Tag Archive - cruciformity

Violence and Power

January 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 11 Comments

Since The Shooting this weekend folks have been engaged in the standard question-asking, finger-pointing, and blame shifting. We always want to blame someone.

One of the most common concerns, and one that I share in part, is the connection between the shooting and the inflamed political rhetoric of our day.

But I wonder if the appropriate response of the church isn’t to start thinking more constructively about what it means to be a peaceable and peace-making people more generally. I can hear my pacifist fans cheering and yes, I can see you, my “just war theory” reader, through your computer’s camera, folding your hands across your chest and scowling at the screen.

But stay with me.

Cross(hairs)


What I want to suggest here is about more than putting away our guns (personal or national). The problem of violence is more wide-spread than this. Violence arises any time we attempt to gain control of a situation through the use of power.

What this means is that it’s not enough for a church to agitate for the U.S. to pursue peace rather than war. We need to start at home.

It’s easy as a parent to use force to control situations. But when we interject the power of our voice (or hands) into a situation where our kids are fighting with each other, have we managed to keep them from the way of violence? Or are we showing them instead that there will always be someone with more power and the destiny they should pursue is to acquire as much of it as possible?

Our churches become hotbeds of power-grabbing. For many, this is the place where we are most involved, and perhaps have the most control over the destiny of an organization. And this becomes a place where we practice the tactics of power assertion, politics, and manipulation to work our will.

The church has not created within itself the counter-culture of peace that should serve as a witness against the ultimate futility of violence employed by the world around us.

We can and should react to such horrific events as we saw this past weekend with all due revulsion. But until we as followers of Jesus have managed to form communities of the cross rather than communities of the crucifiers we have no place either for self-righteousness nor, in the end, for surprise.

Our calling has been to extend the call for a better way to the world around us. But failing to be that better way, we have failed to call others to that better way–and they wouldn’t listen even if we did.

(post script: Along these lines, you should check out this post on our need for new heros by Broderick Greer.)

Christian Oppression and American Religious Freedom

December 27, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s summary of David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom.

I am a historian neither of American religious history nor of the American judicial and legal system. So most of my responses were tangentially related to the book: he stimulated a huge number of thoughts, but those mostly tied to my own interests in teaching the Bible and getting our theology properly storied.

Throughout Sehat’s book, the idea of a “moral establishment,” later resurrected in the “moral majority,” indicated the way in which Christians were seeing to make the United States faithfully Christian. Behind this is the core conviction that the Bible is the book by which God’s moral law is made known, and those who would be faithful to God must strive to enact the law of this law book.

Again and again as I read the book I was struck by how this misconception about the Bible drives Christian political engagement. There was no sense that the Bible is a diachronic narrative, with moral imperatives changing over time.

But more importantly, there was no sense that the defining moment of the story is the cross. A law without a story produced an ethics without the cross which led to power with no room for justice.

When the Bible is the transhistorical law of God (or witness to that law), the point of life on earth becomes enacting that law by whatsoever means necessary: women, stay at home and stop asking to be treated as human beings–you’re simply extensions of your husband; black people: stay enslaved and be thankful that God has brought you under the tutelage of those who have been gifted with the higher refinements of the Christian religion; laborers: be glad that those who are empowered with gifts of rule are ruling over you so as to give you work that lasts 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. Isn’t God good?

And in all this, the fact that the Christ in whose name such oppression was perpetuated refused to seize power by the sword, but attained his kingdom by self-giving love. In all this, Jesus’ rebuke of the sword, his rebuke of the disciples’ desires to rule by power and force, Paul’s mandate that we carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus is all left to the side.

At the risk of sounding narcissistic, Sehat’s book convinced me that what I do is one of the most important jobs in the world. As a theologian and Bible professor, my job is to keep drawing people to read their Bibles well, to understand the story aright. And if you don’t think that’s important, look at how poor readings have reinforced narratives of power, domination, and oppression.

My contention is that the cruciform narrative of the Gospel, found throughout the New Testament itself, provides a sustained rebuke to the ways in which the conservative theological establishment has sought to coopt the power of the state to enforce the law of God. Jesus didn’t come to force people to obey, he came to rebuke the people who employed such tactics.

I left Sehat’s book wanting the “Myth of American Religious Freedom” to become the defining myth of our country–a myth that, precisely because of its mythic power, transforms the imaginations of the American people so that we will never again accept the idea that the “cause of Christ” is served by the state’s imposition of the Christian will on the lives of its diverse citizens.

Advent Love

December 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

I’m not sure who invented this whole advent wreath thing, but we need to have a little conversion. Today, thanks to said Christmas tradition, I was in charge of leading an Advent discussion on love.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. What could be easier than talking about love in connection with the Messiah’s birth, right? Well, to be honest, lots of things could be easier–beginning with, say, the topics that the Gospel writers themselves talk about in connection with Jesus’ birth!

