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Flannery O'Connor and Rural Pentecostal Ecclesiology

2009-02-08T21:58:00.000-08:00

Formatting drops in blogspot. If you're actually interested in this, you may attend the session in Oregon next month, or I can just e-mail the file.
“Temple of the Holy Ghost: The Spirit in the Works of Flannery O’Connor”
Religion and Culture Interest Group
By Dallas J. Gingles, Perkins School of Theology: Southern Methodist University
Presented at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies

In the work of Flannery O’Connor existential angst is fished out of the reader, and if necessary, dredged out without remorse. The reader is assaulted by stories, images, words that feel flung, hurled, mercilessly unrelenting in their appointed task. Instead of finding oneself caught in nihilistic narcissism, this confrontation with the self and the world, is a confrontation with God and the way the world should be made in God’s redemption.
Flannery O’Connor brought this world of God to bear in the world in which she lived sometimes with a single word and sometimes with a violent act of unmitigated gall. O’Connor was a single, female, Caucasian, Roman Catholic, southern novelist, living and writing in rural Georgia during the middle of the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, especially aware of the racial issues of the time (and of the current time as well), and suffering with systemic lupus erythematosus. These facts set the stage for the stage she sets in her fiction, and her other writings. However, her work stands in traditions and practices that require explication that can only be truly absorbed by absorbing her work itself.
The specific question that this paper addresses is where does the reader see imagery of the Holy Spirit within O’Connor’s work and the possibilities these images afford Pentecostals, especially within the rural setting to re-imagine their ecclesiology. The task is partly literary criticism (a task I will, for a large part, rely on others to “get right,” who are better suited for the job) and partly theological reflection from sociological, pneumatological, and ecclesiological perspectives. These will overlap within the course of the paper in an attempt to “read” O’Connor and not just her fiction. This is important for the present purposes not least because she saw herself as offering something beyond her fiction that was also, and perhaps most deeply held, within her fiction. Her idea that, “the fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula,” gives a good starting point for understanding her vision. There are three overlapping areas in which the reader “sees” the Spirit within O’Connor: truth and (telling), the action of grace (especially in the “grotesque”) and ontology.
TRUTH AND TELLING
O’Connor was an unashamed Catholic. Her “bed time reading” was the Summa Theologica, and her theological engagement was further shaped by the current theologians of her day. George Kilcourse’s work on O’Connor’s theological influences; his understanding of “kerygmatic theology” within her work, and the comparisons to both Guardini, and thus Karl Barth, become deeply important in rightly approaching her work. While some regard a theological reading of O’Connor as misdirected, Kilcourse’s ability to demonstrate the theological influences on O’Connor becomes invaluable.
Resisting the discursive slide into to the (re)constructive Thomist work of Bruce Marshall, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, et. al., and the epistemological considerations intrinsically in any discussion of Thomistic thought, for current purposes, O’Connor’s own understanding of her Thomistic thought is best summed up in a series of letters to her longtime correspondent “A,” in which she defends Thomas, the Catholic church, herself against the accusation of “fascism,” and eventually explains herself in these simple terms,
“…you are making me more of a Thomist than I ever was before and an Aristotelian where I never was before. I am one, of course, who believes that man is created in the image and likeness of God. I believe that all creation is good but that what has free choice is more completely God’s image than what does not have it…”

