Death is the peak of all that is contrary to God in the world, the last enemy, thus not the natural lot of man, not an unalterable divine dispensation. … Peace cannot and must not be concluded just here in such a way as to establish a spiritual-religious–moral Kingdom of God on earth, while forgetting the enemy. There is peace only in prospect of the overcoming of the enemy.
(via mshedden)
The identification of God with the helpless and forgotten victim… echoes the creation ‘out of nothing’ on which the universe rests: it is not a case of humanity somehow rising to identification with God through spiritual excellence and moral achievement, but of the divine gratuitously taking the form of those most deeply humiliated and stripped of status and pride, in order to affirm their human dignity and eternal significance to their persecutors.
“The Cromwell conjured by Mantel is deeply drawn to Tyndale’s Bible and Tyndale’s Lutheran theology—on the deaths of his wife and daughters, he reaches there for comfort rather than to the Catholic piety of his wife, to which he also publicly assents—but “to be drawn to” is not “to be committed to.”Cromwell’s religious convictions are elusive to us, but Mantel would have us see that they were elusive even to himself. (The same can be said for many of us.) What this Cromwell clearly does believe is that More’s theological and ecclesiastical certainties, and the fierce campaign against heresy that they engendered, are bad policy and immoral besides.He—he who is kind even to dogs and cats—flinches at More’s cruelties, and sympathizes with the Protestants simply because they are hunted down and persecuted. When he rises to be Henry’s chief minister, he becomes a remorseless enemy of the Church’s power not because he hates the Church but because he sees how thoroughly power corrupts, and wants to limit it wherever he can.Again, in all these ways Mantel’s Cromwell is a characteristically late-modern Western man who happens to be living at the beginnings of modernity. By envisioning him so, Mantel has rendered much simpler the task of making the historical novel into a psychological novel.Could she have told the story of More, or for that matter Tyndale, in this manner? I think not. Author and protagonist merge nicely at this point: the True Believer remains inaccessible to them both. There is one more sense in which this Cromwell manifests the late-modern experience: in repudiating the powers of the Church, he inadvertently, or perhaps half-consciously, throws that power to the State.For Cromwell, even Mantel’s Cromwell, does more than almost anyone in history to enable that transfer of authority. In limiting the power of the Church’s ministers to pursue and punish sinners, in transferring the right to define the condition of marriage from Church to King and Parliament, in making all property effectively the gift of the State, he creates almost from whole cloth the vast powers of modern government. And he grows increasingly aware of the portentous exchange he has made.”— Past Present | Books and Culture. That’s from my review of *Wolf Hall*; I quote it here to extend the point made in my previous post. What strikes me now more forcibly than it did then is Mantel’s decision to make Cromwell sensitive to the sufferings of animals: not unusual in our time, but almost unheard of in the 16th century. Mantel’s Cromwell is late-modern through and through, almost a time traveler.
Our society is not really based on public participation in decision-making in any significant sense. Rather, it is a system of elite decision and periodic public ratification.
Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)
Now, think about this in church terms as well. The modern, American church is not designed for participation, it’s designed for spectating and ratification. Yet, by it’s very definition, ekklessia is a community of participation. Once it loses the participation, it’s no longer an ekklessia.
The person who takes responsibility assumes the burden and the freedom of a sort of authorship. Responsibility is an invitation for others to be freely what they are.
I think that reading the Gospels for what they’re really saying threatens to upset and destabilize our church community dynamics that have become predictable and comfortable. Contemporary Christians—evangelicals included—are too threatened by the Gospels to read them for what they’re actually saying.
(via azspot)
Genesis, and the culture from which it emerges, doesn’t seem to give a damn about our ‘true standing in the world’ and our ‘godlike possibilities; rather, as far as I can tell, it is about God and what He has done, and is doing, to repair what His rebellious and arrogant creatures have broken: our relations with ourselves, with one another, with the creation and with God Himself.
(via acceptandembrace)
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
(via acceptandembrace)
“The very name of God’s people is a window into things to come. Israel’s self-understanding is one of being in a locked battle with God.In their very name, the Israelites make very plain and public that they see themselves as a people that struggle with God.That struggle will take on many dimensions: for example, Job’s struggles with God’s justice; Qoheleth’s struggle with God’s unreliability (in Ecclesiastes); many psalmists who wonder out loud “Where is God when you need him?”This is not a people who see themselves as triumphant, tops on the food chain, but as a wandering, wondering people who— to use the vernacular of our day— struggle with their faith.”—
Byas, Jared; Enns, Peter (2012-04-09). Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible (Kindle Locations 1448-1452). Patheos Press. Kindle Edition.
