The Art of Empathy: An Exploration of Friendship in the Face of Fear

/in , , /by

Lucy Jarasius | Tuesday, 5th July 2016

Fear. Threat. Grace. Friend.

What pictures come to mind when you read or say those words? What feelings are evoked?

The first two words are largely antonymous to the second two.

Fear, Threat. I imagine a person with a malign, hardened facial expression devoid of the look of curiosity… behind which lurks a closed mind, negatively hosting hostility, manufacturing mental barbed wire, a fence designed to keep the “other” out.

Grace, Friend. I imagine a person with a benign, softened facial expression, open to explore possibilities… gratitude, perhaps, opening the way for an opportunity to connect on a positive note, hosting hospitality through a mind portal open to inviting the “other” in.

The second scenario does not necessarily imply a blindness or insensitivity to danger, but is definitely more likely to lead to a moment of mutual appreciation with potential for mutually beneficial interaction, tangible or intangible in nature, and perhaps even meaningful cooperation for future common good.

In the biblical accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 we sense a world of possibility for fruitfulness and perpetual interconnectedness through what could be described as a gracious friendship, a picture of good health, a life-giving, life-enhancing quality to the portraiture of the created order — cycles of nature, plant and animal life thriving, along with human beings amongst them.

However, as we are well aware, something went awry. Fear and threat replaced grace and wonder in the friendly countenance of creation. It is not my purpose in this article to analyse the details of this change, to wax theological about its occurrence and implications, but rather to posit that aboriginally, things were good and friendly and that since the demise, there is a way for us who live in corruption’s aftermath, to return to a healthy way of living in relationship to one another and the creation at large. We can, through the Creator’s provided avenue of reconciliation, namely the Way of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, become recreated for common good.

Being open to participate in our God’s perpetual cosmic art installation, which I see largely as a Portrait of Grace, places us well on the journey of discipleship as friends of Jesus. Not merely servant-like, but truly transformed and enabled participants in the work of reconciliation (spiritual, physical, enviro-human-relational and cosmic, in scope), casting out fear through love, countering threat via gracious acts, in recognition of our shared created-ness instead of instigating and perpetuating acts of violence in capitulation to feelings of threat and insecurity. Our electronic communication devices seem constantly congested with reports of religious, racial, commercial and/or environmental conflict. Compete, dominate, annihilate mantra the media, composting our baser desires toward a harvest of horror. Too few are narratives that cultivate our latent abilities to empathise and build a better future together.

Research in the contemporary field of neuroscience reveals interesting findings in relation to fear, threat, friend and foe.[1]

To the human brain, me is we:

A threat to ourselves is a threat to our resources…Threats can take things away from us. But when we develop friendships, people we can trust and rely on who in essence become we, then our resources are expanded, we gain. Your goal becomes my goal. It’s a part of our survivability.

…we are wired to “sync” with others, and the more we sync (the more psycho-emotionally we connect), the less our brains acknowledge self-other distinctions.[2]

So, it’s already centred within us, God-imaged, God-breathed, this ability to “sync” with the “other”, to connect positively with fellow human beings — an ability which may be waiting to be discovered, recognised and activated, on a daily basis, to displace fear and threat with grace and friend.

It can happen anytime, anywhere, really. Look out for it. You may unexpectedly behold the divine image in the face of an “other” and experience the community of “one another”. It could become a habit and transform your whole scape of things to come.

The following poem I wrote connects points I have raised in this article with some Scripture passages which provided inspiration (quotes are from The Message translation, except the last, which is from the Amplified Bible)

GEN 1:26
God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature…”

GEN 2:7
God formed Man out of dirt from the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. The Man came alive—a living soul!

2 COR 5:14–20
Our firm decision is to work from this focused center: One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. He included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own.

Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.

JOHN 15:14–15
You are my friends when you do the things I command you. I’m no longer calling you servants because servants don’t understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I’ve named you friends because I’ve let you in on everything I’ve heard from the Father.

EPH 2:10
For we are His workmanship [His own master work, a work of art], created in Christ Jesus [reborn from above—spiritually transformed, renewed, ready to be used] for good works…”

PORTRAIT of GRACE
© 2016 Lucy Jarasius

Nano-bot on a mission, scouring corporeal reality
vainly searching for something
of certitude
coronary veracity
birthplace of fear or prayer-prepped capacity?

Today, I beheld the image of God in a Hindu man
We had a heart-to-heart in a cab inching through the city traffic jam
Conversed about gods and goddesses, cycles of anxious appeasement
Of prayers answered, of prayers immanent, of prayers desirous, of spiritual “achievement”
Of faithfulness, of peace, of many things amazing

of another Race,
He graced me with his time, his conversation,
For those few brief moments
a quick snapshot of his faith-life
a man on a quest, not so much different to mine
Actually
made of the same stuff
dirt and breath
earth made
dirt and breath
soil structured
dirt and breath
land formed

Is only mine impressed, stamped, infused, blessed with image divine?

We shared something sweet
something precious though fleeting
just for an instant
a picture of how things could be
strangers whose paths crossed
whose lives intersected
caught in conversation
spirit led and directed
surprise visitation, profoundly reaching through Commonplace situation
but isn’t that just like the impossibly incarnate deity?!
breaking into our monochrome world of mundane reality
with shafts of light, splashes of colour
catching us off guard, off duty, bouncing off anything, refracting congruity

Today, I beheld the image of God in a Hindu man
something whispered, something sang, something in my spirit resonated, Echoed, rang
I recognised the swish, the brushstroke of The Creator
I heard it
I saw it
I walked through a portal, surely immortal
Not searching, I found myself live-painted, whilst glimpsing a Portrait of Grace!