She completes this sentence with another reference to Guardini, and it is specifically from this reference that Kilcourse develops his understanding of her “Christic imagination,” and thus her “proclamation” theology.
Put simply, O’Connor is by her own definition a “Christian Realist.” This leads to two overlapping ideas of the Holy Spirit and “truth.”
The first is the classical Thomist idea that anyone speaking truth speaks from the Spirit. St. Thomas’ acceptance of Aristotle, and his Christian development of the philosopher’s thought, grounded in the “realism” of the world created by God reflecting the truth in “reason” no less than faith, gives her the ability to write and live in a world that is inherently flawed while living into a world that is remade in God’s image. The truth is not static. The truth is in the telling.
This is the “prophetic” in O’Connor; In her own words, the prophet is a “realist of distances,” and this realism proclaims the truth of what is with a steadiness in the “dirt” of the real world, while proclaiming the world as it is becoming, which she describes as “the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.” Kilcourse rightly likens this understanding of truth and truth-telling prophetic proclamation to the work of Walter Brueggemann, especially The Prophetic Imagination. This prophetic speech is directly proportionate to the reality to which it attests, and every “prophetic” character in O’Connor is obsessed with “the truth,” as most often evidenced in the symbolism of the eyes, and of seeing. For O’Connor herself, vision and speech are interrelated: “Fiction writing is very seldom a mater of saying things; it is a matter of showing things.” This truth in the telling approach with the “blind imagination” quickly draws the Pentecostal into the Acts 2 narrative, in which the gift of tongues allows the gathered to “in our own languages…hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” O’Connor embodies her own prophetic vision of a realist of distances; she stands in, captures, and shows the world as it is by telling, while showing again the action of grace in the same distorted spaces.
Distortion and “the grotesque” are considered ad nauseum in all critical considerations of O’Connor’s work, and she considered the grotesque in her work, and the outside fascination with it in several essays. It is this propensity towards the grotesque, especially within the southern novelist, that O’Connor described as “seekers and describers of the real,” while explaining that “the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.” She continues, “the Southern writer is forced from all sides to make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets.” It is the aim of fiction to push, not just beyond, but into reality for the sake of mystery, and the grotesque exposes the reality of mystery.
This grotesque, and all that it enjoins to “show” the truth, gives more than a hint to the work of the Spirit within O’Connor’s corpus. In her most direct reference to the “Holy Ghost,” she states without precursor, “I’m busy with The Holy Ghost. He is going to be a water-stain – very obvious but the only thing possible.” According to O’Connor, when you can assume that your audience does not hold “the same beliefs you do,” “you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing your shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
In this overt language, these large and startling figures, the truth-telling act, the truth is brought into being. This “God-talk” creates space for the action of grace, and the human figures she so richly draws, as free characters mostly resisting grace, requires the violence of grace to bring the character into God’s world.
This is the Pentecostal vision writ large and startling. The work of the Spirit is embracing, multifaceted, and without prejudice to culture and place: the work of the Spirit is the work of incarnation. Incarnation is the work of identity, both of the individual, and the community, and the convergence therein. The coming of the Spirit gives the church new identity that takes the shape of prophetic speech. This identity remakes the individuals present at the coming of the Spirit; they hear and are remade by acceptance of the Spirit’s message. The “violence” of grace in these spaces of truth-telling comes in the remaking of the social order, the eschatological promise of the Kingdom of God in the spaces of oppression and empire, and in O’Connor’s work this is most clearly seen, as she puts it, in
“some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it…It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.”
ACTION AND GRACE
For O’Connor’s characters actions of grace take place in ways that are “both in character and beyond character,” and it in this way that her work is overtly incarnational. Her ability to capture “mystery” with “manners” is reflected in the linguistic constructs, which identifies her characters with their certain place within the southern culture, and their actions as action within and beyond that place.
Gestures of grace are the spaces in the story where the Spirit brings the message of God to the characters in “the territory of the devil,” and the truth-telling within the very real place of space and time, liberates the oppressed from the bondages that hold them. Rather than a simple thought about the bondages and limits of human freedom, O’Connor is deeply committed to the freedom of complexity, and the ensuing complexities of human bondage. She is committed to this in the reality of her audience, not just her characters. She identifies several times the “air we breathe” as that of hopeless nihilism, and modernist unbelief, and this is the audience to whom she is most concerned to speak.
For the Pentecostal reader, the ability to incarnate is immediately seen as the work of the Spirit within time and space, and the direct functionality of language in the land of the other is directly the story of Acts 2, especially when the speaker is a “freak,” is “grotesque,” and more when the truth-teller is “still able to recognize” freaks and the grotesque. This is obvious in the “grotesque” of the Acts 2 narrative, in the “drunkenness,” “blood, fire, and pillars of smoke,” in the “terrible, and awesome day of the Lord,” with the visions upheld, and upended from the prophet Joel. The Spirit comes in this way, not another. The work of grace, and of the Spirit – the work of revelation is violent, messy, dirty, and transformative.
The Spirit of Christ is the Spirit of the grace of the cross, and O’Connor’s God is not distant, not absent. Indeed, “the central Christian mystery: that it has for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for” is a statement of such radical faith in the work of God in the world, to the point of death that it significantly anticipates the theme of the central works of Jürgen Moltmann: The Crucified God. There is no event in the whole of history as grotesque and real as the cross and the resurrection. The kerygmatic theologian confesses this without reservation, and in continuous refrain, “Therefore let all the house of Israel know beyond a doubt that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.”
Confession and proclamation are actions on their own, but the proclamation – the prophetic truth-telling – also brings into process the further, and tangible, actions of grace. O’Connor’s ability to incarnate the proclamation in language, symbol, story is also incarnated in those stories as actions that are overly aware of the current milieu in which they take place. The most obvious of these realities within O’Connor’s work is the issue of race and poverty.
For the purposes of this paper the issue of race will be considered in relation to the understanding of “convergence” as the work of the Spirit – an action of grace.
O’Connor wrote two masterful short stories on the issue of race. “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” “The Artificial Nigger” was O’Connor’s favorite of her stories; “she would read the story to herself over and over, laughing at the funny parts. She pronounced it ‘probably the best thing I’ll ever write.’” The story “really is a profound work” but, “ingenious as it is, the ending is disconcerting.” Her own racism obscures the more profound practices of the Civil Rights movement, and this story falls prey to that racism upon further reading, and especially in light of her personal correspondence.
“Everything That Rises Must Converge” does not. The story does not fall apart for exactly the reasons explicated by Elie: she writes “with one eye on the end of time and the other on the state of Georgia, A.D. 1961…she took no position on integration or race relations generally. Rather, she looked past the immediate conflict over integration to dramatize one of the tense encounters through which racial progress would come about.
The ability to capture this existential anxiety within the minds of the two, white, protagonists, stems from the ability to see, as “a realist of distances” while struggling within the real space and time of the life/lives surrounding her. The title of the story is taken directly from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and is a theological statement that she is making her own by dramatizing, “showing,” the manners of the south, progressing, however slowly, towards the convergence that will be in the life of God. This takes place in the story, by the literal “rising” of persons off of seats in a bus, and the convergence of the races in a “grotesque” scene of violence, in which one of the protagonists accepts his “moment of grace” in the action of movement towards his mother, all the while having attempted on his own, the work of grace between the races, in his own self-satisfied pride, which blinds him to the real work of grace. Quoting Elie again, “Now more than ever she saw a human life as ‘something under construction’ and the grotesque not as a touch of evil but as a sign of the working of God’s grace.” Life under construction is the active work of the Spirit within humanity. This is the ontological reality of the interplay between the Spirit and human.
ONTOLOGY
The life of the Spirit within her attention to racism is indeed the convoluted life of humans “under construction.” O’Connor took very seriously the work of Jacques Maritan, that “An artist does not need to be holy, only to be a good artist; the artistic calling is no less a calling than, say, the priesthood or the life of poverty, which means that the artist serves God most faithfully by being a good artist.” It is in this way that her characters, like Graham Greene’s, are “purified by…religious anguish, a character who, in effect, has sinned his way to God.”
The life of the Spirit is for humans a life of freedom, choice, and the grace of God within the grotesque of their existence. While, the ability to “be a good artist,” without being “holy,” might lead to a bifurcated anthropology, separating the lived life from the artistic life, it does not invalidate the prophetic vision of truth seeking and truth telling that her characters embody as well as any other. Indeed, an anthropology that cannot make space for those who have “sinned their way to God,” is an anthropology with a dull sense of the Spirit’s action within a cosmos where good and evil exist together and God is the only “character” who rightly sorts through the one while culling out the other.
The Spirit’s ability to save in and through sin is, in O’Connor’s world, broad, multilayered, colored, and not constrained to one-dimensional statements. The soteriological confession of Jesus as Lord comes in the most unexpected of ways – the Spirit’s drawing of the sinner and saint to the confession looks like blasphemy, murder, injustice, pride, and all number of other sins, and in this way the action of grace is one “in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.” The murderer is able to look at the self-righteous grandmother and in the stark violence of brutal murder confess, “Jesus thrown everything off balance.” The prophet’s inability to be rid of “the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, and the unprompted rising of the sun as “a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood…mashing the side of her face into the crucifix,” and the “enduring chill” all bring a transformation of life, and its existence to the characters struggling towards eternity.
Remaking characters in light of their conversion does not always nor even often look like their remaking in the image of Jesus. Instead, most of the conversions make the person into the person they were always meant to be, and struggling against. Their being is affirmed as the special love of God in making them who they are. The grotesque functions in this way. It shows the distorted being for what it is, and the offer of grace to those characters, “Christ haunted” and in need of the Spirit’s ability to make them whole.
Kilcourse describes O’Connor’s work in terms close to this, by comparing her work with “the Franciscan tradition and spirituality…the ‘this-ness’ or distinctiveness that gives everything in creation its unique identity.” O’Connor, he states, “does the same by insisting on the union of imagination and reason: ‘For [the artist], to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself…It is to intrude up on the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.’”
As this ontos of the character is remade in light of the cross and resurrection of Christ, the violence suffered by him, and the violence of grace to “bear away the kingdom of heaven,” (as O’Connor described, “the violence is directed inward,” because, “she understood well how ‘human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and all change is painful.’” ), the overlapping pieces of her work come together. The realism, or this-ness of her characters, marred, grotesque, poor, and violent, are all made in the image of Christ and suffer in a world where he suffered. The action of grace comes to them both from the actions surrounding them, and an “action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected…both in character and beyond character.” This direct contact with a moment or space of the action of grace remakes the character into the person they are by the confession of the reality of the world as it is, that is, the world of God, and the world where Christ is present in and through suffering to remake, not just themselves, but the whole of existence. O’Connor shows this with the deft incarnational action of language, story, and what she called “manners,” to “draw large and startling characters.”
O’Connor herself described reading fiction in this way:
“Reading the story is at first rather like standing a foot away from an impressionistic painting, then gradually moving back until it comes into focus. When you reach the right distance, you suddenly see that a world has been created—and a world in action—and that a complete story has been told, by a wonderful kind of understatement. It has been told more by showing what happens around the story than by touching directly on the story itself.”

