Thy Will Be Done

A topic I try to cover every semester in theology class is the theology of prayer.  I first introduced this topic to illustrate the theological category of a "practice" which has become more and more prominent in theological reflection in recent decades.  Taking such a familiar concept as prayer gave me the opportunity to investigate the goal or purpose of the practice, the proper means of practicing prayer, the various forms of prayer that make up the general practice, the "rules of the game" that define what is and is not prayer, the virtues required by and strengthened by practicing prayer, the relation of prayer to a more general practice of worship, and the corruptions of prayer in contemporary practice.  I've written about aspects of this conversation at various times in this blog.

Last week in Systematic Theology class, I started down that road in our unit on ecclesiology.  Having gone over various ways of outlining the doctrine of the church, I had ended with McClendon and Yoder as examples of theologians who had turned to practices of a shared life in community as the crucial ways of elaborating on the nature of the church.  I took the low-hanging fruit, prayer, and began to illustrate how to understand it as an example of a practice.

As usual, the students were fairly quickly drawn into the reimagining of this subject in which they had long been immersed and about which they had often reflected.  As usual, I began to take critical shots at common popular assumptions and problematic teachings about prayer.  We addressed the idea of prayer as a consumer activity, of "shopping" with God.  We looked at the ways we have been told that if we do or say or think or feel the right things, then prayer will work out how we want.  I stressed that prayer is not about getting God to change and do what we want, but that it is an opportunity for God to change us and align us with the divine purpose.  Students were offering helpful supplements to my prepared remarks, and all in all the discussion seemed to me very successful as a teaching and learning activity.

Then the conversation turned deep and personal.  One experienced pastor began to describe pastoral experiences in which a young person had endured a terminal illness.  Another spoke of her sister's illness and partial recovery.  I tried to draw upon my own experience of losing Everly to cancer even as we prayed for God's deliverance.  Finally one told of the sudden death of his young son.  We ran up against the limits of prayer as an input-output machine.  Prayer can never be reduced to doing our duty so that God will do God's "duty" to give us what we hope for.

One obvious protest brings up the story of Lazarus or Jairus's daughter or Peter and John in the temple with the lame man, or any number of other divine interventions for healing and life.  If they prayed and God delivered, why can't we?  The unsatisfying answer is that Peter and John and Jesus did not heal every lame person, raise every dead child, or open every grave.  These mighty works were a sign of God the Creator who is able to do all things in the world God has created.  They were not a sign of the reversal of every pattern and system in creation so that none will ever die or be sick in this world, if we just pray hard enough or in the right way, with the right words. 

The asked but unanswerable question remained:  If God acted in those events, why not in my crisis?  The question has many shades of meaning.  One is the question of whether I have failed God in some way and therefore did not merit God's favor.  Jesus challenged that kind of thinking by the synagogue leaders as wrongheaded.  We do not need to be trying to figure out how to blame people who get sick or face disabilities.  We need to be compassionate toward them.  Another shade of this question is whether God has abandoned us.  But God cannot and will not abandon God's creation.  God stands by us even in the most difficult and most evil of circumstances.  God can, but mostly does not, intervene in the events and actions of human life.  How many years was Jesus living in the world?  Yet we know only a few days and weeks of his life.  These highlights, which emphasize his teaching, his confrontations, and his mighty works, might be assumed to be representative of every day of his life.  Or they may more likely be great and memorable times surrounded by and interspersed among many normal days more like our own experiences.  It's not an answer to the question, but a way of trying to think through the problem.

When I am most faithful to my professed method of theological reflection, I link my arguments back to Jesus.  In this case, words from Jesus about prayer become highly relevant, as well as examples of his prayers.  There are many of these stories and teachings in the gospel, and I will not take them all up in this blog post.  We discussed quite a few in class.  For instance, Jesus' "High Priestly Prayer" of John 17 helps us to identify the purpose of prayer--union or communion with God.  Jesus' parables about prayer teach the proper virtues of communion with God (the Pharisee and the Publican) and the trust in God's loving purposes for us (the Importunate Widow and the children's requests for bread or an egg).  Jesus' model prayer in Matthew 6 deserves extensive analysis for its contributions to an understanding of prayer, but let it suffice here to say that at it's core is the prayerful person's aligning herself or himself with the purpose and will of God:  "thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth."  It is this sentiment that inspired the name of this blog.

So last week I tried to make sense of this aspect of Jesus' praying:  praying for God's will to be done.  It is not only in the model prayer.  Jesus did not forget his own advice when he found himself in a crisis.  Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, not long before he would be arrested, tortured, and executed, Jesus poured out his heart in prayer.  He asked if the expected sequence of events could be avoided.  He asked if there could be another way.  And he followed his cries with the prayer, "not my will, but Thine be done."  He prayed that he would align his will with the purpose and will of God.  As my friend J. Kameron Carter showed me, it was the prayer his mother taught him.  When we first encounter the young Mary in Luke's gospel, she responds to the pronouncement and promise of God's messenger Gabriel by saying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  The mother who was willing to align her life with God's purpose taught her son to pray in this same manner.  When he was old, he did not depart from it.

Even here, we run into dangers interpreting Jesus' prayer.  The core prayer is clear--praying for communion with God and the capacity to join oneself to God's purpose in the world.  But what is it that Jesus wants to avoid?  What other options are available to him?  What is it that he ultimately agrees to be the will of God?

Too often, we operate primarily from our position of hindsight.  We overlay the conversation of this prayer with layer upon layer of traditioned interpretation.  We import the revivalist's personal salvation preaching, the early modern construction of spheres of power through the nation-state, the medieval divinely predestined feudal order, and so many potential distortions of race, capital, religion, and violence.  We assume that when Jesus is asking to avoid the abandonment and torture and execution that he is facing, it is God's will that Jesus be abandoned, tortured, and executed.  We leave aside the actualities of a concrete life and let our minds wander among eternal verities and metaphysical principles.  We accept that dangerous theological dictum that Jesus came to die, as if the life he lived was not itself the purpose and will of God.  We turn Jesus in the garden into a mere cypher for an internal conflict within God.  We pretend that one part of God does not want to die, but the other part of God wants him to die.  But this is the wrong interpretation.

What were Jesus' options?  He could continue to follow the path of proclaiming and embodying the Kingdom of God.  This is what had gotten him in trouble.  This is what had aroused the powerful to make plans to destroy him.  This is what had stirred the crowds to follow him and put their hope in him.  This is what had motivated the disciples to be part of his movement.  He had challenged the social order, the economic disparities, the political structures.  They had pushed back and threatened and plotted to end his movement.  Now, at this moment of truth, what should he do?

If it be possible...this phrase represents the question of how to proceed and be faithful.  For Jesus to stand up for the people, to continue his mission, and to do so stubbornly now is going to mean he will be arrested, tried, tortured, and executed as an enemy of the state.  Another option would be to retreat again to the countryside and wait to continue the battle another day.  He has done this more than once in the past, if we can piece together a history from the four gospels.  But for several weeks at least he has been convinced that the time for retreating is over.  He has told his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem for a final confrontation, and that it is going to cost him his life.  Would retreating once more be a way of extending his influence and building his movement?  Or would it be a way of undermining the work he had built up thus far?  Would it be a cowardly retreat, or a strategic plan for a long-term struggle? 

A different option would be to walk away from it all.  Jesus could concede defeat.  He could say, "Sorry, I didn't mean it."  He could settle back down to carpentry or join his buddies in the fishing business.  He could be that guy everyone has heard of--"remember who he used to be?"  He could give up on the calling he had previously accepted and renounce his critique of injustice.  He could promise to leave the Sadducees and Pharisees and Herodians alone.  He could even hold a joint press conference to say they had worked out their differences and that he is now in full support of their leadership.  Jesus would not have to deal with arrest and execution.  He could walk away.

