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Exposing the “Powers”: Japan, Germany, and the United or Confederate States

I have long wanted to write a fact-based novel portraying what Walter Wink calls the “powers.”[1] The “powers” refers to the spirit or personality of a country or group of people which is larger than the sum total of its parts. The peculiar “spirit” or power I have encountered in both Japan and the United States is remarkable in its capacity to shape and blind people to their history (e.g. war crimes, the enslavement of other peoples) and as a result of this blindness to continue to oppress (and, of course, I am thinking of the present moment in this country in which the blindness to racism is being made evident).

Japanese citizens resemble those in post war Germany, in counting themselves the primary victims of their military and governmental leaders during World War II. Very few admit to any sort of guilt on the part of the Emperor, their own family, or within themselves. Though Germany also experienced this victim mentality, counting themselves the ultimate and worst victims of the war and portraying a blindness to the near universal support of Hitler, the philosopher, Susan Neiman, describes how Germans, over a period of decades, have confronted their past through memorials, official acts of remembrance, and reparations.[2] Otherwise Germans might see themselves as victims, on the order of Southerners who continue to imagine the lost cause of the Confederacy was just and heroic.

Even slight acquaintance with the history of the Confederate States dispels the pervasive narrative that the Civil War was about States’ Rights. The point of secession was, according to the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander Stephens, to correct the United States Constitution: “The Constitution… rested upon the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Stephens deploys biblical language, referring to Christ, to describe slavery as the cornerstone of Southern States: “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’—the real ‘corner-stone’—in our new edifice.” The reason for secession and the resulting war was to establish “a new government . . . upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Christian language deployed lends the strongest of terms to the religious-like commitment to slavery, which stood at the heart of the Confederacy.

Perhaps we would also witness defense of Nazi statuary and Nazi memorials, rather than holocaust memorials, if it weren’t for the particular history in East and West Germany which required the deconstruction of German history. Neiman traces the efforts of clergy, the publication of memoirs of survivors, the production of films and books, and the pressure of various government officials in efforts to change the narrative of “Germans as victims.” A growing self-awareness and broad German acknowledgment of complicity in the rise of Hitler has required a decades long struggle.

This self-awareness or any acknowledgement of corporate guilt is mostly missing in Japan, a blindness which is also intimately connected to the dominance of right-wing politics and attitudes in educational institutions and in the culture as a whole. The Japanese equivalent of Nazi memorials or Confederate statues is the Yasukuni Shrine commemorating Hideki Tojo (the wartime prime minister) and 13 other war criminals (along with millions of war dead) as Japanese deities. Nearly every government, since the end of the war, has worshipped at this shrine, marking the right leaning nationalism of post-war Japan. These same governments have continued to cover up war crimes, and have resisted text book entries which include “aggression in” China (it was, government representatives insist, an “advance”) and have instead focused on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[3] While we were in Japan the Ministry of Education mandated the singing of the Kimigayo (the national anthem indicating the deity of the Emperor) before the Hinomaru (the national flag) at graduation and entrance ceremonies (which fits with right wing goals and a nationalist slant on Japanese history). State powers are at work in institutions, in corporate culture, often marked by peculiar cruelties in schools and in the workplace. The point being that personal attitudes, corporate attitudes, and the political reality of the country, are all quite interconnected and traceable in people’s daily lives.

 In my would be historical fictional portrayal of my real experience of a small town, a psychoanalytic researcher is dispatched to Hartdale, Texas to diagnose how an entire community has become subject to a mysterious malign force. The specific phenomena developed in the research pertains to “research on violence and identity as a corporate and learned process.” What our intrepid researcher discovers, is that while the community imagines itself built on the redemptive act destroying the Bloody Benders (this part of the story is true – the Benders and their demise), this final act of violence, the very act related to the establishment of Hartdale, had a corporate and individual impact. The violence that “saved” Hartdale and the myths that surround this violence turns out to have slowly impacted the lives of many its citizens.

The point of this book that will never be written is that, given the right tools, I believe the story could be told of how the corporate personalities, the schools, the churches, the communities, in which we have our life can also be exposed in the ways they would destroy life. There is a hidden center, an idolatrous violence, which corruptly organizes the powers. This is most obvious among the “possessed,” those suffering PTSD, or those who commit acts of violence, as those subjected to violence and oppression bear traceable marks of their trauma. Lonnie Athens, in his doctoral studies, interviewed hundreds of violent criminals to arrive at a pattern which he calls “violentization.” He discovered that those who commit the worst forms of violence have themselves been exposed to consistent and predictable levels of violence as children. Would this not hold true for corporate personalities or to what Paul refers to as the principalities and powers, or those corporate personalities of states, towns, and smaller groups of people? They must bear a peculiar history that explains how they may have gone bad or become either good or demonic.

In Japan, religion is at stake in the worship at Yasukuni Shrine and in the peculiar religious nationalism surrounding the Hinomaru and Kimigayo. In Germany, it was clearly something on the order of a religious blindness that refused corporate acceptance of national complicity in the rise of National Socialism. In my real-fictional Hartdale it becomes possible to trace the genealogy of violence in a community founded on originary violence in individual lives. We want and perhaps, require heroic ancestors, a heroic nation, or a heroic history. At the very least, we would see ourselves as victims of violence, rather than its perpetrators. Confrontation with this lie we would tell ourselves about our identity must be the essential part of what Paul describes as the exposure and witness to the principalities and powers.

The debate over Confederate statues and the Confederate flag concerns founding myths and how we order our lives and it raises the question of whether that history will be confronted and exposed or whether it will continue to support an ethos of violence and oppression.

[1] C.S. Lewis’ novel, That Hideous Strength, may be the sort of work I am thinking of but in my story the spiritual and fantastic would be replaced by more ordinary developments (which probably would not make for a very good novel).

[2] Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, See https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-confront-a-racist-national-history

[3] Through the life-long efforts of Saburo Ienaga the most widely used Japanese textbooks in the mid- and late-1990s contained references to the Nanjing Massacre, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Korea, forced suicide in Okinawa, comfort women, and Unit 731 (responsible for conducting medical experiments on prisoners of war)—all issues raised in Ienaga’s suits.

Finding the Cross in the Lynching Tree


Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees1

The photograph of the lynching in Marion Indiana of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith haunted and then inspired Abel Meeropol to describe the event in verse. His poem, set to music and recorded by Billie Holiday, is a poignant depiction of the American Holocaust.

It was 16-year-old James Cameron, accused and strung up with Shipp and Smith and then given a last-minute reprieve, who would found America’s Black Holocaust Museum. James Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, echoes the poem in his concerted attempt to view the lynching tree in light of the Cross (and vice versa). His Black Liberation Theology concludes, “Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism.” We must accept, according to Cone, “that God is known where human beings experience humiliation and suffering” and that He identifies with the oppressed and suffering. The “very essence of divine activity” as revealed in the Cross enables us to align the lynching tree with the Cross.2 When we make this alignment, we recognize God and his children are not the cultivators of this strange fruit – Christ and Christians are that fruit. Christ was himself hung from a tree and his followers identify, not with those who put him there, but with the one on the lynching tree.

Cone maintains that God is not the God of all people as he is against the oppressor and is the God of the oppressed. He concludes, “So-called Christianity, as commonly practiced in the United States, is actually the racist Antichrist.” This “false Christianity . . . of the oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed.” Cone’s Theology has been criticized for its too narrow focus and exclusion, but in this time in which Christians seems to be supporting widespread oppression of the poor and oppressed, Cone points us in a definitive direction away from evil.

It may be difficult to place ourselves amidst the crowd at the foot of the lynching tree. Difficult, not in the sense that we can never imagine doing such a thing but precisely because this is near enough that we understand this crowd. Living in Little Dixie here in Missouri, the rebel flag is still proudly displayed, racists abound, and the majority of white Christians are stumped as to why the emphasis should be on black lives. One can hear the echo of Caiaphas in the comeback: rather than “all lives” or “blue lives” how about “Roman lives” or “Pharisee lives” matter – therefore this man must die. It is possible to imagine the sway of the crowd and being caught up in the moment – the blind hatred is too near not to recognize its potential. As Ted Peters has stated it, “What is there about striking out violently and killing others that makes us think we can quell the pangs of anxiety, overcome our frustrations. Relieve our rage, regain a sense of self-worth, and thereby conquer death? Killing others seems to relieve our own fear of being killed.”3 When the crowd turns, in a moment of scapegoating, the cowardice and instinct for survival may be strong – but stronger yet is the blind hatred for this victim who is disrupting our lives, harming our religion, and threatening our nation. Through this “righteous slaughter” we can attain some eternal, universal form of the good.4 “Lynch him so that our nation might be saved! Lynch him so that law and order will return and righteousness be served!”

