The Little Friar

In last night's news: Putting Romans 13 forward, as if it were a clear manifestation of all the ways in which Christians relate to the state government, clearly misunderstands Paul.  But, more importantly, it ignores the overwhelming way in which Christian discipleship shapes political life. If you're going to read Romans 13, you also have to read Revelation 13. Romans 13, specifically, sends chills down my spine when read in the way Jeff Sessions, and so many others in this current American administration, want me to read it.  This text has been used over the centuries to justify every conceivable kind of oppression and tyranny.  It has also been used to stifle criticism of the powers that be and to resist any effort at reform.  This passage has been quoted at Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King.  To people who hang around Jesus, to quote the Bible in the way Jeff Sessions quotes the Bible seems repressive. And it should. But it hasn't al...

I spent the better part of my academic career studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- his theology in its context, with the hopes of articulating a peace-making theology for the twenty-first century.  I never intended that study to become pastorally relevant in our own historical context.  But it's proven to be. Today I made the claim that modern America looks nearly identical to Weimar Germany. For those who don't understand the comparison, first some background. The Weimar Republic was the short-lived experiment in German democracy between the great wars of the 20th century.  It emerged from Germany's loss in World War I, and was brought to a crashing end by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.  The Weimar period was marked by political, economic, and social instability, and intense cultural creativity as well as decadence.  Weimar was time in which the center didn't hold, and extremism took over the imaginations of many Germans, especially the young. ...

I don't make New Year resolutions. It's tough enough living day to day, making all the necessary changes I have to make with my life, to worry about adding some over-arching change to which I will aspire for the New Year.  I'm enough of a mean-spirited, selfish, depressed, solipsist, that one resolution cannot make all the changes that need to be made. So I don't do it. Most people make so short-sighted and self-involved New Year resolutions that, typically, they'll have forgotten what they decided to change by the end of January, or at least most certainly by June. That said, I believe the making of resolutions -- since I do make them (just daily, not annually).  Resolutions offer us a time to give an account, if only to ourselves, about who we take ourselves to be and what we aspire to become.  That kind of honest introspection is anything but self-involved and narcissistic. With everyone one of us, there's a wide gulf between what we are meant to...

John raises his voice alongside those of other protestors like the authors of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch.  John was not a solitary, raving lunatic.  The asylum was full of people who just couldn't "see things" in line with the official picture.  The multiplicity of voices calling out against Rome's injustices at the close of the first century, of which John's voice was one, help us to see that Jews and Christians in Asia Minor were not only concerned about local affairs, internecine strife, or throwing stones at the church or synagogue across the way.  The "system," together with all its local manifestations, was also a major problem.  Uniting the practice of exerting control and maintaining peace through violent suppression of dissent, the promotion of an economy arranged for the great benefit of the few, and the prominent use of religious language and ritual claim sacral legitimation for these arrangements -- uniting these is both the genius of Rome and the ...

So there's this in the news . I've always thought it a serious theological mistake for Christians to use moral law as a basis for creating civil law. That's because I've read Augustine and Aquinas.  Both had serious moral qualms with a variety of measures -- like prostitution, for example -- but thought that those qualms shouldn't prevent taking civil measures to ensure the safety of women. Faith motivates lots of people in politics.  I get it.  But at the same time, I think it's a mistake to take moral law and fashion civil law measures from it.  Each politician has to look at moral law, look at what's good for society (not for their own interpretations of that moral law), and look at what's actually possible, then fashion civil laws. I hear certain politicians saying that abortion should be made illegal in this country.  But I believe that that measure fails to account for the fallen world in which we live.  It simply isn't morally realist...

As Marianne Williamson says: "Evil is the power of God inverted".  I would actually modify that a bit, and say:  "Evil is the love of God inverted -- or absent". This is what so called "religious" (read:  pharisaical and people opposed to the goodness of God in Jesus Christ) people do -- they use holy, life-giving words and concepts to divide, destroy, demean, discriminate and decimate all those they see as "other". Witness the recent 14-point Nashville Statement . Jesus, though, didn't give one whiff what the fundamentalists of his day thought or said.  He challenged them on their exclusive interpretation of scripture, broke their laws right in front of them, overturned their corrupt power and economic systems and called them names to their faces.  (That whole "brood of vipers" thing is something that continually runs in my head on the occasion of the pharisees using holy words to alienate human beings from the love of God kn...

