The _________ Is My Neighbor

Retrospection often brings change.

I think of the “other” and how those who are considered to be wholly different, hostile, despicable, and worth fighting transform as history treads a continuing path.

One of my favorite television shows growing up was Hogan’s Heroes. For those who are not familiar, it was your typical situation comedy. The setting however was unique in that the primary characters were prisoners and their guards at a German World War II prison camp. Now, while the main characters of the show were historically binary opposites, the Allied vs. the Axis, the show portrays them in quite a different light. Of course there is tension, and because the show is a comedy there is much abstraction from reality, but there is general amicability between the Germans and their prisoners.

Now, this is a mere twenty years after a bloody worldwide war of almost unfathomable destruction. Somehow, however, we are able to transform the situation, perhaps see the common humanity within those who were wholly other before. Of course, other nuances exist. The Germans are pictured as silly and, in a sort of way, a bit puerile. Plus, those watching the show are safe; they know who will win.

And, America has a new enemy: the Communists. And then a new new enemy: the terrorist (commonly brushed universally as the “Muslim”). When will it end?

Maybe we need to rework our moral system. Perhaps we need to call upon an ethic of transformation.

I think at some point Christians need to stand up and affirm the heart of our faith, perhaps to ruminate on the transformation of the Cross, a metamorphosis that calls for a changed community and new creation. I think of the parable Jesus discloses of the Good Samaritan, a parable that asks us to encounter the narrative illustrated in a new way.

It is not some story about personal morality. Jesus is no Joel Osteen, calling for us to be our best selves.  In fact, Jesus is completely reworking how his audience (in Luke, this is the lawyer who asks Jesus who his neighbor is and leads to the chiasmic orientation of the parable) sees the “other.” Contextually, the audience enters the story, taking the place of the robbed, beaten, and unconscious Jew. The priest passes, perhaps an expected action as the unconscious Jew would appear dead, perhaps, and thus render the priest and those in his company ceremonially unclean (and in risking this, if he continued with his duties and was found out would be put to death). After the priest, the Levite passes by leaving the bloody traveler to his fate, after all in following the priest he would have been obliged to continue along making the same decision, otherwise he would risk shaming his superior.

Lastly a Samaritan walks by. And stops, feeling compassion for the Jew. The audience certainly would not have expected such a turn! The expected person would have been Jewish layman, not a Samaritan. Instead of an accepted individual, one who is considered outside the boundaries of the Jewish community is inserted into the story, is moved with compassion, and saves the life of one who  would normally have occupied the status of “other.”

In the end the lawyer who asked the initial question to Jesus (“Who is my neighbor?”) is not directly answered. Instead, Jesus reorients the question after he tells the parable: “To whom must I become a neighbor?” The Samaritan is the neighbor, and being a neighbor means to take in the imaginative space that Christ paints with the parable. It means to “Go and do likewise.”

Who are we to vilify those who are  normally considered to be our enemies? Who are we to ignore their pain, their woes, their destitution?

We are the neighbor. Go and do likewise. Seek the justice of God through helping those your context would normally sway you to dislike. Humanize those who you normally dehumanize.

A Kingdom of Justice: Part 2

In the last post I posited several questions that hopefully help guide the Christian to a deeper contemplation of issues concerning justice.

Perhaps one of the more important questions is the one that asks, “Which rationality and whose justice are we operating under?”

Justice is intimately tied to ethical systems. Thus, when we operate under systems of violence it is quite easy to rationalize violence as the primary mean through which wrongs can be righted. After all, when a country or ideology tries to harm or threaten the foundation of modern western democracy it is deemed necessary and justified to either persuade those forces to align themselves with the our ideology, even if that persuasion goes beyond dialogue and enters violent force, which is itself a type of persuasion.

In regards to more secularized conceptions of justice a multitude of theories abound. There is the Rawlsian type which focuses more on an equation of “justice” and “fairness”. Rawls truly does care about equality, and noticing the debilitation caused by inherent caste systems posits a justice system whereby citizens intentionally utilize a “veil of ignorance”. They repress all individual realities and make judgments as purely autonomous and objective entities. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately), we are historically conditioned beings. We cannot just forget the realities that make up our lives, because those realities and experiences are a part of ourselves, they make up who we are.