Love is a great theme connected with the gospel, especially in the Johannine books. So that’s where I went. John 3:16 was the starting point: God so loved the world, that he gave us his one and only son, so that whoever believes in him might not die but, instead, have everlasting life.

But the “giving” of the son that shows God’s love isn’t merely the birth. The giving in view is the giving up of the son to die on the cross for us. And so, with the advent of love Christmas is tied inextricably to Good Friday. There, the love of the son-giving Father is matched by the love of the self-giving son.

And this, in turn, qualifies the life that Jesus calls us to live in following after him: love one another as I have loved you–greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

At Christmas, we exchange gifts. These are small tokens of self-giving love. The hint at the grand narrative of which divine Christmas love is about. And as we renarrate that story among one another we recognize that God so loves the world that he continues to give it his new-begotten sons and daughters, that whoever believes the lives of love that God is working in them might not perish but have everlasting life.

Economic Persecution?

December 16, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 12 Comments

In The Story of God, The Story of Us there’s a character who starts coming around an early Christian community to hear its story. The man is a merchant, curious about this strange group of friends who act more like family.

As the story goes on, the rumor of his association with the Christians starts to spread. Business at his store begins to slow. The other folks in town are avoiding his shop, persecuting him economically we might say, for his association with the Christians.

Do we as Christians feel the pathos of that story because such economic persecution is wrong? Or do we feel it simply because it was happening to us? Is religious difference a reason to avoid a shop? Put yourself in an open air market, even a farmer’s market if you can visualize that better.

Do you avoid the stall with the Muslim vendor? Or is that a sort of economic persecution that good Christian folk should avoid?

Well, it seems that part of how we’re supposed to use our collective buying power as Christians is to engage in precisely this sort of reciprocated economic persecution. In celebration of those vaunted words of the Bible, “They may persecute us now, but we’ll one day have enough political and economic power to persecute them back,” there is now the official Grinch Alert website, dedicated to helping good Christian folks avoid those who would take Christ out of Christmas by saying “Happy Holidays” and playing only Jingle Bells type music on the PA system (HT: Michelle Van Loon at Her.meneutics Blog).

It makes me wonder: how are we telling our story such that we Christians understand our identity in such a way that we think this type of economic boycott is the calling of those who are commanded to imitate our Father who causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike?

How are we understanding this “Christ” we want to keep in Christmas that we follow the one who forgave his enemies on the cross by making them pay for it at Christmas time?

How are we narrating the Christmas story that we can simultaneously participate in the materialistic gorge fest that we all enjoy each December and yet persecute as insufficiently Christian those who would sell us our idols wares?

When we get to this point, where we are shunning those non-Christian merchants who will not put on a Christian veneer to lure us in on a false-pretense of sharing our religious convictions, we need to step back. Perhaps we should return to one of our favorite Christmas-time hymns and reflect.

    He comes to make his blessings flow
    Far as the curse is found

What if we decided that our calling was to be agents and instruments of that flow? What if we decided that our story demands of us that we bring all our blessings to the lost and hurting world around us, rather than attempting to build a hermetically sealed Christian container to hold it all in?

I think we can do it. Go get ‘em.

And Happy Holidays.

Great Thanksgiving

November 25, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

If you manage to slide out of Baptist circles into Presbyterian, the Lord’s Supper becomes communion. That is, it moves from being something Jesus did that we simply remember into something that creates, recreates, and sustains our union with the crucified and risen Christ and causes us to be bound to one another as well.

Move from Presbyterian to Anglican or Catholic circles and you might find your vocabulary shifting again. Now it’s the Eucharist–the Great Thanksgiving.

When I first heard this, I my thought was, “Fair enough, this is the place at which we give greatest thanks to God for the gift most costly given in the cross of Christ.” But then…

One day reading through the account I realized that the “Thanksgiving” isn’t ours. It’s Jesus’.

“While they were eating, he took bread. Giving thanks he broke it and gave it to them saying, ‘Take it. This is my body.’”

And similarly with the cup, giving thanks, the gave it to them, the cup of the new covenant in his blood.

On the one hand, of course, this is simply what is done in the course of the meal. Blessings are said. Food and drink are distributed.

But on the other, the Great Thanksgiving begins with Jesus giving thanks, not that he has been given food, but that the has been called to give himself as food and drink. Jesus gives thanks to the Father for the bread that is his body which he gives as the source of new life to his followers.

Jesus gives thanks to the Father for the wine that is the new covenant–the blood given him by the Father not for his own sake but in order that his followers might drink and have life as the New Covenant people of God.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving today, so often we focus on the things we have been given. And that is good and right.