Jesus also could reverse his previous position on violence.  He could embrace the popular notion of a Messiah as a conquering king.  Although he had spent his career rejecting and denying that was his way, even at the end telling his followers that he did not come to lord over anyone, but to lead as a servant, Jesus could conclude that it was not working and not worth the cost.  He could get his followers to gather their weapons.  He could stir the crowd which loved to follow him and hoped he would lead them into battle.  He could become that Messiah and fight to the bitter end.  Who knows if he could reach the same success as Joshua or as Judas Maccabeus?  This is what all his people seem to want him to do.  If it be possible...

Then again, he might hope that the people who were his enemies, the ones who were at that very time preparing to arrest him to fulfill the plot they had made, would suddenly change their minds.  Could it be that he would not face their wrath, but they would embrace him?  Certainly that was a possibility in some universe.  But it was unlikely.  And the only way he could find out about that was to go confront them again.

This is the choice Jesus grappled with that night in the Garden.  Should he continue faithfully on the path that he had discerned as the calling of God--to confront injustice, face down the powerful, proclaim a counter-politics and a contrast society, no matter where that might lead or what it might cost him?  Or should he renounce his calling, give up on the struggle, concede the defeat, walk away, turn on his people?  He wasn't choosing whether to accept God's plan for his death.  He was choosing whether to accept God's plan for his life.  Would he be faithful to the end, even if it meant his enemies would execute him?  This is not the same as saying God planned for him to die.  This is saying that God planned for him to struggle against evil without taking up the ways of evil and violence, even if it meant his love for his friends meant he would lay down his life.  God's will is to love.  In Jesus' case, to continue to love to the end meant he died the death of a political enemy.

In a similar way, I think it is possible to reflect on the challenges we face without depending on a predestinarian view of God's will and feeling that we must concede to the chess-game god's next move.  I mentioned earlier the hard questions that we ask but cannot answer.  Just as Job wondered why such terrible things happened, the whirlwind only offered the disappointing answer that there are many things we will not know.  When Everly was sick with cancer, we could not know how the illness would respond to medicine and treatment.  We went through ups and downs, through many pains and struggles, in an effort to see how she might live out her life as anticipated.  At 53, too young for a person to die, she had been stricken.  She faced the difficulty of giving up her career at its peak of success.  She wondered what she could do to build up her children who as young adults still had much to learn from her.  She knew that leaving us behind in the world would mean a harder financial existence and an emptiness in our homes from her absence. 

My own struggles were similar.  How could I support her through her trials?  How could I live without a partner through whom God had always led and guided me?  What kind of life should I have, since so much of the life I had been living was tied up in her career and person?  What both of us had to face was the necessity of living the life we had been called to live in a new set of circumstances.  To the extent that we had heard and responded to God's calling in our lives, then that calling was not changed in this new crisis.  However, it was a new context in which to live it.  Everly came to realize that the time she had available could be best used to build up the people in her life--her children, her family, her friends, her colleagues, and me.  She headed straight into the life ahead of her, following the calling she already knew was upon her.

Knowing the "why" of tragic events often escapes us.  Thus, my theology professor from seminary, William Hendricks, offered a response formed not in certainty, but in wisdom.  He urged us as ministry trainees to learn to convert the question.  We must push past the unanswerable "why?" to the practical "what now?"  What now, O God, would you have me do?  In the new circumstance I face, how do I remain faithful?  If this is what my life has come to, then how can I be the person you have called me to be?

Jesus prayed that prayer in the Garden.  He was up against an unfolding sequence of events that would not go well for him.  Like any sane human being, he did not want to go through the things that now were about to come to pass.  Is there another way?  Can I do something else?  What are the options?  God, help me know what to do.  He concluded that the God who had called him and the Spirit who had annointed him to preach good news to poor people, to set at liberty the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor--this same God who had willed this life for him would carry him through whatever evils and trials he must face to carry out that mission.  God wills for us to take up the mission of Jesus.  May I be always able to pray with him, "not my will, but Thine be done."

Fugitives from Injustice

The practice of preaching involves lots of listening and learning from others preachers.  There is lots of borrowing and using of preached materials--one wishes more of the borrowing and using included credit given where credit is due.  I don't deny that my preaching is shaped by many influences.  This sermon, in particular, depends heavily on the debt I owe to my friend J. Kameron Carter.

I have been blessed by his friendship in many ways.  As dads, we have supported and prayed with one another through the task of knowing how best to love our children as the gifts from God that they are.  As workers, we have hashed and rehashed, chewed over and stewed over the ups and downs of employment and collegial relationships on the respective plantations where we find ourselves earning a paycheck.  As theologians, we have run our current ideas by one another over coffee in conversations that seem to open up into so many vistas that there is never a good stopping point.

One such conversation that has gone on across many months is his reflection on Christology, engaging social theorists and classical Christian texts, from which he has been exploring the notion of fugitivity, of Jesus as fugitive.  As Jay might say, "dat joint has worked on me."  On this conversation, mostly I have listened.  My contributions have mostly been around my own efforts to understand Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist, his ministry under the constant threat of assassination, and his reactions to the political murder of John by Herod.

Finally, I felt compelled to try to think within this framing of Christology that has occupied many hours of coffee drinking.  I put it into the form of a sermon for chapel service at Shaw University Divinity School.  I first preached this sermon on Saturday, March 12, 2016.  Thank you, Brother J, for your generous teaching into the life of your friend.

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Mark 6:12-16

12So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. 13They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

             14King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.” 15But others said, “It is Elijah.” And others said, “It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” 16But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”

John 4:1-4

1Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” — 2although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— 3he left Judea and started back to Galilee. 4But he had to go through Samaria.

John 7:10-14, 25-26, 30-36

10But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret. 11The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, “Where is he?” 12And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” 13Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.

             14About the middle of the festival Jesus went up into the temple and began to teach….

            25Now some of the people of Jerusalem were saying, “Is not this the man whom they are trying to kill? 26And here he is, speaking openly, but they say nothing to him! Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Messiah?...

            30Then they tried to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come. 31Yet many in the crowd believed in him and were saying, “When the Messiah comes, will he do more signs than this man has done?”

             32The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering such things about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent temple police to arrest him. 33Jesus then said, “I will be with you a little while longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. 34You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.” 35The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? 36What does he mean by saying, ‘You will search for me and you will not find me’ and ‘Where I am, you cannot come’?”

Fugitives from Injustice

            This week at the Ministers Conference, Dr. John Kinney gave thanks that he has worked in a place that he can continue to learn by regularly engaging with students.  If we are faithful to God, we will keep on learning and having to change our minds.  I can agree wholeheartedly.  In the current Lenten season, as we seek to journey with Jesus and learn through his life what sort of lives we should live, I find myself going back into studies and sermons from my past to dig deeper.  How did Jesus’ life change when John the Baptist was executed?  What was it like for Jesus to continue to do his important work while under the shadow of death threats and people plotting against him?  How can learning about Jesus’ endangered life reshape my vision of the church and ministry in this critical time?

            The texts we looked at today, drawn from two different gospels, provide us pieces of a story.  It seems likely that a fuller version of how these stories fit together was well-known to people who through word of mouth passed down their remembrances of the activities and sayings of Jesus.  While it is not possible to piece together a definitive chronology of Jesus’ ministry years, the fragments we do have make evident certain patterns and relationships between events.  We can see more than mere suggestions of Jesus’ mode of life.  We see his strategic engagements of confrontation and withdrawal and his habits of prophetic witness and pragmatic self-preservation.

            Although the four Gospels provide different accounts of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, it seems clear that even in the early stages of his work he began to face serious conflicts.  John describes confrontations with the leaders in Jerusalem and their response in the form of persecution.  Under this state of affairs, Nicodemus avoided meeting Jesus publicly in the light of day.  Although the synoptic gospels do not describe an early ministry in Jerusalem, they convey a similar atmosphere of conflict early in Jesus’ ministry. 

