War(s) on Terror

College football and the NFL are in full swing, and America is wrapped up in all sorts of war and rumors of war. We hear the name Syria, but it is only the current name among others. There were others before, and unfortunately there will be others after. This is not a statement of cynicism; rather, it is a descriptive statement about America's identity being shaped by the politics of war.

Stanley Hauerwas has often made the rather absurd and presumptuous claim that the church is an alternative to war (e.g. War and the American Difference). But what does being an alternative to war have to do with us Christians other than being kind of sad because some people die in war? If Christianity’s essence pertains to having hope and Jesus in our hearts, then the church hardly has anything to do with war and being alternative to war.

But what if the church entails more than being a collection of persons who just so happen to have similar inward commitment to and experiences of the person named Jesus? What if the church is more than being a morass of individuals seeking introspective enlightenment?

In Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged the supposition that religion and particularly Christianity pertained only to individual inwardness. He refused to be satisfied with Christianity being relegated to such a small and rather superfluous realm of human experience. Rather, he asserted that God is at the center of life, and Christianity has at its core utmost appreciation for bodily existence.

Of course, I rather like Hauerwas and Bonhoeffer. I tend to read them quite a bit. However, it is not simply that I have acquiesced to their ideologies. Their theologies have captivated my imagination only because I was first captivated by the Jesus I encountered in the Gospel of Matthew. The Jesus I encountered there is not meek and mild. Rather, he is tenacious, unrelenting, hurtling directly into precarious territory not with a spear but with forgiveness even, and especially, for perceived enemies. And he called people, particularly the people of “Israel”, to join him, to be such a people of peacemakers in a violent world, in a land occupied by foreign powers, in a region riddled with conflict. In such a landscape, Jesus calls us to do the daring, costly, and shockingly bold thing of being peacemakers.

A few weeks ago, I got caught up in a conversation about violence and praying for our enemies, and my conversation partner said in passing, “But maybe it was easier back then.” She was, of course, referring to the social-historical context of Jesus’ first century listeners. I must say that it most assuredly could not have been easier for people back then, especially the people to whom Jesus was speaking. He was not speaking peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation to theologians in their armchairs. He was speaking to people living in a war-ridden world with rebellion and execution frequently on the airwaves.    

The world we hear reported on the news today is also constantly ruptured by violence and tragedy, and similarly in the late 1930’s Bonhoeffer knew all too well the cost of forgiveness and the dire need for it. When he was thirty-two years old, he gave a sermon in the little village of Gross-Schlönwitz. His sermon was entitled “Loving Our Enemies,” and in it he said,

“This is what Christ did for us. He did not become confused by our evil; he did not let himself be overcome by it. He overcame our evil with good. Let’s repeat how this happens: not by feeding the other person’s evil with our evil, the hatred of the other person with our hatred. Rather, it happens when the evil hits emptiness and finds nothing on which it can ignite. How do we overcome evil? By forgiving without end. How does that happen? By seeing the enemy as he or she truly is, the one for whom Christ died, the one whom Christ loved. How will the church-community win victory over its enemies? By letting the love of Christ win victory over our enemies.”

Until we learn that war does not vanquish evil but leads to sin and death, we will be forever caught up in the false story that war is necessary for peace. War, however, is not the road to peace. Forgiveness is, and peace is a road of righteousness. But in a world of war, righteousness is a road that may very well lead to death; however, there are some things worth dying for. Moreover, until the church learns that its life involves more than individualistic inwardness, it will continue to stand by quietly and do nothing; or even worse, it will misuse its voice by condoning war as it has often done.

To say that the church is an alternative to war may sound a bit idealistic. Peace rather than war is nice; it’s desired, but it sounds hardly more than cute. “War is the real world.” However, what if it were the case that war was easier to wage than forgiveness but that the future made by forgiveness and reconciliation was the only future worth hoping and working for?

Theological Horizons: identity and relevance

Imagine the Church had one of those sticker nametags that says, “Hello My Name is…” Rather than putting a proper name in the blank space, a simple description was written. What would it be?

In The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann describes the church in crisis in terms of relevance and identity, and he describes the ways in which different wings of the church have approached the issue of relevance and identity. The first wing of the church seeks to maintain its identity by defending orthodox doctrine. The second wing of the church seeks relevance by being politically and socially active. The first wing accuses the second wing of assimilation, and the second wing accuses the first of sectarianism. Relevance and identity appear to ram heads.