[1] http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/6/670.full'. Further information is available by contacting K Events who provide specialist professional development to psychologists, counsellors and social workers: http://kevents.com.au/.
[2] http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/6/670.full'.

Lucy Jarasius currently resides in Sydney with her husband, Andrew Park. She works for Salvos Counselling, and is the Asia Pacific Connection for the International Christian Dance Fellowship, which she coordinated for nine years (1997–2006). Lucy also runs sessions/workshops for people to experience and explore arts, faith and culture in relation to peace-building and mission.

Politics that Devour: A Reflection on Revelation 13

/in , , /by

Shane Fenwick | Wednesday, 22nd June 2016

[Reposted from Ethos Engage Mail. Original article dated 6 June, 2016.]

Politics.

It’s a word that will conjure up a myriad of feelings for Christians. For some, politics — or ‘being political’ — has come to represent how one votes in the partisan political process, and is deemed to have nothing to do with the ‘spiritual’ message of the Gospel. For others, Christians must be heavily involved in this process, often through lobbying, to maintain a strong moral voice for ‘Christian values’ in the hallways of power.

As we enter into another federal election season, and as many of us have been observing the U.S. presidential race, perhaps it’s time to re-engage with a passage of scripture that has continuing relevance for us as Christians today – and whose significance many of us don’t seem to grasp. It is perceived as bizarre and out-dated, or conversely as a kind of guide for deciphering the events that will lead to the end of the world. Both views, unfortunately, don’t do this magnificent passage justice. The passage is Revelation 13. And, just as it spoke prophetically to the early church of Asia in the late first century, so too does it continue to speak to us today: not about how we will escape into the heavenly realms, but rather about how faithful Christians are to respond to politics. Or, more precisely, about how we are to faithfully respond to politics that devour.

To begin to engage with this passage, one must first understand it within its own historical context: as a distinctly Christian apocalyptic prophecy. John, no doubt, would have viewed himself as standing in the Old Testament prophetic tradition, writing during the moment in history when those very prophecies were being fulfilled in the Messiah Jesus.

In the opening verses of Revelation 13, we are given a carefully constructed description of the first beast that rises out of the sea. The beast’s physical characteristics resemble that of each of the four beasts in Daniel 7, for in John’s eyes this beast was the summation and epitome of all beasts that had come before. Its origins as coming from the sea, on top of the rich imagery of its seven heads bearing blasphemous names, is a clear allusion to the Roman Empire. For John, this beast — Rome — was a devouring beast, given authority and power by the Enemy. It demanded the worship and allegiance of its citizens, and whoever opposed its supposed divine status would meet its brutal might. Indeed for Rome, might was right, establishing a Pax Romana — Roman peace and security — through its military might. Yet John calls on his readers to resist the temptation to buy into the beast’s deception. They were to worship the slaughtered Lamb alone, who conquered not with the sword, but with the cross. Faithfulness to the true Lord was to be the mark of Christ’s disciples, not allegiance to a system that devoured in order to maintain the status quo. Evil is self-propagating; only Suffering Love can break its power.

The second beast we are introduced to rises not from the sea, but from the land, suggesting that it was something indigenous to the people of Rome. The imperial cult would have been a religious group well known to John’s readers. In the province of Asia, it was controlled by a body known as the commune, made up of representatives from major towns including priests from the cult itself. In all matters relating to local government, it would have wielded the power of Rome itself. What’s more, scholars suggest that it would have been responsible for taking the initiative in elevating Roman emperors to the status of divine beings. John’s second beast — which looks like a lamb but speaks like the dragon — is a clear parody of Christ. It appears to wield divine power; but beware, it is a murderous beast. At the conclusion of this passage, we are given the infamous number of the beast: 666.

Contrary to popular culture and the claims of stringent dispensationalists, John’s readers would have swiftly picked up on who this number referred to: the Roman emperor Nero. John utilises the practice of gematria, known to both Jews and Greeks of his day. But, more than just being a numerical representation of Nero, John would have employed the number 666 for its symbolic significance as a triangular number which not only constantly falls short of the perfect number 7, but also as a parody to the number of Jesus Christ: 888. Thus, the message is clear. Nero, as an anti-Christ figure, represented the beast, that idolatrous creature that sought to wage war on God and on God’s people. Rome and Nero were the embodiment and completion of ancient Babylon, demanding total allegiance from humanity.

What, then, could this possibly mean for us as Christians today? We may not have literal emperor-like figures demanding our worship. But, we would be foolish to ignore the beast-like political systems which devour in our world today - the systems and political powers which, in often covert ways, demand our allegiance and punish those who refuse to comply with ‘business as usual’. Revelation would have not justbeen read by Christians who were outright oppressed by the Roman Empire. Many Christians were, in fact, wealthy and compromising within the beastly, oppressive system. Perhaps we are the comfortable ones that God is disturbing today through John’s Revelation. How do our prosperity, security and wealth come at the expense of the innocent who experience violence, scapegoating and bloodshed? John continually calls us back to faithfulness to the One who is true and faithful. On April 9th, we remembered the life of German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose resistance to the beastly political power of the Third Reich led him to death. It is Bonhoeffer who said, in his sermon ‘My Strength is Made Perfect in Weakness’, that:

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear… Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than we are doing now. (In The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Isabel Best, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2012, 169)

As we behold the politics that devour around us today, may we be patiently faithful in our witness as the alternative community of God. For we worship and follow the Crucified and Risen One, whose politic does not devour, but brings truth, healing, justice and peace.