             Matthew describes the harsh words John used in criticizing the Pharisees and Sadducees, and then shows Jesus continuing John's pattern in the first major discourse section, commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount.  Highlighting the shortcomings of the religious elite, the wealthy, and the powerful could not have won him many friends among those groups.  Mark gives account of how Jesus’ fame spread rapidly, drawing both fans and critics in greater numbers.  When he healed a paralytic and said, “Your sins are forgiven,” some began to accuse him of blasphemy.  He stood his ground and won over the crowd, much to the chagrin of his critics.  When Jesus called a tax collector to be one of his close followers, Pharisees began to challenge him for associating with outcasts, only to have Jesus stand up to them for turning their noses up at his friends.  Luke famously tells of Jesus’ invitation to preach in the synagogue in Nazareth, where he makes the leaders so angry they try to kill him.  Thus, we should be fairly certain that from the early stages of his public life, Jesus was in conflict with the powerful people in his world who began to plot his demise.

As the passage from Mark indicates, Jesus’ aggressive teaching and work among the people eventually gets the attention of Herod, and not in a beneficial way.  Herod, troubled by his shameless murder of John the Baptist, seems driven by his guilty conscience to believe that Jesus is in fact John raised from the dead.  Herod’s paranoia becomes a fast-spreading topic of conversation, eventually getting back to Jesus and his disciples.  We have no reason to doubt that Jesus had been deeply affected by the murder of his cousin and mentor.  Knowing the hatred Herod and his family had for John, Jesus could easily deduce that Herod would be coming for him next, and the stories of Herod’s suspicion confirmed there was reason for fear.

Thus the fourth chapter of the fourth gospel tells a story of Jesus making a rapid retreat to Galilee.  Unlike some more bigoted Jews of his day, he did not take the roundabout Transjordan route through Perea.  Jesus did not share the same prejudice, and he was in a hurry to get away from those who were plotting to harm him, so he took a path straight through Samaria toward the cosmopolitan Galilean region where he could move more freely with less surveillance and fewer threats.

If we can accept some version of the timeline offered by the fourth gospel, then Jesus seems to have made multiple trips to Jerusalem, and perhaps across several years of public ministry.  The last passage we read describes one such trip which was cloaked in secrecy.  First, he told his brothers that he would not go.  But later, he sneaked into the great city and avoided being noticed for a while.  Eventually, he started coming out in public and getting into confrontations.  He seems to have had to go back into hiding from day to day, or even from hour to hour, because people were openly plotting to arrest and kill him.  He intentionally engaged them in argument, then slipped away before they could grab him. 

The gospel says, “his time had not yet come.”  In other words, he was not ready to be caught.  He was not ready to interrupt the subversive work he was doing throughout the countryside and from town to town.  He was not ready to be torn away from his close friends and his large crowd of followers.  They were part of a mass movement, and momentum was building.  He was making progress and wanted to see it through.  So his time had not yet come.  He was not ready to push the conflict toward its possible conclusion.  So he told them that even thought they would look for him, they would not find him.  He eluded their grasp and left them confused.

To borrow a term from my coworker and friend in ministry, J. Kameron Carter, Jesus was a fugitive.  He had taken on a fugitive mode of life.  As a fugitive, he was pursued by the powerful and their agents of police control.  He had become an enemy of the state, persona non grata, an undesirable, unwelcome in the synagogue or temple, a threat to the social order, a subverter of economic progress.

He was Trayvon taking a short cut through the neighborhood.  He was Michael or Rekia walking down the street.  He was Sandra driving into a new town where she was not known.  He was Renisha or Jonathan on a porch, knocking on a door to ask for help, outside their neighborhoods.  He was walking while black, driving while black, living while black—unable to be carefree and at ease in his life.  He had no place to lay his head.  He was living under suspicion, always at the edge of danger, ever aware of the threat to end his existence.

He was forced into constant watchfulness, powered by anxiety, as were those who had escaped slavery into the northern states during the era of slavocracy.  Although they had entered into territory which should have made them free, the perversity of white supremacy had allowed the Fugitive Slave Law to require citizens and police of the northern states to catch, detain, and return slaves.  The corrupt profitability of trade in human flesh meant that even free blacks were in danger of being falsely accused of escaping and forced to go south and be enslaved. Slave catchers and informers could be anywhere.  Fugitivity was the condition of life for escaped slaves.  The danger to black persons even today when they cross out of their assigned neighborhoods maintains a disturbing similarity to the Fugitive Slave Law system.  And yet by living in this fugitive condition, their very bodies announced the truth of a counterpolitical social order.  The truth of their existence was freedom.  The lie was slavery.

For Jesus to be a fugitive required in part that he keep a low profile.  It was not that he remained hidden away in a cave or a back room.  The gospel accounts tell us that he was regularly surrounded by crowds who went searching for him when he escaped their presence for a brief time.  In fact, it seems clear that he often found it hard to rest because of the constant barrage of people wanting to meet him, to hear him teach, or to be touched or healed by him.  Jesus was a revolutionary presence in his world.  People’s expectations were sky high.  And this popularity and fame is what was at the same time forcing him into a fugitive life.

Carter says that this fugitive life of Jesus constitutes a “zone of the new humanity.”  Jesus was enacting through his atoning life the model of social existence to which the church is also called.  It is a life that pursues a different purpose from that of the ruling powers.  Its end, its goal, the Reign of God, is a social order not authorized by the existing power structures and worldly economic and political order.  To the extent that churches or other religious systems accommodate themselves to the status quo, to the interests of the current regime and its overreaching power, they align themselves against the fugitive way of Jesus.  They take on the neocolonial role of the Sadducees, Herodians, and Pharisees, as supporters of structures of domination who gladly take their elite position just below the officials of the colonizing power structure imposed by the Roman empire.  Churches need to stop being that kind of auxiliary to empire.

Carter further says of the fugitive Jesus,

His mode of life, the way he lived, was fugitive from the order of things.  He cared for the poor, fed the hungry, hung out with menaces to society, refused to judge according to our measure of judgment (indeed, his judgment was against all judgment); he worked on the Sabbath, doing good and healing the sick even and especially on that day.  This was his mode of life, his way of being human.  And it was a threat….He was the quintessential enemy to both the religious order of things and, especially, to Roman imperial society.  And because of this there was massive collusion to kill him by his Jewish compatriots, Roman/Gentile society, and even within the fold of his followers, the disciples.  (David Kline & J. Kameron Carter, “Race, Theology, and the Politics of Abjection: An Interview with J. Kameron Carter, Part I,” The Other Journal, March 26, 2012.)

The forces which made Jesus into a fugitive, the empire and its lackeys, had a deadly purpose.  The fugitive Savior was not playing a friendly game of hide and seek.  The consequences of his fugitive ways were likely to cost him his life.  And of course, they did.           

            One hundred fifty-one years ago, not too far away from where we gather today, former slaves hunched down, sometimes having to hide among the crops in the field to dodge bullets that still would fly in their direction.  They were gathered together to study the Bible and theology, in the rudimentary formation of what would become Shaw University Divinity School.  Although by proclamation and by terms of surrender, they were free persons under the law, by actual conditions their efforts at betterment and uplift put them in danger of harm at the hands of those who wished for them to remain enslaved. 

            They were a fugitive people following the way of the fugitive Jesus.  As Kelly Brown Douglas notes, they were aware that the prophet’s claim that “My ways are not your ways” brought divine judgment on the slavocracy and its religious cheerleaders.  The so-called Christianity of the master class denied the truth of the gospel, leading our forbears to conclude that “everybody talking about heaven ain’t going there.”  In a world where human flesh is bought and sold, where a person’s body becomes another persons tool for profit or pleasure, where families can be broken apart by cruel commercial calculation, the first students at the Raleigh Institute understood that to follow Jesus was to disavow the social order.  The world needed to be turned upside down, and they were fugitives struggling to overthrow a perverse and corrupt social order.

