Category Archives: Resurrection

The Truth about Love: A Resurrection Sermon

Posted by on March 31, 2013 4 comments

And now, after the end, now at the beginning, will shall speak, yet again of Love. Love eludes us. Only slightly more frequently and more intensely does love seize us, make us love’s own in the very moment when we find ourselves most lethargic, most unable to take another step. At the moment when we know nothing of love, love owns us, makes us transparent to the actions and call of love.

Love is implacable. It will be satisfied with nothing other than the complete consumption of our whole self, indeed of the very notion of self. Love cares not for our self-thought, cares not for our constant introspection. Love is movement, the movement that happens precisely as our bitterness, anger, sorrow, and rage seem to consume every fiber of our being. Love is the short-circuit that somehow breaks through, somehow catches hold when every element of our feelings are captive entirely to hate, cynicism, rage, futility, tears.

Love brings us to our knees, draws forth our hands, making them to reach out in both supplication, and in service, precisely at the moment when all that we are clenches our fists. Love brings us to tears when our eyes have never been more tightly shut. Love is an openness that flows nonsensically, from a frozen, cold, dead, unopenable heart.

Love is slavery. A slavery more mysterious, more nonsensical than any we have known till now. It is the slavery of joy, a joy that persists in the face of all sorrow. It is not taught. It cannot be learned. The slavery of love cannot be bought, obtained, trained for, or made real by any power or process we could devise. One never knows it until it happens, until it takes hold. When suddenly, in a moment that calls for nothing other than wisdom, for measured, well-thought out decision-making, there isn’t even the faintest hint of a decision to be made. In that moment all that stands before us is the inevitability of the call of love. The call that can only call forth in us the response of obedience: “Here am I! Send me!”

Love is freedom. It is a freedom that persists in the midst of grief. It is a liberation that persists, dwells, never forsakes those who suffer at the hands of its call. Love is the liberation of the traumatized, the forsaken, the forgotten. But more than that love is the liberation from our petty dramas unto a life of self-abandonment. It is a freedom that breaks every fetter, save for the fetter that it, itself is. It makes all else irrelevant, inconsequential, utterly bereft of power. The freedom of love is the freedom from being held back, even by one’s most deep-seated pathologies, sins, violences, lies, and dysfunctions. The freedom of love is liberation unto gift, mission, shouts of praise—amidst the fullness of lament, protest, rage, and yearning that this world might give way to the coming Kingdom.

Love is desperation. Love screams for the consummation of its promises. Love never ossifies. Love calls forth, unceasingly. Love demands that love alone remain. Love cannot be contained, cannot be limited, cannot be reasonably dispensed, cannot be orderly. Love, being love, can do nothing other than demand, proclaim, and scream for its sovereignty, its victory, its fullness.

Love is hope. Love believes a future when the foundations crumble and explode all around us. Love believes a future when we sit in dust and ashes. Love screams against any resignation that would see our present distress as the final word. Love is a senseless, stupid hope, a hope against hope that there yet is another Word, a dawning Kingdom, a New Creation, a making right that is coming, and that cannot be stopped.

Love is boldness. It is a boldness that remains in the face of insurmountable fatigue. It is that small, imperceptible movement, that unnoticeable gesture of a hand, raising itself in protest against death. It is a resolve that remains when all reasons for hope have vanished from memory and thought. Love believes all things.

Love suffers. Love that does not suffer is no love at all. Suffering is the mark of true love. All love that seeks to hold itself back from suffering is the most repulsive of lies, the most abominable of counterfeits. No, love is only as it places itself in the path of pain, only as it abandons its safety, its desires, its rights, its reasonable requests, it’s hopes for satisfaction, for respite, for being cared for in return. Love is love when all these things melt away in the sheer gravity of Love’s imperative. Love is love when it suffers freely, asking nothing in return, save only to be remembered.