Shane Fenwick is a young Christian from Sydney who is deeply passionate about theology and its implications for discipleship, mission and engagement with a hurting world. He is a case manager with Mission Australia as he undertakes his Master of Theology through Charles Sturt University.

Anabaptist Ethics and Same-Sex Marriage (Part 2)

/4 Comments/in , , , /by

Bruce Hamill | Monday, 13th July 2015

Read Part 1 of this series

In the first half of this article, Bruce discussed that New Testament ethics is apocalyptic in nature, characterised by the newness of creation established by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Here he moves to apply this approach to ethics to the topic of marriage.

MARRIAGE IN AN APOCALYPTIC PERSPECTIVE
How then might an apocalyptic and Anabaptist Christian ethic affect our thinking about marriage?

My case for a rethinking of the definition of marriage to permit same-sex marriage comes under four headings: (1) institutional reform, (2) the normativity of eschatology for Christian ethics, (3) embodied salvation: the relevance of biology and psychology, and (4) the role of marriage in sanctification.

The "good newness" of the apocalypse that is the Messiah Jesus had a significant destabilising impact on the social world of Jesus own time. It is a theme of the gospels that Jesus is constantly in conflict with the moral authorities of his Jewish world and ultimately with the Roman world as well. At the heart of this moral revolution lie two ethical moves embedded in both his practice and his teaching: i) his extension of neighbour-love to include enemy-love, epitomised in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and ii) his ethic of non-violent resistance — “You have heard it said 'an eye for an eye…' but I say to you do not (violently) resist the evil doer”. In both cases Jesus is confronting ethical and religious orthodoxy head on. The long-term impact of this moral revolution is difficult to overstate.

For the purpose of this argument, what is important to notice, is that this new 'way' leads and cannot help but lead to serious institutional reform for those apocalyptic Jews for whom Jesus was Messiah.

1. Institutional Reform
We have noted Jesus’ critical engagement with that most sacred of institutions — Torah. The creative use of Torah in service of the gospel became a feature of New Testament writings. Similarly other institutions did not come off unscathed in their encounters with Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ willingness to run-roughshod over purity codes is well known. This in turn was taken up in Peter's vision in Acts leading to a radical revision of the way ethnic identity was related to the institution of the 'people of God'. In forming his small community of disciples, Jesus’ approach to the institution of the family could be regarded as subversive. Perhaps most obviously Jesus was an intrepid reformer of the Sabbath and its associated practices.

The question thus arises whether Jesus’ motto ‘the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ (Mk 2:27) might well apply to marriage.

It is consistent with all of this that the protest wing of the Catholic Church, which calls itself the Reformed tradition, understands itself to be committed to the constant reform of the institutions within which disciples of Jesus seek to live their lives — ecclesia reformata semper reformanda [“the reformed church (is) always to be reformed”]. For them it is first of all a refusal to make idols of our institutions. This is certainly not a license for arbitrary social novelty. But the institutions within which the people of God live their lives are not platonic forms; they are not eternal and immutable simply by virtue of an idea or definition. There is constant pressure from the Triune God for their reform. The working out of the gospel means that the church is always learning how to be the church in ordered and structured ways.

Should we exempt marriage from such reforming processes? It seems to me that the onus is clearly on the traditionalists to come up with a reason.

However before moving too quickly we need to note that the rejection of a platonic view of the institution of marriage is not the same as the abandonment of all definition. We still need to address the question of when a marriage is not a marriage. To put it another way: we need to distinguish between reform and merely changing the subject. To reform an institution is not to reject it but to affirm some purpose for which that institution exists, even if that purpose is itself being rethought in the light of something new.

If, for example, the primary purpose of marriage were procreation there would hardly be a case for reforming marriage to allow same-sex marriage. However as many have observed,[1] in the second creation narrative in Genesis 2 procreation is secondary to a more primary purpose, namely companionship (Gen 2:18–25) and indeed the latter is the explicit reason given for the creation of a complementary partner for 'adam'. It is this purpose which is developed and redefined in the New Testament in terms of communion, especially the eschatological communion of which the ecclesia, the community of the Messiah, is a foretaste.[2]

2. The Priority of Eschatology
If the institutional reform which so characterised the advent of the new aeon is the outer frame and mandate for an ongoing process of organising all of life under Christ, then the inner frame which guides the logic of Christian ethics is Jesus Christ and his mission.

Here we return to the methodological implications of apocalyptic theology for ethics. Since the 'good newness' of this apocalypse is not an evolution of something already immanent within the old aeon, or a logical progression from its premises, it follows that life in Christ, in the 'time between the times' cannot be defined by anything other than Christ. The old aeon is the context to which Christ comes but it cannot provide the norm for life in the new aeon. Ethically speaking, this is indeed 'the year of our Lord', a time in which eschatology (apocalypsed in Jesus Christ) has a certain logical priority for Christian ethics. The defining moment for history becomes also the defining moment for Christian ethics (its norm).

