The danger of sharpening the self-will of nations through religion

I’m slowly working through Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and goodness his observations are timely for today. I don’t know where he’s going with the second half of the book, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

This bit on the relationship of patriotism and religion is particularly relevant right now:

Patriotism is a form of piety which exists partly through the limitation of the imagination, and that limitation may be expressed by savants as well as by saints…

But since the claims of religion are more absolute than those of any secular culture the danger of sharpening the self-will of nations through religion is correspondingly greater.

Even when the religious sense of the absolute expresses itself, not in the sublimation of the will, but in the subjection of the individual will to the divine will, and in the judgment upon the will from the divine perspective, it may still offer perils to the highest social and moral life, even though it will produce some choice fruits of morality. One interesting aspect of the religious yearning after the absolute is that, in the contrast between the divine and the human, all lesser contrasts between good and evil on the human and historic level are obscured. Sin finally becomes disobedience to God and nothing else. Only rebellion against God, and only the impertinence of self-will in the sight of God, are regarded as sinful.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, chapter 3, emphasis mine

This turned the light bulb on for me as to how so many Christians in my evangelical background are willing to turn a blind eye to social ills as long as personal piety is maintained.

Joyful and Unprofitable Pursuits

We will not be saved by our money, our weapons, or our technological virtuosity; we might be rescued by the joyful and unprofitable pursuits of love, beauty, and contemplation. No doubt this will all seem foolish to the shamans and magicians of pecuniary enchantment. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

— Eugene McCarraher, from the prologue to The Enchantments of Mammon

Phew, already can tell this is gonna be a great book and I’m only through the prologue.

The great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

…I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, from The Message [emphasis mine]

A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation

A Christian is not distinguished by his political views, or moral decisions, or habitual conduct, or personal piety, or, least of all, by his churchly activities. A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation - to use the traditional jargon - by his reverence for the life of God in the whole of Creation, even and, in a sense, especially, Creation in the travail of sin.

The characteristic place to find a Christian is among his very enemies.

The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.

— William Stringfellow, from A Private and Public Faith

"Leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of His family..."

Chris Green writes about the communion of the saints and Jesus not just loving us but liking us. It’s all wonderful stuff and worth a read, but his last quote, from the late Russian human rights activist Alexei Navalny, is timely and worth quoting in full:

You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.

Amen.

Marilynne Robinson on Community and Absence

Posting this quote from Marilynne Robinson here just so I have it at hand for later use:

To speak in the terms that are familiar to us all, there was a moment in which Jesus, as a man, a physical presence, left that supper at Emmaus. His leave-taking was a profound event for which the supper itself was precursor. Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life.

I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.

In full context, she’s talking about community with fictional characters and authors here, but this rings so true to me in a world full of online communities.

I'm not claiming any special prescience, but...

I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:

I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.

Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.

Supernatural love, found within human love

Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss:

It is not some meditative communion with God that I crave. What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.

This is why I am, such as I am, a Christian, because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people. I believe in grace and chance, at the same time. I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision — and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life — shapes as polarities.

> My Bright Abyss, p. 164

Beautiful, and it resonates for me with the stuff I was reading from Chris Green a couple weeks ago — that the world experiences God’s love through us in the way God makes space for them in our lives.

A little poetry for Monday night

I’ve done a lot of reading so far this year. Tonight I started My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman. I’m not too far in but the writing (prose, punctuated with poetry) is dense and profound.

In the opening chapter he drops this little poem that resounds with truth in my ears. I leave it here for you as a gift.

Into the instant’s bliss never came one soul
Whose soul was not possessed by Christ,
Even in the eons Christ was not.

And still: some who cry the name of Christ
Live more remote from love
Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.

– ‘After Dante’, Christian Wiman

Chris E. W. Green on the Beatitudes and Power

I’m still only in chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation, but this is too good to not share. Green takes a look at the Beatitudes and how Jesus embodies them. Then, he says, the Beatitudes show themselves to be concerned with power, though not perhaps in the way you’d think:

We can say that true power - the power of the Spirit of holiness (Rom. 1.4) - is first and foremost the power of unanxious and reconciling presence, a power brought to bear on behalf of those who suffer in isolation, those forgotten or ignored by the powers-that-be, whose only hope is ‘another body that comes and stands beside and in the midst… and will not move’. As our lives are made in even the smallest ways to be like Christ’s, we become noticeably less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and increasingly determined for others to be treated with the dignity that is theirs as God’s delight.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 39

If there’s something the church today needs to learn, this may be exactly it: to be less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and more for others. What a word.

Green continues, drawing on Stanley Hauerwas:

To this end, the church must be ‘a body of people who have learned the skills of presence’, skills that are developed only in a community ‘pledged not to fear the stranger’, where the practice of being present with those in suffering ‘has become the marrow of their habits’…

Sometimes the Spirit limns [colors, like a highlighter] our actions so that they body forth the power of Christ’s compassion and wisdom in ways that we and others can sense. But whether we or they can sense it or not, our confidence in God leads us to say that he is always everywhere at work doing good. So, by being there, but showing up and staying put, we ‘present our bodies as a living sacrifice’ (Rom. 12.1-2), which, when all is said and done, is probably the only way that truly overcomes evil with good (Rom. 12.21). Thus, that is the sacrifice with which God is pleased.

We often wrongly imagine sacrifice not as a gift but as forfeiture, not as self-giving but as self-destruction. Christ, however, reveals that God hates whatever destroys us, just as surely as he hates whatever we might do that destroys others. And, as the last sacrifice, his priestly ministry is the apocalyptic bringing-to-bear of the Great Commandment, which is why his sacrifice is the end of all sacrifice. Christ makes of himself a sacrifices, and so all sacrifices, if they are true to themselves must be what his was: a free and freeing gift of reconciliation and healing and blessing.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 40

I have felt both sides of this at times - the feeling that “showing up and staying put” is a sacrifice that is sometimes too much, to the point of my own detriment. Green says, though, that God wants us to stay put in ways that are reconciling, healing, and blessing to ourselves as well as those we are serving.