Rowan Williams, the Trial of Jesus, and #BlackLivesMatter

Last week I picked up a copy of Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment, by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m only a few pages in, but already I’m finding the book eerily applicable with regard to the US’s ongoing racial crisis. Predating the Black Lives Matter movement by more than a decade and writing on a different continent, Williams draws attention to the same abuse of power being protested in the wake of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland (among many, many others):

As Kafka said, it is as if we know we are guilty, but not what we are guilty of. We are going to die, but we are denied the satisfaction of knowing why.

This is where [the Gospel of] Mark’s trial scenes speak most eloquently to our own century, to the contemporary horrors of the dissolution of law. Think of the show trials that took place in 1930s Moscow; the racist murderers acquitted in the American South a generation ago (even now, you can hardly say that issue has gone away, either in the USA or nearer to home; the case of Stephen Lawrence is a prime example); the national leaders put on trial by the new military regime. This is the world of the door broken in at five in the morning, the interrogation block, the questions you cannot understand, to which you cannot guess the right answers, the hustling from place to place in sealed vans, the wrapped bundle dropped by the side of a country road. Calm and stony, the authorities state their case. He was guilty of extensive tax offenses. He was in a disturbed state at the time of arrest. No, we cannot guarantee to supervise prisoners all the time. Yes, it would be outrageous to make political capital of this by suggesting that government employees were in any way involved. No appeal will be considered; interference by foreign governments would be most unwelcome. Sentence was passed seven years ago; administrative complications have delayed the execution; it is irrelevant that he has been described as mentally retarded; his race is immaterial to the decision…

[O]ur age…has virtually normalized these nightmares in so many states and has hugely increased the resources that can be used for surveillance, just as it is our own age that has made such practices alarmingly common for some categories of supposed offenders, even in countries with healthy legal traditions. If the scenes sketched above appear to belong in distant countries with barbarous governments, reflect for a moment on the experience of those charged with illegally entering Britain in recent years. [pp.3-5, emphasis mine]

To Williams’s laundry list of nightmarish (but neither unfamiliar nor uncommon) scenarios, we might also add victim-blaming, along with the dubious smear tactic of linking marijuana to supposedly violent or irresponsible behavior.

The Archbishop goes on to draw parallels between those who suffer injustice at the hands of the Law today with the identity of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.

This is where the meaning of [Jesus’s] trial becomes clear, where we see what truth it is that this trial establishes. Jesus before the High Priest has no leverage in the world; he is denuded of whatever power he might have had. Stripped and bound before the court, he has no stake in how the world organizes itself. He is definitively outside the system of the world’s power and the language of power. He is going to die, because that is what the world has decided. It is at this moment and this moment only that he speaks plainly about who he is. He names himself with the name of the God of Israel, ‘I am,’ and tells the court that they will see the Human One seated at God’s right hand, coming in judgment. Humanity does not live in this world of insane authorities, but with God. When God’s judgment arrives, it will be in the unveiling of a true human face as opposed to the masks and caricatures of the High Priest’s world. [pp.6-7]

May the masks and caricatures of those who abuse their power be unveiled, and soon.

7 Questions That Continue to Shape My Life

Anybody who knows me also knows that I have a deep fascination with questions. Many years ago when I was a youth pastor, we would occasionally have a “Big Hairy Question Night,” where the youth could anonymously ask their Big Hairy Questions (BHQs) and I—with all the wisdom of a 20-year-old—would try my best to offer answers. Late-night conversations at Denny’s with my fellow baptist students often involved the deep questions—questions about life, the universe, and everything. I even wrote my seminary master’s thesis on the questions that Jesus asks in the Gospel of Luke. Below I have listed seven questions that have stuck with me pretty consistently for the last ten years. These questions have challenged me and continue to shape the direction of my life.

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1. Who (or what) am I?

Sometime in my early/mid-twenties I came to the unsettling realization that my personal identity was inextricably bound up with the identities of others. I realized that I’m not me—I’m an aggregate of what I admire in my best friends, my family, my wife, even characters in my favorite TV shows. As Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou sings in “Cattail Down”: “You think you’re you, but you don’t know who you are; you’re not you, you’re everyone else.” When I was in high school, I developed a laugh that was an exact copy of Hawkeye’s cackle on M*A*S*H. I’m still trying to put my finger on what I can call authentically and uniquely “myself.” At this point, I assume I’ll spend the rest of my life feeling like a different person each day.

