Taking sides does not imply a lack of care about the other side. When Jesus took the side of the common people against the side of the privileged of his own day, he cared about the salvation of both sides, knowing that true harmony can only be achieved if the tensions are addressed and overcome rather than suppressed. His impassioned speeches against the Pharisees in Matthew 23 provide only one example of this: accusing them of having neglected “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matt 23:23) implies not so much an ultimate rejection but an invitation to conversation and a new beginning. — Joerg Rieger, No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics and the Future, p. 53
Tag: Jesus
This distinction between social justice ideology and peacemaking is an interesting one that’s been brought to my attention recently through returning to some of Walter Brueggemann‘s work. Obviously, social justice is a good thing. As ideology, however — that is, as an ossified concept or immaterial absolute — its truth and goodness is cheapened. Usually this happens when we pursue social justice solely by mechanical and rhetorical means. In doing so, we neglect aesthetics and appeal narrowly to a quantifiable distribution of goods, rights, laws, or to universal abstract ideals like freedom an equality — without embodied community, neighborliness or celebration of beauty and creativity.
Social justice ideology is depersonalized and lacks self-awareness. It also tends to lack hope. It merely identifies injustice and gets angry. Basically, it’s pure judgment, which means it’s lazy. Social justice ideology, much like conservative ideology, says we are right, you are wrong, and never relinquishes that condescending posture. Richard Niebuhr called this henotheism.
Peacemaking on the other hand goes something like this:
Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. it is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. Peacemaking is about being able to recognize in the face of the oppressed our own faces, and in the hands of the oppressors our own hands.
Peacemaking, like most beautiful things, begins small. Matthew 18 gives us a clear process for making peace with someone who has hurt or offended us; first we are to talk directly with them, not at them or around them . . . Straight talk is counter-cultural in a world that prefers politeness to honesty. In his Rule, Benedict of Nursia speaks passionately about the deadly poison of “murmuring,” the negativity and dissension that can infect community and rot the fabric of love.
Peacemaking begins with what we can change — ourselves. But it doesn’t end there. We are to be peacemakers in a world riddled with violence. That means interrupting violence with imagination, on our streets and in our world. Peacemaking “that is not like any way the empire brings peace” is rooted in the nonviolence of the cross, where we see a Savior who loves his enemies so much that he died for them.
— From A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals
In sum, peacemaking is neither Fight nor Flight, but something altogether different.
According to Walter Wink, Flight consists of submission, passivity, withdrawal or surrender. Conversely, Fight looks like armed revolt, violent rebellion, direct retaliation or revenge. The neither/nor alternative is as follows:
JESUS’ THIRD WAY
• Seize the moral initiative
• Find a creative alternative to violence
• Assert your own humanity and dignity
as a person
• Meet force with ridicule or humor
• Break the cycle of humiliation
• Refuse to submit or to accept the
inferior position
• Expose the injustice of the system
• Take control of the power dynamic
• Shame the oppressor into repentance
• Stand your ground
• Make the Powers make decisions for which
they are not prepared
• Recognize your own power
• Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate
• Force the oppressor to see you in a new light
• Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a
show of force is effective
• Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking
unjust laws
• Die to fear of the old order and its rules
A similar lesson seems to have recently been learned by protagonist and lead female actor Emily VanCamp‘s character Emily Thorne in an episode last week of the hit ABC television drama series Revenge.
I’m interested to see how this season plays out and hope to reflect on it some when it’s over. In short though, she’s dedicated practically her whole life to an elaborate scheme aimed at avenging her father’s unjust death and public shame, which was carried out through a complex cover-up and legal scandal that left a number of pernicious perpetrators off the hook. It’s too early to tell for sure, but it looks like Emily could be making the difficult but transformative journey from eye-for-an-eye ideology to real peacemaking.
Related articles
- A Just Peacemaking Response to the Crisis in Syria (traceylind.wordpress.com)
- On Social Justice (noellecampbelldotcom.wordpress.com)
- Social Justice Sunday (elizabethgardens.wordpress.com)
- Palestinian peacemaker to speak (toledoblade.com)
- We become what we fight against (erasingapathy.wordpress.com)
- Peacemaking Day 2013 (slangcath.wordpress.com)
- Peace in the Midst of Inter-religious War? (interfaithreflections.com)
- Reading: Land in the Struggle for Social Justice (moving4socialchange.wordpress.com)
- Peacemakers (bracketthesethoughts.wordpress.com)
- The Call to Be Peacemakers (heraldmagazine.wordpress.com)
This from Shane Hipps’ latest book Selling Water by the River:
Ironically religious Christianity is often the purveyor of the very beliefs and fears that get in the way of the water.