Love dies. Power triumphs over love. Love is trampled underfoot. It is the destiny of love to be defeated. Love is love precisely in that it gives itself over to defeat rather than dominate another. Love that refuses death has nothing to do with love. Love comes to an end because its gaze always lies outside itself. Love cannot secure its own survival, indeed, love is nothing less than the rejection of survival as a thing to be pursued. Loved only pursues the other. Love lives only for them.

Love rises. Love triumphs over death, over power, over reason, over fairness, over hate, over nature, over logic. The love that suffers, the love that dies, that very love has complete victory. Love is the movement from an unimaginable, extinguished future to a confidence that nothing shall ever separate us. Love is resurrection. It is the cry for resurrection and the coming of resurrection. It is death and life, abandonment and salvation.

Love will never leave us alive. Love will kill us. To love is to die. To love is to lose. To love is to weep, scream, and yearn for a victory that we can never own, never produce, never anticipate. To love is to give ourselves up to death.

Love will leave no one among the dead. Love will not finish its work until death itself is defeated. Love is death’s death. To love is to rise. To love is to have nothing, yet possess everything. To love is to have one’s tears wiped away, to shout for joy, to rejoice in a victory that we never owned, did not produce, and did not anticipate. To love is to be caught up, inexplicably in an indestructible life.
To love is to die alone, forsaken by God and humans alike. To love is to be resurrected into a life beyond anything we could ask or think. To love is to share the ambiguity, suffering, death, and future of Jesus of Nazareth.

Love is never something we do, never a practice we perform, never a thing we learn, never a craft in which we become proficient. Love is an inexplicable, unconscionable, and immoral grace that we learn only by undergoing it. Love is what God does to us, for us, with us, in us, and on our behalf. Love is God’s robbing us over ourselves, our sin, our power, our narratives of success, of victimhood, of all forms of self-seeking.

Love is the suffering of God. Love is the power that lies beyond all powers. It is the power of God to abandon everything for the sake of the worthless, the rebellious, the sinners, the unclean. Love is God’s refusal to let go of even one of us wayward creatures. Love is what God puts Godself through so that we might never be separated from God.

Love finds us. The only thing more true than love’s elusiveness is its coming to us in power. We are those who have been seized be love. In spite of ourselves—and really, really, it is in spite of ourselves—we have been found by love. Oh how love could be dismissed as foolishness had it not so surely found us! Had it not stormed forth from the tomb, wounds and all and gone ahead of us to Galilee! How easy it would be to brush it off and move one with real life had we not been found, been seized, been transfigured, been redeemed, been unforgettably loved, and loved yet again! How easy it would have been!

But such easy paths are no longer possible for us. Something far more difficult, and infinitely more wonderful has happened to us. We have been found by love. Our bloodlines have been redrawn by the coming of Love. Our flesh, our bodies have been claimed by the fire of an unquenchable love. We are left in the wilderness of love. We are left clinging to each other as the death continues to rise up in our sinews and souls. We weep together, we bleed together, we die together, we live together, we laugh together, we sing together, we shout together. We are together. And this is the work of love. And this love will triumph, for in Jesus, it has.

The severity of hope

Posted by on January 5, 2012 13 comments

The reduction of hope is one of our greatest temptations. Hope, unlike optimism, nostalgia, or raw self-assertion speaks of a space in which all our abilities to “deal” with our situation have vanished. We have no raw data, resources, skills, or powers with which to get a handle on things, and are left only to hope. When have no reason or rationale to anticipate a resolution, we are left either to descend into despair, or somehow to inexplicably live in expectancy of a hope beyond our hopelessness, a Word that cannot be produced, but can only be cried out for, and if uttered, only received with thanks and praise.