2. Does God exist?

First I was convinced God exists. Then I was convinced God doesn’t exist (“God doesn’t exist, the bastard!” wrote Samuel Beckett). Now I remain open and cautiously hopeful. As one of my friends recently put it, “I believe in God more often than I don’t believe.” I want to push myself beyond simple mythology, wishful thinking, and nice stories on the one hand, but on the other hand also move away from the scientific reductionism that marks so much secular thought these days. On an emotional level, this question has fueled a lot of the anxiety and depression I have suffered over the last several years. But now I am learning to question the assumptions that underlie the scientific and philosophical ideas we take for granted today in a way that feels a lot healthier than it has in the past.

3. Who was/is Jesus?

As a Christian, I think that this is one of the most crucial questions we can ask ourselves. But the claims about Jesus’ identity (both historical and religious) also demand an answer from society at large. I don’t want to succumb to C.S. Lewis’s flawed “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” trichotomy; history is much more complex. I’m looking for a plausible Jesus of Nazareth, but also trying to reconcile the startling claims made about him by the earliest literary accounts of his life. Moreover, what does it mean to claim that this first-century backwater Jewish would-be Christ who was executed by the Romans is in fact the incarnation of the Living God, who eternally  reigns over all creation as God’s messiah? Here the struggle is for balance between the historical and the spiritual. Or perhaps the distinction between the two is not so clear. On a deeply personal level, though, I want a Jesus who transcends both fundamentalist and liberal attempts at appropriation. A Jesus who is completely human, situated in his own ancient Jewish context, but also somehow wholly other, resisting modern (and postmodern) ideological co-option.

4. What should be the Church’s relationship to the broader popular culture?

As far as I can tell, there are three distinct philosophies regarding the relationship between the Church and the social environment in which it is situated: 1) Should the Church be a follower of culture, adopting popular ideas for its own use? 2) Should the Church be at the forefront of culture, so that in effect the Church becomes the dominant/popular culture? Or 3) Should the Church be a community unto itself, “in the world but not of the world”? Obviously the lines are not so obviously clean-cut. If the Church merely adopts modes of thought that are already popular, what is uniquely “Christian” about it? If the Church leads the cultural pack, where is its prophetic power of dissent? And, by contrast, if the Church isolates itself into its own subculture, how useful can it be to the broader community of creation?

5. What is a moral/ethical life?

I have little interest in learning how to be rich or how to be happy, problems that most American self-help books attempt to address. Rather, I want to know how to be good. How ought we to go about the business of living? How should we purchase goods and services in our free-rein capitalist economic system? Where should we seek employment? What should we eat? Beyond deontological fidelity to the Law or anarchistic libertarianism (“to each his own”), I am searching for a deeper morality. Personally, I am a fan of virtue ethics, in which our moral/ethical decision-making is determined by established “virtues” or conceptions of the Good. The struggle, though, is when one person’s conception of the Good comes into conflict with another person’s conception of the Good. What then? The “right thing” is not always immediately apparent.

6. How can individuals live moral/ethical lives in community?

Community and tradition have always been and will continue to be cornerstones of my faith. A logical follow-up question to #5 above is how to live an ethical or moral life in community. The Christian faith is predicated upon the tension between unity and difference, a balance often referred to as the “wisdom of stability”. How do we navigate that balance to seek the Good together in community?

7. How can I become a kinder, gentler, wiser person?

This question is a little more complicated than it seems at first. There is a balance to be struck between justice and mercy. Sometimes kindness, gentleness, and wisdom are not the right tools for the job, particularly when holy anger, assertiveness, and stubborn persistence may be called for instead. But when I pray—which is, admittedly, not often enough—it is these three characteristics that I ask for.

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These are seven of the most important questions that drive me, that fuel my philosophical and theological curiosity. They keep me reading and writing, and color my perception of the world around me. What questions have helped shape your life?