This understanding of fiction also works in understanding O’Connor’s world, both the world in which she lived, and the world(s) she created. This multifaceted realism of her work and her life gives the interpreter of O’Connor, the ability to engage her work on several levels. To this point we have conflated O’Connor’s own thinking with the larger themes of her fictional works and have returned to the place from which we started. That is, there are three overlapping areas in which the reader “sees” the Spirit within O’Connor: truth (telling), the action of grace, and ontology.
TOWARDS A RURAL PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY
From these three pieces, we now turn to the world in which we find ourselves, and will attempt to engage O’Connor, as a rural Catholic author, in sketching the contours of a rural Pentecostal ecclesiology.
O’Connor did not overtly mention Pentecostals often, and never stated anything close to a Pentecostal ecclesiology. In fact, one of the only overt references to Pentecostals in her work comes in the form of her iconic humor, as the little girl, who is the protagonist of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” describes two teenage boys, “they’re sixteen and they got [sic] a car. Somebody said they were both going to be Church of God preachers because you don’t have to know nothing [sic] to be one.”
Miroslav Volf’s construction of “distance and belonging” captures the space O’Connor inhabits for Pentecostals and their ecclesiology. She is an outsider, being a Catholic, but with the prophetic vision to capture the language, cadence, rhythms of belief and speech of the Pentecostals. Her prophet characters in The Violent Bear It Away, are the most developed in this direction, and her own statement about the elder directly address this point:
The old man is very obviously not a Southern Baptist, but an independent, a prophet in the true sense. The true prophet is inspired by the Holy Ghost, not necessarily by the dominant religion of his region. Further, the traditional Protestant bodies of the South are evaporating into secularism and respectability and are being replaced on the grass roots level by all sorts of strange sects that bear not much resemblance to traditional Protestantism—Jehovah’s Witnesses, snake-handlers, Free Thinking Christians, Independent Prophets, the swindlers, the mad, and sometimes the genuinely inspired. A character has to be true to his own nature and I think the old man is that. He was a prophet, not a church-member. As a prophet, he has to be a natural Catholic.