Other systems of justice exist too, such as those built on the foundation of utilitarianism. Under the roof of this construction it is believed that we can confidently sacrifice the one for the many. If the greater good can be served by a lesser evil, than the lesser evil is an obligation. But, can we make confident calculations such as this? Does this really produce justice? Just as with Rawlsian account of justice problems arise because us moderns believe we have much more knowledge and ability than we actually do. When American policy makers create “justice” they do so with America in mind, primarily. The “infinite justice” proclaimed by Bush, for instance, shortly after 9/11 was met equally by a desire for “infinite justice” proclaimed by Bin Laden.  Both desired acts of revenge, both felt obligated to protect their homelands. This is not to make any sort of justification for the unspeakable acts carried ouy over 10 years ago, but it also is not meant to justify the propagation of violence that has gone on for decades before and after that event.

A Social Ethic

But what about the Christian reality? Do we take seriously the communal standards set forth by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount? Here the followers of Jesus are called to renounce violence, forgo lust, extinguish hatred, stay true to promises, and to love those who seek our destruction; these are both ethical and theological, and thus concerned with justice. We represent a different communal order, a different metaphysic, than the state powers. The Christian way isn’t reduced to forced persuasion in order to propagate, but to spread truth through Community, Cross, and New Creation. The Christian ethic makes no is-ought distinction, but makes a particular claim about what reality is and who people are within that reality. To section off the metaphysical claim to the avenue of “spiritual” is to make a divide where one does not exist. Jesus was no Platonist, and certainly not a Cartesian.

The difficulty is that this is difficult! It is both difficult to live out, but also fundamentally difficult because of lived experience. What do we do about injustice? Is it to be ignored or hugged away? Is it to be stood up to, and if so how? Perhaps we can look to those who came before us and realize the beauty of their resistant nonviolence, even in their sometimes failures. Martin Luther King, Jr. brought about great change. That rumors persist about infidelity (whether true or not) does not negate the impact of one trying to follow Christ, though failing at times. The truth is that violence breeds violence, and justice that is based on violence will not bring about the seemingly evanescent horizon of justice.

While this post does not put an end to the struggle of both understanding the scriptures or how the world works, I hope it is a challenge to take seriously Christian faith as a reality, not merely another choice in the marketplace of ideas.

A Kingdom of Justice: Part 1

Justice? Competing Visions…

Evil acts are committed.

Reaction(s) occur.

The audience applause.

These are the bare minimums, the bare occurrences, within plots; problem, reaction(s), and ending solution. We watch a movie and the plot is introduced with an initial problem. Someone has to do something! Some person must solve this problem which often concerns some sort of evil or immoral act, or other such problem. Stories are ripe with the fruits of cultural engagement, engagement which transcends the story and reaches also into the metaphysical concerns and beliefs of  a culture or cross section of a culture. Thus, perhaps we can look a bit into story to see what seems to me to be the norm when it comes to how justice is understood by our culture.

Take, for instance, a really simplified version of Gladiator. Certainly this film has been seen  by many to be a modern-day classic, and a film which has helped bring about popularity of historic biopics with similar scenery (like Troy and Alexander). It is an amazing piece of cinema and holds up to a variety of interpretations and artful analyses. However, taking an extremely simplified analysis allows one to see the usual good vs. evil motif, or perhaps less strongly, right vs. wrong. Justice must be done, and even if Maximus is not able to see fulfillment in this life, he will meet his family in the next. The ones who did wrong against him are ultimately accounted for and there is vindication.

War movies have similarly been popular in recent decades, especially ones that pit the Righteous Allied against the Evil Axis, or perhaps the Good Western democracies against the Bad Communists. It is all very black and white. It is all very simplified; evil must be defeated ultimately through persuasion or force. Evil is given ontological reality, it is a thing that must be encountered and defeated.

Christians often do the same, especially when aligned with the state or other prominent powers. The Spanish Inquisition, though actually quite limited in scope, sought to bring about the ultimate good through persuasive force. The ultimate goal was to save the soul of the pagan or mistaken Jew, even if they must be forcibly baptized or made to recant their prior faith. We can also see here the separation between the material and spiritual, though such is relatively absent in New Testament literature.