A Quick Observation About Early High Christology in 1 & 2 Thessalonians

Since August I have been taking a course on the Greek text of 1 & 2 Thessalonians, covering about 12-15 verses of translation and exegesis a week. After 6 or 8 weeks of exploring 1 Thess., we have finally arrived at the end of the first chapter of 2 Thess., where the apostle writes these words:

Εἰς ὃ καὶ προσευχόμεθα πάντοτε περὶ ὑμῶν, ἵνα ὑμᾶς ἀξιώσῃ τῆς κλήσεως ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν καὶ πληρώσῃ πᾶσαν εὐδοκίαν ἀγαθωσύνης καὶ ἔργον πίστεως ἐν δυνάμει, ὅπως ἐνδοξασθῇ τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ ἐν ὑμῖν, καὶ ὑμεῖς ἐν αὐτῷ, κατὰ τὴν χάριν τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.

For this also we always pray for you all, in order that you all may be considered worthy of our calling from God, and that every desire of goodness and work of faithfulness may be fulfilled in power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus might be glorified in you all, and you all in him, by the grace of our God and Lord Jesus Messiah. (2 Thess. 1:11-12)

I will be the first to admit that my Greek isn’t perfect, but it seems that there are multiple ways of interpreting the bold text, a construction Paul uses fairly often in altered forms. It looks like the entities “God” and “Lord Jesus Messiah” have been conflated, so that the phrase can mean “our God and Lord” or “our God and our Lord”. But why would Paul pair ἡμῶν (“our”) with θεοῦ (“God”), but not with κυρίου (“Lord”), so that the phrase would read θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ κυρίου ἡμῶν (“our God and our Lord”)? In the absence of that 1st person plural possessive paired with κυρίου, and since ancient Greek did not contain punctuation, it is left to our imaginations. If the text reflects an early high Christology, we might better interpret it as containing a comma:

…by the grace of our God and Lord, Jesus Messiah.

or, substituting a comma for the conjunction καὶ,

…by the grace of our God, Lord Jesus Messiah.

If the text does not reflect an early high Christology, however, perhaps it needs a word or two added for clarification:

…by the grace of our God and of Lord Jesus Messiah.

or

…by the grace of our God and of our Lord Jesus Messiah.

I may be completely off base with this little curiosity, since my Greek is still pretty basic. I’d welcome any additional thoughts in the comments section below.

Review of Before Nature: A Christian Spirituality, by H. Paul Santmire

With an increasingly dire global environmental prognosis, it now seems more important than ever that in addition to practical ecological action and activism,  Christianity must also adopt a serious theological approach to creation care. In Before Nature: A Christian Spirituality, H. Paul Santmire reflects on the potential for a Christian spirituality of creation emerging from what he refers to as the Trinity Prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Come, Holy Spirit, come and reign.

Personal memories and images from nature surface throughout the book and are reinterpreted with theological significance using of the above prayer as Santmire invites the reader to contemplate the author’s own “fragile faith,” taking the reader from the Hidden Garden on the author’s farm in southwestern Maine to the waters of his baptism, from Niagara Falls to the pastoral landscape of the Mt. Auburn Arboretum in Cambridge, MA. Santmire recalls three stories in particular that each serve as excellent metaphorical meditations on the character of the Triune God, and returns to them frequently: a communal Thanksgiving feast, a torrential waterfall, and a self-sacrificing savior. His word choice throughout the book is sensitive and self-conscious, frequently acknowledging the harm wrought by the language of patriarchy and racial subjugation. While in his private devotion he maintains traditional language for naming the persons of the Trinity (as in the prayer above), he openly prefers the image of Giver, Gift, and Giving in place of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and with very few exceptions employs gender-inclusive terms throughout his work.

Rather than subscribe to the extremes of either deism or pantheism (even panentheism has too many difficulties for Santmire), the author finds much-needed nuance in Martin Luther’s theology of immanence, in which God is at work “in, with, and under” creation. This allows for a paradoxical balance of utter transcendence and nearness that matches the biblical understanding of God’s care for the cosmos. According to Santmire, Christians have too often adopted a “theology of ascent,” looking upward and inward to experience the divine, when God is readily found among more mundane places (from the Latin mundanus, “world”). Santmire’s extremely self-aware grounding of theology in the humus of creation neither takes an overtly Romantic view of nature, nor panders to scientific reductionism, as Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufman did with his minimization of God to sheer “cosmic serendipitous creativity”. Santmire’s self-awareness is, in essence, what makes his spirituality of nature so refreshing—he observes the splendid beauty of a vibrant and fecund creation that is truly alive, without neglecting the harsh reality of a violent world—“nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson once famously put it. Santmire’s theology is not naïvely optimistic, but rather persistently hopeful of God’s power to redeem nature in its entirety.