Reworking the vision of the world from O’Connor, towards a rural Pentecostal ecclesiology, we will proceed in reverse order: ontology, the action of grace, and truth-telling.
The church’s being is the direct work of the Spirit. The dynamic of the Spirit and the gathered congregation demands introspection, what O’Connor calls the “violence directed inward,” in the attempt to “bear away” the kingdom. This self-reflection is two-fold in ecclesiological practices: the congregation and the self.
The congregation’s attempt to reflect inwardly is the Biblical demand to look outward. For the Pentecostal congregation this should be especially true. The movement outward begins with the coming of the Spirit at the Day of Pentecost. The space of gathering was immediately for the sustained engagement of the other as witnesses to the graceful and refreshing work of Christ on the cross, and in God’s resurrection of him.
Thus, the question is, what do we offer to God, each other, and the world in the way in which we are gathered? The Spirit has made us the church for the sake of the world, and the Pentecostal reflection on this ontology of mission is many times eclipsed with the introspection for the sake of the self, instead of the world.
The ontological work of the Spirit is in the making a people from and for God, and to the world. The making of the people (character) in light of O’Connor, is to make of them what they always were meant to be. For the Pentecostal impulse this is natural, as a group that was and still is self-defined as a restorationist movement, attempting to re-capture something fresh and life giving from “the early church.” The differences are that the attempt to restore, have in large part become “grotesque” in their own being. The capitulation to culture, the trend toward violence, the loss of place as “realists of distances,” especially in eschatological concerns, choosing the system of eschatology that does not need the realism of Jesus – grounded in the dirt of Earth, eagerly awaiting the righting of the world, redeemed back to God – instead wishing to escape into the clouds, makes the prophetic element of the Pentecostal ontology dull and without the ability to either “criticize or energize.” Corrective to this is the “incarnational” form of being and speaking that O’Connor demonstrates.
Incarnational living is the crux of ecclesiology faithful to vision and work of Jesus. The attempt to make small and trite the message of Jesus as Lord makes the gathered community powerless in a world living against “the grain of the universe.” This has been the crippling effect of capitulation to culture, especially in rural congregations. The message of Jesus has sounded too much like the message of the 1950’s North American culture – a culture in which the “normalcy” of the world is within the “nuclear family,” and traditional values. This does not take into account the reality of sin in the people who have sustained systems of oppression, ironically within the church culture that is being propagated.
O’Connor’s characters are not asked to be perfect. They are not expected to even be good, and the prophetic criticism she offers to the modern church is that they have found that the “way to avoid Christ is to avoid sin.” This is an especially damning critique to rural Pentecostal congregations, as the people who constitute their world are the poor, oppressed, and the hurting. The inability to offer grace in tangible ways, instead desiring nostalgic interpretations of sociological constructs that substitute for the “wild and ragged figure” of Jesus, unattached to any sense of “normalcy” that requires sterile perfection, makes the being of the church within these spaces of oppression weak, and causes the downplay of the prophetic proclamation.
Personal sin, confession, repentance, the baptism of the Holy Ghost, sanctification, and the promise of heaven in the afterlife, function as the most basic of elements of, and in many cases, also the most developed theology of rural Pentecostal theology. This, however, leads to the single dimension reflections on sin and judgment, and the systemic issues of justice and mercy fall blithely by in the pursuit of heaven. Without succumbing to the temptation to make overstated ad hominem criticisms, this leads to an unfortunately abnormal form of Gnosticism, in which the goal of the Christian is to escape the humanity in which they have been brought close to God.
Especially helpful, in contrast, is oddly enough, an editorial introduction to The Hauerwas Reader, by William Cavanaugh. “Ph.D.s are often designed to educate people out of their particular commitments…imagining that the academic’s task is complete once he or she has located every position in its proper category. Hauerwas has contrarily claimed that being a Texan means to have an identity sufficiently particular to resist such universalization.”
Understanding this situatedness in light of the eschatological confession, that is, if Jesus is Lord of all, in all, for all, then it follows that Jesus is Lord of specificity, not just universalization. The intent to universalize is in fact the attempt to become lord, and as such is idolatrous. Epistemic humility is the robust grace to make God God, rather than attempting to be the god of truth. The ontos of the rural congregation is formed, in the same eschatological confession of the church at large, “Jesus is Lord,” and the peculiarity of the rural congregation in relation to the larger world, both urban and global, gives the unique ability to proclaim the lordship of Christ, while also tempting those in the rural setting to make easier claims on the truth because of the resistance to outside influence and ideas. Epistemic humility and epistemic pride are ironically closely linked. This is why the church is formed in the confession of Christ as Lord.
If this kerygmatic confession lies at heart of the ontology of the church, it is specifically in the eschatological nature of the confession that the church offers to the world a peaceful resistance to the dominant discourses of life and reality. This however, is made most real in the eschatological confession that resists pushing God away from the grotesque spaces of the world into only the realm beyond history or into future reign of the heavenly kingdom. Instead, it is the identity of the people situated and humble, and thus able to accept God into their midst by the eschatological confession that Jesus is Lord because of what he did in cross and resurrection. Thus the dogmatic claims are lively and intrusive to the systems of injustice, and found not outside of, nor in escape from, but shockingly in, the grotesque spaces of life, death, resurrection, and the hope that what God did for Jesus, God will indeed do for the cosmos.

