Bible were never judgmental. Listen, for example, to the great eighth century BCE prophet Amos[3]:

Hear this word, you cows

                of Bashan

   who are on Mount Samaria,

who oppress the poor, who crush

                the needy,

   who say to their husbands,

                ‘Bring something to

                drink!’

The Lord God has sworn by

                His holiness:

   The time is surely coming

                upon you,

when they shall take you away

                with hooks,

   even the last of you with

                fishhooks. Amos 4:1-2

Nonjudgmental indeed! Amos just let the idle wealthy who oppressed the people have it but good.

Then of course there is Jesus. Hear again this familiar story:

     Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written,

                ‘My house shall be called a house

                                of prayer for all the

                                nations?’

                   But you have made it a den

                                of robbers.’  Mark 11:15-17

Hardly what you’d call nonjudgmental, is it.

Consider too the story of the so-called “widow’s mite” at Mark 12:38-13:2. There we read that Jesus said:

Beware of the scribes, who like to walk abound in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.

Jesus then observes a poor widow putting into the temple treasury “everything she had, all she had to live on.” In other words, the temple of the scribes has just devoured her house. So Jesus says: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” Again, hardly nonjudgmental, is it.

Amos and other great Old Testament prophets judged and condemned those who oppress the poor and the vulnerable in the name of God. Jesus judged and condemned those who used the most sacred place in Judaism to exploit the people. Amos spoke up for those whom his culture condemned as sinners because they were poor. Jesus condemned religious authorities who exploited rather than served the people and who used their ministry for their own ego gratification. Judgment was very much a part of what both Jesus and prophets were about.

So if we can’t say that Jesus and the prophets were nonjudgmental, and we can’t, how are we to understand judgment as a part of the life of faith? We understand first, I think, that evil is a reality in the world. Amos saw it. Jesus saw it. Prophets of many different faith traditions have seen it all over the world. Our call is to judge, denounce, and (nonviolently) oppose evil.[4] That’s what Jesus did, and it is what he calls us Christians to do. It is what God calls all people to do. And as we judge, denounce, and (nonviolently) oppose evil we must make a distinction that Jesus made (even if prophets like Amos sometimes weren’t very good at making it). We must distinguish between the evil that people do and the people that do it. Of course that isn’t an easy distinction to make. How can we condemn the evil Hitler and Stalin did without condemning Hitler and Stalin? Maybe we can’t, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.     

The problem with saying that we progressive Christians are nonjudgmental is that it fails to make that necessary distinction between evil and the people who do it. Failing to judge and condemn evil leaves us passive. It makes us useless in God’s struggle against the evil that we fail to judge. Of what use to the world is a church that just sits there and lets evil have sway without even saying much less doing anything against it? None, that’s what. God doesn’t need uselessly passive allies. God needs prophets. God needs disciples of Jesus, and both the prophets and Jesus has no qualms at all about judging and condemning evil. Yet we must of course be cautious. Is what we’re condemning as evil really evil? Christians judged faithful same gender relationships as evil for centuries, and far too many still do. Now we know that they are nothing of the sort. Are we condemning evil and not people? We must be cautious, but we mustn’t let the need for caution stop us from making prophetic judgments. It’s not easy, but judging evil is part of our call as Christians. Let’s not let the fact that Christians have often judged wrongly stop us from judging as are called to judge.

So our faith is filled with traps. We make easy statements about important matters without giving them sufficient thought. Let’s stop doing that. Lets recognize the traps that our faith sets before us. Then let’s avoid them, OK?

---

[1] Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Archway Publishing, Bloomington, Indiana, 2015.

[2] Id., p. 134.

[3] The Scripture quotations contained herein 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. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[4] Yes, I know. At Matthew 5:39 Jesus says “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” The late Walter Wink has conclusively demonstrated that the Greek word that always gets translated as “resist” in this passage is a military term that means something like “go out in ranks against.” The line would be better translated “Do not resist an evildoer violently” See Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium, ” Doubleday, New York, 1998, Chapter 5, “Jesus’ Third Way,” pp. 98-111.