It may be that we have to equate the two – the lynching tree and the Cross – to recover the fact that the Cross addresses the lynching tree. The same evil accounts for both but the Cross addresses and overcomes this evil. The Cross is meant to expose and stop the sort of evil involved in lynching, racism, and oppression of the stranger. Yet, there is a form of Christianity which has been rendered ineffective and complicit in evil. How is it that the Cross is emblazoned on battle shields and lawns (as with the KKK) as the emblem of violence and racism? Cone’s claim is that our theology of the Cross has numbed us to the evil which the Cross is meant to expose.

In a strange twist, “Christian” hatred of the stranger, the refugee, and the oppressed, silences the one who exposes the reality of this hatred: “They hated me for no reason” (Jn. 15:25; Ps. 35:19). While we often sing and theologize about being at the foot of the Cross, our theology is such that the horror of the occasion is mitigated by the imagined fact that God is pulling the strings. We might, in a cavalier fashion, place ourselves at the foot of the cross but the lynching tree does not afford easy association. Cone’s point is that Christians, who so easily stand with the oppressors and cannot identify with the oppressed, have been desensitized by their Christianity. Instead of curing blind hatred this Christianity seems to induce it.

Christianity, with the lynchings of African Americans, the crusades, American slavery, Nazi genocide, oppression of women and minorities, etc, has been implicated in evil. Christians have not just been innocent by-standers but have many times been a force for evil.5 I believe, with Cone, that it is time to begin to definitively identify this false Christianity (which even the Apostle John calls the religion of the Antichrist) and distinguish it from an authentic Christianity. Can we can locate the evil, which is not part of an authentic Christianity? Can Christians identify and rid themselves of evil?

Our theology has so tamed the event of the crucifixion that preachers are forced to go to excruciating lengths to recount the pain of the Cross. No one needs to explain the humiliation and suffering of Shipp and Smith. Details only add to the horror of the photograph: both of the arms of Abram Smith were broken to keep him from trying to free himself; police officers participated in the lynching; there was no rape; none of the crowd were ever convicted of a crime. Even without commentary, the photograph conveys the evil. The lynching tree is a revolting horror from which we would turn away. The Cross, on the other hand, is a common piece of jewelry. Equating the lynching tree and the Cross focuses the attention on the evil and violence. The question is, how does the Cross address the evil of the lynching tree? Cone’s work brings out the specific role of atonement theology in disabling this equation (though he has not, I believe, given a full explanation to this question).

In Cone’s estimate, the Anselmian doctrine of Divine Satisfaction, has so twisted the meaning of the Cross that this is not an equation we normally come to. As Denny Weaver points out, Anselm’s doctrine is developed under a Constantinian Christianity which needed to accommodate Christian’s wielding the sword. Cone notes that it also accommodated slavery and racism. Anselm’s doctrine, the received understanding among the majority, accommodates the sword, racism, and oppression of women, so that Cone (from a black perspective), feminist and womanist theologians (from the perspective of female oppression), and Anabaptists such as Weaver (from a pacifist perspective) have converged upon critique of Anselm’s atonement theory. As Weaver describes it, they “have challenged any understanding of atonement that presumes salvation or reconciliation to God that would understand the killing of Jesus as an act required in order to satisfy divine justice.” 6

Anselm’s doctrine, in serving a Constanitinian Christianity, has done harm in several directions. It abstracts the evil of the Cross into a theory of justice in which God enacts violence so as to meet his standard of righteousness. The death of Christ, rather than being a murder carried out by Rome and the Jewish authorities, is an act of violence for which God is ultimately responsible. Rather than uncovering scapegoating of an innocent victim, scapegoating seems to be encouraged and required – even God does it. This violent picture of the atonement projects the violence back onto God, which is something on the order of an originary violence – as opposed to an originary peace. Where the New Testament would have us identify with the victim – the scapegoat (e.g. the woman taken in adultery, the parable of the vineyard, the passion story itself) under Divine Satisfaction we are made to identify with the necessity of having a victim. Christ died so that we do not have to. His death is not thought of as a model in which we would take up our cross and follow him; rather it is a onetime event which allows us to escape the same fate. As I will demonstrate in this series of blogs, Anselm’s “logic” building toward the need for the death of Christ is the logic of those who killed him. God is in one accord with Christ’s executioners. He does not refuse or resist the violence but is the ultimate perpetrator and the one who reinforces or generates its structure.

There is a great deal wrong with Divine Satisfaction (or its derivative – Penal Substitution) but the greater harm may arise, for many, from the displacement of biblical atonement in which the Cross of Christ is defeating a real-world evil. To get rid of Christian complicity in evil it is necessary to identify it and understand how the Cross opposes it. It is necessary to equate racism, oppression of the poor the foreigner and the stranger, oppression of women, and violence, with the sin Christ overcomes. This is so simplistic as to be tautological, yet as with the lynching tree and the cross, there is a disconnect produced by a turn from Christ’s exposure of evil. As Rene Girard puts it, “We are aware that the Gospels reject persecution. What we do not realize is that, by doing so, they release its mechanism and demolish the entire human religion and the resulting cultures.”7 

(If you are interested in pursuing studies on reconciliation and forgiveness, on July 6th the class Philemon and Ephesians will begin. This class will focus on forgiveness and reconciliation in Paul. As the PBI catalogue describes it this course is “A practical development of radical forgiveness and reconciliation from Philemon and Ephesians worked out in healthy community. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/lm/offerings)  

1 Written by Abel Meeropol.

2 James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 63-64

3 Ted Peters, Sin and Radical Evil, 41.

4 After extensive interviewing and analysis sociologist Jack Katz concludes that criminals in general and killers in particular seek to embody, “through the practice of ‘righteous slaughter,’ some eternal, universal form of the Good.” The form it typically takes is that of righteous rage to which someone else has to be sacrificed.

5This is not to argue, with the New Atheists, that Christianity and religion are to blame for all evil and violence in the world. 20th Century secularism, Marxism and Fascism, have unleashed a radical evil that outdoes the problematic history of Christianity. What is clear is that the human heart is evil and where Christianity is so perverted so as not to address or confront this evil it has become complicit with evil.

6 J. Denny Weaver. The Nonviolent Atonement, Second Edition (Kindle Locations 144-145). Kindle Edition.

7Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, p. 101.

Why “All Lives Matter” Misses the Cross

In the tension between the particularism of James Cone’s theology (which might be characterized by the phrase, “black lives matter”), with its focus on black experience, and the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, with its focus on abstract and unattainable universals (which might be summed up as “all lives matter”) reside the problem of universals and particulars. The question is, if you can get to the former (“all lives matter” or the universal) without prior and exclusive focus on the latter (“black lives matter” or the particular)?

Those who blithely intone, what must seem to them the higher principle – the universal, “all lives matter,” are clearly prone to be blind to the particular. The danger, as demonstrated in the past hundred years, is that the leap to the universal conceals the particular vested interest, the forms of exclusion which have given rise to imperialism, death camps, exploitation of the 3rd world by the first world, or the bloodiest period in all of human history. The direct move to the universal (the enlightenment?) is the root cause of suppression and exclusion of differences. The question is, in an order where “all lives matter” in general, will some lives in particular have to be sacrificed, overlooked, or suppressed for the universal (as in the logic that “one man must die that the nation would be saved)?  

Historically, it is clear that where the universal precedes the particular there is a wink and a nod, perhaps unconscious or suppressed, as to which group does not fit the universal. In Giorgio Agamben’s depiction of which life matters, this supposed universal condition (the condition of law, the condition of the state) is established by the particulars of exception. The very root of human polity is structured around a necessary exclusion of one form of life, bare life (homo sacer). It is only where bare life is structured and ordered in the city that it can be said to be “good life” from Aristotle onward.

 The power of the state or sovereign power establishes itself through this power of exclusion, the exception upon which the rule is built.[1] Homo sacer is stripped of legal status and falls outside the political community and is among those continually and unconditionally exposed to the potential of being killed. This power of death, deciding who dies outside the city, establishes the life of the city. This, of course, describes who killed Christ and why. He dies outside of the city of man, beyond law and religion, reduced on the cross to only bare life. Christ as the exception, however, forever exposes the basis upon which inclusion and universality are constructed.  