CONCLUSION
Flannery O’Connor confesses this redemptive work of God coming in and through the “misfits” and “prophets;” their lives reflecting the very real spaces of their time and place. It is the ability to identify with and listen to these characters – the neighbor, the convict, the high school coach, the plumber, preacher, pagan, and unemployed – that shapes the congregation into a compassionate people, capable of resisting injustice, racism, hatred, violence, corrupt systems of power. The cultural norms of rural communities retain the narrative shape of earlier peoples, where grandfathers, fathers, and sons all sit and repeat the stories of family and friends, while grandmothers, mothers, and daughters do the same. At the same time, there are families without these generational narratives and experiences, in not small way, as a direct result of poverty and the resultant need to work multiple jobs. If the church is to be both prophetic, and graceful in action, it hears and accepts as its own, not just the worldview of the former people groups, but also the latter, carving room for the dominated to speak prophetically to the dominant.
The face-value understanding of the work of Christ on the cross is ironically a valuable tool in this rural ecclesiology, because it is specifically in the identification of the wild and ragged figure of a man who thrown [sic] everything off balance, that a community of believers can re-engage their larger confession to critique inwardly the self assurance of their confessions, noticing that the figure they confess critiques even their own confession and interpretation of his work in the world. This is ecclesiology for “the hard of hearing and almost blind” – prophetic speech shouted from the margins, and large and startling figures of grace and action reshaping the congregation’s own being.

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____. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon, 1996.

Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Wright, N.T. The New Testament and the People of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 1. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.

Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004.

Yoder, John Howard. "Armaments and Eschatology." Studies in Christian Ethics 1 (1988): 43-61.

____. Body Politics: Five Practices of Christian Community Before the Watching World. Scottdale: Herald Press, 2001.

____. The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism. Scottdale: Herald Press, 1971.

____. The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2d ed. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994.

____. The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright, 1:53-64. Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994.

Yong, Amos. Beyond the Impasse: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Religions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

____. The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

On Politics, part 2

2008-09-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

To be quite honest, the previous blog about abortion is a conversation I don’t even really care to have. I’ve heard about abortion from the right, left and everything middle and extreme all my life. From friends who got arrested for protesting, to West Wing episodes that centered around “a woman’s right to choose.” All in all, I wrote it as a zip cord into a larger conversation about the way of Christianity, and the place/role of government.
As a quick primer in the discussion I’ve been having in my head/with my friends for a long while now, there are at least two competing views on ethics. The first rests quite squarely in the modernistic (I’m using that as a semi-technical term – see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity) view of pragmatism. Here, we find that the most honest way of governance is that which, in utilitarian terms, brings the most good to the most people most of the time. Contra this, there are “virtue” ethicists who, in the Christian world, wish to “story” the people of faith so as to live in a way that demonstrates their real, social, tangible “being” as people of the cross – this as a practice of faithfulness, without structured concern for the results. For instance: we love our enemies because this is a faithful practice of following Jesus; if that takes us to the point of death, that is vow we’ve taken at baptism. Of course, there are times when, by following “the grain of the universe” we expect the faithful action to result in God’s redemptive work, so that violence always breeds violence, and fails to redeem a hurting world, but enemy love can, and will redeem a broken world as our “better angels” have shown us time and time again: from Jesus to Ghandi, Corrie Ten Boom, to Dr. King.
The problem then follows, how does one choose, first simply to exercise the “right” to vote, and secondly, to navigate the muddied waters of political positioning to find a candidate for whom they can vote.
My current thought on the subject is that the answer lies somewhere within how one defines the “role” of government. Being raised, as I said last time, as a good Evangelical boy, brought up to think that Reagan was the best president (perhaps ever), the role of government was to stay small, and stay out of our business. While this is a view shared by millions, the problem is very, very simple. We need government. There has yet to be a society in which government did not exist. And, if we think that the Regan years (for example) were years where the government did a good job of “staying small and staying out,” we would do well to consider what that meant to fruit farmers, parents, and priests in the southern hemisphere of the Americas, not to mention the millions of poor on the streets of our own nation at the time. From this “preface” you might’ve guessed already, that I have a slightly different view of the “role” of government. Here it is.
Government exists, not to save the world or bring about the Kingdom of God. Quite contrarily, “the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdoms of our God, and of his Christ…” As Christians our allegiance and hope is squarely, only, and always in God. Our story is caught up in God’s story, and our lives have meaning only as God gives meaning to history. Thus all kingdoms, all democracies, all thrones, powers, and competing stories, are idolatrous, and the promise at baptism, and the hope at the communion table, is simply, and robustly, a hope that all governments everywhere will be undone, and that God “will be all in all.” However, we live in the actual “stuff of earth,” and the government(s) we have should do as much good as they can while doing as little harm as they can. They exist to support transit, commerce (without harm), defense (from our own injustices and those of the “other”), and, in short, a common shared space in which life can continue.
Thus we vote, not as virtue people, but as people convinced that killing brown people for oil, refusing to talk to our enemies, stockpiling weapons that will take out the entire Asian continent, and ignoring our friends and family in poverty and on the street is cutting against the grain of the universe, endangering the world, and simply doesn’t do the simple utilitarian work of government well. As I see it, those who wish, perhaps quite rightly, to be faithful to their “virtue ethics” have no choice but to refrain from voting as an “eschatological” protest to the powers that be: powers that compete for allegiance, and that are a direct challenge to the Lordship of Christ. Those who can see their way clear to view the role of government as one that they can help shape for the neglected, to be a voice for the voiceless, to inspire and lead the better parts of our common humanity, are thus forced to reckon with the things that are best for our continued life together as deeply interwoven people. Foreign policy should be the number one issue that concerns us all. It’s not safe for the world for us to be imperialists. It’s not good for the continuing story of history and humanity for those who consume four times the amount as the rest of the world put together to be always strong and never humble. History’s mistakes, from Persia to Greece, from Rome to the British Empire, from the Spanish conquests to fascist Germany teach us that when our self-interests blind us to the hurt of those we’ve oppressed in the name of low cost, and “small” government, we’re only steps away from evils for which God will one day call us to account in the most dire of ways.
Our national myths of innocence mock us in the faces of Native Americans, Iraqis, interned Japanese, African slaves, and the homeless little girl around the corner. Our selfishness plays itself out in the desire to have one or two percent less taxes while thousands of children die without health care each year from preventable and treatable illnesses. Our outdated fear of distilled “Marxism” drives us to be “strong” in the face of our enemies, and weak in the face of our inner demons. To put it straight, both our virtue ethics and our enlightenment based utilitarianism demand that we care for the weak, the poor, the impoverished, the hurting, and the voiceless. This is why I will vote this year. I won’t look for a government to save the world. I have a God who has taken time to do that in a dying poor, subjugated, impoverished prophet from Nazareth 2000 years ago. I will look for a government that will make it more, instead of less, possible to continue our shared space as humans, appealing to “our better angels,” instead of our worst fears; calling us to care not just for our “common defense,” but for our common humanity.

