My message for Pentecost, May 31, 2009

The following is the message I’m giving for the Sunday evening service at Patchwork Central this evening, which is Pentecost. Feel free to use it if you like, give credit if you wish.

Well, we’ve had a reading from Acts, a Psalm, and an Epistle, so those of you who know how this pattern usually goes will be expecting a Gospel reading here. I hope you won’t be disappointed, but we’re actually going to turn back a few centuries or so to an older story.

Today is Pentecost Sunday, when we remember and celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, with tongues of fire and the ability given to the apostles to speak and have others hear in their own languages. This is really the beginning of the church, where the Jesus movement moved beyond a small circle of a few, frightened disciples who had taken to hiding in closed rooms waiting to see what would happen next – and really, who can blame them – what a whirlwind of events over the previous month or so! Their leader, Jesus, whom they believed to be the Messiah, had been tortured and killed, only to reappear a few days later, claiming that the new era of God’s liberation and peace had begun. This same Jesus had spent many days teaching them, and finally, instead of taking charge of things to lead the disciples in glorious conquest to the ends of the earth, ascended into the heavens with the parting command to go forth to all nations with the message of the Gospel. And finally, on this day, the descent of the Spirit gave them a new boldness to speak of this Jesus, and the same Spirit gathered into their number over 3000 in one day. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never preached a sermon with that kind of effect.

It’s a wonderful story, one we should always keep in our hearts to remind us that God can do amazing things, that God’s ability to work wonders is greater than we can imagine. But the story I’m going to read, in lieu of a Gospel reading, seems at first glance to be precisely the opposite of the one we heard earlier. I’m speaking of the story of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9, where instead of God’s work in changing languages and understanding leading to a new gathering, an age of understanding and hope, it leads to separation, confusion, and apparent chaos. The two stories have long been thought of as polar opposites, and while I won’t dispute that entirely I think we have generally missed some very important things the author of the Genesis story was trying to convey. But before I get into that, let’s hear the story again, and pray that God will open our ears to hear it in a new way.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar [near the Euphrates river, in present-day Iraq] and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that they were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth (Gen. 11:1-9, TNIV).

We think we know this story pretty well. Late medieval interpreters, living in a time when common use of Latin was beginning to decline, set the trend to read this as a story of judgment in which a golden age of enlightenment is shattered by the curse of difference, the confusion of languages, and for the most part we’ve followed their lead ever since. But is that really what’s going on in this text? There are a few clues in the story, and one whopper of an ancient Assyrian royal inscription, that indicate otherwise. First, isn’t there something fishy about their using bricks to build the tower? The text makes it a point to mention that they used bricks instead of stone. Who else do we encounter in the Bible who used bricks, and under what circumstances? If your answer is the Egyptians, you get a gold star. The Egyptians used bricks, made with slave labor, to build their cities. The notion of using bricks to build a tower would NOT have had positive connotations according to the historical memory of the Israelites.

Second, what’s up with this settling on the plain? In Genesis 1 God had charged the human race to fill the earth, a concept so important to God’s plan for humankind that it was given again to Noah after the flood in Genesis 9. And let’s not forget the amazing diversity of the Table of Nations in chapter 10. What happened to all that, and why are we now only talking about one seemingly homogenous group of people? And third, the words in verse one for “language” and “common speech” don’t generally mean what we think of as a language, like German, French, or English. Taken together they usually refer to a way of speaking, which could mean a dialect within a language, or a kind of lingua franca necessary to do business, which would not necessarily be the natural language of the people. Because of that, some commentators think verse 1 refers not to a “golden age” kind of language, but an imperial language, a language that is forced upon the people. Others read it more figuratively, but still as a reference to an empire whose subjects must toe the line. An ancient inscription from Assyria backs up this idea. The inscription, praising King Ashurbanipal II, lauds the king as having made the world have one speech. This king was well-known for both his brutality and his imperial building projects.So maybe the story doesn’t really present some kind of pristine human language that had to be broken up to satisfy a jealous God.

This leads us to another question – what exactly was it that provoked God to action? Why does God care about some tower some people are building on some plain in Iraq? Perhaps a better question would be, why do we think the tower is the big deal? The text doesn’t make a big deal about it, in fact when God comes down to kick butt in verse 8 the tower isn’t even mentioned. In fact, tower might not even be the best way to translate the Hebrew word – it could be more like “citadel” or “acropolis”. Perhaps we moderns, with our “skyscrapers”, have fixated on the tower, when there is another sin that should be noted. I mean really, do we really think God was so moved to jealousy by this tower, of this sudden human enlightenment, that he had to break it up?

I suggest that if we see the text this way, and I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty close to the Sunday School picture I got in my childhood, and I can’t think of a preacher who’s tried to correct the notion, if we see this as the message of the text then we’re missing out. There IS a sin in the text that is worthy of God’s judgment, but it’s not the tower. The sin is this: the city-builders wanted to make a name for themselves, and to keep from being scattered over the face of the earth. They come right out and say it in the text. In building this city, the people are fundamentally rejecting the very purpose for which God had created us all, which is to fill the earth as the image of God. Instead of being God’s image, they want to make their own name – contrast this with Abram who obeys God and is given a new name: Abraham.

There’s one more thing worth mentioning too – far from being a judgment born out of jealousy at this sudden human enlightenment, this is a judgment that results in liberation and mercy. First, if we accept the notion that what’s going on here involves imperial domination and possibly even slave labor, then God’s scattering of the enslaved workers is an act of emancipation, granting them freedom from their oppressive masters, for God is a God who hears the cries of his people who are in chains. Second, God’s statement “nothing will be impossible for them” isn’t a reference to some belief that building a big tower would give them superhuman status. In fact, a better translation might be “nothing they could want to do will be beyond them”, with a negative connotation – in other words, “no evil they could intend will be too much”. In chapter 9 God had promised Noah that God would not repeat the cataclysmic judgment of the flood. Now, only two chapters later, humanity is about to descend to the point where no evil thing will be too much for them.

Far from being a tale of a failed skyscraper or a lost golden age, this is a story of freedom and salvation. God comes down to liberate slaves and enable people to fill the earth with the image of God, just as God had planned for humans to do in the first place. And then, in the very next chapter, God calls Abram to sojourn from his home, to be a stranger in a strange land, to be the father of Israel and eventually Jesus, whose church was born on Pentecost.

In some ways Pentecost is almost like a companion story to Babel. Again, one language gives way to many in an amazing act of liberation, but instead of what we might have expected based on our old understanding of Babel diversity is not collapsed into some kind of uniformity, but diversity is affirmed in a miraculous way. And this isn’t the modern liberal sense of diversity as toleration, and occasional celebration of, difference. This is something that runs much deeper, something that is a part of our very human heritage. Cultural creation and diversity is a thread that runs throughout the whole Bible, from the image of God in Genesis 1, where many theologians have seen an implicit mandate to create culture, language, and art, to the very end in Revelation. The ancient author thought it important to mention Jubal, the ancestor of all musicians, and the first person in the Bible who is said to be given the Spirit of God is Bezalel, in Exodus 31, to make many crafts and the sacred objects and vessels of the Tabernacle. In Revelation 7 a great multitude gathers before the heavenly throne to worship, people of every tribe, language, people, and nation. In Revelation 21, the kings of the nations are said to bring into the Heavenly City the “glory of the nations”, which undoubtedly refers to the products of art and culture. After all, it takes all of humankind and then some to reflect the image of God. When we create, we are participating in the image God has given us, and the nature with which we have been blessed.