The point of the Gospel is that the universal (God) is not to be had apart from the particular (the incarnate Christ) and the most pertinent particular of this Christ is that he was lynched outside the city gates. In John Milbank’s description, Christ as homo sacer is the exception beyond exception. He exposes the place of exception as the place of God.  It was those who presumed to overlook the man (the realism, in Niebuhr’s terms, of the particular) that are responsible for his lynching and every lynching.

In this establishment of human sovereignty, the true Sovereign is excluded. God is on the lynching tree and is excluded by those who would gain life by killing him. There is no mystery as to who might be most prone to dispense with a particular life (a bare life, a biological life that has none of the qualities of “good life”). It will be those who presume to be able to distill the universal without reference to an overlooked sort of particular.

To make the point that American theological perspective begins and ends in a peculiar blindness, Cone cites the example of Niebuhr, America’s favorite theologian. His “Christian realism” was admired by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Hubert Humphrey, John Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter and in the present time, President Barack Obama has called Niebuhr one of his favorite philosophers. Niebuhr’s Christian realism presumes that self-interest must always be figured into the justice that will be implemented and this justice will always fall short of love. Because of humanity’s natural tendency to deny sin, we can never fully reach the ethical standard of agape love. The best that we can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, or a balance of power among competing groups. He leaves room for the reality of faith, hope and love only as a future possibility.

Niebuhr claims the 1896 Supreme Court doctrine of “separate but equal,” which made Jim Crow segregation legal in the South, was a positive move, allowing for gradual change. He praised the 1954 Supreme Court decision ending segregation, yet he was also pleased by the Court’s added phrase, “with all deliberate speed,” which “wisely” gave the white South “time to adjust” (while also opening a loophole to delay integration). Cone says, “Niebuhr’s call for gradualism, patience, and prudence during the decade when Willie McGee (1951), Emmett Till (1955), M. C. “Mack” Parker (1959), and other blacks were lynched sounds like that of a southern moderate more concerned about not challenging the cultural traditions of the white South than achieving justice for black people.”[2] When Martin Luther King asked Niebuhr to sign a petition appealing to President Eisenhower to protect black children involved in integrating schools in the South, Niebuhr declined.

In the end, Niebuhr would seem to fall among those sort of liberals King counted more insidious to blocking civil rights than overt racists. Niebuhr, in his silence on lynching displays his own blindness and the inherent problem of beginning with a presumed shared knowledge or agreed upon universal. In his theology, ever focused on an abstract future universal, he is willing to continually delay justice.

Though Cone credits Karl Barth for his turn to the Word (rather than the given human reality) as his own escape from this Niebuhrian/American form of theology, nonetheless he insists this encounter with the Word is very particular. He pits his starting point against that of Barth and focus on the “objective word”: “I am black first—and everything else comes after that. This means that I read the Bible through the lens of a black tradition of struggle and not as the objective Word of God.” Cone’s experience as a black man raised in the Jim Crow era in Arkansas, is the singular, particular approach to his understanding of the word of the cross.

 He concludes his long theological career with the realization the lynching tree, the definitive symbol of black fear and subjugation and white supremacy, is the singular access he has to rightly understanding the cross.  They put Christ to death by hanging him on a tree (Acts 10:39), excluding his life as one of those that mattered. The power elites, who order the valuation of life in the polis, required this death outside of the city. So too, every universal human organization of “lives that matter” will necessarily make this demarcation with the blood of those that do not.

 Cone references the work of Paula Frederickson to note that that description of the cross perfectly describes lynching in the United States. “Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement: Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar. The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching. Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.”[3]

Though Golgotha was the sight of a first century lynching and it would seem only natural to draw out the parallel, yet there is no place for the lynching tree in American theological reflection. Isn’t this silence a telling condemnation of the value of this theological tradition? As Cone poses the question: “The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are so amazingly similar that one wonders what blocks the American Christian imagination from seeing the connection.”[4] The silence in regard to lynching, the very possibility of lynching, but the inability to see the cross in the lynching tree must mean that the reality of the cross remains invisible. Those who oppress and lynch in the name of Christ have undoubtedly been guilty of the worst apostasy, but those that cannot name this apostasy continue in the same blindness.

The point of the cross and the point of the Gospel is not to validate the way our culture, nation, and cities organize and value life but it is to upset this order. Where “all lives matter” is the starting point, the danger is that some lives matter more immediately while others matter theoretically, and one can thus be satisfied with future or theoretical equality and justice. In other words, where “all lives matter” or where the universal is the starting point, the life extinguished on the lynching tree, the life of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Eric Garner, and the uncounted others, clearly do not count as lives that matter but serve to affirm the life that “really counts” (the life of the lynch mob or the representatives of the culture that have carried out the murders).

What “all lives matter” misses is focus on the particularity – the particulars of black lives and the particularity of the cross. Much like a negative theology which cannot predicate any determinate qualities of God, the “all life” is simply bare life, undistinguished life, so that what is excluded from the “all” is the suffering and humiliation of the particular life of Christ or of black lives. To miss the fact that God, in Christ, identifies with the particular, with suffering lives, outcast lives, is to miss the life that matters.

(If you are interested in pursuing studies on reconciliation and forgiveness, on July 6th the class Philemon and Ephesians will begin. This class will focus on forgiveness and reconciliation in Paul. As the PBI catalogue describes it this course is “A practical development of radical forgiveness and reconciliation from Philemon and Ephesians worked out in healthy community.)  

[1] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 18.

[2] Ibid, p. 48.

[3] James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (p. 43). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.

[4] Ibid.

What Louie Giglio Doesn’t Get in his Inadvertent Confession and Subsequent Apology: The Form is the Substance–In Other Words, “No, I think you meant it.”

When you’ve predicated your whole approach to church and the Gospel on making the cross look attractive, then you’ve given up any moral authority you had to acknowledge and speak to its inherent injustice. When you can’t speak to the injustice of the cross and our call to bear it because it’s not attractive, then you can also no longer identify with others on their own crosses, such as brown people suffering systemic injustice and violence, without attempting to make that palatable as well.

When it comes to churches, Atlanta is a fascinating place.  On the one hand, you can visit the old Ebenezer Baptist church and sit before the pulpit that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cut his preaching teeth behind.  I’ve sat in that building and felt the chills of its history and choked on the lump in my throat. You can also find the small Berea Mennonite church that operates a farm in a neighborhood deep in East Atlanta.  I have worshiped with those saints as well.  And, of course, as with any town there are as many myriad other churches per capita as one might expect.

What I hadn’t prepared myself for before I got to Atlanta was the immense popularity of the “megachurch.”  The place is loaded with them.  In a galactic analogy, it’s like a stellar nursery of red giant stars, but sick ones, always threatening to collapse in on themselves under the weight of their own structures into theological black holes of inanity…always needing to “attract more ‘butts in the seats’” (as a former colleague invested heavily in “church growth” once so eloquently put it when telling me how to solve all the problems at my church) in order to sustain themselves.  

There are white megachurches (always systematically planted in affluent, up-and-coming regions) and black megachurches.  Among both black and white megachurches, there are many who are unabashedly prosperity-oriented, and others denominationally structured.  And there are megachurches for every denomination, some having grown up organically, often with more traditional architecture, their appearances reflecting the life cycle of their surroundings.  

Others were clearly planted using the “church growth” model, having been strategically built, facilitated, and marketed based on careful market and consumer research.  This model, having been cursed to us by Donald McGavran and his disciples, has been elaborated on more fully by Paul Axton.  At its heart is a narcissistic, consumer-driven ideology, founded on growth capitalism, and modeled after the modern corporate CEO structure.  It’s intentionally designed to give religious consumers the “worship experience” they want in a competitive religious market.  Customer service can get those butts in the seats.  Corporate America can show us how.

I remember being shocked and disturbed the first time I saw a commercial for a church.  Worse yet, I remember after an experience we had where we were treated poorly in an application process, telling another minister how hurt we were and seeking solace.  I was mortified by his response. “Yeah, we did that to an applicant once.  I feel bad about it.  I guess we need to spend more time looking to the business world to figure out how to treat people.”  

I’m not making that up.  A minister of an organization claiming to follow (at the very least) the greatest ethical teacher in the history of the world recommended turning to greedy corporations to learn how we ought to treat each other in the church.  Failure.

These megachurches are all over the place, though, mammoth structures where throngs get whatever religious fix they prefer in front of the shiny lights and smoke machines and volunteer baristas, while three-chord guitar players lead them in emo-style, stupid-redundant, romance ballads to a God who calls them only to be more comfortable and fulfilled, while their kids jump on trampolines and play on McDonald’s playland gym sets.  And somehow they always leave more biblically illiterate than they entered. 