Why I Will Not Be Voting "Pro-Life"

2008-08-31T11:37:00.001-07:00

31 August 2008
“Why I Won’t Be Voting ‘Pro-Life”

The conflation of politics and Christian faithfulness has been vitriolic, persistent and death-dealing since the deliberate, power-motivated assassination of Jesus of Nazareth about 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, the followers of this non-violent zealot quickly adapted, and even commandeered the methods of the people who killed him, choosing to mesh the life of their messiah and the lifestyle of his killers, failing radically to follow the Messiah, and succeeding with the basest of human triumph in the imperialistic, patriotic, and bloody way of being in a world of hatred and injustice.
This being the case, and Constantinism (the action of “baptizing” the state to do the will of God) being among the first heresies, I would like to reflect on the place, if any, of voting in the life of the followers of Jesus. For an extended reflection the place of “conscientious abstention” see Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections for Not Voting, http://wipfandstock.com/store/Electing_Not_to_Vote_Christian_Reflections_on_Reasons_for_Not_Voting . Being almost completely convinced of this political stance of the church (see John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Church Before the Watching World), I could not in good conscience vote during the 2004 Presidential Election. I had, as a good Evangelical boy, voted for the first Presidential election that I could in 2000, obviously for George W. Bush, and remember watching with great anticipation the night of the election as the votes were tallied and re-tallied.
Having subsequently been exposed to the larger scope of the Christian tradition – perhaps most notably, the Anabaptists – I became more and more convinced that power in the gospel is not power held, power gained, or power seized, but is in the most robust of ways – the cross – power relinquished, power shunned, and loved given through the suffering of a “Crucified God.” This over against the most imperialistic foreign policy since the Reagan attempt to colonize space, and far more actualized than even that, more than convinced me that to vote again for the Bush administration was in stark contrast to the self-giving love of God, that in the person of Jesus called us to enemy love. In short, I had become a pacifist, not for the fun of it, not because it was popular, but because only in this practice could I hold onto the faith that had been the core of my self since birth. I could no longer believe in God, Jesus, the church, or anything without a real, lived and fleshly belief that the church was really called by God to speak prophetically to the powers that be by being something that the powers that be could not: a people so politically structured by and around the cross of Jesus that love of enemy was not only a way to death, but also a way of life, real life – for everyone, including real enemies.
This for me means that no one is pro-life who still holds to the “myth of redemptive violence,” including war, the death penalty, and any type of action that seeks to actively take the life another. Not only this, but the peacemaking that followers of Jesus are directly called to (Matthew 5.9), means that in a world of very real injustices, we are not allowed to sit and wait for the eschaton, but are to actively make peace between victims, the victimizers, the oppressed and oppressors, and to actively recognize where we are the victimizers and oppressors. Ours is a witness of repentance for violence and injustice everywhere, and a hope in a God who makes all things right. With this very real injustice, the deep divides between rich and poor, the inability for many millions of people to make a living wage, and a rising poverty level; a direct correlation between economic factors and the number of abortions, I became convinced that a politically powerful response to abortion in the United States, was not faithful to the life and teachings of Jesus, and that it was pragmatically a terrible answer to a large and systemic question.
This has morphed into at least a threefold reasoning why I will not vote “pro-life” (as defined by the politically powerful, especially including those of the “religious right”):
1. Abortion is a systemic question from the start. Abortion can never be thought of rightly by the Christian until issues of poverty, inequality, continual racism, injustice, abuse, neglect, and the place of women have been thought of in line with the work of the Spirit of Jesus to remake the cosmos in the image of God have been addressed with boldness, honesty, humility and hope.
2. I do not know how to define “life,” much less when it begins. Psyche, nous, the real, physicality of “life” classically defined, understood differently in the modern, and post-modern worldviews, make the “self” a question addressed by scholars, seminarians, peasants, postmasters, union workers, and the unemployed. This being the case, it does not fall to the scientist or senator to define what life is and when it begins. If this baseline space of shared humanity is defined by the powerful then the hope that the church holds in the personhood of God, and in the continued work of God’s Spirit within the world is endangered. Ex Nihilo: “out of nothing,” God called the life of the cosmos. God’s good Spirit enlivens the whole world, and the life of humans is classically thought to be the crowning achievement of this good creation. Thus only God defines, makes, and has the enlivening grace to re-make the creation to be the “new creation.”
3. It won’t make any difference. Abortions have not decreased in eight years of what was the darling administration of the religious right. Instead the deaths of countless thousands of children worldwide, by destructive foreign policy, eerily reminiscent of “manifest destiny” has only been added to the mounting totals of abortions, both early and late term. This, combined with a an ecclesiology that is concessionary in that it concedes its method and manner of being – its ontology – to the empire by needing the validation of the state to do the work of the kingdom as it understands that work to be, draws the church away from its political witness and prophetic power by tying more and more closely with power held, power grasped, and humility abandoned for an imperialistic self-understanding of what is good, right, and salvific for the world, by imposing that will on it (a perfect fit for a foreign policy that believes that democracy can be enforced). This is what Brennan Manning rightly called “conversion by concussion.” (See, The Ragamuffin Gospel).