The severity of hope is easy to close one’s eyes to precisely because it is so deeply severe. Allowing ourselves to live in expectant hope, when all the signs point to its irrationality and foolishness is supremely difficult and disarming. To venture into the realm of hope is come to the very edge of the void, to finally surrender one’s cleverness, resourcefulness, and courage and cry out for a salvation that is, quite simply impossible on the basis of all that is. As my friend Peter Kline has recently pointed out in his superb essay on Lady Gaga’s Marry the Night video:

The line between despair and hope is razor thin. Both face the future anxiously as a kind of empty darkness. The only difference is that whereas despair cowers before the darkness in fear, grasping for some-thing to stabilize the dizzying anxiety . . . hope leaps forward, dancing into the darkness with an inexplicable expectancy that love is present and that love will come. . . . Love is the impossible possibility of dancing the night away on the razor, treating it not as the precipice of despair, but as the edge of glory.

Walter Brueggemann makes some similarly helpful points in his essay “Faith at the Nullpunkt” in his The Word that Redescribes the World. Examining the crises of faith that Israel negotiates in the Old Testament, he speaks of the point of utter failure, in which the securities of Israel utterly break down in exile. It is precisely at this nullpunkt where the challenge of hope begins. In the face of hopelessness Israel is faced with the dual calling to, on the one hand “relinquish what is gone, to resist every denial and every act of nostalgia, to acknowledge and embrace what YHWH has ended”; and on the other hand “to receive what is inexplicably and inscrutably given by YHWH, to resist every measure of despair, to await and affirm what YHWH, beyond every quid pro quo, now gives.” But the crucial point in all this, the point at which we are all tempted tame and blunt the severity of hope is that we can assure and possess “no automatic move from relinquishment to reception; one does not follow necessarily from or after the other” (62).

The movement from despair to joy, from fissure to healing is not a movement that can be held in hand. We cannot anticipate or secure it. Rather, in the very depths of the darkness of the nullpunkt we can only cry out for it, only hope for it. Ultimately hope, if it is not to be reduced to a grasping for control, or a dishonest and self-possessed optimism, must be understood as that which

stakes everything on the unfettered “Thou” who is not in thrall to the reasonableness of any nullpunkt. All nullpunkt, in every sphere, have common properties. In the end what counts is the capacity of this “Thou” to intrude into the nullpunkt and override it. (Brueggemann, 71)

Hope, real genuine hope must not shy away from this bare point of hopelessness. If we are to avoid abandoning hope for nostalgia, self-assertion, or self-imposed blindness and despair we must not close our eyes to the point of dissolution, of emptiness and screaming in which the world, and all of us in it ultimately find ourselves.

The nullpunkt, in its many forms, is enough to evoke deep and raw fear. The exile offers a fear of abandonment. The pressure of chaos invites fear of obliteration. The immediacy of death bespeaks nullification and nonbeing. The nulpunkt carries the prospect of total nullification. Into that is spoken, “Do not fear.” The antidote seems modest in the face of the threat. Unless, of course, the antidote is uttered by one who is trustworthy. Everything depends upon that. The future always depends for Israel [and the church, the world, and ever human person] upon the trustworthiness of the One who characteristically hovers somewhere between the fear so palpably grounded and the faith so fragilely embraced. It is the pivot point of hope: “Do not fear!” (Bruegggemann, 71)

But this “Do not fear!” is not simply the assurance that there is nothing to fear. No, the word of grace which comes among us and tells us “Do not fear!”, the perfect love that casts out all fear (1 John 4:18) comes not before, but after and during the night of trembling in which blood is sweat from the brow of Jesus. The calling not to fear is spoken precisely into the face of that which is utterly and ultimately fearful. And this calling, this severe hope turns always and only on the one who speaks it. It can ultimately be true only if this one is indeed trustworthy and has and will overcome death forever. And it is this one, the Crucified Resurrected one who indeed speaks this to is, precisely on the precipice of hopelessness: ”Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hell” (Rev 1:17-18).

