On Being Redeemed from Violence
I'm not a pacifist, but a violent man trying to follow Jesus and live into the non-violence of the Kingdom of God coming. The theory of just conflict (whether just war or the just exercise of violence at a local level) is aimed at curtailing our inexorable tendencies toward the escalation of reciprocal violence in a cursed creation. The idea is that the evils of retributory violence are sometimes made necessary by the victimization of the innocent and the incorrigibility of some victimizers. The idea is emphatically not that those necessary evils are to be celebrated as though they were a positive good. Even capital punishment may be made necessary when every alternative means of restraining evil has been exhausted, but the practice becomes evil and gravely sinful when those intermediate means are disregarded or half-heartedly attempted. While I make no assumptions about the state of George Zimmerman's soul, it seems pretty clear that "stand your ground," both as a law and as an ethos occasion and even celebrate such disregard and half-hearted effort.

The vocation of a policeman or a soldier is much like that of anyone who wields temporal power. We are especially called to pray for such persons because they bear a heavy load so that we may be free, prosperous, and alive all at the same time. As St. Augustine observed, to wield temporal power is to be unavoidably corrupted by it. Those in authority are faced with limited resources, expansive need, intransigent competing interests, and ungovernable human hearts. Choosing a positive good is the exception; seeking the lesser evil is the rule. That's the price of administrating the civitas terrena. Aspiring to such a burden or unilaterally assuming the role as an an armed individual without the warranting vocation by God and the society so governed is at least the near occasion of grave evil if not evil itself.

Many Christians of late have manifested the tendency to fantasize about unrealities that prepare us to excuse our implication in violence and death-dealingl. You likely know what I mean because you've heard the interrogations of the bloody hypothetical. "What would you do if a group of armed assailants broke into your house to kill you, your wife, and your children? The questions entice us to spend the precious moments of our short lives rehearsing for random disaster and we gradually accommode ourselves mentally, emotionally, and rhetorically to unreal violence. We forget, of course, that the sheer randomness, novelty, and overwhelming unlikelihood of such situations guarantees that they are sui generis. We have no idea of the hypothetical circumstance, the number of involved parties, the nature and disposition of your assailant(s), or our own capacities, so we lack the script to prepare for our role as the would-be, crack shot action hero that we've seen in the movies. And yet in our fantasizing about death-dealing, we've conditioned ourselves to be suspicious of the world and afraid of other people. We've already adusted ourselves to the dire burden of ending the life of a nameless "someone" and who bears the image and likeness of God. Invariably and inevitably the "someone" morphs into the hypothetical "anyone."

We might as well be prepping ourselves for the possibility of a busload of penguins crashing into our house!

All the while, this frenetic rehearsal comes at the expense of contemplating why we shouldn't go about dreaming of and practicing for death-dealing.

Wouldn't we be more obedient to Christ's calling to "take no worry for tomorrow" (Cf. Matt. 6.34) if we were to become just as studied and practiced at spiritual practices of peacemaking and restraint and the discernment of hopeful possibility? Wouldn't this habit of seeking of the Kingdom of God and his righteousness FIRST sharpen our sapiential skill to redeem the world in more high-stress situations of charged strife? Wouldn't this be a better embodiment of the cross and resurrection than rehearsing so as to become more efficient when contributing to the world's further destruction?
Imagine that Zimmerman could calm his outrage at the "assholes" that "always get away." 

Imagine that he humbled himself to obey the dispatcher urging him not to pursue Martin. 

Imagine that he had left the damn gun in the car rather than letting it stoke his bravado and escalate the confrontation. 

Imagine that he hadn't accommodated himself to the fantasy of being the heroic defender of his domain and arrogated to himself the responsibilities of a police officer.

It seems clear that the law and a violent man's fantasy conspired to bring about the death of a man who had committed no crime and who wasn't initially a threat to anyone.

I write to professing, pro-life Christians especially: From where did you learn "stand your ground," meeting fear with fear, violence with violence, or the threat of death with death-dealing? God the Father did not stand his ground. God the Father did not even withhold his only begotten Son, but gave him up for us all (Cf. Rom. 8:32). Neither did Jesus stand his ground. Though he was God of very God, he humbled himself and took the form of a servant, even to death on a cross (Cf. Phil. 2). St. Paul prefaces the latter passage with "Let this same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus." I say "stand your ground" is heresy. I say, TO HELL with "stand your ground." That's where it came from and where it's destined to go. We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.