If these are the reasons I will not vote “pro-life,” I owe a conversation, at least, to the place of the military. For now I will table that conversation. If anyone is interested in this little piece of writing and cares to start a dialog around the topic, I’m of the deepest belief that my thoughts on the place and role of the military in the topic of voting will come up shortly.
These are far from my complete thoughts on the current election cycle, the theological construction of a world gone mad with selfishness, greed, and self-love. However, I’m stopping with this. Let me know what you think.

Biden, Obama and Kerri...What I Have to Say

2008-01-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

In response to my friend's Biden blog:

I haven't said the pledge in like 4 or 5 years. But, I disagree on Obama. I think that Biden is obviously smart, and would've been a great choice, but just because Obama's track record doesn't stand up the same way isn't an instant disqualification. The fervor surrounding Obama has been in a large part based on grassroots excitement involving people who have (like myself) been disillusioned with politics as long as we can sanely remember. I think this is not too unlike JFK, who was a young upstart with problems a-plenty, but worked through that whole "Cuban Missile Crisis" thing so well that Kevin Costner decided it was worth his extreme acting abilities to immortalize it in B&W (okay so maybe the Costner argument isn't the most fool-proof).
I don't think that I'm being naive here. I listened to his DNC speech a few years ago. I listened to his speech at the Sojourners conference (which is one of the best speeches I've ever heard, by the way), and yet I don't think that everything he's saying now is exactly the same as it was then. But, then again, I think that's the very nature of American politics: eventually you have to talk like you're campaigning so that people know that, well, you're campaigning. He has been consistent on his campaign finance stances. He's connected well at the local level (my friend in Iowa said that Obama was the only visible political presence in his hometown -- Clinton had an office outside of the town) and he had been there personally like three times. He was against the war in Iraq from the beginning and still has a nuanced plan to work through the cluster-fuck it has become. His stance on health-care is as leading as any candidate (unless you want Kucinich's wack-job stances). All in all, I would say that Obama and Biden were the two closest candidates to each other.
And, if one of the detractors regarding Obama is that he sounds too much like Dr. King, then I guess I just have different ideas of what detracts. I personally think that all the presidents I've listened to over my brief 27 years (for one more month), listened far too little, and quoted that much less of what people like Dr. King have had to say.
So, I think that Obama is not only the best candidate by far, now that Biden is out of the race, but the most logical one for a supporter of Biden to move towards. And if Obama could actually talk Biden into running as V.P. I think that would be the strongest running ticket in decades.

When Comes the Child: Love Actually and the Post 9/11 Advent

2007-11-28T23:36:00.000-08:00

I posted this on xanga and myspace a year ago, but since I have this snazzy new "blogger" account so I can randomly read Kerri's musings on adolescent make-outs and spitting cobras, I decided to re-post it here this year. I could've edited it and all of that, I'm sure. But I didn't. Also, I still think about it in pretty much the same terms after a year. Hope Advent finds you living in the Peace.
-d
Advent 2007

I started this a few nights ago, and just finished it. It feels choppy and incomplete, but I was trying to keep it "blogging" length, and finish it tonight. It's still a bit long so you'll have to forgive that. I'll want to re-write it at some point, so feel free to critique. Oh, and I think I owe credit for different wordings to John Shelby Spong and Dick Cheney respectively.
Merry Christmas.
-d

I sit in the stillness of a house inhabited by one. There is a candle burning on the stove and a candle burning on the end-table next to me. A C.D. rendition of Handel's "Messiah" plays and I've just finished reading an Advent reflection by Kathleen Norris from Watch for the Light: Reading for Advent and Christmas. Outside the weather drops still after a day of a "blue norther". Christmas begs to be let in. I try, and yet as I meditate on the reality of God's coming to the world, I am struck not by trees, wreaths, or primarily by the music or burning candles, but by the movie Love Actually.