Resurrection

Posted by on April 27, 2011 2 comments

The final summing up of all this which is told us at Easter is: Jesus is victor! Jesus — is it not he who was born in humblest lowliness, who died on the cross crying the cry of a derelict of God, he who forgave sins but who collapsed under the burden of sin, he, the humble, smitten by his fate; and of all those laden with grief, is he not the most burdened man of Nazareth? And he is to be victor?

Yes, it is always a difficult, a dark word that scarcely can be tolerated by our ears — that word “resurrection.” That is to say, it is not necessarily hazy. What it really means is clear — too clear, plain — only too plain. It means what it says: something mighty, crystal-clear, complete. It signifies: that the world, that is life with its imprisonments and tragedies of sorrow and sin, life with its doubts and unanswered questions, life with its grave-mounds and crosses for the dead, a unique enigma, so immense that all answers are silent before it. Nothing, absolutely nothing can one do to stop it; everything is too insignificant to fill up this vacuum. Admit it; it negates everything; there is no way out! There might be  the possibility of a miracle happening — no, not a miracle, but the miracle, the miracle of God — God’s incomprehensible, saving intervention and mercy, the all-inclusive renewal that leads from death to life that comes from him, God’s creation-word, God’s life-word — and that means resurrection from the dead! Resurrection, not progress, not evolution, not enlightenment, but what the word means, namely a call from heaven to us: “Rise up! you are dead, but I will give you life.” That is what is proclaimed here, and it is the only way that the world can be saved take away this summons, and make something else of it, something smaller, less than the absolute whole, less than the absolute ultimate, or less than the absolutely powerful, and you have taken away all, the unique, the last hope there is for us on earth.

~ Karl Barth, “Jesus if Victor.” In Come Holy Spirit, 148-50.

Remember that you are dust

Posted by on March 14, 2011 6 comments

Last Wednesday I facilitated much of our church’s observance of Ash Wednesday, leading out in the reading of Scripture, confession, and the application of ashes. I have done this many years before and it has always been a profound time of mediation on the salvation of the Gospel, but this year it was unique. For the first time it was I alone who applied the ashes, meaning that I got to apply them to every person in the congregation (a mere 20 people, perhaps not a great feat by conventional counting standards, but still).

This meant not only applying the ashes and declaring to my loved ones (almost all of whom I’ve known deeply for years), “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” but helping many of them kneel and get back to their feet without falling down. In the time I’ve known so many people in my church I’ve seen people get much further along in years and watched their health change (and watched one sister die). Declaring their mortality to them as I supported their weight, clasping their arm to keep them from falling or slipping — that was a different experience. The proclamation of mortality was so much more deeply real, not because of anything in the liturgy, but because of the truly real, truly tangible presence of Christ to me in these concrete people with whom I am united.

Feeling the trembling hands and supporting the feeble knees of people I have known for years,  telling them that they are destined to return to dust, and that our sole hope lies in God’s utterly new act of resurrection from the dead, that was something beautiful and frightening to me. I knew as I applied the ashes and spoke those words that I would walk with these people through their deaths and visit their graves when they quite literally have returned to dust. I knew then, once again, how deeply vulnerable and defenseless we all are before the ravages of this broken world. And I knew then, once again, that in these broken vessels, in the process of returning to dust, was the light of Christ, the bringer of new creation, new life, and unlimited hope, a hope that is not seen.

He personally is with us

Posted by on June 14, 2010 15 comments

To say that Jesus rose from the dead is, among other things, to say that in spite of the fact that his love for us in obedience to his mission led to his death — or in fact because his love led to his death — he is still present to us, really present to us and loving us in his full bodily reality. It is not just that we remember him or imitate him, or that he lives on in a religious tradition. The good news is that he rose from the dead, that he went through real death to a new kind of bodily life with us. So that when we encounter someone who needs us, when we find the hungry and the imprisoned and the homeless, we can really say that here we encounter Christ, not in some metaphorical way, but literally. He personally is with us. The difference between having faith in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus and not having such faith is, at one level, the difference between really discovering Jesus in the needy and oppressed, and simply thinking that it is a rather beautiful idea. It is the difference between really believing, like Abraham, that God asks the impossible of us, to find life through death, creation through destruction, that God makes the impossible possible for us, and not believing in God — thereby making him just some part of the machinery of our world.