Before Nature is particularly unique in that Santmire is one of a very small number of theologians in recent years (along with Molly Marshall, Sallie McFague, Sharon Betcher, et al.) not only to emphasize a thoroughly Trinitarian spirituality of creation, but also to give long overdue consideration to the role of the Holy Spirit in sustaining creation. In response to the “binitarian” focus upon the First and Second Persons that is characteristic of so much modern Evangelical thought, Santmire instead focuses much of his energy on developing a theology of the cosmic (that is, pertaining to the cosmos, or creation) work of Christ and the Holy Spirit. The entire final chapter is devoted solely to exploring the role the Spirit plays in comforting and calling forth new life from what the Apostle Paul understood to be creation groaning in travail. This emphasis, however, does exchange the unfortunate traditional focus on the Father and the Son for unconventional and fresh perspectives on the Son and the Spirit. One might raise the minor complaint that Santmire fails to address the role of the First Person in creation as adequately as he explicates that of the Second and Third Persons, thus falling into the same binitarian trap that he critiques so well.

Santmire’s writing vacillates between deeply personal observations and universal speculation, giving his voice the tone of a systematic theologian trying his hand at mysticism. In the prologue, he addresses his book to both “seekers” and “theology teachers and pastoral practitioners”. For those without a basic grasp of theological concepts and terminology, Before Nature might prove to be a challenging read, yet it is worth the challenge. Those who do have a ready understanding of theology might instead take issue with the author’s copious overuse of endnotes, which—while informative—often distract the reader from the flow of the chapter. The lasting impression of Santmire’s work, however, is that of a bright and open-hearted theological memoir, at the center of which rests an abiding love for God’s creation and a sincere hope for its redemption.

 

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[Note: This book was provided free of charge by Fortress Press in exchange for a fair review. A final, definitive, and shortened version of this review will be published in a forthcoming issue of Review & Expositor by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © Joshua Paul Smith] 

The Doctrine of God

God is not a man,
God is not a white man,
God is not a man sitting on a cloud.

—from “White Man,” by The Michael Gungor Band

I BELIEVE in one God, the Creator, the source of all life, in whom we live and move and have our being, who loves Creation and invites us to share in the creative life with the Spirit, and who was made most fully known by Jesus of Nazareth.

Who is God?

A few years ago, megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll infamously claimed that he could not worship a Christ he could “beat up.”[1] I, on the other hand, could never worship a god who is less merciful than the most compassionate human being I know. This is because while “no one has ever seen God” (1 John 4:12), we know God most fully by the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth, whose teachings and self-sacrificial love serve as the model for determining God’s own character. If you want to know the God we worship, the Christian faith looks to Jesus for that revelation. The author of 1 John goes on to further explain that this same Love that was in Jesus is also (potentially) in all of us: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). In the human search for what our Orthodox brothers and sisters call “human deification” (becoming more like God), we realize that the only way in which God can be truly made manifest in the world is through the power of self-giving love.

“Burning Bush,” by R.O. Hodgell

Our typical vocabulary for describing God, in all its Hellenistic philosophical influence, is entirely inaccurate for the Deity revealed in Christ. Yes, God is holy (that is, transcendent, Other), and yet also intimate (immanent, near). Rather than speak of God as something out there (Deism), however, we must reconsider the biblical notion that, “in God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Mere transcendence or immanence are insufficient terms to describe the reality that is God. Picture, for instance, yourself standing in a forest. You are at the same time surrounded by trees and completely unable to recognize the vastness of the forest itself. This recognition moves us beyond a mere theism into a panentheism that gives shape not just to our present reality in which we see “through a mirror dimly,” but also looks forward to an eschatological reality when the fullness of God will be revealed and God will become “all in all”. The failure of classical theism is in its rigid upholding of “divine absolutes” that upon closer inspection fall short of the fluidity of reality. So rather than speak of God’s utter transcendence, we instead look to scripture to show us God’s holy love in the act of creation. God is not immutable, but instead exudes dynamic constancy; that is, not only do we live and move in God, but God also lives and moves in us. God is not apathetic (impassible) and all-powerful, but is instead an endless source of passion for Creation that seeks to liberate rather to oppress by domination. God is not merely omniscient, but is in fact the source of knowledge and wisdom. And rather than a simple unity, God is in fact an indwelling Triunity.