Thus in Christian ethics, nature and the structures of creation play a subordinate role to the ‘new creation’ in Christ. This is a complex claim, and though it seems a clear outcome of Paul's gospel it is expressed in mixed and ambiguous ways in his ethics.[3] Eugene Rogers argues that that at least two things are clear for Paul: God can and does, on occasions, work counter to 'nature',[4] and, secondly, since grace transforms nature, nature is not normative.

Jeffrey Stout summarises Rogers’ argument well:

Natural Law is an important Christian idea... but an ethic of natural law always runs the risk of treating untransformed nature as normative for Christians whereas the whole point of the body of Christ is to transform the natural. The Christian norm for sexuality is not natural law, it is rather human nature transformed, eros swept up into agape.[5]

This latter point finds its clearest expression in Galatians 3:28 when Paul claims not only that oppositional pairs Jew/Gentile and slave/free (with their correlative institutions, nationhood and slavery) are not determinative of life 'in Christ', but also that the complementarity of male/female is similarly subordinated to life ‘in Christ’. His switch of conjunctions from 'or' (Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free) to 'and' (male and female) is a clear reference to the Genesis narrative (‘male and female created he them’ Gen 1:27). This is worth pausing with. Paul is not merely claiming that, for the purposes of Christianity, it doesn’t matter whether you are male or female. His claim is much broader. The ‘male and female’ structure of creation no longer matters. Clearly Paul is not claiming that either slavery, ethnicity or marriage no longer exist for the people of God, but rather that they are all relativised in the light of their ‘end’ (eschatologically). The great complementarity of 'male and female' may still exist, but it does not normatively define life in Christ. Jesus Christ, the one 'in whom and for whom' (Col 1:16) we are created provides not merely momentum for change, but a new norm towards which all our practices and institutions ought to be redirected. His form of life defines the forms of life in which we live. The good life is an embodiment of his future made possible now.

Paul understands marriage in precisely this context when, in Eph 5:31–32, he sees the marriage relationship as a sign referring to Christ's relationship to the church — “’and the two will become one flesh’. This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church.” It is the way in which Paul, on the one hand, talks about marriage in male/female terms (Eph 5:32) as a sign, or perhaps icon, of the mystery of the love of Christ, and on the other hand declares those same male/female terms to be non-determinative of our life in Christ (Gal 3:28) that leads Rogers to argue that other terms and relationships could bear witness to the same reality (Christ's relation to the church).

What Rogers and Rowan Williams[6] before him are arguing is that the point of marriage, as the church is learning to practice it in the light of the eschaton, lies in our human expression of the divine love, the love of Christ for the church. In becoming 'one flesh' we learn in the most bodily way possible what it means to share the love of Christ and thus be his body as we give our bodies to one another, imaging the one who gave his body for us. I will say more on this in a moment.

3. Embodied Salvation: The Relevance of Biology and Psychology
The apocalyptic context and eschatological norm in no way suggests that the Christian life is somehow divorced from the 'old creation' or from biology and history after the manner of gnostic ontology. It is for the reorientation and reconstruction of this creation that Christ comes. In seeking to take seriously the biological and psychological context in which marriage is practised, we will rely on relevant scientific disciplines. In the ancient world of the biblical writers there was little understanding that the dynamic processes of human desire might be constrained and structured according to a same-sex orientation as well as a heterosexual one. Inasmuch as science has deepened our understanding of these matters it provides a significant mandate for reconsidering the modes of marital expression that the kingdom of God might take among the people of God.

When Paul in Romans 1 (assuming it is Paul and not the words of a protagonist as Douglas Campbell argues[7]) considers same-sex desire and practices as impure he does not consider them in the context of a Christian couple seeking to discipline their sexual orientation in practices of love. In stark contrast he is thinking about same-sex desire and practice in the context of idolatry and the pagan temple. However, what is most difficult about Romans 1 is that rather than appeal to the gospel of the new creation he reverts to the language of nature and purity in his comments regarding same-sex relations. This and his judgements about men with long hair stand out as exceptions to his normal approach to Christian life and ethics (1 Cor 11:14-15).

In the final section we will do what Paul does not do in Romans 1, namely consider the possibility of same-sex marriage as a practice within the context of the Christian life.

4. Marriage as Sanctification
According to Rogers the biological and psychological context of the Christian life is such that, for some of us, there are some partners who are "apposite without being opposite". Assuming then that this kind of institutional extension for the sake of such biologically apposite partnerships were possible, does it matter whether the church marries them or not? What matters here, says Rogers, is sanctification (rather than say mere satisfaction). Indeed, what matters are communities of sanctification which are structured as institutions of discipleship. Rogers talks of marriage as a sacrament, rather than an institution of discipleship, as I do, though I think the differences fade provided one's account of discipleship is communal and participatory. For Rogers the sacramental marriage is a community within the community of the body of Christ, which in turn exists within the communal Trinitarian life of God[8].

Indeed the same passage in Ephesians where Paul talks of the one-fleshness of marriage as a kind of icon of the love of Christ — a living symbol of God's salvation — he also talks of it in terms of neighbour-love intrinsic to the body of Christ. “He who loves his wife loves himself, for no man ever hates his own flesh…” (Eph 5:28–29). This two-fold aspect of marriage — both as symbolic witness and as formative discipleship — is expressed the 2010 report of the bishops of the Episcopal Church:

Marriage bears witness to both of the great commandments: it signifies the love of God and it teaches the love of neighbour.[9]

This latter aspect treats marriage as the ascetic discipline of learning to love our nearest neighbour as our self. This point is important because, as Rogers stresses,[10] bodies matter in salvation. Because we are being saved as embodied creatures in all the particularity of our limitation, then we should seriously consider revising the limits of our doctrine of marriage.