Liberal Is Not Enough

A Call to Spirit-based Socialism

Liberal is not enough. Lorraine Hansberry, the young, Black, lesbian author of the play Raisin in the Sun, knew that being liberal isn’t enough. She called on white liberals to become white radicals. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called white liberals out on their timidity, on their calls for patience, in effect for their meek and ineffective support for the civil rights movement. Lorraine Hansberry was right. Martin Luther King, Jr., was right. Liberal is not enough. Yet for us Christians there is an even more important truth that establishes that liberal is not enough. Jesus Christ was not a liberal. He was a radical, nonviolent revolutionary. His teaching turned his world upside down, and it turns our world upside down too. That the church which claims to be his body on earth has betrayed him by taming him doesn’t change the truth. Jesus wasn’t a conservative, and he wasn’t a liberal. He didn’t want to conserve the faith or the world of his time, he wanted to change them, he wanted to change them radically. He wanted to transform them. Many mainline Christians, myself included, have long thought of ourselves as liberal Christians. Well, maybe we were, but liberal is not enough. Liberal isn’t true to Jesus Christ. Liberal won’t reform the world.

By the 1960s American liberals, including Christian liberals, had been calling out for justice for a very long time; and it should have been obvious that it wasn’t working. By 1968 it was obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain that the Vietnam war was immoral, pointless, and unwinnable. We marched in the streets. We put up liberal political candidates like Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy. What happened? In 1968 this country made the despicable Richard Nixon president. The election of Nixon showed that the liberals had lost, and had lost more than one presidential election. We thought we could change the world. We thought that maybe we had changed the world. By electing Nixon the American people said like hell you have. The election of Tricky Dick showed that liberal wasn’t enough. Liberal lost. Being liberal gave us the worst American president until Donald Trump. Nixon betrayed the country and had to resign, but things didn’t get better. In 1976 we elected liberal Jimmy Carter. Carter is our greatest ex-president, but he was a weak and ineffective president. Then in 1980 we elected Ronald Reagan. We made a dimwitted, right-wing ideologue, whose primary claim to fame was having made a movie with a monkey, president. Reaganite culture saw immoral greed as moral. It made selfishness posh. Reaganites claim credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, a very good thing that resulted entirely from internal Soviet dynamics not American foreign ones. In 2000 we made George W. Bush president, an affable but slow bumbler who invaded Iraq when there was no reason to do so and lied trying to justify it. Then we got Bill Clinton, a personally immoral manipulator who gave us the Defense of Marriage Act and right-wing welfare reform. Yes, in 2008 we elected Barack Obama. Obama is a silver-tongued orator who was never as liberal as we wanted him to be and convinced ourselves he was.

Then, in 2016, absolute disaster. The United States of America, the country that claims to be a beacon of freedom and justice in the world, made Donald J. Trump our forty-fifth president. Trump is the swindling, lying New York real estate wheeler dealer who has failed at most everything he has ever tried to do by any measure other than making money, in part at least by defaulting on his legal obligations and not paying his debts. How many times did he declare bankruptcy? I’ve lost count. There simply is no doubt that he is in bed with the Russian mafia, laundering their money and lauding their strong-arm president Putin. Trump, the apparently mentally unstable man who has not one single qualification for being president. Trump, who signs tax legislation that benefits only the very, very rich and screws the rest of us. Trump, who denies the reality of climate change and whose appointees are dismantling the EPA. Trump, who rolls back legal protections for LGBT folks, protections it took us decades to put in place. Trump, who gets elected after he has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and getting away with sexual assault because he’s famous. Trump, the serial adulterer, sits in the Oval Office, the place Aaron Sorkin has called the strongest home field advantage in the world. The office of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. He lives in the home of Abraham Lincoln. He disgraces the White House by his very presence in it. To make matters worse, the ignorant, backward voters of America keep putting the Republicans in charge of Congress. The result? Tax law for the very rich, demands to throw the Dreamers out of the country, confirmation of federal judges opposed to individual liberty, complicity in Trump’s plans to undo all of the gains in civil liberty and care for Americans in need put in place over the last eighty plus years. Congressional Republicans even want to undo Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the minimal programs that provide most of the inadequate social safety net our country provides.

