Push for change
New Pantagruel editor (& De Regno Christi contributor) Caleb Stegall had a piece published in the Dallas Morning News last month. Bill Chellis pointed it out on De Regno Christi last week, and I've had a chance to read it through now. It amounts to a compressed argument for Stegall's urgent public cause, a radical (re)turn to locally- and regionally-centered order in American society – culture, economy, government. It's an argument for a conservatism much more thorough-going & coherent, and many times more conscious of history, than anything given clear expression in the 'Christian conservative' suburban world of my upbringing. I feel I've got a lot to learn from this kind of far-seeing, clutter-clearing criticism. That's not to say, though, that I'm ready to buy in to Stegall & Company's social-political vision. Whitebread sub-urbanity may be too ingrained in me – or maybe I'm just turning out, with age, not to be the vision-buying type – I don't know.I can't look at Stegall's piece at any length here – don't have time, and am too much a novice in many of the questions he's taking on. Anyone who may check in here is hereby encouraged to have a look at it for him- or herself. To whet your appetite, a provocative bit from early paragraphs:
Pollsters wonder why George W. Bush isn't getting more credit for strong economic numbers. Perhaps it is because what are signs of health driven by rampant consumerism are experienced by most Americans as symptoms of economic and spiritual rot – their own and their country's.I can't help wondering where the many awakening Americans he refers to might be sequestered. In my part of the country, at least, you don't have to look hard to find Americans prone to fits of anxiety & scorn in the face of whatever may appear to be 'signs of health' around them – but finding Americans sufficiently at liberty in themselves to attend thoughtfully to signs of any kind of deep-rooted 'economic and spiritual rot', that's another project now.
Americans, many of them at least, are awakening to the truth articulated more than 50 years ago by writer Whittaker Chambers: that the modern world's 'vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind, life mechanized and standardized' does not 'make for happiness from day to day' – and further, that it may mean 'catastrophe in the end.'
My guess is that what all the commentators are sensing is something real. Could it be that unconstrained growth, hypermobility and global markets actually produce social and political instability?
I don't hesitate to say that, from my own limited perspective, I would like to see substantial change in American life at all the levels Stegall touches on. At the same time, I'm as profoundly skeptical of suggestions that change should be pursued via frameworks for recovery of 'oldest sources of order – ... at root religious', which as a society we may to our peril have 'abandoned along with their traditions and taboos', as I am disheartened by the history of positivist Anglo-American industrialism & globalism. Any genuinely society-establishing forms of order must, arguably, be in some sense religious at root. (See interesting discussions at De Regno Christi, among various useful references.) But we Christians have to be on our guard, here: we can't, religion intact, slip toward understanding ourselves to be religious for the sake of seeing society (re)established. We can be religious for one exclusive cause – for the knowledge of His sufferings and His glory, in whom the good of everything in heaven & earth must by nature be and, in fact, with all the finality of His resurrection from death now is established. To the degree we learn to adapt our idea of religion to the gaining of something less certain, less pervasive, less perfect, than Jesus now come in the history of this His world, to that degree – in my judgment – the religion we actually hold on to fails to be Christian religion.
posted by paul bowman @ 10:08 PM
10 Comments:
Your thoughts brought to mind an old post by JPUSA-guy Jon Trott, here. Cowering Anabaptist that I am, I generally feel ambivalent about calls to transformation - whether the call be for Large or Personal transformation, even though we clearly (and desperately) require both. I suspect that most calls for "transformation" are really cloaked calls for revolution - which I will reject outright.
Just some meandering musings (an example of what makes a blog useful, doncha think?).
Darrell, thanks for that link — very interesting, a nice connection across diverse points of view. (I don't know anything about the Jesus People movement, to tell the truth, but am going to explore this further when I get a chance.)