Rogers describes same-sex marriage as a species of complementarity — not the 'rigid complementarity'[11] defined by procreative biological pragmatism alone — but ‘Christologically disciplined complementarity’ defined by the process of learning in all the particularity of one's bodiliness both 'the love of God and God's people'.[12]

CONCLUSION
Let me summarise the argument as a whole. Marriage — that ancient institution serving the nurture of companionship and human flourishing in love — has for most of Christian history been assumed to be defined by the biological complementarity of 'male and female', although not necessarily by procreation. In Jesus and the apocalyptic Christian writers not only does the coming kingdom relativise the institution of marriage to this 'time between the times', it sets it, and all the other institutions within which we live, under the authority and judgement of Christ. In doing this it re-establishes marriage in terms of a new purpose for disciples of Christ — indeed a two-fold purpose — to bear witness to the new creation seen in the love of Christ for the church and to practise the life of that new creation in intimate acts of mutual and bodily self-donation. This ethical revolution reaches its clearest expression when Paul concludes that even creational structures like 'male and female' do not define life in Christ. It is thus a small step with the benefit of biological and psychological science to conclude that other creational structures such as same-sex orientation might, for some, provide a more appropriate vehicle for the discipline of marriage.

God, grant us the serenity
To accept the things we cannot change
The courage to change the things we can
and the wisdom to know that we probably don't know the difference
And that you, our God, are, nevertheless, not limited by our incapacity.
— Modified ‘Serenity Prayer’

[1] Christian Perspectives on Marriage: A Discussion Document (PCANZ: May 2014), edited by the Doctrine Core Group of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. In this document two of the anonymous contributors make this point. c.f. contribution 2, especially p. 11, and contribution 7.

[2] Procreation certainly features in the first creation narrative in association with the creation of male and female, however as the scriptural narrative progresses it plays a minor role, especially in the New Testament. Arguably the task of 'filling the earth' as a species’ responsibility is a completed one.

[3] In this respect I am thinking particularly of the role of nature in Romans 1:26-7 on ‘unnatural’ intercourse and 1 Corinthians 11:14-15 on ‘unnatural’ hairstyles for men.

[4] Later in Romans Paul characteris

es the process of grafting Gentiles into Israel as an ‘unnatural’ act of God (Romans 11:21–24).

[5] Jeffrey Stout, “How Christianity Transcends the Culture Wars: Eugene Rogers and Others on Same-Sex Marriage,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31/2 (2003): 175.

[6] Rowan Williams, “The Body’s Grace”, in Theology and Sexuality (ed. Eugene Rogers; Malden: Blackwell: 2002), pp. 309–321.

[7] Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 313–593.

[8] Stout, “How Christianity transcends the culture wars” p. 175

[9] I refer to the 95 page ‘Theology of Same-Sex Relationship’ published in the Anglican Theological Review (Winter, 2011) and cited by Eugene F. Rogers Jr in “Same-Sex Complementarity: A Theology of Marriage” in The Christian Century (May, 2011).

[10] Rogers, “Same-Sex Complimentarity.”

[11] Rogers, “Same-Sex Complimentarity.”

[12] Rogers, “Same-Sex Complimentarity,” writes, “Christ trains — or orients — all desire to God. Saying there is ‘no “male and female”’ denies, therefore, strong forms of the complementarity theory, according to which a woman remains incomplete without a man or a man incomplete without a woman. Taking that theory to its logical conclusion, effectively denies the Christ in whom all things are “summed up” (Eph 1:10)”

Rev Dr Bruce Hamill is the Minister at Coastal Unity Parish, a Presbyterian Church in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has a PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Otago.

Anabaptist Ethics and Same-Sex Marriage (Part 1)

/in , , , /by

Bruce Hamill | Thursday, 9th July 2015

INTRODUCTION
I recently attended a Pastoral Theology conference which had the theme of “discipleship and formation in community”. It was not an Anabaptist conference but it could well have been. ‘Discipleship and formation in community’ is a good summary of the Anabaptist ethic. The Anabaptist tradition is not ‘liberal’ but ‘confessional’. It takes what happened in Jesus of Nazareth in the first century to be the turning point of the world rather than the developments of the 18th century enlightenment. Moreover it sees these events as a theological centre and not merely a historical turning point. For the Anabaptist world the specific reality and history of Jesus of Nazareth is ethically decisive for human existence and life in community.

I what follows I will, firstly, attempt to persuade you, dear reader, that this Anabaptist ethic is helpfully located in the theological tradition of apocalyptic theology — a tradition which is enjoying somewhat of a revival in our time and is arguably the dominant tradition within the New Testament itself. Secondly, I will attempt to show that this tradition provides strong support for extending our institutional practices like marriage in ways that make them available to same-sex couples. Here I will draw on the ground-breaking work of Eugene F Rogers Jr (and others).

NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS AS APOCALYPTIC ETHICS
The revival of apocalyptic theology in our time has been well documented. And I will not attempt to trace the diverse developments of apocalyptic thought that have arisen from the second half of the 20th century to today.[1] For the purposes of this essay I will simply clarify what I mean by apocalyptic theology by summarising New Testament apocalyptic. Obviously this strand of the New Testament is not the only source for understanding the moral life in the New Testament. I will contend however, that as the dominant strand it allows us to see conflicting modes of ethical reasoning in scripture for what they are — exceptions that prove the rule (perhaps the rule of faith encapsulated in the confession 'Jesus is Lord'?).