(Source: acceptandembrace)
“We preach the gospel while the government is supposed to care for the poor, the homeless, the oppressed, the disabled, or the sick…What would happen if, instead of waiting on Uncle Sam to solve social issues, the church took responsibility? What would happen if kingdom people honored Jesus’ command not to own anything (Luke 14:33) and followed the kingdom principle of giving to those in need and taking in those who are without a home (Luke 6:30-31, 35-36; 10:29-37; Rom 12:13; Eph 4:28)?What would happen if wealthy suburban congregations took it upon themselves to build affordable housing for the poor? What if we actually took seriously Jesus’ teaching that we are to treat everyone in need as though they were Jesus himself (Matt 25:34-46)?”—
“Hebrews, then, however elegant its rhetorical surface, is finally a self-consuming artifact. Readers drawn into this dialectical discourse of the New Covenant will find themselves challenged, destabilized, and ultimately transformed.The New Covenantalism of Hebrews is certainly not supersessionist in the classic sense that it replaces on religious system with a new stable religious system that allows readers to stand in a position of secure superiority.Instead, they find themselves “naked and laid bare” (4:13); they are summoned on a pilgrimage in which they identify with Israel in the wilderness and constantly compelled to confess, “here we have no lasting city” (p. 172).”— Richard B. Hays, Self-Consuming Texts and the Quasi-Platonic Cosmology of Hebrews « Faith Improvised
So how, then, are Protestants to cope with salvation anxiety? For some, I think, the solution has been tribalism.
Tribalism allows you to know that you belong. It allows you to claim, with confidence, that you are among the righteous. It promises the assurance of salvation that Reformed Protestantism otherwise withholds.
Am I really, truly saved? I want to be, and I think I am, but how can I be certain? Reformed Protestantism says you can’t be.
But tribalism says you can. Just assume the positions. Affirm the proper stances in opposition to abortion, homosexuality, evolution and the environment and you’re part of the tribe. Those issues make it clear and obvious to all of us who is and who is not a member of the tribe — and if it’s that clear and obvious to us, it must also be just as clear and obvious to an omniscient God.
Evangelical tribalism and the Protestant ethic (Or, Max Weber doesn’t live here anymore)
This is so true and really so very sad.
(via questionall)
(via questionall)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
(via invicemsunt)
Girard in analyzing the New Testament saw that that scapegoating mechanism was turned upside down. The gospels were written from the point of the persecuted. Jesus is the scapegoat. But, his violent death showed that the scapegoating mechanism was wrong. An innocent person was tortured and killed. The powers were wrong to do this. The powers were not keeping order and peace by executing bad guys. Jesus’ death unmasked and exposed The Powers That Be as wrong and needing overthrow.
Jesus’ death did not show that he was the last scapegoat. It showed the end of scapegoating. Throughout Western history, Jesus’s torture and execution has been used successfully to show that scapegoating is wrong.
On the other hand, The Powers That Be have had success in getting us to reinterpret Jesus’ death as some kind of transaction to satisfy a violent God. God kills Jesus instead of killing you and sending you to hell and whatever. That is the interpretation of Empire. When Christianity and Empire are in bed together, that is what you get.
But the original and powerful and liberating interpretation is that Jesus’ violent death exposed the violence of the powers and thus defeated them.
(Source: azspot)
“More than at any point in our history, the smartest people generally go to high school and certainly to college with one another, move en masse to “creative cities” after college, marry their fellow high achievers and then raise their kids in the cocoons of what Murray calls the SuperZips.The problem with this system isn’t that the meritocrats look down on working-class culture (though “Coming Apart” does get in plenty of digs at elite snobbery). Rather, it’s that the meritocrats don’t participate in working class culture, and that “assortative mating” and geographic clustering have deprived lower-income communities of the social capital (and with it, strong civic institutions, political influence, and so on) that the smart and diligent possess.In this sense, Murray’s analysis follows the late, great Christopher Lasch in arguing that meritocracy works almost too well: Plucking the best and brightest from every walk of life and then encouraging them to live in community almost exclusively with one another means that the rest of the country is deprived of people who otherwise would have been local leaders, local entrepreneurs, the hubs of local social networks, etc.”—
Think of how the community of Christ is supposed to reverse this trend. The collection of social capital at a local “church” should be amazing. Instead the local church often reflect the class trends of the world.
(via trexcommentary)