It’s why you can be a part of a “large church” doing some “good things” and not understand that Jesus wants you to care about black people being murdered.

Enter Louie Giglio, white evangelical preacher at the enormous Passion City Church, another big-box, multi-location “Six Flags over Jesus” (seriously, check out the link) that markets itself as an “inner city” church.  In the midst of what may be the most profoundly important moment for racial justice since the civil rights era, when after the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and countless others, a slumbering white giant is finally starting to wake up and feel the pain of their “red and yellow and black” brothers and sisters and say, “We’ve HAD it!”  and protests are finally becoming harder to ignore, and change may finally be on the horizon again–when the time to stand with our brown brothers and sisters and let them speak and be counted with them came, Louie decided to step in.

You can’t hardly blame him.  In a moment with so much attention, it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to capture some of that lime-light.  My friend posted an ad for their upcoming Sunday “panel discussion”.  Giglio, the Christian rapper Lacrae, and (of all people) Dan Cathy (white, fabulously privileged CEO of Chic-Fil-A) were going to sit with Bernice King (daughter of MLK and head of the King Center), who later (thank Christ) withdrew from the panel.  

My conversation with my friend did not go well.  The panel went worse.  At one point Giglio, free-riffing in front of the only black person on the stage revealed that, in his private conversations with Cathy (a wealthy, white, capitalist) they’ve often lamented that the term “white privilege” (being distasteful to privileged white people) is met with such resistance.  Why not call it “white blessing” so they can more readily accept that, although slavery and racism have been a blessing, they were still kind of unfair.  

He might as well have said, “I bet we could sell that.”

Giglio, when the issue rightfully exploded on him, has issued an apology.  But that damage is done.  He said it because he thought it.  But I’m glad he said it because it revealed something ugly about his version of the church.  

Giglio, on the surface of the comment, is talking about “the cross.”  He wants to call people to bear the cross.”  But the cross…it’s hard.  And in a church culture (like the church growth movement) where the goal has always been to make Christianity attractive in order to attract people to it, one’s goal in preaching the cross is going to HAVE to mean making the cross palatable.  But the cross is the cross.  “Palatable” isn’t the way it works.

Again, the church growth philosophy and the megachurches are predicated on making Christianity attractive.  The problem with the inevitable rebuttal one always hears “But what’s wrong with smoke machines and drum solos” is that it is based on the idea that the form of the message is different from the substance of the message.  It’s predicated on the idea that it doesn’t matter how we say it, it only matters that we say it.   But the question is, “what is ‘it’ that we’re trying to say?”. Is it true that the form of our lives is different than its content?

What Bruce Gorman’s work can help us see is that Christianity was never supposed to be a message that is divorced from its form.  It’s not just a set of belief statements that can be repeated like magic.  It’s not just a set of trite religious rituals to be completed to sate a bloodthirsty deity.  It’s none of that.  

What it is is a cruciform lifestyle of following Jesus.  This means that (contrary to well-meaning folks who try to overemphasize following over the content of our faith) what we believe (substance) is vitally important  but only because what we believe is what we live (form). It is both form and substance because the form is the substance.  When Jesus said “pick up your cross and follow” he wasn’t saying “yeah it might get hard sometimes if you believe in me.”  He was saying, “This is what it is like to be my disciple.  Come and die with me.” 

This means that things like wealth and comfort and self-indulgence and smoke machines and drum solos (though nice at a rock concert) are not worship of the God who submitted to the cross.  It means that consumerism and growth capitalism, both of which are contributors to and sustainers of things like injustice and racism and exploitation are absolutely antithetical to the cross.  You can’t do the cross AND base your church on a theme park.  Once you turn to capitalism (Dan Cathy?) for the answers, you lose the moral authority to talk about things like systemic racism.

Let me take that further: when you’ve predicated your whole approach to church and the Gospel on making the cross look attractive, then you’ve given up any moral authority you had to acknowledge and speak to its inherent injustice. When you can’t speak to the injustice of the cross and our call to bear it because it’s not attractive, then you can also no longer identify with others on their own crosses, such as brown people suffering systemic injustice and violence, without attempting to make that palatable as well.

I used to ask my students: how do you challenge people’s idolatry when you’re using it to attract them to the cross?  You can’t.  And what Giglio revealed in his Freudian slip was the failure of church growth: that it makes the cross incomprehensible.   

If Giglio was concerned with calling people to the cross instead of attracting them to a show, he wouldn’t need to call white privilege something else or try to turn slavery into “blessing” so that his rich white patrons could swallow the idea.  If he called people to the cross, then his white members would understand that they’re supposed to be willing to suffer and die with their brown brothers and sisters.  Because if you’re willing to die for brown brothers and sisters, then at the very least you’ll be able to bear the hurt of the notion that you have it better than them and that systemic racism and slavery were just bad–with no qualifiers.  

But telling rich white Atlantans that the culture that works so well for them is inherently evil is not attractive.  The cross isn’t attractive.  And that’s why guys like Giglio and others such as Andy Stanley, who may mean well and may even stumble on a nugget of truth every now and then, are ultimately not doing the Gospel.  They’re selling a religion that is a different form than Christianity.

And the form is the substance.

Will the Revolution Endure?

Calling them to Himself, Jesus said to them, “You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them.  “But it is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all. “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”

Mark 10:42-45 NASB

Donald Trump has explained to U.S. governors his mode of rule: “You must dominate the streets,” he told them. John Bolton indicates this was also Trump’s advice to the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, telling him he should build concentration camps to keep Uighur Muslims under control. He encouraged Xi, according to Bolton, to buy more American farm products, not for farmers, but to improve his reelection bid. Where the values of empire reign supreme, the lives of Muslims, protestors, blacks, or ordinary citizens, are of less value than the lives of the “great men” themselves.  According to Jesus, their authority permits them to “lord it over” others, such that political power can be equated with this power over life and death. The power to dominate is what power amounts to in this valuation system.

The move that Jesus makes is not simply the relinquishing of power, but the unleashing of a different sort of counter power, in what John Howard Yoder calls “revolutionary subordination.” Subordination is not normally equated with revolution, but there are several instances in literature and cinema which illustrate the point that embracing that which gives control to the other is a means of dispossessing them of power.  In The Usual Suspects, Keyser Söze’s family is being held hostage by Hungarian mobsters. Rather than succumb to their demands he murders his own family, which leaves the mobsters without any power over him and then he is free to massacre the mobsters and their families.  In Speed, Keanu Reeves character shoots his own partner in the leg as a means of freeing him from being held hostage. In Ransom, Mel Gibson playing a wealthy media executive, instead of paying the ransom demanded by his son’s kidnappers, puts up a large sum for their capture. Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, is inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who kills her own child rather than let her be taken back into slavery. In each instance, the situation is reversed and those who exercise power lose control because their would-be victim embraces the very thing that is threatened.

 Abraham, the biblical prototype of faithfulness, is made to act against his own best interest at every stage of his life. He is told to leave home and family and is promised a child, and he spends most of his life waiting for the promised arrival. Once the child is born, he is told to sacrifice him as an act of faith.  The lesson of his faith is that his identity as father, husband, patriarch, and founder of a new people and new form of life, is gained in his move to relinquish the forms of identity which would secure him a place in the world.  For Abraham, the standard order and protection of society, is shattered by his subordinating himself to the very danger this order protected him from.  He embraces homelessness (without kindred or land); he embraces childlessness (leaving him no way to propagate his name); his life is one long encounter with and acceptance of death and by this means he escapes one order of existence for another.

Jesus mode of liberating from the power structures, fulfilling the foreshadowings of Abraham, is not through domination but through subordination to the worst of conditions; a slave’s death. His taking up of the cross is his means of disempowering those who would use crosses and death as a means of enslavement. The willingness to take up the cross renders the threat of the cross as powerless. His subordination is neither obedience nor acquiescence but inaugurates a new kingdom built on servitude.

Paul will submit himself to the same powers, not by ceasing to preach, but by seeing his arrest as itself a sign of honor – the mark that he is an ambassador for Christ.  So too each of the disciples subordinate themselves to the powers, submitting to crucifixion, beheading, and a martyr’s death, but this is counted as a primary form of witness (the meaning of the word martyr). Accepting death is not a form of obedience but it is the most radical form of revolution, as it accepts the threat and in doing so empties it of its power to control. Once death is removed as a means of control, through death acceptance, fear is cast out as a means of coercion.