In talking of New Testament apocalyptic theology I need to state at the outset that I am not concerned, in the first instance, with a literary genre, but rather with a certain mode of thinking which arises out of core experiences and confessions. To identify these I would begin by distinguishing between the notions of eschatology and of apocalyptic. If the eschaton refers to the end or fulfilment of God's creative purposes then apocalyptic thought begins at the point where eschatology overlaps with Christology — the point where God's fulfilment of humanity is revealed (apocalypsed) and arrives in the life, death and resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus. Once the resurrection, a central concept in Jewish eschatology, was aligned with Jesus of Nazareth the apocalyptic trajectory of Christian theology was set in motion. It was only a matter of time and spiritual experience before Paul would conclude that participation in Christ, in his death and resurrection, was nothing less than the arrival of a new creation (Gal 6:15, 2 Cor 5:17). It is this conclusion that defines what I am referring to as apocalyptic, namely, that newness of creation established by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

This realisation finds expression in a range of ways throughout the New Testament. Jason Goroncy has recently observed[2] that in the artistry of Luke (for example) the first proto-eucharistic Emmaus-road meal concludes with a clear echo of Genesis; "and their eyes were opened". Something like a new creation (perhaps a re-creation) begins, according to Luke, with a reversal of the primal meal in the garden.

In 1 Corinthians Paul describes his readers as those 'on whom the fulfilment of the age has come' (1 Cor 10:11). In John's gospel, Colossians and in 1 Peter this apocalypse is light in contrast to darkness. In 2 Corinthians Paul compares this light in the darkness with the first light of the creation narrative in Genesis 1 (2 Cor 4:4). John's Jesus describes both perception of and entry into the kingdom of God in terms of a birth from above (Jn 3:3–21). Indeed the New Testament is pervaded by a stark contrast between the world as it is and the new age arriving with Jesus. The 'anthropological earthquake'[3] that comes with the resurrection of the crucified is not merely anthropological, but at the same time 'cosmic and historical in scope'[4].

Moreover this contrast that the New Testament highlights is not merely a matter of difference but of animosity ('the world hates you', Jn 15:18). This hatred is reflected in their crucifixion 'of the Lord of Glory’ (1 Cor 2:8). It expresses itself in conflict by different means from both sides ('the darkness has not overcome it', Jn 1:5; 'the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this world', 2 Cor 10:3).

The arrival of a new creation comes as liberation to a world in bondage to 'principalities and powers'. The unified character of these principalities and powers and the bondage in which they hold the world is seen by Paul to mean that the world can now be envisaged in terms of two spheres — the sphere of Christ and that of Adam. Thus in the apocalyptic perspective the darkness into which Christ comes is seen as having both a differentiated texture (principalities and powers) and a unity (Adam). If to be human is to be part of a world, rather than in some kind of autonomous independence, we find ourselves caught up in this great and world-changing act of liberation.

The epistemological implication of this stark contrast is that a logical gap opens up between the old aeon and the new. In 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 1:18–25; 2:6–8) the new aeon inaugurated by Christ crucified is incomprehensible as foolishness and inexplicable by the standards of the world (1 Cor 3:18). In 2 Corinthians the 'god of this age' (2 Cor 4:4) — presumably a reference to the unity of the principalities and powers represented by Satan — is the source of the blindness which defines 'the present evil age' (Gal 1:4). Moreover, for John, even the scriptures do not of themselves, apart from the presence of Jesus, provide access to the life of the age to come (Jn 5:37-39). One is reminded of Jesus’ refrain in Matthew 5, "You have heard that it was said … But I say to you". As the stories of the Emmaus Road and the Ethiopian Eunuch suggest, these scriptures need to be reopened and interpreted from the post-resurrection perspective of the age of the kaine diatheke. With a new hermeneutic comes a transformation of mind (metanoia) as a prerequisite for Christian ethical reflection on the will of God (Rom 12:2).

We will return in the latter part of this paper to the ethical implications of this logical gap. At this point is it sufficient to note that when Christ commissions his disciples to go to all nations (Matt 28:19), it is not for the sake of obedience to Torah that he sends them out, but to 'make disciples’. A new covenant calls for a life centred on and disciplined by Jesus’ own life and risen presence. For the Christian the moral life is one of discipleship — a process of working out our salvation which is simultaneously the work of the Spirit of Christ within us.

Indeed because, in an apocalyptic perspective, Jesus is not the epitome of what we already knew to be good, the emphasis for Paul in describing the process of discipleship is placed on how we are acted upon rather than on our action. So we read 'those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first born within a large family' (Rom 8:29). 2 Corinthians puts the same issues differently when Paul argues that the Spirit who is both Lord and the Spirit of the Lord sets us free so that we who ‘with unveiled faces, reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory’ (2 Cor 3:18).

And, of course, as both of these key passages remind us, this Christ-disciplined life is communal. It is described in the New Testament as a participation in Christ's death and resurrection and thus a baptism (Rom 6:1–14) into a new common life together — a 'large family' — whose life is both enacted and given in a common meal (1 Cor 10:14–17) — a meal that offers a counter-formation to the sacrificial pagan cultus (1 Cor 10:18–21). To cut a long story short it is best described as discipleship and formation in community.