–Herbert McCabe, God, Christ and Us (Continuum, 2005), 39-40.

Us and our children

Posted by on April 7, 2010 9 comments

In the account of the passion in Matthew, the crowd responds to Pilate’s declaration of innocence with the cry “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matt 27:25). A curious irony is found here. In that the people here are taking on the responsibility for Christ’s death but do so in language that seems utterly Passoverish. And indeed, as it turns out Christ’s blood will be “on” them and their children. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb protected the families of Israel in Egypt from the angel of death, so also Christ’s blood will protect and save the very ones who shed it without regard for him.

But it doesn’t stop there. With the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost and the attending proclamation of the gospel of the resurrection, Peter claims that “This promise is for you and your children” (Acts 2:39).

Here we see the ironic and futile nature of our resistance to Christ and the radical superabundance of God’s self-giving in response to our hatred and violence. We go out for blood, thoughtlessly throwing our children in with us. God responds to us by coming to us again, as our victim, with words of forgiveness and promise. Where we would condemn ourselves and our children, God continues to come again to us with promise, with the Spirit, with new, vivifying life.

Not easy news

Posted by on April 6, 2010 5 comments

Rowan Williams has a characteristically excellent Easter sermon posted online now. Here’s a snip:

The preaching of Peter and Paul and all the witnesses of the Risen Jesus says that two basic things are demanded of us. First: we must acknowledge our own share in what the cross is and represents; we must learn to see ourselves as caught up in a world where the innocent are scapegoated and killed and where we are all unwilling, to a greater or lesser degree, to face unwelcome truths about ourselves. We must learn to see that we cannot by our own wisdom and strength cut ourselves loose from the tangle of injustice, resentment, fear and prejudice that traps the human family in conflict and misery.

And second: we must learn to trust that love and justice are not defeated by our failure; that God has provided from his own strength and resourcefulness a way to freedom, once we have become able to recognise in the face of the suffering Jesus his own divine promise of mercy and life. The resurrection is the manifesting to the world of the triumph of a love that uses no coercion or manipulation but is simply itself – an indestructible love. The challenge of Easter is to believe that God is not defeated by the most extreme rejection imaginable.

Good news? Emphatically yes. But not easy news. To recognise God in the crucified Jesus alters so much: it alters what we think about God, and it alters where we look for God in the human world. It suggests uncomfortably that God is likeliest to be found among those we have, like the religious and political establishment of Jesus’ day, dismissed or shut out; it suggests that our models of success and failure have to be turned upside down; it suggests that our eternal future is bound up with whether we are able to turn to those we have hurt and seek forgiveness.

If he rose

Posted by on April 4, 2010 8 comments

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body.
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the
amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as his flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of
enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a thing painted in the faded credulity
of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier mache,
not stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will
eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the
dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not make it less monstrous,
for in our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,
we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

– John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 72–3.

He loved his killer

Posted by on January 14, 2010 4 comments

On August 20, 1965 in Alabama, a sheriff deputy named Thomas Coleman took a shotgun and publicly shot and killed two  civil rights leaders, Jon Daniels, a white Episcopalian seminarian who died immediately and Richard Morrisroe, a white Roman Catholic priest who died of his injuries later. Jon died taking a shotgun blast directly to the stomach after pushing Ruby Sales, a 17-year-old black girl to the ground to protect her from the gun-wielding Coleman. An all-white jury later acquitted Coleman of all charges. Jon Daniels was a close friend to Will Campbell, and this is an excerpt from one of his writings in response to Coleman’s murder of Daniels:

What distinctive word, what message of hope does the Christian have for the racial crisis? It may be that he has no word of hope in the sense that hope is understood generally. But he certainly has a distinctive word. That word is The Word. The Word become flesh.