In this discussion, Moltmann has raised some important issues for me, namely that maintaining identity should not mean seclusion and that solidarity should not entail assimilation. In addressing these issues, Moltmann builds upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison theology in which Bonhoeffer asserts, “The church is only the church when it exists for others” (Letters and Papers from Prison, 382). Moltmann explains that in order to exist for others it cannot mean that the church must then become like the other, e.g. like society, for that would merely entail residing in the company of those like yourself.

Moltmann exclaims, “Bonhoeffer’s ‘existence for others’, to which so much appeal has been made, becomes meaningless if one is no longer any different from others, but merely a hanger on. Only someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately ‘exist for others’, for otherwise he exists only with those who are like him” (The Crucified God, 16).

Existing for the other must then entail being different from the other. Existing for the other necessarily excludes assimilation. However, existing for the other also excludes sectarianism, retreating into the ghettoes of marginalization, for this too is a sort of assimilation in so far as it passively accepts the marginalization of institutionalized religion in secular society. “Christians, churches and theologians who passionately defend true belief, pure doctrine and distinctive Christian morality are at the present day in danger of lapsing into pusillanimous faith…they build a defensive wall around their own little group,” and they risk losing their identity by accepting “the increasing isolation of the church as an insignificant sect on the margin of society, and encourage it by their sectarian withdrawal” (The Crucified God, 20).

Rather than falling victim to either form of assimilation – sameness or sectarianism, existing for the other entails plunging into society as a reality distinct from society.

If the church in America is to have a future (which I remain quite hopeful about), then its nametag must surely entail a description that is both relevant and faithful to its identity. It can do so by naming its identity to be in the crucified one whose identity is revealed in his relevance. As Moltmann says, “[Jesus] revealed his identity amongst those who had lost their identity, amongst lepers, sick, rejected, and despised, and was recognized the Son of Man amongst those who had been deprived of their humanity” (Crucified God, 27). Moltmann seems to suggest that the church reveals and maintains its identity and relevance by its difference and solidarity.  

Suffering, Theology, and the Church: a provisional reflection

When I was ten, I went to the Dominican Republic for the first time, and when I was twelve I went to Haiti for the first time. These trips have since shaped and colored my perception of the world; I knew then that not all is right with the world. In the backyard of the wealthy are people living in cardboard huts without clean water as if they do not exist. When I was in high school, my mom was diagnosed with cancer; the world collapsed. These moments in my life shook me, and I think in order to begin grasping the problem of suffering it has to shake you first.  

I remember sitting in my dimly lit dorm room at CIU during my junior year and reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for the first time; I remember reading the chapter entitled “Rebellion” in which Ivan Karamazov graphically describes the suffering of children. After Ivan tells a story about a general casting a young boy to be sundered by dogs in front of the boy’s mother, Ivan declares,

“I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one

tormented child…what do I care if the tormentors are in hell, what can hell set right here, if these little ones have already been tormented? And where is the harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive, and I want to embrace, I don’t want more suffering. And if suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price.”

For the past eight months, I have been interning at a small Presbyterian church in Hollywood, California, and part of what I do is lead the congregation in prayer during the worship service on Sunday mornings. People offer their concerns, and then I pray for them. Invariably, on Sunday mornings I have prayed for people with cancer and for families that have recently lost dear friends and family members. In these moments I have often thought and felt, “What shall I say? How should I pray?” These questions have thoroughly shaped my subsequent theologizing. I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he asked, “What do we really believe? I mean, believe in such a way that we stake our lives on it?” (Letters and Papers From Prison, 382).

On All Saints Day in 1755 an earthquake shook the very foundations of Lisbon, Portugal. Fires broke out, and people fled to the shore. They watched as the ocean strangely shrunk from the shore only to return as a mountainous wall of water; thousands of people fled to the shore only to be swept away by a tsunami. Tens of thousands of people died. This sparked numerous responses. Some theologians asserted that it was the judgment of God, while philosophers such as Voltaire criticized Leibniz’s repugnant best of possible worlds argument.  