             Like Jesus, they needed to stay alive long enough to do what they were called to do.  Also like Jesus, they would have to be willing to stare down a deadly system of power, and in doing so keep putting their lives in danger of violence, imprisonment, or death.  It might seem to be a useless plan of life, a hopeless struggle against insurmountable odds.  Why not find a way to fit in?  Why not trade away some dignity for survival, accept limited freedom in exchange for passivity?  But that was not the conclusion they reached.  They were, instead, the vanguard of a new order living under the conditions of fugitivity.  They embraced their fugitive lives because they served a risen Savior.

As Carter explains, Jesus’ fugitive life was not a mere isolated moment.  He was not a tiny, passing blip on the radar of human existence.  The movement he built in his fugitive life grew toward a tipping point.  Eventually, he pressed his fugitivity toward a full-scale confrontation.  Having demonstrated the truth about human existence, the truest way of living, he went toe-to-toe with his enemies. 

Unlike them, he refused a violent solution.  He turned his followers away from the idea of overthrowing one domination system in order to reinstate another one in which they could be the ruling elite.  He shut down his friends’ efforts to kill or harm their opponents, and offered healing even to the ones who would arrest him.  In other words, he was faithful to the end in refusing to live the life of worldly domination. 

Caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, befriending prisoners, loving each neighbor (even the ones who are enemies)—this was his mode of life even until the end.  Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.  Believing that the way of love is the true path to joy and fulfillment, he fixed his gaze on the joy that was set before him.  That was how he could endure the cross and despise its shame.  For his followers, it seemed that his arrest and execution was the end of their hopes.  But they were wrong.

Jesus became a fugitive from his tomb.  In vindication of his faithful life, God raised him from the dead.  Through the resurrection, we may be united to Jesus in his fugitivity.  We may along with Jesus live in contradiction to the domination systems of this world which would deny that black lives matter.  We may reject the respectability politics that tell us the world will accept us and reward us if we will merely follow its rules and avoid rocking the boat.  There is an outcry today among young people who look upon a world in which the government and the corporation and the church have turned their backs on them.  Following the rules is not working.  Trivial traffic stops can quickly turn to life and death situations through no reasonable cause.  Stop and frisk policies make the prejudice of the enforcer adequate reason for a beat down.  When they speak up in their own defense, they are met with militarized policing; they are fired for pointing out unjust wages and organizing workers; they are labeled as lost and narcissistic and unreachable.  They have become outcast in their own homeland, and then blamed for bringing it on themselves.

The church cannot concede to respectability politics.  The world’s interests and purpose are not our interests and purpose.  We follow a fugitive Savior.  If we are to be the body of Christ, we must live in that resurrected fugitive mode.  Going along to get along is not an option.  Carter argues that we can understand Jesus’ death and its atoning power as his descending “right into zone of death, the fallenness of the creature. His death witnessed to a [fugitive] mode of life, and his resurrection was an affirmation of that mode of life; a distinct way of being human was complete and full and utterly accomplished in him” (Carter, ibid.).

United to him in his atoning life, death, and resurrection, we also become participants in this mode of life as fugitives from the regimes of this world, from the established ordering of society.  We take up a revolutionary way, a subversion of the oppressive, violent ways of this world.  We are made new, and as a cadre of the new creation, we press toward the overthrow of corrupted, perverse systems of death.  We do so with prophetic witness and pragmatic perseverance. 

As Dr. Gina Stewart proclaimed concerning the ending of the Gospel of Mark, we receive the news of the resurrection as a shocking awakening to the breaking in of a world of love and justice.  The women at the tomb received an assignment to organize the disciples and meet up with Jesus in Galilee.  They did not run around making a ruckus and provoking a new crackdown on Jesus’ followers, but they worked carefully and faithfully to build a movement ready to go public.  Ultimately, they got their marching orders from the fugitive Savior.  They strengthened themselves for the struggle ahead.  Behind closed doors, they built trust and community.  The made strategic plans and considered alternatives.  They deepened their resolve to give their lives fully to God.  They looked out for one another. 

Then one day there was a sound as a rushing mighty wind.  They were filled with power as the Holy Spirit came upon them.  They went out and filled the streets.  They proclaimed the coming of a new world order.  They saw it breaking in.  They saw the “powers that be” taken aback and confused. 

And they demonstrated for us, heirs of their movement centuries down the way, that we also may become fugitives from the regimes of this world in the struggle to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.  Amen.

Wendell Berry's Inquiries into Whiteness and It's Inherent Wounds

I'm going to analyze some thoughts from Wendell Berry's reflections on race.  It is a complicated book, and as he admits, not finally very satisfying to him or to the reader.  But before I get started, I want to comment on some of the impetus that led me to pull out the book and finish it.  I had started reading it over a decade ago, but put it away after a few sittings because the framing of the issues was too painful for me.  But with many years passed, I have worked through some of those hard questions and realities.  I found myself this time more ready to push through his process.  But first, why did I pick it up?

A few days ago I was thinking through some of the burdens that have weighed on me in my middle adult years.  Some of them go back to a church crisis when my family and other white people entered into conflict over the relevance of race for congregational life, and particularly whether it was appropriate for a traditionally all-white church to assume, even to prefer, that blacks not be part of their church if their presence means changes in the programs, worship, and habits of the congregation.  Some other burdens go back to workplace struggles and experiences of betrayal as colleagues set their faces against one another.  I did not come out of any of these experiences unscathed.  And I don't mean to say that I was a passive recipient of the conflicts.  I was in the middle of them, and certainly I deserve some blame for the way that things went.

It occurred to me that in my more recent struggle of grief, I have been very public and open about the wounds I have suffered through the illness, death, and loss of Everly.  My friend Willie Jennings, who listened and walked beside me in all of these struggles, has often urged me to write the story of my church's conflict over race.  It was two decades ago now.  I have told a version of the story in face-to-face gatherings, leaving out names to avoid demonizing people.  Sometimes, after this many years, I can tell the story without breaking down in tears, but not always. 

At Willie's insistence, I have tried a couple of times to sit down and write about it.  But I get bogged down in minute details or I get anxious about coming across as self-congratulatory while condemning others.  The anger and the disappointment remain, and there lingers also a level of confusion in those emotions and details that make it hard to tell a story I can believe in.  By comparison to my pain of living without Everly, these wounds remain hidden.  To those who know me, fragments of these watershed events exist in their image of who I am.  But much of it they would have little reason to know.

The sideways movements of thought are unpredictable, and that thought of my hidden wounds brought a mental leap to the title of a book by Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound.  It is a pair of essays, written approximately two decades apart, analyzing his personal story of growing up in white supremacist America (not the official Klan type, but the generic US white folk type).  He brings his memories of relationships into dialogue with poetry and other literature, looking for angles from which to gain greater insight into the significance of race in US culture.  He is intentionally trying to think outside the frames in which race is conventionally analyzed. 

Would any of his reflections on the hiddenness of the wound of white supremacy and black slavery breed insight into my own hidden wounds, interlinked as they are with race?  I'm not sure that I got a good answer to that question, but let's try to parse out what he believes the hidden wound or wounds to be.  I say wounds because it is an exploratory book.  By its nature, it arrives at partial conclusions, then turns another angle on the problem to see what has been missed or what else might appear.  Ultimately, by taking up the topic again after two decades, he again puts himself in the position of reframing the issues, renaming the wound:

once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life. The truth keeps leaping on you from behind (6).