All of this is what being liberal in America has gotten us. Yes, there has been some progress. The 1964 Civil Rights Act is still in place. The 1965 Voting Rights Act is still in place though the Supreme Court has take most of the teeth out of it by claiming that racial discrimination in voting is no longer a problem among us. Despite Republican attempts to repeal it, some of the Affordable Care Act is still law. The US Supreme Court has decreed that marriage equality is the law of land, perhaps became some of its conservative members are really libertarians. Still, millions upon millions of Americans live in poverty while the very rich amass more and more money that they don’t need, don’t use productively, and no one should have. Time in prison is still so much a part of the lives of Black American men that, it seems, many of them just expect to experience it. Institutional racism makes Black Americans second class citizens. Many of them live with lousy schools, lousy health care, and a system that convinces them that they will never be equal, will never make it in American society. So do a lot of poor white people. Untold numbers of our young people check out through the use of prescription opioids, heroin, and other illegal drugs, and no one wants even to ask the question why. We just want to throw people in jail, which solves nothing. Millions of Americans still lack health insurance because even our supposedly liberal politicians won’t work for a universal, single payer system of health insurance, the only system that makes any sense and that works well almost everywhere else in the so-called developed world. Obama took it off the table before he even began working on health insurance reform. That’s what being liberal in America has gotten us. A wealthy elite that puts the robber barons of the gilded age to shame. Tens of millions in poverty. Tens of millions without health insurance. Individual liberty under attack from racist and homophobic bigots. A warming climate that threatens unimaginable damage to the planet and a great many of the people who live on it while right-wing politicians deny that it is even happening. A psychotic gun culture that results in orders of magnitude more gun deaths per capita than in any other “advanced” country. Right-wing politicians hellbent on making sure none of that ever changes. Ignorant voters who buy the right-wing lies and vote against their own self-interest. An enormous military that cloaks itself in the myth of defending our freedom while actually projecting American political and economic power around the world. That’s “liberal” America folks. That’s what being only liberal has gotten us.

Being liberal is not enough. Liberal doesn’t work. Liberal isn’t strong enough to overcome the forces of reaction and oppressive political and economic systems. Liberal doesn’t overcome racism, especially the institutional racism that most white Americans won’t even acknowledge exists. Liberal doesn’t overcome homophobia. Liberal doesn’t reverse climate change. Liberal doesn’t end the gun culture. Being liberal is so ineffective that its actual effect is to empower the political, economic, and cultural right to the detriment of most Americans and even of the planet earth. Liberal isn’t enough. It’s time for something more. It’s time for liberal Americans to become radical Americans. Indeed, it is way past time for liberal Americans to become radical Americans.

It is way past time for liberal Christians to become radical Christians. Imperial Christianity, the de jure or de facto established Christian faith of the European west since the fourth century CE has so convinced us that Jesus was mostly about how we get our souls to heaven after we die that we have almost completely forgotten how radical he was. Listen anew to some of the things he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.” Luke 6:20¹ “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” Luke 6:24 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.² But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second.” Matthew 5:38-41 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you….” Matthew 5:43-44 “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” Matthew 20:16 “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”³ John 18:36 The list of Jesus’ radical statements could go on and on.

Many of Jesus’ actions were as radical as his statements. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. That may not strike us as radical, but it was. Jesus is enacting an Old Testament passage, Zechariah 9:9-10, which reads:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

Shout aloud, O daughter

Jerusalem!

