In my last post, I attempted to lay out a Christian response to the powers and principalities. I've been talking quite a bit recently about how those powers -- be they the Satan, politics, economics or even religion -- strive to support death in all its forms in institutional ways. In this post, I want to turn to the three essential spiritual gifts needed by the Church in fighting those powers. What are the spiritual gifts that make small acts of resistance narrated biblically even possible?
Here, I want to focus on three: Discernment, speaking in tongues, and exorcism.
Discernment is the foundational discipline. In his little-appreciated theological project entitled Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Belief, Christopher Morse lays out how discernment is at the heart of Christian being and thinking and praying. For Morse, "discerning the signs and spirits" is learning to read the world biblically, which means apocalyptically and eschatologically. Two fancy words there. For Morse, reading the world apocalyptically means discerning truth from lies in the dehumanizing forces facing us in the world. Apocalypse means "unveiling". Discerning the spirits is lifting the veil of lies to see the forces of death at work in the background, the forces we cannot see because of the babel produced by the principalities and powers. For Morse, reading the world eschatologically is placing those dehumanizing forces under judgment and living in hope.
And I think he's right. For me, Christian Discerning of the signs has to do with comprehending the remarkable in common happenings, with perceiving the saga of salvation within the era of the Fall. It has to do with the ability to interpret ordinary events in both apocalyptic and eschatological connotations, to see portents of death where others find progress or success but, simultaneously, to behold tokens of the reality of Resurrection or hope where others are consigned to confusion or despair. Discerning the signs doesn't seek spectacular proofs or await the miraculous, but, rather, it means sensitivity to the Word of God indwelling in all Creation and transfiguring common history, while remaining radically realistic about death's vitality in all that happens.
In the midst of babel, as I've been characterizing it, discernment is speaking God's truth.
Truth telling -- reading the world biblically -- is a spiritual gift that allows us to find and care for our humanity in the midst of the Fall.
It's why I connect other practices -- like exorcism and speaking in tongues (and healing) -- to it.
I take my cue of living Christianly from the book of Acts. Which means I'm concerned that we don't read and understand these acts on individual and pietistic terms. It spares Christians, and others, the pitfalls of vain, exotic, individualistic, and exclusive views of the charismatic gifts to treat them, as the Bible does, politically.
Each and every sporitual gift is concerned with the restoration and renewal of human life in society. All have to do with how, concretely, human beings are enabled to cope with the multiple and variegated claims of death. The spiritual gifts furnish the only powers to which humans have access against the aggressions of the principalities. The gifts dispel idolatry and free human beings to celebrate Creation, which is, biblically speaking, integral to the worship of God. The gifts equip persons to live humanly in the midst of the Fall. The exercise of these gifts constitutes the essential tactics of resistance to the power of death.
For example, the account in Acts 2 of "speaking in tongues" shapes how I understand this ecclesial act to restore the world against the violence of Genesis 11's babel. Speaking in tongues at Pentecost expressed the emancipation of human beings from the bonds of nation, culture, race, language, and ethnicity. Speaking in tongues recognizes a universal humanity -- of which the church is a sign (Galatians 3.28) -- stripped of the false divisions created and maintained by the principalities and powers. What's more, speaking in tongues represents the ability of the church to speak freely and spontaneously in the midst of babel. Speaking in tongues represents the church speaking in her own voice and language. Life-giving words that cannot be co-opted, controlled or censored by the powers.
Healing is less about physical healing than a declaration that the threat of death -- a threat made by the powers -- holds no fear for the confessing community. Consequently, a community freed from the threat of death falls outside systems of control as death is the means of coercion wielded by the powers, the state especially.
In this way, healing is the political threat that rightly lands us in confrontation with the world (Acts 4.14-31). To so surpass death is utterly threatening politically, it shakes and shatters the very foundation of political reality because death is, as has been said, the only moral and political sanction of the State. Resurrection exemplifies life transcending the moral power of death in this world and this world's strongholds and kingdoms.
That's why Resurrection -- not crucifixion -- is at the heart of the preaching in Acts.
Finally, exorcism is casting out the spirituality of death. Exorcism, thus, sits at the heart of the Christian resistance to death. The Lord's Prayer is itself a form of exorcism. In invoking God and asking for protection from "evil" and "the evil one" the Lord's Prayer is a act of exorcism. In praying for God's will on earth as in heaven -- for shalom -- we are resisting the powers that be.
Exorcism is nothing short of a sacramental protest against the forces of death.
Such are the practices, I think, that humanize life.