Berry initially focuses on the contrast between the myth of benevolence, which sees whites as looking out for their inferiors (the blacks), and the violence inherent in slavery.  He says that this violence might remain hidden from the believers of the myth most of the time.  But their complicity in the violence and dehumanization of slavery became clear if they ever came to sell or buy a slave.  This commercialization of a human being rips away the veil and shows the slaveholder for what she or he is--a purveyor in flesh, a user of persons, a profiteer on misery.  To sell a slave was to allow some other owner, perhaps one who does not believe the myth of benevolence, to do whatever he will with that person.  It was to hand the slave over to hell.  There could be no more blissful denial of the violence.


So one angle on the hidden wound goes back to the harm done to slaveowners' conscience as they came to face, and perhaps to adjust, to their willing terrorizing of blacks simply because of their racialized identity.  Here, perhaps, he foreshadows a theme taken up by contemporary black studies scholar Anthony Pinn.  In Terror and Triumph, Pinn argues that the quintessential moment of terror in the slave system was the auction block.  There, naked, displayed, handled, on the market for use and disposal by one's enemies, the slave faces the blank abyss of terror.  Pinn picks up themes here shared with existential philosophy, and follows them to similar conclusions about the necessity of building anthropocentric and humane systems of meaning to ward off and rise to the challenge of this terror of existence. 

So from the other side of the market exchange, Berry also finds the slave market, the auction block, as the quintessential signifier of the wound, a wound that remains and still fails to be healed.  He analyzes a certain type of literature which seeks to mask the horrors of slavery by side-stepping them, almost ignoring them, in order to elevate the heroic nature of Southern patriotism on the model of medieval chivalry and knightly virtue.  There are many strategies by which to keep the wounds hidden, and Berry is convinced that they do harm rather than heal.

I have already said enough, I think, to make clear the profound moral discomfort potential in a society ostensibly Christian and democratic and genteel, but based upon the institutionalized violence of slavery (14).

Berry links the hidden wound of slavery to the philosophical/political/social/theological/cultural conviction of the split between mind and body.  Of course, contemporary philosophy is filled with arguments about the origin of this dogma of modernity, with various figures, historical precedents, and movements contributing to it.  Mind-body dualism becomes a critical move of conscience, according to Berry, for slaveowners who profess to be Christian and to believe in democracy:

consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own? To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit (15-16).

Here in this empty space Berry locates the wound.  It is a wound he finds to be born from the contradictions of a slaveholding society.

Yet their wound from the era of slavery is not fully descriptive or explanatory of the continuing hidden wound of a culture.  It is generative of the wound that continues, but it does not encompass all that the wound has become in our times.  This wound of personal conscience, manifest and multiplied across congregations and a nation, exists as a structural feature of culture.  It takes form and gains momentum, reshaping Christianity, democracy, morality, law, and whatever aspects of society and culture in which its implications spin out to their conclusions.

If there is such a duality of mind and body, it is more than an inward analysis of the white man, a theory of human nature applied to each atomistic person.  Ultimately, Berry says that whiteness comes to be identified with mind or spirit.  And by dyadic reasoning, blacks are the body of society.  Mind rules over body, rises above body.  Body serves mind, does the hard, necessary work, so that mind can flourish.

Such a dualistic structuring of culture leads to another way of understanding the hidden wound.  Whiteness separates itself from the material necessities of existence.  Thus, even though in the nineteenth century, almost all people were engaged in farming, it was coming to be looked upon as n----- work, work to be avoided by the people at the top.  White culture shifts its understanding of a good life toward monetary success, measured by competition to have the most, be the richest with the best things, the greatest status.  The dirty, sweaty, exhausting side of farming life can't be good life.  This judgment carries over to all hard and dirty work, from cleaning and scrubbing to disposal of garbage to any necessary but difficult labor.

Berry says that this transition was underway during his formative years (65ff).  As a child, his generation was groomed to leave the farm in order to achieve and succeed.  His grandfather still had some memory of the goodness of work on a farm, of knowing the land, of observing each plant, insect, bird, and animal. 

He kept the farmer’s passion that sees beyond the market values into the intricacy and beauty of the lives of things, and that hungers to preserve and enrich the land. To him crops and animals were not only to be sold, but to be studied, understood, admired for their own sakes (70-71).

But probably better than his grandfather, their hired black farm worker Nick knew that good came from provision, and provision came from daily hard work.  As a boy, Wendell found himself linked to Nick, and to an older black woman, Aunt Georgie, in ways that gave him a glimpse of a different world in which success was not the rat race.  It was a view of reality that did not require the denial of dependence upon the earth.

As for this world, there were two heavy facts that Nick accepted and lived with: life is hard, full of work and pain and weariness, and at the end of it a man has got to go farther than he can imagine from any place he knows. And yet within the confines of those acknowledged facts, he was a man rich in pleasures. They were not large pleasures, they cost little or nothing, often they could not be anticipated, and yet they surrounded him; they were possible at almost any time, or at odd times, or at off times. They were pleasures to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all. There were the elemental pleasures of eating and drinking and resting, of being dry while it is raining, of getting dry after getting wet, of getting warm again after getting cold, of cooling off after getting hot. There was pleasure to be taken in good work animals, as long as you remembered the bother and irritation of using the other kind. There was pleasure in the appetites and in the well-being of good animals. There was pleasure in quitting work. There were certain pleasures in the work itself. There was pleasure in hunting and in going to town, and in visiting and in having company. There was pleasure in observing and remembering the behavior of things, and in telling about it. There was pleasure in knowing where a fox lived, and in planning to run it, and in running it. And as I have already made clear, Nick knew how to use his mind for pleasure; he remembered and thought and pondered and imagined. He was a master of what William Carlos Williams called the customs of necessity (72-74).

Again, the wound of racism on whiteness takes a more complex form.  Unlike the standard frame of saying that racism is simplistically white oppression and black misery, Berry believes that he finds in the memories of Nick and Aunt Georgie another account of reality.  Yes, they suffered from racial oppression.  They were denied opportunities.  They lacked what others had capacity to acquire.  None of their misery or oppressions should be denied or diminished.

They also were part of a community of people who had found a path to goodness in life that was linked to their closeness to the soil and to the land.  They understood the way that life is not fully under our personal control.  They recognized that they had the skills and desire to make a life no matter what others might hatefully seek to deny to them.

Whites, separated from the land, from the knowledge that comes from living with the land, from doing hard work and producing basic necessities, lost all sense of their dependence.  They were the captains of their fate, the shapers of their destinies.  Yet they had forgotten and abandoned the basic knowledge of how to live in the world, demanding that others deemed less valuable provide for them.  Whites have, by Berry's judgment, lost key elements of their humanity by creating for themselves an artificial environment of monetary transactions and technologies of power, a mechanized world which devalues people and celebrates accumulation.  Berry describes here numerous sociological insights one might find in Anthony Giddens's account of the modern nation-state.

That I have thought to ponder at such length over the lives and the influence of two black people is due largely to my growing sense that, in the effort to live meaningfully and decently in America, a white man simply cannot learn all that he needs to know from other American white men. That is because the white man’s experience of this continent has so far been incomplete, partly, perhaps mostly, because he has assigned certain critical aspects of the American experience to people he has considered his racial or social inferiors (77-78).

This division of people takes theological form through the doctrine of salvation.  As J. Kameron Carter has recently demonstrated, a certain kind of soteriology emerges as Christianity accommodates itself to white supremacy.  It is a version of Gnosticism, by which salvation becomes an elevation into the spiritual and intellectual being of whiteness, and the bodily aspects of humanity become relegated to the lower races, be they Jews, blacks, or others.  Scot McKnight has called the Evangelical theological version of this turn "the soterian gospel."  Berry points toward this problem as well, describing the turn to "believing" as the essence of salvation, by which the churches set aside the transformation of a whole person and focus on the mind.

Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man’s Christianity has been its soothing bandage—a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit (18-19).

Having restructured social goods around abstractions of success, stocks, bureaucracies, paper empires, bank accounts, and such, salvation would seem to be to take joy in not being tied to such material concerns as soil, crops, care of animals, rain and sunshine, drought and flood, famine and plenty.  The wound remains hidden and the wounded do not even know what they have lost.  Not caring whose lesser bodies do the hard work, the model of the executive moves production from this town to a far country, replaces human workers with machines, and produces thousands upon millions of items for consumption without ever having to put hands to the task of making anything.  The achievement comes at the cost of a great, gaping emptiness, a wound that is hidden, that separates people from the beauty, the power, the joy of creation and knowing our place in it.

Berry's agrarian themes emerge as an essential aspect of his arguments.  He draws upon literary works which bring a powerful and distant successful person into relationship with the peasant, the worker, the lowly person.  In all of these works by Thoreau, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Homer, Mark Twain, and Dostoevsky, he examines the way that the person of elevated class gains insight into goodness and joy through conversation, sharing meals, and living alongside those who are deemed inferior.

Trying to understand whiteness from the inside, one faces the challenges and limitations of one's own perspective and formation.  Berry acknowledges that blacks generally know "harsher truths about the whites than the whites have ever admitted to themselves--and the whites know it" (92).  Thus he knows it is dangerous and questionable for him to try to interpret his memories of the life of Nick as a key to understanding what is lost to whites through their assumptions of whiteness (75).

This confession, at the heart of his methodology for the first essay, points toward what emerges as a key idea in his overall analysis.  That is, in the language of Willie Jennings, the appearance of a racialized world and the rise of white supremacy represents a fundamental "disordering of desire" in humanity.  Misdirected, distorted, perverted desire comes to be accepted as the natural desire of human existence.  As Berry often states, the wound is in part the inability to recognize our common humanity.  Jennings says that we have deserted, even lost, the God-given desire to know one another in the beauty of all our differences.  This does not go away simply by acknowledging that blacks and whites can be equals.  The structures of culture and society, that have formed as scar tissue around the hidden wound of white supremacy and black slavery, reach much farther. 

It remains that the understanding of reality and of success means to have the most stuff, to live in abstract relation to the land, and to take care of the hard work and necessities of life by "sending a n-----" to do it (106-07).  Whether it is killing in war, cleaning up trash, monitoring machines that produce, or simply dispossessing the unnecessary people and putting them aside to waste away, the class/race divisions still demand that those at the top "send a n-----" to do it.

These kinds of divisions undermine the possibility of recovering the kind of joy and love intended for human social existence.  They still rank people by false measures and ignore the common need for food, clean air, worthwhile work, shelter, and friendship.  This wound also means that the land and its intricate web of life, unknown to the ones who are at the top and making the decisions that move the lesser beings around the chessboard, is being used up, abused, and thrown away. 

The human link to place, to soil, to everyday needs, to hard work, has been broken.  All momentum is away from those things, which are the very things that give life.  Desiring to be separate from those with whom we are made to share the bounty of creation, and desiring to be unimpeded by the limits of sustaining the land on which we thrive--this is the disordering of desire.  And the wound will not be healed until we learn to desire to know and love one another as persons, and to know our land, our home, and rejoice in its intricate beauty and power to provide for us.

So through several transformations, the inquiry into the nature of the hidden wound of slavery, of white supremacy, entails a longer narrative linked to modernity, to colonialism, to European world domination, to the destruction of the natural world, and to the alienation from creation in humanity, in the land, and in all other existing things.  Berry's inquisitive journey sheds valuable light on the legacy of racism and its continued emanations and productions, the ongoing woundedness that wounds the world.

As for the relevance of the book to my recognition of "hidden wounds" in my history, there certainly are some insights for me to draw from Berry's work in these essays.  First, I have not always recognized the expansive character of the construction of white supremacy that through its creation of an inferior blackness extends to the entirety of creation.  Willie Jennings's work on colonialism in Peru also makes this sort of argument, and the links between race and species extinction and environmental degradation are demonstrable.  My own occupational and self-imposed confinement to an abstracted world shows me to be swept along by this torrent.  Remembering my past fascination and engagement with the details of the world around me, my previous participation in the hard labor of daily existence, pulls me toward a different way of organizing my days.  That's a bigger set of issues that I will not pretend to quickly solve in a paragraph.

Second, observing the complicated and adventurous intellectual work Berry did in these essays speaks to me about the intricacy of the task before me as I seek to understand, describe, and find healing for wounds I have allowed to remain hidden from myself and the world.  The road of progress is itself difficult to find.  It may depend on memories, previously considered irrelevant and even trivial, that must be brought to the foreground and examined in new light.  It may require study of comparable narratives through which to shed light on my own story.  It demands willingness to think outside of the standard ways of telling the past, of my way vs. your way, of simplistic dyads, of comfortable cover stories.  And it probably only happens as I risk to tell and retell the stories in which I live.

Grafted In: Challenging Supersessionism, Knowing as an Outsider, and the Genius of Willie Jennings

I'm admitting right up front that I'm trying to say too much in this one blog post.

As a budding scholar, a seminarian in the early 1980s, I watched the firestorm began to tear down the edifice of the Southern Baptist structures in which my life had been formed.  A new breed of white male leader committed to fundamentalist patriarchy and American exceptionalism rose to prominence (in contrast to the old breed of white male leaders who had begun to open the door a crack to white female leaders).  My first years out of seminary were spent in the trenches of struggle.  I did not like the possible future I could see on the horizon of struggling against fundamentalist ideologies, powerful authoritarian bishopoids, and absolutist idiosyncratic scriptural interpretation masked as inerrancy.  By the time I had gotten established in my doctoral studies I began to see the path that was being laid for me:  I was on my way out of the churches which had reared me to be something different than they were now becoming.

In my college days, there had been occasional interactions with a kind of hypercalvinism that held itself up as far superior to us lowly, confused baptists, but I had always assumed they were a kind of oddball fringe movement.  Later, when I heard on occasion that a new Calvinism was taking hold in some intellectual circles of Southern Baptist life, I still doubted it could fly.  Who in this contemporary world would finally accept notions of double predestination, limited atonement, irresistible grace, etc?  Wasn't that a scholasticism that had seen its moment in the sun, then gone on its way?  Sure, there was a "soft" kind of Calvinism which taught activism in faith while reserving the presupposition of comprehensive divine guidance of the world.  But actually reasserting the Puritan hubris of belonging to the elect for salvation, looking out at the rest of us as elect for damnation--I really didn't think that dog could run in our day and time.

I have taken my position as a former Southern Baptist very seriously.  I try not to be aware of what is happening in Southern Baptist organizations and life any more than I have to.  Even in the South, Black Baptist church life is dramatically different from the SBC.  But with some remaining institutional ties from college days at Baylor, and with family and friends who still have direct or indirect Southern Baptist connections, I do now and then get a glimpse into that world.  Fellow baptist scholars now and then talk to me about conversations they have had about Calvinism.  Facebook sometimes points me to something about Al Mohler's latest bending in the winds of doctrine, which has made him a poster scholar for Calvinism.  I occasionally take a look at Roger Olson's blog to learn about the current conversation about Calvinism and Arminianism.  And here and there, in conversations about "emergents" and new movements, I keep hearing about young Calvinists. 