Next instalment: Marriage in an Apocalyptic Perspective

[1] The principle sources of contemporary apocalyptic theology flow through Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonheoffer, William Stringfellow, Rudolf Bultmann, Jürgen Moltmann, John Howard Yoder, Ernst Käsemann, Louis Martyn, Paul Lehmann, Christopher Morse, Nathan Kerr and many other diverse thinkers.

[2] Jason Goroncy, in a private conversation.

[3] James Alison, “Befriending the Vacuum: Receiving Responsibility for an Ecclesial Spirituality” (2009), http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng57.html.

[4] Nathan Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Theopolitical Visions; Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 13.

Rev Dr Bruce Hamill is the Minister at Coastal Unity Parish, a Presbyterian Church in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has a PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Otago.

Escaping “Religion” — With the Help of the Blues

/in , /by

Doug Hynd | Monday, 4th May 2015

Christians engaged in conversation about their faith are often confronted with the assertion that "I'm religious but I don't go to church". The next time it happens to me I have decided that I am going to say, "How interesting. I'm a follower of Jesus but I'm not interested in being religious.”

Beyond the shock value of giving an unexpected response is my deep conviction that being a Christian really has nothing to do with being “religious”. The unthinking identification of being a Christian with “being religious” drastically distorts both our understanding, and our practice, of being disciples of Jesus. Unfortunately the connection in both the church and the public mind between being a Christian and being “religious” is so close that it is going to take a good deal of effort to even begin to disentangle the two.

Let me try and start the disentangling by posing some questions. Why do we as Christians care about being “religious” and think that being “religious” is an area of common ground rather than difference? Why have we accepted the confinement of the Christian faith within the sphere of the “religious”? Or, to put it more controversially, why do we think that the appeal to an interiorised, disembodied and individualised faith is adequate as an account of the Gospel vision of what God was up to in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus?

Our uncritical acceptance of this confinement, and the limitation of the power of the gospel to a “religious”, private dimension of our lives has had devastating consequences. It has left the Christian community complicit in the destruction of human lives, their livelihood, their communities and the created order by unfettered state violence across the globe over the past few centuries.

The story about the separation of “religion” and politics in Europe as it is usually told is that the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants were the reason for the development of the “secular” state. A state free from “religious” control was necessary to ensure tolerance and suppress the violence of competing religious forces. This story gains its substantial plausibility against the background of the co-option of the Christian church by the Roman Empire, the subsequent emergence of Christendom and the justification by theologians and church leaders of the use of imperial violence to enforce conversion to the Christian faith.

Emerging from some recent scholarship about the wars of religion, however, is a substantially different account from the story we summarised above about the emergence of a secular society and the confinement of “religion” to the realm of individual choice.

William Cavanaugh has strongly challenged the commonly accepted story about the “wars of religion” and has retold it as the story of the invention of religion as a sphere of life disconnected from our public, communal, and social life. In “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,”[1] the story is not about wars arising from the inability of differing “religions” to live with one another. The story is rather about the emergence of the state as “sovereign”, with a total monopoly of power within a limited geographic area, and its drive to eliminate all possible rivals and limitations of its authority.

The “Wars of Religion” were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birthpangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between “Protestantism” and “Catholicism,” but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order. … to call these conflicts “Wars of Religion” is an anachronism, for what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance. The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subects.[2]

The story on this telling is very different from “what everybody knows”. We could not have had “wars of religion” according to Cavanaugh, because “religion” in the way we understand it did not exist at that time. Instead, “religion” was carved out during this time as a separate dimension of life, an internal belief system, detached from any significant bodily expression as a consequence of, and essential element in, the emergence of the modern state. “Religion” and politics were carved out as separate spheres of life as an essential element of the concentration of power in the hands the state.

What is at issue behind these wars is the creation of “religion” as a set of beliefs which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from one’s public loyalty to the State. The creation of religion, and thus the privatization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the State.[3]

The church, along with all the other sources of authority and power in medieval society, was brought within the scope of the state’s control. The results were far reaching.

The concept of religion being born here is one of domesticated belief systems which are, insofar as it is possible, to be manipulated by the sovereign for the benefit of the State. Religion is no longer a matter of certain bodily practices within the Body of Christ, but is limited to the realm of the “soul,” and the body is handed over to the State.[4]

Paul's Epistle to the Romans, addressed to Christians at the heart of the then imperial power, comes immediately to mind. According to Paul our bodies are to be a living sacrifice to the Messiah Jesus, No other authority can claim that degree of authority over our bodies.

Handing over of the control of our bodies to the uncontested power of the state was to surrender ourselves to unthinking participation in violence generated in pursuit of the survival of the nation state. The death toll of those whose lives have been offered up on the altar of nationalism, in the cause of the survival of the state, has been appalling, beyond our imagination in the period since the sixteenth century. The (relative) silence of Christians in failing to name this reality for what it is—to tell the truth about this—has been and remains a scandal that hangs over our claim to be followers of Jesus “who came preaching peace.”