You know, if I could get something like this meanderingly musing attitude of yours on, I think I'd find the blogging would stick more satisfyingly. But I don't seem to have that pure, existential, writerly impulse in me, or can't seem to fix on it anyway. Half the time, at least, almost as soon as I take it into my head to put down in words any little thought, I find myself stumbling toward trying to articulate — not to say, necessarily, trying to argue — something that's working around in my head in substantially pre-articulable condition. This isn't bad in itself, of course — seems like a necessary kind of exercise, in various forms, for progress to clearer thinking — but it doesn't make for very good blogging I don't think. One's either committed to fumbling with those thought-fragments or one's committed to being readable — so I'm starting to believe. To operate in both modes at once gets me, for one, tied up in mental knots, especially in late hours. I think I've got to give this thing a rest.
Now I want to append a long development of qualifying remarks to my post. But I'm going to restrain myself! ... Mostly.
I do think I should say — just for the record — that I wouldn't wish to be understood as suggesting that Caleb's anything like a social glue theorist in the mode Trott's condemning. To the extent I follow Caleb's thinking, I don't think there's any ambiguity about his regard for Jesus as only Son of God and Savior of the world.
Again for the record, I should affirm that I understand redemption & transformation — of the corrupted world and of the sinful individual together — to be certain and present in Christ: the emphatic declaration of the Gospel. I can't think of Jesus's resurrection and his ascension as special signals that some hopeful Divine intervention is afoot or, worse, merely somehow existentially available to 'faith's' grasp. At that unique historical event of Jesus's resurrection, surely, everything changes. But for me there remains considerable ambivalence — so far a fruitful ambivalence it seems to me — where it comes to understanding how to recognize &, then, how to point to & argue for this actuality. (Increasingly, though, my (limited) thinking with these questions stays close to baptism and the eucharist, as expressive of the heart of Christian witness.)
I'm even kind of uncomfortable, these days, with familiar Evangelical language like the line from Trott's post, 'the evidence of lives radically changed by him is one reality hard to argue with'. To my mind there's very tricky territory all about, here, at least rhetorically.
Even trickier, of course — though not, for that, any less a matter of obligation — are the enormous problems in translating the declaration of the Gospel to meet the shifting frames of civic & cultural life. They call for — and yet somehow always defy, I can't help feeling — dynamic & subtle constructions like (as I take it) the neocalvinists'. But here I'm really out of my depth as soon as I mention the subject — so I'd better shut up. : )
Can you say something further about what you have in mind in the phrase 'cloaked calls for revolution'?
re: "social glue" - thank you for raising the spectre. I didn't mean to tar Caleb with "social glue", either (it's yucky stuff).
re: "cloaked calls for revolution" - given my childhood in Evangelical Christendom, I've grown (perhaps overly) suspicious of the altar-call. One unfortunate side-effect of this suspicion is my capacity to hear it proclaimed from pulpits and people of every conceivable stripe. Just to keep my own thinking clean, I'll stick to Evangelicals for now: from a very early age to the present, I've been presented with enough evidence of Trott's "lives radically changed" motif for me to buy into the overall concept. But I've also had to come to terms with the likelihood that, failing some sudden absence of mental clarity and moral discipline, this radical conversion story will never be my own. Most young men who come of age in this environment choose to either a) take to the pulpit and make the message their own, b) deliberately test the limits of grace, or c) change the way they think about these things.
I'd like to assert that option c) is the only one for me, but I know I embody all three (hopefully in a not-too-off-putting way). I think what I'm struck by is how easy it is to spot the need for change in others and in ourselves (the farmers around here need to stop letting their trucks idle while they step into the post office for some conversation, and I need to show genuine respect to my father-in-law), but how difficult it is to point the way to transformation. How is it that a biker can repent and join JPUSA, while I can't manage to talk to the old man without my nostrils flaring? That's just me in my neighborhood - how do I begin to address Lebanese Christians and Israeli Jews? We have to say something, but what comes out of our mouths (try "Love thy neighbor as thyself", for starters) is revolutionary. How do I begin to love my neighbor? Maybe by giving the old man a call to see how he's doing. Try, try again.
This is very thoughtful stuff. You head unflinching, in a way, moreover, right into the personal territory — reason enough for me to renew admiration for your 'realness' in this realm of 'virtual' discussion, and reason for any respondent to take pause in attempt at reply.