The "New" Perspective (Or My Perspective, At Least) on St. Paul

[Just so no-one thinks I've completely ripped-off +Tom Wright when his most recent magnum opus arrives in a couple months.]

Wrapped up my triennial lectionary sojourn in Galatians this week. This year I've had the benefit of supplementing my work in the text with prep work for our Wednesday class in 1 Maccabees. After teaching the life and epistles of Paul to upper-level undergrads at Saint Louis University and trudging through the exegesis again this last month (with two additional commentaries on the shelf by Martinus De Boer and FB friend/colleague, ScotMcKnight), I'm more convinced than ever of the soundness the so-called “New Perspective” on Paul. Treating Paul as a polemicist against a proto-Pelagian merit theology (as though the Jews were trying to earn salvation/God's favor by “good works,” etc.) is to miss the point and the power of his gambit entirely.

My basic summary of the New Perspective would go something like this: 

The basic question is not is not "How do I get a gracious God?" or "How are my sins forgiven so that I can go to heaven?" The question for St. Paul was "How does one recognize the "people of God"? Or as he Paul himself puts it in Galatians six, “Whence do we find the 'Israel of God'?"

Beginning in Genesis with the common human ancestry in Adam and the purpose of Israel (children of Abraham) to visit all the families of the earth with his blessing, God has always been about the reconciliation of the whole human family. The purpose of Torah was to preserve Israel inviolate (uncorrupted by Gentile idolatry) until the coming of the true Son of Abraham and perfectly faithful Israelite, Jesus the Messiah.

In his death and especially in his resurrection, Torah had fulfilled its purpose (i.e. the Pauline analogy of the paidagogos, shepherding the people of God to maturity). As no less a figure than Jacob Neusner has observed, Judaism recognizes the people of God by the light of Torah at it's center. Hence, the Judaizers (Christianized Jews) were seeking to maintain the works of Torah (circumcision, Sabbath, kosher laws, etc.) as a continuing center. This is where Antiochus' attempts to forcibly alienate the Jews fro Torah and heroic Judaism's fidelity to the death is instructive. For Paul, however, this was to miss the point of the cross and resurrection entirely. 

As Jesus consistently demonstrated throughout his public ministry with stuff like his “You have heard it said, but I say...” instruction, he had come to fulfill and thus supplant Torah as the luminate center of the people of God. The glory of the resurrected Jesus was Zion restored and his outpoured Spirit was the shekinah (the glory of the divine presence) returned to a living temple (the embodied church). Thus, as Paul both taught and exemplified by his mission to the Gentiles , the time had now finally come to gather the nations and fulfill the Abrahamic promise. Christianity would not be the Maccabaeus redivivus, but something new entirely. Now the nations would be reclaimed and blessed, not simply repelled. 

Critical here, however, was that the Gentiles were to be included AS GENTILES, in all their alien integrity, rather than as bar/bat mitzvahed Jews. To require Judaizing as a basis for inclusion would have been for Paul tantamount to denying the resurrection and would represent a retreat from the in-breaking consummation of redemptive history. We recognize the people of God, therefore, not by the boundary makers prescribed by Torah, but by a living faith that embraces the lordship of Jesus (hence Paul's anti-imperial polemic: kurios iesous) and manifests the fruit of the Spirit—against which (especially when manifest among formerly pagan, idolatrous and reprobate Gentiles) no one could utter condemnation (Cf. Rom. 8.1ff.) or establish a Torah (Cf. Gal. 5.23). 

The “getting in” vs. “staying in” slogans in current use are over-simple in my opinion. I think Paul was defending over-all the notion that we recognize the people of God by their faithful embrace of the Lordship of Jesus and their manifestation of the Spirit's fruitful power. This is a matter of faithfully embracing the manifold reality of the rule of Christ NOW amid this present, contested kingdom, so we are speaking of faith immediately embodied in works of righteousness.