Lo, your king comes to you,

triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

He will cut off the chariot

from Ephraim

and the war-horse from

Jerusalem;

and the battle bow shall be

cut off,

and he shall command peace to the nations….

Borg and Crossan invite us to consider the contrast between Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey enacting this passage about a king of peace and Pilate entering Jerusalem on his chariot with his soldiers bringing a show of massive military force. Jesus is a king, but he is a nonviolent king of justice and peace.

Other passages show Jesus’ radicality even though he doesn’t even appear in them. Take, for example, Mary’s song from Luke known as the Magnificat. There supposedly meek, mild Mary sings:

He [God] has brought down the

powerful from their

thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with

good things,

and sent the rich away empty. Luke 1:52-53

The Magnificat is an example of already and not yet eschatology, for God has hardly done those things in any full or visible way. Still, Mary sings the vision, her son’s vision, God’s vision of a world transformed from one where domination is the order of the day to one where justice prevails, a vision of the world turned upside down. Mary’s song isn’t just radical, it’s revolutionary.

Jesus’ earliest followers understood how radical he was. They practiced nonviolence though it sometimes cost them their lives. They got it how radical his social teaching was. In the book of Acts we read: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” Acts 4:32 It is likely that Marx’ vision of a classless society came from Bible passages like these. Maybe the atheist Marx understood the radicality of Jesus better than most Christians have. In any event, whether we look at the matter through secular eyes examining recent history, or whether we look at the matter through the vision of the one we call Lord and Savior, it is clear that liberal isn’t enough. It’s way past time for us liberals to become radicals.

Which of course raises the question of just what it means for us liberals to become radical. Radical how? Radical to what end? Radical by what means? To get answers to those questions we start by looking at the definition of the word radical. Radical means going to the root of something, to the fundamental nature of a thing. It comes to us from the Latin word radix, which means root. Radical then is the opposite of superficial. To be radical is to look to the root of a thing, to its origin; and it is to work to bring about transformation by addressing the root causes of that which needs to be transformed. In the political context it means advocating complete or thorough change of existing institutions. Change them from the root up, for without changing the causes of poverty, injustice, and violence we’ll never transform the world.

By contrast, liberal means something like relating favorably to progress or reform. Historically, liberal once meant what we now mostly mean by conservative. Liberalism advocated capitalism and the free market. It advocated democratic forms of government. In its time those things were perhaps desirable. Today they are what must be reformed. Moreover, while relating favorably to progress or reform is better than opposing them, liberalism does not go to the roots of our problems. Liberalism leads people to demand patience when it comes to civil rights. Liberalism means treat conservatism as a legitimate option with which you just disagree on some issues and with which you are willing to negotiate and compromise. Liberalism provoked King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” because it didn’t go far enough. It didn’t grasp the depth of the problem of racism, segregation, and racial discrimination. It didn’t understand the misery those phenomena produced. I’m not sure it does even today.

Liberal sees the world as it is, or at least sort of as it is, and is willing to work with and within the structures it has created. For a good example of how liberal works look at the Congressional Democrats negotiating with Congressional Republicans. In doing so they tacitly recognize the legitimacy of hard right people and hard right politics. To recognize the legitimacy of the hard right is to say that it has something to offer, that those who belong to it are decent people with whom one can work, with whom one compromise. Today that is no longer true.

Radical sees the world as it is and says “No more!” Radical gets how bad things are. Radical gets how much far too many people suffer. Liberal may open food banks. Radical seeks to transform society to that food banks are no longer necessary. Liberal decides whether or not to vote to authorize Bush to invade Iraq. Radical says no to all war not just to some war. Liberal doesn’t create a universal single payer health insurance system. Liberal doesn’t reduce the military to what might actually be necessary to defend the nation. Liberal doesn’t use the tax system to redistribute wealth down where it can do some good rather than up where it just makes the wealthy wealthier. It just tweaks around the edges, making things a bit more fair but hardly ushering in a time of true justice. Liberal compromises with the powers that oppose what is right, and when it does it keeps real transformation from happening. We don’t need more liberal. Liberalism has failed, and it’s not ever going to succeed. It’s never going to remake the world, and nothing less than remaking the world will do.