A recent conversation with a professor at a baptist university in the South got my attention.  He told me that for the most part, the Christian students on campus who are very serious about living their faith are reading John Piper and convinced of this Calvinist theology.  I found out that this Calvinist resurgence really is a thing.  If it is a thing, I'm going to have to learn more about it.  The Puritan Calvinism that was so influential in shaping U.S. culture has left a residue that this sort of theology helps to rationalize and justify.  That residue, which is common among Calvinist and Southern Baptist and Evangelical and even Liberal churches in the U.S., is theological supersessionism.  Anglo-American culture is the new "chosen people."  Even not very churchly U.S. folks tend to believe that "we" are the ones destined by God to make the world what it is supposed to be.  Not all these believers in American exceptionalism actually have an argument to sustain it theologically, but the Puritan heritage of Calvinism definitely knew why they believed it.

The precipitating event for writing this post was my stumbling upon a critique of contemporary Calvinists by Christian Piatt.  I was impressed with Piatt's insight into one of the serious problems of this theology.  He points out that there is a suspicious assumption by those who believe that God has elected certain persons for salvation that they are the very ones who are the elect.  The forerunners of this kind of thinking in North American theology were the colonial era Puritans.  They were critics of the national churches of early modern Europe, influenced by Protestant Scholasticism and hard predestinarian theology.  I'll get back to their theological dilemma and anxiety later.

Moreover, a hard notion of predestination leads to the conclusion that genocides, murders, epidemics, disasters, and every form of death and time of death happens by God's direct will, as John Piper seems willing to affirm.

It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.

God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God's hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs.

So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing.

If I were to drop dead right now, or a suicide bomber downstairs were to blow this building up and I were blown into smithereens, God would have done me no wrong. He does no wrong to anybody when he takes their life, whether at 2 weeks or at age 92.

God is not beholden to us at all. He doesn't owe us anything.

Now add to that the fact we're all sinners and deserve to die and go to hell yesterday, and the reality that we're even breathing today is sheer common grace from God.

Piper presents his point of view as purely logical.  He allows the "logic" of ancient tribal notions of God, combined with his assumptions about the nature of the sovereign God of monotheism, to make it easy for him to accept despicable acts.  The pervasiveness of sin in Piper's mind makes nothing surprising or alarming to him.  Such calmness and coolness in the face of immense evil seems problematic to be coming out of the mouth of one whose faith is in the God who says, "I have loved you with an everlasting love," and who teaches us to "Love your neighbor as yourself."  But within the cool calculations of double predestination, he has no trouble saying these things.

This aspect of predestinarian overconfidence was the theological underpinning of domination and genocide of Native Americans.  Reformed doctrine combined divine predestination with a hermeneutical endorsement of Old Testament stories of conquest and monarchy that called them the way of God in history.  Thus, Puritan immigrants appropriated for themselves the biblical notions of the Promised Land, the genocidal conquest, and the no quarter given policy toward idolaters and the nations.  This theology took root in New England and in South Africa, though the South African colonizers were less successful in their genocidal wars.  This is another argument I will return to later.

I have always admitted that because of being a slow reader I am not able to keep up with all current theology.  I depend on my colleagues to be reading other sources I'm not able to get to.  Now I guess I'm going to have to pick up some more writings by John Piper.  Christian Piatt argues that statements like that one of Piper's quoted above provide a theological justification for racism.  I tend to agree, but need to make sure I read enough from an author to be able to accurately draw such a conclusion. 

In my little bit of reading so far, I find that Piper believes he can hold his double predestinarian doctrine in full compatibility with a commitment to racial harmony.  His book, Bloodlines, addresses the social problem of racism as a serious one for the church.  He admits to having been formed in racist thinking and acting it out in his youth.  In this book and elsewhere he cites Martin Luther King, Jr., John Perkins, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and other African American anti-racists to bolster his case.  The book is not making a hard case for racial equality, although he seems to believe that is a good idea.  His favored term is racial harmony.

I will concede one of his theological defenses.  He says it was not really his Reformed doctrine upbringing that made him a racist.  His defense is that other Protestants, Catholics, Christians and religious folks of all sorts also lived and believed racism.  This is true. 

The links between racist ideologies and Christian faith are not limited to the Reformed tradition.  Luis Rivera-Pagan demonstrated the ways that Catholic theologies became adapted to racism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in their participation in the conquest of the Caribbean and Latin America in his book A Violent Evangelism.  The structuring of racialized ontologies into modern Enlightenment thinking and the pervasive influence of white supremacy on European and North American worldviews and Christian religious thought receives excellent analysis in Race, by J. Kameron Carter.  Willie Jennings displays episodes through which racism reshaped Christian thought in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and North America, in The Christian Imagination.  James Cone's recent The Cross and the Lynching Tree leaves little doubt that as progressive a thinker as Reinhold Niebuhr, among many others, was unable to escape the ways that North American culture has so thoroughly encoded the violence of atonement upon racial violence.  A Christian does not have to be a Calvinist to be a racist.

It seems Piper's primary motivation toward hoping for a church that demonstrates racial harmony is the vision of Revelation.  There we find that every tribe, nation, people, and language join together in unison praise of God.  Piper rightly understands this consummating vision as pointing to the nature of God's purpose for the church even in our time.  I'll want to come back to this matter later, because it is not clear to me how in a predestined world that exists in division, a racially integrated church makes much sense.  For now, let it be acknowledged that not only Reformed Christians are racists, and that Piper has good biblical basis for advocating racial harmony in churches.

That defense aside, I have not yet found in Piper an attempt to address the particular linkage between Reformed doctrine and imperialist/colonialist ideologies that comes from a distinctive Reformed hermeneutical claim.  In arguments against Anabaptists, Calvin advocated a dual path of divine authority over the world.  Christ rules immediately in the spiritual realm.  Christ rules through mediation of rulers in the temporal realm.  This variation on Luther's "two governments" responds to the Anabaptist belief that Jesus' words from Mark 10:42-45 was the only model for human society for those who follow Jesus.  Calvin said that Jesus' saying might apply only to the spiritual realm.  In its place, he offered the Old Testament Davidic Monarchy as the divinely ordained model for temporal rulers. 

It was this hermeneutic among Puritan divines that gave rise to the idea that Puritan settlers in New England and South Africa should overlay the biblical stories of Abraham and Joshua upon their communities and destinies.  God would give them a Promised Land, but they must drive out and exterminate the heathen inhabitants.  It's secularized translations of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism carry forward the supersessionist heresy that says God has revoked the election of Israel and chosen in their place the Anglo-American Christian Protestant Capitalist as the new improved replacement elect.  This hermeneutical conviction is at the core of supersessionism.  And it is an inherently racialized vision, an ecclesiology of white supremacy.

I gather from my initial reading that Piper has not directly embraced this sort of thinking.  He is not likely to fit into the committed camps of theonomy, dominionism, or reconstructionism, which he seems to disavow.  These groups find themselves quite disappointed with him for not advocating Christian use of force to fight the Satanic powers in the world.  For instance, Piper argues that Christians ought not to kill in self-defense for the sake of the gospel, but be willing to die (knowing they are saved by God) rather than take the life of someone else (whom they suspect has not been saved).  Here he sounds somewhat less predestinarian than elsewhere, and even echoes some ideas one might find in Yoder's writings.  If it matters that one wait before taking another person's life who may not be saved, that implies one's active faith is critical to carrying forward the divine decree of election.  He seems to be allowing that a person must have faith activated to fulfill his notion of the five alones:

Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, on the authority of Scripture alone. At the center of these "alones" is the precious teaching of justification by faith alone.

Yet he teaches this in the very same context as the TULIP acronym of Calvinism.  To challenge Piper, a reconstructionist Calvinist might reply that if a person without faith were one of the elect and about to die, the irresistible grace of God would activate faith necessary for salvation in a timely fashion in the final moment of life (or some such technical solution that could maintain the closed loops of predestinarian doctrine).  Or maybe the reconstructionist would not care.  But my point is that in such a tightly fashioned system of certainty, there is a way to answer his objections and question why Piper need bother to encourage nonviolence.