That's the necessary point to come to BEFORE we start thoughtfully applying things to our contemporary world, but whatever results will be a community that bears witness to the in-breaking rule and reign of Jesus. It will also be a reconciling community—reconciling people to God and to one another as the fulfillment of what Torah always pointed to as its own fulfillment. See the “summary of the law” at the beginning of the Anglican Eucharist as a basic summons for the Church to more perfectly realize what it is:

Hear what our Lord Jesus saith: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."   Matthew 22:37-40 

Of God, Tornadoes, and Theologians

A couple Facebook friends are going back and forth over Rachel Held Evans posted rebuke of John Piper for his Tweet quoting Job 1.19 with reference to the Moore, OK tornado (following me so far?). In fairness to Piper, Rachel's retort was more a reaction to Piper's derministic modus operandi than it was to his simple Tweet likening the residents of Moore to Job, but her response certainly touched a nerve that led Calvinists and complimentarians to circle the wagons.

Doug Wilson starts in on Evans with a simple either/or:

John Piper lives in a universe where terrible things happen, but he knows that when we come to know the whole story, we will stop our mouths, and bow before a holy God in order to worship Him — and all manner of things shall be well. To acknowledge God’s sovereignty in such things does not keep our hearts from breaking in the midst of such devastation. The sovereignty of God is a hard shell case that carries and protects the tender heart. Rachel Held Evans lives in a world where innocent people just get caught in the machinery, and God is terribly sorry about it.

Wilson is typically derisive in what he writes and this post is no exception, but his snarky triumphalism barely conceals the shell game at work. Wilson thinks that Evans has dethroned God and made him into a "kosmic klutz king" who is incompetent in his handling of the world's destructive powers. That may be so, but Wilson resolves the tension the other way by making God into a cosmic Marie Antoinette, who waxes contemptuous when we rage at his suggestion that we content ourselves with the promise of cake in the sweet by-and-by.

Matt Redmond is a bid more sensible and restrained than Wilson, but he's no less willing to let his theological determinism hold sway: "Do I believe that if disaster comes to a city, God has done it? Yes. Do I believe the penalty for sin is death? Yes. Do I believe we all deserve death because of our sinful rebellion against God? Yes. But there is a mystery as to how all those things fit together."

I wonder, however, if either Wilson or Redmond haven't arbitrarily foreclosed all other options by framing the problem as they have. Both are concerned to defend a notion that all human beings deserve death and destruction and an eternal, nether-worldly water-boarding in the end. They also can't see any other way to preserve this without God as the active agent of the death and destruction and as the proprietor of the cosmic rendition site. Both have a wonderful bag of proof-texts that are alleged to justify this notion, but both run aground on the notion that the purest revelation of God is the self-donating Christ, Crucified and Resurrected. If this is true, even Redmond's restrained determinism is a bridge too far. Not every disaster-plagued city comes to it's plight because "God has done it" and saying that "the wages of sin is death" does not imply that God is the paymaster. Nor is that quote comprehended by saying, "we all deserve death."

As an alternative, why don't we lay blame where blame is due? The world's estrangement from God is consistently laid at our collective feet as humans in Holy Writ. We're the ones who have brought destruction on ourselves in our arrogant conceit that we could master the wind and waves and every other power under heaven. In the heart of each of us lives a tiny Pharaoh entertaining the conceit that we are the divine protectors of our domain. Having banished God in favor of a pantheon of competing idols, we have gone it alone to battle chaos with our own ingenuity and strength. Our pretense at fullness is really a gaping absence. As for our "rendition to perdition" and the retributive violence of God, C.S. Lewis was harmonizing with a rich choir of ancient Christian theologians when he observed that the gates are locked from the inside. The logic of damnation is that we curse the sun that gives us light and warmth and flee to an icy darkness of our own making. Even Dante knew that.

Now this doesn't ultimately solve the problem of theodicy but it places the mystery of evil on a very different temporal axis than Wilson's. For him, evil (and God's implication in evil) is ultimately justified for the goods produced in the "rich tapestry of means and ends." A clearer Augustinian view on things would recognize that both evil and evils represent a privation of divine goodness that God himself longs to fill in a resurrected heavens and earth. We contemplate evil on the redemptive-historical axis of cross and resurrection, not on the axis of means and ends. So, Evans is right to maintain, that we are not worthless, not disposable, not merely the objects of divine wrath, and not deserving of the abuses that we have visited on ourselves. Rather, the summons of grace is a plea to end our self-imposed exile and return to the waiting father who longs to receive us, not as slaves, but as honored sons and daughters.