… the term “religion” has accompanied the domestication of Christianity. It has facilitated the marginalisation of the radical claims of the gospel and the transfer of the Christian's ultimate loyalty to the supposedly rational spheres of nation and the market. The church is now a leisure activity: the state and the market are the only things worth dying for. The modern concept of religion facilitates idolatry, the replacement of the living God with Caesar and Mammon.[5]

To question the identification of Christian discipleship with religion is to open up from a very different angle the question of a non-religious Christianity raised by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his famous Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer was not, as assumed by liberal theologians of the 1960s, arguing for the reduction of Christian orthodoxy to the best insights of modernity. In a recent sermon Thorwald Lorenzen summed up recent Bonhoeffer scholarship around this issue.

Bonhoeffer rejects two alternatives. There is the sectarian alternative that Christians tend to withdraw from the world. Let the world be the world. The church which is often portrayed as a ship would then stay in the safe harbour and never brave the storms of life.

And then there is the liberal alternative where Christians and the church so identify with the ways of the world that the impression is given that the world does not need the Gospel and that people must not be challenged with the option of faith in Christ.[6]

Bonhoeffer, if he did not diagnose the issue of “religion” in quite the terms of Cavanaugh, was I would argue trying to say something similar in his cryptic account from prison of a “non-religious” Christianity. In Bonhoeffer’s account, “religion” tends to separate reality into holy and profane, sacred and secular. Reality, however, as Bonhoeffer understood it, cannot be divided into two spheres. In Jesus Christ these two spheres have become fused to constitute one reality in and through Jesus Christ. Reality is therefore one and our life as Christians should express that unity.

How can we find our way out of the confinement of faith and discipleship within the sphere of “religion”?

Habits ingrained in our language and habits of thought, as powerfully as the identification of Christian discipleship with “religion”, are difficult to break. To name and to diagnose the issue as I have tried to do is only a minor step forward. The weight of popular theology and the assumptions embedded in the language of most sermons reproduce the confinement. Some of our liturgical practices, such as the sharing of our common meal, dying to the powers of this world in baptism, and economic sharing through the offering speak against the limitation of Christian faith to the sphere of religion. Much of our gathered worship stands as a mute, unarticulated witness to the oneness of a “non-religious” life to which we are called by Jesus. There are some helpful resources available to assist us in the work that needs to be done along this line. John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics comes immediately to mind, along with the work sponsored by the Ekklesia Project.

Another way forward is to crack open our imagination to the possibility of a discipleship beyond the limits of “religion”. We have the resources, given in the work of musicians such as U2 and Bruce Cockburn over the last decades, expressing a world engaging faith that subverts the secular-sacred divide.

If these seem too elite in their style and intellectual in their lyrics for your taste, why not start with listening to the blues as a way of reshaping our vision? I glimpsed this possibility recently when on successive evenings I attended an overflow lecture at St Mark’s [National Theological Centre] on the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a concert by the American blues guitarist and vocalist Eric Bibb.

There is an interesting and suggestive link between the blues and the life and witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The turning point of his life from being “a theologian” to being a “Christian” seems to be located during a time when he was participating in the life of the black Christian church in New York. The Negro spirituals became part of the gift that he brought to his students in the illegal seminaries of the Confessing Church.

In the blues there is an embodied and earthy quality that subverts where it does not dissolve the line between the “religious” and the “secular”. There is a quality of “spirit” in the songs about love, work, oppression and an earthed and embodied quality in the songs of discipleship and faith.

The concert in Canberra by the American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter Eric Bibb embodied for me in the music, the lyrics and the performance this undivided approach to life. After nearly two hours of songs of love, faithfulness and struggle unobtrusively the music changed slightly in focus, though not in their style and character.

The closing bracket of songs began with a call to prayer, “The Needed Time”, an acknowledgment of dependence and connection, an invocation to Jesus to “come by here”, even if “you don't stay long”. And come by here ‘he’ clearly did as those present in Tilley’s Bar and Restaurant unwillingly came towards the end of an evening of music of engaging performance and moral presence. Perhaps better expressed, the presence of Jesus was explicitly named for the first time, though ‘he’ had been there all the time.

The final song, a traditional blues number, with its powerful evocation “I want Jesus to walk with me”, had the sophisticated, religiously indifferent audience attentive in a focussed, almost longing silence as the plea went out modulated through the blues melody and the lyrics, lyrics that registered the pain, and loneliness of the human journey in its echo around the café.

I want Jesus to walk with me
I want Jesus to walk with me
All along life’s pilgrim journey
I want Jesus to walk with me
…
When my heart is almost breaking
I want Jesus to walk with me

Here was the penetrating call of a faith that was wholehearted. The autonomous consumer and self reliant, rational individual of market capitalism was nowhere in view. “Religion” as an experience—disconnected from the reality of human life, joy and pain, faithfulness in relationship and the call to struggle for justice—was not what this was all about. Bodily life as a gift, to be lived in the journey with the ‘truly Human One’, expressed powerfully and truthfully in the performance, gave a new vision of what my commitment to living a wholehearted “non-religious” discipleship could be.

[1] William T. Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11/4 (1995): 397–420.

[2] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 398.

[3] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 403.

[4] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 405.

[5] William T. Cavanaugh, “God is Not Religious,” in God is Not…:Religious, Nice, “One of Us,” An American, A Capitalist (ed. D. Brent Laytham; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 112.

[6] Thorwald Lorenzen, “Remembering a modern Saint and Martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945.”

Doug Hynd is a former public servant currently completing a PhD in theology at the Australian Catholic University. He has taught on issues of church and society and Christian ethics as a sessional lecturer at Charles Sturt University. Doug is also an editor of On The Road. You can follow him on Twitter.