At the same time, I realize discussion here can't practically go but so far in any case. (The medium seems to bear such limited seriousness without showing strain of abuse & tending thereby to foster more mistrust than communication, I gradually learn. I don't quite get it, to tell the truth, but I start to have a sense of the formal boundaries — mostly I think through violating them repeatedly. — Of course, one wants to be careful not to confuse one's own limitations with the medium's!)
You send me immediately thinking in half a dozen different directions, and I don't know that I'm competent to turn any of them to serve a useful reply. And anything I do say is bound to violate the formal boundaries I've just parenthetically mentioned. But what the hey, you know. Nobody's being made to read this stuff. : )
Will try to compose some thoughts, following, then.
Let me see what I can say from this angle. John the Baptist is really the arch-revolutionary in the sense you're getting at, isn't he? This didn't occur to me right away — I'm an evangelical after all, I tend to dehistoricize & abstract the message by default — but I begin to think John the Baptist gets us to the heart of things here.
John's business is calling the people of God, the Jews, to account, publicly baptizing individuals as token of a personal repentance (for which 'transformation' is synonymous, in part, the way we've used it here) with national significance — and this at a peculiar point in the history of the people of God, when attention to their identity as the people of God, set apart by the word of God, is already in a way splendidly resurgent, in context of multiplying strong cultural & perhaps otherwise-described societal pressures. (Don't mean to appear to know the historical situation there in depth, I should say.) I mean, John's the prototype of the altar-call preacher, really; and he's the hellfire-&-brimstone prototype to boot. The coming One he understands Jesus to be is in his portrayal a majestic consummator of judgment: 'His winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor, and gather his wheat into the barn; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.' He brings terrible denunciation in particular against the great figures of that extraordinary age of the people of God's cultural & religious distinction, the legitimate pillars of this society, the guardians & translators of revelation-revealing Jewish identity in the vortex of Hellenistic universalism & Roman order. His calls for transformation, then, are — without much requirement of interpretation — indeed calls for revolution. And Jesus unambiguously affirms that preaching's break-with-the-past import: 'What did you go out to see? A reed shaken by the wind? ... A man clothed in soft garments? ... But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet. For this is he of whom it is written: Behold I send my messenger before your face, /who will prepare your way before you.... And from the days of John until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.' (Matt. 11)
And yet, of course, this very affirmation of John's message by Jesus is given in the context of an assumption-adjusting reply to John, who didn't know what to think when Jesus seemed to be making no move to effect the consummation John's prophetic altar-calls proclaimed. Jesus's own preaching was carrying forward the revolutionary idea in the call to repentance, and with greater radicalism — 'Do not think that I came to bring peace .... He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.... And he who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me.' When Jesus preached 'Love thy neighbor', it was distilled to 'Love thy enemy'. He was re-framing, re-rooting, the very terms by which the sort of transformation John had been calling them to, turning their hearts to be indeed the people of God, should be understood. But John knows Jesus's role isn't to be merely that of a still greater prophet than he. John's been proclaiming the imminent disclosing of the One through whom 'the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, /and all flesh shall see it together', the day of whose coming who can endure? He has every reason to wonder what Jesus is up to.