But participation in the Great Thanksgiving begins when we recognize that what is given us is given us so that it might be given away. Participation in the Great Thanksgiving embodies the narrative of self-giving in which even the body given for our life becomes the means by which we pursue the gift of life–for the other.

SBL Precursor: Wright & Bird at IBR

November 20, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, SBL with 18 Comments

SBL = Society of Biblical Literature. I’m at the annual meeting in Atlanta. (If blogging gets scarce, you may want to check out my Twitter feed or Facebook status.)

Each hear a number of other societies use the opportunity of having this group gathered to put on their own meetings. Institute for Biblical Research is one of those. And last night its meeting featured N. T. Wright and Michael Bird. Wright lectured on the cross and the kingdom, and Bird responded.

Wright’s talk was nothing you haven’t heard before if you’re a Wright fan, but it was nicely put together.

He discussed opposite errors.

There is the conservative error of a cross without a kingdom. Mike Bird, in responding, told of how he picked up an N. T. Wright book once upon a time and it hammered home to him that he knew why Jesus died, but had no idea why he lived! That was my experience as well.

On the liberal side, there is a kingdom without a cross: a theology of the reign of God in which Jesus the social revolutionary meets an unfortunate end that cut his program short just as it was getting off the ground.

Wright explored some texts in John in a gesture toward holding these together.

As usual, Wright took a couple of shots at the Creedal tradition of the church, which jumps straight from the virgin birth to the suffering under Pontius Pilate. I think his complaint is apt–we do not confess anything about the life of Jesus when we confess our faith together as a church. Others were less amused.

The call to keep cross and kingdom both in view is apt–and not just for holding together Mark 1-13 with the passion narrative in Mark 14-15. When teaching Mark last year, the larger question presented itself: how does Mark 1-8, the depiction of Jesus the wonder-working Son of Man, fit with Mark 9-16, the depiction of Jesus as the cruciform Son of Man?

To ask the question of how cross and kingdom fit together is to set ourselves on a journey of reimagining our atonement theology, our Kingdom of God theology, and our understanding of the Gospels themselves.

The Only Passage You Need Redux

November 14, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

A few months ago, if memory serves correctly, my Sunday morning musing reflected on Mark 10 as a possible “only passage you’ll ever need.” There, we hear of Jesus as Messiah; we learn that to be Messiah is to suffer and die, and we also see in vivid colors that to follow the suffering and dying Messiah is to embrace such a path for ourselves.

Today our house church is reading together Mark 14. I think we might be on similar ground. This is the story of Jesus’ anointing by a woman, sandwiched between the leaders’ plotting to have Jesus betrayed into their hands.

After he has had his head anointed by this woman, and fended off the criticisms leveled at her, he declares that what she has done will be told, wherever the gospel is proclaimed, in memory of her.

That, of course, raises the question, “How is this deed, good as it is, sufficiently indicative of the gospel itself that it should be told in tandem with the proclamation of Jesus–forever?”

As I see it, this woman’s actions hold together what the disciples perennially fail to grasp. By anointing his head, we have Jesus pictured as messiah. But Jesus tells us that this anointing is a preparation of his body for burial. These are not mutually exclusive options, but in the case of Jesus the one entails the other. Jesus is the one who suffers and dies, precisely as Messiah.

Finally, there is the bit about the cost of the anointing oil. They grumble about the waste, about the money simply poured over Jesus’ head. And even here, it seems to me, we are on parallel ground with Mark 10. Not only is Jesus the self-giving Messiah, he calls us to lives of costly sacrifice–something this woman was willing to do for Jesus’ sake when no one else in the room thought it appropriate.

Who is Jesus? How is he Messiah? And how, then, are we called to live?

Here’s another picture–and this time, someone in the story besides Jesus gets it right.

Authority, Power, and the Cross

October 15, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

A few weeks ago I was raising some cautions about how Christian leaders use / abuse power. In conversation that ensued, a reader pursued the line that clearing out a seminary of its theological rabble rousers was no more an abuse of power than assigning grades in a seminary class.

That struck me as a particularly odd argument to make, and it got me thinking about the nature of power and, in particular, how  we might think about the difference between using/abusing power and exercising authority. How might we qualify and/or quantify the difference between being like the masters of the world who lord their power over others and the leadership that comes to be last and servant of all?

The first thing that comes to mind is that despite some predilections to the contrary among some of my friends, I believe that authority is a good thing. Humans having authority and being entrusted with charges is a good thing. In fact, this is the one thing, despite millions of pages of theologizing about other angles, that “image of God” actually means: occupying the place of one who rules the world on God’s behalf.

The question, then, is what Christian authority looks like, and how we know counterfeits when we see it.

And here is where I keep coming back to the cross, with great trepidation that it far too infrequently determines the narrative of leadership we aspire to live into.