The Trinitarian “Puzzle”

Since the advent of the Christian faith, adherents to the religion have pondered the implication of Jesus’ connection with God the Father. Mark, the earliest gospel, depicts this change so subtly that it is nearly undetectable. In chapter 5, following Christ’s exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, Jesus tells the healed man, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord [i.e. “God”] has done for you” (v.19). Instead, however, the demoniac heads to the Decapolis and begins to proclaim “how much Jesus had done for him” (v.20). This subtle shift from the use of the term Lord to designate the God of the Israelites to now refer to Jesus of Nazareth marked the beginning of the puzzle that would ultimately give birth to early Trinitarian theology. Call it the corner pieces of our puzzle, if you’d like.

But the edge pieces still needed filling in. It is not enough to simply notice that “the Lord” and “Jesus” had become conflated by the time of Mark. By the time Matthew’s gospel was written, there had also arisen the unique phenomenon of Christ-worship. In Matthew 2:2, the magi inquire of King Herod the location of Jesus and his family so that they might worship (προσκυνῆσαι) him, and shortly thereafter the text notes that “Upon entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and worshiped (προσήνεγκαν) him” (2:11). Likewise, at the end of Matthew’s gospel following the resurrection, Jesus meets with his disciples on a mountain in Galilee, at which point “they worshiped (προσεκύνησαν) him” (28:17). Later, the author of Luke/Acts would also write that following the resurrection the disciples worshiped (προσκυνήσαντες) Jesus prior to his ascension at Bethany (Lk 24:52). And Thomas’ confession in the Gospel of John, while it does not necessarily imply Christ’s divinity (that is, Jesus as God), certainly places the two on par with one another.

Granted, all of these canonical Gospel accounts reflect a proto-trinitarian theology that was already in its infancy by the time they were written. Later, the Apostle Paul would take up a proto-Trinitarian perspective in his letters to early churches, frequently referring to God, Christ, and the Spirit, though never distinguishing these three persons in a deliberate systematic theology. But this only illustrates that Christians from the earliest tradition were considering the implications of Christ-worship on their steadfast monotheistic faith. The question now becomes: how did the worship of Jesus Christ emerge out of a decidedly monotheistic cultural setting? What does it mean for us to worship Christ as the earliest Christians did, but also maintain our commitment to the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Trinitarian theology has become the best answer offered by theologians seeking to understand how God can be three and yet also one. In short, I affirm the Triunity of God because it is the most sensible application of the scriptural testimony we have available to us.

The best explanation of the “three-in-oneness” that I have encountered is that of Jürgen Moltmann’s revival of the ancient patristic notion of perichoresis (indwelling community), and the idea that the three identities of the Triune God exist “indwelled” within one another in a loving and open community. In our postmodern era, Moltmann’s rejection of dusty philosophical terms formulated by the authors of the creeds paves the way for talk of the Trinity as relational rather than totally metaphysical, and can be illustrated well with the mystical witness of scripture: “In God we live and move and have our being,” and furthermore, “we too are God’s offspring” (Acts 17:28). In essence, humanity lives out our calling to be part of God’s divine community in a panentheistic reality, accepting God’s invitation to relationship with the Spirit, Son, and the Father.

A triune deity that embodies self-sacrifice and radiates agape love, as Daniel Migliore asserts, means that personal (individual) struggles for power, wealth, and accomplishment must be seen in direct conflict with the communal character of God, in whom weakness is perfected. In affirming the Triunity of God, we affirm by contrast that God is not an oppressive dictator but instead leaves room for human will. A triune God who invites humanity to “join the dance” means that our worship must be fittingly triune, as well—communal, symbiotic, and emboldened by the Spirit.

UP NEXT: “Holy Nearness”: The Doctrine of the Spirit

 

[1] The full quote, in all its repugnant glory: “There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” In “7 Big Questions: Seven Leaders on Where the Church is Headed,” RELEVANT Magazine, August 28, 2007, accessed May 4, 2014, http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/features/1344-from-the-mag-7-big-questions.