This problem of violence seems not to bother him so seriously in his earlier cited remarks about mass murder of women and children.  And it is this core commitment of double predestinarian theology that always demands my attention and critique.  Nonviolence, for Piper, seems like the way that Jesus would have us go, but it does not characterize the way of God whom Jesus is supposed to reveal.  Rather than rereading the Old Testament understandings of the One God in light of Jesus, finding inconsistencies between the received and written insights of those who did not have the final revelation in Christ, and questioning whether they accurately represented this One and the Same God that Jesus revealed, Piper says God does this sometimes and that sometimes.  Could the Israelite leaders and writers who had not heard from Jesus have assumed that their God, like the gods of the nations, would want Joshua to lead genocidal raids on Canaanites?  Could they have been mistaken?  Could the revelation in Christ offer a corrective?  Piper says maybe we should pay attention to Jesus on these matters of using violence, even though the very same violent actions in other seasons can very well be what God wants.

Roger Olson helpfully analyzes the dilemma of predestinarian theologies.  They cannot overcome the inconsistency in the concept of God's goodness.  If God is good, as revealed in Jesus, and we have received revelation of God's goodness, then we must be able to give at least some account of what that goodness means.  To refuse such an account by placing the divine counsels beyond all human comprehension, mysteries in eternity before the foundation of the world, then to allow for all sorts of despicable evil to fit within some elusive, incomprehensible, incommensurable, transcendent, opaque, inscrutable notion of God's goodness, is to say that we have no idea what God's goodness could mean.  And that leaves us only with goodness that is equivalent to arbitrariness and whimsey.  If God has revealed Godself, then we must be able to know some measure of what divine goodness must be.

The age in which we find ourselves now living is dominated still by white supremacy, so that the lives of non-European, non-United States white folks continue to be worth little and less, so that people are marked by their skin color for poverty, slavery, and death, all for the sake of unhindered natural resources and inexpensive consumer goods flowing to the privileged and powerful.  In a predestined world, we know that total depravity is a mark of humanity.  Sin abounds.  Many die every day from violence and its minions, poverty, disease, starvation, and pollution.  By this set of theological assumptions, they also die as God intends.

Are these who die and are not members of certain Reformed churches--are they elect to damnation?  Are those privileged to argue theology among the wealthy leisure classes elect to salvation?  Or is the mystery of divine election far less certain?  The Puritans of the seventeenth century became anxious about this very question.  They understood themselves to be a vanguard for divine truth.  They stood against the established Anglican and Catholic orders to purify doctrine and the church.  It should not be surprising, then, that they initially had confidence that their specific calling gave evidence of their being among the elect of God.  But the logic is not airtight.  What if they simply by their social location had learned these true doctrines, but had not been elect from before the foundation of the world for salvation?  Certainly, the teaching said that the merit of having true doctrine or of attending a true church or of living a righteous life would not be effective for salvation.  Only God's grace in election could do that.

On the other hand, if faith is a measure of election, and they were demonstrating faith, then it could be true that God's grace had initiated and sustained faith in them effective for salvation.  On this basis, the Puritans of the seventeenth century developed a theory of evidences or "signs of election."  First, the participation in a true church was one sign of election.  To be drawn to God in this way might indicate the existence of the faith that comes by grace.  Second, a righteous life might be a sign of election because the person demonstrates evidence of regeneration of their sinful human nature to serve God, which only comes by grace.  Finally, John Cotton is often credited with drawing focus on the quintessential American doctrine of an experience of grace.  If a person had mourned over sin and feared its results, only to find surprising joy and release through grace, forgiveness, and the desire to do good works, that person also shows evidence of the grace of election.  Together, these three signs came to be considered adequate evidence of being among the elect, although frankly the anxiety of double predestination never quite went away.  Some claim that the anxiety over predestination was a dominant characteristic of Puritan culture.

This awareness of an indecipherable, seemingly arbitrary divine election, would seem to elicit an air of futility for those who hold such doctrines.  The anxious questioning would seem to be the unraveling of such a faith.  Yet it still survives with some vigor.  What is the likelihood that racial harmony in the church falls under the divine intention at any specific time in history?  If God is directing the murders, the infanticides, the eldercides, the genocides, the racial and ethnic cleansings, the religious wars, the mass murders, the nuclear annihilations, the serial killers, the drug wars, the industrial accidents and poisonings, the slave trade and middle passages, the death camps, the disappearings, the human trafficking, the weapons trafficking--if the regimes and technologies of death occur, as Piper seems to believe, within God's intentions, who is to say that in any particular age God has elected people with various racial and ethnic assignations to be saved? 

Maybe during the mass deaths of Africans from the Atlantic Slave Trade, all the Africans were elect to damnation.  Maybe that's why blacks and whites were not in church together.  Maybe the Africans elect for salvation come from different centuries than those.  In the eternity envisioned in Revelation, they would coexist for shared worship, even though in history they were centuries apart.  People from different tribes, nations, peoples, and languages might have lived in different eras, but in eternal life they all live together.  Maybe none of the white people going to church in the 21st century are elect from before the foundation of the world.  How can we know?

I suspect someone as intelligent as John Piper, who also displays credible devotion to following Jesus, could offer replies to many of my questions.  I think he might catch some weak arguments on my part here and there.  But I do not think he can quite escape the web of questions his system of doctrine creates.  The attraction of a system of theology that seems to close all the loops is, from my perspective, why people keep returning to this kind of Reformed predestinarianism.  And the internal arguments and divisions are myriad.  There is a wide range that goes by Reformed or Calvinist theology, although some would claim that it is possible to find a subset of common convictions, and place John Piper somewhat off the center of things.  So if it seems I am denying the good in any Reformed theology, I am sorry to have communicated poorly.  That is not my intent, even if I am ever engaged in doctrinal battle around many matters of difference I have with Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, and even my own Baptist theologies.  While all dominant streams of modern theology have failed to adequately overcome white supremacy, I would stand by my argument that Reformed double predestination is especially vulnerable to this failure.

So to get back to the title, what is the genius of which I speak?  Christian Piatt makes another remark worth noting at the end of his post.  He points out examples of many different streams of faith who claim that they are God's chosen, that place "themselves at the center of such a God-and-humanity love story when they are the ones telling the story."  In light of that, he lifts up a challenge:  "show me the faith that looks outside of their own tradition to point to another group as the ones favored by God."

That line took me back to a specific text, a specific conversation.  It is an argument made in the theological writing of Willie Jennings.  It is addressed to the racialized existence of modernity and our churches which organize themselves within this racialized logic.  Jennings argues that the uniqueness of Christian faith is that it offers a message of salvation to those of us on the outside.  God's elect of Israel (the people, not the nation-state) are chosen to be a light to the nations.  That destiny, fulfilled in Jesus yet continuing in them, invites Gentiles (the nations) to be grafted in and beloved of the God who was not their God.  Those who are not the chosen people are invited into the fold.  The ones who were far off have been draw near.  We who were not a people have become a people.  We are a people who exist only because we have been invited by the Jews' God to make of our differences a way of living and loving one another in the full beauty and diversity of God's creation.  That theology, I think, is an answer to what Piatt is asking for.

Piatt is on to something.  The notion of finding ourselves as God's favorites in the world is a destructive notion in theology.  Doctrines of predestination linked to imperial and colonial programmes created some of the worst examples of that destructiveness.  Supersessionist conclusions follow too easily on such distortions of the faith.  A theology which does not separate faith from faithfulness, divine grace from co-operation in grace, divine unction from willing reception, and the power to create from the power to allow other free beings to act creatively--this sort of theology gives room to make sense of our duties to struggle against racism, empire, colonialism, and evil in all its structural and systemic forms.  And in the church, we do so as those who know from the outside what it is like to want to be on the inside, and to receive the graceful invitation to join those chosen of God and become one people.