Now, I would love to end here on this happy note, I really would. I wish I could. But the sad truth is that we are not always, or even often good representatives of that nature God created us to have. For just one example, each of the songs we have sung so far this evening come from cultures that have been suppressed and exploited by either the United States or our colonial parent, Great Britain, as well as other nations from whom we derive our cultural heritage. The wealth of the British empire was built largely through the domination of colonial India, the American economy largely rests on the foundation built by enslaved Africans, and over a fifth of our land territory was once part of Mexico, to say nothing of trade conditions and security arrangements with Latin American countries and the insidious influence of what was called the School of the Americas (which continues operating today at Fort Benning, Georgia, under a different name). We will shortly sing a song from a Canadian Native American group, whose cultures our ancestors basically tried to eradicate (an attempt which arguably continues to this day in some forms).

While none of us here necessarily directly participated in these atrocities, the fact that we profit from them and others like them cannot be erased. Our ability to purchase affordable clothing often comes at the expense of child sweatshop labor in southeast Asia. The food we eat depends on business methods that destroy the ability of farming families to support themselves and agricultural techniques that destroy the ability of the land to produce without being pumped full of chemicals that then infiltrate soils, rivers, oceans, and the bodies of humans and animals, with murderous results. Our methods of generating the wealth that allows each of us to enjoy the standards of living we have guarantee that most of the world not only cannot ascend to this level, but in fact must suffer in order that we can have it. We are all at least guilty by association, if not by participation.

And with an eye more specifically to culture-creation, Elvis became rich by singing the songs of former slaves, but what did they get? This is a question with which I have wrestled much as a jazz musician, the question of cultural appropriation. I believe it is possible to honor our influences by our creation, but we have to be aware that so-called “multiculturalism” is not simply a celebration of difference, but a philosophy that perhaps only exists because one culture has become such a dominant power in the world. In fact, I’ve read some pretty good critiques of multiculturalism as a kind of cultural paternalism on the part of rich white people who maybe feel a little bad about some of the things their ancestors, and maybe even they themselves, have done. I don’t have the time here to develop a strong theological response to these problems, and I’m not sure that’s something I could do right now even if I did, but my point is that we need to be aware of the problems involved when we start dealing with cultural issues and the fact that we are all fallen people. We need to have a more nuanced understanding of culture and the arts and language, and how we interact, of what happens when different people groups come together – what kinds of conflicts, resolutions, and new ways of creating come about.

This is so because in the end we all have to wrestle with our common human heritage as bearers of the image of God, who have been made to fill the earth, to mediate God’s presence to all creation, and to honor God by making something good with the world we’ve been made a part of. It is particularly so for us, the church, who are the redeemed people of God, whose purpose is to display to the world what it means to live as people of the new creation, which to my mind includes the mandate to create culture that reflects the reality of reconciliation. It is certainly no simple accident of language that, as Wendell Berry is so fond of reminding us, the words “cult”, “culture”, and “cultivate” (as in “agriculture”) all share a common root, cultus, which means “care” and came to be associated with religion. Culture-making is a holy enterprise, and we should treat it as such. We are called to be a people of Pentecost, and not of Babel, for “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ… And God has committed to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-19, TNIV).

Now we are going to sing a song by Broken Walls, a group that fuses Native American traditional music with rock in the hopes that through them God will bring healing to the relationships between White Americans and Native Americans. I hope this is one way we can honor the peoples whose songs we sing tonight, and honor the image of God that is in them. I pray the River of Life will indeed set us free tonight.

Seminar at Cornerstone Fest 2009

Once again I am presenting a seminar at the Cornerstone Festival. This one is less focused on theology and politics per se, but the topic could definitely be considered related.

Description: “The (Home)Coming of God: Homemaking as paradigm for postmodern ministry.” Exploring Biblical themes of covenant, land, and exile to articulate a theology of mission in the midst of a “homeless” culture.

My topic is strongly influenced by Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger’s Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, which I consider to be one of the most important books published in the last couple of years.

If you’re going to be at Cornerstone, try and come by! There are a lot of great presenters this year, including Tony Jones and Phyllis Tickle, and a lot of important topics being discussed. Homelessness seems to be kind of a theme, though I promise we didn’t get together beforehand to arrange that!

Shalom.

All things created for God’s pleasure: reflection for Earth Day

Revelation 4:11 can be legitimately translated thusly:

You are worthy, our Lord and God
to receive glory, honor, and dominion
for you created all things.
For your pleasure they came into being
and continue to exist.

Yesterday was Earth Day, a day when many people reflect on the health of the natural world and the relationship between human beings and the planet. Even though awareness of ecological issues is probably higher now than at any time in recent history, as awareness has increased so has the gravity of the situation. Estimated effects of anthropogenic climate change (also known as “global warming”) appear to be heading towards the more extreme end of the potential disasters, with warming feedback loops taking effect more drastically and quickly than previously thought. Studies over the last couple of years have argued (in my opinion persuasively) that increased ocean surface temperatures due to global warming are largely responsible for the increased intensity of hurricane seasons in recent years. The combination of global warming and peak oil scenarios seriously threatens nearly all sectors of the planet’s population, human and nonhuman.

I’ve written before about problems with the economic scheme that requires perpetual growth to stave off collapse and its devastating effects on the ecosphere and human communities. That isn’t new. But I have been remiss in my explorations into the Biblical concepts of creation and new creation and their implications for ecology and economics by neglecting the principle espoused by the above verse: all things exist for God’s pleasure.

In the evangelical circles I’ve frequented much of my adult life the idea that God gets pleasure from our existence, from our dependence on God and our desire to serve, is hardly controversial. I have heard a few dozen sermons on this idea, the idea that God loves me for who I am, and that my life is something about which God is passionate. Ok, so the italics may be a bit much, but I’m sure you get my point. Like other things, the idea of God’s passion and pleasure has been largely presented to me as a matter that affects me as an individual, but anything outside the scope of “me and Jesus” is largely neglected. Loving one’s neighbor is a good thing, but really it’s about my spiritual journey and growth.

Loving one’s neighbor as one’s self is a hugely important concept for Christian faith. It’s the second-greatest commandment, after all! But love of neighbor is not a free-standing command that can be imported easily into any context. While it is a concept found in many different religious and ethical traditions, some of which are not necessarily genetically related, we cannot understand the basis of Jesus’ teaching on this subject unless we grasp deeply the Hebrew notion of creation as done by God’s will and for God’s own pleasure. Indeed, each of our acts towards the Other, be it the human or nonhuman other, must be rooted in this truth: I love the Other because the Other is God’s own creation and her/his/its existence and well-being gives God pleasure.

How much different would our ecological and community lives be if, instead of self-interest, even “enlightened self-interest”, our relations were born from a deep realization that all of creation exists for God’s pleasure? How much more would we seek to honor the Creator and Sustainer of our own being by seeking the best for all beings? I believe a key role for the church in this age is to create real communities where we do not look to other created beings, whether human, vegetable, animal, mineral, or other, to sustain us without being concerned for their own sustenance. This need is particularly acute in this time of crisis, but it is written into the Biblical narrative of creation and new creation. All things are from God, and at most we merely have them on loan. For us, Earth Day should be a day of repentance for the ways we have colluded in the murder of God’s creation, as well as our creation of social, political, and economic systems that oppress, exploit, and murder human beings.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

The Cross and the lynching tree: Good Friday reflection

In God of the Oppressed, one of the most important theological works of the 20th century, James Cone compares the cross of Christ to the lynching tree. When slavery existed lynching was not common because slaves were considered valuable property, but after the end of slavery whites used lynching as a method of asserting dominance. This use of lynching corresponds well with how the Romans utilized crucifixion, which was primarily a punishment for rebellion and other crimes that threatened to undermine the foundations of the Roman social order.

One of the major threads of argument throughout the book is that God is paradoxically presented as the Liberator, who also suffers with his people. In fact, it is precisely when God’s people are faithful even in the context of oppression that God acts to bring liberation. Cone partners the Exodus of Israel from Egypt with the experience of black people in America and deeply challenges our understanding of the crucifixion and its meaning for people today. It is well worth reading, and re-reading, and re-reading again, particularly for people who are white like me who are used to understanding the crucifixion as we have heard it preached, most often by white preachers in the midst of a white-dominated culture.