So what do we need? We need radical. We need reform from the root up. We need to reorder how human beings live together. Now, I get it that that sounds like a Herculean task or even an impossible one. I hear the cries of “It can’t be done!” “People have tried that before, and it’s always been a disaster!” “You should know better, Sorenson. You lived in the Soviet Union for a year. You saw the utter failure of the Communist ideal.” And yes, at least that last one is true. I did live in the Soviet Union during the 1975-76 academic year. And yes, Soviet Communism was a total failure. Instead of creating the promised land it created one of the worst, most brutal, dehumanizing, life diminishing systems of human political, economic, and social organization ever.

Yet if we are to learn from the failure of Soviet Communism we must understand why it failed and failed so miserably. Some say it failed because its ideology contradicted human nature. In this view people are essentially motivated by greed. People work only to make money. Wealth is the surest sign not only of earthly success but of divine favor. Yet I don’t think that is primarily why Soviet Communism failed so miserably. I believe that it failed from the beginning because of its materialistic ontology. The Russian and other Communists who created the Soviet system (Stalin was a Georgian not a Russian) began with Marx’s philosophy of “dialectical materialism.” Dialectical materialism begins with the belief that only the material is real. Only the physical is real. Marxism is thus radically atheistic. If only the material is real then there is no spiritual reality that can be called God. In Marxism there is no God. Marxism claims to be a theory that benefits humanity, but it isn’t. It isn’t because it has no transcendent reality in which to ground a belief in the value of human life. If humans are just material like every other reality then they have no greater value than any other reality.

Moreover, Marxism speaks in terms of the benefit of the mass of the people, not of the benefit of people individually. Consequently, in Marxism people become tools. They are nothing more than a means to a proclaimed end, namely, the building of a classless Communist society. When people become tools rather than ends in themselves they lose their value. Killing a person has no less moral value than throwing away a saw that doesn’t cut. Is this person impeding the construction of the Communist ideal? Kill him, he has no moral value in himself. Does that person object to what the Party is doing to build the Communist ideal? Kill her. She is less than worthless. Stalin is famously quoted as having said that one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic. Well, I suppose one million deaths is a statistic, but for Stalin and the Soviet Communists generally that’s all it was. People were just material. Soviet Communism saw no greater reality. It saw no higher power, no God. So if you believe that it will further your goals to kill someone, kill them. If you think it will further your goals to kill one million people, kill one million people, or twenty million people like Stalin did. Marxism-Leninism claims to work for the benefit of the people, but ultimately the people have no moral value in that belief system. They are mere tools. They are mere objects.

The Leninist part of Marxism-Leninism played its part in the failure of Soviet Communism too. Lenin’s contribution to the theory of Marxism-Leninism was multifaceted, but perhaps his most consequential contribution to it was his theory of the Communist Party. Lenin taught that the Communist Party (or the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party as it was originally caused, also the Bolshevik faction of that party) consists of the leading elements of the proletariat. That is, it supposedly consists of the most class conscious members of the working class. Lenin intended it as a small group of highly dedicated revolutionaries who accepted Marxist philosophy and Leninist ideology. The task of the Party was to lead the country into the Communist ideal of the classless society. To oppose the Party was to be counterrevolutionary. To oppose the Party was to stand in the way of progress toward the Communist ideal. So Lenin created the Cheka, the first manifestation of what became the KGB, the Communist Party’s main instrument of terror.