Where the values of empire reign supreme, the lives that matter most are those of the “great men,” those who “lord it over” others and this is their power. The value of power is immediately evident in the prerogative to threaten life and to cause suffering and death. In the world of Caesar, Roman lives matter and Caesar’s matters most. Every Roman soldier as an extension of the power of empire is representative of this value. In the case of Caiaphas, Jewish lives matter and the life of the chief priest and the Temple matters most. Sadducee lives and Pharisee lives matter, as they are the protectors and keepers of the Jewish way of life. Rome and Israel conspired in their valuation of which life was expendable, what man must die, so that the nation might be preserved. Who would dare defend the life of one Jewish slave against the needs of empire? His death would only serve to secure the empire. Afterall, it is slaves who make masters, the oppressed who make rulers, and subjects who provide the ruler with the substance of his rule. In the world of empire, it is the representatives of power, the blue lives, that matter and any challenge to this power needs to be made an example.

Christ’s death forever exposes the means of “great men” and empire. Perhaps the jujitsu reversal that Christ and the early Christians played on empire is no more starkly illustrated than in the letter to Philemon. Paul is willing enough to accept elements of the household codes. Slaves, and specifically the slave Onesimus, is to subordinate himself to Philemon, his master. It was not Paul’s goal to start a violent revolution in which Christian slaves would rebel and the church would dominate and enforce a new code of behavior. (In fact, where the church has aligned itself with the means of empire it is questionable that any hint of Jesus-power remains.)  Paul’s mode of undoing the slave/master relationship is much more direct and immediate: “I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my imprisonment, who formerly was useless to you, but now is useful both to you and to me. I have sent him back to you in person, that is, sending my very heart” (Philemon 10-12). Paul claims personal kinship and identifies Onesimus with his own deepest feelings – the very center of who he is. “If then you regard me a partner, accept him as you would me” (v. 17). It is doubtful that Philemon will regard Onesimus as anything short of a brother, which is Paul’s appeal: “For perhaps he was for this reason separated from you for a while, that you would have him back forever,  no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (15-16). Here is Christ’s ethic applied, as Paul identifies himself with the slave he undoes the oppression of Onesimus.

Paul might be said to be exercising a kind of authority, but it is the authority of “sharing in Christ.” Paul’s position in prison is not a place of power by any worldly standard, yet Paul takes pride in being imprisoned for Christ. He is subordinate to the powers and he would have Onesimus be subordinate also, but in both instances, he is enacting a revolution. He is challenging the social status projected upon slaves at the same time as he challenges the social status of being imprisoned (he considers imprisonment and chains as the sign of his being an ambassador for Christ). Paul sees his suffering as “filling up the suffering of Christ” so that to suffer with him is to be identified as an ambassador of the Gospel.

God chooses to identify himself with the suffering and oppressed in Christ and his followers. As James Cone puts it, “God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience. God is known where human beings experience humiliation and suffering” as he identifies with the oppressed and suffering.[1] The very essence of divine activity, as revealed in the Cross and as revealed in Christian witness, reverses this world’s orders of power. The victims of the police state, those lynched and killed by the powers are most intimately identified with Christ. Christ’s radical reversal of power enables us to align every lynching tree, every victim of the thugs of empire, with the victim of the Cross. Christ was himself hung from a tree and his followers identify, not with those who put him there (the lynch mob, the Roman lives, the Pharisee lives, or the blue lives), but with the one on the tree (and thus with the victim of every lynching, every victim of empire). While the kingdoms of this world rapidly fail under the rise and dominance of succeeding orders of “greatness,” the revolution of radical subordination endures in its effects as Christ’s life and kingdom endures .

In this sense the revolution enacted through Christian subordination, the revolution of Jesus, of Paul and the apostles, the revolution of Martin Luther King, the revolution of the victims who refuse violence and choose love, is the only enduring sort of revolution.

[1]  James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 63-64

Colin Kaepernick as Minor Prophet – Again

This article was originally written in 2018.  By that time, the controversy this article refers to was already over two years old and Kaepernick had already been unceremoniously “shown the door” by the NFL.  However, though Kaepernick’s football career was certainly on hiatus (if not “over” as remains to be seen), the discussion surrounding his protest against police violence (kneeling during the playing of the national anthem) was still in high gear.  

With the current state of the political climate in the US and the recent spate in police killings of black people (don’t get me wrong–it never stopped) such as Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks among countless others drawing more attention to this issue than ever, it seems that the piece is still relevant, if not timely.  

I suppose I wrote this article when I did because I was discouraged and annoyed (annoyance has always been a primary motivator for me) with how easily people missed the point of Kaepernick’s protest and with the hypocrisy of calls for his firing and arrest while simultaneously screeding about “freedom” (perhaps the most meaningless word in our culture).  

This piece doesn’t specifically address racism as much as it attempts to make the point that patriotism is a religion.  This means that (as I posted on social media recently) “When someone says ‘I kneel at the cross and I stand for the flag’ they are essentially saying ‘Here are my two gods.  This is how I worship each.’”* Because of this, murdering black people was an essential sacrifice for the provision of “freedom”.  

The good news in recent weeks, if it can be called that, is that the murders by the police (and in the case of Arbery, by armed civilians) have inspired near constant daily protests which have cleared the way for the removal of statues of heroes of the confederacy, and the removal of the confederate flag from NASCAR events.  The NFL even apologized (without mentioning Kaepernick) for the way it approached the “take-a-knee protests”.  And, despite the fact that the President has openly encouraged police to be MORE violent and called on the military to counter peaceful protests, there is huge bipartisan support for radical police reform.

The bad news is that this progress is decades too late.

*Anyone who wishes to counter argue on the “here are my two gods” point should ask first why the cross and the flag are mentioned in the same sentence.  Why not simply say, “I stand for the flag?”  The statement admits that flag and cross are comparable.  You should cringe when people say we should be grateful to “Jesus for saving us from sin and the American soldier for providing salvation.”  These statements both explicitly place nation and God on the same level.

Jason Rodenbeck
 ______________________________

Of the “controversy” surrounding the “take-a-knee” protests among certain players of the NFL (beginning with Colin Kaepernick), much noise and political commentary has already been made.  As is usual, social media and the blogosphere have been lit up with shrill opinions since Kaepernick first refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem in protest of repeated examples of egregious police violence against young black men and boys.  Because opinions on this topic tend to be immovable, I don’t doubt that my contribution here will have little impact.  Yet, I can’t help feeling that the perspective I wish to share here may be very different from the ones typically shared—certainly in “evangelical” circles.

Of course, any type of protest against injustice or perceived injustice is, by nature, offensive to the bulk of those who witness it.  That is, after all, what makes it an effective tool for drawing attention to problems.  Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail illustrates, with passion, how often the prophet, standing against injustice, is told “We have no problem with what you are standing for.  What we are offended by is the manner in which you stand for it.”[i]  Most folks are all for “justice,” just so long as the call for justice does not upset the status-quo.  Justice is a nice goal and we’re all “for it.”  Just don’t make me feel guilty about the injustices that benefit me or interrupt my regularly-scheduled programming.  Don’t imply that we are all implicated in structures which produce injustice because it means that I ought to do something about it.  Don’t make me feel like it’s my fault.

Perhaps a reading of the prophet Jeremiah is in order, specifically chapter 20.  Or of Gideon and the Asherah pole in Judges 6.

Yet, the outrage against Kaepernick, and those brave players who have joined him, has surprised even as cynical of a lover of the minor prophets as me.  It ranges from friends and co-workers who have lamented the “politicization of sport” (who blindly miss the irony that the national anthem—a political statement if ever there was one—is played at every sporting event) to those who have unwittingly advocated for a type of fascism on their social media outlets as, enraged, they demand that all Americans must stand for the symbols of the nation because their freedom to do so was provided at great cost (who blindly miss the irony that to be obligated to stand because of “freedom” is not freedom).  And, as budding fascists go, the current president is no slouch as he and his vice-president have repeatedly stoked the passions of their voting base by calling for actions against these players, from taking away their jobs to even arresting them or removing them from the country.

Many of my close friends have stated the obvious racial tensions in play.  And much could and should continue to be said about this.  However, what I wish to point out is the religious implication of the NFL take-a-knee protest.  What I mean is, inasmuch as the hateful backlash against Colin Kaepernick and the other protesting players is frequently racially motivated, I wish to focus for a moment on the fact that it is also, very much, religiously motivated.