As my friend Katie pointed out earlier today, “we’re taught that this horrible thing happened called lynching but it was a long time ago and only happened a few times by some Very Bad People who also sometimes put on white robes and burned crosses but of course everyone else knew they were wrong and that’s why it’s all in the past right?” I mean, we had slavery for 300 years, lynchings for another 100, but then about 50 years ago we had a Civil Rights Movement and now everyone is equal and happy, end of story.

Or maybe not. I don’t know about you, but that is very much how the issue of race in American history was largely presented to me in my school courses. There are bad individuals who are racist, but as a society we’ve moved on and everyone knows it’s wrong. This view, of course, completely ignores the deeply embedded effects of white flight, decades of systematic job discrimination, and rampant cultural appropriation and commercialization just to name a few (not to mention the fact, as Katie also pointed out, of the resurgence in KKK membership since Obama was elected).

For much of my religious life, I’ve been taught that Jesus died on the cross for my sins so that I could go to heaven and spend eternity with God when I die. I was told I was supposed to be good and love people and be nice to them and stuff, because I was grateful to Jesus for having died for my sins so I could go to heaven, but mostly that it was about me, as an individual, having my sins forgiven in a forensic exchange so that I could be whisked away to the otherworldly paradise when I died.

It should go without saying that such a view of the cross has little to say to the realities of systemic injustice that exist today – not only related to race, but also to gender and sexual identity, economic status, geographic location, and other categories. The focus is on individuals, not social realities, and on escaping the realities of life into a magical other-world. If this were really the core of the Christian faith, I might say my radical friends are right in their criticism and rejection of religion. However, Paul offers another explanation of the significance of Christ’s death on the cross.

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Colossians 2:13-15, TNIV).

The reference to uncircumcision points to the fact that, before they were brought into the life of Christ, the people were cut off from the covenant community of God’s love. As this passage points out, in Christ sin is cancelled. Our sins, collectively, are nailed to the cross and have died with Christ. But it is not simply the cancellation of the sins of individuals that is meant here. “You” is plural, and refers to the church community. The sin that is defeated here is social, as well as individual. And the last verse testifies that there is much more going on here than a simple forensic transaction by which people enter from a state of spiritual guilt into otherworldly justification: on the cross itself, Christ disarmed the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle over them, and triumphed over them.

The purpose of the Roman cross was to make a spectacle of the victim, to inscribe the victim into the context of Roman domination and so re-inforce the might of the Empire through the rule of Caesar. Paul makes the audacious claim that what has in fact happened is precisely the opposite! The logic of oppression cannot inscribe the logos of God into its narrative. Christ is victorious, but not by operating according to the logic of the powers. Instead, Christ triumphs by allowing all the powers of sin, death, and hell to exhaust their fury on him. He trusted God unto his own death, and in so doing turned the force of evil back upon itself causing its self-destruction.

We must drink deeply from the well of Paul’s theology of the cross, because the cross is the place where the New Community of God’s people gather, the church of God that is liberated from operating according to the logic of oppression. The cross both convicts and acquits us, because in order to be healed by it we must enter into it. It may not be “good news” to learn of the ways we collude with the powers that have been defeated on the cross at first, but it is liberating because in naming the powers we open ourselves to being freed through Christ in order to live according to a more excellent way.

Paul’s argument in the rest of chapter 2 flows directly from the logic of the cross: since we have died with Christ to the forces that rule the world, why do we still live as if we were subject to its law? Because the logic of death could not apprehend the logos of God, neither can it confine us who wear the name of Jesus as our own. The logic of Rome, the logic of slavery, of collusion with and perpetuation of oppressive structures cannot define the way the people who follow the Way of the logos live.

Coming to terms with the concrete ways in which we share in the guilt of the collective sins of our age is painful – it can be no other way, because in many ways the sin goes to the very core of our self-identities, of how we define our personhood. But carrying one’s cross is more than just an exercise program, it is a march to one’s death, and if we are to be raised with Christ we must also be willing to die. The logos of God spoke creation into being, and it speaks us into the New Creation. It speaks to us from the cross, bidding us to come and die, and find that we will truly live.

Privilege-checks are welcome in the comments. It’s only right, after talking about the need to put to death those parts of our identity that depend on the logic of oppression.

Shalom.

Breaking a window is violence?

Hitting someone with a club is violence. Funding projects that destroy local economies and ecosystems is violence. Displacing millions of people in order to ravage the countryside to extract resources and build useless consumer products is violence. Denying refugees right of return and bombing their villages when they defy the injustice is violence. Creating social structures that systematically stifle free expression and the ability to peacefully promote legitimate alternative points of view is violence. Maintaining an economic order in which the only way to hold off collapse is perpetual growth at the expense of a finite resource base, which cannibalizes itself in order to produce growth that is mostly based on the creation of new debt to finance paying off the old debt, while blaming people who bought into the system because they believed what it promised them for its failure is violence.

Breaking a window is a symbol of the shattered illusions of people who are sick and tired, and don’t want to take it anymore. Breaking a window is a message to the monsters whose livelihood depends on murder, displacement, and ecocide that the game is up and the ones who got us into this mess have forfeited their moral authority to be the ones who define a “new world order”. Breaking a window is liberation, a sign of life, not violence that destroys it.

Whether or not it’s tactically a good idea in circumstances such as the G-20 demonstrations is another matter entirely.

In response to this blog.

Wendell Berry quote

“The work of the executive is… as unproductive and as spiritually desolate as that of the garbage collector. Indeed, depending upon the toxicity and persistence of the products and by-products [produced and sold under the executive's oversight], it may be more so. Certainly, by any standard, to haul garbage away is more virtuous than to manufacture it.” — from “Racism and the Economy”, 1988.

computer problems

The hard drive on my computer went out, and while I can still boot up with Ubuntu from a USB flash drive it is uncertain whether I’ll be online much for the next few days. I’m up to my neck in midterms, and quite a bit of my study material was on the computer, so it’s going to be interesting tomorrow (Wednesday) when I take my last one. As such I’m not sure when I’ll be able to resume more regular posting. I do have a few things in mind, though, so when I again have the means and time I’ll be continuing the “Finding a better story” series and also letting loose other of my theo-political musings. Shalom!

Finding a better story 3

In the last post in the series, I posted some general observations about the cultural context in which the Genesis 1 creation was composed. I contend that the Biblical creation story, as well as other parts of the primordial history (Genesis 1-11) were written to challenge the literary-symbolic world of the Ancient Near East, in order to engender a way of life within Israelite society that was not rooted in the pagan mythos, but in a vision of all life having its origin in the shalom of God’s good creation. By examining how Genesis does this, we can garner resources to do likewise in our world today, with imaginations based on the shalom of God’s creation in a world whose dominant mythos is rooted in violence.

There are many sources on which we could draw to demonstrate the nature of the world Genesis challenges, but the most potent for my purpose is the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish. Enuma Elish served as the ‘official creation myth’ of Babylon during a large part of the first millennium BC. It was performed every year at the spring festival, a practice that demonstrates its importance to forming the social imagination of Babylon. Also, among the Ancient Near Eastern epics, Enuma Elish most closely parallels elements of Genesis, so it is especially useful for showing how Genesis specifically engages the mythopoetic* devices of the ancient imagination. Furthermore, Enuma Elish was adapted from an older Sumerian epic that cast the gods Anu, Enlil, and Ninurta as the heroes, and was later adapted by the Assyrians who substituted their own head god Ashur for the Babylonian Marduk. This demonstrates a fundamental continuity in the mythos of the ancient Mesopotamian societies that shaped the world in which the Israelites lived, most dramatically during their time in exile.