So. But in that troublesome separate fourth gospel, Jesus's own preaching provides a lens through which to see more clearly what's happening as the accounts' narratives turn from John the Baptist's role to Jesus's — Jesus being portrayed there talking so much more about himself than in the first three gospels. In fact, it's exactly Jesus characterized as greatly concerned with talking about himself that can make, narratively, some kind of sense of John the Baptist's prototype altar-calling preacherman. Why? Because here it's plain, even emphatic, that where John the Baptist is properly the revolutionary, Jesus is the revolution. What's in the synoptics more implicitly evident, in virtue of Jesus's portrayals as uniquely good, uniquely devoted to his Father's worship, uniquely authoritative in the prophetic role, &c.; what's explicit in concise depiction in the scenes where Jesus is declared by a bodyless voice from the sky to be God's 'beloved Son', with the Spirit visibly manifested in the sky as a dove; this John's gospel represents in a great variety of declarations made by Jesus about himself. 'If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. There is another who bears witness of me, and I know that the witness which he witnesses of me is true. You have sent to John [the Baptist], and he has borne witness to the truth. Yet I do not receive testimony from man, but I say these things that you may be saved. He was the burning and shining lamp, and you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light. But I have a greater witness than John's; for the works which the Father has given me to finish — the very works that I do — bear witness of me, that the Father has sent me. And the Father himself, who sent me, has testified of me.... You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of me. ' Consider in this light his announcements in this gospel, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.' 'As the Father knows me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.... Therefore my Father loves me.... My sheep hear my voice ... and I give them eternal life.' 'I am the resurrection and the life.' 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.' And so on. It's not his divine nature or character he's announcing (directly), it's the role he fulfills as 'Son of man' ordained, sent, exalted by God.
Since the world was subjected to sin & corruption, has God looked over it and found anything in it, belonging to it, in which he recognizes the completeness of good he established at its creation? Has he had unadulterated joy in his creation again? Has he seen humankind utterly alive, vital again in knowing and worshiping God as Father? Has he seen creation regained? I think we answer yes: he's seen his Son, a man born in the order of created beings, and said that in this one he has found pleasure.
What's the significance of that, if it's not the presence of the world's, and humankind's, transformation? No, not — in experiential terms, where we are now — me showing my dad the respect he deserves every time I'm called to, nor, much less, Israelis & Arabs faithfully seeking each others' well-being, nor any other form of the rightness of things, the character of things in which God has pleasure in his world, that we desperately need to see in order not to be crushed or rendered progressively more numb & lifeless by what happens in the world in its corrupt condition. Nevertheless, as God sees now, in Jesus, that transformed, radically re-cast character of things, we also can recognize and rejoice in it in him, a present reality, by faith. And, faith giving life to our sight, we can even come to see that transformation true in the world of our direct experience (though I'm the first to say, my faith being too flimsy to deserve mention, that the way things are seems to admit nothing but darkness most of the time).
How difficult it is to point the way to transformation — just as you say. I've often enough been reduced to cursing (yeah literally), bitterness, &c. — nothing unseemly on the surface, necessarily, mostly just sullenness, unresponsiveness, ungratitude — because of the ultimate source of that difficulty — the pervasive undoing (with our, with my, participation) in the world of whatever is good.
And on the other hand, how simple, how basic (not to say easy) is the assent that recognizes in Jesus the transformation of things to new wholeness, realized! Requires no postdoc work in sociopolitical ethiconomics. How simple, how basic (not to say easy) to hear his invitation, 'Come to me and I will give you rest', and say Yes. How simple to hold out your hand and take it, when the minister hands you the piece of bread, saying, 'The body of Christ'. If I'm right, we point to this origin of transformation, Jesus come into the world, and in it we point to the transformation — the revolution — in everyone joined to him by the working of the Spirit, and in that to every real movement of love to a neighbor, to a parent, to a lover, or to an enemy — and much more, in or beyond these, than we can see.
Wow, it's absurdly late. Can't keep doing this!
Paul -
A very thoughtful and articulate response. As you portray it, I certainly do get a sense of the existential possibility for transformation in the Eucharist and in our reading of Scripture, among other things. Your thoughts and your experience, however, sit in some contrast to my own (inevitably), so I participate in the Eucharist in an act of near-superstitious hope.
As for the medium, like any other it is a shoddy recepticle of our greatest hopes and dreams. But, you know, for all that, I think it still kinda-sorta works.
Darrell, thanks for the exchange. Some of this is ongoing thinking, as you'll likely have recognized. It's good to have occasion to work some of it out in reply to an attentive & reflective correspondent.
Paul, some beautiful things you've said here. I mean that.
I really do hope you continue blogging. I think people should blog for themselves, as I do in a way. But, I want you to know I like what you have to say and think... and I would be disappointed if this was the end.
Gregory, thank you — many thanks. This means a great deal, coming from you.
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