Modern Christians have done similar. Following H. Richard Niebuhr it has become the norm to view Christ’s commands (or imperatives) as unlivable. After all, we live in a fallen and sinful world.  But also, after all, we live within Christendom, right? A sort of civil religion still exists whereby American nationalism and patriotism are seen as connected intimately with Christianity. What is good for America is good for the church.

In fact, when evil is done to America or seeks to dominate swaths of land or influence culture, the American/Christian must intercede. When terrorists cause havoc it is an imperative that we become involved and punish those that do evil acts so that further destruction may not occur. Or so that those who have died are avenged. The soldier is fighting for the country, and for virtues that are at the heart of both America and (supposedly) the Christian faith.

This is the dominant paradigm. Justice involves engagement, and engagement is usually through mediums of force or persuasion.

Do these contentions hold up? Is this the biblical paradigm that Christians are called to live by? Certainly it is rationally justifiable, but which rationality and whose justice are we navigating under? 

Such questions will be further pondered in the second part of this blog.

Who Isn’t into Theology?

In the wake of tragedies we all question, ponder, examine, or make the choice to make no examination whatsoever (which is by itself the result of examination!). While I by no means would attempt to address the sort of causation-fascination the media is attached to in order to garner attention from their listeners, readers, and watchers, I do believe it important to realize the reactions of humans in the wake of tragedies like the elementary school shootings at Sandy Hook in Newton, CT. The same, of course, occurred after the 9/11 attacks, after the Aurora theatre shootings, in the wake of any sort of horrid tragedy that the media picks up on and rapes from any angle it can in order to sell the sort of reality they portray. 

 

OK. That was a bit pessimistic and a borderline harangue, perhaps. The more immediately interesting issue, to me, however, is the intense theologizing and philosophizing that occurs immediately in the wake of these terrible happenings. Mike Huckabee, for instance, immediately issues a statement that includes God in which he alludes to a certain type of theodicy. In whatever rhetorical manner he intends he makes theological pronouncements concerning the causation of such horrific instances. God being shoved away from society has brought about a situation wherein evils can occur in schools. I do not think it is particularly helpful to dissect someone like Huckabee, but I do think it is helpful to realize that this is a perfectly natural reaction: to orient the situation in a certain way that what has occurred makes sense in regards to the particular schema we live our lives by.

 

If one makes a quick trip on any social media site they see the same being done by most people, whether church-going types, theists who are not engaged in a community of believers, pagans, atheists, agnostics, and whatever other sort of nebulous categories we can come up with. Whether religion is a topic immediately engaged or not, big subjects such as the nature of human existence, bioethics, entitlement rights, power rights, virtue, dualistic tensions inherent in reality, the overall nature of reality, etc… are heavy on the minds and hearts of individuals. We all philosophize. We all theologize.

 

While not seeing philosophy and theology as coterminous, I do think the two are necessarily linked. If one were to attempt some sort of grand survey of human existence it would become quite apparent that the distinction between “religious” and “secular” is quite new (the Ancient near Easterns certainly would not see the distinction, neither would those in the Hellenistic regions). In fact, some would say that there is no real separation between the two even now. William Cavanaugh, DePaul University Professor of Theology, has written several volumes which have engaged this subject such as Migrations of the Holy:God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. His analysis leaves one realizing that the “secular state” really has become the holy order taking the place of religion, mirroring the societal aspects that religion once inhabited, attempting to replace the importance that religion once held; holiness has simply migrated from overtly religious institutions to covert theological institutions. Stanley Hauerwas, along with Cavanaugh, has for instance noticed the sacrificial language used in relation to the soldier, who lays down not only his life but also his distaste for the taking of life in order to serve the means of the state. In a more direct manner, Giorgio Agamben, atheist Italian political philosopher, has written in his  volume The Kingdom and the Glory that “in modernity, theology continues to be present and active in an eminent way” (loc.203 Kindle version). Here he sides with Carl Schmitt, and not Max Weber, in his analysis, though he deepens the paradigm from Schmitt’s early comments. Agamben implements the ideas of the signature found in Foucault’s work in order to explain the relationship between the secular and the religious (the signature is “something that in a sign or concept marks and exceeds such a sign or concept referring it back to a determinate interpretation or field, without for this reason leaving the semiotic to constitute a new meaning or a new concept” (loc. 203).)