In Leninism the interests of the people and of the Party merge into one. What the Party decides is by definition correct because the Party consists of the people who get it, who get Marxism in its Leninist form. Thus, if the Party decrees that progress toward Communism requires that it starve several million Ukrainians to death in order to force collectivization of agriculture, then that is precisely what progress toward Communism requires. People who get it do it. Those who oppose it are counterrevolutionary and must be eliminated. When you combine that kind of Party totalitarianism with a materialistic view of humanity that’s what you get. The starvation of millions of Ukrainians. The creation of the Gulag in which millions more died. Their deaths weren’t significant in any ultimate sense. They were merely people who consisted only of matter. People were either tools in the Party’s hands or they were fully expendable at best and criminal at worst. Soviet Communism failed because it valued ideology over people. It failed because it valued Party over people. It failed because it was spiritually dead, as dead as any understanding of life that denies the spiritual and says that only the material is real.

When we understand that the failure of Soviet Communism was due not to its ideal of a just society of equality but to its underlying materialist, atheistic philosophy, then we can see not only that the failure of Soviet Communism is no proof of the unattainability of the socialist ideal but also how we need to change the Soviet model to achieve a just society of equality for all people. We start by jettisoning Marxism’s underlying ontology. Marx and the other positivists of nineteenth century Europe were just wrong. There is more to reality than the material. In fact, ultimate reality isn’t material at all. It is spiritual. Indeed, it is spirit or, if you prefer, Spirit. It is because ultimate reality isn’t material that we know that people, both individually and collectively, have immense moral value. We know that that is true because our values are grounded in something transcendent, something ultimate. We people of faith say that people have value because they are children of God. Even if you don’t like that God language, please recognize that reality is so much more than the material objects we see around us. Recognize that human life comes from and is grounded in a transcendent reality and that it is its coming from and being grounded in a transcendent reality that gives it moral value. When you kill a person you are not killing a mere material object. You are killing an expression of ultimate reality. You are killing an entire world of that person’s experience, and you are ending that person’s connection with the ultimate, or at least ending it as far as this life is concerned. Because we all come from and are grounded in the same transcendent reality, every person’s life is as sacred as mine. Or if you don’t like the word sacred, every person’s life has the same moral value as mine. Many of us find the expression of this truth in one or another of the world’s great religions to be compelling, but even if you don’t find religion compelling you must find the moral value of every human life to be compelling. For it is only in the compelling conviction of the moral value of every human life that atrocities like those the Soviet Communists (or German Nazis, or Tojo’s Japan, or Mao’s Chinese Communists, or so many others) can be avoided.

So what do we need? We don’t need more liberalism. Liberalism isn’t radical enough. We need a system of social, economic, and political organization that works for the benefit of all people not for the benefit only of the wealthy. And we need a system of that sort that recognizes and respects the infinite moral value of every person. In other words, we need faith-based socialism. For us Christians it would be Christian socialism. For non-Christians it wouldn’t be Christian socialism, but it could still be a faith-based or spirit-based socialism. This socialism would not seek to force any religious faith on anyone. All faiths, including atheism, would be respected and have full freedom to function within the law as the tenets of the faith direct. Taxation would be based on ability to pay. Services would be provided on the basis of need. The political system would be democratic, for undemocratic socialism has proven itself to be a disaster.

The model would be countries like Norway. Yes, taxes are high in Norway; but the people are mostly quite content, and all reports are that life is good there. Would a system like Norway’s work in the United States, which is so much larger and more demographically diverse? I think it could, and I definitely think it is worth a try. Sadly, the American public is a long way away from accepting such a system. Americans did, after all, recently make the American fascist Donald Trump president. That doesn’t mean we give up on the task of creating a truly just and equitable system. It means we have a lot of work to do to overcome the outmoded political and economic beliefs of so many Americans, who associate socialism not with fairness and equality but with Communist oppression. I don’t expect to see those efforts succeed in my lifetime, but as they say our call is to do the work not worrying about completing it. May we get on with that work.

1 The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright (c) 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

2 The Greek word translated here as “resist” means to resist militarily or violently. The specific actions which follow are examples not of passivity but of creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to oppression.

3 John Dominic Crossan considers this verse to be one of the clearest statements of Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence in the New Testament.