Beliefs are an important part of any religion. What we believe matters, but not for the reasons we may assume. Our beliefs (or lack of beliefs) do not qualify or disqualify us from the river. Instead, they determine how clearly we will see the river, which is always running just beneath our noses. Some beliefs clear the way and give us high visibility, while others create a thick fog. The distance between the river and us never actually changes. What changes is how well we can see and accept it.
The “water” reference in the above quote and throughout the whole book is a metaphor for many things — God, the “source,” “life,” healing, truth or the salvation we all seek — and the one that guides us there is Jesus, but religious Christianity often gets in the way. Hipps is not playing the “gospel vs. religion” game though that’s so popular with neo-reformed folks; nor is he even siding with the “spiritual but not religious.” He continues:
I am convinced that many of the barriers to the water created by religious Christianity share a common source – the ways we have been told to understand and interpret the Bible.
The Bible contains sixty-six books, in dozens of literary genres, written by nearly as many authors, in multiple languages, over several thousand years. The Bible is not merely a book, but an extensive library capable of conveying wide and brilliant truths. The Bible is like a piano with a vast range of notes and capable of playing an endless array of songs.
In the last few centuries, Christian institutions have narrowed the range of notes it plays, resulting in a simple song easily learned and repeated. But through time, repetition, makes any song, no matter how beautiful, lose its edge and interest.
The fresh becomes familiar and what was once powerful become predictable. Familiarity breeds predictability, and this leads to boredom.
Today, we are in danger of believing that nothing new can come from the pages of this ancient book.
But the notes that have been neglected are waiting to resound with songs that still surprise. Strings long silent are now eager to sing . . . [A]n effort [is needed] to let sound these neglected notes, to strike the dust from those strings and let a new song rise.
A song big enough for a complex world.
A song that wakes the weary from their boredom and sleep.
I agree with Hipps here, and I believe this new song can and should be sounded. With regard to the church-world relationship and better engagement with society, however, I also think that we need to mine for songs to sound in culture and in life that corroborate the Bible — not just that stem from it. And I’m sure Hipps would only say the same thing. We need to look outside the Bible simply because the Bible is no longer as widely revered as it used to be. Unfortunate as this may be, it’s a reality with which Christians must do a better job dealing. There’s no “going back” on this front.
As such, we have to ask, what are the “sacred texts” about “water” that God has given us to discover beyond the holy writ? Where and what are the sacred places and practices outside of our sanctuaries? Whether and how we answer these questions is likely to significantly influence the future of Christian churches in North America, for good or ill.
Related articles
- Five Cool Things Fundies Should Know About Christianity. (weoccupyjesus.org)
- The Journey Class: animateFAITH series for September 1: Shane Hipps on Salvation (arborlawnumc.typepad.com)
- http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2013/10/02/what-the-church-can-learn-about-millennials-from-small-batch-distilleries/
- http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2013/10/04/no-the-writers-of-the-bible-did-not-expect-it-to-be-taken-literally-questions-that-haunt/
This is what gets left out, I was realizing: not just left out of the national political debate but also left out of religious discourse. Politicians talked about welfare – usually to blame and scapegoat – and occasionally made speeches about poverty. There was no shortage of talk about the poor and social services from church leaders of all stripes. But the experiences of people such as my volunteers, the texture and specificity of their incarnate lives, were missing from the story of what Christianity was like now in contemporary America.
And just as I’d looked for the unofficial truth, as a reporter, on the edge of things, I believed I was discovering , at the food pantry, our people’s significance to the real story. They were on the margins of society, and often on the margins of the church, but their lives were full of meaning. They threw light not only on the overlooked parts but on how the whole system worked. These poor lives illuminated middle-class life – our anxiety, our reliance on managing and fixing feelings rather than having them, our desire to punish. They made clear the limitations of religions that cast out every member whose reality didn’t fit inside church doctrines. Their lives showed the profound resourcefulness and strengths of the weak. The thing that astonished me sometimes – listening to tales of terrible damage, psychosis, loss – was not how messed up people could be but how resilient; how, in the depths of suffering, they found ways to adapt and continue.
– Sarah Miles, Take this Bread
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