And that Word leads us to the death of Jonathan Daniels and our response to it. What can one say when a brother whom we have set apart and sent forth is dead? We can say, “Our brother is dead. Let’s go bury him.” Then we can say a benediction. And perhaps nothing more is appropriate.

But we who set Jon Daniels apart and sent him forth have said far more than that. We got immediate appointments with the highest official of the Department of Justice. We pressured through releases and statements and marches and court stays for federal intervention. We have said such things as: “We must have federal initiative and involvement in the investigation and prosecution of murders . . .” And now we are considering civil proceedings of our own against the murderer of our brother. We have indicated that the President is a scoundrel for not “doing something.” And worst of all we have said that unless the conditions which we have set forth are met, Jonathan will have died in vain.

Yes, that is the worst of all because nothing, absolutely nothing, any of us do or do not do now will cause his death to have been in vain. That is out of our hands. He can never have died in vain because he loved his killer. By his own last written words he loved his killer. (If one is looking for a martyr in it all, to die at the hands of one you love for a cause in which you believe strongly enough to let the beloved kill you is coming mighty close.) If he had loved only the Negroes with whom he lived and ate and worshipped it might have been different. Then one might set up conditions and issue ultimatums in order to get mileage out of his death, in order to have his death “mean something.” But since he loved his murderer his death is its own meaning. And what that means is that Thomas Coleman is forgiven. If Jonathan forgives him, as he did when he came to love him, then it is not for me to cry for his blood. Any act on my part which is even akin to “avenging” his death is sacrilege. Vengeance negates martyrdom. It never confirms it. The sacramental act was Jonathan’s, not mine.

When he loved his killer he set him free, for that is what love is. We might at least have learned that much from two thousand years of punishing Jews for killing Christ. . . .

The notion that a man can go to a store where a group of unarmed human beings are assembled, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart and bowels from his body, turn on another and send lead pellets ripping through his flesh and bones, and that God will set him free is almost more than we can stand. But unless that is precisely the case then there is no gospel, there is no good news. Unless that is the truth we are back under law, and Christ’s death and resurrection are of no account.

When Thomas killed Jonathan he committed a crime against the state of Alabama. Alabama, for reasons of its own, chose not to punish him for that crime against itself. And do we not all know what those reasons were?

When Thomas killed Jonathan he committed a crime against God. The strange, the near maddening thing about this case is that both these offended parties have rendered the same verdict—not for the same reasons, not in the same way, but the verdict is the same—acquittal.

The Christian response here is not to damn the “acquittal by law,” but to proclaim the “acquittal by resurrection.” One frees him to go and kill again. The other liberates him to obedience in Christ. Acquittal by law was the act of Caesar. Render unto him what is his. The state, by its very nature and definition, can do anything it wills to do—Hitler proved that much. Acquittal by resurrection was the act of God. And he has entrusted us with that message.

Thomas also committed a crime against Jonathan. And Jonathan rendered a similar verdict when he loved him.

But he also committed an offense against us, against those of us who set Jonathan apart and sent him forth. Thus far we have come out worst of all.

Perhaps it is because we are afraid of the Colemans of this world. Perhaps it is because he rebuffed us in the Delta and elsewhere. But worse than either of these it may be that we just plain do not love him.

Will Campbell, “Law and Love in Lowndes,” in Writings on Resistance and Reconciliation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), 14-16.

Easter Report

Posted by on April 13, 2009 24 comments

This is an open thread for people to describe their Easter experiences this year. The (western) church’s most developed, profound, and meaningful times of worship, proclamation, and prayers occurred yesterday. What did people hear, see, smell, touch, discover in the experience of Holy Week this year?