I present here a summary of the Enuma Elish narrative with commentary on its role in forming the ancient Mesopotamian social imagination.

* “mythopoetic” refers to the imaginative devices that construct cultural mythos, and has nothing to to with “mythical” as opposed to “factual” or “historical”.

In the beginning, the world exists in a formless state, from which emerge two primary gods, one male and one female. The gods in Enuma Elish represent various facets of the physical world, with Apsu the god of fresh water, representing male fertility, and his wife Tiamat the goddess of the sea, representing chaos and disorder. Apsu and Tiamat give birth to gods who in turn give birth to other gods, including Ea. The younger gods make so much commotion that Apsu decides to kill them, but Ea hears of the plot and murders him. Ea sires Marduk, god of spring (replacing Apsu’s role in fertility) and patron of Babylon, with his wife Damkina. Tiamat is enraged and vows revenge, creating 11 monsters, and takes a new husband, Kingu, and puts him in charge of her army.

Tiamat prepares to unleash her monsters. Meanwhile, Ea learns of her plan and attempts to convince her otherwise. He fails, as does Anu his father. The gods become afraid that no one will be able to stop her. Marduk steps in and agrees to defeat her if the other gods will make him their king, a proposal to which they readily agree. The council of gods tests Marduk, and upon his passing the tests they enthrone him as king. Marduk assembles his weapons and goes out to fight, killing Tiamat and dismembering her body. The text goes into graphic detail describing the mutilation of Tiamat’s body, and Marduk uses her carcass to create the heaven and earth. He creates a barrier to keep the raging waters, imprisoned in the sky, from escaping and unleashing chaos upon the earth.

Marduk establishes order by creating dwellings for the other gods, who take their places and go about setting up seasons of the year. The city of Babylon is established as the the audience room for King Marduk. The gods begin to grumble about the hard work of building and farming, and so Marduk decides to create human beings as a labor force. The gods finger Kingu as the instigator of Tiamat’s rampage, and so Marduk kills him and uses his blood to create humankind to perform menial tasks for the gods. The gods honor Marduk, building a house for him in Babylon and praising him for his greatness. The fifty throne names of Marduk are pronounced, declaring his dominion over the earth. Then a blessing is pronounced, and the people are instructed to remember and recite Marduk’s deeds.

This summary is greatly shortened, leaving out most of the rich detail of the text. I encourage readers to read the full text carefully and pay attention to the language used to describe the emotions of the gods, the connection between death and creation, and the exaltation of Marduk.

As mentioned above, the text was ritually recited every year on the fourth day of the spring New Year festival to reinforce its mythopoetical function in Babylon. The next day the king of Babylon would take his place at the head of a ritual procession representing the gods, with the king identified with Marduk. The king led the procession outside the city gates and then back in again, and while much of the rest of the festival is unknown there were entreaties to the gods to “fix the destinies” of the universe.

The king is identified with Marduk, and the procession invokes the imagination of the conquering king’s armies carrying out the ongoing work of making order from chaos by assimilating peoples outside Babylon into the empire. We have inscriptions and writings from Babylon and Assyria identifying their conquests as such. Creation comes from a primal state of chaos and happens by violence and bloodshed, with the heavens and earth rendered from the slain carcass of Tiamat the chaos-monster-goddess, and the human race from the blood of her slain consort (this is known as “creation-by-combat”, a common theo-sociological motif in the ancient world). Humans are created to render menial service to the gods, which legitimates the social stratification of Babylon and its division between royal, priestly, and common classes. From other writings we know they viewed creation as always in danger of reverting back to chaos, with the threat of the waters escaping from their heavenly prison, but for the efforts of the king and priests in taking forward the conquest of Marduk both on earth and in the spiritual realm. Chaos and violence have ontological priority, and the “war against chaos” (also known as chaoskampf) is ongoing, without end.

Genesis paints  a very different picture of creation and human origins, and we will examine that in my next post. Shalom!

The opposite of “liberal”

The opposite of “liberal” is not “conservative”. It’s “authoritarian”.

Likewise, the opposite of “conservative” is “radical”.

Continued opposition of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in the public discourse is likely a carryover from 19th century British politics, where the major parties were the Liberal and Conservative parties, but what we call political “liberalism” and “conservatism” in the common parlance today are both rooted in classic liberalism. “Liberal” comes from the Latin liber, which means “free”, which is the term that came to distinguish modern philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson.

In that sense, anarchism can potentially be seen as a “liberal” philosophy.

Think on that before you denounce someone as too “liberal” or “conservative”.

Shalom!

The Bush II and Obama administrations and the transition from American hegemony to the “Post-American world”

This past weekend the Common Root conference was held in Minneapolis. Tom and Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates led the first plenary session, and my friend Jordan Peacock wrote the following as a summary statement of one of their points:

The Pax Americana is not necessarily the strongest ‘empire’. It stands together with global capitalism, which, while largely birthed from the Pax Americana, shares no allegiance to it, and will likely outlast it.

I think this is an excellent point, and one that bears fleshing out a bit by contrasting the approaches of the Bush II Administration and what we’ve seen from Obama so far. The neoconservative plan seemed to me to clearly be an “American empire” kind of strategy, with American military power as the trump card in the world political game. “Regime change” and militaristic power politics, whether through direct military intervention or the funding of “satellite” armies in places like Israel and Colombia, seem to me to be parts of a larger strategy for attempting to maintain a specifically American hegemony over world affairs. The purpose of the use of military and other overtly violent forces in this fashion seems to have been to make the world safe for “democracy”, by which is meant the interests of “American” corporate entities (often really more multi- and trans-national) who have exploited the twin Bush II tools of unilateral military intervention (or the threat thereof) and implementation of neo-colonial “free trade” policies, combined with other corporate-friendly measures, such as the widespread loosening of labor, safety, and environmental regulations at home and undercutting the social safety net (which was already quite sparse in the aftermath of Reaganomics).

The adventure in Iraq is a signal example and convergence of the combination of military and corporate objectives with the toppling of the Hussein government and the swift looting of the country through a forced rewriting of Iraq’s economic laws in an attempt to create a “free trade paradise”, causing a descent into chaos and insurgency that, contrary to what you hear from the corporate media propaganda machine, really only picked up steam as the effects of the combination of economic deregulation and the insistence on American corporations rebuilding the country (translation: looting Iraq and fleecing American taxpayers) destroyed the ability of the average Iraqi to obtain basic needs and services.

Indeed, Iraq-as-originally-conceived could be considered a case study for the Bush II approach to Pax Americana. Key to neoconservatism is the concept that the welfare of corporations is intrinsically linked to the welfare of the nation-state and its security interests and policies. This convergence of military, corporate, and political machinations is the engine that drives the neoconservative American empire project. The very name of the neoconservative thinktank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), illustrates the imperial designs of the people who made up the backbone of the Bush II administration, as does their stated belief that “American leadership is both good for America and good for the world”.

I want to say, at the outset of my brief foray into what we’ve seen so far from Obama, along with his campaign rhetoric, that in some ways Obama substantially continues some of the Bush II tactics and underwriting assumptions unchanged. Glen Ford, editor of Black Agenda Report, cites no less a media authority than the New York Times calling Obama “center-right” and then goes on to say:

The ideological pillars of America’s first Black presidency have been planted wholly within the parameters of governance allowed by big capital and the imperial military. Obama’s “transition” is more accurately seen as a “continuity” of rule by the lords of finance capital and their protective screen of warriors and spies. The Obama regime, still incomplete, already wreaks [sic] of filthy rich thieves and gore-covered war criminals.