The literary theorist Umberto Eco has a theory about readers.  Every text calls for an ideal reader .  The ideal reader of any given text is the person receptive of its content and formed to follow its patterns (see, The Role of the Reader, 1979 ).  In other words, the person who is willing to "see" as the text sees (this is how the world is) and then live accordingly is the ideal reader. Consider the following picture: That guy is not the ideal reader of Nazi propaganda.  He refuses to buy into the Nazi's picture of the world -- choosing not to "see" as they see.  And he won't live accordingly by offering his salute to Hitler and all that his regime stands for, despite the very obvious social pressure.  "Nope", you can hear him saying to himself. I think the task of the twenty-first century preacher to congregations has to be this:  "Be that guy".  Refuse to become the ideal reader of Nazi propaganda, and if you find that eas...

I've been thinking lately about the Church's call in the context of modern policing.  With the increased visibility and attention being paid to issues like militarization , systemic racism , and deadly force , how can Christians speak and act faithfully? My first instinct is to look towards those doing work on what is called "just policing", with scholars like Gerald Schlabach and Tobias Winright .  While I appreciate the contributions of these scholars, I have often wondered whether the questions being asked -- how we reform the criminal justice system, or create a just system -- are not built on assumptions which should be interrogated much further.  I think those are essentially Constantinian questions.  They also require an account of justice that must be (at least in part) abstracted from the work of Christ.  How much meaning does the word "just" lose when it's applied to a system that requires some degree of violence and domination...

I've finally had time to read and reflect on the so called Nashville Statement -- the statement that a hundred and fifty evangelical signatories signed their names to.  It seems to be their attempt to draw a line in the sand in regard to what they see as a pressing problem for the Church, and in particular, their evangelical church.  The problem for them, of course, is the progression and in-roads of the LGBTQ, homosexual gay agenda, as they see it transforming not only the body politic of culture in general, but its pressing into the church itself. But I have a main problem with it.   For me, the problem has more to do with these leaders' conception of how the Church ought to operate in regard to its witness to the Gospel in relation to the world at large.  As I see it, they are presuming upon an "us versus them" dynamic that the Gospel itself forbids; instead, the Gospel equalizes humanity (cf. Romans 3).  The Gospel as the Word of God in Jesus Christ...

The prophetic witness of Christians in the face of the State is muted, I think, by a serious misreading of Romans 13.  Particularly 13.1:  "Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God".  I want to explore what it means to read Romans 13 in light of the rest of Scripture, in order to help us understand that we don't necessarily have to accept every line that proceeds out of a particular politician's mouth or every policy proposed by any certain politically reigning group. A caveat lector is probably in order here, though:  What you're about to read is the way I read Romans 13, which is informed by the way folks like Bonhoeffer and Barth read Romans 13 and resisted the Nazi German agenda.  It's the foundation of why I resist Donald Trump (and, before him, Obama and lots of other American politicians).  To let the cat out of the bag early:  ...

Enough time has passed that I can finally say something without the risk of too much personal violence toward me. In the wake of the recent (read:  if we're honest, there's nothing new about Charlottesville, VA -- America has been doing that sort of thing since the mid-seventeenth century in one way or another) I kept seeing this image circulate in my Facebook feed: All of my family were either too old or too young to fight in the Second World War. But I'm sure if called upon, they would have. Not because they were itching for a fight, but because that's what one did, even if humbly. It certainly wouldn't have been to save the Jews. Antisemitism was extremely widespread in the United States at the time, after all, and it's doubtful the average American would have willingly gone to war for the good of a people group they generally disliked and mistreated, themselves. Far more reasonable to believe they went (reluctantly) to war because they felt that ...

I came across this today, in reading, and I find it very helpful: There are three kinds of people in the world. The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them. In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them -- the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society -- and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow.  They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on.  Their life is divided, like a soldier's or a schoolboy's life, into time "on parade" and "off parade," "in school" and "out of school." But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them "to live is Christ." These peop...