But we need not look back several centuries. Such tragedies are with us today. The tsunami that overwhelmed Japan a few years ago is not front-page news in the U.S. any longer, but nonetheless people are still recovering. The same continues to be the case with people in Haiti.

We would likely wish for a few giant miracles to eradicate suffering from the world in one fell swoop. Indeed with a few twirls of a wand that is what we would like God to do. However, an easy button may be consistent with our character, but however strangely it is not with God’s. Is God then a malicious demon? Or is God impotent?

In response to the question, “How can a good, powerful God allow suffering,” it may be retorted, “God created beings free, which entails the possibility of suffering.” I rather dislike this response because like Job’s interlocutors it pussyfoots around, holding the matter at a distance and pretending to have answers that are little more than half-baked clichés of self-congratulation (albeit I am not calling Alvin Plantinga’s freewill argument a half-baked idea).  

Leaving our armchairs in which we query only about the logical problem of suffering (such queries never get us out of our armchairs!), we should ask, “What has God done and what is God continuing to do about this terrible mess?” I would submit that God is not a malicious demon nor is God impotent; it is often the case that theologians are willing to relinquish God’s omnipotence for the sake of retaining his goodness (cf. Harold Kushner).

God has done and is doing something. The canonical witness describes God responding to human suffering. In response to theodicy questions, it may be said, “Christ and the Church.” 

Christ stood in solidarity with those who were suffering. Jürgen Moltmann says, “The apocalyptic sufferings of ‘this present time’ are gathered up into ‘the suffering of Christ’ on Golgotha. Jesus suffers them in solidarity with others, and vicariously for many, and proleptically for the whole suffering creation” (The Way of Jesus Christ, 152). 

The Church universal is Christ taking form in the world and bearing the world’s suffering. Bonhoeffer explains,

“Suffering has to be endured in order that it may pass away. Either the world must bear

the whole burden and collapse beneath it, or it must fall on Christ to be overcome in him.

He therefore suffers vicariously for the world. His is the only suffering, which has redemptive efficacy. But the church knows that the world is still seeking for someone to bear its suffering, and so, as it follows Christ, suffering becomes the Church’s lot too and bearing it, it is born up by Christ.” (The Cost of Discipleship, 92).

Theodicy questions then are as much ecclesiological ones as theological ones. What Christ did and continues to do is linked to the very existence of the Church universal. But this is not only a theology of solidarity, for this also entails empowered activism on the Church’s part. The suffering Church, the bleeding Church, the Church of the bread and the cup is the Church that knows the suffering of the world and seeks to bring it to an end with the knowledge that it will be brought to an end because the Church is the Church of the empty tomb. This does not mean that the Church mends wounds in the same way an atomic bomb destroys; rather, the Church works from weakness like Christ; the empowered Church works like a mustard seed. 

On Practicing Prayer

Prayer is hard, and it is rather easy not to do. But we are told to pray, and we should even on days when we feel like we are only speaking to ourselves in an empty room.

Leo Tolstoy described a man told to lift a handle up and down without further instructions. The man could have scoffed and refused, but instead he began lifting the handle up and down. Nothing happened. But he continued. Then he noticed water coming out the other end; it was a water pump with a spout. He continued. Then he saw that as the water gushed out of the spout it was spreading across the ground. He saw plants, flowers all around him. He was in a garden, and as the water continued to flow the garden flourished. Then he was moved on to another task: gathering fruit. As he moved from lower to higher tasks, he learned more about the structure of the establishment and participated in it.

Prayer is that way. We are told to do it; we could scoff and refuse. But instead we do it; following the pattern of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, our vision is widened; we begin to see ourselves, others, and the world differently. We continue. This is not blind obedience because as we do it we learn what we could not learn without doing it. Sometimes initial obedience is a pathway to discovery and full participation.  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained that when we pray for particular people it is rather difficult to hate them as we pray for them. Prayer when it is a habit changes us even when we think our prayers are like trees falling in a forest without ears. But we are not merely to pray for anything; we are to pray the Lord’s Prayer and to shape our prayers accordingly. We are to appeal to God’s own character, and when we do we may very well find ourselves being shaped into the image of God. We become “perfect” like God by loving our enemies, and we learn to love them by first praying for them.