The two biggest differences I see between Bush II and Obama-so-far are:

1. a re-assertion of government playing a role in establishing some kind of common welfare through a kind of social democracy (NOT the same thing as “socialism”), albeit in a much-weakened state compared to LBJ’s “Great Society” and “war on poverty” programs, over and against the explicit undercutting of the social safety net that has occurred systematically since Reagan; and,
2. while the desire to maintain America as the foremost world power, the notion of American hegemony seems to have given way somewhat to something perhaps more analogous to America as a “senior partner”. Obama was seen carrying a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, which argues for “not.. the decline of America, but the rise of everyone else”. Zakaria sees this story, that of “the rise of the rest”, as the defining narrative for the rest of the 21st century. Obama’s talk, at least, regarding initiatives such as strong diplomacy and sitting down to talk with people with whom Bush II would not, may reflect a similar understanding of America’s role in the coming years.

The basic thrust of these same-nesses and differences between Obama and Bush II seems to me to be that Obama seeks to implement policies that will create greater stability in the world, at least as it relates to America, both at home and abroad, by strengthening regulation of the economy at home that will prevent unrest and by allowing the “junior partner” nations of the world a greater role in determination of world political action. That contrasts strongly with Bush II’s neoconservative agenda focused around American hegemony which in practice led to more destabilized conditions both at home and abroad.

However, this “change we can believe in” is a “change” designed to fundamentally underwrite the corporate consumer capitalist status quo and the continued advancement of an “economic growth” agenda. In other words, it’s a “change” that is geared towards producing “more of the same”. With a decreased link between the welfare of corporate entities and the welfare of the United States, I believe we will indeed see the Sines’ prediction play itself out in world affairs over the coming years. William Cavanaugh (in Theopolitical Imagination and Being Consumed) argues that the universality claimed by the modern nation-state is giving way to the universalizing tendencies of the global market, and the global market almost entirely consists of action by corporations. Also, Brian Walsh argues (in Subversive Christianity) that capitalism is a necessarily expansionist, even imperial, economic system. If the empire of global corporate capitalism is unconstrained by national borders, as is largely (and increasingly) the case due to “trade liberalization”, then its expansion, by definition, must increase beyond the hegemony of the USAmerican political nation-state entity.

Not only that, but it is also the case that the one-and-only responsibility of a corporation is to increase its value for shareholders. Indeed, neoliberal architect Milton Friedman called ascribing any other purpose to the corporation “fundamentally subversive” (he was specifically referring to the idea of corporate social responsibility). A corporation-based economy must grow or it will collapse, and the same is true of the current global debt-based monetary system – new debt must constantly be created to generate money to pay the interest on old debt, according to an ever-increasing practically exponential growth curve.

The empire of global capitalism is highly complex. Whereas the nation-state depends on territory for its very existence, the corporation theoretically is a territory-less entity. While I would argue that this is not true, strictly-speaking, because no economic activity can truly take place without there being land and material products involved somewhere, somehow, according to the currently-accepted rules of the game a trans-national corporation does not depend on the territory of any one nation-state, nor is it accountable to any entity outside its shareholders except insofar as maintaining relations of accountability and corporate social responsibility allow it to maximize profits and therefore value to shareholders. In addition to the “territory-less” nature, though, there is not any one entity that can serve as an object of wrath for those who oppose this evolving empire. Corporations are legion, they are interconnected, they are buttressed by international organizations and agreements, and We the Consumers play a major role in keeping them in business.

This seems to be the world into which we are headed, a world where “change” occurs to ensure “more of the same”, with the locus of imperial activity increasingly translocating from nation-state entities (particularly the United States) to transnational corporations and the entities that ensure their preeminence (such as the WTO). This does not mean that the emerging empire will not favor certain nation-states (or at least certain people in them), as mentioned above, certain nation-states will enjoy “senior partner” status (hence the continuing neo-colonial nature of global capitalism), but the world is shifting from under the dominating shadow of the United States to global corporate consumer capitalism, as illustrated by a comparison of the Bush II administration and what we’ve seen so far from Obama.

This was first posted on the Common Root discussion forum, but I wanted to also open it up for a possibly wider discussion here. Shalom!

Missio Dei in need of help

Missio Dei is a Christian community on the West Bank of Minneapolis, in the vein of what could be called “neo-monasticism”. The community seeks to live out the way of Jesus according to the principles of simplicity, prayer, and hospitality in an ethnically diverse part of Minneapolis, the most densely populated square mile between Chicago and Los Angeles, where over 2/3 of the population is low-income or below the poverty line. Community members live in one of two houses, one of which was recently served an eviction notice by the city of Minneapolis.

The lowdown on the situation, as told to me by community founder Mark van Steenwyk:

Minneapolis served an eviction notice to Clare House (the missio dei owned community house) over our failure to obtain a rental license. Basically, we don’t need (nor want) a rental license because it could potentially restrain our mission (among others things, it could make it illegal for us to discriminate…as well as make it harder for us to get any variances on housing usage). The city has been very unhelpful to tell us any of our options, even though there are other ministry houses and religious orders that don’t have rental licenses. We’ve refused to get a license as we sought the same status that these other communities have.

We’ve been trying to get legal help, but nothing has really turned up yet. We’re thinking that we’ll just have to settle up with the city before we can proceed. That may be costly. Alternately, legal help may also be costly.

Please pray for us. If you have any strings, please pull them. If you are able to help in any way, please let us know. This could be a SERIOUS blow to Missio Dei.

I have been acquainted with Mark for a couple of years through various networks related to common interests, and I have met few people who are as dedicated to making Christ known in post-modern America. Mark is committed to preaching Jesus in deed as well as word, and to not only developing individual believers but disciples in community who will be the hands and feet of Jesus in the neighborhood. Please join me in praying for Missio Dei in this time of trouble, and if there’s anyone out there who might be able to help or is connected with someone who could, please contact Mark either through the form on the Missio Dei site or by email.

Rewriting “Anarchy” page

As you may have noticed, the tab at the top of my blog that read “Anarchy” has been changed to “Christ-archy”. That is because since I started this blog my thinking has evolved somewhat, and I desire to change the content of some of the articles to which those tabs link to reflect that evolution. Since those articles are always linked at the top of the page, they provide a kind of framework that informs (or ought to inform) one’s reading of the articles I post from day-to-day in the blog. Therefore, I think I ought to edit them to reflect my changed understanding from the times at which I originally wrote them. It is also the case that I’m less happy with the way some parts of them read than others, so I want to tweak them a bit.

The only change I’ve made so far is to change the title from “Anarchy” to “Christ-archy” and add this paragraph to the beginning:

I used to consider myself an “anarchist Christian”, or a “Christian anarchist”, or however you want to put it, but the term I prefer for myself now is “Christ-archist”. “Christ-archy” should not be confused with desiring a theocracy, but what it does mean is that I absolutely, unequivocally believe the God revealed in Jesus Christ to be the source of all authority, and the one to whom all authority is accountable. Any authority that does not submit itself to God and seek to operate according to the politics of Jesus is illegitimate. Since I’m not aware of many earthly authorities who do this, that means there are a lot of bastard governments (and corporations, other economic entities, and social organizations) running around out there!

When I have finished a substantial portion of the rewrite I will post a notice and invite people to comment and perhaps suggest further changes. Shalom!

The Bible and “plain meaning”

I have been involved in two discussions (using the term very lightly) lately, one on this blog and one in another, where I have been accused of over-intellectualizing, getting too into scholarship, and not taking the “plain meaning” of scripture.

I’m not going to mince words. This is an absurd charge to make. It is only because people are so out of touch with the fact that the Bible was written over a span of centuries, thousands of years ago, in a culture that operated on very different foundational assumptions than the late modern Western world that people can say things like that. It is because people (quite likely myself included) are prejudiced towards our own understanding of what it means to be a person-in-the-world and so we universalize our own place as if it were the time and place from which all other people have lived, experienced the world, experienced God, and written about that experience.