The problem with identity politics and white nationalism is that they're flip sides of the same coin.  When you reduce mainstream politics to the attempt to establish and represent your identity, you invite racists/white nationalists into mainstream politics.  The language of identity is as appropriate for the alt-right as it is for oppressed minorities.  They can snag a victim-narrative, a label, and a t-shirt as much as anyone else.  The white nationalists -- who've been ever so vocal in the most recent landscape of American politics -- want nothing that the #blacklivesmatter folks don't want.  In fact, the alt-right folks are fond of  describing their platform as "identity politics for white people". Over the past 20 years, since I first encountered the insidious alt-right philosophy, I've noticed their trend to refute labels that end in describing them as "white supremacists".  Instead, they're "nationalist" or "tradition...

You might have heard of the protest movement Buy Nothing Day (BND). BND is an international protest against consumerism and it's held the Friday after Thanksgiving, what is commonly known as Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. The basic thing to do on BND is just opt out, don't shop on Black Friday.  But BND protests can take on all sorts of forms. A strange and public form of BND protest is the Zombie Walk.  Here's a video of the 2012 Zombie Walk in a Portland mall.   During a Zombie Walk you dress like a zombie and go shuffling through a mall, making a comment about how consumerism has robbed us of life, personality and moral agency.  We're just dead, obedient zombies when we rush to the malls on Black Friday. I expect that people might find the Zombie Walk ridiculous.  But there's huge biblical precedent for prophetic rebuke taking the form of performance art.  The biblical prophets did things like the Zombie Walk. Cons...

Okay, so it's an election year in the United States.  And yet again it's time to say something. Michelle Obama has said quite a bit already , and I can't add anything more to her words. But there's something that needs to be said around recent developments involving Donald Trump. The word "flawed" has been bandied about this political season in the US, most notably as a few Christians of significant influence cobble together bizarre arguments for how Americans might in good moral conscience support Donald Trump.  Most prominently, Jerry Falwell drew a comparison between Trump and Israel's King David , and more recently, radio host Sean Hannity added to that comparison .  Their arguments suggest that both Trump and David are "flawed" leaders who either rule over, or might rule over, a great nation.  King David was God's "flawed" man, and on analogy, Trump might be as well.  While Trump is no saint, to expect a saint is ...

Apparently President Obama now fears future American presidents will wage perpetual covert drone wars.  On the surface of it, such fears are well-grounded.  President Obama himself has embraced controversial covert counterterrorism programs began by George W. Bush:  The rendition and harsh interrogation (including torture) of terrorist suspects, and the use of drones to kill terrorist suspects outside of traditional battlefields. Two days after taking the oath of office Obama signed an Executive Order , which revoked the Bush-era directives authorizing torture, and reemphasized international conventions and federal laws prohibiting torture.  The following day, Obama authorized two CIA drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan, which, combined, killed an estimated one militant and 10 civilians, including between four and five children. Whereas Bush authorized approximately 50 drone strikes that killed 296 terrorists and 195 civilians in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, ...

I think politics, to be understood Christianly, have to be approached spiritually.  Which means that oppression and idolatry, in under to be understood Christianly, cannot be separated. That seems hard for us to do that.  When it comes to evil, conservatives tend to spiritualize the issue, looking for demons behind every door and under every rock.  Liberals, by contrast, tend to politicize evil, reducing spiritual warfare to the political fight for social justice. Throughout the Bible the spiritual and the political are interconnected and woven together.  The political and the spiritual form a gestalt , a bigger picture greater than the sum of the individual parts.  That's what I want to explore over the next few days. One way to see the interconnection between the spiritual and the political is to examine the way demons develop in the Bible. Specifically, in various parts of the Old Testament we get the notion that when God created the world and set...

We have fallen into the habit of seeing everything, ourselves included, as a thing to be used and consumed, and this is rightly called a fall.  Indeed, this is what the 'fall of man' consists in.  Eating the forbidden fruit means believing that it is for us to define the distinction between good and evil.  We then rewrite the distinction in purely human terms:  good and evil become benefit and cost, so that nothing is holy, nothing is consecrated, nothing is rescued from barter and exchange.  We deal with the world by pricing it. -- Roger Scruton, The Face of God