 

Suffice it to say, the secular is a type of religious, even if one does not want to go as far as Agamben. It orients the individual to schematize reality in certain ways and to relate signs and symbols of reality in these certain ways. The demythologization of reality is another mythologization, just of a different type (sorry Bultmann!). The difference is simply that it is the reigning myth and is asserted as the hierarchical victor (though it exists in constant tension and will eventually topple, if we take Derrida seriously).

 

With all of that said (and I admit it was a lot and may seem a bit technical to some) I must come to the main part, perhaps the important challenge, that I want to impart: as Christians we must know our theology.

 

Too often after tragedies it becomes easy to make these simple statements, many of which are good meaning but carelessly said. We state, “God has his will,” or question, “Why would God do this?” or, “Where was God in the midst of this tragedy?” or, “Why would someone do this?”. We comfort those in sorrow with well-meaning but misplaced words. This is certainly not to say that all of the above is not valid, nor correct; I am not attempting to evaluate the statements, but the background of the statement made or position held. We need to be careful with what we say. We need to engage theology and philosophy very carefully. Our theology and our philosophy reflect our worldviews, and often our worldviews are the result of the global culture industries we spend the majority of our time engaging in rather than the Scriptures, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Thomas Aquinas.

 

Please, challenge yourself to drop the popular god of comfortability, the god of pleasure, the god of the media, the idols that are thrust upon us often. If you are a Christian, engage in studying who the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is. Justify through the Scriptures and through other interpreters of the Scriptures what you know of God, the world, who the human is, what sin is, what economics is, etc… This is necessary, of the ultimate importance, for the Christian. It is also a difficult and lifelong commitment.

 

To become literate in the language of Christianity is quite easy; to become fluent in that language, however, is difficult and must be worked toward.

Is There a Purpose?

      A blog is a wonderful construction, an organic idea that seems to have blossomed exponentially as time has marched onward. Everyone seems to have one. From you “every day” celebrity, to the specialized academic, on to the “normal” individual no matter the walk of life they travel and continue on. 

      I will seek to implement this common tool of communication into my own life. Why not? Everyone else is doing it, after all…

      While that may not quite be the best reason to create such a public website (even including my full name! Gasp!), it does seem to be a valid reason. As the Internet has proliferated in our increasingly globalized existence it has become an exciting and integrating medium in the exchange of ideas.

      “Oh!” You may exclaim, “But we already have the Facebook! We have the Myspace! We have the other ‘grams and ‘interests and ‘walls and ‘books and ‘pages and ‘spaces and ‘squares! Why choose such a medium as a blog?!” 

      Simply put, these other social media sites are tiring! One finds it quite hard to accomplish the task of engaging interesting conversation on such sites. Especially when they seem to be concerned with propagating memes and the latest office gossip!

      I want discussion. Particularly concerning the issues and areas of study that I am concerned with. I may not receive much feedback, but at the least I can flesh out my thoughts in a public space where the possibility of other interested people encountering me is much greater.

      You may wonder what topics I do care about? I hope? Unfortunately, they cover a wide range. Mainly I have a passion for theology, and because of that I have a concern with everything; theology is, after all, a study that does concern all other areas of study, even economics.

      In relation to that, my “heroes” mainly include theologians and philosophers who have impacted me immensely because of their bold march onward in academics and their desire to further the grace of God onto the world: N. T. Wright, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Budde, William Cavanaugh, Kierkegaard, Richard B. Hays, Chris Hedges, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Jeph Holloway, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, D. Stephen Long and countless others.

Oh, and I also like Batman.

      As is obvious from my list of “heroes, one of the more interesting areas of study that I am enthralled with is the rather recent upsurge in Thomistic styled virtue ethics, although I lament the lack of interaction between popularizers of Christian virtue ethics and the scriptures. I hope to delve more into this problem in later posts and to interact with others who may have a bit of fat to chew in regards to these interesting issues.

      In the mean time, I will leave this post with one of the most influential quotes I have encountered as of late. I hope it is a sort of comfort to those who struggle in their living out the grace of Christ who has redeemed all,

 

“Love is the apprehension of the ‘other’ as the ‘other.’”

-Stanley Hauerwas