It is precisely because the Bible speaks to us from a time and place that is very different from our own that scholarship is needed. It is simply irresponsible to teach or to expound on the scriptures if one has not done some serious homework learning about the various contexts involved – the ancient near eastern background to the Old Testament, and the Second Temple Jewish and Imperial Roman background of the New Testament. If you don’t have some knowledge of these, all kinds of errors are likely in interpreting the writings the church has (more or less) always affirmed as the inspired record of God’s work within history. It is not because of some intellectualizing fetish, but because of a love for God and for the message God has given us, both in the written words and especially the Word-made-flesh to whom the written words witness, that I dig into the essential background for studying the scriptures with understanding.

If you don’t know that Paul is poking at imperial propaganda in Romans 13, you can easily make the mistake of thinking Paul’s project is to underwrite the state’s authority; if you don’t know about the Babylonian worldview to which Genesis 1 is a challenge, you won’t catch even a glimpse of the full breadth and depth of the Biblical vision of creation.

It is precisely because I believe the Bible itself contains the writings through which God desires to speak to us, in our time, that I seek to study what the writings said in the times in which they were written – at least with as much understanding as it is possible to attain. It is because I love the scriptures that I do what I do, it’s because I love them that I desire to hear them speak to us from their time, instead of imposing the presuppositions of late modern American culture upon them. I’m not naive, I don’t assume that we can ever truly and finally transcend our time and place to hear the message in some pristine, unadulterated sense (nor should we be able to, but that’s another matter to discuss), but to tear the scriptures from their contexts and re-inscribe them into our own without hearing first with ears to hear how the word calls to us from a time and place in the past that is very different from our own is an act of supreme violence against the text, and even extremely irresponsible particularly when it is done by people in pastoral positions who have the responsibility to teach and to help people grow as disciples.

Christian Truth-with-a-capital-T is not a set of precepts, though it is not a bad thing to make concrete theological propositions based on the word we have received. But Truth is not in our constructions, it is in a man who lived nearly two thousand years ago, a man whom we believe still lives today and is with us even to the end of the age. The Jesus who is with us is the Jesus who walked the earth healing, teaching, and living out God’s will to the fullest, and unless we get to know him for who he was we cannot know him for who he is.

Shalom.

Finding a better story 2

Since I have this unfortunate tendency to start a series and then never finish it, I’m not going to make any promises about how long this will go, how many installments it will have, or even if it will be all that coherent. However, I went back and re-read my “Finding a better story” entry from a few days ago and decided I really needed to elaborate more on some points in it and on the Biblical, historical, and philosophical background of some of the statements contained therein. In some ways this could be seen as an attempt to formulate a more comprehensive statement of what I believe about the church and theological politics, or it might just end up being a collection of thoughts related to the idea – we’ll see what happens.

A great many people today read Genesis with little-to-no knowledge of the historical context in which the stories compiled into the final form we have today were composed, or of the social realities of the world to which the texts witness. In our modern penchant for finding the one meaning that stands outside of time and is universally true in all contexts, we have come up with all kinds of applications for the text that have very little to do with the message it was actually written to communicate in the world in which it came into being. Understanding that message is extremely important if we are to understand its place in the Biblical canon and more appropriate applications for the text today.

I’m not going to attempt to undertake a full-on commentary on the whole book of Genesis, but there are a few particular highlights I think need to be hit, with a keen eye on the ancient near eastern context, in order to better understand the book and the important role it plays in the canon and in the formation of the Christian story. In many ways, Genesis is far more than just a prologue to the story of Israel (which itself is far more than simply a prologue to the story of Jesus).

The first and possibly most important highlight is the account of creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3. This may surprise some people to read today, but there is absolutely no indication in the text that the creation story is intended to be a scientifically-accurate depiction of the processes by which the world came into being. The 20th century debate over creation vs. evolution could hardly have been further from the author’s mind. Rabbinical and scholarly interpretations of the creation story have differed widely from ancient times until now on how literally, versus symbolically or allegorically, the account should be taken, and there has never been a consensus on how closely the events depicted therein had to match the facts of natural history for the story to be theologically true – and this long before the advent of modern science.

The likely reality is that Genesis 1:1-2:3 was originally composed as a liturgical text for use in worship rituals. Its form generally corresponds to other texts from ancient Mesopotamia that were used for this purpose, and it is highly probable that the purpose of the Genesis creation account was precisely to provide an alternative imaginative basis for conceiving of God, the place of humans in the cosmos, and the ordering of society than the mythologies of other ancient near eastern nations.

It’s difficult to date the composition of Genesis as a whole, much less its component stories, with any precision. The book contains much that is likely of great antiquity, going back to more than 1000 BC (if not centuries earlier), as well as marks of editing from later periods, possibly as late as the exilic and post-exilic periods. The creation account in Genesis 1 could have been composed at pretty much any time between the 12th and 6th centuries BC, give or take. The worldview it challenges was certainly dominant for at least that span of time.

The single work from ancient Mesopotamia that most closely resembles Genesis 1 is the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian creation myth. In the ancient world, there was not the separation of “religion” and “politics” we supposedly have today. Instead, the usual function of what we call “religion” was to give storied support to political, social, and economic structures. The religio-politico-socio-economic structures formed a tight web, the glue that held cities and nations together. Enuma Elish was performed every year in Babylon at the spring festival as a ritual re-enactment of the myth, and so the story was of great importance in determining the accepted nature of society in the Babylonian empire.

To understand Genesis 1, it is necessary to understand not just the Enuma Elish, but the broader worldview the myth underpinned and the forms of social organization it legitimated. In Biblical times, the strength of a nation’s gods was viewed as directly proportionate to the strength of the nation. If a nation was powerful and prosperous, its gods were mighty. If one nation conquered another, its gods were revealed to be stronger than the gods of the defeated nation. So Egypt’s gods were the most powerful, and then when Egypt declined and Assyria rose to prominence Assyria’s gods gained preeminence, and so on (a framework that greatly aids our understanding of the Exodus narrative!).

Furthermore, almost universally in the ancient near east, members of the ruling, priestly, and in some cases other economically powerful classes were seen as having some kind of special relationship to the gods. For example, the Pharaoh of Egypt was viewed as the manifestation of the god Horus, who was reborn into each new heir to the throne. In Mesopotamia, the term “image of god” (Hebrew tselem elohim) was a technical term that ascribed attributes of at least representative (and perhaps inherent) divinity to those who were deemed images of gods. To be the image of a god principally meant two things: 1) that the person who was image of the god mediated the god’s presence wherever he was, and 2) that the authority of the god was re-presented by that person. So to say that the king of Babylon was the image of the god Marduk (as he was held to be), was to say that Marduk’s presence was seen with the king, and also that the king’s rule represented the authority of Marduk, who took on the role of king of the gods and creator of earth (contrast this with the Genesis statement that all humankind is made in the image of God).

A final point that needs to be mentioned is that societal structures in ancient near eastern nations were ordered to be earthly representations of the mythic divine reality. The myths explained not just how things got to be the way they were, but why it was necessary that things were that way. In other words, the myths legitimated the world in which the people whose lives were ordered by those myths lived.

The next time I write on this theme I’ll explore the Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, in order to demonstrate the mythic underpinning of the dominant modes of society in the ancient near east and enhance our understanding of how Genesis challenged that worldview and the order of life according to it.

Romans 13:4 and irony

Romans 13 is often invoked (usually somewhat unthinkingly) as an objection to my ideas about Christian political engagement. The argument goes, as best as I can reproduce it here very simply, that Paul says we should submit to authority, the government is here for our own good, and we owe them certain things by virtue of the simple fact that they exist.

Each of these are highly questionable points, though I am not now going to systematically examine them or the passage in full. For now let me just examine two points of irony, one involving how the text is often invoked (at least in the United States), and one having to do with the text itself.