If the cross is our model for godly leadership (cf. 2 Corinthians), what might it look like to exercise power Christianly? I have a certain level of authority as a seminary professor and a father. What are some questions or parameters for faithfully exercising these charges?

  • Am I embodying cruciformity myself, not taking from my students, readers, and children to prop up my own ego or empire, but using the life I have been given to help steer them toward the way of life?
  • As a person inhabiting a narrative of forgiveness, to I ask for and extend forgiveness to those under my authority?
  • In fact, I have started to wonder if this isn’t the single most important thing we do in our parenting and in scholarly activity and  friendship: modeling the knowledge that I am a person who has been and will continue to be wrong–not in a general sense where I say I need forgiveness for everything but then refuse to acknowledge it in anything. But naming our failures and asking for forgiveness from those we’ve wronged.
  • Embracing within the communities I lead the manifestation of what I believe to be true: God gifts people differently, and shapes their personalities differently, and that difference is a good thing. As hard as it is for us, I think that Christian leadership entails leading a community where people not only come to the same answers in different ways, but come to genuinely different conclusions, deeply and passionately held.

Those are actually just some starter thoughts. I have it on good authority that many of you are more godly parents, profs, administrators, pastors, mentors, etc., than I.

So what about you? How do you think through whether the way you’re leading and/or exercising the authority of your various roles is sufficiently emblematic of your Christian identity?

This is My Body… But Why?

October 11, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 15 Comments

I have a general take on the Lord’s/Last Supper: the Synoptic Gospels depict Jesus predicting his death as the pathway to his Messianic enthronement. This cross-shaped life is also the call to Jesus’ followers: take up the cross and follow.

In addition, you might start probing the significance of rewriting the Passover ceremony around Jesus, such that the “ransom saying,” (the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many) is illustrated in the meal. The body of Jesus is given in order that we might be set free and might become the New Covenant people of God. Taking and eating is our participation in [the people of] this deliverance.

All this from some combination of Matthew and Mark, perhaps with a little Paul thrown in if I’m honest.

But what’s going on in Luke?

One thing, at least, is definitely different in this telling of the story of the supper itself. A cup is passed before the bread.

Another interesting choice Luke makes is to put the disciples’ dispute about greatness here. Whereas in Mark this happens on the way to Jerusalem, after a passion prediction, Luke locates the fight in the upper room after they’ve taken the Supper.

This is even more interesting in that Jesus’ response to the disciples here is part of the talk he gives them that culminates in the ransom saying. But Luke eliminates the ransom saying. He substitutes a more generalized call to imitate him, who is in their midst as a servant.

Finally, this is followed by another lesson from Jesus: the disciples are the ones who remain with him in suffering, and therefore receive from Jesus the same kingdom that Jesus receives from the father–its food, its drink, and its rule (you will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel).

What are we to make of all this?

First, Bart Ehrman has famously argued that the interpretation of the bread (“which is given for you”) and the “second cup” are not original to Luke, but later insertions to bring the passage into conformity with the other Synoptic Gospels.

Although the manuscript evidence for this is weak, it works really well with the passage as a whole.

With the removal of the ransom saying in particular, the idea of Jesus dying “for you” is muted, and the notion that Jesus dies as an example and in order to bring about a surprising sort of divine reign is drawn to the forefront.

By placing here the saying about Jesus as servant to be imitated, without ransom, participation in the supper is drawn more in the direction of finding our own lives drawn to self-giving service.

By following that with the definition of the twelve as “those who remain with Jesus in his sufferings,” and thereby receive the kingdom, the imitative note is struck even more forcefully.

Why take the cup? Why drink the bread?

Here, the most clear reason is to remember that Jesus received the kingdom through suffering, and that self-giving life in service of others is the call of discipleship.

Good News Happening

October 5, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 1 Comment

It’s far too easy at times, and usually better for the blog stats, to track controversies and jump into the middle of the fray. But this evening I want to take the daring step of saying that a couple of people are getting it right and to celebrate the way that two people are living the gospel story.

First, Kirsten Vogel posted on her blog today about having to come to terms with her husband’s desire to donate his kidney to a good friend. This is an inspiring story of a family that is willing to enact a gospel story in which life is found by losing it.

Then, there was a post on the CNN Belief Blog by Warren Throckmorton calling for a genuinely Christian response to the issue of gay bullying–not a passive ignoring of the problem, but an active pursuit of a world in which we love our neighbors as ourselves. And he does it all without having to advocate for any particular stance on the issue of homosexuality itself.

And that’s precisely the point. We love our neighbor as ourselves. And if we have to ask who our neighbor is, we realize then that we are the Priest and the Levite, leaving the man on the side of the road for someone else to love as God would have him loved.

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