Marginal Christianity

From one of Bonhoeffer’s underground seminary students: “Twice [Bonhoeffer] quoted to them the words: ‘One man asks: What is to come? The other: What is right? And that,’ ” said Bonhoeffer, “ ‘is the difference between the free man and the slave.’ ” What do you think Bonhoeffer means? What does it mean for you?

Ron Rolheiser tells us to ask 3 questions of ourselves to evaluate our spiritual health: 1) Do I pray every day? 2) Am I involved with the struggle of the poor? 3) Do I have the kind of friendships in my life that move me beyond bitterness and anger? This suggests to me a trinitarian form to our spirituality: -Talk with God -Walk with Christ -Live in the Spirit If we follow two central rules for talking about the trinity to this we get the following: -such talk, walk, and life always and at the same time constitute our spiritual life, and -this talk, walk, and life cannot be separated from each other or played off against each other. This triune form of spirituality, then, constitutes our participation in the life of the triune God!

This story from Brother to a Dragonfly  by the late Will Campbell hits right at the heart of what it means to be a Christian today in race-torn America. Campbell was a maverick minister and civil rights activist. He was born and raised in Mississippi, and by the age of 17 he was ordained and preaching in local Baptist churches. He served as a medic in the Second World War, and then attended Yale divinity school. It was in the mid-1950s that he joined the Civil Rights movement. In 1957 he became the only white person to be invited by Martin Luther King to the inauguration of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in 1963 he joined King’s campaign of marches and sit-ins in Birmingham, Alabama. Campbell had a good friend named Jonathan Daniels, a 26-year-old Episcopal seminarian and fellow civil-rights worker who in August 1965 was in Lowndes County, Alabama, registering black citizens to vote. On being released from jail for “agitating” (as the local folks put ...

Racism is about skin color as much as rape is about sex. In other words, not much. Both are about power. That is, the ability to make the "other" do what one wants for their own gratification or satisfaction.

It helps to distinguish being the church being political and the church having a politic. The former may lead one to think of the church being aligned with some political party or another.   The latter, proper sense, that the church has a politic , well-explained by Lee C. Camp in his recent book Scandalous Witness. By the church having a politic, he writes, “I mean an all-encompassing manner of communal life that grapples with all the questions the classical art of politics has always asked: How do we live together? How do we deal with offenses? How do we deal with money? How do we deal with enemies and violence? How do we arrange marriage and families and social structures? How is authority mediated, employed, ordered? How do we rightfully order passions and appetites? And much more besides, but most especially add these: Where is human history headed? What does it mean to be human? And what does it look like to live in a rightly ordered human community that engenders flo...

My fb friend Paul Hinlicky gets it just right: “the ‘left-right’ binary which (a rightist) indulge(s) as vehemently as any leftist descends ultimately from the French Revolution. In my view, it is passé. In part that is the message of the ‘anarchists’ – nihilists with no positive vision of the future other than to smash the existing system. But fundamentally we need a new configuration of political options for democratic society that is not singing the same old tired songs. I am a political independent for these reasons, which is to say that I am as cynical about the Democratic Party as I am about the Republican Party. What Christian witness should be saying in this mess is that all lives in America will in fact matter when black lives in particular matter – of course that is no endorsement of the platforms or organizations that have appropriated the mantra, BLM. Thinking that (we) have to fit in with the options that are given us is precisely loss of the freedom of Christian thoug...

MATTHEW LYNCH The U.S. Justice Department  announced [last] Monday  that it will resume federal executions after a hiatus of nearly two decades. The timing of this announcement in the middle of a nation-wide cry for police reform raises questions about the motives for resuming this practice. But for many Christians, the death penalty is a biblical mandate. Many Evangelicals appeal to the Bible’s supposedly clear teaching on the death penalty to defend its ongoing place in the American justice system. Genesis 9 is key here, since it seems to teach that God “requires” humans to take the life of a murderer in exchange for their deed (9:5-6). [2] Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, the nation’s largest Christian prison-focused non-profit, declared that he now backs the death penalty on biblical grounds. Colson writes, The Noahic covenant (Gen 9) antedates Israel and the Mosaic code; it transcends Old Testament law per se and mirrors ethical legislation bindin...

We tend to assume (not unnaturally) that biblical books named after characters in the stories they tell are “heroes” in those stories. Not perfect, to be sure, but the stories about them wouldn’t be in the Bible if we weren’t supposed to find them models or exemplars for some aspect of biblical living. And most of the time that’s a good instinct. Even Job who is as daring as can be imagined in challenging God has that challenge honored and though rebuked for his arrogance ends up back in right relation to God, The narrator of Ecclesiastes accepts Qoheleth’s stringent critique of meaning and purpose in life lived “under the sun” (without God) and though he finds that critique finally inadequate never says it is wrong on its own terms or denies that God’s people may experience life as meaningless to if they attempt to live it Qoheleth’s way. Even if we live from our commitment to Yahweh and his covenant life never falls into place like a jig saw puzzle but contains seemingly endless ...

According to Theodore W. Jennings, Good News to the Poor: John Wesley’s Evangelical Economics , John Wesley was led by a passion for liberation and chief among those passions for him was what Jennings calls the “demystification of wealth.” He believed, as did Jesus that money/wealth/Mammon was a spiritual power possessed of a devilish capacity to ensnare and “damn” us as well as godly use to liberate and bless others. The sin of Ananias and Sapphira he took as an analogue to Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden as a “fall” for the New Testament church. Money, this first test of the early church, exposed its love as a primal foe of the church’s mission. Therefore, for Wesley, the love of money, even possessing excess money, is an ever-present danger to the Christian. Not every alleged financial blessing is a true one.   His late tract Thoughts Upon Methodism , begins like this: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or...