The first point of irony is that Americans who invoke Romans 13 as God’s blessing on the US government are justifying the results of a revolution approximately 230 years ago, while using the passage to delegitimate the principle of revolution. The same people who invoke Romans 13 generally (though not always) tend to be the sort of people who see the US as a blessed nation and some kind of agent of God’s work in the world. This is mildly ironic.

The second, more serious for our general purpose here, is that Paul himself makes reference to Roman propaganda in such a way as to cast the pallor of irony against all his seeming exhortations of the state as God’s servant and agents of good. Nero’s teacher, Seneca, wrote a letter to Nero called On Clemency (De Clementia) in which he says Nero can claim for himself the statement “with me the sword is hidden, nay, is sheathed.” Paul specifically refers to the ruler’s wielding of the sword – it certainly is not sheathed! This subversion of Roman proclamations of the Caesar as a ruler of peace casts irony on the passage as a whole, as one can imagine the ancient Roman Christian reader nodding along with the passage in realization that this is exactly how the establishment presents itself, though all know it is at least stretching the truth. Paul’s subtle twisting of the official party line undermines, not reinforces, the legitimacy of the governing authorities.

Reading these statements as irony makes perfect sense if one reads Romans 13 as a continuation of the line of argument found at the end of Romans 12, not as its own independent section, thus making the injunction to “be subject to the governing authorities” an example of how to love one’s enemy, not as an independent command without reference to literary context. Indeed, given the demonstrably subversive nature of Paul’s Gospel, it could hardly be otherwise. This is not the only time Paul’s letters make subversive reference to Roman propaganda (for one particularly potent example, see Colossians 1:15-20).

I’ve had a more comprehensive treatment of Romans 13 brewing in the back of my head for some time, but haven’t had time to put it together. Hopefully this post will help me consolidate my thinking and move me towards making the effort. My contention is that Romans 13 fits exactly within the Christarchy framework, and not at all into a collaborationist/correlationist system. I shall make this argument more fully in the future. Until then… Shalom!

Chomsky quote on the prophets

“The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.”
–Noam Chomsky

The “stimulus” and economic assumptions

What seems to get lost in all this shuffle about whether or not the Senate will pass Obama’s economic stimulus package, in what form, and what compromises will have to be made with the House, is that there is absolutely no debate about what form the economy should take. It is simply taken for granted that what is needed is to enact provisions that will spur spending and kickstart once again the cycle of consumer-driven “growth”.

That we call it “growth” masks the real costs of such an economic system: the fact that millions, even billions of people are left by the wayside, their prospects not growing but quite the opposite – growing only in hopelessness, despair, hunger, and the inability to procure for themselves and their loved ones the even basic necessities of life; the increasing strain on an already-sick planet as we poison her air, water, and land in the drive to extract resources to fuel the production of “goods”, the increasing purchase of which will fuel continued “growth”, all driven by the (ought to be clinically) insane belief that a world with finite resources can support infinite, exponential economic growth.

Even the language of recession bears witness to our idolatrous worship of progress, for is not recessing the very opposite of advance, of progressing? It would do us good to see the current economic crisis as just that – an eco-nomic crisis. The most common definition of “crisis” in the common parlance, is something like this (from Mirriam Webster’s online dictionary): “an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending… a situation that has reached a critical phase”. As instructive as this definition may be in so many ways, there is another definition of “crisis” to which I wish to point your attention: “the turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever”.

If the economic system currently accepted by the Western powers is causing the entire planet to become sick, then perhaps the best language to use regarding it is not the language of progress and prosperity, but of disease and illness. Consumer-driven corporate capitalism might better be understood as a pathogen, a disease-causing agent that is draining the life of our home, the earth itself. The current economic crisis provides an opportunity for reflection and action to possibly break (at least some of) the power presently-existing economic structures hold over our lives, the life of the earth, and the lives of humankind.

Furthermore, even the word eco-nomic is significant. Eco is derived from the Greek oikos, meaning “household” or “home”, and nomic from nomos, or law. Eco-nomics, then, is the ordering of the home, running the household. While we moderns have so often limited economic discussion to the performance of markets and its effects to factors that can be reduced to matters of cents (and dollars, euros, yen, etc.), it doesn’t make any sense to limit discourse on the economy to these things. Perhaps we like them because they’re more easily quantifiable, or perhaps it’s because it hides from us those things we do not wish to face head-on: the plight of those who are systematically disempowered and impoverished by the “advancing” global economy, and the pain we ought to feel if only we were in touch with the voices of the earth and its other, nonhuman inhabitants. Let us instead seek to formulate an eco-nomics that will enable us to more rightly order our life together in our home, as inhabitants of earth and of the particular communities in which we dwell.

The eco-nomic crisis has the potential to be a turning point in our understanding of how we relate to our home and how we order our existence within it. Christians in particular, who believe the earth to be the creation of God and a gift into which we have been placed by our loving Creator bear a particularly acute responsibility to enable oppressed voices to be heard. This is no less true for the voices of the nonhuman creation than it is for the voices of people of color, women, GLBT/Q, and others who have suffered exclusion and oppression at the hands of the discourse of power and its embodiment in socio-politico-economic structures. For the church, the current crisis provides a golden opportunity for prophetic engagement, for sensing the heart of God and communicating truth in the now, and not only that but also for putting flesh on prophecy – creating economic relationships within the church to serve as a witness and a model to the world that we can live in ways that are more faithful to our nature as created beings in relation to God, to each other, and to the land, water, and air – a holistic eco-nomics with a trajectory towards health, not disease.

May your basilea come, your will be done – just as in heaven, so also let it be upon the earth. Amen.

Finding a better story

The dominant modes of social, political, and economic discourse in our day may be fragmented, they may seem without coherence, and they may be characterized more by argument than agreement. Indeed, I think even a cursory survey of the ongoing public discussions reveals this to be true. The landscape of public discourse over pretty much every issue is littered with scars, discord, and mines waiting to be found and unleash their deadly fury. But there is one thing almost, if not absolutely every voice that garners a significant hearing in the public ear(s) shares, and that is the foundational story, the ground motive, the “metanarrative” that lies at its root.

This is the myth of the modern age, exemplified by Hobbes’ idea that the “natural state” of humankind was one of war, one against all, with the world as a fundamentally hostile place. Methods of control must be established to provide order where there would be unchecked chaos, control of other people, control of the natural world. The world and other people went from being gifts from God, to be loved accordingly, to being potential agents of discord and danger in need of being put “in their place”.

I do not mean to imply that Hobbes was the founder of this idea, it goes back much further – all the way back to ancient Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt. It is an idea almost as old as the human race. It is embodied in mythologies ancient and modern. Whether it is by a social contract, the “divine right of kings”, or the rulers’ being the “image of God/the gods”, the idea that some agents of humanity are needed to enforce order and fight back the forces of chaos has been around for quite some time.

The proclamation in Genesis 1 that the whole human race is created in the image of God mitigates precisely against this idea. Instead, humans are to co-rule, to mediate God’s presence and love to the whole creation, a story rooted in primal goodness, not primeval violence.

Furthermore, it is as agents of the New Creation that the church is to engage the world. God is coming to make his home with people, with creation. We shall be his people, and he shall be our God. Indeed, God has already come in the person of Jesus, the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and now the Spirit is with us as we, as Christ’s body, continue the work he began. It is not that our work brings the kingdom, but because we participate in the divine life we are called to fulfill that purpose given to humankind so long ago – to enable each other and all creation to participate in the life and love that God has for all of us.

As such, we cannot be a people whose imaginations for engaging the world, the political, social, economic, and all other realities, are determined by modes of discourse rooted in a story of primeval violence. Violence does not redeem; rather, it is an aberration, it destroys, it mitigates against working according to the call God has given to us as daughters and sons, heirs of the kingdom and creation.