I have long held that American nationalism (especially as I’ve seen it play-out in churches and religious culture in evangelicalism) is very much a kind of civil religion.  And it is, in fact, a fairly complete one.  It has a type of salvation (freedom) provided and protected by a sort of messiah (the military and police force) which has provided that freedom through the shedding of blood.  It has a father-god figure (the president) who the messiah serves.  It has patriarchs (founding fathers), worship (anthems), and holidays (Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day)[ii] venerating its totems (flags and symbols) and honoring its messiahs.   It even has holy scriptures (the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) and priests (politicians) who serve the worshipers.

The reader may be thinking that my analogy is melodramatic, or a baseless exaggeration.  To my mind, no other explanation makes sense of the kind of reactions one sees when one refuses to participate in flag worship.  As someone whose theology is beholden to the Anabaptists, who feels that to pledge allegiance to the flag is to put myself in tension with the one I call Lord, stating that belief has never failed to generate offense.  “But, people (the messiah) died for your freedom (salvation).  They fight still to protect it (stated unequivocally despite the fact that no one has been able to explain to me adequately how the current wars are about my freedom).”  I attest that this is a religious reaction to a type of blasphemy. 

And that’s just it.  The outrage about Kaepernick’s protest isn’t just about race (though it is racially motivated).  It’s that Kaepernick’s protest is blasphemous to the American civil religion.   And this is why so many who, truly, aren’t racist are unable to see the point. To not worship the totem when the call to worship is announced is to dishonor the messiah who provides the salvation which the totem symbolizes.  That the protest implies injustice by the messiah compounds the issue.

In other words, what’s really bothering people isn’t just that Colin Kaepernick is a black man wanting social change for other black people.  It’s that he’s a black man knocking over their idol in protest of their idolatrous culture’s indifference to injustice.   Colin Kaepernick is fulfilling the role of a minor prophet.

Perhaps a reading of the prophet Jeremiah is in order, specifically chapter 20.  Or of Gideon and the Asherah pole in Judges 6.

Nationalism is a religion.  It’s a national civic religion.  And, for Christians, it’s idolatry.  Putting your hand on your heart for the anthem, whether you think you are putting your allegiance to the state below your love for Jesus or not, is a form of worship that is necessarily in tension with your proclamation that Jesus is “King” or “Lord.”

This is, perhaps, no different from the Roman world of the first century which inspired the writers of the New Testament to appropriate so much of the language of Caesar into Christianity.  The euangelion (the Gospel) of the New Testament is, itself, borrowed from the emperor cult intentionally: to point out that it is Jesus who brings the good news to the world, not Caesar.  The repeated claims of the Lordship of Jesus in the New Testament are, in fact, scathing political commentaries about the NON-Lordship of Caesar, who claimed Lordship.   And this is why the Romans persecuted the Christians for centuries, prior to Constantine.  I imagine that 2nd and 3rd century Christians would be mystified by the assumptions of many American Christians today who not only see no tension between patriotism and Christianity, they unreflectively seem to equate their faith in Jesus with their national patriotism.

The writers of the New Testament understood that to call Jesus “King” or “Lord” meant they couldn’t call Caesar “King” or “Lord.”  American Christians struggle to understand this.  Perhaps it is because we don’t use those terms politically anymore.  This is why contemporary writers such as Brian McLaren and Shane Claiborne have advocated for using the word “President” with Jesus, instead of “Lord” or “King” in an effort to reestablish in the minds of those who claim to follow Jesus the inherent tension between the nation and the Kingdom of God.

As for my part, I kneel with Colin Kaepernick for many reasons.  I think he’s fiercely courageous.  I believe he is a faithful follower of Jesus who has devoted much of his life to loving under-privileged kids and helping them.  I support (as all Christians should) the call to racial justice that his protest is about.  But, also, I kneel because I cannot venerate the American flag, anyhow.  It is a bloody totem idol of a false religion and I am a follower of the true President and a citizen of the Nation of God.

[i] Myself, I cannot count the number of times I have been told, “The problem isn’t what you say, but how you say it.”  As if there is any nice way to say that “treating people unjustly is wrong.”

[ii] What I claim here is, undoubtedly, offensive to many sensibilities. Make no mistake, I have nothing but compassion and concern for members of the military and for those who have served.  I truly believe that a country that calls men and women to go to war for its interests, owes it to those it calls to take care of them later—if only this country were as concerned with that as it is with new weapons and new wars, perhaps this nation would, at some point, be at peace.  That said, I believe that in order to truly love those who serve, one ought to wish they weren’t fighting.   I hold that it is only those who hold a commitment to the rejection of violence who can truly love those who fight.

Are There White Christians?

The mode of doing identity through difference (Jew versus Gentile, free versus slave, male versus female) is, according to Paul, set aside in Christ. At one level the provenance and end of these categories is uncomplicated (oppression, discrimination, inequality, are to end) but at another level, considering all that is included in Paul’s categories (ethnicity, religion, biology, social class, economics, culture, behavior, gender, sex, etc.), setting aside these categories entirely will not be possible and negotiating around them so as to make Christ the prime identity will be no easy task. Most every element of what is normally considered as constituting humanness will have to be reconstituted, deconstructed, reoriented, recreated, and so, a great deal of Paul’s effort will be spent in explaining how oneness in Christ is to be implemented. Jews and Gentiles will have to renegotiate nearly every element of their life – how and what to eat and the role of ethnic and religious identity. Men and women cannot simply continue to identify themselves through the gender and sex roles of the surrounding culture. Slaves and free will have to undergo a radical reevaluation in their relationship, as now they are of the same family in the body of Christ.

Identity will no longer be through oppositional difference but will be “in Christ.” However, what needs to be obliterated and what needs to be preserved and reconstituted would seem to work out differently in each of the opposed pairs. “Master Christians” and “slave Christians” resonates very differently than “male Christians” and “female Christians.” The slave/master relationship is undone in that in Christ all become the slaves, or at least the servants, of one another. The same principle, of relinquishing self-interest, applies in gender roles but Paul specifically warns the Corinthians against a unisexuality. So, there are some things which need to be obliterated – there are no master Christians – while there are other things that are changed up and yet preserved. Jewishness, for example, is preserved but changed. It is not simply assimilated into the dominate Gentile mode but neither does it maintain its segregated stance. Clearly all must relinquish the self-interest which is the prime force in privileging one half of the pair.

The precise thing that is obliterated between the opposed pairs is the “hostility” or the alienating force or the principalities and powers which divide and darken. The dualisms that divide – Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female/, or most recently and most clearly white/black, all gain meaning (political, religious, ethnic, or gendered meaning) through an interdependent difference. The difference cannot be absolute or there would be no point of comparison, but to describe the difference as necessarily inhering in the pairs creates an instability. There is no essence in either of the parts; there are no masters without slaves, no men without women, no Jews without Gentiles, no white without black.

James Baldwin captures this in his description of the American invention of whiteness. He claims, in fact, that there is no white community. Whiteness is a false construct created by shedding Irish, Italian, German, English, and Jewish identity but this becomes a unified identity over and against what it is not. “No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” It became a white country on the basis of what was done to “red,” “brown,” and black humanity. “White men—from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.” America became white on the basis of subjugation of people of color. “No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie.”[1]

Whiteness describes a relationship of power. To the degree that people depend upon this power, to the degree they live off this power, to the degree that this power defines, to that degree their identity is dependent on the genocidal form out of which this identity emerges. This genocidal hermeneutic, in Willie Jennings description, continues to center “the good, the beautiful, the intelligent, and the noble” around whiteness, creating a regime of whiteness. This whiteness “disciplines fantasies of becoming (becoming human, mature, cultured, civilized, authoritative,)” such that whiteness continues to colonize through these ongoing effects. Jennings refers to it as Caucasia’s capital.[2]

He raises the question, “Can white people be saved?” The question, as he explains does not pertain to the efficacy of salvation in regard to a category of people. The point is that whiteness is a way of being in the world that stands opposed to the Christian way of being in the world. Whiteness, he explains, is “a deformed building project aimed at bringing the world to its full maturity.” It is conceived as part of the idea of progress as Europeans colonize(d) the world. This new world is not allowed a voice but is named in reference to the colonizers. “These Europeans answered the question without the voice or vision of the peoples of the new worlds. They self-designated.” And they designated a vast variety of peoples in reference to their self-designation. They began to “suture different peoples, clans, and tribes into racial categories. They, the Europeans, were white, and the others were almost white, not quite white, or nonwhite, or almost black, not quite black, or black.” Metaphorical and literal genocide began with denying these “non-white” people a voice, so that whiteness was projected into their world as an order of meaning, very often in the name of Christ and missions. “Death expanded its reach by designating peoples and the earth in reductive categories, isolating lives into fragments in order to make them useful, turning everything into commodities.” Christian conversion became an event toward whiteness “as a formation toward maturity.”[3]