Unconditional Promise

Posted by on April 12, 2009 Comments Off

“In Jesus’ resurrection, the identity of the God of promise became clear. The news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is a claim on behalf of a God unequivocally identified as a God of unconditional promise: of life precisely in spite of, indeed using and transforming, death; of fulfillment in spite of, indeed including alienation. “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead” is both past tense and future tense; for it can also be stated this way: “Jesus’ life, as defined by his death, will triumph – and that triumph will be the reality of God.”

~ Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 60.

All of it can be transformed

Posted by on April 12, 2009 2 comments

“…the resurrection becomes the moment which overthrows an idolatrous view of grace, idolatrous because it sees grace as serving my needs as I define them…Grace deals with us whole: it does not simply console me as a victim, for that would be to leave untouched the reality of my complicity in the hurt and damage of the world.  Human beings long to be reassured that they are innocent.  [However] the Gospel will not ever tell us that we are innocent, but it will tell us that we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify with, and make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and have been.  That is the transformation of desire as it affects our attitude to our own selves – to accept what we have been, so that all of it can be transformed….grace will remake, but not undo.  There is all the difference in the world between Christ uncrucified and Christ risen: they speak of two different kinds of hope for humanity, one unrealizable , the other barely imaginable, but at least truthful.”

~ Rowan Williams, Resurrection, 80-81.

The Ethics of Witness

Posted by on February 18, 2009 8 comments

In his Free in Obedience, William Stringfellow takes up an absolutely vital point regarding the nature of Christian political ethics, what he terms “the ethic of witness”. The ethics of witness “means that the essential and consistent task of Christians is to expose the transience of death’s power in the world.” Herein lies the fundamental vocation of Christian political thought and action: to bear witness to the defeat of death itself through the cross and resurrection of Christ. The point of Christian politics is to point to the defeat of death through resurrection.

What this means, however, is that the Christian can never be satisfied with the political accomplishments of the principalities and powers. Since our purpose is to bear witness to the defeat of death and its power, “the Christian in secular society is always in the position of a radical…in the sense that noting which is achieved in secular life can satisfy the insight which the Christian is given as to what the true consummation of life in society is.” From the stand point of Christian theopolitics, we can never find ourselves fully, or even largely committed to the political accomplishments and movements of our time, given the reliance of the principalities on the power of death.

Thus, “the Christian always complains of the status quo, whatever that happens to be; he always seeks more than that which satisfies even the best ideals of other men.” This is precisely why Christian politics are not, or should not be “useful” to the principalities and powers. The Christian is always seeking to bear witness to the resurrection and the defeat of the powers of death. All the principalities of our world fundamentally operate on the basis of the power of death in order to secure and exercise their authority. Given that the Christian denies the legitimacy of the power of death to order and facilitate human life, the principalities should find no allies among Christians in their pursuits.

To again quote Stringfellow, “Or, to put it differently, the Christian knows that no change, reform, or accomplishment of secular society can modify, threaten, or diminsh the active reign of death in the world. Only Christ can doe that, and now his reign is acknowledged and enjoyed in the society which bears his name and has the task of proclamation in all the world for the sake of that part of the world still consigned to the power of death.”

This puts the Christian in the extremely unpopular position of remaining a critic of all forms of earthly political sovereignty, even (especially?) when they seem to be becoming more morally appealing and worthy. Because the whole logic of the principalities is based on the power of death to order and control human life, no amount of institutional maintenance, reform, or fine-tuning can satisfy the Christian ethic of witness, the call of Christ to live a life free from the powers of death itself, the invitation of resurrection life. What is important to note here is that the inherent antipathy of Christianity towards secular politics is not a negative reaction determined by that which it is against. It is rather the overflow of the abundant gift of life that is wrought by Christ in the resurrection. The issue is not that the world is so evil that Christians must be anti-world. Rather, it is that the resurrection of Christ has actualized the reality of true authentic humanity so utterly that we cannot settle for supporting anything less.