From most angles the story amounts to nothing more than an anglophile's Christmas movie extraordinaire -- it actually includes a scene with Hugh Grant caroling "Good King Wenceslas" outside a London "flat".

I consider this movie to be holiday tradition in the same vein White Christmas is that great 1940's New England postcard fare holiday tradition. Only this movie has ownership of the season's actual grace. Where Bing Crosby sings the emotion of the season, Richard Curtis gracefully extrapolates the reality of it. He doesn't shy from the hurts of life, from the witty nuance of English Comedy, or even from the overly sensitive romance of chance. But in all that, the movie is primarily about the coming of, well, love actually. And love finds its beginning and completion (both teleological and narratival) in the coming and going of a post 9/11 airport.

The movie opens in a busy holiday ridden Heathrow airport. It takes care to point out the setting as after the twin towers fell, and the security testifies in its own right to the historical placement. As the multiple stories begin to intertwine, the 9/11 reference becomes obscured, but it is important as the final scenes reflect the reality of the "Magnificant" in a way that my many church experiences have failed to do.

1^st century Palestine bares few resemblances to 21^st century airports – or 21^st century anywhere for that matter. The changes are obvious at the most casual of glances, but the similarities in life are quite real. We live in a world that is dominated. We are dominated by many ideologies, faiths, rulers, etc. But for those in the western world, those of us who wake to death tolls of a "war on terror", the domination is certain and full.

The domination of the 1^st century is well documented and the high school student should give at least a knowing nod to the names of Greece and Rome. Rome's domination and rulership was absolute and unswerving. They brought peace at the cost of the sword, and safety at the cost of life. Caesar was the lord of the world. (You can read more about this from any decent book – John Howard Yoder or N.T. Wright would be good places to start)

Jesus' birth, in short, changed the order of everything. What was weak is strong, what was strong is weak, and the poor have God as their friend. That peace was proclaimed in the angelically lit skies, according to Luke's story, is no small detail or Hallmark greeting to be passed blithely down through time. But, rather the proclamation/gospel/good-news of a new order in the world, an order marked by the self-giving of God (even to the point of a radical's death) in what someone has called "loving wastefully" – this is now the "new normalcy".

So when a few days after the towers of New York fell, and the world (by world I of course mean what every good white person means: the western world dominated by leftover "manifest destiny") scrambled to find meaning again, we became prisoners of violence and hate and exclusion. We are dominated still by rhetoric of "calling" and "freedom" (a word I believe to have absolutely no meaning left in it). We are prisoners of our own "safety", in airports, and football games, and even telephone lines, and of course in Guantanamo Bay.

Dynasties love to make the jokes (he who laughs last, etc.) They even tolerate Saturday Night Live skits that play off of their blunders. But dynasties hate to be mocked, and to have their rules flaunted. Jesus did that. Actually, as a baby Jesus just had the potential to do that, and they tried to kill him.

In the movie, after two hours of story and story convergence, the little boy's story is the final part of the dénouement. He openly and with only slight hesitation, and with a little prodding from his stepfather, flaunts national security. He takes on the empire with nothing but a running start – and wins. He does it all for a last ditch attempt to (what he knows is) love wastefully. The girl is getting on the plane. She's as good as gone. His words just can't stay unspoken; his love has to come out. Damn the police: love, not security brings freedom. For the little child with eyes, the emperor is either lying or has been lied to: he's naked and so are his subjects, and the he's still crying out loud about how great the clothes are. The child looks at the naked futility of violence and risks the "security" of a world in fear just to love, actually.

In Jesus story, Luke takes time to make a real case study of the "compare and contrast" concept. It is always the weak, the poor, the hurt, the oppressed who are protagonists, and Jesus is the "firstborn among many brethren" here. He dies to bring life, and what an idiot that makes him, the whole world thinks – and rightfully so, because the world is blinded by its claim to ownership and power. Jesus dies, and anything that dies is a failure, especially to die as a fledgling zealot leader. But Jesus' coming in obscurity, his loving wastefully, his monotonous commitment to peace in a world of oppressive violence, these things bring life when poured out.

An overweight servant to the Prime Minster, a cleaning lady who can't speak the dominate language, and little boy who has just lost his mother, but is too struck by the "total agony of being in love" to be confined by the empire, all point to the gospel of God in Jesus: "he has filled the hungry with good things, but sent the rich away empty".

The coming of Jesus and the wasteful loving of a little boy in the face of empire both show the revolution that Yoder writes about: "a new order in which men may live together in love. In his time, therefore, as in ours, the question of revolution, the judgment of God upon the present order and the imminent promise of another one, is the language in which the gospel must speak". And so I say that the story(ies) of the movie do tell us that God has come into a world of injustice and hate. But when God comes, God comes as a child. God comes and the empires of the world cleave desperately to their power, and all for nothing. God has come. God has come as a child. The world is different. A little Child will lead them. God has come as Love actually.

First One

2007-10-26T13:30:00.001-07:00

Bogger is apparently the place to be.