So, whiteness does not pertain to birth or biology but it refers to a particular form of agency and subjectivity by which progress is gauged. To merge Christian with whiteness is to reverse the valuation system of the former: being an owner rather than owned, being a citizen of the first world rather than a stranger, and gauging the departure from darkness by being seen as white. Whiteness can be equated with ownership and having a voice, whereas to be non-white amounts to literally being owned or being material in the production process. To be a citizen of Caucasia meant taming the wilderness, subjugating native inhabitants, and by this means establishing an identity in the new nation. Citizenship in nationalism is a pure construct, not grounded in the land but taking ownership and control of the land, rather than being integrated into the land and its controls. The labor of whites took on a different order of meaning than the labor of blacks in that it was a labor of ownership and control to establish whiteness and citizenship. Native and black, in Jennings description, were perceived as “closer to nature and its raw condition of unproductivity.”[4] In this understanding, whiteness is a condition of lostness: one is lost due to a misplaced notion of ownership and control, a misplaced citizenship, and a misplaced value system.

In a similar but differently articulated vein, James Cone maintains that God is not the God of all people as he is against the oppressor and is the God of the oppressed. He concludes, “So-called Christianity, as commonly practiced in the United States, is actually the racist Antichrist.” This “false Christianity . . . of the oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed.” In other words, to claim to be a white Christian is to miss the oppressive genealogy of this identity.

In Paul’s depiction, the principalities and powers exercise this alienating force through the dualisms that divide. The full weight of the Christian Gospel is aimed at defeating this division, this mystery that has us entrapped. The mystery of division is one we naturally inhabit in the way we organize ourselves in dualistic identities. The mystery divides and confounds our thinking. It is a mystery concerning the relationship between creation and Creator in which the one (the created order) is idolatrously pitted against the other. The idolater self-designates, imagining all else is relative to his created image, and imagining oneself as his own father-creator. Paul depicts passage from out of this mindset as the opening of this obscurity that darkens every mind.  The passage from “once hidden” to “now revealed” marks a new historical consciousness.

According to Ephesians, it pertains to “things in heaven” and “things on earth” and to God’s predetermined purposes for all things. No longer should we posit a gap between God and creation, heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile. Christ has bridged the gap. Paul will refer to the broad sweep of history in Romans 9-11 as the unfolding of this mystery and he will refer to the breaking down of the “dividing wall” between Jews and Gentiles as pertaining to a fulfilled cosmic order previously hidden (Eph 2:14). People are reconstituted as a singular family in which their personhood involves a new consciousness – holistic and personal. Given this insight, all divisions are exposed as a false order of identity.

To be Christian is to break out of the division of whiteness as an identity, a value system, or a form of citizenship. Perhaps all we can expect is to gradually learn to be something other than white, something on the order of citizens of a different sort of kingdom. This begins, in Paul’s description, through a different order of embodiment – finding ourselves embodied in Christ. This is not an abstraction but a real-world connection to other people as a means to receiving grace and gifts of the Spirit. This is not identity by segregation but a preservation of unity provided by Christ. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4).

To be Christian is to give up on ownership and first-world citizenship so as to identify with a different citizenry, dispossessed and poor in this world. The space Christians are to occupy is neither coveted nor contested as it is outside the city, where doing life together is the singular economy and value. As Jennings puts it, we must be saved “from being or becoming white people.” As we relinquish white capital we can begin to enjoy “the gifts from on high.” “But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Eph 4:7). This is capital enough.

[1] James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies,” https://bannekerinstitute.fas.harvard.edu/files/bannekerinstitute/files/on_being_white.and_other_lies_baldwin_0.pdf

[2] Willie Jennings, “Caucasia’s Capital: The Ordinary Presence of Whiteness,” https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/divinity.duke.edu/files/documents/faculty/Jennings-Caucasias-Capital.pdf

[3] Willie Jennings, “European Christian missionaries and their false sense of progress” in The Christian Century, (October 31,2018). https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/european-christian-missionaries-and-their-false-sense-progress

[4] Ibid.

On Being White and Other Lies and Other Links

In honor of George Floyd and in support of bringing about reform and a more equitable and just society, in place of a blog, below are links which point to practical action and an article by James Baldwin.

WEEK OF ACTION

https://8cantwait.org/?fbclid=IwAR31rG8tP4lj08Ttjx3IQ0JAQV7RnR2KoLW8d1ffCGRKhox8svkny5wGqck

https://www.google.com/search?q=James+Baldwin+On+Being+White+and+Other+Lies&oq=James+Baldwin+On+Being+White+and+Other+Lies&aqs=chrome..69i57.20198

Renouncing the Way of Violence

This is a guest blog by Allan S. Contreras Ríos

At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. In struggling for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Bible portrays God as intervening in human evil and putting sacrifice and violence to an end, through Christ (as Daniel 9:27 prophesied) and it is this continuing nonviolent intervention into violence to which the followers of Jesus are called. In other words, Jesus’ death is not a violent sacrifice for God, nor is it a sacrifice bringing to a climax the plan required by God to forgive mankind.

What God requires is self-denial, since “the sacrifice of the heart is the atonement for which alone he cares.”[1] To think God required or needed a sacrificial death is to succumb to the lie that God requires violence and, therefore, to cover up the evil that the Gospel tries to annul. A Christianity which needs sacrifice would fall under the critique of Regina Schwartz and others, which would suggest monotheistic religion is inherently violent, an abomination in its promotion of violence and exclusion. In reality, authentic Christianity is a critique of violence and is the singular means of ending it.  

Violent atonement theories, such as penal substitution, have prolonged violence in the world, reducing large portions of Western Christianity to a reaffirmation or means of violence – a vehicle for Satan’s lie which requires bloodshed. The force at work undermining an authentic Christianity is the error of Israel, the darkness of the nations, the delusion of the world, that is characterized by violence. A violent Christianity has succumbed to or even embraced the world’s darkness, while the authentic Christian life is an intervention into this system.  

In a biblical-historical recapitulation, when humanity becomes its own god (Genesis 3; cf. Romans 1:21-23), it begins to depend on itself for its survival, because without God, humanity stops living and begins to survive. Violence becomes the means of survival. As Darwin would describe it, survival is only for the fittest (or strongest), but in order to survive, it must destroy its surroundings, that is, creation itself (including the neighbor). The problem is, that by wiping out the resources that surround it, survival entails self-destruction.

Revelation presents the alternative; a peaceful alternative, an alternative in which the harmony that was in the original design is restored. In this alternative, the human being must retake his place as a gardener. Only by loving God, loving the neighbor, and caring for the Garden, can humanity not only survive, but truly live, truly be a well of water springing up to eternal life (John 4:14).

Likewise, the violence of Cain (Genesis 4:8), Lamech (Genesis 4:23-24), Joseph’s brothers (Genesis 37:18-28), Saul (1 Samuel 18:7-11, etc.); Judah (Ezekiel 8:17), the one imposed on the scapegoat (Leviticus 16:21-22), and that of the rest of humanity, is reversed through Christ and His followers by loving the brother (Matthew 22:39) instead of murdering him as Cain did, by forgiving 70 times 7 (Matthew 18:22) instead of taking revenge 70 times 7 like Lamech, by reconciling with the brother even if he provokes one to anger (Matthew 5:23-24). By submitting to the King of kings the follower of Christ reverses evil (Ephesians 5:24a; Revelations 19:16) instead of perpetuating it as Joseph’s brothers did. Instead of wanting a position of power as Saul did, instead of committing violence as Judah did and humanity does, the follower of Jesus seeks peace with all (Romans 12:18; Hebrews 12:14).

This is the path of peace that God had been presenting gradually from the beginnings of the Old Testament, but that had its fulfillment in Christ and in His Church. Pacifism is the quality that makes Christians unique in this world full of violence. Being a pacifist like Jesus, is not only to imitate Him, but it is the true sacrifice that God requires. Sacrificing the violence that dwells in the human heart and replacing it with the peace of Christ is the way to eternal life.