Stringfellow on the Resurrection

Posted by on February 16, 2009 2 comments

“Christ’s resurrection is for men and for the whole of creation, including the principalities of this world. Through the encounters between Christ and the principalities and between Christ and death, the power of death is exhausted. The reign of death and, within that, the pretensions sovereignty over history of the principalities is brought to an end in Christ’s resurrection. He bears the fullness of their hostility toward him; he submits to their condemnation; he accepts their committal of himself to death, and in his resurrection he ends their power and the power they represent. Yet the end of the claims of the principalities to sovereignty is also the way in which these very claims are fulfilled in Christ himself. The claim of a nation, ideology, or other principality to rule history, though phony and futile, is at the same time an aspiration for salvation, a longing for the reality which does indeed rule history. In the same event in which the pretension of the principality is exposed and undone, how and in whom salvation is wrought and disclosed and demonstrated. In Christ the false lords of history, the principalities, are shown to be false; at the same time, in Christ the true Lord of history is made known. In Christ is both the end and fulfillment for all principalities, for all men, and for all things.”

– William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience (Euegene, OR: Cascade Books, 2006, 73)

The Apocalypse of Christ as Reverse Recapitulation

Posted by on July 23, 2008 12 comments

Recapitulation is one of the earliest theological ways of conceptualizing the nature of Christian soteriology. In this conceptuality the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, in some sense take all created reality into the person of Jesus, and thus into the life of God, transposing it into a modality of communion in the Trinitarian life of God. What is crucial about recapitulation is to see that it posits the whole event of the Messiah as a sort of microcosm of true worldly reality which, in the midst of the false reality of sin, lives out the truth of redeemed reality, thereby translating created reality out of the false reality of sin and into the new reality of beatitude and koinonia in the Holy Spirit, the very field of God’s own Triune love.

This notion of salvation as recapitulation remains, I think an indispensable one for Christian theology. However, I wonder if there are other modes of conceptualization which would allow us to explore the richness of salvation even further, while still remaining within the thought-world of a theology of recapitulation. If there is a problem with recapitulation, it seems to me that it is the problem of reducing Christ to a sort of microcosmic repetition of created reality which then absorbs us by virtue of his sinless perfection. In other words, recapitulation can come to sound like simply saying that Christ re-performs the human drama the way it should have been originally done by Adam, rather than seeing Christ as apocalyptically irrupting into the human drama of sin in all its brokenness and dissolution and miraculously purging, purifying, and reconstituting it.

This description clearly casts recapitulation in its most simplistic light, and I do not mean to so characterize its Irenaen form by any stretch of the imagination. However, what I do hope to do is point us toward a theology of recapitulation with a slightly (but critically) different cadence. Rather than seeing Christ as the microcosm in whom the history of humanity is re-performed, I suggest we should see the biblical history of Israel and the nations, as preverberations, if you will, of Christ’s apocalyptic recreation of the world in the event of death and resurrection. Such a theology of recapitulation would see the apocalypse of Christ as the macrocosom, the mesoform within which created reality has its being and freedom.  Christ does not so much recapitulate humanity’s past so as to re-render it in perfected form; rather the past acts of Yahweh constitute prevenient events of Christ’s apocalypse, being retroactive recapitulations, or perhaps what we could call precapitulations of Christ’s future, which is to say, the resurrection. The reality of Christ is not a re-performance of a broken past, rather the past is a proleptic pre-performance of the Trinitarian future of absolute freedom.

What we have here is a sort of recapitulation in reverse. The past events of the history of salvation that are determined and constituted by their ordering towards the end which is the Trinitarian epiphany of the eschatological Messiah. This is, of course, the grounding of a decidedly eschatological ontology. The being of things is located, not in their protology, but in their teleology. We are what we are because of what we are destined in Christ to become. Our past, both as individuals and as co-humanity, is a precapitulation in progress, a reversed beginning, a primordial death longing for eschatological resurrection which we taste in the irruptions of the future which constitute the life of the church: Word, Water, Wine, and Bread.

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