Let us no longer be subject to the imaginations that have their genesis in violence, but to the divine peace that is at the center of all things and the original heart of creation. As John Howard Yoder said, people who take up their crosses are not countercultural – they are going WITH the grain of the universe, because the universe is fundamentally God’s creation, moving towards the time when the New Heavens and New Earth will be revealed.

So I ask you, dear reader… what does it look like to talk about these things with imaginations rooted in the better story? I welcome thoughts, reflections, and suggestions in the comments.

Shalom,
Jason

The irony of progress

However else it may be defined, it is generally agreed that a (if not the) major feature of modernity is the pervasiveness of the myth of progress. According to the progress myth, progress will be attained in a definite, concrete form as the continuing dialectic (and, in some forms, utopian end) of history if “we allow human reason freely and scientifically to investigate our world. Progress enables us to acquire the technological power necessary to control that world and bring about the ultimate human goal: economic affluence and security” (from Brian Walsh, Subversive Christianity, Seattle, WA: Alta Vista College Press, 1994, pp. 39-40).

While the progress myth has come under fire in the 20th century, it clearly lives on in discourse regarding things like “making the world safe for democracy” and “bringing prosperity to underdeveloped nations”. Economic affluence through free-trade (neoliberal) economics and democratization have become intrinsically linked, and the juxtaposition of the two with neoconservative imperialism is just one example of the horrific possibilities of such a marriage. For exhibit one, see the aftermath of the attempt to turn post-American-conquest-Iraq into a “free trade paradise”, which might have had more to do with the explosion of unrest in the country than any other single factor (see this excellent article by Naomi Klein).

The discourse of progress is alive and well in the speeches of newly-inaugurated President Obama, albeit in some different ways than now former President Bush. The one thing that has certainly not changed, though, is the statement of faith that the United States is in some way a blessed nation charged with a divine mission to be a beacon of freedom, justice, and prosperity to the whole world. Obama drinks deeply from the well of America-the-Promised-Land.

My purpose in this post is not to criticize Obama per se, but I think it’s important to realize that despite the promise of change some things fundamentally have not changed – notably the public presentation of faith in the myth of progress, and faith in America as the driving engine of global progress (though the question is never asked – at what cost?). There is, however, a certain irony in this idolatrous faith.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes once predicted that his grandchildren would be able to experience a life beyond economic necessity. John Dewey believed that the visionary application of science and technology would cause the desert to bloom like a rose. Neither of these conditions has come to pass; indeed, quite the opposite has happened in both cases. Economic anxiety is at its highest point in decades, with the current generation projected to be the first in quite some time (possibly hundreds of years) to not fare, on the whole, better economically than its parent generation. And the former hotbeds of science and technological development, the cities and industrial centers, have become or are fast becoming post-industrial wastelands.

Those city centers that have seemingly reversed these trends have done so by engaging the post-industrial economy by expanding the service-sector, increasing the emphasis on consumption, rather than production, and by creating “arts districts” that are little more than microcosms of the consumer economy providing barely-subsistence labor for advertising and other corporate-controlled “creative” enterprises. In the long run, these transitory economic schemes hailed as “new urban developments” are likely to cause more damage than good as the “consumer goods” that must be shipped into these places for consumption by shoppers (who are increasingly less likely to be able to afford them or be inclined to purchase them, given the current economic climate), create their own ripple effect of environmental, as well as labor and other human rights disasters on a global scale.

This is the grand irony of the progress myth: that it promises a glorious future through worshiping the idols of scientism, technicism, and economism, and yet the very fruits of that worship undercut the possibilities of the very future it promises us. Moreover, the problem is far from “just economic”. The dominant economic systems in place have a huge cost in human terms and in terms of damage done to the creation. I do not believe it is a stretch to call the results of the current economic empire ecocide, and possibly also genocide. The fruits of progress have not been increased prosperity; rather they have been turmoil resulting in conflict and “terrorism” (conditions the “war on terror” ironically reinforces), the Damoclean sword of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads, and the increasing murder of God’s creation, the destruction of earth and depletion of resources, and despoliation of nature. This is a murder in which Christians have often all-too-willingly participated.

The myth of progress in its economic manifestation requires constant growth (and indeed the concrete systems in place supported by the myth will collapse without it – that is the real danger of recession). This requires a planet with finite resources to provide resources for infinite growth, while the profit motive supports increasingly wasteful use of those very resources (think “planned obsolescence”). While the nations of the world have been aware of the environmental crisis for some time, it has increased, not decreased over that time, particularly over the past couple of decades when awareness has drastically increased. This should not surprise us, as “an expansionary economic ethic necessarily destroys the earth.” An economics that “knows nothing of contentment, of ‘enough’, necessarily sacrifices the environment (and especially the environment of others) iin order to satiate its greed. It is powerless to do anything else” (Walsh, p. 43).

Deficit financing and environmental destruction go hand-in-hand – both destroy the prospects of the future. “A progress-oriented, future-facing society is robbing its own grandchildren of a healthy future” (Walsh, p. 44).

In light of this, what can be our response? With the false hope of progress revealed to be empty and destructive, the only solution can be to turn to the God of creation, the God who lovingly formed the earth, to whom all the earth belongs and everything that is in it – to turn from our faith in idols that destroy and do not save, and to prophetically engage the culture with grief and contrition, but also with hope that God will be who God has said he will be, and that God will make good on the promise that all things are being made new (Rev. 21:5). I refer you at this point to the essay linked at the top of this blog entitled “Prophetic” in hopes that it will stimulate your thinking. I’m also still asking the same questions as I was in this piece I wrote over 2 years ago. In light of the need to diagnose our current problem as not just a political, economic, or ecological problem, but primarily as a spiritual problem, one that persists in large part because of the enculturation of the church and its failure to live prophetically, I think it’s appropriate to close this post with the words of the Ash Wednesday collect.

Almighty and merciful God,
you hate nothing that you have made
and forgive the sins of all who are penitent;
create in us new and contrite hearts,
so that when we turn to you and confess our sins
we may receive your full and perfect forgiveness;

through Jesus Christ our Redeemer
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God now and for ever. Amen.

May God give us imaginations to live prophetically in this time, and in the time that is to come.

Glen Ford on Obama and MLK

Glen Ford is the executive editor of Black Agenda Report. This article hits on a number of points I’ve had swirling about in my head the past several days, which I hope to be able to collect coherently and post soon.

Yes, the article is from Al-Jazeera’s English site. If people can get over that fact and realize that Al-Jazeera is not a “terrorist news channel” (I have actually heard people call it that), they’ll find the quality of commentary and fact-gathering is consistently top-notch and often provides perspective we are SORELY lacking in our American media vacuum.

Excerpt:

When the New York Times describes the emerging Obama administration as “centre-right,” there is not much for an honest progressive to defend – and most African-Americans are progressive on economic issues and questions of war and peace.

Beyond a ritual counting of the president-elect’s African-American appointees, most African-Americans seem oblivious to the political nature of his cabinet, his policy pronouncements and shameful silences.

More likely, they pretend to be oblivious so as not to lose that once-in-a-lifetime feeling that happened when a black man won.

It is not simply that the Obama-ites failed to muster a defence in Harlem or Baltimore or other venues; admittedly, it is difficult to defend the indefensible.

What is most shocking – maddening – is their rejection of any political or moral standard for evaluating the black soon-to-be president.

All that remains is the fact of Obama’s power and the delusion that blacks somehow share in that power.

Ford goes on to say that Obama actually compares more to Lyndon Johnson than to Dr. King, if you must compare him to a political figure from the 1960’s. King realized that a movement for equality and economic uplift of those who are underprivileged cannot co-exist with war, a view most decidedly not shared by Obama.

Full text of the article