Pacifism is controversial since, as mentioned above, a large part of Western Christianity has adopted violence as part of its interpretation of atonement. In other words, under this wrong perspective, God requires violence to end violence. But violence only gives birth to more violence; it does not eliminate it. Rather, violence as the means of combating violence, is the degenerate perspective by which humanity is governed, and it is the one that God seeks to eliminate in a redeemed cosmic order.

This is why the Sermon on the Mount is controversial, Jesus not only wanted humanity to love those who are easy to love, but also the enemy. And how many wars has humanity started in the name of God? Many, but Jesus taught, it is impossible for a person to genuinely love another and at the same time seek to murder him. “Just war” does not make “Christians” of those who subscribe to this theory, it makes zealots – people willing to attack the enemy for a “good reason.”

Jesus precisely rejected the zealot option because it was not radical enough. Attacking the enemy does not require much, it is easy to get angry and seek to do evil to the other. What is radical and extremely difficult is to forgive the enemy; and not only that, but love him too. In his omnipotence, Jesus allowed Himself to be crucified by His enemies, and hanging on the cross forgave them (Luke 23:43). The call is for the Christian to do so as well! For Jesus said, “take up your cross and follow me” (Luke 9:23). “Jesus’s death on the cross instructs us to self-sacrificially absorb violence instead of forcefully resisting it, or worse, inflicting it. It tells us to suffer violence, to allow it to do its worst to us, rather than to use it ourselves.”[2]

As Mathew C. Fleischer describes it, Christian pacifism is not passive or inactive, but just the opposite, it is active non-violent peacemaking. While violence hurts, destroys and tears down, Christian love serves, restores, and edifies.

There is no verse in which Jesus commands violent action, not even for a righteous cause. “What is a more righteous reason than defending the Master?!” Peter thought as he cut off Malchus’ ear (John 18:10). And Jesus’ answer was “Stop! No more of this.” And He touched his ear and healed him (Luke 22:51). Not only were Jesus’ commandments non-violent, they were anti-violence, as the example of His arrest demonstrates. Jesus fought valiantly, not violently. He subjected Himself to the worst form of violence, and triumphed over the violence that killed him in his resurrection.  This is the King who offers eternal life; a life where there is no more death, because there is no more violence. While human governments reign by force, Christ reigns by peace. His Kingdom is not forced on mankind, for this would make Him violent. Jesus does not force His entrance into the human heart, He knocks on the door, He does not knock it down (Revelation 3:20), because violence has no place in His Kingdom.

The Christian who denies this pacifism and adopts violence as a resource, not only denies the teachings of Christ, but denies Christ Himself. “Jesus did not renounce the way of violence for the way of peace so that we could renounce the way of peace for the way of violence.”[3]

Man is made perfect in his faith when he lets his violence, his desires, his aspirations of power, his sinful thoughts, his failures, his negligence, his grudges, etc., die. Loving the enemy requires a true sacrifice from the Christian. It is to go against what he feels in his guts, it is to go against his strongest instincts. But it is the way to a full life. It is extremely easy to kill the enemy, but very difficult to forgive him. However, that is the living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God. Instead of the Christian adapting himself to this world and its violence, he must allow himself to be transformed by God by the renewing of his mind, so that he may verify what the will of God is: what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:1-2).[4]

[1] George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons Series I., II., and II. (Kindle Location 280). Kindle Edition.

[2] Matthew Curtis Fleischer. Jesus the Pacifist: A Concise Guide to His Radical Nonviolence (Kindle Locations 1061-1063). Epic Octavius The Triumphant, LLC.

[3] Brian Zahnd, A farewell to mars: an evangelical pastor’s journey toward the biblical gospel of peace (Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook, 2014).

[4] The above is an excerpt of the last chapter of the book I’m writing: The Sacrifice God Requires.

“I Can’t Breathe”

The police officer ignores the plea, “Please, please. I can’t breathe,” George Floyd gasps out.  “I can’t breathe, officer.” A bystander addresses the officers: “He is human, bro.” The cop is unphased and keeps his knee in place cutting off Floyd’s breath. After five minutes he is motionless and silent. A bystander notes the unbelievable but obvious: “They just killed that man.”  It is obvious from the video released on the internet that for ten minutes the officer drove his knee into Floyd’s neck. Despite pleas from bystanders, the officer showed no pity or compassion.

Six years ago, another black man, Eric Garner, pleaded with police officers in New York City who held him in a chokehold, saying “I can’t breathe.” He was choked to death and his cry, “I can’t breathe,” became the slogan and chant against police brutality.  

The final words of Frank Gabrin, the first ER doctor to die of coronavirus were, “I can’t breathe, help me.” His partner reports, “he was gasping for air in great, hoarse breaths, but could not get enough oxygen.” By the time paramedics arrived, Gabrin was on the edge of death, or had already gone. His face had turned purple.

 Dr. Byron Safewright indicates that this is a common refrain. “When people came to the hospital, it was because they couldn’t breathe. But when they had oxygen, it just didn’t help. They still were fighting for air. It doesn’t matter how much oxygen we give you — it doesn’t improve the problem.” The coronavirus can infect the respiratory tract, irritating and inflaming the airways. As the infection travels through the respiratory tract, the immune system fights back but this causes airways to become even more swollen and inflamed. As the body fights back suffocation results.

Some of Gabrin’s final texts before contracting the virus were, “Don’t have any PPE that has not been used. No N95 masks ― my own goggles — my own face shield.” He is one of numerous, and as of yet uncounted, medical workers across the U.S. who have succumbed to the virus, many of whom have died due to lack of personal protective equipment (PPE).  State legislators and health care providers across the country called on the Trump administration to help with the lack of PPE but the administration maintains it is the states’ responsibility to procure PPE and Donald Trump has deemed the shortage “fake news.”

Columbia University recently released a study showing 36,000 fewer people would have died in the midst of the crisis if the U.S. had acted just one week earlier to impose social distancing. If the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, 83 percent of the nation’s deaths would have been avoided, researchers estimated. President Trump called Columbia University a “liberal, disgraceful institution” after it released the study.   

Vanity Fair reports that heading into the Memorial Day weekend, Trump complained that he was COVID-19’s biggest victim. “This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!” Trump said to an adviser.

There are many ways to bring on asphyxiation but the most well-known is crucifixion. Pierre Barbet describes crucifixion as “death by asphyxiation.” The crucified have severe difficulty inhaling, as the chest, with arms outstretched, is expanded and unable to take in more air. The struggle is to pull the body up, either with the arms or the legs (which explains why breaking the legs insured a quick death), so as to be able to take in air, but one becomes exhausted. As with COVID-19, it is actually the attempt to fight for life that kills. It is a slow process of exhaustion and suffocation, very much like having a knee thrust into the throat so as to shut off oxygen. The more one cries out the greater the loss of oxygen. Crucifixion was preserved for those considered less than human and it was deployed as a means to frighten slaves into maintaining their station without rebellion or complaint.

The state requires sacrifice so as to maintain an ordered world – that of the slave or capitalistic economy. The knee of state, literal or metaphorical, requires the asphyxiation of the most vulnerable. The question is whether to identify with the powers that would vie for the economy, for “law and order,” or whether to identify with the vulnerable being asphyxiated.  

Jason Rodenbeck challenges us to do the right thing:

kill me with George Floyd

murdered in public by
the powers’ enforcers over
vague accusations before
mobs of bystanders, some
begging for mercy, he gasped

“I can’t breathe.”

and then he died.
what terrible crime must he have done
to be worthy of such treatment?
would it have even mattered if
he was innocent?

…

murdered in public by
the powers’ enforcers over
vague accusations before
mobs of bystanders, some
begging for mercy, he gasped

“I’m thirsty.”

and, when he had
asked forgiveness for them,
then he died. alone.

what terrible crime had he done?
nothing more than loving George Floyd.
and on his cross he gasped with George
on the pavement.

it didn’t even matter that
he was innocent.

I suppose it’s easy at 3 AM from the
quiet safety of my dining room to say
“I’d rather die with George Floyd than
suffer another to die alone.”

I’m sure it will be much harder to speak
when it happens in front of me,
and I am tempted to retreat to the
quiet safety of my whiteness.

but I hope in my heart that,
if that time comes I will
have the courage say to those officers

“if you really must kill someone,
kill me with George Floyd.”[1]

[1] Found On His Blog, “Thinking Peacefully,” https://jasonrodenbeck.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/kill-me-with-george-floyd/?fbclid=IwAR2gWip5xURX_8l4ZNacvPDnJIzCVDNlPgYADeDXQptGMWtWC9ooftdOycY