In this way, the practice of prayer is not merely about “prayer closets” and “small group bible studies.” Prayer is relational; it spills into all areas of who we are in relation to others. Their concerns become ours and ours become theirs. Prayer creates embodied community that reflects the righteousness of God. And as such, prayer must be inherently connected to public action. If we keep the water cupped at the spout, the garden will most certainly wither. The wounds of the world are far too deep and wide to be plugging the spout. 

Fragments on Peace

Since beginning my studies at Fuller, I have toiled over whether or not some form of pacifism is most in keeping with a serious reading of the gospel narratives (and other early Christian teaching).

From the outset I should probably say that my toiling over the pacifism question is not a mere ideological concern. We live in a country whose history is a history of wars and whose present is entangled in wars. We must then ask ourselves the question, “Where and how will we locate ourselves in this country?” This is a practical question, for this question and its answers will permeate our whole lives in everything we see, say, and do in the present and the future. Moreover, a theology that does not pertain to the ethical and the political is all too impotent and mostly useless.  

My first quarter at Fuller, I read John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (I was also reading Michael Walzer at the time), and I was quite receptive to it I think perhaps because I had recently read N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God in which Wright draws Jesus’ renunciation of violence into focus (e.g. 595). During this time I was also studying under Glen Stassen who is a pacifist and who encourages the practice of what he calls “transforming initiatives,” which are inspired from the imperatives (in contrast with the indicatives) in the Sermon on the Mount (e.g. “go, be reconciled!”).

I must say, however, that I have never quite been comfortable with pacifism, but for that matter pacifism is not about feeling comfortable. If anything, just war theory is about we who are comfortable keeping our comfort. Pacifism, however, is not exactly about retaining personal or for that matter societal equilibrium.

I have never quite been convinced by arguments for pacifism, though I must admit that I have purposefully read pacifists with the secret hope of becoming persuaded. The self-sacrificial concern for the other has been a natural draw for me since this fits well into the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, but pacifism has remained all too much like a quixotic principle to me. And as is the case with many principles, pacifism has seemed to be yet another principled ethic that breaks down in the midst of gritty life – what am I to do as a pacifist when I am standing in front of Dachau and Auschwitz? Simply renouncing violence does not get us very far at all. In part I think it was this apparent sense of passivity in pacifism that C. S. Lewis was reacting to in his talk entitled “Why I am Not a Pacifist” (though I must say, that talk is not among the best responses to pacifism; of course if we all became pacifists, we would get over run; so did Jesus and many of his closest followers. A rationale of self-preservation is practical but does not remain in keeping with the gospel narratives).  

All this to say I have been hungry for an ethic other than pacifism but that is perhaps not far afield from it (as an aside, I should say that I have read my fair share of just war theorists and listened to their lectures, and I do not consider any of that a viable option; using the enemies’ weapons against the enemy will only reveal us to be duplicitous in character).

Roughly six years ago, I read Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It seemed rather saintly, and not something I or anyone else I know could possibly live up to. It struck me as rather pietistic not to mention terribly passive. Shortly thereafter I began reading his Ethics, but I never got very far, though I tried reading it on about two or three different occasions.

Then this winter quarter I took a class entitled “The Ethics of Bonhoeffer.” I was excited about the class because I knew we would be reading Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison. Now I would be forced to read Ethics. This time my experience of it was completely different. It was, of course, thoroughly theological, which is not unhelpful. But more importantly, his concept of “responsible action” was like a breath of fresh air. It was a convergence of the gospel narratives, pacifism (though not passivism), and thoroughgoing social responsibility. He had my attention. I felt as if finally someone was answering the questions that I wanted to ask but was incapable of asking.

Bonhoeffer had no room for keeping individuals’ consciences unscathed nor did he suppose it to be any more helpful to talk about maxims abstracted from life. His ethic is thoroughly social and concrete. There is no talk of drawing lines between those who share complicity and those who do not. Those who take responsible action plunge into the guilty society as members of the guilty society. “If it is responsible action, if it is action which is concerned solely and entirely with the other man, if it arises from selfless love for the real man who is our brother, then precisely because this so, it cannot wish to shun the fellowship of human guilt” (Touchstone, Ethics, 237) – for more explanation see Tödt, Authentic Faith. This is not a passive peace ethic nor is it concerned with retaining one’s individualistic piety.

I have to agree with Jürgen Moltmann: Bonhoeffer got it right in his “prison theology.”