Sin is a multifaceted reality and requires an illustration that captures that multifacetedness. I suggest the image of a Russian nesting doll adapted having a string emerging from the top of the largest, outermost doll. We pull on the string a lo and behold the whole series of inner, smaller dolls emerge connected to each other by that string. -The larger, outermost doll is cosmic sin; attached to it and coming out of it next is environmental sin, sin against the creation, our necessary habitat and home. Emerging next and connected to the cosmic and environmental sins, is systemic sin, the patterned/habitual/institutional/political/social/economic ways we oppress and repress one another. A final pull draws up the smallest, innermost doll, personal/individual sin. -This doll as a whole is named Idolatry and the interconnected nature of sin is the string that binds them, together. Every sin is always and at the same time implicated in some fashion at each of these levels....

Walker Percy writes a memorable scene in his novel The Thanatos Syndrome with this truth at its heart. It is a conversation between Dr. Tom More and a presumably mad priest, Father Smith. The old priest is now a fire-spotter for the park service and the conversation takes place in the tower he lives in. We pick up the conversation with Father Smith speaking: “Words are signs, aren’t they?” “You could say so.” “But unlike the signs out there (the trees on fire), words have been evacuated, haven’t they.?” “Evacuated?” “They don’t signify anymore.” “How do you mean?” . . . The two proceed to spar verbally until Father Smith proposes a word association exercise. “Let me turn the tables on you and give you a couple of word signs and you give me your free associations.” “Fine.” “Clouds.” “Sky, fleecy, puffy, floating, white –“ “Okay. Irish.” “Bogs, Notre Dame, Pat O’Brien, begorra –“ “Okay. Blacks.” “Blacks.” “Negroes.” “Blacks, Africa, niggers, minorit...

The figure of Nikabrik the dwarf plays an important and salutary role for those wanting to be true Narnians, of C. S. Lewis’ fiction and 21 st century Western life. Nikabrik is a dwarf, and the dwarves are “good guys” in the story he appears in Prince Caspian. They are among the “old Narnians,” created by Aslan the Great Lion Ruler of Narnia. The Lion entrusted various aspects of the life of the land to carious of his creatures. Over time, however, invaders from other lands had magically entered and gradually enslaved Narnia to their corrupt and unjust way of life. Tales and evidences of Old Narnia were systematically eliminated or trivialized or melded into New Narnian mythology, folk lore, and old wives’ tales, good only for scaring New Narnians away from any serious interest in Old Narnia. Prince Caspian is the nephew and ward of his Uncle Miraz, who unbeknownst to the young Prince led a coup to have his father, the king, killed as a part of his plot assume rule of Narn...

Can we simply do away with the concept of “race”? Craig Keen says no. Such easy dismissal of “race,” he claims, “‘race’ is in fact an invention, one made by people who were self-consciously superior to those they had for some time controlled by violent, colonial, means. But so much damage has been done by it and it has entered so deeply into the way we think and act that to pretend to be in a position to brush it casually away is to leave it in place. It will not yield so easily. (Christians) . . . everywhere are to denounce ‘whiteness,’ but that is different than pretending that it isn't there.” As Jesus said of the demonic, this kind comes out only with prayer and fasting!

I believe our problems valuing and respecting each other as people bearing different skin pigmentation has to do with our problem with God. That may seem an odd, even wrong-headed, statement to make, but let me play it out a little bit. Loving one another, which surely involves respecting and valuing others, means at bottom embracing and acting in the best interest of a person truly different from ourselves. Too often we dilute love down to embracing and caring for those who are like us. Jesus teaches us this: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.    If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again.” (Lk.6:32-34) Jesus call is for his people, following him, reach out to, embrace, and act in the best interest...

Were you there when they suffocated George? We all were. Some of us were the officers involved in subduing and mercilessly taking his life. Some of us were other cops on the scene who did nothing to stop this atrocity. Yet others of us were among the onlookers, fretting and repulsed or uncomprehending what they were seeing or silently approving or at least accepting the necessity of this (ab)use of state authority. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once made this famous comment about the church’s response to social and political evil: “In the first place it can ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e., it can throw the state back on its responsibilities. Secondly, it can aid the victims of state action. The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a s...

This writer’s testimony parallels my own in many ways. I thought I’d post it here to see if it resonates with anyone else. Rethinking Church: Introducing A New Series by  ifaqtheology ( https://ifaqtheology.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/rethinking-church-1-where-to-begin/ ) All writing is to some extent autobiography. The series I begin today is especially so. It arises out of my own struggle to understand the nature and place of the church in the world and my relationship to it. I write to articulate my feelings and clarify my thinking on this subject and perhaps to help others to a similar clarity. I don’t know in advance what I will say or at what destination I will arrive. Like many of you, I don’t remember a time when I was not held within the embrace of the church. She was to me a mother, teacher, and guardian. She taught me about creation, Abraham, Daniel, and most of all about Jesus. And I loved her for it. From early childhood I felt a call to...

Stupidity a lá Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a keen observer of human beings and their history. His profound and acute observations about his German contemporaries who fell prey to Hitler and the Nazi phenomenon are striking in their own right. They appear downright prescient as America faces what can only be judged a cognate phenomenon under the Presidency of Donald Trump. Bonhoeffer describes what he calls “Stupidity” in an essay “On Stupidity” in his  Letters and Papers from Prison . The essay describes this kind of person, probes the nature of their “stupidity,” and observes appropriate responses to them (Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison: DBW 8 (Kindle Location 1475-1504). Augsburg Fortress. Kindle Edition). Description of “Stupid” People These people are not malicious or evil. They cannot be made or convinced to forswear their stupidity. Their prejudgments are immovable overruling or dismissing contrary evidence. Stupid people ...